by John Rechy
The bartender is looking at her in helpless pity as if he knew what would happen now; as if perhaps he had witnessed it before.
Released, Sylvia turned to face the jammed bar. Her eyes had misted, whether from the harshness of the burning liquor or from something else.
And she held the glass out—high—in a toast to everyone here.
I left the bar quickly, infinitely depressed. But in the other crowded bars, or on the streets, or walking through Jackson Square, I was obsessed by Sylvia’s face. And I went back to The Rocking Times.
Intermittently, she was surrounded by the people she knew, the people whom, I was certain now, she had needfully searched out. She was laughing raucously; but her face was marked clearly by the impact of the liauor and the years-long, clawing desire to understand what everything in her. ancestrally, demanded she hate. Occasionally, someone would place a hand on her shoulder, cautioning her about the fervid, sudden drinking; someone else would coax her to let him take her home. But she pushed the hand away, rejected each suggestion that she should leave.
“No!” she said harshly. “This is it!” Her face clouded, as if she were still sober enough not to be certain whether she wanted to go on. To indicate her instant decision, she gulned another drink. “Gonna sell this bar!” she shouted. “Leave New Orleans—never, never, never come back.”
“Not even to see Us?” said Desdemona Duncan sadly.
Sylvia raised a wrenched face toward her, touched the queen’s cheek tenderly, and began to cry in drunken, convulsed sobs. She slid off the stool and rushed out into the courtyard.
I found her there, hidden in the shadows, sitting on the steps outside leading to the upper part of the building. Jocko sat next to her. The chilly night wind had dried her tears, and her face is glazed and unreal, as if a mask, worn successfully for years, had been washed away. The toughness is all gone, drained by the liquor and the tears. She covered her face, as if to shut out the vision of the bar, her bar. The cold wind brushed past us like the wing of a huge bird.
About us in the courtyard, people milled in the light-speckled shadows.
And we sat there on the steps with Sylvia—Jocko and I, silently.
“Let me take you home, baby,” Jocko said.
“Not yet,” she said. “Just stay here—both of you—just for a few minutes—with me.”
Now she faced the courtyard, staring, listening raptly to the jumbled conversations, the shrieking of the queens rising above the sounds of the others. . . .
And then Kathy was standing before us, looking down sadly at Sylvia. Sylvia reached for her hand; and Kathy said, “How are you feeling, honey?”
“Kathy,” Sylvia stuttered drunkenly, “Kathy—honey—Im sorry.”
“Dont be sorry,” Kathy said—and she waited. And I will wonder later if she knew it had to be to her that Sylvia must speak the words she will soon say.
“You dont understand,” Sylvia insisted.
“I do,” Kathy said.
“No, you cant understand!” Sylvia said. “Because—. . . because I did to him . . . what they did to you.” And she blurted at last: “I threw my own son out!”
I felt a sudden cold sadness pass over me at her words. Jocko sighed.
“I do understand, honey,” Kathy said, and she held Sylvia’s hand more tightly.
“No,” Sylvia sighed. “No one knows. . . .” She looked at Jocko, then at me, again at Kathy. “He could be . . . you . . . or you . . . or any of these other . . . youngmen!” she said. “Your age—their age. Theres just two ages anyway: youngman and oldman.” As if an inner echo had accused her—had been accusing her silently for years—she protested haltingly: “It’s just—just not possible—to love too much. Too little—okay: The whole screwing world loves too little. But too much?” She paused, as if thoughts, long submerged, had begun to gnaw into the present of her mind. “But maybe it is possible—to love too much—and too blindly—and maybe I did,” she muttered, looking at me.
The ferocious love of my mother from which I had fled leapt on my consciousness like a dark animal.
“My only son . . .” Sylvia sighed. “A stranger to me; a stranger to his long . . . long string of fathers,” she accused herself.
Jocko straightened up, as if her words had reminded him of something. Whatever he remembered, he seemed to have been carried into a past which had determined his own vagrant future.
