Page 298 - Some Dance to Remember

268 Jack Fritscher

spends forty minutes every day on her upside-down board. She says, ‘Time
is a friend, but gravity is the enemy.’ Sometimes old people grow to a
wisdom.”
“Ry,” Kick said “I’ve got a brain, but you’ve got a mind. What are
you saying?”
“I’m saying that the point of Universal Appeal is the taking of strength
training beyond strength to achieve power. Power is the ability to apply
strength. That’s basically what I’ve written. That’s what I think you’ve done
with bodybuilding. I think that’s how far muscle can go. Your physical
training has brought you a certain power. You’re more than a bodybuilder
on Castro. You’re more than Mr. San Francisco. You’re a symbol.”
Ryan unsheathed the manuscript. He told Kick about Emerson’s
theory of representative men and how a strong presentation of self could
aid others in defining their own selves. “The way,” Ryan said, “you made
me more me.”
Kick shook his head. “How could I not love a man who not only
teaches me about the Oversoul, but plugs me into it!”
“Take your tongue out of your cheeky cheek.”
“Someday I’ll figure out how I’m me and more than me,” Kick said.
“One thing always means two things.” Ryan frowned inside, think-
ing about the Davies Hall fiasco, but he smiled at Kick the way lovers
smile across a small table in a public restaurant, thinking more about the
evening sport ahead.
Universal Appeal.
Danger lurked in their project. They had always known it. But they
had agreed, that for all their keeping the secrets of their relationship a
mystery on the streets of the Castro, the time had come to represent Kick
in a way more public than even his physique presentations on stage.
“Privacy,” Ryan had once warned, “is the last luxury. That’s why I
never write autobiography.”
Both remembered the night when they had first conceived the book.
Kick had shown Ryan pictures taken of him when he was nineteen by a
photographer in Florida. Kick, in those teenage snapshots, showed all the
potential he later actualized in the medium of his body.
“I’ve always had so many looks to play with,” Kick had said. “So many
people think there’s something vain about looking good. I was embar-
rassed in my teens and twenties, because I was overwhelmed. I saw what
I looked like, but I wasn’t ready on the inside to deal with the physical
gifts on the outside. It was a struggle for me to go to my first gym. I knew
what might happen. I thought I had potential. My dick in my hand in

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