The Coming of the Night

by John Rechy

  Orville was about to come in the guy's mouth.

  “Not yet,” Bruce ordered. “Fuck me.”

  He lay face down, ass up. Orville straddled him. Looking back at him, Bruce guided Orville's cock in. Orville pushed slowly and waited.

  “Go on, that's okay.”

  Orville entered Bruce fully, stayed there, then pumped in, out, in, almost out, deep in.

  Bruce moaned, “Yeah, yeah, fuck me.”

  Orville couldn't hold it anymore. He shoved against the upraised buttocks and held his cock deep inside Bruce, and came, and came, feeling Bruce's ass tighten and loosen, tighten, squeezing out every drop of his cum.

  “Wow!” Bruce rolled over.

  Orville reached for Bruce's cock, jerking it off. It was good not to be selfish, to get the other guy off.

  Bruce resisted. “I don't want to come.”

  “No?”

  “Uh-uh. I just wanted your cum in my ass.”

  Orville didn't know entirely why he felt so damned disappointed. Maybe Bruce would stay until he was hot again. He'd love to be fucked by him. He hesitated to ask, not wanting to hear a negative response. “You wanna fuck me?” he heard himself ask.

  “Uh—oh. Sure.”

  Orville was already getting hard again. He lay with his legs open, propped on the bed. Bruce mounted him. It was clear to Orville that the blond guy preferred to be fucked, wasn't doing it right, kind of poking in, getting soft even when he was beginning to slide inside. Orville eased away, still very aroused. On the bed, Bruce, facing him, spread out his legs, Orville held on to his ankles and entered him again in one hard lunge. Bruce came without even touching himself, and Orville came again, in him.

  They fell back on the bed. “I hadn't intended to come,” Bruce said. “It's just cause you're so hot. I'm kinda drained from San Francisco.”

  “Lots of action?”

  “Yeah, last night, with a couple of guys—but you're the best,” he smiled. “Maybe we'll get together again.”

  “Yeah.” Now Orville would ask him if he wanted to hang around, maybe have dinner together.

  Bruce was dressing. “I'll sure keep your number. Ciao, Orv.” He headed toward the door. Orville let him out.

  So the guy was going cruising again. So what? Orville asked himself. For him, it had worked out, a terrific scene, he'd come twice, and he'd made the other guy come even though he hadn't wanted to. He lay in bed, and he felt—satisfied—almost satisfied—not quite satisfied—He dozed off to the sound of the urgent winds.

  When he woke, he wasn't at all satisfied. The encounter with Bruce was turning depressing—why hadn't he wanted to stay for dinner, make out, hang around, spend the night?—arousing the anger he had felt with the guy before him. Damn! He really didn't feel like going out again. It was good to stay mellow when the day was growing more agitated with these nervous winds.

  He'd call friends, two or three, invite them over for dinner, steaks, a baked potato. He had lots of friends, and they often invited him to dinner. He'd made it with some of them, once—not great sex or anything—and then they'd become friends. He dialed the number of a friend who'd just broken up with his lover of three years. He'd welcome an invitation.

  “Danny, I'm glad I caught you at home.”

  “Hi, Orville. Yeah, ever since I split up with Jack, I don't go out much.”

  “Nursing the blues, huh?” He'd had a lover once—no, twice—one good, one bad. Both kind of bland.

  “I guess.”

  “Listen—wanna come over for dinner? Just you and a couple of guys you already know.” That would signal that he wasn't into anything more.

  “Great! You couldn't have called at a better time.”

  After they had arranged the hour, Orville dialed two of his other friends. Not home. He'd call again in a while, and even if only Danny joined him, that would be all right. They'd talk about movies, past tricks, and—

  The telephone rang. “Me, Orv—Danny.”

  “Yes?”

  “Listen, I'm sorry. Right after you called, I heard from this guy I've been wanting to hear from. I may have told you about him, remember? We're getting together tonight, so I'll take a rain-check on that steak—okay? I'm sure you understand. A hot date's a hot date, right?”

