City of Night

by John Rechy

  Grinding against her from the rear, a sailor pressed himself against the wiggling butt of a young calicoed girl holding hands with another man, who giggles uncontrollably as he crushes eagerly into her from the front. As I pass, the girl turns her face sideways to me, inviting me, and we kiss.

  Moving away, I begin to laugh, and I stop laughing and become strangely paranoically angry when a ratty old man out of nowhere says to me: “Wanna go with me, boy? For just a few minutes.” And in graphic terms he describes exactly what he wants to do.

  “You cant afford me,” I said, hugely pleased to put him down this way for taking my mask for granted.

  “Who you fooling? Ive seen you every day in the bars.” He looked at me with contempt. “Another one with delusions of grandeur,” he smirked, which oddly made me start laughing again.

  More clown faces, grotesquely paint-tattooed.

  At The Rocking Times a youngman I know wants me to help him “finish a rumble with some bad cats from Gretna.”

  “Hell, man, I dont want to fight anyone. Im not mad at anybody—nobody! Im happy!” I said crazily. At the same time, I feel depression and loneliness hammering at my senses.

  “Whats the matter?” he asks me, squint-eyed, “you too chicken to fight?”

  “Yes,” I said, “too chicken—and too happy—and too tired.” feeling my stomach toss, my head throb vengefully.

  Grimacing masks, leering masks, laughing masks, weeping masks. . . .

  I see Sylvia at the bar. Her face too is a mask.

  In a corner a man was glued to a woman in a bathing suit.

  “Disgusting!” a queen sneered, turning away from The Heterosexual Spectacle and bumping into a lesbian dressed like a male Apache dancer. “Excuse me, sir,” the queen said

  Tall ears wire-erect, a man beside me in a bunny suit removed the rabbit mask. “Wish fulfillment—thats what theyd call this costume!” he laughed merrily, although the wish-fulfillment costume, like the wish itself, was about to come apart; he hangs on to the bob-tailed pants with one hand.

  The Tin Man from Oz!

  Two youngmen who look like college students have been flirting with two queens in high drag. “You wanna drink?” one asks the queens, who nod demurely. The other youngman said: “Hell, let em get their own.” “But theyre ladies,” the first one protested. “The crazy-fuck they are!” said the second, staggering away.

  “Here we are! Just in from Los gay Angeles!” Arms eagle-spread, there stands Lola, Miss Destiny’s ugly queenfriend from downtown Los Angeles. And with her is Pauline, whos already spotted me.

  “Baby!” she gushes at me. “How good to see a familiar face—From Home! Oh, I just knew youd be in New Orleans. Why did you desert me!”

  Acknowledging Lola’s hazy salutation—and promising to see Pauline later—I fled back into the streets.

  In the reverberating currents of franticness, I tell myself insistently that Im still too sober.

  At midmorning the Parade of Rex, King of Mardi Oras, will begin. After that the streets will be ruled by even greater Madness. The true anarchy will reign under the contemptuous Sun.

  “I gotta know how big it is before buying,” a fairy said to me.

  Another one with him lisps: “Mary! He’ll think we’re size queens!”

  The other one shrieks: “We are! Any size!

  From Jackson Square, the steeples of the Cathedral are luminous, uncovered of the night. The Cathedral seems to be expanding as if in preparation for siege. . . . Before it: completely in black, with black angelwings, a longhaired woman stands frozen: a statue who has left its holy sanctuary to mourn over the city.

  I avoid looking at Her, turn my attention to an empress gliding along the park, her train held by two candy-striped pages.

  Winking, disappearing, someone Ive been with or talked to hands me a pill. Beside me a man holds out a hurricane glass to me. I down the pill with the proffered liquor.

  Cannibals! Executioners!

  I feel cold but theres no breeze. It will be a warm day. The sun floats on the purplish horizon.

  Wrapped around a post near the Bourbon House, a drunk man is proclaiming: “This is my true love!” as he hugs the post passionately. An outraged woman pulls at him insistently. “Get away from me!” he commands her, “I found My True Love!”—as one leg curls about the post like a dog’s.

  Sorceresses! Wizards!

