by John Rechy
3:05 A.M. The Garages, Yards, and Alleys Along Bierce Place.
As he drives to Bierce Place, he glances apprehensively at his watch. Still time before night turns purgatorial purple at dawn.
Several cars cruise the area, many men roam the alleys. An afterhours club, a bathhouse, a gay theater—these lure the hunters here after 2:00 in the morning.
Nearby, neat trim houses slumber cozily, unaware that for a distance of about three blocks and lasting till just before dawn, orgies will recur in their garages, yards; under stairs, unlocked patios, store entryways, open spaces between buildings, and on the street itself.
In the gray night, Jim walks along the alley. The sexual odor of amyl permeates the misty air. Men drift gracefully like dark searching ghosts in a silent ballet; flowing forms unite, float away to another, others. In the garages, darker bunched shadows stir. Under a stairway, at least five men devour each other, slowly, slowly. Against walls and in cars, bodies connect. Suspended in the dark, forms emerge recurrently beyond the misty scrim. Like in a dream. Jim stops his thoughts by surrendering to hands and mouths in protected shadows, his cock only barely hardening.
In the lighted window of an upstairs room over a garage, a naked man signals Jim as he cruises the alley. Jim looks away, walks toward the corner. The naked man has come down the stairs, is now standing in the street. He reaches out for Jim—but Jim pulls away. Although the man is attractive, his exhibitionism is too blatant.
Jim crosses the street, to another alley. Under a sheltered stairway shadows shift. Stirrings in a garage; shadows materialize. Men lean against telephone poles. Jim moves into a vacant garage. Garden implements are dark and strange, like dormant weapons. Immediately someone is with him. Others squat before others. Someone holds a vial of amyl under Jim's nose. He sniffs, the scene explodes in sex.
Now he stands by the partition between two buildings— until he notices that only a few feet away two men are fucking. He moves away.
The lights of cars cruising the alleys entrap the walking figures, suspend them for moments in crystal light filtered through mist.
Now Jim is with a handsome man in an outdoor patio left unlocked. A garden table there, iron-grillwork chairs. Dark windows stare blankly. The two bodies advance, slowly as if not to violate the mesmerized rhythm of the mysterious hunt outside. Both cocks, aroused but spent, touch limply.
In the alley again, Jim looks at his watch.
Not yet near dawn.
VOICE OVER: Four Factions of the Rear Guard
1
I ATTEND A DINNER of gay gentlemen and icy ladies.
Our host is a little man who adores collecting people. He looks like a gay monk. On a black and white tiled floor multiplied by mirrors, he's explaining breathlessly in the corridor who the combatants will be tonight:
“Oh, the usual Los Angeles royalty— though of course they're all from Pasadena—and our darling Dusty, an ex-Busby Berkeley chorus boy—he'll be 5000 years old in February, and the poor thing still thinks he's the cutest thing in dyed feathers! You'll adore Natasha, she's a Russian duchess, simply devastated by the revolution, and now she's a lab technician but she reads cards. And the wife of Herman von Dern? She never says an intelligent word. Oh, there is a strange little man all in white and one emerald, I think he's famous but God only knows what for!—he's here with his muscleman protégé, a Mr Somebody (you two might like each other)…. Oh, yes, and Otto, a clairvoyant from Orange County. Simply marvelous with earthquakes. Do you know Billy Adams?—the son of Alexa Alexandra?— the silent-movie star? Most people don't know it, but she was a deafmute, and you can imagine what the talkies did to her. And some others— …” He pauses for breath; we're at the ornate door to his apartment. He turns suddenly to me and says: “Oh, and I want to tell you I adore your book!”
“Which one?” I ask, somewhat irritated; I've written five, and people still refer to my “book.”
“City of Night, of course,” he says—inevitably. “Oh, it was forward of me to call you out of nowhere—but how else? how else? But let's do go in. Everyone is simply dying to meet you!”
Entering, I see the incredible ensemble; here and there are a few very beautiful determinedly sexless women, one in a tuxedo. I'm wearing a tight, very open shirt, and I love how I am being looked at; I am obviously the evening's fresh blood—myself, and the other muscular man, who sits rigidly throughout the evening with the man who “sponsors” him in body contests.
