Night for Day

by Patrick Flanery

  I’d a swore he’d never turn.

  I’d a swore it was a two fer one.

  One of owwwaaahhhs. . .

  You can’t trust him either way.

  Can’t trust him won’t trust him.

  Never could trust him.

  Dozens of better directors.

  He’s had his day.

  Hire someone else.

  Smells fishy.

  Smells funny.

  His ears stick out.

  He’s gaining weight.

  Oily.

  Greasy.

  Probably a queer to boot.

  Give that Commie faggot the motherfucking boot.

  10. Murder.

  Contemplations were a drain whirling down, blue shot-silk planet at the bottom of time’s drain. Not as shot as he, dragging his feet with soles pressed on cool concrete. All of it shot to hell, this paradise and he, circumnavigating, shot-up without needles.

  Nick? Nick Charles? John called out. Mumblety-peg he’d play between the blades of that brown-cloth back. A new Brownshirt, Nick Charles. Again the young man clocked him over his shoulder, checking John was still at heel. He ducked his chin in affirmation, maintained the pace, afloat on currents of wet goodwill. He would kill in love.

  Sure, I’ll be Nick, says the Brownshirt, you can call me whatever you like.

  A red-brown streetcar stopped to vomit mouthfuls of lovers and John swerved out of their way, teetering as a man hustled him back on his feet.

  Woah now, you’d better get a taxi, mister.

  A taxi, yes, he could follow Nick faster on four wheels.

  You know where you’re going?

  Always. I’m the director. The prime mover.

  A woman in red waylaid him, hand on his chest. He liked the shape of her face but not the stubble sprouting through peach foundation.

  We could go somewhere, she said.

  I’m not sure what I’d find down there. John reached between her legs, got a face full of fingers and a scream.

  Monster! she shouted.

  Bulbs shone so brightly he had to cover his eyes, but the light wormed between his fingers, vibrating into blazing rings spinning in different directions, burning his irises – what would become of his Iris? – until he had to turn away and, keeping Nick Charles in his sights, fell into the back of a cab. Nick danced just ahead, scooting atop the hood, flexing his supple form into feline chrome ornaments as they progressed along the Boulevard, turned north on Vine – he could see the lights of Earl Carroll’s, head of a woman on the nightclub’s side outlined in white lights, beckoning John to come inside – then roll left to Franklin, flow up Los Feliz, north on Vermont – Live around here? Park’s closed, said the cabbie – and when Nick flew from the hood into the air John shouted STOP. He opened the door before the wheels were still. Slapped his wallet into the driver’s hand, the man palmed bills and coins, shook his head, and cuffed the wallet back into John’s breast pocket, hand flexing a moment to feel the beating of his heart.

  A cop at the park’s entrance slept in his car so John slipped past, patent leather jogging on concrete as the road climbed to the Greek Theatre. A coyote paused ahead of him, raised its paw, and trotted away into darkness, glancing over one gray shoulder. Paranoiacs, coyotes, always checking what’s behind them.

  From beneath the pines on either side a scree of teens tumbled, boulder boys in black, rubble girls in white with matching red leather shoes and motorcycle jackets curving over wheel-well busts and biceps. Seeing him in his monkey suit, one of the girls shook her head, harping, Get a load of that.

  Woman-hater, wailed another.

  A high young man stepped forward, spit, lit cigarettes end to end. We’re the Angels, and this is our circle, he said, nodding at the girls in red and white, and who is you?

  John Horatio Marsh.

  Never heard of him, coughed a barrel-shaped girl with ropy black hair.

  You live at RYC?

  Sure he don’t. They don’t got fine livin’ up there.

  Too old to be a vet. He’s a cop!

  I’m not a cop.

  Vice squad I bet.

  On the wrong end of the squad maybe, laughed Ropy Barrel.

  Said he was a woman-hater.

  In the distance the coyote stood on its hind legs, stretched tall as Mount Hollywood, gingerly stepped over the hills and disappeared into the valley on the opposite side.

  What are you kids doing here in the middle of the night?