  Crowds whipped up, exacerbated by each fleeing moment.

  Alice in Wonderland!—billowing skirt raised obscenely.

  Tom Sawyer!—pants open at the rear.

  A cruddy-looking youngappearing boy-man, his eyes like black marbles, is talking to me: “I seen you the other day,” he said. “You was in a pink Cadillac with some fags. Man, I got contacts you never dreamed of! I connect for guys like you—but I gotta test you out first, myself! . . . I aint queer, myself, dig?—but nacherly I gotta know what youre like.”

  “Shag, man!” I said belligerently, strangely repelled by him.

  The shadows become deeper on the streets, the sky brightens.

  A hobo in rainbow patches. . . .

  Devils prowling the streets!

  “I own a chain of stores,” a shabby man is trying to impress me.

  I turned away from him.

  He tries to dazzle Sonny, nearby. “Shit, man, Im going to Paris,” I heard Sonny say to him, turning for affirmation to the two scores hes been with. “Right?” the two scores nodded solemnly, a nod that could have been a permanent farewell.

  Seminaked men and women!

  For no coherent reason, I thought about Chi-Chi—the cigarette holder in that screw-you symbol of contempt, the mask stripped off for those blazing moments in the courtyard. . . .

  And then incongruously, I think. Maybe this will be Jocko’s last Mardi Gras. And Kathy’s. . . . Not Sylvia’s. She’ll always be here waiting. The Evil Angel has already passed sentence on her.

  A fugitive from some scorched wasteland, his body draped in orange and red crepe paper, howling through the streets in simulated searing pain. . . .

  A score at Les Petits says to me and a youngman next to me, “I’ll buy one or both of you,” and he opened his wallet clumsily, showily. The other snatched it from him, rushed away through the mobs. No one cared. Not even the clipped man. He dug into his pockets, brought out a wad of bills. Laughing, he says to me: “I still got more than enough for you—how about it?” Hes asking for it! I snatch the remaining bills from him, all guilt erased by the man’s still-unconcerned laughter following me.

  Demons!

  In flashing waves of bursting colors as they whirl from one to the other, the costumed revelers create patterns like those locked accidentally within the mirror of a child’s kaleidoscope, images so easily shattered by a sigh. . . .

  Two souls dredged from a netherworld, their bodies draped in ashen mummy-tatters.

  Most of the malehustlers are dressed in their ordinary clothes—the studiedly carelessly open shirts, the casual jackets, the levis, the khaki pants. ... This is their costume.

  This is our mask!

  Heaven, hell, earth have unleashed their restless souls.

  Angels!

  And lucid suddenly as if I had stepped beyond the world, I watch the spectacle, and I remember myself years ago before I left that window through which I had merely watched the world, uninvolved.

  Masks!

  Masks, masks. . . .

  And I think: Beyond all this—beyond that window and this churning world, out of all, all this, something to be found: some undiscovered country within the heart itself. . . .

  Suddenly, I feel released—the emotional coil sprung.

  But the next moment, I feel horror scratching at my mind. . . . I force myself to think. It’s Mardi Gras!—but that thought is followed by another: It’s the day before the Ashen mourning.

  And to escape that thought, I rush through the streets, fleeing from myself.

  Again at The Rocking Times, in the court
yard.

  And afterwards—when the vortex of this carnival has become a haunting memory and I recall what occurred then—what Kathy and Jocko, standing in the midst of it, will do in a few moments—I will try to find a clue there for my own subsequent actions, my compulsive attempt to drop my mask, to try, at least, to face myself at last. . . .

  In an immaculately white dress of a flimsy material like a veil—shoulders uncovered, smooth and rounded and feminine—Kathy stood gazing into the mashed crowds. Her eyes appear to be fading, as if the color had been washed away by tears. . . . Over her hair, she wore a sequined crown, from which a long white bridal veil flowed over her dress. She shook her hair free of the crown now, and the golden hair came loosely to her shoulders. Even in the midst of the drunken scenes, she commanded awed attention.

  Beside her, Jocko is dressed in black circus tights, as if mourning the Lost Trapeze.

  Kathy is the bride at that final wedding, and Jocko is her groom.

