Page 432 - Some Dance to Remember

402 Jack Fritscher

“The Mr. California is next Saturday. I’ll follow him there. I’ll follow
him to every contest he enters. When he poses, I’ll shout, ‘Fag! Fag! Fag!’”
“All bodybuilders are fags,” Solly said. “I thought you wanted him
dead.”
“I’ll kill him professionally. I’ll...Oh, shit! I don’t know what I want.”
Ryan turned ambivalent back to the window. “I want...I want...”
“What do you want?”
“I want to remember all of this. I’d rather feel what I feel than never
to have known I could feel this much...passion!” Ryan walked back to the
couch where Solly reclined like Madame Recamier. “That’s what we had,
you know. Passion. More than sex, we had passion.” He lifted Solly’s feet
and scooted in under his legs. “How did we ever get to this point, this
time, this place? All my life has been lived and I sit here with my best
friend, whom I’ve never balled, wondering what happened and what I
should do next.”
“I can end this nonsense for you,” Solly said.
“How?”
“Passion costs,” Solly said. “Sex pays. Maybe Kick didn’t like the
going rate of passion. Sex turns a profit. He’s opened up a small business,
and I think not for the first time.”
“I don’t understand.”
Solly turned the Pink Section of The Advocate open to the page where
the hustlers, whom The Advocate called models, listed their personal ads.
One of them was circled.
“Read this,” Solly said, “and weep.”

ARMSTRONG. San Francisco’s Biggest Bodybuilder. New
in town. First ad. Big Guns. Big Arms. Feel them: thick, big
ARMS, muscle-bulked heavily from sweaty workouts, their huge
girth sported in a tee shirt, or subtly concealed by shirtsleeves
of well-washed flannel stretched across their mass, now stripped
to reveal mounds of baseball biceps cabled with vascularity, and
thick horseshoe triceps, growing bigger before your eyes, the
pump of each successive flex further expressing the disciplined
power of the life force that built them. With those Big Guns lifted
high in full frontal display of arm muscle, feel them again. Feel
the density of each striation as it’s gathered down into the depths
of muscle armpits rich with the heavy male scent of bodybuilder
muscle sweat. After a bit of smoke and a hit of popper; if you find
your nose and tongue exploring the depths of those pits, if you

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