  Kids he calls us! High Angel fogged smoke in John’s eyes. We’re here to play. Ain’t that what kids do? We plays.

  You haven’t seen Nick?

  I said he was a woman-hater.

  Nick your son, old man? High Angel sneered. Or just your punk?

  Nick’s the man who makes me cuckold.

  We don’t like no dirty talk here, Mister!

  I didn’t – I said cuckold.

  Ohhhhh! It hurts my ears. . . cried squawking girl.

  Why I oughta warsh his mouth wid soap.

  That’s some kinda queer somethin’ he’s sayin’.

  Sure looks queeroo.

  Hey, Bea?

  I’m over here.

  Well I wants you over here, Cicone.

  Yeah, yeah, keep it in the icebox.

  Queer him if he’s queer, Bea.

  They wants I should queer you if you’re queer, said the one called Bea, flicking a finger at John’s chest. So is you queer or ain’t you?

  Don’t know what you mean, John said.

  He’s trying to queer us, plain as starlight. Queering our fun.

  Queering the pitch.

  Queering our plans.

  Surely, madam—

  Hey, buddy, I ain’t no pro!

  Honestly, I don’t understand you, John cried.

  Hear the way he speaks! I said he was a queerer.

  Fumbling closer to the theater as a rock came flying from deep in the crowd, John staggered wide of the missile and watched it thump to the ground at his feet. Poor John, said the rock, forgive me.

  Man, look at him. His head’s queer. He took sumpin’.

  Look at the hands flutter. Patron of the Waldorf. I said he was a woman-hater.

  The Waldorf? Where’s that?

  Place your pops used to go.

  Why I oughta. . .

  Why’s he lookin’ at me like that?

  Are you Nick? John asked High Angel. It’s a very good disguise.

  You queer for me or sumpin’, old man?

  He’s queer as a coot.

  Let him go. The queer cull ain’t worth it.

  I like we should shake him down.

  It’ll only be queer money!

  Laughter all around. A second stone fell and then another, each one blinking at John, abashed.

  Look at him talking to rocks! You can tell he’s on the queer!

  Bea daggered his chest again with ruby-red nail. Why you lookin’ at my fella, fella?

  Because I know your fella. He’s the one who’s been screwing my wife. He made me cuckold.

  Bea spun round to clock High Angel. What’s that queer talkin’ about, Angel?

  Fiction, sweetheart! I ain’t done nothin’ to no one but you. Don’t listen to the queerie!

  You two-timin’ me, Angel? You cheat on me I’ll cut you!

  Come on, Cicone, I ain’t no double-crosser!

  As Angel and Bea threw down on the pavement, John crept towards the entrance to the theater. He had nearly escaped when Angel noticed, shouting, Our queer’s getting away!

  John pushed at the doors but the first pair were locked so he ran to the next, heaved, the doors gave way, and he rushed in, flinging them shut behind him. The amphitheater scooped uphill and in the dark he ran along the rightmost aisle, listening as the gang pushed the doors open again and pursued him, vaulting over the first rows of seats. Someone thumped a drum, another buzzed a harmonica, hands clapping time against their drunken chorus, ‘Kill the faggot, kill the faggot.’


  If only the goddamned cop would wake! John scrambled for the third tier, screaming for help. A rock grazed his cheek and he turned to face the gang, their blades flashing in starlight. He did a quick tally, twelve or fifteen of them. Nowhere to go but back to the stage. He ran along the other aisle, taking steps two at a time, but they closed around him, blocking his exit stage left and right.

  We wants t’ask you again, Angel shouted.

  Yeah. . . Is you a queer or ain’t you? said Bea.

  I am not, John cried, and in his own ears he sounded like Mary.

  Now that’s what you call a hypocrite! Angel laughed.

  Who’s that?

  Someone what says he’s somethin’ he ain’t.

  That’s this whole town all over.

  Laughter all round.

  Not like us.

  We calls ourselves like we see ourselves.

  So tell us again, woman-hater, is you a queer or ain’t you?

