Page 52 - Some Dance to Remember

22 Jack Fritscher

jump off the Bridge. It is mostly outlanders, anonymous immigrants from
the dark interior of the American continent, with only a few months in
the City, who are jumpers. No one, no one who is anyone, ever jumps
off the industrial-strength Bay Bridge coming in from Oakland. It is the
Golden Gate, and only the gracious Golden Gate, that has the singular
siren mystique.
You can’t really understand San Francisco without understanding the
Golden Gate Bridge.
I think California draws high-fliers from all across the country. New
beginnings in America have always beckoned westward. California is as
far west as you can go. When even that last hope of California’s promise
becomes, like everything else, betrayal, the Golden Gate’s siren height,
spanning land’s end to land’s end, gives those would-be upwardly mobile
aspirants who wanted to fly so high, one last ironic chance to dramatize
the talent for daring they couldn’t even give away: one soaring flight, out
and over and down into a deep Pacific sea of surcease.
“Gravity sucks,” Ryan wrote. “Gravity holds us bondage on this
prison of a planet. Gravity is the bottom line for angels flying too close
to the ground.”
Ryan had seen enough of love in San Francisco to have learned the
country-western wisdom of Aristotle who said, “Love makes a man a
romantic; the loss of a lover makes him a philosopher.” When you can’t
beat something, you join it. When you can’t find love, you settle for sex.
The Bridge is, perhaps, the last chance of the existentially betrayed to
flaunt gravity’s unbeatable revenge on all the world’s high-fliers.
When, I wonder, and how, does a flier become a jumper?
One of my university students, a glowing young freshman girl, asked
me why so many books and films are always so depressing. “Why aren’t
artists content to show happy people having good times?”
I handed her that morning’s Chronicle. Page two featured a shot of a
young man sitting on the rail of the Golden Gate Bridge. He faced the
City. Jumpers always face the City; everybody’s movie requires a block-
buster audience, especially for the final reel. The athletically built boy was
naked. His head was shaved to a Mohawk. He had padlocked his ankles
tight together with a heavy chain. He had handcuffed his wrists together
behind his back. A blond California Highway Patrolman was leaning,
black-gloved hand outstretched, to the bound boy. The patrolman’s mir-
rored sunglasses doubled the image of the perching figure. The photo was
an esthetically perfect shot. Seconds later, the boy arched his buttocks
and dropped, cutting like a rock through the wind, naked and shaved and

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