Rushes

by John Rechy

  Don feels a tremor of doubt again. But. It’s not the same boy, it’s not, it’s not. Yet if it is and Chas—. . . He pushes words out at the black man. “You’ve run out of beer, can I get you another?” He actually spoke that.

  The clear eyes look at Don.

  He’ll reject me, he’ll—. . . Don’s words of invitation reverberate, pursuing him. Again Don searches out Endore, for borrowed strength. But Endore is facing Lyndy.

  “What game are you playing?” Endore asks her. His voice is very controlled.

  “I don’t play,” Lyndy says. “Do I, Martin?”

  “Always,” he says.

  “Are you playing, too?” Endore turns to Martin.

  “I’ve seen it, and it bores me.”

  “Does it, Martin?” Endore asks.

  “Yes,” Martin hisses. Then: “Look at Chas and the youngman, Endore. You’re avoiding it.”

  Chas’s eyes insist Robert look at him. He and the youngman are only inches apart. Chas’s hand floats over his own groin. The warm moisture there still lingers from the moments in the toilet. His hand searches it out. Robert is looking—yes, he’s sure. Then the blurred figure his mind avoids stands blackly before him. Chas removes his hand from his groin.

  Robert turns away. Fear. But he doesn’t move. Desire.

  Chas looks back at the others. Did they see the kid turn away? He feels the cold edge of rejection. He turns his own back to the kid. An ambiguity–the kid is still there. It’s not over.

  “Chas is afraid. All his bravado and he is afraid,” Lyndy says.

  “Here, we all are,” Endore says. “Except you, Lyndy. You’re safe here.” He glances at Martin.

  “I did go to the piers, you know, I went into the warehouses,” she releases. “Last week? Rot, decay, sex.” Her eyes hold Chas and Robert.

  “Where you think it belongs,” Endore says.

  “And some of you too, apparently,” Lyndy says.

  “Why did you take her there, Martin?” Endore confronts the cold man.

  “They’re our monuments,” Martin says.

  Endore looks again toward Robert and Chas. Their backs are to each other. But neither has moved apart. And Don. He seems to be waiting for the black man to speak; answer.

  “It was a warm late afternoon on the piers,” Lyndy remembers. “There was rubble everywhere. Rot. Silence. Debris. Sex.”

  She saw it–the gutted collapsing warehouse. She walked under the gate, which is like a rusted knife.

  “I bent to touch the spotted decay,” Lyndy says. “It was as soft as ermine.” Her hand rises as it did behind the dark window of her limousine. It remains there as if demanding more. Then the fingers clench over the pearls on her velvet suit. “Shall I tell him what we saw by the trucks?” she asks Martin.

  6

  O God, Who established the nature of man in wondrous dignity . . .

  AS OFTEN as he comes to the Rushes, Endore still wonders why he is pulled to it—and he is. True, the men he is physically attracted to come here, but they are the men whose attitudes he often questions. And so at times he tells himself that he returns to find out why he comes to the Rushes. For him, the bar contains a central mystery, and the identification of that mystery might be its solution. Some nights, he feels on the brink of discovering it, when the collective laughter in the middle of the evening—before the hunt turns solemn—seems to him to threaten to bleed from a pierced central wound.

  The Rushes was one of the first of the rough bars that emerged along the waterfront several years ago. Most had names which evoked, fear, threat, filth—the Hole, Pure Garbage, the Pit, Trash, the Shaft, the Toilet. There had always been “leather and Western” bars throughout the city, but their concentration along the waterfront revealed a toughness inchoate in the others. The bars here were born old, the ragged stores taken over and left unkempt, as if the spoiling piers had shaped them out of the spilling dross.

  Entering the Rushes the first times-he cannot remember a first time—Endore felt a sensation different from that of other times in other bars, so many other times, in so many other bars. In retrospect, he feels, at times, that the drawings on the wall alerted him, and he felt apprehension. Something kept in hibernation throughout the more overtly repressive years had awakened here—and in the orgy rooms which came soon after, bearing similar names. It seeped out of those places and into the troubled “paradisiacal” ghettos—Sunday mornings the determinedly masculine men lounged along the streets like triumphant casualties of the night; others wandered like deserters in neutral turf.

