by John Rechy
Shadows huddle, drinking.
From the street, I looked up into the apartment buildings, into the naked windows of the tiny cubicle-rooms. More haggard faces peering blankly; skinny, maimed bodies of uncaring women in slips; men without shirts. All have the same look: the look of nolonger-questioning, resigned doom.
The world on its knees. . . .
A beat-up old man before me chases a wine bottle along its course into the gutter. He yells at it: “Go on, damya—into the gutter whereya belong. I aint gonna touchya no more.”
Instantly, three men jump out of the shadows to retrieve the bottle. Discovering it empty, one smashes it on the filthy street.
I see the terrible cheated eyes.
Other ghosts to pursue through the bandaged jungles.
Beyond the tangle of the elevated, to State Street: carnival street: Tattoo joints; novelty shops (horror masks leering among rubber cobra snakes, masks less hideous than the human ones along the Madison doorways); arcades (“Parisian Movies,” “Chauffeur Photos,” “Art Films”). Tough girls shoot pool. Sailors stand on corners. Burlesque bars coax you with NO COVER NO MINIMUM. The Gayety Burlesque is featuring Teddy Bare and Borden’s Ice Cream.
A tall gaunt man hands me a pamphlet. ARE YOU BORN AGAIN?
And I followed the ghosts into the burlesque theater.
Blondes! redheads! brunettes!—lips liver-colored in the changing light; shouting Ah-haaaaa like cowboys; hands edging toward the hypnotic spot between the legs, resting there caressingly; hips momentarily magnetized, suddenly released, swinging sex around; kneeling. . . . Fingers teasingly exploring the breasts, playfully pinching them, coyly affecting looks of mock pain. . . . G-strings like phosphorescent badges etched across the thighs; spread legs radiating their unfulfilled invitation; breasts like searchlights, completely uncovered; apocalyptically revealed pink-crowned nipples, presented cupped in white hands like an offering to the hungry audience; breasts bouncing playfully, jiggling temptingly like white-jelly. . . . Night Train from the jungle of exhibitionistic sex. . . . Hands at the back, naked breasts pointing Heavenward; tensed stomachs forming a tight “8”; legs arched open; fingers sliding into G-strings; thighs thrust out groaningly simulating orgasm.
Hungry unfulfilled eyes in the male audience, focused on the promised but unattainable. . . .
Pursuing ghosts through Negro streets. . . .
Under the elevated at 63rd and Cottage Grove: nearby: The Temple of Brotherly Love. A cross proclaims:
GOD’S CORNER.
And GOD’S CORNER is a tangled glob of steel tracks thundering with the roar of trains. . . . I see only Negro faces for blocks in that area. Jukeboxes shouting. . . . Vainly, the afternoon sun tries to pierce the tracks into the street
Wells.
Oak.
Franklin. Thirty-fifth.
Negro streets at night.
Past black faces staring through curtainless windows into the dark streets . . . Negroes swallowed by the merciful dark. Into the street—into torn porches—they escape out of tiny cramped rooms, the dark stairways like mazetunnels through the open doors. . . . A little Negro girl asks me derisively: “Hey, mister, ain I seen you on TV?” In the hot nightair, I feel the resentful stares. The silence explodes into laughter coming from somewhere within the crushed darkness.
Pursuing ghosts on Clark Street . . .
Panorama of ripped sights along the rows of ubiquitous loan shops, poolrooms, “bargain” centers, billiard halls, cheap moviehouses. Zombies in a ritualistic hungover imitation of life. Men staring dumbly at nothing. A body lies unnoticed in a heap by a doorway. An epileptic woman totters along the block. . . . Staring startled eyes. Mutilated harpies wobble along the street—past crippled bodies. A man beats a woman ruthlessly as the man’s two husky friends stand guard over the scene.
NO DOGS OR OTHER ANIMALS—a sign warns outside of a bar.
And I search through the ghosts at the Shamrock. . . . A ripped bar with tables, tough outcast faces. One woman passes out on the floor with a long, desperate sigh. A man slides a glass of beer toward her. Instantly, she awakens—reaches for the beer, guzzles it, passes out again.
Outside. . . .
Skeletons gaze through apartment windows down into the street As if their gazes were somehow aimed directly at me in horrible judgment!
Fun in Hell!
