by John Rechy
She didn’t know! “The Ambassador Hotel.” She remembered that name from—
As the car drove away, she concentrated attentively on the technicolored city, people, cars, buildings, an Art Deco shop like an imitation jewel, a glossy store with haughty tanned mannequins—and flowers, and trees, and palmtrees, palmtrees, more flowers! Still, her mind returned to the silver silhouette in the poster.
The cab stopped in the graceful but patched driveway of the sprawling hotel, new wings jutting from the old basic structure, embracing flowered lawns. Attendants hopped toward the car.
“Never can come here without thinking this is where they killed Bobby Kennedy,” the driver said as if he had lost a friend there.
Was he mistaken? Normalyn remembered now where she had heard the name of this hotel. Miss Bertha had mentioned it. It was where Marilyn Monroe had received her first modeling assignment. But that had no further meaning for her. She had merely provided as her destination the only hotel she knew of. She paid the driver, tipped him, hoping it was the correct amount. He did not thank her.
A bellman carried her suitcases. Glass doors swooshed open before her. This hotel did not have the graceful drowsy grandeur of the Texas Grand Hotel. There was a drone of voices, men and women moving about busily to rooms, halls, dining rooms, elevators. Men with nametags on their lapels laughed loudly.
Inhaling, Normalyn prepared to walk the eternal distance to the desk. She would rehearse each movement before she committed herself to it. Unclench fists. Raise head. Too high!—she saw the ceiling. The first step, firm and— She could not walk! She pictured Enid’s entrance into the Texas Grand Hotel, and she managed to reach the desk.
She gasped at the clerk, “I want a room overlooking the park!”
“The grounds,” he corrected absently without looking up.
She regained control by counting her breaths. Three. Like Miss Bertha’s puffs on her cigarillo.
“Your reservations are for—?” This time he almost glanced at her.
“Normalyn Morgan.” She said that firmly, the way Enid would have announced, “Enid Morgan.”
The clerk searched his reservations. “I’m sorry, I don’t seem to have any—”
Please! Normalyn did not allow herself to speak that word. “I’m sure the reservations were made,” she said in an emphatic tone, a slight drawl. “Mayor Wendell Hughes, from Texas, made them for me himself.” She thought that up quickly.
He finally looked at her. Then he consulted his list again. “Here it is. And how long will you be with us, Miss Morgan?”
She wanted to thank him but wasn’t sure whether he was being kind to her or mistaken. “I don’t know,” she answered her own question.
“I see. We’ll have—”
She was sure he was going to ask her to pay in advance. She couldn’t bear that. She’d beat him to it. She searched her purse, pulled out several books of traveler’s checks. “I’ll need to cash these—and I’ll pay for the room in advance.” She congratulated herself on this thwarting device.
“Advance payment won’t be necessary, Miss Morgan. But I will need some identification to—” He looked at her in astonishment. “What is this?”
“My birth certificate.”
Nearby, two other clerks stared at her in spreading astonishment. The man before her studied the document she had handed him. He tried to retain his indifference. “Do you have a credit card, Miss Morgan?”
“What the hell’s better than a birth certificate?” volunteered one of the jubilant older men with nametags. Others with him agreed.
The clerk surrendered to the unknown. “Very well.”
In the elevator Normalyn was safe—but not for long. She had to turn away from the scrutiny of other passengers. She put on her glasses, her vision blurred, she stared down. A bellman led her along the carpeted hallway into an attractive room with a large bed. Fussing airily, he waited, waited.
To be paid! “Please tell me how much to give you!”
“Ten bucks’ll do it,” the man told her. “More if you want.” There was a derisive smile on his pinched face.
“Don’t look at me like that!” she snapped. She had not even had to prepare the words.
The knowing smile fled.
She gave him five dollars.
“Thank you, miss,” the man muttered.
When he closed the door, Normalyn felt she had survived several wars to reach her hotel room.
