City of Night (Rechy, John)

by John Rechy

  “Go on now, get out!” he snaps like a tough cop in a movie. He turns his back on us—petulantly.

  Outside, the sullenfaced boy walks a short distance into the park with me, says: “Im beginning to think this town is nowhere, man, I aint scored for nothing today—but I get stopped by the fuzz.”

  Then catching sight of an obviously intrigued man-in-a-suit, he goes and sits next to him.

  Like all the others warned to stay out of the park, I continued to return and the fat cop didnt bother me. And this is how they do, unless youre wanted for something definite: They warn you to stay out, they leave you alone—and then when the heat is on (when some robbery supposedly involving a young Pershing Square vagrant has been headlined in the papers—or, as I had heard Trudi describe it once at the 1-2-3, “when Officer Morgan is going through her period”), they pick you up for vagrancy. And the papers gleefully announce:RAID IN PERSHING SQUARE.

  Now, as the anarchy welled inside me, I went through each day on pills and marijuana.

  And then one afternoon, High, sitting in the park, hearing the convulsed chanting, the spiritual singing—in the midst of the lonesome hunting, the sexual hunger in the eyes all around—the franticness to fill each space of time with something! —I imagined-Suddenly! as if in a nightmare—as the crowds emerged from the depths of the subterranean garage, swarmed from across the streets—that all the world was pouring into Pershing Square in a tidal wave of faces—that frantically each person would shout his Loss—into Eternity —to an uncaring Heaven!

  In panic, I returned to that rented room on Hope Street. I shut the windows, drew the shades, bolted the door.

  Still, I could hear life shrieking at me....

  Now again there came a time when I stayed away from the streets. I took a job.... Again the guilt. At night I found relief from the strange terror in the joints of marijuana which I smoked on the roof of that hotel. As the false clarity of the weed seized me, I would look onto the city showered by the black of the Night—and imagine, as if in a dumb show in which all emotion is muted, that I was separated from the world: as I had felt as a boy watching out the window, separated from life.

  The world was revealing its death to me by the process of slow discovery: the slowly gnawing loss of innocence; and I found myself longing for the God in Whom, unquestioningly, I had believed as a child. But this world of loneliness and desperation belied Him. The sky was now a black cave where once it had been limitless, stretching into that Heaven of childhood angels and peace.

  As the doleful sounds of the bells from the church across the street mourned into the night, I looked from the roof in the direction of Pershing Square:

  One day, in sorrow at His own creation, God plunged Into Hell.... Now the world spun dizzily like a ferris wheel out of control.

  CHUCK : Rope Heaven by the Neck

  1

  “HEY, MAN!—HOW YOU MAKIN rr? ... Cummon over—jine me.” Chuck sat familiarly on the railing at Pershing Square under the statue of a World War I soldier valiantly facing the street. Wearing a new pair of cowboy boots—resplendently Bright (orange, brown, traces of yellow)—which hes showing off by rolling his levis an extra turn—Chuck sits there as if on his own frontporch. “Where you been?” he asks me.

  (I didnt tell him this, but I’ll tell you: After staying away from the park as compulsively as, always, I returned, I had gone to San Diego again: to the beach at La Jolla set like a jewel in a ring of gleaming sand. I would lie alone for hours on that still-cool beach, just staring at the sky, at the patterns of the hastily smeared clouds: as I had lain looking into the El Paso sky when I was a kid, when I had climbed that range of mountains called Cristo Rey, to get closer to that Sky; hugged by the jutting sandy hills: lying there—alone—looking up—at times at the sky itself, times at the clouds, times toward the giant statue of the peasant-faced Christ at the top of the mountain.... And years later I was lying on the sand at La Jolla, trying now perhaps to find in the shape of those California beach-clouds the lost patterns I had found as a kid. Vainly.... The idleness of the not-yet crowded beach hinting lazily of spring—and the keyed-up idleness of the streets in the city—San Diego!—at night swarming with aimless sailors—this only emphasized the formless terror and panic.... I returned to Los Angeles, to that same room on Hope Street, to that same roof at night—to the same maryjane daze whose miracles were slowly diminishing.... And I returned, soon, to Pershing Square, as, before, I had returned to Times Square....)

