by John Rechy
Had she said that before, in front of me? When? I tried to remember. I am … When, before, had that occurred? The memory eluded me in a disturbing way.
* * *
The Korean War was over; more than 50,000 U.S. soldiers had died among countless more Koreans. For what terrible reason so much devastation?
Had Acting Corporal Bailey survived?
After a few happy days with my sister and her family, I rented a room in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, on Hope Street. The building was a few blocks away from Pershing Square and Main Street. One side of it faced the tall YMCA residential building.
Not since I had reacted so powerfully to Paris had I felt the exhilaration I felt in Los Angeles. I embraced the warm days, the cool misty nights, the sight of palm trees everywhere, tall, indifferent, elegant, strung along the streets in regal rows, shifting away from sea breezes. Every block in the city burst with flowers, flowered shrubs, flowered trees, flowers everywhere, every color, some like colored butterflies, others like birds—and roses, roses, all colors, roses even in abandoned lots. And beyond it all, the ocean, land’s end, the edge of the country, the last stop before the sun set, golden-red.
And Pershing Square.
The size of a large city block, the square was green with velvet grass, lush with trees and flowers along several paths that led to a fountain in the center, silver strings of water spouting out in shifting arcs. At one corner was a bold statue of Beethoven covered in a mossy patina. All about, preachers thumped their Bibles; evangelists tinkled their tambourines and sang out “Hallelujah!” Neatly dressed office workers took a break at midday from the surrounding offices, sitting facing the sun along flowered curbs. Male hustlers loitered about. Clients paused, walking on, waiting. Here and there, a small group of queens held court, having arranged their clothes to look as much like drag as possible without trespassing into “masquerade,” a man dressed to suggest a woman, which was then illegal.
There was an easy mingling among hustlers and queens here, a camaraderie absent in New York. As I strolled along the curved paths, one or another of the hustlers would greet me: “Howzit goin’, man?” … “Just got in, huh, man?” A queen would squeal approval.
In a few days I had met Chuck, a sanguine, lazy cowboy; Skipper, once the most sought-after hustler in Hollywood; Buddy, a kid, just arrived, always a green, gullible kid; the fabulous Miss Destiny with her dreams of glory; tough, tattooed, dangerous Tiger; Trudi, the cutest queen in the world; Pauline, the ugliest—all those, and so many others among whom I would live and whose lives I would glimpse, sometimes only for fleeting moments.
But whom I would always remember.
The more I continued to explore the world I lived in, the harsher it was capable of looking at times, as if, in burrowing deeper into it, I was being forced to see more of it, more clearly. To experience its unique excitement, I had to experience its dangers. There was always a current of tension, tinged with possible violence in encounters among exiles and outlaws and those who sought them, and in the threat of arrest. That current found its voice in the growled words pouring out of jukeboxes, hard rock-and-roll moans in the hustling bars.
In that charged atmosphere, the world I had again moved into was making constant demands of allegiance, further initiations, powerful challenges and commands to move closer to its edge, or to move out, a visitor.
At the Waldorf—the most hard-core of the hustling bars in downtown Los Angeles, a bar where the harshest queens challenged any hostility as they perched on gutted stools next to restless hustlers demanding instant connections once desire was established—I met a man, “in town to see the low life.” As we stepped outside, he halted. “You’re not queer, are you?”
The question did not surprise me. Even more assertively than along Times Square, where “straightness” was assumed without declaration, playing “straight”—“trade” for sale—was demanded of the hustlers. I had heard rigid variations from potential clients: “I don’t want you to touch me, you understand?” … “You’re not gay, right?” … “I’m not looking for a queer.” It was a time that demanded deception.
I answered the man I was with: “No, man, shit, I’m not a fucking queer, man, shit.”
“OK. Let’s go.”
At his hotel a couple of blocks away, he went down on me, insistently trying to keep me hard while restraining me from coming, until, finally, I became soft and gave up.
My cock soft in his mouth, he jerked himself off, quivering, shouting loudly. Then he lay back in his shorts, indifferently, yawning.
“I don’t think I should pay you, you weren’t any good, just lay there, didn’t even come.”
“I told you before we came here what was involved,” I said.
“You tell yourself a lot of things, don’t you, punk?” he said.
I dressed, stood over him. “Give me the money we agreed on, fucker,” I said.
“You were the worst I’ve ever had,” he taunted. “Here.”
Half of what we had agreed on. “You owe me more,” I said, snatching the money.
“Fuck you.”
“I said pay me what we agreed to.”
“And I said, fuck you.”
“Listen, motherfucker,” said a voice I recognized as my own. “If you don’t give me what we agreed on, I’ll take it.” I grabbed his pants from the floor and went through his pockets to locate his wallet. For awful moments, it was as if I was viewing myself robbing this man, and I was trying to recognize myself.
The man sat up. I held onto his pants, pulling them away from his grasping hands.
“I left my wallet downstairs in the safe,” he said, his voice losing some of its bravado. “Here, I kept the exact amount you asked for.” He threw more money onto the bed.
I grabbed it. “I want more, motherfucker.” Now the words were easy; my actions were easy.