  “Right,” Orville said. Goddammit, why did people think everything could be canceled—friendship, family, anything—when you had something going?

  He felt so depressed he didn't bother to call his other friends again. Goddamn them. All they ever thought about was sex.

  Paul

  AFTERNOON

  Paul and the man he had met on the concrete walk braced against the wind—which contained the odor of ashes—as they made their way off the beach and toward Paul's house. Only a piazza, a few buildings with carved columns, and several canals and arched bridges remained of the original plan to re-create the Italian city. A scattering of oil wells like dinosaurs constantly dipped their snouts into fields in the area.

  What if, this one time, Stanley had returned? Paul slowed his step.

  “Would you rather not go to your place?” the man asked.

  Eagerly? Jesus, what was he getting into with this guy Mitch? Yes. And a last name. What? “No—I mean, yeah, if you want to.”

  They reached the house with the porch, and they walked in. The wind made the rooms seem even more silent. Determined to go through with it—and the guy was sexy—Paul leaned toward him, holding him by the shoulders, inviting his lips on his own.

  The man stiffened. “I—”

  Shit. A disaster. Did the guy really consider himself straight, after all the cruising on the beach? Then Paul was overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness, that with this confused man he was sabotaging his own life, with Stanley, whom he loved.

  The man sat back on a chair in the living room, the chair Stanley often occupied when he watched television alone. When they were together, they sat on the sofa, Stanley's arm around him.

  “I thought maybe we could talk, man,” the guy said.

  “Talk?” Christ, he was back on that again. “About your lesbian girlfriend? Listen—man—that's not why I asked you here.”

  “I must've made a mistake,” the guy said.

  “I guess you did.”

  “I'm sorry, man, really” He paused, looked away, back at him, as if genuinely confused. “You wanna give me head, Paul?—that's your name, right?”

  The son of a bitch just wanted a blow job. Fuck, he could pay a whore on Sunset Boulevard to do that. Paul's sadness deepened. He turned the radio on. Sounds.

  “Uh, listen, uh, Mitch—that's your name, right?—I guess we did get it all wrong, man. I thought—the way you kept cruising me—that you wanted to blow me.”

  The man stood up, shaking his head as if to push away what he had just heard. He turned his back on Paul and left.

  Paul walked out, to the porch.

  A layer of smoke gathered by the Sant'Ana from distant fires was spreading across the sky, singeing everything with an eery orange glow The sun, like smeared blood, was reflected in shattered waves from the surface of the ocean.

  Nick

  AFTERNOON

  So what if he'd told the guy he was “Ahn—” Whatever name he'd said. Every hustler knew that lots of times johns told you who they wanted you to be, and what—so you always said yes.

  Nick was still peering into the car that had stopped for him, sizing the driver up, good-looking, not old either. Shit, some guys preferred hustlers, and this guy was too nervous to be a cop. Nick pushed his pants even lower on his hips and let his shirt open wider. Fuck, man, the guy just kept studying him.

  “Please, get in, Angel,” the man finally said, and leaned over the passenger side to unlock the door.

  Nick jumped in. “What ya lookin’ for me for?” he asked, cocky, sure, getting into the role this guy would ask him to play, being someone named Angel for whatever reason he had in mind.

  Clint

  AFTERNOON

&nbs
p; “Only fantasy.”

  Clint lay, restive, hot. He had spoken those two single words aloud, but others, unspoken, followed—

  What did that man feel?—although, immediately after, he wasn't sure which man he had been thinking of, out of those turbulent memories of last weekend.

  NEW YORK

  Last Weekend

  He stared at the leatherman yanking at the chain attached to the iron collars of his two slaves. About to move up the cramped steps with them, the leatherman stopped. He faced Clint.

  Does he recognize me from other times here? Clint met the man's stare. Had the man smiled, vaguely?

  The leatherman led his slaves into the dark mouth of the Mineshaft.

