by John Rechy
Jim walks slowly toward the path behind—slowly, to make sure that the other follows before he commits himself to the rocky climb. The other does. They climb steep rocks, move along a short dirt path, climb more rocks—higher into the hill. Still higher. They have silently conveyed to each other that they want more than the furtive moments a readily accessible place might provide. They climb still more. Now they reach a tightly sheltered pocket of trees. They have to stoop to enter it.
1:47 P.M. Griffith Park. The Isolated Cove.
Standing before each other—mirror images—they flex in the fantasy poses of body magazines. Briefly, they touch each other. Now they remove their clothes. Naked in the remote cove, they kiss, hands outline carved muscles.
Now the other's downward-sliding tongue draws a moist line along Jim's flat stomach to his groin. Jim cups the other's hard pectorals. The other's mouth glides slowly lower. Jim looks down, seeing his own firm thighs, the other's; his flat stomach, the other's; his stone-hard cock, the other's. Their muscles. Jim squeezes the other's nipples very softly; the other sighs.
Both stand, separating so they can study each other's flexing bodies, looking at the muscles they will soon touch, lick, fuse with—aware, each, of the rush of blood into aroused organs, as into weight-pumped muscles. The man's tongue dabs at Jim's nipples, now it slides from one to the other, around, in tiny, soft brush strokes, moving under the arms, into the armpits, mouth nestling there, tongue rousing the moist hair, lapping gently at the gathering sweat, tongue returning to the pectorals, down the torso, nestling in his navel, moving downward moistly to the pubic hairs flecked with spilled sun.
Alive, alert, Jim can almost feel the tiny buds on the other's tongue as it moves down in circles on his tingling flesh; tongue inching steadily downward, until—at the moment that Jim, leaning back sighing, anticipates the mouth will enclose his cock—it moves up again, instead, startling anew the flesh at his nipples. The man bites. Jim pulls back. The other licks the barely stung nipples with a light-brushing tongue—which now glides up to meet Jim's, mouth open. They kiss, tongues extending, withdrawing, tongue sucking tongue. They part again, to see each other fully; again to study the muscles they will again explore.
Their hard chests gleam in the spotty sun.
Jim glances at the hairs shining on their legs. He reaches over to touch the other's protruding cock as the other bends, mouth swiftly enclosing Jim's bare cock. Jim feels the skin of his cock pull back, the head exposed raw to sensation, feels the other's saliva lubricating the cock, feels the tongue finding the ring-like indention between the head and the shaft; the tongue swirls there.
Jim reaches for the other's cock. Visual images, physical sensations meld. Where is he feeling the other, where is the other feeling him? He wants the other's cock in his mouth, but the other will not release his yet. The head of Jim's cock pauses at the back of the other's mouth, as if that is as far as it can penetrate. But expertly the other's throat opens, and the cock, poised only for moments, slides in, head, vein-pulsing shaft—as if to burst within. Holding it there, the other constricts the muscles of his throat, squeezing Jim's blood-gorged cock tighter, lips touching his balls. Jim's eyes devour the spectacle—his pubic hairs against the other's mouth, his balls firmly against the other's chin; his cock hotly inside the other's throat.
Now the other releases Jim's cock. He straightens up; his cock is so rigid rising from the furry pubic area that it almost parallels his stomach. Again, apart, they flex.
Jim bends over the other's waiting cock, but his mouth retreates deliberately without touching it yet; instead his tongue moves in a “T” from the other's pectorals to, then along, the trickle of hair down his stomach, to the cock again. Pubic hairs touch his lips. The full cock slides into his mouth, his hands rise grasping the other's tensing pectorals. The sexual flesh engorges his mouth.
They lie on the leaf-mattressed ground, head to feet. The other's mouth nestles below Jim's balls, velvet tongue edging toward his ass; it glides tantalizingly over Jim's buttocks, avoiding the opening. Jim releases the cock in his mouth, takes it again, releases it again, takes it. The other swallows Jim's cock—and suddenly releasing it, the mouth slides back to the buttocks, presses against the parting, the lips kissing it. The other's mouth opens, the tongue protrudes, his hands pull Jim's buttocks softly apart to expose the inner opening; the tongue touches it softly, draws back and forth.
