Page 89 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 59

Maybe Teddy’s my real mirror. Maybe that’s why we can’t stand each other
these days. We’re exactly alike. We’re both jokes.”
Ryan invited Teddy back to his bed. Out of all the quarrels and venom,
they still had one thing going for them, the thing that had brought them
together at the Gold Coast bar in Chicago: as long as they didn’t talk, they
were good in bed. “That’s the solution,” Ryan said, “sex partners should
never speak outside the sack.” They were mutually convenient.
Teddy was a red-haired boy. He was not a man. “I don’t love you,”
Ryan said to him. They were on their first scouting trip to El Lay. Ryan
had insisted on staying at the Cabana Sands near Muscle Beach. They lay
side-by-side on a blanket in the sand. The ocean was as blue as the sky. A
low surf rolled idly toward their feet. This was the first time they had taken
acid together. Teddy had tears in his eyes. “You’re so goddam manipula-
tive,” Ryan said. “You can cry on cue.”
“You’re the only one who makes me cry.”
“I’m the only one who does anything, everything, for you. Food,
lodging, tuition, plane tickets. Your teeth. You’ve got the price of a new
VW in your mouth.”
“It was all your idea to make me into something.”
“So become something. Anything. Be yourself. Get a job. Stop hiding
out in me.”
“I can’t. I’d be a bum, an alcoholic. I’d be dead if it weren’t for you.”
“I wanted to love you more than anyone or anything in the world.”
Ryan could not bear the tears streaming through the Coppertone on Ted-
dy’s freckled skin. “Don’t cry,” he said. There was a long silence between
them; they had lived together for three years; they would continue to live
together for five more. “You cry too easy.” Ryan reached for Teddy’s hand,
and would not let him pull away. “Listen,” he said. “Forget it. Okay? It’s
not me. It’s the drug talking.”
Later that afternoon they made furious love.
Many nights of their last year together, Teddy cruised out to trick.
Left alone in the Victorian, Ryan could not bear to go out. “My aura’s too
sad.” He tried making solitary love to himself, finding some semblance of
God in his cuming, finding the blinding amyl-nitrite vision that God is
what you jerk off to, that what you see when you’re cuming is God, only
God will be more so, because He will last longer, and passing over into
Death will be to slip into the vortex of holy orgasm forever. Aching to
have a life before dying, Ryan rehearsed his dying nightly, cuming often
with tears streaming down his face for the sweet sad joy of understanding
nothing at all.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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