by John Rechy
“Where now?” Jesse asked.
Sometimes Orin answered; sometimes he didn't—like now.
For the first time, Jesse reached out defiantly and turned the radio on. He felt his heart pound. He'd done it! Classical music—but he left it on that station, not wanting to reemphasize his daring gesture.
Without reaction, Orin steered the car onto a freeway. Peak traffic was thinning, and so they were able to flow. As they rode on, the drivers and passengers in most of the cars were either Mexicans or Negroes.
IMPERIAL BLVD, the sign on the off-ramp read.
The indigo car, topless, floated imperviously into a section of stunted buildings, short houses. Mexicans and Negroes roamed a busy business area. Now there were mostly Negroes.
It was dusk. Streetlights sighed on. The graceful snobbish music—Pachelbel, the announcer had intoned—was eerie along the black-teeming streets.
“Looking for a house,” Orin announced belatedly.
They came to an old warehouse on this wide street. Huge cylindrical tanks lay rusting. An American flag waved over a western-clothes factory, locked now, across the street from a junkyard coated with dark steel ashes. Orin made a right turn.
As if leaving one world and entering another—Jesse impulsively clicked off the radio—they were driving along a long stretch of dead houses, a graveyard of deserted houses in varying degrees of collapse, some totally demolished. Only the walls of others stood, pastel green, yellow, pink plaster crumbling into colored dust. Others remained almost intact, except for smashed windows covered over by crossed boards. Large red numbers had been painted on the houses still standing. The red paint had dripped in long streaks and dots; the numbers gave the houses the appearance of marked graves, or dwellings hit by a deadly plague.
“It's scary,” Lisa protested.
Jesse James was silent. He didn't want to admit that he too was frightened to be in this area. There was nobody else anywhere, no one; and no car except theirs—the obvious arrogant car, uncovered—and the plucked frames of discarded others.
On bare fields dried palm leaves formed piles, fallen, scratching wearily at the erratic wind. Weeds clutched struggling grass and persistent wild flowers. Many still alive, brave trees, just beginning to mourn, surrendered enormous white and red biossoms to the blemished ground. Farther ahead, an urgent crush of bougainvillea splashed dazzling color into the desolation.
The long, wide street ended in a field of dirt, wind-shoved dried vines entangled like tumbleweeds and huge clumps of concrete like overturned tombstones.
Years ago, the city had decided to build a freeway through this area; it was to stretch to the outlying beaches. People were evacuated into already crowded areas nearby. Grass, trees, and flowers were allowed to die. The demolition of houses began. Then the freeway project was abandoned, and the miles-long area exists like an unhealing wound.
The streetlights remain—on, as dusk fell into night; but most have been shattered, not replaced, so that darkness saturates the wasted area.
“There's no one around,” Jesse said. But he thought he had seen a straggling shadow—a branch bending in the abrupt wind?
“Pearl's scared,” Lisa said. “Don't cry,” she soothed the doll anxiously.
Muted music floated from somewhere within the isolation of the slaughtered buildings. One note, another, three; then the fragment of a phrase—from a guitar. Through a small partition in one of the scarred structures and seeping out into the night from an opening unstopped by the crossed wooden boards, a dull light flickered.
Orin stopped the Cadillac under weeping black trees. He raised the top.
“Is that the house you're looking for?” Lisa asked.
“No,” Orin said. But he got out anyway. Jesse was quickly behind him. Orin locked the car. Jesse looked in panic at it, so vulnerable out here. Then the three moved across a weedy path toward the faltering light, the smothered sounds. The building which contained them had once boasted windows with colored glass. Shards like painted fangs remained on the frames. “Bet it was a church once,” Orin identified.
A muffled male voice sang:
Ya say you gotta soul— …
Orin found the door—boards had been pushed apart, nails pulled out from the bottom, then the boards swiveled back into place. The wind had pushed one slab of wood to allow the sliver of light to escape.
I say if I can shoot a hole
In ya, I won't see no soul— …
Orin entered the wrecked church. Only the remains of one or two benches had been left, like brown bones. Jesse stood behind Orin. Holding Pearl carefully, Lisa worked her way in through the sliding boards.
