Page 346 - Some Dance to Remember

316 Jack Fritscher

It was more that he knew he needed from Ryan some way to regain the
very Energy he knew he was losing in himself as his soul thinned and
weakened and he fell in-love with someone he knew in his heart of hearts
was not evolved enough for him. He had taken a step not up, but down,
the old evolutionary ladder.
Kick’s legitimate pride in himself, once his soul grew thin and wasted
by the systemic plague of the steroids, was replaced with a certain vanity,
the sin of the thin-souled. He lost proportion. How ironic. Proportion was
the very thing he had sought to achieve in bodybuilding.
“Contests,” he had said, “are won on proportion of legs and arms to
torso and head.”
In Ryan’s videos of his first physique contests, Kick had radiated a
finessed proportion of body and soul and manly energy. In later videos,
he showed only brute physical proportion of arms and legs and pecs and
shoulders. He moved from the idealized sport of bodybuilding to the
hard-core business of the muscle game. His new heavy-iron muscle Look
at first masked the fact that he had lost the essential proportion of body
and soul.
He had become meat.
His face, which Ryan thought had changed when he came back that
night before Thanksgiving, was a dead giveaway. Among bodybuilders on
steroids, there is at first a slight change in the shape of their faces. I’ve never
seen a professional bodybuilder who didn’t have more chin than seems
humanly possible. Initially this change is aggressively attractive. Every
man wants more chin. But then this acromegaly, this slow rearrangement
of the face, after a number of years, can produce prominent, often uplift-
ing, enlargement of the facial bone structure. Is Schwarzenegger’s newly
refined movie star face a plastic surgeon’s reduction of his bodybuilder
acromegaly? I wonder. Ryan had thought the slight change in the forward
thrust of Kick’s strong chin was simply another notch in the intensity of
his manly Look. He had loved him for his face as much as for his muscle
and his soul. Ryan had no objectivity at all. The lover never really knows
the beloved.

7

On that night before Thanksgiving, neither knew that they were on a
trajectory of ruin. Sometimes it is better not to know the future. What I
tell here, I tell from the rearview mirror. I know now what Ryan was too
innocent to know then. What is, is, Solly constantly, irritatingly, repeated.

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