Page 443 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 413

on its tripod and aimed mid-focus at him on the bed. The other, a new
forty-four-inch rear-projection screen, was connected to a recorder set to
PLAY. Next to it sat a pile of cassettes. All of them of Kick.
“What is to happen tonight,” Ryan announced to the recording video
camera, “is an act of freedom. I am untying the knots of our bonding to
each other that somehow we both turned into my bondage to him. Enjoy
this, Magnus,” Ryan said to me on the videotape. “It’s the autobiography
you always wanted. Look around me in this bed. I have not to remember
these things; they have remembered themselves. My memory of the vision,
of the man who walked that first El Lay night into that vision and fulfilled
it, remains clear and bright. Too clear. Too bright. What movie am I?” He
laughed. “Alas, poor Yorick.” Sitting naked, up on his knees in his bed,
he laughed.
“I guess I’m more narcissistic than Kick. Am I embarrassed? Are you
embarrassed, Magnus? I can reveal anything to anyone. People who have
been publicly humiliated have that freedom, you know. Stick with me,
Magnus, the way you always have. Watch me kill. Watch me die. Watch
me fill and smoke the sacred pipe. Watch me break the bonds of gravity
and soar into the air with a sky full of angels.
“This is the ceremonial end of ceremony. My childhood and schooling
and life choices now seem a strange series of mistakes, arranged first by
others, then by myself. It wasn’t sex that made me happy. It was Kick who
gave me more happiness than I have ever known. You know that, Magnus.
You will be my only spokesman—spokesperson. Ah. I have learned that
too. Is not Ginger greater than Fred? She did everything he did, Kweenie
said, and she did it backward in high heels. It all makes sense, Magnus,
and none of it makes sense. Ask the ladies to forgive my joke on them. You
have to interpret everything.
“You can become me for a while, Magnus. You are the professor of
popular culture. You can write a piece for a professional journal. What
will you write? Confession? Apology? Memoir?
“I went to Kick for precisely the same reason Thoreau went to Walden
Pond: to front only the essential facts of life.
“Can you give lectures on that to your students? Can you be the genial
professor lecturing to young students, handing out mimeographed notes
to eager, upturned faces on the pop-culture rise and fall of the Castro, like
we were part three of a miniseries that started with the Beats in North
Beach and the hippies in the Haight-Ashbury? Was the Castro no more
than Brigadoon? What will you say about AIDS? Will you trivialize all us
gay guys—you see, I can say it; I can admit it—into questions and answers

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