Page 104 - Some Dance to Remember

74 Jack Fritscher

as the other man is more ruggedly handsome, more muscular, more a
cocks-man, with more earning power. American men idolize other males
who are top dog. American women go for men who are the underdog.
American homosexuals love top dogs with big dicks. Ah, yes, I know, all
generalizations limp.
Ryan, having quit his technical writing job at the Glass Tower, began
to write even more torrid fiction of man-to-man musclesex.
In his Journal, he reasoned that a man’s body, ideally developed and
then tensed into the graceful flow of a posing presentation, skin bronzed,
sweat running, and veins popping, was the ultimate existential act of
physical defiance shouting I AM HERE into the cadaverous face of Death.
Ryan needed, really needed, Kick’s body, the cuming strength of his good
seed, his good genes, to hold back his fear of his own body that he felt too
closely linked to the body of his father who had died so young so slowly.
Ryan was so concerned about Charley-Pop that he once said, “My one
outside hope, as much as I love that man, is that my mother will finally
confess to me that I’m her love child, her little bastard. Fat chance. She was
a true Catholic bride. She was always totally in-love with him, and he with
her. Besides, God help me, I look exactly like he used to look before his
pancreas exploded inside him and started eating his guts like lunch meat.”
The weight of the world was in Ryan’s face.
“The poor man’s suffering was a disaster. It destroyed our family.
Everybody in Peoria thinks we held together so bravely. Matter of fact,
we’ve all become mad as hatters in a textbook example of a dysfunctional
family. At least, Thom and Kweenie and I have. My mother grows more
translucently saintlike every day. She lived to make her man fight to live.
I don’t think she understands that all three of her children, unlike her, are
terrified that what happened to him might be passed along to us. She only
married him. She’s not descended from him.”
He found the antidote.
Muscles were all.
Sport.
Art.
Ritual.
Sex.
Bodybuilding pulled an adult man together. Whether a muscleman
was displayed in full glorious competition pose in a double-biceps shot,
lats spread, legs thrust forward, or was standing in noble repose, the body-
builder was simply the way a man should look in his full body armor, if
he was to protect himself from the onslaught of everything that adds up

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