  It was in those bars that Endore began attempting to grasp the message of the split laughter. A new threat apprehended as inevitable and therefore only to be staved off by leaving it unacknowledged; an unwelcome awareness of a temporary troubled peace, a temporary peace to be seized?—the dichotomy would account for the break. Was anger coagulating?

  Soon, other questions battered him.

  Why, after the bursts of “liberation”—why, now, the courtship of filth, even when sterilized filth? Within the safe, enclosed bars and orgy rooms, why the imitation of the dank tenebrous places into which others had been shoved by oppression—toilets, crumbling buildings, prison cells? Props from those real places were exhumed and brought, advertised as such, into the bars and orgy rooms—urinals, prison doors, rotted wood—like artifacts and relics to be preserved.

  Violence spiraled on two fronts. “Queer-haters” still plundered, as always before, cruising areas outside bars, robbing, slaughtering, murdering. And now homosexuals mimed, and increasingly executed, sexual violence on their own. Pantomimed “slave auctions” became popular games.

  It was then that Endore pulled himself away—and, soon after, that Michael seized his life and he Michael’s—from that segment of his world; he felt a dark fury at himself. He explored his own blurring boundaries and moral confusions. When did abundant sex–which he extolled–become a soulless reduction, a sacrifice of, all human contact? It didn’t have to! Where did the sexual power endemic to all sexual contacts trespass into oppression, even when willing? It didn’t have to! But at the point where such a soulless reduction occurred as absolute, and sex, benumbed, insensate, pushed into pain for mere sensation, he would, he knew, warn against it, oppose it, while, always, supporting its right to be—and supporting, too, the intrinsic enrichment of abundant sex with one or many.

  The hardened practiced looks, the mirthless laughter, the ravaging alcoholism which began so much earlier now, the reliance on sexual drugs–these came with uniforms of policemen, of storm troopers, of fascist militarists, even of hooded executioners. Black leather draped the body in sexual mourning. Along with implements for pain, labeled “toys”—clamps, handcuffs, pincers—these uniforms became ordinary in store windows in the ghettos; the manikins were as rigid as the men who wore them in the bars and orgy rooms. The clothes and the stances became as obvious as those of the old effeminacy; a new drag—but now effeminacy was despised, forbidden, outlawed. The masculine homosexuals had become the new sissy-haters, like the bullies who had taunted them as children.

  Along with the sissy-hating there came to these ghettos a contempt for women among many of the macho men. Endore despised that.

  Now, in the Rushes, he knows he must isolate his disturbing feelings toward Lyndy’s presence, yes, and Martin’s—and Martin’s, he keeps reaffirming; feelings always before in suspension, awaiting definition. If he can find that definition now, he will exorcise the taunting demons resurrecting buried questions, dredging doubts about his previously uncluttered attitudes toward women. And his emergent feelings toward the Rushes as impenetrable territory except by the masculine men. Like him.

  “I went farther into the warehouse,” Lyndy continues to evoke the haunted piers, pulling away her question to Martin about the undefined occurrence by the trucks.

  And she walked into the midst of violent sexturf, a world Endore knows well. Within the enormous room, its ceiling higher than two storie
s, are the charred bones of other rooms. Holes are seared into the wooden floor. An erect iron column thrust out of the shaft in the middle of the room is strangled by oxidized pipes. Inside a gutted inner room, wires dangle from a lower ceiling like severed veins.

  Stopping the evoked images—they flow easily into the Rushes—Endore searches out Robert and Chas; they still stand close, but their backs are to each other, in the deep redness which licks at them like smoking fireless flames.

  Lyndy’s lips part; she speaks, a breath. “The free-form shapes of debris and silhouetted bodies—. . .”.

  Cinder, scorched wood, torn cans, broken metal pipes. Rubble accumulates against the corners of the fire-blasted rooms. Splinters of glass shine. In the reevoked images, a familiar figure, luminous even in the decay, moved into Endore’s mind. And faded.

  “There was a hollow sound,” Lyndy pulls at Endore’s attention.

  Disembodied footsteps are realer in the isolated caverns of the warehouse than the now alien mechanical roar of traffic outside. Sexshadows push against knots of darkness. This time Endore evokes the images, as if to pull out the faded figure which glided through them.

