Rushes

by John Rechy

  “I even asked you about the others you were with, I wanted to please you,” Michael reminds, “to let you know that you were free.”

  Granted freedom. “While you let me know—with your unhappiness–that you felt I was . . . ‘unfaithful.’” It’s coming, Endore knows, Michael’s judgment. “And you told me about the ones you were with.” He hears his words with astonishment. It is he who has rendered the judgment.

  “And you couldn’t cope with it! After all your bullshit about selfish ‘fidelity,’ you couldn’t cope with it.”

  “I would have,” Endore knows. He had discovered the hated attitudes like venom injected too deeply, too early, in him, too. If Luke hadn’t come over that night, if I hadn’t seen myself in him, and Bill in–. . . “If only you hadn’t wanted pain!” he hurls.

  “Because I thought you missed that world, and I loved you that much!”

  “Is that true?”

  “Find out!” Michael’s voice is angry. “I’m not blaming you for anything, Endore! Damnit, stop trying to change the jungle you understand so well!” Michael squeezes through the flesh in the bar.

  Is that, then, all? All that will be revealed of what occurred between them? These fragments of unclear accusations and judgments, like splintered pieces of a mirror reflecting different shades and hues, not even shapes; and even the tint and outlines of those glassy splinters may be reinterpreted, over and over, by memory. Or will there be more clarity? Or more mystery.

  How long has the leatherman been standing next to him? How much did he hear? Endore looks away from him. Michael is resorbed into the thickening mass. From this distance Lyndy and Martin look like spectators at a slaughter. Endore feels his anger engulfing them in a wave which roars beyond them.

  Chas studies Endore, back with them. “How’s Michael?” He acknowledges the undertones of his question by not taunting with the shortened name.

  “I’ve got to have sex tonight!” Don says aloud. He looks at his watch.

  He said that before. Yes, the night he called from “out of town.” In that urgent tone. No, he said it earlier when Endore saw him at—. . . Cruising, attentive bodies thwart Endore’s remembrance.

  “It’ll be Last Call soon and I’m still alone. All night long I’ve tried to connect.” Again, the shout threatens to rage out.

  “You shouldn’t feel you have to connect, that’s what’s cruel, Don,” Endore says. Tonight he senses a much greater pain than usual in the troubled man who is becoming an alcoholic.

  Lyndy’s head makes a slight tilt toward Endore. Her fingers press open on her chest, covering the pearls. When her silence is broken, it will crash, Endore knows.

  Don confronts Endore: “I need to make out, you can always make out.”

  “No one can—always; we all know the horror of ending up alone when we don’t want to,” he tries to soothe Don., But Endore’s attention is pulled by the gorgeous flotsam of flesh in the smoky sea of the Rushes. Yes, he wants sex tonight.

  “I need someone tonight.” Don’s face is contorted with urgency.

  A momentary substitute for salvation, Endore knows. Ahead, the resplendent, lewd carnality lures again.

  Look at him, so “compassionate,” Don feels anger focusing on his good friend. So desirable—and he’s not that much younger than me. And Chas, all that boasting! Bill! If he doesn’t get what he wants tonight, he’ll start fresh and young tomorrow. But for Don the pain of each night cuts closer to a core each time, so close to it now, so close to screaming.

  Endore. Chas. Martin. Don. And Bill is back. They all turn to look at Lyndy. She has pulled out one of the pearls from her pocket. She bites it hard. She touches it with her tongue, now with a finger.

  “They are the real ones, Martin,” she breaks her long silence. She tosses that pearl on the floor with the other. Now her voice is eerie as she releases the blackmail with which she tantalized Martin earlier. She can now discard the ugly information like garbage.

  “The night we went to the trucks, Martin waited in the Jaguar, and after I had seen the shadows locked in sex, I moved across the street to witness it all.” She strokes the remaining pearls about her neck. “A carload of those boys rushed into the trucks, I got into the car with Martin. The boys drove off yelling names, men staggered out, and one man–bleeding–came up to the window on Martin’s side.” Her fingers soothe the pearls. “The man pushed his bloody face against the glass and he was yelling to be let in, and Martin drove off, and then he stopped and cleaned the bloody prints the hands had left on the windshield. That’s all.” She pauses. Now, for her, it comes: “Except that later, at Marissa’s party, Martin couldn’t stop trembling, it was the first time I have ever seen him tremble.”

