Rushes

by John Rechy

  How differently the man at the door spoke even at first to Lyndy. “They’re as adamant as you, darling,” Endore tells her. After her narrative earlier and his lashing at her, hostile silence bound them. “Do you suppose they’ll come in, Martin?”

  Martin’s glaciated face is turned toward the door. “Perhaps.” He drops the word.

  Lyndy’s head snaps toward Martin. “Perhaps—. . . Perhaps you can use this in one of your columns, Endore—what we saw by the trucks that other night. I. And Martin.”

  She is pulling attention from the two figures—she’s enlisting Martin by warning him; reminding him of what? Collusion in some voyeuristic horror perhaps. Martin is the only one who can bring the two in, Endore thinks—and Lyndy knows it.

  Her eyes on Martin, holding him, Lyndy says. “I walked right up to one of the trucks,” she drops the diversionary words, she has implied them before. “Martin waited. In the Jaguar.” She touches his arm; then her fingers shoot back to the strands of pearls. “I saw the shadows of men—limbs intertwined—on the floor of the trucks.” She is speaking very slowly, allowing Martin to stop her. “There was no frenzy . . . until—. . .” she studies Martin; his reaction will determine whether she will continue. She tantalizes the core of her story again. “. . .–until some boys . . . attacked . . . one of. . . the men.”

  Martin looks away from the door. Lyndy’s hand releases the pearls.

  The subtle blackmail shaped. But Endore could not grasp its meandering direction. At the trucks, did she raise her hand, the way she does?

  She saw a mugging, Bill knows. He and Luke saw a man assaulted once. Luke ran. Bill watched. Later Luke cried. Bill explodes: “Maybe someday you’ll be slumming. Lyndy, and someone will mistake you for—. . .” One of us? No!

  The two avenging figures at the door have not budged. The shockwaves created by their presence lap farther into the bar, roiling waves of anger.

  “What?”

  “Two fuckin queens are trying to come into the Rushes!”

  That bitch Lyndy’s fault! Chas looks in her direction. Her presence festers in the Rushes.

  “The day after my tour of the piers, I designed my boldest creations,” Lyndy’s voice turns gay.

  She has skipped a crucial part of her narrative, Endore realizes. “I draped swatches of moiré and slashes of red, I wanted the brightness that only plastic has . . . and blood . . . but so briefly . . . before it turns black.” She stares at Martin. “Oh, look, our macho stud is back, our darling Chas,” she greets him back.

  Fury digs into Chas’s face, gaunt with anxious sweat. He stares toward the reddened gauzy figures at the entrance. How dare they? Christ! It’s not her! No. The queen on the piers was much larger, looming on the truck ramp.

  “Macho stud is redundant, darling,” Martin tells Lyndy.

  “That’s it, Martin!” Bill announces. “I’ve always wondered who or what exactly you remind me of, and I just saw it. You remind me of a depraved pope.”

  “Depraved pope is redundant too,” Martin utters.

  “Always standing there-judging but not joining,” Bill refuses to let go.

  “I judge nothing,” Martin’s lips pronounce, “and I see nothing to join.”

  “Looking, then; just looking?” Bill stalks him. “Is that what you like, to watch? There are so many rumors about you.” He allows silence to dredge up interpretations.

  “No, that’s not what I like,” Martin says.

  Bill’s tone is tripped by memory. “Sometimes it is better, just watching. Like jerking off with your favorite photograph, nothing can go wrong then, no broken wrist at the wrong time, no fuck-me when you want to get fucked. One time I pretended Luke was asleep, my live photograph; whatever I wanted him to be. We played games like that; he loved it.”

  Chas turns away from the tawdry figures at the door. “They won’t get in!” he shoves the words at Martin; a note of entreaty impinges. It can’t be her! But he remembers lustrous black and stabbing beads. And then he sees the man entering the Rushes past the two punishing presences at the door, and it is as if electricity has replaced the blood in his veins.

  Tall, slender—stark, stark—with broken rough features, short-cropped dark hair, the man is dressed—enclosed—in black leather—pants, jacket, cap. Gloves. He wears gloves—but no keys, no handkerchief, no earring—no proclamation of his sexual role. Cool, cool even in the fluctuating temperature of the bar. He is one of those electric figures in homosexual bars who grabs awed attention. He has managed to yank it away from the two waiting figures at the door.

