Page 78 - Some Dance to Remember

48 Jack Fritscher

Olentangy River.
Ryan was a good sport. He wrestled like Ado Annie in Oklahoma!
He could rarely best the older seminarians physically, so he topped
them with his imagination and his words. He invented a new game: fight-
ing slow-motion the way brawlers sometimes wrestled in the movies. In
slow motion, he figured, with his long, lean build, he had a better shot at
giving even the huskies a run for their money.
Not until Ryan was eighteen, four years into the seminary, did he
begin to realize fully that the rough-and-tumble brawls seemed more like
some kind of sex than sport. He wasn’t dense. He was pure. He wrestled
with their bodies and with his feelings. He was confused. He liked these
muscular, older boys. Besides, sin, they had drilled into him, was in the
flesh of young girls.
No one had ever said anything about older boys.
Yet a nameless warning hummed in Ryan’s vigilant soul. He had a
way with words in English and Latin classes, but he had never heard the
word homosexuality; or, if he had heard it, the word meant nothing he
could fathom exactly. Monsignor Linotti tended to speak in abstraction,
except for the time before Christmas vacation when he told them all if
anyone asked them what time it was in a bus station toilet to kick them
in the crotch and run. It hardly seemed charitable to Ryan, but he was
nothing if not obedient.
What worried him most was the return of the nameless feeling he had
first felt with Charley-Pop. The boy he had it for was David Fahnhorst.
I remember he said it was on an October afternoon of his senior year
in Misericordia Seminary high school. He sat with his best friend, the
strapping Dave Fahnhorst, who was the captain of that and the president
of this, down on a bench overlooking Misery Lake. The feeling he had for
Dave Fahnhorst was lodged in Ryan’s heart, not yet in his crotch. He was
in-love for the first time in his life and in his confusion he did not know it.
“I can’t wrestle with you anymore,” Ryan said.
Fahnhorst, a big German farm boy from Ottawa, Ohio, looked puz-
zled. He palmed his hand through his blond crewcut.
“You...” Ryan hesitated. He ached for the full hug of Fahnhorst’s
husky arms.
“I what, Ry?” Fahnhorst’s blue eyes pierced Ryan’s resolve. Ryan felt
suddenly deferential to the big blond jock. Maybe he should forget it. It
was nothing. At least it was nothing he had a name for. Except maybe a
vague sense of sin. “This,” Ryan later said, “was how I got so twisted.” His
deference gave way, in his young Gemini heart, to resolve to protect his

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