  Don wishes he could reject the evoked image of the bloodied face. “How cruel of you to run away!” he accuses Martin.

  “Perhaps,” Martin tosses aside. “And perhaps the man was one of those who raided the trucks.” It is the first time he has even seemed to want to explain anything.

  “Left behind by the ones who drove away?” Endore pursues.

  “Perhaps,” Martin says.

  “Then why did you tremble?” Bill asks him. “You’re always so cool, so cold, so in control.”

  “Oh.” Lyndy finishes, “but that time he was astonished. By the scent of sexual blood.”

  11

  As it was in the beginning, is now. . ..

  AS OFTEN as he comes to the Rushes, Chas is still awed by the resplendent sexual animal the bar becomes near Last Call. Raunchy sweating currents rush through amyl-injected veins of red smoke. Groaning music comes. Flesh and leather—his eyes select the two—crunch into one sensual body. You make out now—the only release the grasping animal allows now—or you offer up the evening to aloneness. The bar clutches by reminding that no matter how many connections have been sundered, redemption is possible; one surpassing contact may atone for all the broken ones. Only when the lights crash after Last Call is shouted will the death of the evening be acknowledged in the Rushes.

  As he stands in the curdled silence which followed Lyndy’s narrative, Chas feels a growing sexual hunger. He evaluates his prospects. The leatherman wears no insignia, so he will go either way. Even machos who wear their signals on the left side, proclaiming dominance, will shift for a good top-man; it happens often to Chas, and he enjoys vying for the dominant role, and winning. By touching his own keys, on his left, Chas asserted himself as a top-man; the leatherman affirmed it with his nod. And there is Michael. True, he has received no clear invitation to invite, nor has he felt the requisite hardon, but he has been aroused by his presence in the past, and they have not been in proximity tonight. Having him would erase the defeat with Robert—that still stings. But conquering Michael would involve an astounding configuration—the evening hints of possibilities. And it would force him and Endore into combat. Oh. and there is Bill, ripe tonight. Or one of so many others who may yet give him a magical hard cock.

  He wants the sex to be heavy; a masculine slave kneeling before him, tongue lapping the black boots, buttocks squirming at the hint of his belt, which he will slide along the other’s naked back, tantalizing with it and with his cock. Images bombard Chas’s brain, he holds an ampule to his nose, to retain them longer and more tightly. And then, no longer wearing pants, just the black chaps, he will wrap the belt about the other’s neck, after dangling the tip over his mouth, and pull the head against the naked groin and force the eager head to drink, and shift it artfully back against the crack of his buttocks, the knot of flesh there, forcing the tongue to explore the opening, and he’ll wrap a part of the belt about his fist and slap at the flesh with the other part, awakening the raw flesh, stinging, yes. but not cutting, no, indulging only the charade just one degree before real pain, and the epithets of macho love-contempt will bless. And then tying—. . . He feels his cock growing under the clinging pants, the cockring clasping. The imagined figure with him has altered among his choices, the leatherman. Michae
l, Bill, and–. . . Strange that the fantasy did not span out to Robert. . .. Or a three-way, the resurgence of the amyl provokes. Two mouths on his cock, and a hard thick cock juicy in his hand, yeah, as he reaches to pectorals, squeezing, pinching, biting the nipples.

  Don breaks Chas’s revery, and the entranced silence since Lyndy’s narrative: “Those damn lights are going to go on in a few minutes,” he repeats obsessively, as if to hold the lights back with his warning tone. “There’s a man over there—my age. He looked at me. I’m not attracted to him at all, but if I close my eyes–. . .” He realizes he’s thinking aloud. He clamps his hand over his watch, to stop time.

  “Be alone!” Endore hears his voice become blunt toward Don for the first time this evening. The Rushes is flaying the vestigial compassion the earlier part of the evening allowed.

  Don welcomes the tone. He would like to arouse anger so that his own may be flushed out. “You talk about aloneness as if it were your lover!”

  “One not to be betrayed.” Lyndy uttered the unexpected words.

