Numbers

by John Rechy

  But Johnny’s is an easy masculinity—not stiff, not rigid, not blundering nor posed—although, when he wants to, he can look tough: unapproachably tough when he carries it to a self-defeating extreme. The fact is that, as with all truly sexually attractive men, there is something very, very subtly female about him; and only at first does that seem a semantic contradiction: because, although, yes, there is that something which is vaguely female, there is nothing feminine, there is nothing effeminate.

  He walks gracefully, weightlessly, like a panther—and with just the slightest trace of a cocky swagger. (A girl he went out with told him once that she waited at her door to watch him walk away.) His eyes are green—but if he wears blue, they assume that color, become unbelievably azure; and they’re rimmed by thick, full, curled, almost ridiculously long lashes. He constantly flirts by glancing down through sleepy lids, then looking up quickly. He has dark-brown wavy hair. A slight crook in his nose keeps him from being a prettyboy and makes him, therefore, much more attractive and masculine. He has a tremendous smile, which he has often observed himself while looking into a mirror—but only after many people had commented on it (so it is not “studied”): It begins, his smile, almost shyly as the barest hint of a grin—then, disappearing entirely for an instant as if he has decided not to smile after all, it spreads suddenly—bursts radiantly—very wide, revealing white, even, dazzling teeth.

  So the “femaleness” has to do with the fact that he moves sensually, that his eyes invite, that he is constantly flirting (although this is not conscious), and that he is extremely vain.

  And, also, it has to do with a harrowing sensitivity about age.

  One should therefore merely say that Johnny looks to be in his early 20’s. He has even been asked for identification when, on very rare occasions, he has bought liquor during the past three years. (And he’s firmly convinced that—largely through sheer determination—he’ll never age.)

  Neither tall nor short (though closer to short than tall), Johnny has a slender, muscular body. In the past few years he has exercised diligently with weights—not in order to become one of those rigid grotesques with coconut muscles that bear no relation whatever to the natural lines of the body, but to keep lithe and hard. This he has accomplished eminently.

  There is at least another reason for his determined exercising. Stripped down to trunks, alone in the room where he works out in his apartment in Laredo, he becomes acutely aware of his body—at first in opposition to the weights (himself overcoming the resistance), then in fusion and harmony with them (strength and power existing only in their actual manifestation, in the kinetic activity). His muscles pumped, flushed tight, rigid and filled with blood, the perspiration flowing in relief, he’s aware of whatever mysterious thing it is that makes him alive.

  Johnny’s father, now dead, was Irish. His mother is Mexican. (“Rio” is not actually his last name—it’s not even his mother’s maiden name, although hers is really Mexican. He assumed the name in Los Angeles because, especially in a world where no last names are given, it sounded romantic—like a gypsy’s.) From them he inherited a smooth complexion which sponges the sun’s rays easily, almost, one could say, adoringly: When he lies stretched under the stark gaze of the sun—and he does so religiously each summer—he feels that the heat is making love to him, licking his body with a golden tongue. Each summer his skin becomes like brown velvet.

  Many people have told him that he’s very handsome. He likes to hear that, and he never denies it. But he knows that the designation is not exactly correct. Precisely: he is much more sexual than he is handsome; and that, for Johnny, is even better. There is something about him which exudes sensuality. He knows it, he may even have cultivated it. He has been told that there is a promise of “dark sex” that hovers about him.

  Again, as with all truly sexually desirable men, he attracts both sexes—even, among his own sex, some who will never recognize that attraction, who will feel it, disguised, only as a certain anger and resentment toward him. Johnny is used to a type of man, usually married, who will try to quarrel with him instantly.

  Added to the various paradoxes of his being, as well as to his attractiveness—there is—or so he has been told (but only by people who have not known him sexually)—a suggestion of something that remains pure and innocent about him, something of uncontaminability.

  This perplexes Johnny because he has not—since he was a child—felt “pure.”

