Bodies and Souls

by John Rechy

  He took the bus to Hollywood. Sunset Boulevard. The section known as the Strip.

  *Z*O*O*M*

  An electric poster blazed. The letters of the word lighted up one by one in a rush, and then all four pulsed the word, the name of a new album. Under the electric word was a picture of three youngmen and a girl—all in shiny vinyl, more watery than black leather, but almost as menacing, the look of leather and steel. All had very short hair, bleached bright yellow; all held long black dangling belts from their hands and seemed to menace the street. Under the picture was the name of the group: REVELATION.

  A few feet away, a photograph of a woman in lavender feathers—real feathers fluttering sequined in the nervous breeze—invited all to LAS VEGAS LAS VEGAS LAS VEGAS. A barnlike building with a nude plaster statue of a woman guaranteed naked female bodies in performance or money back.

  Across the street, many youngmen and girls gathered before a band-club there. SALVATION was playing, the black letters on the hospital white marquee announced. Manny walked past the groups of young people sitting on the street waiting for the next show. Several resembled the girl and men in the ZOOM poster. Some had bright red hair, streaked green or yellow; many of them were in black—several of the thin youngmen had shaved heads and wore sleeveless shirts, tattoos on their skinny arms. Tattoos. Manny noticed one particularly: A skull; out of one eye, the bare torso of a woman crawled out, and out of the other, the bare torso of a man. It was on a youngman's bare chest. “Where'd you get that tattoo?” The youngman hardly glanced at Manny. “Down the street,” he muttered.

  Yes, there it was—large, brightly lit. And closed. A long, long tattoo parlor. Manny peered in. There were even more figures here than downtown. Inside, someone moved. It was a tall, skinny man, about sixty years old. Manny knocked insistently on the glass. The man turned around. Manny knocked again. The man mimed the word “Closed.” Manny knocked urgently. The man shook his head, pointed to his watch, and flashed ten fingers plus two. “Open. At. Noon.” He formed the words slowly with his lips. Manny took off his shirt, revealing the wavy cross he had carved there after Indio's murder. The old man came closer to the window. With his finger, Manny outlined roughly the figure he wanted drawn there. In large movements he drew the cock and balls; to clarify, he touched his own. Only the glass separated Manny and the man, the man had moved that close. Now he nodded his head. Manny nodded back, and then moved away.

  His shirt on again, Manny followed the loose flow of people. He was now on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. Many homosexual men cruised the streets.

  In a triangle of green and concrete, youngmen and young women lingered before the West-Sky Club. They resembled those outside the club on Sunset—but these looked tougher. Many wore black vinyl, some leather—and swastikas, chains, torn shirts and blouses, ragged uniforms—like an army of deserters from different, causeless wars. Yet, Manny noticed immediately, they looked healthy—some deliberately skinny, the skinniness that comes from choice, not hunger—and Manny knew the difference. They smoked dope freely, but it didn't seem to mellow them—no, it etched anger. That, too, he recognized easily. Loud music blasted its way into the night.

  Carrying the bundle of clothes as unobtrusively as he could—though nobody seemed to notice it—Manny slid past the burly guard at the door. He entered a large room that contained smaller ones united by green corridors. In one corner pinball machines exploded in colored lights, ricocheting against lit squares. Everywhere were frizzle-haired girls with anger painted on their white faces—and youngmen in slick, new ripped clothes. Many looked like surfers, more of them like rednecks, and they all drank freely. Through a long tunnel, Manny walked into the restroom. The walls in the dirty room were smeared with words. Pissing, Manny read:

  WASTED YOUTH KILL REVOLUTION EVOLUTION A PROCESS TO SLOW TO WORRY SAVE MY SOUL JESUS HATE YOU ITS ALL SHIT DESTROY EVERYTHING BODIES IN THE STREET COMMIE FASCISTS GO AWAY COME BACK FEEL POWERFUL I HATE SWEET COMMUNION ZOOM

  Several youngmen, doped and drunk—or pretending to be—swerved over the urinal. Manny had the impression of deliberate posing.

  He followed the loud music into a large room. Electric guitars crashed against screaming voices blaring unintelligible words. Four or five youngmen were making sounds and motions on the platform draped in light.

