by John Rechy
Those times, the franticness would send me to hustle back at Selma, where I had been earlier; but on the fatal nights, it would all be as if the world I had thrived in were conspiring against me. As I waited on the streets where I had been so popular—perhaps only last night!—cars would glide by, a man would peer at me, and then would drive away, leaving me wounded, grasping for reasons why that had occurred. If that same person then moved on to someone else on the streets, I would bleed doubly—and I would extend the hunt, demanding to succeed, not allowing myself the deadly questions: Was I through? Had time left me behind? Was I finally looking my age? Could I no longer pull it off? I flexed my muscles, touched them, rubbed them, reassuring myself that my body was intact, still challenging time.
Without surcease I would drive back and forth to the places that thrived past midnight, underpasses, garages, dark streets. Still, no connection, many approaches, no connection. The raging need pushed me on. Even if it was chilly—cold—I would remove my shirt, rub my body with fresh oil, demanding attention. Nothing. Why? I must look dangerous—anything but undesirable.
The deadly accusatory tint of smoggy dawn would augur the day, the end of the monstrous night, and I would still be cruising, from street to street, alley to alley, underpasses that turned into hunting turfs, where bodies of men pressed against concrete walls, and now I was standing alone on a deserted turf, the sun glaring down.
Exhausted, sweating, I returned to my rented room, but the horror of having been denied all night would send me out again, to shatter the nightmarish sense of defeat, the hunt without connection.
I would drive back to Griffith Park. Then, as if the world I had pursued had lifted its deadly curse, its punishment for all the past conquests—its payback for all the triumphant exhilaration of the sex hunt—everything would change. I was desired, again counting contacts, one after another after another, to make up for the depths I had plunged into. More. More.
I counted twenty-seven contacts in the park in one day, twenty-seven men who desired me.
Why? I had asked that question before, but I preferred not to ponder it—what had carved this insatiable need in me, this unfillable demand to be, not really wanted, not loved, no, no, only to be desired? How easy it would be to invoke my father, the childhood game he had asked me to play, sitting on his lap—“Give me a thousand”—in exchange for a few pennies. How easy to extend that to the gray men (they existed only as shadows now) to whom he passed me around for more pennies. Too obvious, too easy. Because there was this: the violent unreliability of memory, the vicious tricks it plays, the camouflages it creates, one terrible imagined memory substituted for an even more horrifying one, thrust back, away. What could that be, the camouflaged origin of the driven sex hunt? There were mysteries that existed only as mysteries, and that, to me, was one.
32
Gerard Malanga came calling.
Don Allen had written me that the poet-actor-writer-performer was coming to Los Angeles and wanted to meet with me, to discuss a possible association. I knew about Malanga; he was supposedly Warhol’s “lover,” although in actuality he was not. Purportedly heterosexual, he was one of the original members of Warhol’s factory. He recently had been traveling with a kind of S&M-ish dance show in which he brandished some whips. I had seen him in the film Chelsea Girls.
I agreed to see him, and he turned up. He was not as handsome as I had feared, not as handsome as he photographed, although certainly a handsome man of about 30-plus years. He was shorter than he appeared in the movie I’d seen. He was beyond glamorous, with flowing brown hair, a classic face, lips that seemed eternally between a sneer and a seductive smile. He wore a jacket with glittery decorations, tight suede pants, low-rise boots. He seemed to be prepared to be photographed at every moment, and the resultant photographs reproduced—widely.
I liked him. I felt no competition with him, as I had feared. We were quite different beings. There was no sexual tension that I detected.
What he came to propose was a collaboration, a book about his association with Warhol. He would describe wondrous adventures—including a time when Mrs. Warhol and Mrs. Malanga despaired of the fact that their sons were leaving the East for perverted California. The fear of abject perversion was indeed justified—they were going to Disneyland. Getting into the spirit of the matter, as if we were playing a clever game—I did not welcome the thought of collaboration with anyone—I suggested a title: “Narcissism, Madness, Suicide: The World of Andy Warhol as Experienced by Gerard Malanga and Re-Created through John Rechy.”
I thought he would swoon with delight.
After he left my apartment that day, we agreed to meet again, in a few days. The prospect intrigued me increasingly. After all, I would be the only writer involved in the venture; Gerard would simply tell me stories I would then dramatize. Too, Warhol was a fantastic creation, existing simultaneously in several guises—at times sending out impostors to fulfill his contractual appearances; he was an enigma who often acted like a petulant child—mouthing one-word answers to complicated questions during interviews, and doing so in a breathy voice.
On one of the rare times that I attended a “Hollywood party” during a period of surcease from the streets, I had met one of his earliest “superstars”—Tom Baker, purported to be the first actor to be photographed frontally naked in a non-pornographic movie, as he had been in “I, a Man.” A very handsome, masculine man, with a reputation as a compulsive heterosexual seducer, he gravitated toward me that evening when I had separated myself from the others there—actors and writers. Laughing, at times mirthlessly—mostly rambling as if he was on speed—he told me this that fascinated me about Warhol: The artist controlled the beautiful narcissists around him by withholding desire, depriving them of their main—often only—strength, the power of their desirability. “After that movie I made,” he said, “nothing more happened, nothing, man; no more roles, nothing, no one calling; it was like we couldn’t exist without him.” Only a few weeks later, I learned that Tom Baker had died from an overdose, perhaps a suicide.
