Page 59 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 29

talked about the heat and the smog. He said he had never been
to San Francisco. He asked me what the city was like. Dan sat
back and grinned, listening to us making our way through the
small talk with steady gains toward discoveries of everything we
had in common.
Kick and I were not strangers.
We almost instantly recognized we were Old Souls.
I masked what I was sensing, afraid he might not recognize
what I already knew. I asked him about bodybuilding.
“The summer I was twelve,” Kick’s voice was an easy Ala-
bama drawl, “I spent three months with my uncle and aunt. They
ran a filling station with a diner outside of Muscle Shoals.” He
grinned. “I didn’t quite know then how much I’d learn to love
that name. About the second week, I started noticing this young
trucker came in every day. He talked to me the way a grown
man, who’s not much more than a big kid himself, jokes around
with a kid. I remember he had cut the sleeves off his flannel shirt.
He asked me if I wanted to feel his arm. I reached up. Way up,
I remember.”
Kick raised his arm, smoothing his moves through the ges-
tures of his story.
“I was such a little guy then, and he was so big. I wrapped
both my hands around his bicep. For the first time, I felt how
strong and hard and big a man’s body could be. I hung on to his
arm and he lifted me up. Swung me right up off my bare feet,
up out of the dust. Face to face. After that, I guess I pestered the
shit out of him. Every day for the rest of the summer, without my
asking, he let me swing from his arms, betting me he was strong
enough to hold his flexed double-arm pose while I hung, my
face to his chest, with both my hands on both his biceps. I could
hear his heart-beat and I wanted arms strong as his. He bet me I
could chin myself from that position.” Kick grinned. “So I pulled
myself up, the first time half-climbing his tall body. By the time
summer was over, I was hanging from his arms and chinning
myself up to his face. All that next winter, back in Birmingham
in my own bedroom, I stood in my white cotton underwear and
started flexing my arms. Sort of posing the way boys do when
they’re home alone with a mirror. I studied my arms. I imagined
them growing big and hard. Like his. You should have seen me.
Squinting my eyes. Concentrating on them to make them grow.

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