In the clearing, Robert does not turn away from them. He stands steadfast, and he nods to them.
They nod back.
The pursuing man retreats, slowly, bewildered by the youngman’s stance.
Robert remains isolated in the abandoned area.
Then the tension ebbs. The merging bodies close the open fissures. Elaine and Roxy have made it past the most volatile area and to the bar, where they sit on discarded stools.
Endore looks at Robert. He wishes he had done what the youngman did. Had he been in the angry aisle, would he have? Now there is more to redeem, he knows; and it is possible because Martin has not gone all the way. He abandoned the black woman and the transvestite, but now they are here, like reserve dynamite—which may ignite on different fronts.
It’s her, Chas knows, the queen on the piers. He confronts Lyndy: “It’s your fuckin fault! If you hadn’t shoved your way in, they never would have been able to come into the Rushes!” That kid Robert, he helped too-but he didn’t know what he was doing, still has to learn. But Lyndy and Martin knew.
True, Bill knows, and his anger fans out. It now includes not only Lyndy—and Martin—but the black woman and the transvestite.
In surrogate answer—looking at Chas—Lyndy says, “I think that adorable boy is dreadfully attracted to you . . . Endore.”
The face of Robert blends with another. Does he remind me of me? Endore doesn’t disguise his staring at the youngman.
Robert meets his look. When he did not turn his back like the others on the two separated figures, he felt afraid, yes, but their glaring isolation—magnified—reflected his. Robert does not look away from Endore. I cried that night. He remembers the late misty afternoon when his fantasy became real; he saw the man in denim, exactly as he had conjured him when he was alone in his room and his brother was gone—or so it seemed the moment he glimpsed the man and reality over-whelmed the fantasy. Amid the rot. Now terror and sensual excitement battle within him. With Chas he could not find the full origin of his excitement, and he pulled back from the man he knew was offering sex but not just sex, a special brand of sex.
A rough, then soft—smooth like velvet–brushing on his knuckles. Surprised, Robert looks away from Endore to see a man in black, black leather. The leather glove still touches his hand. Repelled, fascinated-attracted to the rugged man?–Robert pulls back his hand, but he does not move away. The leatherman lurks near him. To resurrect a clearer feeling, Robert locates the man in the denim shirt.
“And now that Chas is out, Endore,” Lyndy continues and snaps her fingers at the word “out,” “you could easily—. . .”
The outburst she counted on comes: “Who the fuck says I’m out?” Chas demands.
Bragging, bragging; he’s going to start bragging again, Don thinks. The anxiety is snapping like dozens of rubber-bands stretched inside, each as if pulled by words demanding to rush out.
At the bar, the bartenders refuse to serve Elaine and Roxy.
This time with all her force, Lyndy is moving to sever the delicate balance between him and Chas. Yes, the two figures at the bar threaten her—they sit within a quarantined hollow—and she is plotting her strategy. Don’t fall into her trap! Endore tries to alert Chas.
“Not sure I want someone that new,” Chas inches back. It’s partly true: Chas is not sure now, but not because of Robert’s “newness”—that excites him—but because, reinterpreted, the signals are even cloudier. And there’s the badgering presence of the leatherman, doubly powerful when he stood near Robert. Strange, though, that the leatherman isn’t wearing keys or any other sign of whether he’s a top- or a bottom-man. Perhaps he goes both ways. In Chas’s experience, such flexible performers have been among the best.
“The youngman is quite gorgeous,” Lyndy goads. “A trophy for anyone.”
“He shines even in this light.” Martin seems to join her strategy.
“Which is meant for us who have lost it, even inside,” Endore says aloud.
“Has Michael lost his . . . inner glow?” Lyndy mocks her own words.
“No,” Endore says. But has he?
“The youngman is so brash, so shy,” Lyndy says.
“It’s his first time in a bar,” Chas announces; “he said he learned about the Rushes because his brother and his friends come around to beat up on the guys cruising outside.” He wants to try out the information on Endore.
“Maybe he’s looking for queers to beat up,” Don’s voice is anxious.
