Rushes

by John Rechy

  And Roxy pulls back.

  Finally she is more threatened by women than by men, Endore discovers.

  “Look at me!” Roxy stands in front of Chas. “You know why my drag makes you uncomfortable—why you had to run away from me?” her withheld rampage continues. “Because yours is just as gay as mine.”

  Chas pushes away the flicker of understanding he felt earlier for the transvestite’s anger.

  “There’s some truth in that—. . .” Don stumbles.

  Chas flings at Roxy: “Wrong! You’re accusing everyone, huh? What about you? You hate being queer so much you want to be a straight woman.”

  “I feel like a woman!” Roxy defends. Then the tone of entreaty is swept away: “So don’t call me a queer!” she shouts. “Cause you’re the fuckin queers!”

  It is as if she, and Chas, had been waiting for the word, eager for it, Endore thinks. It is what made the mutual ravaging possible.

  “Oh, hon, don’t use that ugly word, baby,” Elaine says to Roxy.

  Anger trembles in the bar.

  “I hate them as mucn as they hate me!” Roxy curses the men about her.

  Anger rushes at her from the bar.

  “Aw. you know that ain’t true,” Elaine asserts. Loudly. She wants the enraged men to hear, those near them, before the wave of anger sweeps others in. She-has to placate the menacing faces. “Not true,” she repeats. She’s proffering a truce. “We’ve talked about it, babe, remember? You’re always saying we shouldn’t hurt each other, cause them others hate us all so, and we gotta—. . .”. It’s working. Sheltering her, she’s leading Roxy past the mined field. Elaine’s eyes implore the staring men: Wait, wait! And it’s working: “No one’s queer, baby, you always saying that, babe, no one’s queer.” She is evoking the dormant mutuality of outcasts—and it’s worked. The angered buzzing dies. The two sides release each other.

  But after the slaughter, will anything change? Endore sees Elaine and Roxy leaving the Rushes. A certain silence holds—and then it’s pushed away by voices, laughter.

  “How touching.” Lyndy says, “the black whore and the white drag queen.” Then her words tumble: “We’ll photograph my models on the piers, Martin.” Her words crackle. “Men in leather and chains in the background.” Her hands slash as if draping the cruel fashions on her black models. “Vinyl, much vinyl! Bold new fashions in tribute to it all. Oh, you must get me into the Rack, Martin, I want to see it all—and I’ll use chains, keys in my designs, whips—. . .”

  “This time for women,” Endore says. “And they’ll wear your hatred of them.” What he has discovered in himself during the questioning of his fealties and vaunted attitudes—Endore will ferret out its implications no matter how ugly; but he knows this: Elaine and Roxy should have “belonged” here—as outcasts among outcasts.

  Lyndy touches her cheek. Her look penetrates Endore. Her fingers tangle on the necklace. “And my models,” she continues in the fevered voice, “will stand—. . . ‘Like clothed corpses. Life always in the background, and in the foreground, fashionable death.’ It wasn’t Plato who said that, was it. Endore? Oh. I believe it was you who wrote it about us!” She tosses at Martin: “And I was not astonished!”

  Martin glances down at the small form of the woman on the bar stool. “Weren’t you. darling, astonished? For a moment or so I thought you might have been. But then it becomes so difficult in our time, to be astonished. One can only keep trying. But do let go of your necklace. Oh. look, you’ve broken a strand of it.”

  Lyndy stares down in astonishment at the pearls about to cascade onto the patchy floor. Her fist chokes their flow.

  “You can let go. darling.” Martin says. “I’m sure they’re your cheap ones.”

  Her grasp loosens, tightens. Loosens. Tightens.

  “Don’t you believe Martin, Lyndy?” Endore prods. “Why don’t you let go?”

  Lyndy’s fist opens. Like a feeble bullet, one pearl pelts the sawdusted floor. Then her fist clasps the remaining pearls of the broken strand and she thrusts it and them into a pocket of the velvet tuxedo.

  “I’ll find the one that fell, darling.” Don bends toward the floor.

  “Leave it!” Lyndy’s voice is peremptory.

  Chas’s boot brushes the littered floor, as if threatening to smother the fallen pearl in dirty sawdust.

  10

  We bless You We adore You. We glorify You.