  John opened his mouth but found he could not speak. He shook his head and saw the coyote reappear, its giant nose sniffing the line between mountain and sky.

  Cat got your tongue? High Angel said. You know what we do to chumps who won’t talk?

  John collapsed to his knees, put his hands together in supplication. Murders are supposed to happen off stage, he screamed, as the gang pummeled his back, long-nailed fingers pulling at his clothes and hair, a boot connecting with his stomach, another his kidneys. They beat his head with sticks and stones, rakes and garden hoes, striking him until he could feel nothing but a soft gray fuzziness, a giant paw reaching down from the mountain to press against his chest.

  This is the end, John, the coyote whispered in his ear, there will be no dawn to reckon with, you will never have to make the choice, it has been made on your behalf, Angels beating the life right out of you, squeezing the juice from your skin, stomping the fat white grape.

  John tried to scream, but the soft gray paw covered his face, smothering and pushing him so that he fell through a trapdoor in the stage, circling down into darkness and looking back up at his body where it lay on the boards, broken by those children in red. John Marsh looked at John Marsh as if there had never been any connection between the self that thinks and the one that feels, and in sinking found himself descending without guide, passing portents of the day just past, before entering a red conical hell.

  At his death, stones wept sand and heated themselves to glass, trees dropped their needles and leaves, rivers swelled to flood. All the world dressed itself in black as his body, ripped limb from limb, was tossed around the stage, head kicked and stuck with blades before being carried to the river, floated off to the ocean, and borne away to other shores, where, temples dripping saltwater, he would face fresh insult: the bite of a snake bearing the face of his wife.

  John rubbed his eyes and when he looked again he found himself alone on stage, clothes soaked from night sweats, the truncheon of a policeman tickling his ribs.

  Park’s closed, pal.

  There was a gang. They attacked me.

  The cop looked around, shined a flashlight in his face. I ain’t seen no one but you. Hey, ain’t you. . .?

  No, I’m not.

  Sure you are, you’re what’s his name. Cocoanut Grove. Ciro’s. You get around. You’re in all the papers on account of your wife.

  Funny papers.

  When I heard you scream, I thought maybe you was one of them fairies. I mean, no offense. The cop reached down and helped John to his feet. You don’t look so well.

  My wife gave me some pills.

  What you want is a good night’s sleep.

  Almost too late for that. It’s Saturday already.

  Sleep it off. Need a lift?

  What’s the time? I lost my watch.

  Almost three.

  As they walked from the theater back to the street, John imagined how the cop would tell his friends that he had met someone from the movies, a man who goes to bed every night with a real live star but still scrounges in public parks for sex and trouble.

  Although the sky had too much texture, there was no giant coyote, and if there were not fifteen hoodlums there must have been two, swathed in red leather. John would go home, sleep two hours, and wake at first light certain he never wanted to be mistaken again for what he was not.

  Just radio someone downtown to call a cab, he said to the cop. I need to go home.

  August 30, 1955

  14

  Today is not Saturday, not this April 15th, but a Monday, although it is as sunny and warm as that Saturday in Los Angeles, some six thousand miles distant from where I now sit, except that when it is noon here it is only three in the morning in California and the bright sun I see from this terrace has not yet reached the Pacific Coast. If I look too intently at this Italian sun I will be blinded, although my eyes are already dim despite the cataract surgery ten years ago. I fear they will give up before the rest of me does and I will no longer be able to look out from my terrace across the roofs of this city to see the tower of Santa Croce and the Tuscan hills and the Arno, now tame after its spring torrent. Memories of those I loved – still love, since love outlasts life – continue to nourish me. I suppose you deserve to know what happened next, Myles, at the end of that extraordinary day sixty-three years ago, or rather at the beginning of the day that followed, which was not the first day of the rest of my life, because that would be too prosaic, but the first day of a new life entirely. Even that is somehow incorrect. It was the first day of a life beyond the life I had lived up until that point, a life with nothing because it was a life without you.

