Page 157 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 127

rang clear. Kick and Ryan were light and dark, sun and moon, as necessary
to each other as brawn and brain. They were good for each other. Kick
made a clean impact on Ryan who forgot the depressions and anxieties he
had brought with him to California from his childhood, his family, his
schooling, and his church.
“Kick doesn’t like anyone to be down.” Ryan was learning as fast as he
could from the golden man of bodybuilding. “He says we’re all responsible
for our own happiness.”
Ryan’s big secret was that he had not made himself happy. Kick was
the only real and continuing joy he had known.
“They’re an improbably grand couple,” Solly said. “I hope Ry can keep
up. Kick will give him a run for his money.”
Somewhere in his youth or childhood, Ryan felt he must have done
something good. With Kick, he finally penetrated the A-group fraternity
of handsome bodybuilders.
“They’re not gay,” Kick said. “They’re not even homosexual. They’re
homomuscular.”
For a kid once on the outside of everything, Ryan had pulled off what
he had always wanted to be: one of the boys. He wrote in his Journal:

Le bonheur, Wednesday, June 20, 1979. I am happy. This
is happiness. This happiness is high flight. I’m giddy, raucous,
uproarious. Walt Whitman would be proud of me. I laugh in
bed, at dinner, outside in the sun, on mountaintops at night.
I’m dizzy with the spin of happiness. The sheer vertigo of delight
scares me as much as it thrills me. I have as much happiness as
I can stand, and then Kick shines on me, and I am more happy.
Life is a constant up, a spiraling scale of incandescent fragile joy.
The higher I go, the rarer the feeling. The higher Kick and I go,
the more fragile I feel. The more fragile I feel, the more trusting I
become. He could hurt me. He could hurt me worse than anyone,
because I have let down all my defenses against him. He requires
none. My love for him, if defined, is trust. We are safe people to
each other.

In the same Journal, dated two days later, June 22, 1979, Ryan
scrawled a related fast entry:

Kick is a vacation, an adventure, a religious experience. We
daily for hours in bed. He is the most personal sex I have ever

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