Rushes Read online

  Don waits for Endore to answer. Tell him! When Endore says nothing. Don sighs. “And that’s why at the Rushes, I’m not worth a damn. This moment I’d give all that I am outside to be–. . .”

  “No, Don!” Endore tries to stop him.

  “. . .—to be desired by someone beautiful.” Don finishes. He looks from Endore to the black man; has he followed me here? he wonders. No. Don looks at the bar through his glass, empty again: The bodies trapped in the red smoke seem to be grappling with each other.

  It is another world, the Rushes. Bill thinks. I forget, whenever I’m away: we all change, and even more as the evening goes on. He adds a man in a Western and brown-leather combination to his possibilities. Visually right. But when Bill moves in, who of the men he’s signaled will hold up? Will they reject him! the doubt pushes. “Sometimes Luke and I would stay at home,” he remembers a time when he was away from the Rushes. “All I really asked was to give myself totally to him.”

  “And that’s all.” Endore’s words are tense.

  Bill frowns. “Luke made the rules, he was the dominant one.” Even when he stopped getting hard. Yes, he would lie there, Luke, eyes staring; pulling at his own cock which would lie relentlessly limp, his naked body wiped with the oil Bill rubbed on it. “I don’t mind, baby,” he would tell Luke, and it was true. He would lick the prone body: “Just lie there.” Bill says aloud now: “I know Luke blamed me for God knows what sometimes, but it wasn’t me who was weird. One time he kept insisting I tell him I loved him, between my sucking–. . .” He stops. “It was spooky.”

  “We have to find love.” Don wonders whether he slurred any word.

  “Not every night, not every moment. Not even ever!” Endore says. “Then when–if–we find it–. . .” He is surprised by his overt anger. He searches the growing mass of bodies; has it thrust Michael out? He can’t locate the familiar body.

  At the entrance the red darkness parts. Gauzy in the smoke, a figure stands there. As always, the attention shifts to the door when the darkness separates allowing a fresh warrior into the arena. As the waves of smoke melt, the figure forms into that of a handsome youngman, not tall, quite young. He is bringing out some identification to show the man at the door.

  “You sure this is your age?” he asks the youngman.

  “Yeah,” the youngman says. “Bobby–I mean, Robert. See? Legal age plus three days. I’ve been legal three days, man.”

  The man at the door says hostilely, “If you’re here to hustle or–. . .”

  “What?”

  “Hustle. Sell it, sell your body. If you’re here for that, you’re in the wrong place. Stay outside with the other punks, or go uptown where—. . .”

  “I’m not here to hustle.”

  The man allows him in. The youngman is sucked into the field of attention. He advances. Apprehensively. Cockily. Shyly. Not wearing any hint of a uniform, he looks out of place in a loose ordinary shirt and unselfconscious jeans, scuffed tennis shoes. Only his young beauty provided him entry. His hair is dark, curly; the face is lean, bones already asserting beautiful angles. The loose clothes do not disguise the coltish body.

  The four men are looking at the youngman. They heard scattered words which told them this is his first time in a bar.

  Endore tries to remember his first entrance into the Rushes. But too many subsequent memories, of entrances—and exits—have absorbed the first one. There was a choking excitement, yes, but there always is.

  Looking at Robert, Chas’s mind bolts back. His own first time at the Rushes. Behind the black shroud that threatens to snuff the memory of excitement lurks a dark figure. Chas watched. Now he looks at the youngman. Was I that obviously new my first time?

  Robert moves into the sparser area where the four men stand, lean against the post there, sit on stools.

  “Too bad his first time is in the Rushes,” Endore says.

  “He came looking for it,” Chas says ominously.

  Don looks in horror at the youngman. For a moment he thought it was the hustler from outside, but it isn’t. Still, memories scratch at him, of other faces, another face. No, it can’t be! “What is he doing here?” he says aloud. It can’t be him! “He looks too–. . .” He touches his neck; the pain burrows more deeply.

  “Normal, huh?” Chas confronts him.

  “He looks wrong, that’s all,” Don revises nervously. “Like a hustler.”

  “You think you see them everywhere,” Chas says. His eyes study the youngman intently.