The chairs are all high-backed, of course. Velvet cuddles the room. The light is, oh, golden. A yellow chandelier twinkles flirtatiously.
The ladies and gentlemen are wearing emeralds, diamonds, rubies, pearls—one gentleman exhibits at least a dozen rings on a chain (“his fingers are too fat,” our host whispers).
Dusty the Busby Berkeley chorus boy wears a tacky necklace of pukah shells. “They're quite expensive,” he informs Count Etienne, a skinny man with plucked eyebrows—no relation to the duchess here.
“Hmmm,” says his lordship.
“I paid fifty dollars for the necklace,” the ex-chorus boy insists.
Flashing rubies and emeralds, the count says, “Oh, nice! But you know, dear, you have to have a certain bubbly personality to get away with those things—you have it, I don't.”
Dusty waits for his turn. It comes. His lordship is narrating the shock he felt when an ordinary policeman came to his door by mistake. In Pasadena!
Dusty strikes: “And the Pasadena ladies looking out their windows said, Oh, my God, she's entertaining the military now!” He loops the pukah-shell necklace around his wrist.
Drinks about the room are like colored water in goblets: green, red, amber. Photographs of the great stars line bookshelves; the gorgeous artificial faces next to dead flowers.
When the count comments favorably on my body, I ask what he does.
“Mostly I'm a count,” he answers.
And the Busby Berkeley chorus boy strikes again: “Cunt?”
His lordship smiles tolerantly. The rabble— … “Count, dear, with an ‘O.’”
“Oh,” says the ex-chorus boy, and goes on to tell about the death of Hollywood and glamor.
“So many funerals,” sighs Billy Adams, the son of the mute star. “So many stars dying. Gone, gone. I went to Mandy Mandeville's funeral. She looked terrible—so shriveled, so tiny. They used to be bigger. Oh, but at Forest Lawn this adorable youngman insisted I buy a plot there— before need. And I did.”
“Did you buy the youngman or the plot?” asks the host.
“It overlooks Glendale,” the famous son of Alexa Alexandra says.
“How chic,” says his lordship.
The icy ladies sip their drinks frostily. They look like Russian spies in an American movie.
“My God!—I thought you were dead,” Dusty the ex-chorus boy says to a new guest, a man who once played the evil scientist in dozens of movies,
Natasha the Russian duchess wants to read the cards for me—but there's only an incomplete deck, two incomplete decks. So she mixes them—different-sized cards. In her chubby hands, they flutter to the floor. “Fuck it,” she says.
The clairvoyant tells me he doesn't need the cards to tell me I have powers I haven't even discovered yet and I'll win the contest I'm entering.
But the old gentleman “famous for God knows what”—and he is all in white, with just one huge emerald—says, no, no, it's his muscular friend—who hasn't said a word—who is entering the contest.
Oh.
Somebody tells me he loved my book.
“Which one?” I ask.
“City of Night, of course.”
“Do you still hustle?” the ex-chorus boy asks me naughtily.
“Yes,” I say defiantly.
“You know,” he goes on. “I occasionally dial the telephone on the corner of Selma, and I speak to the hustlers—so exciting!”
My God, I've talked to him!
I want to affront them all, they're so uptight, re
actionary. “I also go to alleys.”
His lordship says he couldn't get involved with alleys because, being inbred royalty, he has to guard against disease. “It would kill me,” he says. From his coat-of-armed blazer jacket he pulls out an ivory fan, which he spreads expertly—swushhh!—as if to chase away deadly germs, especially those that may be coming from the ex-chorus boy.
I tell the count he could go to clean alleys.
“What kills me,” says Dusty the Busby Berkeley chorus boy, “is that all the niggers are driving Cadillacs.”
The gentleman in white asks him didn't he wear feathers in his last film?
“What happens in the alleys?” the clairvoyant asks.
“Some clairvoyant,” sighs the host.
“Fucking and sucking.” I don't like how I'm sounding, but I want to protest this stagnation.
