Page 80 - Some Dance to Remember

50 Jack Fritscher

pure to let him. I denied myself everything. I never even masturbated
until I left Misericordia when I was twenty-four. Stop laughing! I didn’t
want to go to hell. I really believed all that stuff. Priests never tell you that
masturbation is the main way to maintain your center.”
When later he began his promiscuous search for the perfect man, the
man selected for audition in his bed became for that night the only man
in the world. Hoping each next man would be the right one, Ryan gave
every man he met the benefit of the doubt.
It was a gift Kick would enjoy to full advantage.
Perhaps, and this is Magnus Bishop talking, the only curse on liber-
ated homosexuality is the all-too-easy access openhearted men give one
another to their homes, their bodies, their hearts, and their souls. It’s an
innocent trust, this belief in the homofraternity among men whose pref-
erence is each other. It’s an incurable irony, more terminally dangerous
than disease, that this gay innocence continues to exist, so frequent and
so many are its betrayals.
“Men should make love at the baths,” Solly Blue said. “Never take
anyone to your lovely home.”

16

Kick was clever. On his visits to San Francisco, he purposely moved a
heartbeat slower than all of madcap Castro. He drawled when he talked.
He moseyed when he walked. His style was an appealing mix of down-
home redneck and southern gentleman. His gray Crimson Tide tee shirt
with ALABAMA screened in red across his broad chest said it all. He was
Bama-Alabama. He was an original: more archetype than stereotype and
certainly no cliché. He was no Castronaut. He brought Ryan, who was
speeding on fire in the fast lane, to a grinding halt. Kick was virtue on the
prowl. The boys on the Castro sidewalks parted like Kick was Charlton
Heston and they were the Red Sea. He had no eyes for them. He had come
to the City for Ryan. Slowly, deliberately, he began to coach Ryan onward
toward a pristine manliness that Ryan feared he had betrayed in himself
with too many cheap tricks and cheaper thrills. Before Kick, Ryan had
been the Wife of Bath. With Kick, he became Caesar’s wife. Or at least
the emperor’s new, uh, lover.
“Castro’s the place where,” Kick said, “you can see men do to them-
selves things you hoped you’d never see men do to themselves.”
Kick set off an alarm in Ryan. He pierced the veil of the Castro.
He saw things and said things. Ryan thought him a seer and a sayer.

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