Page 85 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 55

die and in dying he had transcended spiritually.
Castro was never a street of sorrows. Harvey was not dead a month
before a story, recounted with the kind of gay hilarity that laughs even at
Death, made the rounds of the bars and bruncheries: how some of Har-
vey’s mourners snorted coke on the sailing sloop hired to spread his ashes
over the Pacific waters outside the Golden Gate. The punch line was that
several stoned mourners, as the gossip escalated into a joke and the joke
became an urban legend, had gone all the way and snorted carefully laid
out lines of Harvey’s ashes.
I think you must remember that to gay men everything is a joke.
It has to be.
Otherwise, their lives would be unbearable.
Why else would shops on Castro make small fortunes selling Generic
Blues tee shirts saying, “Don’t cry for me, San Francisco”?
Death, in Ryan’s stories, was erotic, heroic, tempting, beautiful. As
much as bodybuilders were the life force, they were angels of Death,
escorts of the dying; repeatedly, like Tennessee Williams’ Christopher
Flanders in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, they hold out their
strong arms to guide the cleansed soul directly into the muscular eternal
embrace of God’s Big Daddy arms.
Stuffed in a torn-out centerfold from Blueboy Magazine, February
1977, was a sheet of stationery from the Cabana Sands Motel in Venice
Beach dated before Ryan had met Kick. On it, Ryan had written words
that seemed to have sprung from the vision he saw in the centerfold pic-
tures of the sexy young model, whose name was Roger, and whose face and
body, all muscles and tousled hair, glistened with the kind of sun-sweat
young men sweat only on Southern California beaches.

CABANA SANDS MOTEL. Death? I’ll know Death. I’ll
be seated somewhere hot and bright, squinting painfully toward
the beach, trying to clear my vision which movielike will have
become all blurred about the edges, and I shall want to clear my
sight to resume my sweating cool glass of Perrier and I’ll look up.
He will be there. Suddenly. Unexpected. Waiting. Turned
in upon himself. Leaning back against the white stucco wall.
His body tanned, stripped to the waist, wearing those long white
nylon beach trousers that will cling wet to his thighs, wet from
his healthy sea-sweat, from a plunge in the sea. A white sweatband
will coil his dark hair. His face will be turned down toward his
white transparent crotch, the draw-string opening a V-shaped

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