Rushes

by John Rechy

  3

  Send forth Your light and Your fidelity.

  AS OFTEN as he comes to the Rushes—“between affairs”—Bill still experiences the same collision of fantasy and reality. He knows that the cowboys, construction workers, and telephone linemen here are not that, and he wants them to be; yet the real ones would not match his fantasies, which only full consciousness of their specialness can fulfill. He adjusts by creating his own “unreal reality.”

  As always when he’s here, his clothes are only “oriented” toward this bar; the styled “Western” shirt, the indigo Italian jeans display his own mode. With his blond hair and lithe body, he looks just as good in any of the city’s stylish discos, which he frequents—for dancing. His body is sinuous within the rainbow-dyed vortex of lights. For sex he almost invariably ends up at the Rushes among the men whom he jabs for their rigorous machismo—and whom he needs because of it.

  Within the firm knowledge of his own boyish masculinity, he challenges that machismo. Sometimes he will even lunge into campiness, flirt with outlawed poses-limp wrist, thrust hip–daring incursions into the macho psyche. Others in the bar shed their masculinity in jarring, shocking accidents–but Bill gets away with it all because it is deliberate. Then in one magical movement all the sinews of his body, magnetized, come to almost military attention at once, and he assumes the macho stance. A mysterious Southern accent tinges his voice then.

  Bill came out early, in his teens–and easily. First came the muscle-building magazines. When he saw the cover of one on a newsrack, his heart gasped at the shiny colored photograph of the almost naked man. His outstretched arms were flexed so that each sinew was carved on the tense muscles. The abdominals were etched over tiny white trunks which barely concealed the groin. The thighs were strained in full striated bulges. The stunning body gleamed with oil or sweat. The face stared enrapt, at nothing, or perhaps toward the flooding light of the sun.

  Bill boasts he never felt guilt about his next love, written pornography. And why should he? To him as well as to others his age, it was easily there, to be used creatively. He made his choices contingent on a tacit promise of definite sexual roles and players. A jacket photograph or drawing of a gorgeous muscular body being “adored” by a man equally masculine but slender, younger—even “prettier”—would get his money order.

  He tried photographic pornography but was appalled by the skinny bodies of so many “tacky kids with nothing but large dongs.” When he did locate a photograph of a muscular body being “worshiped” by an attractive younger man, Bill’s hard fantasy would deflate if he turned the page to find the muscular man licking the slender boy—or both going down on each other. Even more of an enraging “waste” for Bill would be two gloriously muscled men of like age responding mutually.

  Bill’s attractiveness allowed him to be just as selective about his lovers when he shifted from fantasy to reality. He began a series of brief affairs—which he ended the way he had traded a favorite sex book for another more exciting one.

  He met Luke. That was Bill’s deepest and longest affair; “the first person I ever really loved.” With Luke he did not need pornography.

  True, Luke still had sporadic bouts with the “spooky religious” stuff Bill had long abandoned. Once, after “insignificant quarrels” about it, he went so far as to get Bill to go with him to church. Bill agreed—if Luke would go dressed as a cowboy. He did. Bill entertained himself through the interminable service by looking at the men in the paintings on the walls of the elaborate church, the faces so handsome, the bodies so strong. He tried to point out his favorite to Luke, who became furious. Attempting to give the unreal figures “motion,” Bill’s eyes shifted from the 14 stations on the walls to the pages of Luke’s cherished old prayer book. The same handsome men were depicted in the reproductions of gaudy religious paintings in the book.

  Many of the figures in the gaudy paintings—familiar from Bill’s childhood—were actually sexy, handsome muscular men straining—much exposed flesh. A painting in front of the book revealed the crucified figure almost naked. Each muscle of his outstretched arms tensed into sharp definition. The beautiful body—sculpted abdominals, sinewy straining thighs—gleamed with sweat. The brief white loincloth hardly covered the groin. The figure did not seem pained but seemed, instead, to bask ecstatically in the flood of light. Oh, was it the same painting? A similar one, then?—the one from which as a child Bill had blotted out the disquieting too-red blood in order to stare in fascination at the beautiful stripped shiny body. Did it have the same inscription under it? “Greater Love Than This No One Has.’

