Page 37 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 7

5

Something there is in love that rules out amnesty. For everyone. For
every word and act. For every promise and betrayal. For every reason and
passion. For all sins of omission and commission.
Love interests me. Intrigues me. As well it should. If love were easy,
everyone would be in-love.
Ryan in his romantic fantasies wanted to be a sexual soldier of for-
tune. He marched from the Midwest to California in quest of other men,
preferably jocks, and precisely in conquest of blond bodybuilders. Ryan,
I think, started his search for the perfect body the day he discovered he
didn’t have one. “I’m no movie star, but I know how to get what I want.”
Ryan’s face and aerobic build were attractive enough. As a child, he
had suffered the embarrassment common to many cherubic curly-haired
boys. Women in their 1940s’ clothes stopped his mother to say, “He’s too
pretty to be a boy. He should be a girl.” Something in Ryan’s baby gut
tumbled. He hardly knew what, but he knew he did not ever want to be
a little girl. Little girls grew up to have female trouble. Those two words,
perhaps because the women ordered him to run out and play when they
said them, locked together in his head: female and trouble. So he endured
the women’s dismissal gladly and ran out to build his forts in the woods
behind the house. Ryan somehow was always building fortifications. I
think his passion for real estate took root at the same time the women in
his mother’s kitchen shooed him to the porch, and he went in search of
other boys to share his forts. He liked hunting boys. Something outdoors
in the treble heads-up shouts of older boys at play drew him irresistibly.
He liked entering into a group of strange boys and picking out the best
one for his best friend.
Ryan’s curly dark hair slipped slowly up his forehead which he minded
at first in his mid-twenties, growing the compensatory beard, and then
after thirty not so much at all. Some young gay men, balding themselves,
ran from his bravado. Some men read his aggressive balding-bearded Look
as style.
“I think of myself,” he once told me, “as a sports car with the top
down.”
He made humor with words. He seduced with his voice. He was
Pillow Talk. When he tied men up at the baths, he discovered dirty talk
enhanced the sex scene. His words could cause a hard-on. Out of the sack,
on Castro for brunch, he was smart enough to dish himself harder than
anyone could needle him. It was the best defense. It kept tongues sharper

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