Page 154 - Some Dance to Remember

124 Jack Fritscher

long-lost fuck buddies out through the door in the back wall of the Red
Star that led to the Barracks.
The Barracks was a four-story maze of fantasy sex. In its long narrow
corridors, men stripped down to combat boots and jockstraps. Most car-
ried a white towel over one shoulder and a bottle of poppers tucked in their
gray wool socks topped with red and green stripes. They paraded the halls
and stairwells bumping into newer and newer flesh arriving in those early
days. They cruised the open doors of the hundred rooms.
It was a golden time, those first post-Stonewall years with their
Haight-Ashbury glow. Everyone seemed young, because everyone was
young, born mostly during World War II. Drugs were for going up; there
was no coming down. No one had yet overdosed or burnt out. There
wasn’t the cannibalistic hunger one reads about in stereotyped accounts of
gay baths that always end up seeming like the scenario for Suddenly Last
Summer. The only diseases were euphemized as social and they were few
considering the shenanigans. Banners of LOVE, PEACE, JOY hung over
the City. John and George and Paul and Ringo sang about me being he
and him being me and us being all together.
At the Barracks, each room was a fantasy. Men lay back on sheeted
bunks, arms across their pecs, teasing their own tits, surrounded by huge
latex dildos of monumental cocks and gut-wrenching fists. In four-poster
beds made of heavy lumber, men with chinstrap beards and crew cuts
hung cradled in black leather slings, their booted feet spread high in stir-
rups clipped to the suspension chains, sniffing poppers, waiting for the
right man propelled by the right drug to shove his fist up their exhibition
assholes.
In other rooms, men, more top than bottom, straddled chairs under
the acid-red glow of the naked light bulbs. They thrilled the hall cruisers
with their dark threat of bondage and humiliation and real pain. They
projected the right Look: their thighs strong in tight black leather chaps,
their big chests hairy under tailored leather vests, ropes and chains and
metal clamps spread seductively around them, waiting, turning on and
turning down most of the hungry, horny men stopping at their door, wait-
ing for the right man to come along to be tied up spreadeagled, whipped,
tortured, and fucked.
The Barracks excelled at fuck-music. Over its loudspeakers, Chuck
Mangione lifted everyone to the “Land of Make Believe,” and singer Tim
Buckley, who too soon died of an overdose in an El Lay elevator, wailed
“Sweet Surrender.”
In other rooms, men uniformed like California Highway Patrolman

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