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    Numbers
    Numbers
    Numbers
    Ebook255 pages4 hours

    Numbers

    By John Rechy

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    An aging male hustler wages an obsessive battle against the passing of his youth in this darkly compelling follow-up to the cult hit City of Night.
     
    Johnny Rio, a handsome narcissist no longer a pretty boy, travels to Los Angeles, the site of past sexual conquest and remembered youthful radiance, in a frenzied attempt to recreate his younger self.
     
    Like a retired boxer—an undefeated champion—who refuses to accept the possible ravages of time, Johnny is led by some unfathomable force to return to combat once again. Combat, for him, takes place in the dark balconies and dismal bathrooms of LA’s all-night movie theaters and on the hot sands of the city’s gay beaches. But these are only warm up bouts. The real test, Johnny soon learns, will be in the shaded glens of a rambling park on the outskirts of the city. Through those alcoves, as a gallery of sexhunters emerges, he sets out to discover whether the passage of time—as terrifying to the male hustler as to the dancer or ingenue—has diminished the allure that was the source of his pride.
     
    For Johnny, the final proof resides in numbers. So he sets himself a rigorous time-table—ten days—and goal: thirty “numbers” to prove is mettle. But through all the sexual episodes, the self-indulgence which comprises Johnny’s tawdry world, there resounds the universal cry of a human being’s desperate need to be loved.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateDec 1, 2007
    ISBN9781555847302
    Numbers
    Author

    John Rechy

    John Rechy is the author of seventeen books, including City of Night, Numbers, Rushes and The Coming of the Night. He has received many awards, including PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lifetime-Recognition Award from the University of California at Riverside. He lives in Los Angeles.

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Johnny Rio leaves Phoenix to Los Angeles in the "early dawning moments when the world is purple". He is returning to the city of "Lost Angels" where he was a hustler, after 3 years of isolated recoil in his home town of Laredo, Texas. He is handsome, good-looking, has a slender trained body and he is going for 10 days, just 10 days...Johnny's new convertible car speeds in the desert highway. Immobile black birds ahead and "tragic mots-creatures" that smash against his windshield are a sombre presage of his future destiny.Arriving in LA he finds everything changed, the only remaining constant being the "Cloud" of smog that hovers over the city. Why is he coming back? "Once, it had been the most liberating of experiences - to be desired enough to be paid for". But now he has in his back pocket the 700 dollars he saved in Laredo."Johnny has ghosts to pursue." He calls his old time friend Tom who gave him shelter and treated him like a prince. He walks from Santa Monica pier to Venice West, where there once was a bar which attracted dikes, queens, hustlers, "heads" and others. He stands in one corner of Pershing Square where he hustled before, but nothing is the same anymore. Everything changed and so did he."We awll doomed - we awll go tomorrow." cries a white-haired Negro woman with a black bible in her hands in Main Street. Johnny walks away. He wants to be desired, he needs sex and buys a ticket to an all night porno cinema where he knows that in the dark back rows of the balcony hungry men will come down on him. "Does Johnny Rio consider himself heterosexual?" As a male hustler he would say that he never desired another man, he was aroused only by what the men did to him and after all, he made it only for the money. Now, he has no excuses. Men sit next to him in the cinema and touch him, but Johnny panics and runs away. "I want them to want me, I want them to... love... me, he thinks. But of course, he means 'desire me'." He gets another ticket to the same movie.Johnny awakens in his motel bed naked with a hard-on. Three... Three men came on him yesterday in the cinema, two sucked him and he came two times. He didn't do it for money but for the experience in itself.(to be continued)

    Book preview

    Numbers - John Rechy

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