by John Rechy
Now the leathered-cowboy’s fist is swallowed by the starved ass. It widens to receive the muscular thighs of the tattooed panther. The bound man gasps. The face of the leathered cowboy is stoical. Other intense eyes watch, faces press closer to observe the anus violated by the fist, a portion of the wrist. The arm rams midway to the elbow, the snarling panther disappears into the ass.
In a soundless howl, the strapped man’s mouth opens, issuing silence.
Throughout the room, other similar contraptions are occupied. Men straddle the faces of the eager, bound men leaning back. Men move their cocks and fists from hole to hole. Before an empty leather sling, a tall man holds up a prepared fist coated with melting lard, summoning a willing hole and alerting the witnessing men who will now shift like wandering acolytes along with the crawling figures into a transferred ceremonial circle. The fist gleams in the strangled light, which is the color of drying blood. A man is now being strapped to the sling.
Down the wooden ladder. Red silhouettes of naked and leathered men glide within the lower depths of the cardinal sea, past the imported garbage like flotage.
Shackles, chains on the walls, manacles restrain men in anxious surrender. Even when there is for this moment no visible source of pain—no violative fist or belt or instrument, even then, they moan and writhe in soft motions of deep hurt, as if it were being inflicted by an absent torturer.
In a tub a man lies nude. A circle of thighs and exposed cocks surrounds him. Men urinate on him, jerk off, spit on him. The sweating, growling man in the tub slurps at the mixture of urine, cum, spittle. A hand shoves his head against the stained porcelain. The thirsty tongue laps at the dripping liquid. A circle of men wait for their turn to grovel in the tub or to thrust their liquid contempt into it.
Like a slavemaster, the man leading the naked men by metal collars pulls back the chains before Endore.
Endore stands in the midst of the carnage at the Rack.
The man before him tugs at the collars of the two naked men. They open Endore’s pants. The mouths devour his genitals. Endore’s cock does not harden. He has moved with cold excitement through the vicissitudes of the decay—the death—of fantasy; has floated, now shirtless, past crawling, licking, clutching masses of bodies in this rubicund twilight of mangled sex, has shifted from mouth to mouth, pushing his cock in. But it has not hardened. Not once. Here, he will not reciprocate. He knew that when a man attempted to kiss him and he turned away, sheltering the touch of Robert’s lips. And Chas’s. Now he pushes the collared heads away.
Whack! the sound pulls from the lower room.
Endore moves through the frozen fire. Shadows wrestle in the corridors.
Whack! the slap of flesh lures.
Why am I here? Thoughts rush to protect him. The sex-hunt, endemically ours, its unique joy and opulent profligacy, yes, earned, outlaw defiance against repression, yes, that, converted, full, unique, ours, envied by others attempting imitation, yes. But he knows that that is not here at the Rack, and that the Rack is the inevitable extension of the Rushes—and that what he loves and has vaunted in the sexhunt is not in the nightly deaths of mean bars nor in the charade of filth and pain. No, the Rack is permeated by the punishment for sex. He sees this clearly and with anger: This is what they have done to us! And he sees this as clearly but with sorrow: And this is what we do now to ourselves in ritual reenactment of their hatred, and we masquerade it all as masculine strength.
It is only charade, a part of him argues, only a charade, a willing charade, all willing.
But he knows the psychic bleeding is as real as the rancidity that coats these ugly rooms; and, recognizing with equal clarity his own part in the hateful ritual, he knows that later, oh, yes, later, he will bear reliable witness to it all, and to his contribution to it.
Now he will surrender to the onslaught of the Rack
He faces a growing cluster of men, five at first, then seven, now ten, more. They fuse into a grinding mass of sexflesh. It throbs, moans, sighs. Like a great wounded beast devouring itself or licking its own wounds. Coming or dying.
Which!
Whack!
Pulled by powerful undercurrents, he enters the third large room of the Rack.
At the back is an elevated platform. The outstretched hands of a naked man are shackled to a horizontal board supported by two upright ones. The man’s slender body is beautiful. The muscles are taut, bold. His booted feet are shackled to a lower horizontal board. On the platform a man pops a series of crushed ampules of amyl nitrite to the nose of the strapped man.
The back of the tied man is turned to the room and to the spectators gathering for this central spectacle.
A man kneels licking the boots of the bound man.