  Before them on a circular clearing, bodies churned and jumped in a violent dance, shoving each other as if fighting, hitting each other, bodies toppling, sometimes laughing, sometimes angered. Some pushed themselves against the walls. Manny stood in this pit of flamboyant rage.

  Over a balcony, leaning heads floated out of candelight enclosed in bulbed glasses on the tables; spectators, for now. A few similar tables outlined the extreme back of the first floor. Throughout, several of the young figures snorted white powder. Manny stared at the urgent, determined, writhing bodies in studiedly trashy clothes. The white adorned faces all glared in frozen anger.

  Now the group called Unholy Communion came on. There were two youngmen with Mohawk haircuts—narrow swatches of hair forming a straight line from the tip of the hairline to the nape of the neck; another had shaved his hair totally. The lead singer had dark, impossibly black hair—black dyed blacker—and white skin. His eyes were outlined in black paint. He wore a black vinyl vest and black vinyl pants—and coarse engineer boots.

  Unlike the singer in the earlier group—and most other like groups—the singer of Unholy Communion could be heard; the words deliberately clear, the music of bass guitars and drums allowing them clarity. Manny listened.

  If you believe in angels,

  Ya been smokin’ angel dust

  In the land of the cops

  And the home of the jerks.

  Manny made his way past the thrusting, bobbing bodies. He stood near the stage and stared at the singer until the singer looked down at him. He seemed to address his words at Manny:

  Tell us no lies

  And we'll ask you no questions.

  He was different from the others, Manny told himself. Was it only the dark dark hair—so dark it gleamed silver blue—that reminded him of El Indio?

  After the club closed, Manny lingered outside with many of the others, who stood there as if unwilling to relinquish the close ritual. Occasionally a reference slid out revealing a daylight reality—“school,” “draggy job”—beyond the night's mask of assumed names.

  It was clear the cops hated them, too. In brown uniforms across the street, they dared them to give them an excuse to move in. It came—someone threw a bottle into the street. Because it had come from his direction, Manny ran into an alley behind the West-Sky. On the other side were the backs of short houses and apartment buildings.

  The singer of Unholy Communion was pissing in the alley. Nearby, a girl with green frizzled hair waited, smoking grass. Manny stopped running. “Pigs,” he said.

  “Yeah,” the girl said, “we hear them.”

  Manny stared hard at her. She would have been much prettier without that strange blazing hair and those black-painted lips.

  “You gonna be much longer, Revolver?” she called out to the youngman in the shiny vinyl pants and vest. In the night his hair was black without tones or shades.

  A fat man rushed out of one of the houses. “You're a puke,” he said to Revolver, “and you're a slut,” he said to the girl.

  Finished pissing, Revolver shook his cock at the man. A cop shoved him on the dirt before he could even raise his pants. Another pushed the girl against the back wall of the West-Sky Club. There were only two cops, and so they didn't grab Manny, who stood frozen. The raging fat man said to the cops, “Kill the sons of bitches, kill ‘em all.”

  “Fuckin’ germs,” one cop said.

  The other said to the girl, “Your mother should've aborted you.”

  “Yeah—right down the toilet,” the fat man said.

  Lashed by waves of anger and nausea, Manny saw a bottle in the alley; he grabbed it and flung it against another wall,
the glass smashing loudly. The cops whirled around, releasing the youngman and the girl—who ran—and Manny ran, too, zigzagging, knowing the cops had drawn their revolvers. He made his way through the alley and back to Santa Monica Boulevard. Although it was after two in the morning, squads of people lingered near a bookstore—OPEN 24 HOURS—that sells paperback books and pornographic magazines.

  In the alleys behind and beyond it, staring men lingered. Cars cruised very slowly along dark garages. Many of the men were shirtless, others wore shorts; one youngman wore shorts so high on his legs his genitals showed.

  Manny walked into the alley. Eyes. The light of a car startled a man kneeling before another in a garage. Shadows. The sweaty air soaked Manny's shirt. He walked beyond the sex arena. Near an apartment building not yet finished—its wooden bones covered here and there with thin walls—there was a series of large dark green trash bins, filled. On top of one was a discarded mattress. It was thicker and cleaner than the ones Manny had slept in at the detention home. He pulled it off and dragged it as far as he could from the trash bins without coming too close to the unfinished apartment building. There might be a guard, even a dog trained to attack.

