About My Life and the Kept Woman

by John Rechy

  I remembered Marisa Guzman as she lifted her veil from her face. For her incursion into the territory her father had forbidden her to enter, she had ensured that she looked beautiful.

  Now, as I stood being filmed at the vantage the cop had described, my fear eased further. All the cop could have seen were entangled branches.

  “You may need some publicity photos for your next book,” the photographer told me. “Why don’t we go to my studio?”

  The familiarity with which I was referred to as a writer still startled me.

  In his studio, I felt good as he photographed me—in jeans, boots, a cut-off denim vest, and no shirt, with a cigarette dangling, a scowly look. He clicked and clicked.

  After one particular photograph he labeled “Terrific!” he set his camera down. “You are one hot dude,” he said. Kneeling, he opened my pants and slipped down before Johnny Rio.

  The trial was set, not a jury trial. Our attorneys opted for a trial with a judge. They were confident. They had seen the film we had taken, photographs of the park, the drawn map. The cop who had arrested Sam had not made a statement. There was no way that the single cop’s testimony would hold up.

  Before the proceeding began, I met with Sam in the hallway. He seemed to be distant, cold.

  “What’s the matter, Sam?”

  “My attorney said that this was dragging out because you want material for a new book.”

  “Jesus Christ!” I felt the anguish of the past months wrenching inside me with added disgust. I wanted to shout at him, If you hadn’t been caught before, then we wouldn’t have to deal with that, too. But this would indicate that I was being contaminated by the false charges.

  The judge, a man over sixty, looked stern. Sam and his attorney, my attorney and I, and the district attorney entered the pale courtroom. Both cops were already there. A court recorder waited to take down testimony. I breathed in relief that no one else was there. Beyond the immediate proceeding, my anonymity had survived. My new fame as a writer had not intruded.

  When the cop who had arrested me was on the stand, my attorney showed the map drawn of the terrain—without the brush or the lush trees or the entangled branches indicated. The cop located himself along the open path. From here, he said, he had witnessed me with my pants down to my ankles; he had witnessed Sam squatting before me—and he had witnessed “a full act of fellatio” before he and his partner moved in to arrest. He was asked whether the details in his arrest report were accurate as to location.

  “Yes, of course.”

  The other cop did not testify.

  I was asked to show the movie of the park on a rented projector. The courtroom was darkened. I said that the camera had been placed exactly where the officer had indicated he was standing; at the same distance he had designated, in feet, in his arrest report and had reasserted just now. The film began. I saw myself on the screen swaggering along the path, appearing shirtless, smiling, looking as if I was auditioning for another kind of movie. I closed my eyes, regretting my stupidity in the display. Still, the point had been made. The distance claimed by the cop and recorded in the film belied his report.

  “There is only one way to gauge this matter,” the judge said coldly, “and that is by going to the site in the park. The court is adjourned to reconvene in the area in question. The officers will designate the site of the arrest there.”

  Even the prosecutor, who seemed not to be interested at all in the matter—he looked friendly to me—was startled by the extreme shift of the court to the park. “Your honor—?”

  “We will reconvene in the park, counsel,” the judge said sternly.

  It was just past noon, one of the busiest times in the park for sex. I saw the look of apprehension on Sam’s face, and the smiling contempt on the face of the cop who had arrested me—of course, he knew what would be occurring there when the court arrived.

  By a fast route I had discovered on the freeway, I sped there, dreading that I would be stopped for speeding. I drove into the park, up the familiar road, to the familiar site.

  I had beaten the others there.

  But, goddammit, there were at least ten cars parked at the side of the road there. That meant that there would be at least that many people on the terrain; more, including those walking. Men might be having sex in the very same cove where the arrest had occurred.

  I ran into the heart of the cruising arena. I shouted: “A trial judge is coming!” My words shattered the pervasive silence of the sex hunt. There was rustling all around, of men scurrying out.

  “A vice trial is coming!” I shouted into the usually traumatized mood of the park. Hurrying about the paths, I came on two men in a grotto of trees. They were fucking. “A trial is coming,” I softened my voice. The two men continued frantically, finishing, before they ran away. More men slipped out of coves, some running deeper into the park.

  I heard cars parking. I rushed to stand by my Mustang, as if I had just arrived.

  The judge drove up in a Rolls Royce as the lawyers, the two cops, Sam, the two attorneys, and the court recorder parked their cars.

  “Show me where you were standing, officer,” the judge asked the cop who had testified.

  In a jagged file, we walked into the area of the sex hunt, deep, deeper.

  “I was here,” The cop planted himself firmly in the position where he had indicated, on the map and in the arrest report, he had stood, the place the film had identified.

  My attorney asked me to start walking toward where we had been arrested. Sam was to follow. We walked down the path, moving farther and farther from where the cop and the others waited. We were out of their sight even before we reached the designated cove.

  “I was here!” I heard the cop say loudly. He strode down the path, placing his location much closer to the cove.

  Inside the cove now with Sam, I looked back. I could not see the cop, even at the closer range he was claiming.

  “You still have no view of the defendants from here,” Sam’s attorney said, catching up with the cop. The judge followed.

  The cop took several more anxious steps. “I stood here!”

  In the cove, I could still not see him. Neither would the others be able to see me or Sam.

  The cop stalked down the path, down, along the path, into the cove. He put his hand roughly on Sam’s shoulder, forcing him down. “Kneel, like when you were blowing that guy!” He shoved Sam’s head against my groin and pushed me against him.

  “Take your fuckin’ hands off us!” I shouted at him.

  He raised his hand as if to hit me. I raised both my hands to ward him off, and then realized that I had hit him, hard. Fists clenched, he came at me.

  The attorneys were there, placating us. The judge remained behind.

  As we moved out of the territory, back to our cars, two men scurried out of the bushes, adjusting their clothes.

  “I’ve seen enough,” the judge said as he went back to his Rolls Royce.

  On the side of the road, I stood with my beaming attorney. The prosecuting attorney walked over. “Congratulations,” he said with a wry smile, as if to indicate that he was satisfied with the obvious outcome in our favor. “I’ve read your book City of Night,” he told me; “it’s very good.”

  The next day, in the hall outside the courtroom, our attorneys gave me and Sam the news that the judge had already found us guilty. Sentencing was set for a few weeks from now, pending reports from the probation officers we would be assigned to.

  Time crawled. I called my mother daily; I was terrified to think what would happen to her if I was sent to prison. I avoided seeing my sister, but I called her often, to hear her calming voice. “I sense it; something’s wrong. What is it, little brother?”

  “Nothing, sister. I just have some business I’m tending to, about my books.” That was all I could think to tell her. How could I tell her that I was waiting to be sentenced, and that the charge carried a possible sentence of five years in prison?

 
* * *

  Again, this time at the sentencing, the attorneys met me and Sam in the hall outside the courtroom. The judge had agreed that the evidence was flimsy, and so he was finding us guilty of a misdemeanor, not the serious felony. There would be no jail time. There would be probation of two years, and, for me, a fine of $1,000; for Sam $500.

  I wanted to laugh—even then, even there—when I learned what the judge had chosen to convict me of, a charge usually reserved for hustling.

  “Because of who you are and what he knew about you,” my lawyer confirmed.

  As I walked out of the monstrous courthouse, I realized that I had been arrested as Johnny Rio, but it was John Rechy, the writer, who had managed to avoid incarceration.

  I drove straight to the park. I left my Mustang in the same place where it had been that fateful day. I took off my shirt. I walked down the same path where the cop claimed he had seen me and Sam. I waited in the same alcove where the arrest had occurred.

  A handsome young man walked into the cove. We neared each other.

  Footsteps, crunching on the ground, dried leaves.

  Fear gripped me. What if … ?

