Page 192 - Some Dance to Remember

162 Jack Fritscher

away the store, the way Safeway supermarkets gave away their groceries at
gunpoint when the Symbionese Liberation Army held Patty Hearst and
the whole Bay Area hostage.
Old San Francisco, with its cable cars running halfway to the stars,
had eroded under wave after wave of special-interest groups until there
was nothing left for those who remembered old San Francisco but Dan
White’s gun. The City had opened itself to everyone. No stranger waited
outside its door. Finally, overextended, the City began to collapse back
inward on itself, beginning that symbolic day when Dan White crawled
through the basement window of City Hall and held his own private
election. It took him only minutes to assassinate the liberal Italian mayor
and the gay Jewish supervisor from the East Coast. That morning San
Francisco changed forever, the way America changed the day Kennedy
was shot.
Not everyone hated what Dan White did in committing himself fully
to what he believed in; but they were little noticed in the media coverage of
thousands of gay men and lesbian women marching down Market Street.
After that morning, San Francisco moved under the shadow of the gun
that by a single bullet had made a woman its mayor.
Solly would always be his best friend, but Solly was wrong.
The world had begun with Kick.

18

Ryan felt queasy leaving Solly’s apartment. The rich cake hit him with
sugar blues. For a moment, in the deep Tenderloin canyons of theaters
and old hotels, he felt a pang for the narrow fast streets of Manhattan. He
hailed a taxi. Traffic swirled around him. The cabbie drove him from the
Tenderloin, jockeying through the Market Street cars and pickups and
motorcycles cruising through the unusually hot September night. They
sped past the Castro Street Station and the gyrating line standing outside
Alfie’s disco. A few doors west, shirtless men, with red bandanas in their
back pockets, hung out the upstairs windows of the Balcony bar. Someone
had torn the letter C from the awning. The party continued under the sign
“THE BAL ONY.”
Ryan waited at 18th and Castro for at least twenty minutes. Kick’s red
Corvette was nowhere to be seen in the steady stream of cruising traffic.
Ryan called the Victorian from a phone booth outside the Star Pharmacy.
There was no answer. Twice in the next forty minutes, he dialed again.
He felt a surge of panic. Nothing unaccountable had ever happened to

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