Rushes Read online

  It wasn’t him at the Rack, Chas thinks with some disappointment. “You’re always looking for a new lover,” he accuses. Bill looks particularly “hot” tonight.

  “And why shouldn’t we look for one person?” Bill asks. Chas would be so attractive without all that sinister black leather. A cowhand-he’d make a good cowhand, so lean and hairy, yes.

  “Why not many?” Chas asks.

  “Or one and many,” Endore says.

  Don looks puzzled. “That doesn’t sound like you, Endore.” he chastises. He doesn’t know now exactly how he feels about Lyndy’s presence; a brush of resentment. “I remember your column in which you wrote love is an unnatural state for queers. ‘Learned in heterosexual imitation,’ you said; I remember the phrase very well.” Especially when I’m alone, he thinks, when I’m alone, it’s good to think that being with someone else is unnatural. “Lwas reading it the night I called you—I keep my favorites of your columns in my desk–. . .” He catches himself too late. “I took it with me to read,” he revises.

  And so he called me from his apartment, pretending to be out of town, Endore knows.

  Bill sighs in frustration. “Did you actually say queers, Don? I’m sure Endore didn’t.” Soon he will raid the arena of the bar, but first he’ll collect more interested glances. Where is the muscular man? I hope he moves near the jukebox; his muscles would make shadows on his body.

  Endore answers Don: “I didn’t say love was an unnatural state.” Did I feel it? Or something I call that? And the icy pain. That is unnatural, yes. If I could, would I blot out the memories, quell the intrusive feelings? “I was writing about the insistence that we must have a lover–so many always looking for one impossible person.”

  “Not all,” Chas reminds.

  “Too many,” Endore says. “We even claim to have lovers when we don’t, as if alone we’re incomplete; that’s sad–and unnatural–whether you’re homosexual or not. And I was talking about the selfish possession of bodies we call ‘faithful love.’”

  “Amen,” Chas intones—and thrusts: “But was it unnatural, what you had with Mike?” He mocks Endore’s insistence: “‘Scuse me, I mean, Michael.” The knowledge that Endore was involved with the youngman—if he was—affronts him, as a deserter affronts a staunch soldier.

  When Endore doesn’t answer—and Chas waited—Chas drawls: “Your archangel is real popular in the back part of the bar, and you wanna know why?”

  “Chas, if you—. . .”Endore stops. Has Michael, with Chas? No. Michael’s not there yet. Yet. Was I right? And was that him at the piers? I would have crossed the street into the warehouse. The traffic kept me, he thinks, trying to remember what kept him other times, on the street, at parties, even—once—here when they both left, alone.

  Nearer them, Lyndy pauses with Martin to greet a familiar face, perhaps someone they have worked with. Her titled claim to wealthy—archaic—aristocracy is unquestioned, as is her status as a top designer of women’s fashions; bold, defiant, scornful clashes of the expensive and the cheap, the real and the plastic proclaim her designs—cashmere and vinyl, crepe de chine and dacron, voile and mylar, moiré and orlon.

  Martin is even more famous; a painter whose vast canvases render in minute detail the perfect angles and shapes of modern architecture; buildings, bridges, avenues, as if unused, never, to be used—a tectonic order unmarred by even the shadow of a human form. He is also a photographer and the escort of other famous women, the ex-wife of a powerful senator, the wife of a rock star, a drifting princess—obsolete women who feel safe with him.

  “And so the Mona Lisa of the chic gay bars has come to the Rushes with her consort,” Endore releases the postponed announcement. Often he’s seen her—surrounded by dazzling creatures of all sexes—holding surrogate court, usually with Martin at the disco restricted to the rich, the famous, the gorgeous—and ruled paradoxically or appropriately by a squat ugly man on whom they have bestowed the papal power of excommunication from glitter. Tonight Lyndy is attempting to extend her boundaries. Other men knot about her and Martin.

  “I hate that fag hag,” Chas spits on the floor.

  “That’s like calling Caesar a soldier.” Endore says.

  “That sounded like me.” Bill says, but he can’t laugh. He has sat with her and other beautiful youngmen and women, yes, at other bars. Now she’s here. Why? “How did Martin manage it?” he asks.

