Bodies and Souls

by John Rechy

Dianne leaned over to Billy and whispered, “Billy, we might have to take you to the hospital.”

  Billy uttered one word through his bloated lips: “No.”

  Hope shot through Stud. He can talk—he'll be all right, he'll be fine— …

  Dianne left and came back, with bandages and everything she had ever heard was used on someone hurt. She and Stud patched Billy, dressed the wounds. Stud cooled him with a towel. He wished there were clean sheets, but there weren't. Gently, he tore the ripped cutoffs entirely. The back of them was soaked in blood. He threw them away fiercely with a cry of anger and despair. He watched terrified to see whether more blood would come from Billy's rectum. No. He waited. No. He waited. No more blood! He felt the heat now as if it were something artificial that had attached itself to him forever.

  Through the window and over the rooftops, Stud saw the shaggy palm trees of Los Angeles bending in the wind. The glow on the horizon deepened to orange—the glow of sun and wind and fire.

  Stud nestled next to Billy, careful not to shake him. “I love you, Billy,” he said.

  Billy heard. He tried to open his eyes. Only one opened as wide as it could. It was the most beautiful, cruelest green-speckled color Stud had ever seen. Hope embraced him. Stud's hand closed over Billy's. He felt Billy's fingers press back with determined strength, promising to live.

  Lost Angels: 11

  Marilyn Monroe breathed, “Hi,” in that way she had of whispering words that was like blowing pink bubbles which burst softly. “Hi,” Lisa whispered back.

  Against folds of bleeding red velvet, Marilyn stood dressed in clinging white satin, sequins like bits of ice, white furs like pure snow.

  “The figures are wax!” Jesse James laughed at Lisa.

  “I know they are,” Lisa said, “but what if a piece of her soul crept inside it and I didn't say Hi?” She thought she said it under her breath, for only Marilyn to hear—until she saw several tourists studying her closely. She had said, “I could be Marilyn's daughter.”

  “Well, you know, you just could,” said a fat jolly woman past middle age, her hair had just been tinted and set—not a wisp moved. “Well, you know,” she informed everyone, “they do say she had a secret child.”

  “I know,” Lisa said as more tourists continued to study her.

  “Well, doesn't she resemble Marilyn?” the happy woman asked her husband, who nodded. “Well, my goodness, you're the same remarkable people we saw outside the Chinese Theater!” she discovered joyfully. “Well, you certainly have become much prettier!” she told Lisa. “Well, you know, they do say Los Angeles does that!”

  This morning, Orin had wakened Lisa by barely touching her shoulder and whispering they were going to the Hollywood Wax Museum. She heard it in a dream. Orin repeated it. Lisa jumped up!

  Cagney! Bogart! Robinson! Jesse sprang from the bed.

  Last night after Orin had hung up the telephone and Lisa had accused him of pretending, she quickly forced laughter—which Jesse eagerly joined. Then Orin laughed, too, a strange sound they preferred not to notice. “Oh, you!” Lisa had said, “always pretending!” She and Jesse were glad to allow today's excitement to bury the matter, for now.

  They had taken the Santa Ana Freeway to the Wax Museum, which is near Disneyland, Magic Mountain, and Knott's Berry Farm. In the back of the car alone, Lisa had let the hot air dry her hair, which she had cut shorter, just washed, wanting to look gorgeous. And she did, in a light blue dress that deepened the azure of her eyes and the tan of her glowing skin. She had deliberately “forgotten” Pearl; it was important that Marilyn not feel “betrayed.”

  When they had reached the museum, there were bunches of tourists. In the crowded lot, each parking space is named for a movie star. “Hedy Lamarr!” Lisa gasped. “Greta Garbo! Merle Oberon! Ugh—Sinatra, too?” She was chagrined because the first parking space they found was one named after La Wanda Page, and she had not heard of her.

  At the entrance is another huge naked David. “The other one at that cemetery was sexier,” Lisa had said, “and he wasn't wearing that silly leaf.”

  When Orin paid for their tickets, Jesse had lingered close by. The grouping of money in Orin's wallet had slimmed. He was not replenishing it; there had to be more, that was for sure.

  Inside, the museum is filled with angled mirrors so that at times the figures seem trapped in geometric designs of glass. Some of the wax statues stand alone in the niches, others are grouped into scenes from a particular film. The figures are carefully lighted, so that the wax may look like flesh, the wigs like real hair. At times, though, they look only slightly more real than store manikins, at other times less real for the attempt at deception: petrified figures. But the tourists—many, many, young and old—had come to be thrilled, and so they exclaimed, “They're so real, aren't they real?—you expect them to talk any minute,” before the figures propped like painted corpses in an adorned, noisy mortuary. Then Lisa had found Marilyn Monroe in icy satin and sequins, snowy furs.

