City of Night

by John Rechy

  “But if a hustler in my bar gets treated decently by a score (and I know most of the scores, too),” she went on, “if he agrees to what hes going to get paid—and exactly for what—and then I hear he clipped the score,” she warned, “then, God damn it, hes gonna answer to me or he doesnt come back. The same with the queens and their daddies. . . . Theres got to be some kind of morality!” she insisted. “Not the bull they teach you in Sunday-school. I mean; just living in the world you find yourself in—with its own rules, considering everything—yes—but theres got to be rules!” She stared into the empty bar, at the shattered mirror.

  Yes, it was exactly as if she had been clarifying something, rather unconvincingly, for herself—speaking words shes probably spoken to others many times, memorized now—as if she were torn between a compulsion to understand, to accept—and an innate tendency to reject. . . . And I wonder to what extent she really believes she can impose rules on the flagrant anarchy.

  “Why the hell did you come to New Orleans?” she asked me tiredly, as if shes used to getting an inadequate answer.

  “For the Carnival,” I told her simply.

  “And something else,” she said to herself. “Beyond the parades and—. . . the rest.”

  “I guess youre right,” I admitted uneasily.

  “Theres always something else,” she said. “Ive been in New Orleans—oh, several years. I came directly from New York—right after my last divorce,” she added pointedly; I had the feeling she was trying to indicate to me that shes been married several times.

  “Why did you come here?” I asked her.

  She waited a long while before answering. “I came down here—. . . for the Carnival. Like you,” she added with bitter sarcasm.

  Then she looked at me curiously, as if suddenly I had become a complete stranger with whom she had found herself accidentally speaking intimately. She got up quickly, and she went through the lighted kitchen—to take, I suspected, the knife from the wounded boy. . . .

  Sailing in out of the dark in Sylvia’s wake, a painted queen stood over me.

  “Im Whorina, darling, and I like you,” she said.

  3

  There are of course other bars in the French Quarter where the hunted and the hunting of that world gather.

  There was Les Petits, where, nightly, Love Face, a fat Negro woman with bleached hair, made panting, sighing song-love to the mike. And, outside, past the courtyard, was Sandy-Vee’s bar—and Sandy-Vee is one of the most flagrant, most famous drag-queens in America. Vaunting her imposed exile, defiantly she dangles his/her orange earring for the curious tourists. (And my first time there, exhibiting herself before the amused tourists—hating them but using them cunningly—as I walked in—she shrieked: “Theres muh new husband!”—and then she said to an ancestrally bored woman sitting with her fat, tired middle-aged companion: “Ahm doin much bettuh than you are, honey!—and theres more where he came from!”—and she underscored the flagrant put-down by squirting seltzer water, fizzing, into a glass and shouting at the woman: “Douche time!”)

  And there was Cindy’s bar, run by a fat, jolly-looking, pursed-mouthed woman who pined after her clients. There was Les Deux Freres. (“Why The Two Brothers’?” “Because it’s owned by two brothers, and theyre sisters!”) And there were the other bars, scattered throughout the Quarter.

  But, usually, especially in the moments of needed respite from the compulsive fury of those days, as the city went through that period of initiation before Mardi Oras, I would return to The Rocking Times.

  And it was mainly to be with Sylvia that I went there.

  In the world of her bar, she treated each member on his own respective level. With the queens, she discussed their drag costumes for Mardi Gras, assuring them that such and such a color would be just right. With the masculine homosexuals—neither scores, hustlers, nor queens—she listened attentively as they confided to her their broken love affairs. With the hustlers, she often spoke roughly, using their own expressions. . . . And on all, at least verbally, she imposed her rigid, though largely unobserved, rules.

  Yet there were those other times when she would merely stare gloomily before her, as if she had shut her ears. At such times, within me, she augmented the churning unfocused guilt.

  Still, I sought her out. And when she wasnt at the bar—which was rare—I would feel acutely disappointed, personally cheated—almost angry at her as if she had stood me up.

