by John Rechy
And Main Street, though also fuzzhot, is even more crowded now.
When the bars close on Main Street, their world spills into the streets. Malehustlers, queens, scores—all those who havent made it yet in one way or another—or have made it and are trying again—disperse into the night, squeezing every inch of nightlife from the streets.
They stand pretending to be looking into store windows—continue their searches into the all-night moviehouses—the burlesque-movie theaters, where along the dark rows, in the early jammed hours of the morning on weekends, men sit, fly open, pulling off.... Or the scattered army goes to Hooper’s on Main Street—where periodically the cops come in, walk up and down the counter sullenly, picking you out at random—and youre suddenly intensely studying the cup of coffee before you.
Life is lived on the brink of panic on the streets, intensifying the immediate experience—the realness of Today, of This Moment—Now! —and panic is generated by the threat of the vice-squad (plainclothesmen sitting in the known heads licking their lips; sometimes roaming the streets, even offering you money before they bust you); by the copcar driving along the streets —a slowly moving hearse. Like a gang looking for a rumble from a rival gang, cops haunt this area, personally vindictive....
And for the homeless drifters there is also the panic that one day youll wake up to the fact that youre through on the streets, in the bars—that everyone has had you, that those who havent have lost Interest—that youve been replaced by the fresher faces that come daily into the city in that shifting wave of vagrants—younger than you now (and Youth is at a premium), and now the interest you once felt is focused on someone else. One day someone will say about you: “I had him when he was young and pretty.”
And as a reminder of this, beyond Los Angeles Street, in the same area of the world of Main Street but not really a part of it, is Skid Row—and you see prematurely old defeated men, flying on. Thunderbird or Gallo wine, lost in this sunny rosy haven—hanging shaggily like zombies waiting for the Mission to open; folded over in a pool of their own urine where theyve passed out along the alleys....
If youre young, you avoid that street, you concentrate on Today.
Tomorrow, like Death, is inevitable but not thought of....
At night, the fat Negro woman sprawled like chocolate pudding between Harry’s Bar and Wally’s mumblingly coaxes you to take a copy from the slender stack of religious magazines falling from her lap to her fat tired feet. The magazines shouts: AWAKE!
And along that strip, the gray hotels welcome the scores and malehustlers: No Questions Asked. For a few minutes—unless you havent got another place and stay all night—you occupy the fleetingly rented room, where inevitably a neonlight outside will wink off and on feebly like exhausted but persistent lightning.... Throughout the night there are sounds of rapid footsteps running down the stairs.
In the morning, if you stay, you walk out into the harsh daylight The sun bursts cruelly in your eyes. For one blinding instant you see yourself clearly.
The day begins again.... The same.
Today!
SKIPPER: A Very Beautiful Boy
1
ALONG THE PANEL OF AMBER MIRRORS at Harry’s bar, a panorama of searching eyes emerges out of the orangy twilight of cigarette smoke and dimlights: a stew of faces floating murkily in the smoky darkness.
In the mirror I see the fat man on the stool beside me as he extends money across the bar to buy my drink. I turn away from the image of myself sitting next to him. I face him directly.
Like pale dough, his pudgy face—coagulating into a tiny upturned nose—seems molded about a cigar which he munches lewdly, his puffy rounded lips caressing it intimately. He reeks of cologne and beer, cigar smoke.
With one fleshy hand he slides the drink in my direction—after counting his change ostentatiously and stuffing it into his wallet. “Drink up, sonny!—drink up and I’ll buyyanother-one.”
The skinny man standing beside us at the crowded bar slices the air with a cigarette holder. “Who are you playing tonight?” he asks the fatman. “Santa Claus?” Emaciatedly skinny, in his late 30s—his eyes gaunt with years of frustration—he stands there—body curved vampishly, one hand on his hips, the other balancing the black cigarette holder like a parody trumpet, lightly—tightly—between long manicured fingers.
“Dont pay attention to her, sonny,” the fatman says to me. When he smiles, the flesh squeezes his tiny eyes, almost shutting them. “Shes just in from New York,” he explains, indicating the skinny man, “and I told her she’d have to see Main Street.” ... And so the fatman has been playing the role of initiated Guide to the other’s First- Trip-to-Main-Street-and-Vice amazement.
“Dont—call—me—‘she,’ ” the skinny man said, stretching his lips across his face tightly in a straight pink line.... I can tell hes Gigantically intrigued with this bar; nevertheless hes affecting indifference. Crazily, I imagine him walking along Madison Avenue in New York, mincing in a tight olive-green suit as if his legs were tied at the knees; carrying a pencil-thin umbrella as affectedly as he carries—and he carried it—the cigarette holder; entertaining, in the evenings, his equally closeted friends—with Cocktails. Late at night, he will lonesomely pull off, looking at pictures of youngmen.... Sometime tonight, I felt certain—if I stuck around (twice I had started to leave, repelled by the fatman, and twice he had showily slapped a large bill on the bar for drinks: “Drink up; buyyanother-one”) —sometime tonight, I would hear the skinny one, in excited tones, claim surprise that “supposedly straight men” take money from homosexuals in exchange for sex.... Still, I felt strangely sorry for him for the mask which defensively he has to wear.
