Beauty Queen

“I’ve never seen a flood before,” I said.

Famous last words.

I’ve always had an uncanny ability to predict the future, and this was one such prescient moment. This is precisely what I told my mother before she stuck the key into the ignition and turned it. The engine roared. She grabbed the steering wheel and twisted it. And out we went on this rainy day to our destination.

“Hopefully, you never will.” My mom said.

My mom was very risk-averse. She didn’t like dogs or, really, any pets. She didn’t know how to ride a bike and didn’t care to learn.

One time, we went on a field trip with the St. Lucia National Trust to a beach that was so remote that most people had never been there before.

It was on the Atlantic Ocean side of the island, so the seas were rough and hostile. Menacing. And there were all sorts of exotic creatures on the Atlantic side that could kill you or fuck up your day, so most people avoided swimming on that side of the island. You were indeed much more likely to drown over there.

The waves on this beach were unspeakably rough. The tide would pull back so far you could see the corals and sea urchins where the sea floor was just a moment ago. It pulled back hard for what seemed like an eternity. You could have easily gotten sucked out to sea if you weren’t careful.

But when the wave finally returned to the shore, it crashed like it was trying to kill you. The water got to our necks and knocked us over like bowling pins. One guy got smashed into the side of a cliff and broke his leg.

That’s when my mother said, “I don’t care about how great this mystery beach is… We’re all going home.”

“C’mon!” I said. “We never do anything fun.”

I had never experienced so much fear of missing out in my life. My father was also quite salty about her executive decision but went along with it.

About half the people kept going even after the guy broke his leg. And they did make it to their destination… But they risked life and limb to get there. Grown adults started to cry like children. Some parents had to hold their baby over their heads to keep it above water.

For my mother… There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that she would get caught up in a nightmare like that. She would do anything and everything to avoid that kind of situation.

But sometimes disaster strikes when you least expect it — and no amount of preparation can save you. That’s the very situation we found ourselves in one day when I was 11.

I told my mother I’d never seen a flood before because cats and dogs were raining that day.

Now, there are TWO types of rain in St. Lucia…

Sometimes rain came crashing down out of nowhere, and then five minutes later, the sun would come right back as if nothing happened. Look around, and you’d see some gutters draining out, some dripping from tree branches, maybe a little steam coming off the roads, but that was it. Ten minutes later, you would have no idea it rained.

And other times, the rain would put the fear of God in you. Usually, the rain would last the entire day. Sometimes, two or three. It would be like a monsoon. Or a wet blizzard. The sky would go completely dark and sinister. Thunder would go off like cannon fire — giving you goosebumps and startling you more with each burst.

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Prisoner of War

“Put your hand out.” My teacher said.

I look around at my classmates. On their faces, I see a mixture of delight, terror, and empathy for what I’m about to endure. There’s nothing worse than doing the exact thing you don’t want to do. I didn’t want to put it out. But I did.

I tried to keep as much distance as possible between myself and my hand. I braced myself. At that moment, my teacher truly felt like God. They were all-powerful, and I was as insignificant as could be.

This may have been a traumatic encounter, but it wasn’t rare. Someone got beaten almost daily. It would be rare for us to make it a week without someone getting theirs.

Think about how fucked up this situation was — so many people can relate to being bullied by other kids at school. But what about when the violence came down from the institution itself?

For this reason, I can honestly say that growing up in St. Lucia felt a lot like being a prisoner of war. I know this because I once watched a movie called Unbroken. At one point, there’s a whole section of the film where the main character is a prisoner of war. I watched him get beaten and tortured. I watched him shovel latrines. I watched his tormentor gleefully commit war crime after war crime. And I thought, how relatable.

The teachers took sadistic pleasure in causing us pain. Some of them gave their thick wooden sticks pet names. Like “Long Hot and Spicy”. Or… “Tickler”. This barbaric practice was only recently abolished, thank GOD. However, some people fought for decades before they were able to sway public opinion on the topic of corporal punishment.

Violence was so normalized that it would genuinely shake you to find out what kinds of brutal acts are commonplace in the country.

Everyone in the class got their ass whooped, so we bonded over it. I got it, so you deserved to get it, too. And, after growing up like that, most people here couldn’t wait to dump all of their rage, aggression, and hostility onto the next generation. You couldn’t convince them otherwise.

The tiniest bit of therapy would have gone such a long way, yet ironically, most people here look upon therapy the way Americans think about voodoo. It’s this scary and evil thing that never works. They were hardcore “spare the rod and spoil the child” types. It was all so fucked up. And it gets so much worse than what I’m describing to you right now…

The first strike would always be the worst.

My teacher cranked her arm back with her stick raised to the sky.

There was dead silence. Everyone held their breath.

Her arm comes down like an axe.

I jerk my hand back as a nervous reflex—an involuntary act of self-preservation.

“If you do that again.” She said. “I’ll make it worse.”

