Numbers

by John Rechy

  Sebastian and Tony. Clip! . . . Emory. Clip! . . . Tony’s drawings. Clip! . . . Myself as I know I looked. Clip! Clip! Clip! . . . Paul and—. . . No, he can’t “see” Guy. He remembers only: curly black hair over a face covered despondently by a hand; and: a note of doom wounding his voice.

  Fleeing the scattered, shapeless thoughts, the empty awareness of today—trying to stop the persistent sense of mental drift by physical motion—Johnny has just moved down the path that leads from the clearing of the Arena to the Cave, wondering which of several men cruising him will be the first to reach him. He’s in luck: the Cave is vacant. Perspiring in the unusual warmth of this afternoon, he waits before it.

  Soon: A man is standing a few feet behind him. Now another—right next to Johnny. In a quick backward glance, Johnny notices that a third is higher up on the path. All three are clearly cruising Johnny.

  Three at once! The thought excites him, but beyond that he figured: I’ll make it a total of 19!

  But the three have assumed stationary posts, trying to outlast each other; and Johnny’s already been in the Arena about ten minutes. If this becomes a stalemate—instead of making it three in one, he’ll have to start over again somewhere else and lose all that time.

  Time!

  I’m not going to look at my watch! he tells himself. But he measures approximately three more minutes of the standstill. He ducks into the Cave. But before he does that, he looks at each of the three men for a few seconds—deliberately encouraging all three.

  Surprisingly, the man who stood farthest away on the path enters the Cave first. Johnny sits on the low-hanging branch, one leg propped, the other stretched before him in invitation. As if apprehensive the others will still get to Johnny before him, the man advances quickly:

  He licks the sweat off Johnny’s shirtless chest, licks his shoulders, under his arms. Like a child with an ice-cream cone! it occurs to Johnny—but he blocks the image.

  Having opened the top buttons of Johnny’s fly, the man inches his mouth to where Johnny’s pubic hair begins—kissing the lower part of his stomach so softly that his lips feel like feathers. The tongue withdraws to Johnny’s chest again.

  Through the opening of the branches that form the Cave, Johnny sees the other man is still there. Even more obsessively now, Johnny wants all three to express their desire for him at one time. Soon, two pairs of legs; a third man has come down the path. What if the two outside the Cave are playing with each other? He refuses to accept that. His mind repeats prematurely—as if to make it so: nineteen, nineteen, nineteen!

  The man has lowered Johnny’s pants to his calves. Methodically his tongue outlines each of Johnny’s thighs—down and up in a U, always avoiding the groin. Again the chest; again under Johnny’s arms.

  Impatient, Johnny pushes the man’s head downward. When it resists, he pushes more firmly—until his prick touches the man’s lips, which are nevertheless tightly closed, clenched. In exasperation, Johnny reaches for his own pants. Warned he’s about to leave—and having apparently been playing a game of deliberate delay—the man opens his mouth and swallows Johnny’s cock.

  The second of the three enters the Cave. A tall, good-looking youngman, he stands there tentatively. By glancing first at him, then at his own cock, Johnny indicates he wants him to come on too.

  Kneeling, then bending his head and edging the first man slightly to one side, the tall youngman is able to lick Johnny’s balls while the other continues to suck.

  As if Johnny’s determination has pulled him into the Cave, the third man enters, stands there looking for long moments during which Johnny’s mind keeps insisting: Nineteen! . . . Finally, the third man advances to the side of Johnny, licking his chest as the first one did earlier, tongue flitting over his nipples now, then along his back, down, rimming him, while the two others grovel at Johnny’s crotch.

  Nineteen! he counts exultantly. Three in less than 20 minutes!

  He comes. Still, he feels aroused. His cock isn’t softening at all. Having felt his jetting cum, the man who sucked him has swallowed and withdrawn his mouth. The other one, however, pounces on the still-hard prick, while the third man bends to lick the lower part of Johnny’s stomach. Still kneeling, the first one looks on in amazement as Johnny pumps into the other’s mouth.