By the time Gerard was to return to discuss the proposed book, I had become excited about doing it.
Looking even more glamorous in a Studio 54 way, he turned up wearing a man’s fur coat—it was a chilly afternoon, but not chilly enough for fur. He set up the tape recorder he had brought. I sat on a chair facing him as he lounged on a couch not unlike Truman Capote in the famous photograph of him lying on a hammock. We began. Rather he began:
“Who is Gerard Malanga?” he asked in dramatic despair. “Poet? Artist? Actor?”
“I think we should start with when you met Warhol, Gerard.”
“Of course. … When I met him as a poet? When I met him as an artist? When I met him as an actor?”
So it went. All about himself. After a few minutes, I suggested we continue at another time, having decided that there would be no further “collaboration.”
Very serious now, dramatic, he asked whether he might ask a favor of me.
“Of course, Gerard. What?”
“Will you take me to the Griffith Park you described in your book Numbers?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be heterosexual?” His suggestion annoyed me.
“I am—or whatever. I don’t want to go there to cruise. I just would like to be able to be there with you, the author of that book, in the actual setting.”
“I’m not a tourist guide, Gerard,” I said. “If you want to go there, go there by yourself, but not like a visitor.”
He was unfazed. When we parted, he gave me a tight hug and a kiss on each cheek.
As if the mere suggestion that I might take anyone to “see” the park had questioned my allegiance to it, I drove to the park early the next day.
I had already had sex with three men by just past noon. Now I waited at my car, again, on a sandy islet adjacent to a long path leading down to several coves of entangled branches. I never parked where other cars were in the immediate area; t
hat signaled several hunters already in the foresty coves. Shirtless and oiled, the top button of my Levi’s unhooked, I preferred to wait alone by my Mustang for others to approach me.
A handsome young man walking by stopped, glanced at me, and nodded as a signal. Moving past him, I entered the wooded area, down a familiar path and into a branchy secluded hollow, like a cave. I waited.
The young man entered the cove. He slipped onto his knees. His fingers reached to open my fly.
Footsteps, hurrying, uncommon in the area.
He stood up.
I started to move away along the declining path.
“Los Angeles vice officers! You’re both under arrest!”
Two cops in plainclothes, looking like typical sex hunters, were on us, their handcuffs ready.
“Arrested for what?” I said.
“That guy was going down on you,” the dark cop barked.
“That’s a lie.” In their urgency to arrest, they had stopped what this cop was claiming. He wrestled my hands behind me and handcuffed me. He shoved me along the path, back to the main road, past other startled sex hunters who went scurrying away.
Ahead of us, the other cop was leading the young man I had been with, now also handcuffed—I thought I heard him sobbing—to a waiting unmarked car. I was pushed into another.
Shirtless, I was driven to the downtown jail, a large fortress of a building, gray, dark. There, the cop led me still handcuffed into a metallic elevator that scraped as it moved up, and it opened into a large room, the color of piss.
Several cops milled about before a desk. I was led past them, into another room where I was fingerprinted and photographed. I felt frozen. These men, in the guarded seclusion of windowless rooms, had absolute power; they could claim whatever they wanted. Behind what looked like a cage, a cop took inventory of my belongings to be taken from me, my wallet, keys. I could keep some change and a slip of paper on which I had written the telephone number of a bondsman given to me by someone in the park with whom I had sex on an earlier day—“The park is hot with vice, man, watch out”—a number I had forgotten about till now.
I was led farther into the innards of the rancid building—there was the smell of incarceration—where several cops, coming off duty, loitered. I kept searching for the young man arrested with me. He would be somewhere invisible within this maze of a fortress.
“Strip.”
I turned the humiliation and fear into a desperate triumph. Sitting on a bare bench, I removed my boots and pants. Then I stood up. I flexed, exhibiting my body. Several cops turned quickly away. A few stared.
I took a shower as demanded. I dressed. I was led into a dank cell, by myself, along a row of other cells, all of which looked vacant.
I told the cop who was locking the cell that I wanted to make the allowed phone call.
“We’ll let you know when,” he said. With an echoing clang, he shut the jail gate. The cell was dark, with one cot and a bare toilet, streaked.
“What they bust ya for?” came a voice from the cell across from me. A slim young man seemed to have awakened, rubbing his eyes and sitting up on a bare cot.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Me, too—for nothing,” he said. “That’s why everyone’s in here. For nothing.” He laughed.
A hot and cold encroaching fear ran through my body as I realized—in flushed waves—what had occurred, where I was, what was possible. Someone could disappear here and no one would know. My body erupted into cold sweat. I called out, “Officer”—hating the word, “officer!”—to demand using the telephone.
No one came.
