by John Rechy
NUMBERS
ALSO BY JOHN RECHY
Novels:
The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens
The Coming of the Night
City of Night
This Day’s Death
The Vampires
The Fourth Angel
Rushes
Bodies and Souls
Marilyn’s Daughter
The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez
Our Lady of Babylon
Nonfiction:
The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary
Plays:
Rushes
Tigers Wild
Momma as She Became—But Not as She Was (one-act)
NUMBERS
JOHN RECHY
Copyright © 1967 by John Rechy
Foreword copyright © 1984 by John Rechy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Acknowledgments: “Wild Thing” by Chip Taylor, copyright © 1965 by Blackwood Music Inc., reprinted by permission of Blackwood Music Inc.; “Summer in the City” by John Sebastian, copyright © 1966, reprinted by permission of Faithful Virtue Music Co., Inc.; “Hungry” by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, copyright © 1966 by Screen Gems-Columbia Music, Inc., New York, reprinted by permission of Screen Gems-Columbia Music, Inc.; “Dirty Water” by Ed Cobb, sung by the Standells, reprinted by permission of Equinox Music, Publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rechy, John.
Numbers.
I. Title.
PS3568.E23N8 1984 813’.54 83-49450
ISBN 0-8021-5198-1 (pbk.)
Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
04 05 06 07 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4
for Bill, Bob, and Bill
Foreword
Driving out of Los Angeles after a ten-day visit, I looked in my rearview mirror as the freeways that knot within the city untie into a straight highway; and I saw reflected a gray amorphous “dome,” a cloud created by entrapped smoke and lingering fog enclosing the “city of lost angels,” the city of daily apocalypse. At that moment crowded memories of that visit full of sex and revelation seemed to be contained within that mirrored reflection; and I began writing this book, on a pad placed on the console of my cherished black-and-tan 1965 Mustang.
After publication of my first novel, City of Night, I had fled to the relative isolation of my hometown of El Paso, Texas. This trip to Los Angeles had broken that isolation, briefly. My mother had come with me and stayed with my sister in a small town outside the city; I had taken a motel room in Los Angeles. Now, as we moved into the mesmerized California and Arizona deserts, back to El Paso, my mother held the writing pad firmly on the console. Steering the car with my left hand, I continued to write, notes, then sentences, passages.
We stayed overnight in Phoenix and left early in the “purple moments” before dawn, referred to in the first sentence of this book, and so my exit from Phoenix to El Paso became the long entrance of Johnny Rio into the city whose reflection I had seen in my rearview mirror. By the time we reached El Paso, the first draft of the first chapter was almost finished.
The writing of City of Night had stretched over a period of four years. Numbers was written in exactly three months, although some chapters went through as many as a dozen drafts. (The only writer I read—re-read—in that period was Poe, a deep influence.) The sexual frenzy that had gone into the actual experiences funneled into the writing as I wrote feverishly every day, into night, transferring into this book an urgency I hoped would equal that which I had felt during those 10 days: a sense of time pausing—seeming to pause, stop—and then racing in assault, and the burgeoning need to cram “life” within a tiny space of allotted time.
Sometimes I think I would like to rewrite several chapters in Numbers—but I won’t. I feel that it doesn’t completely fulfill one of my primary goals in it—the unity of narrative “reality” and symbol promised by the first chapter. That chapter, which has some of my best writing, foretells the story, introduces all the themes and symbols that will illuminate Johnny Rio’s descent into the dark heart of the sexual arena he discovers in Griffith Park, and brings into the prose the various cadences intended to underscore the stages of his sexual odyssey. Although it contains other passages I consider among my best—Johnny’s invading the darkness of the movie balcony, his search for the sexual area of the park, his entrance into it—I feel there is a floundering in the first half of the book. When Johnny moves into the park, the novel proceeds largely as I intended. The imagery is deliberately bright but contained within a deceptive “quietude” I tried to create in the slowed rhythm of the prose. When the park becomes dangerously seductive—now “the Park”—I altered its descriptions with more active verbs and darkening imagery, gashes of shadows. Simultaneously, the depiction of sexual encounters “darkens” also, and scenes occur in the lower depths of the Park. I tried to pace the last chapter to “match” that of the speeding car in the first.
In this account of “10 days” (the book’s title in its Danish edition) in the life of Johnny Rio, my attention to structure—to shape chaos—increased. I wanted to trace the patterns of a certain destiny—and destiny and meaning reveal themselves only in retrospect within the frame of memory or “art.”
When Numbers was finished, I showed it to two close friends. With unquestioned sincerity, one exhorted me not to publish it; both warned that the book’s concentrated sexuality might harm me as a serious writer.
Their concerned reaction should have prepared me for its largely hysterical critical reception; even the use of my photograph on the front of the book’s jacket aroused anger conveyed in reviews. To buy the German translation, readers had to sign a card stipulating that they were over the age of 21, knew the book’s contents, and would not lend it to anyone under that age, and to no one else without informing of its subject. Although the American edition was excellently reviewed in The London Magazine, fear of censorship prevented its publication there. A proposed Italian version was made contingent on my allowing about one-third of the book to be excised; I declined.
