City of Night (Rechy, John)

by John Rechy

  Escape from this room!

  Escape from the bedcover thrown in a heap on the floor—escape, especially and mysteriously disturbingly, from the rumpled sheets.... But I lay back in bed. I would stay only a few more minutes, I told myself, trying momentarily to shut out the hypnotizing, seductively beckoning sounds of the frenzy roaring Outside: beckoning like a ritual prepared especially for me.

  “Why is it,” this man was saying slowly, almost as if he were seeking an excuse, by talking, in order not to join the streetcrowds—or to keep me from it, “that the moment the orgasm is over—or the moment it’s remembered, after sleep,” he added, as if understanding very clearly my anxiety to leave -as if, too, he is speaking about me personally, “why is it that people want to leave, as if to forget—with someone else —whats just happened between them—which will happen again and again—and again have to be forgotten?”

  The inappropriateness of his searching remarks, while the carnival fury which we have all come to seek—that very cramming of experiences with many, many people—roars outside—the vast inappropriateness of it strikes me immediately. Of course, what he had said was largely true: Afterwards, in those hurried contacts, you want to leave instantly, as if in some kind of shame, or guilt, for something not exchanged.

  But I said: “It’s just the carnival outside; it’s what everyone comes here for.”

  “Youll see it all,” he assured me, indicating that to him it’s not important. “It doesnt really begin again until after the morning parade. Ive seen it before. There nothing going on now that wasnt going on when you were down there just a while ago—only more of it.” He spoke softly, nevertheless compelling conviction.

  He was a well-built, masculine man in his early 30s, with uncannily dark eyes, light hair. He is intensely, moodily handsome.... Looking at him, I wonder why such a man would pay another male when he could obviously make it easily and mutually in any of the bars, and I wonder if perhaps there is another reason for his having given unasked-for money. It is a sudden feeling, not substantiated by anything that has actually happened. But it is a strong one. The money rests there, something constantly present, but, still, by the fact of my not having yet taken it, unacknowledged.

  He was propped against the headrest on the bed, a pillow at his back; covered from his waist down by the sheet. I lie on top of the sheet in order not to feel that Im actually in bed with him.

  This room, just around the corner from the bar where I met him, is obviously one of those expensive rooms reserved months in advance of the carnival: their prices determined almost exclusively by their location in the French Quarter, the balcony from which the carnival rites can be viewed. The furniture attempts to suggest the Old New Orleans of novels and movies, romance; but there is an air of emulation—of carnival-masquerade, even about this room.

  “Besides,” he was saying, “if you rest a while longer, you can take full advantage of it all.... Thats what you feel you have to do, isnt it?” he shot at me strangely. Then, quickly, before I could answer his question, as if he had already known the answer: “What is your name?”

  Following the rules of that nightworld which tacitly admits guilt while seldom openly acknowledging it, I told him my first name.

  He smiled. “My name is Jeremy—Jeremy Adams,” he said, announcing his last name pointedly. And, curiously, something which is seldom done in those interludes, he held out his hand for me to shake, and I took it.... (I remember Mr King and his resentment of the distrust implicit in merely giving first names. I remember him with a sharp, pungent loneliness, not only for him but for the situation he had resented.... “I’ll give you ten, and I dont give a damn for you,” Mr King had said, and with those words he had verbalized the imposed coldness of the life he lived, of the life I would soon, then, discover.)

  I told Jeremy Adams my own last name.

  “It’s your first Mardi Gras, isnt it?” he asked me.

  “Yes.” I felt amazingly sober after the short intense sleep. All at once, Im not so anxious to be back on those streets. For a moment, the prospect terrifies me. It’s only that Im still tired, I told myself. It has nothing directly to do with this man.

  He moved his leg slightly under the sheet, closer to mine. I leaned over as if to retrieve something from my clothes on the floor. Actually I merely wanted to move away from something oddly threatening about him—strangely, the very evenness of his voice now, the certainty of his manner—the moody handsomeness—the ease. Even during the sex, although I had detected no inhibition in him, this ease had manifested itself. There had been none of the hurried hungriness of some of the others.

