Page 51 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 21

Ryan always ended up at Solly’s penthouse. Teddy, ever jealous Teddy,
accused him of having a hot affair on the side. Not with Solly, for god-
sakes, but with somebody! A terrible fight ensued.
“I’ll never let you go,” Teddy said.
“Alright, already. Okay. I get the message. It’s okay. Stop worrying,”
Ryan said. “I’ve never balled Solly.”
“You have sex with his hustlers,” Teddy said.
“I’ve always liked hustlers.”
“What’s that mean?” Teddy was pissed. Ryan was expert at saying one
thing and meaning another. “I’m not a hustler.”
“And Castro isn’t paved with yellow bricks.”
“I need you,” Teddy said.
“Ryan wanted to be needed, but not by the likes of dear sweet Teddy,”
Solly Blue said. “Teddy was life-size. Ryan wanted someone larger than
CinemaScope. He was ripe for Kick’s picking.”
“If I’m not needed,” Ryan said, “I don’t know how to relate to the
world.”
Monsignor Magnus Linotti, the rector of Misericordia, had encour-
aged Ryan, telling him the essence of a vocation was the world’s need for
handsome, manly, young priests. His father, sick and dying those twelve
long years, had cornered Ryan’s ear and whispered how much the fam-
ily needed him. Teddy had needed him. The priests’ pinched souls, his
father’s illness, and Teddy’s whining, exhausted him. He was depressed.
He thought not so much of actual suicide as about the idea of suicide. He
read Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death. His curiosity overrode his emotions.
He was down, but he wasn’t ready to kill himself; he was merely sniffing
around the edges, the way a porn writer sniffs around an asshole for a story,
to imagine what suicide might be like. He never wrote a Maneuvers story
ending with the cliché of gay suicide. He was, if anything, intellectually
curious only, because he was in his mortal soul afraid of Death.
If Ryan thought of suicide, he was in the right City. He drove regu-
larly across the Golden Gate Bridge to spend weekends near the Russian
River in Sonoma County at his small ranch that he called Bar Nada. He
felt the Bridge’s strange attraction.
“Some nights when I drive back to the City, and the fog is sweeping
in over the railings, all orange from the Bridge lights, I see ghosts. The
Golden Gate Bridge is the most haunted place in San Francisco,” he said.
I was hardly afraid that Ryan would do himself in. At least, not from
the Bridge. Ryan was a flier not a jumper. I might explain that the City’s
notoriously high suicide rate is misleading. Native San Franciscans rarely

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