Ya say ya got a body in the image of a lord?
I say all ya got is meat, bones, filthy flesh and dirty blood.
Ya say— …
At the extreme end of the abandoned church, a corner was lighted with candles. One was flickering, about to go out, darkness waited to enclose it. Several young bodies bunched in that one area. A youngman plucked on a guitar again, only once. He was skinny, almost bony. His hair was straight, oiled to gleam black. Around his neck, he wore a leather strap dangling halfway to his stomach. A skull over a cross hung from it onto a sleeveless black t-shirt. About him were two other thin youngmen, also with cutoff shirts, one a combat green fatigue jacket, with a large swastika painted on it. Their hair was shaved, except for one long carefully level patch in the middle—like a Moh-hawk Indian's. A girl sat on the floor near the singer. Her hair was dyed green and frizzled, her eyes were black tadpoles. Another girl with purple and yellow hair huddled over a candle as she heated a can of food. Other open cans rested on the floor. Male or female, another body lay on a mattress.
The girl with green hair squinted lazily at Orin, Lisa, Jesse James. One side of her face was painted in various colors, the other was chalk white. In the light of the few candles, all the faces seemed to float. The singer turned away, unconcerned, from the three, caught in the flicker of dim flames. Plunk! A loud note on the guitar. His hand quickly muffled it. He sang softly:
Ya say ya got a soul?
Well, I say fuck it,
Fuck your soul cause
All ya got's a filthy body— …
He stopped. “You like that, Fever?” he asked the girl sitting near him.
“I guess,” she shrugged. She dipped a spoon in the warming can, ate from it, and placed it on the floor.
“Needs more shove, Revolver,” said one of the youngmen with the Mohawk haircut.
The girl warming the open cans said to Orin, Lisa, and Jesse, “You better find another place of your own—like toward the end of the strip. Pigs come around and too many people fuck up for everyone.”
Outside, Orin replaced the boards carefully across the door. Jesse made sure they were in place. The three moved back through the weeds to the Cadillac; it looked somber in the assaulted area.
At night, car lights on opposing sides of the freeway shoot like tracer bullets—white lights hurtle along the darkness. The top left up, the windows of the speeding car all open, the moving air stirred heat. Usually the nights are cool in Southern California; but tonight, heat did not release the city.
They got off the freeway, moving across Western Avenue, a shabby street of bars, restaurants, pornographic arcades. At the intersection of Sunset, black and Mexican prostitutes gather outside an all-night food shop. Cars drive through an intersecting alley, appraising the shiny women.
Before they left the motel this morning, Orin had checked the television several times, to make sure it was all right. Even so, he elicited reassurance from the man at the desk that they would be able to provide a replacement if anything went wrong with the present set. Now back at the motel, they parked in the allotted space before their unit. Hidden lights smeared colors in the pool.
The room was very pretty, and large, with wooden beams, dark brown, and pictures of the ocean, and several elaborate lamps, one looped to a chain over a round table, on which
the telephone rested. There were various comfortable chairs. And the two double beds.
“We sure do live in a pretty place.” Lisa admired the room again. She lay Pearl gently on one bed. She was so beautiful! The doll's eyelids shut the agate blue eyes.
Bootless instantly, his body moist in the sudden coolness of the room, Jesse looked at Lisa and thought, She gets prettier and prettier. Damn! He stared annoyed at Orin.
Orin consulted his pocket watch. He turned the television on. He seemed impatient for the picture to coagulate on the screen. “It's working real good,” he said, clearly pleased. He shifted channels.
“…—in a schoolyard, with a black hood over his head. Authorities say he— …”
“They're talking about that guy who hanged himself!” Jesse leaned over to listen and watch attentively.
