City of Night (Rechy, John)

by John Rechy

  Later, I would be sent out to ask one of our neighbors for a dime—“until my father comes home from work.” Being the youngest and most soulful looking in the family, then, I was the one who went. . . .

  Around that time my father plunged into my life with a vengeance.

  To expiate some guilt now for what I’ll tell you about him later, I’ll say that that strange, moody, angry man—my father—had once experienced a flashy grandeur in music. At the age of eight he had played a piano concert before the President of Mexico. Years later, still a youngman, he directed a symphony orchestra. Unaccountably, since I never really knew that man, he sank quickly lower and lower, and when I came along, when he was almost 50 years old, he found himself Trapped in the memories of that grandeur and in the reality of a series of jobs teaching music to sadly untalented children; selling pianos, sheet music—and soon even that bastard relationship to the world of music he loved was gone, and he became a caretaker for public parks. Then he worked in a hospital cleaning out trash. (I remember him, already a defeated old man, getting up before dawn to face the unmusical reality of soiled bloody dressings.) He would cling to stacks and stacks of symphonic music which he had played. orchestrated—stin working on them at night, drumming his fingers on the table feverishly: stacks of music now piled in the narrow hallway in that house, completely unwanted by anyone but himself, gathering dust which annoyed us, so that we wanted to put them outside in the leaky aluminum garage: but he clung to those precious dust-piling manuscripts—and to newspaper clippings of his once-glory—clung to them like a dream, now a nightmare. . . . And somehow I became the reluctant inheritor of his hatred for the world that had coldly knocked him down without even glancing back.

  Once, yes, there had been a warmth toward that strange red-faced man—and there were still the sudden flashes of tenderness which I will tell you about later: that man who alternately claimed French, English, Scottish descent—depending on his imaginative moods—that strange man who had traveled from Mexico to California spreading his seed—that turbulent man, married and divorced, who then married my Mother, a beautiful Mexican woman who loves me fiercely and never once understood about the terror between me and my father.

  Even now in my mother’s living room there is a glasscase which has been with us as long as I can remember. It is full of glass objects: figurines of angels, Virgins of Guadalupe, dolls; tissuethin imitation flowers, swans; and a small glass, reverently covered with a rotting piece of silk, tied tightly with a fadedpink ribbon, containing some mysterious memento of one of my father’s dead children. . . . When I think of that glasscase, I think of my Mother. . . a ghost image that will haunt me—Always.

  When I was about eight years old, my father taught me this:

  He would say to me: “Give me a thousand,” and I knew this meant I should hop on his lap and then he would fondle me—intimately—and he’d give me a penny, sometimes a nickel. At times when his friends—old gray men—came to our house, they would ask for “a thousand.” And I would jump on their laps too. And I would get nickel after nickel, going around the table.

  And later, a gift from my father would become a token of a truce from the soon-to-blaze hatred between us.

  I loathed Christmas.

  Each year, my father put up a Nacimiento—an elaborate Christmas scene, with houses, the wisemen on their way to the manger, angels on angelhair clouds. (On Christmas Eve, after my mother said a rosary while we knelt before the Nacimiento, we placed the Christchild in the crib.) Weeks before Christmas my father began constructing it, and each day, when I came home from school, he would have me stand by him while he worked building the boxlike structure, the miniature houses, the artificial lake; hanging the angels from the elaborate simulated sky, replete with moon, clouds, stars. Sometimes hours passed before he would ask me to help him, but I had to remain there, not talking. Sometimes my mother would have to stand there too, sometimes my younger sister. When anything went wrong—if anything fell—he was in a rage, hurling hammers, cursing.

  My father’s violence erupted unpredictably over anything. In an instant he overturns the table—food and plates thrust to the floor. He would smash bottles, menacing us with the sharpfanged edges. He had an old sword which he kept hidden threateningly about the house.

  And even so there were those moments of tenderness—even more brutal because they didnt last: times in which, when he got paid, he would fill the house with presents—flowers for my mother (incongruous in that patched-up house, until they withered and blended with the drabness), toys for us. Even during the poorest Christmas we went through when we were kids—and after the fearful times of putting up the Nacimiento —he would make sure we all had presents—not clothes, which we needed but didnt want, but toys, which we wanted but didnt need. And Sundays he would take us to Juarez to dinner, leaving an exorbitant tip for the suddenly attentive waiter. . . . But in the ocean of his hatred, those times of kindness were mere islands. He burned with an anger at life, which had chewed him up callously: an anger which blazed more fiercely as he sank further beneath the surface of his once almost-realized dream of musical glory.

  One of the last touches on the Nacimiento was two pieces of craggy wood, which looked very heavy, like rocks (very much like the piece of petrified wood which my father kept on his desk, to warn us that once it had been the hand of a child who had struck his father, and God had turned the child’s hand into stone). The pieces of rocklike wood were located on either side of the manger, like hills. On top of one, my father placed a small statue of a red-tailed, horned Devil, drinking out of a bottle.

