by John Rechy
And the bright sun directly in my eyes erupted violently, the liquor jolted me anew, the pills were like claws ripping mercilessly inside me. I shut my eyes momentarily. And when I opened them:
Suddenly!
The clown on the float became an angel before my exploding eyes, and it raised sun-luminous wings as if to catapult to Heaven . . . leaving me sadly alone. Down here. Alone. I began to follow it, reeling through the crowds blocking my path; and the angel leaned from the float toward me. And he threw me a silver star! And I jumped to catch it but someone else did too, and the cheap necklace the clown-angel had thrown spilled on the street, all pink and blue pieces of glass, my silver star.
And already the disdainful angel, only vaguely visible to my shattered eyes, has been replaced by clowns on other passing floats.
An angel. . . .
Miss Destiny’s angel!
The angry angel who plays the swinger in the childgame of statues: here to sentence everyone to pass Eternity doing the same things over and over, with our own huge guilty knowledge of things done—because we had to do them. Or perhaps, more importantly, of things undone—because we couldnt do them. . . . Here to sentence us for living the only way we could. . . .
Caught!—in whatever absurd fate life has apathetically but elaborately chosen to trap us in. . . .
The Negroes in torn muslin tunics over their pants jazzed It with flaming sticks; a white band played Dixie; and a southunn laydy said to a southunn genelmun in a southunn voice: “Aint that gorjus now, all them coluhs?”—and a woman: “Y’all come rought on back,” to the stray cotton-candied children, “this instant—y’heuh?”
And the Parade like a long column of giant worms passed squirming slowly: dragon heads, clown heads, monster heads: all with enormous rolling eyes: all peopled by sad mad clowns throwing out the glass beads. They flowed mysteriously along the streets like ships sailing on the surface of my mind.
Then I had the feeling that I was in hell. To be swallowed by those monstrous apparitions; but before I can be swallowed, is it Possible that this nightmare city will suddenly flare into flames—set off from one of the torches carried by the contorted dancing snaking bodies? I imagine the floats devoured by flames, the clowns-turned-angels, the clowns-turned-devils sprouting wings to join that vast exodus to heaven ... or hell ... or nowhere; and seeing the costumed people determinedly laughing—and the skeletons, the jesters, the cannibals, the vampires, the ragdolls, the witches, the leopard-people—I imagined the razing fire sweeping this rotten city. People scream! Attempt to Escape! Flee the holocaust!... Entrapped! ... I imagine the rubble of French irongrillwork, the cockroaches of this city scurrying out of their dank places, the balconies toppling—crash!—the peeling falling walls of the Cathedral. . . . The purification.
Vengefully, I cling to the vision of that terrible apocalyptic fire.
But the Parade winds on.
Little children in weird hats run like scurrying, lost mice . . . in a maze.
The Parade.
The Caravan.
The dark masked Ritual.
Clowns passing dumbly throwing out glass beads: a pantomime of life itself.
Later, I’ll remember. . . .
Along Royal, the redwigged woman in the tight peppermint skirt leaned toward the half-naked blond Indian covered with rouge and whispered, “Screw me please, dear,” where the burgeoning Parade-crowds, released for the afternoon, have been heaved into the Quarter; and youngmen prowl Jackson Square restlessly watching the tourists anxious to wait anxiously in line to have coffee and donuts at the French Market, while Marie Antoinette and Robin Hood are being chased into the Cathedral by a band of cannibals that later caught on fire as the beautiful wideboned Tarzana posed for the newsreel cameras with her scarletpainted nails—while dejectedly at Pirates Alley (the saddest single sight I saw), Scarlett O’Hara, Miss Ange, her hooped skirt high up revealing hairy man’s legs—drunk, dead drunk—and frantic and lost and lonesome and sad and desperate—wailed to no one:
“Tara burned! And I aint got the money to pay the taxes!”
And to escape the sad, sad sight, I think: If I take the subway, I’ll be on Times Square. . . .