From her suitcase, she brought out, carefully wrapped in its tissue, Enid’s figurine of the chipped angel. She placed it on a table. She did not touch the hurt wing. Exhausted from her journey into this room, she sat on a chair. She looked at the birth certificate still in her hand. Then she saw that the one Mayor Hughes had given her was different from the one Enid had altered with inked entries. Enid’s had indicated an “Unknown” father. In this one, in a type that matched that of the other entries, a name—“Stan Smith”—had been entered as that of her father. Enid had never allowed Stan a last name, and the Mayor would have known that. Normalyn was certain that the deliberately ordinary last name Mayor Hughes had chosen was a gift to her of a less tentative identity, without separating her from Enid Morgan. Suddenly Normalyn missed Mayor Hughes—“a good man.”
Outside her window the silver morning was tarnishing into a gray afternoon.
In the large shiny bathroom, Normalyn allowed herself to look at her naked body reflected in the full-length mirror on the door. Had her body changed? Were her slender hips and legs really curved? Were her breasts really round, firm?
Quickly, she showered in hot purifying water.
In a light robe, she sat on the bed and picked up the telephone. “The Hollywood Four Star Theater, please,” she said to the operator.
“‘Night of Legends’ at nine sharp, one performance, dancing later,” a man’s indifferent voice informed her on the telephone. Even while she wrote down the information, Normalyn was not certain she wanted to find out who the radiant silhouette on the poster belonged to, who the woman was with her name—and claiming to be “Marilyn’s daughter.”
2
It was night! She had been so tired that as soon as she’d reclined on the bed, she had fallen into locked sleep. She woke up famished. Laughter erupted in small bursts in the hallway outside. She tried to imitate it, to prepare to join it when she entered the dining room and said, “A table—”
For one.
She called room service and ordered from a menu by the telephone: an elaborate sandwich. “And iced tea. And hot pecan pie.” No? Then lemon meringue.
A Mexican man with a generous moustache brought her dinner. He arranged it neatly on a small table he had wheeled in. She went to her purse, to pay.
“No—you just sign,” he said in an accented voice. He handed her the tab, showed her where.
“How much do I tip you?”
Glad to be consulted, he told her how to figure it out. “The same everywhere,” he added. “If you like someone, add a little more.”
She added more.
He stopped at the door. “Miss, you shouldn’t let people know you’re so innocent.” He hurried out.
As she ate the sandwich with frilly decorations, she thought of the misty figure in the poster, the pose so sure.
She dressed quickly, in a pretty dress, a flowered print. Enid had always bought her attractive clothes, but she had used hardly any of them; doing so would have emphasized that she went nowhere.
She applied makeup from Enid’s gold-leafed box, carefully now. She was still not entirely able to “see” herself without Enid. She touched the etched roses on the lid of the box.
Her goal would be the lobby! No, first the hallways, then the elevator.
She made it.
In the lobby, several youngwomen with effortless smiles mingled among the men brandishing their names on their lapels. Normalyn imitated the smile of one of the prettiest girls, who quickly frowned at her. Her smile began to itch as Normalyn wander
ed about the lobby, as if she were waiting for— Looking for—
“Are you a hostess?”
She faced a tall, elegant man different from the others, except that he, too, wore a nametag. His temples were brushed with gray. He was about forty, and good-looking. “No.” She pretended to understand his question.
Lines crinkled about his dark eyes when he smiled at her. “Just visiting?”
“Yes. And then I’ll find a job.” She allowed an easy explanation.
“What are you looking for in the city?”
A few feet ahead—and hiding from the man’s view—the waiter who had brought her food was miming an urgent message to her: He clasped one hand tightly over the other. Handcuffs!
Forgetting to remove the smile, which was now hurting, Normalyn drifted away from the tall man. He called after her. She continued to move away, casually, toward the waiter. “I think he’s a cop, miss,” the waiter said, “and I know you ain’t no whore cause whores know how to tip!” He disappeared.
Why would the man assume she was a prostitute! Suddenly Normalyn wanted to run away, back to her room, to hide—No! She faced the man, still there, still looking at her, still smiling at her. She tried to remember his exact words to her: “What are you looking for in the city?” As she turned away from his insistent smile—and hers disappeared—his words changed meaning, contained other suspicions: What are you searching for in the city?