  Only a few moments later, Johnny came again.

  He pulls away, adjusting his clothes. The man who entered first is now fondling the tall goodlooking youngman. Now he’s going down on him. Johnny rushes out to his car.

  As he turns the key starting the ignition, it strikes him with depressing impact:

  The one who entered the Cave last—he didn’t touch my prick!—just kissed and licked my body: almost but not quite my prick!

  I can’t count him!

  It isn’t nineteen!

  It’s only eighteen!

  Shit!

  He’s become so familiar with the Park he can tell the approximate hour by its changing appearance as the shadows flee the sun: mistier in the morning, actually darkening in the afternoon.

  Driving beyond the boundary of the hunt, he’s even more disturbed by the increasing sense of drift—as if he’s succumbing to the trance he’s sensed in others.

  To set things at least superficially in order by executing a phase of what has become a Ritual, he drove to the Observatory: to the Mirror.

  Now there are two faces he doesn’t want to encounter: the leering one of many years ago, and the sad one of the day before yesterday.

  Before confronting his image in the Mirror, he smiled widely. . . .

  It’s all right.

  He dazzles himself.

  But even that pleasure fails to sustain him for long. Today, there’s a mountain of emptiness inside him. He needs a catharsis from the Fear. Desperately.

  I’ll make it one more time, and then I’ll leave!

  A few minutes later:

  In shorts and carrying a towel as if he’s going to sunbathe (and seeing him, Johnny realizes that the blond youngman in the bikini isn’t back today), a youngman follows him into the Nest—where, the day before yesterday, Johnny and the youngman cockily wearing the sailor cap had their disturbing encounter. For a few moments it looks as if something of the day before yesterday will be duplicated as both stand there with their pricks out, working them up, Johnny looking away from the other in pointed indifference. But moments later, the youngman is jerking Johnny’s cock with a saliva-moistened hand.

  “Let’s go to that place where we can take all our clothes off!” the youngman in shorts invites him.

  Johnny of course resents the suggestion that he’d be interested in the other’s nudity, but he asks, “Where?”—telling himself he wants to keep oriented to the Park’s total geography.

  “Up there—on that hill; we could drive to it, then climb.” He means the Summit. “There’s not too many places—so it could be crowded, but we could try.”

  “Naw,” Johnny rejects the suggestion.

  “Okay, then,” says the youngman with the towel. He’s lowered his own shorts and is playing with himself with one hand while he jerks Johnny with the other. “Say, can I screw you?” he asks Johnny.

  Johnny feels a surging anger. “Hell, no, man!” he says gruffly, reaching to bring up his pants. “What the fuck’s the matter with you?”

  “Okay, okay,” the youngman placates him. “Actually I really wanted to ask you if you’ll screw me.”

  Johnny pauses, long, before answering no.

  “Okay,” the youngman says. Then before Johnny can stop him, the youngman has placed his own stiff prick on Johnny’s to jerk them both off with one hand. Johnny twists away furiously. “Cut it out, man. I don’t dig that!”

  “Okay, okay,” the youngman placates him again—by going down on him. But the youngman in shorts isn’t very good at sucking, and Johnny’s having a difficult time coming.

  Still, the other continues to blow him determinedly, at the same time playing with himself.
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br />   Johnny still can’t make it. “Why don’t you come?” he suggests; that would be one way of ending it.

  “No,” the youngman says. “I think I’ll just wait and find someone to blow me later.”

  That bugs Johnny enormously—that the youngman in shorts would prefer to come while someone sucks him rather than with Johnny Rio’s prick in his mouth.

  That, however, settles it: Johnny fakes coming—increasing his breathing, thrusting his cock far into the other’s gagging throat.

  Soon after, they take different paths out of the Forest.

  So much intimacy and . . . you . . . just . . . walk . . . away . . . without a word, Johnny thinks suddenly. All these people. What are they really like? Does anyone ever get to know anyone else? Does anyone ever want to? I don’t know anybody’s name. . . .

  Yet: here I am!

  And that’s only part of the Fear.

