Page 86 - Some Dance to Remember

56 Jack Fritscher

area of winter-white skin above his cock which will be hard and
held covered in his right hand. His left hand will hold out the
drawstrings to slow the slide of his clinging wet pants down his
strong cyclists thighs.
He is very muscular: arms, shoulders, chest, legs. He has
a black moustache which, with the curl of hair over the white
sweatband, obscures seductively his perfect dark face. But I know
him. I know that boy, who in the village is called Roger. I know
that when he looks up, finally, from his crotched hand, across
the distance to my eyes, that he will be beautiful, that he will lift
my heart, sweet savior, right out of me, and carry me up into the
brightness and light and heat of the sun, and my eyes will pain
no more.
Death is no less than the brightness and heat burning in a
young man’s body.
Then I’ll learn the secret some of them know, those golden
ones, running from a Castro bar to a waiting Mercedes or a slick
Ford truck, hair styled and washed, jeans or slacks, perfect, and
somehow all the same, because they know the secret, and they’re
not telling, not these perfect golden boys who traffic only among
each other, signaling their secret to pick each other up at bars, to
ball each other at the baths, to lounge together weekends on the
Russian River and months on end in Laguna Beach and Palm
Springs.
Solly Blue refuses to go out anymore where the boys with
the secret hang out, “Because,” he says, “they only make me feel
bad.” The way someone who thinks he’s an insider feels when he
discovers he’s an outsider, because no matter how far in you make
it, there’s always a still more intimate, precious, charmed circle.
Not all gay men are created equal. Cocks to karma. Maybe I’m
not a nice person. Maybe I’m jealous because the boys with the
secret always remain twenty-seven, lean and muscular and hairy
and hot. I’m now thirty-four. Solly’s thirty. Why do we think
they’ve sold their souls for some transitory, skin-deep beauty? Are
multiple Polaroids of Dorian Gray stuck aging up in the other-
wise empty closets?
The new liberated species seems everywhere. They come and
they go, I’m sure, like flowers for a season. They have first names
but no last. They have phone numbers, best written in pencil,
and no addresses. I see them on Castro Street and think of them;

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