Two
N*I*G*H*T * O*F * L*E*G*E*N*D*S
Normalyn read the glittering marquee. Under a hazy half moon, she stood before a violet building—a series of stone arches illuminated orange and blue, each adorned with a shimmery star, all crowned by a dome vined with beads of tiny lights. This purple creation—an attempt to reproduce the front of the Beverly Theater, a Deco-Islamic Palace built in 1925 as the first movie house allowed in Beverly Hills—is only a facade. It was constructed over what was once an abandoned warehouse in West Los Angeles. Now it is a brash nightclub called the Hollywood Four Star Theater.
Behind it, tall palmtrees, just darker than the inky sky, barely swayed in a breathless night. . . . Normalyn felt steeped in Technicolor.
At the Ambassador Hotel earlier—rejecting the abrupt suspicion created by the ambiguous encounter with the stranger in the hotel lobby—he was a man trying to pick her up, only that—Normalyn decided she would go to the Hollywood Four Star Theater Club. The theater was on Wilshire and so was the hotel. When she had traveled eternal blocks, she asked a man where the address she had written was. “Miles away, in West Los Angeles. You lost, girl?” he inquired happily. She took a cab, wincing at each click of the meter.
Immediately after she arrived, she almost fled. Whistles of approval greeted her from men—there were only men—waiting to get in. They were youngish to slightly older, studiedly casually well dressed, brimming with dogged enthusiasm. A sign clarified: “Gentlemen allowed only after 8:30 P.M.” Holding her breath, Normalyn made her way to the entrance. A burly man with an open shirt guarded vinyl doors. With incredulity, he studied her birth certificate as demanded “proof of age.” “Okay, hon . . . I guess—if you got that," he surrendered, baffled.
Velvet-paneled doors opened with a gasp. Normalyn saw only women inside, women of all ages and shapes sitting at many small tables. Like the men outside, the women exuded determination to have a great, grand time.
The inside of the club flaunted an assaulting cheap opulence. Sprinkles of lights winked everywhere. Gold-edged red drapes swept the floor on both sides of a sleek plastic stage, empty now.
Normalyn was startled to discover that the waiters were shirtless, with silly collars, cuffs, bow ties, tight pants. Serving their last drinks of the evening, they were being replaced by youngwomen in black body stockings so sheer their flesh shone through.
Normalyn looked at her feet and counted her steps as she was led by one of the shirtless waiters with streaks of blond hair to a table where two other women already sat. “Crowded tonight. Gotta share, hon,” the waiter explained with an etched smile. Everyone said “hon” here.
One of the two women at the table was pudgy, with glasses attached to her dress with an elastic strand. The other was younger, about thirty-five wearing a dress held up only by spilling breasts. Normalyn was relieved to learn from their spirited evaluation of tonight’s “male strippers” that the “ladies only” portion of the evening was over. Now gentlemen would be allowed.
And here they were! The gentlemen swaggered in with growls of laughter. They lurked about the ladies, laughed, courted, watched, laughed, stood in studied poses, laughed, sat, laughed, laughed.
Normalyn quickly rejected two offers of “company” from roaming men she was sure were mocking her with easy invitations. The two women at her table stabbed her with stares.
When a waitress with peeking buttocks asked her what she wanted to drink, Normalyn echoed what the woman with attached glasses had just ordered another of: “A Margarita, hold the salt.” It came. She hated it. “I’ll have iced tea instead.” The waitress’s smile crumbled: “You’ll have to settle for mineral water, hon, and if you want a twist, you got it.”
When Normalyn rejected another of the roving gentlemen, this one with an astonishing moustache, the woman with the fancy snap glasses hissed to the one with proud bosoms, “She’s keeping the men away, Belinda.”
“I know, Pam,” Belinda agreed, with a hoist of her breasts. “Are you sure this isn’t female mud wrestlers night for gentlemen? That’s not a good night for ladies,” Belinda said.
