Page 467 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 437

Ryan sat at the opposite end of the long picnic table where we both
worked under the shade of the ponderosa pines. He had arranged our
work places. “You sit here and I’ll sit there. Just like Tennessee Williams
and Carson McCullers.”
“I miss the allusion,” I said.
“Williams and McCullers were great friends. One summer they sat
at opposite ends of the same picnic table. She was writing The Heart Is a
Lonely Hunter and he was writing Suddenly Last Summer. Or maybe it
was Reflections in a Golden Eye and Sweet Bird of Youth. What difference
does it make?”
“Ah,” I said.
“I mean I really want you to really live with me. I don’t want sex. I
need companionship.”
That summer he was on even more powerful medication prescribed
for him by Dr. Shrink whom he saw weekly in Berkeley. On top of every-
thing that happened, he suffered from total AIDS paranoia. He washed
even his own dishes in Clorox.
“Dr. Shrink thinks you’re perfect for me.”
“Is Dr. Shrink always right?” I said.
“He’s righter than I am.” Ryan shook the small bottle of Lithobid.
Dr. Shrink was an anxiety-depression specialist. “He says I’m starting to
remember who I am.”
“With an ego like yours, I could have sworn you’d never forgotten.”
“I’m a Gemini. Remember? I’m a chameleon. When I wake up in the
morning, I have no idea who I’ll be that day.”
That Acquired Identity Deficiency Syndrome may be the essence of
homosexuality. Walt Whitman sang songs of himself, his wonderful mul-
tiple self; wandering through the streets of New York and the docks of
New Jersey, identifying himself with every appealing male, man and boy,
who caught the fancy of his eye. Monsignor Linotti at Misericordia had
warned the seminarians that Leaves of Grass, despite its so-called literary
reputation, was pornography.
The following summer vacation, when he was seventeen, Ryan had
checked Whitman’s book out of the Peoria Public Library. He wanted to
see for himself the truth about a man he suspected was a kindred spirit.
He wrapped the hardbound cover in the plain brown paper of a Kroger’s
grocery bag. He sat under the willow trees in his parents’ backyard and
read the poems, searching at first for the forbidden parts, and, wondering,
when he found nothing dirty, why the good Monsignor had been so stern
in wanting to keep something so beautifully written away from him.

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