Page 88 - Some Dance to Remember

58 Jack Fritscher

their control, feeling some big mistake, if not some big joke, lay in his
not belonging here, having never been consulted, plunked down on this
planet, belonging somewhere else.
He had to defy gravity.
He had to gain altitude.
He had to fly.
He had the Golden Gate blues.
He told Solly on the phone he never meant to cry, but each night as he
lay down in his bed the water table of sorrow tilted inside him, his body
quaking, life having ticked off another day at the Glass Tower, another day
toward his Death, making him, in those long minutes between Valium
and sleep, making him a thousand years old. He plodded through the day
at his desk editing engineering reports that raped the environment. “This
work is unnerving. It’s immoral. I’m working on Department of Defense
contracts for nuclear-waste repositories on Indian reservations. Sometimes
I envy window dressers. You know: faggots who get to do something
pretty during the day. I mean creative. Like carpenters.”
By night, he began to write pornography. “I’m overheated and under-
ventilated. I’ve got to defuse myself somehow. I write with my dick in my
hand.”
“You’ve put in three years,” Solly said. “You should get some time off
for good behavior.”
“My boss thinks good behavior is letting him suck me off.”
“Why don’t you quit?” Solly asked.
“Who would feed Teddy?”
After sundown his mind picked up speed.
Teddy holed up in another room. Ryan refused to sleep with him until
he found a job. Ryan regretted his refusal, but he stuck to it. He missed the
familiar cuddle of their night’s sleep. “Doesn’t anybody ever stay together
anymore?” He tried strangers, but found nothing worse than an alien in
bed. No one but Teddy knew exactly how to sleep with him, back-to-belly,
turning belly-to-back in some perfectly natural horizontal choreography.
His bed was empty. He needed Teddy more than he wanted him. He
needed excitement. He needed the sunny balance of somebody physically
athletic, an upbeat sportfucker who suffered none of the mondo depresso
soul-searching that plagues writers inspired by anhedonia.
Teddy I thought even more sorrowful than Ryan. Neither of them
could enjoy normally pleasurable experiences. How can straight parents,
clueless, guide their little children who are not straight?
“Teddy’s sadness,” Ryan said, “is superficial. Like a cartoon of sadness.

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