“I’m sure he’s not here for violence,” Endore says. He remembers the youngman standing in the cleared aisle earlier. Now he feels sadness for him—brought here by the ramifying knowledge of violence; and that sadness floods out the remembrance of the youngman. The long eyelashes. He followed me that afternoon on the piers. The memory slides into focus.
“His brother might have been one of those boys we saw rushing at the trucks.” The thought excites Lyndy.
“There are so many of them,” Endore rejects.
“They’re everywhere!” Bill says. “The park is a jungle. They’re everywhere screaming, ‘Faggots, queers, fruits!’ I think it’s getting worse.” He intercepts trajecting gazes in the sexfield. “I believe I’ll go back in again,” he says as if to drown the echoing shouts.
The logger in cutoffs is alone! Bill stands next to him. The logger glances at him; eyes hold. The logger looks down at his exposed cock. Bill lets his hand fall, touching the hairy thighs, fingers spidering toward the naked head of his cock. Uncircumcised! Bill loves the uncut skin. The cock begins to grow in Bill’s hands. His fingers outline the moist ring under the delicious skin. The logger moves away. Son of a bitch! Bill sees him situate himself next to another quickly interested man, whose hand too drops to grope the exposed cock. Again the logger moves away. The bastard!—he’s counting, Bill knows. He’s counting contacts. Bill feels an errant hand on his own groin. Without investigating to whom it belongs, he pushes it away. Son of a bitch! He tosses his gaze into the bar again. The prostitute and the transvestite–how long can they hold out, without a drink, everyone avoiding them? The two seem to be looking in Lyndy’s direction.
“You keep staring at the youngman, Endore,” Lyndy says.
“I’m trying to imagine what the Rushes looks like to him,” Endore says.
“A feast,” Chas pronounces. “So delicious even heterosexuals are coming here now. We act out the fantasies they’re afraid to even dream of. We can have sex in one day with more people than most of them have in their lives. They think they’re slumming but they’re sniffing out our freedom.”
“Perhaps we come to watch what we’ve created and you call freedom,” Lyndy’s black lips frost the words.
“What you’ve created?” Chas snorts. “You didn’t create our orgy rooms or the piers or the trucks. Or the Rushes. You didn’t create them.”
“Didn’t they?” Endore wonders aloud.
“Try this. Chas.” Lyndy’s words thaw; their brutality is warmed—disguised—by an ironic tone. “We come to watch you as you wallow in the exile we’ve thrust on you and you don’t know it.”
Endore studies Martin’s immutable hauteur.
It’s true, it’s all true! Don’s thoughts shock him.
“Bullshit,” Chas says. “What you call our exile we’ve turned into the best rush. Now we don’t want you, but—look!—there you are!” He mimics her gesture earlier, hands out, palms up.
“So I am,” Lyndy says.
“Has it occurred to you that it is we who slum with you?” Endore says to her.
“Oh, try this, Chas—and Endore!—like Romans we watch the beautiful captive gladiators slaughter each other for our pleasure.” Her smile is intended to palliate the words, but it cuts into her face.
Yes! Don thinks. Yes. Anger ignites. I’ve got to make out tonight. Would Steve really have gone with me?
“Are you capable of other than borrowed pleasure, darling?” Endore aims at Lyndy.
Reboundi
ng, Lyndy turns on Chas: “I’ll make a bet, Chas: If you lose the boy, you call me darling. If you win. . . you win the boy!”
“Not sure I want the kid.” Chas stares at his boots.
“You do,” Lyndy moves to kill. “And so does Endore. Are you afraid, Chas?”
“If I want him, I’ll have him!” Chas kisses his knuckles.
“Leave him alone,” Endore says.
“For you?” Chas adjusts his stance—feet apart, one farther out than the other, yes, like that, knees at a slight crook, hips prepared to thrust.
“A challenge!” Lyndy triumphs.
“I bet on Endore. No, on Chas,” Martin speeds the momentum.
