Numbers

by John Rechy

  As Johnny drives by, he and the curly-haired youngman wearing the sailor cap look at each other—and—two of a kind—they both turn away immediately after.

  As Paul Revere and the Raiders groan over the radio:

  Hungry for those good things, baby,

  Hungry through and through;

  I’m hungry for that good life, baby—. . .

  Johnny parks in the islet of dirt and sand before the Trail. As before, he stands exhibiting himself on the mound there.

  The first person who stopped annoyed him badly. “Are you a dancer?” the man asked him through the window of his car.

  Johnny changed his stance quickly. “No!” he said curtly, deepening his voice, irritated at being taken for a dancer.

  “An actor?” the man persists.

  Oh, for chrissake! “No, man!”

  “It’s just that you’re so goodlooking and you’ve got such a beautiful body.” The man senses Johnny’s annoyance.

  That calms him down somewhat.

  But the man bugs the scene again. “Is that really all tan?”

  Now what the hell does he think it is? Johnny decides to ignore him.

  “I bet you’re a ‘traveling salesman,’” the man persists, his meaning unequivocal: He’s pegged Johnny as a tramping hustler.

  The man continues to sit in his car staring at him. Johnny continues to ignore him, still exhibiting himself on the mound so someone else will stop and hopefully drive this guy away.

  Suddenly Johnny realizes the man is jerking off looking at him. He pretends not to notice, but it pleases his vanity; and he flexes his body exhibitionistically for the man, who, after a few seconds—evidently having come—drives off.

  Then: Long, long minutes elapse.

  A longer time.

  Johnny avoids looking at his watch.

  Cars pass, pause, move on.

  More empty time!

  I’m looking too rough! Johnny reasons. Indeed, since the man took him for a dancer, he’s been clenching his fists. Because: a dancer wouldn’t stand that butch!

  “Please!—just stand over me and let me jerk you off on me!” the man pleads, thrusting himself on the dirt while Johnny straddles him (with difficulty because of his pants dropped down over his boots). They’re by the water tank at the base of the Trail.

  The face Johnny looks down on radiates desire.

  The man has Johnny’s cock in his hand, trying to jerk him off in that position. But Johnny can’t come that way right now—he’s only semihard. Bending at the knees, he tries pulling himself off into the man’s open mouth. At last he comes: on the other’s tongue—weakly.

  A few moments later he’s standing by the road alone again.

  Now Johnny has come three times, four people have made it with him and many more have wanted to, one jerked off just watching him. And what does he feel? A screaming need still unfulfilled.

  He panics when he finally looks at his watch: It’s 4:30! He’s been here since morning—longer than yesterday—and he’s made it with the same number.

  I’ll stay around and make it just one time more than yesterday, and then I’ll leave for sure, he tells himself.

  Driving down the road. Now-that he’s familiar with this area of the park, it doesn’t seem so vast as it did at first; he moves like an animal in his jungle. (He’s even begun to recognize some men by their cars. Like: the white convertible: the scary man with the two X’s; he’s back, probably just got off work.) For these three days the park has become his world.

  My world!

  Shit, no! he rejects the thought.

  Not mine!

  To prove it, he decides to leave the park now—skip the fifth.

  But as he drives past the Forest and sees two cars, he thinks:

  Five.

  He waits in the Nest.

  The curly-haired youngman swaggers in. Shirtless too now—but he’s still wearing the sailor cap.

  His car, which Johnny would have recognized, wasn’t one of the two parked outside by the road; and so Johnny wonders if he saw his car and actually came here looking for him.

  Suddenly Johnny knows there could be no more decisive triumph in this crazy battle they’ve been waging since morning than for this youngman to come on with him.

  But neither is looking at the other. They just stand there—although: To someone else looking on impartially they might seem to be swaying sideways toward each other. In fact, the curly-haired youngman has let his knuckles touch Johnny’s. Casually: as if it Just Happened accidentally.

