The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens

by John Rechy

  “You have to leave because you have to leave. That makes sense. If you go with those two, you’ll be doing a lot of singing, right?”

  “Right.” Singing with you, he wanted to say. But she seemed not to want to acknowledge that.

  She closed her eyes. “All right then, learn, I’ll teach you.” Her voice trembled as she sang:

  Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

  Were you there when they nailed him to the cross?

  “What the hell!” Lyle blurted. Was she daffy? Her mind did hop around. He lowered his voice respectfully: “Sister Matilda, that’s beautiful, but I don’t feel like practicing,” he said.

  Sister Matilda was indignant. “You gonna pretend to sing gospel and you don’t want to hear how? Shame, boy, shame. Now listen, and then you join me:

  And were you there when they nailed him to the tree?

  “To the cross,” Lyle corrected irritably what everybody knew.

  “Were you there?” Sister Matilda aimed at Lyle.

  “Were you there?” he fired back at her. He was feeling low, very sad to leave his sister—she was not his sister!—and Clarita. And Sylvia. Yet here was Sister Matilda singing and sulking as if she didn’t understand he’d be going with her.

  “Yes, I was there!” Sister Matilda snapped. “I was there when they nailed my daddy to the tree!” Her eyes searched beyond the window. “He was nailed to a tree when he was lynched, and I saw him, crucified.”

  Lyle winced with pain at the sudden image, a little girl watching while … He wanted to touch the ample woman, comfort the terrible memory. But even in her sorrow she was so regal touching her seemed forbidden.

  “I’m gonna tell you something you never heard and most folks don’t want to hear.” Her form slumped on her chair. “Jesus was black, that’s why they lynched him, too!”

  Lyle accepted that, her truth, all that mattered now.

  Sister Matilda shook away tortured memories. “You got a darn good voice on you, Lyle,” she called him by his name for the first time. “You don’t play the guitar all that well, but you got one good voice, and Lord knows you can move around. Use all you have to lift spirits, but never,” she said darkly, “to deceive good souls.” She leaned toward him, whispering as if she might be overheard: “If you decide to go with them—and I believe you have decided—be alert, cowboy, watch out for wickedness. You might be called upon to remember.”

  Lyle didn’t ask more because he didn’t want to hear anything that would shut out the one possibility of leaving right away. “We’d be together, Sister Matilda!” he blurted, to shake that knowledge into her.

  Had she even heard him? She was singing, her voice swelling with reverence:

  Were you there when they nailed him to a tree?

  Lyle pushed away his guitar. Why learn gospel songs when he didn’t intend to sing them, ever?

  8

  A firmed position. A betrayal announced.

  “Why should I join you?” Lyle asked Brother Bud and Sister Sis in their gilded office. Goddammit, he still wasn’t sure, just considering.

  “To obtain a choice place in the Lord’s fold—” Brother Bud said.

  “—and a plush job, cowboy, a singing job. Good pay,” Sister Sis encouraged.

  “—real good,” Brother Bud agreed, “and good hours, and—”

  “—lots of ad-u-la-shun to make you forget all your woes,” Sister Sis winked, “and, cowboy, you look like you need some forgettin’.”

  “Forget?” Lyle grasped at the word he wanted to hear.

  Brother Bud cleared his throat: “We’re leavin’ tomorrow. Come with us.”

  “If I go, I want to leave with Sister Matilda,” Lyle was firm.

  Sister Sis wiped away instant tears. Brother Bud shook his head.

  “Sister Matilda is—” Sister Sis started.

  “—a very disturbed woman,” Brother Bud said. “Now hold your horses, young man—” He backed away from Lyle’s clenched fist.

  “She’s my friend,” Lyle warned about any insult.

  “I don’t doubt that, in the depths of her black soul,” Sister Sis said. With a mean giggle, she added, “Didn’t mean that, just meant—”

  “She meant,” Brother Bud amended, “that at times Sister Matilda babbles like her mind’s on its way out, sometimes even seems to be on the side of the demon. … Now you keep that fist away from me and listen.”