On the screen a pretty woman with light-brown hair was continuing in a tone of grave concern: ‘’…—was an ordinary twenty-one-year-old man, a good student; he had no known connection to the school.” “You wouldn't have expected him to do anything of the kind,” an old woman, hair carefully sculpted for the cameras, was talking into a microphone as the scene shifted from the television studio to the dead-man's neighborhood. The first woman's voice-over continued over the newsclip of a fat bald man wearing a tie: “Another neighbor, Mr. Albert Silbert, said— …” The man's voice took over: “That boy was just like anybody else—just like you and me and everyone else, as far as I knew; and he sure laughed a lot, always laughing.” The picture faded back to the pretty woman in the studio. “No one seems to know why he hanged himself in that grisly way—or how he managed in the early afternoon to make his way into the schoolyard, drape the black hood over his head— …” The voice continued over a film of the deserted playground, the deadly flowered jacaranda, then the victim's placid dwelling—curtains drawn, silent. “…—loop a strap, and hang himself from a branch.” The picture returned to the woman, sitting at an oval table in the slick television studio. Beside her was a well-dressed gray-haired man. “Nobody knows why he did it, Kenneth, or what the black hood was meant to signify, or why he went there,” the throbbing voice of the woman said.
The man she was addressing shook his head. “What about the rumors circulating, Mandy, that he was the Viet Nam veteran who escaped earlier today from the army psychiatric facility in West Los Angeles?”
“No connection. Just a rumor, Kenneth,” the woman said earnestly. “And about the disturbed veteran, police received several calls from people reporting to have seen a man matching his description; some of the callers even claimed he had a rifle. Sightings were reported—simultaneously—in Westwood, Hollywood, Venice Beach, several at the Griffith Park Observatory. Police ruled them all out as crank calls. They attributed the embellishment of a rifle to the fact that the veteran has been described as having been suffering from so-called ‘flashbacks’—…
“Believing he's still at war,” the gray-haired man clarified. The camera closed in on him, shoving the brown-haired woman away. There was a very subdued but deliberate smile on the man's face as he continued: “On another front—no pun intended! —both camps claim it is pure coincidence that both Senator Thorn Hutchens and Cardinal Unger are scheduled to speak—on the same night—at the same Beverly Hills hotel. In different rooms—I hope.” His voice became serious. “As you know, Mandy, Senator Hutchens is known for his—this is a quote—'extreme left views'—and Cardinal Unger—again a quote—has been called ‘one of the most reactionary men in the established religious hierarchy in the country.’ While both— …”
“Fuck them!'’ Jesse said irritably. “More on the guy in the schoolyard!”
“That's all there'll be,” Orin said. “Won't be any more. And nobody'11 ever know why he did it.”
Lisa had retreated quickly into the bathroom. Now Jesse heard the shower running. He imagined her naked body, her hands soaping it lovingly, under her breasts first, bubbles bursting right at her nipples, and then the soap would drip down her stomach, to her legs, and then the water would wash all the bubbles away, and she'd stand there naked and wet and— …
‘This is Kenneth Manning with the latest news,” the white-haired man on the screen was saying. “We'll be back—after these announcements—with Mandy Lang-Jones, substituting tonight for Eleanor Cavendish, who's a little under the weather.”
“And we'll have a full report on that—the weather,” Mandy Lang-Jones said with the slightest smile, “when we return with a full report on the Santa Ana condition that has caused unseasonal soaring temperatures all over the southland, with winds rising up to— …”
Again, Orin consulted his watch. Now he brought it to his ear—as if he were deliberately stretching time. In apprehension? To prolong anticipation? Both? He shifted channels. One. Two. Three— …
In azure hues, the television screen revealed a woman sitting on a high-backed, gold-gilded chair like a throne. With her in a similar chair but located facing hers at an angle so that his did not seem as imposing, was a man in a handsome, subdued suit.
Orin removed his hand from the dial. He sat on the edge of the bed and watched.
Against a cyclorama of peaceful blue artificial sky, the slender woman had light, light, delicate blond hair that at times appeared almost silver; it fell in soft white-yellowish clouds on her shoulders. Her eyes were coal dark, or appeared so because they were outlined black and heavily into the terribly white skin of her face. Her lips were painted a very dark red. She was ageless, she could have been forty or sixty, older, younger. She wore a long, flowing azure dress, a misty robe, which covered her neck, her arms. Now and then a sigh of a created breeze lifted the chiffon, barely. Her private breeze.
