by John Rechy
“Sad, so sad,” Troja said into the long silence.
Ahead was a gathering of bodybuilders with oiled muscles. Troja said, “Kirk was better. Did a movie once, gladiator movie, in Italy. Never released.” She faced Normalyn. “He loves me, a lot, the way no one else ever has.”
They left the beach, driving past hidden mansions in Bel Air, exhibidonistic ones in Beverly Hills—into Hollywood Boulevard before it shatters into dismal remains. When they entered the shabby part of Sunset Boulevard, Normalyn saw the loitering women there even in the early day. Troja swerved away. “Showdown’s cornin’ with Duke, just know it. I’ll return to freelance datin’ before I go back to him!” she said darkly to herself. Then moodily she told Normalyn about her old neighborhood, Watts, here in Los Angeles. She’d been there when years ago outraged black people burned buildings in protest. “And nothin’s changed,” she said. She told Normalyn about an old beautiful structure made out of wire, cement, fragments of colored broken glass: “Watts Towers. Used to go and sit there when I was a kid cause it was the only pretty thing around.”
They traveled across the city to a cemetery Normalyn mistook for a park until she noticed gravestones along the roads. Swans floated in a lake among flowers. Naked statues were situated among stately trees, green hills. Troja and Normalyn sat in one of the many alcoves in Forest Lawn. In the confessional mood that had developed between them, Troja told Normalyn about her operations, how much they had cost, the hormone shots. “And then at last I was the me I wanted.”
Normalyn understood. Still, she found it impossible to think of Troja as other than the imposing beautiful woman she saw.
“All worth it,” Troja said. “And, hon, I can’t say it was one thing that made me decide, but part of it was Marilyn, because she created herself.”
The reference to the movie star returned Normalyn to the avoided reality of earlier at the Temple of Divine Love. What battle had she fought? Won or lost?
As they sat in the shade of calm trees, Troja told Normalyn this: She had met Kirk when they were both hired to “perform sex” for a couple—she as “the black Monroe,” he as a muscleman. Kirk did not know she was a trans— . . . Troja could not speak the word even now. She revised: Kirk did not know about her “operations.” And Troja did not suspect that the couple had been told about her by Duke. It was to be part of the “entertainment”—at the height of the “performance” to confront Kirk with the fact that he was making love to a— . . . When he heard the hated word, Kirk pulled away in revulsion. He stalked out. But he waited outside for her. She tried to run past him. He held her while she cried; and he kissed her and reassured her, told her how beautiful she was. They slept together that night. But nothing more happened, ever, and for Kirk it was no longer possible, not with anyone: “He couldn’, just couldn’t any more,” Troja told Normalyn. That was two years ago, two years of Kirk’s steady decline. And for Troja two years of “tryin’ everything, hon,” everything to break away from the “goddamned sex dates” and from Duke.
Normalyn told Troja about the ugly afternoon by the Rio Grande.
Troja held Normalyn’s hand, sharing the day’s sadness.
5
But the closeness was pulled apart that same night. Troja put down the just-reconnected telephone after arranging “a goddamned date.”
Kirk had been snorting cocaine. Without looking at her, he said, “You don’t have to go out.”
“How can you keep telling her that when it’s you and that expensive powder that’s pushing her out?” Normalyn could not hold back her words. She remembered the poignant vehemence with which Troja had talked about despising her “sex dates.”
“Shut your goddamn mouth, girl!” Troja ordered. “You don’t know nothing!”
“What she said is true, Troja,” Kirk said. “I’d go out myself, Normalyn, but I can’t do anything any more. And I’m fuckin’ scared.”
Normalyn did not want to be swept into pity for him. She turned away.
“I’m, responsible!” Troja said.
“That’s not true,” Kirk protested.
Troja embraced the enormous, surrendered shoulders. She looked up at Normalyn and whispered, “Stop starin’ at me with your sad mopey eyes, girl! What the hell you know about feelin’ hurt!”
The words struck Normalyn like a slap. She walked into her room, she shut the door. The closeness and sharing of just hours ago meant nothing. She was here only because they needed her money. Goddammit if she would cry!
