Page 426 - Some Dance to Remember

396 Jack Fritscher

into a new state of grace; but finally the best boy on the movie set real-
ized what he had lost in gaining the fast-lane manhood he had come to
California to find.
Innocence.
Children live in a state of grace from which adults fall away. Ryan read
tome from The Education of Henry Adams: “A boy’s will is his life, and he
dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in
becoming tame.”
Deep down, this taming of his will to deference, to become what Kick
wanted, and not Kick’s dalliance with Logan Doyle, was the betrayal.
All Ryan’s life was a taming: the doctor who, clucking at foreskins, had
civilized his penis; the women in the kitchens of his childhood; the priests
at Misericordia. Education had fucked him over. Nurture tried to destroy
his nature. He had been an innocent who had resisted them all, more or
less, for better or worse, until Kick came along and took all his resistance
away. He had fought to save his wild innocence for a reason he did not
know until Kick walked into that house in El Lay that hot summer night
when he surrendered everything to become the wild man he wanted to be.
When Kick betrayed his innocence and trust, Ryan’s wildness turned
into a madness. He became bitter, cynical, biting, sarcastic. He did not
like himself, so he liked nothing and no one.
He stopped writing his erotic stories. He felt desexed. He could not
encourage serial tricking. Heavy sex was unsafe; tricks were as dangerous
as serial murderers. He had dreams, and sometimes dreams are wiser than
waking, that his writing grew at the end of his hand like a cancer growing
on his fingers.

I’ve written too much. I’ve written about the wild, promiscu-
ous, dirty things our mothers warned us against. A bleary life of
bars and baths and drugs. We have the bodies of men, the feelings
of men, but we are headstrong babies. What if some poor fool gay
boy reads my stuff, goes out and does it and dies.

He was afraid his writing encouraged behavior that caused the AIDS
that killed the boys who lived in the fantasies Ryan built. He stopped
publishing Maneuvers. He could no longer glorify sex in its pages.
Solly was appalled. “As a pornographer myself,” he said to Ryan, “all
I can say is that we’re talking major league brain damage. Yours! Maybe
you did take too many drugs.”
“I’m heavy into Killing Time till Armageddon,” Ryan said. “I’m into a

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