by John Rechy
Leaving the weights randomly on the floor, they move into the bedroom. Jim draws heavy drapes there too, looking away from the window and the soon-lightening sky.
Naked, they stand kissing, erect cocks pressed together like extensions of each other. Neither has yet touched the other's cock with his hands. Not yet. But now simultaneously, guardedly simultaneously, their fingers edge there, touching still tentatively for full mutual commitment; assured, both hands grasp the other's cock.
They lie on the bed, limbs entwined. Now they shift, holding each other's cocks close to their mouths but not touching the blood-hardened shafts to their lips. “Let's count to three and go at the same time,” the youngman suggests.
“One,” Jim says. He's so much like me, he thinks.
“Two,” the youngman counts.
“Three,” they both say.
Heads push forward onto waiting cocks. Sensations indistinguishable—mouth on cock, cock in mouth. Both tongues lick furry balls, return recurrently to cocks.
Heads locked by firm thighs, cocks pushing in and out of each other's mouths, Jim feels a magnificent confusion, as he did earlier this afternoon in the park, his own cock and the other's growing as if one. The other's mouth increases its lunging movements, Jim's matches them.
Now! Jim wants to shoot in the other's mouth, but he's not sure whether, as always before at the crucial moment, he will withdraw his own mouth from the other's pulsing cum. So much like me! he thinks again.
The tightening magic at Jim's groin unknots, and he shoots in the other's eager mouth and feels the other's cum jetting into his and doesn't pull away, doesn't want to, and imagines that his own cum flowing into the other's mouth will course through the body and flow back mixed with the other's into his own mouth filling it with the creamy juice. Swiftly, bodies still thrusting, they kiss, exchanging each other's cum back and forth in open mouths, tongues mixing it together, gluing it with their saliva, cocks still pulsing.
They lie back. Their legs touch lightly.
Now both are slightly embarrassed. Too much was given, which neither has given before to that degree.
But: “My name is Steve; yours?” the youngman asks.
“John,” Jim says.
Neither can bring himself to ask what they both want-to spend the night together. Tentatively, slowly, the youngman begins to dress, sits back, resumes dressing. Trying to sound casual, he says: “Hey, I'll give you my phone number.”
Jim says quickly: “I'll give you mine too.”
They exchange phone numbers—knowing unequivocally, as well as they know their outlaw world, that despite the intense moments—afraid of rejection—neither will ever call the other. That this is all.
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
7:34 A.M. The Apartment
HE WOKE AND LOOKED toward the windows. Dawn has evaporated. He moved from night to morning avoiding the purple limbo.
This memory lodges in his mind: the man at Greenstone turning from him fiercely, spitting angrily. Jim's mind rushes to drown the memory: the muscular man in the park, the long, beautiful orgasm; the fact that he was paid to be desired (but remembers: the bronzed baby shoes, the aged photograph of the woman; Roo). Danny—that memory obtrudes…. The youngman named John … and Steve; the many, many others who admired him, desired him; and those he desired back…. Yet: The memory persists of the strange man at Greenstone—and the eternal vacuum during which nothing happened.
Suddenly he wishes he had got up earlier and joined the first wave of post-dawn hunters in Griffith Park.
FLASHBACK: Griffith Park An Early Sunday Morning.
Those still up after the purple stasis in the broken cycle of sex must push the search forcedly into the next day.
The gates into Griffith Park open early, when foggy mist still clings in shreds. Jim drove up the hill for the intense moments. Within the lingering mist, flagrant exhibitionists stood openly naked by their cars. Other outlaws walked silently along the rustling brush.
That morning—and the world was ice-green—Jim stood shirtless halfway up the road and by his car. A van drove up. The side door slid open, the driver unseen. Jim walked past the door. A goodlooking man lay on the floor naked. His own narcissistic exhibitionism, not nearly as blatant, is affronted by the other's. Jim would have walked away, but the man called out to him. Inside, he took Jim's clothes off. The door left open, they made sex for long minutes.