Jim's lips hold the head of the other's cock, his tongue circling the sensitive ring of raw flesh. He stares at the flesh less than inches from him. His tongue slides over the other's tight balls; he encloses one in his lips, then the other. Sensations blend with sensations; as if what the other is doing to him, he is doing back; as if what he is doing to the other, the other is doing to him. Time stops.
Their eyes are open wide, studying naked muscles outrageously flexed; limbs, organs. Jim touches the other's flaring thighs, his fingers awakening the soft field of hairs; his hands about the other's buttocks, stretching them, touching the knotted hole with his finger—as the other explores his with his tongue. Masculine, beautiful, muscles, male. Quickly the bodies shift, head to head. Lips grasp flitting tongues. Naked, cocks, male, outlaws. They inhale deeply the sweet odor of their mixed, clean sweat. They taste it on their tongues.
Again they part to look at carved pectorals, thick arms, wide shoulders, tight waists, round legs. Naked muscular bodies. They press together again, cock on cock, hands sliding up and down, around, front, back; mouth on mouth, mouths on nipples, mouths on cocks, on balls, thighs on thighs, mouth on mouth. And now mouths on cocks, cocks in mouths; they blow each other rhythmically, the inward thrust of one's mouth matching the outward pull of the other's, alternating. Is it his own cum Jim feels gathering from all over his body, or is it the other's? Both? He feels it, rushing as if from his feet, along tensed calves and hard thighs, buttocks; feels it rushing, sliding, up the spine to his cock and into the other's mouth, along spine, buttocks, thighs, calves, feet—and back to the other's cock and into Jim's mouth and back to the other's in an electric fused circle.
Jim breaks the circle, pulling his head back to capture visually the moment of challenged death—and the other's orgasmic liquid arcs in a pearly spurt into the air. Jim's body contracts, feeling his own cum flowing into the other's throat—once, again, again—and Jim takes the other's cream-smeared cock in his mouth—both men still coming, as if the universe itself were gathering into their bodies, their mouths, their cocks.
MONTAGE: The City
FIVE HUNDRED AND ninety-seven miles of freeways in Los Angeles! Longer than from here to Phoenix by almost two hundred miles!
The Santa Ana Freeway, Santa Monica Freeway, Ventura, Hollywood, Harbor, Golden State, San Diego Freeways!
Wheeeeeeeeee!
Onramps and offramps and sweeping connecting archways clinging to gravity. Magnificent concrete arcs. Freeways leading everywhere! At night cars stopped to avert recurrent disasters—crushed trucks, stalled cars, an ostrich (once) blocking the lanes—form a ruby necklace of braking red lights.
This great city's pulsing arteries, five hundred and ninety-seven miles leading to nice-death at death-loving Forest Lawn, to childsex at Disneyland, contrived disasters at Universal Studios, simulated corpses at wax museums, throw-back premieres, impossibly gorgeous rose gardens, the grand Watts Towers asserting peasant love. Progressive colleges and universities, repressive colleges and universities.
Those hundreds of tangled miles of freeways try valiantly to embrace the contradictions of this technicolor city. Freedom and repression in a palmtreed battlefield— with time out at the beaches. Loving and hating, the gentle and the violent, glorious beauty and hard-core ugliness. Beaches and forests and deserts. The elegance and the raunch. Manson and the new Governor Brown. Om and Amen. Body and Soul. Extravagant nude bodies and Hare Krishna zombies.
Rebellious dopers and the red-necked grandsons of Okies, crushed—as the dust bowl couldn't—by lower-m
id-dleclass splendor.
Brrrrmmmmmmmmmmmm!
Every Wednesday night, the red-neck children, with pimples like hard-earned badges, drive customized cars (just off the blocks—stick shifts held like roaring hard-ons) up and down a blocks-long area of Van Nuys Boulevard; they parade their chrome creations like small dinosaurs, low-riding. Vans like squat futuristic castles. A pubic ritual of growling engines. On the sidewalk, little groupies applaud the pimpled charioteers.
Brrrrmmmmmmmmmmmm!
And downtown Los Angeles is the casbah of the walking dead among courageous tambourined missions insisting: Survive!
