by John Rechy
“Have you heard of a writer named Christopher Isherwood, man?”
I had, but I had not read anything by him. “He wrote I Am a Camera, didn’t he?” I was gradually dropping the hustler pose, then resurrecting it, then dropping more. To be addressed as a writer excited me at the same time it continued to make me uncomfortable. In the “costume” of a hustler, I was talking like a writer.
“When you meet him, don’t tell him that. That pisses him off. John van Druten wrote I Am a Camera from Christopher’s stories. He gets bugged by people who recognize him through a play he didn’t write.”
“I don’t think I’ll be running into him,” I said.
“Listen, where can I reach you? I’ll arrange for my friends to meet you—Isherwood and a couple of others, a film director, Jim Bridges, and Gavin Lambert—”
Which role would I be expected to fill, the hustler in the stories, or the writer who had written about hustling? I shook my head, no.
“Come on, they’ll dig you, come on,” he said.
Knowing that I wouldn’t go but feeling flattered by the invitation, and to test it, I gave him the telephone number of the hotel where I was staying.
“Oh, and, uh, would you like to make it together?”
He had approached me as a writer; now he was propositoning me. That was now arousing particular anxiety. Be who? I prepared an excuse for not going with him.
He didn’t press the matter. “I’ll call you.”
I went back to Main Street, my identity there secure.
Back in my room and evaluating the encounter with Smiley—and startling myself because the sudden awareness made me realize that the memory had receded for some time but had now returned with even greater clarity—I thought of the kept woman of Augusto de Leon as … the hand with the cigarette drifted away from her face, was lowered, and she touched the tip of the cigarette so lightly to an ashtray that the ashes vanished, merely vanished.
Smiley called. His friends were having a “small gathering.” “I can pick you up at your pad,” he said in his typical jive talk. Surprising myself, I said yes.
At the upstairs apartment we went to—I didn’t know whose it was—there were about half a dozen people, all men, all drinking. When we came in, they all looked at me—stared at me. I felt on display.
Smiley introduced me to them all.
“This is Christopher Isherwood.” He was a smallish man in his fifties, quite British, nattily dressed. “Oh, I’m delighted.”
“Don Bachardy.” He was Isherwood’s young—very young-looking—longtime companion. Too pretty to be handsome. He seemed to want to be a replica of Isherwood, bouncing on his feet back and forth as he talked, affecting a British accent, although, I would learn, he was from Long Beach.
“William.” No last name; he was a handsome married man. He referred immediately to his wife’s absence—“My wife couldn’t come, had to stay with our kid”—although there were no women there; he was nearly drunk.
“Tom Wright.” Another writer, a friendly man from the South—he had a sweet Southern stutter; I liked him immediately.
The evening proceeded smoothly, with small talk about books, a gracious remark now and then about my writing. “It is very good,” Christopher said.
Tom asked me, “Wh-wh-when was the novel c-c-coming ou-out?”
I had never heard anyone stutter so engagingly. I dismissed the question: “I’m still working on it.”
Another man came in with a young companion. The first man was somewhat dumpy with ordinary features. Smiley whispered with obvious amusement: “He’s Zsa-Zsa Gabor’s chauffeur.” The younger man was identified as—“a reporter from the Times.” He was handsome in a hustlery way. Both had already been drinking.
There was immediate tension between me and the younger man.
“Oh, yeah, uh, you’re the guy who’s writin’ about hustlers, huh? How do ya know so much about it?”
The married man, drunker, joined the baiting: “Hey, hustler John,” he slurred at me, “how about you and me driving down to Long Beach and picking up a couple of sailors to blow?”—challenging my rigid role as conveyed in what they had read.
Christopher’s kind questions pulled me away from the antagonists. He touched my arm briefly—“and do call me Chris”—leading me to one side, where we might talk. I wanted to impress him, a famous writer. In horror the moment my own words registered, I heard myself say, “Mr. Isherwood”—I couldn’t call him Chris, not yet—“wouldn’t you agree that, after all, we are all cameras?”