  And then—as I sat up on the bed again, farther from him now—he said this, completely unexpectedly, without hint of its coming, without preparation; bluntly:

  “You want, very much, to be loved—but you dont want to love back, even if you have to force yourself not to.”

  I faced him on the bed. He was looking at me steadily. I grasp defensively for the streetpose that will dismiss his statement. “Oh, man, dig,” I said, “I just want to ball while I can.”

  “I was standing right near you at the bar when you were talking to the two men you were with,” he said. “I heard you —everything you said—everything about ‘pretending’—about being just as frightened as everyone else.”

  I felt my face burning with shame. Emotionally, in that bar, for those few moments, I had stripped myself naked; and this man had witnessed it.

  “Dont be embarrassed,” he said quickly. “I had sensed something like that, even before I heard you in the bar. Γd seen you several times before—the first time was near the French Market. I saw you staring at the cooped-up roosters there, I saw your reaction when they seemed to want to claw their way out of their cage. Do you know that you actually winced? Do you remember?”

  Yes, I remembered—and I remember the eery feeling that I had been in that cage.

  “I would have talked to you then,” Jeremy went on, “but you walked away very quickly.... I knew you wouldnt speak to me—it’s difficult for some people, and I was sure it was so for you.... I was right, wasnt I?—about not wanting to love back; not even wanting to feel anything—for one person.”

  Curtly, squashing out the cigarette to indicate that the direction of the conversation will push me to leave, I said: “I dent even know that I want to be ‘loved.’ I just know that I want to feel Wanted. I dont even want to feel that I need any one person.”

  “Just many,” he said ineluctably. “Im sorry,” he apologized. “Dont be ... ‘bugged,’” he laughed.

  His use of that word, so obviously for my benefit, made me laugh too.

  He seems to realize that lm not so eager now to leave; and he seems to sense, too, my unfocused fears of the streets. Perhaps taking advantage of that, he pursues the subject. “Youve never loved anyone?” he asked me.

  I wanted to say something flippant that will make his question seem ridiculous, particularly at this carnival time. Instead, I answered hurriedly. “Not the way you mean.”

  But I think of my Mother—her love like a stifling perfume. ... Yes, that was “love”—on both sides—a devouring potentially choking thing—like Sylvia’s love for her son—but love nonetheless.... The always-scorching memory of my Father, emerging—“loved”—out of the ashes of that early hatred.... Yet I know that this is not what Jeremy means.

  He had pushed my thoughts into an area I preferred to leave unexplored. I grasped for the least dangerous thought: Could I have really loved Barbara? (The stabbing unhappiness inside me when I saw her that last time—but hadnt we merely used each other, in some kind of mutual fear?) And my mind sprang forward: Dave.... (I try to picture his face when I first met him; but the face I remember is another one—the one which had stared at me in disbelief that afternoon when I had walked out, that look branded in my mind, recalled so clearly, so often....) And how much of what I had fled from had been fear for myself?—how much had been fear of hurting him? ..
. Lance.... Pete: the feeling of hopelessness and pain and embarrassment and isolation that night when he had held my hand for so long in bed.... The man on the beach in Santa Monica (and I remember him, instead, as I had seen him earlier here in New Orleans).... Mr King’s loneliness—shared!—shared and acknowledged; and it had been that very awareness of his pain (as perhaps, too, it had been toward Dave) which had sent me from him. By fleeing impotently, hadnt I manifested what could be, perhaps, a shape of “love”? ...

  “No,” I repeated emphatically, “Ive never loved any one.” And when I said that, I thought of this: That night in Chicago, walking along the lake, when I felt myself exploding with love—but it was something else, something that was closer to pity (as it had been in my feelings toward Mr King, the others, I now realized).

  Outside, there is a sudden change in the noises. Voices are shouting: “Let them go! Let them go!” Soon the shouting becomes a chant, the same three words: “Let! Them! Go!” The clapping of hands in rhythm to the commanding words. The sound of feet stamping.

