City of Night

by John Rechy

  “Dikes gotta live too,” Chi-Chi growled hostilely at Echoes and Encores.

  “But, oh, me-oh-my!” shrieks Echoes and Encores, reaching out delightedly to touch Chi-Chi’s massively muscled arm. “Nevuh you mine about girls!. . . Ah just wanna ask you, Chi-Chi: Where did you get those Shoulders? And those Muscles—I swan! Rippling—thats what they are! . . . Honey, you just take off that dress and that paint and I’ll marry you!”

  “Cut the low camp, bitch!” Chi-Chi barked furiously at Echoes and Encores, shoving the queen’s hand roughly away from her shoulder. “Im as much of a Lady as you are—and dont you forget it . . . Now swish your goddam nelly ass away and leave us alone!” To me, as if to reassure me that she is a queen: “Stick around till this mob clears, babe; I’ll party you like you never been partied before.”

  At the top of her voice—in order to be heard over the paroxysmal roar of the crowd—and safely away from Chi-Chi, who, because of her enormous size, would have had to struggle for minutes through the crowd to reach her—a startled Echoes and Encores confided to another queen: “That big queen over there—I swear, she must be a Mr America in drag!”

  “I saw her!” said the other, hollering too. “She might be the vice squad—you never know what those bastards will pull.”

  “Do you know?” hollers Echoes and Encores, forgetting about Chi-Chi “Those tourists over there thought I was A Real Woman!”

  “Thats nothing, honey,” said the other. “I was sitting in a car the other day with a daddy whod left his ole tired wife at the Roosevelt Hotel to be With Me—and we were necking up a storm—and a vice cop saw us and he says—guess what he says to your sister—he says: ‘A Pretty Young Lady like yourself ought to be at home this late in the evening, Miss!’”

  Seizing advantage of a break in the mob, I wrested myself from the bar. At the door, I saw Chi-Chi aim the fuck-you cigarette holder once more at the crowds outside, and I heard her roar loudly:

  “Hey, world!”

  2

  Outside in the chilly air, I felt suddenly whirlingly dizzy. Two hands of darkness threaten to enfold me. But I tell myself Im still completely sober—still not even nearly high enough. The moment of panic is followed by renewed dazzlement.

  I toss myself into the thickening crowds.

  Bodies are passed out in Jackson Square as if on a battlefield before the mop-up, empty hurricane glasses like mock tombs beside them. Occasionally one of the bodies will rouse itself to blow a horn or shout into the night, which is calm and still—a sky like dark ice—and the world so turbulent.

  A flurry of tourists like a band of wide-eyed children in the midst of this flowing river of drowning faces passes gleefully blowing horns, and I think: We’re trying to swim in a river made for drowning. And I feel harrowingly sober.

  At Les Petits, equally crushed: A queen in wilting drag, in withering eye makeup, was singing raucously: “Howre you gonna keep them down on the fawm—after theyve seen a New Wor-lee-eens queen?” . . . The same jangling, jangled crowds. Angel Face—wide livermouthed—is singing a blue jazzsong.

  With great difficulty, advancing two steps, being pushed back one—feeling the ubiquitous hands on my legs—I worked my way to the back of the bar, where a glass was suddenly thrust into my hand by someone I know from the dozens of score-faces here. Liberatingly, outside, I stood in the courtyard, and I gulped the drink in a hurried swallow.

  The crowd was not so thick in this courtyard. Male-and-female couples, male-and-male partners cling in loveshadows against the wall.

  In the center of the courtyard three queens were posing for a man in a small party of tourists. The camera bulb flashed harshly expelling the gray darkness momentarily. The queens, feeling acknowledged as Women, struck impossible languid poses. One bends down, raises her skirt to reveal her man’s knee, invitingly. Miss Ange, in Scarlett-O’Hara plantation tones, says to the man taking the pictures: “Now me! Take My picture!” . . . Muttering “bitch,” the other queens glared at Miss Ange as she poses in her billowing ballgown—as if she has just returned, Triumphantly, to Tara. The flashbulb clicked on the smug at-last womanface bf Miss Ange.

  I sit exhausted on the steps leading to the balcony over the bar. I breathe in the air, deeply, scanning the crowds—which are slowly thinning in respite for the renewed burst of merriment which will precede and follow the morning parade when the fever will rage uncontrolled, twisting across the city like a tornado, when the invasion of costumed revelers will raid the streets.

  In the shadows of the courtyards, Chi-Chi stood against the wall, her head cocked quizzically to one side as if she cant really understand what is going on about her. The breeze had tossed her frizzled hair recklessly, the lace dangles over one massive shoulder. She leaned artlessly, ungracefully against the wall like some kind of lavender vine.

  As the flashbulbs popped around her, chasing away the returning yellowish islands created by the lights strung along the balconies, the lights from inside Les Petits and Sandy-Vee’s—she looked even more incredible. Like a football tackle in drag. Some careless foot must have ripped her lace dress, it dangles in a long tail. Feeling it on her legs, she tore off the piece of lavender cloth, held it now like a delicate lace handkerchief. With the other hand, she grips the cigarette holder in that still-ominous fist

  I raised myself higher on the steps, sat looking down on the scene, feeling a sense of almost-heavenly safety to be watching the crowds from this distance—remotely.

  The man taking the photographs spots Chi-Chi—delightedly like an archeologist finding a rare treasure. He wears an absurd peaked hat, striped red and silver, photographic paraphernalia draped over his shoulders make him look like a futuristic decoration. His wife or companion—but she looks too much like him not to be his wife—his wife is a sadly puffed-up middle-aged woman in a starkly masculine-tailored suit.

  The man with the camera approaches Chi-Chi, while his wife, looking on incredulously at the sight of her, muttered in amazement: “My God!—look at the shoulders on that fairy!”

  Quickly, the two close in on Chi-Chi in visible fascination, followed by the others in their group—two men and two women—each face stamped with that contemptuous, incredulous smile. As if she were an animal which may escape, they pin Chi-Chi against the wall—like hunters, the man’s camera a gun.

  Adjusting the camera, the man said loudly to Chi-Chi:

  “Okay, sweetheart: Now you. I want to show your picture back home.”

  “Otherwise theyll never believe it,” laughed his wife, her laughter echoed by the others.

  “I mean,” said the man—and he grins with all the contempt of his ancestry, “I mean that I wanna show everyone back home what a real big fairy looks like.”

  Chi-Chi shook her head in bewilderment, as if dazed.

  The man’s wife rocks with bitter laughter, as if Chi-Chi’s humiliation will vindicate something inside herself, or perhaps erase something lurking uncomfortably. She stretched the rubber-smile to the point where it seemed her mouth would snap.

  Looking into the camera as he inches closer to her, the man addresses Chi-Chi:

  “Come on, sweetheart, you go ahead and give us a real big fairy pose!”

  “And dont forget to say ‘cheethe,’ his wife lisped poisonously.

  Instantly!—as if a wire had been uncoiled—Chi-Chi sprang away from the supporting wall toward the man with the camera. She didnt even bother to adjust the lace dress; it clung carelessly to one leg, over the knee, revealing the powerful leg. She glared at the man for long seconds, with a hatred greater than she could possibly have felt toward one individual; and she gnashes suddenly at him: “You come on, father-fucker!” And she advanced toward him, toward the encircling group, advanced within that small clearing of grinning, hating faces which is like a symbol of her isolation.

  “Whats the matter?” says the rubbermouthed woman viciously. “Arent you a real lady?”

  Unflinchingly, Chi-Chi aimed her gaze very sure
ly at the woman. Her terrifying owleyes rake the woman’s body significantly—the masculine-suited, frigid body. And Chi-Chi smiled as if at a private secret, just discovered, between her and the woman, who looks quickly away.

  Then the smile disappeared, and Chi-Chi turns again to the man with the camera, still unclicked as if the finger is frozen.

  “Come on!” Chi-Chi repeats. The cigarette holder fell to the ground, her hands tightened into enormous manfists. The paint on her face seemed suddenly to be disappearing—the calcimine powder stripping itself from the skin as if of some inner volition. The false breasts dangled absurdly.

  As I watch from the steps—aroused by the prospect of what may happen and wanting it to happen—Chi-Chi’s face, contorted angrily, seems painfully aware of the crushing fate of her tattered lace dress. And I will think later that in that moment she must have felt the paint like pain on her face. In a moment of recognition—recognizing herself in the eyes of the other world, in the eyes of those leering men and women, in the harsh waiting eye of the camera, recognizing herself prematurely in the picture which would be laughed at, disbelieved—as she stands there like an animal who may or may not be trapped by the hunters, and, if trapped, is determined to wound back savagely—in that moment, she may perhaps have faced that image of herself: because her whole massive body seems to be struggling against something—perhaps that absurd fate—against the shackles of that dress, those rings, beads, sequins.

  And I will wonder later if Chi-Chi was seeing, then, smothered in youthworlds of humiliation and derision, the youngman—himself!—crushed by that something too overwhelmingly unfair to define.

  If she didnt see that, I will remember it in her; and the memory of Miss Destiny, planning her impossible Wedding—the memory, too, of Trudi, resigned to The Beads—the thought of Kathy—will fuse with that remembered sight of Chi-Chi—and I will wonder if Miss Destiny’s evil angel had not, that once, relented—was perhaps even smiling graciously, if only for a few moments, over Chi-Chi.

  Because Chi-Chi still stands menacingly before that man, those other people. And the man doesn’t move, as if the queen-eyes from a strange, forbidden world are not only making it difficult for his finger to click the shutter but are warning him in other, reverberating ways. Chi-Chi is unmistakably a man as he faces that entrapping group and yells: “Father-fuckers! I’ll take you on together or alone! Prove to Me what big men you are! Whos first?—whos first? All of you? Come on!” And the fists wait.

  Like moths attracted to this blazing inner light emanating from Chi-Chi, the other queens, silent and tense, watched as if seeing a part of themselves, long ago throttled, stunningly revealed in this wide-eyed Cassandra.

  And still, no one moves toward Chi-Chi to answer his challenge.

  And as the man makes a sudden nervous motion as if to take the picture, Chi-Chi lunges at him like a grotesque jack-in-the-box. The enormous fist crashes into his face.

  The camera falls to the ground, the bulb smashes.

  The man staggered, reeled against another man, and fell, sprawled on the ground, dazed, at his wife’s feet.

  Chi-Chi’s manfists are still clenched like a champion boxer’s, ready for the others.

  But no one moved.

  And was it only the sudden, ramming violence, the sudden smashing fist prepared to crush again and again, the sudden threatening image of this queen? Or was it, instead—or at least partly—Chi-Chi’s shouting for an instant acknowledgment of dignity? Or was it a swift glimpse, by that man now cringing stonecold-afraid beside his wife, of himself in Chi-Chi, not of the woman in himself, but of the hopelessness of his own sad fate, mirrored in his wife’s tired face, the frigid body—whatever shape that fate may have assumed for him, whatever destiny hovering over him—over us—like a dreadful cloud?

  What is it that makes that man, his face imprinted with the terrible impact of Chi-Chi’s giant fist, what is it that makes him turn to his wife and to the others with him, away from this menacing-eyed Cassandra whose message of doom, through violence, has finally flashed out—and, after looking at Chi-Chi in amazement and, now, with only the barest, flimsiest imitation of derision—that derision so carefully taught and practiced, seeded, cultivated, nurtured—what is it that makes that man, rising from the ground, retreat and say to his wife, as he covers his face where the blood is now coming—what is it—really—that makes him say—almost sadly:

  “Lets get away from here and leave them alone.”

  Oh, soon. . . .

  Very soon now it will be just another of many incidents quickly to be forgotten by those who have witnessed it (but remembered, perhaps—perhaps remembered, unmentioned, unacknowledged but festering in the cobweb-infested shadows of their minds—by that fleeting man, that woman).

  Already the cleared space about Chi-Chi is being filled. Already the crowds are milling, the horns are blaring again, the streamers floating, the confetti falling, the couples making love. . . . Already the queens are squealing. . . . And already, Whorina, fluttering a huge ostrich fan, is saying in a husky siren voice: “Never, never, never try to dish a queen, babies—thats the moral of this story!”

  And now!