  Now the fat lady was going on happily: “Well, it's a pleasure to see you again, we seem to be visiting the same wonderful places; you're touring the sights, too?”

  “I just had to see Marilyn,” Lisa said quietly.

  “Well, I think it's important to have a goal; and, well, you're certainly remarkable young people. … Well, good-bye now, we'll probably see you at Magic Mountain.” She moved along jovially with her husband and clusters of other tourists.

  Lisa squinted her eyes and looked again at Marilyn in her velvet enclosure.

  They wandered from figure to figure, scene to scene. Lisa's mood fluctuated. At times she would “Oh!” other times she'd be silent. Then she became bewildered, as if unexpected feelings were battling within her; her voice veered toward hysteria—she'd name a star, explain a scene. Orin studied her, and the figures, without a word. Jesse sought out cowboy and gangster figures.

  Lisa glided past Mae West and would have lingered longer before Jean Harlow—reclining on a white divan and wearing a white dress like a slip—except that she knew that, somewhere, Marilyn was looking on. “Hedy Lamarr and Robert Taylor in Lady of the Tropics—she was so beautiful. You know, she's alive—somewhere; imagine that: Hedy Lamarr is alive, this very moment, doing something! Oh, Garbo! Look! Joan Crawford was not, not, not a mean mother! … Gene Tierney!—she had to kill her child because he made her do it, drove her to it—and he left Amber!” She stopped, aware of her fevered frenzy. Again, it pitched: “Look, Jesse—Tyrone Power, but not as Jesse James; he's the bullfighter who left Linda Darnell and Marlene Dietrich in that other movie, when she sacrificed everything for him! They just kept doing it, being so mean to them, over and over!” Mirrors thrust her into a hideous wreckage of spilling water, steam, tangled pipes—the recorded sounds of fear and panic! Lisa wiped her reflection from the reproduced setting of a disaster movie. She rushed away from the simulated horror.

  Orin paused in a spooky cave of ice, studying its crystals; where Superman lived. He paused two more times: before Spartacus—Kirk Douglas, assertive jaw and teeth, wears a loincloth and prepares to fight a muscular gladiator; and before Ben-Hur—the fallen charioteer lies bloodied on the ground near four white horses and Ben-Hur stares on in— …

  Pity? Regret? Satisfaction? It could have been any of those, Jesse thought. But not loyalty.

  Sissy cowboys! Jesse was angered by that silly Tom Mix—whoever he was—in an ornate costume with flowers on his shirt; the gun didn't help one bit. And Alan Ladd—one of his semi-favorites—why did they choose that frilly frontier costume?

  “Jesse, stop that! I know what you're doing!” Lisa admonished.

  Mounted on a motorcycle, Nancy Sinatra wears a short white skirt and boots. The floor was a mirror. Jesse was angling himself to catch more of Nancy's flirtatious, winking panties.

  “Some of them are real sexy,” Jesse acknowledged; his cock was responding. And there was Brigitte Bardot, the unbelievably curved body stripped to the lower part of
a polka-dotted bikini—no bra, her hands covering her bare breasts! Jesse's was a full hard-on now.

  Lisa wouldn't glance at Brigitte—Marilyn would “know.”

  Jesse groaned silently. “Look at that silly fringe and those decorated boots on that awful, awful Roy Rogers.” The happy gathering from Bonanza didn't help—and neither did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which he liked a lot, but not this smily scene, which never happened.

  Lisa froze. In torn—ripped—clothes, Sophia Loren, hair disheveled, face anguished, kneels crying, holding a young-woman—her daughter—who is bleeding from the mouth, her eyes imploring her mother to— … What! Orin eased Lisa gently along—to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers! Top hat! Sequins! Lisa looked gratefully at Orin for having led her away from that other scene; sometimes he seemed to think with her.

  Bogart! Jesse was indignant. They had him old, pulling on a sinking boat with that woman. Things got better, though—when he pushed himself away from that Bogart. Chuck Connors wasn't bad, his rifle cocked. John Wayne— … He'd always looked phony to Jesse, and he strutted like those hard-boiled frontier women in red feathers.

  Robert Stack held a machine gun. Jesse studied the man, the weapon, the setting. He didn't like him. Stack would be against Cagney and the real Bogart—the tough Bogart. Stack even looked like the man who shot Cody, that two-timer cop. Even went to prison, to get Cody's confidence. Jesse shot Stack a challenging look. Gary Cooper in High Noon. That was good—but in the movie, Cooper didn't know which side he was really on.

