Bodies and Souls

by John Rechy

  Chip pushed his hands away. “I'll take care of that, master. Order me!”

  Dave spread his legs assertively.

  “Want some real amyl poppers? That shit at the auction—ugh!”

  “Yeah,” Dave welcomed.

  Chip popped the amyl ampule, held it to Dave to snort, snorted it himself, and put it carefully into a silver container like a bullet; he placed several other of the small yellow ampules, like ready bullets, nearby. The pulsing chemical fumes enclosed everything in sex. Dave reached for the mounds of Chip's ass.

  “Slap it, master,” Chip said.

  Dave slapped it—cautiously. On display on the platform, his actions had come easy, as if rehearsed for long. Now it was like starting out again, although the same excitement clenched.

  “Harder!” Chip said. “Like this.” He slapped himself fiercely. “And talk real tough and dirty, okay? Wanna start?”

  “Suck my cock!”

  “It's too soon for that,” Chip said. “Gotta work up to it.” He threw himself on the floor and lapped at Dave's boots with his tongue. “Tell me to lick your boots and do-it-good-slave.”

  “Do it real good!” Here Dave couldn't bring himself to call this youngman “slave.”

  “Tell me what I'm doing, huh? I wanna hear it real dirty.”

  “You're licking my boots.”

  “Yeah—lickin’ your fuckin’ dirty boots!” The tongue pulled in and out.

  Dave lowered his chaps. Under the jockstrap, his cock was anxious.

  “Now tell me to lick your filthy jockstrap,” Chip said. But he didn't wait. He licked until the jockstrap was moist under Dave's balls. Each time Dave reached to bring his cock out, Chip would push it back in, pulling with his mouth at the strap. Then he slid between Dave's legs.

  Dave felt the dabbing tongue.

  “Talk tough! Mean!” Chip swallowed Dave's cock. Dave leaned back, groaning. Chip leaned away, too. He popped another ampule, didn't bother with the silver container. He breathed deeply from it—giving it to Dave to do the same.

  “What all do you like?” he asked Dave.

  “What?” Dave said. The amyl pulsed into his groin. He removed the chaps.

  Chip looked at him wistfully. “I mean, you wanna tie me up and whip me?” he asked. “I got some whips. Or use your belt, huh?”

  Dave thought, Yes! But— …

  Chip shrugged at the indecision, knelt again. “Say, ‘Spit-shine my boots, slave!’ “

  “Spit-shine— …” Dave's voice seemed to come from beyond him.

  “Say it real tough, cummon, like this— …” Chip dropped his voice: “Lick my boots, fuckin’ filthy slave!”

  “Lick my boots, fuckin'— …” Dave bent over the arched body, his hand fingering the blond knotted ass. He lowered himself to the floor, lowering Chip with him, shifting his own body to suck the youngman while he sucked him. Chip squirmed away; Dave pressed his body against his, hugging him, rubbing his cock with his, his mouth about to kiss— …

  Before Dave's lips could touch Chip's, Chip squeezed away. He reached for the drink of wine and Seven-Up, sipped it, popped another ampule, held it longer to his nose, gave it to Dave, who placed it on the table without breathing from it this time.

  “I want to suck you, too,” Dave said, “and then fuck you.”

  “I was in this orgy the other day,” Chip said. “Two guys fucked me at the same time, but one had a small dick, so it wasn't such a thrill. I got lots of dildos, you wanna fistfuck me? I can take it to the wrist.” He moved away, came back with a can of Crisco and three dildos—different sizes, all big, one huge. “Why don't you put your chaps back on and tie me up and stuff a dildo in my ass and wrap your jockstrap over another dildo and stuff it in my mouth and slap me with the other, and then you can fistfuck me.”

  “I want my cock up your ass,” Dave said. He heard his own voice again. He looked at Chip's angel face. Blue, long-lashed eyes.

  Chip said, “Ah, cummon, man, tell me to drink your piss.” He began to slide from Dave's embrace. “And call me a dirty quee— …”

  Dave choked the word by pulling the blond body up and pushing his mouth against the youngman's lips, kissing the unresponsive mouth. Chip wrenched away.

  He bent over, offering his ass. “Go ahead and fuck me, then,” he said.

  In frustration and confused anger, Dave pushed his cock into the waiting hole.