  If you approach Los Angeles on the highway turned freeway, as Johnny Rio will soon be doing, you’re aware, perhaps as far as a hundred miles away, of the Cloud. It enshrouds the city. In the daytime and from that distance, the Cloud, which is fog and smoke, creates a spectral city: a gray mass floating on the horizon. At night, lit by the millions of colored lights with which the city attempts futilely to smother the dark, it becomes an incandescent, smoking halo; dull orange: as though the city were on fire.

  In a curious trance at the awareness of his imminent return—sailing automatically, effortlessly, unconsciously, between cars, ahead of them, assuming a waltzing rhythm as he does so—Johnny Rio hasn’t yet noticed the ominous Cloud. He hasn’t even noticed that the traffic has thickened considerably for the last few miles on the long, long . . . long . . . entrance to Los Angeles.

  He tries the radio once more . . . the electronic murmuring.

  Suddenly, with a blast, a rocking L.A. station shatters the static. A male voice groans:

  Wild thing, you make my heart sing—

  You make everything groooooveee. . . .

  The music, by a group called the Troggs, with its persistent beat (like life imbedded in the record’s groove, to be played over and over—the same; what changes between the beginning and the end?), acts as a catalyst for Johnny’s buried despair; and despair flows in a confused mixture of panic and excitement which burrows between his legs; his cock begins to swell.

  The moaning voice on the radio imitates the dark sounds of Negroes:

  Wahld thang . . . Ah thank Ah loooove yew!

  But Ah wanna know foh SUUUUUUURE! . . .

  As he speeds into that mushroom of gray mist ahead of him (the car devouring the highway), the foggy, smoky Cloud reaches out for him, begins to surround him more and more closely—although he’s still not aware of it, partly because it seems to recede as one nears it.

  “Wahld thang—. . .”

  The sky is still clearly blue; but the scenery ahead has begun to fade, buried beyond that foggy veil; the mountains appear unreal, like movie props. Each mile farther inward, the Cloud perversely shuts out more of the sky; and the spotty verdure assumes that patina of gray that settles on the city.

  Wahld thang, Ah thank yew mooooooove me! . . .

  Enveloped by the grayness, Johnny Rio suddenly realizes he has entered the Cloud.

  On a Friday afternoon in summer.

  TWO

  “JOHNNY! JOHNNY RIO!”

  The man calling him has just stepped out of a bar and into the dirty yellow afternoon. He waltzes up to Johnny, who has just turned the corner of 5th Street into Main—three blocks away from where he parked his car. Johnny and the man meet before the men’s store there, its windows an insane clutter of flashy, tacky clothes, bright colors battling each other for prominence.

  “Lord-uh-me!” Hand-to-heart. “Where? have you? been, Johnny Rio?” Striking a languid pose, one hand wilting on his cheek, elbow supported by the other, the man stands before Johnny, openly appraising him.

  Knowing that he’s being studied, Johnny tries quite urgently—but unsuccessfully—to read the man’s reaction to him by an expression, a look.

  “Now tell us: Where? have? you? been?” the man goes on. Like the small bulbs that wink in response to each tap on a pinball machine, his eyes blink, twice, as he punches each word out lightly.

  Johnny remembers the man, vaguely—from a dim bar, a yellow-lit gray street, a smothered room. “I’ve been—. . . Away,” he answers.

  “Well, of
course you have! But where? I bet some absolutely mad, rich queen just snatched you away from us—like a vulture—and kept you away—all these years!— until now!”

  Johnny remembers the imagined vulture feeding on the carrion in the desert. “No,” he says, trying to place the man more definitely. “It wasn’t like that. I’ve just been Away.”

  And he has been Away.

  “Away” means Laredo, in Texas, his hometown in the beautiful purple, blue, and golden Southwest: Laredo—which, on one side—toward the border—is still very Mexican, as colorful as a spread sarape; and, on the other, toward the highway as you leave the city, is all imitation-rainbow motels. Though it has unpleasant memories for him (a dreary fatherless Mexican Catholic childhood: poor, poor years and after-school jobs in a laundry call-office, a department-store stockroom, and on a newspaper as copy boy), Johnny has lived there for three years since fleeing Los Angeles one day, fed up; has lived there alone in an apartment (except for a few weeks with his mother at her home soon after his return). He could have found turbulence in Laredo, too, of course—though not in the abundance of Los Angeles; but he could also retreat, and did: working hard (for his father’s brother in the evenings), saving all his money; in his leisure time exercising compulsively with weights or listening to music in a darkened room; avoiding people (except his mother and a few others who wouldn’t remind him of the world he left behind); and, often, having to drug himself to sleep, to stifle a stunning fear of the annihilating darkness.