  “Or like those boys that raid the piers; they look alike, you know, those and the hustlers.” For the first time tonight Don feels the origin of a scream.

  From a closer distance, Endore’s and Robert’s eyes connect.

  “What is he doing here?” Don demands.

  Endore recognizes the youngman. He was standing near the trucks earlier tonight; he seemed to hide from him. Again there’s the tip of another memory. Of crushed glass and rubble.

  5

  Show us, O Lord, Your kindness.

  AS OFTEN as he has imagined coming to the Rushes. Bobby-Robert-feels a different excitement now. Sexual arousement—his cock hardened—is flailed by fear. These moments are rushing to sum up his life. His body exudes cold heat. His vision blurs perspiration gathers in tremulant beads on his long eyelashes, it’s as if he’s viewing the bar through shifting dark red water. The next moment he feels tossed into the smoky ocean in which exposed pieces of flesh swim. Nothing he has glimpsed in surreptitious forays into livid-white sex-magazine stores, nothing he has imagined lying in bed alone remembering the men he saw after one of his exploratory incursions into their world, no, nothing his brother has warned him about-nothing matches the sensual reality of these men, all hunting sex. Reality has swallowed the fantasies. After prowling outside it for three nights, he is in the Rushes.

  The visual tide recedes, leaving individual figures like sexual jetsam. His eyes recoil from one to another: the muscular man in the white tank top, the tall cowboy, the blond biker, several men in plaid shirts, a shirtless man, another. His eyes float away. The hairy-chested man in the open vest, and next to him the handsome man in the tight open denim shirt–. . . It’s him! Robert turns to flee as he did earlier when he encountered him by the trucks. And before that, that hypnotized afternoon of bodies and haunted decay. Orange waves licked at the hollow sound.

  He wishes the music were louder–it’s like a growled hum—so that it would smother the loud pulsing of his own body. Is it his body’s? Or the music’s? The bar’s?

  Eyes. He feels them. He’s dressed wrong. Do they see the bulge growing between his legs? The man in the denim shirt. The man in the vest. When he glanced at them, they were taring at him.

  Look away from them!

  But his eyes are nailed to the two men. Bare chest covered with hair. Tanned muscles stretching the tight shirt. The black leather on the one. Did he notice it only now? Does it repel, frighten him? Excite him? No, it’s the naked chest, the arched sexual body. When he looks at the other man, in the denim shirt, he feels uncluttered desire.

  A chemical odor raids him. Near him a man sniffs from a small dark bottle. Even the wafting scent made Robert edgy.

  Run out!

  He doesn’t move.

  “What?”

  “What are you drinking?”

  How did he get to the bar? Until the bartender–and his chest is bare too—repeated the question, he didn’t realize he was there. Now he remembers the rising heat as the bodies pressed his on his way here; he kept his eyes lowered. Hands brushed him—. . .

  “A beer.” He stares at the bartender’s wrists. He’s wearing split handcuffs like bracelets. The compressed present is so overwhelming that reality is occurring in spurts of sensations and sights. Cold. He’s clutching the beer, an anchor in the waves of sexuality. Hot. A bare arm slides against his elbow.

  “Huh?”

  “I said, you gotta pay.”

  He digs into his pockets. Ch
ange falls but he will not bend to pick it up. A cool wetness on his chest. He blows on it. The beer has slid out of his lips and onto his chest. These men. So masculine. You’d never know they were—. . . He blocks his brother’s word. If he knew I was here! He shoves away that part of his life.

  Blotted darkness. He’s staring at the curtain of shadows beyond the pool table. Figures bend under a shaded light. The smothered darkness leads to a deeper one. Figures twist the smoky shadows. Sex.

  He’s back near the entrance. The man in the denim shirt. The handsome face, the body he remembers. I followed him. A shaft of sunlight pierced the tangled darkness within which forms bunched.

  The black leather vest, the exposed arched body.

  Leave now!

  He looks away from anyone who seems about to approach him. Would he if it was either of—. . .?