  He placed the bundle of his clothes beside him. He was tired, he didn't know how exhausted until he lay on the rank mattress and fell asleep in the heating darkness.

  A gurgling noise awakened him. He felt unfocused fear. The noise had come from the closest bin. The garbage stirred—scratching noises. Dazed from heavy sleep and heavier fatigue, Manny staggered toward the bin, drawn to it. Mewling. A cat— … He drew back in electrified horror. He saw flailing little hands—an abandoned baby among the garbage! He ran! Santa Monica Boulevard was still alive with night and sexual energy. Manny stopped. The streetlights revised his reality. Had there really been a baby back there? Imagined, dreamt as he ran? He had to go back; his clothes were there, and he had to find out. The perspiration turned chill as he approached the bin.

  Nothing. There was nothing moving there.

  He pulled the mattress and his clothes farther from the bins. He woke to a smeared sky. He ate breakfast at an open counter and put coins into a gas station bathroom to clean up. He washed himself urgently, changed his clothes, putting the dirty ones in paper towels and shoving them into the strapped bundle.

  He went back to Sunset Boulevard. The tattoo parlor was open. He was sure that the man had been waiting for him. Their glances intersected.

  Again on the main strip, Manny saw a new poster going up. Whatever it was, torches of electric fire would be spewing from it.

  “Hi,” Revolver said. “You're the guy in the alley last night when Scarlett and me got rousted by the pigs.” He looked just like he had last night—black vinyl, vest. Manny noticed, this time, that he wore one earring. He had a face that seemed to have been carved—but delicately, formed by soft pain.

  “You got away?”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Revolver said. They were standing outside a liquor store. The girl with him last night came out. “They won't sell me the booze,” she said.

  “She's Scarlett Fever,” Revolver introduced, “I'm Revolver.”

  “Manny.”

  “Hi, Money,” Scarlett Fever said. “Thanks for helping us out last night.” Wearing less makeup, she looked prettier today and, Manny was relieved to see, the dye on her hair was not permanent. Where the green coloring was wearing off quickly, her hair was blond, pretty; soft where it was unfrizzling. But she still had the ugly black lipstick, like Revolver about his eyes.

  Revolver looked at Manny's bundle. “Don't live anywhere, huh?”

  Manny shook his head.

  “Come around the club tonight, Money,” Revolver said. “We might have a place. And thanks again.”

  Manny went to a cheap movie, ate a hamburger, hung around the boulevard, reclaimed, in the afternoons only, by the original inhabitants ambushed in periodic cop raids. Then he was on Sunset, standing before the tattoo shop again. The artist was tattooing a man, but again he glanced clearly at Manny through the window. Manny remained there for moments. The man stopped the movement of his needles until Manny walked away.

  That night he went back to the West-Sky, late, not wanting to pay five bucks to go in. Apparently looking for him, “You wanna come in or hang around?” Scarlett Fever asked him.

  “Hang around.” He had thought she was older than him, but he realized now she was about his age—just tried to look older—a few years, Revolver's age.

  They walked off Santa Monica Boulevard, north half a block into the edge of a residential district. They sat on the back sheltered portion of a lawn. Trees bunched. Wind rustled the leaves. Manny and Scarlett felt a breeze without coolness. Enclosed by trees and shadows, they sat on the grass. Manny rubbed his left hand.

  “The scar hurt?” Scarlett Fever said. “It looks old. Is it new, Money?”

  Manny pulled his hand away.

  “Sorry,” Scarlett Fever said.

  “My mother burned me,” Manny said. Spoken for the first time ever, the words didn't surprise him. Before, there had been no one to speak them to; and now, away from her, from Yolanda—forever—he could let the memory flow out; “I was just out of the detention home.” Another kid's father picked me up and took me to the tenement apartment, which looked out on a pile of garbage like the one I slept close to last night. My sisters were in school; Paco wasn't born yet. I had my key and I let myself in.

