by John Rechy
Don’s face is grim. The words which invaded his mind earlier reshape: A wish. I wish–. . . I wish! A curse. I want—. . . I want! No, don’t. He forces the horror away. I love Endore. He closes his eyes, wanting to shut his ears, too, his senses, his feelings, to disconnect them. He hears the echo of each of their earlier words about sexual choices, like traversing bullets in his brain.
I wish–. . . He opens his eyes. Now Bill is close to Chas; no, closer to Endore. Don’s mind screams, Stay apart or I’ll shout the words! “Bastards—. . .” The word escaped.
“Don, what is the matter?” Bill asks him softly.
“You just leave me alone, you!” Don says. His hand begins a pushing gesture. Instead, both hands cover his face.
“Why do you keep hiding your face?”
Did someone really say it? Yes, it was Bill. Don can’t believe the blunt words. “I’m not, I—. . .”
The thought struck Bill with such abrupt clarity that he verbalized it automatically “Oh, God, Don, did you have your face lifted? You were gone all that time, and—. . .”
No! A sustained moan implodes in Don’s mind. No!
Oh, God, it isn’t that, Endore knows. I should have known. My God! That afternoon on the piers! He wants to shout to Bill to stop.
Chas! Martin! Lyndy! Bill! They’re all staring at his face. And Endore is too! No! Don covers his face again. “Bastard!” he yells at Bill. “Bastard!”
Bill tries to pull back; he didn’t want to hurt Don. “There’s nothing wrong with it, Don,” he tries to placate. “I’m really sorry. You do look so much better, really. I’m sure you’ll look great when you heal, it’s the puffiness that’s still—. . .”
“They beat me!” Don howls. He tears Endore’s hand away from his shoulder. “On the piers! I had to have stitches!”
“Oh, Don, I’m sorry, really so very, very sorry; you should have told us,” Bill pleads.
“Beat me with clenched fists!” Don clenches his own. “Kicking me when I fell. ‘Faggot! Queer!’ They kept yelling and kicking. I followed the little bastard, thinking he really wanted me, the way he kept looking at me, signaling to me, following me around. And they ambushed me! Five, six, I don’t know how many. They robbed me—but that wasn’t enough. They kept kicking.” The memory floods. Earlier that same afternoon, he had attempted to join a cluster of sex-pressed bodies and was pushed to the filthy floor of the warehouse. He ran. Playing with his own groin, the handsome boy stood in a gash of light. Don followed him into the darkness. Then the young savages captured him in a terrible circle of thrusting feet and fists. “I just wanted to have sex with him,” Don sighs. His voice grows stiller. He lay there bleeding, trying not to move so they would think they had killed him. Even after they left, he just lay there, knowing that even if he called the police and they came, they would act as if he were the guilty one.
“The bastards,” Chas feels a powerful anger at the murderous assaulters. “The fuckin bastards.’
“The bastards,” Endore echoes.
Lyndy’s eyes badger Martin to remember the bleeding face at the window of his Jaguar.
She didn’t care about the man, no, Endore notices her look; she cares only that she has a weapon against Martin, that he may–may–have felt. . . something!
Only when he opened his eyes and saw Endore—so hurt—and Chas–fierce–and Bill–shocked–staring at him in disbelief, only when Don saw Lyndy and Martin watching him in fascination, only when his eyesight blurred and he realized, I’m not sweating, I’m crying—only when he was aware of others near him staring—only then did Don know that he was shouting, is shouting out the accumulated words:
“I wish the cops would rush in and arrest everyone like they did us. I wish they would padlock the Rushes and all these places. Goddamnit, we couldn’t even dance, not even touch—and look what’s going on right in this bar! I hate all of you-Bill, Chas, Endore-I hate you!” Then he yells at no one: “Arrest them! Arrest them all!”
12
Cleanse my heart and my lips.