Smiley doubled over with smothered laughter; Tom tried to hide his smile. Don Bachardy looked at me, aghast, as if he would demand that I leave. William raised his glass of liquor in a toast to my gaffe. Zsa-Zsa’s chauffeur and his friend were arguing loudly and hadn’t heard.
Not only had I done what I had been warned against, confusing Christopher with van Druten, but I had sounded childishly pretentious. I put my drink against my cheek to cool the embarrassment.
Isherwood swayed back and forth on the balls of his feet, “Well, uh, yes, yes, of course, John,” he said; “yes, we are all cameras.”
In my room a few days later, the telephone rang. It was Christopher Isherwood, inviting me to dinner at his canyon home that weekend; he would pick me up. I said yes. I had impressed the famous writer.
I went to the public library to familiarize myself more with him. I had known only that he was famous. I was glad to find out he was much more than that. I found several of his books, including The Berlin Stories; I read the stories on which the play was based. I had time to read all of Prater Violet. His impeccable prose excited me; I thought he was a brilliant writer. By the time he picked me up for dinner with himself and Don Bacardy, I would be able to talk intelligently about his work—and mine, my own fascination with literary structure, already manifested, perhaps not yet seen, in my own “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny.”
I was armed for an exciting literary evening. I dressed in khaki slacks, shoes—not the usual boots—and a regular shirt. With this famous celebrated writer, I would drop my stance as hustler. I would be a writer.
Isherwood picked me up in his small car, a Volkswagen. We drove to his home. It perched atop one of the canyons of Santa Monica, a sensational setting—flowers growing up and down the roads, budding hills, trees bursting with flowers, lofty palm trees, the ocean just a steep decline away.
Inside, a large window welcomed a view of the ocean, foamy crests against the land.
Don Bachardy was in London, Christopher explained; he was in art school for the time. He had left soon after I had met them.
We went out to dinner, walking down a series of steps along a craggy path that led to a short block of small buildings—a gay bar, a restaurant, an antique shop. Across the street, the swirling ocean tinged the air with a salty smell.
At the restaurant, cooled by night gathering mistily, we had dinner. A waitress asked Chris if I was “another son,” a nasty tone in her question. “This is John Rechy, a writer friend,” he said.
When we returned to his home, he lit the fireplace in the living room. He fixed drinks; we sat before the flickering flames—orange, blue, blue. We talked and drank and talked and talked—about writers, writing, literature. I even talked about the novel he and his friends—and Don Allen and the people at Grove—were anticipating, the novel not written. Perhaps because of the liquor, I became spirited in discussing it as if it really existed, indicating that I was shaping it as a series of encounters, like the experiences themselves. That might have been the first time that I actually considered, if only briefly and vaguely, writing it. I was enjoying, with heady excitement, this literary evening fueled by friendly liquor in the company of a famous writer.
Before that memorable fireplace, time passed. It was two o’clock in the morning—“too late to drive.” I easily accepted Christopher’s invitation to spend the night in his guest room.
“Thank you, yes.”
; He showed me to an ample room, well furnished, with a large bed. Here, too, a window faced the cresting ocean, waves crashing, receding.
“Good night, Chris,” I said, “I’ve had a terrific time. I’ll see you in the morning.” I began to take off my pants as a signal that I wanted to go to sleep now, very tired, just a bit woozy.
He sat down beside me. I sat up, startled.
“It’s a big bed,” he said.
“It is,” I said. My pants now off, I tried to slip under the covers, but in trying to do so hurriedly, I caught my feet on the sheets.
He was on me, on top of me. I pushed him away.
“What’s the matter?”
“Look, Chris,” I said, facing what was happening and trying to cope with it without severing what I now considered my friendship with him, “I can’t sleep with anyone else, I never have—” If what I thought was happening, then who had I been all night?
He grabbed me, drew me to him. I pulled myself away, to the very edge of the bed. “You offered me the guest room … Chris.”
