Page 316 - Some Dance to Remember

286 Jack Fritscher

Ryan’s heart felt faint. Death, despite Kick, seeped like San Francisco
fog all around him. He hid at the ranch for two weeks. He could not tell
Kick how depressed the facts on the evening news made him. He was
thankful he had holed up so long a time with Kick. He felt consolation
that Kick had rescued him from the serial promiscuity he had so eagerly
pursued upon his arrival with Teddy from the Midwest. A Channel 9
PBS live special fingered multiple sex partners as the primary cause of
contagion.
Serial tricking was exposed instantly as dangerous as serial murder.
Ryan resented the plague. If a man couldn’t have the sex he wanted
in San Francisco, then everyone should go back home where they came
from and pursue the careers they all gave up to follow their dicks around.
Every day the news little by little astounded the City. No one knew
what caused GRID. No one knew how to cure it. The one grim fact of
agreement was that once a man got it, he died.
On the six-o’clock news, Wendy Tokuda read the day’s lead story.
“GRID is now AIDS. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Doctors
at San Francisco General announced today that the City’s latest AIDS
victim died this afternoon. The patient, whose name was not disclosed,
died, the hospital spokesperson said, with more than a thousand diseases
in his immune-deficient body. He was the second person to die of AIDS
this week in San Francisco where more than 200 AIDS cases have been
reported. Nationwide, deaths from AIDS now stand at 22.”
“Not counting Tony, and how many others,” Ryan said, “who checked
out before anyone knew what was happening.”
For half a month Ryan stayed at the ranch, cleaning up after Thom
and breaking out in crying jags for fear that he might already harbor in his
body whatever it was that was attacking them all. He resented cleaning up
the broken glass in the main house. He resented the closets with peanut-
butter sandwiches stuck to the walls and the blood on the bedroom carpet
and the filth in the bathrooms and the animal shit in the living-room shag
and the holes pounded in the walls and the French door to the bathroom
ripped off its hinges and the torn mesh of the screens where the cats had
gained entrance from their nightly prowls.
He resented Thom’s dying. He resented his father’s dying. No one
stood between him and Death but Annie Laurie, and now the news was
telling him nothing so much as that he might die before her. He was
humiliated thinking that he might die of a gay disease. For one whole
day, he actually felt he wouldn’t mind dying of anything but a gay disease.
He didn’t want anybody to be able to say: “He’d be alive today if only he

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