Page 197 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 167

Opel projected a crazy charm. He was planning to start a new-wave
erotic magazine called Cocksucker. The week before, he had bought from
Ryan for the upcoming first issue a piece called “Muscleman Sex.” Some-
thing clicked.
“I want you to read from your story while Kick poses on the platform
next to you. Sort of a ‘Physique Reading.’ Our crowd will love it.”
The crowd that night, in fact, called out for more. Kick posed and
Ryan read. Actually Ryan’s lips moved while the crowd cheered Kick’s
display, bulk-posing first in flannel shirt and jeans, then slow-motion
stripping away the heavy cotton shirt, posing in white tee shirt, flexing
his arms, finally pulling off his tee shirt, displaying his tanned upper body
front and back, then dropping his jeans, stepping out of them without
missing a beat, looking huge in his posing briefs, moving through a slower,
more sensual version of his posing exhibition than he dared on a contest
stage. Never once as he stripped from his shirts and jeans did he cross
over the bump-and-grind line with which male dancers make a burlesque
of themselves. He was not a stripper. He was a bodybuilder revealing the
layers of his Look. Kick got the whole room off.
Kweenie appreciated the commotion. Kick was a star. She knew
exactly what Ryan saw in him: Kick was larger than life. She was grateful
to him. He had cured Ryan’s blues. Before Kick, the only thing Ryan had
recognized as larger than life was Death.
Kweenie flushed with the heat of lust she had felt since first she had
laid eyes on Kick. She wanted him for herself alone. Who didn’t?
“Keep sweating that old, boring depression out of him,” she told Kick.
“You’re his exorcist.” In her heart of hearts, she felt so like her brother that
she had grown up anguishing that his ups and downs were bad sneak
previews of her own emotional life when she got to be his age. But not to
worry. Ryan would always be there. Besides, she had made a certain name
for herself. After Sharon McKnight she was the crisp toast of gay cabaret
society. She was a genuine San Francisco star.
“At least,” Ryan told me, “Kweenie didn’t grow up to be one of those
dykes who wear Bella Abzug hats and smoke long brown cigarettes.”
Ryan and Kweenie were quite a show that night at Opel’s. Not every-
one knew they were brother and sister. They seemed more like loving
rivals: each a mirror of the other, and both taking one step toward, then
two steps back, in the tangled tango of the hardly restrained feeling they
always shared. Even though fear of guilt kept them from coupling, I some-
times thought them the same being, divided by age and sex, and wondered
if the sexual tension of their feeling was more narcissistic than incestuous.

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