City of Night

by John Rechy

  I saw a tiny rag-doll Miss Ange waving at me asking was I looking for A Pad To Sleep?

  She had short hair.

  And I began to laugh so uncontrollably, right there on the street, that she swished away in understandable indignation.

  Suddenly I felt vastly repentant—and very, very sad.

  Very sad, sitting in the Coffee House at the French Market, sitting thinking strangely obsessively of the lady-tourists dragging their husbands depressingly along Royal Street (Roo Rowyall), hunting for gay antiques and pralines that are Clean, and feeling, myself, Hugely Bitter that they wouldnt give a royal damn if they knew that only minutes earlier the plainclothes had warned me—as they were warning all the others on the streets (the jails being crowded)—if I was still in town, theyd bust me for novisiblelegalmeansofsupport.

  Sunday. The parades canceled.

  It snowed today in New Orleans for the first time in more than 20 years, I wrote my mother.

  A little boy—his features Youngly real in the icy white glare—rushed excitedly into the street from somewhere to gather the mysterious snow, his face turned questioningly to the Sky.

  And the snow fell in white plumes.

  Like a million tiny diamonds it covered the cemetery in back of the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

  And everyone, even Us, looked pink and real in the white light.

  And if it had snowed longer, it might have killed some of the cockroaches. For a few hours, this rotten city was purified.

  Someone even threw a snowball!

  The snow melted in quilted brown patches, it rained, there was slush. The sun came out with renewed cold fury.

  Monday.

  The Parade of Proteus, who can assume any shape, any form, will pass tonight in a flaming snake of torches. Whiterobed mummers, ghosts of ghosts. . . . And at midnight, Mardi Gras begins. . . .

  Negro children somersault along the street for Tips. Stray Dixieland bands become more numerous. Spasm bands sprout. . . . And this birthplace of Jazz is now shaking and rolling, twisting, to the new sounds of our ravenous time.

  Through the open doors of the welcoming nightclubs on Bourbon (aggressive hawkers like recruiting sergeants luring the tourists with unfulfilled promises), you hear the drum-dominated, subterranean sounds of take-it-off music from the vast neighborhood of sexless sex.

  In the cramped rooms, the smoke-choked apartments, the old, old houses, into the patios, the parties are impromptu and laughter reigns tover the city like a reckless deity.

  And the afternoon has already aged into grayish yellow, the shadows are lengthening to pull down the night. And soon even that fading light wearies. Stars appear cautiously in the wings of dark. The gray darkness reaches insidiously soothingly for its anxious children.

  In the swelling cankerous crowds, men and women in the streets drink out of giant hurricane glasses from O’Malley’s bar, tilting the glasses to capture each drop, seemingly toasting the faint moon which has already appeared in her own sequined drag. . . . And the cops continue intrepidly, pointlessly, vengefully to scour the city, nailing the youngmen who look like vagrants—and who, as the cops stop to interrogate someone else, can dart into the crowded streets, escaping before their absence is discovered.

  Past the Cathedral, obliviously, swelling groups snakedance dizzily through the weird streets and alleys. And in the rushing night, the Cathedral—its nebulous spires trying more urgently to fade into Heaven—girds itself stonily for the masked revelers who will soon appear. . . . And gray, as if preparatory to mourning, donning the night’s dark shroud, it waits—frozen, austere, ashen—for its own redemptive day:

  Ash Wednesday.

  Near the French Market is an enormous chicken and rooster coop. Earlier, I had stood before the wire, watching in fascination as the roosters sliced frantically at the air, feathers like sparks of many-colored fire. . . . Suddenly, one jumped above the others, clawing directly before me, urgently at the wired cage.

  Remembering that now as if I were standing before that cage again, one thought thundered in my mind:

  I’ll go to the airport right now, I’ll get a plane, I’ll fly out of this city!

  But already, night has inundated New Orleans.

  The mob frenzy is like an epidemic out of control, claiming more victims each darkening moment. I squeeze through the revelers, and I feel myself once again exploding with excitement. I move from bar to bar, from drink to drink, from person to person—pushed along by that excitement which I know is suspended precariously over a threatening chasm of despair. But if I can go on!—hectically!—if I can retain my equilibrium on this level of excitement, of liquored sobriety!—then the swallowing void, though already yawning, can be avoided.

  Night races toward midnight.