  “The police, probably,” said Jeremy. “Probably trying to arrest someone—but that crowd isnt going to let them. It’s the crowd’s day of complete freedom, if anarchy is complete freedom. The police know it too. Theyre largely powerless—but still they put up a pretense. Their masks are the last to come off,” he said ambiguously....

  After a short pause, he asked me—again bluntly: “Do you always go for money—only?”

  “Yes,” I lied. How impossibly difficult it seemed to explain to him that it was the mere proffering of the sexmoney that mattered; the unreciprocated sex: the manifestations that I was really Wanted.

  “Oh?” he asked, as if something in the way I had reacted so quickly has made him doubt it, perhaps, too—certainly—the fact that I hadnt asked him for money, that he had given it. “Somehow, listening to you with those two in the bar—and having seen you with others—I got the impression that the money they gave you wasnt the important thing—that you were, maybe, compulsively playing a game.”

  His words annoyed me. Yet I can stop them by merely walking out on him. Nothing keeps me here, I keep insisting to myself. Still, I remain lying on the bed.

  There is a new relief in the knowledge that he has overheard me in the bar with those other two—beyond the adopted pose—when I had acknowledged my own terror. Knowing that, he had nevertheless sought me out.

  At the same time, my senses seem completely alive, tingling, after the resurrective sleep. What could be false, momentary sobriety—which, if false, could hammer me into drunkenness with just one more drink—makes me feel reckless. It could be, too, the noises outside, the recurrent anticipation—beyond the fears—of rejoining the people sweeping along the streets madly. It could be that like a child before a luscious dessert, Im savoring the anticipation before the actual taste—trying to stretch the time before I’ll be in the midst of the steadily growing, thunderous frenzy....

  Perhaps this man, Jeremy, senses my doubts as to why I remain in this room with him.

  In an almost amused tone, he said: “Did you think that if I knew—since you didnt know that I had overheard you in that bar—that if I knew what you were really like—or might be like—what you were trying to tell those two about yourself —that I’d lose interest in you?”

  “It’s happened before,” I said. “You saw it happen then. People want you for what you ‘appear’ to be—unconcerned, toughened. You learn that immediately when you hang around the streets.”

  “Thats where people looking for streetpeople naturally go,” he said. “And maybe it’s true that for them you become more masculine if you appear ‘tough’—or even dumb. Or maybe—as someone once told me—they feel that, although theyve paid you, theyre ‘better’—smarter. And it could be also that theyre searching for their seeming opposite: the seemingly insensitive street-youngmen—as they themselves might want to be in order not to get hurt....”

  And I remembered the man in Los Angeles who had almost begged me to rob him.

  “Im sure, in part, it’s all of these—but not exclusively,” Jeremy went on. “It sounds too much like a defense.... It could be, rather,” he continued slowly, “that theyre resigned to finding nothing but a momentary sex experience. Maybe it isnt that they dont want something more; maybe theyve just given up on finding anything beyond sex, and theyre even afraid to ask, ‘Can I see you again?’ Theyll look for someone else rather than possibly hearing the answer ‘No’—an answer just as frightened perhaps as their own question. So they resign themselves to the brief contacts. Now they look for the people who ‘dont care’.... And the reasons of the people on your side are just as mysterious as those of the ones who pay you ... like me,” he added, and went on: “How much of it, for you, is being a part of this alluring defiant world without really joining it?—so you can say (and Im talking about ‘you’ only generally—Im actually talking about many people) —so you can say, ‘I do it only for the money involved’; or: ‘I dont do anything back in bed myself; my masculinity is still intact—and in the meantime I can go with as many men as I—... need ... to’?”

  Ordinarily, those words would have resounded as the score’s attempt to compensate for his previously indicated desire by questioning the very masculinity which had originally attracted him. Yet, coming from this man—somehow—perhaps because of the fact that hes paid me without that payment having been asked for or agreed upon—his words dont really register as the ordinary put-down after the battlefield of one-sided sex has been cleared by the leveling orgasms. For that reason, those words are doubly disturbing.

  And it was what Barbara had implied—and the memory of her saddens me beyond the fact that I had liked her so much: that she had tried to prove with me what she had told herself that I, and others, were trying to prove with her.... Yes, it was at least in part a mutual fear that had brought us together.

  Once again my thoughts had veered into a dangerous territory. To stop their direction—astonishing myself, yet responding commandingly to the burgeoning rashness, I reached impulsively for Jeremy’s hand and placed it on my leg. He left it there, without comment, almost as if he were unaware of my having done it.

  Or is he too pretending? Has he understood what my motion with his hand is meant to convey, what I was trying to indicate to him—that, at least in that direction, it was I who could make the rules.

  But he had understood: Whatever pang of victory I might have felt by executing that gesture, he erased swiftly by saying: “Wouldnt your masculinity be compromised much less if you tested your being ‘wanted’ with women instead of men?”

  “It’s easier to hustle men,” I defended myself quickly, at the same time trying to put him down—but, although that is true on the streets, it had sounded weak and I knew it. I had merely mouthed one of the many rationalized legends of that world.

  “I think it’s something else,” he went on relentlessly. “Even a wayward revenge on your own sex—your father’s sex....”

  I winced. He had aimed too cruelly. “You sound like a damn headshrinker,” I hit at him. But, automatically, I had begun to twist the ring my father had given me that lost morning; and Im remembering, out of that gray-shaded world of childhood —out of those moments of tattered happiness—the times when he would ask me for “a thousand”—when I would jump on his lap, when he would fondle me intimately—and then give me a penny, a nickel ... reassuring me, in that strange way—so briefly!—that he did ... want me.

  But... somehow ... that was much too easy.

  “I cant blame my father—for anything,” I said sharply, sitting up. And having said that, I was amazed by the certainty, the ease, with which I had been able to vindicate my Father.

  “Im sorry,” Jeremy retreated. And he went on cautiously but again unexpectedly: “Some people tell themselves they want to be ... wanted ... when, actually, they wish, very much, they could want someone back. And notice I said ‘could.’”

  Suddenly I hear
d myself saying: “If I ever felt that I had begun to need anyone, I would—...” I stopped.

  “Run away,” he finished.

  I stood up, walked to the window.

  Against the shutters, restlessly moving shadows of people along the balcony seem to grapple, struggle, creating swallowing shapes in outline, as if to invade this room.

  I returned to the bed. Not only the fear of facing the streets -or the prolonging of the recurring anticipation—keeps me here, I admit now. It has something to do with Jeremy’s words.

  “I saw a dragshow in a bar once,” he was saying. “A beautiful queen was singing. She didnt do the actual singing, though. She merely mimed the words from a woman’s record. The queen looked very much like a sure woman. But when the record ended, and she was deprived of the female voice that had completed her for those moments, she broke down crying—and the sound of her crying was distinctly that of a man.”

  Wanting to ward off the mysterious implications of the story he had told me (is he referring to the forced stripping of any sustaining pose?), I said defiantly: “Hell, I knew a queen who was so sure she was a woman that she came to the door once, from taking a bath, covering her ‘breasts’ with a towel; she even pissed sitting down.”

  I had expected him to be annoyed at this attempt to explode his seriousness. But he laughed. “Is that a joke, or true?”

  “True,” I said.

  Then, in that unexpected way, he said this: “If I told you, right now, that I love you—and you believed it—what would you do?”

  I laughed, but Im sure hes aware that it’s a forced laugh—much like the laughter outside.... I had never stayed around anyone long enough to hear those words, except during the sex-scenes: words spoken over and over by hundreds of people, meaning the same thing each time—nothing.... I remembered that night in New York when I had made the decision that it would be with many, many people—through many rooms, through many parks, through many streets and bars—that I would explore that world. And what, really, had prompted that decision? An attempt to shred the falsely lulling, sheltered innocence of my childhood, yes. But had it also been, at least in part, fear?—a corrosive fear of vulnerability with which the world, with its early manifested coldness, had indoctrinated me; imbued in others: a world which you soon come to see as an emotional jungle; in which you learn very early that you are the sum-total of yourself, nothing more.