City of Night (Rechy, John)

by John Rechy

  The queen put her hand indignantly to her heart In obviously posed amazement, she formed, soundless, the Astonished word “Me?” and left her mouth gaping in practiced disbelief.

  “I dont give a damn who you clip-as long as it’s someone who knows what hes getting into,” Sylvia went on; and I can feel her begin to relent toward the queen. “But a drunk sailor-and how many other drunk sailors?” she says in exasperation. “Well, Lily, this isnt the first time Ive told you: I wont have it. You go find yourself another bar-and thats thatl ... That sailor was so damn drunk- I saw you with him-he probably thought you were a girl. Either that or you offered him trade-sex, or money.”

  “Well, honey,” said the queen, smiling demurely, pleased at the former, ignoring the latter, “you know yourself how real I can look-and that particular night, I had my hair- ...”

  “I told you to stop rattling your beads at mel” Sylvia interrupted her, forcing the queen to retreat a hurried step, her hand anxiously at her throat. “This is the last time I warn you: I wont have anyone in my bar that takes advantage of someone thats not hip enough to know better.”

  “I am Telling You The God’s Truth,” Lily protested, hinting, but somehow feebly, at tears-and crossing her heart spiritedly. “It was that washed-out queen Whorina-” She sneered at the name.—“that made up that Utterly Fantastic story-just because, like 1m telling you—cross! Myl Heart!-I made it with the sailor she was after. If something happened to his wallet, well, I certainly had nothing to do with that.”

  I wonder whether Sylvia actually believes the queen’s story. Telling it, the queen seems too nervous, too quickly apologetic; I have a strong suspicion that Sylvia doesnt believe it-but, as if it is easier to believe her than face what disbelief will entail, she says to the queen, wearily, “Okay-all right; forget it,” like a judge not quite satisfied with the veracity of the defendant’s story but considering and bowing to the mitigating circumstances.

  “Thank you, honey,” sang the queen, enormously relieved. “Introduce me?”

  Sylvia introduced us.

  “Gotta place to stay, hon?” the queen said to me. “I got an empty bed.”

  “Yes,” I answered. There is something patently lubricous about her manner which turns me off.

  “Too bad,” she sighed. “That empty bed in my pad just gives me the cold chills.”

  “What happened to your stud boyfriend?” Sylvia asked cunningly.

  Thrown suddenly off balance, the queen blurted: “He split! -with all that money we been making!” And now shes genuinely shaken. Realizing, quickly, that shes trapped herself clearly, she excuses herself with enormous courtesy and slithers into the kitchen. She is now talking to the youngman still eating there.

  “Screwed-up world without lawsl” Sylvia muttered disgustedly to herself. “Queens, hustlers, fairies—and me!” Suddenly angry, her words accused me harshly: “All of you!—guys like you—and that kid with the gashed head—what the hell are you trying to prove? Why, especially—...?” I was glad she stopped the uncomfortable words—but she had looked at me as if actually expecting an answer to the question that hadnt been asked. Then she reverted to what she had begun to say: “But even in a world without laws—and mostly, hell, we all know it—mostly it’s lawless because it’s a scene—... a scene people shun, are ... afraid of, dont even want to know exists—even in that kind of world—well, Jesus, Holy, Christ—youve got to have some kind of—hell, yes—decency—some kind of rules. In my bar, I make those rules. And I dont give a damn who gets bugged and doesnt come back. Hell, I know everything that goes on. I watch it every day: scores coming in looking for youngmen. Some of them try to impress the hustlers with how Rich they are. So they end up clipped. That doesnt bug me. That kind of score asks for it.” She had begun with the familiar bravado, but it had faded quickly, and she dropped her eyes, unable to face me even in the darkness.

  “But if a hustler in my bar gets treated decently by a score (and I know most of the scores, too),” she went on, “if he agrees to what hes going to get paid—and exactly for what—and then I hear he clipped the score,” she warned, “then, God damn it, hes gonna answer to me or he doesnt come back. The same with the queens and their daddies.... Theres got to be some kind of morality!” she insisted. “Not the bull they teach you in Sunday-school. I mean; just living in the world you find yourself in—with its own rules, considering everything—yes—but theres got to be rules!” She stared into the empty bar, at the shattered mirror.

