Page 370 - Some Dance to Remember

340 Jack Fritscher

a deferentially false self. Kick had shared with him twenty new pounds of
chemically false muscle. Was either one real to the other anymore?
He lay sprawled in the dark on the carpeted floor of his bedroom.
Seduced and abandoned. Ground down into the realization that everyone
is alone. Lost in their lives. In their deference. In their drugs. In their
mendacity. All of them lost. Some more than others. For a while. Maybe
forever. The truth weighed heavy on his chest. Squeezing his breath. Lost
and alone. “Until the sham of companionship returns,” he wrote, “and you
can begin again to pretend in your coupling that you’re finally making it
together through the night.”
He missed Kick. He missed the idea and ideal of Kick. For the first
time in three years he was admitting to a self of himself that Kick, as much
as he, had been lying in his teeth. To get what they each needed for them-
selves both of them said what the other wanted to hear. And they called
it love. Ryan knew he could no longer deny his real self. He had to talk to
Kick. He had to save him from himself. They both had to save themselves
from themselves. Muscle wasn’t worth the consequences of steroids. He
had to really communicate with him. Kick had once asked him to move
with him to a new plane of muscle. He must now tell Kick that they must
move their relationship from the fantasy of muscle to the reality of health.
He had once sold his soul to get Kick. He had sold his own self to
keep Kick. He hated himself for selling out what Annie Laurie had cau-
tioned him against. He had bought into the Acquired Identity Deficiency
Syndrome.
The needles and the steroids told him more than he wanted to know.
Kick was selling his heart and soul for muscle gain. What had happened
in his healthy soul to so endanger his healthy body? Solly had read to him
in his Physicians’ Desk Reference about the side effects of oral and injectable
steroids.
He was Kick’s accomplice. He had swallowed and snorted more drugs
with Kick than with anyone else. But they never, never shot themselves up.
Maybe we’re bad for each other.
Ryan tried to balance his conscience against his lust. He did not know
if he dared ruin everything between them. His hard-on struggled with
his heart. Guilt is a strange country. Ryan fell into a habit of his adoles-
cent Catholicism. He examined his conscience. He knew the difference
between sins of commission and sins of omission. It was the same old fight
for purity against the sexual sins of the world, the flesh, and the devil. If
he loved musclesex more than he loved Kick, he would say nothing when
Kick flew back from Birmingham.

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