by John Rechy
The two vice cops are checking identifications at random. From the voices I hear respond, slowly, with emphatic animosity, I can tell that theyre avoiding questioning the queens; concentrating on the malehustlers as if the hustlers’ presence somehow threatens them personally.
Obviously I havent been cool enough; the vice cops are already standing behind me. “Where are you staying?” one asked me. I turn to face stone-cold cop-eyes. . . .
Before I could answer, the blackhaired woman said clearly: “Hes staying with me.” She adds wryly, addressing the vice cops: “You know where that is, dont you . . . boys?”
The taller of the two smiles at her—but only with his mouth; the irascible meanlook remained on his face, carved there by years of blind hatred. “That house of yours sure must be crowded,” he drawled at the woman.
“I got a real large one.” Her cold look matches theirs.
They stood momentarily at the draped door, the two cops, looking back into the bar as if to engrave each face here threateningly—indelibly—on their minds: the look of someone who says: “This is only the beginning of the game—a hint; we’ll get you eventually; if not here, then somewhere else.” . . . Typically cop-swaggering, armed with invisible bully-sticks, they walked out. The frozen scenes about me resume, as if a movie film had begun again at the exact point at which it had paused.
The blackhaired woman says to me: “They try to bug everyone before the tourists come in. Mostly the hustlers,” she added pointedly. “But after a while, the closer it gets to Mardi Gras, it cools off; they lose control—too many to take care of.” Coming from a woman—a woman with whom I havent even spoken—those words, aimed so surely at me, embarrass me curiously. “Where are you really staying?” she asked me.
“At the Y,” I told her.
“You sure?” Then: “Look, boy, Im not trying to pry. I know your scene. And I dont give a damn. But if you dont have a pad, theyll bust you for vag. . . . Hey! Desdemonal Drusilla!” she calls out to the two look-alike queens. “Theyre real sisters,” she explains to me, “twins: Desdemona and Drusilla Duncan. And theyre cool.”
“You callin us, sweetheart?” one queen says, and they both slide off their stools simultaneously and come over demurely.
The woman introduced us.
“Chawmed,” says Desdemona Duncan.
“Dee-lighted, Ahm sure,” says Drusilla Duncan.
“I really have a place,” I said to the woman, realizing why shes asked the two queens over.
The two queens perched on nearby schools. “Too bad,” sighed Desdemona and Drusilla Duncan almost at the same time.
The woman shrugged. The bartender refilled her glass—with Seven-Up. “Im Sylvia,” the woman introduced herself. “I own this bar.”
“And shes a real darling, too,” trilled Drusilla Duncan.
Someone entered. Sylvia squinted, leaned forward. Then she turned away.
“I hate the vice cops as much as you do,” she told me.
2
Two youngmen near the Bourbon House face each other on the street—one, blackhaired and meanfaced, threatening the other with a large stick; the other, a small blond boy of about 18 (turned-up nose, cleft-chin, blue eyes, masses of blond hair over his forehead—a replica of the current, boyish, blond-faced teenage idols of rock-n-roll), tensely and imminently uncertainly menacing the other with a knife poised gleaming in the blind sun. Behind the dark one hovers a small skinny girl like an anxious vulture. Her painted mouth seems to have been slashed carelessly across her pinched face in a gaping, scarlet gash. The stick and the knife are ready to attack. Eyes starved for violence, the girl shouts malevolently to her dark boyfriend, pushing him forward:
“Go, man! Kill the motherfucker!”
The two poised malebodies hurl themselves against each other, grapple, separate, lock for a long motionless moment as if in passion. The blond boy staggered back, a bloody slit at his temple. The blackhaired youngman stands looking down in bewilderment at his own hand, ripped at the thumb and the finger so that it opened like the webbed foot of a duck.
“Killim!” the girl screamed savagely at the dark one.
Someone from the Bourbon House rushed out shouting: “Police! Police!”
Like a stone scattering birds, that hollered word disbands the group quickly. People dart into doors, cross the street
“Bring him with you,” an older man says peremptorily to me and another youngman who has witnessed the fight, and who, minutes earlier, had been with me and the blond boy at Les Petits bar. We hold the blond boy, the blood from his temple creating a growing dark-crimson flower on his white shirt. As quickly as we can move him—past the startled eyes of tourists as they dodge to one side to avoid Contamination—we turn into Royal, where the man who has asked us to follow him has already called a cab.