“She gave her soul to Satan,” she said to the camera.
The man with her had ashen hair. Almost as ageless as she, he resembled her. “She told you that?” he said sadly.
“Yes,” the woman answered. Her words were breaths, like puffs of the softest cotton. Her hypnotic voice issued from the gashed dark lips. “One of our operators for Jesus took down her words while I spoke to her, and this is what she said.” In awed words—distinctly pronounced whispers—the woman read from a paper. “ ‘And I played with him and he caused me to do all manner of vileness, and caused me to mock Jesus.’ “
“The unspeakable adversary!” the man denounced.
“ ‘Until the Lord led me to you,’ “ the woman finished reading. Then she looked into the camera. Her face radiated power. “No.” She shook her head. No!” Her voice and hands rose. “Not to me. To him! To the blood! The blood of the Lamb! … Jesus.” She pulled out the word, longer, longer, as if to possess it.
There was a telephone number on the bottom of the screen.
The camera enclosed the woman as she knelt. Her sleeves flowed onto the floor, the long skirt spilled in a sheer pool of blue about her.
Coming out of the shower, Lisa saw the woman. Fiercely, she turned away. She pulled Pearl from the bed, clutching her as if to protect her from an unleashed memory.
In fascination, Jesse James watched Orin; his blue eyes looked haunted by the presence radiating from the screen.
There, the hand of the kneeling woman glided out, upward, higher, slowly, more slowly—higher—and then it clenched into a strangled fist. Her eyes opened wide—black on white. She smashed down with the fist. The ghostly echoes of her earlier tones crashed: “Crush the Evil Prince!” Her raised fist remained frozen in an attitude of violent prayer.
Orin said, “That's Sister Woman. She's why I'm here.”
Manny Gomez: “The Frontal Christ”
Manny Gomez was eighteen and living in East Los Angeles when he became aware that he wanted a naked Christ tattooed on his chest, a Christ with cock and balls.
The thought must have been there, unshaped, as far back as five years—when he was in Juvenile Detention Home in El Paso, Texas—because with a knife and a pen he had carved into the webbed part of his hand a “burning cross.” Bu
t that was a borrowed symbol of a rough Mexican gang; wavy lines created the impression of smoking flames. The blood-inked drawing was almost gone now, replaced by smooth pinkish scar tissue from a severe burn.
He didn't look at that part of his hand, to avoid the memory not of the tattoo, but of the singed flesh. When the memory threatened, he drowned it with others, ugly but less so, fragments from the same time: his mother sobbing, two red-faced men shoving him into a wired wagon with three other Mexican boys—all wearing crucifixes around their necks, like him; the iron-barred windows of the long, flat building where they were incarcerated; on the floor the blanket-thin urine-tainted mattresses they slept on; police dogs barking outside; bugs that crept and flew; cans instead of toilets in the small cubicles. And voices, sounds, sights out of the limbo of nights of constant fear and loneliness; a guard pinioning him against a wall: “How'd you get that tattoo on your hand, boy? Means you're tough, huh?”—and the fist in his stomach; the voice of another guard bolting out of a distant room: “I'm tired of your shit, punk! “—and the sound of feet thrusting against flesh; “Slit your throat next time”—and a guard—they all had reddish white angered faces—pulling a boy along by the hair, the boy's wrists flaring with blood, slashed with a broken light bulb. And the terrified voice that kept screaming throughout that first night: “Mamaaaaaa!”
Manny didn't know exactly why he was sent to the detention home. There were many mysteries already gathering in his young life. He didn't even go to court. True, he had stolen a kit of tools from a hardware store. Yolanda—his mother—had come home to find him dismantling a small television set piece by piece, looking at each part carefully, holding it up to the grimy light. The set belonged to the man who was living with his mother at the time.
When he got out of detention, Manny returned with the tattooed cross on his hand to the two-room apartment—full of crucifixes and candle-lit Virgin Mary's, black-draped Mothers of Sorrows. The apartment was on the second storey of the sagging tenement where they lived in South El Paso. Manny was fourteen, just turned fourteen.