  Endore glances at her; a whisper of unwanted . . . empathy.

  Without a word of parting now, Bill and Chas invade the heavy pit.

  A man pushes his back against Chas’s groin. Attractive, but not what Chas wants, no, not macho enough, but okay for a moment’s “charge.” Chas’s probing finger discovers split pants. He shoves another finger in, another. The man allows it. Chas digs into the smooth, smooth, oiled flesh. He bunches his third and fourth fingers and tries to force them in in one rough shove. The man jerks. Chas pulls out his fingers and moves on.

  “If you got a big cock, I’ll go with you,” an ordinary man offers Chas.

  He’s the type who hasn’t much to lose, and so, aggressive. “I got the biggest you’d see,” Chas boasts. “But you won’t see it,” he discards.

  He passes Bill. He hears Bill’s Southern drawl; he’s talking to a tall man. “I like a man who knows he’s a–. . .”

  Seeing Chas, Bill stops his words. True to the rules of the sexhunt, the two pretend not to know each other—any outside gesture may break a connection. Bill isn’t as turned off as usual by Chas’s clothes. Tonight they show off his sexy body.

  “Whore! Don’t you ever let me see you here again!” The shrill voice of a man raids the stagnant air from somewhere deep within the crunch of flesh.

  “You fucking bitch! You’re nothing but a wasted tramp, give up!” another voice screeches.

  “Good enough for you to get all hot over me!”

  Hearing the shrieking voices, Chas feels outraged. These strident outbursts occur as the tension knots toward Last Call. Chas loathes those moments. They scratch out rancid effeminacy, and they jar the ritual, which, in the arena, should be as silent as possible now, the exhortations and verbalized explorations like prayers. He sees the heated, shouting men ahead: A drunken man in leather—chains and keys askew on his left side, handkerchief dangling, the uniform in ugly disarray-faces a lanky, shirtless man; earlier he looked good, now he’s haggard. Get the fuck out! Chas issues a silent curse as he prowls his kingdom, nodding to the many he has been with.

  The voices of the angered men regurgitate. Lashing, they invoke the harshest curse in the Rushes—effeminacy—while personifying it in cruel paradox: “Cunt! You just—. . .!”

  Another fresh wound peeled, Endore thinks, hearing the distant fury. Throughout the Rushes, this very moment contains a myriad separate moments—lives.

  “The precious minutes before Last Call,” Martin intones.

  His façade is intact. He will not allow Lyndy and the victory of his anger. Or do they admire each other only in mutual ambush?-a game which joins them, bored, together? Endore wonders.

  “Now even the sleeping beauties will awake,” Martin is explaining the sexual hunt to Lyndy, “and even the ones who kept hoping for someone better, surrender to tonight’s reality. You see, darling, when the men who have desired each other all night wait too long to signal an invitation, it becomes a contest to see who will look away first. Then the exact moment of rejection becomes as important as the exact moment of approach was. Oh, there, see, he moved too slowly, the other left—victorious; they’ll both end up alone or with someone they did not prefer—but, look, a stalemate! Ah, the backs are about to turn. Desire denied converts both hunter and hunted into enemies for life. Fragile connections–. . .”

  “And yet they do connect.” Lyndy’s eyes are wide.

  “Miraculously we manage, over and over and over,” Endore says.

  “All of them in heat,” Martin spits. Now he passes his judgment: “So chic and beautiful away from the Rushes. And so vile and hungry here.”

  So chic, so beautiful. And so despised. The screams outside remind us, Endore knows. We cruise and fuck away the knowledge of the stalking hatred. Whipped by strobe lights, young warriors desert the battle for sequined disco graves. In bars we numb it away.

  “Chas has moved toward Michael,” Martin announces.

  But also near the leatherman, Endore makes the important adjustment. Don’t prove me right with Chas, he sends an urgent silent message to Michael. He shifts his gaze to the drawings. The artist meant to leave the last panel unfinished because he didn’t understand the meaning of his creation; he pulled away from it, Endore has a sudden clarity. His look is drawn away. Chas is moving next to—. . . The shiny black back of the leatherman obtrudes.