  “He owns things,” Endore says. “Property and people.”

  “Not the Rushes?” Chas asserts.

  “I heard a Catholic family owns it,” Bill says half-seriously.

  “Jewish,” Don says.

  “The fuckin Protestant Mafia!” Chas derides them all.

  Bill pretends to take him seriously: “You heard that too?”

  “Shit!” Chas hates any intimation of ownership of the Rushes. “I think I’ll go to the back of the bar and charge up; man, my big cock needs a good macho mouth wrapped around it,” he says. Lyndy. Her presence floods him with disgust. He went in full leather to her recent showing. He has always hated her, her assuming looks, her doubting smile. Why the fuck is she here? Why did Martin bring her? Chas begins to move away.

  “You’re running from them, Chas,” Don pays him back.

  “From that cunt?” Chas is indignant. “I just want a little back-bar action, two heads on my—. . .”

  Lyndy glances toward them.

  “Always bragging, bragging,” Don says.

  “Just because I make out, man.” She’s here, Chas faces. Actually inside the Rushes! His turf, his bar for communion. She’s here. Now Chas remembers the transvestite on the piers. Her words to him resound. “Tonight I’m gonna conquer me a real macho stud for some rough sex, man.” he tries to rub out both the presence and the memory.

  “Do you feel, Chas, that by saying ‘man’ after each sentence and holding your beer to guard against a broken wrist, do you think your masculinity is increased?” Bill jabs. “Luke was like that,” the memory touches him. “Every now and then he’d slip up on the wrist.”

  “But you’d remind him,” Endore’s voice is steely.

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “No,” Endore answers. He looks at the scrawled panel where the drawings should end. Did the artist just walk away from the unfinished “series?” Endore has tried counting the number of scenes depicted—14, 15, more, less—the panels meld into confusing permutations, figures connecting one to another.

  Lyndy whispers to Martin. Both look toward the four men. Lyndy waves.

  Endore nods. Looking away, he asks Don gently: “And our respected lawyer, what are you looking for?” He wants only to remind him of the identity he left at the door, to sustain him with the knowledge that he may regain it by leaving—although he knows how difficult it is to shed the iron spell of the Rushes. Why did he tell me he was out of town? Was he? Again, he searches the scratched panel. This time it’s as if at the edge of violence the series tangled on its implied nihilism. Did the artist die before finishing the drawings? Was he in the process of restoring them?–and that is the reason why some are bolder than others? Yet there seems to be a selectivity in the boldness.

  “Oh, I’m just looking for a drink,” Don sighs. Strange to see a black man at the Rushes. Don is staring at a handsome black man who just walked by. “Or for a new friend to add to my beloved small knot of friends. Or just for someone to talk with into the night. Actually I’m looking for someone to fall madly in love with forever—if you’ll forgive me my trespasses, Endore, for being ‘unnatural.’” He tries to laugh, but the laughter hurts. “My forever is getting shorter.” Again he glances at the black man. He’s standing against one of the panels—nude men grappling over some intimate object of clothes. Tonight the drawings disturb Don particularly.

  “No love for me anymore,” Bill reiterates. “But look at this feast of studs,” he says spiritedly. “They don’t all wear too well, though, you notice? First you think everyone’s so gorgeous, and
then—. . .” He shrugs.

  It’s true. The visual assault of flesh and sensuality does not hold entirely. When the throbbing collective corpus of the bar releases the individual bodies, earlier-extinguished flaws emerge even in the smoothing red lights. Several of the men are wrong—starkly—in the uniforms, others expose bodies not in the right mold for exhibition, still others offer up their masculinity early, some faces age in minutes. The sensual assault recedes, somewhat, somewhat, even more, yes, but not totally, never nearly totally. There is always the insistent macho beauty asserting itself everywhere.

  “Still,” Bill reassesses the situation, which may shift with his mood, “it’s not bad at all. That construction worker is pretty humpy—he’s looking over here, I hope it’s at me. I think I’ll go get a—. . .” He stops. Don is ready to release the accusation of attempting to avoid Lyndy and Martin.

