Page 150 - Some Dance to Remember

120 Jack Fritscher

“Aw, jeez,” Ryan said. “Like, kill me already; but, please, not the face.
We’ve just arrived in Hollywood, California, and I’ve got to be ready for
my close-up.”
“I don’t understand what’s between you boys,” their father said.
“In the name of the Father,” Annie Laurie said, crossing herself with
the rosary beads blessed during the 1950 Holy Year by Pope Pius XXII,
“and the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.” She intoned the Apostles’
Creed, and they all, everyone but Sandy, who sat dumbfound by the way
their unison recitation had stopped their conversation dead, began to pray.
“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son,
Our Lord, who was born of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was crucified, died,
and was buried....”
“Can you believe,” Ryan asked me, “what growing up Catholic in the
fifties, early sixties was like?”
I could and I couldn’t.
“I was different then,” Ryan said. “We were all different then. Those
were the last days before Jack Kennedy was shot and the world changed
forever.”
Sandy’s was not the first knee, female or male, pushed into Ryan’s;
but her knee was, faster than all the others, pushed away. Ryan’s sins in
those days were all the sins of a tongue sharpened by the stress of enforced
Catholic purity. I believed him when he told me I should call the Guin-
ness Brothers because he had kept himself from masturbating until he
was twenty-four years old. Physically and spiritually. Ryan fought to cling
to the modesty and sexual purity Monsignor Linotti taught him were
absolutely necessary for a boy to become a priest.
“My sins of speaking uncharitably were venial enough,” Ryan said,
“not to worry me. In those days, I lived in terror of only one sin. Impurity.
All I ever wanted, because that’s all the ideal I ever heard, was to be pure.
I felt pure behind the walls of Misericordia. Later, here in San Francisco,
I lost it. I purposely tried to lose it. I didn’t care anymore about sexual
purity. I wanted to be sexy. But when I met Kick, I realized that purity
isn’t only sexual.
“Kick made me realize a grander manly purity, far more important
than the narrow sexual purity the priests taught. That’s why I love him.
He brought me through his body and his ideals to a purity far greater than
the slender sexual purity I agonized over and tried to protect every day and
every tempting night of my adolescence. Sometimes I was physically sick
I was so afraid of committing a mortal sin of impurity. I was terrified of
spending an eternity in the fires of hell.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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