  Being a good Marxist – if ever I was such a creature, if such a creature is even a possibility since surely the best Marxist is one who believes in the continuation of historical cycles and thus the progression of the self, the endless evolution of one’s own personality and ideology – I should have had no problem taking a vow of poverty, even emotional poverty, living a life beyond possession excepting that which I needed to keep myself alive, foreswearing my estate like some good old Jesuit, like the new Papa Francesco who comes in the habit of a pauper, telling even all the atheist queers that we are not beyond redemption, promising us an afterlife in heaven, which is more than can be said of his predecessor with those Dorothy Gale pumps, red and witch-slaying. I had a pair made for myself by a wicked little calzolaio and wore them to Rome where devout tourists gawped and wondered, with my bush of white hair and dark beetling brows, whether I might not be the Papa himself, wandering the streets looking for mischief, ogling young men on pale blue Vespas.

  This morning the Arno is a river of light. Earlier this spring it was almost in flood after a misery of incessant rain that reminded me of the catastrophic flood of ’66. Now at last real spring has arrived nearly a month late and we Florentines, the indigenous as much as the naturalized, act almost ungrateful for the beauty of these days when the wisteria comes into bloom and fields burst with a cosmos of tiny white daisies. Only yes, the past, the past that is never past but always resting upon us in the mind of memory: the twenty-four hours that preceded the day that followed sixty-three years ago were decisive, although not so fundamentally different from all the other days I spent in Los Angeles over the course of the previous decade, not even essentially different from my childhood and adolescence and young manhood in New York. But the day that followed, the day that was precisely sixty-three years ago today by the Gregorian calendar, which means I am now a very old man indeed, was an extraordinary day because that was the day I launched myself into a life with no certainties but also no responsibilities. Lest you still think me unfeeling, Myles, let me assure you I did as much as I could at the time. I returned to the hospital, I drove Helen’s car back to her, I waited for you to regain consciousness, but you did not, not until the following day. Ever since the death of Noah Roy I have cringed from goodbyes, hating the hot clench in the throat, the way my chin trembles when I realize I have no guarantee of seeing the person again. Having lo
st one love so precipitously I could never thereafter trust time to hurl me back into the orbit of those I most adored.

  Forgive me for leaving before you woke. Forgive me for leaving at all.

  I took a taxi from the hospital back to Bel Air. The wreckage of my car had already been towed but there was broken glass and I don’t know what else on the street, maybe some bits of metal, scorch marks from the fire, water on the pavement, the shadow of blood, and then your and Helen’s car. I don’t know who moved it, but it was just inside the gates and I got in and drove myself home, so distraught I was shaking all over, my hands trembling, and I nearly had an accident myself. The drive along Sunset that time of morning was like navigating through ink, and coming over one of those rises I strayed across the center line. It is possible I had an impulse to end it. Although I did not actively think of killing myself, I wanted to be dead. There is a difference between thinking the desire to end one’s life and thinking the desire to not be alive, to be living no longer. Psychoanalysts might say there is so little difference as to be immaterial, that desiring one’s non-life is no less a violence to the self than actively imagining ending one’s days. Psychoanalysts want you to believe the problem rests in the nuclear family and not in the nuclear societies that produce such great unhappiness. I would never have thought of killing myself if it were not for the way we were being persecuted by people who menaced us under the mantle of liberty, but that is another matter. I corrected my steering, I swerved, I realized the risk of my own subconscious thoughts and so drove home slowly, taking each curve and turn with as much caution as my frayed nerves could marshal, for the greater part of me did not want to be dead.

  The house was dark when I arrived and I let myself in knowing that someone was listening to my every footstep. I turned on all the lights and when I saw the look on Max’s face as he emerged from his room behind the kitchen I was certain he had betrayed me, even though I had employed him after he was fired during the union purges. For several months I had suspected his disloyalty but had no proof, and I could tell that when he saw me he regretted what he had done. Perhaps they gave him little choice. He said nothing, just put a finger to his lips and swiveled his eyes around the room as if to warn me the whole house had ears, that my nightmare of hidden surveillance beneath the wallpaper and under the tables was not so far-fetched.