Page 412 - Some Dance to Remember

382 Jack Fritscher

“I’m an approval junkie,” he said. He meant Kick’s, Charley-Pop’s,
God’s approval. “I’ll do anything to get attention. I’ll tell jokes. I’ll court
danger. I’ll let my lover live with his boyfriend in my house. I’ll even stoop
to taking a pie in the face. I’ll do anything to get Kick back and not get
AIDS.”
In Karel Reisz’s film Isadora, Vanessa Redgrave sang a nursery song that
haunted Ryan. Out of all women, Redgrave was his muse—his Vanessa-
Isadora. In Camelot, her Guenevere, closeted in-love with her Lancelot,
sang, “I Loved You Once in Silence.” But was the bum-diddly-bummed-
out lyrics of La Redgrave swathed up as the dancing, doomed Isadora
Duncan that haunted Ryan—all that movie-queen bravado packing up
cares and woes ’cause here she goes, swinging low, “Bye-Bye, Blackbird.”
Fucking A! The voice that sings loops in the back of heads: is it the inner
fat-lady singing camp? So what if no one loves or understands me? What a
fucking hard-luck story! I can take it like a man. I made my bed. I lit all the
lights. And it’s still “Blackbird, bye-bye.”
Isadora, born in San Francisco on the northwest corner of Geary
and Taylor, in the Tenderloin, knew it, knew it all, as she tossed her scarf
around her neck and settled in next to the young, dark, handsome driver
of the red Bugatti convertible. Ryan felt hurt by so many well-intentioned
people trying to adjust what they saw in him to what they thought he
should be, that he turned deeper inside himself. He thought it was a sign
and an omen that Isadora’s long scarf, which she tossed so gaily as the car
sped off, had caught in the spokes of the Bugatti’s rear wheel and broke
her neck instantly. So much for Quentin Crisp’s theory about the tall, dark
man. Bitterly he wrote a poem called “Postmark.”

Dear God: You created me. Then you hated me.
Dear Folks: You conceived me. Then deceived me.
Dear Teacher: You told me. Then you sold me.
Dear Boss: You bought me. Then you fought me.
Dear Lover: You thrilled me. Then you killed me.
Dear Death: You embraced me. Then erased me.

“I figured,” he said, “that between my adolescent crisis and my midlife
crisis, I’d have at least one day off.”
Three years had passed since the Death of his father. He missed
Charley-Pop so desperately that he was jarred to tears in a Market Street
cafeteria, overhearing two homeless street people conversing about a third,
also dead, saying, “He’s better off wherever he is.”

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