Page 121 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 91

Ryan called Solly at least twice a day. If he failed to answer, Ryan
immediately feared the worst. Guns. Knives. Blood on the mirror. Brains
on the carpet. Terminal choke holds. The swollen tongue protruding black
from the mouth. Roaches feasting on the undiscovered corpse. The traffic
in Solly Blue’s Tenderloin penthouse, where every room was painted the
same dark blue, was dangerous.
“Everybody who comes through my door,” Solly said, “is either buy-
ing or selling something: bodies, drugs, you name it.”
Solly had been robbed at gunpoint, knifepoint, and fistpoint. He had
been roughed up and tied up. He had been burglarized even though he
rarely left his apartment. His boys watched his comings and goings from
the street. They spied on him. So he stayed put on his couch, connected to
his friends over the telephone, and wired to his boys through the network
of the streets. In a way, his boys held him hostage for his art.
“I have the only penthouse in the City furnished in early Salvation
Army.” He gestured at oddments of recycled blond end tables, pole lamps,
and faded chairs and sofas. “The movie set of the damned,” he said. As
low-class props, the junk furniture fit the hustlers videotaped upon them.
“I can’t have anything here that anybody would want,” he said. “The tape
recorder, the tape duplicator, the color TV. They’re temptation enough.
To say nothing of all my blank tapes and my master videotapes these boys
would erase to record wrestling.” Solly always expected the bottom line
of abuse from his boys. “One day one of them will kill me,” he said. “I’ve
already lived too long anyway. There’s only one thing to be in life and
that’s twenty-one and tough.” Solomon Bluestein saw his boys the way he
saw his life: in finite terms. “What is, is.”
Ryan saw his own life as the launchpad to infinity, to transcendence,
to spirituality, to purity, to idealism, to life everlasting. Classic, clean,
athletic manliness turned Ryan’s head, but he appreciated Solly’s Sar-
trean pursuit of mean street hustlers whose tattoos, lean hard bodies,
and redneck attitudes took no shit. Their penchant for boxing, wrestling,
and karate led Solly to a deep-seated respect for their knives, guns, and
deadly nunchuks. He courted their danger. He found honest excitement
in victimization.
“I pay them money to spit on me,” Solly said.
Ryan understood his friend’s sexual preference, but for his own part
he had no intention of being a victim. His sexual preference was not
victimization; it was celebration. Solly warned him that the difference
between them was semantics.
“What kind of fool am I?” Solly Blue asked. He paused and pointed

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