Along the trellised balconied houses, the taxi flees from the afternoon, into the protective custody of the approaching night The youngman holding the blond one, who threatens to pass out at any moment (the older man sits in front, staring straight ahead; the driver is predictably unconcerned), is saying Toughly to me: “That dirty motherin bastard, we gonna come back and git him!”—asking me would we or wouldnt we kill the son of a bitch who had hit our buddy with a stick—although our buddy—the blond boy, whom both of us had met minutes earlier at Les Petits bar (all three of us with the same score), had done nothing but come on to the black-haired-youngman’s girlfriend; and she, sensing the possible conflict (easily brought into play in any hustling bar by the necessity of the hustler to assert his masculinity with a girl—any girl, any woman) and instigating the scene connivingly (by winking at us as the darkhaired youngman embraced her), had told her boyfriend that the blondhaired boy had leaned toward her as if to kiss her. On the street the fight had occurred.
Somewhere beyond the Quarter, the taxi stopped before what looks like a boarded-up store, with black-painted windows. The man pays, we enter the building through an unlocked side door. Inside, the large room is dark, like a cell. Pushed against the walls are tables, chairs upturned on them. A couple of booths. Dark, smeared, ugly patches on the wall behind a bar without stools indicate that several panels of mirrors have been removed. Only one grayish-amber panel, smashed in the middle creating a glassy spider web, remained. A light is on in a room beyond the door.
From the shadows, other faces begin to appear, slowly, dimly, peering impressionistically out of the darkness. They seemed to be crawling like giant insects from somewhere out of the woodwork. Now I can distinguish the faces clearly: three malehustlers I had seen at The Rocking Times, a bewildered girl, and a young painted queen.
The man who brought us here disappeared quickly through the lighted door.
We placed the blond boy, propped, on the seat of a booth. As if in renewed, dazed surprise, he stared at the blood on his hand, and he tore at his shirt, holding the piece of cloth to his wounded temple.
The queen’s face hangs like a white, painted mask over him. “Poor dear,” she sighs, “and hes so cute too.”
Now the shadow of a woman appeared against the light from the other room, followed by the man who brought us here. As the woman approached, I recognized her: Sylvia—the woman at The Rocking Times.
She sat quickly beside the blond boy doubled over in the booth; she dressed the wound deftly, urgently. Responding to her authority—and shes in complete command—the two of us who brought the wounded boy here lift him and follow Sylvia through the lighted room, which is a kitchen—with a long table and several chairs, an old coiled refrigerator; through a corridor; into another room. There are several rollout beds, couches, mats on the floor; and we laid the blond boy on a bed.
“We gonna git the guy that done this,” says the youngman with me.
Sylvia looked at him uncertainly, as if undecided whether to chastise or praise him. She merely turned from him, looking down sadly at the wounded boy. “Let him sleep. Hes just scared,” she said with a note of what could be contem
pt. She drew a cover over him, at first tenderly. Then she tossed it over him impatiently. Again, relenting in the impatience, she sighs, touches him lightly on the bandaged face. Asleep, the boy looks like a peaceful young kid. . . .
When we returned to the unlighted room with the eyeless panels of removed mirrors, the man was gone; the youngmen, the girl, the queen have disappeared, probably to other sections of this strange building. Like the underground stations for Negro fugitives from the South, this place must provide temporary shelter for the Carnival vagrants.
“Are you hungry?” Sylvia asked me and the youngman with me. I said no. The other youngman said yes. She directed him to the kitchen. As he helped himself to food from the old refrigerator, the woman and I sat in one of the booths, facing each other.
With her hand she quickly wiped away a few drops of blood that had dripped onto the table—as if to erase the fact of their existence.
She looked at me questioningly, knotting her eyebrows as if to ask me something, the answer to which, though vastly important, she will nevertheless find perplexing, or even painful “Why—?” she began. Instead, she shifts the questioning look. Her face had mellowed for a moment. Now the toughness crept back into it. She fixed her eyes stonily on the deserted gray bar. At first, I had thought she hadnt recognized me; now she calls me by my name. “What happened to that kid?” she asked me.
