Page 40 - Some Dance to Remember

10 Jack Fritscher

threatening suicide.
Late one night Ryan told the crying Teddy who saw the end coming,
“I love you, Teddy. I do no kidding love you.” Ryan talked 7-Eleven con-
venience talk, the kind of bull you know a hungry old lover will swallow
like junk food. He said it exactly the way Tony Perkins had said to Tuesday
Weld in Pretty Poison. “I do no kidding love you.”
In San Francisco, Teddy had gotten in the way. He couldn’t keep a
job for fear of not keeping a constant eye on Ryan. He seethed if Ryan
said hello on Castro. Without changing his boyish smile, Teddy could
conjure instant Evil Teddy. Men asked Ryan, “Teddy’s hot but what’s
with his vibe?”
“You need,” Ryan said, “to live on your own for a few months. You
need to have some friends who aren’t my friends.”
“I don’t want anyone else,” Teddy said. “I’ll never let you go.”
“Your meal ticket’s punched out. So’s your free ride. Get a job.”
Suffocating captivity drove Ryan-Orion mad. I think more than any-
thing in his heart of hearts he wanted nothing more than to be captured;
but unless it was precisely the right man, it was a bondage he would never
allow. Not in a million years. Not until he found the Ideal Man of his
dreams.
Not until Kick.
Not until Kick captured Ryan completely.
“Kick? Kick.” Ryan was talking long distance to El Lay. “Is that his
stage name?” He grilled Dan Dufort who told Ryan he had a friend Ryan
must meet. “I’m suspicious of blind dates.” But that first night, when Ryan
first saw Kick, he dropped the suspicion. Something clicked in his very
soul. Ryan stared in awe. At Misericordia Seminary he had learned the
words of transubstantiation. Hoc est enim corpus meum. This is my body.
Muscular blond flesh and blood walked into the Platonic Ideal he had
tucked away in the back of his head about the way a man is supposed to
be. The sweet treble call of boys’ voices at far-off games deepened down
into the slow southern drawl of Kick’s first Alabama “Hullo.”
Kick. With a shelf life from here to eternity.
Kick was a man’s man, to hear Ryan tell it, an angel’s angel, a god’s
god. His was the perfect body, the classic face, the supernal blondness
that was the object of Ryan’s search that something in life could be ideal.
I myself thought Kick a bit slick, but I recognized the type. Everybody
can recognize the type: the man who since he was a little boy is popular on
the playground, always a captain in sports, the jock who dates the prettiest
girls, the muscular guy in the showers who makes boys with high IQs and

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