by John Rechy
In his apartment, he asked me to wait for him while he changed. I waited longer than I had estimated, and was almost ready to walk out of his fussily decorated apartment—delicate antiques everywhere—when I heard his footsteps, very loud, assertive. I turned to look at him.
Someone else was standing there. “Who the hell are you?” I backed away.
I recognized him, the dainty man who had picked me up. He was now dressed in shiny leather. Almost every inch of him was covered; only patches of his face were visible under a low-slung biker’s cap.
“Make me your slave, please, master,” he said in a tremulous voice.
“I’m not into that, man,” I said.
“Please.” He held out a shiny belt toward me. “Punish me for wanting you.”
He dropped to his knees, the leather creating a slicing sound like a sustained hiss. I did not welcome the sudden excitement I felt when he crawled toward me. “Master, I want to worship you. Punish me for wanting you.”
To walk out on him now, at the height of his frenzy, to leave him on the floor like that, kneeling … To end this scene, I grasped his head and pulled it into my aroused groin, to stop his words, to end my own disturbing excitement.
He ground his head into my groin. He leaned back, looking up at me with pleading eyes. “You’re a man, and I’m a filthy faggot! Punish me!” He gasped; his body contracted.
Exhausted, he got up, again the man who had brought me here, the same man but in an incongruous costume. Arranging an antique lamp that had tilted, he avoided looking at me.
Out on the street, I decided I would not attempt to see Isabel Franklin.
Every morning there was the promise of sun, and then, very soon, the wind would start whipping down the slanted streets, blowing cold into the city.
“Mardi Gras, man, that’s where the real action is.” The young hustler dug his hands into his pockets, thwarting the nightly chill of the city as we stood on a corner of Market. “That’s where I’m headed, man.” He eyed a man walking past us, pausing. “Just as soon as I hustle enough to get there, man, I’m splittin’ for Mardi Gras, that’s where it’s all at, that’s where it all happens.”
27
That’s where it all happens.
I arrived at the bus station in New Orleans on a day spattered with cold sunshine. In a rented locker at the bus station. I left my duffel bag and my typewriter, a judgment I nevertheless clung to. I had not slept on the bus, and I was tired. A large movie theater was showing Witness for the Prosecution, a movie which I had seen and liked, and which my sister Olga had ruined for me by blurting out the solution about halfway into the film.
“Are you sure you want to come in, sir?”
Only then did I notice the woman in the ticket booth. She was young, pretty, a Negro.
Although I was baffled by her question—had she reacted to my disheveled appearance?—I nodded, yes.
She didn’t take my money, hesitating.
I pushed the money toward her.
“Sir,” she said in a soft voice, “you are more than welcome to come in. It’s a theater for Negroes—but you are welcome to come in.”
I remembered the theater in Balmorhea that had challenged me. I remembered my reaction, the chafing sense of shame afterward when I had sat in the “white” section with Scott and Ross. “I’d like to see the movie, yes,” I said.
She handed me the ticket.
I walked in. There were several people in the large theater, all Negroes, men and women. The film flickered in silver swaths, illuminating the faces of the audience; it seemed to me that everyone had turned to look at me as I walked along the aisle.
I sat down. Were they wondering whether I was there to create trouble? A man and a woman with a child rose to leave. Another woman and a man followed. Another man.
I walked out, feeling like a brazen invader.
I found a room at the YMCA, just as a man was checking out. “Probably the only room left in N’awrleans,” the man at the desk said. “City’s filled up for carnival.”
“This far in advance, two weeks?”
“Sometimes months,” he said.
As the seven days of carnival approached, the urgency in the city mounted. Streets, alleys, bars in the French Quarter were thronged by men and women of all ages, some already in costumes. Bourbon Street became a raucous outdoor bar. People staggered about with bottles of beer, wine, and hurricane glasses filled with colored liquor. In Jackson Square across from St. Louis Cathedral, sleeping bodies were strewn like the first casualties of a war just beginning. Cathedral bells tolled lugubriously as if protesting against the cacophony of revelry. The police roamed into and out of bars, along crooked narrow streets, trying to expel vagrants before the carnival pitched the city out of control.
