Page 350 - Some Dance to Remember

320 Jack Fritscher

It had hurt Ryan to see Kick grow more and more gay. He had wanted
Kick to maintain, to be as big as the heroic Hercules he had seen on the
screen when he was a child. He needed Kick to remain archetypal with an
aura, because an archetype fallen was no more than a stereotype.
“Actually,” Solly mused, “all archetypes are stereotypes, and vice
versa.”
Ryan squeezed his eyes shut and held his ears. He clapped his hands
to make Tinker Bell live. He stopped going down to Castro altogether.
Acquaintances kept him posted, more than he wanted, on Kick’s fre-
quent street appearances with Logan through those lonely two months
of Indian summer. Ryan was frightened for Kick. He thought of him
as an innocent abroad. He was a southern boy swept up in a Northern
California whirlwind. He did not know what Ryan knew from his years
in the City. The downward mobility of homosexual men as they exit from
straight middle-class values and come out into the gay lifestyle is legend-
ary. Kick had once been a carpenter. He hadn’t touched a hammer in over
a year. He and Ryan had spent many an afternoon hanging out on Castro,
but they had stayed above it, on top of it. Ryan had told him about Vanessa
Redgrave in Blow-Up.
Identity meant nothing to Kick in the company of Logan. Kick was
giving up himself to become what Logan wanted. At Misericordia, Ryan
had been warned against falling in, as Monsignor Linotti said, with bad
companions and special friendships.
In his long absences from Ryan, Kick suffered a shift in Attitude,
which he tried to conceal from Ryan whenever he returned, like a lost
little boy, to Ryan’s doorstep. Ryan grew fearful for him, hearing some of
the antics Logan had involved Kick in on Castro.
One Sunday afternoon on the corner, a shouting match had erupted
between them. Actually, Logan had done the shouting, but Kick had not
discreetly withdrawn. The story had sounded very gay to Ryan, but he
dismissed it as gossip. He knew the story must be garbled. He knew that
any fighting, much less a public squabble, was not Kick’s style. He knew
that Kick could maintain. But he was wrong. Something he did not know
had happened. Something he could not acknowledge had occurred.
He denied that the intersection of 18th and Castro was crowded with
gaping witnesses.
The steroids had a deeper, aggressive side effect.
Kick had become in those two months with Logan a street-corner
bodybuilder posing and prick-teasing in the thin-sliced afternoon sun in
front of Donuts & Things. Vanity had overtaken his pride. He had picked

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