“Oh, it was all more fun and sexy before the so-called sex revolution,” says Billy Adams, the famous son, “before all this sexual revolution mess. We kept in our closets.”
“My family lost their estate in a revolution,” his lordship sneers icily.
“Mine too,” echoes the duchess; “that's why I'm a lab technician.”
The table is set: Silver plates shine under hypnotized candles.
The sexless beauties look like killers.
Now here's a guru in flowing robes—just out of jail for attempting to shoot his lover. "Om, om.”
The beauty in the tuxedo gets told not to smile—she hasn't—or she'll ruin her lovely baby face. The gentleman in white suggests that his “friend” and I armwrestle.
The guru asks me what I suggest for his sagging middle.
Someone tells the cool beauty that if she sneers she'll get wrinkles too.
Om.
Dusty laments the openness of everything sexual now. “I like it more naughty,” he giggles.
The gentleman in white agrees snippily: “The closet is perfectly comfortable, thank you!”
For dinner we have meatloaf.
2
In his palatial home, the famous director courts an army of drifting youngmen. All are sure they'll become big stars. Not one has, not one will.
I hate the man, his contempt. So much wasted power! He uses it to extend a tapestry of dreams cruelly to the hungry youngmen, only to withdraw it quickly and send them to others in a sliding order back to the streets but, now, with memories of evaporated glory.
“My films extol the old truths,” he says in an interview. “That is what is needed, a return to morality.”
3
I meet a famous star. He gets drunk. Under the dinner table his hand gropes me. His fingers dig into my fly. I'm trying to be cool, not to embarrass anyone. Others at the table are unaware what's happening under it.
Except for the star's bodyguard-lover.
Alerted by other similar times, he stands abruptly behind the star and looks down. The star withdraws his stumbling fingers.
“I knew it,” says the bodyguard-lover.
“Piss,” says the star.
The bodyguard leaves.
The star gets drunker. His overtures to me increase. “Please come home with me.” He's pitiful, this famous, rich, powerful man. Pitiful. Always falling in love with those who can't love him, who will only use him; surrounded by an entourage of invited sycophants who drain his need for love; always, always inviting to be used. No, I can't go with him, I say.
He leaves the party. But he calls back on the telephone. Please come to his house, just to talk. Just so he will be with someone. Please.
Driving to his mausoleum of a house, I see in the flash of my headlights his bodyguard-lover, spying.
Fuck it. I promised I'd come, to talk. And there he is, the lonely star, at his door.
The house is cluttered like an overbought antique store. Chandeliers like crystal spiderwebs. Devouring velvet chairs. Figurines and statues battling limply for attention. Plastic corpses of flowers.
“I want to show you my bedroom,” he tells me.
I decide I have to leave.
“Please.”
His bed is on a platform. It's a cross between a throne and a circus tent; drapes held at the top with a golden crown. Rows and rows of clothes hang in enormous open closets like squads of frozen guards.
He tries to kiss me, but I'm not attracted to him. “Hey, man,” I say.
“Please.”
He knew all along I'd reject him this way, I think suddenly. He knew it all along.
As I'm leaving, he offers to take me to Palm Springs if I stay.
4
“It's a white party,” the man informs me. “Everyone has to dress completely in white.” The party will be in his lovely rustic home.
What the hell. I get into it. I wear a white-bloused, see-through open Cavalier shirt, white boots, and pants with two rows of buttons in front.
A greenhouse with exotic flowers. Listen to the delicate water spray, like kisses. Oh, a brook! And alcoves. Look! A large swaying hammock. And minstrels in white, playing flutes.
Men and boys in white jockstraps wander along the multi-leveled gardens. A man turns up in tennis drag. Men sit along the tiered ledges watching the parade.
A few women idle about, ignored. There's a sultan in see-through pants. There's a man in white ballet tights, genitals exposed. A dazed-looking youngman with a very bad complexion and wearing nothing but crossed belts on his skinny body wanders aimlessly.
I think suddenly of a dull, white purgatory.
Over a hundred guests in white.
A producer arrives with harnessed “slaves.” There's appreciative applause from the tiers.