  Now—that mere interlude of his life over—Chi-Chi again leaned languidly, calmly, demurely against the wall, adjusting her dress with auspicious care, arranging the false breasts. Missing her cigarette holder, she spotted it on the ground; and in a composed queenvoice, softly, she says to a man standing next to her:

  “Baby—sweetheart—would you mind retrieving her fairy-wand . . . please . . . for a Lady?” But despite the composure, there is a note of frightened, melancholy pleading in her voice.

  A noble cavalier, the man bends, picks up the cigarette holder, and presents it to Chi-Chi with a deep, deep acknowledging bow. . . .

  Smiling gratefully at him, Chi-Chi clenched the retrieved cigarette holder between those second and fourth fingers. She puffs a long billowing stream of smoke into the air. Then gazing savage-eyed at the hectic crowds, she defied the world in a loud, clear voice:

  “Hey, world!” she shouted.

  And she punctured the dark air sharply with the beaded cigarette holder.

  CITY OF NIGHT

  PHANTOM CLOUDS SEARCH THE DAWNING SKY.

  Like a spurned persistent lover, the night tries possessively to hug the city—but vainly, sensing the approaching dusk, which already imbues the streets with grayish haze.

  The morning will come mossily in tatters.

  The crowds, which had thinned immediately before dusk—the city holding its breath momentarily—erupt as if hurled from a volcano igniting the streets. As the supernal light claims the sky more surely, the city will be overrun by waves of costumed revelers.

  Clowns! Gypsies! Pirates!

  Emancipated of their restrictive sex for the length of this one liberating day, women like scavengers will prowl the streets, in and out of the shadows, into the fading yellow-winged streetlights: their bodies flung, given easily; mouths welcoming other mouths glued for long locked moments; and hula skirts will shimmy, unheeding the cool air; anxious thighs revealed beneath diaphanous dresses; waiting bodies displayed in flesh-colored tights covered sparsely with leaves from a violated Garden of Eden: imitation motions of sex while hands easily explore their bodies—bodies passing to other hands, hands to other bodies. . . .

  Spanish gauchos, squaws, Arab princes!

  Ballerinas, circus strongmen!

  Mermaids!

  Along the scabrous balconies, people lean like spectators to a Roman circus, encouraging the frenzy with shouted commands. . . . A dark cluster of young Negroes, gathered like purple grapes, make jazzsounds on washboards, tin cans.

  Gladiators!

  Marie Antoinette dancing with Robin Hood. . . .

  And I go from bar to bar, reaching for drinks which sometimes are and sometimes arent for me. Hands which can belong to anyone in the surrounding crowds grope intimately, anonymously, like predatory birds.

&nb
sp; At the head in Cindy’s bar, malebodies were clamped to each other, kissing, sexhuddling. Standing at the crowded urinal next to me, a man reaches for me mutely, automatically; the unconcerned, mechanical gesture of someone picking up something from the sidewalk. I could be anyone! . . .

  And in that public head, I see a crewcut man going down on a youngman, and I recognize that crewcut man: the man on the beach who had fled from me that lonely night in Santa Monica—and suddenly I feel like crying because it’s true that people dont have wings. . . . But I merely lean with my arm against the scribble-blackened wall, while the man groping me goes on inevitably and the others obliviously continue their own respective lonely games. . . .

  Outside again!

  Werewolves! . . . A creature draped in weeping seaweed, dead seahorses glued to the legs. . . . Bats!

  Medusa!

  Men and women in skin-clinging, purposely revealing tights; in bathing suits of the 20s; in plumage-decorated bikinis . . . naked peacocks. . . .

  “I been clipped!” a man shouted, staring after a youngman winding along the streets. “They oughtta cut their filthy hands off—like they did in England!” he bellows to the uncaring sky.

  He probably asked for it, I tell myself defensively, as if the man had been accusing me. . . .

  Improvised costumes: Capes spread like devilwings ready to soar. Masks elaborately protruding in tinseled whiskers from the eyes. Someone covered with playing cards, another with dominoes. . . .

  A queen is talking to two men. “My name,” shes telling them, “is Miss Ogynyst. And I specialize in group parties—If You Know What I Mean.”

  A Vampire woman stalking the streets, fangs over her lower lip . . . craving blood . . . craving life.