Page 31 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 1

Reel One

Welcome to the Hotel California

1

In the end he could not deny his human heart. Always he had known,
long before he came that drizzling California night, with the gun in his
hand, to the gymnasium, that his life, scaled down, of course, would be
forever like the newsreel of the Widow standing, alone and in black, with
her tiny son, his hand saluting as muffled drums rolled across a dazed
and weeping landscape. In the movies one image dissolves into another.
The dissolve itself is metaphor of change. He, now looking thirty-seven
years old, managed a drive-in movie against the screen behind his high
forehead. He had Movietone newsreels from his black-and-white child-
hood of a plane crashing into the Empire State Building, of VE Day and
Hiroshima, of Korea, the Papal Holy Year, and the wedding of Elizabeth
and Philip. He knew by heart the first campaign footage of Camelot and
the final Super-8mm Zapruder strip shot in grainy Technicolor in Dallas.
He had images of draft cards burning up in defiant flames; inserts of dogs
lunging at black bodies on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama,
oh yeah, hungry dogs of Alabama; of American cities burning in protest;
of the Summer of Love; and of terrified Vietnamese fleeing their American
saviors on the evening news.
Chronology was not his style. Feeling was. Sometimes he forgot to
breathe. Sometimes he remembered he would have to pay for the good
times. Once on fortune’s wheel, everything is fixed. Sometimes he had
that high-flying feeling of a person who goes starved to bed. Sometimes
nothing mattered. Sometimes everything mattered too much.
He was smaller, more real in size, than the huge Widow, who, like
him, would forever mourn her love, ended abruptly like his, but who,
unlike him, was not approaching the gymnasium stage where his victori-
ous blond bodybuilder lover was posing, handsome, muscular, golden,
brilliant, shimmering with sweat, triumphant in the final moments of the
Mr. California Physique Contest.
Waves of applause washed him closer and closer to the bank of the

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