Page 415 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 385

They shook their fingers at him, accused him of worldliness and pride,
and said the poor needed the vision of hope dramatized in all the pomp
of Roman ritual and pageantry. They wanted his obedience, but his intel-
ligence could no longer let him kneel in blind faith. His first attraction
to the Church had turned to distraction. Faith gave way to reason. His
distraction, by dint of reason, turned to refraction. He saw the world in
a different way: bent in and through and then out of a Catholicism that
had shaped then shaken him.
His soul resounded to Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El
Topo and The Holy Mountain. Jodorowsky’s vision of Catholicism, twisted
through mystic myths of Santaria saints and pagan warriors, spit in the
face of Roman theology. Wildly. Magically. Jodorowsky’s films, virtually
painted on black velvet, were as ritually crazy as Catholicism’s worship
of the sweating, naked, crucified, muscular Jesus. Jodorowsky engaged
Ryan’s Catholic bloodlust as much as his uncle Les had engaged him sexu-
ally for the love of God in the sacristy. Something sacred and erotic in the
dark womb-cavern of profane movie theaters made him need to cum. The
cuming relieved ever so temporarily his anxiety. If ever Ryan’s life was a
movie, Jodorowsky was the director.
Ryan was so fascinated by The Holy Mountain, he went back for a sec-
ond time to the Ghirardelli Square Cinema, taking, against his loneliness,
an acquaintance named Juan Jose Morales who danced the “Love Act”
with a blonde woman in a North Beach topless club. The “Axon: Chief
of Police” sequence had proved too much for Juan Jose. In the seat next
to Ryan, Juan Jose fainted dead away under the power of the on-screen
action.
Ryan watched, in utter surprise, something like Juan Jose’s Catholic
soul rise momentarily, sucked up and out of his front-row seat to merge
with the screen. With good reason. The young male victim in the film
looked physically much like the beautifully built, olive-skinned Juan Jose
himself.
Lithely muscular, he was strapped, on screen, this young Latin boy, to
a raised platform, spread-eagled and naked, his cock covered with a black
leather sheath, his dark curly hair garlanded with flowers. He was spread
for initiation into Axon’s army of soldier-lovers. The platform itself stood
centered in a hot and dusty military parade ground. A thousand soldiers
in green fatigue pants, stripped to the waist, faces covered with gas masks,
stood at silent attention, as through the fortress gate rode, on his huge
stallion, Axon, the Chief of Police of the Planet Axon.
Kick could have played the part. Axon was as fair as Juan Jose was

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