Chas lowers his cap so that he has to push up his chin to face Endore. They have never competed on the battlefield. The buried rivalry is untested. Endore never advances first, Chas assesses his own strategy. But the Rushes is unpredictable tonight. Pull back! “Wanna see who can get him, Endore?” Too late; the words are out. “Michael is here,” he makes a vague retreat, but a warning of a conflagration on another front.
Michael’s laughter, Endore remembers that increasingly. “Play your ugly games alone, Chas. Like a lonely child with your toys!” Endore turns his back on Chas.
Chas feels relief and rage. Yes, Endore pulled back, but he shoved the fight into an unexplored arena. “I’ll play!” Chas says. But why doesn’t he move?
“You’re afraid of Endore,” Lyndy slaughters.
Chas’s head jerks toward her. He brings his fist to his mouth, as if to swear: “I’ll make it with that kid, my way, and you’ll all see it!” He slaps one hand on his thigh. I should be wearing gloves, he thinks, pulling at remembered power lodged in his past. The rush of exhilaration bursts. “It’s not a gentle world that kid’s entered. No one knows it better than you, Endore. You entered it alone—and you’re still alone, and so did I, and so am I, and so did he, and all the others now and forever, alone.” He looks down at his pants, the black leather. He remembers the moisture there, that long ago time. First cold, then hot, it touched his skin.
“He was pushed here by his brother’s hatred.” Endore lowers his voice to exclude Lyndy and Martin from this intimacy.
“But he’s staying, and he’ll have to survive in it,” Chas says. “I believe in the Rushes, man, and it is what it is, and you take it or leave it,” he says passionately. He breaks an ampule of amyl. He devours the vapor into his nostrils. This time that is not enough. He brings it to his hungry mouth and inhales it into his lungs. His voice is a murmur, a growl, barely audible—the smothered music of the Rushes pants in accompaniment to his words. The afferent chemical matches its beat. Sexual images curdle in his whirling sight. “That man I started to tell you about—the first guy, here in the Rushes. He—. . . I was so hot for him and he knew it from my hardon and he stood in front of me without a word and he started opening his pants real slow and he brought out his cock and he pissed on me.” The last words fade. “He said he was baptizing me, and then—. . .”
“No, Chas,” Endore breathes the words.
The coagulated images untangle in his brain as the rush of the amyl recedes. Chas looks about him as if the echo of his words surprises him. He looks down at his pants. There is no moisture there now. From under the cocked leather cap, he glares darkly at Endore: “I’ll send that kid back to you, Endore—baptized in my piss!”
Don turns away from it all. He staggers toward the entrance. He can’t breathe. At the door, he stands looking at the jagged landscape. The sky is ferrous gray. Rancid air curls from the waterfront. The young hustler is outside—shirtless, his pants pushed low; waiting. I hate you! Don’s mind screams. I detest you!
“Will that make you more the man?” Endore asks Chas.
“No, you less,” Chas answers.
“Just make sure you play your game all the way with yourself!” Endore shoots.
Chas’s sight clouds. Not the amyl, not just the amyl. His vision opens as if onto a new clarity always hidden in the Rushes. “Watch!” And he moves toward Robert.
“Will you let Chas have the boy—that hideous way?” Lyndy pretends a shudder. This time she bites a pearl with her teeth.
Chas confronts Robert. He stares nakedly at the boy. No ambiguity now! Go all the way! Chas gropes his own crotch. Hard! Then, discarding all other looks of interest, he moves between bodies and toward the back of the bar. A few steps. He stops, looks back. Waits. He locates Robert amid the twisting forms draped in dyed smoke. With the power of proffered sex, he pulls at the youngman. Yes, Robert is following.
Dodging bodies which glide to intercept him, Chas takes more steps. More. He’s moved into a sparser area, to one side of the steps, so Robert can see him. Again, Robert stops. Chas hardens his grasp on his groin; the cockring tightens. He moves up the steps. Robert advances.
Extracting himself from the massing flesh within the bowels of the Rushes, the leatherman follows them.