  Today shes talking to Sonny—the blond youngman who had been wounded in the fight that afternoon before the Bourbon House. Only minutes earlier, he had walked in Proudly, Cockily—like a big-game hunter with a lion’s head—with two impressively suited scores.

  “Be cool,” I heard Sylvia warning him. “Those two are here every year. I see them pick up a green kid like you, each Mardi Gras—” Sonny winced noticeably at her designation of him. “—and they tell him theyre going to take him to Europe, and after Mardi Gras, they split—alone. Youll never see them again.”

  Sonny nodded impatiently. It is difficult for him to believe that he can be taken. Sylvia watched him with an ambiguous look as he returned to the two well-dressed scores, who have been staring resentfully at Sylvia as if aware that shes been warning Sonny about them.

  As usual, Sylvia is drinking Seven-Up. It was all I had ever seen her drink. Occasionally, though, I had noticed her stare longingly at the varicolored bottles of liquor behind the bar, then turn from them as if they threatened her in some powerful way.

  The quavering, sensual voice of Elvis Presley is coming from the juke-box in lonesome, sad, sustained, orgasmic moans:

  The bell-hop’s tears keep flowing,

  The desk clerk’s dressed in black.. . .

  Sylvia studied two youngmen who had just walked into the bar. “Two more new ones,” she sighed. “Each year—new hustlers, new queens, new—. . .” she hesitated, “—new gay boys just out for kicks—and the ones that keep coming back.”

  And the juke-box sang lugubriously:

  Just take a walk down lonely street

  To Heartbreak Hotel. . . .

  “Kathy just passed out on the steps of the Maison Blanche!” a queen blurted at Sylvia.

  “Whos with her?” Sylvia asked urgently, shocked out of the revery the two entering youngmen had smothered her in.

  “Whorina is—and, well, I was—but I got so rattled, I didnt know what to do! So I thought I’d better run and tell you.”

  “You dizzy queen,” said Sylvia, “didnt you think to call a doctor?”

  “I just Didnt Know What To Do!—except run to you as fast as I could!” the queen protested vehemently. “Me and Whorina—well, we went with Kathy to the Maison Blanche, to pick up, you know, some drag things for Mardi Gras. . . . And, oh, we created quite a stir, I want to tell you: All those tourists just Turning and Looking at Us—. . . Then Kathy, she just blacks out—” She covered her eyes to indicate the intensity of the blackness. “—all of a sudden—you know, Sylvia, like she does—those awful spells she gets! Well, she just fell back on the escalator, and it hauled her down, and—. . . Well, I didnt know what to do! Like I say: Me and Whorina—well, see . . . we had just—well, taken certain items which didnt exactly belong on our persons; and when-well, see, honey, then I—. . .”

  “What about Kathy?” Sylvia said harshly, exasperated.

  “Well,” the queen says, inflating herself with her importance as the harbinger of some, to me, obscure doom, “like I say, she just passed out. Oh, those horrible dizzy spells—”

  Sylvia brushed quickly past her, leaving the bar.

  When I returned that night—separating at the door from the man I had just made it with—Sylvia was back too.

  “Youre really keeping busy.” She smiled a strange smile.

  Embarrassed, I didnt answer.

  “The first season, it’s always great,” she said. “Maybe youre one of those thatll keep coming back each year. Some do.” She studied me for a long moment. “Somehow
I doubt that youll be back,” she said flatly.

  “What happened to—. . . ?” I asked, to stop her from going on in that direction.

  “Kathy? Shes okay now. They took her home. She gets those spells—more and more often. She hardly ever comes out any more, except during the carnival.”

  “Has she seen a doctor?”

  “Yes. I made her go. I wish I hadnt.” And that was all she said; but a dark look had brushed her face like a shadow.