“I told you, it’s Legends, with a new attraction each week— and a surprise tonight. Andy at the door told me,” Pam said knowledgeably.
Very tan, a man stood over their table. He wore a sports jacket and an open shirt. A giant medallion with an astrological sign nestled on his dark-haired chest. He said to Normalyn, “I’m Buck. Want a hunk?”
“Leave me alone!” Why did her hands hurt? Looking down, Normalyn realized she had held them locked into fists since walking past the men outside.
Buck’s brash front toppled: “What the shit—?”
“Hey!” Belinda winked. “We like hunks.”
Pam snapped her glasses.
“Fuck off!” Buck told them.
Pam said to Normalyn, “Listen, sweetie, you are out of place.”
“Why not scram?” Belinda suggested.
“I’m—” Normalyn was about to apologize. Instead, she pushed her unwanted Margarita at the woman who had ordered the same. “You want this?”
“The nerve,” said Pam. Belinda took the drink.
“Clumsy damn jerk!” The words erupted nearby. A middle-aged woman with a hundred ringlets of hair sprang up from a table. A waiter stood with a tray and an overturned glass. “You spilled it on purpose!” the woman accused.
Normalyn had never seen a body as muscular as the waiter’s—and it was oiled. He looked odd with the bow tie, cuffs, and collar the others wore easily. On him, the very frailty of those objects bound his enormous body.
“Retire him!” a woman in her fifties said. “He’s too old anyhow.”
Although he did not look “old” to Normalyn, he was older than the other waiters, and his extravagant muscularity set him further apart from them.
The waiter tilted the tray, spilling drinks on the screaming women at the table. Then he removed the bow tie, collar, cuffs and flung them on the table—stood defiantly unadorned before the women. One of the hefty men who oversaw the club intercepted him as he walked away. Near the edge of the stage, their angered voices tangled.
Then Normalyn saw:
A glittering form emerged from shadows beyond the wings and guided the muscular man away from the other’s wrath.
There was a roll of drums! A slick middle-aged man in a white tuxedo appeared within whirling lights on the stage: “Rusty Hills, your emcee, ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to A Night of Legends!” Rusty Hills promised “another spectacular entertainment” in the club’s Saturday Night
series: “And, remember, each night will feature a new legend! See them all come alive on our stage!”
There was dramatic music. Lights dimmed. Mingling became subdued.
“Our first legend, returning for her third week is . . . the princess of . . . love.” The last word was a throbbing amplified whisper. “Our beloved . . . Judy!”
Within drained light appeared a woman wearing a black top hat, a mock tuxedo cut high on her thighs, exposing sheer black tights. Squeezed clothes did not conceal her plump body as she sat with her legs crossed on a high stool and leaned back, miming the recorded voice of Judy Garland—which suddenly wrested all attention from her, silencing the audience:
A foggy day in London town
Had me low and had me down. . . .
The great voice held at the edge of despair, tilted over for a daring moment, and rose exultantly, conquering even this tawdry nightclub.
Normalyn closed her eyes, listening to the magical voice.
Suddenly there was laughter!
On the stage, the woman’s movements had slowly become a brutal exaggeration of the star’s. Her hands grasped, her body quivered as if electrified. She strutted, stumbled. The voice of Garland, triumphant and hurt, soared even over the laughter invited by the clowning performer.
This was the intention—ridicule! Normalyn realized as the audience continued to release yowls of readied laughter.
Shaking his head in pretended disbelief, Rusty Hills called after the performer as the voice of Garland faded; “We’ll never let you die, Judy!” And now he announced to the ladies and gentlemen: “The King himself! Elvis!”
Over the recorded voice of the singer, prepared squeals greeted a man with darkened sideburns. In a fringed gold and white outfit, he imitated the singer’s dynamic motions, one hand up, hips gyrating. Then lights blinked. When they steadied, the performer had grown fat with added padding. Exploding laughter could not drown the gospelly, soulful sensuality of Presley’s voice:
Don’t be cruel
To a heart that’s true. . . .
The audience encouraged panting, orgasmic thrustings: “Ugh! Ugh!”