I felt the city vibrating with the call to anarchy I must have come to seek—where it all happens. Drums pounding in spontaneous parades asserted that call. These frenzied days of ceremonial orgy demanded to be seized fully before the mourning of Ash Wednesday ended them.
I flung myself into the mounting fever, drinking whatever drink was placed before me, swallowing any pill handed to me. “Uppers” and “downers” warred against each other, and, soon, it was as if I were dreaming awake, moving fast and slowly at the same time as I made my way from bar to bar, street to street, carried along by erupting laughter, the muffled beat of drums, forced euphoria, the agitated church bells—moving within currents of bodies crushed into masses of flesh, the city now existing within a timeless limbo of day and night, night and day, then night again, and sex again, sex in bars, sex in squashed rented rooms overlooking old Southern courtyards, sex in cramped alleys, pills and liquor, a sleepless time, a frantic dream.
Those days, those nights, through the haze of drugs and liquor, I encountered—at times clearly, at times like living ghosts—people I would remember forever, hustlers and queens and those who lived around them. Jocko, no longer on a circus trapeze, falling much more dangerously, the last carnival; Sylvia in her gay bar, looking for the son she had exiled, giving up; Chi-Chi, the giant queen with her readied upheld middle finger toasting the world; Kathy, the beautiful queen, dying, laughing at her death—and so many, many others. I felt I must now follow them to the very edge on which I saw them dancing on their own graves, having long abandoned the possibility of escape, even the desire to escape, not even a substitute for salvation left. I thought I heard, as I experienced their lives in brief spurts of drunken laughter and drunken tears, their extreme challenge, a demand for the last initiation, as if here in this old, profound city of cemeteries—where it all happens—I must enact a ritual of my own, finally, to be undone by the world they lived in, a world without exit, a world I had chosen; and that world allowed no short-term visitors, demanding total fealty. If I was not to judge myself a visitor, I must be undone, like the others. In those days of delirium it was as clear as that to me.
A heavy man and two others picked me up outside a bar. I rode with them, a dizzy drunken drive, out of the Quarter, to a motel. They took my clothes off, licking whatever of my flesh was exposed as soon as it was exposed, circling about me, pushing at their own clothes, drinking out of spilling bottles, liquor dripping down my body and licked, as I stood unsteadily, bathed by thirsty tongues, grasped by hands.
When it was over, they lay back on the floor, dozy. The fogginess of liquor, the heightened awareness of pills, made me reckless, alert, excited, compelled.
I went through the sleeping men’s pants; I found their wallets, I took out most of their money. I lay back on the single bed.
When they woke, I asked them to drive me back to the Quarter.
In the moving car, one checked his wallet. “My money’s gone,” he said. Another one searched his own wallet anxiously, then the third of them. “So’s mine.” “Mine, too.”
“You were so drunk you don’t remember spending,” I said coolly in a voice I was used to. “Yeah, and you haven’t paid me.”
; When I stepped out of the car, swilling from the bottle of liquor I took from one man, I waited until one of them fumbled in his wallet to pay me from what I hadn’t taken. The blast of cold sun made me reel, dormant pills and new liquor ganging up, pulling me harshly into more shifting currents of flesh in the Quarter.
On the streets …
Floats sailed along Bourbon Street mounted by teary clowns and laughing angels throwing out glass beads, mummers marching along spectrally, hordes of people somersaulting to grasp tossed beads; slaves decked in chains joining kings and queens and acrobats and gladiators and Tarzan and Jane.
I jumped to catch a spinning star, a trinket tossed by a clown turned angel. It fell to the ground, where others battled for it.
“Mardi Gras!”
The carnival had begun. I tried to make my way along cramped aisles of masked revellers, staring at faces that looked like masks, masks that looked like faces. Time hopped, then was spliced like strips of film. I was in a bar and someone was blowing me. I was in an alley, as masked revelers invaded, dancing. Others pushed, shouted, screamed, wept, rushed, fell, recovered. I was in a bar drinking among almost naked bodies of men groping, shouting, going down, pressed against each other, fucking.
Outside …
I stared down at the ground where someone’s mask had fallen, an abandoned face.
“Who are you?”
“Cinderella!”
“What?” I had only overheard those words, not asked of me.
Someone, male or female, in a twinkly gauzy dress, had flitted by like a lost butterfly, and was now fluttering away, repeating in answer to a tourist’s question, “I’m Cinderella, I’m Cinderella.”
I wove along the streets and into bars, out, into other bars, the streets, back into bars, laughing, drinking, smoking, drinking, surrendering to hands, surrendering to mouths, laughing, drinking out of giant hurricane glasses, liquor reddish like thinned blood. I was now in a bar, and a clown fell to his knees and removed his mask. The painted face pasted against me smeared me with colors.
“What a gorgeous mask!”
“What?”
“I said, what a gorgeous mask!”
A man stood before me; he was addressing me. I touched my face—had I put on the discarded mask?
The man touched my face, with one finger.
“It’s not a mask,” I said.
“I know, I just meant that you’re gorgeous!”
I opened my mouth, seized by a strong desire to laugh, but no sound came, or rather sound came but not from me, from the crowds, from the clowns and angels and harem women, and ballet dancers, and smiling skeletons.
And more pills, liquor, sex, sex, pills, liquor, sex …
I have to leave, I thought. You can’t! I will, I’ll fly out of this city now, I’m out of control—where it all happens. I’ll leave before I’m trapped—in what? Can’t get out—of what? No exit where it all happens. Land’s end.
I looked toward where the bells were tolling.
On the steps of the cathedral—I had made my way there—a woman apart stood smoking, surveying the masked debauchery, and—
… she completed an intricately graceful choreography of slight movements as she withdrew the cigarette from her lips … and she looked up, and she smiled, definitely smiled, this time—
At me.
Only when I woke up—wakened because the cathedral bells had stopped tolling or I couldn’t hear them—did I realize that I had made my way into a dank hot night movie theater. On the screen, cartoon figures were jumping, cackling, spastic bodies out of control. I was leaning back groggily on the seat where I had fallen asleep, still half asleep. I felt a gnawing at my groin. Looking down, I saw a man blowing me. Illuminated by the flashing color of the cartoon, a cockroach skittered away along my chest; my shirt was pulled open.
I sat up, pushing the crouching man away. All the money I had stuffed into my pockets, now turned inside out, was gone, taken as I slept a dark, terrifying sleep, maybe stolen by the man while he was blowing me. I checked my back pocket: my wallet was still there, secured by the weight of my body as I slept.
Rushing out—running, it seemed a long distance and into the cold dawn—had the tides of people heated the streets or had I not noticed the cold within the frenzied pace? I found my way back to the apartment where I had been staying—oh, yes, I now remembered I had moved out of the Y into someone’s apartment. The groggy man there, blinking, didn’t seem to recognize me. I walked past him and retrieved my duffel bag and the case with my typewriter.
The sun was washing over the debris of the carnival; glittery trinkets winked among the trash now being collected by giant trucks. On the morning streets, people walked about reverentially with ashes on their foreheads. Drunken revelers who remained slept along streets and alleys like living debris. Lent had begun.
In the stark light of a winter sun, in an old, old city, on the day of Lenten mourning, I stood on a street strewn with fake beads and trash. I had become the person I had only played at being. I made my way to the Delta Airlines ticket office.
“I have to leave New Orleans,” I said to the young woman behind the counter. I looked into my wallet; only the few bills that I had put there instead of in my pockets remained. I placed the bills on the counter. “I need to go to El Paso.”
The attendant counted the money. She frowned.
“It’s not enough?” I asked her.
“I’ll furnish what you need,” she said.
Did I seem that desperate?
I thanked her, walking away.
“You’ll need money for a cab,” she said, and gave it to me.
At the door I noticed how very pretty she was. I asked her name.
“Miss Wingfield,” she answered.
I flew back to El Paso, to my mother’s love. I surrendered to her embrace. She was still in the projects, my promise to her still unkept, remote.
“M’ijo, you don’t look well. What’s happened to you?”
I had become gaunt, my eyes hollow.
During the days that extended there, and as before, my mother slept in the bedroom. My brother Robert, separated from his new wife, slept on a bed couch in the living room. I slept in the same room on a roll-out bed.
Rather, I tried to sleep. Sleep wouldn’t come. When it did, it brought nightmares, of masks, leering angels, weeping clowns.
As a child, I was often overwhelmed by a feeling of devastating sorrow for everyone, for everything. At those times, I would stand on the ragged porch of our house on Wyoming Street in El Paso and I would pray into the black sky: “Please help everyone.” Years later, after long sex hunting on the streets, that feeling of isolated horror, infinite sadness, would recur. Black, black depression would pull me down, lower and lower, until I felt that I was drowning in darkness.
Now, in El Paso, during those sleepless nights, I felt the accumulation of those black times, felt it so powerfully that I could not breathe; I had to go outside, even late at night, till dawn, to breathe again. I would sit on the small step in front of the unit, smoking, smoking a lot, muffling my crying so my mother wouldn’t hear.
Paralyzed days passed like that.
Then one day I needed to convey what had led me to feel the inevitability of my own self-destruction. I would write to Wilford. No, that seemed unfair after the last sad encounter with him. In El Paso, he had introduced me to a soldier whom he had run into in the library, a very tall, very thin man. The soldier had known Wilford in Urbana and then reconnected with him at Fort Bliss. Wilford gave me the man’s permanent address as a definite connection to him if our paths separated. I had retained that address throughout the years in a drawer at home. Illogically, I decided to write to him.
My cherished portable typewriter that my father had given me was gone, left at the New Orleans airport when I was racing to catch my flight out of the city. No, I would not attempt to recover it. It seemed appropriate that the memory of the time my father had given me the typ
ewriter would have an ending, a cherished completed memory now.
I rented a typewriter. I placed it on a table in my mother’s bedroom. I wrote a long letter to that man who was a stranger, a long letter about the anarchy of sex and liquor and pills and thieving, and nights without mornings, nights that extended from New York to Los Angeles, nights that had culminated in New Orleans.
I did not need to send the letter; I had written it to myself.
Days later—this surprised me because I thought I had torn it up—I found the letter and read it. I revised it slightly; I gave it a title—“Mardi Gras.” I mailed it as a story to Evergreen Review, an adventurous literary magazine of the time; and to the New Directions Anthology.
I received a letter from Mr. Laughlin, the publisher at New Directions. Yes, he would publish “Mardi Gras,” but it would not appear for another year, the new collection having just been issued. Almost simultaneously, I received a letter from Don Allen, the senior editor at Grove Press, publishers of Evergreen Review. He and the staff were considering the “story” for publication, he wrote. Was it perhaps part of a novel?
It was not. I had no intention of writing about the world I had lived in; “Mardi Gras” would remain a letter, only that. To write more would betray that world. Allow the stories of the people I had lived among, and remembered so keenly, to provide my own escape when there was none for them? Thinking that the publication of the letter would encourage the publication of Pablo! I quickly wrote to Don Allen claiming that “Mardi Gras” was part of a novel—“almost completed.”
I waited in El Paso, having dinner nightly with my mother and my brother, my mother cooking my favorite dishes, asking me to join her in nightly prayers, which I recited by rote, granting them no power, other than the power of her hopes.
Days stretched out with no commitment from Don Allen. I was becoming restless in El Paso, doing nothing, going for long aimless drives, watching television on a set my brother Robert had bought my mother, on which she watched cherished Mexican serials that I shared with her—serials full of anguish and demands and, finally, redemption for the good, banishment for the bad. I began to think that the miraculous opening into my life as a writer was closing, again feeling a resurgence of the dark paralysis. I had to move.