“I told you—”
I went to the drawer next to the bed. I pulled everything out; I threw the few contents onto the floor, some underclothes, keys. No wallet there.
He lifted the telephone and spoke into it: “There’s a guy up here, he’s robbing me, threatening me, call the cops, send someone—”
I knew he wasn’t talking to anyone; he would incriminate himself—and I saw his finger on the cradle.
I went through another drawer, throwing out the contents, a hotel Bible, some nonprescription medications. I went through the jacket he had hung in the closet, through the upper shelves.
He stood, dropping the lifeless telephone.
I replaced it on the cradle quickly—so the person at the desk would not inquire. The man’s belongings were strewn all over the room.
“I swear to you, I swear I left my wallet downstairs. If you come to the desk with me, I’ll get it, I promise.”
I found the wallet. Shoved into a corner of the closet, under a suitcase. I opened it and took out all the money. I threw the wallet onto the floor.
Before I closed the door, I heard him shout: “You son of a bitch! You’re not foolin’ anyone, none of you guys are, you’re all as queer as I am!”
As I left the building, I heard a gasp—my own. The person who had ransacked the man’s room had earned credentials to be true to the streets, but he was now retreating. As I stepped into the lurid streets, I felt like crying. I thought, I’m me again.
Longing for another life that would not contain what I had done—to attempt to flush the incident out of my mind—I called my sister to ask whether I might come to dinner. “Of course, little brother, of course; I’ll make something special—I’ve learned to cook.”
She had. She made a scrumptious roast. Her husband helped her clear the table. My nephew played a piece he had just learned on his accordion; my niece spun about in what she thought was a grand ballet. I applauded extravagantly.
“Now everybody—out!” my sister said. “I want to catch up on news with my little brother!”
The children had left the television on. Sen
ator Joseph McCarthy, scrunching before an open microphone, was pointing at a man off-camera testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
“Asshole,” my sister surprised me by saying when the camera focused on McCarthy; that surprised me not only because of the word she had used, but because I hadn’t known she was aware of the dangerous political climate taking over the country. She clicked off the image of the scruffy man.
“Now!”
I settled to hear about the person I was sure she would be discussing—and to welcome the warmth of another life.
“Remember Alicia’s cousin Lenchito?”
Vaguely, I did. He was a kid then, almost blind, his eyes washed with a bluish mist. Still, he was able to walk around briskly, remarkably well.
“He’s eighteen now. The poor thing has to carry a blind cane to cross the street. A little saint, so kind.”
The way she was propping her story meant it would be one of her best. It had always amused me to try catch her in an inconsistency in her dramas, but I had never been able to.
“He’s so moved that Tina can’t get her own daughter to answer her letters—”
“Tina has Isabel’s new address, sister?”
“The hired detective, remember?” my sister chastised me. “Tina’s letters are returned—no such person here—”
“You said Tina gave up on her.”
“How can a mother stop caring?” Having reasserted the unassailabilty of a mother’s devotion, she went on: “Lenchito got a paid invitation to address some kind of blind people’s convention in San Francisco, and he promised Tina he’d locate Alicia, no matter what; she’s his aunt, you remember.”
I didn’t dare ask for more details about the blind people’s convention; I was too eager to hear her news.
“So when he had finished his speech at the blind convention—he got an ovation—he took a cab to the address of that famous columnist. Oh, what Lenchito faced!”
My sister was becoming even better at building suspense. She was able to guess the ending of any episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents on television, to everyone else’s chagrin because she ruined the story.
“Lenchito got out of the cab and he made his way to the gate of the house.” My sister was pacing her delivery as if to underscore Lenchito’s weary journey to the gate. “A maid answered the buzzer. Lenchito identified himself as a nephew from El Paso. He told her he was blind, so that Alicia would be sure to know who he was. There was a long pause.”
My sister paused, long. Then: “The maid came back: ‘There is no one here by that name,’ she told Lenchito.”
“Maybe he asked for Alicia Gonzales.”
“He used all her names,” my sister snapped. “He’s not dumb, you know. He was so angry he beat the gate with his cane.”
I couldn’t help it; I laughed. I imagined Lenchito beating at the gates with his blind cane, something like Morris pounding on the Heiress’s door in the movie. “I’m sorry for laughing, Olga, but that sounds like the ending of The Heiress—1949.”
My sister was not fazed. “It does. I suppose Lenchito saw it—”
“Lenchito’s blind, Olga.”
“—or heard about it.” She shook her head. “All I know is that Alicia refused to see her blind cousin and has the damn nerve to claim she isn’t who she is.”
Isabel Franklin was becoming legendary, a spectacular fraud.
The encounter with the man whose hotel room I had ransacked recurred in my mind. I justified it—he had insulted me, had backed off from our agreement. I stayed away from Main Street and Pershing Square.
Extending the pattern I had adopted in New York, I telephoned a temporary-help agency whose clients were attorneys, citing my “legal experience” in the army and asking for an interview. In an unfriendly tone, a woman told me that her agency no longer employed men.
I sensed that something was off; she had said “no longer.” As curious as I was annoyed, I called again, determined to charm her—“You have a unique voice; you must have been an actress”—into granting me an interview. She did—“Let’s talk.”
I turned up at an office in a building downtown. A middle-aged man and a woman sat behind juxtaposed desks. Both were surprisingly friendly, asking me to sit down, to tell them more about myself. I told them I had been in the 101st Airborne Infantry Division.
The woman turned to the man, her husband and partner in the agency. “Yes?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he echoed, smiling. “The 101st Infantry Division, eh?” the man commended.
“We had to be sure,” the woman explained, “that you weren’t one of those sissies flooding Los Angeles from Washington.”
I knew what she meant. Senator McCarthy was extending his hunt from “commies” in government to “perverts” in Washington. There had followed an exodus of homosexuals to Los Angeles.
It pleased me to think that the woman’s husband might be gay, closeted even from her.
As I left with my first assignment—“with an important law firm, one of our best clients,” the man said, trying to impress me—the woman called out in a most matter-of-fact tone, as if it didn’t matter at all, not at all, a cast-off remark: “Of course they will ask us if you’re homosexual …” She paused. I turned to face her. “… and we’ll be able to assure them that—?”
“You can assure them I’m not,” I said.
“Obviously not,” Mr. the man seemed, mildly, to chastise the woman for even asking. “He was in the 101st Airborne Infantry Division.”
In the following weeks, the agency sent me out to several offices, whenever I wanted the work. The jobs paid well; I sent my mother money steadily. I typed court reports, transcribed depositions, did research on legal cases. I was well liked in the offices where I worked. I flirted with the women and they flirted with me, finding me “really cute.” One maneuvered to keep me after hours with her. Sensing what she intended, I told her I had a date.
No one in those offices, or at the agency, would suspect that, after work, at first sometimes and then fervently every night, I was going to Pershing Square and Main Street to hustle.
Some afternoons, in the building I lived in on Hope Street, I would go up to the roof to sunbathe in brief trunks. A side of the YMCA building faced the roof at a distance not too removed. Occasionally, I would look up toward the windows across the way and I would see someone signaling. If there were further signals of attraction, I would motion that I was going downstairs. In my room, I would put my pants on; then I would walk out to the front. There I would meet whoever had signaled. Often, it didn’t work; those who had signaled were looking for a mutual connection, a mutual attraction. The few times it did work out as a hustle, I would ask the person to come up to my room.
Responding once to such a signal from a man at the window, I went downstairs to meet him.
“Hi,” he said; he was good-looking, about thirty.
It wouldn’t work out; he would be searching for a mutual unpaid connection. I wanted to defuse any anger the mistaken intentions would create, but he was already asking the usual question that preceded mutual casual sexual encounters:
“What do you do?”
“Uh, nothing, you know.”
The smile faded. “You mean you’re one of those guys that just lies back and expects—” I could tell he would now attempt to put me down. That was OK if it made him feel less rejected.
“Actually,” I tried to do this tactfully, “I was on my way to Pershing Square—”
“To hustle?”
“Yeah.”
“You go only for money, huh? And who the hell do you think would pay you? Well, let me give you some good advice: You just go on upstairs to your room, pay yourself, and fuck yourself.”
Again, I immersed myself in the life of downtown Los Angeles.
Almost regularly, on my way to Pershing Square, I went to the public library a few blocks away. To assert a connection to my earlier life, I sat at one of the long wooden
tables reading for hours. The old, impressive building, as solid as a stone temple and pervaded by the musty, oddly sweet smell of books, was a haven from the turbulence of the street life I would soon join, sometimes after only a few restless minutes, at other times during long lulling hours stretching into night.
I reread familiar books—Lorca, and I remembered Barbara (where was she now?) and Wilford, whose success I continued to follow in newspapers and magazines and whom I remembered with sad warmth. I discovered writers I had not read: Camus, Sartre, more of the metaphysical poets I had been introduced to by Dr. Sonnichsen—and Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, more of Blake, reading pages of one, moving to another, returning, roaming back and forth trying to grasp all urgently, reading “newer” writers, Norman Mailer, Nabokov, Calder Willingham, Styron.
At first I would not check books out, because that meant I would have to carry them with me to Pershing Square and Main Street, and my pose of being only a street-smart hustler would be seriously compromised. When I eventually did check books out, I would do so in the morning, returning with them to leave in my hotel room. Walking back to my hotel room with two books I had checked out—having lingered at the library into early afternoon—I saw one of the hustlers I knew from Pershing Square walking toward me with a queen I also recognized. I dashed quickly across the street before they could see me with the books that would ostracize me from my other world.
The night I pulled out of the library shelves the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past, I didn’t leave the library until the guards began clearing it out for closing. The next day, I went to the library when it opened in the morning, to spend the whole day reading more of Proust, swept away by the images and rhythms, the various lives flowing in and out of the pages—so moved that I would stop reading, search out another writer in order to return anew to this wondrous discovery, always returning to the passage of magical recollection in the Overture:
“And suddenly the memory returns. …”