City of Night (Rechy, John)

by John Rechy

  And then I remembered, suddenly and distinctly. Abruptly, I got up from the table.

  “Where are you going?” Pauline asked.

  “I just remembered,” I told her, “I have to see someone downtown. Ive got to split, Pauline. I’ll see you some other time—at your Hollywood pad, okay?”

  “Why, baby!” she exclaimed. “You havent even finished, the drink I got you!”

  I drank it in a gulp.

  “Something is wrong,” she said. “Or dont you love me any more?”

  “Ive just got to go back,” I said. “I just remembered some. one I have to see, thats all.”

  And now she became mad. “Go to hell, for all I care—youre not so dam tough anyway,” she growled in a man’s voice.

  “Sorry, Pauline—Ive got to go.”

  At the door I looked back, and she was storming across the dancefloor; stood staring back at me for a moment, to see if I would follow her. Realizing that I wasnt going to, she rushed into the ladies’ room, dabbing at nonexistent tears. The scene, for her, although not what she had intended, was nevertheless complete. She was now the hurt, wronged woman....

  Shortly after, I was back at the Hodge Podge. As I walked in, looking through the dark clouds of smoke, I thought for a moment that the man had left, and my heart sank. But then I saw him. He had merely moved farther into the dark. And now that he was high—as he had been the first time I had seen him—I was certain who he was. I had the sudden feeling that he too was waiting for me. I stood near him.

  “Drink?” he said. I sat down. He called Miss Billie. “Hi, hon,” she said to me. “Why’d you leave so quick justa while ago? ... And come to think of it, why aint I seen you in such a long time?—but then of course I’ve been in the hospital myself for about a week. I had this operation—and when I—”

  “An abortion?” an eavesdropping white queen asks.

  “Shut your nelly mouth, Mary,” said the Negro queen—“or I’ll have you eight-sixed out of this bar so fast you wont even be able to hold on to your makeup!”

  “Honey,” said the other queen. “I wasn’t trying to dish you, sweetheart... Why, dearest, I’d like to get pregnant myself!” They all tittered now, including Miss Billie: suddenly all sisters again.

  The man Im sitting with doesnt speak for a long while. He doesnt even look at me. He stared down at the table, playing with his drink.... But Im almost certain that he remembers me too—that hes been waiting for me to fulfill something vastly, if perversely, important.

  “Will you come with me?” he asks me.

  Without answering, I stood up. We walked out.

  We went to a hotel nearby, much better than the ones on Main Street. Coldly, we went up the elevator, into his room ... Outside, he hadnt appeared as drunk as he seems now, and I wonder if somehow it’s necessary that he be drunk—and if not really that drunk, that he pretend to be.

  He removes only his coat, places it carefully inside-out on a chair, his wallet showing half-out from the pocket.

  In bed, when he touched me, it was all quick, frantic.... Then he lay back as if in drunken sleep.

  Instantly—doing what I had come up to do—I reached for his wallet. I removed all the money. I left the wallet, open, on the chair.

  And I walked out feeling strangely triumphant for having just clipped the man with whom, that first afternoon in Los Angeles, I had failed the world I had searched.

  Part Three

  “He’s got the wind and the rain in His hands,

  He’s got both you and me in His hands,

  He’s got the whole world in His hands.”

  —He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands

  CITY OF NIGHT

  HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD IS THE HEART OF the heartless Hollywood legend. Like special moths attracted to the special glitter of the nihilistic movie capital, the untalented or undiscovered are spewed into the streets by the make-it legend.

  You came here to find the wish fulfilled in 3-D among the flowers ; the evasive childworld projected insistently into adult-hood (some figurative something, that is, to hold hands with like you used to with Mommie until you discovered Masturbation) ; the makebelieve among the awesome palmtrees that the invitation of technicolored gold-laced Movies (along with Sodafountains and Stardom and the thousand realized miracles which that alone implies), of perpetual sun (seldom the lonesomeness of gray ... lost ... winter, say, or of the shrieking wind), and the invitation of The Last Frontier of Glorious Liberty (go barefoot and shirtless along the streets) have promised us longdistance for oh so long.

