Chas swaggers past Robert. He pauses. Vest open, beer to his lips—held to them for seconds—eyes dark on Robert. Snap! The look between the youngman and Endore breaks. Robert’s eyes transfer to the figure of Chas. Clasping the look—a promise of more—Chas moves toward the bar, glancing back to hold the invitation.
A familiar figure here, Chas is still the object of much attention. The bartenders greet him—he’s made it with most of them. At the opposite end of the long bruised counter, Lyndy still sits, her pearls about her wrist, black lips pulled, eyes hungry. Martin stands beside her like an effete king. The leathered courtiers have paid their tribute–and moved away. Leaning against the bar, Chas surveys the area. No one who really gives him a sure hardon–his test.
A man sidles up to him. “You look real hot, stud. Can you get heavy?”
“Yeah, but not with you,” Chas discards him with a bark. As the evening moves the hunt into the sexual quicksands, Chas slurs his speech into a sensual growl, low, guttural; his grammar loosens deliberately. He hates to be approached by those he does not desire.
Avoiding Lyndy and Martin—for now; the confrontation must be exact—Chas moves up the four steps at the back of the bar. Forms crouch over the pool table. Beyond the heavy darkness at the back, bodies toss. Some action there. Like other times, he’d “force” an eager head between his legs, grope another’s heavy cock and balls; an interlude, a charge. But tonight he’s not sure he wants to join there. As long as the woman and that man are here, they inhibit him; he has to push them away, to purify his turf. Then he can move like a proud animal in it again.
He walks up the stairs. Many hot studs here—but he has not had even that preliminary signal his cock gives him, like an electric stab. He feels a hand grope him. A goodlooking stud, yeah; Chas squeezes the other’s cock and balls, tightly. The other does not resist. Then Chas moves away. His own cock didn’t harden.
Tantalizing, inviting, he pauses under the stained aura of its bleak light before he enters the toilet, a truncated tunnel redolent of urine. Sexual exhortations usually for humiliation tinged with violence pock the peeling walls. Outlines of swallowing mouths and engorged cocks are carved like scars there. The light is filthy yellow. Four men stand before the aged urinal, like a trough, sediment smooth as velvet on the stained porcelain. A man sits on a toilet. A round hole in its gashed partition gapes into the next cubicle, where a man in leather stands. The odor of poppers further taints the air.
No one moves, it is as if all have been trapped in a dream of squalor. Now Chas locates himself in the middle of the men at the yellow trough. He opens his pants, exhibiting his cock. Then he begins to piss, an unsteady stream at first—that disturbs him–then a gathering flow, finally a full gush-that pleases him. He looks down at his liquid discharge splashing on the soiled porcelain. In a glance, he’s determined there’s nobody here he’s attracted to.
Leaning back, pulling at eyes, he does not squeeze out the last drops. He shoves his cock into his pants. His fingers touch the moist spot there. Warm. His memory darkens as if the dim yellow lights had inhaled.
Outside, he makes his way through the packed bodies. He stands at the top of the steps, watching the Rushes. His groin stirs, yes, but at the collective sexuality, like at other times. He feels a rushing joy. His! His world, his beautiful sexual banquet, yes. A reedy darkness stabs through the joy.
From here he can see Endore. Don. Bill. Robert.
And Lyndy. She stands up. She edges away a new group of men who have come to acknowledge her power. Her hand on Martin’s arm, she moves away from the bar. Other men still turn their backs to her invasion.
Down the four stairs, Chas makes his way through the twisting flesh. Robert. The kid is standing before one of Chas’s favorite drawings. Two men face each other as if at a standoff; sometimes, in Chas’s heated mind, one “wins,” other times the other does. Very close to the youngman, Chas tilts his beer to his lips again. His torso stretches, the leather chaps inch down. Now he loops a finger through his thick chain-linked belt. He lowers the pants and chaps until the tip of the triangle of thick hair about his groin shows glistening. From behind the tilted bottle, he eyes the boy, trapping him in the tinted gaze. He holds that stance, hips thrust in challenge and invitation. Now he brings the beer down, down, toward his legs. His eyes are clamped on Robert—on the careless hair, the lean sensual young face, the lithe body—and then Chas feels it, the first real rush of a hardon.