  Between Luke and Bill all was perfect. Then it ended.

  Bill prefers to hunt rather than be hunted. A recurrent paradox in the homosexual world, the hunters, aggressive in their approach, like Bill, are often sexually “passive”: the hunted, waiting to be solicited, courted, like Luke and Endore, are often sexually “dominant.” Of course, the definitions do not hold—Chas is a “dominant aggressor,” but sadomasochism, which eludes Bill, has its own exotic rules. Then there are the many men—most?—who prefer mutuality, and those who shift roles. Did Luke? Of course not!

  Because Bill is very desirable, men often attempt to respond to him the way he wants to respond to them. Then he will either ease his partner away or—quickly, before the other can—he will part his long blond legs and offer his slim, tight, down-brushed ass for fucking.

  He is attracted to Endore, who reminds him of Luke; whether or not Endore is attracted to him, he is not certain, sometimes feeling yes, others no. He finds Chas sexual but pulls back from the postures of violence—and from the overtness of his “costume.” For Bill it is that, a costume, unreal, with no context in reality; it is itself, stands for nothing else. “Realness” is very important to Bill; “unreal reality.” Outside the Rushes, he likes Don as a good friend. Inside, Don brings too much unwelcome “real reality.”

  For Bill, the Rushes is a fantasy bar, the best. At certain times in the evening, and with the expert eye of a stalking cat, he can locate in a sweeping arc of the bar—and collect visually like a stack of photographs—the most attractive men in the room, and he can do it through dense smoke and red shadows.

  Although the drawings, which show the same figures shifting roles in subsequent panels, naturally displease him. Bill has a few favorites among them: especially one in which a “gorgeous hunk”—magnificently exaggerated beyond any possibility of reality—stares ahead as if at an invisible object. Bill disagrees with Chas, who said once that the man was cruising an even more exaggerated image of himself. In the drawing, two men denude the main figure and another hovers at his feet. The possible implied violence. Bill erases facilely.

  Bill has many friends, including women, who respond to his easy masculinity. He likes—respects—transvestites. Often, in the area of the piers—which he does not cruise, aware of the pillaging raids of violence—he will see the tawdry figures. He will go out of his way to greet them. He would have done so earlier if there hadn’t been that encounter between Chas and the vinyled transvestite on the ramp. She seemed to be waiting like a sequined panther for Chas.

  Bill looks toward the entrance to the Rushes. I hope they won’t let her in, he thinks. There is only one breed of woman he dislikes, and Lyndy is its epitome.

  “We don’t allow women,” the voice of the man at the door is raised.

  The woman’s voice says: “I know, darling.”

  “But you will allow her, won’t you?” the voice of the tall man with her says to the beard-stubbled man at the door.

  “And you’re not properly dressed for this bar,” the man at the door tells the man.

  The four men look away from Martin and Lyndy, to block the pulling knowledge of their presence. But the awareness encloses these moments in sudden silence among them. Fusillades of voices and laughter rush to kill the hollow.

  Endore turns in the direction where Chas indicated Michael was. He waited long enough to look;
the youngman has disappeared.

  Holding his beer between his legs like a surrogate hardon, Chas lights a cigarette, cocking it in his mouth so the smoke causes him to squint. The bar is distorted through the smoke, wavy, like dark-red water in which sexual bodies sway.

  Bill’s gaze sifts the bar, then moves toward the back, the farthest area, as if that way to abandon the disturbing presences at the door.

  From that back elevated portion of the bar, a squat unused jukebox sends out a sullied halo of light; that is its purpose. Like the affusion of light over the pool table, its vague circumference provides exhibitionistic highlights for bodies on display. Often Bill will stand near it, just stand, for long moments, outside the boundaries of the dirty light. The men within it seem at times not to move, as if at last they have captured a perfect pose. Bill wishes the muscular man in the white tank top would stand there.

  Endore looks again at the magnetizing figures at the entrance. The raised voices are becoming more subdued but firmer.

  “Do you know who she is?” Martin asks the beard-stubbled man at the door.

  “Ask him if he knows who you are, darling,” Lyndy’s voice is almost joyous.