  “Men moved silently into the abandoned rooms,” Lyndy breathes.

  Past the bolted darkness of a stairway is another huge room. Slabs of dimmed sun cut the shadows. Within the frames of smaller wall-less rooms, shards of cold glass clinging to gouged windows, bodies entwine, sucking, kissing, fucking.

  “I saw it all.” Lyndy’s hand rises in the slow gesture.

  Like a mangled benediction. And it always ends on the strands of pearls. Endore turns away from her. His eyes scan the red battlefield, avoiding Robert and Chas, but in a sliding glance he saw them still standing like intimate strangers. Endore sees Don and the black man.

  Don flashes an alert in the direction of Endore—that he will flee to him for comfort. The black man has not answered his offer of a drink.

  “Why not?” the black man says.

  Feeling a warmth he has not felt all night, not since that ugly, ugly exhibit, Don still can’t keep anxiety out of his voice. “Please wait here, I’ll get it, please wait, please.”

  “Not going anywhere,” the black man says.

  He wishes Endore had heard; and Bill; and Chas. He moves nervously to the bar. The warmth is chilled by distrust. Will the black man wait for him? Please! He wends his way. Hurry! He hardly nods to Bill, standing looking around as if wondering which area to assault next. So selective all the time because he’s so pretty—well, the black man is waiting for me. Is he! Hurry! Don pushes at the men at the bar.

  When he returns, the black man is still there. Don hands him the beer.

  A trace of a smile graces the hard look like that of the white men here. Then the black man looks away. Don can hear the words of brutal false apology, I see someone I know, I–. . . And so all he wanted was a cheap beer. But the black man looks again at Don.

  “Thanks.”

  Distrust drains out of the warmth. Gulping his drink, exhaling so that his voice will not break with excitement, Don says, “I haven’t seen you here before. Not too many Negroes—oh, I’m sorry—black men—come here. You new here?”

  The clear eyes study him—yes, they’ve got to be amber, Don decides.

  “Uh, no, yeah, uh, whattaya mean?”

  Does the puffiness show! Don brings the cold glass to his face, as much to soothe it as to hide that part of it. But the black man has never seen him before; so he wouldn’t notice, he assures himself. Secretly he stares at the chocolate muscles. Sudden implosions of desire ricochet in shots of pain. He hears his own voice. “Sometimes people come to the Rushes because they’ve heard it’s, well, strange, not really because they. . . belong. I mean, I’ve met some normal—uh—straight-men, in queer—uh—gay—bars.” I’ll tell him I’m a well-known lawyer, that I’m respected by—. . . That doesn’t count here, he knows.

  There’s a slight change in the black man’s voice. “Just came cause I heard lots about this place. Didn’t know much about it.”

  He’s norm—. . . straight! Don feels urgent desire. Please, let it work. He looks around, trying to locate Chas. He taunted me, thinking I couldn’t make out with this handsome man. Well, look now! And there he is—still trying to entice that boy—but he hasn’t the nerve to approach him. Don wants Endore to see him, too. But from here all he can make out is part of Lyndy’s face.

  Lyndy moves farther into a shadow created by the post near which she sits. “There was another empty warehouse,” she continues the account of her excursion.

  Inside, its original function a mystery now like that of other lingering props in the warehouse, thick grilled wire creates a large cage. Did she see the men mold into one form, and others fusing in smaller pockets? Did she smell the dried urine and dying cum? Or did she arm herself with an expensively perfumed wrist?

  “It was slashed with yellow, green, red paint.” Lyndy is now describing the aluminum wall that blocks the wharf from the lot.

  Colors assault the grayness as if someone tried to coat the ugliness. Oh, and was she aware that beyond that wall, female and transvestite prostitutes fuck their clients among the glued male bodies. Would she look at them?

  “Someone had written the word ‘Visions.’ Très amusant!”

  The ambiguous word is a giant scrawl on the wall. Did she notice on the same scorched wall a warning against killers?

  “The water had an orange sheen, quite splendid really, like moiré!”

  Rubble floats in the periphery of the water rejected by the ocean, thrust back at the city.

  “Ah! Chas seems ready to spring on the beautiful boy,” Lyndy slices off her narrative.

