City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations and Theses City College of New York 2013 Lower Shad Road Melanie L. Danza CUNY City College How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cc_etds_theses/393 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] 1 LOWER SHAD ROAD By Melanie L. Danza Mentor: Linsey Abrams May 6, 2013 “Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts of the City College of The City University of New York.” 2 PART 1 PROLOGUE New York City 1980 Matt smiled. “What are you, like seventeen?” he asked. “No! I’m nineteen!” I tried to shove him. But as usual he yielded, coming around and pushing me again. “That’s cool,” he said, while I hit the wall. “Now I can buy you a beer after class.” I acted like I didn’t hear him, continuing with push-hands and then I tried to push him , and once again he went back softly from my touch, turning and bending like water around a rock. It was futile. “You’re so soft,” I said. He shook his head and grinned. “Not always.” Hair, sandy-colored strands brushed across his eyes. “Most of the time it’s…” He looked down. “…uh… I better not say it…” Here comes something cheesy, I thought. “It’s the opposite of soft,” he said. I puffed out a laugh and shoved him against the wall. He came back. “Ha! Lucky shot!” 3 Suddenly my father’s head appeared from behind Matt’s left shoulder. “Serena, Master Ming wants you,” Dad said. We dropped our hands to our sides. We backed away from each other and I turned to the front of the room and saw Master Ming still sitting on his cushion. Normally he would call out my name and I would be in front of him in a near instant. I stood there for a second or two, still holding onto a little of Matt’s laugh. The smile faded from my face. Matt bowed and walked across the room toward Rechtor. “What does he want?” I quietly asked my father. “He wants to wish you happy birthday,” Dad said. Matt and Rechtor started heading toward the dressing room. “Oh.” That’s a new one. I never imagined the master wishing anybody anything. And wasn’t birthdays a part of that “ego-mind” thing he talked about? That ‘mind’ that warps our perceptions and makes us think we’re wonderful? Master Ming said that the ego-mind attaches itself to material things and desires, perceptions of ourselves and blocks the spirit body from enlightened experience. Maybe he was going to test me, like the ancient masters tested their monks. I was still adjusting to the unusual ways a Zen Buddhist master teaches his student. I walked slowly toward him with my father following behind me. We stopped and bowed. Master Ming looked up. “You are nineteen today, Serena.” He smiled and squinted as if from a bright light. “Happy Birthday.” 4 “Thank you,” I said, bowing slightly. My dad made a move toward the dressing room. “Wait, DeContenza!” “Yes, sir.” Dad stopped. “I still have your permission?” “Yes, sir,” my father said. He looked at me briefly then slid behind the divider. “Come closer,” the master said. I obeyed and took two steps toward him. He was looking up at me now. “Your father said I could give you a birthday kiss.” Okay, that’s weird, said a voice inside me. But then I stopped myself. I remember reading in one of Dad’s books on Zen that there were no rules in Buddhist practice, no rules the master and his student abided by. There was that story of a monk who got enlightened while stumbling upon his master taking a crap in the woods. His master’s words, “Shit stick!” did it for him, brought him instantly to Nirvana. “Of course if it makes you uptight…” the master said. I had seen this switch before when he dealt with the other members. For weeks he had been cold and distant to me. But today he waived all that and he was now the warm and friendly grandfather. I was thinking about how everyone wanted to be near him, craved his touch, they were honored when he used them to demonstrate push-hands, always sprinting for a spot in front of him before his Sunday sermons. Practically the entire class except me was getting 5 energized now. His energy was money or food for the malnourished. Maybe this was his birthday present to me. “Well?” he asked. “….Ok.” I heard the men changing behind the divider. I heard Matt’s voice, then his laugh. I saw many feet under the wooden dividers, large and wide smaller and narrow. They moved and stepped and I wondered which pair was Matt’s. “Come here, then.” I moved closer and sat down on my knees before him. He leaned in close and pressed his lips against mine. They were cold and wet. I heard the dividers slide open, heard Rechtor’s low voice, followed by Matt’s cheerful one. Then silence. Master Ming was parting my lips with his tongue and rolling his tongue around the roof and base of my mouth, sliding around my teeth, then nipping slightly a part of my lip. I pulled away and felt a burning all over, like the inside of my mouth. The vibrations in my mouth spread to a pounding in my face, into my brain and all over my body. Men continued emerging from the dressing room. The master looked at me. “Very good,” he said. The men were holding their ghees and cushions and walking out, single file. At nineteen I could count on one hand how many people I had kissed. Some had on suits, some construction gear, some looked like they had been painting all day. 6 I was a beginner, the youngest member of the class. It must have been a lesson, a koan to a rooky monk from his master. We were standing now. Master Ming stepped in closer. His eyes looked jolly, drunken, beaming. Leaning his round cheek into to mine, he said, “Don’t let anyone kiss you unless they can make you feel that way.” He slid into the dressing room, against the tide of the other exiting men, who moved aside to let him enter more easily. I got outside onto the sidewalk. The sky was dark blue. The lights from cars, stores, windows and the street lamps were bright and random. My father and his car were gone. I watched Matt and Rechtor, already in Rechtor’s truck, pull away from the curb. As they drove past me, Matt’s eyes looked straight ahead, following the traffic all the way up Eighth Avenue. That week I received the loan for NYU. As planned, I gave the extra grand to Master Ming and started back with energizing sessions. By the following Sunday Master Ming didn’t call my name to come up. Instead, while we sat in the beginning of class, before the Tai chi lesson, he came down the sitting line and touched the top of my head, lifting up some of my hair with his finger and I followed behind him to the polished root bench. After he stopped energizing me, he brought his face down, pressed his lips against mine and added the same tongue rolling and mouth acrobatics, he did 7 on my birthday. I felt the same strange sensations. My mouth was pulsating and the vibrations rattled around in my face and then spread out into my brain and body like the ripples getting wider and wider until they hit the shore. I derived no pleasurable feeling from them, like what I had felt from boys at my college, or even with boys I had played spin the bottle with in high school. But there was no denying Master Ming’s power. He patted the space below my navel and said, “Very good.” I lifted my body up from the bench, placed my feet back down on the floor again and before I got up to walk back to my cushion in the line up, he said into my ear, in a low voice, “Don’t let anyone kiss you unless they can make you feel this way.” I walked back through the center of the two rows, along the backs of my classmates, past Matt’s straight back, and disheveled hair and I felt something deflate inside. I kept walking until I got to the end and didn’t remember exactly how or when I had sat back down on my cushion. From then on the kisses were included during the energizing. And after each time Master Ming reminded me, “Don’t let anyone kiss you unless….” 8 ONE 1962-1967 We were all born in Staten Island, my mother, father, my brother and my sister and I. By the time my parents were nineteen, they had two babies, first me then Theo. My grandfather let us stay in one of his two family houses, a few yards from a major artery on the island called Clove Road. My dad worked in a grocery store. Not one day went by when he didn’t feel the pressure of feeding his family.