“Yeah,” Sylvia said, “I did love him too much—except—. . . except when he needed me. . . . Kathy,” she said, as if she must explain it to her, be vindicated by her, “he came to me, he started telling me—. . . I made him stop. I said, ‘Shut up!’ And he tried to go on, trying to tell me—. . . And he was crying . . . crying. And I said, ‘Dont you dare go on!’ I shouted, ’What youre trying to tell me isnt true!’ “
She put her hands to her ears, drowning out the sounds from the bar, the courtyard; trying unsuccessfully to drown other louder, more insistent sounds from the ravenous past When she removed her hands, tiredly, from her ears as if surrendering to this courtyard, we heard, shatteringly clearly, the high-pitched shrieking voice of a queen saying to another:
“Sweetie, I dont give a damn what nelly queen Lily says about me. After all!—she dont pay my gay rent!”
Sylvia laughed, hearing that: laughed in pain. And then, waving her hand in a sweeping gesture that included this courtyard and the bar, she sighed:
“All—all, all . . . all . . . my . . . saintly . . . children. All flung out by something—or someone!—to a city like New Orleans—to a bar—like mine. Flung out guiltily. Guiltily,” she echoed herself. . . . Then entreatingly, to explain, to confess: “And, that day, when he wouldnt stop, I shouted to him, ‘Get out! Dont come back!’ . . .” She covered her eyes. “And the memory of his face, that last time—his face smeared with tears as I yelled after him: ‘Youre a man, God damn it! Youre a . . . man.’ “This time she whispered the last word as if it had lost all its meaning. “And you know why? You know why I couldnt face what he was trying to tell me?” she asked Kathy. “Because—. . .” She stopped. Then she finished harshly: “Because I felt—. . . guilty! Crushingly, crushingly guilty—as if—as if he were accusing me in making this confession to me. . . . And I—didnt—understand—. . .”
“But you understand now,” Kathy said.
Sylvia looked up at her, studying the beautiful woman’s face. “Understand?” she said, as if perplexed by the word itself. She shook her head. “No. Ive tried. . . . But I’ll never . .. understand.” She seemed suddenly to be searching the courtyard, her eyes wide—wide with the hatred which in some strange way, through pain, had been forced to turn into something else—at least the attempt to understand.
Kathy bent down and kissed Sylvia on the forehead, like a child kissing her mother at bedtime, forgiving her.
And Sylvia raised her glazed unmasked face to the dark sky, and she said:
“God damn it—I dont give a damn! Either in makeup, either like a queen—in the highest, brightest screaming drag—with sequins and beads—. . . Either like that—or hustling a score, trying to prove with another man, because of my . . . words still ringing in his ears—trying that way to prove that I was right, that he is a man. . . . Even—. . . even if he has to prove it by finding another man who will pay him for his . . . masculinity—. . . Even with a bloody gash on his head, proving it with violence. That way . . . or with another youngman, his—. . . lover—. . . Any way! Any shape! I dont give a damn! . . . It’s just that—God damn it!—I want to see him—if only once more—just once—to tell him—. . .” and her voice trailed off into a barely audible whimper: “—to tell him Im sorry.”
CITY OF NIGHT
THOSE DAYS. . . .
Those New Orleans carnival days, divided for me not by clock-hours but by the many, many faces. Vicissitude of sex-locked rooms.
Those face-crammed days in which time existed in the one dimension of Now, immediately. In which I took pills indiscrimina
tely to keep me awake—pills passed from one person to another with more abandon than a cigarette is offered. In which I made it several times a day, often only pretending to come. In which I rushed through the barcrowds crushed like communal massed lovers—as the fugitive armies, expelled shortly from the other nightcities, came daily in restless tides to join that procession before Ash Wednesday.
And occasionally I will remember—during those teeming French Quarter days, like a startlingly recalled dream of long ago—things forgotten for long returning as phantom-memories—and suddenly I’ll remember the processions in El Paso when the people marched chanting to the top of the mountain where the statue of Christ looked down, pityingly, arms outstretched—but instead of devout-faced men and women chanting prayers, instead of the priests in bright robes, there will be, now, in New Orleans, soon, only days away, on Shrove Tuesday, the masked clowns, the twisting snakedancing revelers. . . . The seminude sweating bodies writhing along the streets.
