Page 182 - Some Dance to Remember

152 Jack Fritscher

movement. They’re traitors to essential manliness.

“The Castro they want,” Kick said, “is like the Indians who meet the
trains in Albuquerque. They want us to dress up in cute little leather hats
and Lacoste shirts and have our pictures taken with the tourists.”

17

It was Solly’s birthday. Ryan was insistent on the phone that Solly
forget his agoraphobia long enough to dine out.
“As long as you come alone,” Solly said. “I can do without your side-
kick. I can’t bear a crowd watching me age.”
“I’ll take you some place decent,” Ryan promised.
“Don’t threaten me,” Solly said. “You know I like to eat with my
hands.”
Solly preferred fast-food joints sleazy enough to need their own rent-
a-cop. He liked places like that. Places where anything can happen. Those
plastique places whose hose-down decor, vibrating in late-night fluores-
cence, made him realize how things can go wrong on a minute’s notice.
“Tomorrow night then?” Ryan asked.
“Make it early. I don’t like to be out after dark.”
The next afternoon, Ryan carried a boxed cake on the 8 Market/Ferry
bus down to Solly Blue’s Tenderloin apartment. If Solly insisted on junk
food, at least the cake could be good. Ryan bumped his way through
the doors of the Saint Anne’s Apartment Tower. The name was the last
reminder that, before the neighborhood was dubbed “The Tenderloin,” it
was known as “Saint Anne’s Valley.” The inner lobby clung to its grandeur
against all the noise and sirens and dirt and screams and traffic that since
its construction in the graceful twenties had ravaged its first-floor store-
fronts. The main entrance was a haven behind wrought iron. Cupid-faced
fountains spit water into deep shells. Spanish tile and curling arabesque
columns echoed with the sound of an FM radio playing music reserved
for waiting rooms.
Solomon Bluestein was a Libra growing older. Ryan hoped the birth-
day cake had survived the rush-hour crush. He balanced the pink card-
board box from the Court of the Two Sisters in one hand while he pressed
the elevator button to Penthouse 1603. Ryan watched the elevator descend
past the small window in the door, its cage like a squadron of metal Xs.
Behind the Xs, feet also descended, followed by legs, crotch, belly, shoul-
ders, and surly face. The door split open. The manager of the building

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