Sensual Bachata NYC

"What's your cat's name?" asked Lionel, daring to broach a conversation with a stranger.

"That's Pitpat," replied the man with all the friendliness and suggestion of time for a conversation.

"I've seen you a few times. You seem like an interesting person," added Lionel. "I'm from Buenos Aires."

"I always thought I could catch a shimmer of Tango in your step when you walked past," said the man with a warm, uplifting intonation like he could see myth and miracle in the world, which ordinary people can't. He continued eating his burrito without any impulse to further the conversation while making Lionel feel welcome to stay in the man's company. The man exuded an air of being present and encouraging others to stay in his presence, a meditative kind of gathering.

"I'm Lionel," said Lionel.

"Call me Hiroto," said the man, reaching out his hand. The hand was deeply furrowed with canyons between the roots of his fingers and taught sinews attaching the webbing between the fingers. Green and blue powder marks were all over his hand. Lionel paused for a moment to receive the open hand but then decided that there was such neatness about the man that he'd take the colored hand. Hiroto's hand grasped around Lionel's like a seal folding around and locking in. Hiroto pensively looked into the void while he seemed to be reading Lionel's metacarpals and phalanges.

"You are too soft and not soft enough. You have to know more what you want and go after it with more yielding to fate," prophesized Hiroto. Hiroto pulled Lionel forward so that Lionel had to bend down to the man. Hiroto placed his burrito on the window sill and rested his hand right on Lionel's heart. "What do you want more than anything else?"

"Aurora on my dick," burst Lionel out, not knowing where it came from or why he would say such a crude thing. The two mean jolted apart. Lionel's heart was pounding at the bizarre revelation, anticipating with dread the response of Hiroto.

Regaining his composure, Hiroto spoke with the calm of an oracle, "You speak true. You can't see the destination yet because it is like a mountain peak shrouded in clouds. You still think that you are only walking the path for a little bit, but you are meant to join the gods above the clouds as an equal. Today will be your first trial. You must not fail."

"Come inside," said Hiroto, lifting up the cat into the palm of his right hand.

Lionel stepped after Hiroto through the window, cautious about the unusual demeanor of Hiroto but feeling the social obligation of accepting an invitation. The room was in a haze of darkness after entering with the eyes adjusted to the brightest midday midsummer light. The first thing Lionel noticed was an easel in the center of the room with a large white sheet that was covered in sweeping curved blue and green chalk lines to create human bodies in motion. Then he noticed the little microwave in the corner. The room seemed to be a mail or bike room converted into an illegal studio. The walls were lined with oil paintings and graphite drawings in expensive baroque frames resting on the ground, stacked actually like a warehouse of art. In a corner was white bedding, a narrow mattress with a layer of white sheets.

With the eyes increasingly adjusting to where Lionel saw almost the whole room, he was startled to notice a woman lying on a big bolster in shorts and a t-shirt, apparently sleeping. Another woman was sitting in a corner with her knees up and reading a book. She had luscious, long, and full hair. Leather adornments were wrapped multiple times around her neck and wrists. A dress draped her body and ballooned in such a way that it created lots of internal space to allow the air to float up her legs and body to wick away her sweat. Neither of them paid attention to their entrance. Because the room was so small, it felt like it was filled with women even though there were only two.

Hiroto, noticing Lionel's pause, added, "Those are muses. They appear and disappear as they wish."

Lifting a piece of black charcoal from the floor near the easel, Hiroto grabbed Lionel's wrist to pull Lionel's forearm straight to draw Japanese letters. "Keizoku wa chikara nari," pronounced Hiroto as he wrote and repeated once more when done. "Continuing is power," stated Hiroto. "Whenever you have doubt today, look at this."

Hiroto let go of Lionel physically and psychically. Hiroto went to the microwave and lit a piece of incense on top of it. The red glow stood out in the dark light. The sweat smell immediately reached Lionel's nose. Hiroto clapped his hands and called out, "Susanna!" The reading woman stood up and pulled her balloon dress overhead to reveal her healthily chubby body, teardrop-shaped full breasts, and snug narrow underwear. She reached her arms overhead to create a loop with grace like that of a swan. She lifted one foot on her knee. Hiroto tapped on her shoulder to make her twist her torso slightly and look over her shoulder. Then Hiroto got lost into drawing long, quick slashes on the easel, lost in his world of drawing. Lionel saw himself out through the window.