  Clint turned away from the place he knew from countless weekends and many weeknights spent there. He walked along the streets, past blocks of men roaming, waiting. They stood on the steps of buildings or outside bars in clusters, laughing that wounded laughter, or stood alone, on corners, or lingered or pressed against buildings darker than the sky. Some melded into shadows in doorways along crooked streets, others spilled out of male-thronged bars. Some slouched against motorcycles on the curbs of the streets. All waited to connect, creating a vista of dark sensuality extending to the edge of the water.

  He went to the Anvil.

  Hundreds of men crowded into the huge warehouse converted into a club. The odor of poppers exploded into hammering blasts of music . within dark reddish light streaked by cigarette smoke. Pornographic images of engorged organs flashed on the walls from a projector. A short hall led beyond the periphery of darkness into a blackened room. Out of its total darkness there emerged moaning sounds, whimpers, sighs. He knew that inside that darkness a mob of bodies would be writhing and tossing, and within that churning mass tongues and hands and cocks would search invisibly about the darkness, and there would be only sensations. Tonight Clint remained at its mouth, stood in the shaded back of the main hall, where a few bodies roamed among standing figures in preparation for joining the dark maw.

  On each of three small improvised platforms about the main room, a naked man, contained in a blotch of light like a gray cage, danced in slowed frenzy to jolts of music and amyl. The bodies arched toward mouths and hands, men gathered before them, watching, groping each other, some sinking down.

  In the center of the room, a naked man appeared on a mangy stage. Bathed in oil, his body glowed red within a pool of dark light. Flowing into abrupt rhythms, he contracted his body in spasms, flinging himself on the floor. His head bucking, he crawled toward the booted feet of a man in leather who had moved forward. The naked man halted before the spread legs. He licked the leather-clad thighs, the shiny boots. The man in leather pushed the naked man back. The nude man lay on the floor, face up, torso thrust forth.

  The man in leather held a lit candle over the naked body. He tilted the candle. Drops of hot wax dripped on the naked man's chest. The naked man vaulted. Wax dripped lower on his body. He made a hissing sound. The man in leather held the candle over the naked man's cock, which was soft, only his face delirious. Wax like shiny drops of blood dripped onto the exposed groin.

  Snarling, the naked man made a sound like a moan, a sound like laughter.

  Clint opened his fly, offering his hard cock to a mouth in the dark.

  Sun from the windows slashed long triangles of light on the floor of the hotel room.

  What did the man feel?

  Still, Clint could not identify the single haunting face he was trying to evoke.

  Ernie

  AFTERNOON

  Goddamned size queen! Ernie kept repeating after Andy had left like he couldn't get away quick enough. He remained naked, sitting before the television screen, pointing the control like a gun at the screen. Saturdays were awful television days. He could hardly wait for that new cable channel everyone was talking about, that MTV, with all those cute guys dancing around in tight clothes.

  He flicked on the television. Not even a good old movie with Bette Davis, that movie queen old guys loved so much. Lots of stupid talk shows. Who cared about that fucking Jupiter planet? Or Mars, or wherever the hell they were shooting those damn rockets at now. Hey, don't anyone say he was against science, but first things first, right? Those scientists couldn't even cure a cold.

  Too much to hope for a big special, like when Prince Charles and Lady Diana got married. He'd stayed up into early morning to see the wedding, and damned if he hadn't cried. That old queen—not the English one, the one who lived in the apartment near his—had watched, too, he knew, because he could hear the TV and her sobs. The next day she'd asked him how he'd liked the royal wedding. Of course he'd said, “What royal wedding?”

  What he wouldn't give for a rerun right now. Like Dynasty! You didn't have to apologize for loving Dynasty, because every gay guy had watched it at one time or another, even the most macho guys. A favorite gay bar on Santa Monica had held "Dynasty nights.” Leather guys, cowboys—everybody sat watching and cruising—and whenever that Alexis came on with one of her lines, the guys would yell it out after her, “Dawn't even bothuh!”

  Go to the movies? Hey, maybe Ragtime was playing. He'd seen it at a preview a friend had invited him to, and he planned on seeing it again, to check out that real cute reddish blond kid with a knockout bod, the kid who'd played a photographer by the beach in one scene, and then was in the ballroom scene. Look, it wasn't that he went to movies only to look at cute guys, like some of his friends did. Hey, he didn't have sex in the head, right? But what was wrong with spotting one of your favorite sexy types and having a little fantasy going in Technicolor?