Minutes later, Troja knocked. Normalyn did not answer. The door opened. “Mean of me to talk that way,” Troja said.
Normalyn looked away.
Troja sat on the bed with her. “I am sorry for that.”
Normalyn could only nod her acceptance, still too hurt by the stinging words, the severed trust—and Troja had voiced only a qualified apology. “Okay, dammit,” she managed to say.
Troja walked to the door. She paused, long, uncertain moments. Then she said softly to Normalyn, “Hon, how come you wanted so much to find out your mother lied? What are you trying to discover about her, and about Marilyn?”
When Normalyn did not answer, Troja’s smoky eyes continued to inquire.
Seven
Morning with its new reality—a bright mistiness—tempered yesterday’s events. Normalyn dismissed what she had discovered at the Temple of Divine Love. It did not confirm the truth of the letter. And she had come to Los Angeles to find her life, a life which assumed a jagged pattern jutting into Troja’s and Kirk’s. Everything still was in abeyance, but she did not know what “everything” included.
She was aware of a sense of allowed drifting, a protected drifting in this turbulent city. The feeling recurred that she had “brought” Gibson with her, extended its isolation by becoming immersed in the lives of others. She felt like a spy.
Yet Troja’s and Kirk’s lives, too, seemed paused—Troja’s only to match Kirk’s slow surrender; the black woman’s flame-specked eyes flashed at times as if rebelling against that constraint. Normalyn was sure they did not want to be alone with each other during a crisis she saw only manifestations of. Therefore, she was wanted.
And so was her money. Normalyn didn’t fool herself about, that.
“Got an inheritance?” Troja startled Normalyn by asking.
“I’m going to get a job soon,” Normalyn said through clenched teeth. And she would, she thought at the moment. She would become a—
“Why? With all your money you left back in that safety box at the Ambassador hotel,” Troja gibed, not entirely unseriously.
References to money recurred. Troja had tried to collect rent for a following day, insisting she couldn’t remember Normalyn paying in advance. Normalyn would gladly have loaned Troja money—given it to her if she needed it—but she did not want it used for Kirk’s destructive purpose. Instead, Normalyn had already bought bags of groceries. That would help them—and improve the quality of what they ate.
Normalyn learned this: Troja was a mixture of beautiful warmth and snappy “high-and-mightiness”—a description Normalyn kept to herself. What she could not accept, would not accept, were Troja’s unpredictable rages.
Not wanting to be overheard—she did not welcome her reasons for being here probed—Normalyn called Mayor Hughes from a telephone booth in a gas station nearby. The drawly voice of the Mayor jolted her into an awareness, welcome, that she had left Gibson. The Mayor was as warm as always— “concerned you hadn’t called me, sweetheart”; eliciting reassurances about her well-being—“ya sure now, ya swear?” “Business matters” were “in order,” he informed her. Then he told her that Ted Gonzales had “most courteously inquired” about her. “Shall I give him your telephone number, honey?” No! she thought. “Yes,” she said. She explained that the number she gave him was only temporary, belonged to friends. “I miss you, too, Mayor Hughes,” she said truthfully.
In those days, Troja went out on “auditions,” some of which were probably “
dates.” Normalyn could hear her growly voice as she made arrangements, “freelancin’.” Kirk did not look at Troja when she left, only when she returned. Although she did not wear it, Troja combed out her blonde wig often. One such time, Normalyn stared at it, wanting to locate a ghostly memory it had almost aroused, of fugitive warmth.
More and more, Kirk seemed to be abandoning interest in everything except the powder he breathed, the weights he lifted until sweat oiled his body, and the old movies he saw, sometimes one after the other, on television or on his VCR, as if they contained more reality than his own life. His one seeming contact with the present was the tabloids he bought, as if the pages smeared with rumor and innuendo extending into the past of Hollywood linked him to a time he cherished.
Among Troja’s more admiring movie books, mostly of star photographs, were pulpy ones they would pull out impulsively, books with titles like Scandal! Exposé! True Gossip! They would sit flipping through stories they repeatedly denounced as “dirty lies,” often offering versions of “the real truth,” gleaned from their own peripheral participation in that life.
