Page 87 - Some Dance to Remember

P. 87

Some Dance to Remember 57

but not seeing them, I do not think of them. Individual boys can
move out of town or die, and I’d never know, because it’s only in
seeing them that they are there. Not seen, individually they do
not exist. Not seen, only the general memory of them provokes
in me not an aching jealousy, but an aching desire to penetrate to
the heart of their secret hyper-gay fraternity.
Will Death reveal the secret? Will Roger, hoisting me to
heaven by flap of his muscular wings, whisper to me the secret I
know he, behind the muscle of his body armor, conceals? Will the
brightness and light become so light and bright that in a flash I
will see what, in spite of careful observation of everything in my
life, I have somehow missed? I know I am missing something.
In all that light will I finally see? Where is the handsome body-
builder who will coach me, who will take my hand, and, leading
me toward the only vocation I want, leading me toward perfect
manhood, smile at me, shine on me, and say to me, “Follow me.”

Such, in the years before Kick, with Teddy around his neck, was
Ryan’s idealized, aching desire. Through all his adolescence, he had stud-
ied older boys and young men, not knowing what it was he wanted with
them anymore than only to be like them when he grew up. Now he was
grown, newly moved to San Francisco to pursue the secret, and he felt
betrayed. No man, no shaman priest, and no coach, not even his father,
had ever taken him in hand and explained to him how it is that an Ameri-
can boy grows to American manhood. He had trusted they would and
they had not. They had not confided the secret passage some boys seem
to know as naturally as they pull on their virgin jockstraps at thirteen.
In his first two years in the City, Ryan had not yet written anything
erotic. He had left university teaching in Chicago to work as a technical
writer for a large corporation in the Financial District. He had slept his
way into his job at Glass Tower Engineers. He thought it was cute at the
time. He had met the man who became his boss at Dave’s Baths, and for
a time his boss had been a sometime lover. Then Teddy had conjured up
Evil Teddy and caused a scene and the man had grown angry and made
life at the office miserable for Ryan. He wanted Ryan to quit. But Ryan
would not.
At night, exhausted by nine hours’ writing of engineering propos-
als on nuclear-waste repositories, Ryan lay awake moaning in his rooms,
not exactly feeling sorry for himself as much as wondering vaguely if all
people crawled off alone in the darkness to anguish over reasons outside

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