The Kings Palace on Clark Street. A skeleton awning (no canvas) and a drawing outside of what could be a mangled clown. . . . Inside, a huge dirty square hall with two oval bars—those harsh lights which only derelicts with nothing left to hide can stand for long. On the walls, faded paintings hinting of faraway Escape: sailboats, palmtrees, cactusplants, leis.
Hybrid of all the tarnished fugitives of America.
From a tiny improvised stage a mustached round man announces: “The Amateur Talent Show!” . . . First prize: Five Magic Dollars! It can buy much magic wine. . . .
A woman who looks like Mrs Haversham of Great Expectations sits woodenly like an elaborate stuffed bird with open eyes. On the stage a gravel-voiced man tries to sing: “Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.” A tramp nods, agreeing. A skinny old woman sits at the bar, sticking out her tongue at the world. A drunk man shoves a woman through a door with a sign that says PRIVATE KEEP OUT. She doesnt come out.
“Enjoy yourself—it’s later than you think—. . .”
And while the man goes on trying to sing, a Negro fairy goes through the motions of a strip; and like an Indian doing a frantic war-dance, a harpy rocks and rolls about the neon-flashing jukebox—a badge across her desiccated breast proclaiming her name pitifully: “BEATRICE.”
Mrs Haversham has rousted herself onto the stage to strum a guitar, producing an anarchy of sounds. A sadfaced man, surprisingly welldressed, guiltily buys drinks for all the derelicts around him, while a sullen old woman huddles against a cubicle, menacing with a fist anyone who approaches her.
“Beatrice,” now on the stage, hopped like a puppet.
A fat old fairy stares longingly at the young drifters and bursts uncontrollably into tears, the sound of his crying drowned (his pain reduced to paroxysmal pantomime) by a brownfaced man who howls like an Indian as Beatrice hops loose-limbly on the stage. . . .
A mountainous woman calls out to a man across the bar: “Wottayalookinat?” “You, honey, I wanna kiss you.” “Kiss-my ass!” she roars (and Beatrice, still on the stage, wiggles hers for emphasis). “Okay,” the man says, getting up, “where?” The fat woman shakes her giant butt: “Cant miss it, baby,” she says, “Im ALL ass.” . . . Still hopping convulsively, Beatrice is ushered off the stage by the announcer.
A fastidious man, in elegant tatters, sends back his beer because the glass is dirty. The waiter stares incredulously at him.
Next on the stage are two skinny drunk men, leaning on each other singing plaintively: “Those far away places—. . .” Like a chipped record, repeating: “Far, far, farrrrr away places—. . . Far away—. . .” And cant go on.
A Negro woman, perched like a crow on a stool next to a tattooed sailor, feels suddenly beautiful at his attentions (she smiles, rolls her round eyes in pleasure) as he strokes her butt, which she squirms deliriously—but stops its movements abruptly at the thud of the two drunk men collapsing on the stage.
Against a wall a faded blonde woman—an exiled angel, the hints of beauty still lingering on her palewhite face—sits with blackoutlined eyes burning into the bar. A young tramp, drunk—the mark of premature doom stamped on his face which resembles James Dean’s (1 have seen him before—hustling Main Street in Los Angeles—but he looked much younger then)—offers her a beer, paid for with a few coins I saw him clinch only moments earlier from the Negro fairy. The woman takes the beer wordlessly, her gaze piercingly buried beyond the bar.
Now on the stage a fleshy woman is trying to do a belly-dance. Someone hooted: “TAKE HER OFF!” and misinterpreting the harsh command, she began to do a strip. . . .
Th
e boy who looks like James Dean touches the faded blonde woman intimately between her thighs. She turns in demented raging fury, ready to slap him. He hurls the beer at her in a stream. “Dirty whoor,” he yelled, “huccome you don wanna screw with me?” He slaps her. She smashes the beer bottle on the counter, threatens him with the sharp glassy teeth. He runs out. Someone calls: “Go ioin the army!”
Next in the competition on the stage is a giant of a man, introduced as “The Growling Bear.” In a cracked, beer-slurred voice, he begins to sing. Noticing the lack of response, in desperation (the five dollars! . . . the wine! . . .), he sprawls on all fours, pretends to be an animal, having, while the master of ceremonies, trying to inject something of comedy into the tragic moment, hops on him.