Interrupting my narration of the fight before I could get beyond the girl’s goading of her boyfriend, Sylvia shook her head wearily as if she had already heard too much. “I know the girl youre talking about,” she said. “Shes always trying to make others prove something—but shes really trying to prove it to herself.”
And I think of Barbara, perhaps still somewhere in the maze of downtown Los Angeles. . . .
Sylvia said: “I’ll take that knife from that kid, if hes still got it—he probably doesnt even know how to use it.” She shook her head again in bewilderment. “You should have taken it from him when you first knew he had it,” she said, as if I had failed in some established duty. “All of you—” she started, compelled to approach a certain dangerous subject which, barely neared, must be avoided. She was silent. I felt uncomfortable with her right now—mysteriously guilty, blame-ridden, as if I had done something to her.
“Is this your bar too?” I asked her, only to fill the powerful silence.
“Yes,” she answered. “It’s been closed for quite a while, though—it was too far from the Quarter. I bought that other one instead. The Rocking Times.” She added the name with deep sarcasm. “Hell, I couldve sold this place, many times. But I prefer to keep it—for a while anyway.” Like a person prepared to fight even before a hostile situation exists, she added defensively, abruptly belligerently. “Yeah, sure, this was a hustling bar too: hustlers! queens! butch homosexuals! Everything!” She pronounced each word with bravado, like a child who must prove he can use dirty words; and, as with that child, each word had sounded unconvincing. “What else?” she challenged, as if I had been questioning her.
“When those bars swing, they make a lot of money, I guess,” I said clumsily, still trying to ease some of the strain I felt with her.
She flashed a ferocious look at me. In the gray darkness, I could almost feel her eyes burning on my face. Predictably, she relented, changing the subject. “Usually, by this time,” she was telling me, “Im already at the bar. But what the hell? Everyone whos there now will be there later—or theyll come back.”
“You know everyone who goes there?”
“I see everyone,” she said. “And I know most of the regulars—the ones who stay here all year. It’s mainly during Mardi Gras that the gay scene really changes in this city. . . . I hate that word, ‘gay’—‘queer’ too, even more,” she said quickly.
I remember the man on the beach, that afternoon in Santa Monica, with whom I had sat on the sand watching that bird Escape into the sky. He had made much the same protest against the unfairness of the labels thrust at that world—a protest echoed over and over in that life. . . . But this woman? Was her resentment of those labels bred by a consuming guilt for catering in her bar to a world in which, I suspected, she didnt really belong?
While we had been talking, a queen had entered surreptitiously through the side door. She seemed to be hesitating in approaching Sylvia. Suddenly she was there—standing before us.
“Lily, I been looking for you,” Sylvia said harshly.
“I know, honey,” the queen named Lily said querulously. “And—You Believe It Or Not—that is exactly why I have come over looking for you—to clarify certain points of a vicious, untrue, unfounded, utterly fabricated, bitchy story someone has been spreading About Me. . . . I aint been hidin from you or nothing—honestly, honey,” she said, oddly prematurely conciliatory. “I want you to know that. You must know that,” she said like Bette Davis. “It’s just that I been—Really and Truly—I have been Very Busy, what with Mardi Gras coming up.”
“I know,” Sylvia said cuttingly.
“Why, Sylvia, honey—it aint at all how you heard it, baby,” Lily protested, playing nervously with a long strand of beads about her neck.
“Now how the hell do you know what I heard?”
“Because I been told!—by mutual friends.” She avoids looking directly at Sylvia; guiltily studying the strung beads. “I did not clip that drunk sailor,” she says, plunging into the immediate matter. “And I know it was that old queen Whorina who told you I did. Honey, you know me well enough to know : that-I-simply-do-not-clip-no-one-that-aint-lookin-to-be-clipped.” She strung out the words, obviously memorized, as if they constituted what she knew is a ready, forceful defense. “And that sailor was not! It just so happened I dug him, see, honey?—and ole Whorina was digging him too (oh, she was twisted out of her gay mind for him!—she even offered him money to make it, but he was digging Me)—and, well, Whorina, like the bitchy nelly queen she is, well, she was Bugged—fit to be tied, I wanna let you know.” She swung her beads in a defiant loop at the thought of Whorina. “Why, I even heard she—. . .”