  A lighthaired, heavily muscled youngman was standing behind Sylvia, ready to surprise her. He had the kind of good-looks that is a combination of hinted toughness and the All-American wholesomeness depicted in hundreds of advertisements: the epitomized face of America’s young vagrants. But I noticed immediately the telltale brand about his eyes: the eyes of someone who has seen much too much. Suddenly this youngman with the massive arms no longer looked so young. And I remembered Skipper. . . . He placed his hands quickly on Sylvia’s shoulders.

  “Jocko!” she greeted him warmly.

  “Back as usual,” he said.

  “This is one of the ones I was telling you about—who come back every year,” Sylvia told me. “Youre later than usual,” she said to him. “How was Miami?”

  “I didnt stay there long. I had to split,” he said. “I been in St Louis.”

  Sylvia frowned. Again I get the impression that she doesnt want to know too much. “Well, welcome back—again,” she said, looking at him tenderly, almost sadly.

  “Always back,” he said, moving away.

  Staring after Jocko, Sylvia said: “That guy’s made it on his muscles long after most of them would be through. He was an acrobat—once. Like everything else, the circus folded. Now he comes here each year to join another kind of circus. . . . He was the best hustler in New Orleans,” she said, almost proudly, “and he had iron rules he stuck by—thats why everyone liked him: never clipped anyone, treated everyone straight. . . . Now—well—maybe it’s changed.” Abruptly, as if to stop the wondering about why Jocko had to leave Miami, she said: “After Mardi Gras, this city clamps up. It dies, as if it’s seen too much during the Carnival, and then you can almost feel Lent in the air. You breathe it. It takes over the city. New Orleans goes into mourning. Thats when the plainclothesmen haunt the bars again for vagrants,” she warned. “And thats when Jocko leaves—at midnight. The next Mardi Gras, hes back. . . . And yet, each year since Ive been here, I wonder if that will be the last one—if he’ll never show up again. . . .”

  As if now on an invisible trapeze, I thought suddenly.

  “In a few years he’ll be old,” Sylvia said, “and hes the kind that should stay Young. No brains. Just goodlooks—and an instinctive understanding of so many things. I guess no one can blame him for anything,” she said, as if to herself. “Something—something tossed him out!” she said fiercely. An intense silence. Then: “Maybe it would have been better for him if he’d fallen off the damn trapeze,” she said brutally.

  I looked at her, at the harsh, saddened face, and I realized how violently, at that moment, she hated the world of this bar she owned.

  As if she had materialized from the very smoke that clouded the bar, the most beautiful queen I have ever seen appeared. If it hadnt been for her clothes—maleclothes worn to imitate a woman’s—I would have thought her a real woman; and as a woman, she would have been one of the most beautiful, too. In her 20s, with a pale perfectly featured face—the face any woman would have envied on another—she had dark-lidded eyes and long, blond, almost-golden hair, which now is tightly bunched in back to conceal its length. She is lithe, slender. There is a ghostquality about her, perhaps because of the way even the feeble light plays on her hair, so that, appearing almost translucent, she seems incandescent.

  She surveyed the bar slowly, as if for the first time, with a smile which is unbearably, wistfully sad. In this bar of very real faces—the studied toughness of the malehustlers, the sedulous (but largely unsuccessful to practiced eyes) madeup attempts at femininity of the queens—this youngman, this queen, standing in the midst of it, appears as unreal as an angel: a monument to the utter perversity of her violated sex.

  She glides through the bar now, easily, past the bunched groups; nodding to the others—not aloofly, but, rather, as if she herself is aware of the unreality of her person; and they stare at her in a kind of bewildered awe. She moves like fog, as if some invisible wind is carrying her along toward Sylvia. Now, closely, I can see the queen’s haunting green eyes. And I feel a great sadness because of the doom so inexorably stamped on that beautiful face.

  “How do you feel now, Kathy?” Sylvia asked her softly.

  “Oh, Im always all right,” Kathy answered. Even her voice has a quality of unreality. “Im fine. . . . Sylvia, what time is it, honey?”

  Without looking at her watch, Sylvia said: “It’s five o’clock.” But I knew it was much later.