“It's just lovely. Lovely. So innocent,” says a man standing benignly on a balcony like a voyeuristic high priest.
3:40 A.M. Albertson Avenue.
A FEW MEN WALK along rows of elegant antique stores. More drive around the blocks, cruising in their cars. Jim is about to park and get out—to be seen fully, as always— when an ominous squad car invades the area. Now the tide of hunters will recede here to surface elsewhere.
As Jim drives off, he sees a man he was with last week; the man stops abruptly, ignoring the rampaging cops and signaling that he wants to make it again with Jim. But it was too complete, that one encounter.
FLASHBACK: A House. Last Week.
On the street the man had appealed instantly to Jim's hungry narcissism. Leaning out the window to comment on Jim's body, the man, slim, with angular features—he was dressed in casual modishness—looked much younger, Jim knew intuitively, than he actually was. Agreeing to get together, Jim followed the sports Mercedes into the hills, to a house loftily distant from the others, its Spanish balconies poised over a lush hill.
Inside, the man moved up carpeted steps. The house had the easy elegance of wealth and style, the only discord the colors slashing each other in paintings on the walls. The man led Jim into a huge bedroom in the upper level of the house. There was a sitting room, a bar, a dressing room. Jim saw a photograph on a table, the photograph of a little boy; the man as a child? his son? Gliding past the table, the man turned the photograph down. He lighted tall candles about the room. It swam in gold mist. Instantly the room was bordered by retreating candlelight; it became a framed picture.
“All this is unreal, this house, this furniture, it means nothing. None of it is real.” The man spoke softly, his words flowing into the amber light. “You are what is real. You and your muscular body.” His voice became even softer, as if not to stir the gold twilight. “Tonight I found you finally, I knew you when I saw you. I knew that here with me you would walk into that dressing room and find clothes worthy of your precious manhood.” And then he pronounced one word slightly louder than the rest, a word formed precisely, carefully, a mantra:
“Stud.”
Jim was pulled into the dream, it melded with one of his. He often becomes a fantasy figure in sexual encounters. That fulfills a part of him, yes, because he knows that no object is more adored, i
dolized than that in a dreamer's fantasy of Sex.
Ageless in this light, the man opened a bottle of wine at the small bar. The cork crumbled. Dropped crumbs floated in the purple liquid. Frowning, as if that tiny incident had violated too much, the man discarded the bottle. He reached for another, opened this one easily, and served two glasses. The glasses were so frail they were invisible without the purple liquid. He handed one to Jim, sipped from the other.
Purposely Jim had not spoken since they met, knowing that jarring demons lurk within the fringes of a fantasy. He stood showing his body in studied casualness.
The man reclined against the backboard of the bed. “I would lie here,” the soft voice floated, “looking at these magazines—…” He reached for magazines, four, five, strewn strategically on the floor. He leafed through one, the special one. Jim saw the photograph of a determinedly masculine muscular man in a narcissistic pose before an adoring figure not quite as masculine, looking up from a kneeling position.
“This one,” the man's voice glided into the candle mist of the room, “the muscular one is you.”
No, the model did not look like Jim, but he and the man in the photograph were of the same type, probably the same size. The model wore tight, faded jeans—a tear at one thigh, another at the knee, boots buckled at the ankle, a thick carved belt, a vest under a denim jacket. The figure idolizing him wore ordinary clothes.
The man turned the pages of the magazine. In each succeeding photograph the model wore less clothes; the other remained fully clothed, his adoration increasing in poses of worship.
Jim glanced at himself in a mirror on the wall. He flexed, slightly.
“I would be looking at these, and you would appear from that room— …” The man indicated the open dressing room. “… —and I would recognize you from my dreams, this time with my eyes open.” Again he formed the magic word:
“Stud.”
Mirrors embraced Jim in the dressing room. His image was shot back and forth, like projected slides, onto the gleaming glass screens. Without surprise, he saw on the dresser what he had known would be there. Neatly set out-waiting for how many nights?—faded jeans torn at the thigh and knee, strapped boots, carved belt, vest, denim jacket, a jockstrap.