  Yes, it was exactly as if she had been clarifying something, rather unconvincingly, for herself—speaking words shes probably spoken to others many times, memorized now—as if she were torn between a compulsion to understand, to accept—and an innate tendency to reject.... And I wonder to what extent she really believes she can impose rules on the flagrant anarchy.

  “Why the hell did you come to New Orleans?” she asked me tiredly, as if shes used to getting an inadequate answer.

  “For the Carnival,” I told her simply.

  “And something else,” she said to herself. “Beyond the parades and—... the rest.”

  “I guess youre right,” I admitted uneasily.

  “Theres always something else,” she said. “Ive been in New Orleans—oh, several years. I came directly from New York—right after my last divorce,” she added pointedly; I had the feeling she was trying to indicate to me that shes been married several times.

  “Why did you come here?” I asked her.

  She waited a long while before answering. “I came down here—... for the Carnival. Like you,” she added with bitter sarcasm.

  Then she looked at me curiously, as if suddenly I had become a complete stranger with whom she had found herself accidentally speaking intimately. She got up quickly, and she went through the lighted kitchen—to take, I suspected, the knife from the wounded boy....

  Sailing in out of the dark in Sylvia’s wake, a painted queen stood over me.

  "Im Whorina, darling, and I like you,” she said.

  3

  There are of course other bars in the French Quarter where the hunted and the hunting of that world gather.

  There was Les Petits, where, nightly, Love Face, a fat Negro woman with bleached hair, made panting, sighing song-love to the mike. And, outside, past the courtyard, was Sandy-Vee’s bar—and Sandy-Vee is one of the most flagrant, most famous drag-queens in America. Vaunting her imposed exile, defiantly she dangles his/her orange earring for the curious tourists. (And my first time there, exhibiting herself before the amused tourists—hating them but using them cunningly—as I walked in—she shrieked: "Theres muh new husband!”—and then she said to an ancestrally bored woman sitting with her fat, tired middle-aged companion: “Ahm doin much bettuh than you are, honey!—and theres more where he came from!”—and she underscored the flagrant put-down by squirting seltzer water, fizzing, into a glass and shouting at the woman: “Douche time!”)

  And there was Cindy’s bar, run by a fat, jolly-looking, pursed-mouthed woman who pined after her clients. There was Les Deux Freres. (“Why 'The Two Brothers’?” “Because it’s owned by two brothers, and theyre sisters!”) And there were the other bars, scattered throughout the Quarter.

  But, usually, especially in the moments of needed respite from the compulsive fury of those days, as the city went through that period of initiation before Mardi Gras, I would return to The Rocking Times.

  And it was mainly to be with Sylvia that I went there.

  In the world of her bar, she treated each member on his own respective level. With the queens, she discussed their drag costumes for Mardi Gras, assuring them that such and such a color would be just right. With the masculine homosexuals -neither scores, hustlers, nor queens—she listened attentively as they confided to her their broken love affairs. With the hustlers, she often spoke roughly, using their own expressions. ... And on all, at least verbally, she imposed her rigid, though largely unobserved, rules.

  Yet there were th
ose other times when she would merely stare gloomily before her, as if she had shut her ears. At such times, within me, she augmented the churning unfocused guilt.

  Still, I sought her out. And when she wasnt at the bar—which was rare—I would feel acutely disappointed, personally cheated—almost angry at her as if she had stood me up.

  Today shes talking to Sonny—the blond youngman who had been wounded in the fight that afternoon before the Bourbon House. Only minutes earlier, he had walked in Proudly, Cockily—like a big-game hunter with a lion’s head—with two impressively suited scores.

  “Be cool,” I heard Sylvia warning him. "Those two are here every year. I see them pick up a green kid like you, each Mardi Gras—” Sonny winced noticeably at her designation of him. “—and they tell him theyre going to take him to Europe, and after Mardi Gras, they split—alone. Youll never see them again.”

  Sonny nodded impatiently. It is difficult for him to believe that he can be taken. Sylvia watched him with an ambiguous look as he returned to the two well-dressed scores, who have been staring resentfully at Sylvia as if aware that shes been warning Sonny about them.

  As usual, Sylvia is drinking Seven-Up. It was all I had ever seen her drink. Occasionally, though, I had noticed her stare longingly at the varicolored bottles of liquor behind the bar, then turn from them as if they threatened her in some powerful way.

  The quavering, sensual voice of Elvis Presley is coming from the juke-box in lonesome, sad, sustained, orgasmic moans:The bell-hop’s tears keep flowing,

  The desk clerk’s dressed in black....

  Sylvia studied two youngmen who had just walked into the bar. “Two more new ones,” she sighed. “Each year—new hustlers, new queens, new—...” she hesitated, “—new gay boys just out for kicks—and the ones that keep coming back.”

  And the juke-box sang lugubriously:Just take a walk down lonely street

  To Heartbreak Hotel....

  “Kathy just passed out on the steps of the Maison Blanche!” a queen blurted at Sylvia.

  “Whos with her?” Sylvia asked urgently, shocked out of the revery the two entering youngmen had smothered her in.

  “Whorina is—and, well, I was—but I got so rattled, I didnt know what to do! So I thought I’d better run and tell you.”

  “You dizzy queen,” said Sylvia, “didnt you think to call a doctor?”

  “I just Didnt Know What To Do!—except run to you as fast as I could!” the queen protested vehemently. “Me and Whorina—well, we went with Kathy to the Maison Blanche, to pick up, you know, some drag things for Mardi Gras.... And, oh, we created quite a stir, I want to tell you: All those tourists just Turning and Looking at Us—... Then Kathy, she just blacks out—” She covered her eyes to indicate the intensity of the blackness. “—all of a sudden—you know, Sylvia, like she does—those awful spells she gets! Well, she just fell back on the escalator, and it hauled her down, and—... Well, I didnt know what to do! Like I say: Me and Whorina—well, see ... we had just—well, taken certain items which didnt exactly belong on our persons; and when-well, see, honey, then I—...”

  “What about Kathy?” Sylvia said harshly, exasperated.

  “Well,” the queen says, inflating herself with her importance as the harbinger of some, to me, obscure doom, “like I say, she just passed out. Oh, those horrible dizzy spells—”

  Sylvia brushed quickly past her, leaving the bar.

  When I returned that night—separating at the door from the man I had just made it with—Sylvia was back too.

  “Youre really keeping busy.” She smiled a strange smile.

  Embarrassed, I didnt answer.

  “The first season, it’s always great,” she said. “Maybe youre one of those thatll keep coming back each year. Some do.” She studied me for a long moment. “Somehow I doubt that youll be back,” she said flatly.

  “What happened to—...?” I asked, to stop her from going on in that direction.

  “Kathy? Shes okay now. They took her home. She gets those spells—more and more often. She hardly ever comes out any more, except during the camival.”

  “Has she seen a doctor?”

  “Yes. I made her go. I wish I hadnt.” And that was all she said; but a dark look had brushed her face like a shadow.

  A lighthaired, heavily muscled youngman was standing behind Sylvia, ready to surprise her. He had the kind of good-looks that is a combination of hinted toughness and the All-American wholesomeness depicted in hundreds of advertisements: the epitomized face of America’s young vagrants. But I noticed immediately the telltale brand about his eyes: the eyes of someone who has seen much too much. Suddenly this youngman with the massive arms no longer looked so young. And I remembered Skipper.... He placed his hands quickly on Sylvia’s shoulders.

  “Jocko!” she greeted him warmly.

  “Back as usual,” he said.

  “This is one of the ones I was telling you about—who come back every year,” Sylvia told me. “Youre later than usual,” she said to him. “How was Miami?”

  “I didnt stay there long. I had to split,” he said. “I been in St Louis.”

  Sylvia frowned. Again I get the impression that she doesnt want to know too much. “Well, welcome back—again,” she said, looking at him tenderly, almost sadly.

  “Always back,” he said, moving away.

