Page 54 - Some Dance to Remember

24 Jack Fritscher

every molar and bicuspid. Guess who paid good Doctor Percodan? I mean
tooth decay in this day and age? Not tonguing around in my mouth,
thank you. I read somewhere tooth decay is contagious.” Ryan was a hypo-
chondriac who would go berserk with the onset of AIDS. “After his teeth,
Teddy had surgery to repair a torn cartilage in his knee. He claimed I tore
it when I tied him up. I told him he shouldn’t have struggled so much.
Then he had a kidney stone, which was right before his hepatitis. Then
came the series of allergy shots. He’d endure anything rather than work.”
The downward spiral of gay men, I’ve found, goes with the territory.
A man, straight or gay, can’t follow his dick around and not expect to lose
ground in the real world.
“And during his allergy shots, he had a tonsillectomy.” Ryan rubbed
his thumb to his fingertips. “Guess who paid for it all? Teddy was an attrac-
tive twenty-four-year-old strawberry blond when I met him. He never got
over being a hustler. He’d work New York for awhile. Then Chicago. He
said I rescued him from being an alcoholic.” Ryan was resolute. “Believe
me when I say my Finishing School for Gay boys is closed. From now on,
I want full-grown adult men only.” His madness those days was the kind
of madness one sees in men saddled with bitter loyalties to old lovers they
can’t seem to dispose of in a gentlemanly fashion.
In those last days, Teddy kept to himself in the Victorian flat that
had always been more Ryan’s than theirs together. His room was a pile of
old clothes, magazines, and boxes of Styrofoam peanuts from the packing
cartons of photographic equipment Ryan had bought for him.
“You spoiled him,” I said.
“I loved him,” Ryan said. “I still love him. But I can’t stand him.”
When finally Ryan ordered Teddy to move out, he refused. It took several
of us, including a gay San Francisco cop, to coax him from the house.
He did not go gently. There was a fight. Physical blows. He held onto
Ryan tighter than I have ever seen anyone cling to anyone else. He was
hysterical.
“You made me move with you to California,” Teddy said. “Now you’re
abandoning me.” He was terrified of going out into the world alone.
“That’s precisely why he has to go,” Ryan said. “He’s hiding out in me.
He has no friends of his own. His only friends are my friends.”
When we dragged Teddy screaming from Ryan’s apartment, his fin-
gernails tore into the carpet like a cat being pulled on its belly out the
door to the vet.
Teddy’s forced exit had been shaped sometime before. The last straw
had been the Friday evening Ryan flew to Hollywood/Burbank. Teddy

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