Black chaps, black boots, black shirt, black cap, black gloves—all leather—a tall man stands before the back of the nude figure. The leathered man grasps a long black belt. He flails it with a snapping Whack! at the fetid air–another summoning sound. The naked man tenses in anticipation of the nearing assault. More men join to watch the promised ritual. Their faces are drained of expression.
Endore pulls away, to leave. He turns his back to the cruel pectacle about to begin. Untangling from the darkness ahead, a man nude except for thick silver-studded belts forming an “X” across his body, approaches Endore. The man holds out a vial of liquid amyl like an offering. Endore brings the pure liquid to his own nose. He inhales the strong vapor in long, long breaths, clutching each in his lungs. Now he sucks the odor through his mouth. The naked man with belts crisscrossing his body begins to slide down.
Before the naked figure on the platform, the leathered man cracks the belt behind him in the air.
Whack!
He is still tantalizing, only that—but each time, the forward lashing of the belt reaches closer to the eager flesh. The buttocks of the naked man gird. The leathered man unleashes the belt again. It cracks—
Whack!
—still not touching, but this time the tip breathed on the flesh. Still the man in leather is prolonging the anticipation of the strapped man, who growls in pained expectation.
More men are gathering for the rite. Now crawling manacled figures explore the booted legs, the indifferent groins.
The black-leathered man arches his long feline body.
The amyl clasps Endore. The beating of his heart pounds in his head.
Whack!
The tip of the belt stings.
In one sudden motion the leathered man brings the belt back and lashes it in brutal surprise across the back of the bound man, who growls in deep, pained, deep pleasure.
Whack!
Endore turned at the same time that the head of the naked bound man jerked in ecstatic hurt to one side and in that moment Endore saw the face of Chas and Chas’s body being thrashed by the leatherman. No! It isn’t Chas! It’s someone else! Not Chas! It isn’t Chas, it isn’t Chas it isn’t Chas it isn’t Chas. No!
The head of the strapped man turns again.
Whack!
The head turns to the other side.
Whack!
The roaring amyl rushes Endore.
Whack!
At the same time that Endore saw the man with studded belts across his body slide down before him to his knees, at the same time that he felt a mouth sucking his unhardened cock, at the same time that he throttled a scream lodging in his throat, at the same time that he closed his eyes to blind himself to the carnage—at the same time, Endore saw the head of the strapped man twisting to one side, then the other, and to one side it was Chas’s, and to the other it became his own, then Chas’s, then his own, Chas’s, his own, Chas’s—and then it was a stranger’s! It’s someone else, not Chas, not me! Endore told himself–and felt the lash of the belt on his own raw flesh and saw himself lashing the same belt across the twisting naked body.
Outside on the street, dawn is exposing the plundered battlefield along the waterfront.
Distant bells, announcing Sunday, res
onate across the blighted streets.
The beginning glare of the rising sun purifies the water only for these translucent moments. Endore’s hand rises to clear his eyesight from the lambent sheen of dawning light. Because through blinking eyes he thought he saw in the distance the luminous form of Robert moving away from the waterfront just as he had earlier, but farther away now, much farther, farther; and Endore thinks now: There is hope!
A car speeds past. Its angered motor announces the return of the night’s plunderers for a final act of violence. A block ahead, the car stops before the parked trucks, its motor left running. Alerted, men scramble out of the trucks escaping past five young bodies rushing with iron pipes into the maze.
“Queer cocksucker faggot! “
Speeding away, the car abandons a horrible reality.
Beautiful, slender, naked, a man emerges out of the maze of the invaded trucks, and he walks to the very edge of the street. For moments he looks straight ahead in astonishment or horror. Then blood oozes from his head, runs down his chest, covers his groin, flows down his legs, gathers at his feet, and rushes into the filthy gutter. The man collapses.
Soon Endore will run to help the man, as others are already doing. But for this moment he cannot move.
His hand is still raised as when he tried to filter the shimmering dawn to see more clearly the luminous figure he thought was Robert’s. But now his hand moves instead to cover his eyes. Even that motion stops. His palm pushes outward, as if attempting this time to thrust away the terrible sights and the memories of this long night—except one, except one, except one memory.
Still raised, Endore’s hand pauses as if in a benediction impossible to complete. Then it falls to his side in a fist.
