Page 46 - Some Dance to Remember

16 Jack Fritscher

one that involves a person deeply. Sometimes dangerously. Something like
covering El Salvador, or San Francisco, under fire. Writing history is dead
and distinctly different from the vicarious adventure of witnessing a whole
people being carried away by history.
I admit I’m a fame-and-failure junkie. Not mine. Others. I entertain
an almost perverse curiosity about the ironies of American culture. I want
to know why the postmodern craze for derivative pastiche, quotation, and
appropriation succeeds seamlessly in Spielberg and Lucas and fails in the
lurid flash films of De Palma and the post-Apocalypse Coppola. I am more
interested in the delayed-stress syndrome of Vietnam that affected Ryan’s
brother, Thomas a’Beckett O’Hara, than I am in that curiously flawed war
itself. I am more interested in the generic emotional effects of MTV than I
am in any Number One song ever. Beatlemania interests me far more than
the Death of Lennon. I am more interested in the American males’ sports
obsession with muscle and size than I am in knowing which bodybuilder
is contractually owned by which publisher of which glossy physique maga-
zine. I want to know how men achieve a certain Look, a certain Attitude, a
certain way of Being. I want to know why star-crossed lovers, such as that
woman created by John Fowles, wait for the French Lieutenant who, like
Godot, never shows. I want to know why Ryan cruised in the fast lane,
certain that what he was looking for was looking for him, praying for the
first time ever he’d see the like of Kick’s face. Kick, you see, was not the
French Lieutenant, nor was he Godot. Unlike them, Kick showed up.
Saint Theresa, beloved by Saint Truman Capote, was proven right again:
“There are more tears shed over answered prayers than unanswered.”
On a more mundane level, Ryan’s friend, the streetwise porn-video
mogul Solly Blue, had warned him: “In California you’ve got to be careful
what you wish for. You might get it.” I want to understand sexual politics.
I want to understand how Dan White revised gay history one November
morning when he crawled through the basement window of San Fran-
cisco City Hall, high on junk food, and shot the liberal Italian Mayor,
George Moscone, and the gay Jewish Supervisor, Harvey Milk. I want
to understand how White brought an outrageously playful community,
with little more than sexual freedom on their minds, together in a way
that he neither wanted and they could never have foreseen. Especially, I
want to know in all their infinite variety about all American women and
American men. America, I tell my students, is a wonderful country that
has yet to be discovered.
My name is Charles Bishop. I am only peripheral to these events of
passion and illusion. I was a bystander taking notes. I thought I was not

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