Page 456 - Some Dance to Remember

426 Jack Fritscher

volatile heart. Objectivity is the coolest function of the human mind. I
loved Ryan for the Energy of his passion, and I pitied him for what had
happened.
I realized early on that it was Kick, and only Kick, who had ever
broken through to what Ryan called his soul. It was Kick, and only Kick,
whose brilliant golden light was intense enough to pierce the fearful dark
night in Ryan’s soul. It was Kick, and only Kick, whose arms, strong as
angel’s wings, lifted Ryan from his isolation and his terror of Death. At
least for a time.
I remember, you see, all too well that morning on Venice Beach when
I met a woman who had run into a Golden Man. The startled Look in her
eyes has never left me. That Look was the willing suspension of disbelief
that lodges in a face when something ecstatic beyond expectation lifts a
person once and forever outside the closed circuit of themselves.
It is a profound belief in otherness.
I spent more and more time with Ryan.
He stripped the Victorian. He excavated the mounds of paper and
artwork in his study. He boxed everything up for a fast escape.
“Packing boxes are the only way to live,” Solly had always said.
Ryan called a mover named Ralph Joy, whose yellow truck, painted
with the logo, “The Joy of Moving,” appealed to his ironic sense of humor.
“There is,” Ryan said, “no joy in this.”
The yellow truck, loaded by eager young gay boys, made six trips cart-
ing everything he owned into storage in the house and barn at Bar Nada.
Ryan did not move to the ranch. He holed up in the Victorian for six
more months, sleeping his prescription-drug sleep like a monk on a pallet
on the floor. By night he wrote Killing Time till Armageddon, sending
photo-copied sections to Kweenie and me. By day he painted the large
empty rooms of the house. He lived among canvas drop cloths, paint-
brushes, and rollers. He pointed to his single wooden stepladder.
“What movie am I?” he asked. He answered the question himself.
“Our Town.” He was suffering, he said, a tenth-rate nervous breakdown,
borrowed from Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. “I’ve hoped it would be a
nervous breakthrough. But it can’t be. Not here. Not in these rooms. Solly
was right. I have to move.”
The fresh paint had not erased his life in those rooms with Kick. The
Victorian assaulted him. He put it on the market and sold it in two days
to an Asian family. The sale of the house, bought in the early seventies of
the great gay invasion into real estate, compounded with Solly’s life insur-
ance, brought enough for him to live on the rest of his life. He packed his

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