  Chip's voice moaned. “Fistfuck me, master, cummon, master, push your fist up my ass, Mr. Macho, shove it all the way to your elbow, fuck me with a dildo, Macho Man, then shove your fist in!” He ground his ass.

  Dave reached under for Chip's cock. It was soft. But Chip's growling continued. “Yeah, yeah, cummon, master, be mean, push your … !”

  Dave pulled out his cock, softening, not coming. Soft.

  Chip turned and looked at Dave's cock as if it were a wasted offering.

  “Can't come, huh?” Chip said. He popped another ampule of amyl. “I guess I'll come.”

  “How do you want to— …?” Dave started, trying to order the rebelling emotions, contain them until he could understand, try to understand them.

  Chip knelt on all fours, reached for the largest dildo, closed his eyes, and shoved the dildo into his ass. He said to no one, “Yeah! Punish me hard for being dirty and licking your filthy boots and eating you out; punish me hard, use that fucking belt on my ass, shove your fuckin’ fist in, cummon, be mean!” He tried to push the dildo more deeply inside himself, but it was buried to its fullest length. Coming, he yelled, “Punish me for being a fucking queer, Daddy!”

  Please don't punish me, Daddy! Dave thought he heard a buried voice scream that out of his own drowned past—or was it just the echo of Chip's? Dave sat on the couch.

  Chip removed the dildo, sipped the “crazy” drink. “You know,” he said, “us kids are really lucky. I mean, when you were my age—I just turned, twenty-one, ugh, but I look younger, don't I? I know I do—you think I look eighteen?—I know I do—when you were my age, I bet you wouldn't do the things I did. I mean, liberated things and stuff.”

  He sat down, legs tucked under him. “Being a slave at the auction—that was a rush. You played the auctioneer real good, too—just an act, huh? You couldn't really get into it for real, could you? Actually, you don't act like your photographs.” He shook the glass in his hand, dissolving the ice. “I guess all you guys did was fuck and suck. And kiss, huh? You still like to kiss, don't you? Yeah, I noticed.” He sucked a piece of ice into his mouth. Then he spat it out. “Cold,” he said. “The ice is sure cold.”

  Dave felt a deepening confusion, a growing fatigue, a sense of betrayal—cheated by a world he had helped to create and which he was not sure he understood anymore, knew only that it was now preparing—indifferently—to shut him out, discard him.

  Lost Angels: 5

  “What are you going to tell her?” Jesse dared boldly.

  “I'll just tell her— … I'll tell her: I am here.”

  Orin's words pulled at Lisa. They were the same words he had reacted to the other day when she had spoken them. She stopped stroking Pearl. Had he spoken them just now in threat aimed at Sister Woman? No, Lisa was sure, when he went on easily, ‘“I'll just tell her that I'm here. She already knows the old woman is dead.”

  His words evoked the figure banished since that early day of Jesse's clumsy question about the Cadillac. An old, old woman, dead. And Sister Woman. Lisa felt touched by two invisible presences.

  “And now it's all up to Sister Woman,” Orin answered Jesse James's question. He spoke in that soft, calm voice of his—as if all this should have been obvious. But he removed his hand from the telephone.

  The sound was still off on the television screen. Sister Woman's gliding, slashing hands spoke their own language. Then they were dormant on her lap, and she bowed her head. The blue chiffon expired, released by her breeze like an exorcised spirit.

  Lisa stood—leaving Pearl open-eyed against the pillow—an
d faced the screen. Until now, she had tried to ignore the woman behind the glassy unreality of the television.

  Now on the screen appeared the unfurled flag of the country, waving in a strong wind, as if the gentle breeze that stroked Sister Woman and her veily robes throughout her sermons lost its control without her. Burning in white light, the luminous cross appeared.

  Jesse longed to question Orin further. The old woman— …?

  But he had shot out his question about what Orin intended to tell Sister Woman and Orin had answered, and now Jesse felt only relief that his words had not unleashed Orin's fury, angered probing of him. And it was clear from Orin's set lips that he would say nothing further now.

  Orin turned off the television and went into the bathroom.

  Lisa returned to Pearl. “Don't grow up,” she told the doll, “stay pretty so I can!” She felt Jesse looking at her; she laughed softly, erasing the strange words. Jesse's look continued on her. She met it. Both looked at the closed door of the bathroom.