  “Let’s ball!” A woman’s arm curls tightly about my waist, whirls me around. . . . Someone blows a shrill whistle at me, its paper body unfurling suddenly like a rigid-spined worm, tipped with tiny fluttering feathers quivering tensely, mockingly before my face.

  Rattles shake like at a children’s party out of control. Noises blast their way into silence, into a blare outlasting sound. Drums, voices, laughter! A raging hurricane lashing at the city. A symphony gone made.

  Stray costumes appear.

  A band of red-dressed men and women in black-tentacled masks dance prematurely in the maddened street—red like flashing rubies crushed together, angry flames burning insanely bright before turning into smoke. Redly. . . . Roses pressed against each other in screaming shapes of red, red shrieking red. And like a flock of startled red-winged bats, the group disbands in separate scarlet bodies caracoling along the streets to join other screaming groups.

  Confetti like colored snow pours from the balconies, quickly stirred by shifting, stamping feet. . . . Streamers float, curl gracefully, are carried aloft by the winter night-breeze—suspire in the air as if reluctant to be trampled on along the littered streets.

  Midnight!

  The revelers sweep into the streets like tumblers into an arena.

  Mardi Gras!

  CHI-CHI: Hey, World!

  1

  As IF THE DOOR—THE ONLY DOOR—to an insane asylum had suddenly been thrust open, the crowds rocketed along the streets, flowed in currents, chose sides; howled the purple laughter; pushed, screamed, shouted, shrieked, roared—crushed against each other in a jigsaw puzzle of unfitting colored pieces.

  Whistles, horns!

  A churning, violently tossing ocean of angry cacophonous sounds. Multikeyed laughter erupting in unison like a fire-bursting sky rocket scattering a diffusion of burning sparks into the streets. Over the broken noises, momentarily the scream of a woman threatens hysteria, reaches its strident plateau, breaks, veers from its panicked course, becomes a longly sustained joyous laughing, reverting jarringly into an ear-knifing sirenshriek. Floating to the surface of that raging storm of erratic sounds, the beat of bongos underscores the streetmadness as if somewhere a spontaneous parade has begun.

  Having waited in their rooms for this magic witching hour to convert them into women to the full extent of drag, the queens are the first to appear in costume. Most of the others will wait until the morning. But the queens have already come out anxiously like prisoners fleeing a jail.

  Through the crowds, I spot Miss Ange—self-conscious about her short, short hair, which undauntedly she has arranged in minuscule ringlets over her forehead. In a green-flowered hoop skirt and a wide yellow straw hat—her dress so wide that she shrieks in annoyance when someone threatens to crush it—which keeps her screaming over and over—today she is Scarlett O’Hara. . . . Desdemona and Drusilla Duncan, standing under the yellowish umbrella of a streetlight, For The Whole World To See, are in twin outfits of the fast, vampish 20s—their hair, too, in helpless ringlets—and they carry cigarette holders pointed carefully into the air in order to avoid poking some sympathetic someone. . . . Shimmying recklessly on the street, legs thrashing, looking like an alarm clock jangling
insistently out of control, Whorina is a Woman of the Night—in a studded shiny red dress: a vision, at last, of her stifled impossible dreams from the graveyard hours when she knows, inside, that she was meant to be, every bit, a Woman. . . . And Sandy-Vee, in mesh stockings, bustle like a pinned rose—a chorus girl—has left her bar to display herself as A Celebrity. A handsome youngman in tuxedo and cummerbund escorts her Proudly. . . . Another queen, Cinderella, shakes a long metallic wand—gold streamers attached—at the tourists, as if to banish them from her sight forever.

  Now, during Mardi Gras, when the barcrowds flow from one place to another—a mob thirsty for the momentary liquid gayety of the carnival—from the blue-shifting, pink lights of the burlesque halls to the offbeat, side-street bars—there will be, too, in overwhelming abundance, the curious and the largely unaware, both men and women.

  For this one day, those two worlds will collide—the night-world and the touristworld—on the twisting, grinding, clamoring stage of Carnival, New Orleans.

  Even in the melee of queenfaces, painted eyes, bodies in drag—even then, she stood out from all the others at The Rocking Times: a queen perched on a stool like a startled white owl: a man with bleached, burned-out hair and a painted face dominated to the point of absolute impossibility by the largest, widest, darkest eyes I have ever seen, painted into two enormous tadpoles, slanting to the very edges of her temples. The frizzled quality of the bleached curled hair and the devouring wideness of the eyes gave her the appearance of a demented Cassandra whose futile, unattended knowledge makes her burn, inside, with a fire that consumes only herself, while others refuse to heed the prophecy shining from her face.

