Page 93 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 63

Teddy shrugged.
“I admit I hit him first. Sometimes I held on to him, because I figured
he needed someone to grab ahold of him, and hold him; but he’d fight me
off, yelling that I was making him claustrophobic. That I was smothering
him. That he couldn’t breathe. That I should let go and leave. He only
made me hold him tighter because I didn’t want to leave him. Life with
him was better than any life I had ever known. He rescued me from the
streets. When we met, I was—I don’t know if you know this—hustling
between New York and Chicago. But I wasn’t, you know, making ends
meet. I was mostly hanging out in bars waiting to score with some john
and I was drinking a lot. At first, he liked the idea I was a hustler. He
thought that made me exciting. Then after awhile he tried to save me. He
wanted to make me more like him. When I couldn’t be what he wanted,
he accused me of wanting him only for his money.”
Teddy looked at me, expecting me to be able to sort out the truth.
“He accused me. ‘Once a hustler,’ he said, ‘always a hustler.’ Then
came the salt in the wound. He’d tell me I was too old to hustle the streets
and the bars anymore. He told me I was too fat to be hot. That’s when I
busted him in the chops.”
“Because it wasn’t true?”
“Because it was.”
Consider Ryan considering Teddy. Teddy was an outsider like Ryan.
He was a tagalong like Ryan’s brother Thom. Neither Teddy nor Thom
was part of the charmed circle of hot, elite men that Ryan wanted to crash.
Kick was different.
He was not only one of the boys.
He was the leader of the pack.
He was a man’s man.
Anyone could see that a hundred yards off.
When Ryan met Kick, he felt if he himself was not fully one of the
boys, the boys with the secret, then at least he was in the final stages of
learning how to be one of the boys, a mystery whose secrets had both
eluded him and turned him on from boyhood. In Ryan’s heart of hearts, in
his outsider’s heart, he had always felt there existed tighter male fraterni-
ties within the general fraternity of men. He had foregone the fraternity of
heterosexual men to enter the fraternity of celibate men who were priests.
He had abandoned the fraternity of straight men to enter the more secret
fraternity of homosexual men. Yet even in that narrowed fraternity, he had
discovered even tighter circles of kinship. Man hunts what he likes and
discriminates against the rest. Ryan cruised through the bars and baths.

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