  Sister Sis turned her face away in pain. Mascara tears melted on her cheeks. “Sister Matilda’s gone, cowboy, fled without a word.”

  Not possible. They were lying. He’d prove it, he’d go to the Texas Grand Hotel, and she’d be there. He started for the door.

  Sister Sis said mournfully. “We haven’t told you why she had to run away, be—”

  “—’cause,” Brother Bud took over, “she absconded with some funds that belonged to us—to the Lord.”

  Lyle’s fist pushed out and landed on Brother Bud’s shoulder because he had been prepared to dodge.

  “My, my,” said Sister Sis in an especially high, girlish voice, “you are strong, young man. You are very strong.” She turned to Brother Bud and said sternly, “Now you straighten up and bear it like the Lord Jesus bore his cross.”

  “I’m sorry—” Lyle started, realizing what his fist had done.

  Brother Bud rubbed his shoulder, “Nothin’ to fret about, cowboy—it’s all gonna be in the family now. Ain’t it?”

  Lyle ran all the way to the Texas Grand Hotel and learned that Sister Matilda had left the night before without a word or a note for anyone.

  9

  The unsettling mystery of Sister Matilda.

  To all his woes, Lyle added this: Sister Matilda had left, abandoned him. Had she really absconded with money? He couldn’t believe that, didn’t want to believe it, and yet why else would she flee like that? There was also this. If she was capable of fleeing from him without a word, wasn’t it possible that the dark tales she had hinted at, about Brother Bud and Sister Sis were false?

  10

  Some thoughts about farewells.

  At times, it seems, life becomes a long good-bye, ending with the saddest farewell. For Lyle, the saddest farewell of his young life contained a series of good-byes he might have to say.

  “Clarita, I may be going away.”

  “What!”

  “I may be leaving Rio Escondido.” He was sure now, no, he wasn’t, yes, no—

  Her body crumbled. She adjusted herself. She must give him courage to face his future, a future that, she prayed—please don’t let me shed tears, Holy Mother—would cast away, at least from him, the curse under which Sylvia still lived. No, she would not cry, especially since she must tell Lyle certain essential things she had not been able to teach him along with his history lessons; must talk firmly, without tears.

  “Lyle,” she said, and she broke into sobs.

  “Clarita! Please stop! You’ll make me cry.” He hugged her tightly.

  “Enough!” she said, rubbing away her tears. “Of course I knew it. You have to, the way everything has turned upside down. Now I must tell you some very important things.”

  About Sylvia!

  “You must rely on the Holy Virgin Guadalupe, the patron of Mexico; she is the source of miracles. You must pray, and let her know that I recommended you to her.”

  “I will, I promise,” Lyle said earnestly.

  “I won’t worry, ever, about your future, because you have so many gifts, you’re smart—even if you haven’t graduated from school, like me—I have a diploma, you know—and the Holy Mother will guide you because I’ll be asking her to. One more thing—” She knew she’d better rush because she was breathing deeply. “Always remember that your mother was the object of great cruelty—”

  “From that goddamned son of a bitch, my father,” Lyle upheld.

  Much more than that, Clarita added silently. “—and so you must never extend cruelty, so much of it in the world.” Could she go on?<
br />
  “I promise, Clarita,” Lyle said, wondering why it was necessary to vow never to be cruel.

  Consumed by sobs, Clarita managed only to give him her most powerful silent benediction.

  11

  The saddest farewell.

  “You’re considering leaving?” Sylvia Love Clemens heard words she had repeated in her mind for years, over and over, words she had not been able to speak when she had first needed to speak them, not able to because the last time she had seen the cowboy she hadn’t known it would be the last time; and so her mind often echoed—throughout the years after she faced that he was not returning to marry her, to love her—often echoed what she would have said to him, adding words, at first pleading words when she cried alone, but, soon, especially when she drank more and more, she added words of unspoken rage: You god-damned son of a bitch, where the hell do ya think you’re goin’?