  Around that time I had a dream which still recurs (and later. in New Orleans, I will experience it awake). We would get colds often in that drafty house, and fever, and during such times I dreamt this: Those pieces of rocklike wood on the sides of the manger are descending on me, to crush me. When I brace for the smashing terrible impact, they become soft, and instead of crushing me they envelop me like melted wax. Sometimes I will dream theyre draped with something like cheesecloth, a tenebrous, thin tissue touching my face like spiderwebs, gluing itself to me although I struggle to tear it away. . . .

  When my brothers and sisters all got married and left home —to Escape, I would think—I remained, and my father’s anger was aimed even more savagely at me.

  He sat playing solitaire for hours. He calls me over, begins to talk in a very low, deceptively friendly tone. When my mother and I fell asleep, he told me, he would set fire to the house and we would burn inside while he looked on. Then he would change that story: Instead of setting fire to the house, he will kill my mother in bed, and in the morning, when I go wake her, she’ll be dead, and I’ll be left alone with him.

  Some nights I would change beds with my mother after he went to sleep—they didnt sleep in the same room—and I surrounded the bed with sticks, chairs. The slightest noise, and I would reach for a stick to beat him away. In the early morning, before he woke, my mother would change beds with me again.

  Once—without him, because he was working on his music —we were going to take a trip to Carlsbad Caverns, in New Mexico: my mother, my sister and her husband my older brother and his wife, and I. My mother prepared food that night.

  In the morning, before dawn, I woke my mother and went to my sister’s house to wake her. When I returned, I saw my mother in our backyard (under the paradoxically serene star-splashed sky). “Dont go in!” she yells at me. I ran inside, and my father is standing menacingly over the table where the food we were taking is. Swiftly I reached for the food, and he lunges at me with a knife, slicing past me only inches short of my stomach. By then, my sister’s husband was there holding him back. . . .

  There was a wine-red ring my father wore. As a tie-pin, before being set into the gold ring-frame, it had belonged to his father, and before that to his father’s father—and it was a ruby, my father told me—a ruby so precious that it was his most treasured possession, which he clung to. As he sat moodily
staring at his music one particularly poor day, he called me over. Quickly, he gave me the ring. The red stone in the gold frame glowed for me more brilliantly than anything has ever since. A few days later he took it back.

  During one of those rare, rare times when there was a kind of determined truce between us—an unspoken, smoldering hatred—I was crossing the street with him. He was quite old then, and he carried a cane. As we crossed, he stumbled on the cane, fell to the street. Without waiting an instant, I run to the opposite side, and I stand hoping for some miraculous avenging car to plunge over him.

  But it didnt come.

  I went back to him, helped him up, and we walked the rest of the way in thundering silence.

  And then, when I was older, possibly 13 or 14, I was sitting one afternoon on the porch loathing him. My hatred for him by then had become a thing which overwhelmed me, which obsessed me the length of the day. He stood behind me, and he put his hand on me, softly, and said—gently: “Youre my son, and I love you.” But those longed-for words, delayed until the waves of my hatred for him had smothered their meaning, made me pull away from him: “I hate you!—youre a failure—as a man, as a father!” And later those words would ring painfully in my mind when I remembered him as a slouched old man getting up before dawn to face the hospital trash. . . .

  Soon, I stopped going to Mass. I stopped praying. The God that would allow this vast unhappiness was a God I would rebel against. The seeds of that rebellion—planted that ugly afternoon when I saw my dog’s body beginning to decay, the soul shut out by Heaven—were beginning to germinate.

  When my brother was a kid and I wasnt even born (but I’ll hear the story often), he would stand moodily looking out the window; and when, once, my grandmother asked him, “Little boy, what are you doing by the window staring at so hard?”—he answered, “I am occupied with life.” Im convinced that if my brother hadnt said that—or if I hadnt been told about it—I would have said it.

  I liked to sit inside the house and look out the hall-window —beyond the cactus garden in the vacant lot next door. I would sit by that window looking at the people that passed. I I felt miraculously separated from the world outside: separated by the pane, the screen, through which, nevertheless—uninvolved—I could see that world.

  I read many books, I saw many, many movies.

  I watched other lives, only through a window.

  Sundays during summer especially I would hike outside the city, along the usually waterless strait of sand called the Rio Grande, up the mountain of Cristo Rey, dominated at the top by the coarse, weed-surrounded statue of a primitive-faced Christ. I would lie on the dirt of that mountain staring at the breathtaking Texas sky.

  I was usually alone. I had only one friend: a wild-eyed girl who sometimes would climb the mountain with me. We were both 17, and I felt in her the same wordless unhappiness I felt within myself. We would walk and climb for hours without speaking. For a brief time I liked her intensely—without ever telling her. Yet I was beginning to feel, too, a remoteness toward people—more and more a craving for attention which I could not reciprocate: one-sided, as if the need in me was so hungry that it couldnt share or give back in kind. Perhaps sensing this—one afternoon in a boarded-up cabin at the base of the mountain—she maneuvered, successfully, to make me. But the discovery of sex with her, releasing as it had been merely turned me strangely further within myself.

  Mutually, we withdrew from each other.