Moments later, on a rocky trail in the barely clinging haze, Jim leaned against a tree. Two men took turns blowing him. Hostile only in those misty moments, the bright sun stared into his sleepless eyes.
When Jim emerged out of the trail, the sun shone in splendor, preparing for the afternoon shift of hunters.
11:07 A.M. The Apartment.
Lying in his bedroom, Jim knew that the early moments in the park had vanished for today. He fell asleep again— and didn't wake till near noon. He showers in cold, cold water. Again he breakfasts on eggs, milk and honey, wholewheat bread and butter—and coffee. He prepares the thermos of liquid protein which will charge his body through the day. Sundays he does not work out. His muscles ache deliciously— proof of their growing preparation for the onslaught of the next workout. He stands in front of the mirror. Yes, he has managed to challenge sextime.
12:02 P.M. Griffith Park. The Isolated Hill.
Preparatory to moving into the heavy Sunday-afternoon arena, he wants to sunbathe. He drives to a secluded place not strictly within gay turf; he walks up a hill. The increasingly warm sun flirts with his body as he climbs. In a place enclosed by rocks, he spreads his beach mat, places a towel on it, removes his cutoffs and climbing boots, drinks from the thermos, and lies facing the sun. He stretches, glancing at his stripped body gleaming. Loved indifferently by the promiscuous sun, he dozes off.
He woke bathed in perspiration. He looks around, hoping for an outlaw. But not here, not now. With the towel he wipes his sweating body. Dressed again in cutoffs and climbing boots, he drives, then walks to a water pipe down a trail. There he splashes his heated body with the cold water, letting the sun dry him sensually. He applies a light coat of oil to his further-darkening body.
As he emerges from the trail, he sees a squad car driving past. Moments later, about to enter his car, he sees another. This is relatively rare in this area, which is usually patrolled by plainclothes vice cops.
Jim gets in his car and drives down the road to join the afternoon tide of hunters.
FLASHBACK: Griffith Park. Nine Years Ago.
He had just moved out of a nest-like enclosure of twigs and branches. Moments earlier, inside the inclined nest, he had unbuttoned the top of his pants, just one button, as a signal to the youngman who had followed him there. The youngman's hand advanced toward Jim. But nothing happened because they heard the untypically clumsy crunching of branches along the path. They parted. On the trail, Jim secured the top button of his pants.
Simultaneously, two men rushed toward him down the winding path—a bleached-blond man, and another, hickish in stiff-new, rolled-cuffed jeans. The hickish one glanced wildly at him, and the bleached man intercepted Jim:
“Vice officer!—you're under arrest!”
The hickish cop rushed into the branchy alcove. Jim heard spat words coming from the hollow he had just left, “Fucking queer!"—and the sound of fists on bones. Jim tried to pull instinctively toward the youngman he had been with, the youngman the cop was beating, but the handcuffs and the bleached cop held him back. The hickish cop emerged out of the brush with the handcuffed bleeding youngman doubled over.
They were taken to a gray rectangular cop-fortress of a building. Both were fingerprinted and stripped. In defiance, Jim flexed his naked body. Later, the hickish cop took him into a room alone.
“That guy wanted to give you head, right?”
“No, man,” Jim said.
“I saw it.”
“Nothing happened.”
“Why were you buttoning your pant
s on the path?”
“Just noticed the top button was open.”
“I saw him give you head.” The voice was becoming increasingly agitated.
“You couldn't have, it didn't happen.”
“It can go better for you if you— …”
“Nothing happened,” Jim said. Then angrily, “Look, are you getting off on your lie?”
Jim was booked, locked in a barred cell alone with a dirty toilet and two naked cots like iron skeletons.
Only when he was bailed hours later did he learn the cop was charging them with a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison. Of all the times he might have been busted while making it in the park, it had occurred with terrible irony when nothing had happened.