  Clarita, of course, was watching from the doorway, clenching her rosary and praying to the Holy Mother to shower her beneficence upon mother and son, intercede in the name of the holy martyrs—“and don’t let them scream at each other,” or rather, she quickly amended lest the Holy Mother unleash something she had not intended, “Don’t let Sylvia start screaming.”

  “Yes, Sylvia, I believe I am leaving, maybe join the people you took me to, remember?” But, oh, God, would he? Would he?

  Sylvia heard only the first words spoken. She turned her back on them, hoping it would not be noticed that she had to grasp for the stairway railing to keep her posture erect, dignified, proud, as she was determined to be.

  Her frightening composure! What was it hiding? Clarita prepared to enter the room.

  “I have to leave,” Lyle explained to her silence, “because everything is very complicated now, for all of us. I don’t even know who I really am anymore, and I’m trying to understand—”

  “Understand?” Sylvia’s mind grasped only that one word. She laughed, a dry, terrible laughter. She leaned against the wall, seeking strength to stand. She heard—again, again, again—the haunting echo of laughter, louder than an echo should be. She covered her ears.

  “Don’t, Sylvia,” Lyle said. “You have to hear me.”

  Sylvia Love pushed herself from the wall, empowered by rage. She screamed, “Go ahead and leave me, you fuckin’ bastard, get the fuck out of my life, never come back!”

  The look of horror on Lyle’s face made Clarita rush in to stand next to Lyle.

  “Good-bye, Sylvia,” Lyle said. He walked out with the suitcase he had packed, uncertain until now, and his guitar—left hidden under the stairway until he decided. The decision was made.

  Sylvia whirled around. “Lyle?”

  “Yes, your son,” Clarita said.

  “My son? Lyle? He’s gone?”

  Clarita held her, close. “It’s for the best, muchachita linda,” she said. “Things couldn’t continue like this. It’s for the best, beautiful little girl.”

  12

  A litany of farewells.

  “Good-bye,” Lyle said aloud to the City of Rio Escondido as he stood, for what might be the last time, on his vacant lot. “Good-bye,” he said again, and this farewell included several sad farewells, to Maria and Clarita, yes, even Armando, and to Raul, and the kids who had followed him around like the king of the geeks, and—

  “Good-bye, Sylvia. Good-bye, Mother”—he could say the word, alone. He shook his head, strummed a few notes on his guitar. He walked slowly—shuffled—with his suitcase and his guitar to the Pentecostal Hall.

  Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye!

  CHAPTER TEN

  1

  On the perfection of coincidences, here involving Mr. and Mrs. Renquist and Tarah Worth. Considerations about Valley of the Dolls.

  When the lives of strangers intersect another’s, the wayward pattern of those lives seems to have always been leading in a straight line to one point of intersection. Accidents and coincidences assume retrospective inevitability. Then it seems that those distant strangers have been living their lives in preparation to coincide with another’s. Before that happens, those lives proceed on their own course until every coincidence falls into place to create interlocked fate.

  At this point, it would seem impossible to Lyle that at the moment he prepared to depart from Rio Escondido, miles away in Hollywood (or more exactly one block away from Hollywood) a woman who would become an essential player in his life would be shouting out:

  “A remake! Of the greatest movie of all time! Based on the greatest novel of all time! By the greatest writer of all! Jacqueline Susann! A remake of Valley of the Dolls!” And she, Tarah Worth, was up for a leading role in it, according to confirmation in Liz Smith’s recent column—never mind that a note at the bottom indicated that that particular column had been written by an assistant. When Liz Smith carried an item in her column, Liz Smith made sure it would turn out to be correct, even if she had to make it be so.

  Tarah Worth, sitting before a silvery mirror in her small but elegant home—it had a pool—repeated those words aloud, words she had been saying, cherishing each syllable, since she had read the thrilling news in the daily column by her favorite living writer, whom she consulted religiously, the way others say morning prayers. Reading Liz Smith first gave her strength to face her horoscope, which had been drawn by a hostile astrologer who made sure each day contained a fearful warning. Why? Jealousy. Of course, the astrologer might have suspected she’d given her a wrong year of birth. The astrological sign was right; so what difference did it make? She was born under the proud sign of Scorpio.

