Page 396 - Some Dance to Remember

366 Jack Fritscher

The cement bowl makes a great tanning basin. You know how I’ve always
preferred quality of life.” The sound of daring to challenge the odds was
in his devil-may-care voice.
Ryan ignored the bait. “When will I see you?”
“Give me a couple more weeks. We’re hanging pretty close to the
ranch right now.”
The two weeks dragged into a month. Ryan’s Dr. Quack upped his
prescription of Valium. Ryan said to Solly, “What can I say? Kick needs
alone-time to think.”
“He’s not alone, you fool.” Solly looked up from his newspaper. “And
the time he’s having, at your rancho, I might add, is the time of his life
with Loganberry dingleberry. You’re now letting two hustlers—count
them, two!—live free!”
“When he’s with Logan, he’s as good as alone,” Ryan said. “I trust
him.”
“Trust is the main mistake you can make in San Francisco. Never
trust gay boys.” Solly sipped his Coca-Cola. “I hear tell some guys with
AIDS are still pulling tricks out of the bars and fucking their brains out
at the baths.”
“I’m retired from gay sex. I can’t even watch gay videotapes.”
“Not even mine?” Solly asked.
“Yours are solo jerk off. That’s different from gay videos with all the
sucking and fucking and rimming that look like sex acts from a lost
civilization.”
Solly waxed nostalgic. “Remember what a gay trick used to be? You
pick him up. He fucks you and pants and screams and throws you around.
He spasms and cums, moaning all over you like you’re the greatest lay in
his life, and you think he’s a liar, and you wonder if he’s faking, because
you feel so dead, and you wonder if he really came. So when he rolls off
you, you run into the toilet and squat it out to check for those few precious
clots of proof.”
“You’re cynical.”
“Cynical? You’re cynical. You pray to God to stop the epidemic. What
kind of God would let an epidemic begin? Your God is cynical. Why
pray to a God to protect you from AIDS if he was mean enough to let it
start in the first place? If he’s so omnipotent, he has all the power. If you
believe in that kind of God, you’re as hapless as an S&M bottom begging
for torture. I really wish you’d stop worshiping at the Church of our Lady
of Perpetual Guilt.”
“Leave me some consolation,” Ryan said.

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