  I shoved the fear away.

  The contact charged by the cop had not been completed—now it would be, in this same grove—and it was, in mutual desire for the first time.

  We had got off easy—I never saw Sam again—in that time when arrests, automatic convictions, and severe prison sentences were routine. Vice cops, rubbing their groins, arrested whoever solicited them. Accused falsely, many gay men pleaded guilty so that their lives would not be ground down by the courts. Gay men faced punishment by public exposure, registration for life as sex offenders, and being ordered to appear in lineups with heterosexual suspects involved in child molestation. Gay men netted in cruising areas were, notoriously beaten after being handcuffed; often they were kept in jail at the cops’ whim for forty-eight hours without charges, released, then charged again, and kept incommunicado for another forty-eight hours. In the aftermath of salacious news reports about “perverts,” bashings soared. Even murder might be justified if the killer claimed to have been enraged at being solicited for sex by a gay man.

  Anger at those outrages was ignited during a New Year’s eve party in a bar called the New Faces in downtown Los Angeles. Men in costume, several in drag, cavorted there till almost midnight. The tide of revelers rollicked across the street to a new bar, the Black Cat, which had planned an extravagant New Year’s celebration.

  At midnight, with a group named Rhythm Queens leading the gathered men in singing “Auld Lang Syne” and as multicolored balloons were sent aloft and men kissed each other randomly, vice cops raided the bar. Flailing batons, brandishing handcuffs, using pool cues, the cops beat scores of gay men and arrested them on various charges, smearing the street outside with blood.

  As the resultant trials extended with deadly rancor and slowness, rage flared, and less than two months later, more than 200 gay men and women protested on the street, waving signs and shouting, “No more abuse.” Police cars and unmarked vehicles responded, and watched, frozen, from the sidelines at this troubling new development: queers protesting, intimating violence—and violence did erupt, sporadically at first with improvised missiles hurled at the stunned cops, and then much more forcefully. Men rushed at the cops, smashing the windows of squad cars, hurling rocks at the astonished fleet.

  The riot was given tiny notice in the city newspapers, which cited a “street disturbance.”

  That occurred in Los Angeles in 1967. I was not there. I had already returned to El Paso.

  And so time passed, times of turbulence in the world, the devastation in Vietnam, of massive protests, of the rise of violent “flower children” preparing to be led by Charles Manson, of drugs and acid dreams and nightmares, of spurious celebrations of love.

  In those years I joined the turbulence and the celebrations. Aroused by my detestation of war, I joined GIs for Peace. We met for strategy sessions in my home, and invaded Fort Bliss with fliers opposing the war.

  I welcomed the destructiveness of drugs hoping they might assuage but they only deepened the depthless endless sorrow at my mother’s death, which, even now, many years later, I cannot entirely face.

  33

  By 1977, I had written five books. The most recent one, The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary, threatened to surpass the original outrage created by City of Night. Bookstores were returning it. A television station in San Francisco had rejected an advertisement for it. A reporter had offered to do a story about this incident in San Francisco, along with an interview with me. Grove Press coaxed me to accept. I agreed, certain that I could control whatever would compromise my cherished private identity.

  By then, the Castro district in San Francisco had become a gay haven. On warm afternoons, hundreds of gay men lolled about, many shirtless, but many in leather despite the warmth. There was a mood of euphoria on those streets, a strange euphoria, a forced confidence asserting that times had changed for gay men.

  I tried to identify it as I moved from turf to turf. It was a desperate euphoria, which seemed to me to contain a sense that it might not last, that it must be seized, must be sustained on the highest level, at a pitch that could not endure.

  Cruising those streets, and the more intimate areas where sex occurred openly at night, I would hear—emanating from a bar or a cluster of men walking along the streets, and even, at rare times, held only for moments, breaking the heavy silence of somber orgy rooms of ritual punishment—a mirthless laughter, laughter that belonged to the euphoria, a terminal euphoria, laughter that began as a gasp, stumbled as if on a wound, and then rose, rose into a shriek, throttled.

