Page 315 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 285

mention of GRID. Solly read him the grim facts. Ryan thought of Tony
Tavarossi dying in the ICU of San Francisco General. He thought of kiss-
ing Tony dying in the ICU of San Francisco General. He thought of Dr.
Mary Ketterer saying she had never seen a patient so distressed.
He panicked.
“Don’t get your bowels in an uproar,” Solly said. “Gay-Related
Immune Deficiency is not your fate. It attacks gay men. You’ve always
said you’re not gay.”
Kick was philosophical. “What men I’ve had,” he said, “are body-
builders. They’re healthy enough.”
Ryan tried to match Kick’s power of positive thinking. Kick had not
seen the dying face of Tony Tavarossi. Ryan did not want Kick to see his
speeding depression. He had to get control both of Thom’s suicide and
the horrifying news, if it was true, of the plague that stood hungry on
their threshold. Ryan left Kick in the Victorian and drove alone up to Bar
Nada. He had to escape the City and he knew he certainly had to clean
up the mess Thom had made of the ranch. He needed time to think about
all that the media was saying about the awkwardly named Gay-Related
Immune Deficiency syndrome.
“Be thankful, at least,” Solly said, “the press is no longer calling it
‘gay cancer.”’
“‘Gay-related’ sounds so ‘cause and effect.’”
“They think only our kind gets it. They’re sure our kind started it.
Don’t you absolutely love the politics of medicine?”
Ryan had agonized through his childhood over polio. Every sum-
mer, during the polio season, he woke next to Thom in their bed, and
both of them, every morning, immediately touched their chins to their
chests and their knees to their chins. As long as they could do that, they
knew they hadn’t awakened with polio, which struck like a thief in the
night. Annie Laurie had been careful. During polio season, she followed
all the precautions. Ryan and Thom were not allowed to swim in public
pools, which were all closed anyway. Their dental work was never done
in the heat of summer. They never ate the ends of bananas even when not
exposed through the skin. No one knew from what dark place polio had
come. Everything was suspect. Everyone knew someone who was in an
iron lung, or worse, dead from polio. Parents were in a panic for them-
selves and their children. They all believed anything and everything they
heard about the dread disease. Every day the radio and the papers listed
the number of polio cases reported in the city, the state, and the nation.
The news was clear. People died.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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