  “—two more fires in the hills. No planned evacuation yet. The freeway—” A breathless news bulletin had come on, with that weird an-chorwoman, Mandy Lange-Jones, smiling away. “Some are saying this is earthquake weather, too—” Damn if she didn't look even more delighted than usual, at the thought of two disasters at the same time. Now Mandy Lange-Jones went on to announce a late-evening news “In Depth Report” on young male hustlers along Santa Monica Boulevard. “Street-smart young men can earn a thousand dollars a week selling their young bodies to—”

  Ernie clicked her off and waved goodbye with a finger.

  He reached for a magazine that pictured muscular men wearing only boots or cowboy hats, or a leather jacket. He picked his favorite—a bodybuilding fireman with shiny boots and a helmet. The guy's cock wasn't even average. Yet look at the attitude on that son of a gun. Get down and worship me, motherfucker.

  “Listen, Ernie, you and me, guy—we'll worship each other's bod, maybe get into a jockstrap scene, huh, buddy?”

  “Sure, guy Hey, let's get down and do it!”

  “Hey, Ern, you got a real nice cock—”

  “You, too—hey, Lars, I didn't recognize ya at first.”

  Ernie put down the magazine, banishing his fantasy. Nothing was working. He was too angry at that skinny size queen.

  The afternoon stretched out before him, a blank. Hey! He knew what he would do. Have sex. Gay people always had that, and they knew where to go at any hour of the day for it.

  In no time, Ernie was dressed and driving his snazzy Volkswagen—don't call it a bug, his looked sporty, right?—to the porn theater on lower Sunset Boulevard.

  Pulling his tank top low so that his pecs showed, he bought a large box of popcorn—with lots of liquidy butter—from the concession attendant, who was clearly coming on to him, all hot looks.

  If he hadn't been so familiar with this movie house—once an art deco theater, colored arcs now peeling—he wouldn't have been able to see a thing except, on the giant screen, what looked like two dinosaurs about to crush each other. Cocks and asses looked strange in closeup when you walked in on them, right? He sat down toward the front, away from clusters of men scattered along the rows.

  He ate some popcorn and looked up at the screen. The flick was directed by Z.Z., his favorite director, king of macho sex, and in the movie was Huck Sawyer in the famous Jockeys he
always wore until some top—who was this one?—no face shown yet—would flatten him, yank ‘em down, and fuck his round bums—and that was exactly what was happening. “Ya wannit, ya know ya wannit!” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, shove it to me!” “Oh, ah, oh!” “I'm shootin’, shootin'!” “Shoot your load, stud, yeah, yeah!” Cum, cum, cum. “Ah, ah!” “Ahhhh!” The end.

  Great flick!

  Now wouldn't you know it? There was ole Rex Steed in a coming attraction, twisting his neck to the side to avoid being kissed by the guy who would be blowing him in a minute. Fuckin’ Steed always trying to show he was straight—

  “—till I met you, Ern.”

  “Fuck off, Steed. I don't go for no straight guy.”

  Time to start cruising, right? With his box of delicious buttery popcorn, Ernie made his way toward the back of the theater. Now his eyes could untangle the configurations along the rows, lots of groping and sucking going on, and, over there, a guy bouncing up and down on a cock. Ernie walked to the back of the theater, the portion separated from the seats by a railing. A cute guy leaned over the railing with his pants down while a guy rimmed him. Jesus Christ, the guy doing the rimming was the guy who sold popcorn at the concession stand!

  Ernie abandoned his popcorn on a nearby seat and decided to take in more of the movie.

  He was sitting there encouraging a hard-on when he looked down to see a face between his legs. The guy must've crawled from under the row behind him, and there he was on the floor looking up at him. The guy ran his hands along Ernie's thighs—obviously into muscles, right? Ernie tensed his quads for the guy to lick, over his jeans, and then—