  She wore a lace dress, a ruffle about her shoulders: a misty lavender which nevertheless drained—as any other color would have done—her flour-white face, the skin covered with some kind of cement-like powder. As if aware of the precariousness of the improvised harsh makeup, which may crack suddenly, she holds her face stiffly. Two round smears of rouge burn on her cheeks as if she had been slapped over and over, cheeks painted red like the bright rounded smears on a clown.

  She wore bracelets—cheapglass-beaded. Rings. Sequins sprinkled in her hair. Tiny glittering dots pasted over her blue eyelids. A long, long necklace which wound about her neck at least five times dangled in a pendant where her clumsily stuffed false breasts rounden rather than protrude. Occasionally, she pulled tightly on the strand of the neckbeads—as if to choke herself. Her dress, short, reaches her knees, the legs crossed so that the purple spikeheeled shoes, coming to a long point like those of a witch, protrude on either side of the stool: one foot swinging back and forth impatiently, recklessly, constantly, like a pendulum.

  And this man—this queen—holds a foot-long frailly thin silver-beaded cigarette holder—glossy ebony—the beads buried in it teasingly like tiny, winking, alive eyes. She held the cigarette holder tightly—curiously tightly—from a clenched, angry, potentially menacing fist—and she blew the smoke out constantly, her head turning in abrupt snakehead movements, as if expecting to be assaulted from the rear and trying to obviate the surprise attack by diligent alertness.

  A queen.

  A flamboyant, flagrant, flashy queen. A queen in absurdly grotesque, clumsy drag.

  But there was something else.

  There is something else that accosts you immediately about this flaming, reckless, gaudy queen contemptuously puffing out smoke as if it were something burning fiercely from Within that will force you to acknowledge her blazing anger:

  When she slides off the stool momentarily—and nervously, uncertainly, often—to straighten the lavender folds of the lace dress, you will see that she is enormous, this queen: over six feet tall. And if youre a man and you stand near her—near that painted man, that demented-eyed queen like a startled white owl—you will surely be envious of his/her shoulders: which are immensely, improbably wide.

  And youll notice, beyond the lace drag, the idealized body of a powerful man. Her arms, beneath the delicate lace ruffles which dance up and down in curves, are bulgingly muscled, deeply vein-rooted. Her legs, supported precariously on the wobbly high-heeled witchshoes when she stands, reveal themselves strong and firm, molded solidly, massively, as if by years of physical labor or exercise which necessitates sustained straining.

  Yet this body and this voice (the husky voice too: as she turns, camping, to speak to me, the Cassandra owleyes becoming momentarily demure, the look of a man patently unsuccessfully mimicking a flirt woman), which should belong to that idealization of a man, are vitiated by the lavender drag-clothes. The gestures that were meant to match that man’s body have wilted. . . . Occasionally, as if by an impulse not quite drowned, not quite smothered by the perfumed femininity, she straightened up very much like a man. Then, as if realizing what shes done, her body relaxes, melts, curves effeminately, as if to compensate guiltily for the sudden flash of masculinity.

  An incredible gigantic white owl, I thought—as I leaned against the bar near her to allow the mashing tides of people to pass in their fervid display of restlessness (as I lean against the bar, too, in order to avoid facing Sylvia, whom I can see sitting at the other end, closely surveying the constantly changing panorama of her bar). And through pill-clouded thoughts, I imagine this queen next to me as though she had descended from the sky through the ceiling, perching owl-like on that stool—defiantly, to bring her unheard prophecy to doomed ears.

  Through the open door, near which she sat, facing it, the man-and-woman crowds, howling outside in the compulsive happiness which may be Terror, are visible like writhing worms gnawing at each other. And the blond-owl queen in lace drag turns toward the door, slowly as if to perform a ritual:

  With the cigarette holder clenched between her second and fourth fingers—the third finger, erect, supporting the holder—she aimed an unequivocal fuck-you symbol at the world Outside—and she rasps loudly:

  “Hey, world!”

