City of Night

by John Rechy

  When he was through, he said: “God bless you, darling angel. Yes—” he sighed wearily “—God Bless All of You—. . . And me. . . .” He waved his fat hand in the familiar airy benediction, his eyes drooping. For the first time since I had known him, I see him remove the glasses now. The eyes look at me intently. The huge eyes behind the glasses were actually tiny. . . .

  “Now go—” he sighed “—yes—fly away—join that endless—endless!—flight of angels. . . .” The eyes closed. His hand moves to the very tip of the tape-measure.

  I received no more telegrams. After a week, I telephoned the apartment, and the malenurse answered. “The Professor is dead,” he said. His voice was shaken; controlling tears. “The interviews are over,” he said, and I knew that in a moment he would be crying. But before I could hear the inevitable sobs, he had hung up.

  CITY OF NIGHT

  AND THEN THE DAY CAME IN NEW YORK when, standing on a street or in a park, I would see someone and wonder whether I had been with him—or just talked . . . one night . . . somewhere.

  Briefly, I went to Southampton with someone I had just met I lay on the beach all day turning brown, trying in idleness to squelch the recurring panic, longing for something still vastly undefined. And briefly, with the same person, I went to Vermont, to a cool, cool summer interlude in a house set in the midst of the green mountains.

  As we drove back into the islandcity—into the jungle of knifegleaming buildings—I knew suddenly I wouldnt stay much longer in New York.

  I would return to El Paso.

  And once again I got a job—determined that the money I would go home with would not be street money.

  I said goodbye to Gene de Lancey in the hallway where I had met her, as she had drifted out of the dark corridor of that enormous building. Of all the faces that I would remember from that time in New York—hers, branded with years-long loneliness, was the only one that was around to say to me:

  “I hate to see you go. I’ll miss you, lambie-pie—much, much more than I can say!”

  I walked west to the Greyhound station on 34th Street. I would leave this city unmissed except by Gene de Lancey, even my absence undiscovered. New people would replace me on Times Square and in the park . . . . As I remembered those short, short, short interludes with the streetpeople (sometimes remembered with wryness, sometimes with huge sadness for something undiscovered within them), would they also remember me?—as someone of a long line who had expelled, with them, mementarily, the loneliness: yet, ironically, increased it perhaps in the instants following the vagrant soon-to-recur contacts—with others?

  I had an acute sense of the incompleteness intrinsic in sharing in another’s life. You touch those other lives, barely—however intimately it may be sexually—you may sense things roiling in them. Yet the climax in your immediate relationship with them is merely an interlude. Their lives will continue, youll merely step out A series of encounters multiplying geometrically. . . . A prismatic network of . . . (I remember the Professor, I see the tiny eyes behind the thick glasses) “interviews.”

  Like mechanical dolls, people around me along the blocks proceed doggedly to their various morning destinations; wait, mobbed, at the stoplights, restlessly pausing before rushing at each other, meeting in a melée in the middle of the street. They will brush shoulders, unaware, stumble, move on: each person enclosed by his own immediate world.

  Suddenly, unexplainably, I wanted to laugh.

  The grinding journey to—. . . Where?

  In a few days, by the beginning of autumn, I was back in El Paso.

  As I opened the door of my mother’s house, I saw her standing there waiting for me. She hugged me fiercely to her, and I glanced beyond her at the fragile case with the glass angels. . . .

  Now there were steps to retrace.

  I called the girl I had climbed Cristo Rey with. Her father answered: She was gone; married; she had a baby. . . .

  Alone, I returned to climb that mountain.

  Here, on Holy days, I had seen long processions of people from El Paso, Ysleta, Canutillo, Smeltertown, Juarez, as they marched up chanting devout prayers—kneeling at intervals, shawled ladies gripping rosaries. The priests leading the procession; men carrying sadfaced saints. . . . Under the hot white sun, I had wanted to be . . . then . . . a part of that belief that transfixed those faces as they climbed.

  And at the top of that mountain—now, years later—I wondered suddenly if emotionally I had really ever left this city.