Assertive legs spread, Chas stands at the top of the steps. Like this! he remembers, that man stood exactly like this.
Robert looks up at the form of Chas. The dying bulb taints the smoke umber behind Chas’s looming form. The leatherman stands beside Robert.
Snapping it like a tiny gun, Chas cracks an ampule of amyl and holds it waiting before him. The fingers of his other hand locate the buttons on his pants.
II
Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo.
8
We give You thanks for Your great glory.
AS OFTEN as he comes to prowl the electric city. Tim is still raided by excitement and fear as he moves like a night animal through the battered landscape. When he does so, he is determined to abandon even the vestiges of his identity beyond the night, compressing its experiences into a pastless present. The boundaries between the two emotions are at times indistinguishable; at times one feels like the other. Even when its scratches bloody him, he is determined never to show the fear constantly there. He conquers it by generating it. His stance and his swagger flash toughness, and a look of surly anger warns. That look slides at the appropriate time into a sexual invitation.
Tim’s face has a crooked angularity which augments his sexuality. His body has the deep outlines of a gymnast’s.
He just left an apartment where he went with a man he met earlier near the Rushes. Although the waterfront is not a malehustling area, Tim can make out. Even among the abundance of free sex along the piers, in the trucks, the bars, there are men, older or not attractive, who spill out rejected.
When the turf known for hustling teems with other young bodies for sale, and there are fewer buyers than sellers, Tim will shift to the waterfront. Sometimes he goes there first, without checking out the surer territory. He carries his hustling stance like a medal into what he considers enemy turf. And he connects there. But not as often as he tells himself.
Because he comes to the area of the waterfront in order to feel outrage and rage.
He loves to watch the men who hunt there for malesex. He cherishes the anger the sight of them elicits; it purges him, soothes him. When they know or suspect he’s hustling, he affronts them, and they look away, as he does—glancing at them as they move often in their strange costumes into the weird bars. When he shoots his cum later with a client, it is as if he has fired his anger like a gun at all the sights he collected.
Earlier, he asked the man he went home with for $10 more than he agreed to, “for cab fare.” He said the words with a crooked ominous smile, and he got the money, as he usually does. As always, he hated the man who licked his stripped body and gave him a fierce hardon. When he came into the man’s mouth—shutting his eyes, pushing his cock as if to choke the man—his fists bunched. There is always that moment in which he is sure he will batter the retreating head. But the next moment he feels a wrenching in his stomach, which weakens him, as when a blow connects. His hands remain fists for only seconds. Then they open up, exhausted as if they have done invisible battle. He feels the men
who pick him up pay him to hate them, and he feels they hate him even while desiring him.
Unfair! he screams, because his only moment of importance in the crushing world is when he comes—or so he feels—and he grasps those moments that form a sextime which he knows is short, leaving him with nothing more when it—but not he—dies. He has seen young, very young ghosts haunting the streets.
Those feelings occur each time he hustles. Tonight’s fusion of excitement and fear veers toward heated terror, panic, a cumulative rage which pleads to free itself.
The night fluctuates between the last of a cool spring and the first of a panting summer. His sweat cools as he walks—his shirt unbuttoned—along the upper part of the city’s main street—wide, long, a buzzing electric vein. He sees the mobs of people ignoring him and each other and the madness bursting everywhere; a tattered woman rips at imaginary figures ripping back at her, and Tim watches as if to give his fear or sorrow or anger an object. She snatches at the air, her body contracts, and then releases the tension as if for only a moment she has slain the horror. He moves on. On greenish-brown benches others sit traumatized like sacrifices to the street. The buzz is nervous.
When did tonight’s new terror begin?
There are times when it is-the city that makes him ache, ache with anger; so beautiful, this concrete jungle, trying to survive the raining filth, as if it knows it’s dying. Other nights he focuses on the giant buildings stabbing at the sky, which seems lowered each year by a new layer of filthy clouds. Iron, steel, cement, the buildings—at times they crush him tiny; other times he searches the sharp angles of light and dark they create, shoving himself in and out of them to become a part of their ordered patterns.