Page 90 - Some Dance to Remember

60 Jack Fritscher

“Orgasm,” Kweenie said, “is Ry’s cure for the blues. Too bad it’s not
working.”
“All I live for is to cum,” Ryan said. “Everything in between is
intermission.”
Insomniac, Ryan walked from room to room chasing the ghosts he
had brought to his old Victorian. At Misery, he had received all the minor
holy orders of the Catholic priesthood. He was an ordained exorcist. He
pursued phantoms in the night. Men were his only distraction and they
weren’t good enough. He entered rooms for no reason. He left rooms
for no reason. He turned on both televisions to different channels. He
switched on the radio, all the lights, the four burners on his small Wedge-
wood stove, and the oven. He ran the faucets in the kitchen and bathroom
sinks. He turned on the shower, and listened for the gas water heater
to kick on. He plugged in the blender and the Hoover upright vacuum
cleaner and left them roaring in place. He turned on his new electric type-
writer. “It’s better to light one candle than curse the darkness.” His house
roared with sound and glowed with light signifying next to nothing. The
gas wall-furnace burned blue and orange near an open window. His reel-
to-reel tape deck pounded out heavy rhythms. He lit a candle in front
of Teddy’s picture. The face of the red-haired, moustached boy flickered
between a stuffed deer head and a staring fox fur Ryan had rescued from
the Saint Vincent de Paul Thrift Shop. Wandering naked through his
booming, blazing house, he threw himself on top of his electric blanket
and lay, in the days before video, watching slow-motion Super-8 movies
of bodybuilders thrown up against his wall in heroic poses, projected the
way he preferred his men, three times larger than life. If the house was
empty, he would give it the illusion of fullness. He was his own high-
tech poltergeist. He haunted himself. His utility meter spun in expensive
circles. “Everything in the house is turned on—except me.”
He had only himself to exorcize.
Teddy told me once how it had been between them in the last scream-
ing weeks of their relationship.
I think, and this is only my casual observation, that when men go
against the norm and love each other, they love each other somehow
more intensely, precisely because the world is against them, and when
that intense love ends, its passion becomes enormous rage, at each other,
and at themselves, for making the straight world seem right and them
seem wrong.
Teddy and Ryan pushed and pulled at each other until quarreling and
clinging slipped past bickering and bitching into knock-down-drag-out

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