Now the gigantic man groans like a dying animal.
I didnt wait to find out who had won The Prize.
Outside, I walked along the bleeding nightstreet, toward the park. . . . The faces of hustlers and scores . . . queens.
Always waiting.
And I walked, that night, along the impassive nightlake—northward beyond the couples making love under the silhouetted trees. . . . Along the dark lake. . . . And I looked back toward the magnificent Chicago skyline: that magic cyclorama embracing the water. Even the buildings which earlier seemed like giants marching snobbishly into the lake, now softened, blended into a glittering network of lights, lighted checkerboard. . . . Black and mysterious, the water trembles toward the shore uncertainly. A distant light shatters the black water in a shimmering streak. . . . A man who has been following me propositions me. I say no. As he moves away, I stare beyond, along the drive, where cars move as if in slow motion along streetlights strung blue-white in a curve.
And I see:
Dominating the skyline, at the top of a tall building, a giant searchlight scanning the city.
It glides eerily, swirls over the black water. It floats, soars above the skyline, encircles the nightcity.
And crazily excited I wonder suddenly if that spotlight swirling nightly is not trying somehow to embrace it all—to embrace that fusion of savage contradictions within this legend called America.
And I know what it is I have searched beyond Neil’s immediate world of sought pain—something momentarily lost—something found again in the park, the fugitive rooms, the derelict jungles: the world of uninvited, unasked-for pain . . . found now, liberatingly, even in the memory of Neil himself.
And I could think in that moment, for the first time really:
It’s possible to hate the filthy world and still love it with an abstract pitying love.
Part Four
“In the land of dreamy scenes
There’s a garden of Eden. . . .”
—’Way Down Yonder in New Orleans
CITY OF NIGHT
EACH YEAR, NEAR THE EARLY PART of January, a strange exodus prepares to depart from the Cities of Night. From East to West, a private call will murmur throughout the darkcities.
Along Times Square, in the midst of the dogged winter, when the wind lashes at the concrete City like an icy scythe, the tattered army of young vagrants will raise their collars shelteringly and receive the calling. . . . In the warm palmtreed Los Angeles nights, restlessly they will feel the secret excitement. In Harry’s, Wally’s. Along the Main-Street-blocks-long arcade. In Pershing Square. Along winking Hollywood Boulevard. At Hooper’s in the stale greasy light. . . . On Market Street in dewy San Francisco, from Seventh Street to the magazine store at Powell, as they stand perhaps in the drizzle, fugitive spirits will respond to that now-faint message soon to become drummingly insistent. . . . In Chicago, along Clark Street. In the Square—as they huddle indolently in the frozen night for a car to stop and someone to ask if you want a Ride—that call will whisper to the outcasts like wind from the deserted concrete lake. Along Division Street. In the bars. .. . Sweeping through the other nightcities, the beckoning becomes louder.
And the summoning words are these:
Mardi Gras!
By early January, say (depending on when Lent will begin that year, and therefore Mardi Gras), lean young faces will dot the white-winter highways, fingers will point in the direction of Away, New Orleans. In the Greyhound buses headed South, youngmen with maybe guitars and patched bags if any will eye the young girls reading True Confessions. . . . Quilted jalopies will tackle the highways of many-masked America.
The exodus has begun.
Slightly later, the second wave of fugitives will have felt the stirring of this call to brief Freedom. New Orleans is now the Pied Piper playing a multikeyed tune to varikeyed ears. In those same darkcities equally restless queens, wringing from their exiled lives each drop of rebellion, will feel the strange excitement (“My dear, the Most Fabulous Drags in the world go there,” you will hear them say, “and the simply butchest numbers—and all kinds of rich daddies so tired of their frigid wives theyll pay High for making it with a Queen!”)
And with much more care and planning than that of the initial wave of masculine vagrants, the queens (prematurely sentenced to a purgatory of half-male, half-female) will begin their fe-male plans, selecting their women’s clothes Lovingly. The golden image of at last being Women—for that one glorious day!—of not possibly hassling getting busted (as they were in New York, Los Angeles, Points In Between)—is a fulfilled daydream in which The Newsreel Cameras—The Eyes and Ears of The World—will focus on them. Hips siren curved, wrists lily-delicately broken, they will stare in defiant demureness from theater screens and home screens all over the country; and those painted malefaces will challenge—and, Maybe, for an instant, be acknowledged by—the despising, arrogant, apathetic world that produced them and exiled them.