The parades. . . .
In one moment of sharing (as on that night, sitting with Sylvia on the steps of the courtyard of her bar: with Jocko and Kathy), the hint of a miracle can occur. But even vague miracles fade, turn inside out. Momentarily, the knowledge of Sylvia’s pain, when it had become a spoken thing, had fused with our own knowledge of ourselves, and from that knowledge of guilt, in that courtyard, we had attempted mutually to vindicate each other. But a kind of closeness that joins people too suddenly can be a fleeting thing. Accumulated for years, finally released by liquor, confessions flow out like a flood-swollen river. Then, calmed, the waters seek to return to their source, to retreat; but the memory of the turmoil, of the flooding, remains, scarring the land it washed.
And so it was now with Sylvia. For a whole day she had stayed away from The Rocking Times. When she returned, it with again the Sylvia I had first known: sitting at the bar, drinking Seven-Up. Waiting. But now, although she spoke to me much as before, I could sense that she preferred to avoid me.
As with Pete, those many faces away, when his discovered knowledge of himself had threatened me and we had chosen to pass like strangers on the street, the face which Sylvia turned to me now was the face of someone who, clearly, in the deep night, wishes passionately—because of that fear of vulnerability in a world in which you have to pretend at toughness—that he could erase from another’s mind the shared remembrances of what has passed between them.
But, once, for a moment, we had been Close, and perhaps in that remembered closeness, the real miracle might occur, waiting in a chamber of the mind which could open now more readily, with others.
Thursday.
The Parade of the Krewe of the Knights of Momus—the mocking spirit expelled from Olympus—will invade New Orleans tonight, four days before Mardi Gras inflames the city at midnight. Floats will sweep the dirty streets trailing gauze like ghost-wings; silverleafed reflecting the choked lights along Canal Straeet under the winter stars. . . .
Waking up wherever that may be, invariably I’ll feel a sudden apprehension, because now I will have to face the Mirror, which will stare at me lividly—and I’ll look for Someone; but I wont see whom I want to see, but see, instead, in that morning hour (the hour of waking, whether afternoon or night) a strange accusing face: . . . Myself. With knowing eyes that somehow dont belong: a face violent in its Knowingness, if only so to me.
Scrutinizing that stranger’s face, of Myself in the Mirror, I hear the voice of the man Im with, saving: “Dont stare so hard; youre still a boy”—as if understanding from the searching looks that Im hunting Someone, urgently—that someone unfound in the dim past, in the parks, the moviebalconies, the bars, the streets, the sexrooms; that someone perhaps lost or evaded somewhere in the labyrinthine memories leading back to a serene window. . . . But despite that man’s words, of course I know—and the face knows—that I am no longer a “boy.” I appear Young, yes—but, inside, it’s as if miles of years have stretched since I left that window in El Paso.
Turning away from the Mirror, I feel stabbingly guilty. But guilty of what? Perhaps my guilt is a wayward apology for living in a world for which I dont feel responsible.
I walk out of that room, and the sun claws savagely at my eyes.
It means a day has gone by.
But what good is a day going by so easily when, suddenly, there is the devouring sun and another day, another empty stretch of time before you can hide again?—another day standing before me at attention like a private waiting to be told what to do, sir. . . . It’s better to wake up nights so you dont have to screw your eyes up and your Dark self adjusting to the sun.
Reluctantly I join the hordes of other nightpeople, stark in the reality of Morning, their features as if erased by the sun from the bloodless faces, more stark in juxtaposition with the sleepfed faces of the others, the morningpeople: the many, infinitely many, varieties of “tourists.”
And in that sun, it will begin again, trying to fill the nothing with something—with anything!—which this time is God Damn It this:
Sonny said: “See, you go and tell him—over there, see (and, man, I seen his wallet and that score is loaded!)—and tell him Sandy-Vee wants to see him, and when he comes outside, you come with him and shove him toward the stairs and me and my buddy’ll grab his ass, and if he dont come across nice, we’ll take it and break the bread in three.” His childface looks pervertedly demonic—like a fallen angel’s—as he whispers the plotted violence—his look reflected by the darkhaired youngman beside him who, that other violent afternoon, had taken Sonny with me to Sylvia’s boarded-up bar.
