Page 257 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 227

and I can’t hear you because what is shouts very loud.”
“You and your egocentric existentialism!”
“Stop bitching. And stop crying.”
“Why should I? Death hardly ever lets anyone say good-bye.”
“Stop blathering pseudo-country-western song titles, or I’m going to
hang up.”
“Don’t hang up.”
“I wonder what they’ll write about me. I can see the headlines now.
‘PORNOGRAPHER FOUND POISONED, SHOT, STRANGLED,
DROWNED, AND ELECTROCUTED IN TUB WITH MULTIPLE
KNIFE WOUNDS by Maitland Zane.’”
In his Journal entry for July 9, 1979, Ryan wrote:

At my Death, let gather bodybuilders. One by one in my life
these muscular brother-men have placed their arms around me.
Now, bonded, let them gather. In the perfect face and body and
look of each is all the study of all the universe a man ever needs.
I look at one face. I look at all the faces. I see finally the only face
that counts. Death is a murderer. Oh, please, my Lord, let Death
be not mean. Let Death look like these men. Let Death be a
golden muscle angel. Oh, please, my God, when I come to you, let
Death be as beautiful as a golden man-angel in flight, welcoming
me with open arms. I could have died the morning after the night
I first met Kick. Every minute I’ve lived since then has been an
excess of luxury. Take me....But don’t take me now.

10

Ryan was as much photojournalist as writer. By the beginning of his
third year with Kick, he had shot thousands of black-and-white stills and
color transparencies and nearly fifty hours of videotape.
Kick was always on.
I remember one particularly poignant videotape: an intense, silent
study of Kick’s face. “Video portraiture,” Ryan said, “captures the subject’s
essence far better in its multiple frames than any single-frame still shot.”
When Kick flew back to Birmingham to visit his widowed mother,
Ryan ran the tapes in slow motion and freeze-frame. He studied expressions
and movements that in real time occur too fast for the eye to appreciate.
He pored into Kick’s soul held captive on his video. He masturbated. He
remembered, then ignored, Monsignor Linotti’s quaint rule of Catholic

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