Amid the swishing of taffeta and rayon drag, the queens will now join the Pageant.
Still later, the third and more comfortable wave of this exodus (the tired richmen, the tired richwomen, the not-so-rich but tired men and the not-so-rich but equally tired women—and the other Young men and women—equally curious but not as defiant as the vagrants of the first and second waves) will feel the call of Shrove Tuesday.
And now!
Airplanes will zoom across the heavens. Telegraph wires will buzz for hotel reservations. Into this old, old city, trains will grind past backyards and waiting impatient lines of cars . . . will dash past the awesome scenery of America. In comfortable automobiles, in busloads of carefully chartered tours—along the whooshing winter-purified highways, they will come to join this determined pilgrimage to Frantic Happiness.
Now the exodus will be complete.
With the clamor of this strange invasion, New Orleans will awaken from its feudal memories of Romance to become the center of our desperate Today: a microcosmic arena of the electric nightworld Aware of the triumph of loneliness and death.
A religious ritual will take place in this rotting Southern city.
To New Orleans:
Riding on a sea of faces in an army of cars and buses— away from Chicago and the mortally bleeding streets (with stops in St. Louis and Dallas, again—briefly) and hanging in haggard busstations inevitably in the starless dawnhours. . . .
Now at last in New Orleans, in the bright sun of this winter-warm city, I stand outside the Greyhound station where Ive left my bag, and I wonder where to go.
Canal Street lengthens before me—perhaps the widest street I have ever seen. The day was clear. I walked along that wide, store-crowded street, hearing the drawls of the people. The day became slowly grayer—the Southern pall of clouds enshrouding the sky.
I have to find a place to stay—alone—to separate myself when, predictably, the seething world will become intolerable: a place where I can find a lone symbolic Mirror.
I pass through the open door of one of the walls shutting in a courtyard—to ask about a room. The building, constructed like a tenement about the small square yard—which is paradoxically green with plants and trees—is all small balconies, like wooden hammocks sagging resigne
dly in the middle. The apartments huddle about the garden as if possessively claiming it from the gray streets.
The landlady wasnt in. I knocked at the neighboring door, which was open. A man is painting inside on an enormous canvas: color-smeared, savagely Red, yellow; swatches of black, inkily smeared at the edges, creating tentacles from a solidly dark body—a hungry giant insect groveling on a violent vortex of colors. “Y’ant gonna fine a place now,” he tells me. “Too close to Mardi Gras. Shoot, man, rents go up to fifty bucks a day. People sleepin in cars, on the streets. Better fine you someone to shack with,” he advises me. Aware that I was staring at the savage painting, he drawled: “This heres a picture of Nawleans.” . . . And he slashed at the canvas in a purple, dripping stroke. . . .
Now walking along that punctured area of old New Orleans, I see those famous hints of a world that disappeared long ago: depicted, sheltered like a precious memory, in books: a world that left merely the remnants of what may have been; a city scarred by memories of an elegance and gentility which may never have existed.
A ghost city.
The streets narrow, as if the ocean world of cities has now taken the slower, more sluggish avenues of a crooked river. Attempting futilely to hide beyond the closed doors of courtyards, beyond the grilled ironwork that still surrounds some balconies like rusted spiderwebs, houses drunkenly lopsided (leaning toward the streets as if, given half a chance, in a rubble of wood and stone and oxidated grillwork, they will topple vindictively over those on the other side) hover over the courtyard walls like grotesque, indomitable, painted old women peering into the streets.
Ugly dank places—the ones they call Enchanting in the travel folders; houses tenebrously rising in tiers of shuttered windows above shredded walls; the pallid historical buildings from a timepast of gilded elegance. . . . An almost Biblical feeling of Doom—of the city about to be destroyed, razed, toppled—assaults you. The odor of something stagnant permeates the winter-air of this summercity: not so much an odor that attacks the sense of smell as one that raids the mind. . . . The invitation to dissipate is everywhere. And you wonder how this city has withstood so long the ravenous vermin—the rats, cockroaches which surely hibernate here even in winter. And you wonder how one single match or cigarette has failed to create that holocaust which will consume it to its very gutters. . . .