  Then—precisely one day after he told himself he was completely rid of the need for the life he’d fled—that day, as he stood looking at himself in the mirror, he felt curiously that he had ceased to exist, that he existed only in the mirror. He reached out to touch himself, and the cold glass frustrated him. Before, others had confirmed his existence with admiration.

  Johnny was driven back to Los Angeles not unlike the apocryphal criminal driven to return to the scene of his crime.

  But he set an exact limit to the time of his return: ten days. He announced this to his mother, his uncle, and his very few friends.

  Ten days.

  “Well!” the man says. “So you don’t want to tell me where you’ve been. You always were quite the mysterious one!” He takes a short step back, to view Johnny more strategically. “Let me look at you!”

  Johnny stares at the man as a defendant will at the jury that decides his fate.

  And the verdict is read: “Why, you haven’t changed at all!” the man says.

  Johnny’s heart opens gratefully.

  “No, wait!” the man says. “I take it all back; you have changed!”

  Johnny feels like a man whose reprieve has been withdrawn.

  “You’ve gotten sexier!” the man says. “And, you know, you always were one of the sexiest numbers around.”

  Now Johnny smiles, radiantly. He exists again in the admiring eyes of the other, the apprehension has evaporated. He feels more sexual, handsomer than ever. He relaxes.

  “I just bet you’re madly broke and in need of money,” the man says gleefully.

  And so I’m really back, Johnny thinks. He shrugs indifferently, playing the role he knows so well. (Though he’s taken money in exchange for sex over and over and over, Johnny Rio has never felt like a whore.)

  “I’ve rented a room at the hotel nearby just in case something like this happened.” The man giggles naughtily. “And it has!—lucky me I saw you!”

  “How much?” Johnny asks automatically from the past.

  “I’ll pay you the usual,” the man sniffs, as if somewhat offended that Johnny hasn’t taken that for granted.

  Johnny nods, wondering what the usual is now. Almost unconsciously he reaches behind him, touches his wallet. I’ve got about seven hundred dollars here, he thinks, and I’m going with this man for maybe ten. He follows the man, who ambles merrily crossing the street toward the hotel Johnny remembers only too well. Johnny walks this familiar street—past stores displaying hundreds of magazines showing naked bodies in garish color; past the rancid fried-chicken counters (“You hungry?” the man asks. Johnny’s stomach turns in revulsion. “No thanks”); past the leathery army-and-navy outlet stores.

  Johnny stops abruptly. Is this why I’ve come back? To prove to myself I can still hustle? Once, it had been the most liberating of experiences—to be desired enough to be paid for lying as motionless as possible on a bed while a man burrowed his head between Johnny’s legs.

  With a tilt of his head, the man motions Johnny to come along. He doesn’t.

  “What’s the matter, honey?” the man says. “Ooh, you are a cute number!” he exclaims.

  “I don’t want to go to that hotel,” Johnny says; and although that’s true (he remembers the rooms there: a bed, a table, a chair, a tin can for an ashtray, the smell of loneliness), his main reason for hesitating is that a nebulous plan is forming. “I’m staying at another one, just a couple of blocks away. Let’s go there.” What he just said isn’t exactly true. It’s true that he has rented a motel unit, but it’s not nearby.

  “Okay,” the man says, somewhat bewildered. “It’s highly irregular, of course,” he adds.

  They walk together. Away from Main Street. Along trashy, ugly downtown Los Angeles. A distorted checkerboard of afternoon shadows.

