City of Night

by John Rechy

  The skinny man, even drunk, blinked incredulously.

  Skipper passes his hand dazedly over his face, as if trying to place the scene in his mind. “Yeah?” he mutters. “Yeah?”

  Again I want to leave quickly. This blacked-in scene, in focus, has become excruciatingly real. But helplessly aware that the bull is already charging—the beer and hard liquor churning vilely inside me—I hear the fatman’s words go on ineluctably: “Will you go with him?” he has asked Skipper.

  The skinny man, grasping all at once for the vestiges of sobriety, said, almost in tears: “Leave me alone, will you? Will—you—please—leave—me—alone—please!”

  “Well?” the fatman asks Skipper.

  “I’ll go with him—” Skipper muttered.

  “Good,” said the fatman. But he seems disappointed; as if somehow he has expected another climax.

  “—for thirty bucks,” Skipper finishes.

  And by the way the fatman blows out the smoke in relief, I know this is what hes been waiting for. “Thirty dollars!” he roars. “One for every year, huh?—and a few years thrown into the bargain? Is that how you figure it?”

  “Thirty bills,” Skipper repeated. His head almost touched the table.

  “I can get several for that price,” the fatman boasts. “Any of them! Take my pick of em!”

  “Leave me alone,” the skinny man is muttering.

  “Twenty-five bucks,” Skipper said, clenching his fists.

  “Too much,” the fatman says laughing.

  Painfully, I see the bewilderment on Skipper’s face as he looks up now from the table in amazed stupor—to face the fatman, the score—the Enemy. . . . As Skipper reaches into his pocket, removing the group of pictures from an envelope, I hear something inside of me shout to him: Dont! . . . realizing that Skinper is about to barter for his Youth. But already there are two frayed clippings in Skipper’s hand. “Look,” he says triumphantly to the fatman. “I was in the columns.”

  The fatman reaches for the clippings. He looked at them carefully. “Oh,” he said dully, “you escorted a young actress to a nightclub.” He reads the other. “This one doesnt have a name. All it says is that she was escorted by a young actor.”

  “Yeah,” says Skipper, “but it was Me. . . .”

  The fatman returns the clippings to him.

  Now Skipper shoves the pictures at him, they scatter on the table, among the bottles and the glasses and the smoked cigarette butts. “Thats Me!” he says. The figure of a youngman—Skipper—lies among the debris on the table: the almost-naked body caught gleamingly young by the camera.

  The fatman stares at the pictures indifferently. “You werent wearing much, were you?”

  “They were in the body magazines,” Skipper said. “I even made a movie for them—and there was more pictures—you could order enlargements, even—pay for them—and—”

  The skinny man drunkenly reaches for the pictures. He studies them carefully. “Why—this looks like—isnt this the same—?” he started.

  And the fatman interrupts him abruptly: “Give him back his pictures!” he shouted angrily.

  “Yes—it looks like—just like the picture youve got framed in your room—the big one!” the skinny man said to the fatman. “It is—it’s the same pic—“

  “Give him back his pictures!” the fatman commands, snatching them from the skinny man. . . .

  And now, his motives discovered, the fatman turns with undisguised ferocity on Skipper. “You were much younger then,” he said.

  “I was! . . . I had just got outta the marines—I told you—I—when—see—”

  “Thats a hell of a long time ago!” the fatman shouts.

  I see Skipper’s face turned down again toward the table in crushed defeat—and I hear the fatman say to him: “I’ll give you ten bucks—and I dont want you myself—I’ll buy you for that one—” He points at the skinny man, who recoils from the fatman’s finger extended pitilessly toward him. . . . “Ten bucks—for you—. . . and the pictures. . . .” the fatman says pitilessly, trying now, by degrading even the memory of Skipper’s youth, recorded in the photographs, to erase his own years-long desire.

  “Not the pictures,” Skipper muttered.

  “No deal then,” the fatman announces victoriously. He still holds the photographs in his hand.

  Suddenly Skipper lunges across the table, snatches the photographs from him. “Take your filthy hands off them!” he shouts. The pictures scatter on the floor.

