Page 466 - Some Dance to Remember

436 Jack Fritscher

our relationship through a glass darkly.”
“How biblical! How Bergman!”
“Armageddon is a parallax view.” He quoted Osbert Sitwell to me:
“When indiscretions become historical, they become discreet.” He was
more sad than angry. “Kick and I are history. We’ll stay that way unless I
do something about it. I don’t know where he is. I can’t call him. I can’t
write to him.” He waved the envelope with the contract. “This is my last
and only chance to communicate with him out there wherever he is.” He
pulled open the mailbox and dropped the envelope. “I feel like a castaway
throwing a note in a bottle into the ocean, hoping against hope.”
Kweenie kept Ryan posted with monthly updates. The option turned
into a contract. The contract turned into a treatment and then a draft
screenplay. The draft itself turned into a dozen drafts and then into a final
shooting script.
In the end, nothing came of the deal. One afternoon, on the set of his
Cover Up TV series, Jon-Erik Hexum woke from a nap and was told that
the day’s shoot was delayed one more time. He did no more than any of
us have done when we make a joke about being frustrated once too often:
we point our forefinger at our temple, pull it like a trigger, and say bang!
Jon-Erik, however, pointed at his head with a prop gun loaded with
blanks, smiled to make the joke we all make, and pulled the trigger.
The wadding from the blank imploded a piece of his skull the size
of a quarter into his brain. For a week, machines kept his heart alive.
The Friday after the Friday of the accident the doctors pronounced him
brain-dead. With only two movies and a TV series to his name, Jon-Erik
Hexum never became the James Dean of his generation. His healthy body,
kept alive on machines, was flown from Hollywood to San Francisco for
multiple transplantations.
“I want his face,” Ryan said.
For him, another supremely beautiful man was dead and gone.
That was the end of Armageddon.
“Hexum was my only connection,” January said over the telephone.
“Without a star attached, the project is dead.”

15

Over the next year, Ryan and I finally became friends. One night, he
simply said, “Live with me.”
“I am living with you,” I said. It was the summer of my sabbatical year
and I had moved to Bar Nada to write my doctoral thesis.

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