  Okay, okay, thinks Johnny, remembering what Danny said on the beach about wrestling, guys touch knuckles. But he breaks the contact after hardly a few moments. He begins to rub his own cock; the curly-haired youngman rubs his own. Johnny looks away; the other does too. Like children playing follow-the-leader. Boldly, Johnny brings out his prick, works it up, enticing the other. Instead of reaching for it—as Johnny clearly wanted him to—the curly-haired youngman brings his prick out and begins to work it up too. (That doesn’t mean anything! Johnny reminds himself quickly. Remember the blond guy in the bikini, how he played with his own cock and then—. . .)

  But, now, Johnny’s victory or defeat is contingent upon whether the other touches his cock. It’s got to happen!

  Johnny wins: The curly-haired youngman wearing the sailor cap is holding Johnny’s quickly stiffening prick—but lightly, as if undecided, evidently expecting that, now, Johnny will take his. When he doesn’t, the youngman reaches for Johnny’s hand, clearly to coax a mutual act. Johnny jerks his hand away angrily.

  “I don’t dig that, man!” he says gruffly.

  The curly-haired youngman releases Johnny’s cock instantly. “Naw?—then what do you dig, mahn?” he asks him.

  “Getting blown,” Johnny says.

  “So do I, mahn.” But, sadly, the cockiness is fading. “If I blow you, will you blow me?” he blurts hurriedly.

  “Hell, no!” says Johnny with incredible outrage.

  “Then me neither!” the youngman says.

  Cocks stuffed indignantly into respective flies; flies buttoned hurriedly pretending they hadn’t gaped open only seconds before.

  “Fuck it,” Johnny says—stalking furiously out of the Nest.

  “Yeah—fuck it!” the other calls out angrily.

  Anyway, Johnny thinks, he played with my cock—and I didn’t touch his!

  And yet—. . .

  Johnny doesn’t feel happy with his victory. He can’t help wishing it had stayed a tie.

  In his darkening motel room.

  Five! (For a curious moment, he hesitated over including the curly-haired kid of this afternoon; but then, firmly, he insisted: Five!) Four yesterday! Three the day before! Just one the day before that. . . . Goddamn that shit-ass car in Lafayette Park! (He’s beginning to think of that incident as though it had been deliberately planned: Is it possible? Of course not! Some silly-ass drunk, that’s all. But—. . . Someone from the other park, maybe—from MacArthur Park! The man I scared away by coming on tough—or—yeah!—the loony who ranted about “love” and then sucked me and didn’t even say so-long-buddy! . . . Oh, wow, mano, he tells himself, you’re too much! Some drunk makes a weird U-turn, busts up your scene, and you think he was aiming for you on purpose—oh, wow! Cool it! He tries to ridicule his potential obsession.) . . . Five, four, three, one. And three before that!

  For godssake!—I haven’t included Tina! No. Not her. Why? Just because! A reason! Well, she’s a girl—that kid’s mother, for chrissake!

  Three, one, three, four, five. Three and one—four! And three—seven! And five—. . . I mean, four—eleven! And five—sixteen! Sixteen! . . . Wait! That real young kid yesterday—I pushed his hand away and didn’t want him to (so it’s not my fault!)—but he did grope me! Hell, I wouldn’t include him anyway. He’s too young. Anyhow he didn’t really touch me—only through my pants. . . . Only if someone actually touches my cock, directly—. . .

  A rule! A def
inite rule. Rule One.

  And it can’t be the same one twice.

  Rule Two!

  And if—. . .

  Oh, God!

  Shocked suddenly by his feverish thoughts—jolted as if someone had shaken him unexpectedly—Johnny left his room impulsively to do this:

  He drove downtown, parked, walked to the corner of Broadway and 7th.

  She’s back!

  The Negro woman proclaiming doom dispassionately is back!

  Okay.

  Okay.

  We’re still not doomed.

  TEN

  “JOHN! You look simply smashing!”

  Sebastian Michaels hugged Johnny warmly. Johnny is so glad to hear his own name (the first time in—. . .!) that he doesn’t pull away as he usually does, instinctively, when anyone, male or female, tries to embrace him unexpectedly.

  Indeed, it was partly to restore his own identity that Johnny called Sebastian.