As had occurred with City of Night, the book’s “sexual” content was glared at—and here it is highly graphic; the novel’s careful structure—effective or not—was ignored. But again I received hundreds of letters from readers, male and female, homosexual and heterosexual, most of them responding to the book’s various themes beyond its sexuality. Eventually, perceptive views of this book were published, and continue.
For me, Numbers remains a favorite among all my books.
John Rechy
Los Angeles, 1984
It was always so; during the day
the Dwelling was covered by the cloud,
which at night had the appearance of fire.
Numbers 9:16
ONE
HE LEFT PHOENIX in the morning, in the early dawning moments when the world is purple; and he saw, on the highway, bands of spectral birds clustered on the pavement searching for God knows what—certainly not food, not on the bare highway and so near the sleeping city.
Expecting them to take flight quickly, he did not reduce his speed; but even as the car dashed dangerously
toward them, they remained there as if mysteriously involved in some suicidal ritual—until Johnny Rio, who would have brooded grayly about killing anything (he would prefer to swerve off the road), smashed at his brakes and sounded his honk—the long sound spreading emptily, lonesomely, into the caverns of the still morning.
Only then did the strange birds scatter—but very, very slowly, reluctantly; they flew away—gliding like pieces of dark paper abandoned suddenly by an erratic wind; gliding, but quite low, just barely above the hood of the car: as if in a deep trance.
Again and again, as he drives now much more slowly (the car hardly moving, Johnny himself caught in the hypnotic mood this phantasmal morning has spread over the birds and the highway), he encounters other, similar birds, always small, always shadowy, always in groups of eight or nine, always as if courting a harsh, inevitable destiny, either reluctant to move away from or unaware of the crushing path of the car.
Within a distance of perhaps a mile, the birds were gone.
Once again, Johnny can slash the desert in his speeding new car, as he has done from Texas to New Mexico, into Arizona—the country he has traveled from Laredo, through the burned desert, the level lands leprously spotted with dried bushes; and he’s rushing to Los Angeles for a reason he does not know: knowing only that he’s returning for ten days.
Exactly ten days.
To avoid the yellow heat of the Arizona desert, a heat remembered from other, distant times, he left Phoenix early (after arriving there yesterday afternoon: renting a room in one of those synthetic “luxury” motels which seem to be made of layers of colored sugar; and he lay by the pool glancing admiringly and often at his slenderly muscled body stretched sensually turning dark tan under the raging summer sun, the hairs on his legs gold despite his dark-brown hair); but already, now that he’s many, many miles into the desert, the heat is panting at the windows in recurrent smothering breaths.
He removes his shirt. He never wears underclothes, and so his chest is bare. He feels free and sexual.
The sun has whitened the desert, transforming it paradoxically into that snowy, icy spectacle created by the sand and the trembling waves of steam released by the pavement in the distance. A car ahead of Johnny (but not ahead for long: he has a compulsion to pass) augments the sense of unreality which has not yet been lifted; that car seems to float on the horizon as if on a frozen lake.
Deliberately to shatter the mood, Johnny turns the radio on, hoping for one of those miraculously lunatic stations that spew out the blessedly mesmerizing wailing of young groups with lovely names, the hopped-up disc jockeys making bad jokes; or hoping for a biblestation from which a Negro preacher will moan out ineffable rocking blue damnation. But Johnny has already traveled too far from the cities, and all the radio picks up is one of those square stations you inevitably get so inappropriately as you speed frantically in the daytime along the highways of America toward an urgent destination.
He’s going 90 miles an hour.
The amorphous heat is fierce.
Far, far away he sees a shadow slice the air before him sharply like a scythe ripping the sky: perhaps a vulture swooping down on something dead in the desert. Johnny imagines it perched humped over the bleeding flesh. Appalled by the cruel image, he futilely tries the radio again.
But death, which he avoids thinking of, seems determined to permeate his awareness; it does like a knife in his flesh.
Behind him are memories of dead birds smashed by other cars along the highways—of the red, red freshly spilled blood smeared on the concrete pavement. The crushed feathers.
And already his windshield is speckled heavily with those tragic moth-creatures that descend from the sky to crash against the glass—each tiny life transformed mercilessly in one instant into a powdery smear, perhaps a dot of blood on the pane—to be wiped off with a moist paper towel at the next gas station.
Are those dusty insects aware of the windshield? Do they lunge from the sky, welcoming their destruction? Or are they trying to enter the car to escape the powerful currents created by the plunging cars? Deceived by the glass, they crash against an invisible destiny—a destiny unperceived until the fatal moment.
Not that Johnny would equate destiny with death, which may be only an anticlimax in the curve of life; no, his awareness is not so much of death as of a welcome extended to fate, of the suicide that doesn’t involve the taking of life: of the infinite ways in which your “number” (so many penultimate numbers!) comes up every single day.