Lionel continued onward to the subway. Because the connections from Brooklyn to Queens are poor, he had to cross into Manhattan to get the right train out to Elmhurst. When he exited the Elmhurst station, he knew he was in a poor and abandoned area. The gas station at the corner had shut down with the sign for the prices busted out. A vigil of candles, flowers, and framed photos was in a plot of weeds, suggesting that someone had been murdered there. Only residential buildings existed a hundred yards away from the subway station. Their chainlink fences in the front had been pushed down and ripped off. During the half-hour walk from the subway, plenty of scrawn stray cats and dogs hustled into the shade of old beater cars. The only people in the street were groups of men standing and sitting in close clusters at street corners.

The address on his forearm matched an abandoned mechanics garage, a white single-story brick building. A line of about twenty bullet holes covered the facade like the spray of a machine gun. The two-car bays had their doors taken off to let in ample fresh air. Lionel was covered in sweat from the hot, humid day and looking forward to refreshing in the cool shade inside the building. Three brown pointer-type dogs with short, shiny fur ran up to Lionel as he crossed the front yard with cracked open pavement. They sniffed him, gently stubbed their noses against his pants, but were respectfully gentle. A plantar made from fresh wood boards and neatly manicured tomato plants stood in the corner of the yard suggesting a diligent gardener.

Stepping through the mechanics bay door, Lionel felt the coolness of the shade. A five-foot-tall rotor fan like an airplane propeller was in front of the wide-open backdoor. Lionel could instantly feel the end of the draft as it escaped the front doors caress over his skin, evaporate the sweat, and give him almost a chilly cool. Overhead windows gave the place a warm, welcoming light, almost an elegant auditorium. The floor was covered with wooden tiles that fit together like a puzzle. The rough concrete was underneath it. Dancers stood equally spaced and arranged like chess pieces on the floor. They were dressed in shorts, knee-long tights, and bras, anything to be comfortable in the heat while working out. Their feet were wearing ballet shoes, socks, or barefoot with tape wrapped around the balls of their feet. They stood in silence, waiting.

An old man stood near the chains to raise and lower the garage bay doors. His face was brown, not brown like a brown person but brown like a marker. His skin was so weathered that it had thickened. He seemed like a dark-skinned white man whose skin had been continuously in the sun for 70 years, which had turned it brown. The skin was a ripple of creases running lengthwise. He was a trim man in stature, but his posture showed that he was ailed by age. His eyes were black, the eyebrows nearly gone, and the head hair buzzed only a few millimeters short stubble of gray. Overall, he looked like a beautifully restored vintage car in Cuba. He also had the island charm of it.

Wordlessly, the old man presented his palm. Lionel placed a fifty-dollar bill into it. "20," said the man, known as Inquisitor, and pointed at a spot on the floor among the dancers.

Lionel noticed the stickers on the ground, laid out in a grid pattern, with numbers on them. He found his spot on the far right. When he took his shoes off, Luna waved at him from a center spot with her warm smile and excitement about seeing Lionel try out the professional-grade class. Standing in his socks and a baggy pair of shorts, he felt a bit out of place among the more dance-equipped dancers. Half the men had taken off their tops to bare their torsos with well-defined muscles and no body fat. Lionel felt too shy to do that.

Next to him stood a tall, sylph-like woman with thin blond (almost translucent) hair all the way down to her back. Her frame was so thin that it suggested she had started training dance so young that her body hadn't fully expanded into the weight that it should have. She seemed anxious, pressing her lips together and shooting flighty looks through the room, while everyone else was rather bored and calm, like a herd of horses waiting in a stable. The pinkness of her lips stood out against the translucent whiteness of the rest of her body. She whirled her hair into a tight bun at the top of her head.

Two minutes into waiting, the Inquisitor clapped his hands to announce the start of class from behind everyone, "first position!" Everybody snapped into standing straight, heels touching, toes pointing out, and the arms bowed in the shape of a basket. Lionel didn't know what the first position meant but copied everyone else. He instantly felt a warm hand on his shoulder and the old man's voice in his ear, loudly announcing to the whole class, "We have someone new. We need to review. This will be good for everyone."

