Page 262 - Some Dance to Remember

232 Jack Fritscher

“I do live for you. You have no idea how much I live for you.”
Kick pulled Ryan close to him. He kissed Ryan’s cheeks. He put his
moustache against Ryan’s moustache. Their lips touched. Ryan held tight.
He felt Kick’s baseball biceps knot around him and pull him into his mas-
sive chest. He knew this was the way it was supposed to be. His very breath
was squeezed from him. Kick’s tongue darted through Ryan’s moustache,
parted his lips, passed through his teeth, and slid down Ryan’s throat.
“Oh, God!” Ryan breathed.
This was no joke. Lichtenstein’s cartoon balloons, filled with Benday
Dots, appeared above their heads.
“We’ll be together forever,” Kick said. “I promise. However life takes
us, we’ll always be together.” He held Ryan’s jawline in both his iron-
calloused hands. “I’ll never leave you but once,” he said. His blue eyes
pierced Ryan’s soul. “And that will be when I die.”
“Oh, God! I love you!”
If ever Ryan were ordained a priest, his ordination was that night
in the swirling mist, anointed not by some Roman cardinal, but by the
southern bodybuilder who held his face in his hairy blond hands and
breathed immortality into his soul.
“You are,” Kick said, “my lover forever.”
“And you are mine.”
That night on that rooftop something happened.
It was bonding.
It was marriage.
“It was just another cheap balcony scene,” Solly said.
I harbor a suspicion that the truth is cornier than we think until the
moment when we find ourselves inside some truth that is stranger than
fiction. Ryan was a child of the movies. He lived cinema. The way he
described the rooftop scenario moved me profoundly.
Imagining that scene, I genuinely wanted to have been seated behind
a Panaflex camera in a helicopter that would lift off from the two of them
on that roof, holding on them in each other’s arms in slow motion in the
mist, while the camera rose and they grew smaller and smaller, shrinking
against the night, as the rooftop took reference from the intersection and
the intersection from the Castro and the Castro from the City and the
bright City from the darkness of land and sea until the Earth itself stood
majestic against the full moon.

11

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