dancing is my life.
let me start over. i was born of a vaginal birth, i assume (because i don’t plan on ever asking).
maybe uncertainty isn’t the best place to start; i have two hands and two feet. one time someone told me i had two left feet to which i replied, “no i don’t”, at which point i proceeded to take off my shoes and show him.
as it turns out i really do have two left feet, which explains why i’ve always had to wear two left shoes. things had come full circle; or so i thought. i did a little research and as it turns out, the labels “left” or “right” refer to the side of the body on which something is appended and not to the contour of the arch of the foot. i mean, sure, if you isolated both my feet, you could look at them and say, those two feet are both of the left leg; however, in proper context, two left-like feet on two separate legs, such as mine, cannot technically be considered “two left feet”. so i looked this guy up a few weeks later, ready to redeem myself and blow his mind. i knew the kinds of places scum like this hung.
“well, if it isn’t old lefty-two-foot,” he taunted as i sauntered into a dive unfit for an innercity high school special ed. swim team and that probably had more aids than greg louganis’s nineteen eighty-eight gold medal three meter springboard performance in seoul.
“how would you like two left feet up your ass?” i steadily recited. it was at this point, i’m pretty sure, that this asshole understood i was serious, because he got to his feet and summoned a couple of his buddies;
“tater, hoggy, get his left foot; jimmy, bubba, get his other left foot,” the gang broke into laughter at their leader’s wit, as blood boiled under my cool skin. i had come this far; i had gotten here. i hadn’t planned beyond that. i was going to explain to him how technically i don’t have two left feet and put him in his place, but it was becoming clear to me that things weren’t going so smoothly. no. you couldn’t reason with his kind. the only thing people like that understand is a hard-learned lesson. the only thing people like that understand is violence.
“i’ll show you who has two left feet—” i reached above me, above the bar, where they keep all the kooky metal signs that say stuff like, we don’t walk on your food, don’t eat our carpet or duck crossing: low clearance or whatever, and grabbed down the one that read, vagina is for lovers. i began bringing the bottom edge of the sign down as hard as i could on my right leg, just below the knee cap. i kept going until my bones snapped and my fingers were bleeding from the sharp sides of the metal sign, where i was holding it. i was screaming in agony, i was screaming because i felt insane, and i was screaming for scream’s sake. “you wanna see two left legs?” bam! the sign would come down, slicing through my skin. “you like that?” bam! down came the sign again, cutting my skin deeper. “i’ll give you left leg!” bam! i brought the sign down again nearly completely severing my right leg, below the knee. i grabbed my leg by the foot and began tugging the shoe off, incidentally tearing most of the skin that still held my lower leg to my upper leg. i got my shoe off and ripped off the rest of my leg, spilling blood everywhere. i insisted he have a look at my ‘second left foot’, but he kept covering his eyes. i balanced myself on my left leg and the woodwork of the bar and limped towards and hovered over the cowering man crouched under the ledge of the bar.
“look at me,” i said. he continued to shield his head in the crook of his elbow, with his knees pulled up to his chest. “look at me,” i insisted. he guardedly lifted his head and i brought the bloody limb down across his left eye and forehead. he hunkered back down. “look at me,” i insisted again. he looked up and winced, expecting some kind of pain, but i let him look at me for a minute, and take everything in. i was covered in blood and i’ll bet i looked pretty crazy; he gazed up at me with wonderment.
“if i have two left feet, then how am i able to dance like this,” i let out a piercing cry and finished him off with my mangled, bloody limb and fractured bone. it took no more than twenty blows to finish him off, and no less than eighty-six to satisfy my rage. it was over. somebody had learned a lesson.
the scene had grown stale and it was time to split. i looked around at all the stunned people in the room and they all just looked back at me. i looked down at my right leg, then back at them, then back at my leg, then back at them, “well!” i screamed, “a little help?!” at least seven people rushed to my aid, including the dead asshole’s now-frightened and submissive friends. “tater, hoggy, get my left foot. jimmy, bubba,” i tossed them the severed limb, “get my right.”