  In her bedroom decorated in black and white—only black and white—Tarah wore the kind of glamorous robe that only yesterday’s most glamorous stars were worthy enough to wear—Garbo! Dietrich! Crawford!—lustrous satin, pearl-white. Any moment now, her manager would be calling her back to inform her about which role she was up for in the remake of the classic novel. When it was originally filmed in the ’60s, when she was a mere child, the searing novel couldn’t be made correctly. Now it would be done the way the immortal Jacqueline Susann would have wanted it.

  Tarah bowed her head in reverence to greatness when she glanced at—reflected in the mirror and arranged to achieve that reflection—the shelf behind her bed. There was only one book there, and that book was Valley of the Dolls on an altar of its own. Stunned anew by the existence of such a work, she looked away from the mirror, out of her glistening window at—

  Hollywood!

  Actually she didn’t live in Hollywood; she lived exactly one block away from where she could legitimately claim she did. She had been deceived by the rental manager, who had told her otherwise—and had added that, in the house she would lease, Greta Garbo had lived with John Gilbert. It was Garbo’s lighting man who had lived here, briefly.

  Behind her, the television was spewing words she wasn’t listening to. She left it on so she could hear voices, not feel so alone, a self-imposed loneliness that had to do with the fact that she hadn’t had a role in almost a year, except for a mortifying stint on that horror called Hollywood Squares, where only one player directed a question at her, which she answered wrong. Who would have dreamt that, after her auspicious debut in Where’s Susan?—in which she played a homewrecker, a juicy role that had earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Up-and-Comer—and after a few starring roles—including two horror films in both of which she was axed—and after several seasons in a featured role as a reformed nymphomaniac in Summer Comes Once a Year, a soap opera that had unwisely been canceled—who would have thought that she would ever be idle? Especially after having almost, almost, almost been cast in the role that made Sharon Stone famous—of all things, by crossing and uncrossing her legs in that reprehensible way. Well, Tarah Worth’s bad times were over—and how!

  What role, what role? Should she consult her thrilling psychic, Riva? Maybe have her channel Jacqueline Susann for some encouragement, some profound insight into the deep emotional depths the author ha
d explored in her characters? Not yet. She must wait for the call first, so as not to disturb the great author’s spirit with indefinite questions.

  Would she be up for the role of Anne Wells?—Anne, the undaunted New Englander who leaps from a job as a secretary to being the most famous model in the world … Aristocratic, seemingly aloof—but passionate underneath—and wronged, betrayed, but brave. She, too—Tarah Worth!—at the young age of thirty-five—but looking at least ten years younger, everyone said—had been wronged and betrayed, by three husbands—no alimony from any of them and one had the gall to ask alimony from her; two lovers—men who had become interchangeable in her memories; and all of Hollywood—yes, all of Hollywood—had betrayed her; she was always up for great roles that actresses who looked like her ended up getting. Was she bitter about all that? Damn right she was! But she, like Anne Wells, was brave. She would bring all that to the role.

  She’d be just as good as Jennifer North, the great beauty who plunges into the squalor of erotic films, and utters, while propping up her breasts—Tarah did that now—one of the great lines of all time:

  “Oh, let them droop!”

  Hers didn’t. That line would have to be changed for her. “Let them rise!” Rise? “Let them emerge!” Emerge? “Let them protrude!”

  Did she dare dream that she would be offered the role of—

  Neely O’Hara!

  The most challenging role of all time! A celebrated singer, once on top, now sinking, swallowing “dolls.”

  “Dolls?” Tarah said aloud.

  That had always puzzled her. She’d never heard pills called “dolls.” Where had the great author gotten that word? Never mind! Who was she to question Jacqueline Susann?