  The fatman looks with undisguised cold hatred at Skipper. He organizes his spilling flesh, to rise—ripping his gaze away from Skipper.

  Skipper gets up unsteadily now. In one swift unexpected motion, he shoves the fatman into the booth, the leather creating a sucking protesting sound as the fatman’s form sinks into it.

  Skippers shouts: “Sit down—fatso!”

  In an instant the demonic composure of the fatman shatters like a wall crumbling under the impact of a wrecker.

  “You son of a bitch!—dont call me that!” he whines.

  The people in the bar, sensing excitement, crowd about the booth.

  Skipper stands menacingly over the fatman. “You even smell fat!” he says.

  They stare at each other like two soldiers in opposing armies who realize that neither will be the victor—that each has been mortally wounded.

  Skipper repeats: “You even smell fat!”

  The fatman—the bull rallying once more after having been stabbed—yells at me: “Well—you comin with us or not?”

  “Fuck yourself,” I said.

  He roars over to the skinny man, lifts him from the booth, dangling him like a puppet. The skinny man, lashing out with his nails, burying them into the fatman as if to puncture the inflated body, wrests himself free of the bear clutch.

  “You do!” the skinny man shouted—and he is crying now. “You really do! You really smell fat!” He begins to laugh, repeating over and over: “Fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat . . . FAT! . . .” until the word was drowned in the hysterical laughter, as the fatman—dodging Skipper’s drunkenly aimed fist—thrusts his arms almost pitifully into the encircling crowd and rams his way into the escape of the sheltering night.

  As he stormed out, I heard a familiar voice saying, “Let me through, let me through,” and in the fatman’s wake—pushing her way insistently toward the booth and Skipper—Trudi emerged out of the curious crowd. Small, frail, completely made up—understanding instinctively what had gone on—she gathered the spilled photographs from the floor—neatly—with the clippings, and she put them carefully into the envelope. Her head barely reached Skipper’s shoulders, and she looked at him with the compassion that only one outcast can feel for another. Now she put her arms about his waist, whispering softly to him: “Cummon, baby—screw the beads—lets go home.” She leads him through the crowd, unsteadily but firmly—Skipper willingly surrendering now completely to the drunkenness.

  Outside, the air is cool. Night embraces Main Street blackly. . . . I stand watching the people as they leave the bar in pairs or in desperate aloneness. A few feet away, I see Skipper bent over the curb, vomiting.

  Now a queen passes by, stands staring at Skipper. . . . And I hear Trudi—holding Skipper lovingly as he vomits rackingly into the street—challenge the queen’s suddenly bewildered stare:

  “Whats the matter, queenie? . . . Aint you never seen a man puke?”

  CITY OF NIGHT

  AFTER ALL, THERES THIS TO CONSIDER: The world’s no fucking good. “Youve got to pretend you dont give a damn and swing along with those that really dont—or you go under.”.

  I needed hungrily to feel wanted—but when someone tried to get too close—someone met in that daily excursion through moviehouse balconies, bars, the park—I immediately moved away from him. I seldom saw the same person more than a few times during those months.

  Recurrently, around the others hustling those places, I felt a peculiar overpowering guilt because I was convinced I w
as not trapped by that world, as I was certain they were. Yet there were those other times when I felt even more hopelessly a part of it for having searched it out It was a quandary so strangely disturbing—so difficult to understand—that I tried to force myself not to think about it—perhaps because I sensed even then that the answer to the riddle would entail something much too harsh to face.

  Increasingly now there were moments of craving for a form of revenge on life—to get even with it. And for what reason specifically? I didnt really know. More and more, revenge became a conscious craving.

  There is a bar in Los Angeles a block from Pershing Square, on Sixth Street. It’s called the Hodge Podge. At that time it wasnt exclusively a hustling bar—many went there to make out mutually with each other. But often you can score much better in such a bar.

