About My Life and the Kept Woman

by John Rechy

  I told my mother I was going back to Los Angeles. I longed for my sister’s old sustaining camaraderie, her gossip. There, I would get a job, order my life, resist the pull of anarchy. I returned the rented typewriter.

  Without even asking whether I needed it, my brother Robert gave me $100 to take with me.

  “No, Robert.”

  “Johnny, you can give it back when you can,” he said.

  Another good-bye between me and my mother, still in the projects, a good-bye never less painful, never less sad. Yet another in the long good-bye that life was turning into.

  28

  “Beautiful sister!”

  “Little brother!”

  How I had missed her, her smile.

  “Is there a letter forwarded from El Paso for me?” Still no word from Grove Press.

  No letter.

  I stayed a few days with my sister, enjoying her and the company of my brother-in-law; his marriage to my sister was idyllic, it seemed to me, especially given the conflicts it had created in El Paso.

  I took my nephew and niece, an energetic and good-looking boy and a pretty, flouncy girl, to a nearby playground. I whirled them on the merry-go-round, pushed them on swings; bought them ice cream, enjoying myself and them.

  “Uncle Johnny!”

  “Don’t call me uncle, you hear?”

  At night we all watched television, my sister always ahead of whatever movie was being shown. “It’s so clear that the sister is the one who …”

  This time my sister had no news about Isabel Franklin.

  * * *

  I moved back downtown, to another hotel on Hope Street. I contacted the agency I had worked for earlier, at temporary jobs with attorneys. The man and woman at the agency were glad to have me back. They immediately sent me out on a job in a glitzy law firm on Wilshire Boulevard, miles away from Pershing Square and the bars on Main Street.

  Forwarded from El Paso to my sister Olga and delivered to me when I rushed to her house to receive it, a letter arrived from Don Allen. “Mardi Gras” would be published in the next issue.

  Not soon enough to quell my anxiety but actually not long after hearing from Don Allen, my letter appeared as a story in Evergreen Review. The few lines about “Mardi Gras” identified it as “the first published story by a new American writer” and indicated that it was part of a novel in progress.

  I began to receive letters forwarded by Grove Press from readers, touching letters from men, from women, empathizing with the feelings detected in it. On another rented typewriter, I answered each.

  While reminding me that he was waiting to see the rest of the novel that I had told him was “almost finished,” Don Allen suggested I write some shorter pieces—perhaps something about my hometown, El Paso.

  Excited by the request, I wrote an impressionistic view of my hometown: the incomparable sky; the infinite desert; memories resurrected from early years; the mountain I had climbed; gaudy flashes of Juárez, across the border; loving memories of my mother; and memories, rendered as tender as I could, about my father.

  Published as “El Paso del Norte,” it drew more mail.

  I continued working. I sent my mother money regularly. I haunted the public library. With amusement and sadness, I reread the section of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams that I had read before the troops at the insistence of Acting Corporal Bailey.

  Don Allen suggested another short essay. I wrote an impressionistic view of Los Angeles, which I had come to see as a Technicolor city of lost angels, perhaps the metaphorical place of exile for the rebellious angels cast out by God. I celebrated its overt narcissism, the display of physicality on the last horizon, the last stop before the sun disappeared each night into the ocean. Titled, “The City of Lost Angels” it drew more mail.

  Carey MacWilliams, the great editor of the Nation, asked me to write for the magazine. I wrote about discrimination against Mexicans, in the interior of Texas—remembering Miz Crawford. I wrote about a juvenile detention center in El Paso where minority teenagers were being treated like war captives. I wrote about a kid I had known in the projects who had committed suicide in an isolation ward of Huntsville; he was twenty-one. Those articles drew more letters, and more suggestions for material from other magazines; I wrote for the Texas Observer, Nugget, the Saturday Review.

  Eager to send it to Grove, I continued to revise Pablo!—certain of its publication now that I was making a reputation, if the many letters were to be believed, and I did believe them, gladly.

