Rushes

by John Rechy

  That’s for later, Chas thinks, if I want it. Now. from this distance, all he can see is the illumined flesh—“meat, prime meat,” he loves to call it. From here, the amassed bodies seem to be involved in an arcane ritual. Yes, he may join them soon—and then the denser darkness beyond. His cockring squeezes his balls tighter. Aware of Endore’s nearing presence, his body girds.

  Endore is there.

  Bill flashes his most boyish—dazzling—smile at him, wiping away the apprehension. Have they talked since Luke left the city?

  Touching his leather cap in a hint of a salute, Chas nods but does not face Endore. His eyes are still on the slabs of flesh under the pool-table light.

  Don slides into a heavier shadow. “It was a dreadful exhibit, wasn’t it, Endore?” He raises his drink to his face: the glass is empty, but he continues to hold it there. The remaining ice looks glassy, broken. “Were they paintings or photographs?”

  “The artist painted on blowups of photographs,” Endore says. It’s the first time he’s seen Don since his abrupt telephone call, and the older man seems uncommonly anxious. Endore’s feelings about Bill are in suspension. Bill changed his life, or was it Luke? Endore was once attracted to Bill, and still is intermittently. But none of the four men here has ever had sex with any of the others. They met outside the area of the sexhunt—through mutual friends, at exhibits, parties. That can create a sexual barrier between men used to hunting in bars. If sex is not immediate, it may never happen. Still, there are undercurrents, stirrings among them.

  “We walked out,” Don is rushing. He insisted on leaving when he saw Endore. In the bath-of light at the exhibit, and already jangled by the benign violence of the paintings, he had unsuccessfully tried to avoid even Bill and Chas. But then, they hardly really ever look at me, he reminded himself; still, each glance from them made him pull back. But Endore would notice. Outside, Don invited himself to the Rushes; Bill and Chas were already in their bar clothes. When Don called out to Endore just now, he did so automatically, responding to the kinetic pull of their close friendship. The red shadows shelter me, he assures himself. “What did you think of the paintings–or whatever they were.”

  “I thought the artist rendered violence too lovingly,” Endore answers.

  A key word spoken, Chas pushes his leather cap forward and raises his chin, preparing to confront Endore.

  With pain, knowing that it is not he who is being looked at, Don notices the muscular man in the white tank top staring in their direction. Don feels the evening’s third lunge of terror. The first was when he avoided Endore earlier—and a hint occurred when he saw the paintings; the second was when he noticed the hustler lurking outside the Rushes. Don averted his look, to thwart any sign that the youngman might consider him a potential client—he has never paid for sex—but also because the young shirtless body reminded him of one he longs to expunge.

  “Violence! Is that what they were about?” Bill says. “I had enough of that when Luke left,” he releases. “Oh, you know he left the city, don’t you, Endore?” Endore is so handsome, Bill thinks, but he and Luke were too alike, both dominant; they couldn’t have got together.

  “Luke’s gone.” It is not a question. Endore remembers the frantic man who crumpled crying in his arms.

  “Yes. It’s my first night out, really, since he left.” The memory of Luke’s face—always so desperate and sexual at the same time—brushes Bill’s mind like the touch of a ghost. “Here, Endore,” he tries to erase the memory, “take my beer—it’ll give me an excuse to check out the bar again. You know, I actually hate beer, but I can’t bring myself—even after all these years!–to call out for a 7-Up in a gay bar.” Well, his humor has survived, he congratulates himself. Beyond the smoke, one of the panels on the walls depicts a man on the ground, fallen or thrown. Others crouch about him. The fallen man looks like Luke. The blocked memory thrusts forward to Luke shouting, “No, it is not perfect!” Bill pulls his eyes away from the drawing. They rake the area.

  When homosexuals who do not expect to make out with each other, for whatever reason, gather in a bar, there is a scattering of visual attention at regular intervals.

  Before them, the cowboys and motorcyclists, construction workers, cops, lumberjacks, telephone linemen, soldiers grind within the main pit of meshed flesh. The artificial air pants only intermittent coolness. Gleaming as they insinuate in and out of the shadows, nude torsos twist toward each other as if to fuse into a huge single body. A match suddenly held to a dangling cigarette strikes blotted features into life. Eyes search, discard, search again. The sound of laughter and voices achieves its own level of silence over the swallowed music.

