City of Night (Rechy, John)

by John Rechy

  It was difficult to write that book. Guilt recurred as I evoked those haunting lives. Oh, was I betraying that anarchic world by writing about it—or even more deeply so if I kept to myself those exiled lives? I increasingly found “meaning” in structure: In “Between Two Lions,” I wanted to create out of the reality of Times Square a modem jungle in which two of its powerful denizens connect momentarily, but because of their very natures inevitably wound each other. The story of Miss Destiny found fuller meaning in the childhood game of “statues.” I attempted to tell the story of Lance O’Hara as a Greek tragedy, the chorus of bar-voices warning of the imminent fall of the demi-god, the almost-moviestar on the brink of aging, the whispering Furies conspiring to assure the fall. From my early fascination with mathematics, I “plotted” the chapter on Jeremy as an algebraic equation drawn on a graph, the point of intersecting lines revealing the “unknown factor”—here, the unmasking of the narrator. Memory itself, being selective, provides form; each portrait-chapter found its own “frame.” (The most difficult chapter to write was Sylvia’s.) My rejected Catholicism was bringing to the narrator’s journey a sense of ritual—and the bright colors of garish Catholic churches are splashed in descriptions throughout this book. As I wrote, stirred memories rushed the “stilled” present, and to convey that fusion I shifted verb tenses within sentences. The irregularly capitalized words I hoped would bring a visual emphasis that italics could not.

  Before writing, I often listened to music: Presley, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, Bartok—to absorb the dark, moody sexuality of rock, the formal structure of classical music, the “ordered” dissonance of modem composers.

  Each chapter went through about twelve drafts, some passages through more than that—often, paradoxically, to create a sense of “spontaneity.” The first four paragraphs that open this book were compressed from about twenty pages. The first chapter was written last, the last one came first. Although four years elapsed between the time I began this book—with the unsent letter—and the time it was finished, most of it was written during one intense year in El Paso.

  Three titles had been announced with published excerpts: Storm Heaven and Protest, Hey, World! and It Begins in the Wind. The intertwining chapters that connect the portraits were called “City of Night” from the start. But I did not conceive of that as the book’s title. I did consider: Ash Wednesday, Shrove Tuesday, The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny, Masquerade. Finally, I decided: Storm Heaven and Protest. Then Don Allen—always a superb editor—suggested the obvious: City of Night.

  The book was finished. That night—and this is one of the most cherished memories of my life—my mother, my oldest brother, Robert, and I were weaving about my mother’s living room, bumping into each other, each with great stacks of the almost-700-page typescript, collating it—I had made three or four carbon copies.

  The manuscript was mailed. I went to return the rented typewriter, but I couldn’t part with it. I bought it; I still have the elegant old Underwood, now comfortably “retired.”

  Proofs came. As I read, I panicked. In print, it was all “different”—wrong! About a third of the way through, I began changing a word here and there, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph; then I started back at the beginning. By the time I had gone through the galley proofs, the book was virtually rewritten on the margins and on pasted typewritten inserts. But now—I knew—it was “right.” I called Don, then in San Francisco, to “prepare” him. He was startled but agreed with the alterations. Despite Don’s preparation, others at Grove reacted in surprise at the rewritten galleys. Knowing how expensive the resetting would be, I had offered out of my royalties to pay for it—a contractual provision. But Barney Rosset made no objection to changes, and he refused to charge me. Publication was rescheduled, and the book was reset.

  I had no doubt that City of Night would be an enormous success. I was right. In a reversed way. I had thought it would sell modestly and that the book would be greeted with critical raves. The opposite occurred, dramatically.

  Before the official publication date, my book appeared in the No. 8 slot of Time’s national bestseller list. Also before publication, I saw my first review. Even for the dark ages of the early 1960’s the title of the review in The New York Review of Books was vicious in its overt bigotry. What followed matched its headline. The book climbed quickly to the No. 1 spot on bestseller lists in New York, California. Nationally on all lists it reached third place. In a review featured on its cover, The New Republic attempted to surpass the attack of The New York Review of Books; it was a draw. The book went into a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh printing and remained on the bestseller lists for almost seven months. In its assault of about eight lines, The New Yorker made one factual mistake and one grammatical error.

