Page 469 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 439

AIDS epidemic: innocent people living creative lives while some invisible
government Death Ray sneaks in to kill them.
Kick had no feel for Ryan’s pop-schlock interests. When John Lennon
was shot, Kick shocked Ryan. “Lennon was nothing to me.”
Ryan pretended not to notice the difference between them.
Kick was a true southerner, cool to social and emotional issues that
he said caused Ryan a world of hurt and depression.
Kick had the gift of sexual alternation of self, but he lacked the knowl-
edge that is the true heart of romantic otherness. He lacked the generosity
of love. If he ever, for one moment, had really put his redneck self inside
Ryan’s creative skin, no matter how mondo bizarro Ryan was, things might
have turned out differently.
Kick, after his own fashion, loved Ryan. But I doubt if Kick could
have identified Ryan’s body in an accident. He can’t be blamed. Ryan
was such a changeling that Kick many nights must have wondered who
he was. Ryan was an anticipation of anything he figured Kick wanted
him to be. He was a million movies. He had a thousand faces and more
expressions than all the Barrymores put together. Kick loved Ryan’s sexual
madness and creativity more than he loved Ryan himself.
Ryan may have been a Woolworth’s Five-and-Dime Wordsworth
reincarnate. He understood the poet, who himself had fallen out of space
and time. “Our destiny, our being’s heart and home/Is with infinitude,
and only there.” He loved Tennyson’s declaration of dependence for imag-
inative identity: “I am a part of all that I have met.”
Ryan’s main intensity was an ironic drive, I think, to escape the isola-
tion of solitary confinement in his own skin by becoming anyone and
everyone else. He suffered a fatal attraction to otherness, to becoming
other than he was, and he had achieved ecstatic otherness beyond his
wildest expectations with Kick.
When the golden man of bodybuilding walked into that El Lay room
that first summer night, Ryan rose up to shake his hand and was pulled
into Kick’s otherness. In all their nights together, conjuring on the stolen
gym clothes, suiting Kick up in authentic uniforms of quarterbacks, cops,
and Green Berets, playing their endless list of construction workers, log-
gers, cowboys, and musclemen, abstracting Kick’s blondness against the
tight black bondage of skintight latex, Ryan taught Kick the only trick
Kick had not known. It was the trick Ryan knew best. The achievement
of otherness. It was both his virtue, and, if not his fatal flaw, then at least
also his vice.
His talent for otherness cost him his self.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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