  Along the walls and against the garish malebodies painted there, men pose in studied aloofness, their drinks a further subterfuge during these moments of exhibitionistic separation in the trenches. But unceasing glances traverse.

  Endore accepts Bill’s beer.

  Chas faces him. “Hi!” he fires.

  Each time the two meet, there are moments of tense adjustment, as if in the interim since they last saw each other, even if only a few days, they have become estranged. This was so even before Endore wrote a column attacking what he interpreted as the ubiquitous signs of fascination with sadomasochism rampant among masculine homosexuals. He admitted his former participation in “violent sex”–for him, as for most others, a charade that quivers at the tenuous edge of reality; he had worn its leather uniform, felt the rush at humiliating a willing other.

  Even when the two men agree—and they often seem to—nuances of differences abound. Both feel that abundant sex–what others but not they call “promiscuity”–is–Endore says “can be” and “should be”—an enriching, unique experience not to be denied or surrendered to conventionality posing as liberation; and both agree that sex need not occur with love—Chas says “does not.” When Chas was arrested at the “slave auction” and the sensational raid was reported luridly across the country, Endore wrote a column upholding the right of the men to hold the auction, no matter how repugnant, as long as there was no force.

  All that, and the fact that in flailing against S & M, Endore did so not from a rarefied distance but from within, against what Chas holds is the ultimate in male trust and “male-love”—he encloses that in quotation marks—arouses a sense of intimate alienation between the two men—like that existing between two generals of opposing factions in an internecine war. Its battlefield seems at times to become the Rushes.

  “You just returned from your trip?” Endore asks, as if, this once, they will allow that to explain the uncomfortable distance.

  “Yeah. Whew! I found a real heavy scene, man, one leather bar after another. And a private place called the Catacombs! Wow! At one time you would’ve loved it, Endore,” Chas does not accept Endore’s offer of a truce. He holds out his beer as if to toast that part of Endore’s past.

  “At one time,” Endore says.

  “Oh, Chas would still be away, but he had to come back to tend his antique ‘shoppe’; you do spell it with a ‘ppe,’ don’t you. Chas?” Bill likes to needle Chas–and Chas, him–but they are careful that a ribbing tone blunt the hostile words.

  “You think my owning an antique store makes me less a man?” Chas demands.

  “I don’t–but it seems you might. Luke was very sensitive about being a hairdresser, and we know now, since that movie told us, that they all think they’re straight,” Bill says. Luke would hide his hands–which were long and deeply veined, beautiful–when he caught himself moving them a certain delicate way.

  Chas’s voice is tight. “Well, hey, I’m not ashamed, man. I can bring it all together. Fuck, man, I go to my store in leather, and—. . . It’s no stranger than your being a goddamn clerk—. . .” He sees a familiar body moving toward the deepest pool of shadows at the back of the bar. It’s Michael! Chas looks at Endore. Endore does not register awareness of the presence. Chas’s tongue brushes his lips hungrily.

  “A c
lerk! I beg to inform you that I am responsible for one of the chicest—. . .” Bill starts frostily; but realizing that Chas has succeeded in piquing him back, he says, “I’m not against antiques; if it wasn’t for us, there wouldn’t be any!”

  Endore laughs. He stops himself. He has begun in certain places to attempt to listen to his own laughter as if it emanated from someone else; to search out that tone, or hollow, that pause, that break. But he knows the mysterious stasis occurs only when the laughter erupts without object, released as if by the barest touch of a nerve.

  “I don’t think that reference to antiques is funny,” Don says. He is forcing himself not to go to the bar for his third drink; he has drunk the melted ice. Is Endore looking at him too closely? he wonders. And why hasn’t he mentioned his being gone since he telephoned to tell Endore he’d been called away unexpectedly? Touching his forehead—a slight swelling there?—Don lowers his head and moves into a buried shadow. “Getting old, especially in our world, isn’t–. . .”

