Page 48 - Some Dance to Remember

18 Jack Fritscher

The writer took up bodybuilding and the bodybuilder began writ-
ing. Falling through the looking glass, mirrorfucking, each becoming the
other, they fathered that third mysterious Entity that lifted them out of
space and time and made their world stand still, in a space out of time, for
almost three years when for both of them there was no one else.
Ryan, by the way, nicknamed me “Magnus,” because, he said, I
reminded him of the stern rector of Misericordia Seminary, the Very Rev-
erend Monsignor Magnus Linotti. “Magnus,” he said. “Magnus Bishop.
A perfectly ironic name for a cynical, atheist critic.” Kweenasheba picked
up on the name game because of her counterculture taste for changing
given names. Solly Blue endorsed it because all his hustlers had street
names. Kick and the others simply followed suit. So I, Charles Bishop,
from Peoria, Illinois, nicknamed by Ryan O’Hara from Peoria, Illinois,
became, in San Francisco, California, Magnus Bishop.
Kick’s was a nickname too. “Without a nickname,” they say in China-
town, “a man has no chance to become rich.” Kick was born rich, the only
child of an athletic, horsey, handsome couple whose roots went back three
generations in the American South, and before that, to the icy blond, arc-
tic midnight sun of Norway, and before that, if Ryan was to be believed,
to the Planet Krypton.
How the real Billy Ray Sorensen, southern-born and Alabama-bred
in Birmingham, became the bodybuilder titled Mr. National Physique,
Mr. Golden Bear, and Mr. California, is part and parcel of my pop culture
theory that people tend to be like their names, given or assumed.
“Kick” was short for “kickstand,” a name dropped on Billy Ray in his
high school shower room by a coach who joked in front of the other lather-
ing players: “Hung like that, boy, you ain’t got a dick. You got yourself a
kickstand.” The nickname stuck in the positive upbeat way things always
stick to good-looking, well-built, blond athletes. For those on whom the
gods smile, they positively grin.
I’d like to say none of this happened to anybody. Yet, with all Ryan’s
Journals and videotapes, Kick’s muscle trophies, the pile of their mutually
passionate letters, and the hyper-male fetish-clothing belonging to both of
them spread around me here in my study, I have good reason to believe,
sitting alone here at Rancho Bar Nada, facing westward over the Pacific,
that something enormous happened. Something beyond their control.
Something one or both of them, and I say this metaphorically, sold their
souls for. I want to find the name of that Entity they conjured between
them. I want to know where are they now, and why am I alone with my
feet and my head tangled in their footage? Remember that. And remember

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