Page 411 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 381

he is. I intend to play the gentleman to the very end. If it kills me. It’s my
only shot.”
“I think you’re making a mistake.”
“I have,” he said, “something very important to learn here. I want to
milk my feelings for all they’re worth. If I don’t do that, then all this gay
emergence has been for nothing. I want to feel it all. What it felt like at
the beginning. What it feels like at the end.”
When Ryan’s Victorian could no longer contain his exploding despair,
he took to the streets, the last refuge of the urban damned, shrouded in
a fur parka and gloves against the cold nights. He called me from phone
booths. I could imagine him standing masked with dark glasses and a
thick four-day growth of beard. He liked to pretend he was down and
out, shuffling along the red bricks of Market Street, feeling that his life
lay not in his apartment, not in any place or any thing, but only in Kick.
But he did not have Kick.
He forced himself to walk among vagrants and bag ladies, envying
them. They survived with nothing. Ryan, despite the gain of his writing,
his property, and his past time with Kick, knew that his life lay only in his
body, which he indulged in none of the expected vices. He had stopped
drugs completely. He neither smoked nor drank nor did any of the things
grown men were supposed to do. He purified his body. His body remem-
bered Kick’s body. His body was all he had left.
Everything was his body, and his body, as with his father’s body, felled
at forty-four, dead at fifty-six, was a cache of time bombs ticking toward
total explosion. His pancreas, his liver, his lungs, his immune system, were
each on a timer counting down; but none counted more than his heart,
the ultimate body clock. He had long before thrown the gold Rolex Kick
had given him deep into a drawer of old socks. “It’s a fake Rolex,” Solly
said. Nightly, the news reminded him he was at the high-risk center of
Castro-Folsom roulette. Somewhere the AIDS virus waited for him on the
lip of an unwashed glass.
Standing at 7th and Market, dressed like a bum, waiting to cross
the street, he was hit hard in the head by a Hostess Berry Pie. At first, he
thought he had been shot; but then he realized that someone on a passing
Muni bus had thrown the eight-ounce chunk. Unwrapped. Cherries-in-
goo ran down his face and onto his jacket.
By the time he called me, he said, “I’ve been hit in the face with a
cosmic pie.”
Ryan never let anything be simply what it was. Once I understood his
style of portent, I knew where to add the grain of salt.

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