  Several men are about to tie up another. They’ve ripped most of his clothes. Robert is looking at one of the panels on the wall. The sexual figures resemble some of the men in the Rushes. His eyes glide over the panels—some faded, others blurred by the smoke, the shattered plaster. The figures seem almost to move. One of the men, jacketed, holds a whip. Robert pulls his ‘eyes away. To the last panel, swallowed by slashes and swirls.

  He’s looking at the man in the denim shirt, and the man is looking back at him.

  Endore continues staring at the youngman. A splinter of the insistent memory bruises his mind. The boy ran away. That was earlier, by the trucks. No, another time. There was the crunch of glass. No, the glass was earlier beside that other youngman outside.

  “He’s a hot little dude.” Chas raises his beer in a toast to the youngman.

  “He’s beautiful, all right,” Bill says. “But not my type. Too innocent.”

  Innocent! The word affronts Don. “ ‘Youth is no guarantee of innocence, and age no affirmation of corruption’—you wrote that in one of your columns, Endore, it’s one of those I saved,” Don says eagerly. His words are precise, to control any quivering. He read the column over and over. Each time he walked the areas of the city where surly malehustlers lurked, the memorized words gave him sustenance.

  It was a column about the young boys who attack the old in the ghettos, Endore remembers, and about the ones who pillage cruising areas like the piers, luring, then beating, even killing homosexuals. “But neither is the opposite true,” he reminds Don. Endore continues looking at Robert. “He feels ugly, guilty,” he says aloud. The youngman is trying so hard to look cocky as he moves about the bar; trying so hard to camouflage his fear, and he’s so unsure; Endore is studying him.

  “He keeps lookin at me,” Chas says.

  “Oh, I’m not so sure it’s you he’s looking at,” Don says. Pain needles his temples. A drink would cool them. I shouldn’t have come out yet, he tells himself. A few more days.

  “At you then, huh, Don?” Chas derides.

  “I’m sure not,” Don says. “But at Endore. Or Bill.” Is it the same boy? No, he wouldn’t dare be here. Would he even recognize me?

  The presence of the boy has diffused their attention from Lyndy and Martin. But her recurrent laughter reaches them in soft puffs of assertive sound. She will keep her promise to return. Eager as he is now to join the sexual feast, Chas will wait until he can declare his war against her.

  Two men walk by. Both are dressed in black motorcycle cop uniforms. They wear helmets, handcuffs, empty holsters, gloves. It is a uniform popular in these bars. The uniform overtaking the body, the men stand like rigid manikins.

  “Ugh.” Bill turns away from the two men. He dislikes that uniform very much.

  “My God, how can they dress like the men who arrest us and hate us!” Don says.

  Endore, too, loathes that uniform, for the same reasons. He rejects the looks of the two men.

  Chas feels confused now by that uniform. He used to be attracted to it, to wearing it, although he never has. The memory of the cop who handcuffed him has blurred his reactions. But he nods toward the men. He touches his groin automatically—no, the sides of it, feeling for a certain spot there. He pulls his burning hand away. He looks at it, a sudden fist, crushing memories; he opens it, releasing others. He remembers the chain he held at the slave auction; he dropped it from handcuffed hands; he dropped it into the water. The two memories interlock. He looks away from the uniformed men.

  They strut away.

  “The little dude’s ripe for pickin, go any way at all!” Chas looks at Robert. Bolting past the protective darkness in which his mind imprisons him in ambiguity, the submerged tenebrous figure from a past time stands silhouetted on the screen of his memory. Chas lets himself remember: He stood like this. He adjusts his booted stance, feet wider, hips tossed out. “The kid’s first time.” His voice is almost soft. “What’s he feeling, huh? Fuck! When I first came here–. . .” The hand of the remembered black figure, gloved, drops to his own groin. “I’ll never feel like that again, the excitement, the heat.” He chops the fragment of laughter rising. “The–

  “Fear,” Endore finishes.

  Fear? Chas frowns. “No.” He pushes the word away. He studies Robert. He remembers the makebelieve slave auction, the youngman willingly posing as a slave. He crouched. No, it was the man on the pier. The chain-he flung it at the cop. No, he tossed it into the water, which swallowed it.

  “My first time here,” he says. “I saw this guy. I’d recognize him even now, that’s how well I remember him.” His eyes idle about the bar. He laughs, and stops before apprehension pushes into the sound.