"Luna," he called out. Luna gazelle-like sprinted to the front of the class with wide jump-like steps. She presented herself in first position. The Inquisitor looked old but moved near-instantly around the class with grace-like steps. He placed the tip of his bamboo stick on her hips and ordered Luna, "Raise." Luna raised her heels up. She demonstrated how flexible her ankles were to allow her feet to be almost vertically. Her knees bent at the same time so that her hips stayed constant at the end of the bamboo stick. "See how she keeps her body steady?" the Inquisitor called out to Lionel.

"Turn on four," the Inquisitor ordered with a precise tone. Luna stepped her right foot forward, toes pointed to the ground, heel off the ground. Then she stepped forward, bringing her wide arms in towards her torso to accelerate her spin. With four steps, she moved along an imaginary and turned 360 degrees. Her body stayed perfectly perpendicular.

"Novato," the Inquisitor addressed Lionel, "watch how she spots." The inquisitor placed the bamboo end on Luna's left side of the chin. "Again," he ordered her. As she started to turn, she held her head, looking straight ahead while her body turned to the back. Right at the end of the range of her neck turn, the Inquisitor lowered the bamboo stick to signal her to snap her head around to face back to the front, where the bamboo stick already awaited her in the exact position he wanted her chin to be. "Novato, you get fifteen minutes to learn this before I start correcting you."

The Inquisitor tapped the ground with the bamboo stick to mark the rhythm. Then, he counted out "1-2-3-4." The entire class turned in unison. Lionel only tried to stumble out of the way of the three closest people to him to avoid pushing them off balance. To Lionel, they seemed to be moving perfectly, but the Inquisitor would tap the thigh of a guy to signal him to turn out more. He'd poke the bamboo stick into the back of a woman until she perked up her torso. With the swiftness of a dancer, he appeared next to dancers four positions away, and would snap the bamboo stick against the inside foot for a better turnout.

The mechanic hall was quiet, except for his calls of "again" and the snaps of his bamboo stick. And as Lionel noticed, his footsteps were the only ones heard. Everyone else stepped so smoothly that there wasn't a sound. Lionel felt proud of himself because the step pattern became locked into his body. He was focused on stepping more quietly. Then he heard the first whine. The bamboo stick had come down harder on a female dancer because the patience of the Inquisitor seemed to run short.

Struggling with dizziness from the spins, Lionel felt more lethargic about the drudgery of executing turn after turn. That's when the Inquisitor appeared right behind Lionel so that he couldn't see him. With a bamboo stick tap on Lionel's knees, the Inquisitor said, "Knees straight!" Then the Lionel felt his chin and back of his head grabbed to be pulled back and up. "Head on top of the body. Anything off-center throws you off balance. That's why you tumble like a barrel rolling down a hill," explained the Inquisitor. The Inquisitor got on his knees to pull Lionel's right foot forward. With iron force, the Inquisitor bent Lionel's foot to point more forward and placed the toe precisely on the ground where the Inquisitor wanted it to be. Then he traced a line from the front foot to the heel of the backfoot. Feeling utterly handled and controlled, the Inquisitor double-tapped the ground again to tell the class to repeat the four-step turn.

A half-hour of turning created a bitter, actually angry mood. Most of the students' faces pale. Some let out grunts of anger and complaints about headaches. The Inquisitor tolerated emotion and sounds as long as their turns were perfect. His relaxed face seemed to actually relish the outbursts in apparent nostalgia of his own dance training, signifying to him that the class was making the necessary progress. Lionel felt entranced by how guttural some of the feminine cries were. The sounds came from such deeply felt emotions that Lionel felt them in his own body and couldn't help himself to respond emotionally.

The Inquisitor focused on the tall bland next to Lionel. He dug the tip of the bamboo stick under her chin to push her up. "You are beautifully tall, but slouch like a fat line cook," the Inquisitor admonished her. The woman struggled to stand erect with every ounce of her posture, but he tip kept driving into the soft part under her chin relentlessly. When the struggle reached its zenith, her hips tilted forward. She got an extra quarter inch of height, but he bamboo snapped down on the side of her butt with a loud snap and a wailing cry from her throat. Instantly, the tip was digging into the underside of her chin again. Her hips were shaking as she fought against them tilting forward and struggled her body higher. Then she lost her hips again forward, the bamboo snapped down on the side of her butt with a sound so viscious that it seemed to cut the air. Her whole body crunched across the burning side of her butt, but the tip was pulling her out of the crunch. One tear each ran out of her eye. She whimpered. The blue eyes of the Inquisitor locked into hers insisting on compliance. Then a vertebra in her thoracic spine snapped with a dry pop, and her chin lifted a quarter inch up. The Inquisitor remarked, "Good!"