Robert looks away. He’s afraid, yes, and excited.
Don’t move too fast, he’s new, remember, remember, Chas warns himself. Turning sharply, he joins Endore and the others. “The jungle is hot tonight,” he says. His growl imitates the roar of a lion.
“Here they hunt with their eyes, only their eyes at first. The movements are slow, like those of a dance,” Martin describes the rites. “Sometimes like a funereal dance,” he judges.
Don begins looking for a stool for the woman. Chas is sitting on one, but he doesn’t get up. There’s one near the black man—but Don can’t bring himself to go there now. He finds another stool. “For the lady,” he explains to the man near it.
“I’m back!” Lyndy announces, her hands open.
“So we see,” Endore says. “And so is Martin.”
“So he is. It hasn’t happened yet,” Lyndy pouts.
I won’t ask her what, Endore thinks.
She wants to be asked what, Bill knows.
Fuck if I ask her what, Chas thinks.
“What hasn’t happened, darling?” Don returns with the stool.
“Astonishment! Like Gide–I want to be astonished! You told me about that, Endore.”
“It was Cocteau who said that to young artists,” Endore corrects.
“Plus que chic,” Lyndy approves. “Je l’adore! But no, I haven’t been astonished yet. Amused but not astonished.”
“We’ll try harder,” Bill says. He glances at the Rushes, a flashing look, as if to snatch it away from her.
Lyndy’s head jerks, but her lips pull farther at the edges as if welcoming the implied confrontation. Thanking him, darling, she sits on the stool Don brought her. She gazes at the drawings on the wall. Her lips open, the tongue touches them. The lips close. Her look slices away. “Of course, there’s still much more to the hot jungle,” she says. “Is that what Chas just called it?”
“Oh, he can,” Endore says. “His credentials are intact. He’s fought in the wars.” Only the casual tone veils the anger. She—and Martin?—have not earned the right to experience either the joy or terror of the Rushes.
Chas nods approval.
“You speak as if one needs a passport into the battle zone,” she says.
“You do.” How quickly she perceived the arena. Endore realizes.
Martin’s eyes slice at Chas’s keys. “The placement of the keys indicates general position, darling,” he announces to her, “a ‘top-man’ or a ‘bottom-man’ in the quaint vernacular of the natives. Dominant or otherwise. The color of the handkerchief indicates sexual activity, mild to, as they say, I think, heavy. A silent language like that of the eyes. And often confusing.”
“How much did your clothes cost, darling? All that leather is expensive,” Lyndy asks Chas.
“Lots, custom-made, all of it.” Proud, Chas looks down at his sleek chaps and then he glances at the leather straps encircling his biceps. The studs imbedded there are tiny silver pyramids.
“I’ll use keys in my new designs—the new femininity!” Lyndy announces.
Chas winces.
About to rebut, too swiftly, too overtly, too clumsily, Endore knows. He interrupts. “The keys—left for sadist or right for masochist?” She loathes women more than any of the men here, even Chas, Endore purifies his campaign against her presence.
“Guess, darling,” she purrs.
“Then we should know whom you hate more, men or women.” For years the close antagonism between Endore and the woman and the man with her has hovered on th
e brink, the three—and Chas—poised in despised closeness and fascination. He may push it over tonight.
“Do guess again, Endore!”
“Women adore her,” Martin’s lips move.
“They loathe me,” Lyndy says flatly.
“Darling, I’ll get you a drink,” Don offers. Such unbelievable rudeness! And he needs another drink. Despite the often overt racism at the Rushes, several men are hovering about the goodlooking black man nearby, Don notices. How many more would cruise him if others wouldn’t see them?
“No, thank you, darling.” Lyndy indicates an almost-full glass and makes a face.
Don takes a deep breath, holds it. Fear tightens. Then anger. Just stay here, with Endore. Or leave. A whisper of relief touches him. Then he looks at the massed flesh ahead of him. Where is the black man now? Leave the Rushes! “I think I’ll venture into—. . . the chasm,” he says and laughs to soothe the last word.