  As he passes by, the leatherman brushes Endore’s hand with the gloved knuckles. The glove is cold, rough. Endore feels a distant stirring. He pulls his hand away from the somber presence. The cold black glove-warm, soft-touches Chas’s hand. Chas’s cock hardens.

  Bill feels an ugly shudder, a threatening sexual attraction which he doesn’t like.

  “Il est formidable!” Lyndy breaks the spell over the men.

  “Why can’t we come in?” the transvestite’s words pull again at the door.

  “You’re not wanted here. You’re not properly dressed,” the voice of the man at the door is sarcastic; he is now performing for others in the bar.

  “Coat and ties?” the black woman derides.

  How can anyone be attracted to that man in leather-masculine and roughly handsome as he is? Yes, and it’s obvious he’s got a gorgeous body, the leather is molded to him like skin. But he looks terrifying. Don is easing his way back toward the others. He’s taking advantage of the tautened attention to shield his return. Then he sees Steve.

  A few feet away, Steve waves at Don.

  Steve. The great beauty of years back, everyone wanted him, Martin’s most famous model. He looks terrible now, wasted. Don used to fantasize about making it with him.

  Steve smiles at Don.

  I used to desire him, oh, so much, Don remembers.

  Steve’s smile is eager.

  He’d go with me now if I would resurrect his lost image, Don thinks, and feels a sigh of warmth returning.

  Steve moves toward him—the smile more anxious.

  With a slight flip of his head, Don walks away. I rejected him! he exults. Now he can move back to the others.

  Oh, God! The two at the door are drag queens. Drag queens at the Rushes! Good! “Have you seen those two queens?” Don joins Endore and the others. He hurries his words, further to camouflage his bloodying in the field.

  “The black one is a woman, isn’t she, darling?” Martin asks Lyndy.

  “Yes.” The woman in the tuxedo does not look at the man who brought her in.

  Did the queen only appear that tall on the ramp? Chas’s words will serve as an imprecation against the two attempting invaders: “The Rushes is pulsing with ‘love’ tonight!” he asserts the power of his bar.

  “It’s the amyl nitrite,” Martin cuts. “You’ve confused the amyl nitrite with love.”

  The voice of the man at the door rises in anger: “Shit, you wouldn’t make out here.”

  “Her or me?” the black woman demands. She pushes her large breasts. The affronting cleavage is sharper.

  “Neither,” the man shoots.

  “Roxy makes out everywhere,” the woman says.

  “So does Elaine.” Roxy says. Her skirt shines like black cellophane.

  Elaine crosses her arms. “Not budgin.”

  Chas snorts: “They’re disgusting.” The queen on the ramp was with a black whore, the thought asserts.

  They’re courageous, Endore reminds himself, but does not speak the words.

  “They certainly get the real men.” Don remembers the “queens” and the tough “normal men” in the bars he and his friends used to brave only now and then, years ago.

  “Real men go with real men,” Chas controls his voice. It is the same queen! He transfers his anger to Don: “Haven’t you been rejected enough for tonight, Don?”

  “How cruel,” Bill protests. He to
uches Don’s arm. Don looks different, he notices. But how? His attention floats away and descends on a man in Levi’s cutoffs. Muscular hairy legs! Striped logging socks! Climbing boots! And the round head of his cock is hanging out from under the cutoffs!

  The leatherman moves farther into the bar.

  “I could have gone with Steve just now,” Don says, but the echo of his words snuffs out his tiny triumph.

  “He’d go with anyone who would remind him of what he was,” Martin says.

  Endore sees Steve gliding about like a lost shadow. An avenging ghost has wounded another, he thinks.

  The leatherman pauses. Near Robert.

  “You won’t always be young, Chas,” Don erupts. Pressure clamps his temples.

  “I’ll survive!” Chas bolts his boots to the patched floor.

  “Well, we survived, too,” Don roars. “You forget that.” He feels the earlier bunched words—he pushes them back; speaks others: “We fought battles, too, even if we had to hide.” He remembers the subtle cruising “right under their eyes,” but

  “they” didn’t see it. “We had secret bars, word of mouth, where we could dance,” tinted memories tug. “And it was fun!” he insists.

  “It’s still. . . fun!” Chas says, but he didn’t like the sound of the word. The leatherman—the mesmerizing presence—is standing near Robert. Chas feels an entangling confusion.