  From the street, you descend into it, as if into a cellar. It is dark and like a cave: partitions separating it into small ghettos, where groups huddle in the semidarkness. As you walk in, a youngman who looks like a hood may check your I.D. Because he hadnt seen me there before, he asked me for mine. Before I could pull it out of my wallet, a Negro queen I had seen briefly, at the most twice at the 1-2-3—Miss Billie—comes rushing over to me and the youngman checking I.D. “Oh, baby,” she says to him indignantly, “hes All Right—why, Ive known him for years! You just go ahead and let him in like your sister says, hear?” She turned to me: “Im working here now, baby—to attract a new crowd—and you just rely on Miss Billie whenever you need help to get in this bar.” Someone called to her for drinks. “I’ll talk to you later, sweetheart,” she said, moving away.

  Before you can make out the faces here, your eyes have to wait a few moments to adjust to the light As my eyes focused, there was one person I saw immediately, and he was looking at me: a well-dressed man, not yet middle-aged, sitting alone at a table. . . . Immediately I realized I knew him—from somewhere, sometime. It could even have been New York. Perhaps I had merely talked to him somewhere—Main Street, the park. But I knew it wasnt just “somewhere, sometime.” I knew him from a time somehow important. . . .

  “Baby!” I saw Pauline coming toward me with two drinks, one of which she handed to me. She is fiercely madeup around the eyes tonight—still trying to look like Sophia Loren, her lips round and pouting. I wonder what shes doing away from the 1-2-3 and Ji-Ji’s—the two places preferred by queens because they could get away with higher drag. “I knew I should come here more often. Ive heard it’s really getting to be a kicky bar.” She comes on like this with everyone—soon she’ll be promising me all kinds of things. She’ll be talking about her beauty shop—still Soon To Open. And she’ll be telling me, as she tells everyone else, how Im the only person she has ever loved.

  “I just moved into this grand apartment, out in Hollywood, baby,” she gushed, “and you must come out and live with me. And we’ll live in grand style. . . . You know, my Beauty Shop is about to open—and my customers are the wealthiest women in Beverly Hills, and I just—. . .” She goes on familiarly.

  The man at the table is still staring at me. I wonder if he too is trying to remember from where he knows me. As much as I tried to avoid looking at him, I kept turning to face him. In that bar—among all the giggles and the loud laughter, amid the jukebox rocking—he appears strangely to me now as if sitting in some kind of judgment. On me? But I still cant remember.

  “Ive got to split,” I told Pauline abruptly.

  “But you just got here, baby!” She poses at being offended. “Are you being unfaithful?—to the person who loves you the most in this wide, wide world? Now, confess—are you being unfaithful to me? . . . Youre bugged by this place, arent you? I can tell . . . . I’ll tell you what! I am loaded tonight, sweet heart Lets go out to this real wild place I know of, where we can pick up some really fine maryjane. Then we’ll go to my pad and get high . . . . Of course, I wish I could take you out to my new apartment—in Hollywood (though actually it’s closer to Beverly Hills)—but as a matter of fact, I havent really occupied it, yet. You see, theyre remodeling it and the interior decorators want it to be just so—you know how those girls are—and so, in the meantime, Im still living on Spring Street . . . .”

  We walked out together, Pauline shrieking to attract attention as she makes her exit. At the landing leading up the steps to the street, I glanced back at the man. He was still looking at me.

  This time, for once, it turned out Pauline is telling the truth. She was indeed loaded. We took a cab to a place on upper Broadway.

  The bar turns out to be mostly a spadebar.

  On the dance floor, spade chicks with classic butts squeezed into gold and orange and red hugging dresses dance with gleamingfaced Negro men. This is not a queer bar—it is an outcast bar—Negroes and vagrant whites, heads and hypes, dikes and queens. On the dancefloor, too, lesbians—the masculine ones, the bull-dikes—dance with hugely effeminate queens, the roles of course reversed but technically legal—broadshouldered women and waspwaist-squeezed youngmen. The dikes are leading the queens.

  “Isnt this positively mad, honey?” says Pauline, playing for tonight—or until her money lasts—the wealthy woman out on the town with her “escort.” “I have a fine connection here, baby, and we’ll get tanked on bees and pod and then I’ll really show you a sex-scene. Ive been waiting since the first time I saw you. . . . Huccome youve never made it with me, baby?—youre the only one Ive ever loved! . . . My God! Those queens dancing with lesbians—ugh! They must be perverts!”