“Well, this is my bedroom,” he snapped. He rose, grumbling. “Oh, then, come on,” he said testily.
Grabbing my pants and shoes, I followed him to another room, a smaller room, a smaller bed. “Good night, Chris. I really—”
I slipped into the bed.
Here he was again, pushing, shoving, poking.
I stood up angrily. “I have to leave, Christopher.”
“I won’t drive you,” he said.
“You picked me up.”
“I’ll drive you in the morning; you’ll have to stay.”
If I stayed, he wouldn’t leave me alone. Yet I was miles away from downtown Los Angeles.
“Let’s have some coffee, and then you can drive me,” I said.
He walked away from me.
“Drive me back!” I followed him to the door of his bedroom.
On his bed, he grumbled—“You can stay or you can leave”—and turned over.
I walked out, into the night—soothed by the fragrance of flowers drifting into the light fog. I walked down the long, long road of the canyon, walked down, down, down, toward the edge of the ocean, to Pacific Coast Highway, to hitchhike my way back to downtown Los Angeles, miles away. Son of a bitch, I kept repeating, what a lousy son of a bitch that Isherwood guy is. Now that the cold ocean air was hitting me I realized how drunk we had both been. I was glad he hadn’t driven me back.
After a chilly half hour or so of shivering—I had opened my shirt nearly to my waist and had rolled up my sleeves—I was picked up by a man who drove us to the shadows of a closed gas station. He gave me the money I bargained for. I knew who I was then, with this man: I was hustling, period, no ambiguity.
Don Allen wrote to me that it was important for me to continue publishing sections of the book. Anticipation was growing, he told me. Whether he meant at Grove or elsewhere, I wasn’t sure.
I sat at the typewriter in my room. Write what? Tell what? Chuck … Skipper … … Mr. Klein … Chi-Chi in New Orleans …. Jocko …. Seize how much of their lives? Dare to presume that I understood them? Try to convey the exhilaration of hustling: the extreme highs, the unbearable lows, why being paid for sex without reciprocation on my part—over and over and over, never enough—held me so powerfully even though it might spill over into desperation? How to explore that? How much to remember?
I pushed the typewriter away, tore up the paper on which I had managed to type a few desultory sentences, and went to the Waldorf bar on Main Street, the sounds from the jukebox blasting into my ears, bursts of laughter erupting. Wounded laughter?—did a particular shrill laughter so often heard in exile bars stumble, right in the middle, as if on a bruise? No, it was joyful laughter, the laughter of free exile. Was I hearing all that clearly for the first time?
I managed to write more “chapters” that were quickly published in Big Table and Evergreen Review: one about Pete, a young hustler with whom I had once hustled a wistful, sad little man who wanted us to pretend he was our mother watching over us “sleeping” in bed naked; another about Chuck, longing for a vanished frontier; and another about … Mr. Klein, resurrected as Mr. King, and so, now, frozen in a story, left waiting between two lions.
Hitchhiking on lower Wilshire Boulevard one night to eventually reach Hollywood Boulevard, I met a man named Bob. He had seen me hitchhiking on the corner, in that section not known for pickups, certainly not known as a hustling or cruising area. He had driven around Wilshire quickly, thinking someone else would pick me up.
Despite the ambiguity of the street on which he had picked me up, I played the hustler role I had perfected, although at first I didn’t think he was gay—hitchhiking always pitched me into that role. In easy conversation, he guessed that I was eighteen, and I let him believe that. He was in his upper thirties, slender, tall, good-looking in an undramatic way … like an engineer, which he was.
I spent the night with him, in a modern house in Pasadena, all glass windows, several of which slid open onto a pool entirely calm in the breathless night. In trunks too large for me—his—I sat at the edge of the pool with him, talking. He mentioned foods he liked, making conversation. I mentioned that I liked filet mignon, perhaps risking an edge of my street hustler’s image by that much knowledgeability.