  “No—it’s all too serious,” Don says. The parties. Curtains drawn. The perennial threat that one of the “cute boys” might turn out to be “vice.” “Sure, the cops kept busting us, and they lied, and we were convicted, but we lived with it,” Don says.

  “They still bust us, man,” Chas reminds him. He sees Robert finally glance at the awesome leatherman. Chas touches his knuckles where the black gloves brushed. “Maybe not in the Rushes, but lots of other places.” The cop handcuffed him! I’m a top-man! he wanted to protest. “That’s why we make our own ghettos. Which they still invade,” he throws at Lyndy.

  An amused smile is pasted on her lips.

  In the thickening smoke the insistent forms at the door are transformed into nebulous threats.

  Damn! The logger in cutoffs is trying to talk to the muscular man, Bill sees. So scratch both off!

  Now the leatherman is looking back at him. Or at Endore? Chas saw him touch Endore too. “This is our island in the ocean,” Chas tells Don.

  Is that it? Endore wonders. Inside the ghettos we can pretend we’ve won the raging war. He wipes his hand where the glove touched. Why is he so silent about the figures at the door?

  Wait! The muscular man isn’t interested in the logger in shorts. Bill adds a distant possibility–two?–to his growing column; the muscular man might just—. . .

  “We even went to jail,” Don’s voice weakens. “And even friends turned their backs on you if they discovered you’d been arrested.” The stigma, the shame!

  “We still go to jail!” Chas reminds him. He turns away from the two arousing, disturbing figures—the youngman and the leatherman. Is the gloved hand of the leatherman on his own groin? Opening the buttons there. Memories mix. His look stumbles on the two forms at the door. Don’t let them come in!

  “Some of our friends committed suicide,” Don remembers. Eddie—always camping, doing Mae West, that feathered boa trailing. And then he was dead, wrists slashed. His friends, where now? Huddled in close groups at awful dinners, afraid to face the new soldiers.

  Lyndy seems uninterested in this interlude. Or preoccupied? Endore wonders.

  Don is going on: “But most of us just went on, and in style—and it was fun,” Don pleads.

  “Well, fuckeroo if that wasn’t a tribute to closetry,” Chas says.

  Don forces the knotting words back. “Now all I see are the mean fake machos. Fake machos!” he hurls at Chas. And Endore. Yes, he included Endore. “And it’s all so hostile.”

  “Toughened,” Chas says.

  “If you’re not going to screw with someone he’s your enemy.” But Don knows it was always like that. Always. “No one wants to go home anymore, just to orgies. And everyone looks the same.”

  Surrender by absorption. Endore hears the muted music converted here into a sex-dirge.

  Chas is becoming too cruel—and those two figures at the door, just standing there, are unnerving. Bill would go over and smile at them, yes—maybe they’d leave if someone were nice to them. Tension keeps rushing at them from all over the bar. Yet they’re still standing there! Bill begins to inch away from them and the others—and toward the hairy-legged logger with his round cock on exhibit. He retreats; the logger is talking to a biker.

  “We loved our difference,” Don sighs. “Now everyone wants to look straight.”

  “But not be straight,” Chas attacks back. “We’re the real men now. They imitate us!” In one urgent look he captures the magnificent display of machos. The leatherman emerges out of the sexual mass. And Robert. Chas cups his full groin, full balls, full cock.

  “Goddamnit, they—you—make me feel estranged from my own,” Don says. “I wish–. . .!” Pull back, not that, don’t say that! He retreats. “Well, I have an open wound and I’m bleeding and no one’s trying to seal my wound or stop my bleeding!”

  In the real jungles, the old are sent out into the wilds to die, the young savages throw stones at them so they can’t come back. Here we allow them to stay and be bloodied, Endore thinks. But not the two at the door-for any reason. Still, he remains silent.

  “Because we faggots aren’t bleeding anymore, not hating ourselves anymore, that’s fuckin why!” Chas says.

  “Oh, no? Don’t you talk about self-hatred to me, Chas. You hate each other even more than we did.” Don frowns. Oh, God, I hurt Steve. I’m sorry, Steve. “You, Chas, with your straps and chains and handcuffs and God knows what other precious objects of pain you call toys. Well, children play with toys! How do you think you get your beloved slaves to let you call them queers and cocksuckers?” His own words batter at his brain. His face is on fire, throbbing as if fists are crashing on him. His hands rise to cover his ears. “The same names they call us when they beat us up!” he roars.