  Manny entered the house into what was both kitchen and living room. He called out, “Mama, mama.” Nothing. The bedroom door was closed. “Mama!” he called again. Yolanda emerged out of the bedroom and closed the door behind her.

  “Manny! I didn't know you were getting out, not till— …” I wanted to run to her, hug her, kiss her, cry in her long hair. Yolanda was barefoot, in a short slip he could see through: brown round breasts, a heavy black shadow between her legs. Her long hair was loose, black. She seemed angry, or nervous. “You wanna go buy yourself something to eat?” She looked around for some money, then toward the closed door; her purse was in there. “You got money?” she asked him. I wanted her to fix something for me, just for me, and sit down with me and ask me if it had been awful, as awful as it was, I wanted— …

  “I'm not hungry.” He reached out to touch her. She jerked away from me.

  “What is that thing on your hand?”

  “A tattoo,” he said. “The burning cross.” I held it out to her.

  “That's a bad sign; it's blasphemous, and it belongs to that awful gang,” she said, the anger there already.

  “It just means you're tough.”

  “No! It's ugly! How dare you defile the cross of Jesus like that. Bring it in here. How dare you!” She was coming at me. I backed away from her anger, not believing it; I leaned against the gas stove. She grabbed my wrist. My hand went limp. Emotions were crashing inside him, he simply surrendered his hand to her. He was so numbed by the combustion of emotions that he saw Yolanda turn on the burner of the stove and saw her pushing his hand over the circle of fire to scorch away the tattoo—saw all this before he felt the searing pain and smelled the burnt flesh. But in my head! I felt it first in my head—that's where the fire was!

  He saw his other hand reach out for her. The strap of her slip tore. One breast showed large, brown, red-tipped. Then the bedroom door opened. I saw a naked slender man there. The man seemed to have been awakened, still groggy. Yolanda yelled at him to go back in the bedroom, but he just stood there, dazed. Manny looked down at his own hand, saw or imagined he saw, the flesh smoking, and then at the same time I saw her giant exposed breast and behind her the naked man. The naked man leaned against the door, his arms outstretched, hands propped on the wooden frame, three heavy dark patches of hair on his body. Then I saw only blackness. When the blackness cleared, the man was gone. Dressed, Yolanda was tending the wound on Manny's hand, kissing it every few seconds—kissing it the way I had kissed her bruises—licking it, holding the hand to her breasts. Manny's hea
d burrowed into her chest. “Mama, mama,” he cried, and recognized the voice that had screamed that word over and over his first night in detention.

  “She held my hand over the stove and burned it,” Manny told Scarlett Fever. “And she was the one who called the pigs to come for me when I took apart a television that belonged to her boyfriend.” And she got the cops to take me each time she had a new man. He knew that—hidden in the mire of the rest. “And that's how I got the scar.”

  “Bummer,” Scarlett said. She kissed him with her tongue. He pushed his into the moisture of her mouth—the first time he had kissed anyone other than Yolanda. ‘You wanna fuck me?” she said. He looked around—at darkened windows beyond flanked trees. “Nobody can see, nobody cares, either—they're used to it,” she said. She moved farther into shadows, away from phantoms of distant lights. She leaned back on the grass and pulled up her dress; she wasn't wearing pants. He looked fascinated at the dark hairs there; brown? black? He coaxed her to move, into ashen light, to see better. “Go ahead,” she said. He felt his whole body breathe with excitement, heard it—or the wind? He leaned over, studying her intently, closely—something forbidden suddenly so easily allowed.

  He lay diagonally on the grass, pressing his stiff cock against the sweating earth, to contain this hint of explosion. He stared at her cunt, his face just inches from it. A triangle of dark short hairs, a slight protrusion of flesh, an opening parting it. His fingers touched the hairs, separating them carefully. He blew on them, seeing, in the increasingly lightening darkness, the exposed flesh. His finger probed the opening. Flesh so smooth it wasn't even like skin. So smooth and moist. He wished for more light, wished he could search into this mysterious partition. He pushed his finger into the furry lips, which became as moist as her mouth when he kissed her. Her body quivered. Her odor, the odor of a warm sea, blended with the scent of night flowers, sweet, heavy, inviting, threatening.