  Moving now, Kathy’s gossamer figure reeled. Threatened by that sudden blackout, she staggered a few steps like a puppet tangled on its strings. Jocko held her firmly.

  I gravitated through the crowd toward them.

  A tourist had made his way eagerly toward Kathy. “Pardon me, buddy,” he said to Jocko, “but I gotta say your girlfriend is bee-yoo-tee-ful!”

  Jocko looked at him ambiguously. “You want to kiss her?” he asked the man, and Kathy smiled.

  “Could I?” the man said enthusiastically.

  Kathy turned her smiling face to the man, her parted lips inviting him.

  “Yes!” Jocko said, pushing the man savagely toward Kathy.

  The man kissed Kathy, very long.

  And then, suddenly, ferociously, Kathy reaches for his hand, pulling it from where it wound about her back. Leaning slightly back, she plants the man’s hand firmly between her thighs. The man’s hand explores eagerly. Kathy smiles fiercely. The man pulled his hand away violently, stumbling back in astonishment. Kathy follows him with the fading eyes. Now Jocko smiles too.

  I turn away quickly from the sight. I feel gigantically sad for Kathy, for the dropped mask—sad for Jocko—for myself—sad for the man who kissed Kathy and discovered he was kissing a man.

  Sad for the whole rotten spectacle of the world wearing cold, cold masks.

  And I remember someone’s words—from some darkcity:

  “The ice age of the heart”

  Minutes later, my own mask began to crumble.

  I was standing drinking at Les Deux Freres with two scores who wanted to make it with me—“before the parade,” one said, “weve still got time”—and I had agreed. And as they gulped their drinks hurriedly to leave the bar with me, suddenly something uncontrollable seized me.

  Incongruously, like this: out of nowhere, surprising myself by the sounds of my words, I blurted to those two:

  “I want to tell you something before we leave. Im not at all the way you think I am. Im not like you want me to be, the way I tried to look and act for you: not unconcerned, nor easygoing—not tough: no, not at all.”

  And having said that, as if those words had come from someone else—someone else imprisoned inside me, protesting now—I felt as if something had exploded inside me—and exploding at last, I went on, challenging their astonished look: “No, Im not the way I pretended to be for you—and for others. Like you, like everyone else, Im Scared, cold, cold terrified.”

  Predictably, I became a stranger to them. They had sought something else in me—the opposite from them; and I had acted out a role for them—as I had acted it out for how many, many others?

  Almost despising me, I knew, for having duped them—for having exposed my own panic to them when they had sought momentary refuge from theirs in the flaunted, posed lack of it in me—the two moved away, trying perhaps—I think with perverse pleasure—to forget they had ever wanted me. Now theyre talking to a youngman who looks as unconcerned as I had tried to pretend to be with them.

  I moved back, against the wall, feeling a wave of depression sweep over me; depression made many times more horrible by the fact that, although unfocused (like the thousand unnamed fears experienced in the dark when you know only that Something lurks, waits), it had something to do with vulnerability.

  I closed my eyes, right at the point where I will admit: Im going to be drunk.

  But I cling to sobriety when I hear someone say: “Youll feel much better if we leave this place.” When I opened my eyes, I saw a man standing before me looking at me strangely. “Im staying right around the corner,” he said. “Will you come with me?”

  Outside, a small stranded hotdog wagon steams ominously like a relic out of hell.

  JEREMY: White Sheets

  1

  PONDEROUSLY EXHAUSTED AFTER THE DETERMINED EJACULATION—which had come, strained up to the actual moment of discharge, in those doubly orgasmic thrusts as if I had tried to drain from myself something infinitely more than the mere sperm—I had lain back in bed and instantly fallen asleep. Waking up just as suddenly—suddenly alert as if someone had called me—I saw, still lying on the other side of the bed, looking at me, the man who had talked to me earlier at Les Deux Freres bar.

  Outside, beyond the draped and shuttered windows of this balconied room on Royal (it’s still not time for the Parade, I notice, looking urgently at my watch), the sounds of the revelry continue, like hundreds of phonographs playing different but equally blaring records.

  Quickly, I sat up on the sheet-rumpled bed and reached for my clothes—to get out of this room, to hurl myself back into the streets, to join the summoning anarchy raging outside: as if I have begun to lag in an important race which I must run.

  But before I can begin to dress, the man in bed says: “Dont go yet. Have a cigarette.” He holds out the cigarette as if, I think, it were an indication of truce after the sex act which has suddenly, for me—now remembered vividly after the brief, blacked-out period of sleep—made us Strangers.

  I take the cigarette from him. He reached for his pants on a chair next to him and retrieved from a pocket several bills which he places for me on the table beside the bed. He did this as if, for him, this is the most insignificant aspect of the scene we have played out.

  Coming here with him—I remember distinctly—I hadnt mentioned money. There had been nothing about him to suggest he was a score. In the state of pilled and liquored panic which I had felt threatening to bludgeon my senses at that bar, the evenness of his voice, the calmness, had acted immediately to sap my nerves in that advancing tide of forcedly laughing faces determined above all else to enter an engulfing tide of madness. . . . And so I had merely been grateful to him for the offer of momentary respite from the crowds.

  Now, aware acutely of the thriving street, as if its sounds were connected electrically to my senses, and remembering the previous sex scene, during which I had played the unreciprocal role more obsessively than ever before (as if the dropping of the streetpose, in the bar previously with those two scores, had made it necessary for me to prove with greater urgency that I could still wear that mask), I thought of one thing:

  Escape from this room!

  Escape from the bedcover thrown in a heap on the floor—escape, especially and mysteriously disturbingly, from the rumpled sheets. . . . But I lay back in bed. I would stay only a few more minutes, I told myself, trying momentarily to shut out the hypnotizing, seductively beckoning sounds of the frenzy roaring Outside: beckoning like a ritual prepared especially for me.

  “Why is it,” this man was saying slowly, almost as if he were seeking an excuse, by talking, in order not to join the streetcrowds—or to keep me from it, “that the moment the orgasm is over—or the moment it’s remembered, after sleep,” he added, as if understanding very clearly my anxiety to leave—as if, too, he is speaking about me personally, “why is it that people want to leave, as if to forget—with someone else—whats just happened between them—which will happen again and again—and again ha
ve to be forgotten?”

  The inappropriateness of his searching remarks, while the carnival fury which we have all come to seek—that very cramming of experiences with many, many people—roars outside—the vast inappropriateness of it strikes me immediately. Of course, what he had said was largely true: Afterwards, in those hurried contacts, you want to leave instantly, as if in some kind of shame, or guilt, for something not exchanged.

  But I said: “It’s just the carnival outside; it’s what everyone comes here for.”

  “Youll see it all,” he assured me, indicating that to him it’s not important. “It doesnt really begin again until after the morning parade. Ive seen it before. There nothing going on now that wasnt going on when you were down there just a while ago—only more of it.” He spoke softly, nevertheless compelling conviction.

  He was a well-built, masculine man in his early 30s, with uncannily dark eyes, light hair. He is intensely, moodily handsome. . . . Looking at him, I wonder why such a man would pay another male when he could obviously make it easily and mutually in any of the bars, and I wonder if perhaps there is another reason for his having given unasked-for money. It is a sudden feeling, not substantiated by anything that has actually happened. But it is a strong one. The money rests there, something constantly present, but, still, by the fact of my not having yet taken it, unacknowledged.

  He was propped against the headrest on the bed, a pillow at his back; covered from his waist down by the sheet. I lie on top of the sheet in order not to feel that Im actually in bed with him.

  This room, just around the corner from the bar where I met him, is obviously one of those expensive rooms reserved months in advance of the carnival: their prices determined almost exclusively by their location in the French Quarter, the balcony from which the carnival rites can be viewed. The furniture attempts to suggest the Old New Orleans of novels and movies, romance; but there is an air of emulation—of carnival-masquerade, even about this room.

  “Besides,” he was saying, “if you rest a while longer, you can take full advantage of it all. . . . Thats what you feel you have to do, isnt it?” he shot at me strangely. Then, quickly, before I could answer his question, as if he had already known the answer: “What is your name?”