The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens

by John Rechy

  Lyle stepped out of the back side of the limousine and walked toward Tarah, ready to take her arm and stroll into the auditorium with her, ready to submerge himself in this obliterating pandemonium.

  Tarah recoiled from him in horror. “Help, help!” she screamed. “It’s the stalker!”

  “He’s threatened to kill her in front of everybody!” Rusty shouted in alarm.

  Photographers dashed back toward them in a squirming tide.

  Lyle looked around. Then it was true that someone was threatening her? But where was he, the dangerous stalker?—and why was she pushing him away and why did Rusty Blake seem to be preparing to head-butt him?

  Bulbs flashed, television cameras spun and jerked.

  “Let me go, let me go!” Tarah shouted at Lyle, who had grabbed her, to protect her from the stalker—who must be somewhere. Where? Why the hell was she fighting him?

  “It’s the Mystery Cowboy! He’s attempting to kidnap Tarah Worth!” Rusty Blake screamed. Reporters danced madly about them.

  “In a brazen act, the notorious Mystery Cowboy is attempting to seize Tarah Worth!” Claudia Mans shouted into her microphone and over the screams and shouts of the fans.

  “Brave Rusty Blake is attempting to—” Tommy Bassich pushed his way in with his mike.

  Fans screeched with delighted fear. From the bleachers, a heavy woman with a jiggly chin rose, nudging awake a small man next to her, and she announced victoriously, “Well, I just knew that man was a criminal, that Mystery Cowboy! Well, haven’t I been keeping my eye on him?”

  Counting on the police rushing over to restrain Lyle, Rusty Blake lunged at him too soon and was greeted by Lyle’s fist, flattening him.

  “My face!” Rusty Blake pleaded, cringing on the red carpet.

  Cops surrounded Lyle, forcing him down on the ground. Terrified, struggling, trying to orient himself, he looked up at Tarah Worth. “Tell them who I am! Tell them I’m protecting you!”

  Encircled by every interviewer, every reporter, every photographer, Tarah Worth stood like a triumphant empress over Lyle as cameras recorded every move, every word. “I’m sorry for you, young man, Mystery Cowboy, whoever you are. I tried to talk you out of this. I found you and pleaded with you. I understand your infatuation. But I cannot allow you to destroy my life because of your desire.”

  “It’s just like that scene from the sequel to Valley of the Dolls,” a reporter alerted by Lenora Stern said. “Exactly like it!”

  Two burly cops handcuffed Lyle, who lay on the ground quietly.

  A deep voice rose out of the bleachers; and a glamorous figure, assertive, commanding, emerged out of the sea of excited fans. “It’s a fake, it’s a fake!” The figure struggled through the crowds, shoving to clear a path.

  There stood Blanche from Hollywood Boulevard.

  “I saw the Mystery Cowboy exit the limousine,” she said to reporters and cops. “This is all a hoax. That bitch Worth staged it all, it’s a fake!”

  2

  A true report.

  Los Angeles Times

  Cara’s Hollywood:

  As difficult as it is may be for rational people to believe, a scene right out of the script of the movie sequel Return to the Valley of the Dolls was played out at the Academy Awards by actress Tarah Worth, 52. But that was no coincidence. It was staged! Even more difficult to believe is that the aging actress should have thought she would get away with such enormous fraudulence, which also included a shady chauffeur, a former porn performer known as Hunk Williams, and up-and-coming (now down-and-going!) actor Rusty Blake. The so-called Mystery Cowboy, the subject of speculation for weeks, was reportedly manipulated into a cruel hoax. He was handcuffed as the supposed stalker but was quickly released when a man who said his name was Blanche and who identified himself as a friend of the Cowboy uncovered the charade. It seems that in her desperation to get the role of Helen Lawson, in the sequel to Jacqueline Susann’s famous Valley of the Dolls, Worth, with the encouragement of manager Lenora Stern, orchestrated the faked kidnapping scheme. Producer David Wesbourg informed me that Tarah Worth needn’t have gone to such extremes because the role of Helen Lawson has already gone to Sharon Stone.

  Note: Liz Smith was not at the Academy Awards but will be reporting on the great parties of that night.

  3

  The saddest event of all.

  Betrayals, betrayals, betrayals! Lies and deceit! Meanness, and fraud, betrayals, more lies and deception, and cruelty, goddammit, so much meanness, so much cruelty! Goddammit if life wasn’t fuckin’ ugly. He’d been deceived, arrested, mugged, robbed, used, lied about, lied to, beaten, handcuffed.

  At the sounds of mayhem at the Academy Awards—police sirens, and shouts of “kidnapper!” and “stalker!”—movie stars elbowed each other as they threw themselves on the red carpet, glitter and sequins flying into the air, tight gowns splitting, hairdos crushed. Assured that danger was over, they struggled uneasily to resume their entrances into the auditorium, a few limping, having sprained something, and waving. “Who did your gown?”

  Released by the police, Lyle fled with Blanche, who drove him to his apartment.

  “Good-bye, beautiful cowboy, I’ll see you in my dreams forever,” she said.

  He kissed her hand.

  In addition to all the ugliness, there was kindness, he assured himself. He threw his body on the bed and lay there, tired, weary, tired, tired, despondent, tired. Without bothering to remove his clothes, not even his boots, he fell into a troubled sleep that lasted deep into the next day, when he was wakened by Mrs. Allworthy at the door.

  “Lyle! Lyle!”

  She was here to comment on last night’s events—she’d certainly seen it all on television. He didn’t want to hear any of it, needed to forget, try to. He lay silently, hoping she would go away.

  “There’s a special delivery letter for you!”

  From whom? Why? He stood up.

  “You’re all right, Lyle?” Mrs. Allworthy called in.

  “Yes, thank you. I’m in the shower. Please put it under the door.”

  Quickly, he retrieved the letter from the floor. It was from Clarita. He sat on the side of the bed and read:

  My dear, dear Lyle,

  My heart breaks to tell you that your beautiful mother, our Sylvia, has been taken by the angels to heaven. She went in her sleep, a heart attack.

  Lyle stood up, as if lightning had bolted into his body. No! But no news is more quickly understood than the terrifying news of the death of someone loved. Once announced, that fact rushes into comprehension, and everything changes. The world stops to allow that full reversal. In that moment, a new presence is born, an absent presence, the person gone. Memories of that person halt. There will be no new ones, everything about that life becomes final, like the inevitable sum of an exact equation.

  Lyle grasped immediately that, however much his mind and heart protested—No, no!—Sylvia was dead. If he shouted his pain, that would not be enough.

  He read:

  Her sorrows are laid to rest. I am released of my vow not to let you know what I now reveal, what you have long wanted to know.

  She had enclosed a copy of an old newspaper clipping:

  The Alamito Gazette

  HOWLER AT MISS ALAMITO BEAUTY PAGEANT!

  An enraged woman claiming to be the mother of Sylvia Love, a contestant for the Miss Alamito County Beauty Title, stole the show last night when she rushed onstage brandishing a Bible and then threw a sheet over her daughter during the bathing suit competition. According to others onstage, the contestant’s mother shouted a series of curses at her daughter for exposing her body. Miss Love attempted to flee the stage but tripped on the sheet, creating a scene that could have come out of a slapstick comedy and that was greeted with howls of laughter from judges and spectators alike, a hilarious commotion that must have lasted 15 minutes, during which Miss Love continued to struggle with the sheet, stumbling over and over, causing gales of laughter each time, unt
il she managed to leave the stage. According to one judge, Miss Love impressed the panel during the talent competition, when she “sang ‘Amazing Grace’ very sweetly,” and when she said her first wish would be “to banish meanness from the world.” According to this judge, right up to the time of the uproarious intrusion, Miss Love was the leading contender for the title that would have taken her to the Miss Texas competition and eventually might have earned her the Miss America title.

  Oh, Sylvia—Mother!—Lyle longed to say to her, if I had been there, I would have killed them all! His fists tightened and pounded the bed. Goddamn them for laughing at you! Goddamn them all!

  And finally from Clarita’s letter Lyle Clemens learned about the hope the contest had offered the beautiful girl, hope of escaping the dismal life her mother—“a miserable, heartless woman”—was assuring; about the crushing of that hope by the crazy woman’s act, by her curse—repeated at the Pentecostal Hall with her last breath—hope swept away in waves of degrading laughter.

  Lyle heard echoes of the song Sylvia had sung sweetly, heard the diminishing hope she had put into it, heard the pain that replaced it—and that lying goddamned son-of-a-bitch father of his had heard that pain, had walked out on it. Where, goddammit, had grace been extended to Sylvia Love?

  “Our Sylvia would have won the contest,” Clarita wrote.

  “She would have!” Lyle said aloud. The figure she had drawn on the school poster—that was her in her moment of near-triumph.

  Lyle reached for the piece of paper Clarita had enclosed, written by Sylvia “just days before she died.”

  “My dearest Lyle—” Sylvia had written, and then crossed those words out with a line. In their place she had written: “My son, know always that I love you. Your Mother.”

  Lyle gasped, the first time she had called him son, the first time she had called herself his mother.

  He did not go on to read the rest of Clarita’s letter, about arrangements to be made, did not go on to read her plentiful blessings. Now, within all the memories that were gathering, there returned to him echoes of Sylvia’s words that had formed a refrain in his mind, ghostly words now: “Understand? … You can never feel what I’ve felt. You can never understand.”

  He took his guitar, put on his hat, and walked out.

  4

  A naked cowboy.

  From his apartment he walked to Hollywood Boulevard—unaware of anyone, unaware of anything. He did not answer any smiles, answered no greetings. He walked on, ahead. It was not yet evening. Only a pallid sun lingered behind gray clouds in the distance.

  He walked past stores that had become familiar during his excursions on this street, coffee shops he had eaten at, walked past street people who now welcomed him easily, past the many tourists always here, walked across streets until he came to the Egyptian Theater. There, on one of the cement oval benches that enclosed the palm trees in the court, he sat down. He removed his shirt. He pulled off his boots. He took off his pants, stripping down to his briefs. He slipped his boots back on, and adjusted his hat. Heat shot through his body in waves of fever, as if pain had turned into fire. He stood up and waited for a moment, inhaling. He closed his eyes, to transport himself somewhere else, somewhere back in time, to another place, another time.

  He plucked at his guitar, scattering a few broken notes. He began to sing, words, a jumble of words, sung, spoken, breaking. His voice quivered, cracked, stumbled on a smothered sob. Desperate sweat drenched his stripped body.

  “Look! A naked cowboy!” a kid shouted, doubling over with laughter.

  “Everybody, look at the cowboy singing naked!” someone else yelled.

  People gathered quickly, encircling him. They laughed hysterically as he began to perform a jagged preacher-strut.

  “Cowboy’s dancing a jig without any clothes!” a woman’s voice gasped out of her laughter.

  Tourists ran over from across the street. They joined the chorus of jeers and ridicule, some hopping up to see over those in front.

  “Hey, you, naked guy, cowboy, you’re fuckin’ hilarious!” a young man heckled and faced the crowd for approval, which he got with cheers. Jeers grew, the heckling rose.

  Lyle continued the shattered song, the harsh notes, the jerking motions. Heat crawled over his perspiring body, sweat soaked his briefs, rendering him naked.

  The derisive circle expanded. A boy and a girl did an imitation of him, quivering motions, voices croaking.

  “Check that weirdo cowboy dancin’ nekkid!”

  A young man with a pinched face walked up to him, laughed in his face, and hopped around him.

  Lyle heard the laughter, howls of laughter, howls of derision. Frantic, sweat gleaming like oil, he sang on and danced—a tall, lanky puppet out of control.

  More people gathered. They poked each other, hooting. They shouted, giggled at the weird cowboy, his stripped body out of control, jerking about.

  Waves of ridiculing laughter drenched him as powerfully as the sweat flowing down his body. He felt feverish, then cold, he shivered, his eyesight blurred from the sting of sweat and tears. A cold, hot darkness began to envelop him, a darkness that closed in, closer, closer, enclosing him in violent swirls that threatened to pull him in. His breathing became ragged, and still he twisted and uttered tattered words, and plucked at the strings of his guitar, and heard the laughter that Sylvia had heard, and felt what she had felt, and understood her at last, her surrender of all hope, her surrender to hopelessness, just as now he would surrender, like her, just like her. His body swayed toward the cement and he began to fall, surrender, fall, and—

  The sun broke through gray layers of clouds along the horizon and it swept a dazzling light along the street.

  Lyle lifted his fingers from his guitar. His gyrations slowed, stopped. He sighed. His body slackened. He sat on the concrete ledge. He plucked again at the guitar, a note, another. He began to sing softly, tentatively, words rehearsed in his mind for years, notes he had never played, words he had never sung.

  “Shhhh,” someone calmed the laughter.

  “Listen!” someone else said.

  Laughter diminished, only vagrant bursts lingering, fading, stopping.

  “Shhhh!” someone commanded. “Listen!”

  Lyle’s voice floated above the muffled silence about him. Into that suddenly intense silence, he sang in a voice that began with hurt, a voice that was sad, sorrowing, pained, and then it moved past sorrow, slowly away, drifting away.

  Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,

  That saved a wretch like me—

  His body was calm, his voice firm. More people gathered about him, responding to the triumphant words he sang in a voice that was entirely his own:

  I once was lost, but now I’m found,

  Was blind, but now I see!