Page 36 of The End of Summer

“I don’t know,” Agnes replies, looking me over. “He could be.”

“Please, ladies. I’m just looking for a dance studio. If there’s not one here, I must be in the wrong place.”

“You might check the Harwich Cultural Center. It’s over on Sisson Road. You know where that is?” Betty asks, loudly.

“Isn’tthisthe Harwich Cultural Center?” I ask.

“Oh no,” Agnes replies. “This is the HarwichCommunityCenter. We welcome everyone, but it’s really mostly a senior activity center.”

Fuck. That explains it.“Oh,” I say. “I’m sorry for the confusion. Hope you both have a lovely day,” I add, and turn to leave.

“Come and see us again sometime!” Agnes hollers after me.

I pull up the number for Max in my phone. I dial it.

“Hello?” a man answers.

“Yeah, hi. My name’s Brady. I got your number from Steve?”

“What’s up, man? We’re all down at the HCC. You coming?”

“I’m on my way. Just got a little lost. Sorry. Where exactly is it at?”

Max offers me directions; turns out I’m just a few minutes away. When I arrive, he meets me at the door. “What up, bro? I’m Max.” He holds out his hand and gives me a pound. “Niceto meet you.”

Max has to be about 6’5”. He’s huge, not to mention ripped. Hard to imagine him as a dancer. Now, a baseball player,thatI could see.

I follow him down a long hallway. “This some kind of school?” I ask.

“Used to be,” he says. “Now it’s an artist’s collective. Groups rent out the old classrooms to set up shop for all sorts of things – fiber arts, pottery, you name it. We just borrow space from the Zumba group that meets here. I’m friends with the girl that runs the classes.”

“Cool,” I say, as we turn the corner.

When we get to the dance room, Max introduces me to the other guys. You would think I was entering a Greek God competition or something. It’s impossible not to notice how good they look.

Max explains that there are two numbers we need to rehearse. The first is a mash up of classic walk up songs,Enter Sandmanby Metallica,Seven Nation Armyby the White Stripes,Welcome to the Jungleby Guns N’ Roses, and a few others. For that number, we’ll be using the bats. There’s a bag with a dozen or so wooden bats in it, and Max explains we’re using wood because it’s heavier, so our muscles will flex harder when we hold the bats up. For that dance, we’ll end up shirtless but still wearing our pants.

The second number, which abandons the bats – is a hip hop compilation including Notorious BIG, DJ Khaled, and Drake. This is the one where we strip all the way down. “It’s a slow burn,” Max explains. “We’ll make more money if we keep the ladies at bay a bit longer. So the twodances combined will take us about ten minutes. By then, they won’t be able to keep their hands to themselves,” he grins.

“Or their money in their purses,” another guy named Tommy adds.

We begin with some basic stretching, and I’m surprised at how much it feels like a dance class. Most of us will stay in formation as backup dancers, so the work for the first song is pretty minimal. It’s a lot of hip thrusting and hands sliding down our chests. The bats are (of course) synonymous for our pork swords, so there’s a good amount of holding them upright and grinding our hips while slowly stroking the wood. Then there’s a part where we freestyle – each of us finds a lady in the crowd and has to give her our baseball cap while we body roll up against her.

My position in the lineup is in the back row, all the way to the right. This is good because no matter what, I’ll be able to watch the guys in front of me on the off chance that I forget the moves. They’ve all done similar versions of this dance before – they’ve pretended to be a hockey team (same thing but with hockey sticks), construction workers (with levels), even farmers (with hoes). There’s a lot of repetition, which makes learning the dance pretty easy. About halfway through, we abandon the bats for folding chairs, and there’s a good amount of flexing and posing – each of us, one at a time – followed by a synchronized dolphin dive to the ground that marks the beginning of the end of dance number one. Once we emerge from the ground, the shirts and belts have come off, and after that it’s a whole lot of gyrating and sharp, precise thrusting until the end ofthe number.

The second dance comes up almost like a flash mob sort of thing, because we’re expected to mingle and dance with the girls on the floor for a solid five minutes first. “That’ll prime them,” Max says. “That way, when they’re all hot and bothered, sweaty and ripe, that’s when we’ll break out into the second number. This one is a little more tricky because of the water.”

Water?I wonder.

“It’s during the DJ Khaled song, ‘All I Do is Win.' The confetti will go off and then we'll do the water cooler dump. So, Brady – you and Dex are going to pop the confetti canisters from the back corners and I’ll be in the middle, holding up the trophy, when Billy and Jay come up behind me with the cooler full of water. It’s the best part of the dance. We can’t spill actual water in here – or userealconfetti – so we’ll improvise those parts.”

Max shows us the various formations we’ll need to get into and we practice the part where we rip off the pants – which is kind of funny, given how all of us are currently in regular underwear underneath. It looks smooth, though, and after several takes we get it right.

By the time we finish up, it’s almost 4:00, and I’m surprised at how fast the afternoon flew by. “Nice work, everyone,” Max says. I follow him to his car and he gives me my baseball-inspired thong, a navy blue and white undergarment that’s gotBig Ballerswritten in script across the center. I laugh and shake my head.

Big Mike meets up with me again to drive up to Cosmo. We take his truck this time. I’m surprised at how nervous I am, and he’s surprised that I’m doing this again,especially two nights in a row. “Didn’t think you caught the bug, after how you dashed off last night like Cinderella,” he jokes.

Instead of telling him the truth about Gretchen and the fact that I just want to see her again, I shrug and say, “You were right. It’s great money.”

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