  Endore forces his attention away. Don is so nervous. There is something different about his face.

  In the compressed moments created by the intruding presences at the door, Don feels Endore’s look on him. Why the hell doesn’t he ask me why I was gone so long? Does he suspect? Both Chas and Bill wouldn’t remember he’d been away, and they were “gone” too part of that time. He will force Endore’s attention away from him in any way: “Luke and Billy were together four months, so you see it can work,” he flounders.

  “Three,” Bill corrects. “Then he couldn’t get hard, and he blamed me.” Bill removed the crucifix after Luke left—that was all of his own Luke didn’t smash. Bill remembers Luke’s body—smooth; he had almost no hair on his chest, just the shocking heavy nests under his arms. Bill loved to lick them.

  “Be glad you’re rid of him,” Don says abruptly. Will they notice it’s his fourth drink if he gets another?

  Bill erupts: “You never liked him, Don. He used to tell me no one did. Except you, Endore.” His look flings an accusation based on a question. “You don’t understand that I loved him. But Endore does.”

  Endore nods.

  Chas studies Bill. He and Luke despised each other, and Bill seemed to enjoy that. Chas wouldn’t mind having Bill, fucking the slim blond ass, holding–. . .

  Luke. Endore remembers. The handsome man, yes, but he remembers more than that the pained eyes. Not unlike the eyes of the youngman outside when he pressed against the wall next to him and their bodies touched. Another face is superimposed on the memory, like a double-exposure, the face of the other boy lurking near the trucks. Again a memory flickers—but is it now of the shirtless youngman or the curlyhaired one? Has he confused one with the other? He cannot recognize even the nuance of the memory—pleasant or unwelcome? It reflickers, is snuffed. He glances at the faces of the men drawn on the walls. A slice of a shadow converts the look on one into anger; curling red smoke reinterprets it.

  The presences at the door pull again. The smallish figure of Lyndy has moved to the side of the man guarding the door. Martin is talking to him in flinty tones. The woman faces the smoky haze before her.

  Don’t let her in! Chas is glancing at the two figures. He touches the dark close stubble of his beard, a mere dark shading, its roughness feels good. He eyes a goodlooking man passing by, keys on his right side. “Cologne!” Desire smashes. To drown the offensive odor, he retrieves another cloth ampule of amyl. A slight pop—he cracks it, inhales. He waits for the sexual synapse. It comes with a silent burst. The sealing blackness has blocked the woman out. Through the throbbing black frame sealing the moment, he glances at Endore, but this time he does not hold the crushed ampule to him.

  Don says, “Maybe, Chas, you should protest to the management that that man dared to wear cologne. He obviously got by because the man’s attention is distracted.” His voice is traced with anger. “Clearly the Rushes doesn’t allow sissies, or ladies—. . .” There’s no respect for ladies now, he thinks, none. He’s aware that the smallish figure of the woman has retreated somewhat, the men’s voices are hardly audible.

  “Or older guys,” Chas aims.

  Even Chas spoke those words softly, but their mere evocation is always a curse, Endore knows. Age. Even as desirable as he is, knowing his body is more muscular—with much younger men, yes, he notices the velvet softness of the creaseless flesh. The velvet feel of Michael’s ridged stomach.

  Chas holds out the ampule, like incense, letting the sexual fumes pervade the smoke.

  “I hate that stuff,” Don pulls away from the clutching odor. “It smells like dirty socks.”

  Allowing the chemical to stir his memories, Bill leans over to inhale it this time. “Whew! That is powerful!” He has not sniffed any since one night with Luke. “God, was Luke into that stuff. Sometimes he’d pass out on it.” But Bill would go on. Now he tries to think of Luke, to enhance the sexuality; instead, he thinks of the naked figure over their bed.

  At the door, the voices are muted.

  An impasse? Is she retreating? Endore’s look rivets to the entrance.

  The woman is obscured now by the two men. She walks slightly past them. The man at the door seems about to block any further move. Then he stops next to her. Martin speaks to him again.