Yes, hundreds of miles connecting splendid names—Westlake, Silverlake, Hollywood, Echo Park, Bel Air, Laurel Canyon—and ugly names—Azusa (“A” to “Z” in the U.S.A.!), Tujunga, Downey, Tarzana, for godssake!
Carpets of magnificent flowers. Those proud birds of paradise with golden beaks. Those blue and purple lupin. Those joshua trees with bunches of blossoms like candelabra! Flowers that will eventually cover the razed lot where L.A. cops burned the S.L.A. on TV.
And palmtrees. Bless the lofty proud palmtrees!
Bless the unflinching movie-struck hordes in coffeehouses discussing where they felt that breakthrough emotion that freed them, man, you know, to, you know, man, act! (“And Justin said, man, ‘Let it come out, let it come out—all of it, every bit of it—that's what acting, and living, are all about!’”)
Sweep off the freeway!
Sunset Strip, best gallery of pop art in the world. Electric posters, giant electric mouths opening and closing, electric tongues protruding, winking electric eyes, electric crushed rainbows. Sexy cardboard electric men and women. Jeweled neon. Phosphorescence as art form.
Revolutionary murals in East L.A. And a dazzling frieze on La Brea: Creek statues, painted like movie stars, lounge among L.A. palmtrees; The Thinker, unusually muscular, is tanned bronze.
And four thousand and forty-three and seven-tenths acres of land donated to Los Angeles by, bless him, Colonel Griffith J. Griffith.
Griffith Park in the midst of the great city, acres of forested hills, miles of driving roads and hiking paths. Golf courses, tennis courts, sex haunts, meandering horse trails, merry-go-round, springs, picnic areas, exhibitionistic heaven, train rides, Travel Town, Mineral Wells, flowers, voyeurs' delight, wild trees, squirrels, sexual paradise, wild deer, bird-watching; and a saintly hermit lived in the park undetected for months.
There's a makebelieve sky at Griffith Park Observatory. Every hour they create a star-spilled sky on a magic cyclorama.
The sky that used to be.
On the beach, a man plants an exotic red cloth poster decorated with magazine pictures of Coca-Cola bottles, Marlboro men, Volkswagen vans, refrigerators, furniture. In a booming voice he gathers tanned bodies about him on the sand. Beard and hair scratching at the sea wind, he prophesies:
“I predict the sun will set tonight, and I predict the night will come, I predict the night will fade at dawn, and the sun will rise again, I predict people will die and new ones will be born.”
Acceptance as prophecy. Survival as habit.
2:12 P.M. Griffith Park. The Road. Another Hill.
BACK ON THE main road—and a new wave of men has poured into the tide already in the park—the two muscular men smile at each other. Both hesitate to enter their cars, resisting the ancestral pull to become strangers again after the intimacy; each waits as if for the other to extend the connection into another time, another place, another level. But neither can, that ancestral fear of rejection pulls. Still smiling, still hesitating, still looking back, they inch toward their cars, slowly, wait at open doors—and then they drive away.
As superb as the sexual sharing was only moments earlier, Jim is aware immediately of an instant panicked emptiness. Only one moment of time was conquered, the experience ending when it began. Another eternity challenges him. So he drives to another side of the park, to another hill in the arena.
Suddenly the fragment of a broken memory cuts.… Danny.
The sun's heat laps at the park and him as he climbs the rocky barren hill. Only at the top are there trees. The brush is sear, brittle, weedy along the jagged “paths.” Almost at the top, Jim looks up and sees a copper-tanned, tall man standing naked on a rock. Because he's attracted to him—and because others are here, wandering the area, in trunks, or clothed, or lying nude in depressed clearings of rocks-Jim turns away sharply, obviating even the barest possibility of rejection; but he makes himself available like this: He slides under a gathering of trees nearby. A man is blowing another. Jim moves out quickly.
He stands among open rocks against sharp blue sky. A towel now wrapped around his middle, the tall man follows him there. They stand on the brown rocks. “Fuck me,” the man says to Jim. Despite the earlier long orgasm, Jim feels his cock react. To prepare for the act, the tall man sucks Jim for moments. Now he sprawls on a towel-draped rock, his legs spread invitingly, one finger moistening his ass with suntan oil. “Cummon, baby, fuck me!”