I put my hand out. This time, I have to force myself to keep it there. The stick comes crashing down. It makes a whoosh as it cuts through the air. The strike makes a crack that could be heard three classrooms away. Everyone in my grade would know what happened by the time it was over. It feels like hot lava. At that moment, my brain broke. I can’t believe this is happening to me. This is so violating.

I take eight strikes in total. My palm is swollen and blood-red.

Most boys my age could take the beating and pretend to be completely unfazed. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t one of those boys.

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Frenemy

“I think it’s okay for a man to eat a woman’s ass…” Erika said as she slurped her black coffee.

“But I’ll be DAMNED if I EVER eat a man’s ass.”

This was how my day started with Erika every day.

We drank coffee strong enough to kill a horse and talked about the most ridiculous bullshit. Every single day for eight years. This was our ritual. It went with the territory. Two creative geniuses attached at the hip all day—every day.

We were codependent as fuck. Dangerously codependent. We had a three-bedroom apartment from which we lived and worked. It was a universe unto itself. We rarely had visitors. We kept to ourselves. Two writers up in that house all day. With anywhere between four and eight cats. More if you counted their stray lovers. With nothing but our crazy thoughts — it always made for great discussion.

She was a Tumblr feminist.

This is a VERY niche type of personality. VERY.

People on Tumblr were thoroughly indoctrinated in a worldview that ran counter to mainstream Western values.

Tumblr Circa 2018 was the original woke mob. Everyone was a communist or an anarchist. Everyone used pronouns — long before pronouns were a thing. All the girlies were leaking the tea about racism, intersectional feminism, and all things LGBTQ.

Tumblr’s user base was younger than most other social media sites. About half the users are under 25 years old. It was where all the kids absconded because their parents were now on Facebook, which meant that Facebook was no longer cool. It was full of high school drama, silly in-jokes, and kids trying to figure out who they were and what they believed—sometimes by getting into absurd arguments with strangers.

There was always something hilarious going viral on Tumblr.

It always made for great conversation in the morning.

Most people on Tumblr write for a small audience of their friends, not for public consumption by their grandmothers and coworkers, as you write on Facebook. Most people use Tumblr with a pseudonym and don’t connect it to their “real name.” Because of the anonymity on Tumblr, there were some real psychos on the platform. This was a place where sex workers would do long, deep dives into their entire lives and how they got into the business. How much money do they make per night? What positions do they like? What they think about the Johns they fuck. You would be surprised at how much thought goes into being a prostitute. Many sex workers had husbands and children. Some parts of their lives looked very ordinary on the surface.

People would be incredibly open with each other on the platform. This was the place to let your freak flag fly.

There were all sorts of strange parasocial relationships, lasting for years between people who had never met in real life. It was such a wacky place.

Where all the nerds went to be nerdy together.

Naturally, the discourse of that day on Tumblr was ass-eating, and Erika was weighing in with all of her Tumblr friends. The whole of Tumblr was split down the middle on ass-eating. Some for, some against. There was even a microbiologist who weighed in. She was definitely against it. Scientifically speaking… there was no way to explain away the millions of microbes you can see under the microscope with your own two eyes.

But some people on Tumblr defended ass-eating vociferously.

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St. Lucia is both hell and paradise.

I wondered how I might capture the island’s mystique in a way that might register with an American reader. A place like that is so far off the average American’s radar that they have no clue what it’s like until they finally visit.

Every time a foreigner comes here, culture shock hits them like a bus—a rude awakening. After I moved to the U.S. and started working for big influencers like Tony Robbins, any time I felt self-doubt or unworthy, I’d say, “These fools wouldn’t have lasted one day in St. Lucia.” And I know I’m right—not one day.

One look at the teacher’s stick…

One step into the bathroom at my school…

And 99% of Americans would be on the first flight back to their country!

But I don’t want to tell you the bad stuff right now.

After thinking about it, I thought I’d start with Pigeon Point. We begin here for many reasons. Pigeon Point is a little island about half a mile offshore at the northern tip of St. Lucia. Back then, nobody could access the place without a boat… so most people only got to go there once or twice. Suddenly, The Pirates of the Caribbean becomes real when you go to Pigeon Point.

On the island stood ruins from St. Lucia’s colonial past: old army barracks, an armory, two lookout points at the top of two mountains, and maid’s quarters. Cannons littered the place. A couple of old houses and a cemetery rounded out the site. It was a time capsule for the 1700s. Everything was made out of bricks that people don’t make anymore, from an archaic type of cement that no longer exists.

Today, the island is connected to the mainland with a causeway constructed in the 80s. So, now, people go there all the time. I had many birthday parties for myself and others there. People get married all the time there. They throw massive concerts and events there. It’s a stunning backdrop. The air there is extra salty. You can detect the vague whiff of sea life wherever you go in the air. And the winds are heavy and constant—the type of wind you need to propel a sailing ship across the Atlantic.