  “Hey, Lisa—look!” Jesse teased. “The Wizard ofOzl There's ole Dorothy and the three— …”

  Nose in the air, Lisa walked past them, and him. “You look like Roy Rogers,” she shut him up. She ignored The Phantom of the Opera, hurried past Dracula in a coffin, Frankenstein on a stretcher. “Too real, too real, too real,” she protested in disgust. “Oooooo! Gone! With! The! Wind!” she gasped out each word at the full scene of Tara. Scarlett, Rhett, Melanie, Ashley, and Mammy! She loved Mammy, and always wondered why Scarlett didn't free her. Now she said; “Scarlett was so brave! Even when everything was burned around her and she stood among black ruins, blackened stones! Even then she— …!” Suddenly Scarlett threw her into a clear confusion, because, no, they weren't that mean to her; she survived, unlike— … “That Hamilton Woman!—Vivien Leigh played her, too!” she said urgently. “And they were so mean to her, put her in debtors' jail—and in Waterloo Bridge she threw herself under a truck! And then she was poor Blanche—so very much like my— …” Where were Maria and Pearl Chavez! Agitated, she looked down at her hands, for a second thinking she had brought her doll with her, wishing so. She hurried along the groupings of frozen movie stars.

  James Cagney!

  In a tuxedo, Cagney holds a gun to Pat O'Brian, the white-collared priest. Jesse had not seen Angels with Dirty Faces. The priest must've been a fake priest, like those FBI guys, treacherous. The cop locked himself in prison to get Cody's confidence—Jesse's mind kept pulling to that—pretended to love him and then betrayed him—boy, did he!

  James Cagney!

  In profound respect, Jesse James tipped an imaginary hat at Cagney. It wasn't White Heat there, but it was Cagney and he was Cody, tough, tough! And yet like a little boy, too. Jesse's hand reached out, to touch the figure in tribute. A terrible electronic hiss spat at him. Dozens of tourists looked reprovingly. An amplified voice ordered, “Do not touch the figures!” Jesse James had withdrawn his hand. He smiled crookedly at Cagney; he'd understand, yeah! Jesse felt good, loyal.

  Edward G. Robinson!—and the figure moved! He's shot in the arm, but he still holds a stub-nosed gun. Jesse had seen Little Caesar. With tan coat, bowler hat, Robinson moves in an arc. Jesse liked Robinson, sure—but he wished they'd done this with Cagney as Cody Jarrett, made him move, and had a record of his last words before white flames mushroomed— … He couldn't believe it! Right next to Robinson was Shirley Temple with those crazy curls. He moved away before Lisa could say anything about that.

  Noticing him acting sheepish, Lisa thought it was because she had told him he looked like Roy Rogers, and so she made up. “Actually, you look more like that sexy Big Ed in White Heat,” she soothed him.

  Jesse James squared his shoulders; he remembered the tough, good-looking man with incredibly wide shoulders. But! He had been the dirtiest of the two-timers—betrayed Cody and Cody let him have it in the back, like Big Ed had let Ma— … Ma? Come and get me— …! Jesse's memories always jumbled at that point. Every day he looked at what was playing in those theaters that showed only old movies, hoping it would be White Heat—they would all see it together!—but it was always one of Lisa's “all-times” they were showing. He turned around to tell Lisa he didn't want to look like the man who two-timed Cagney, but she had disappeared among the glittering wax figures and the angled mirrors.

  “'Bye,” Lisa returned to say to Marilyn's soul.

  Paths and arrows guided the visitors through a curio shop and into the Palace of Living Art. It is an extension of the Museum.

  Lisa, Orin, and Jesse passed wax-figure reproductions of famous paintings—the Grand Inquisitor of Spain; a princely priest in a purple cape; Cardinal Richelieu in brutal red; an opulent, sated Louis XII. Corrupt, disdainful.

  Jesse's attention was quickly diverted by the many naked wax women in this section of the museum—Leda and the Swan, a naked woman on a couch. Salome with a severed head on a tray, three naked female bodies—one exhibiting her back, the other teasing in a three-quarter pose, and the third boldly facing the front. A naked golden woman holds a dog on a leash! A nude Venus has arms. There are male bodies, too—naked wrestlers, a sissified David with a thick figleaf held God knows how. “The Captive” writhes in a loincloth and chains.

