Page 468 - Some Dance to Remember

438 Jack Fritscher

Whitman was the first crack in Ryan’s vocation.
The priests never wanted Ryan’s identity of Ryanness. They coached
him to deny his own self, as they had denied theirs, to become “another
Christ.” A vocation to the priesthood is the supreme act of self-denial, a
kind of religious suicide. It murders all the selves a man might become to
make him into one other self only. They preached that his self must die
to be filled with Christ’s self. Souls open to multiple selves were like the
New Testament souls possessed by devils whom Jesus exorcised into swine
and stampeded over a cliff to their Deaths on the rocks below. The priests
forbade Walt’s singing because they could not chance Ryan filling himself
up with multiple, alternative selves.
But he had.
Against their priestly intent, he had become a student of forbidden
romantic poets “half in-love with easeful Death.”
“You can’t be a priest and have a mind,” he said.
He romanced the drowned Byron and gunned-down Shelley and the
tubercular Keats. He felt their restless spirits reborn and too soon dead
again in obituaries on the evening news. Always there were the ghosts of
Jack Kennedy, of Bobby Kennedy, of Martin Luther King.
He kept a pop hagiography of the famous who died before their time:
James Byron Dean on a two-lane blacktop; Marilyn in her tangle of sheets;
Hemingway sucking off his shotgun; Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, and
Jay Sebring slaughtered by slaves of Charles Manson in a house owned by
Doris Day’s son; Mama Cass, a nice Jewish girl, choked to Death on a ham
sandwich; Janis and Jimi and the pouty Botticelli mystic of the Doors, Jim
Morrison, killed by drugs and drink; Tennessee Williams, suffocated by
a nasal-spray cap caught in his sinus; Natalie Wood and Dennis Wilson,
famously drowned; the original golden boy, William Holden, bleeding to
Death in a drunken fall; Richard Brautigan and Jon-Erik Hexum, dead
by gunshots; Sal Mineo, murdered by knife; Pier Paolo Pasolini, beaten
to Death by a hustler. He held open a blank space for the first big movie
star to die of AIDS.
He kept notes for a book he titled Great Movie Star Deaths.
He wondered, with Sal and Natalie and Jimmy Dean dead, if there
had been a curse on Rebel without a Cause; or on The Misfits, the last
movie for Monroe and Gable and Montgomery Clift; or on The Conqueror
whose stars Susan Hayward, John Wayne, Agnes Moorehead, and direc-
tor Dick Powell had all died of cancer, as had most of the supporting cast
and a hundred of the crew. They had shot on location in Utah, too near
too soon, the site of a nuclear test blast. He saw them as archetype of the

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