AS OFTEN as he comes to the Rushes, Endore is still amazed to uncover a nuance missed before in the erotic cartoon figures on the walls. To avoid the avalanche of Don’s words and the wake of resentful silence, he looked at the panels. The contrasting vagueness and sharpness in the primitive line drawings have a new possible explanation. Whether this clarity will survive into another night—others have not—for now Endore is sure that another artist tried to restore the original drawings, but selectively. He inserted or expunged only certain expressions, clarified or blurred only certain attitudes. Yet he too pulled away from definite meaning and left the last panel blank—only inserting the vague sketch, or refusing to restore it.
Endore remembers the photographic paintings he saw earlier tonight. The artist painted blood over beautiful settings-arranged, ordered. He did not allow them to bleed in disordered ugliness. How would that artist depict the Rushes stripped of the rage of emotions? The disemboweled stools, the overturned crates, the sawdust in jigsaw puzzle patches, the ampules of amyl like dead insects. No. Endore cannot “see” the painting. Then he locates Lyndy’s pearls on the floor, and the painting shapes. Endore realizes then the brutality of the earlier-evening’s exhibition. The artist proffered purification through beautified–beatific–violence; he omitted the overwhelming factor of feelings, emotions, the pained disorder that must precede and follow his perfect frozen violence. Those paintings were as cruel in their implications as the architectonic sterility of Martin’s work—both praising order through an immolation of feeling. Like Martin himself. And Lyndy.
Again Endore looks at the bloated muscular men drawn on the walls. He searches the faces from which emotion has been excised. Crushed too long by ancestral hatred against them, is that what the real men standing against the drawings long to become, in defense—but can’t? Do I? he questions.
He hears that new laughter rising from a red-shaded, depth within the Rushes. Tense, he waits to listen to the break. His clarity about the drawings, the paintings at the exhibit earlier, the incidents of the night have roused a sudden expectation of discovery. The laughter holds, almost stopped. Is the “hollow” stasis the intersection of desperate hope to become insensate–to be bludgeoned feelingless–and the reality of intensive vulnerability? If so, which of the two components survives longer?
In couples or alone, men leave the Rushes; squads, perhaps fresher, replace them. There is a late-night flow to the Rushes, by those who cherish the crucial last minutes of the hunt. Eyes, staring eyes, are palpable presences throughout.
Endore has learned to turn his back on the sexhunt, to walk out in triumph over the radiating power of the Rushes; but there is a certain time–different for each man but usually before Last Call—when a certain stirring demands fulfillment or sexual death for the night. Handsome and desirable as he is, Endore is not immune to the series of missed connections that lead to a sentence of sexual aloneness for the night.
Although in his columns he has praised the abstract beauty of the choreographed hunt—“the solo dancers join the corps in shifting patterns of elegant geometry”–when he and others are caught in its bloodiness, he sees its horror.
Like now. Don’s face is carved by tears and pain. His body trembles as if caught in a fatal chill.
Endore puts his hand on Don’s trembling shoulders. This time Don does not thrust it away.
“I didn’t mean that.” Don looks about him in surprise.
“Of course not, we know that,” Endore says.
He meant it, Chas thinks. Without glancing at Don, he walks away—“to get another beer”—to push down the vomitous anger. And to assess the territory.
Bill turns to say something kind to Don. But the painracked face makes him turn away. I wish he wouldn’t come back. He too moves away.
Don inches toward the exit. The man he saw earlier–about his age, carefully arranged—moves from a deeper part of the bar, as if to approach him. Nearer
to the exit—he doesn’t want to look out, to see whether the hustler is still there—Don waits. The man approaches him. Don smiles a grateful but uncertain welcome.
Let it work, Endore thinks.
“He’s back,” Lyndy says. “The beautiful youngman who ran out earlier is back. Look, Martin.”
Near Don talking to the man, Robert stands at the entrance.
Ahead, approaching with fresh beer in hand, Chas stops.
Robert searches the bar.
For me? For Chas? Endore’s body tenses.
“Chas may still win–or lose again,” Lyndy resurrects the battle.
“Is it important that he call you darling?” Endore postpones the reality of the youngman’s return.
“I so want to be loved,” Lyndy says. Because she has drained the word of all meaning, she can use it easily.
“Have you chosen yet whom you will be pursued by, Endore?” Martin stabs.
