Page 375 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 345

Bodybuilding had become a Deathsport of Attitude masquerading as
a celebration of life’s force.
Death, whatever its face, terrified Ryan.
Ryan: “If you were the only jock in the world and I were the only
coach. If you were the only man in the world and I were the only boy.
But’cher not, Kick. But’cher not.”
But he was.
Ryan was like the man trapped in his car at the beginning of Fellini’s
8½. Ryan had to escape from his overheated car where his breath was fog-
ging the wind against the cooler night air. He climbed free of the tangle
of steering wheel and brake and clutch and pushed his way out the door.
A downdraft of air from the top of Corona Heights hit him. He breathed
deeply fearing he had not been breathing at all. He looked up the long
rocky path. He saw the pinnacle of rock crag where he planned to stand at
midnight when the known dread of the last year turned into the unknown
dread of the next.
Some New Year’s.
He began his climb. His rubber-cleated boots hugged the packed
gravel. The half-mile climb seemed longer alone. He was not climbing like
a lover running in lighthearted slow motion. He was slogging up against
gravity like a man struggling to make time, and cover telephoto space,
on film unreeling in motion so slow he seemed he would suffocate in cel-
luloid. He lifted one foot and then the other. He stood gasping for breath
at the first level. He looked up at the second and third levels he must reach
before he gained the top. The mountain’s natural red rock glowed with an
eerie violet light reflected from the City humming down below.
He approached the steep climb, hanging onto bushes that overhung
the trail. His feet slipped. Loose gravel rolled down the hill into darkness
behind him. The sweet smell of wild hemlock took his breath away. He
made the second crest and then the third.
The rocky outcropping at the top looked too far away. He was losing
out to gravity. He had the weight of the world on his shoulders. Yet inch
by inch he made his way up the gravel trail. Every inch he gained glowed
brighter and brighter from the lights of the Castro and all of San Francisco
surrounding the mountain at its foot. Finally he took the uppermost crest.
He stood, catching his breath, turning slowly, fully, to the City, real now
only in miniature, spread out far below him. Market Street was a landing
strip. The marquee of the Castro Theatre spiked up through the night.
It was a view from Golgotha.
The December night was warm and windless. A wisp of fog lay north

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