  He’s thinking that and driving away from the Forest when in his rearview mirror he sees, trailing him in the red convertible, the man wearing the dark sunglasses.

  “Mother-bitching-fucker!” Johnny says aloud.

  What the piss does he want? Who the fuck is he? Why the hell is he following me? . . . Is he following me? Could it be some wild coincidence? Jesus, is he a cop? No. Just some guy with some odd perversion bugging him, something real weird he wants from me.

  Johnny slows down, edging to the side of the road, allowing the red convertible to pass him so he can see the man more closely, more clearly. But the man with the black sunglasses continues to trail him. Johnny parks suddenly, intending to get out and confront him angrily—but the man accelerates his car. It growls up the road.

  I’d like to ram my cock in the fucker’s mouth and choke him!

  Fury is transformed in Johnny into an intense longing for sex. Suddenly it swells inside him. He’s made it with four people (no: three—he can’t count the one who only licked and kissed his body), and he’s come twice in quick succession. Yet he longs again for the excitement of the act: for the precious moments when his body poises at the instant of ecstasy and then life surges in orgasm. But it’s over so quickly that it’s almost as if it exists only in retrospect—or in anticipation.

  The wave of excitement has drowned the terror, has calmed the sense of drift.

  But only momentarily.

  Today it all seems wrong. He feels very sad. He’s drifting toward nowhere.

  One more!—to make it four today!

  As if in preparation for what must be the hecticness of the weekend, there are even more men than usual in the Park today. Cars hurl themselves up and down the road. Johnny imagines the Park devouring them.

  But he hunts for more hunters in the Arena. Two men are milling in the clearing. One won’t do. The other will—but he looks familiar. Did I make it with him some other day?—or did he just cruise me? He can’t remember. Rather than run the possibility of having already “included” him (not the same one twice!), he discourages him, and the other one as well, by looking down as he winds along the Labyrinth. Alerted by footsteps, others materialize out of the green. A youngish man follows him to the Cliff. But there, two men are—were—playing with each other’s cocks. Johnny hurries away, along the extension of the Labyrinth from the Cliff. The youngish man is trying to keep up with Johnny, who darts along the branch-formed tunnels—paths tangling in and out—to the Grotto. In the Grotto, a man hurriedly straightens up before another. Johnny cuts quickly through the brush—not really caring that he lost the man who was following; not caring because there are many, many in the Park and he attracts new ones as he moves to the Cave. Predictably, it too is taken: Two youngmen kissing (squeezed so far against the back wall of the Cave that Johnny didn’t see them until he was already inside) don’t even start at the accidental intrusion.

  Too many in the Arena today.

  So he drives to the Forest. No one parked there.

  At the Outpost, three cars. He slows down, considering this area. Too open. You’d have to make the contact here, then walk across the road and down an almost-concealed path along which two men are already moving.

  On the radio the Standells:

  Yeah, down by the river . . .

  That’s where you’ll find me . . .

  Along with lovers, muggers, and thieves. . . .

  Well, I love that dirty water—. . .

  Cars at almost every islet along the road. Some of the men merely sit inside, talk to each other through windows.

  No one before the Trail. Johnny parks there.

  In only a few minutes a car cruises in. From where Johnny stands exhibiting himself on the mound of sand, he sees a shirtless, tightly muscled chest on which a good-looking face, though somewhat askew, like a boxer’s, is mounted. Ordinarily Johnny would have considered this man to be searching a scene like his own—or a mutual one—and to be therefore incompatible to him; but he’s no longer apprehensive that way, having been wrong too often—with the notable exception of the curly-haired youngman wearing the sailor cap; and even then, he—. . . (He rejects the memory, which, oddly, is followed by a fleeting remembrance of Guy’s wounded voice.)

  Not in a whisper but as loudly and casually as if he were asking the time, the man with the boxer’s face and body calls out to Johnny: “Hey, kid, you wanna blow job? . . . Just stand by the window, I’ll blow ya, cummon.”

