Page 248 - Some Dance to Remember

218 Jack Fritscher

corrugated steel door, and shoved him into the street alone. The
door roared down closed behind him. He tried to pull what was
left of his piss-soaked clothes together around him to avoid atten-
tion, to pretend nothing had happened so that no more would
happen, but no one on the street seemed to notice.
In the distance, the shelling of the hotels continued. Gunfire
crackled through the night. They had hurt him anonymously,
for no reason, for nothing he had done. They had turned on him
for some kicks and he felt angry and dirty enough to be sick in
the street, next to the burnt-out body, dirty and sick and embar-
rassed enough to mention nothing to me of the incident until this
one night of confidences. And even at that, he seemed to hold
something back.
People who are tortured, no matter how or for whatever rea-
son, seem always to gain a reserve, a mistrust, a modesty, born of
an astonished, well-grounded fear of their own kind.
“It was a wonderful vacation,” he said. He always made a joke
of everything. “I love foreign travel.”

7

Kick had become Ryan’s father. He had replaced the father whom
Ryan could forgive neither for dying so young nor living so long so tor-
tured by illness. The exchange of one man for the other was a simple
equation. The Long Good Friday, the l3th of April, 1979, Ryan had told
Kick on top of the parking deck overlooking the corner of Market and
Castro: “I love you more than anyone. More than my father. More than
my mother. My brother. My sister. Anyone.” He meant, “You are my
father. You are my family.”
He gave it all to Kick.
Ryan always knew that one thing could mean two things. Ryan had
always loved wordplay. It was Charley-Pop’s fault. Back in Ryan’s Tech-
nicolor childhood, his rugged and dashing father had amused and amazed
him. He taught him how a riddle means more than the guesser thinks.
Leaving a restaurant, Charley-Pop had handed Ryan a book of matches
from a fish bowl near the cash register. It read on the cover: “For our
matchless friends.” Ryan thought Charley-Pop a wonder as he explained
the little joke. He saw suddenly the possibilities of the duplicity of words,
and maybe the ambiguity of life itself when one thing between two people
can mean two different things to them both, but he was too innocent then

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