  Staring after Jocko, Sylvia said: “That guy’s made it on his muscles long after most of them would be through. He was an acrobat—once. Like everything else, the circus folded. Now he comes here each year to join another kind of circus.... He was the best hustler in New Orleans,” she said, almost proudly, “and he had iron rules he stuck by—thats why everyone liked him: never clipped anyone, treated everyone straight. ... Now—well—maybe it’s changed.” Abruptly, as if to stop the wondering about why Jocko had to leave Miami, she said: “After Mardi Gras, this city clamps up. It dies, as if it’s seen too much during the Carnival, and then you can almost feel Lent in the air. You breathe it. It takes over the city. New Orleans goes into mourning. Thats when the plainclothesmen haunt the bars again for vagrants,” she warned. “And thats when Jocko leaves—at midnight. The next Mardi Gras, hes back.... And yet, each year since Ive been here, I wonder if that will be the last one—if he’ll never show up again....”

  As if now on an invisible trapeze, I thought suddenly.

  “In a few years he’ll be old,” Sylvia said, “and hes the kind that should stay Young. No brains. Just goodlooks—and an instinctive understanding of so many things. I guess no one can blame him for anything,” she said, as if to herself. “Something—something tossed him out!” she said fiercely. An intense silence. Then: “Maybe it would have been better for him if he’d fallen off the damn trapeze,” she said brutally.

  I looked at her, at the harsh, saddened face, and I realized how violently, at that moment, she hated the world of this bar she owned.

  As if she had materialized from the very smoke that clouded the bar, the most beautiful queen I have ever seen appeared. If it hadnt been for her clothes—mateclothes worn to imitate a woman’s—I would have thought her a real woman; and as a woman, she would have been one of the most beautiful, too. In her 20s, with a pale perfectly featured face—the face any woman would have envied on another—she had dark-lidded eyes and long, blond, almost-golden hair, which now is tightly bunched in back to conceal its length. She is lithe, slender. There is a ghostquality about her, perhaps because of the way even the feeble light plays on her hair, so that, appearing almost translucent, she seems incandescent.

  She surveyed the bar slowly, as if for the first time, with a smile which is unbearably, wistfully sad. In this bar of very real faces—the studied toughness of the malehustlers, the sedulous (but largely unsuccessful to practiced eyes) madeup attempts at femininity of the queens—this youngman, this queen, standing in the midst of it, appears as unreal as an angel: a monument to the utter perversity of her violated sex.

  She glides throu
gh the bar now, easily, past the bunched groups; nodding to the others—not aloofly, but, rather, as if she herself is aware of the unreality of her person; and they stare at her in a kind of bewildered awe. She moves like fog, as if some invisible wind is carrying her along toward Sylvia. Now, closely, I can see the queen’s haunting green eyes. And I feel a great sadness because of the doom so inexorably stamped on that beautiful face.

  “How do you feel now, Kathy?” Sylvia asked her softly.

  “Oh, Im always all right,” Kathy answered. Even her voice has a quality of unreality. “Im fine.... Sylvia, what time is it, honey?”

  Without looking at her watch, Sylvia said: “It’s five o’clock.” But I knew it was much later.

  “I dont mean what time. Did I say that? I mean what day?”

  Sylvia answered. She reached out to touch the queen, but she brought her hand quickly back.

  “That late in the week?” Kathy sighs.

  “That early,” Sylvia laughed unconvincingly.

  “Oh, well,” Kathy said indifferently. The smile hasnt left her face. “Youre new in the Quarter, arent you, baby?” she asked me. “I dont come out very often any more.” She seemed to be looking through me, as if everyone within the span of her vision is as unreal as she herself. “New people all the time, some come back, some never do.” She asked Sylvia, “Is Jocko back in town yet?”

  “Yes. He was here earlier.”

  “Good,” said Kathy. “I like him.... What time did you say it is?” she asked again, vaguely.

  Sylvia answered, this time correctly. But Kathy seemed not to have noticed the difference.

  “Excuse me,” she breathed—and she disappeared as un-really as she had appeared.

  “Shes beautiful,” I said.

  Illogically, as if mysteriously it explained the queen’s beauty, Sylvia said: “Her family threw her out, years ago; they even offered to pay her to stay away.” She added proudly: “But Kathy wouldnt take their money. Shes lived in a little hell-hole in the Quarter ever since then—on her own.... Those blackouts she has—... Shes dying,” she said abruptly.