  I only told Chuck: “Ive been away”

  “Ain that somethin now?” he said. “Me, too—I been away too. I had this gig justa while ago.” He yawned as if even the memory of work tired him. “It was in this parking lot out in Hollywood. This score I met out here, he got me that job. But, hell, I figure: So I make a few bucks working, I blow them—jes like that! Shoot, I get along jes as good without. Why hassle moren you got to?” Then, squinting at the sun, he added philosophically: “Theres jes two kindsa people that don gotta work: Those that got all the money, an those that ain got none.... An me,” he said happily, “I ain got nothin.”

  I sat next to him on the railing. In my mind, later, Chuck, like that statue, would become a part of my memory of Pershing Square: Chuck, sitting there complacently in the lazy afternoons, in the same spot, shoulders hunched, hands holding on to the railing, balancing himsetf—long, lanky legs locked loosely under the bar by booted toes as if on a fence, on a ranch; sandy hair jutting out from the widehat over long sideburns—as he looks at the passing scene of Pershing Square with what I would usually think was amusement—but wonder, occasionally, Is it more like bewilderment ? ... When something unusual—unusual in the sense of Pershing Square—happened within the area of his vision —or, rather, of his consciousness, since the two seemed at times to be completely separated—he would shout: “Yippee!” with more energy than he would muster for anything else—as he might have at a rodeo—or at the movies rooting in child-excitement for The Rangers.

  Others in that restless, nervous world came and went, suddenly disappearing altogether. But Chuck seemed always to be here. And unlike the other youngmen hustling the park, be seldom even moved about hunting for scores. Not because of vanity or self-confidence, I am sure, but because he preferred to move as little as possible, he waits for someone to come to him. And, usually, they did: In that world of downtown Los Angeles, Chuck was one of its best-liked citizens—as much by the scores as by other hustlers—perhaps because, with him, everything always seemed to be going right.... He moved effortlessly from day to day as if taking a necessary journey which he must make as easily as possible.

  “You know what I mean about hassling a gig, don you?” he asked me. “I mean, crazy if you dig what youre doing an thats what you want—but jes workin—1 Hell, I would jes as soon hang aroun here.... Hell, I made a few bucks in that there parkin lot—an—dig—Ibought me these here boots.” He raises one gaudy-booted foot for inspection. “Tough, huh?” he asked. “I wanted some with Red on em—but they didn have none.”

  I nodded yes on both counts: I understood about working -and the boots were “tough.”

  “So: I hang aroun here an make it jes as good,” he said.

  It’s that limbo-time in Los Angeles arbitrarily called “spring,” merely because, technically, summer hasnt come. The weather inches toward summer, boundaryless, and the only difference you notice, in the park, is that the crowds become even thicker as the days become slowly warmer.

  Now, in the park—and it is mid-afternoon—there are the familiar sights of mangled American outcasts of every breed. Under the drooping palmtrees, old men and women sit on benches; and outside the enclosed lawn, along the outer ledges, the vagrants of all ages—the younger ones out to score and the older ones out merely to fill the necessary space of time required of that day to qualify them as being “alive” —sit singly or in groups, always waiting: the masklike faces of people expecting anything or nothing....

  “When I got this
gig, parking cars,” Chuck was going on, “I figured theres got to be that malehouse somewhere in Hollywood I heard so much about, an someone’ll spot me, sign me up for it.” This was a familiar thing with him—said now half-jokingly. “This score, man, he says: ‘Chuck, you jes work in my parkin lot an someone’s bound to show that knows where it is an you can go there an apply.’ But, hell, nothin happened, An I Got Tired.” He shrugs his shoulders. His hat was pushed away from his face, turned toward the sun. “Gettin a tan,” he explains, yawning lazily, very long, “an—uh—it makes me—unhhh—real—sleepy.”

  Directly behind us, the howling voice of the Negro woman who preaches there every day rises in a wail as she goes through a religious Revelation. She clutches her throat, gasping out choked obsessed mutterings; eyes shut deliriously, one hand dangling intimately between her slightly spread arched legs—like a burlesque queen. “Comin, Lawd!” she announces triumphantly. She gasped now as if shes seen Him, lurking among the California palmtrees. She greets Him with bumping hips. “Comin, Lawdee!” and her hands are stretched out in supplication or welcome.

  And Chuck said happily: “Yippeee! Man-oh-man! She has made it!—I swear she has made it!” Then he yells to her: “Grab Him, lady! You jes grab-im while you got-im—an don let go!”

  Now he turns to face me. He yawns again. “The best way to get there,” he mused now, “is to take it slow.”

  “Get where?”

  He shrugged. “Wherever.... I mean, wherever you wanna go. Like for her—” indicating the Negro woman “—her, see, she wants to make it to Heaven.... Or, I mean, like, if you wanna make it to New York or Denver—... Or Nowhere, like me....”

  And there it was.

  There was what had intrigued me about Chuck from the very beginning: His easy, happy acceptance of Nothingness. It wasnt resignation—it was acceptance. I look at him as he smiles into the bright glare of the sun.... In the midst of all the turbulence, he was always enviably cool—almost as if some compassionate angel had whispered a secret to him (which must have been something like: “Rest”), and based on that secret, he seemed to live his life untouched by turmoil—yet the turmoil surrounded him constantly.

  “Now you take Skip,” Chuck is going on. “That stud, he is gonna bust wide open one of these days—I mean, he is gonna explode! Boom! It’s like he has gotta firecracker with a long fuse up his ass—an that fuse gets shorter an shorter—an one day: Baroom!! ... An take Buddy: he is gonna end up with his picture hangin in a postoffice.... An Tiger—one day he is gonna kill one of them guys he makes it with -he hates everyone, man.... An you too, man,” he says to me now, “hell, you always ack like youre hyped up or comin off: Always movin. Where you think you gonna go so fast?—an what’s gonna be there if you get there? ... Me, I’ll take it real slow, real coo!—easy—I’ll last longer.”

  And so how could I explain to him the frantic running that, for me, was Youth? With the stark realization that I could never outrun It, I became more and more anxious to find some kind of meaning in Youth itself.... And so how can I explain this to Chuck?—always smiling, always drifting happily, effortlessly.... He was right about the other youngmen hustling Main Street and the park. Although they never spoke of their terror—and for that matter neither did I—it was stamped in every frantic gesture, in every empty pose of unconcern.... We worked at indolence from bar to park to bar.... Not Chuck. His idleness had an aspect of purity. Again: The world for him was a vast plain which he must occupy for a space of time, easily.... And yet—... Yet there was something incomplete about his easygoingness.

  “Now there is one thing I wouldnt mind,” he was going on good-humoredly. “I wouldnt mind finding that male whoorhouse I been hearing about Out in Hollywood. Wouldnt that be a gassy kick?—get signed up workin there? Even hustle chicks for a change. Man, I will tell you somethin: Usually I don get no real good buzz outta guys swinging on my joint. Most of the time, I fall asleep. When I fall asleep, I ain got no problem. I always sleep with a Hardon....”

  With Chuck—and I knew this instinctively and without a doubt—there was nothing ulterior in his making it with males. It was merely easier in the world in which he found himself. That sexually he liked only girls, I never doubted. The other scene would have been too complicated for him to hassle.... And I had never heard even the scores and queens, who would often in bitchiness claim that “today’s trade is tomorrow’s competition,” say it about Chuck.

  “Not that I got anything against anyone swinging on a joint, dig?—if they wanna—” he was going on.

  There was little he condemned, little he didnt accept—even to being rousted by the cops.... Once, weeks before, sitting with him at Hooper’s coffee-and-donuts after two in the morning, we had been picked up at random from the other faces there by two cops. Chuck had remained lackadaisically cool, almost Philosophical. He told me: “Shoot, unless they really want you for something, we will be back here in jes a few minutes. On weekends, man, this late, they got too many in the joint already.... But we are gonna take a little trip to the glasshouse,” he predicted—and he was right—the glasshouse being where they interrogate you, fingerprint you without booking you: an illegal L.A. cop-tactic to scare you from hanging around ... (I remember: As we were being taken to be fingerprinted, along with five others out of Hooper’s—one of the night typists at the station, a pretty roundfaced girl, said to the one next to her: “Thats a cute bunch they got there.” And Chuck called to her: “What time you get off, honey?” She answered saucily: “When do you get out?”—just as the cop, Meanly, stormed back to squelch the Romance.... )

  Along the walks in the park, the hunters and watchers slowly thickened. I noticed three malehustlers standing a few feet from us. I can hear snatches of their conversation: “—I rolled him for a C, man—...” “Man, I didnt even let im touch me an I scored 20 bills ...” The preaching has increased. The angelsisters are marching solemnly to Their Corner—led by the sinister deacon old man.... A man is now standing inches before the howling Negro woman, and as she bumps, he puts his hands behind his neck and thrusts his pelvis lewdly at her, shouting: “Go!”—while she continued howling: “Lawd! Don lure me wid da Debil! Lawdl Ah done seed Yuh in all Yuh Glory! Lawd!” as if playing hide-and-seek with God.... A tattered gray old man, drunk, passes by, mumbling: “Goddamn! God-Jesus-damn!” ... Chuck is staring at all this. He shakes his head. I wait curiously for whatever comment hes about to make.

  What he said was: “Man, dig those birds.” Before us, two pigeons were cooing romantically at each other. “Now ain they something? They make it with each other in Broad Daylight, an nobody busts them for in-decent ex-posure.... What happened to that guy?” he said abruptly—and always he would speak out whatever had formed in his mind, as if expecting that others were following his thinking identically. One moment he could be consumed almost childishly with glee—and like a child dazzled by sights of spinning ferris wheels and rollercoasters, the next moment he could shift his interest easily to something else.

  “Which guy?”

  “Oh, you know, man—the score you was with that time—the one that wanted pod so bad.”

  Sometime ago, on Main Street, I had met a man from out of town who was almost breathlessly intrigued by what he called “the lowlife”—and particularly with what for him was its ultimate manifestation: smoking marijuana. I told him I could get the weed for him and we’d get high. He was so completely square that I figured—correctly—I could get him to pay as much as two bucks for each joint—which at that time was four bits a stick but which I could score for free from a queen from San Francisco. That night, I couldnt find her anywhere. I tried to pick up at Dora‘s—a junk bar—but the heat was on, and the twitching pusher who hung out there—talking to you in the sinister, evil-smelling mazelike head downstairs where he made all his transactions—told me he couldnt get anything that night—“not even a benny.” At Ji-Ji’s, Dad’o hadnt even shown up—nor the pusher with the prophet-like face.... Then
we ran into Chuck in the park, and while the score stood wide-eyed digging the “lowlife” scene, I told Chuck what I was looking for—and why. He conceived a plot: He would split, get some ordinary cigarettes, remove the tobacco, and re-roll them in brown paper. I’d meet him in a few minutes and he would give them to me, playing a real “lowlife” scene for the score. It worked.... Later, in a ratty rented room—which I was sure the score had chosen for “lowlife atmosphere”—the score gagged on the faked joints; said: “This is sure powerful stuff you got us, boy.” After smoking about two of the ordinary cigarettes, he was convinced he was Heavenly High.... “You sure are getting high,” I told him, “just look at your pupils, theyre about to explode!” “Is that how you can tell?” “Sure!” ... “Yeah,” he said, rushing to the mirror to look at his lowlife pupils, “I Sure Am High. Powerful stuff, powerfull”