Page 55 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 25

had been supposed to drive him to San Francisco International.
“I can’t find the car keys,” Ryan said.
“You can never find your keys.”
Ryan grew frantic about missing his flight. Teddy searched all Ryan’s
pockets hanging in his clothes closet. Teddy had always taken care of
keeping track of things Ryan couldn’t be bothered with. The search for
the keys escalated into name-calling. “If you don’t find them, I’ll have to
call a taxi,” Ryan said. “You asshole!”
“They’re your keys, asshole,” Teddy said. I admired nothing so much
in the boy as his ability to put up with Ryan’s stormy temperament. Any-
thing Ryan gave him or paid for, believe me, Teddy had earned.
The taxi arrived. Ryan was in a movie. “The airport. And step on it!”
The gay driver, thrilled by the classic line, careened past everything on
101 South. He roared into the airport, wheels squealing around curved
ramps. Ryan jumped out at the PSA stop and threw the driver a wad of
bills. “Keep the change, pal!” Ryan said.
Everything in his life somehow seemed to depend on making this
flight. Six months before, Dan Dufort, a man Ryan had taken into his bed
from the CMC Carnival, had promised to fix him up with a good-looking
blond bodybuilder he knew in El Lay. Ryan had watched professional
musclemen posing in nonsexual commercial videotapes nightly in his bed-
room. All the straight, big-muscled names displayed themselves in slow
motion on his screen: the brothers, Mike and Ray Mentzer; the blond Mr.
America, 1965, Dave Draper; the ultimate manimal, Pete Grymkowski;
the moustached blond Scott Wilson; Rod Koontz with his “Thee Animal”
tattoo; Big Daddy Bill Pearl, and a dozen more, always excluding Schwar-
zenegger whom Ryan found big but not erotic. “He looks like something
Hitler shit.” Ryan had grown tired of muscle fantasy. He wanted reality.
Quite the opposite of Miss DuBois.
“There are no real bodybuilders in San Francisco,” Ryan said. “El
Lay. That’s where. Venice Beach. That’s their Mecca. Like Castro is ours.
Maybe I should have moved to El Lay. I moved to California because this
is where the bodybuilders come from all across the country. But I couldn’t
move to La-La Land. It scares me too much. I get set down in the middle
of it and I can’t comprehend it. In San Francisco, I go stand at the top of
any hill, and I know exactly where I am.”
At the Hollywood/Burbank airport, Ryan picked Dan Dufort out of
the crowd at the arrival gate. Dan was an intermediate bodybuilder. He
wore a tight white tee shirt and faded Levi’s. His biceps were pumped
and tanned against the white cotton. His white teeth smiled. His face

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