Page 47 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 17

part of any of this. Yet, I must confess, what happened to them all touched
my heart one way or another, a fact that for a very long time my cynical,
atheist critic’s head hardly believed. Now I am working my way back. This
is my only deep, dark secret. I must work my way back. Back from what
once was called a nervous breakdown. Not a real nervous breakdown,
mind you. I wasn’t myself touched that much. But from a tenth-rate ner-
vous break-through. The kind you don’t see a psychiatrist for. The kind
you work out for yourself. By examining all the pieces that push you to
the limit. By examining all the bad things that happen to good people. By
trying to figure how golden fliers become star-crossed jumpers.
Like Ryan, I left the Midwest to start a new life teaching in California.
I like the academic life. It’s sheltered. It gives a man time to himself, even
with endless papers to grade. My time made me accessible to Ryan. Ah,
yes. In some ways we were very much alike: me with the analytical need
to listen, and him with the emotional, Catholic need to confess.
My masculinity, and rein in any ambiguous cynicism about closets,
runs exclusively, when it runs at all, straight toward older women. I am
more asexual than consciously celibate. I remain perhaps cooly interested
in—forgive my slight pedantry—the existential ramifications of human
love. Somehow, Ryan Steven O’Hara seemed to me, if anything, at first
proponent then victim of the new romantic, liberated sensuality trying to
fit itself into the inexorable mainstream of twentieth-century existential
constraints. Translated, that means he was trying to find love in the face
of Death, but not the same way The Advocate proclaimed the safe sex of
the New Homosexuality in the face of the Acquired Immune Deficiency
Syndrome. Ryan and Kick were, long before AIDS, when San Francisco
was still Eden, something like Adam and Eve, a couple with something
special. In his heart, Ryan carried a priestly purity; in his body, Kick
carried a manly nobility. This mutual recognition, achieved through the
transcendence of hard-balling sex and drugs bonded them together. Actu-
ally, both of them were something like Adam before the Fall. And nothing
like Eve.
What I must tell you makes me feel like a film editor whose footage
has all run off the reel and lies in tangled snarls on the dusty floor. I
must make sense of it. Stories in the movies all make sense. Maybe mov-
ies—something all these film fans never understood—are a crock. Maybe
movies lie. Maybe in assembling the footage of what happened what I too
want to know is what the tall dark writer and the short blond bodybuilder
had in common. I think I know.
It was body and blood and soul and divinity.

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