Endore reaches out to touch him. Don brushes back Endore’s hand. Excusing himself elaborately from Lyndy, Don moves away. Good luck, Endore thinks. His eyes follow Don—but his look is intercepted by the figure of Robert, so out-of-place yet so beautiful in his unselfconscious clothes. Men glide about him, but he continues to thwart any advance by studying the bottle in his hand.
Oh, another one! A lumberjack in a peaked cap has answered Bill’s signals. How many has he lined up? He takes inventory. The cowboy—two of them, one femme though; he can locate only one. The aviator is silly, actually. The marine—yes, but that tacky leather guy is talking to him and should keep his shirt on with that waist. There’s the gorgeous muscular man in the tank top—of course, who could miss him? He would be Bill’s first choice. But he seems to be here just to be seen by many.
“I’ll go to the Rack tonight,” Lyndy’s voice is casual as she tantalizes again.
“We’ll see!” Chas says.
“Don’t count on it, darling,” Endore tells her.
“Oh, allies?” Lyndy glances from Chas to Endore.
“No, Lyndy, they won’t let you into the Rack,” Bill says. His mind shoots out memories. “Those ugly contraptions and straps. I went there with Luke the only time. He’d point out who he wanted me to blow, and he’d watch, then I’d suck him, and then in that one large room where they—. . . I did everything to get him hard.” Bill looks at Endore. Although the memory pushed out the words. Bill deliberately coarsened them, to assault the woman. But now the memory is filtered. “I fell in love with Luke moments after I met him.”
So quickly, so easily. Endore remembers Michael’s lips brushing the words against his cheek. The gentle opening, of the secret wound, with a mere breath.
“Ah! Since we’re confessing–. . .” Lyndy kisses a pearl. “We drove to the piers.”
“You didn’t go in?” Endore asks her.
“Not then, darling. No passport, remember? And, you see, my pearls—. . .”
“You’re not wearing the real ones, darling,” Martin says.
“Ah, non?” She frowns. “Vous êtes sûr?” She holds them out to Martin. “Can you tell, darling?”
“Of course not—there’s no difference,” Martin says. “There were two whores in garish colors on the ramps.” He looks at Lyndy.
Chas spits on the sawdust, rubs the spit into it.
“You remember them, don’t you, darling?” Martin asks.
“Yes,” Lyndy dismisses.
Oh, no! Now the marine is talking to the fake cowboy—and he is definitely the femme one, Bill sees. Where’s the construction worker? The muscular man in the tank top is superb. But he just stares straight ahead–although-. . . although he actually did seem to glance at Endore. Wait! The marine is alone again. Time to move in. “Excuse me.”
Bill weaves his body expertly between other bodies: he creates spaces where there are none. He stands next to the marine. He has short-cropped hair, he’s square-jawed.
Don sees Bill. I hope he doesn’t make out. No, I hope he does. The black man—. . . Just as well he’s gone. But his eyes strain. He sees the blond youngman who angled away from him at the bar. At least he and the black man haven’t connected, Don feels a slight victory. Bill’s talking to that man already, he’s so forward.
“Hi, stud,” Bill thickens a Southern accent for the marine.
The “marine’s” posture thaws. “Huh-I” he drools.
“Oh, excuse me.” The Southern tone evaporates. “I think I see a dear friend.” Bill flees. To an outlaw biker, yes: no keys, no heavy leather—not a Chas.
“Hi, stud,” the “outlaw biker” says to Bill.
“I think we’re looking for the same thing, hon,” Bill slips away.
He retreats to where the others are. From here he’ll scout the territory again. He has learned that when two assaults in a row don’t work, it’s better to retrench and start again.
Endore sees the blond, slender form of Michael walking toward the bar from the shadows in back. Beer in hand, he makes his way to the border of the area where Endore is. Michael stops. He holds his beer to Endore, as if in a toast.
He was so gentle, so vulnerable. Is he still? So eager to please me. Even that way. But he was wrong—I didn’t want that, Endore insists, he was wrong. What are the implications of that hinted toast?
Michael turns away. His shoulder brushes Robert’s as the two youngmen move in opposite directions.
Chas has remained silent, surly. His eyes stake the bar, returning always to Robert, each time verifying the recharging excitement between his own legs.