“I didn’t know that about Hedy,” Troja said today as Kirk roamed through a book titled The Best of Confidential: The Greatest Scandals! “Makes me like Hedy even more!” she approved. “Look at this, hon,” she called to Normalyn—and emphasized, “such awful lies!”
Normalyn did not want to reject her invitation to share. Kirk moved over for her to sit down, but she sat next to Troja. Whatever Troja had wanted Normalyn to see, Kirk had already turned to another page of exclamatory scandal.
AGE STALKS LIZ!
“Who doesn’t it stalk?” Kirk said seriously.
TYRONE AND ERROL: THEIR SECRET LOVE!
“Think of the beautiful little girl they would have had . . . if they could have had children,” Troja drooled, and was quickly saddened.
ASYLUM HELL OF FALLEN STAR!
“The real truth was that Frances’s mother was the crazy one,” Kirk said.
SINATRA’S MAFIA FAN CLUB!
“Ugh!” was Troja’s remark.
ALAN LADD—!
Normalyn touched the picture of the handsome actor.
“You like him, hon?”
“Yes.” But Normalyn had been thinking of Jim in Long Beach.
VERNA LA MAYE’S BURIED SECRET!
“Those little Dead shits on television are actually claiming they know who really killed her,” Kirk said. He bypassed the next headline. “Sick trash.”
STAR’S SEX-CRAZED MOM! EVE HARRINGTON’S GIRL! UPPERS, DOWNERS, AND JUDY! HOLLYWOOD PINKOS! KAREN STONE PAYS AND PAYS! THE KING WAS KINKY! AVA’S GAMBLE!
“Such lies!” Troja reasserted.
JAMES DEAN ALIVE AND INSANE!
“Everyone who dies young gets that,” Kirk reminded. “I guess some people should die young.”
Troja turned that page swiftly. She moved even closer to Kirk, as if to keep him close forever. “Can’t bear to look at another,” she said, but she did.
“Nelson Eddy did that?” she marveled at the next revelation.
NASH MCHUGH AND LORNA REHNQUIST: WHY?
Kirk knew “the real reason”: “He had to marry her because he was open about his male lover; so the studio got rid of his lover by calling him a commie and saying he liked young boys. Nash was so damn scared he’d be ruined that he married a lez.”
Kirk looked away, toward a memory of his own. “Nash was one of Wilson’s boys. Fuckin’ agent picked guys off the streets, beaches, promised he’d put ’em in movies, hardly any made it—but he made everyone. I met him, once,” he said quietly. Then he closed the book, snagged on the earlier memory. He pushed them away, book and memory.
All those beloved figures turned on in those ugly books, and in the brutal parodies at the Hollywood Four Star! The fascination with their lives! Did scandal make them realer? Normalyn thought, Miss Bertha had been right: There were real fans, who loved the movie stars—the way Troja adored Marilyn Monroe. And there were avengers, too. Sometimes one became the other.
2
When Troja went out in the daytime, Normalyn did, too. She did not like being alone with Kirk, although she was no longer afraid of him. Normalyn was used to walking in Gibson. Now she walked in Los Angeles. She would avoid the library. She was living!
She explored the neighborhood of small aging houses. The sweet presence of jacaranda trees, blossoms disintegrating right before her, gave her a wistful pleasure. Their lacy leaves were mere decoration for the beautiful dying flowers. She gathered some filmy petals from the ground. Gently, she crushed them into tinier bits, releasing them. She heard the delighted laughter nearby of two schoolgirls watching her. For a moment she thought she heard an echo of two other girls laughing years ago, inventing games. But that was not her memory; it was from Miss Bertha’s imagined account.
In DeLongpre Park, a small city park, children played games while scattered derelicts slept in shade. There was a fountain, filled with discarded wrappers, newspapers, wine bottles. Ignored in its center was a bronze bust of a handsome man. Next to it was a statue of a nude male staring into the sky. Titled “Aspiration,” the monument was erected to Rudolph Valentino in 1930, the marker informed, by “friends and admirers from every walk of life, in all parts of the world, in appreciation of the happiness brought to them by his cinema portrayals.” Yes, some fans continued to love them! She walked over the debris and wiped dust off the bronze head.