  When Jesse heard the shower running, he stood over Lisa, looking down into her breasts over the loose opening of her nightclothes. He saw the nipples—no, just the pink outline of the nipples. He assured himself the shower was still running. He sat next to Lisa. With one long finger he touched one nipple. It hardened. Lisa closed her eyes. Jesse cupped her breast. The spraying of the shower stopped.

  Jesse withdrew his hand and stood up. Sliding under the sheets, Lisa grabbed Pearl. When Orin came out of the shower, Jesse marched past him, feeling rage as he closed the door of the bathroom behind him. Orin stared at the locked door, and then his gaze grabbed at Lisa. Her eyes were closed; her breasts rose up and down, up and down under the light cover of the sheet as she breathed nervously.

  In the morning, again Orin was gone when Jesse woke. But this time he felt no apprehension, just a surrendered relief—Orin had gone to pay for that day's full rent. Lisa was still asleep. Jesse took his turn in the bathroom. When he came out, Orin was back; his sly smile confirmed what Jesse had conjectured about the rent. It was now difficult to know when he expected them to pay their share, or a portion; he would indicate that simply by placing his money on a counter, a table, wherever—and pull back, waiting for them to respond. They did.

  “Guess where we're going today, Jesse?” Orin asked.

  Lisa looked down at Pearl Chavez. Bring her along today or let her stay?

  An hour later—after breakfast, which they split equally—they stood on the white terrace outlining the Griffith Park Observatory and looked down into the acres and acres of trees, coves, brush, craggy rocks jutting up intermittently—a piny forest and a palm-treed jungle; caves, cliffs, escarpments.

  Indeed the park is so vast that, years ago, a hermit was discovered to have been living there for what was variously claimed to be several months, a year, more—unseen by anyone. He lived in one of the hundreds of coves created by intertwined branches overhanging sudden hollows and covered over with fresh leaves each new season. He kept his few belongings there. At night, when certain sections of the park close—the upper levels at sundown, the lower ones when night blackens—he would scavenge for food left by picnickers. He knew where water was to be had, from which of the network of pipes that water the park he could drink; he learned which berries to eat. When he was finally “captured,” a newspaper photographer caught a messianic-looking man staring in shock at the camera. Behind him, on a small elevation of green, stood a terrified deer. The man was committed to a mental institution.

  The size of a small city, the park rises in many hills, cut into by countless trails that connect, split up, crawl through cluttered brush, emerge out of overhanging trees, which at twilight turn ashen green.

  During the season of heat and wind, the park is vulnerable to fire. Old scars are covered over by indomitable new growth, new wild grass, wildflowers; recent scars are blackened with ashes and the broken dead limbs of charred trees, creating a surreal cemetery. Especially during the Santa Ana winds, the upper portions of the park are blocked, but only to vehicles, not to the intrepid hikers and sexhunters.

  On the crest of a hill is the Griffith Park Observatory. Surrounding an obelisk like a tall needle are life-size statues of six scientists who studied planets and stars. Their hands are held in the attitude of hopeful prayer. Flanked by rows of ever-present oleander and paths that burrow into green depths is a carefully pampered lawn of grass bordered by walks leading up white steps toward the wide-stretching facade of what looks like an Egyptian temple topped with a green dome. Inside, the dome becomes a seemingly depthless sphere on which the sky, stars, planets—even stars in collision—are reproduced several times daily by intricate lenses, prisms, lights contained in a huge dark metallic globe that rotates on the floor in the midst of rows and rows of comfortable seats for the spectators to witness the heavenly configurations.

  Beyond acres of descending green, and beyond the scattered orangey roofs of houses, from the back of the Observatory, Los Angeles looks like a scrambled jigsaw puzzle out of which distant buildings emerge—and the city fans out for miles and miles and miles until it connects with the ocean.

  The day was hot. A pacifying stillness had replaced the sporadic thrusts of wind; a stillness that might as easily announce the death of this Santa Ana season as a mere stasis before greater fury. A “Santa Ana” is a wind that gathers heat as it blows across the sun-soaked deserts, a wind like no other. It can just stop, instantly; severed from its invisible source, it dies, a corpse of heat. Or dredging up its own violence, it can push again, seemingly out of nowhere.