  I still had no intention of writing about the hustling world. I guarded, intimately, the memories of the people encountered throughout those cities of night. I had conveyed only a glimpse of that world in “Mardi Gras,” a letter. But betray the streets and bars, betray the times of unique excitement?, the highs of outlawed exile? Expose those times, those people to possible judgement by a world that had rendered them invisible? No.

  But what if I wrote about them with the compassion I felt, the closeness of exile? If I didn’t, would those lives I now sheltered disappear entirely, just as the actual denizens disappeared invisibly—and where?—along the last stops of skid row?—into the artificial surcease of drugs and liquor? Perhaps—I thought of Jocko in New Orleans—to suicide.

  In the rented room on Hope Street, I began to set down an account of my encounter with the flaming drag queen who called herself “Miss Destiny.” Once, in a bar, both of us high on booze and pills, she had told me about her longing for a white wedding; she, a bride, would sweep down a spiral staircase to join her husband, a hustler who would love her faithfully forever.

  With growing enthusiasm that tempered the sadness even in memories which were often funny, I wrote about her, about Main Street, Pershing Square, about her and some of the others—Trudi, Buddy, Chuck, Skipper, those whose faces at times seemed to float over my typewriter, my memories. I titled the story “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny.”

  I awaited Don’s response to it.

  The response came; he admired it, he wanted to publish it in Evergreen. Others on the staff were still reading it.

  Further news came: Barney Rosset—the daring publisher of Grove Press and editor in chief of Evergreen Review, the man who was tearing down censorship in America by publishing Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence—had rejected it. No reason was conveyed to me.

  My betrayal of the world I had begun to reveal in that story had been confirmed. I had exposed those lives to more rejection.

  Guiltily, I felt a strong pull back to the streets. Like a repentant lover, I returned to Pershing Square and the hustling bars on Main Street.

  Might I revise “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny”? Don Allen wrote to ask me. I had no idea how I could change it. I had set it down as closely as I could evoke the actual events, almost compulsively so; wincing at any temptation to alter a single detail that I remembered. When I changed the color of a dress Miss Destiny had worn, I felt immediate remorse. Hadn’t she chosen that color?

  It was a rare, starry night. I went up to the roof of the four-story building I lived in and I lit a marijuana cigarette. The bells of a nearby church began to toll the evening’s time. I looked in the direction of Pershing Square. In the haze of the marijuana, I remembered a game of statues I had played with my sister Olga and other children. Spun around in turns, we had to freeze in the position we fell in. That image drifted into my mind along with the impression, in a wispy cloud that floated in the dark distance, of an angel.

  I returned to my rented room. I incorporated both impressions—angels and stilled statues—into a passage of epiphany in the story of Miss Destiny. I sent it to Don.

  Don admired it even more. Barney Rosset rejected it.

  Now my response was anger. How dare those lives of exiles, of outlaws, be thrust aside even in literature, doubly exiled? I knew of no other publication where my story would be accepted. I hustled even more feverishly, early afternoons, late nights.

  Don Allen wrote to me abo
ut a literary quarterly that had spun off the Chicago Review in a controversy over the editors’ having printed sections of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. In reaction, the editors had formed a new quarterly, Big Table. Don encouraged me to send “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny” there. I had his permission to convey his own admiration and the fact that he had recommended it be sent there.

  It was accepted—no payment involved—and published in the third issue of Big Table as “‘The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny,’ a section from a novel in progress.” Letters from readers multiplied. I received solicitations from agents offering to represent the announced novel, and letters from several publishers asking to see the novel: Jason Epstein at Random House, editors from Macmillan, Dial Press. I heard from Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Ken Kesey.

  Don wrote that he was coming to Los Angeles and wanted to talk to me about my writing—and, he added, “to see the scene.”