Impulsively, she took a bus that said “HOLLYWOOD.” A few blocks along its route, she saw a mural painted on the side of a wall, larger-than-life depictions in bold colors: Humphrey Bogart! Bette Davis! James Dean! And, again dominating even those dazzling stars, Marilyn Monroe. Normalyn got off the bus, walked. In Hollywood, almost every bench displayed an advertisement for the Hollywood Wax Museum—with a reproduction of Marilyn Monroe, white skirt swirling about her legs.
She was on Hollywood Boulevard! The street looked spent, its colors faded. People—men—looked at her. She put on her glasses; that banished some of the stares. Quickly, she took off the glasses, briefly welcoming the attention before she banished it again. Wanderers everywhere, tattered people throughout the city, young and old. And across the street—!
A girl dressed in a gown, with a huge cloth orchid stuck into her flaming hair, was signing autographs for two plump teenage girls. Wearing a bloused shirt and pants tucked into cowboy boots, a youngman with her added his autograph and posed cockily for a giggly girl with a camera. Another youngwoman, with a huge wave of hair covering one eye, pushed into the picture. With them four other young people in similarly odd clothing lingered on display before a shabbily fancy ice-cream parlor.
“It’s Lady Star and Billy Jack with the Dead Movie Stars!” a youngman in shorts whispered to a girl with him as they rushed to get a closer look.
Normalyn walked away. The group—and evening advancing with mist—frightened her.
“Hon!” Troja welcomed her at the house. “Been worried about you. You just in time for dinner.”
To Normalyn’s pleasure, Troja had managed a delicious chicken with whipped potatoes. When Normalyn complimented the meal as Troja’s “very best,” she was frosted with the information that Kirk had cooked that evening—probably in an excess of false energy, Normalyn concluded. Kirk’s fingers were drumming soundlessly on the counter.
“What you lookin’ for?” Troja asked Normalyn.
“My purse.” She had just realized she had left it on the counter when she went out.
“It’s on your bed, where you left it,” Troja told her.
She found it there. She opened it urgently, looking for the letter, the newsclippings. All were there—and the traveler’s checks she had hidden in the lining. Still, the contents seemed to have been rummaged through.
Troja had followed her. “Found it where you left it?”
“Did you go through my purse?” Normalyn’s words bolted out angrily.
“Of course not!” Troja
turned away.
3
Normalyn’s life—the drifting—resumed during cloudy days when the lingering jacaranda blossoms seemed most alive, desperately alive.
“There’s another article about Marilyn,” Kirk said one afternoon to Troja. He indicated the tabloid he read regularly.
“What does it say?” Normalyn asked. Not to ask would emphasize her discomfort about an ordinary statement, but she did not want to look at the paper.
“It’s about all the women who’ve called the paper after that story about Marilyn having a daughter,” Kirk said. “All of them probably trying to get into the movies. Everyone comes here to get into the goddamn movies. Why did you come to Los Angeles, Normalyn? Never have told us.”
It was not an extraordinary question. It could have been asked of anyone. But it made Normalyn apprehensive.
“She came here to find herself or lose herself, like everyone else,” Troja offered. She was now reading the newspaper with Kirk. “How old are you, hon?”
“You asked me before. I’m twenty-one,” Normalyn upheld her made-up age. She looked away from them—to sever the subject of her age from the story in the tabloid.
“Imagine! Being Marilyn’s daughter!” Troja said. “Can you imagine, hon?” she asked Normalyn.
Normalyn’s hands were trembling. She went to her room. She made furious sounds by rearranging the sparse furniture.
Troja had understood Normalyn’s signals. She came into her room.
“You did go through my purse.” Normalyn hated those words.
“Yes.”
“You read a letter.”
Troja hesitated. “Saw one.” She did not look at Normalyn. “I borrowed some money from you—had to.”
For Kirk’s cocaine, Normalyn knew, with anger and sadness.