The score was drunk, sitting at Les Petits bar; and responding to the howling anarchy, and challenged by the world implied by Sonny’s plotting words, I said to the score: “Sandy-Vee, outside, she wants to talk to you,” and he got up smiling and looked blearily through the door of the bar, past Angel Face making starved mouth-love to the mike; and the drunk score looked into the courtyard leading past the shadowed steps of balconies to Sandy-Vee’s bar, and he started to come outside with me, placing his arm around my shoulder warmly as if we were two sudden comrades; and he saw the two moving out and looked at me sadly and sighed and understood sadly through the liquor and said: “You run along yourself, son, and you tell Sandy-Vee I’ll see her later, hear?”
And I sighed too in relief, as the two outside prowled waiting.
Friday.
The Parade of Hermes . . . patron of wanderers ruling over the restless flocks, over the travelers from America’s grinding cities; nightmessenger bringing the news of the approaching Tuesday. . . .
Although my wallet was loaded, I knew suddenly I had to clip someone again as urgently as some men need to come sometimes—for nothing better to do, the way old women knit. The jaded man from Houston in the tawdry pink Cadillac (with the jaded younger man with the face like a blubbery mask—rather, like a fish long out of water—and the tall lanky dancer, just as male-jaded) said: “Join us for breakfast?”
And we did go to the Bourbon House, but it was jammed—and so we went, instead, directly to the motel, and I had expected money, but no one said anything, so I used this as my excuse.
We drank and drank on the bed—and I still felt sober—still deadly Sober even when the three jaded figures seemed to swirl in one enormous, composite, gobbling mouth about me.
All three exhausted from the liquor, out—I went through fishface’s pockets first, and counting the money carefully, I took only half—then the others, and I took just half. Then I lay down on the floor—because I didnt want to be near them—and almost-slept and woke up and woke them, in the diamond-clear afternoon.
Then!
Laughing, Smiling, Being Happy, they rode me into town through the coldblazing sun and the knowledge of myself, with the clipped money in the pocket of my levis; and fishface looked through his wallet and said, “I been robbed.” And I said: “Youve got to be awful careful of that during the carnival, theres lots of thieves around.”
&n
bsp; I got off at the Y. And I saw the statue of General Lee surveying Lee Circle, arms crossed, disapproving.
I saluted him.
And I thought he must still be looking at me reprimandingly through the window of the Y as the hot-water steam mushroomed about me, protecting.
Saturday.
The Parade of Iris. . . . Rainbow floats weirdly illuminated, passing in papier-mâchéd splendor. . . .
And still I was sober—despite the maryjane, the pills, the beer, the whiskey; still alertly conscious, feeling at times a parodoxically turbulent calmness, perhaps like the stillness of a stormcloud waiting for a bolt of lightning to release the pent-up rain. Torrents of expectation and alarm rage inside me at the prospect of Mardi Gras, now only two days away.
The queens would be bitchy like petulant children to each other that day in the bars because the vice patrol had made them cut their hair, they looked so much like women and thats against the law If Youre Not—and so, Dejectedly, with short hair, they must face The World; and feeling their female stances somewhat compromised—unfairly—by that short, short hair, theyre arguing rhetorically over which queen would have which of us at her pad that night.
Betti (who was Benny in Nebraska) said I was her new husband, and Vicki and Salli (Victor and Steve, respectively, in Atlanta) grabbed Sonny and Jocko and said: “Well, honey, these are our husbands.”
And as the queens began to dish each other, myself and the two other “husbands” felt ourselves so Goddamned absurdly Masculine—because, remember, queens always say they want Men—and we kept on studiedly digging a cute young girl nearby—because youre supposed to want real girls only . . . for “love.” But, oh, oh, soon Sonny has drifted away, looking for the two momentarily lost scores hes been going around with; and Jocko left—and Im standing outside on the street.