Rage bursts. “When will you finally choose, Martin?”
“I choose not to choose,” Martin answers. “There is no greater power over the beautiful than to withhold desire from them.”
“What do you feel, to watch it all at a distance, Martin?” Endore pursues. He feels an inner trembling.
“Nothing,” Martin answers.
“Are you afraid your vaunted power will not survive the battles?” Endore has crossed the boundary of their hostile truce.
“It does, that’s all that matters.” Martin says.
“Even if you have to slum among your own.” Endore declares open war.
“Did that hurt, darling?” Lyndy acknowledges the declaration.
“Not at all,” Martin says. “‘My own’—as you put it, is me, just me. I.”
“Oh, I like that,” Lyndy joins. “Moi aussi.”
“Then why did you tremble after you saw the bloodied man at your car window?”
Lyndy waits for his answer.
“There was a dreadful chill at Marissa’s that night,” Martin says.
Lyndy applauds, releasing him from her earlier judgment of feeling.
Robert locates Endore. Chas still waits.
“In all the encounters with you,” Endore says, “the bouts with you at rancid parties and dinners and sterile exhibitions, in all that time, I’ve waited for one single moment of revelation about you. Epiphany. When one detects and understands, perhaps, the psychic wound. But that moment hasn’t come. Not in either of you.”
“Ah. sad,” Lyndy says.
“Until tonight,” Endore says.
“I’m breathless to hear your epiphany,” Lyndy jibes, but her hand brings an invisible pearl to her lips.
“The revelation is that there is no revelation,” Endore says. “Your core is nothing.”
Lyndy applauds, this time one slow clap follows another, dead applause. “I adore your epiphany of us, Endore. No pain, no psychic wound.”
“Gorgeous!” Martin’s hands join in the dead applause.
“But just one question, Endore,” Lyndy says. “Did the epiphany about our nothingness reveal anything about you?” She is evoking the malign attraction that has bound them for years.
Did it?
Endore looks away from her, and the question.
Robert glances at Martin and Lyndy and then at Endore.
Chas locates Michael and the leatherman, as if he’s determining foes, choosing allies, evaluating reserves.
“I came back to ask you why you told me to leave after you got me away from Chas,” Robert has walked up to Endore. He pushed out the rehearsed words.
“Oh, yes,” Lyndy sighs.
Endore will not allow her to listen. He moves away from them, the youngman follows. In a thinning area of the bar—as the men rush inward to clash and fuse—Endore is aware of Chas’s clenching look. Robert continues the prepared words:
“You came over, man, and I was with Chas,” he is trying to find meaning in the sequence he has recreated over and over since he left, “and you said I was—. . .”
“I said you were beautiful,” Endore repeats, to emphasize, “because I knew Chas was making you feel ugly.” And he’s a master at it, like me, once. “I told you you didn’t have to feel dirty.”
Robert abandons the rehearsed words, searches for others.
Endore feels caught in a web of looks–Chas’s, Lyndy’s, Martin’s. And Michael’s. The leatherman has returned to stand near Michael. Endore feels a coldness like that when the black glove touched him earlier. Has it touched Michael?
“And you are beautiful,” Endore says to Robert, “and very brave, when you stood with the transvestite and the black woman.”
“They felt alone, and I felt alone,” Robert says. “I did feel ugly, with Chas, but turned-on too—he was talking weird shit, and my head was fucked like when my brother talks about queers and it all seems mean and I know he’s wrong, but it makes me feel guilty and dirty, and that’s how I felt with Chas—and I’m glad you came over, man.” His words struggle to order the confusion. “Then you kissed me.”
Kissing away—. . . Endore tries to remember.
“It wasn’t ugly then,” Robert says.
“No, it wasn’t ugly,” Endore says.
“Then why did you hide from Chas when you kissed me? It wasn’t ugly.”
“I was afraid to be vulnerable before him.”
“Something between you?”
“No.”
“Then why did you tell me to leave?”
Endore can’t answer. He knew then, when they kissed.
“You’re the first guy I ever kissed,” Robert prods him.
“It was a first time for me, too,” Endore says: The first time he approached anyone.