  “To extol the virtues and splendors of slavehood, no doubt,” Martin almost-laughs.

  In Martin’s laughter there is only contempt. Endore does not turn to look at the youngman. He remembers the thick eyelashes when he saw him near the trucks. But then he must have had only the impression of long eyelashes, the boy was not that near. Endore feels a sadness that contains Michael.

  “Chas has retreated. Oh, just slightly,” Lyndy announces.

  If he wasn’t interested, he would have walked away. Chas has eased his body to one side, only to gauge the youngman’s reaction. Robert doesn’t move.

  A brown-haired man in abbreviated leather approaches Chas. “You’re quite a stud,” the man appraises him.

  Chas hopes Robert heard that. It will increase his interest. But while not dismissing the man, he is careful to hold Robert with a firm look.

  “I bet you could give a guy a rough time,” the man says in a low voice.

  “The right guy at the right time, yeah,” Chas tantalizes. He’s not sure how much he wants Robert to hear now; he can’t be too overt yet.

  “You get heavy?”

  Chas lowers his voice. “Been known to.” He still has Robert’s eyes. It’s working-and the kid hasn’t looked toward Endore in a significant time.

  The man’s voice drops to a hoarse whisper. “I like your boots.”

  Chas muffles the growled words. “You a bootshiner? Bootlicker?” His voice is hardly audible. His look is tied to Robert’s.

  “Tongue-shine, sir.” the man offers.

  Fuck! A goodlooking man is cruising the kid now. He’d better dismiss this man. “Well, maybe I’ll catch you another time.” He raised his voice on those words. He turns his back to the man and now he smiles crookedly at Robert.

  Robert smiles back.

  Chas moves closer to the boy. So beautiful—a certain softness all mixed with toughness; no, not softness, just newness. What is he feeling? His first time here. A cold wave of heat engulfs Chas. He looks down at his boots. To make sure he is in the exact stance he remembers. The crooked smile is held. From under thick, dark, lowered brows, his eyes capture Robert.

  Robert stares at Chas’s dark clothes.

  Chas is aware of the intense stare on the leather. His own image bounces back at him. For a
moment, it is as if he were viewing himself through the kid’s eyes, seeing the black chaps, the black vest, the black gloves. No, he’s not wearing gloves. His mind reels. The man’s gloved hand unbuttoned his own pants, so slowly. Chase touches his own groin. The moisture is gone. Bewildered, he looks at Robert. Then Chas turns away, to leave, to leave the kid alone.

  “Looking for a good top-man? I could give you a rough time.”

  Chas whirls to face the man talking; an unattractive man in solid leather. Chas’s forehead creases as if to wring the man’s words from his mind. “What the fuck!” he says. “You see these keys, man?” He touches them, jangles them. “Left side! You see the earring? Left side! And the handkerchief? All on the left side, man! That means top-man, man. Top!”

  The man backs off from the pouring rage. “Some guys go both ways, stud. No offense.” He retreats.

  “I don’t!” Chas yells. Blackness trembles at the edge of his sight. I’ll have the fuckin little dude!

  Feet spread, crotch forward, Chas drawls at Robert. “Haw-ya, man? I’m Chas.” The coldness recedes, leaving a hot surface.

  “I’m Robert,” the youngman says.

  Chas checks his own stance. Yes, like that. Has Endore moved? He can’t see him.

  “First time in a bar?” he asks Robert.

  It shows then. Through the moisture stinging Robert’s eyes, the bodies blur in fluid red. “Yeah”–but he tries to sound tough.

  Has Endore advanced? No, and he’s looking away. Endore doesn’t approach anyone, Chas reminds himself. Then why the apprehension? Chas sees the outlined face of the woman.

  “Ah, darling Chas has sprung on the boy!” Lyndy tells Endore. “Oh, you don’t care, Endore,” she poses at concern. Her voice resumes in fascination. “That same night, Martin showed me the trucks.”

  The threat of the lurking gangs, the sudden intrusions into the sexual turf, the shouts and curses, waking the sexual sleepwalkers—did Martin tell her about that? Did he withhold it? Endore forces his eyes not to slide toward Robert, Chas. He looks at the enigmatic man. Martin. Behind that mask, what?