  A few minutes after 10:00 this morning Johnny Rio was automatically on his way to the park—when a furious rebellion against going there raged within him.

  A powerful fear seized him.

  Impulsively—just as he had called Tom—he telephoned Sebastian. “Oh, please do come over!” Sebastian said enthusiastically. “For dinner.”

  Not early enough for Johnny: The fear persisted, increased; and the hours till evening stood before him like an unbudging gray rock. Determined not to go to the park, he exercised until he was exhausted; he sunbathed, read, listened to the radio, watched television; but as with an addict in withdrawal, nothing soothed his shrieking nerves: He felt a physical demand for the park—a craving as commanding as those triggered by hunger, thirst. Finally it was time! Avoiding the familiar streets, he drove into Santa Monica.

  “It sure is good to see you, Sebastian,” he says.

  A small, slender, grayish-blond man in his 50’s, Sebastian Michaels is a famous writer of fine, serious, often beautiful, books.

  They sit in Sebastian’s lovely house in the Santa Monica Canyon. An enormous open window greets a lush vista of Malibu and the magnificent ocean.

  “But I simply can’t get over how wonderful you look,” Sebastian says. “Frankly, one expected you to have faded.”

  “Why?” asks Johnny—but he knows: People generally expect that those who flash brightly will dim quickly.

  Sebastian explains it more nicely: “One hardly expected you to become better looking in three years; few people do.”

  Johnny’s ego soaks up his words. And he does look “smashing”: A pale-blue silk shirt—two buttons open at the throat—clings to his body so sensually as to suggest nakedness. He exudes sexuality and knows it.

  Though the evening is warm, a fireplace stacked with wood warns of the chill California nights.

  It was on such a cool night, before that fireplace, that Johnny first got to know Sebastian.

  Introduced to him earlier by a mutual acquaintance on whom Sebastian happened to drop in one afternoon, Johnny—on a murky day when the sun doggedly refused to shine on the beach—accepted Sebastian’s invitation to call him.

  After dinner at a nearby restaurant, Johnny and Sebastian sat drinking by the fireplace. Tony Lewis—Sebastian’s young companion for several years—was away at art school. In rebellion against the hustler’s life, which relies on silence in order to readily fit any prospective client’s sex fantasy—and impressed by Sebastian’s fame as a writer of sensitivity and perception—Johnny talked freely about his frantic life, even about his increasingly complicated relationship with Tom. Sebastian listened with serious attention. Both very high—almost drunk—Sebastian invited Johnny to spend the night in the guest room—accompanying his invitation with what seemed a more-than-cursory press on Johnny’s thigh. Johnny declined; he knew that if Sebastian came on with him he’d be convinced the famous writer had listened to him only because of a sexual interest and not—as Johnny wished—because he wanted to be an understanding friend. Johnny needed the latter much, much more than the former.

  Very late that night Johnny hitchhiked from Santa Monica—and made it (parked by a dark abandoned filling-station) with the man who gave him a ride—and five quick bucks. Then Johnny asked the man to drop him off one block from Tom’s house. Waking Tom up, Johnny told him, “I just had a strong urge to sleep here tonight.”

  After that, the ambiguous incident with Sebastian was ignored; and Johnny would drop in occasionally from the beach to talk with him. Subsequently, Johnny even met Tony Lewis.

  “Tony will be out presently,” Sebastian is explaining now as he sets golden drinks before them. “And some friends of yours and ours will be coming over soon.”

  Johnny knows who they’ll be: two writers he met through Sebastian. Creative and sophisticated—and at times sexually chauvinistic—they represent still another aspect of the homosexual world—a world as vast and complex as that of heterosexuality.

  “Emory Travis,” Sebastian is naming the people who’ll be over, “and Paul Blake and his actor . . . friend.” In saying “friend,” Sebastian didn’t quite use the inflection which makes the word a euphemism for “lover”; he did, however, pause before it—as if he’s not certain.

  And so again it’s six days of Saturday and one of Sunday. That’s how Johnny remembers his life among people who keep no definite hours.

  “What have you been doing, Sebastian?” Johnny asks, longing for conversation.

