Page 142 - Some Dance to Remember

112 Jack Fritscher

do mercy-fucks. Do you think my father thought I’d have to do this when
he asked me to take care of Thom? Jeez!”
Thom was not the head of his family; he was the victim of it. Sandy
and the triplets held him hostage. With all the leadership the Marines
had drilled into him, Thom was never able to hold his family in control.
I had heard Ryan’s jokes about Sandy’s Annual Christmas Tree Toss. In
one of their monumental fights, she had picked up the tree and thrown it,
lights and ornaments and, all, across the heads of her playing children, at
her husband sitting behind dark glasses and wearing stereo headphones.
Three times Thom had convinced her to commit herself to a sanitarium.
Three times she talked her way out. I think she was not truly mad or cruel.
I think she was desperate, dim in most things, but sly in her whining way
of negotiating her life with Thom. She knew if she bore his children, she
could have him forever.
“I think Sandy got a little too intense,” Ryan said. “She had three
kids at once. Clever girl. Once is maybe all he plugged her. Thom swears
he prefers sex in the dark. Maybe he means with Sandy. Maybe he lies.
When I have him in my bed, I leave the lights on low. He never shuts his
eyes. Not even when he cums. He stares like a killer directly into my face.”
To make a long story short, let me put it this way, in sort of a flashback
to the early sixties when Jack and Jackie’s romantic comedy was not yet a
tragedy, when there was no war, back before Monroe and Clift and Gable
all made their last movie together and died, long before Kerouac and Cas-
sady and Ginsberg in North Beach had ever heard of Grace Slick, when
women wore gloves and hats and men wore suits, the summer Merman
played Gypsy in San Francisco near the movie theater premiering La Dolce
Vita, one of those last innocent summers before things fell apart.
At seventeen, Thom joined the Marine Corps Reserves.
“That’s stupid,” Ryan said.
“It’s no more stupid than you going off to the seminary when you
were fourteen.”
“I have a vocation.”
“So do I.”
“To get yourself killed?”
“We’re not at war.”
“To kill people?”
“What people?”
“We’ll think of someone. Enemies are easy to find.”
“Get off my case.”
“You’re only seventeen. Wait till you graduate. Maybe you’ll have

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