Page 91 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 61

wrestling and fist fights, followed by cold silences and colder apologies.
“I was afraid to leave him,” Teddy said. “You don’t know how safe I
felt with him. He can make you feel like the most wonderful guy in the
world. I wish we could have been together forever. Or at least together the
way we were back in the Midwest. Back before he insisted we move to San
Francisco. He packed up everything. Including me. He told me I could go
or stay. He told me he wanted me to go with him. I think he was afraid to
move all the way to the west coast by himself. For myself, I figured that
time with him was better than time without him. He used to say that to
me, back there, that time with me was better than time without me. We
weren’t in California even a year before the opposite was true. He got
along fine without me. As long as he wasn’t depressed. As long as it wasn’t
night and dark. As long as he could get to sleep.”
The stoicism of the betrayed had hardened Teddy’s face.
“I was good enough for Ry until we moved out here. Then I wasn’t
good enough. He told me I was keeping him from meeting the people
he needed to relate to. I don’t know how. He was relating, if you get my
meaning, to three guys a day. Like he had a quota. Like he was keeping
score. Like he was auditioning guys for some part only he knew about.”
I must tell you: when Ryan lived with Teddy in the Midwest, even
before they moved to California, they flew the Great Gay Bermuda Tri-
angle of SFO to LAX to NYC. “When you’re gay,” Ryan explained, “travel
is cheap. Someone’s always inviting you to stay. You find yourself admitted
into circles that otherwise, without money or name, you’d never access.”
He laughed. “But you have to be hot and good in bed.”
On the leather circuit, especially with the attractive, laggard Teddy
in tow for three-ways, Ryan was in play. His new face in town, his fast
repartee, and his aggressive sexual kinkiness opened doors to him I’ve
only read about in People. In the sixties, Ryan had known nearly everyone
worth knowing in the big-league designer and pop-art sets in Manhattan.
He spent time at Warhol’s Factory. He skipped teaching his university
summer classes for two days one June, dismayed that Warhol had been
shot, standing side-by-side with art critic Mario Amaya. Ryan himself
felt wounded, reading the newspaper accounts of bullets entering flesh
he knew intimately. Vivid in his mind forever after was the image of
the elevator doors of the Factory opening, revealing Valerie Solanas, the
proto-feminist founder of SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men, gun
in hand, shooting down in surprise attack the man she told police had
too much power over people. Poor Mario, discussing art, was caught in
the fusillade.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
HOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK