Page 246 - Some Dance to Remember

216 Jack Fritscher

Solly is good at adapting to any situation. His halfway house
for ex-cons and hustlers is his professional practice. It’s made him
cynical, but not jaded. Jaded is when you do it but don’t enjoy
whatever it is. He is frank. You adapt or you get out. You adapt
or you die. He adapts continually. He handles alternate realities
well. All the time, I think.
Especially one night, late, a bit drunk and a lot ripped, he told
me, confessed actually, embarrassed the way a woman is embar-
rassed after a rape. No fault of hers, nor in this case his, but the
embarrassment acute all the same.
Solly at thirty-five for all his wanting to be a dirty old man,
is boyishly attractive.
Some years before this drunken confessional, he was vaca-
tioning out of sheer perversity in Beirut, pushing the edge of
danger that so thrilled him. The Hilton was under fire. The city
was an armed camp of swarthy young soldiers. In two months,
the American ambassador would be murdered. But this night,
Solly was traveling through the Muslim section in the early eve-
ning to ball the son of a gold merchant. The winter before, in a
Tenderloin bar, Solly had met the young foreign student who had
come on to him as perfect Arabian trade.
“Then he became a terrorist in the sheets. These people are
not of the twentieth century,” Solly said. “We were very primitive
together. Having never fucked above the lower classes in Amer-
ica, you can imagine my surprise afterwards. I found out he was
a son of the wealthy bourgeoisie. He was every rugged eastern
Mediterranean I had ever seen on CBS. From now on, you can
call me the Ayatollah Bluestein.”
In a way it was logical he should go to Beirut. Ten years
before, he would have gone to Saigon.
“Terror,” he wrote in one of his Solid Blue Video brochures,
“is my only hard-on.”
The Muslim section of Beirut was awash with people. Dark
faces pressed against the glass windows of his slow-moving car.
What he had been looking for seemed to be looking for him. The
driver of his car cursed their luck as the car immediately ahead
rear-ended the auto closest to the intersection. The trunk of the
car in front of Solly popped open. “Omigod,” he said. Bulging
from inside the sprung trunk of the small car was a fully clothed,

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