Page 50 - Some Dance to Remember

20 Jack Fritscher

lost in Hollywood. You end up like Marilyn in a tangle of sheets with
the phone on the floor. Besides, as the Castro’s greatest party producer,
Michael Maletta, always said, ‘In San Francisco, everyone is a star.’”
Maletta’s was no idle observation. San Francisco, unlike Los Angeles,
is small and familiar: hardly more than a simple fishing village with an
opera. And a tolerance for colorful characters. In three fast generations,
the Beats of North Beach begot the Hippies of the Haight-Ashbury who
begot the Gays of the Castro. Because San Francisco is the easiest place
in California to do parole, eighty percent of the convicts released in the
state go directly from jail to the City’s Tenderloin. It’s a sleazy, dangerous
neighborhood of small hotels, of mattresses burning in gutters, of pub-
crawling drag queens and whores and hustlers, of old people waiting to
die and new boat people scrounging aluminum cans to live.
The Tenderloin is a war zone.
The Tenderloin was Solly Blue’s totally urban place of funky prefer-
ence. It was his life. Its delinquent tough boys were his business. Their
bodies were zoned commercial. He hired them in, and shot artful porn
videotapes of them solo on screen as if they were specimens trapped in
solitary confinement. They flexed and posed, showing off their tattoos and
big dicks and buttholes. They talked dirty to the camera, asking Solly’s
mail-order customers if they wanted to “slob on bob,” stroking their dicks,
masturbating to full spasm, spitting cum and saliva at the camera. Person-
ally they were straight. Commercially they were anything a patron wanted
them to be. They were the throwaways and the runaways of America, kids
born, back in the deep South or the Midwest, to some strange calling to
the streets of El Lay and San Francisco.
“And they’re all twenty-something,” Solly said. “Like us.”
He taped them, had hustler sex with them, gave them more money
than they earned or asked for, had them sign a model release, and sent
them back to the streets. In the Tenderloin, where he lived, Solly Blue
was a star the way movie directors are stars. He was as much an auteur as
Truffaut, but the young men who brought him other young men didn’t
know that. His money made him famous with the boys and the boys, par-
ticularly quite some few of them, had no idea how famous Solly had made
them on the home-video porn circuit. Solly Blue was a marketing genius.
Ryan often disguised himself to walk the streets of the Tenderloin. The
neighborhood was a perfect match for his frequent bouts of depression.
“Convicts, alcoholics, immigrants,” Solly Blue said. “Judy Garland
exposed the truth. San Francisco’s Golden Gate lets no stranger wait out-
side its door.”

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