Times Square, Pershing Square, Market Street, the concrete beach in Chicago . . . movie balconies, bars, dark hunting parks: fusing for me into one City. . . . Yes, If I take the subway, I’ll be on 42nd Street. Or in Bryant Park, or on the steps of the library, waiting for Mr King. ... Or in the park in Chicago, also waiting. . . . Or if I hitchhike on this street, I’ll be on Hollywood Boulevard, which will be lighted like a huge electric snake—and there, I’ll meet—. . .
And ghostfaces, ghostwords, ghostrooms haunt me: Cities joined together by that emotional emptiness, blending with dark-city into a vastly stretching plain, into the city of night of the soul.
I see—or I imagine I see—Jeremy within the mobs of people. . . .
Jeremy. . . .
The undiscovered country which may not even exist and which I was too frightened even to attempt to discover.
Life conspiring to trap us!
And I feel trapped by the world which I know now has sought me out as ineluctably as a shadow seeks its source in the bright sunlight . . .
That world which Ive loved and hated, that submerged gray world; this world which is not unlike your own. . . . Out of the darkness and the shadowed loneliness, like you I tried to find a substitute for Salvation. And the loneliness and the panic have something to do with that: with surfeit; something to do with the spectacle of everyone trying to touch and giving up, surrendering, finding those substitutes which are only momentary, in order to justify the meaningless struggle toward death. . . .
Outside the Bourbon House, another blond Indian, much more cunning and much more naked, danced while cameras clicked, flashed and rolled—until the fat bald man whispered in the Indian’s ear, would he consider giving a private performance for himself And Friends?
Now at Les Petits, where, on a small crowded platform, to the blaring of a record at full blast, a few couples try to dance, twisting and squirming as if to leave even their own bodies. Among them, Sonny danced with a small blackhaired girl (while the two scores who have promised to take him to Paris wait coldly for him). The girl’s hair is long and straight to her waist. As she bent from her knees, arching her thighs toward him, her hair sweeps the floor behind. Sonny twists before her. Male and female untouching, merely going through the distant gyrations of sex, as if to see how close they can come to each other without touching: carried into that limbo where savage music becomes the expression of life.
And Sonny puts his hands in his pockets and arches his back sensually like a cat’s—the hair tumbles over his eyes; and he danced with such frenzy, such abandon, that the other couples left the floor, circled him and the girl—and soon even the girl steps aside, superfluous, while Sonny dances on alone as if with an imaginary partner: the world. He seemed suddenly to be all our defiant youth—desperate to spring from the Cage, futilely defying the world in that twisting dance. In the heat of the feverish dancing, he throws open his shirt, removes it—twirls his hand in the air as if he held a rope—“Yahoo!” he shouted—and he dances shirtless, chest gleaming with sweat—and the crowd applauds as he goes through the sex-gyrations. Alone.
Leaving quickly, Im carried by the rivers of people outside. . . . White-robed mummers from the parade. Spears, plumed helmets catch the light. Devils dance with angels. Skirts part, invite. . . . The dusty-yellow wintersky. Tinseled bodies. Sequined faces.
“The City That Care Forgot”: New Orleans.
The Parade of Comus. . . . The last parade of Mardi Gras—a gaudy funeral. . . .
And then, it was as if I were imprisoned in a glass room, looking out—isolated from the world, which could see me, which I could see—which couldnt hear me. Locked inside, away from the million people. And each of those million people in turn is separated within his own glass chamber from the others. . . .
> Suddenly the Devil leapt toward me!
In red, with long black horns! He opens His arms to embrace me in His batwinged cape! And I lunge toward Him anxious to be claimed, and He encloses the flapping wings about me. . . .
Freed of his embrace, I look at the ghostly steeples of the Cathedral. I’ll climb to that nonexistent Heaven! . . .
Now at Cindy’s bar a man is groping me, and gropes someone else—and all around, hands are searching—while Cindy herself, globs of frantic, shaking flesh, bouncing, moves chaperonely nervously sighing:
“Please, please, please, boys! Be Nice!”
Outside again, I recognized the ovaled fairy who had made it with me that first day in New Orleans; he is a freckled schoolboy, with a lollypop. With him is his youngman-lover who had turned femme—and he is, resignedly perhaps, a schoolgirl: bloomers peeking, ruffled, from beneath the starched skirt.
“Tramp!” the ovaled one sneers at me—and he skipped quickly away as if I would menace or contaminate them.
Past the giant burlesque picture of Holly Sand on Bourbon. And I imagine her making quite a breeze, creating quite a storm, fanning waves of flesh-desire (to go all the way), and the poster of Aloha twirled giant mechanical breasts like windmills—whoosh! and around; whoosh! and around. . . . I look about me searching Burlesque street, L.A. Instead, I see the costumed orgy of Mardi Gras.
“Lover!” A fat woman embraces me tightly. We kiss. Now I turn to a young girl near me, shes dressed in a leopard suit I kiss her too, pushing my tongue urgently into her mouth, crushing her mouth—as if to erase from my own the stamp of Jeremy’s remembered kiss....
The sky has darkened. The streetlights, turned on now, will prolong the naked street merriment to midnight.
Tomorrow, I keep thinking. Tomorrow . . . When Ash Wednesday will hang like a pall over this city.
“Lets make it, man!” Sonny shouted into my ear, his lips so near they brushed my face. Still shirtless, he embraced me drunkenly while the two suited scores hes still with look on disapprovingly.
“Later,” I said dazedly, taking the pill he slipped into my hand. “Later. . . .”
The Cathedral is solemn like a tomb.
I think groggily: Dave. . . . The man on the beach, now somewhere in this city. . . . Lance, Pete, Mr King. . . . Miss Destiny. Skipper. . . . Jeremy. Each in his own way. . . . Each in his own way what? And Barbara. And Jocko in his way. . . . What! Nothing, I thought. “Nothing!” I said aloud, as face blends with hunting face.
“Honey,” said Whorina, “youre twisted out of your swinging mind. Whatve you been taking? Here. I got something thatll straighten you out.” She hands me a strange pill which looks like a raisin. She says: “Nothing like it, honey, You Just Wait and See.” I pop it into my mouth and hurl myself back into the crowd.
Although the star-tossed sky is clear—as if to reveal the city, Naked, to the sight of Heaven—I hope it will begin to snow suddenly: a sheet of snow covering this city drowning the shrieking colors. . . . The ice age of the heart. . . . But I forget about that quickly, forget about the snow which would purify the city. . . .
In the courtyard of The Rocking Times, moments later, I saw Kathy. Still with Jocko as if he can protect her from something shadowing her, she smiles as she stares at the mobs.
God damn it, I want to shout to her, dont smile, dont laugh! I want to say to her: Cry, Kathy! But the smile is permanent as she seems to loom over the crowd—a luminous apparition: amused perhaps by the cruel knowledge of herself—the knowledge that shes been twice doomed: by the limbo sex and death lurking prematurely in a threatening black-out which will end, in her very youth, even her defiance of the despising world that tampered with her sex and stamped her face with Impossible beauty. Struggling through the crowd toward her, I said: “Kathy. . . . Kathy.”
“Yes, baby?”
“Why are you smiling?”
“Because,” she said easily, “Im going to die.”
“Babe, I’d like to eat you,” said the man in the ballet tights at Les Deux Freres.
“I dare you,” I challenged.
“You do?”
“I dare you,” I repeated.
“Right here?”
“I dare you—right here,” I said, laughing, feeling out of control. He slid on his knees. He opens my fly, begins to go down on me in the thronged bar. And they started daring each other, and a youngman dressed only in a striped bikini pushed his trunks to his knees and stood there waiting, and immediately there was someone pressing behind him and someone squatting in front.
I leaned groggily against the bar looking down at the bobbing head between my legs.
Strangely, illogically—like a shadowy movie cut indiscriminately without logical order, I remember living next to the Y in Los Angeles, where I sunbathed on the roof of that apartment building, and by signals from the residents of the Y, I would meet them later on the street. ... I remember Griffith Park—the hill where you could make it hidden by trees. . . . I remember the police, the many roustings, finger-printings, interrogations: the cops, the rival gang—the enemy: the world. . . . Laguna Beach, the sand drifting into the bar. Lance . . . poised on a cliff. . . . And I remember a Texas sky. . . . I remember a party where three of us turned on with marijuana in the locked head, and I remember the indiscriminate partners, later, outside in the yard. . . . Remembering a man on the Boulevard who picked me up, who paid me to tell him what the others I had been with had done; and as he listened, he tried to conceal the fact that he was pulling off. . . . That sky recalled from a childhood in gray, gray shades. . . . I remember a steambath and the naked bodies pacing hungrily along the hallways, the sudden entrances and exits into the tiny cubicles; and, in the phosphorescent grayness, like nameless bodies in a morgue. . . . I think of St Louis Cemetery in this city, the stark graves above the Waiting ground. . . . And the wind had swept that sky, coming in a steelgray cloud. . . . I think of the beach in Chicago, deserted except for the maleshadows hugging the cold walls. And I remember the FASCINATION sign in New York . . . . In Dallas—remembering—the doors of rooms left open at the Y and the steamy intimacy in the showers. . . . I imagine Miss Destiny storming heaven, protesting to God, shaking her beads. . . . Remembering Sylvia, I think: And she slaughtered her son and he slaughtered her because they each had to. . . . And I remember: Out of that Window during that windstorm which is now howling again in my mind, I watched a tree bend with the wind. . . . Something searched, its fulfillment hinted by the fact that the heart craves it—but not to be found. Not found. And the heart weakens and resists even hope. . . . Twas the night before Ash Wednesday and All Through The City—... I remembered someone in San Francisco who had followed me and someone else to an apartment, and later I looked out the window and saw the man who had followed us still waiting, looking up forlornly to where we were, his hands in his pockets. . . . Finally, the wind had lashed furiously at the tree, tearing off the branches, which had hinted of spring. . . . And the dust rose, coming from the orange horizon, settling on my mind.
Dregs of memories churn.
Remembering. . . .
This:
Once, walking along Hollywood Boulevard in the afternoon, I saw a woman coming out of Kress’s: a wild gypsy-looking old woman, like a fugitive from a movie-set—she was dark, screamingly painted . . . kaleidoscopic earrings ... a red and orange scarf about her long black hair . . . wide blue skirt, lowcut blouse—an old frantic woman with demented burning eyes, and as she stepped into the bright Hollywood street, this old flashy woman began a series of the same strange gestures: her right hand would rise frantically over her eyes, as if to tear some horrible spectacle from her sight. But halfway down, toward her breast, the gesture of her hand mellowed, slowed, lost its franticness. . . . And she seemed now instead to be blessing the terrible spectacle she had first tried to tear from her sight. . . .
Stupidly, now, I raised my hand as if to imitate that woman’s benediction.
Then smash!
/> Smash! Smash! Smash!
The world collapsed.
And it happened exactly like this:
Suddenly, in one moment—in one single solitary crazy one-unit moment, I was both drunk and sober: I was two people. And the sober me was looking on at the drunk me, and it’s terrifying to see yourself so beaten and scared. Soberly and clearly I saw myself drunk—drunk worth all those days and nights of determined sobriety. And I saw myself folded over vomiting in the head of The Rocking Times; and I knew it was happening, that the nightworld was caving in—because the terror of a lifetime can be contained in one inexplicable moment. And why that moment? I dont know. But it was then.
It was then that the ugly tortured world whirled. It was then that a perimeter of black surrounded the area of my sight, closed in swiftly, heavily, darkly.
And it was then that the sober me saw the drunk me reel to the floor and fall. Felt the drunk laughter like cotton in my mouth choking.
It’s Ash Wednesday.
Im out on the streets.
There are only a few stray people, some foreheads smeared with ashes. The city is strangely quiet. It’s late night.
The demons, the clowns are gone.
After the smothering black-out, I remember—only hazily, as if my mind had been rubbed over with an imperfect eraser—waking up on a cot in a back room of Sylvia’s boarded-up bar where we had taken Sonny that afternoon. Others were still passed out about me when I walked out. I remember walking the streets of the Lenten city, away from the Quarter.
Now, too tired to walk any farther, I enter an all-night moviehouse. The air is excessively hot. Derelicts sleep on the floor. I slump on a wooden seat A few rows away, I see Sonny, dejectedly asleep: deserted. The two scores are no longer with him.