Page 284 - Some Dance to Remember

254 Jack Fritscher

January laughed.
“Thanks for the advice,” Kick said. “Have a good flight.”
“Ciao, baby, ciao.”
When Solly heard that Kick had taken Logan to the Davies Hall
premiere, he called me. He was pissed.
“Magnus,” Solly said, “there’s some things in life these boys don’t
understand. Some people you take some places. Other people you take
other places. If you ask me, and no one did, there’s some places you don’t
take your whore. Ryan tries to make light of this entire thing. He wants
that crazy sense of fraternity he’s always writing about to work in real life.
Real ity isn’t like his fiction where he can control his characters. He fails
to see that Kick isn’t clever enough to know there’s a difference between
lovers, partners, friends, roommates, fuck-buddies, and whores.”
“Kick may have a southern drawl,” I said, “but he didn’t just fall off
the turnip truck.”
“Precisely,” Solly said. “He knows exactly what he’s doing.”
“And Ry doesn’t.”
“He doesn’t know what Kick is really doing. Ry doesn’t know reality
like I do.”
“We’ll have to wait around and pick up the pieces.”
“Yeah,” Solly said. “Wake me up when the killing starts.”

6

Ryan and Thom were both refugees from the America of the sixties,
a de cade of social concern Kick seemed to have missed altogether, despite
what happened at the lunch counters in Birmingham, Alabama. Kweenie,
who was ten years old during the Summer of Love, never forgave fate for
making her too young to come to San Francisco wearing flowers in her
hair. Ryan had tuned her in, as they said back then, to incense and Super 8
movie mak ing, playing sitar soundtracks to their homemade underground
films, always starring Margaret Mary, who was starting on her way to
becoming Kweenasheba.
“It’s my fault she’s turned out so crazy,” Ryan said.
Kweenie would have been the last one to blame him. Charley-Pop and
Annie Laurie had their own ideas, but they trusted Ryan to give Margaret
Mary, born in their forties, things they felt their own golden boy could
give her. She had loved Ryan bringing home the Sgt. Pepper album and
Surrealistic Pillow. “Go ask Alice.” And she was Alice by the time she was
nine. She had loved her brother showering rose petals on her face while

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