  “Oh, they’ve finally seduced me into doing a screenplay—and from some absolutely ghastly bestseller: The Pope Goes to Heaven. Simply a trashy, irrelevant book—but if I camp it up, it might be rather fun!” Sebastian says. “Oh, here’s Tony!”

  Once preciously pretty, Tony Lewis in his 30’s has become a goodlooking man. “John!—how well you’re looking!” They’re greeting each other warmly when Emory Travis arrives.

  “Oh . . . John! So . . . good!” (They’ve never called him Johnny—perhaps considering that to be his hustling name.) “You look absolutely ravishing! Ummm!” Emory is a tall, skinny, fastidious-looking man of about 45. Soon after they first met, through Sebastian, he made a pass at Johnny—a pass which Johnny quickly discouraged for the same reason he declined to spend the night at Sebastian’s. Now Emory camps up his interest in Johnny as though he’s simply languishing from unrequited love.

  Emory, Sebastian, and Tony kiss in greeting.

  They’ve hardly sat down when here are Paul and his actor . . . friend. Kisses for Paul. But not for Paul’s friend, whom Sebastian, Tony, and Emory have apparently met before.

  “John!” Paul greets him with a handshake. “How very good!” An intelligent face compensates for Paul’s lack of goodlooks. “This is Guy Young,” Paul introduces his friend. “Guy—John Rio.”

  Johnny Rio and Guy Young glance at each other—and quickly away.

  But in that one glance Johnny sees that Guy is neither tall nor short—about Johnny’s size: a very handsome dark youngman with curly black hair and enormous brooding eyes rimmed by thick lashes. Despite his name—which is probably only his actor’s name—he looks distinctly Italian. Automatically weighing him as competition or otherwise, as he always does with others who are goodlooking, Johnny acknowledges a certain sensuality about him, especially in the pouting lips, the unruly black hair—which make him resemble a rock-n-roll singer—or, more, one of the moody dark youngmen who play (inevitably in black T-shirts) sad, sensitive, rebellious gang leaders in movies about Brooklyn or Chicago.

  They sit about a square table while Sebastian makes drinks for the others. Johnny waits for Paul (whom he doesn’t know as well as he knows the others, having seen him only a couple of times or so and never alone) to comment on how very fine Johnny looks.

  Instead, Paul asks him: “And how long will you be in southern California, John?”

  Johnny is actually startled by the question. “Oh—ah—I—. . . oh, a few days,” he finally stutters. For those moments he forgot he’s returned for ten days. “And what
have you been doing, Paul?” he asks suddenly, to change whatever disconcerting course his thoughts hinted of taking.

  “Oh, I’ve got a book coming out—I’ll probably have copies when you come over—. . . Sunday? Will you still be here then?”

  “Sure,” Johnny says quickly, no longer disoriented; “I’m leaving Monday—before noon. I came back for only ten days. I’ll be here four more.”

  (“Oh, so soon!” pined Emory.)

  “Then Sunday—for dinner.” Paul invites everyone.

  All agree—yes, fine, marvelous, wonderful.

  “And I’m working on a screenplay,” Paul continues. “Really a great bore. Stifling! But it might be fun.”

  Johnny remembers: In the land of technicolor, life, if it’s fun, is good; when it isn’t, it’s a bore.

  “And you Emory?” Johnny asks politely, intending then to ask Tony.

  “Oh, darling, how nice of you to ask. I’m doing a simply maddening screenplay—the most completely boring thing in existence: When the Swans Come Home to Roost. . . . About a revolution in South America. . . . But you— what have you been doing? You’ve always led such an exciting life!”

  “I’ve been Away—in Laredo—leading a very, very quiet life.” He wants to indicate to them that in Laredo he hasn’t been involved in the turbulent life they all know he lived here—the life Emory’s words implied just now. “I left Los Angeles in a hurry,” he reminds them.

  “Oh, I quite remember,” says Sebastian. “I didn’t know what had happened to you until I got your postcard with a picture of a . . . cactus?”

  “I pined for days!” says Emory.

  “He really did,” Tony confirms.