Goaded exhibitionistically by at least two other men who stand watching eagerly—and now another is straining to look over the brush—Jim manages to slide his cock, not entirely hard, into the tall man. Legs straining, the tall man came the instant Jim's cock entered him. Jim withdraws his soft cock, wiping it on the man's towel.
He climbs down the hill hurriedly, drives up to the restroom outside the Observatory—and washes his cock with soap, preparing it for more encounters.
2:47 P.M. Griffith Park. The Arena.
There are men all over the sexual turf—some men shirtless or tanktopped, in bluejeans; others in trunks, shorts, cutoffs, bikinis; and some—even in the hot, hot sun-stand rigidly in black leather by motorcycles like surly chrome animals.
Along the road, Jim sees a hugely muscular man he's seen often in the park. Elegantly theatrical in leather shorts, strapped sandals, he walks a beautiful, sleekly muscular dog, like an extension of himself. The man glances quickly away from Jim's car, recognizing it and him, just as Jim glanced away from him, each trying to beat the other at looking away. One's obvious narcissism challenges the other's. Although each wants to, they will never come together.
Leaning against the side of his car a few moments later, eyes closed, Jim is startled by a man's voice—he must have walked up from the bushes behind.
“Remember me?—you jerked off in my mouth up the road a few weeks ago,” the man says.
Jim doesn't remember him.
“Want to do it again?” the man asks.
Jim doesn't. “Sorry, I just came.”
The man moves away.
Replaced by an attractive one, blond.
Moments later Jim and the blond youngman face each other in the sheltered brush below. Each is signaling the other by brushing his exposed groin. But there's an impasse—neither moves. “Suck me,” Jim says finally. “That's what I want you to do to me,” the other says. Instant enemies, they move back to their cars.
Now Jim will commit himself to what he calls “the arena.” Parking among many cars near a turn in the road, he breathes deeply. This “arena” demands the fullest commitment because the very abundance of choices in the shifting choreography creates the most precarious balance between success and rejection. Although he knows it will be crowded with dozens of hunters, Jim can enter it—ostensibly but not actually violating one of his “rules”—because it is so wide and sprawling that it is not as if he were “joining” one group.
He moves into a hollow clearing. Crumpled papers, a semen-caked handkerchief (relics left by other outlaws) lie on the leaves. Jim waits, alone.
A goodlooking man enters—is about to approach Jim, when another, equally goodlooking, moves in. Panic grabs Jim. Before he can leave—goaded by even the possibility that the two will prefer each other—he sees them, yes, moving closer together. He feels a cold knife rip the length of his body. He walks out, almost running.
In his car, he re-oils his muscl
es, pumps his arms by clenching his fists behind his back, drinks protein from his thermos, touches his body. Rejection. But maybe if he'd stayed, they would have both turned to him. Maybe, having signaled him already, the one wanted to signal the other, to make it a three-way. Maybe— … Rejection scorches coldly.
3:05 P.M. Griffith Park. Along the Road.
Anxiously—to wipe away the earlier incident—he drives to the area of the water tank. He walks under the bright sun down the path. Three bodies are clustered by the tank; he turns away.
On the path he stands alone. Floating men approach, look at him, pass. The delicate balance wavers further. It doesn't matter that so many have admired him, adored him—yesterday, last night, today, minutes earlier, no. Not even the glorious orgasm earlier matters, this moment. Each moment bears its total reality in his hunting existence—now. The past evaporates.
He returns to his car, drives to another spot. He stands there, showing off. A car drives in. The man, young, gets out, begins to approach him—then gets back in his car and drives away. Desolate and alone, Jim feels a hollow scream inside. What happened? He reminds himself of the beautiful muscular man in the isolated cove earlier. Ended. Rejection is present now. He tells himself: I'm looking too tough, I'm showing off too obviously, I'm looking unapproachable, I'm— … Rejection.
A convertible sports car parks.
“Hi.” A handsome youngman.
“Hi.” Jim's hand drops brushing his own groin. He walks down the path, toward the bushes, committing himself, as he rarely does, rashly. Breath held, he waits.
The other does not follow. He drives off.
Despair deepens blackly.
Moments later the same handsome youngman in the sports car returns. Jim is about to get into his car, to drive away, to reject him, when the youngman calls out to him: “Look—you're not a cop, are you?”
And so that was it. “No.”