  A few days later he was in the city. He called to make plans to meet. When he repeated that he wanted to see “the scene,” I mentioned a few popular clubs on Sunset Strip. He said, too quickly, “Oh, then your writing isn’t authentic.”

  Jesus Christ! He wanted to see the bars and streets I had written about, not what I had inferred for a sophisticated New York editor. His doubt shook me. Was the world I was writing about so hidden that even the editor who had championed my stories was ready to doubt its existence?

  I borrowed a car from a man I saw regularly, met in a bar. I did not tell him the reason I needed the car, since it would have destroyed the image he had of me as a street-smart hustler. I offered to get him some “dynamite dope”—he loved to feel that he was slumming—but, I said in my most concerned voice, I didn’t want to expose him to danger, since it would involve some tricky maneuvers. He believed it and lent me his car.

  I met Don at a classy hotel. A tall man, very distinguished—I thought he was English—with a swipe of graying, silvery hair, an aura of supreme sophistication, a bearing like John Barrymore’s, and the movie actor’s classic features. I imagined him with an elegant wife, sipping a Dubonnet before dinner, like John D. Rockefeller.

  I was dressed in my usual hustling “drag”—I had come to call it that, in amusement: fitted Levi’s, engineer boots, shirt open three buttons down, and a motorcycle jacket slung over one shoulder if it was early in the warm evening.

  “Oh,” he said, and smiled as if I had fulfilled his expectations of what I would look like—and, I hoped, how I would dress.

  Apprehensive because of the incident with Taub in New York—although Don Allen had already proved his interest in my writing—I was glad that there was no hint of his being homosexual. I had become an expert in detecting nuances, signals—I saw none. Now, once I had verified that I knew “the scene,” we would be able to talk about me as a writer. I would mention Pablo!—and Wilford’s enthusiasm.

  In the car as we drove to Hollywood for dinner, we conversed easily, about Los Angeles, about my time in New York. Several times I conveyed my gratitude for his interest, to which he merely nodded graciously. When he approached the matter of the novel I wasn’t writing, I veered away.

  “How much is written now?”

  “More than half.”

  “I would like to see it.”

  “I’m not ready to show it.”

  We went to dinner at Musso and Frank’s, the Hollywood restaurant that was frequented by Faulkner and Fitzgerald. We sat in a booth and talked about Evergreen Review. I asked him why Barney Rosset hadn’t wanted to publish “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny.” He shrugged. “He’s brave and unpredictable.”

  “You still want to see the ‘scene’?” I changed the offending subject. I had deliberately used his quaint word.

  “Yes.”

  OK, then, that’s what I would show the elegantly dressed classy gentleman-editor from New York.

  I took him to ChiChi’s, the toughest bar in downtown Los Angeles. It was as if, for him, it had prepared to display itself in all its tawdry splendor amid intimations of dangers. Ratty pushers lingered outside, tough queens cursed and shoved their way in, rough hustlers gathered in tight conspiratorial groups.

  They all seemed to spot Don at the same time. Everything and everyone froze.

  Don, too, froze. “I think it’s perhaps too noisy,” he said, already heading back to the car.

  I kept myself from laughing because I liked this man, very much, already, and I respected him. He, singly, had been responsible for everything I had published.

  When I left him at the hotel, he asked me to come up tomorrow so we could talk more about my “pending work.”

  Pablo! Yes, I would tell him about Pablo!

  I arrived at the hotel—no more car. I had to hitchhike, as punishment for my not having provided the owner of the car with the “dynamite dope” I had promised him. I took the elevator up to Don Allen’s room. He opened the door with an amber drink in his hand.

  “Would you like—?”

  I shook my head, no. I needed a clear head when we discussed my complex novel about Maya legends, the sun and the moon, the narcissistic boy and the girl he meets in the jungle, the—

  “Please … sit down.” His speech was slightly slurred; his eyes were drowsy.

  I sat on a couch. He sat next to me. I didn’t move. He edged over toward me.