  The invitation to rot obliviously, to die without feeling it, to grow old looking young, is everywhere in this glorious, sunny, many-colored city. And you sense this even before you enter the technical boundaries of the world called Hollywood: The sign on Crenshaw, surrounded by giant roses, said: WE TREAT THE SOLES OF YOUR FEET FOR INNER PEACE—and on Melrose you see a happy-faced Christ before a church: His splendid robes uncommonly festive.

  And what you came hoping to be cured with (which is, importantly, what someone else came to be cured of—your sickness being someone else’s cure) is certainly here (although you may not find it): all here, among the flowers and the grass, the palmtrees.

  The blessed evenings....

  Hollywood—the fringe world beyond the movie lots.

  Hollywood: Sex and religion and cops and nymphos and cults and sex and religion and junk ... and sex and sects and flowers and junk and religion ... fairies and nymphos and sick, sick cops ... and sex.

  Hollywood Boulevard is the imitation of a Dream.

  Immediately, youre disappointed—expecting to see The Stars (in hope-materialized limousines), but the only ones you see are the bronze stars set into the sidewalks, exhibiting the names of the Memorable—but sometimes not so Memorable—Hollywood Personalities. You see, too, the long sequin-lighted rows, on either side, of stores and counter-restaurants, B-girled bars, Red Devil hotdog stands, moviehouses.... But you wont be disappointed for long if youve come to burrow beneath the tourist-neon surface of these streets.

  Off Las Palmas, along—but on the opposite side of—the outdoor newsstand—where professional existentialists with or without sandals leaf through a paperback book and the fairies cruise each other by the physique books, while the lady from, say, Iowa (who will sigh Ahhhhhh as the Premiere searchlights screw the sky), here to attend a PTA convention at the Biltmore, buys a moviebook—off Las Palmas, on Saturday nights especially, the oldman graduate of Pershing Square writes Bible inscriptions on the street: in chalk; neat, incredibly beautiful letters. The young highschool delinquents with flattops proclaiming their Youth heckle him cruelly in merciless teenage fashion while he dashes out his prophecies of not-unlikely Doom: the booming words like the musicless theme of this street.... The fairies, half-listening momentarily to his shouting threats of imminent Judgment (while surveying the crowd for someone Cute), cross the street on their way, perhaps to the Green bar (where Miss Ana Mae—in Congenial Surroundings—will drown those echoing Threats as she plays her organ coyly), and they may say bitchily about the judging prophet: “My dear! Isnt she Too Much?—she should get a Man and settle down”—and swish on giggling—hoping for a Man to settle down with—wondering nervously does tonight’s sexnervousness show beneath the giggles (and this can easily ruin a birl), and will they make it tonight and if so will it be someone Nice and early please God so they wont have to add to the shadows on Selma.

  And Selma Street is a dark purgatory to which those who havent made it in the bars or on the lighted Boulevard sentence themselves in the desperate hours after midnight.

  Along a distance of about four blocks on that street, throughout the late night and into the first morning hours, male ghostforms haunt Selma along the apartment houses and the outlined trees (all appropriately flimsy in the night like movieprops); stand waiting for a car to stop, for someone to ask them what theyre looking for: If what you want is what hes willing to give, you go; if not, you wai
t for someone else to emerge out of the shadows ... Faces stare out of dark parked cars you think at first are empty, until a match, lighted suddenly, erupts, revealing a pair of staring eyes in the match-shadowed face....

  But Coolly: The plainclothes detectives also cruise this street....

  Toward the end of the stretch of more-or-less activity, back now on the Boulevard, before it sprints a short distance farther, diminishing in fluorescent splendor and turning into softlawned apartment units with pastel lights (where starlets live lonesomely wondering will they make it, finding no substitute for stardom in the carefully rationed joints of maryjane for manufactured dreams)—there (before the softlawned swimming-pooled apartment houses) is a coffeehouse primarily for teenage queers and those who want them: Inside (stained-glass windows like in a church), a dike (a squareshouldered butch lesbian, stocked up on bees—with poised pencil and pad) writes lovepoems to the femmetype teenage fairies.... After two in the morning, they wait in line to come in.