  “Bill didn’t mean that,” Endore says. Don is hiding his face. His voice was so frantic when he called to tell him he was out of town that Endore won’t stir his obvious anxiety with questions now.

  “Really, Don!” Bill protests. “You’re not that old, and I didn’t mean you. You think every reference to time is aimed at you. That’s what makes it so difficult for you to—. . .” He backs away from Don’s pain.

  “To make out? That’s what you were going to say, isn’t it?” Don demands. He sucks at the empty glass. As they stand there, groups of men mill in this zone. Don is increasingly aware of the stares his three attractive friends are getting, returning, even rejecting. It is always so, but tonight each glance denied him chafes his raw nerves. “But that’s not why. It’s because I’m . . . plain; and here—. . .”

  “And a brilliant lawyer in real life,” Endore reminds him. But that doesn’t matter in the Rushes, he knows.

  “Real life?” Chas says. “What’s real right now is this sex paradise, and that’s all!”

  “A disturbed paradise,” Endore hears himself say.

  “You can’t get off that S & M thing,” Chas says. He breaks the locked stare between him and Endore. He looks beyond the massed bodies in the main portion of the bar, beyond, toward the shrouded back. He knows that area well, as he knows every inch of the Rushes. Often after posing at the pool table, he will join the bodies beyond it; he will have glanced back to invite others. The sex there is not usually what Chas calls “heavy”: more a preparation for the late-night orgy rooms. Two marines kiss, a cowboy gropes the firm pouch of a construction worker, a biker slides to his knees before the waiting erection of a lumberjack, a cock may slide into a lubricated ass. When he is in the dense jungle of shadows there, Chas can usually direct the sex at least to the outskirts of “heavy.” His growled commands, muted consistent with the quiet dance, ignite the darkness with sex.

  “What?” The broken moment between him and Endore was so intense that only now is Chas aware that Bill said something to him.

  “I said,” Bill repeats, “that if you wear anything more on the left side to prove you’re a ‘top-man,’ you’ll fall sideways.” Curving his body slightly, he dares to mock the rigid masculine stance.

  Prove! Chas charges at Bill: “I saw you on that contraption at the Rack–. . .”

  “Not me!” Bill denies.

  “. . .—and the guy had his fist all the way into your asshole.” Chas is floundering—it was dark, ambiguous, and he knows Bill–who believes in “fidelity”—was still involved with Luke.

  “That’s a lie!” Bill says. “If you–. . .” He retreats. Chas is raging too ferociously. “What’s the matter with you, Chas? Ever since you went to the piers before we came in, you’ve been wanting to fight.” On their way to the Rushes, Chas separated himself from the two other men—to go, he said, fondling it, “charge up” his cock in one of the warehouses where men were lingering. There were two female figures-obvious hookers, one black, one white—on one of the nearby ramps. As Chas approached, the white one, in a black vinyl dress sprayed with sequins, stood up. The black one remained swinging her legs. Bill couldn’t hear the words. Chas stomped back angrily.

  Chas crushes the evoked memory of the encounter. I should have punched “her” when “she” spoke to me, he thinks. On this hot, turbulent night he has already begun to threaten the tacitly respected boundaries between him and the others.

  Endore felt Chas’s spiraling tension, and he pulled away from it. He studies the field they will all be moving into. He recognizes a famous ballet dancer—a motorcyclist draped in chains—talking to an architect—a construction worker. A chic working class. Endore often thinks.

  “A sleeping beauty,” Don says aloud. Realizing he’s verbalized his thoughts, he tries to laugh; a nervous laughter. “I meant that muscular man over there.” Tension squeezes his words. He’s not sure now whether he meant the man in the white tank top or Endore; the accusation swells: So aloof! Endore sometimes chooses to leave the bar alone. “He looks like a sleeping beauty waiting for his prince.” Don laughs again.

  In Don’s laughter there has always been pain, Endore knows. That’s not the sound he tries to locate. And the look in Don’s eyes—that’s’ clearly the look inherited by so many homosexuals who drink heavily and are past a certain age; it burrows in the eyes. That’s not the look that Endore sees in the new men. Its progenitor?