  AS OFTEN as he comes to the Rushes, Don is still surprised by his inability to leave even after the first mangling of the night. No matter how often he goes to the door for the “breath of fresh air” he hopes will pull him out, no matter how often he restricts himself to “one more drink and ten more minutes with dear friends,” no matter how often he insists he will not cruise, just “perhaps peek in at the boys,” no matter how often he reminds himself that if he stays he will wake up to despair, no matter how often he recalls a previous evening’s vow never to come back, never, to the Rushes, the Rushes will clutch him. He will remain trapped until the night is dead.

  Wondering, Where are the boys letting their hair down and camping? and answering himself, They’ve been replaced by the armies of machos, he will plunge into the arena of cruising, and he will be bloodied.

  The connective miracle he screams for—. . . Tonight the scream is taking another form.

  The fatal minutes before Last Call will soon occur. All around him men are connecting, leaving in pairs or threesomes, and the sight lacerates him. They have abandoned him again. He watches men kissing, and he watches the beautiful, unattainable men all around: the Adonic muscular man, the mahogany man—still here. Even the sinister man in leather. And Chas like a lean version of the men in those awful panels on the walls. And Bill, a tiger plundering the bar. And Endore waiting hungrily to be hunted. All so desirable, so sexual. Damn them!

  The withheld words surge to the edge of his throat. He looks at Martin and Lyndy, and he pulls the words back. Only one shapes and he’s not even sure whether or not he spoke it aloud: “I!”

  “What?” Bill is back. He studies Don’s face.

  “Nothing.” Don realizes he spoke. I have to be careful. Stop drinking. He moves away from Bill’s stare.

  After the encounter with Elaine and Roxy, and her febrile oration following, Lyndy seems removed. She makes a wisp of a touch over the remaining strand of pearls, the long one. The loosed pearl lies, unextraordinary, on the sawdusted floor.

  Lyndy will strike, Endore knows.

  Don assaults Bill: “Do transvestites upset you? I saw you staying away.” He is proud of his own reaction.

  “She looked so strange, in her costume,” Bill hears himself. He detects an iron mood in the others. Chas’s rigid back is to Endore. Lyndy and Martin are somber. “Home from the wars,” he tries to lighten the mood. Here, he will get a distant perspective, again. “The cowboy over there–. . .”

  “He’s not a cowboy!” Don interrupts. Oh, God, they have choices. I would go with anyone, he thinks. Steve. I’ll go with Steve. Where is he? Probably drunk at the bar. They’ll put him in a cab, if anyone cares.

  “Of course I’d prefer the muscular man,” Bill says. “I’d lick his body from his toes to—. . .” His graphic words are meant to assault Lyndy again; increasingly he wants to tear the bonds of civility between them.

  But there is no reaction. Now her fingers rest listless on the isolated strand of pearls.

  “But he’s not enough like—. . .” Bill’s voice became serious.

  Luke, Endore supplies the suspended name.

  “. . .—what I want tonight. Luke was a wonderful cowboy.” Bill tries to sound flippant. “I bought him his first contruction helmet, he loved it.” He’s studying Endore, to detect any spark of judgment.

  Don looks at his watch. “Oh, God, it won’t be long before Last Call.”

  “It’s still a while before Last Call,” Endore soothes him.

  But he’s begun to look into the bar, Don notices. He’ll make out,
yes—although he does go home alone more often than the others, but out of choice, Don thinks.

  “Last Call announces the last drink before the hunters are released from the pretense of drinking,” Martin tells Lyndy. Even he seems aware of the pall of silence over her, a palpable brooding. She stares into the bar.

  A new rhythm is moving through the Rushes. There is a greater silence as if in acknowledgment of the increasing seriousness of the balletic rites. The bass notes of the throttled music are steady beats. Like fleshed ghosts, men move in the red limbo of sex, pulled toward and separated by the same invisible flux.

  “Oh, I hate those minutes before Last Call!” Don’s voice is strident. “You feel trapped, tired.”

  “It’s the best time,” Chas breaks his own silence. Sometimes he will sacrifice a “heavy conquest” to remain for those sacred moments. “The time when the sexual. . . savages . . . prowl the jungle.”

  Even those words, aimed at her, have not broken the electric silence of the woman.

  Yes, Chas loves the moments when sexual mettle is tested. Yet one single incident may shake the structure of the hunt’s well-ordered anarchy. The incident with Robert, still sealed—and the moment when he felt a flashing unity with Roxy: those disturb. He tilts his beer, the bottle is empty.

  Two men walk by. One is dressed in the brown-shirted uniform of the German SS, another in the black uniform of a Nazi. Both men are heavy, balding, tubby, red-faced. Only their uniforms get them into the Rushes.

  “Disgusting!” Don says. “How dare they wear that uniform? Don’t they know they put homosexuals in concentration camps?”

  Endore and Bill turn away from the two men.

  For now, this area of the Rushes is Chas’s headquarters, from which he will evaluate the “prime meat” in the battleground. Right now, his attention focuses on a man fresh in the arena. No shirt, belts crisscrossed over a hard hairless chest. Keys on the right. A proud masochist. Chas likes that. But his attention is magnetized repeatedly toward the leatherman. And Michael.

  “After Last Call, the white lights crash, and everything is. exposed,” Martin tells Lyndy. He seems to be prying at her silence.

  Lyndy glances at him.

  “Will you be, Martin, exposed?” Endore asks. “I assume you’ll stay till Last Call.”

  “Of course.” Martin retains the ambiguity.

  “I’ve got some sure ones,” Bill evaluates. Anxiety pricks his voice. It will soon be that time, and there’s always the chance, always, that all connections may fail. “The logger is a mess. Out! One cowboy is a cowgirl! Out! The construction worker—possibly, just possibly—but the waist’s a little thick. Did you see the ridiculous man with the naked ass? And that one–ugh! Oh, look, the bitch! He’s talking to that other guy who was cruising me earlier. There’s one I like a lot, but I can’t tell what he’d be–. . .”

  “Why don’t you tell him what you want him to be?” Endore cuts the mean evaluation. Bill is becoming cruel, discarding coldly. He even looks different, harder. But Endore’s reaction is only a congealing of the hostility he has kept in abeyance all night.

  “I could, I suppose,” Bill snaps. He always felt Endore sided with Luke, although he and Endore are the real friends. He tries to dissipate Endore’s accusative look. “I did whatever Luke wanted.”

  “If he’d be what you wanted to own,” Endore says.

  “Own!” Bill is indignant. “I gave myself completely–and gave him total freedom.”

  “And let him know it, like a kind master,” Endore says, astonished by the rush of his anger.

  Chas eyes Bill. The firm ass. I’d mount him like a neighing pony, he thinks.

  “Luke was always saying you’d understand, but I never expected you to side with him like this, Endore,” Bill says. “You know Luke controlled our affair.”

  “Yes,” Endore relents.

  With his boot, Chas teases the fallen pearl, pushing it even closer to the litter. He glances up at Lyndy.

  She remains silent, not reacting.

  The black man Don solicited earlier is walking out with the blond youngman who was at the bar. Don looks away from them. “Do you realize the beauty in the tank top is still here?” he asks.

  The shirtless muscular man has located himself in the clearer area of availability.

  “He probably hasn’t turned down enough people,” Bill says, considering it, yes, but also thwarting Endore’s possible interest.

  “Or no one’s dared to ask him,” Endore says.

  “Luke said sometimes people would look at him all night, and no one asked him home. He said he felt so isolated,” Bill says. “He was always using that word. Isolated. Especially when he couldn’t get hard any more.” Bill is no longer attempting to assault Lyndy with his candor, she seems hardly to be listening; he is releasing evoked memories. “He did get hard once more.” Bill frowns: he remembers the dry hot tongue. “But it was wrong.” he smashes the memory.

  “Stop thinking about Luke,” Don says. It is irritating him dangerously to hear about Bill’s lover. I never had one. But I arranged so many affairs. And what did that get me? “Just remember how he used you.”

  “He said I used him,” Bill says in wonder. “Yet I did everything he wanted, to arouse him.” He assaults Endore’s judging vision of what occurred between them: “I even let myself be strapped in one of those contraptions they have at the Rack. Yes! Did he tell you that, Endore?” He regrets the words.

  “It was you I saw,” Chas says. “Strung on that rack, your feet in the stirrups. That guy was pushing his fist into your ass.” He feels his cock stretch.

  “Chas, you are–. . .” But Bill has trapped himself.

  Endore looks at Lyndy. Her hand is glued to the remaining strand of pearls, as if she were evaluating her tearing of the other strand.

  “I did it for Luke!” Bill releases. Luke stood a few feet away, staring. “It hurt! But he kept nodding, yes, encouraging me. A man was sucking him while he watched me with those sad—mean!—eyes of his. Then he ran out. Later at home, he kept crying. Maybe because he hadn’t been able to get hard. . .. Maybe because—. . . He cried a lot, especially for such a macho man,” Bill says in amazement. “And then—. . .” But he withholds the worst moments, he’s smothered by their intimacy. “You did understand him, Endore, didn’t you?”

  Luke cried that night, and he clung to Endore. “No,” Endore refuses, “I didn’t understand him.” Suddenly Luke said, “Bill wants me to hurt him, in weird ways, and he says it’s because I want that; and he calls it. . . love.” Endore eased Luke away, seeing another truth, another possible truth.

  “What I did that night at the Rack, I did it for Luke,” Bill says.

  “Out of. . . love.” That was the last night Endore was with Michael.

  “Why else?” Bill wonders aloud. He plunges back into the bar.

  Bill’s words have made it easy–essential–that Endore face Michael at last, now, after all the fake “attempts.” His eyes explore the bar. But Michael has left. No, he’s standing alone against another post in another section of the Rushes. Endore glances at Chas. Chas looks at him and then toward Michael.

  Before any new untruthful “reason” may intercept his determination, Endore approaches the intimate stranger, who, seeing him near, waits for him this time too.

  “How are you, Michael?” Endore asks him. The banal words, the ease with which he spoke them—they render the moment surreal. The blond youngman–reddish-blond–is perhaps handsomer than Endore remembers. In so short a time, the boyish features have found sharper definition.

  “Okay. You?” Michael’s words are as banal, as easy, unreal.

  Endore hears crash behind them the sourceless laughter. Does Michael laugh like that? Is the joyous sound he remembers invaded now?

  “Christ, it’s easy,” Michael is amazed, and a touch of the discarded boyishness returns to his face. “I’ve wanted and dreaded talking to you, almost every day, and now it’s so dam
n easy.” He laughs, a short laughter.

  The expectation of joy, even at this moment, is still there. “We moved at the same time,” Endore says. “I moved,” he corrects, determined to avoid subterfuge.

  “I would have,” Michael makes it easy for him.

  He understood me so well, and yet he was wrong, Endore insists. “I almost followed you into the piers, earlier.” He wants to find out whether it was him. “But the traffic—. . .” A note of accusation punctures.

  “Yeah, I was there earlier.”

  Now the banality of the approach cannot shelter them.

  Rehearsed for days, weeks now, the unspoken accusation, reinforced by memory, rushes out of Michael: “When I first said I loved you–. . .!”

  “You said it so quickly, so easily, you said it the very first time,” Endore thwarts the certain assault.

  “I felt it that quickly, that easily–and the first time,” Michael’s words slide from anger into benign memory, bruised again by accusation. “I did feel it–but you told me there was no such thing.”

  “No. no! I said. Let’s not brand it, just experience it.” Endore tells him. Accusing each other, they may see their respective truths, solve the mystery of their coming together, the mystery of their breaking apart.

  The tone of accusation grips Michael’s voice: “When I first saw you with someone else—. . .”

  “I had warned you, I had told you: I didn’t lie or hide–. . .”

  “. . . –I cried, and–. . .”

  “I held you.”

  “. . . –you convinced me we had to protect each other against possessiveness.”

  “I believed it, I believe it. I was determined not to surrender my life, nor allow you to surrender yours to an imprisoning concept of ‘fidelity’ as ownership.” And to guard against pain, Endore reminds himself; against myths which wound when exposed as myths. Yet he knows he tried and was pulled by warring lovers—the Rushes and Michael. When he questioned. Why not both? he found no negative answer. But there was another battling lover, the most possessive and powerful—his aloneness, the vulnerable isolation; and that lover joined forces with the Rushes.