Page 92 - Some Dance to Remember

62 Jack Fritscher

Two days later, Sirhan Sirhan put Bobby Kennedy’s anguished face on
the front page: his head, cradled in his wife’s arms, oozed life across the
tiled kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel in El Lay. Warhol’s headlines
were bumped in fifteen minutes to a small update and quickly buried.
Both events gave Ryan his first real taste of bicoastal urban terror.
Coupled with his father’s saga of illness, he felt more mortal than ever.
“Anyway,” Teddy continued, “Ryan had all these guys coming and
going in and out of him and the house. He was very San Francisco. Tricks
fed his ego. But nothing ever satisfied him. He always wanted more; and
more was never enough. I figured he had over nine thousand guys during
the eight years we were together. He probably came with them all. He
only needed me for fill-in sex. You know what I mean, Magnus? The kind
of affection old lovers have for each other when the honeymoon’s over.”
He meant when the passion was gone.
“He’d come home from the Barracks or the Slot wanting still more.
Hardly anything satisfied him. He tried everything: whips, chains, fisting.
He stuck mostly to grass. And Quaaludes. Late nights, scrubbed clean of
Crisco, as if you could ever scrub clean of Crisco, he’d crawl into bed with
me, and hold me, and I’d hold him back, half asleep, and silently, as if we’d
never had words with each other, he’d start massaging my tits and we’d
make love. Ryan was good in bed, but as soon as he climbed out of the sack
and his feet hit the floor, he turned into the world’s biggest asshole.” Teddy
shook his head. “But in public on Castro or Folsom, Ryan was always on.
Especially after he quit his straight job and became Mr. Wonderful Porn
Writer. He was expert at talking guys into bed. He used his writing the
way he used his mouth. He knew how to talk a guy to orgasm. Sex-talk
scenes were his specialty. Guys fantasized about star-fucking him. They
never lived with him.”
Teddy clasped his hands together. “Everything was his. His money.
His property. His furniture. His decisions. His work. He treated me like
scum. He said I didn’t care enough about those things. His things. It
wasn’t enough that I cared about him. He wanted proof that I loved him.
I was too naive then to say to him that the proof was that I was there asleep
and waiting in his bed when he dragged himself in from a marathon night
of sex at the Barracks.”
Teddy’s face was sad.
“He expected me to take whatever he dished out, and when I took it,
he’d twist it, in that special way he could twist everything, and despise
me for taking it. What could I do? He had a way with words that was too
clever for me. That’s why I first hit him.”

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