Page 444 - Some Dance to Remember

414 Jack Fritscher

on a pop quiz about our lost homosexual civilization?
“I can’t hold that against you, Magnus. Analytical education is what
you do best. You remain the teacher I once was, but unlike you I could not
remain an observer. I had to go and get involved. I should have known I
don’t have the strength of character to get involved in anything. I’ve not
been adventurer enough to handle life in California. I should have stayed
sitting in my seat in the dark womb-caverns of movie theaters in the Mid-
west. I’m not cut out to live life. I was born to be a moviegoer, a film fan of
dashing, adventurous, romantic men who act out lives larger than my life
on brilliant Technicolor screens in Panavision with stereophonic sound.
“Where did I get the idea I could avert fate and change history?
“I smoke my hash pipe and I ramble. The traditional narrative you
want from me is impossible in a world of film and videotape that has
turned us all into voyeurs of ourselves. I am a man who tried to be gay,
and more than gay, because that seemed the way to absolute manhood.
“For one, brief, shining moment...Oh, Jack! Oh! Jackie!...I thought we
all might be onto something; but finally I said no when I found no god in
man, when I found no angel in him, when I found he was, like me, not
perfect, but only a fraction of Adam after the Fall. Welcome, Magnus,
to my Paradise Lost. What’s the line the Eagles sang? ‘Call some place
paradise, kiss it good-bye.’
“‘How did you find me?’ I asked him that golden afternoon his heli-
copter landed in my fields at Bar Nada. He never answered that. Not
really. He only said, ‘I know everything about you.’ Did he love me before
I didn’t even know? I wonder if he did. I wonder if he loved me because
of a secret me only he knew. Maybe he was trying to coach me to become
that me of the me he loved. If he was, then he was guilty of the same sin
as me trying to coach him into becoming the him of the him I loved. I
wonder if I drove away the best man I ever met before he had a chance to
tell me what to this night, this Christmas Eve, I still think he had to tell
me. The last thing he said to me was that he had been trying to make a
man out of me. He said it just like Charley-Pop.
“My God! My dad would have loved him for a son.
“What if he were an angel? What if I turned on a truly good man?
What if I was too impatient with this young god? What if, as I suspect, it
was I, not he, who fell from a state of grace?
“I look at it now. Logan was nothing. The steroids were nothing. I
should have put up with anything to keep on keeping on with him. But I
couldn’t keep up with him. Not physically. Not even sexually. I kept losing
part of myself. I thought that was wrong. I feared I would die. But maybe

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