  Endore detects a tautened strain in it. But why is it so difficult for him to hear Chas’s laughter, almost as difficult as to hear his own?

  “I got hot looking at the dude,” Chas continues, to ease the memory away. His laughter begins again, is chopped again. “He actually pulled out his—. . .” He strangles the laughter by tilting the last of his beer to his mouth and allowing the liquor to spill over. Then he looks down where it moistened his groin. His hand touches the wetness. The interrupted laughter is finished. There was no middle.

  “Is that all?” Bill says. The marine hanging around looks very hot.

  “Yes.” Chas is solemn.

  “Well, that’s a let-down. ‘Pulled out his–. . .’ What kind of a story is that?” Bill says. Hot, yes, but the cowboy isn’t bad. Bill can’t remember, though: Was that the cowboy who turned femme so quickly? Was he a cowboy? “Really. Chas, what kind of a story—. . .?”

  “Shut up!” Chas shouts at him.

  Silent tension winds about them.

  In the trenches to the sides of the entrance, the knots of men are beginning to untangle. The individual hunt for connection, lonelier than any other, is pushing at the-serious part of the hunt. Friends turn into strangers, even enemies. Some men are leaving the bar together, ending the hot-night’s hunt. Two of them walk out, arms about each other. Two others leave, kissing.

  That doesn’t mean they’ll make it, Don assures himself. His hungry eyes follow them. Outside, they might see each other more clearly and then—. . . He smears his vision of them by holding the empty glass to his mouth.

  Bass tones of the stifled music beat like a heart.

  Bill feels the bar’s rhythms luring into the sexual vortex. He has filed the general locations of the marine, the construction worker, and two cowboys—an extra one to offset the one who may be femme. All those have answered more-or-less definite signals. The biker is too leathery. But maybe not. And the aviator—is he an aviator? And there’s the man in the army fatigue cap and combat boots. Most of those gave vague signals. Soon he’ll move in. But not into the wrestling shadows in back.

  “It’s the highest group high–the Rushes,” Chas says aloud.

  “Suicidal when it fails,” Don says. Why is it hurting so much more now than in the last few days?

  “It’s not for everyone,” Chas says.

  Anger dulls Don’s pain. “Because I’m over forty, I’m supposed to stop living?”
/>   Endore says gently: “At the Rushes anyone can be old when the night ends.” He knows the feeling of desolation when all connections fail and last night’s successes are wiped away. All the men here know it–he. Chas, Bill—no one escapes it—some just more than others. When tonight’s sexual battles end here, there will be those—so many—still glaringly alone, the strain of unsuccessful hunting pursuing the faces, beautiful men, unattractive men, all playing roulette with desolation, each night. Will this night slaughter them?

  “To be a good faggot,” Chas pronounces, “you gotta be strong. Otherwise, get out.” He directs his words at Don but cannot look at him. “One sex rush after another—that’s the reward.”

  “Not enough!” Bill protests.

  “Fuck if it isn’t,” Chas says.

  “Only if there’s nothing more, or when more has ended,” Bill says. Luke. Luke.

  All three men wait for Endore’s comment. None.

  Jabbing at Endore’s silence, Chas pushes into a new round: “Those rushes have been your life, Endore. You hate that one exception when you betrayed it with Michael,” he says with passion and shoves the combat beyond sparring.

  “Betrayed! You speak as if the Rushes is alive,” Don says. The black man. There he is again. Oh, God, is it possible he’s looking for me?

  “Yeah, and I’m loyal to it!” Chas hurls at Endore.

  In the sudden quiet among them, Lyndy’s laughter floats toward them.

  Robert looks at the men again.

  At Endore? Chas is an expert at locating sexual attention. Yes, at Endore. He relocates his booted feet. Exactly like that, that first time in the Rushes. He’ll break the kid’s look on Endore-ending this round now. “I think I’ll go look the jungle over.” Before Don can accuse him of decamping, he says, “I’ll be back.” He hasn’t broken his promise to himself to confront Lyndy; he’s merely made another one.

  Don wants to ask for a drink, but he doesn’t like to impose on friends–except in inviting himself along. The handsome black man is lurking nearby.