  Then the curious curse of contempt was followed by unintelligible grumbling. And now loudly: “Why doesnt somebody close the fuckin doors? You wanna contaminate the Pure air in Here?” as, at each tossed-out word, she “purifies” the air with puffs of gray smoke, to create a smokescreen that will shelter her within the wombgrayness of this bar. She scowled meanly at the door. Open, it threatens her world.

  “Chi-Chi! Chi-Chi honey!” Miss Ange (Scarlett O’ Hara) gushed at her, over somebody’s shoulder, unable to advance any closer through the deadlocking crowd, “you look simply Fabulous, honey! No, no, you dont look Fabulous—you look Real! . . . And who made your gorgeous gown?—Im green with envy,” she says, unsuccessfully hiding her astonishment at the clumsy dress draping the huge body.

  “I made it myself,” the blond-owl queen, drag-named Chi-Chi, snorted.

  “When did you get back into town?” Miss Ange asked, wresting her arm free from between two people pulling her along. “I thought youd decided Not To Come Back. How was Boston, baby?”

  “Lousy,” Chi-Chi answered. “I kept getting busted. Father-fucking cops! wont leave me! alone!” she called loudly as if addressing a proclamation at every hostile person in this bar.

  Farther and farther away, surrendering now to being carried along by the shifting crowd, Miss Ange shouts: “But youre making it All Right?”

  “Yeah—yeah, still living off the lean of the land,” said Chi-Chi sourly.

  “See you later, sweetie!” Miss Ange called, all but swallowed by the other bodies as she adjusts her beribboned straw hat; raising her skirt over her head to make her dizzying way through the crowd. “Y’all stop crushing muh skirt!” she pleads plaintively.

  Mostly sporting New-Year’s-type hats, the tourists—intrigued, revealing auspicious Interest—eye the queens; and Chi-Chi eyes them back coldly, challenging them.

  As I lean against the bar—for protection from the crushing mobs—leaning there next to Chi-Chi until the strategic time when I can move away—another queen, tossed out of the main current
of the struggling bodies, spots Chi-Chi incredulously; but toning down the incredulity, she welcomed her to the queen sorority of the French Quarter.

  “Im—whew!—Echoes and Encores,” she says to the blond owl. “I never—whew!—seen you in the Quarter, but then—whew!—I just got here myself—and, well, I think We Girls—whew!—have got to stick together—or—whew!—we are Lost! . . . Oh, damn this maddening crowd anyway. Why dont they go home!” she shouted.

  She squeezed in next to me, smiling at me—Bewitchingly, she thinks—and lets her hand drop casually so that it floated tenuously over my groin. “Dont I know you from the 1-2-3 in L.A., doll?” she asked me. The floating hand finally cupped my crotch. I said maybe. “Well, it’s closed now, you know—so is Ji-Ji’s—the heat is on in downtown L.A. something fierce.” She emphasized the ferocity of heat-heavy Los Angeles with an intimate press of her searching hand. . . . She turns to the owlqueen Chi-Chi: “What is your name, sweetie?” she asks her.

  The owlqueen answered: “Chi-Chi. . . . And where did you get such a crazy handle like Echoes and Encores?”

  Holding herself as if a hundred cameras are focusing on her nonexistent beauty to record this revelatory moment, Echoes and Encores answers: “Well! . . . My Life Has Been Just That: a long, long series of echoes and encores. . . . Oh, Chi-Chi, honey,” she said dramatically as her hand more openly and with assurance now explores my thighs since I havent knocked it off, “I just got to tell you about a positively shattering experience I had just a while ago.” Suddenly she develops a thick, inconsistent Southern accent: “Ahm still shakin from it.” She held out her free hand—gloved (shes an elegant lady)—to prove it. “Ah saw this cute butch numbuh—and Ah wouldda swore hes a hustluh—and Ah thought: Well, your mothuh’s gonna go aftuh that one! . . Well, honey, that butch numbuh turns out to be a les-bay-an—the butchest dam diesel dike y’evuh haid yuh gay eyes on!” Now she grinds her squirming butt against my pelvis and goes on: “I wanna tell you, Miss Chi-Chi: that dike was so dam butch if Ah wahnt such a lady muhself, why, I wouldda turned straight for huh. . . . Why, they are gettin butchuh and butchuh each yeah—those dam buildikes. And Ah don mine tellin you Ah personally think it is ob-see-an: girls dressed like men!”