There’s no denying that Pigeon Point is a magical place. I’m sure thousands of babies have been conceived at that place. Erika and I spent lots of time there.

I wanted to start here because Erika and I once went to Pigeon Point, and the strangest thing happened.

Erika was near the shoreline, enjoying the crash of waves in the water. I sat further up the beach, watching her do her thing. Looking down at the sand—at my feet—I saw two dead baby leatherback turtles.

It is a very curious sight. Sea turtles are rarely spotted during the day. When a turtle comes to shore to lay eggs, it’s usually very late at night. Likewise, baby turtles head to the sea at night when they hatch. So, I rarely saw such things in my day-to-day life. I’d lived on the island for most of my life, yet this was still a once-in-a-lifetime moment.

If Discovery Channel hadn’t told me about the creatures swimming around in the sea, I probably would never have known most of them existed in St. Lucia.

Maybe that’s an exaggeration. Once in a while, a starfish, a pufferfish, or perhaps even a super poisonous translucent jellyfish might wash up on land. But I’ve never seen a shark in the water—although some have.

These days, scientists are studying a pod of 500 sperm whales in Dominica. Scientists from Oxford University are using AI to try to decode the sperm whales’ language literally. And yes, they speak a real language.

Sperm whales have the largest brains in existence. It’s six times bigger than a human’s brain. They also make the loudest noise of any animal. Some say their clicks are louder than a jet engine. Others say it can kill you if you’re in the water and you’re too close. They have distinct names and words for all sorts of things. They hope someday to have the world’s first whale-to-human conversation. I can hardly believe that people are doing cutting-edge research like this in my backyard.

Two dead baby turtles. What an odd thing to see.

My mind started noodling over this puzzling mystery.

Why were there two dead baby turtles lying in the sand?

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Foreword

When I started this journey, I didn’t know it would lead to this book. I didn’t know I’d write about betrayal, resilience, dancing until sunrise, or fighting my way through life’s messiness to find my own rhythm. I didn’t know how many layers I’d uncover within myself or how much I’d grow in the process.

This isn’t a story about perfection—it’s a story about becoming. It’s about the moments that broke me, the ones that healed me, and the ones that made me feel alive. It’s about heartbreak and redemption, vulnerability and strength, and the endless pursuit of joy in a world that sometimes feels too heavy. It’s about choosing to keep going, even when the weight of the past feels impossible to carry.

You’ll meet the people who shaped me: mentors who believed in me, friends who held me up, rivals who challenged me, and those who hurt me in ways I never expected. Each of them left a mark, and this book is as much about them as it is about me.

At its core, this is a love letter—to dancing, to resilience, to connection, and to the messy, imperfect, beautiful journey of being human. Writing this was an act of courage, and I hope reading it feels like an act of connection.

Wherever you are in your own journey, I hope my story encourages you to take the next step. To embrace the hard lessons, to find your own rhythm, and to never stop dancing—even when the music changes.

Welcome to my story. I’m so glad you’re here.

Tony V.

December 2024

Introduction

I like to party with a 77-year-old woman named Frances.

She’s the queen of our dancing cult here in Rochester.

Even though she’s a dinosaur, she still parties at least once or twice a week. She’s at practically every salsa event, every time.

We’ve probably done 100 parties together over the past three years. Yeah, that’s about right.

Frances is so flexible that she can still do a dropkick that would knock a grown man in the face. She loves whipping out a big dropkick whenever a salsa song starts with a dramatic opening.

She’s been dancing salsa for over 50 years.

When she was younger, she danced for Garth Fagan, the choreographer behind the Broadway production of The Lion King.

Frances gets nervous and restless if she goes without dancing for too long. Since I’ve known her, she twists every dancer’s arm to assemble a show for the local community every six months.

Thanks to Frances, I can proudly say that, at 36, I have a dance crew—and we’re damn good. This past summer, she used her connections to get us a performance at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester. That’s the most prominent art gallery in the whole city.

She’s so revered that whenever I take her to dance in Syracuse, the DJ has Frances lead a group dance at the night’s end. She improvises a bunch of moves, and the whole room follows. And yes, we all do follow.

Despite her age, Frances is always the baddest bitch in the room. She taught me how to be larger than life. It’s a skill—and she gave it to me. It was a critical ingredient in shaping the person I am today.

She taught me to bring the party with me wherever I go. To be the source of fun.

If the dance floor is empty, I fix that fast.

Frances taught me many dance moves, but that’s not what’s stuck with me the most.

A lot of guys go out, don’t see many cute girls, or think the dancing isn’t great, and then whine about how the party sucks.

Not me.

At 36, I thought my best partying days were behind me. Boy, was I wrong? I was leaving 98% of my party-animal self on the table without realizing it.

Frances taught me how to be an expert at having fun. How to bring joy to the masses.

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