Page 170 - Some Dance to Remember

140 Jack Fritscher

on her. Leave her standing right in the middle of McDonald’s,
without a dime, and not a word of English.
I went into the bedroom. She was sitting up in the middle
of the bed. It was a mess. They dirtied my sheets. Punks. She
was crying. I sent Tiger out and made him buy Kotex. With
my money. Kotex. I don’t even like women. I called the Swedish
consulate. They couldn’t do anything that evening. They asked
me if I could keep her overnight. The Swedes are very liberal with
their common sense. The next day a black limousine pulled up
and took her away. I wish limousines would take them all away.
You know, don’t you, the reason for all this introspection?
I’m almost old enough to be a dirty old man—which I’ve always
been anyway. My birthday’s coming soon. Call me for my sizes.
End of tape.

13

Ryan always pumped up his life with intensity. He thrived on the ten-
sion of living with Kick. To Solly Blue and me, life seemed risky enough.
I avoid risk. But Solly, like Ryan, courted it. It was their common bond.
Solly’s risks were physical; Ryan’s were emotional. Intensity for both was
their main hard-on. Solly couldn’t really enjoy sex unless some tough
young hustler gripped his neck in a threatening stranglehold.
Theirs was not a strange kink. A best-selling tee shirt on Castro was
silk-screened: “Beat me. Bite me. Whip me. Fuck me. Hurt me. Make me
write bad checks. Cum in my face. Tell me that you love me. Then throw
me out like the scum that I am.”
Ryan, for his part, burned with a passionate intensity for experiencing
as much as he could and survive. I thought he was making up for time lost
in Misericordia; he always staunchly denied that. He admitted to no more
than that he had moved to California because the Midwest lacks intensity.
Ironically, as a writer chronicling those wild nights, he became an
agent provocateur. He had founded Maneuvers magazine on a shoestring.
He glorified the nightlife of the wild, liberated masculine male. In some
ways, Maneuvers was Walt Whitman on speed.
In the early notes for the Manifesto, Ryan wrote:

The baths teach homomasculinism. In their mazes, men
cruise to find reflections of their preferences. More than one
Telemachus searches for his daddy, and finds him. More than

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK