by John Rechy
For a long time, Jeremy had remained silent. He seems to know instinctively when to retreat, or, rather, when to stand still: when he may have come too dangerously close, too soon. Now he asked me: “Have you been to New York?”
“Twice,” I answered, still thinking of the electric island. “I never learned how to swim, though,” I said jokingly, “and each time I realized I was on an island, I panicked.”
“Thats were I live,” he said. “But that kind of island never bothered me. Just what I felt when I first went there—the feeling of being alone among so many people.”
“I dont mind being alone,” I challenged him.
“Then youre very rare—maybe very lucky,” he said. “Most people cant stand to be alone. Theyll do anything to avoid it.”
“And you think I dont know that?” I asked him, resenting what I consider an implied accusation of coldness. In a way, I begin to interpret what is going on as a kind of battle between us—some secret, not-entirely-understood battle—at least, not understood by me, now. I fluctuate in my feelings toward him and his words. At the same time that he seems to be prying, he seems, too, to be reaching for something inside of me which, whether he is right or not, he feels may somehow release or liberate me. In preparation for the streets? For something else?
“Im sure you do know it,” he said, “Im sure youve seen it” After a short pause, he added as if to himself: “Yes, Im sure you can feel compassion. But it stops there.”
Compassion! Yes, I knew that was true. There were those times when it ripped me, when I had to retreat from people, from their sadness—as I had done how many times? . . . But perhaps thats what he means. . . . As an end within itself, when it became impotent pity, was compassion merely another subterfuge to grasp at, to resort to in guilt when we questioned ourselves?—so that we could move away more easily, telling ourselves we could do nothing else. . . . Beneath it, was there a sheet of ice which forced all feelings to stop there? (What had the Professor called it?—a flicker of compassion rising up to thaw the icy blanket of the heart, and smothered by the very ice it sought to melt.) Beyond those feelings of abstract compassion, have I merely posed at caring? Again out of that inherited fear?
Faces of strangers return like ghosts out of the graveyard of my mind. I had a sudden feeling of having played a game of charades.
And I felt, suddenly, in that keyed-up, manic mood, as if my heart had begun to listen—to something.
For something.
2
“But you do want love,” Jeremy said.
This time there was not the slightest note of a question. Hes so composed, so sure.
And I think purposely: Only a short time earlier my legs straddled his shoulders. And at that thought I feel fully armed to cope with his words, aimed, Im sure now, at some kind of revelation of me. It is only their purpose which is to be determined.
“I want to be wanted,” I corrected.
“Oh, yes, I forgot. . . . Maybe because Ive stopped running away.”
His words slapped at me. This time they resounded unequivocally with the petty, malicious put-down of so many of the others—and I slapped back viciously: “Now you run after?”
“In a way,” he said, unperturbed by the clearly vicious intent of my words—and I have the feeling that he may have purposely exposed himself to them. “If you mean that what I do now, sexually, I do without inhibitions—that I can talk to the people I want instead of waiting to be spoken to—attaching no great symbolic significance to it, well, then, youre right.”
“And you think it has a ‘great symbolic significance’ for me?” I asked him. I know that possibly, later, I’ll regret these words. Now, freed by the dormant effects of the liquor and the pills into heightened lucidity and rashness, I dont care. The feeling may not last. While it does, I must go on.
“Yes,” he said, “as sure of it as you are. . . . Im sure youve thought you have a definite advantage of whatever kind over the people youve been with, because theyve wanted you, because theyve paid you—some sort of victory beyond the sex-experience, beyond the money. (But dont you need them just as badly?) . . . Anyway,” he continued quickly, “I’d say that when you leave, I’ll be less lonely than you. No, not because of the role Ive played (that can be infinitely lonely, too—perhaps lonelier—certainly lonelier); but merely because of that very rejection of those symbols. And it’s not just on your side that the symbols take over and create the elaborate guilt-ridden defenses: The ‘scores’ who brag about what the hustler did back, about how they screwed him. The hustlers who brag about how the score didnt even get to touch them—they clipped him. All the legendary defenses—to be used against that lonely, lonely feeling of the lack of love—on both sides. . . . An imitation of sharing.”
I want to ask him why he paid me—why he went along with the one-sided sex—especially without my having asked for the money, especially because everything about him suggests desirability within that world. I feel certain now that he has purposely emphasized the giving of the money, given perhaps, at least in part, to underscore all these words—which he seems determined to speak, to me.
Yet I can feel the gap between us broadening into a chasm as he attempts to come closer to me. Or is this his purpose?—does he want to broaden this gap?
This scene. . . . This man’s words. . . . So completely incongruous before the Parade. . . . Still, I feel glued to this room as if all that is being spoken, while seeming incongruous, is somehow related to the ritual of the Carnival—mysteriously. And yet there are times when I cant tell how serious he is. Sometimes, when he speaks most gravely, he smiles immediately after, as if half-mocking himself, half-mocking me.
“Anyway,” Jeremy had gone on, “all I meant when I said that I’d stopped running is that Im no longer afraid to give of myself. . . . On the other hand,” he added, looking at me directly, “Ive known people who have retreated into a symbolic mirror—in order to force themselves not to give.”
The defensive narcissism, I thought, avoiding his look. . . . That self-love that implies a completeness within yourself—and yet implies a huge incompleteness—your devouring need of others to sustain each battered return to the Mirror. . . . You have Yourself—only!
He seemed to be waiting for me to say something; and when I didnt—purposely silent—he continued: “I sometimes wonder,” and he aimed the words clearly at me, “if it isnt more difficult for some people to believe theyre loved than it is actually to love. . . .”
“Maybe,” I said cautiously, “people like that resort to finding in themselves what they cant find in others because they know what it’s all about; and when they run away from those who may claim to ‘love’ them, they do it because maybe theyre afraid of being duped again with another myth—of finding out that, like ‘God,’ theres no such thing. And is it really so strange,” I went on, “when you consider the world? After all, I didnt make it—neither did you. It made us. . . . Sure, as a kid,” I continued slowly, wondering if I really want to go on, “as a kid, I wanted to right the messed-up world—or at least try to, somehow. Then, like everyone else, I looked around, I found out. I found out that nothing justifies innocence. I saw that other lives werent much different. Like me, everyone else had been tossed out.”
And: Yes, I thought, you become aware of a terrible imposed fate—fate, or whatever else you called it: “the beads” for Trudi—or whether it became an evil angel, as for Miss Destiny. For the Professor, ugliness—and for Skipper, paradoxically, it had been his physical beauty—as it might have been for Robbie. . . . Lance, searching out his guilt shaped by a “ghost”—in turn, himself, possibly haunting Dean. . . . For Sylvia and her son, it had been . . . “love.”
And as I thought that, and as I had been speaking, I knew how wrong I had been in thinking—so often, so many, many times—that I had sought out the world which now claimed me. No. Even outside that sheltered window, even then, that world had been waiting for me, scratching at the windowpanes, summ
oning me, tempting me by the very fact of its existence, like that tree in God’s primal garden.
And I knew, too, why earlier I had been able—so easily, at last—to vindicate my father. . . . I had seen enough in that journey to know with certainty that the roots of rebellion went far, far beyond that. Beyond the father, beyond the mother. Far beyond childhood—and even birth. An alienation that began much earlier. From the very Beginning. . . . Something about the inherited unfairness—that nobody’s responsible but we’re all guilty. Something that has to do with destiny—and with so many other things: starting out with the legend about a God who cares—and the discovery of a paradise we were deprived of . . . replaced by a prejudiced Heaven. . . . Something about the fact of death—of decay—of swiftly passing Youth: the knowledge that we’re sentenced to live out our deaths, slowly, as if on a prepared gallows. . . . And something about the fact that the heart is made to yearn for what the world cant give. . . . Yes, the seeds which were planted in childhood were already here, in the world. . . . It was something in the wind.
“So, very early, I began to hate the world,” I went on; “to suspect everything—mainly ‘love’—and to try to become,” I added bitterly, “‘strong’—and maybe thats what you mean by ‘not giving’—by retreating to the Mirror.” I had avoided looking at him as I spoke. When I faced him finally, he was staring at me as if he, too, had felt all those futile emotions.
But he said: “It’s strange that we should have to force ourselves not to love—or share, if you dont like that other word—even force ourselves not to acknowledge that love is possible. And so we make the world even more rotten than it was when we discovered its rot; justifying ourselves by saying it’s the only way: Get tough. Or be swallowed by it. And we further that original alienation. . . . And by ‘rot’ I mean only all the things that repress and forbid—the rot created by people in order to keep themselves from facing the real horror—within themselves—the coldness, the lack of understanding—. . .”
“And yet you cant understand rebellion—in disgust?” I interrupted, thinking of Chi-Chi, of Kathy. Skipper, Jocko.
“Rebellion?” he said. “Or is there a point where it becomes surrender to the very rottenness youve rebelled from?”
“Ive never leeched off anyone,” I said defensively, again feeling accused by his words. “It was always someone who wanted me. Ive never even spoken to anyone first,” I said pointedly. “And Ive never taken anything from anyone who didnt want to be taken from, who didnt already know the score.”
“There isnt any difference, really, between the hunter and the hunted. The hunted makes himself available—usually passively, but available, nevertheless. Thats his way of hunting. . . . Im sorry,” he said, relenting. “I just wanted to see you defend the very innocence youve probably set out to violate. . . . You see,” he said, again smiling so that I cant tell how serious he is, “even the heart rebels—finally against its own anarchy. And thats the most powerful rebellion.”
Cataclysmic bursts of sound from the streets draw me to them. I can shatter his sureness by walking out.
“I want to be outside when it’s really swinging again,” I told him. “Just before the Parade.” But by the way hes looking at me, Im sure that he knows Im afraid of returning to the streets, afraid of the Carnival, the beginning all over again: the ritual—and because I am sure that he knows all this, and feeling that recurrent resentment, Im overwhelmed by a sudden compulsion to do what Im doing now: I draw his hand over my body so that it rests this time between my legs.
“All the symbols,” he smiled—understanding again clearly, annoying me that nothing can shatter his composure. “No, it doesnt compromise me. Not at all.” It’s almost as if we’re dueling—but for what stakes? I wonder disturbingly. “You remind me of a youngman I loved very much,” he said. “He kept telling me he couldnt love me back the way he knew I did him. He told me that ultimately he’d want women only. Unwittingly, I hurt him. I finally believed that he actually wanted, very much, to get out of the life he’d been living with me. So I stopped seeing him. Then he called me up. He asked to come over. In bed, I could sense him becoming purposely cold. It was what he had plotted, to establish that I still wanted him, on his own terms. What he didnt know was that he didnt have to test anything about me. I would easily have told him—and proved to him—that I wanted him back. And all he had done was to compromise his own stance—his professed stance of indifference. . . . We say we hate the world,” he went on mockingly, “but we imitate it constantly: Weve got to make ours a battlefield, in which theres always a winner and a loser. But, really, the line isnt that definite. . . . Have you ever thought that in all those fleeting contacts in which you consider yourself the winner—have you ever thought that youre being used too—by those who want you now only for something that doesnt last?”
“No,” I answered sharply, wanting to stop the inevitable direction of his words, “Ive never thought that.”
But once again I was thinking of Lance and Skipper, of Esmeralda Drake, the Professor, the fatman in that bar on Main Street. . . . “Who was the giver, who the taker?” the Professor had asked—and even as he eulogized them, he had discovered that it had been the voracious angels who had destroyed him. Yet Skipper (drunk somewhere in downtown Los Angeles . . . remembering the deceptive past) had discovered that it was the scores who had swallowed him. . . . “Angel” and score like intimate enemies, each mortally wounded by the other, hating the other, needing the other. . . . Is it possible that there is no real difference in the two roles? Is that something of what Jeremy is trying to point out?—that the common denominator is loneliness. . . . A momentary sharing of sex. And beyond that the infinite separation, the alienation. . . . Both give, both take. . . . All. Or is it, rather, nothing?
“I have a feeling,” Jeremy had gone on, slowly at first, as if again to test how far I’ll listen, “that sex isnt even sex any more for people like you. That you actually come to loathe it.”
“Sure,” I aimed at him. “You saw it earlier.”
“A compulsion to reach orgasm,” he accused me, “to get it over with. Not sex. Something else that youve got to cram your life with—some kind of revenge for what youre convinced is the lack of love. . . . But what a short rebellion which relies exclusively on how long you can look young! . . . Afterwards,” came the inevitable words, “after the youth is played out—when youre ghosts, with painful memories of being young—when they no longer want you—what form will the rebellion take then?”
And he stared at me relentlessly in that way that makes me retreat from him on the bed, turn my face from him; that glaring uncompromising look which makes me think: He knows things Ive never spoken. And his words conjure phantoms of that insidious empty tomorrow; and I think of youth ebbing out, of youth equated with rebellion, rebellion with orgasm. . . .
“Now it’s you who arent supposed to care,” he said. “But, later, theyll be the ones who wont care. . . . In a way we’re all phonies, pretending sometimes not to care—out of fear; other times pretending to care more than we really do.”
“I hate that word ‘phony,’” I told him. “After all, we only see what ‘appears.’”
“I agree with that—but underneath, we know,” he said. “Certainly the hustler knows he hasnt created the legend of what he is in our world. Like all other legends, it’s already there, made by the world, waiting for him to fit it. And he tries to live up to what hes supposed to be: And, mainly, hes not supposed to care.”
“And yet,” I said, “those times when you want to be taken as you think you really are, beyond the Mask—like for example earlier, with those two in the bar, before I met you—when you try, then youve exploded their dream of you. Youve shot right out of it, by revealing that you, too, are as terrified by the isolation as they are; and what should bring you together pulls you apart. Not even that other sharing can exist then.”
Jeremy said: “I know someone who fell very much in love with an a
wol marine; he worshiped him, did everything for him. One day the man came home to find the marine ironing the man’s clothes. The man wanted nothing more to do with the marine—just like those two in the bar when you said what you did to them. . . . I guess you could say they had given up, to indifference—to the emotional masochism of our world, because of the unfair guilt thrust on it. (When I first realized I was homosexual, I prayed to be changed. I felt guilty, as if I had committed a crime—and the only crime had been in making me feel guilty.) . . . But, yes,” he went on, “with those two, you left their dream, but you entered your own reality. And that can be much more important.”
And as I listened to this man’s words over the sounds of the Carnival—the thundering street noises, the steadfast clashing and clamoring—I had a sudden feeling of having been dreaming for very long. Rather, of having been in someone else’s dream.
And how many other dreams?
How many of all the people I had known had ever begun to know me? Had even wanted to? Perhaps thats why I listen to Jeremy—to words which would ordinarily have sent me away—because he seems to want to know me, because even when the words themselves are cruel, they seem to be spoken in understanding. . . . Of course, I had hidden purposely from the others. Yes, even from Dave, who might eventually have said the same things, who had in a way prepared me so that Im able to listen to Jeremy now. And it had been at that point —when some of these same words might have been spoken by him—that I had fled from Dave. . . . No, not even the Professor, certainly, whose obsessive wordhunt “for me” had been merely for himself, by himself, of himself, discovering himself in his own “interviews” (as he measured out his life—or more exactly the length of his sustaining hope . . . on a tape-measure): no, he had not even vaguely approached me. . . .