  I went to the head, and there, sweat-bright spade and fay faces focus intensely on dice, cramped bodies in the tiny room exploding with the odor of maryjane smoke. A droopy-eyed Negro hands me a tiny joint, offers what is hardly a roach now: “Turn on?”

  “You took so long,” said Pauline when I returned to the table where we were now sitting. “I hope nobody was being naughty with you. I’ll scratch their eyes out!” She goes on like this—but I wasnt really listening. I was still thinking about that man at the Hodge Podge. Somehow, whatever had happened with him, whenever and wherever it had happened, or not happened, was important I knew that much with certainty.

  “Why are you so nervous, baby?” Pauline asks me.

  And then I remembered, suddenly and distinctly. Abruptly, I got up from the table.

  “Where are you going?” Pauline asked.

  “I just remembered,” I told her, “I have to see someone downtown. Ive got to split, Pauline. I’ll see you some other time—at your Hollywood pad, okay?”

  “Why, baby!” she exclaimed. “You havent even finished the drink I got you!”

  I drank it in a gulp.

  “Something is wrong,” she said. “Or dont you love me anymore?”

  “Ive just got to go back,” I said. “I just remembered someone I have to see, thats all.”

  And now she became mad. “Go to hell, for all I care—youre not so dam tough anyway,” she growled in a man’s voice.

  “Sorry, Pauline—Ive got to go.”

  At the door I looked back, and she was storming across the dancefloor; stood staring back at me for a moment, to see if I would follow her. Realizing that I wasnt going to, she rushed into the ladies’ room, dabbing at nonexistent tears. The scene, for her, although not what she had intended, was nevertheless complete. She was now the hurt, wronged woman. . . .

  Shortly after, I was back at the Hodge Podge. As I walked in, looking through the dark clouds of smoke, I thought for a moment that the man had left, and my heart sank. But then I saw him. He had merely moved farther into the dark. And now that he was high—as he had been the first time I had seen him—I was certain who he was. I had the sudden feeling that he too was waiting for me. I stood near him.

  “Drink?” he said. I sat down. He called Miss Billie. “Hi, hon,” she said to me. “Why’d you leave so quick justa while ago? . . . And come to think of it, why aint I seen you in such a long time?—but then of course I’ve been in the hospital myself for about a week. I had th
is operation—and when I—”

  “An abortion?” an eavesdropping white queen asks.

  “Shut your nelly mouth, Mary,” said the Negro queen—“or I’ll have you eight-sixed out of this bar so fast you wont even be able to hold on to your makeup!”

  “Honey,” said the other queen. “I wasn’t trying to dish you, sweetheart. . . Why, dearest, I’d like to get pregnant myself!” They all tittered now, including Miss Billie: suddenly all sisters again.

  The man Im sitting with doesnt speak for a long while. He doesnt even look at me. He stared down at the table, playing with his drink. . . . But Im almost certain that he remembers me too—that hes been waiting for me to fulfill something vastly, if perversely, important

  “Will you come with me?” he asks me.

  Without answering, I stood up. We walked out.

  We went to a hotel nearby, much better than the ones on Main Street. Coldly, we went up the elevator, into his room . . . Outside, he hadnt appeared as drunk as he seems now, and I wonder if somehow it’s necessary that he be drunk—and if not really that drunk, that he pretend to be.

  He removes only his coat, places it carefully inside-out on a chair, his wallet showing half-out from the pocket

  In bed, when he touched me, it was all quick, frantic. . . . Then he lay back as if in drunken sleep.

  Instantly—doing what I had come up to do—I reached for his wallet I removed all the money. I left the wallet, open, on the chair.

  And I walked out feeling strangely triumphant for having just clipped the man with whom, that first afternoon in Los Angeles, I had failed the world I had searched.

  Part Three

  “He’s got the wind and the rain

  in His hands,

  He’s got both you and me