In the consecutive days I spent with him—three—we had filet mignon for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner. Conversation was easy with him, although my stance restricted the range of subjects. About movies, I joined him. Other times, never in condescension, he seemed to want to convey information about subjects he felt would benefit me, perhaps to teach me: about politics—he was a professed liberal—and about his travels to other countries. Often he would stop himself and say earnestly, “Now tell me everything about yourself, Johnny.” Then I would edit details of my life that would sustain the view I knew he had of me, instinctively bright, not too many years of school. It no longer surprised me how easily I could become that other person. Sexually, he fed my need to be desired.
I would not move in with him, as he suggested—offering me my own room. I kept my room in the hotel on Hope Street.
I saw him week after week, often daily, staying over at his home on weekends. He gave me money frequently, generously, never just before or after sex, usually when he drove me to my hotel room. He would announce different reasons for giving what he did—for rent (“Probably due”), for clothes (“You can always stand to have another pair of jeans, although you look great in faded ones”). I spent more and more time with him. I did not write, even as the contractual date for the novel to be delivered to Grove Press came.
And went.
We were at the beach in Santa Monica. I lay on the sand, tanning, knowing he was admiring my body. He rubbed it with oil, lingering, smoothing the liquid even under my trunks, so that I had become aroused.
“Will you please?” he asked me.
I hadn’t heard what he had asked. “What?”
“Will you rub some sun lotion on my back?”
I pretended I hadn’t heard him. The thought of touching him that intimately, especially publicly, on the beach, impeded me; it would amount to a compromise on who I was at that moment. I lay back on the sand and closed my eyes, not wanting to see whether he had been hurt, whether he had understood my hesitation. When I opened my eyes, he was looking at me in a way I could not identify—perhaps did not want to identify. Bewilderment? Hurt?
Dressed, we lingered on the beach, walking along the cooling sand barefoot. I saw some men moving toward the underside of the piers, into growing shadows. They disappeared into the dark maw. I wondered whether Bob was aware of them; that they were cruising; that as the day darkened, sex would occur within the light-slashed darkness.
Bob stopped along the cresting line of the ocean. He was looking out, beyond the water, where the sun was fading into a bluish dusky haze, not yet the day’s total surrender, a brief limbo before night.
“Do you know what this time
of day is called?” he asked me.
“No.”
“The blue hour. Its a light that creates contrary perceptions, the time of day, just a few moments between dusk and night when everything is at once clearest and most unclear; distance disappears, objects seem sharp.” He laughed. “I’m sorry, Johnny, I didn’t mean to bore you.”
I had followed what he meant as the blue moments disappeared, swallowed by the night. I didn’t tell him I understood. It was at such times that I felt burdened by the identity I assumed.
On a radiant Sunday, when the ocean, so calm, gleamed like a blue mirror, we drove to a restaurant in Malibu to have a late breakfast. Sitting at a table that overlooked the ocean, which spilled in crests against the craggy rocks where the restaurant was perched, he was silent for a long time, a quiet moodiness I had grown familiar with.
“I’m concerned about you, Johnny,” he said.
“About—?”
“You’re just a kid, but what about later—I mean, what will you do with the rest of your life?”
I felt fraudulent. Tell him I had a college degree, that I had a contract to write a book, that I could easily get jobs?
“I just don’t think about that kind of stuff,” I said—Johnny said.
“You should go back to school,” he said.
I didn’t remember whether I had told him I hadn’t finished high school; perhaps he had only assumed it from my street posture and the age he still believed me to be.
“I don’t mean necessarily high school, unless that’s what you want,” he went on, “but maybe some specialized school, where you can learn something that will give you a good life.”
The imposture, too perfect, had created a trap, springing now, with someone I truly felt close to.
“I’ve written off for some catalogs. They’re at home. If you want, I’ll go through them with you. I’ll pay your tuition.”
I held my breath, wanting to tell him I was sorry, sorry that I had duped him so successfully.
“Think about it,” he said.