  Only the book’s subject seemed to be receiving outraged attention; its careful structure, whether successful or not, was virtually ignored. I was being viewed and written about as a hustler who had somehow managed to write, rather than as a writer who was writing intimately about hustling—and many other subjects. That persisting view would affect the critical reception of every one of my following books, and still does, to this day.

  I remained in El Paso. Once again, a letter came with a plane ticket, to New York. A man who had read my book and was outraged by its treatment in The New York Review of Books invited me to attend the American premiere of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem in Tanglewood. But I was waiting for an answer to a request I had made of Grove; and it arrived, a further advance on royalties so I could make the down-payment on a house for my mother.

  I flew to New York to meet another major figure in my life, the man who had invited me to Tanglewood; and I spent the following months with him in a fourteenth-storey apartment overlooking the Hudson River (an enormous eagle appeared on the balcony one day and peered in through a glass wall), then in Tanglewood; and then we went to Puerto Rico, the Caribbean Islands. On a beach I read in a New York gossip column that I was a guest of Mr. So-and-so on Fire Island, a place I have never visited. That was the first I would iearn of several men claiming to be me, impostures made possible by the fact that I had decided not to promote this book, to retain my private life; only my publishers knew I was in New York, in Riverdale.

  In late September I returned to El Paso, to another of the most cherished memories of all my life, of my mother joyfully showing me the house I had bought for her, her new furnishings. She had a dinner-reception for me, with my brothers and sisters and my special great-aunt.

  Strangers appeared at my house, creating ruses to be let in. One youngwoman came to the door, claiming to be the “Barbara” of this book. In school, in the army, and on the streets, I had been what is called a loner—very much so. These incidents increased my isolation. But it seemed appropriate to me, this period of “austerity”: I did not want my life to change radically while the lives of the people I had written about remained the same. In El Paso I began the transition from “youngman” to “man.” I created my own gym in my mother’s new home, and I began working out fiercely with weights.

  Some excellent reviews began appearing, and eventually the book would be translated into about a dozen languages. Letters arrived daily—moving letters, from men, women, young ones, older ones, homosexual, heterosexual. I answered every one. When I went out, it was usually to drive into the Texas desert. I had only two or three friends. With the exception of brief trips to Los Angeles and one to New York, I remained in El Paso in relative isolation until my mother died and I left the city perhaps forever.

  More than twenty years and seven books later, how do I feel about City of Night? It thrills me—not only for myself but for the many lives it contains, those always remembered faces and voices—that within my lifetime this book, so excoriated when it first appeared, has come to be referred to frequently as a “modern classic.” And I no longer feel the guilt I battled so long, about the “real people”
I thought I would “leave behind.” No—they are a permanent part of my life, of that-part of me—the writer-who tells of his journey as a “youngman.”

  John Rechy

  Los Angeles, 1984

  Part One

  “Children, go where I send you—how shall I send you?

  I’m going to send you one by one. . . .”

  —Children, Go Where I Send You

  CITY OF NIGHT

  LATER I WOULD THINK OF AMERICA as one vast City of Night stretching gaudily from Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard —jukebox-winking, rock-n-roll-moaning: America at night fusing its darkcities into the unmistakable shape of loneliness.

  Remember Pershing Square and the apathetic palmtrees. Central Park and the frantic shadows. Movie theaters in the angry morning-hours. And wounded Chicago streets. . . . Horrormovie courtyards in the French Quarter—tawdry Mardi Gras fioats with clowns tossing out glass beads, passing dumbly like life itself. . . Remember rock-n-roll sexmusic blasting from jukeboxes leering obscenely, blinking manycolored along the streets of America strung like a cheap necklace from 42nd Street to Market Street, San Francisco. . . .

  One-night sex and cigarette smoke and rooms squashed in by loneliness. . . .

  And I would remember lives lived out darkly in that vast City of Night, from all-night movies to Beverly Hills mansions.

  But it should begin in El Paso, that journey through the cities of night. Should begin in El Paso, in Texas. And it begins in the Wind. . . . In a Southwest windstorm with the gray clouds like steel doors locking you in the world from Heaven.

  I cant remember now how long that windstorm lasted—it might have been days—but perhaps it was only hours—because it was in that timeless time of my boyhood, ages six through eight.

  My dog Winnie was dying. I would bring her water and food and place them near her, stand watching intently—but she doesnt move. The saliva kept coming from the edges of her mouth. She had always been fat, and she had a crazy crooked grin—but she was usually sick: Once her eyes turned over, so that they were almost completely white and she couldnt see—just lay down, and didnt try to get up for a day. Then she was well, briefly, smiling again, wobbling lopsidedly.

  Now she was lying out there dying.

  At first the day was beautiful, with the sky blue as it gets only in memories of Texas childhood. Nowhere else in the world, I will think later, is there a sky as clear, as blue, as Deep as that. I will remember other skies: like inverted cups, this shade of blue or gray or black, with limits, like painted rooms. But in the Southwest, the sky was millions and millions of miles deep of blue—clear, magic, electric blue. (I would stare at it sometimes, inexplicably racked with excitement, thinking: If I get a stick miles long and stand on a mountain, I’ll puncture Heaven—which I thought of then as an island somewhere in the vast sky—and then Heaven will come tumbling down to earth. . . .) Then, that day, standing watching Winnie, I see the gray clouds massing and rolling in the horizon, sweeping suddenly terrifyingly across the sky as if to battle, giant mushrooms exploding, blending into that steely blanket. Now youre locked down here so Lonesome suddenly youre cold. The wind sweeps up the dust, tumbleweeds claw their way across the dirt. . . .

  I moved Winnie against the wall of the house, to shelter her from the needlepointed dust. The clouds have shut out the sky completely, the wind is howling violently, and it is Awesomely dark. My mother keeps calling me to come in. . . . From the porch, I look back at my dog. The water in the bowl beside her has turned into mud. . . . Inside now, I rushed to the window. And the wind is shrieking into the house—the curtains thrashing at the furniture like giant lost birds, flapping against the walls, and my two brothers and two sisters are running about the beat-up house closing the windows, removing the sticks we propped them open with. I hear my father banging on the frames with a hammer, patching the broken panes with cardboard.

  Inside, the house was suddenly serene, safe from the wind; but staring out the window in cold terror, I see boxes and weeds crashing against the walls outside, almost tumbling over my sick dog. I long for something miraculous to draw across the sky to stop the wind. . . . I squeezed against the pane as close as I could get to Winnie: If 1 keep looking at her, she cant possibly die! A tumbleweed rolled over her.

  I ran out. I stood over Winnie, shielding my eyes from the slashing wind, knelt over her to see if her stomach was still moving, breathing. And her eyes open looking at me. I listen to her heart (as I used to listen to my mother’s heart when she was sick so often and I would think she had died, leaving me Alone—because my father for me then existed only as someone who was around somehow; taking furious shape later, fiercely).

  Winnie is dead.

  It seemed the windstorm lasted for days, weeks. But it must have been over, as usual, the next day, when Im standing next to my mother in the kitchen. (Strangely, I loved to sit and look at her as she fixed the food—or did the laundry: She washed our clothes outside in an aluminum tub, and I would watch her hanging up the clean sheets flapping in the wind. Later I would empty the water for her, and I stared intrigued as it made unpredictable patterns on the dirt. . . .) I said: “If Winnie dies—” (She had of course already died, but I didnt want to say it; her body was still outside, and I kept going to see if miraculously she is breathing again.) “—if she dies, I wont be sad because she’ll go to Heaven and I’ll see her there.” My mother said: “Dogs dont go to Heaven, they havent got soul.” She didnt say that brutally. There is nothing brutal about my mother: only a crushing tenderness, as powerful as the hatred I would discover later in my father. “What will happen to Winnie, then?” I asked. “Shes dead, thats all,” my mother answers, “the body just disappears, becomes dirty.”

  I stand by the window, thinking: It isn’t fair. . . .

  Then my brother, the younger of the two—I am the youngest in the family—bad to bury Winnie.

  I was very religious then. I went to Mass regularly, to Confession. I prayed nightly. And I prayed now for my dead dog: God would make an exception. He would let her into Heaven.

  I stand watching my brother dig that hole in the backyard. He put the dead dog in and covered it I made a cross and brought flowers. Knelt. Made the sign of the cross: “Let her into Heaven. . . .”

  In the days that followed—I dont know exactly how much later—we could smell the body rotting. . . . The day was a ferocious Texas summerday with the threat of rain: thunder—but no rain. The sky lit up through the cracked clouds, and lightning snapped at the world like a whip. My older brother said we hadnt buried Winnie deep enough.

  So he dug up the body, and I stand by him as he shovels the dirt in our backyard (littered with papers and bottles covering the weeds which occasionally we pulled, trying several times to grow grass—but it never grew). Finally the body appeared. I turned away quickly. I had seen the decaying face of death. My mother was right. Soon Winnie will blend into the dirt. There was no soul, the body would rot, and there would be Nothing left of Winnie.

  That is the incident of my early childhood that I remember most often. And that is why I say it begins in the wind. Because somewhere in that plain of childhood time must have been planted the seeds of the restlessness.

  Before the death of Winnie, there are other memories of loss.

  We were going to plant flowers in the front yard of the house we lived in before we moved to the house where Winnie died. I was digging a ledge along the sidewalk, and my mother was at the store getting the seeds. A man came and asked for my father, but my father isnt home. “Youre going to have to move very soon,” he tells me. I had heard the house was being sold, and we couldnt buy it, but it hadnt meant much to me. I continue shoveling the dirt. After my mother came and spoke to the man, she told me to stop making the holes. Almost snatching the seeds from her-and understanding now —I began burying them frantically as if that way we will have to stay to see them grow.

  And so we moved. We moved from that clean house with the white walls and
into the house where Winnie will die.

  I stand looking at the house in child panic. It was the other half of a duplex, the wooden porch decayed, almost on the verge of toppling down; it slanted like a slide. A dried-up vine, dead from lack of water, still clung to the base of the porch like a skeleton, and the bricks were disintegrating in places into thin streaks of orangy powder. The sun was brazenly bright; it elongates each splinter on the wood, each broken twig on the skeleton vine. . . . I rushed inside. Huge brown cockroaches scurried into the crevices. One fell from the wall, spreading its wings—almost two inches wide-as if to lunge at me-and it splashes like a miniature plane on the floor,splut! The paper was peeling off the walls over at least four more layers, all different graycolors. (We would put up the sixth, or begin to-and then stop, leaving the house even more patched as that layer peeled too: an unfinished jigsaw puzzle which would fascinate me at night: its ragged patterns making angryfaces, angry animalshapes—but I could quickly alter them into less angry figures by ripping off the jagged edges. . . .) Where the ceiling had leaked, there are spidery brown outlines.

  I flick the cockroaches off the walls, stamping angrily on them.

  The house smells of Rot. I went to the bathroom. The tub was full of dirty water, and it had stagnated. It was brown, bubbly. In wild dreadful panic, I thrust my hand into the rancid water, found the stopper, pulled it out holding my breath, and looked at my arm, which is covered with the filthy brown crud.

  Winters in El Paso for me later would never again seem as bitter cold as they were then. Then I thought of El Paso as the coldest place in the world. We had an old iron stove with a round belly which heated up the whole house; and when we opened the small door to feed it more coal or wood, the glowing pieces inside created a miniature of Hell: the cinders crushed against the edges, smoking. . . . The metal flues that carried the smoke from the stove to the chimney collapsed occasionally and filled the house with soot. This happened especially during the windy days, and the wind would whoosh grimespecked down the chimney. At night my mother piled coats on us to keep us warm.