  Orin had led them expertly across the lawn of the Observatory, up its outside steps, and to the back terrace of the domed building. Telescopes, set into operation by a few coins, line the rounded wall. Orin dropped coins into one of the telescopes. He swiveled it in a full arc of the park, then pointed it at a mass of gathered green, far away, in the park's deepness. He adjusted the telescope, held it, held it.

  What is he always looking at?—-for? Jesse wondered.

  Abruptly abandoning the telescope, Orin faced Jesse's stare.

  Jesse looked down at his boots and marched a few steps. “I bet this is the exact spot where ole James Dean got killed in that movie.” Jesse lowered his booted foot assertively on one exact spot. “Here!”

  Tourists looked down earnestly at the designated place.

  “I don't think it was James Dean who got killed,” Lisa tried to remember; that movie wasn't one of her “all-times,” although it had been shown with one that definitely was—The Grapes of Wrath: Ma Joad so loyal, so strong—and nobody seemed to know that she was the strongest one. “I think it was the other boy.” She leaned over the concrete ledge. Below was another semicircular tier—and skinny yellow flowers fluttering next to pale blue ones like tiny stars! And a willow tree! A real willow tree—just next to all those oleanders! She looked over toward Orin and Jesse and said, “You know, they're poisonous, oleanders; that's how they all got killed in Dragonwyck. Gene Tierney.” The thought of the exotic beauty made Lisa suck her cheeks in imitation of the doomed star. Leave Her to Heaven, the— … She didn't let herself think about what she did in that one. Lisa had loved the movie about the jealous woman who loved intensely, but it bewildered her.

  Tourists wandered all about, leaning over, peering down, poking each other, putting coins in the telescopes which destroy distance, clicking cameras, “ahhing” at everything.

  Bang! Bang!

  “Sniper!”

  “Oh, my God!”

  People screamed, scrambled, some threw themselves on the concrete ledges.

  Lisa crouched. Jesse began to; but when he saw that Orin did not budge, he straightened up, and felt a seizing excitement. Orin stared away into the park, toward where he had pointed the telescope.

  Bang!

  A figure jumped off a lower ledge.

  BANG! Bang! Bang! Close, then more distant reports.

  Someone laughed, then someone else did,
too.

  “Just popping firecrackers!” The teenage boy who had screamed “Sniper!” roared with laughter at his friend thrust out another popping firecracker into the distance and then, smirking, ran around the base of the Observatory, back up the path to the walk. Almost everybody laughed in relief. One old man cursed the pranksters: “Nasty bastids!” The teenagers ran off, shoving upraised middle fingers behind them.

  Just like Orin to remain so cool, Jesse admired. Look at him still staring ahead as if in those moments of simulated shots and real pandemonium, the greenness would reveal something to him—only to him. Jesse's eyes followed the direction of Orin's gaze—down, beyond, toward a mass of trees behind large craggy rocks. It looked like a jungle down there.

  An exuberant, hefty woman nearby said, “Well, that's what I call a good scare!'’

  “Are we going to see the stars in the Planetarium?” Lisa asked Orin impatiently. She hadn't enjoyed the incident.

  “Not today,” Orin said. “See more of the park.”

  “Okay—if you promise me the moon,” Lisa said, evoking Bette Davis in Now, Voyager, she had wanted the stars and the moon, and that man who claimed to love her told her that was too much to ask for!

  When they reached the moody car, Lisa was surprised to realize she hadn't left Pearl there, as she had thought; she'd left her in the motel. She felt guilty.

  Three teenagers hovered admiringly about the Cadillac. Jesse strutted to the driver's side; he was glad Orin waited till the kids walked away before he got in the driver's seat.

  Before they felt it brushing against them, they heard the urgent murmur of the rising wind swirling through dark trees. At first only a few trees shook, their branches attempting to thrust the wind away. Then it pounced more angrily—and on others. Soon every green thing was set into urgent motion.

  They left the top of the car up as they drove through a tunnel. It enclosed them in a startling darkness after the yellow heat of the park; and then they drove up, past pools of wild orange and blue flowers and hills deserted at times by any verdure, at times forested. Orin braked the car by a patch of gray decay, leafless dead twigs and branches, dead vines like disintegrating brown lace; dying trees. Against this, the wind had shoved brown leaves, tinged desperate purple. Orin fixed his gaze on the dead area.