  “A prince who’ll never show up,” Bill says, looking at the muscular man. Luke waited like that, he remembers. It’s a miracle I approached him, gorgeous as he was—nobody else would. Live pornography. He explores his feelings. He misses Luke. Very clearly. Yes. Yes. He tries to catch the eyes of the muscular man.

  Chas crushes a cloth ampule of amyl nitrite—the precious “poppers” he loves and is never without; when he can’t get the real ones, he settles for one of the liquid substitutes of butyl nitrite more readily available-Rush, Bullet. The aphrodisiac vaporescence rushes blood to his brain, clasping a vagrant sexual moment. Now sensual images of the Rushes compress inside his mind, then resile, framed by a throbbing blackness. Again, he feels his cockring squeeze his growing cock. He holds the cracked ampule to Endore. “I got the real, powerful stuff, tonight,” Chas coaxes.

  “Not now,” Endore rejects.

  Chas withdraws it, as if to erase the gesture. Fumbling, he holds the ampule unexpectedly toward Don.

  “I like my sex straight,” Don says. Tonight his need to connect is screaming. The last time was–. . . He bolts the memory shut.

  “That’s not all you like straight,” Chas seizes the double meaning.

  Bill recoils from the chemical odor. But already it brushed over the memory of the crucifix Luke insisted on keeping over their bed. Sometimes in the isolated reality of the chemical sexmoments, Bill would look at it while he licked Luke’s body. The long limbs of the nude figure over the bed seemed to strain.

  The disturbing tension growing in him–Don wants to verbalize it in order to dissipate it; but he can’t locate its definite origin, it has too many components. “That hustler outside looked normal,” he tries.

  “Normal!” Bill is indignant. “I didn’t think anybody used that word any more.”

  “Fuck, Don,” Chas shoots, “you think the guys you’re attracted to are heteros”—he often refuses to say “straight,” as Endore also does—“just because they rob you.”

  Don winces. “I’m not at all attracted to norm—. . . hetero—. . . straight men. And no one has ever—. . .” The pain knotting under his ear stops his words. His hand is trembling about the empty glass.

  “That’s cruel, Chas,” Endore says.

  “Sorry, Don,” Chas whispers. Outside the Rushes, he likes Don. But the bar changes everything. The Rushes is for the fit warriors. Chas’s sense of communion with the others is compromised by Don’s implied judgment. As if to wipe away his attack on Don, he looks at the panel to his left. Two men are tearing the clothes off a
nother. The blurred expressions in the drawing bother him tonight.

  “I know I don’t make out the way I used to,” Don won’t let go, and knows he never made out well.

  Chas waits for another chemical buzz from the popper. It comes. “I always make out,” he says, feeling his cock throb in a series of rushes. “And I go after what I want. That’s dominant. Waiting to be approached is passive, and nothing to brag about.” He looks at Endore. “Like that muscular sleeping beauty over there,” he diffuses his meaning.

  But he means Endore’s method of aloof cruising.

  “Definitions blur,” Endore tries to dissipate the implied charge. Chas is rampaging.

  “Only yours,” Chas thrusts. He grinds his boots on the sawdusted floor; by now that has become a familiar gesture from the first time he forced the man to lick them. “In S & M there’s a top-man and there’s a bottom-man. It’s all clear and honest.”

  “Is it?” Endore asks him.

  Again, Chas licks his lips, this time to release his trump: “Mike is here.”

  “Michael,” Endore corrects him coolly. “He never liked to be called Mike.” He remembers the blond head nestled under his chin. The reddish blond hair. The beautiful face fresh even on awakening. And the laughter—unscarred; his laughter was unscarred. He does not look in the direction toward which the three other men turn to see the blond youngman cruising the crimson forest of shadows.

  “I said, we don’t allow—. . .”

  The words rise clearly from the entrance.

  All four men–and the others in this enclave-turn in that direction. The man guarding the door is blocking the entrance to a smallish figure. A tall shadow looms next to it.

  “My God,” Don utters, “is it really–. . .?”

  “Oh, God,” Bill echoes.

  “Fuck,” Chas spits.

  He did bring her here, Endore thinks. The outline of her hand pressed against the black-tinted window of her limousine. The hand pantomiming touching was blocked by the glass.