The youngman passes by them. Don’t look at them! He pauses. Eyes. Moves away. A step. He stops. Another step. He waits. What does he want? Why exactly is he here? Careful to stay within the sight of the men, he moves farther away.
Lyndy has captured the slow dance of their eyes. “What a beautiful youngman,” she says. Then she lunges. “Why don’t you be his guide past the jungle, Endore?” But she looks at Chas.
“He’s already here,” Endore contains his voice.
“Perhaps he can lead you out then. They say a child shall lead them,” she laughs.
“Not in the Rushes,” Endore says.
“That’s where they found Moses,” Martin derides.
“Is the boy looking at—. . . Endore? Chas?” Lyndy goads.
Chas’s voice is becoming a deeper growl. “A kid like that, man, lookin, and he don’t know yet for what–. . .”
Lyndy’s glance at Martin signals his attention. She licks her lips, as if the pearl she bit earlier were still there to taste. “Why don’t you go show him your hairy chest? You’re always telling us how successful you are, Chas—and how well you’re . . . hanged.”
“Hung,” Bill corrects her.
“She means hanged,” Endore says.
Lyndy forms a precious noose from one strand of pearls, the long one, and dangles it from her chin toward Endore.
She’s sensed the tenuous alliance between him and Chas against her, Endore thinks, and she’s moving to wedge them apart, but he will not allow it. He waits, not risking a wrong move. He pulls his eyes away from her tiny noose. Don is nearing the black man, he sees.
Leave right now, Don tells himself, never come back. He stands in the midst of the hunting men, all ignoring him. He looks back to see whether Endore is looking at him. Yes.
Endore closes his eyes for a few moments, to blot out Don’s painful presence.
Chas is quiet, pensive.
Bill edges away from the crosscurrents of tension. He’ll scout the bar again. He motions a vague wave as he returns to the funnels of flesh. Then he feels—yes, feels—the memory of Luke—and he glances back at the others, as if to thrust it back. He sees the outline of Lyndy’s eyes and mouth, black in the red light. The black lips part. He looks away, moving, and he sees Don standing next to the black man. Don is touching his temples again. Was he doing that at the exhibition? Yes, Bill remembers. Does he hurt there? His face looks a bit—. . .
Don removes his fin
gers from his forehead. The pain has eased. The black man is handsomer than he thought. Light, light eyes. Amber, Don decides. Even in this light they couldn’t be that clear and not be amber. And the muscular arms. Don sees the thick carved veins on them, the broad forearms, and his throat tightens with desire.
Endore looks away from Don.
“That kid’d be easy,” Chas brags. He studies Endore for a reaction. None. He knows Endore never advances first in the sexhunt. “I like them real masculine,” Chas seems to withdraw.
“The boy is very masculine—even without props,” Lyndy pursues.
“Yeah–. . .” Chas still studies Endore.
As if to break Endore’s silence, to push him against Chas, now, Lyndy asks Martin: “What is it slaves do, darling, in S & M?” Her tone is flippant, cruel.
“Oh, darling, I don’t really know. I think they kneel before the master, lick his boots, they’re called queers or cocksuckers in return, something or other, and they get to—. . .”
“Why the fuck don’t you leave the Rushes?” Chas counterattacks, looking from Martin to Lyndy.
The pulled smile on Lyndy’s face almost breaks.
Martin’s icy hauteur is unthawed.
Chas turns his back on them. Robert. Yes. Yet if he advances and it goes wrong—. . . An expert at thwarting rejection by swimming only when he has established that the sexual currents are favorable, Chas will test them.
Endore looks away from Robert. The confrontation he anticipated with Lyndy–and Martin-he did not know its shape; now, revealing itself, it is unexpected. A quick convolution of words has tangled him and Chas. She has split their silent alliance swiftly, for now. Endore does not look toward the youngman. Don—has he approached the black man?
Don opens his lips, to speak to the black man. The words don’t come. He glances down at the man’s brown arms, the veins playing there. Then he searches out Endore, for distant comfort, but Chas’s dark leathered form intercepts his view of him. Chas is with that boy!
Robert looks at Chas about to approach him. The black leather gleams red.