  On the side streets off the Boulevard, that world’s bars make turn-down business on weekends—even when their patrons keep moving from bar to bar, making it sometimes in one hectic night through more than a dozen of those bars—some catering to the hustlers (and one, near the U.S.O., to the hustling servicemen), some to mixed groups, others to the more effeminate or “arty” chorus-boy fairies; some to those with pretensions of Elegance, others to the goodlooking, masculine movie “actors”—whether ever in a movie or not. ... A private “club” in the hills up a twisting dirt road, where men dance with men, women with women.... And there are, too, the “leather bars”: black-jacketed mesh inside, moving pictures of youngmen wrestling realistically, murals of motorcyclists at a race, their faces sexually aroused; motorcycles parked in menacing rows outside.... After the first inadver. tent times, I avoided those last bars.

  And when the bars close, the crowds invade the Boulevard; those still without a partner stand as if looking into the gaudy-shirted shopwindows—or idle in the outside lobby of Vic Tanny’s gym—or outside the sandwich stand toward Highland, which attracts, mainly, young hustlers and the scores hunting them.... Or go to one of the all-night coffeehouses: especially, then to Coffee Andy’s, which throughout the day is more or less a straight restaurant, but, after 2:00, becomes a meeting and exhibition place for the nightworld.

  Or, in the late weekend evenings, a portion of this world will move to one of many parties, usually planned in an instant in a bar or at Coffee Andy’s, and usually lasting until Monday, when the previous-day’s faces will have changed, possibly completely replaced: in which some chosen house will turn into a closed-in world: servicemen picked off the streets or as they wait for the bus outside the U.S.O., masculine fairies, queens, scores, dikes, straight but often frigid girls, straight but curious men, malehustlers, nymphos.... Bedrooms suddenly locked, opening to expel one person, quickly replaced by another—or sometimes by two, three.... Lights suddenly turned out, bodies anonymously sprawled on the carpeted floors

  Lulled into an emotional trance by the liberating victory of having at last stolen, I felt myself in a constant state of highness—and I no longer sought either the joints of maryjane or the pills: senses on pinpoint as if I were drunk without liquor.

  And what I was high on was the furious unsurfeited search. Now the subterfuge that I did it only for money—even though, as early as New York (especially when the act was executed in public places), I had not strictly adhered to it—began to disappear. It was now a matter of numbers.

  Often—satisfied merely to know that I could have scored, and turning down the person who asked me—I returned alone to, now, another rented room on Hope Street, in another hotel this time; and in that room, I lie in bed aware of myself ... sexually aware.

  Often, too, the longing to return to El Paso would grasp me without warning. I would imagine my Mother standing before the glasscase in the living-room. Longingly, I remember the mountain I had climbed as a boy: the statue of Christ under that most beautiful sky in the world.... The memory of my father.... I would touch the ring he had given me.

  And then I would see El Paso racked by the savage wind.