  Deceptively petite, pretty, in her 30s, slim, Lyndy stares boldly into the Rushes. She wears a tailored dark velvet tuxedo without a blouse. She holds a string of pearls in a loop before her. She bites one but only with her lips—dark like the outline of her eyes. Stark eyes, stark lips are the only features of her face revealed by this light. A second strand of pearls rests on the velvet.

  Chas feels his temples throb. He looks at the glorious maleflesh meshed about the bar. There are more bodies now. The amyl recoils. The bodies vibrate with the accelerated beating of his heart, as if the chemical throbs control them. Then the receding rushes strip his anger at the woman’s presence. She mustn’t come in!

  The man at the door abdicates to Martin’s new words.

  Lyndy slides past the man at the door. “I’m in!”

  Beside her, Martin, tall, slender—in his late 40s—is dressed in fashionable evening wear—an affront here. Even in the torpid light and smoke the man and the woman radiate the aura of power. The beard-stubbled man surrendered to it. The woman enters the red caverns of the Rushes.

  So easily. She came in so easily—but riding on Martin’s power, Endore thinks. Endore himself has close friendships with women, perhaps closer than with men—he has been accused of preferring the company of women. There are women he loves—without posing at desire or bisexuality: he considers that a subterfuge, disdains it. He has written against the hostility burgeoning in the macho ghettos against women. But would he support another woman’s entrance into this bar? Yes. Perhaps. No. He is astonished by the possessiveness the Rushes has aroused in him.

  Seeing the woman enter. Don’s mind clicks: Good!

  Chas squeezes the ampule of amyl between his fingers. He would be affronted by any woman’s presence in the sacred domain of the Rushes, any violation of this macho font. But Lyndy—and with Martin! She has come to challenge all he worships; she will do so with her slashing smile, her devouring eyes, her soft purled curses. Chas lets the expired ampule of amyl fall to the floor, where it squirms in the sawdust like a dying worm. He grinds his black heel on it.

  Bill looks at the crushed ampule. There are times when the flux of the amyl is not pleasurable. The clasping moment, refusing to release, can be violent. It twists him into darkness, he hears his heart beat. Bill’s body jerks. A wing of sadness slides over him. In fragmented fascination, he’s still looking at the squashed ampule. A memory of Luke—no, of the aftermath of his last time with Luke, possessions strewn, broken-lies beached and dead in the wake of the unwelcome
rush. “When Luke left, he smashed everything,” he hears himself remember.

  Endore looks at him, in surprise at his abrupt words.

  In accusation; he’s looking at me in accusation, Bill knows. “It wasn’t my fault! I did everything!” he shoots at Endore, releasing the tension he had merely allowed to burrow. “The three-ways, the four-ways—not enough! I picked up tricks for him—did you know that, Endore?—because—can you believe it?—he said he was shy! Shy! I even let myself be—. . .” The jarring rush passes.

  They’re all looking at him. He’s grateful for the distraction at the door. It obviated whatever Chas was about to say.

  Groups of men are recognizing Lyndy and Martin. Powerful themselves in that other world outside this night, this bar, many of these men are accepting them—pretending to accept them—now that they’ve passed the barricade, Endore thinks with irony.

  Bill looks away from the woman and Martin. Often he goes to discos with pretty women, heterosexual or Lesbian; and he knows—feels—he would have—might have—applauded the invasion of this macho fortress by a woman—if only to watch the outraged machismo tested—but not by Lyndy. She’s here for cheap titillation; a spurt of adrenalin for boredom. But perhaps there’s more. Still, have his feelings toward the Rushes been always this tight? To avoid seeking an answer, he searches out another of his favorite drawings on the walls. Where is the man alone, clothes ripped, and the—. . . He didn’t locate it; his glance was intercepted by that of a construction worker. Clutching at the look, keeping it steady, he tries to erase his earlier outburst: “I’m here for sex, just sex—not love,” he says lightly. “But I don’t want to go to the back part of the bar for it.” A touch of anxiety edges in. He looks at the pulling shadows in back, not even shadows; there the bodies mesh in blotted darkness. “Have you noticed that hardly anybody wants to go home and have sex any more?” he thwarts the attention threatening to rush toward the entering figures. “Or anyhow not with only one person. People just want to make out in back rooms.” I won’t go to the Rack, he thinks.