All they could prove to the judge who would hear the case, Jim's attorney decided, was that from the distance the cop had clumsily designated—twenty feet away from the enclosure—he could not possibly have seen what he claimed, Jim's cock inserted in the youngman's mouth, the placement of hands; the pants…. In court, they showed movies of the terrain. The judge shifted the trial to the park. There he saw the impossibility of the cop's statements. He also saw the sexhunters lurking.
After eight months of court appearances, Jim and the youngman were convicted of a misdemeanor not requiring sex registration. They were fined six hundred and fifty dollars each.
Nothing happened, Jim's mind kept challenging the reality. And even if it had!
That same afternoon, he returned to the exact area of the park, and made it, over and over and over.
MONTAGE: The City
Los ANGELES IS HAUNTED. By dead people, dead places.
Pershing Square. Tanned derelicts, tanned preachers, tanned malehustlers, tanned innocent sinners, and powdered-white queens—all defied smog and the cops in old Pershing Square. Cone. Gone with the lazy indigent afternoons; banished by parking lots and cleared paths; no protective shadows. And no more sweet angelsisters and their picture of Christ bleeding wax. Oh, and no more Jenny-Lu bumping “Lord-uh” in heavenly orgasm under benign pubic-fringed palmtrees. No more Saint Moses with flowing white hair and admonitions of hell, tomorrow.
Gone with Clifton's Cafeteria, across the street. A phosphorescent Hawaii of fake brooks and plastic neon palmtrees, and lei-ed ladies in Biblical drag, really—and, below, in The Garden, amid moaning organ music, a giant statue of Christ, meditating.
Swept away with Angels’ Flight, the motored lift from a low street to a heavenly high one, where ubiquitous palm-trees waited as if to escort you even higher.
Gone. Gone with dead movie stars and the wind.
And ghosts lurk in Venice West.
An exalted madman was going to re-create Venice right here in Southern California. Venice West! he called it. He started. Built the canals, the bridges. A small town square. Quaint benches along the shoreline, wooden shelters from the water's glare. And that was that. They found oil. He stopped. Now giant-beaked machines drill remorselessly into the earth.
The old Jews came here and built their synagogues and delicatessens along the beach. Wearing sunglasses and pasting cold cream on their noses, they sit together, eyes closed, facing the white sun. (Little urchin boys nasty in their sun-bleached blondness pedal with skinny bare legs past them—impossibly ignoring the kewpie-doll woman carrying a Vermeer reproduction, a FOR SALE sign pinned ambiguously to her bursting breasts.)
Then the jazz outcasts came to Venice. Among the imitation-Venetian buildings, the voices roared good and bad poetry, shouting for mad sanity.
While along the fabled Sunset Strip soon after, the insurgents of the legendary sixties—the most remote period in the history of time—proclaimed that flowers in one's hair meant love and peace, and, man, that's all you need. But the rampaging cops said ugh-uh! and, to prove it, crushed the flowers because the children had refused to move on, move on.
And then they did move on. To Manson and Altamont.
And to Venice West.
Blood-initiated, the children turned to acid for pretty dreams and got bummers instead. They were zombies on the spent battlefield of love.
They live now hunched like cold birds on the white beaches, rousing themselves occasionally to ask for change, to beat a drum funereally, or to walk stoned for hours along the glaring white beach. Betrayed. Beautiful dim ghosts in skeletal frames. Betrayed.
Junk came. Blacks and whites together shoot up skinny vein-dried arms in dung-heaped alleys.
Surviving.
12:29 P.M. Griffith Park. The Roads. The Hills.
As JIM ENTERS the area of the hunt, the road that winds up the hill for several miles past sporadic forests of bushes and hills, he notices red signs posted at irregular intervals on trees. Less than a foot by slightly more than a foot square, they were not in the area he left—only in the sex arena, and they were not here yesterday. Up the road, the signs recur. Motor of his car still running, Jim stops by one:
RESTRICTED
ENTRY
Mountain Fire District
MOTORCYCLES,
MOTORSCOOTERS
& OTHER MOTOR
VEHICLES PROHIBITED!