Not letting go of her, the Inquisitor added, "from now on when you turn, your heels will never touch the ground anymore. You have no more heels." He double-tapped the ground to signal the group to turn forward again. Lionel noticed in the corner of his eyes that the woman actually put her whole foot down on the third step to ground herself before pulling the other foot tip close to the arch of her other foot for the final step.

"You did it again," complained the Inquisitor with a dogged focus on the crying woman. "Lie down on your belly and bend your knees." She got flat on the ground. Her soles were flat, facing the ceiling. The skin was gentle, youthful, and moist. The arch and balls had the right curves. The foot was rather narrow and long with luscious round knobs for toes. The Inquisitor kneeled neatly in front of her feet. "Repeat, 'I don't have heels,'" prescribed the Inquisitor. Not expecting much more, she began repeating as ordered. Midway through, the bamboo snapped down on the sole of one foot. For the split second that the stick lifted to reveal the sole and before the outcrying woman pulled the foot into both her hands in fetal position, Lionel saw that the bamboo had hit so hard to leave a fat red line. The woman was sobbing.

Lionel felt the masculine urge to grab the stick and break it in two. Feverish with anger at the old man, his face turned red. Luna noticed and shot him a look that said, "We all went through this. We all stand in solidarity with her. We all support her lovingly to go through the transition." Then Luna's face went back to looking at the tall woman sobbing on the floor in the fetal position, her whole body shaking from the cries. Luna's face sent such deep and loving energy to the woman.

"Present," ordered the Inquisitor with a cold discipline. She rolled back on her belly and bent her knees obediently. With a weak and raspy voice from crying, she spoke out, "I don't have heels." The overhead strike of the bamboo whipped down just as savagely on her other sole. Her voice screeched loud and high-pitched from the impact and then broke down into wall-to-wall echoing sobs. But the soles of her feet stayed up even though her calve and thigh muscles were shaking and spasming. The Inquisitor continued administering the caning until five equally spaced lines were on both soles of the feet. Then he helped her up tenderly because she could no longer put her weight on anything but the balls of her feet. Her heels was hovering half an inch off the ground. The front of her top was soaked with tears. Yet on the next turn repetition, she had an otherworldly beautiful grace that took away Lionel's breath.

Lionel looked at his forearm that said in Japanese "Continuing is power." The script had gotten blotted from his sweat. It wasn't a waterproof type of paint. The Inquisitor corrected other students. The precise taps of the bamboo explained details. Lionel learned a thousand details about making correct turns. When the Inquisitor's laser focus came back to Lionel, Lionel had an idea of what the Inqusitor might correct. His knees kept bending too much, no matter how he tried. And with each step of the rotation, his steps got more wobbly. Lionel didn't expect the Inquisitor to pull on his t-shirt.

"I can't see your body with that thing. Take it off!" ordered the Inquisitor. Having noticed that all the guys had pulled her their tops pretty early in the training, he had felt the impetus to follow them but was to embarrassed about showing his chest. Now, he hurriedly took of his t-shirt.

"This, too," said the Inquisitor, pointing at his baggy shorts. "I can't see your body with that on."

"But it's my briefs underneath it!" protested Lionel.

"Look around you," ordered the Inquisitor. Lionel looked around, noticing that all the guys wore tight leotards that were essentially underwear. So he took off his pants and stood only in his underwear and socks in front of the class.

"Take these off. They make you step sloppy!" continued the Inquisitor.

Lionel stood only in his underwear in front of the class. He felt exposed. He felt all the eyes on him. He felt like on a platter. Yet, he also felt the underlying emotion of each individual person. It was a feeling of support and deep bond, a community of men and women who supported each other. Baring his body to their view was like a rite of passage to be utterly open to become fully accepted. He felt himself growing from a stranger to someone accepted into the group. The Inquisitor kneeled in front of Lionel with the same devotion as the Inquisitor had for all the dancers. The Inquisitor wrapped Lionel's balls with smooth tape that stuck to itself so that he could spin better and with more control. Lionel felt a bit of a badass for such a professional outfit. The snugness without any pressing spoke of the profound experience of applying dance tape from the Inquisitor.