  Chas has intercepted the looks from Don to the black man. “You like niggers, Don?” Especially now, he wishes he could drive Don away. Now with Lyndy and Martin here. And drive away the memory of the transvestite.

  “I am not a racist,” Don is indignant. “How can you, a queer, call anyone names?”

  “He said ‘queer’ again,” Bill marvels.

  “Maybe that black dude is as proud of being a nigger as I am of being a faggot,” Chas says. “You thought of that? Hey, how about it, Don, you hot for a big black hung stud? He’d stumble on your antiques—. . .”

  “Which he bought from your shop-pee,” Bill forces Chas back.

  “I was just glancing at him–. . .” Don begins.

  Feeling the presence of the approaching woman like light doom, and the tension of the remembered encounter with the transvestite like an invisible knife, Chas goes on relentlessly: “You want black cock, Don, and fuckin Bill wants another lover–. . .”

  “Oh, no,” Bill protests.

  “. . .—and Endore,” Chas lunges, “Endore is looking for—. . .” He suspends the words. He allows them to dredge into Endore.

  Endore looks into the depths of the shadows, as if to separate them. When the veils of red smoke part, he faces the abandoned panel of scrawls. Did the artist leave it deliberately blank?

  “What are you looking for in the Rushes, Endore?” Chas asks softly. His booted feet are planted so hard that the muscles of his thighs knot.

  4

  Deign to grant some part and fellowship.

  AS OFTEN as he comes to the Rushes, Don still feels an outsider in it, and is. In the homosexual world of the bars there are avenging ghosts who refuse exorcism: the relentlessly effeminate among the relentlessly—even when unsuccessfully—macho men; the faded “beauties” changing into “queens” and clinging to shadows and the shadows of memories; and the older men—often near-alcoholics—who refuse to disappear from the sexual arenas or to surrender to the isolation of tight dinner groupings of men their age and older, gatherings brightened or rendered even more desolating by an occasional, quite often discreetly bought, “boy.”

  Don is one of the avengers.

  Men his age–or men who look his age and are not “sexy”—are not welcome here nor in many of the other bars, orgy rooms, baths; increasingly, posted notices bar the entrance to “over 35s”–or those who look over 35. Even where there are no restrictive signs, such men may be banned from entering the “private clubs” because they are not “properly dressed” or because of a fire ordinance limiting the number of clients; yet others pass by. There are men, even older, who manage miraculously to continue surviving in that world, sacrificing their bodies to sweaty rituals at the gym, the male “beauty shops,” Don calls them. But those smashing survivors are very, very few.

  Masculine, yes, but not sexually so, Don was never attractive; plain even in his youth. So he became a “good friend,” a devoted listener, a good sympathizer when love affairs collapsed. He gave grand parties and made a point of introducing interested people—discreetly—to each other. In return, infrequently, someone desirable might accept his offer of a hungry blowjob. Or at a party Don might meet a friend of a friend, no place to stay; such a man would be welcome as Don’s guest, and then again Don might–or might not–be rewarded.

  Each time he comes to the Rushes—using his attractive friends as his passport, hoping people will think he’s involved with them—he tells himself he will not plunge into the fray, not now, not later. He comes here to “visit with friends and learn the gossip”—and “queer bars” are where that happens.

  Happened.

  He knows that that reason is subterfuge, exists only in memories of an increasingly real past—the 50s—hued in ambers and pinks, the tints of naughty romance, when gossip was endemic–not really mean, no, at worst slightly nasty; how else did one learn about others “who were”?—what star went in drag?–who–who else–had been busted? You came to the bars to interpret it all, give it meaning. Camp. Have fun. Don could be coaxed to do an impersonation of Tallulah—which friends said sounded more like Ethel; but he would do it only for his best friends, dalling; and he wasn’t sure he liked it but they loved it and that mattered.

  No, he has not forgotten the harrowing “interludes.” The bars were raided periodically—he himself was arrested once for “disorderly conduct”—entrapped by enticing vice cops, charges dropped after many court appearances and thousands of dollars. “Just the usual harassment.” If the same bars raided didn’t reopen, others did. Nor has he forgotten friends who committed suicide in quiet shame at having been “discovered,” usually after an arrest. But in his mind those times were less complicated because everything was clearer: To be a “queer”—a word he cannot expunge from his vocabularymeant to accept being an outcast, and to hide at least half one’s life.