  The man is saying: “Oh, Johnny Rio, you should have been here a few years ago—when that stir happened! (I think you had just left.) Well! You probably remember him—this young number that used to hang around the bars and Pershing Square? Well! He wrote a book about Main Street and hustling and Pershing Square and queens, and tourists came down looking for Miss So-and-So that he’d written about! And that trashy big picture magazine did an article with photographs of Main Street. . . . It’s calmed down again, however.”

  Johnny is walking so fast, impatiently, that the man is having a difficult time keeping up with him. One block.

  “Can you imagine?” the man continues. “I knew him—the author. Knew him quite well, I might add,” he adds suggestively. “Who would have thought he was going to write a book? Why, he looked like any other young vagrant!”

  It’s a smoggy, livid afternoon. The Cloud has taken possession of the city. Two blocks.

  The man goes on: “Now every time I pick up a hustler, I wonder if I’m going to end up between the sheets of a bed or the sheets of a book!”

  Three blocks.

  “Why, doll,” the man says incredulously, “where are you going?—and whose car is that?” Mouth-ovaled-in-alarm. “My God!—you’re going to steal it! In broad daylight!”

  Johnny has deliberately led the man to where his own car—new and shiny and goodlooking with just the touch of subtle flashiness that he likes—is parked; he proceeds to unlock the door. Looking at the man over the black vinyl top of his car, whose lower body is prairie-gold, he says coolly: “I’m going back to where I’m staying. In a real expensive motel. Alone. And this is my car.” The car has suddenly become a symbol of his not needing that man, of no longer needing the man’s ten bucks.

  “What—. . .?” The man is visibly bewildered, and this is exactly what Johnny has hoped for. “This is your car? But I thought—. . .”

  Johnny gets into his car, starts it, drives away, engine roaring. Instantly he feels very sorry for what he did to that man, but he thinks:

  It wasn’t that. That isn’t why I’ve come back.

  But he’s still not sure.

  And so, that evening, he went to Pershing Square.

  He’s dressed like this:

  In a thin, pale-yellow silk shirt, perfectly tailored to show off his body (even his nipples are lightly outlined)—short sleeves rolled even higher, two buttons open at his neck; faded Levi’s; and scuffed tan (not at all tawdry) boots.

  Years ago, he had first arrived in Los Angeles by Greyhound bus. Less than half an hour later he was in Pershing Square. This time, it took him longer; but here he is again.

  In the light, warm early evening,
he sees it has all changed.

  It is no longer the Pershing Square he knew. Vengefully, the enemy, known as “The City Authorities,” had removed the benches and ledges that outlined the park, had cut the trees that sheltered the old and pensioned from the sun in the afternoon, and the young and indolent from the cops in the evening. Now it was a concrete skeleton. In two pitiful little squares surrounded by grass and no trees, a handful of the old denizens of a freer Pershing Square—preachers, winos—still gathered intrepidly, sitting crowded on the few benches situated in the glare of the sun and any hostile eye.

  But looking more closely at the tight groups, Johnny spots a male hustler here, an interested man there, a potential queen; and he thinks: Soon it’ll be the same. They could dig a hole to replace this square (and probably will, in time), and its usual inhabitants would fill it up. He doesn’t know whether he thinks that with sadness or satisfaction. Perhaps with some of both.

  And look at this: An obvious queen (a very, very, very effeminate youngman, all windmilling, busy hands) has strolled into the park—like the unafraid advance guard, or scout, of a soon-invading army—only temporarily vanquished. With “her” is a hoody-looking youngman, obviously a hustler. The queen spots Johnny, says something to the youngman, and saunters toward Johnny. Her youngman waits a few feet away.

  She wastes no time.

  “I’m having a party tonight, out on Vermont, baby,” she says. “I’m issuing the invitations right now. And you are invited!” She points a reedy finger at Johnny. “My ‘sisters’ and their ‘aunties’ are furnishing lots and lots of liquor, and I’m rounding up the—. . .” She makes her voice deep, throaty, husky; she tilts her head, looks at him sideways, suggestively growls: “. . .—and I’m rounding up the meat!” Now she indicates the youngman waiting for her and says: “The number over there will drive you to the house when we have a carload.”