Thinking that, Johnny accelerates his speed to 95—as he lunges toward the foggy city of lost angels.
Unconsciously, he’s begun to count the number of bugs slaughtered by his speeding car.
Splash! . . . One. . . .
Two . . . three. . . .
He’s about to count four, but the tiny fluttering speck veers away from the windshield, escapes. Its number wasn’t up.
But when it is—. . .
He imagines a roster, with everyone in the world—past, present, future—numbered (as in that book of the Bible in which Moses is commanded by God to take a census of his people): all listed neatly in long, thin, tight columns. Say that your number is infinite-billion, six million, eight hundred and sixty-six thousand, three hundred and seventy-three. That means you’ll go immediately after number infinite-billion, six million, eight hundred and sixty-six thousand, three hundred and seventy-two. If you could only determine the numbers of those before you, then you’d know almost to the instant when your own would come up. (A sure way, Johnny can’t help thinking with amusement, of insuring that you will, indeed, be your brother’s keeper!)
Splut! . . . Four.
He imagines God poised behind an automatic rifle sniping each “number” down—though on occasion He might, for expediency, use a machine gun to topple the ranks like dominoes.
Johnny notices the fifth crushed bug since he began counting.
When your number comes up—. . .
Six!
Suddenly aware of what he’s been counting, and angered by it, he tries once again to shut off that area of his mind obsessed with death and self-destruction—that area opened by the shadowy birds outside of Phoenix, the crushed feathers glued with blood to the pavement, the mothy bugs on the windshield.
And this is how he tries to shut those thoughts off: He looks down at his shirtless chest, which—deeply, deeply tanned—gleams with sweat. Pleased by the sight, he runs his hand over it, brings that hand to his mouth, and he licks his own perspiration, feeling excitement burgeoning between his legs. He spreads his knees, arches his body. His foot on the pedal accelerates the speed still more: one hundred miles an hour.
Triumphantly, the thought of sex has driven away the thought of death, at least for now.
He has counted the number of cars he has passed on the highway from the time he began to encounter some light traffic. Three cars so far. The fourth now coming up.
Whooo-oosh!
Four. He’s passed four cars.
And not one has passed him!
He sees the fifth ahead, approaches it. Now he inches to the left, to begin passing; but the driver in front of him, challenged, accelerates his own speed. Johnny sees the blond head of what appears to be a youngman—he too shirtless. Johnny Rio is about to steer sharply to the left, to force the other to allow him to pass—begins to do so in a swift, swerving arc; but a car rushing in the opposite lane—its panicked honk blaring, echoing itself into the desert—forces him to retreat. The driver of the car which Johnny is even more determined now to pass is keeping to the left, almost flush with the line dividing the highway; he’s seizing strategic advantage of the narrow, single lane to block Johnny’s car. Enraged, Johnny watches his speedometer wavering uncertainly beyond the 100 mark.
A distance away, on a gradual ascent, a heavy truck moves slowly like an enormous red-striped insect along a no-passing stretch. Approaching it, both Johnny and the driver of the car ahead—brakes protesting shrilly—are f
orced to decelerate suddenly: 95 miles . . . 90 . . . 80 . . . 70 . . . 65 . . .
Now the driver in front turns to look at Johnny. In that swift instant they see each other, and what Johnny sees is a blond youngman in his 20’s with wild, wind-tossed hair.
I’ve got to pass him! Johnny thinks urgently.
He notices that only a few feet ahead, beyond a curve on the ascending highway, the double, no-passing line breaks for a short distance. There are no cars on the opposite lane. At exactly the right instant he depresses the gas pedal, moves quickly into the left lane, is now parallel with the car he’s been trying to pass (the two drivers glance at each other once more, swiftly, like charioteers), moves ahead of it (wishing strangely for the wild beat of rocking music on the radio to accompany the speed), is parallel with the truck, passes it—and glides into the right lane feeling almost sexually released.
I’ve passed five cars, one truck! he exults.
The number on the speedometer is 105.
He tells himself to slow down, but he doesn’t. He feels carried on a current—not so much he who is driving as he who is being driven—as if the highway is pulling him.
Faster than time!
He leaves his foot pressed tightly to the pedal.
Yet despite the urgency, at the thought of his destination (I am returning to Los Angeles after three years!), his heart protests in terror, his body chills the perspiration, his mind howls with echoes.
As he speeds ineluctably to the foggy city of dead angels (even when he lived there, he often thought of Los Angeles—with its ubiquitous advertisements for interment—as a “swinging cemetery,” a “graveyard of fun”; have-a-ball-on-your-own-gravesite!), Johnny Rio appears moody, almost sinister, like an angel of dark sex, or death.
He looks like this:
He is very masculine, and he has been described recurrently in homosexual jargon as “a very butch number”—a phrase invariably accompanied by a great rolling of the eyes, a nervous, moist flitting of the tongue along the lips. A supreme accolade in that world, “butch” means very male and usually carries overtones of roughness; a “number” is a potential or actual or merely desired partner in vagrant sex.