  Aroused by the words, Johnny moves to the man’s car, which is flush against the mound. He stands on a slight rise so that his groin is even with the window and almost with the man’s face.

  In shocked surprise, Johnny sees that the man in the car is completely naked.

  Johnny is about to move away quickly, to indicate his disinterest in the other’s nakedness, when the man reaches out through the window to unbutton his pants. Oblivious of being seen, the man doesn’t even pause when a car drives by: a rashness that in itself is exhibitionistically exciting. He’s already got Johnny’s cock out and is sucking it through the window.

  Cars pass. Whether or not they see what’s going on, or whether they think the two are just talking, they slow down, look. But that’s ordinary.

  The man has opened the door and is sitting on the edge of his car seat (a pair of trunks lie next to him) in order to reach Johnny better.

  Jerking Johnny’s moist cock with one hand while with the other he arouses himself, the naked man asks in a desire-shaken voice: “How many cocksuckers you been with, kid?—do they lick your balls too?—and stick their tongues up your ass?—how many, kid, huh?—how many times today?”

  An unwelcome memory evoked: Going to confession and telling the priest you’ve comitted such and such a sin—like telling a lie—and the priest insisting, in order to determine penance, “How many times? . . . Estimate how many times. . . . How many times?”

  “How many, kid?” the man with the boxer’s face is going on. “I’ve seen you several times—but I never had a chance till now to get near you. You’re driving everybody in the park crazy. Jeez, you’re a sexy number!—but you know that, don’t you, huh, kid? . . . Cummon, tell me how many tongues you’ve had up that cute ass of yours. Tell me—. . .” He pauses in the rush of words every once in a while to lick Johnny’s crotch. “Let’s go to another part of the park, kid!” the man says. “I wanna go all the way with you, let’s go down the road to that place where there’s lotsa people, I wantem to see me lick you all over, from your toes to your neck, I want to eat your ass, I wantem to see you spit in my mouth, jerk off on my face, I want you to piss all over me, I want—. . .”

  Johnny stops the crazy words by pushing his cock in the other’s mouth.

  The driver of a car passing by did see them; he jammed his brakes suddenly, backs up. The naked man doesn’t seem to care; would certainly welcome the other’s watching. “I want you to—. . .” he starts again. But Johnny buttons his pants quickly, gets into his car, and dashes away.

  I must be looking mean today; that’s not my scene—that way-out stuff, he pr
otests to himself.

  Seeing that the naked man is following him, Johnny speeds up the road toward the Observatory—but he makes a quick left—through a tunnel that takes him to another road leading to the lower part of the Park.

  Something else! There’s got to be something else!

  Johnny implied that last night at Sebastian’s—and he’s thinking it as he stands at the Outpost only a few minutes later, looking down at the city. But his thoughts are pushed aside by the fact that a well-dressed man in a suit and a tie has just driven up cruising him.

  One more!

  Leaving his car parked by the sandy rim, Johnny crosses the road automatically, toward a giant umbrella of trees—completely automatically, by reflex, as if now one movement inevitably sets off another. (And this, too, is only part of the Fear!) He descends the grading off the road, along a brambly path down the slope. The man who cruised him on the Outpost soon stands in front of him in a hollow of branches as Johnny rubs his own cock. Now the man raises his hand as if to touch Johnny Rio’s face gently . . . tenderly.

  But the gesture is quickly abandoned by him and, at the same instant, rejected by a sudden movement of Johnny’s body. Simultaneously rejected by each, that gesture implies too much affection, too much tenderness: it’s too far beyond the realm of desire.

  The man goes down on Johnny. Afterwards, he spits out whatever of Johnny’s cum there was.

  Johnny Rio looks down where his sperm creates a small spot of mud on the ground.

  Twenty-one.

  Twenty-one!

  The horror that he is counting, accumulating numbers aimlessly, strikes his consciousness like a sniper’s bullet.

  He sits in his car before the Forest.

  And so it is a game—but a game that can’t be won because it’s limitless. Only It can win—the game itself . . . and the Park. The Park, which is suddenly his enemy—his opponent in this mysterious game.