  The openness now! Magazines everywhere full of organs like slabs of meat. Books full of fucking and sucking! Men in the macho ghettos like sexual armies trampling out love. Sex on the open streets! Ugly marching demonstrations! “Queers” shrieking slogans for God knows what new rights. Oh, they still languish, look at them, but in macho costumes.

  When did it change? The death of Judy and the Stonewall Inn riot, when the “queens” fought the cops. For Don, a troubling death, a troubling birth.

  Why do I come to the Rushes? He reminds himself that there have been those nights–rare, rare, rare, but he hugs them in his memories as if there had been many such nights—when he has connected with a gorgeous someone so shaken by a rejection that he will turn to Don for urgent immediate affirmation of his power to attract. Don will bestow that affirmation. Other times–he reminds himself of this too–if it’s the exact moment and he dares to approach someone being avoided as “unapproachable—too conceited,” he may fill the other’s astonished emptiness, hurt narcissism—and he will connect.

  Don has always longed for “a beautiful lover.” Each time he comes to the Rushes, he screams for a miracle he knows will not occur but waits for: An extraordinarily attractive man will see into his soul and find what his plain face and body do not have. But no one looks that deeply—“any more”—and he continues searching, only in the most attractive and disdainful men.

  He detests hustlers. When they look at him “that knowing, mercenary way”—the way the shirtless boy outside might have stared at him if he’d given him an opportunity—but he looked away—he is hurt for hours, even days.

  He used to cruise the piers. If he saw any of his friends, he would usually abdicate the arena to them. Even the darkness has its light, and most often he faced brutal rejection there. Still, there were times—again he hoards these—when he would wait until he saw several attractive men, and he made sure they were attractive, gliding into one of the gutted rooms. Moving in surreptitiously—when the bodies tangled and the origin of one more groping hand might not matter or might go unnoticed—he would insinuate himself into the tangle.

  He has not been back since one lacerating night. The moon was so bright that the metal bones of the cadaverous warehouse cast black shadows. T
he water exhaled a cummy stench as it licked at the decomposing edges of the pier. Don attempted to join a clutch of sex. He was pushed away violently. He ran deeper into the lit darkness, stumbling.

  His mind careens from the horror of that night.

  Now, the drink in his hand gone, he discovers again that he has swallowed the melted ice. He has begun to perspire, longing for another drink, but he doesn’t want to touch his face to wipe the perspiration, afraid to summon Endore’s close scrutiny again, afraid to arouse the dormant pain. Instead, he glances at the drawings on the wall. Men about to shove another as if to pinion him against a tree. Ugly. The gross exaggerations repel him, the menace. The men in the drawings would resemble Chas except that he’s too wiry. Still–. . . Bill? Much too boyish and cleancut. Endore. Yes, they resemble Endore.

  Tilting the empty glass again, Don looks at the handsome man—his friend, his good friend, his good friend Endore. And Chas. So wound up tonight since he saw that “drag queen.” And now confronting Endore with that brusque question about what he’s looking for in the Rushes. So rude. But why does Endore come so often to the Rushes? Too often, it seems to Don this moment. Endore comes here just to be with, not in. the Rushes.

  “I’m prowling our jungle,” Endore answers Chas.

  Chas allows the answer, for-now. “A hot jungle, and we’re hot animals.” He holds a cigarette between his lips, the match in his fingers, ready to strike.

  Don leans away from it. “At times the Rushes is somewhat more like a cathedral,” he says. About the bar, rows of men stand in solemn outline against the walls.

  Chas misunderstands. “Where we worship or are worshipped, yeah, and that’s righteous, man.” He cracks the match.

  Don recoils from its flicker.

  “If Luke hadn’t been a Catholic,” Bill says, catching the interested eye of a cowboy walking in—he’s increasing his prospects for tonight, “maybe he wouldn’t have got hung up on all that spooky stuff.” The cowboy looks back. “That crucifix—Luke kept one over our bed, did I ever tell you?” He looks at Endore.