  Don Allen invited me to lunch to meet some people who, he said, “are eager to meet you.” I met them at a fancy Chinese restaurant.

  Don introduced me to Michael McClure, the glamorous poet and playwright; an effeminate fashion photographer; and Allen Ginsberg.

  Bluntly, but not sounding hostile—as if he was really only amused—Ginsberg said to me: “So! You still don’t get fucked? Just get blown?”

  The fashion photographer tittered; Michael McClure adjusted his long blond hair; Don Allen said, “Hmmm”; and I was taken aback—my face felt flushed. “That’s none of—” I started to say.

  In that curiously friendly tone, Ginsberg went on, while showing off his facility with chopsticks: “I suppose, umm, that you believe your stance makes you, umm, the powerful one in sex.” He laughed; his beard jiggled. With a swipe of his tongue, he assertained the presence of, a piece of something Chinese that had nested in his beard. I knew that he was performing, showing off his bravado, his lack of inhibition. “Man,” he said, in an altered, jivey tone, “when I’m blowing someone or I’m getting fucked, I know I’m the one who has power; I’m the one who’s drawing out the cum into me.”

  I liked that his philosophy assigned power to both performances in sex; it was a sexual democracy. “Fine with me,” I said. “Equals, both feeling powerful.” It amused me to think of him as the exalted guru he was becoming, had become, because he continued to talk relentlessly dirty at the table, while Don kept saying, “Oh, Allen,” and McClure languished handsomely in the red-leather booth, and the fashion photographer looked around as if scouting for locations.

  “What about when your body grows old and you can no longer attract your numbers?” Ginsberg extended his oddly friendly interrogation.

  “It will never happen,” I said firmly.

  “How will you stop it?”

  “It will never happen,” I said.

  When lunch ended—despite his bravado at my expense, I liked him—Ginsberg invited me to visit longer with him. (“Uhhmmmm,” said the fashion photographer. Don Allen said, “Oh, Allen.” Michael McClure, recognized, signed an autograph graciously.) Ginsberg was staying at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s pad. Would I join him?

  “Sure.” I accepted a visit with the legendary poet.

  In a ratt
y part of North Beach, I walked up what seemed to be 100 steps to a nondescript apartment, where, inside—amid hardly any furniture, only books—Ginsberg sat on the floor in what I imagined was the manner of a guru. He was wearing something flowing that looked like a muumuu, white, muslin. He indicated a cushion for me to sit on.

  “Relax; take your clothes off,” he said, again in a pleasant tone.

  “No,” I said. The conversation would not turn literary if I sat there naked. Maybe this was part of his mystical approach to detect visitors’ auras—and enjoy their nudity. I asked, “Why?”

  “Because you said you’d never grow undesirable. I hope that is true, really. For now, I want to see your body when I know it’s beautiful—and then it will be so forever in my memory.”

  What a rap, I thought, laughing, but the implication of his words had stung me, challenged me, aroused the demon of losing desirability.

  “I’m comfortable as I am,” I said.

  “Too bad; I really would like to see you naked.” He reached over to something on the floor that looked to me like a lyre. He began playing the instrument and singing—I recognized the words—from Blake’s Songs of Innocence or Songs of Experience.”

  The phone rang. Ginsberg answered. “You know who’s here with me?” he said to whoever was calling. “John Rechy …. Yes, him. Yes, he is very …” He extended the telephone toward me. “It’s Peter,” he said, “he’d like to talk to you.”

  I knew he meant his supposed “lover,” Peter Orlovsky. Rumors were already afoot that they were nothing of the kind; like Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga, they were said to be just posing.

  “Hi.”

  “Man, Allen says you’re in terrific shape.”

  Orlovsky must have asked him if I was in good shape when Ginsberg had answered yes. “Yes, he is very …”

  “You work out, man?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much do you press?”