  Almost physically, as I walked down, I could feel those very mountains which awesomely rim the city crushing me as in that childhood dream. But of course it was something else: the memories of that childhood which I had tried to bandage by fleeing the spurious innocence. Returning here again, I felt how easily I could regress to those early attitudes. The memory of the guarded isolation of that window (in that house which we had vacated, that house where my dog had died) drew me again to a craving for a powerful symbolic window away from the world.

  If I was to resist these lulling echoes, within this very city I had to usurp those memories. . . .

  Once, years ago, El Paso had been a crossroads, between the Eastcoast and the Westcoast, for the stray fairies leaving other cities for whatever restless reason. As a young boy, crossing San Jacinto Plaza (sleepy crocodiles in a round pond, then, so tired and sleepy they wouldnt even wake up when little kids grabbed them by their tails and flipped them into the water), I had seen the giggling groups of birls camping with the soldiers. I had walked quickly past that park. . . . Now the inevitable smalltimecity roundup had come. The cops had swooped jealously on the fairies and to jail they went—and from jail: Away Again.

  Still, in this plaza, stray hunters turn up.

  But I couldnt remain there long.

  I went to a movie theater in South El Paso—resolved, that night, to slaughter those seducing memories in this way:

  The man followed, me to the head, propositioned me there. I pretended I was a transient, reverting to the poses learned in New York. I told him I needed money. He agreed. In a parked car, in a dark section of this childhood city, I made it.

  Crushing into my pocket the ten-dollar bill he had given me: rather than feeling liberated as I had expected, I felt a scorching horrendous guilt.

  And I knew that no matter how long I would be in El Paso, I would never again allow that other life of New York to touch me here.

  The next day, with my mother, I went to the cemetery where my father was buried. There was only a tiny weather-faded marker over his grave. Memories of his pride at having once been so widely recognized swarmed over me. (And when he had died, as if the world had chosen belatedly to nod once more to him, his picture had appeared with the notice of his death on the front page of the newspaper, and my mother had received telegrams from as far as Mexico City.) . . . But that tiny marker over his grave seemed to acknowledge what life had done to him. When we left the cemetery, we went across the street, and we chose a marble stone for his grave.

  A few days later, I returned to the cemetery, alone. The tiny marker had been replaced by the marble stone. Within that ground, his body had decayed. He lived only in my thoughts of him. I looked at the childhood-coveted ring which he had given me the last time I had seen him alive. To a great extent, for me, it was all that was left of him.

  Now I drove around the city in my brother’s car, still retracing those early years.

  I stopped before the house where Winnie had died, where I had grown up. The porch no longer slanted. The skeleton vine was gone. The walls had been painted white. A dark shade was pulled over the window where I had looked out at the cactus garden, the street . . . my dead dog in the wind. . . . I tried from the sidewalk to look into the backyard. . . . My mother’s white sheets had hung on a line there, and I had watched her in unfocused fascination. Those remembered clean, clean sheets in the Texas wind. . . . Now a new fence blocked my view. But without seeing it, I knew the yard had changed too.


  About that house there remained no trace of those angry years.

  I listen for the wind.

  But the air was completely calm.

  The sun looks down blindly at me.

  Part Two

  “They’ve been so long on lonely street

  They never will go back. . . .”

  —Heartbreak Hotel

  CITY OF NIGHT

  SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, WHICH IS SHAPED SOMEWHAT like a coffin, is a giant sanatorium with flowers where people come to be cured of life itself in whatever way. . . . This is the last stop before the sun gives up and sinks into the black, black ocean, and night—usually starless here—comes down.

  And although youll soon discover youre still separated from the Sky, trapped down here now by the blanket of smog and haze locking you from Heaven, still theres the sun, even in winter, enough—importantly—to tan you healthy gold . . . and palmtrees drooping shrugging what-the-hell . . . green-grass . . . cool, cool blessed evenings even when the afternoons are fierce.

  And flowers . . .

  Roses, roses!

  Orange and yellow poppies like just-lit matches sputtering in the breeze. Birds of paradise with long pointed tongues; blue and purple lupines; Joshua trees with incredible bunches of flowers held high like torches—along long, long rows of phallic palm-trees with sunbleached pubic hair. . . .

  Everywhere!

  And carpets of flowers even at places bordering the frenetic freeways, where cars race madly in swirling semicircles—the Harbor Freeway crashes into the Santa Ana Freeway, into the Hollywood Freeway, and when the traffic is clear, cars in long rows in opposite lanes, like cold steel armies out for Blood, create a whooooosh! that repeating itself is like the sound of the restless windswept ocean, and the cars wind in and out dashing nowhere, somewhere. . . .

  Anywhere!

  Along the coast, beaches stretch indifferently.

  You can rot here without feeling it.

  All that, I would see and realize later.

  Now it’s the Greyhound station in the midst of the Westcoast Times Square, the area about Los Angeles Street, Main Street, Spring, Broadway, Hill—between about 4th and 7th streets.

  (From El Paso—knowing that my journey had somehow just begun—I had returned to New York. Again to the sexual anarchy. . . . In a period of about a month, I lived on East 16th Street, then 70th Street, finally Riverside Drive, in a once-mansion converted now into rooms-for-rent: From a large window I could see the trees along the strip of park—the river gray beyond it—and as those trees turned bare, sighingly releasing their leaves, I knew New York for me had been exhausted. I must find another city.)

  I walk along Main Street, Los Angeles, now. The jukeboxes blare their welcome. Dingy bars stretch along the blocks—three-feature moviehouses, burlesque joints, army and navy stores; gray rooming houses squeezed tightly hotly protesting against each other; colored lights along the street: arcades, magazine stores with hundreds of photographs for sale of chesty unattainable never-to-be-touched tempest-storm leggy women in black sheer underwear, hot shoeshine clipstands, counter restaurants . . . the air stagnant with the odor of onions and cheap greasy food.

  Instantly, I recognize the vagrant youngmen dotting those places: the motorcyclists without bikes, the cowboys without horses, awol servicemen or on leave. . . . And I know that moments after arriving here, I have found an extension, in the warm if smoggy sun, of the world I had just left.

  As I stand on the corner of 6th and Main, a girlish Negro youngman with round eyes swishes up: “Honey,” she says—just like that and shrilly loudly, enormous gestures punctuating her words, “you look like you jest got into town. If you aint gotta-place, I got a real nice pad. . . .” I only stare at her. “Why, baby,” she says, “dont you look so startled—this is L.A.!—and thank God for that! Even queens like me got certain rights! . . . Well,” she sighs, “I guess you wanna look around first. So I’ll jest give you my number” She handed me a card, with her name, telephone number, address: Elaborately Engraved. “Jest you call me—anytime!” she said.

  And the spadequeen breezed away, turned back sharply catching sight of another youngman, with a small suitcase. I heard her say just as loudly and shrilly: “Dear, you look like you jest got into town, and I—. . .”

  I turn the engraved card over, and on it there is written in ink: WELCOME TO LOS ANGELES!

  I walk into a bar by. the corner, next to the loan shop. HARRY’S BAR. . . . It’s a long bar with accusing mirrors lining its back. A canvas hanging across the ceiling from wall to wall makes the bar resemble an elongated circus tent. . . . Although it is early afternoon, there are many people here. I realize immediately that this is a malehustling bar. Behind the counter a gay young waiter flutters back and forth, all airy bird-gestures. The scores sit eyeing the drifters who are stationed idly about the bar, by the jukebox, leaning against the booths.

  I sit at the counter and ask for a draft beer. The fluttering bartender winks. WELCOME! his eyes beam. . . . Now the man next to me says: “You shouldnt be spending your money.” He slurs the words, hes very drunk. He pushes my money back toward me, replaces it with a dollarbill of his own on the counter. “Wottayadrinkin?” he asks me. I change from draft to bourbon.

  Hes a slender not-yet middle-aged man—well dressed—although in his juiced-up state, his clothes are slightly disheveled. He is not effeminate, but from the way hes looking at me calculatingly, I know hes a score. I sit there next to him for long minutes, and he doesnt say anything. I begin to think hes lost interest. I go to the head, through the swinging door. The odor of urine and disinfectant chokes me. There are puddles of dirty water on the floor. Over the streaky urinal, crude obscene drawings, pleading messages jump at you. Someone has described himself glowingly, as to age, appearance, size. Beneath the self-glorifying description, another had added: “Yes, but are you of good family?” Another scrawled note—a series: “Candy is a queen.” “No she isnt.” “Yes I am. . . .” And in bold, shouting black letters across the wall:

  IN THE BEGINNING GOD CREATED FAIRIES & THEY MADE MEN

  The drunk man walks into the head. “You broke?” he asks me abruptly. I wasnt; I said yes. “Wanna come with me?” he said.

  We leave the bar—the bartender calls after us: “Have a good time!” . . . Outside, we turn left, past the burlesque house with the fullblown tantalizing pictures of busty women. We enter the hotel next door.

  A ratty-looking man with a cigar barely glances at us, opens a splotchy old register book, we scribble phony names. “Three dollars,” the man behind the counter says. The man Im with opens his wallet. Bills pop out. He counts out three. The man behind the desk says: “That rooms open, you can lock it from the inside.” He doesnt give us a key. . . . We go up the long grumbling stairway. Along the hall a door is half-open, a youngish man sat alone on a bed, in shorts, rubbing the inside of his thighs. We move along the maze of . . . lost . . . rooms, until we reach ours. Inside, the room is almost bare. For an ashtray theres a tin can. No towels. The walls are greasy, sweaty plaster peeling in horrendous childhood-nightmare lepershapes snapping at you—no window-screens. Paper curtains with ripped edges like saws hang dismally over the window: a room crushed in by the brief recurring lonesomeness that inhabits it throughout the days, the nights. The bed is slightly rumpled—as if only a hurried attempt had been made to straighten it after its previous occupancy.

  The man almost reels. “Heres money,” he says, again opening his wallet, some bills flutter carelessly on the rumpled bed. I take them. He stuffs the other bills clumsily back into the wallet.

  “You gonna rob me, boy?” he asks me suddenly.

  Then he grins drunkenly. “Hell,” he says, “Idon-givfuck—happens—happened—manytime. . . . Don-givfuck.” His look sobered momentarily. His eyes, which are incredibly deep, incredibly sad, look at me pleadingly. “Gonna rob me?”

  Im thinking: He wants to be robbed, thats why he came up here with me, hes asking me t
o rob him. . . . I feel a sudden surge of excitement—as if Im being tested. He pushes the wallet loosely into his back pocket.

  After a few frantic moments during which I didnt even take off my clothes but merely lay in bed with him touching me, he sighed: “Whew!”—closed his eyes. He turned over on his stomach and seemed to pass out. His wallet is almost sliding out. With an excitement that was almost Sexual, I reach for it. It slips out easily. He didnt move. ... I stand over the bed looking steadily at him, very long, fixing the scene in my mind, experiencing the same exploding fusion of guilt and liberation I had felt that first time, with Mr King. I hear the man almost-sob: “Gonna rob me?”

  The monotonous beat from the jukebox outside invades the room persistently.

  I replace the money I had just removed from his wallet. I lay the wallet—intact—beside him. And I walk out, past the unconcerned glance of the man at the desk.

  Outside, in the rancid air, I stand looking at the carnival street. Through the grayish haze of the smoggy afternoon, the sun shines warmly but feebly—the great myopic eye of Heaven. . . .

  Somehow—I knew—in that room just now—I had failed the world I had sought

  A few minutes later I was in Pershing Square.

  I walk about the teeming park for the first time—past the statues of soldiers, one on each corner of the Hill Street side—past an ominous cannon on Olive, aimed defiantly at the slick wide-gleamingwindowed buildings across the streets: the banks, the travel agencies (representations of The Other World, to which I will flee recurrently in guilt and feel just as guilty for having abandoned, if never completely, the world of the parks, the streets)—past the statue of Beethoven with a stick, turning his back fiercely on the Pershing Square menagerie.