“They’ll come whenever they want to,” the man in the cell across from mine drawled. “Just relax, buddy. Whatever is gonna happen is gonna happen.”
It had already started to happen, I thought—as a new wave of realization swept over me that I was behind bars, that my freedom had been snatched away—and for nothing, because of a lie, the interrupted act; and even if otherwise, what fucking crime?
“Rechy!” a voice boomed out.
“Here!” The unwelcome urgency in my voice echoed along the halls.
I was led outside the cell to a phone on the wall in a corridor. I dialed the number the man in the park had given me. Please, let him answer, I kept saying as the phone rang and rang.
“Gibson bonds.”
I clasped the phone. I was connected to the outside world, the world I had been wrenched from, and this was now my only link, a voice on the other end of the line.
“My name is John Rechy,” I said. “I’m a writer.” That was, as far as I remembered, the first time I had spoken those words to a stranger, my full correct name, my identification as a writer. Whatever was necessary to escape this trap.
“I’ll be there,” said the voice.
I was led back to the iron-barred cell.
“Got your call, huh?” came the voice from across the hall.
“Yeah.”
Time passed, minutes that were hours.
“Rechy!”
I was led to a small counter, two seats faced each other, separated by thick glass through which we would speak through individual phones. I looked at the man on the other side of the glass, the bail bondsman. He was smiling. I knew instantly that he was gay. I was glad that I was shirtless.
His look on me reassured me. “You’ll be out in a few minutes,” he said.
I was out, in the bondsman’s car, moving along through the night in downtown Los Angeles. A dark rebirth, because I knew that the trap I had fallen into was allowing only a partial opening, that it was poised to spring even more viciously.
“Is your car in the park?”
“Yes—but they close the park at night,” I said.
“I know a back way we can use.”
It was the first time I had seen the park in the dark, without the presence of the sex hunters who roamed the glens and coves. So quiet, so placid in the warm darkness.
There, ahead, was my car, its isolation in the dark shadows a blunt reminder of what had occurred.
“You need a drink,” the bondsman said.
Yes, and to be with someone who would reassure me that things would be right. There was no use pretending that I wasn’t afraid.
In my retrieved Mustang—I felt so warm in it—I followed the man to his small house in Silver Lake.
Inside, jiggling some ice, carrying a bottle of liquor, he said, “It’s very serious.”
“Getting busted in the park?” The words, spoken, made the situation even less real.
“Yes, it’s a felony. Oral copulation, both parties. He handed me the drink and sat down on the couch next to me. “Punishable with up to five years in prison.”
Hot sweat froze. “What?” I took the drink, holding it as if it was an anchor within a violently shifting reality. “It didn’t happen,” I said. “The fucking cops interrupted it.”
“Don’t worry,” he assured me. “I’ll put you in touch with the best lawyer.”
He put his drink on a table. He stood up; he sat next to me; his hand cupped my groin.
Although his advantageous advance made me angry, in a weary impotent way, I would do nothing to sever the connection that indicated the possibility of escape from the yawning trap. I lay back and closed my eyes. He bent over my limp cock and took it in his mouth, trying futilely to arouse me.
When he had jerked himself off, and I was ready to leave, he said, “By the way, I read your book City of Night. It’s terrific.”
I called my sister to cancel our planned dinner that evening.
“Is something wrong, little brother? You sound strange.”
“Nothing, sister. I’m just tired.”
There were times when I felt that my sister could read un-spoken signals from me, the way she figured out mysteries in the movies or on television.
“Are you sure you’re OK, little brother?”
“I’m sure, beautiful sister.”
The attorney recommended
by the bondsman told me there were several preliminary steps I could take in our defense. He had the arrest report. The cop had designated his exact location, several feet away from where he had busted me and the young man whose name I learned only now—Sam. I was familiar with the area described. From the distance claimed, the verdure made it impossible for anyone to see what the cop alleged. The attorney suggested I hire a photographer to make a film of the locale to indicate that impossibility, and an investigator to draw a map of the area.
For once since the nightmare had begun, I felt relief. The attorney had Sam’s telephone number; he was being represented by another attorney.
I met with Sam in his apartment, after I had called him. A sweet good-looking young man—he resembled a high school tennis player—he was as frightened as I had been at first. He had been put into the tank in jail, with dozens of others, dangerous men. He had cowered there, trying to hide, until his attorney got him out. He did not want to be in the film we were to make in the park to present in court. As I left, he told me that he had been arrested before, on the same charge, and that he had been convicted, a matter that would affect our trial.
An overriding vanity, which I grasped as another element of reassurance that everything was going to be all right, overtook me the afternoon I went to the park with the photographer to film the area of the arrest. The day of the bust, I had not worn a shirt. I had considered being filmed that way, “for authenticity.” Instead, I wore a tight flesh-colored T-shirt that would convey a similar impression. Trial or not, I wanted to look good. As I was being filmed walking down the path—counting steps to indicate the distance between the place of arrest and the claimed location of the cop—I smiled. That would bring Johnny Rio, intact, into the courtroom.