There's more; unintelligible, jumbled, obscurely legalistic sentences and clauses printed in tiny letters. Probably motorcycles and jeeps have been exploring the steep paths and trails. The hunting outlaws are apparently not affected.
And there will be hundreds of sexhunters in the park this hot, hot Sunday afternoon. Though still not the peak hour, dozens of cars are already driving into the sexual turf. Others will come in shifts throughout the afternoon, from the beaches, bars, early parties.
Up the road, almost every good area is taken. Jim drives farther up, to the water tank. Another cop car races down the road.
Jim returns to the hill where he sunbathed yesterday. Hunters emerge throughout the tall brush. They stand against the clear sky. There are too many on this hill, Jim decides. He descends to the main road, back to his car. Some of the red signs lie on the paths. Intense and ominous, the heat pulses in the stirless air.
At a sandy outpost where Jim stands, dozens of other shirtless men cruise each other, soon moving into the secluded paths across the road. Here too are the ones who come to meet others, invite them home. The tall blond muscleman in strapped sandals is here again with his equally muscular dog. Again he and Jim turn instantly from each other.
A short distance away from an inviting branch-tangled cove, Jim stands later, showing off on an indentation off the road beyond the water tank. A very goodlooking brown-haired youngman has been driving slowly back and forth, glancing at him. Unfortunately, another man stops before he does. Jim doesn't want to hurt this man, but he prefers the other; so he begins to walk away idly from the cove until the man leaves. The brown-haired youngman drives in. “Hi.”
Now another car drives in. Two unattractive men eye them slowly. “Got a match?” one asks. No. “Got a lighter?” the man persists. There is something uncomfortable about them. Jim and the brown-haired youngman say no. The car drives off.
Jim and the youngman, also shirtless—body slender and hard—slide down the hill into the cove.
Whrrrrrrrrrrr!
The helicopter!
The two men look up. The cop helicopter is circling the hill where Jim was only minutes earlier. From here, they hear its muffled speakers, electronically amplifying harsh voices.
The youngman and Jim move out of the cove, farther down the path.
“I wonder what's happening,” the youngman says.
“I don't know,” Jim says.
1:12 P.M. Griffith Park. The Beginning of the Invasion.
As Jim and the youngman move farther down the path, they hear the roar of cars, clearly different from the more flowing sound of outlaws’ cruising cars.
“It sounds like an invasion,” Jim laughs.
In the distance and above, the helicopter swirls angrily. Undefined electronically magnified voices echo distantly.
“Jesus,” the brown
-haired youngman says, laughing too, “it does sound like an invasion!”
As they continue down the path, they instinctively avoid being in view of the helicopter, now circling widely.
Startled, they hear the distant clap of horses’ hooves.
They reach an alcove and move into it.
“I'm on probation,” Jim thinks aloud, not knowing why that occurred to him at this moment.
“Me too,” the other says.
As far as they are from the main road, they can hear heavy tires. Trucks? The screeching of rushing cars. And now they hear the loud speaker—either from squad cars or the hovering helicopter:
“THIS IS THE POLICE DEPARTMENT. MOVE TO THE MAIN ROAD. PROCEED IMMEDIATELY TO THE MAIN ROAD!”
The incredible reality assaults them. The cops are actually invading the park!
“They can't bust everybody for just being here,” the youngman says.
But the sounds of battle along the roads beyond are unequivocal.
“We can't go back to the road now,” Jim says. “We could go around the hill and into the straight section—it's safe there for sure.”
“What about our cars?”
“Get them later.”
“It's a long way around—…”
They both know that to get to the straight side of the park without returning to the main road they will have to walk very far along clawing brush, down a steep slippery hill, around, then over another high hill, and down again and across the road.
The helicopter whirs directly over them.
They throw themselves on the matted leaves. Hooves— still distant.
“They're using horses—…” the other starts.
“I don't believe it,” Jim laughs, to obviate the fact that they are actually in danger for being in the gay section of the park.