  Then they passed an alabaster reproduction of the Pietá—Christ in the arms of his looming mother, his thin limbs flowing into the giant folds of her shawl. A recorded voice intoned, “The hands execute, the heart judges.”

  Wandering voices hushed as recorded thunder pulled them to a crucifixion scene. Crowned with thorns, the waxen figure of Christ waits to be murdered. Muscular Romans cast lots for his robe while clustered women weep. The sky changes shades, light, darkening, dark. A recorded voice pleads, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” In answer, thunder pounds.

  “I don't know what that's doing in the Movieland Wax Museum,” Lisa said, looking at the spooky man preparing for radiant martyrdom; the dazzling, indifferent soldiers; the eagerly resigned women huddled weeping.

  Jesse didn't know what to do here; Orin just stared and stared.

  With a gasp withheld since she first saw the waxen movie stars, Lisa separated herself from Jesse and Orin; she pushed her way urgently through the lines of tourists, looping in knots before a particular favorite figure—and she hurried past the curio shop—and back into the Movieland Museum.

  She saw herself in various mirrors among the dead polished wax figures. She felt hot—disturbed. She found her—the figure of Marilyn Monroe—and stood before her. This time she didn't squint her eyes. She looked at the artificial face, the wax skin. She turned her back abruptly.

  “Good-bye, Marilyn,” she said aloud. Good-bye, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Ida Lupino, Linda Darnell, Paulette Goddard, Olivia de Havilland, Gene Tierney! Good-bye! And walking away without looking back, she added, Good-bye, Cathy, haunting the moors for Heathcliff; good-bye Amber, searching Bruce in the wilderness of a new country; good-bye Leave-her-to-heaven demanding love beyond death; good-bye, Miss Julie—Jezebel—facing her fate in the wagon taking her and her sick lover to the island of death; good-bye, Cassie, abandoned to her murderous father; good-bye, Now-voyager, longing for moon and stars; good-bye, Casablanca, flying away to unhappiness; good-bye Maria, pulled by horses— … Pearl Chavez— … Pearl— … Maria— … Pearl— …

  No!

  She withdrew the last two farewells. She ran out of the museum. She could not say good-b
ye to Maria or Pearl Chavez.

  Mandy Lang-Jones: “The Lower Depths”

  Mandy Lang-Jones is fucking the brains out of Tommy Bassach!

  Tom Bassach thrust his hips up, drilling his cock in deep. But Mandy, straddling him upright, raised herself on her knees, just enough to control his shove and keep his cock at the lips of her cunt.

  Mandy Lang-Jones is fucking the hell out of this dumb television grip!

  “Shove down, shove down, goddammit, I'm about to come!” Tom Bassach sex-groaned.

  “Not yet!” Mandy raised herself another essential inch and abandoned his despondent cock; a tear appeared on its tip.

  He jabbed at her. But she put her hand over the fluff of her legs, feeling the warm moisture—and shut out his straining cock. With her other hand she slapped his readied erection.

  “Ouch!” he said; his discouraged cock surrendered to the smarting slap.

  “Don't come yet.”

  “Where'd you learn to do that?” he asked her, watching his deflating organ. “I was about to come. You already came,” he accused.

  “Once,” she said. “But you weren't ready then.” Mandy Lang-Jones is going to fuck the cocky fuck out of Mr. Hotstuff!

  She lay back beside him on the unadorned tanned sheets she preferred, her hands behind her head.

  She was even prettier than she appeared on television. When she did her special reports, she insisted on makeup that added seriousness to her face; then—and only then—she had her lips painted thin, to subdue their sensuality and increase the grave concern she needed to project to her growing audience—“fans,” they were beginning to say at the station—and the show's sponsors. She had large, dark brown eyes, and a nose that seemed just about to tilt and didn't. Her brown hair was straight except for a sudden assertive inward swirl at each side of her neck.

  She was thirty-four, and her body was superb, with curves that flowed like a series of linked S's; firm curves unmarred by fat; thighs that arched to a lithe taper. For Mandy the “ideal” woman's body was one that strengthened “femininity,” not one that altered it; she disapproved of women weightlifters, who were increasingly converting their bodies into ugly knotty muscles parodying men's—the way some women, but not her, thought trans vestites parodied women; she herself admired their gutsiness. In action—roaming the city for her “specials,” or swimming—firm arms and legs creating a sinuous flowing line—or playing tennis, jogging, fucking—in all of which she excelled—Mandy's body moved in feline harmony with her limbs; her flesh did not sag or bounce. The nipples of her round breasts remained boldly pointed, proud to be there and asserting that pride.