Page 43 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 13

They stood on their tongues trying to figure what the Famous Cou-
ple had in common. Kick’s contribution was obvious. He had Universal
Appeal. Ryan was the ringer.
“I hear they have sixteen inches between them.”
“Yeah. Twelve-to-four in favor of Kick.”
To me the bigger curiosity concerned more mysterious workings than
sex appeal. I wanted to know, in the game of love, how a one-night stand
turned unexpectedly for them both into an off-ramp to Alpha Centauri.
Mysterious forces propelled both men toward one another. Ryan, on
an enchanted El Lay evening, had indeed met a stranger across a crowded
room. So had Kick. But while their blind date that first night seemed
the very essence of gay lust, the kind Ryan sold by the column inch in
Maneuvers, somehow, very quickly, sometime between midnight and the
next dawn, this match of writer and body artist, something like a same-
sex Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, became much more than trick
rock ’n’ roll.
Somehow, I think, Ryan and Kick accidentally tapped into a Force
Field so basic and so human that it thrilled them narcotically, before it
terrified them totally.
That first August night in El Lay something clicked. Kick posed and
Ryan talked his sex-rap. Recreational sex became unitive sex became tran-
scendental sex. They pushed out the bounds of the finite, conjuring sexu-
ally, riding into dangerous psychic territory where neither was himself,
and each passed through the other, until they triangulated a third Entity:
a Power, a Force, a supranatural Being neither at first fully recognized,
and, once conjured, neither could ever live without again. Something
more than love muscled in on them.
Crisp may be right. There may be no tall, dark man; but Ryan had seen
at their first meeting, and this I reveal as plainly and without prejudice as I
can, the face of the Golden Man. Knowing Ryan’s Catholic metaphysics,
of one thing I am absolutely certain; and don’t misunderstand what I, a
confirmed atheist say, when I say it with qualification, not on Ryan’s part,
but on mine, that Ryan had glimpsed the very face of God.

6

On the title page of his dog-eared Billy Budd, Ryan wrote, in the
most legible scribble of all his random notes, what must have come to
him, suddenly, as a single, illuminating, uninterrupted, crystalline vision
of sexual elegance.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK