Rushes

by John Rechy

  Chas moves to the leatherman.

  “What a sly hypocrite you are, Endore,” Lyndy says.

  “I mean everything I say,” Endore says.

  “You’ll gamble your power again?” Martin asks.

  “Chas is formidable, look at how he’s displaying himself, now that he’s a proud . . . ‘top-man’–again! Are you so sure you can take him away from Chas?” Lyndy prods. “You offered the youngman more of what he wanted, one assumes, but–. . .”

  “I’ll offer this man more of what he wants,” Endore’s voice is colder. “Because I have a deeper knowledge of our contempt than Chas. I long ago faced what the ‘top-man’ sees when he looks down at the groveling masochist. He sees himself.”

  Chas is talking heatedly to the leatherman. The bare chest shines.

  “That’s the knowledge you turn away from in terror, Martin,” Endore pursues him. “The bloody face you drove away from, yours and the other’s, reflected in the window of your Jaguar.”

  Martin lashes: “Oh, tomorrow, Endore, if you ‘win’ tonight, will you write a column about how we’re destroying ourselves and each other in rituals of self-hatred?”

  “Yes! And I’ll know it from the inside!”

  He moves away from them, toward Chas, toward the leatherman.

  From the thinning bar, Michael watches Endore and Chas flanking the tall dark figure in leather.

  “I’ve come to say good night.” Don stands by Lyndy and Martin. “And, Lyndy, I want to apologize for the shameful way the men in this bar have treated you, a lady.”

  “Good night, darling.” Lyndy offers her cheek for Don to kiss. He does, and she dismisses him. Martin nods to Don. Don moves away. The man his age waits for him.

  Lyndy and Martin see Chas’s lips move, then Endore’s. Forced laughter leaps. From Chas. From Endore. The leatherman is quiet. Lyndy and Martin watch the raging battle from the distance. The three men are dark figures burning in the dusty fire of the Rushes.

  “Last Call!” the bartender’s voice booms.

  “Ah! And soon the lights will crash!” Lyndy anticipates.

  Endore hears Chas’s ugly words. They tumble. He hears his own words crash against them in cruel power. He hears Chas’s guttural laughter. No, it’s his own! He can hear it for the first time. He listens in fascination. It breaks in the middle, like Chas’s: and he knows, Yes, the origin of that crack in the laughter is a contradiction as simple as that of intimate love and intimate hate, and in the clash lies a buried scream. He feets the pain of the touched nerve. Then the laughter resumes, and fades. Was it Chas laughing? Or himself? Is it his and Chas’s laughter he’s been listening to all along, seeking out the meaning of their shattered sound?

  The ferocious blandishments to win the leatherman rush out of the two warring men.

  The leatherman turns his back to Chas, choosing Endore.

  “Michael!” Chas calls loudly for Endore to hear. Chas moves toward the bar and the youngman there.

  From across the battlefield, Endore sees the blond youngman he knew so well and the dark man he knows even better. Michael nods to Chas–and, his hand tight on Michael’s shoulder, Chas turns to face Endore.

  Endore moves away from the leatherman. He walks up to Michael and Chas. “That man is yours, Chas,” he says. “You’ve won him–all in black leather and eager to grovel for love.”

  “I pulled you down, Endore,” Chas says, but with no note of victory. “I pulled you back in.”

  “I was never out of any of it,” Endore says.

  Michael catches the words.

  A sorrowful knowledge unites us now, Chas, Endore knows, and it will separate us irrevocably. This is the moment of our greatest intimacy.

  The two men face each other. Long moments. Longer. They stretch them longer.

  Endore turns toward Michael, and Chas moves back to the leatherman.

  “Would you have gone with that man?” Michael asks Endore.

  “Would you have gone with Chas?” Endore counters. Neither answers.

  “Last Call!” the summons is repeated.

  White brutal lights crash on the Rushes. Black shadows collapse on the floor.

  Debris from the night’s battles lies among the sawdust like the aftermath of a storm. The taped music is strangled. Shadows, forms of men now, adjusting their clothes, abandon the back of the bar: they do not look at each other. A few men conjoin, these last moments. Others are leaving alone, dazed. The plain and the beautiful, one tattered army now, straggle into the destroyed night.

  “Ah!” Lyndy sighs in amazement.

  The man he’s with frowns at Don in the glaring light. Don tries to hide his face. “I just remembered, I’m meeting someone else,” the man tells Don, abandoning him to a vortex of terror.

  Alone in the ruthless light, Don looks about him. The shirtless muscular man is alone too! Is it possible? Don’s eyes plead. The beautiful muscular man looks at him. The tip end of acknowledged recognition? Then he turns away from Don. As if rendered too nakedly vulnerable, the muscular man puts on his white tank top before walking out alone.

  “Good night. . . darling,” Lyndy calls out to Chas as he walks by with the leatherman.

  Chas stops before her and Martin. He waits. He looks at them. He waits longer. “You can try and try and you’ll see it all,” he tells Lyndy. “But you’ll never be one of us—and that’s what you want, because we’re alive, and you’re dead!” Roxy, she said something like that, Chas remembers now. Yes, it was the queen in vinyl and sequins who said that first.

  Lyndy pulls back. At her throat, her hands seem to discover anew that one strand of pearls is missing.

  “And you, Martin, you’ll always be one of us,” Chas says.

  The cold eyes of the man freeze on him.

  Chas leaves the Rushes with the leatherman.

  “Tonight!” Lyndy’s voice destroys the quivering moments. “Tonight, Martin, you’ll take me to the Rack. Won’t you, darling? Oh, you can get me in.” She slides off the stool, looping the remaining strand of her necklace about her hand, releasing it, looping it again.

  “Perhaps there we can astonish you at last,” Martin says.

  Hatred blazes between them.

  The bar is emptying now. The bartenders have begun to clear the wreckage. Lagging casualties sway. A man is trying to rouse Steve, folded over on the bar. A few other men still linger.

  Still at the door, Don sees Endore talking to Michael, the beautiful youngman. Endore could still have him, and yet—. . . Does Endore really prefer aloneness? Is it possible he does? I don’t hate you, Endore. I love you.

  “No, I wasn’t going with Chas,” Michael tells Endore.

  Endore wants to believe that. Has to believe it. That incident between him and Michael, the same night Luke left Billmemory seems to be soothing it. What was it, really? Did Michael really insist–. . . ask for–. . . suggest–. . . only hint—. . . What! “I’m glad,” he says simply.

  His eyes glide along the exposed walls of the Rushes. It is the first time Endore has seen—remembers seeing–the panels in this damning light. Impressions—which may fade or become permanent this night of revelation-bombard him. There is a central figure which recurs from panel to panel, and—this astonishes him—there is a definite sequence of events, like recorded stations, but they are scrambled, not in order. The “last” panel—the recurring man now pinioned in ecstasy or pain against the trunk of a tree, the uniformed men assaulting his flesh or stripping the remnants of his clothesdepicts a final pornographic immolation, willing or forced. Now Endore is sure there are 14 drawn panels, and one more, left blank. He looks at the vortex of scrawls entangling flushed organs: the vague, ghostly image there. The artist saw no meaning in the scattered procession to violence. He pulled back by leaving the summary panel undrawn. Endore knows—and now he too pulls back from the impact of the panels. Illumined, cracks in the walls slash the drawn figures like bolts of lightning.

  “You’re damned to
see it all so clearly.” Michael says. “All the worst in our world. And still need it. Even love it. Chas needs it as much—but he’ll never see it. But you’ll both always need the Rushes.”

  “Before long, that may be true, for you,” Endore says wearily.

  “Then I’ll have to live with it. In it,” Michael tells him. “As well as I can. As well as you do.” He waits. “And even if there is no. . . love, I’ll pretend-like you–that there can be.”

  Dazed men pull out of the bar. Some stagger out, drunk-pretending gaiety or slurring anger at this night’s waste, which has only now connected into a barren vista of other wasted nights of empty hunting.

  Michael’s hand reaches out to touch Endore’s shoulder, and then it retreats. He walks away.

  Dark silhouettes against the darker night, Martin and Lyndy stand framed by the door. “Endore, are you coming with us?” Martin calls out.

  Lyndy loops one arm through Martin’s. “Of course he is.” She holds out the other arm extended for Endore to take.

  Looking at Lyndy—hating her—and at Martin—hating him—Endore takes a step toward them. He stops. He looks down. Smashed beer cans, mangled cigarette butts, empty bottles of butyl nitrite, worms of ampules, cum-smeared tissues and handkerchiefs, dirtied sawdust—and two pearlslie dead on the floor. He looks up at Lyndy and Martin and shakes his head: No. And knows his fascination with their inability to feel—with their dead living—is over: I do not belong with you.

  Anger smirches Lyndy’s face for one instant. Then she laughs her tiny laughter. She drops her extended arm to her side and links the other one more tightly through Martin’s.

  The woman and the tall man walk into the wreckage of the night.

  14

  And this deign to regard with gracious and kindly attention.

  AS OFTEN as he comes to the Rushes, Endore is seldom more aware of its power than when the bar abandons its casualties to the wasted street. Squads of men linger outside. Some still hope for a connection, made those last moments, that will save them from aloneness—tonight—or from the deeper caverns of the sexhunt. In their uniforms of defiant masculinity—slightly tarnished now—they exude a collective desperate beauty, a desperate sexuality, dozens and dozens of men waiting, just waiting. Eyes searching, they stand alone, lean against smirched walls. No matter how cruel the Rushes may have been, it protected them from a vaster cruelty outside.

  Now the mass of men begins to separate.

  Endore looks at the sprawling waterfront.

  A desolate scenery of gray and black shadows is almost extinguished toward the edge of the water, the end of the land, before total darkness.

  A breeze pushes at the sweaty heat. It stirs the rotten exhalations from the piers—a psychic poison. The warehouses cut giant gravestones into the electric orange scrim created by the streetlights.

  Within the hypnotized night, the lingering men outside the Rushes stir. Behind them, the Rushes–unsated–gathers its energy to pull them back tomorrow. Now men move into the aisles between the meat trucks or toward the blotting darkness of the piers. Feet will further crush the blight. Along the spilling blocks, dark doorways and walls will shelter other waiting bodies.

  In the scarred apartment building across from the trucks, dim lights frame denuded men inviting floating forms below.

  Hot vapor coats the streets. Reflections of broken light quiver on the oiled grime gleaming like vinyl.

  The black arrogant limousine purrs in the sullied light. The tiny form of Lyndy, smaller from this distance, so much smaller, bends toward the lowered black window of the car. Her darkened lips instruct the chauffeur. Then she crosses the street to join the tall imposing form of Martin.

  He will attempt to get her into the Rack, Endore knows.

  Unable to face Endore among the stragglers choosing among the trucks, the piers, the Rack, Don hides in the declined entrance to a locked building. Earlier, he was relieved to find that the shirtless youngman was gone from the street; he did not want even to glimpse the taunting presence. In the clasped shadows behind him now, three or four bodies toss in slow sexual convulsions. Don looks away.

  Next to the Rushes, a new life has begun to thrive.

  Taxis, private cars, motorcycles converge. Squads of men come on foot. Most but not all are dressed in leather and metal, some in authoritarian uniforms. Even bared flesh is decorated with linked chains, intertwined black belts, studded crossed straps, cut whips. In the Rushes, there was not the cumulative black austerity coalescing here. The black, enchained leather uniforms have assumed the solemnity of the sacramental vestments of officiants at a rite.

  Under the rotting iron skeleton of a rusted fire ladder outside, the men will move up the leprous corridor, past the tough guards blocking out “undesirables”—“Strict Dress Code No Fats Femmes Over35s,” the posted sign warns–and into the maw of the created ruins of the Rack. Some of the men have waited all night, waking for these moments. Whetted or still unsatisfied, others return from earlier encounters. Resuscitated after the hiatus in the hunt between Last Call and now, some men move from the dormant Rushes and to the Rack. It flanks the Rushes like an inevitable extension, separated only by a decaying wall, a partition which may one day topple, joining the two in irresistible power.

  Endore watches the mass gathering across the street. More cabs and cars arrive, depositing men. Some will change inside into their decorated leather. There is an awed traumatized seriousness. Endore has not been there since before he met Michael. He’s aware of its pulling emanations, this hot, cool night. He looks away from the procession of leather and silver. He sees a familiar form. It is. No, it isn’t—. . .

  Robert is standing alone across the street. Endore does not take a step toward the youngman. Instead, he slides into a cove of darker night. No more is possible between him and Robert. There was a beginning, a middle, and an end. An end. What happened—like what happened between him and Michael—will continue only in memory, that real.

  The hustler is back! Don saw the young figure from where he still waits to escape from Endore’s sight. After a groaning convolution, one body untangled itself from the sexual knot in the shadows behind him. Two others joined, pulled by the sighs, the slide of flesh on flesh. Don doesn’t dare look back. Doesn’t dare be lured. No, it isn’t the hustler, he realizes with relief; it’s the boy in the bar. They look so much alike.

  The violent scraping of brakes on the wet pavement—a car stops. Alerted to the recurrent battering violence sweeping the waterfront this first hot night, men on the street tense. The car stops only for a moment. It does not spill out the angry plunderers, only a shirtless youngman. Tim does not wave back at the driver of the car. He still holds, warming it, allowing it to warm him, the money his second client of the night just paid him. Holding his breath, Tim watches the stark dark-leathered men ascending the steps to the Rack.

  Across the street, Robert waits. He has not seen Endore. Gauging the youngman’s interest, figures lean against the wall, cruising him.

  Endore recognizes Tim. He remembers the face mellowed by terror when the invaders flung their curses at them and he and the youngman touched against the wall. The long eyelashes. No, Robert’s. The youngman next to him, too, had—. . . Grasping, the possible connective meaning, he looks at the two youngmen.

  Frozen on opposite corners, Robert and Tim stare at each other.

  The shirtless hustler is back, Don knows. And he’s running–. . .

  Tim runs across the street.

  . . .—toward the youngman Endore and Chas talked to in the bar.

  Robert starts to dash away. He stops, waits. He faces Tim.

  From the distance, Endore hears exacerbated words, and he understands the confrontation.

  “What the fuck you doin here?” Tim asks Robert.

  “I was just–. . . Walking. I–. . .” Robert wavers.

  Figures slide into the muddy maze of trucks.

  “Were you in that queer bar? That Rus
hes?”

  “Hell, no!” Robert denies. Then: “Yeah! But I didn’t know who—. . . You said—. . .”

  “You were in that queer bar, my own little brother in a fucking queer bar!” Tim rails as if he’s been wounded.

  More men are entering the Rack, more menacing black and silver. The emaciated bulb over the entrance creates a shredded veil through which they pass.

  “I told you, I was just walking past.” Then Robert’s words bolt out: “Yeah, Tim, I was in that qu—. . . in that bar, yeah!”

  The hypnotized night is violated by the sound of their voices.

  Tim tries to hide the money he just hustled. It’s crushed in his fist

  Robert understands: “That’s how you get your bread; all this time you were lying about—. . .” But he’s relieved. Listening to Tim so many nights when he came back late, Robert would lie on his bed and hate himself for allowing the aroused voice of his brother to narrate his violent encounters with “queers.” Later; excitement at war with fear, Robert would sever the described figures from the violence, converting them into sexual fantasies. It was out of those that “Endore” arose.

  “Don’t call me a liar, cocksucker!”

  Robert winces.

  Tim withdraws. “I’m really sorry I said that, but, look man. that word don’t mean nothing unless you’re a fag.”

  From the piers, as if rising out of the vaporescence on the streets, other men are transferring to the Rack to avoid the damning dawn.

  Tim’s voice is firm: “I asked you: What were you doin hangin out with the fags?”

  “What do you do for the bread you were hiding?” Robert questions back.

  “Nothin! I just take ‘em. And if you go for bread and don’t do nothin’, that don’t make you nothin!”

  They’re going to go home together, those two beautiful boys. If it weren’t for that affronting possibility, Don would feel a spark of triumph. He outlasted the bunched men, did not try to join. He can’t see Endore now. Still, he waits. They seem angry, though, the two youngmen. There’s so much anger, he thinks. Was there always this much and I don’t remember it?