  He said, “Give us a kiss?” Only a slight inflection had converted his words into a question. He reached out for me, coaxing me toward him.

  I stood up, feeling disoriented, harshly remembering Taub in New York. “I have to leave; I have to return my friend’s car,” I lied.

  He stood up, very formal again, but unsteady. “I’ll call you before I leave, John.”

  “Great.”

  It was over, I thought when I was back in my room. The interest in my writing, certainly genuine at first, had been compromised. Or was it possible that my material had aroused more than literary interest when it had first been read by him? I didn’t want to believe that. He had helped me so much, so much.

  When I returned from the Main Street bars the next night, there were two telephone messages at the desk for me, both from Don Allen, only one hour apart. Please call him to arrange getting together for dinner the next day. I considered not answering. Yet what if—?

  He took a cab and met me in a restaurant nearby.

  I greeted him awkwardly; he greeted me as graciously as before yesterday’s incident.

  When we had ordered, he handed me a contract from Grove Press for a book I had not even yet begun, the book I had claimed was more than half finished. With the contract was a check sent through Western Union to him for me, an advance of $2,500 for the novel.

  I felt saved.

  “Thank you, Don, thank you very much.”

  The vague incident in the hotel seemed to have disappeared, perhaps carried away by—initiated in—a blur of liquor. In the long professional, and friendly, relationship that would extend for years between me and Don Allen—who would emerge as one of the most important people in my life, to whom I would owe so much, so very, very much—nothing of the sort ever occurred again, not a word of solicitation, not a gesture of invitation. Along with Wilford Leach, he became the main champion of my work.

  This was all I was sure of: my writing was all that would allow me to move my mother out of the government projects into her own home.

  29

  “You’re John Rechy, aren’t you?”

  I was bewildered by the question that an attractive muscular man, in his upper thirties or early forties, had asked me, intercepting me as I left Harold’s bar. If he hadn’t thrown me off balance, I would have lied and said no. I was determined to remain anonymous, separate from my identity as a writer. “Yeah, why?”

  “Damn, man,” he said, “you are one fabulous guy. Your story, ‘Mardi Gras’—wow, man—and that Miss Destiny, the Fabulous Wedding. Great! You’re telling it, man; goddamn, man, you’re th
e only one really telling it!”

  As wonderful as that was to hear, it also scared me. If the few pieces I had published were identifying me, what about later? Would I be able to continue to live my anonymous life, if my street identity was canceled?

  The man—he identified himself amiably as “Smiley”—asked me to have dinner with him in a nearby cafeteria. I was glad it wasn’t the cheap Green Rose Cafeteria across the street, where customers often took hustlers but I never went: or Clifton’s, the crazy “Jesus-oriented” one a block away, where, in a shady “grotto of meditation” downstairs, a life-size statue of Jesus knelt before a running stream. No, we went to the “expensive” cafeteria, Clinton’s.

  As we ate, Smiley told me that a group of friends “in the canyon” were very excited by what I was writing, especially “Miss Destiny.”

  “When will the novel be out, man?—can’t wait.”

  “Soon,” I said.

  He had come to downtown Los Angeles, roamed the bars and Pershing Square looking for me, he said, taking his lead from the locales I had described in “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny.” He would pause intermittently—look at me, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe it—and say, “You’re telling it, man, you’re the only one really telling it.”

  “How did you recognize me?” I asked nervously.

  “I knew that when I saw you, I’d know it was you,” he said, “and I did, right away.” Then he smiled. “I have to admit, you’re not the first hustler I’ve asked if he’s you.”

  I laughed. Smiley approaching Chuck the cowboy hustler in Pershing Square and asking him if he was a writer was something I wish I had observed. Always ready to fulfill anybody’s fantasy, Chuck would lazily have pushed his wide hat back and said, “Well, uh, man, if you want me to be, uh, yeah, sure—”