  About the bar, bodies are increasingly bared, shirts are open or removed, pants pushed to the edge of pubic hair, deep oblique muscles. In the carnal arena an erotic army of exposed soldiers is gathering. Terror of rejection wars with the desire to connect. Lovers are potential enemies. Against the walls, on the beer crates, on stools, against the posts and pool tables, men pose now, fingers looped, hips loose and forward, cigarettes drooping, boots always, always asserting, shoulders hunched. Alike. While seeming never to look, they look constantly, masking fear with disdain.

  At the bar a man slides down, his head buried in another’s groin. Like a spark flying from a conflagration onto waiting tinder, the synergetic sexuality from the dark back of the bar crackles forward. Another form is crouching on his knees. A man pushes against the back of another. Knots of men throughout kiss, hands anxious. A few bodies have stripped down to shorts, jockstraps, elaborate leather pouches bradded with silver studs. Red-dyed flesh, oiled, sweating, gleams.

  The shiny back of the leatherman slides to one side, and Endore sees Michael and Chas. But before he can determine whether they’re talking, Bill’s wandering form blocks his visual vantage. Bill looks lost.

  All night he’s felt Endore judging his relationship with Luke. The tension he’s been feeling—that’s what’s been intruding in his cruising. By confronting it, he will clear it away so his style will uncramp. He moves back to where Endore stands with Don, Martin, Lyndy. “I’ve got three lined up!” he announces.

  “Oh, Christ, the fatuous bragging!” Don says. His sweating body is cold. The artificial air chills him hotly.

  “The problem is that of the people I really want, nobody’s really dominant.” Bill wants to pull out a definite accusation to rebut. Without a plan, he’s just stabbing. “They seem to be, but they’re not.”

  “Boundaries blur,” Endore says.

  Chas is back, and there’s a new cockiness about him.

  He spoke to Michael. Or to the leatherman, Endore adjusts his evaluation.

  “Not with us, the boundaries didn’t blur; Luke was the dominant one,” Bill says.

  Anger seeps into Don’s words. “Does it matter!” The words he longs to shout bunch inside, bile.

  “Yes! It matters.” Bill is irritated by Don, and he is ignoring Lyndy and Martin.

  “Amen, it matters!” Chas pronounces.

  “It certainly mattered when Luke tried to change it; that’s why it ended, and it was his fault!” Bill thrusts at Endore.

  “I thought it was because he couldn’t get hard anymore,” Don says. The unspewed wor
ds taste like vomit, yes. He pushes it back with the last of his new drink.

  “He did get hard again—once—the same night he ran out of the Rack. Later.” The memory spills out: “He tried to express desire for me the way I did for him. He began kissing my body, licking it, licking me all over, sucking me, rimming me, I don’t know what got into him, he wasn’t supposed to do that, he was the dominant one, I wanted him to stop, kept telling him to, but he was too aroused by then. He came!”

  The image of Luke licking Bill’s body–the two beautiful men; and Bill pushed him away!—it lodges in Don’s mind like a needle.

  Too late to stop them, the words flow out of Bill: “But then I couldn’t get hard.” He waits for Endore to absolve him.

  Endore says nothing.

  Bill’s voice is frigid. “I. Did. Love. Luke.”

  “Did you love Michael, Endore?” Chas faces him.

  His body is so close to Endore’s that Endore can feel his breath.

  Assaulted by that closeness—no matter how tense—between the two men—their chests bared!—Don knows he has to break it: “Goddamnit, don’t!” he almost shouts, and his hand drops like a knife between the two men. It’s because of my face, my bruised face!

  Endore hears the ambiguous command like an alert of toppling control.

  “I thought you were really going to be angry at each other, I thought any moment you’d–. . .” Don tries to explain away his strange action. So beautiful, Don thinks. The two men are so beautiful.

  Feeling released from Chas’s powerful clutch, Endore looks into the sea of bodies in which Michael and the leatherman swim.

  “I have. To have. Sex. Tonight.” Don squeezes out the words.

  Yes. Endore remembers. The same words. The same desperate tone. On the piers, the last time he saw him before the night-call. Endore was surprised to see Don there and left. Looking back, he saw Don inching into the arteries of darkness in the warehouses. Oh, no, the thought begins to form.