Page 285 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 255

they listened to Ravi Shankar. Her view, as much as both her older broth-
ers’, was from the sixties.
“What movie are they playing?” Kweenie asked me.
I was tired of her game. “What movie is who playing?”
“Kick and Ry. What movie?”
“Casablanca?”
“Not yet,” she said. “Right now, Kick is the golden, aloof Redford and
Ry is the activist Streisand in The Way We Were.” She turned up her pert
little nose. “Then there’s Thom who’s playing John Wayne in The Green
Berets.”
I could have wished my pop culture students were as astute as Kweenie.
She was right about them all. As for Ryan and Thom, Vietnam had dis-
turbed them both the way wars always seem to pit brother against brother.
Blue against Gray. One a hawk. One a dove. Ryan feared the violence he
saw in Thom’s face, almost as if Thom were the angry, bestial incarna-
tion of the gay rage Ryan had repressed—no, civilized—within himself.
Catholicism had made them both miserable with the threats of eternal
torture that coexist in the Church’s theology of Death and fugitive lusts.
If anything more than sex and drugs and life in the fast lane conspired to
destroy Ryan’s sense of self, it was the Church and its penitential discipline
of self-abnegation. The intense Catholic obsessions with sex and sin had
taught him the thrill, the joy, that the intensity of pure obsession adds to
life.
The same was true for Thom in a way. He transferred his Catholic
obsession to a lockstep militarism. Ryan transferred his Catholic obsession
for worship to Kick, who, even when Ryan was not locked in passionate
sex with him, was his Christ, was his Adam before the Fall, was his male
Muse, was the apple of his eye, the sunshine of his life, his roman candle
of Energy and imagination. As the seminary had been Ryan’s way out of
Peoria, Kick was Ryan’s ticket to ride.
Poor Thom. The Marines had been his way out of Peoria, but all Thom
had was a worse case of depression than Ryan, a twenty-percent disability
from the VA, three monsters, and the ultimate dipsy doodle, Sandy Gully.
Thom drove from his monthly checkup at the Veteran’s Hospital in
San Francisco to the Victorian and picked Ryan up in his truck. They
drove north from the City across the Golden Gate Bridge, through the
Rainbow Tunnel, and up the Redwood Highway through Marin, past the
X-Rated Drive-In movie ten feet inside the Sonoma County line, on past
Petaluma and Cotati to the Sebastopol exit to 116 West. Thom had come
into the City on the last of a series of visits to the VA.

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