“Dont rattle your giddy beads at me, Mary,” snapped Sylvia. “I can tell when youre faking it. I know how you work with that studhustler—how you pick up someone and play the helpless, defenseless queen; youll even offer them money to get them to your pad, and then your studhustler boyfriend threatens to beat them up unless they hand over their bread!”
The queen put her hand indignantly to her heart In obviously posed amazement, she formed, soundless, the Astonished word “Me?” and left her mouth gaping in practiced disbelief.
“I dont give a damn who you clip—as long as it’s someone who knows what hes getting into,” Sylvia went on; and I can feel her begin to relent toward the queen. “But a drunk sailor—and how many other drunk sailors?” she says in exasperation. “Well, Lily, this isnt the first time Ive told you: I wont have it. You go find yourself another bar—and thats that! . . . That sailor was so damn drunk—I saw you with him—he probably thought you were a girl. Either that or you offered him trade-sex, or money.”
“Well, honey,” said the queen, smiling demurely, pleased at the former, ignoring the latter, “you know yourself how real I can look—and that particular night, I had my hair—. . .”
“I told you to stop rattling your beads at me!” Sylvia interrupted her, forcing the queen to retreat a hurried step, her hand anxiously at her throat. “This is the last time I warn you: I wont have anyone in my bar that takes advantage of someone thats not hip enough to know better.”
“I am Telling You The God’s Truth,” Lily protested, hinting, but somehow feebly, at tears—and crossing her heart spiritedly. “It was that washed-out queen Whorina—” She sneered at the name. “—that made up that Utterly Fantastic story—just because, like Im telling you—Cross! My! Heart!—I made it with the sailor she was after. If something happened to his wallet, well, I certainly had nothing to do with that.”
I wonder whether Sylvia actually believes the quee
n’s story. Telling it, the queen seems too nervous, too quickly apologetic; I have a strong suspicion that Sylvia doesnt believe it—but, as if it is easier to believe her than face what disbelief will entail, she says to the queen, wearily, “Okay—all right; forget it,” like a judge not quite satisfied with the veracity of the defendant’s story but considering and bowing to the mitigating circumstances.
“Thank you, honey,” sang the queen, enormously relieved. “Introduce me?”
Sylvia introduced us.
“Gotta place to stay, hon?” the queen said to me. “I got an empty bed.”
“Yes,” I answered. There is something patently lubricous about her manner which turns me off.
“Too bad,” she sighed. “That empty bed in my pad just gives me the cold chills.”
“What happened to your stud boyfriend?” Sylvia asked cunningly.
Thrown suddenly off balance, the queen blurted: “He split!—with all that money we been making!” And now shes genuinely shaken. Realizing, quickly, that shes trapped herself clearly, she excuses herself with enormous courtesy and slithers into the kitchen. She is now talking to the youngman still eating there.
“Screwed-up world without laws!” Sylvia muttered disgustedly to herself. “Queens, hustlers, fairies—and me!” Suddenly angry, her words accused me harshly: “All of you!—guys like you—and that kid with the gashed head—what the hell are you trying to prove? Why, especially—. . . .?” I was glad she stopped the uncomfortable words—but she had looked at me as if actually expecting an answer to the question that hadnt been asked. Then she reverted to what she had begun to say: “But even in a world without laws—and mostly, hell, we all know it—mostly it’s lawless because it’s a scene—. . . a scene people shun, are . . . afraid of, dont even want to know exists—even in that kind of world—well, Jesus, Holy, Christ—youve got to have some kind of—hell, yes—decency—some kind of rules. In my bar, I make those rules. And I dont give a damn who gets bugged and doesnt come back. Hell, I know everything that goes on. I watch it every day: scores coming in looking for youngmen. Some of them try to impress the hustlers with how Rich they are. So they end up clipped. That doesnt bug me. That kind of score asks for it.” She had begun with the familiar bravado, but it had faded quickly, and she dropped her eyes, unable to face me even in the darkness.