by John Rechy
Survive!
Fire swallows, the earth rumbles, mudslides crush. Homes collapse like toys. But new houses and lives are rebuilt on the brink. SLIDE AREA—signs along the awesome coast boast proudly. Jagged cliffs challenge along the ocean:
Survive!
SCIENTISTS PREDICT MASSIVE EARTHQUAKE IN L.A. WITHIN YEAR, the newspaper proclaims. You incorporate the knowledge and live life eight degrees more fully now.
At the corner of Highland and Franklin, when Hollywood traffic is a crush of metal and chrome in the sweating sun, skinny shirtless boys take turns standing on their heads on a crumbling stone wall—exhibitionistically breaking records before the involuntarily captive audience.
Survive!
If the earth shrugs and thrusts this glorious city into the ocean, the rest of the country will follow, with hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, tidal waves, and killer winds.
5:12 P.M. Hollywood Boulevard.
HE PARKS ON A side street. He's wearing Levi's and cowboy boots, no shirt. Sunglasses. Though his muscles have lost their pump from the morning's workout, they are beginning to ache deliciously, a signal of the body's rite of resurrection.
Traffic jammed, Hollywood Boulevard is at its trashiest under a stoned white sun. This street—a tattered crazy old woman, sweet at times, dangerous at times—is clashing rows of tawdry clothes shops, smelly quick-food counters, mangy arcades, patchy stores, movie theaters. Beyond the tops of frayed buildings, palmtrees look away disdainfully.
Periodically, campaigns will be mounted to clean up the boulevard. Merchants will call for a return to its former elegance. Yet no one can remember when Hollywood Boulevard, unworthy symbol of glamor, was elegant. Even stars’ names nobly engraved in bronze into the sidewalks have turned gray and sullen. Castouts from the American myth glorified by films have taken over like locusts. Without even noticing it, the outcasts step on the names of the great stars. This is the exiles’ turf now, fought for in blood skirmishes with merchants, cops, citizens’ groups. The outcasts endure on the carnival street.
Jim walks shirtless along it. Even when the weather is cool, he wears little—partly discipline of his body, partly proud exhibitionism. He nods to other outlaws. Other malehustlers. Though on the beach he cruised only for excitement, on the boulevard—and on Selma, the tacky side street he will soon move into—he will hustle for money; then he will most often pretend to be “straight”—uncomfortably rationalizing the subterfuge by reminding himself that those attracted to him will usually—though certainly not always—want him to be that, like the others of his breed.
They stand now, his breed, in clusters outside the Gold Cup Coffee Shop, the Pioneer Chicken. Youngmen— younger certainly than he, he knows, though he doesn't show his age—who recognize him easily as one of them and feeling the bond of exiles nod and say, What's goin on? Masculine men with shifting eyes, watching for clients and cops.
Jim may pause for a few words, but not for long; he's an outsider among outsiders.
At Highland and Hollywood, the queens, awesome, defiant Amazons, are assuming their stations. The white queens are bleached and pale, the black ones shiny and purple. Extravagant in short skirts, bouffant hairdos, luminous unreal mouths and eyes. The transsexuals are haughty in their new credentials.
“Ummmm-ummmmm,” a black queen approves Jim's bare muscles as he moves toward Selma.
Men in cars, off work for the weekend, are circling the streets for male prostitutes.
5:39 P.M. Selma.
A semi-residential district just one block south of the boulevard, the area of Selma at first seems unlikely as a main area for malehustling: Old squeaky houses have been broken up into rooms populated by old ladies and gentlemen who keep birds, maybe parrots. A shocked Baptist church, white and pure, glowers at the hustlers who use its steps and pillars to display their bodies for sale, occasionally strumming guitars until the cops come by. A large parking lot sits dully behind the Catholic church—all grand steeples and mute mystery—on Sunset Boulevard. A small deserted playground is locked behind meshed wire. Car-repair garages, crumbling closed hamburger stands patched with torn cardboard, more parking lots—this, at first, is Selma. But soon after, it's male prostitutes standing singly or in groups along the street, at corners, before rooming houses providing ready access for paid contacts.
Jim walks along this familiar street.
“What's happenin?” A blond hustler who like himself has survived many streets, many cities, many nights asked Jim that question.
“Not much—with you?” Jim answers. He pauses; the two stand eyeing the prospective clients cruising the blocks.
For long, the two, Jim and this blond man, were hostilely aware of each other—a hostility conveyed by the fact that they would cross the street to avoid direct encounter. Why? Mutual recognition. Although Jim is dark, the other blond, both are husky, and each is much classier, yes, than the younger, much younger, boys and men who flash and sputter in their gaudy—beautiful—youth; who will not survive, no—the streets devouring them and replacing them with fresher bodies, each day; who will remember the times when they glimpsed other worlds, glimpses made possible only by their young bodies and only for interludes.
But Jim and this blond hustler have other than that, a certain street elegance which speaks of rare street survival. Yes; and that was what formed the mute hostility, now mute bond, the unstated secrets each knew intuitively about the other's survival: You're older than you look. You love the streets even when they fight you—and you go on, with style. You're smarter than you act, and you're not so tough. And we both know—… But that remains unexchanged.
“Making it, making it,” the blond hustler answers. He's wearing a tanktop which shows off broad shoulders.
Jim expands his. They laugh briefly, glancing at each other and away.
After many nights avoiding direct encounter, they spoke; a night when each decided not to cross the street in avoidance. In a sense they startled each other into speaking, and the blond one said, “What's happenin?” and Jim answered, “Not much—with you?” “Making it, making it.” And so it became a litany, a rote message of survival, repeated each encounter afterwards, except that they would alternate in asking the first question, assuming a mutuality. Today it was the blond man's turn.
They split. Jim walks on. A man drives up behind him, stops, motions him over. Jim is suspicious, the man stopped too quickly—hardly had a chance to see him. “Looking to make some money?” he asks Jim. Convinced the man is a vice cop—and he's driving a suspicious Plymouth—Jim walks right up to the window. The driver leans over. Jim says, “Fuck off!” Looking back, prepared to warn him, he sees that the blond hustler too is avoiding the same man.
Despite its dangers, Jim loves this street. Despite— … He remembers with what anxiety he returned to it after years away. He blocks that memory.
Another car has slowed down. But Jim doesn't encourage him either; he's got to be extra cautious. He's on probation.
FLASHBACK: Selma. A Year and a Half Ago.
He hadn't even seen the man. It was a Friday, like tonight. He had just been driven back to the street by a man he had just made money from. He hadn't noticed the car parked by the lot behind the Catholic church until the driver blew his horn at him. Jim glanced at him. The man waved him over. Jim crossed the street, stood on the sidewalk near the car. The man, slightly out of shape, veering toward premature middle-age, opened the passenger door. “Get in?”
Jim did.
“I got some bucks burning a hole in my pocket,” the man said.
“I could use them,” Jim said.
“I know an alley we can go to—haven't got much time.”
“Uh, first let's get straight how much and what for,” Jim said “I, uh, don't do anything.” He was not at all attracted to this man; Jim would merely allow him to blow him.
“Okay with me,” the man said. “I just dig your body. How's twenty bucks for a few minutes on a dark street?” When
Jim agreed, the man started the car, drove on, turned the corner, stopped at the intersection at Sunset Boulevard. Two hands thrust suddenly from the sidewalk through the open window pulled Jim roughly back by the shoulders. “Vice officers!—you're under arrest,” both men said. Jim was handcuffed, taken to the Hollywood station, booked for prostitution, fingerprinted, frisked intimately about the groin. That night other street hustlers greeted each other noisily in jail throughout the night. Jim was bailed out by a friend. That same night—dark morning—he was back hustling on Selma.
5:55 P.M. Selma.
He's on probation now—for about six more months. What angers Jim most is that in his arrest report—to cover up the illegal entrapment—the cop said Jim had approached him and asked for sexmoney; it angers him fiercely even to remember, because such an approach would violate his rigid style.
A man has been circling the block, eyeing him, looking back, pausing, returning. After another U-turn, the man stops. Jim sees a large, blond, well-dressed man. Jim walks very slowly toward the open window.
“You look good enough to eat,” the man calls out. “Where you headed?”
“Nowhere—just hanging out.”
“Want to get in and talk?”
Jim doesn't. He wants to study the man further. If he even gets in the car, and the man's a cop, he'll have violated a condition of his probation.
“You've got a gorgeous body, worth paying for,” the man says.
Jim loves to hear his body praised. He stretches it.
“Can we get together?” the man asks. “Say, you're not a cop, are you?”
Jim laughs. “Fuck no—are you?”
“Of course not.” As verification, he allows his hand to dangle out the window and touch Jim's groin lightly. “Let's go to my place.”
“I don't do anything,” Jim says.
“I don't want you to,” the man says.
6:17 P.M. Laurel Canyon. Someone's Home.
“Actually I'm a very well-known writer. I've written several books.”
The man's home is all brown leather and plastic; glass windows for walls. Trees protect it all. Drawings and photographs decorate the bedroom.
“Yes,” the large blond man continues, “I'm told I'm a very talented writer. So you see, I have my … intellect, and you, well, you have your body—that's your talent. We both have something beautiful.”
Jim lies naked on the man's bed. The man sits beside him fully dressed.
“Of course I'd like to have a body like yours,” the man goes on—defensively, Jim knows, because he desires Jim and will pay to have him and Jim does not desire him, “but not if it meant—well—that I'd be not as … creative—smart— as—well—… People with beautiful bodies aren't very— … They– …”
Jim listens with secret amusement. And indeed he believes in the construction of his body as equal art form. Determined hours of thrusting and pushing iron. The result, the muscular body, is put on display; his prize will be to be desired.
His naked brown body is stark on the white sheets. Jim feels the man's adoring tongue over his flesh.
Afterwards, the man wants to arrange to see him again. But Jim will not commit himself. Paying him twenty dollars, the man tells Jim: “I want to give you more than we agreed—but I don't have any more cash with me. I'll give you a check. What's your name?”
“It's—… Skip the check,” Jim says.
VOICE OVER: Interview 1
A WRITER FOR a literary magazine calls me up about an interview. I'm wary. I ask him to send me some of the interviews he's done. They're good, and with writers I know. When he calls up again, I agree. My place or his? His.
I arrive at the building. Two-story Spanish-style apartments, gardens with bleeding flowers kept neat by—of course—an oriental gardener: like a forties movie. Barbara Stanwyck might answer the doorbell. Now I realize I've been here before. With the interviewer's neighbor? it amuses me to think. Maybe with his roommate. That would be— … Or— … 1 No, impossible.
Yes. The man who opens the door is a man I've been with, anonymously, right in this apartment. Instantly we recognize each other. Identities and splintered memories spiral. The first time, neither had known who the other was. Then—I was a silent street figure. Now—here I am a writer, and there he is the interviewer! Finally, I laugh. “Oh, no!”
“Oh, yes,” he says.
“Hey, man—…” I begin to lapse into street jargon. Then I say, “At least you won't have to ask me if my work is autobiographical.”
We start the interview slowly, adjusting to the fusing realities. He asks me mild questions—about Los Angeles (I say it is perhaps the most exciting city in the world), about New York (I tell him that when I left there, I thought, My God, I'm still alive!).
Still slowly, but edging along, he asks me: “Don't you think that now all the blatant sexuality has made Los Angeles less sexy?”
I answer: “No. For me the ideal sexiness, finally, is a loose one, not a hidden one. Some people think a tantalizing sexuality is more intriguing. I love going around without a shirt.”
I go on to evoke a symbol of repression. I tell him I was on a private beach recently with some very gorgeous people, males and females, tanned, exposed, beautiful, bikinied bodies. Suddenly a figure appeared, a small, wrinkled dinosaur of a man; he was wearing a shirt, shorts, shoes, body hidden almost totally to the brash sun. A woman was with him, and a bodyguard followed behind. The eyes of the sagging-skinned man met ours, invisible guns pointed at us. Ronald Reagan, his wife, and bodyguard passed on.
Now the interviewer asks me how old I was when City of Night was published.
I try to be cool, but a monster figure of the gay world has been evoked—age. “That would be a way of figuring out how old I am now, and I'm very sensitive about telling my age.”
A bad moment. He asks my opinion of the gay liberation movement.
“It's done a lot of good, and I am for it.” But I add mentally: When it isn't being used as ultimate cop-out, as it is now, increasingly.
The interviewer moves into the mined area of relationships.
Well, I have made mild flirtations in that area, and I might still try. I tell the interviewer: “A brilliant psychiatrist friend of mine upheld that what is so alienating about homosexual relationships is that they begin with the intimacy of sex instead of proceeding toward it. To get a relationship going, you have to work back. Perhaps this is the reason so few homosexual relationships last.”
(Reading that portion of the interview now, two or so years later, I'm disappointed with myself for that answer. By implication, I elevated relationships over promiscuity. I will have to think about that more.)
Suddenly the interviewer shocks me: “Why are you so reticent about your age?”
I stumble badly: “… extremely narcissistic … appearance … bodybuilding … muscles…. My body is important, I love my body…. “I pull away: “I never tell strangers that I'm a writer.” I'm telling him what he already knows, and I'm putting him down subtly. “On the street, I'm another person.”
He smiles. He knows. “There's also a certain suggestion of violence in your street appearance,” he recalls. “I assume that's intentional?”
The bad moment passes. Our identities adjust again to the present. “I've been told that often. There are times when I use it deliberately. People are attracted to it, and the narcissism in me loves the adoration. But there are times when, with someone, I think it's going to be sweet. Suddenly, though, what the other person wants is the fulfillment of the promise, even unconsciously sent out, of toughness. Sometimes I'm with someone and I get a hint of his humanity—and I would like to pursue that more. But I know that if I drop the street role, that will destroy his fantasies about me. In a way it's a trap: What often attracts people to me on the streets is what often isolates me.”
“You presumably make a living by writing, so why do you still go out hustling the streets?” he asks me bluntly.
�
��Listen, I shouldn't answer that question,” I surprise myself by saying. But I do. Yet when he sends me the typescript of the interview, I surprise myself again. Feeling slightly unfaithful to the streets I love, I substitute the following evasive answer: “Hustling is linked to narcissism, and being paid is proof that one is very strongly desired and desirable.”
We move into the area of promiscuity. I define my “numbers” trip—sex with one after another after another. I estimate I've been with over 7000 people, but I know it's more. I chose the “7” because it's my lucky number. Thousands of sex encounters are not rare in the gay world.
Now the saboteur in me interrupts: “But I don't mind telling you, sometimes I feel despair about the promiscuity scene.” In fascination, I hear the saboteur go on: “It has nothing to do with morality; all I know is that sometimes after I've been with dozens of people, I just want— …”
To die.
The part of me true to the streets wrestles with the strong saboteur: We're still so influenced by the straight world's crap. Tell someone recurrently that he's a sinner, sick, and a criminal—and how do you escape totally?
The interviewer asks me: “Is your entire sexual scene one of not responding to other people?”
I answer: “My primary scene, yes.”
But I should say: Not totally. When I hustle, yes; when I'm into “numbers,” mostly. But there are other times of mutual exchange, yes. Yes; and I do cherish those times.
There's a pause. I speak about the need to do away with all laws against consenting sex acts.
“But if sex in the streets became legal,” he voices the familiar argument, “don't you think that when the danger disappeared, so would most of the excitement?”
If so, then cops and judges and closeted police chiefs should be the first to talk it up! I answer: “It would merely result in another kind of joy, an unthreatened excitement.” I think now of the remark by an ex-vice cop turned writer, who in an interview voiced the stupid cliché of bigoted psychologists and sex-threatened cops that the main element in gay public sex is “the chance to be caught, the chance to be punished.” Wrong, wrong, ignorant bullshit. Public sex is revolution, courageous, righteous, defiant revolution.