Page 448 - Some Dance to Remember

418 Jack Fritscher

my business. You may be totally depressed, but you’re my only beneficiary.”
“Don’t be morbid.”
“This may seem,” Solly said, “to be a moral fable, a story with a point
to drive home, an ethical dilemma. Pay attention.”
“You mean,” Ryan said, “there’s more to life than getting fistfucked
on the altar of a Catholic Church at midnight on Halloween?”
“See how you are,” Solly said. “You’re bouncing back nicely for some-
one clinging to the wreckage.”
“Gee, thanks,” Ryan said. “What’s the difference between a bounce
and are bound?”
“I must tell you that there is more to my business than videotaping
young hustlers.”
“There’s blowing young hustlers.”
“As I always say, I don’t know if I’m Fagin or Father Flanagan.”
“I can answer that.”
“Don’t.”
Solly fingered an antique silver spoon once used by stars in the studio
commissary before the MGM auction. He sat on his luxurious new couch.
He had been upgrading his penthouse furnishings from Salvation Army
to Macy’s. Behind his head a Warhol poster of Marilyn hung in a chrome
frame on the stark white wall.
“Last night I gave this seventeen-year-old hustler my usual speech.
Tiger brought him over. I told him why boys like him exist. I told him
what his value was. He already knew his price. I actually tried to give him
some direction to what he was doing in life. You thought you had a voca-
tion! That’s my calling. I counsel hustlers. He’ll remember what I said for
about two nights, then I’ll have to make my speech to him again. Or to
another boy just like him.
“That’s the function of a john in a deteriorating society. I’m always
giving advice. Me and Auntie Mame. Of course, she had the bucks. If I
must be compared, Auntie Mame is my choice. I guess I’ve always wanted
to be Auntie Mame. There was a time in life I would have been offended
by that. Shows how times have changed.”
“Life in the bizarre lane,” Ryan said.
“This Auntie Mame’s boys are street trash,” Solly said. “My boys are
not Colt models. If you’re to be my heir and carry on my style and tradi-
tion, you’ve got to learn that thousands of men prefer my boys to the slick
Colt Studio glamour-boy El Lay muscle types.”
“That’s why you never liked Kick. He was too ‘Colt.’”
“Colt is too Vargas, too George Petty, too Flo Ziegfeld, too Hefner.

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