  And it was somewhere about that time that the narcissistic pattern of my life began.

  From my father’s inexplicable hatred of me and my mother’s blind carnivorous love, I fled to the Mirror. I would stand before it, thinking: I have only Me! . . . I became obsessed with age. At 17, I dreaded growing old. Old age is something that must never happen to me. The image of myself in the mirror must never fade into someone I cant look at.

  And even after a series of after-school jobs, my feeling of isolation from others only increased.

  Then the army came, and for months I hadnt spoken to my father. (We would sit at the table eating silently, ignoring each other.) And when I left, that terrible morning, I kissed my mother. And briefly I looked at my father. His eyes were watering. Mutely he held out the ruby-ring which once, long ago, he had given me and then taken back. And I took it wordlessly. And in that instant I wanted to hold him-because he was crying, because he did feel something for me, because, I was sure, he was overwhelmed at that moment by the Loss I felt too. I wanted to hold him then as I had wanted to so many, many times as a child, and if I could have spoken, I know I would have said at last: “I love you.” But that sense of loss choked me—and I walked out without speaking to him. . . . Only a few weeks later, in Camp Breckenridge, Kentucky, I received a telegram that he was very sick.

  And I came back to El Paso.

  I felt certain that this time it would be different.

  I reached our house, in the government projects we had moved into from that house with the winged cockroaches, and I got in with the key I had kept. There is no one home. I called my brother. My father was dead.

  I hang up the telephone and I know that now Forever I will have no father, that he had been unfound, that as long as he had been alive there was a chance, and that we would be, Always now, strangers, and that is when I knew what Death really is—not in the physical discovery of the Nothingness which the death of my dog Winnie had brought me (in the decayed body which would turn into dirt, rejected by Heaven) but in the knowledge that my Father was gone, for me—that there was no way to reach him now—that his Death would exist only for me, who am living.

  And throughout the days that followed—aud will follow forever—I will discover him in my memories, and hopelessly—through the infinite miles that separate life from death—try to understand his torture: in searching out the shape of my own.

  The army passed like something unreal, and I returned to my Mother and her hungry love. And left her, standing that morning by the kitchen door crying, as she always would be in my mind, and I was on my way now to Chicago, briefly—from where I would go to freedom: New York!—embarking on that journey through nightcities and nightlives—looking for I dont know what—perhaps some substitute for salvation.

  MR. KING: Between Two Lions

  1

  34TH STREET IN New York City hurries urgently from river to river, and on that street, east, is the soul-squashing building where a few days later (not yet) I will add to the shadows in that cavern of halls, rooms, community kitchens, yellow-mirrored bathrooms (and whatever light entered the maze from outside squeezed in reluctantly through grimecoated windows at the ends of each hall), and at one corner was the Armory like an Errol Flynn movie, and on the next Lexington Avenue rushes determinedly past bars and stores and checkertabled Italian restaurants; and everywhere, gray steel buildings stab the sky—and beyond the Armory, past technicolor Kress’s, is the goodbye Greyhound station, where I arrived from Chicago one weepy day in September, welcomed by banner headlines warning of a female hurricane—and I think suddenly for the first time:

  My Godl Im on an island!

  From El Paso, I had gone to Evanston outside Chicago—a serene green campus city—where I saw a friend I had met in El Paso when he was in the army. Sensing the anarchic restlessness in me, he tried to persuade me not to go to New York yet. (And through him—because I had given most of my separation money to my mother and what I had was running out—I got a job cleaning autumn yards.) In the afternoons, in that quiet city—especially quiet now that summer was over for the University students and the fall term hadnt yet begun -my friend and I would walk through the campus, along the lake. . . . And at the same time that I felt myself being lulled by the serenity of the lake and the soon-to-fade green of the scenery, the craving for a certain life drew me away from them. Because even before I got there, New York had become a symbol of my liberated self, and I knew that it was in a kind of turbulence that that self must attempt to find itself.

>   After my separation from the army, I had come into my first contact with the alluring anarchic world which promised such turbulence. On my way to El Paso, I had stopped in Dallas for about a week, to postpone facing my mother with my decision to leave El Paso. In Dallas—suddenly!—with the excitement of someone exploring a new country I discovered that world. As abruptly as that, it happened; that sudden, that immediate: One day, nothing, and the next it was there . . . as if a trapdoor had Opened.

  Those days in Dallas, without entering it then, I explored the surface of that seething world; and from the isolation of my early years and the equally isolated time in the army—purposely apart from everyone—I resolved to free myself swiftly, to leave my place by the Window, uninvolved with life, and hurl myself into its boiling midst But it had to be after I had faced my mother again.

  I couldnt tell why 1 was determinedly taking that journey. Perhaps in part it was because of the obsessive ravenous narcissism craving attention. Whatever it was, it was a compulsion for which I didnt have clear-cut reasons. I only knew that in the world I had discovered and not yet entered there was a desperation which somehow matched—and justified—my own. . . . And although, now, to you, this sounds unclear, I’ll clarify it very soon. This is only by way of saying that when I reached New York, that world was waiting for me. I required no slow initiation.