“I saw you on the piers first.”
“I remember.” In the warehouse the slender figure watched. It was an afternoon when the sexual nerve chafed insatiable and Endore moved from man to man along the crush of rubble. In a diagonal of light, Robert stood—so close for that moment that Endore could see the thick eyelashes; he looked out of place there too, because his clothes were careless. He followed Endore. Then he disappeared.
“I kept hiding from you, you kept making out with different guys,” Robert seems to accuse. “I didn’t do anything. I never have, I went home and I cried, fuck yeah, I cried wishing I’d made it with you.”
On the rubbish? On dank boards? Stairs like blackened teeth? In the cadaverous warehouse? Pier filth? Ensnaring wires? Oxidized metal? Endore looks at the boy’s face, the angles which will mature into those of a handsome man—the way Michael’s have already. He looks at the beautiful body with the natural muscles hardening, the exposed flesh under his shirt traced by definition, and he desires this youngman. His tight body would fit into mine. His furry crotch, the hairless chest, the—probably—surprisingly hairy legs, the eager cock would press against my crotch, chest, legs, cock. Our mouths will kiss, then slide between each other’s legs.
“Can we make it?” Robert asks Endore.
He’s not afraid to ask, so easy for him; he’s not afraid to feel. “Yes,” Endore says.
“Every night I imagined it would happen, and it will. I love you,” Robert says.
“Don’t say that!” The terrified words bolt out of Endore’s lips. “There’s no such—. . .” He hears his voice, his tone—and echoes: There’s no such thing, Michael!
A few feet away, Chas dismisses a man trying to approach him.
Assuring that Chas is watching—to make up for the covert act earlier—Endore kisses Robert on the lips. The youngman’s lips part, the tongues touch. Then Endore eases Robert away.
Robert frowns. “We are gonna make it, aren’t we?”
“No!” Endore says, and now he knows and can answer why he told him to leave: “Because you threaten the cynicism by which I survive,” he says angrily. “And it was threatened once before.” And now by memories, of Michael. And he is here in the jungle I prepared him for without wanting to, and you’d inherit it too.
“Then all you wanted was for me not to go with Chas, huh? There is something between you.”
“No,” Endore says.
“I could still go with him,” Robert threatens.
Chas holds out his beer in an unfinished toast.
“I’m sure you won’t go with Chas.” Endore’s voice is unsure. “Because you know it doesn’t have to be ugly—and you know he can’t give you what you know now you want. But somebody else can.”
“Not you?”
“Not me. Not Chas.” It’s too late, he thinks.
Robert erupts, “Then fuck you—you’re as fucked as Chas in your own way, as fucked as my brother in his. Fuck you!” he shouts.
Chas takes a step toward the youngman.
Tense, Robert waits.
Against the wall, the leatherman watches.
Chas takes another step.
He won’t go with Chas, he won’t go with Chas, Endore thinks.
Robert walks out of the Rushes.
He left. He left Chas. And me, Endore thinks. He left us both.
Feeling abandoned in hostile currents of the Rushes, Endore moves back to the safety of the trenches.
Before Lyndy and Martin, Chas confronts him. “The kid told you to fuck off!” he triumphs. “Endore even kissed the kid, did you see him?” He wants the others to acknowledge that, as if he does not—does not want to—believe it. “Did you see him? And the kid told him to fuck off! He came back to tell him to fuck off!”
“I told him to leave,” Endore says.
“Shit, we heard him tell you to fuck off.” The strength in Chas’s voice wanes.
“You didn’t hear it all,” Endore says. “He walked out on both of us, Chas. He won’t grovel at your boots, nor—. . .”
“Nor yours!” Chas thwarts a further accusation.
“Nor mine,” Endore agrees. “Some of us are scarred beyond healing. But that kid isn’t yet.” Is Michael? “You wanted his initiation to be brutal. Like yours.”
“I wanted it to be honest!” Chas contradicts. His hands form fists. They begin to hurt. He unclenches them, feeling the warmth flowing into the strangled fingers. He remembers the touch of the leatherman’s glove.