  In a dark moviehouse in Hollywood, a thin youngman picks me up, asks me to wait In the lobby for a few moments, returns shortly with another youngman, and takes us both to his place In the hills, where he comes on with both of us—and later, with someone met while Im hitchhiking (as cars like glowing-eyed bugs curve along Sunset Boulevard as if in general alarm), I go to his house, where—he being hung up on pictures—I merely stand while he peers behind the clicking camera, and I wonder, Is this all?—and it is, because now Im in Echo Park, where a queen, camping by the head, calls out, “Hi babe—welcome to Jenny’s tearoom—and , you understand, lm Jenny, and this is my tearoom”—indicating the head (across the street from Aimee Semple McPherson’s Temple of uppropriately Brotherly Love); going on: “I come here, oh, every day,” brazenly, “And I run away all those other hungry nelly queens first so I can have my pick of the cute tricks—and so, sweetie-love, if youve got A Mind To, would you join me in my tearoom for a few happy Wholesome moments?”—and soon after (mornings afternoons, nights fusing into a boundaryless existence) Im sitting in the balcony of a moviehouse in Hollywood—waiting purposely for someone to come on, turning him off to replace him with someone else—needfully adding numbers; and I leave the theater—alone—going back to that rented room in fulfilled—but only momentarily fulfilled—Awareness; and I meet a youngman, high on grass, and we drive to the hills, where the houses being built are mere skeleton frames against the grayish ghost-moon, where we turn on, smoking under the oppressive sky, and he comes on right there while I smoke looking at the stars, so few that I begin to count them—no longer looking at those stars now at a party that lasts two smoky nights, where I get so drunk I forget who I came here with, where I wake in a rumpled room, with people sleeping on chairs—and a pale wide-eyed, opportunistic, up-two-nights-in-a-row queen is saying to me almost worriedly: “You feel better now, honey?”—and I wonder what Ive.said or done—but I no longer wonder when, only minutes later (or so it seemed—but it could have been hours), Im on Mulholland Drive in the parked car of a man just met: cramped in the car by the edge of a cliff overlooking the city—and another scene follows that rapidly, this time at Westlake, where two anxious fairies cruise me—one coming up saying hurriedly, “Right here—behind those trees—my ‘sister’ will watch out for us”—and the sexnoises are stifled by the sounds of the ducks nearby shivering out of the lake-water, sounds of cars rushing along Wilshire—the park so dark, so dark, so dark, under now a starless night—that starless heaven soon replaced by the smoke-hugging ceiling In the bar where Im with a man Ive just scored from, where another score, with a youngman, talks to the man Im with about exchanging partners, and we all four go—and now coming out of a theater (the dungeon sex-head where they exchange partners, too), Im stopped by a man whos followed me and offers me “ten bills for just a few minutes—just a short time” —and I feel depressed, and I put him down, regretting it lonesomely as I go home and try to sleep and feel the Terror like a heavy blanket smothering me, but soon—and it’s an afternoon—Im hitchhiking again on Sunset (not going anywhere —or, rather, going anywhere!), picked up this time by a very young fairy, with whom—because, he explains, he has A Jealous Lover—l go, instead, to the house of a friend of his—who surprisingly turns out to be a dark girl with gobbling eyes: the three of us making it, the nympho coming on like a starved fairy but not wanting to be screwed: and Im wondering why as I ride in a car with three men who will soon now come on, and I will feel hugely excited and momentarily surfeited, to be, oneway, the object of their desire—but surfeited, again, only for those few moments; and out on the streets to add more numbers, I get stopped, instead, by two cops —one frisking me Intimately against the car with the red light like an angry science-fiction eye; frisking me, his hands sliding between my legs, and I say, high on Sex: “Are you ge
tttng your kicks?”—which ges me aken to the station -not booked but fingerprinted illegally—and the cop, searchIng records to find a suspect who fists my description, says I gave him a fuck-you finger as he passed in His Car (which is not true), causing the detective there (more cool than most and not too fond of the paranoic cop anyway ... perhaps) to break up derisively in laughter, and he lets me go—the cops driving me back to where they picked me up—and where, soon after I have stepped out of the copcar, I meet someone else with whom I’ll soon make it. . . .

  All this happened within perhaps a week. And more. More —forgotten ... incidents stretching into a crowded but somehow vastly empty plain.

  Within that period there appeared a face which at the time had little significance but which I would remember later.

  Outside of Coffee Andy’s—a good pickup place if you can avoid the periodically rousing cops—a very young boy whom I recognize as a hustler asks me for a match.

  “Howre you making it?” he asked me.

  “Okay.” I distrusted him.

  “Made it today?”

  I hesitate.

  He said impatiently: “Oh, man, dig: You dont have to play square with me. Save it for the hicks. Im cool—Im making the same scene you are.”

  He was at the most 18. He looked like hundreds of other youngmen in Hollywood, not tall, almost thin—slouched; his pants, beltless, loose below the waist: a street-hood type with brown hair—not really handsome but of a type that scores find attractive. He has a look that may be meanness or a premature bitterness at the discovery of what life is really like.

  “Man,” hes saying, his eyes shifting scanning the street for a prospect, “you know what Im gonna do tonight? Im gonna find me a rich queer and clip him for every coin—I mean, Im gonna leave him pantless! ... But, see, I aint been here too long—and I dont know the scene too good yet. So, see, what I’d dig: I’d dig finding some swinging cat wholl help me clip the queer—you know—take him to a dark street—or some cool pad youre Sure of....”