  “I dont mean what time. Did I say that? I mean what day?”

  Sylvia answered. She reached out to touch the queen, but she brought her hand quickly back.

  That late in the week?” Kathy sighs.

  “That early,” Sylvia laughed unconvincingly.

  “Oh, well,” Kathy said indifferently. The smile hasnt left her face. “Youre new in the Quarter, arent you, baby?” she asked me. “I dont come out very often any more.” She seemed to be looking through me, as if everyone within the span of her vision is as unreal as she herself. “New people all the time, some come back, some never do.” She asked Sylvia, “Is Jocko back in town yet?”

  “Yes. He was here earlier.”

  “Good,” said Kathy. “I like him. . . . What time did you say it is?” she asked again, vaguely.

  Sylvia answered, this time correctly. But Kathy seemed not to have noticed the difference.

  “Excuse me,” she breathed—and she disappeared as unreally as she had appeared.

  “Shes beautiful,” I said.

  Illogically, as if mysteriously it explained the queen’s beauty, Sylvia said: “Her family threw her out, years ago; they even offered to pay her to stay away.” She added proudly: “But Kathy wouldnt take their money. Shes lived in a little hellhole in the Quarter ever since then—on her own. . . . Those blackouts she has—. . . Shes dying,” she said abruptly.

  A subtle odor—Kathy’s perfume—lingered long after she was gone. Like the memory of someone’s death.

  Like flotsam from the world’s seas, the vagrants of America’s blackcities are washed into New Orleans. And Svlvia scrutinized each new face of the invading waves as if all—or perhaps one miraculous one among them—would bring her the answer to an obsessive question—would . . . perhaps . . . redeem her for the very fact of her own bar.

  She had just warned me that there was a man in the bar who might be a vice cod playing a score, and she was maneuvering to get a young bov away from him. In the process of catching the kid’s attention, she saw a youngman in a suit walking into the bar from the courtvard: a goodlooking youngman. evidently not a hustler, probably a masculine homosexual, neither out to score nor to be scored from; looking for a mutual partner.

  Sylvia followed him intentlv with her eyes as he stons to talk to another youngman, also in a suit, also obviously neither hustler nor score. Sylvia remained as if bound to the barstool; but her body became tense, as if, of its own volition, beyond her conscious control, it might spring toward the youngman. Together, the two youngmen approached us, standing only a few feet away. Seeing the first one clearly at last, Sylvia turned from him—as she had turned from me that first day—and she sighed in frustrated expectation.

  Moments later, without a word, she walked outside into the street.

  Through the open door, the curtain pushed back to welcome the street crowds, I saw her standing on the sidewalk, looking in all directions as if undecided which one to take, or as if it made no difference.

  She brought her hand to her forehead in a tight fist.

  Then she squared h
er shoulders and walked away.

  And at that moment I knew with certainty what I must have suspected from the very first—and I realized why it was that I returned to her constantly.

  4

  “Fucking queers!” the drunk man roared as two queens swished by him gayly into the head of The Rocking Times.

  “What the hell are you doing here if you dont like it?” Sylvia was standing before him like a black panther.

  “Hell,” the man said, “I dont need em. Im married, got a wife—kids.”

  “Not much of a wife,” Sylvia lashed, “if you have to come here to feel youre a man.” Her voice was controlled, but her face blanched.

  “If I had a queer in my family, I’d kill him!” the man spat venemously.

  Sylvia grabbed him by the shoulders. “Get out of here!” she commanded, pushing him out.

  And then, instantly, shockingly, it began.

  Like someone yearning for water—deprived of it for long hot smoldering days, Sylvia brushed past the bartender behind the bar, and she reached for a bottle of bourbon, and she poured out a glass. I could see the taut veins on her neck as she leaned her head back, welcoming the stinging amber liquid. Her hands, which had been trembling as she stared at the drunk man stumbling anxiously out of the bar, relaxed. She gulned another drink in one long thirsty swallow.