  “Don, you don’t understand faggot S & M,” Chas steadies his voice. “It’s makebelieve—not like that. No one forces anyone. When the bottom-man looks up at me, he sees what he longs to see, a dominant faggot—a man, yeah, like him—standing over him, powerful.”

  “And when you look down at him, what do you see, Chas?” Endore hears his soft words.

  “A man acknowledging the power of another man!” Chas says.

  Trapped in tension, he and Endore face each other.

  Chas releases words as if the intensity must be peeled away with care. “When I confront another stud and he says he’s a top-man and he won’t do this or that and I know he wants me to make him do it—. . .” A subdued tone enters his words: “That man I told you about—shit—my first time here.” His voice softens. “I still have—. . .” He stops, frowns. He holds his beer to his groin, to moisten it with the bottle’s cold sweat. But the bottle and his hand are hot. The humidity in the bar is weighted. He moves, to locate a fuller current of artificial air. He rubs his hand on his bare chest, collecting the sweat; now again he touches his groin.

  Roxy’s voice pulls at the entrance. Precise. Determinedly “correct.” “We’ll tell you again; we’re not tryin—trying—to make out here. We know we can’t. Elaine and me—I—was hustlin the truckers, and a gang of thugs came at everyone—they’ve been at it all night, so we run—ran—here, and damned if we gonna go out there for a while yet, so allow us to enter.”

  “I tell you, boy, they come on us—with sticks, bottles; they called me a fag, and I’m a woman.” Elaine says.

  “We still don’t allow trans—. . . women.” the man at the door says.

  Roxy stares into the red smoke. “What about her?” She points to Lyndy. Her finger remains aimed at the woman.

  It points at him. Endore feels. “Why do
n’t you intercede for them, Martin?” A heaviness lightens. “You’re the only one who can.”

  Chas sidesteps as if to block Martin.

  “Do they have passports?” Lyndy asks.

  “Honorary ones,” Endore says. A weight begins to lift.

  Lyndy puts her hand on Martin’s arm. “Oh, darling, don’t. They’re those creatures we saw on the piers earlier.”

  The two on the ramp, Bill knows. Does Chas know that?

  “Don’t?” Martin eases Lyndy’s hand away. “I thought you wanted to see it all, darling.”

  “And be astonished,” Endore reminds her.

  “At the trucks that night!” Lyndy threatens the withheld part of her earlier narrative.

  Martin glances down at her. “Why don’t you tell them, darling?” he refuses the implied blackmail and takes a step toward the door.

  “I’ll wait until you return,” Lyndy breathes.

  “Do,” Martin tosses back.

  “We don’t like your kind, and you give us a bad name,” the man at the door tells Roxy.

  “He actually said that,” Elaine says.

  “The same thugs were beating on guys like you,” Roxy says. “Think about it.”

  “Actually,” says Elaine, “we just got caught in the shuffle; they was really after the machos. You the guy in the limo?” she asks the tall man suddenly there.

  Without looking at Elaine or Roxy, Martin whispers to the man at the door. This time without argument, the man surrenders. Martin abandons Elaine and Roxy to the Rushes.

  The two are trapped in a sea of hostile stares.

  “We need a drink bad,” Elaine says. They make their way in, toward the bar. Men move away from them, spitting. “Just one drink,” Elaine repeats, as if extending a promise, containing, trying to contain, the simmering animosity. “Just one, only one.”

  Roxy plants her hands on her hips, but her pose of overt defiance loosens. “Yeah, just one drink.” She feels the incandescent stares, hears the muttered curses as they move through the flammable territory. “One drink.”

  The men turn their backs to them. A path clears before them, as if they are contagious; and it holds. Tenuously. Moving in a direct line to the bar, they do not pass Endore or Lyndy–or Martin. The cleared path still holds, bordered by angry faces, backs, bodies which may push forward at any moment. The tension is about to boil overr A man blocks their way. Roxy faces him, her painted eyes ignite, one hand rises to her hip. Other men gather behind the man blocking the transvestite. Easing her away, Elaine guides her around them in a wide loop, following a clearing curved path. The man who blocked their way pursues them there.