But I avoid looking at them now. I study this familiar bar: the exotic plants painted to suggest a jungle: a giant butterfly, trying futilely to Escape!—the canvas from wall to wall drooping heavily from the ceiling, shelteringly or oppressively. Pinpoints of colored lights dart into the darkness from the pinball machines ... feeble childhood sparklers, expiring.... In the booths, figures huddle intimately—shadowy clustered vulture forms when you first walk into the smoky twilight, features swallowed by the darkness, emerging into the splashes of light like flotsam out of shallow water; then eyes become visible, incessantly finding a new object to focus on.
Like buyers in a market place, scores in groups, before seat tering singly about the bar for the actual Hunt, may exchange remarks about the malehustlers: discuss them openly, weighing one against the other—as if, like inanimate objects, the hustlers cannot hear.... And like conspirators against a common enemy who must nevertheless be used, the malehustlers, also momentarily together, braggingly discuss how much a particular score is worth.... So the two armies—scores and hustlers—meet here nightly.
And nightly a game of charades is played at Harry’s. Unlike the ones who haunt the streets, even the most masculine scores here usually—but not always—become effeminate in groups, their gestures progressively more airy as the night advances toward the desperation of after-midnight; as the liquor releases the feminine self. And the hustler emphasizes his masculinity in one of various poses—one leg propped against the wall; cigarette held between thumb and finger—eyes veiledly following a likely prospect: the rehearsed, inviting Tough Look.... Bodies sprawl on the benches along the booths. There is the swaggering unceasing exodus to the smelly toilet at the end of the long bar—a gaping toothless mouth....
An air of determination is in every gesture here, in every look, every move. People come to Harry’s primarily for one of two purposes: to buy or to be bought.
Occasionally the femmequeens from the 1-2-3 or Ji-Ji’s breeze in like wilted flowers, carried on the currents of smoke: giggling, regally scanning the bar—making studied defiant exits with great airs, grand queenly shrieks of exiled laughter. And they indicate a kind of contempt for those other men in the bar who only desire other males, without posing, as far as the law allows them, as real women the way the queens do....
The skinny man has been raking the bar, putting everyone down with a bitchy comment. Defensively, he must reject this alluring, disturbing world to which the fatman is connivingly exposing him. “My God!” the skinny man says, “look at that one—his pants are about to fall off his waist! ... And there goes that one to the restroom again!” ... Suddenly, his eyes abruptly stopping their swirl about the bar, he blurted unexpectedly, as if his thoughts had pushed the words out without his control: “I like that one!” He points with his cigarette holder at Skipper, who is standing by the jukebox while obviously avoiding buying his own drink. The fatman slapped his forehead in affected amazement, and in a highpitched, incongruous voice shrieked: “Oh, no, Mary, you cant mean that one!” His blubbery lips envelop the stub of the cigar, almost swallowing it. “You dont mean the one in the black T-shirt!”
“Yes, I do mean the blond one,” said the skinny one, having gone this far. Then he said to the fatman: “And dont call me ‘Mary.’ ”
Skipper, aware of the skinny man’s interest, brings his hands together, fingers intertwined, and flexes his body slowly. The light from the jukebox weaves colors sinuously on him—and from the distance he looks like a very youngman, a boy....
“Honey,” the fatman was going on, addressing the skinny one, who still holds the cigarette aimed at Skipper as if it were a magic wand that would bring him over, “I could have had him when he was Young and Pretty!”
On the stools next to us, sit two middle-aged men. They have been talking in whispers, but now, as they glance surreptitiously but obviously at the fatman. one word emerges clearly from their sibilant sounds: “Fat.”
The fatman drops the cigar butt suddenly on the floor, letting it fall from his mouth; brings his ovaled fatfoot heavily on it, squashing it angrily into the debris of cigarettes on the floor. The two middle-aged men, aware he has heard them, turn away nervously, making rushed incoherent conversation as they clutch at their beers as if for protection—as they move against the wall.
The fatman’s eyes follow the two doggedly. With renewed venom now, he goes on about Skipper: “I’ll bet hes over 30—hes been around longer than just about any of them.”
“Maybe hes not as young as some of the delinquents around here,” said the skinny one, “but I still feel rawthuh Intrigued.” ... And then, in an uncontrolled burst, in which the Mask slid off shockingly, he said: “I think hes positively Savage!” He flung his eyes ecstatically toward the smoky Heaven. Quickly, realizing what hes just said, he composes himself, adjusting his pose consistent again with his earlier charade of Maiden. He sips his drink, shifts his skinny hips; says:
“This whole place is Positively Indecent; it should be razed!”
The fatman roars with laughter. “Why dont you go talk to him?”
“But what will I say to him?” the skinny man asks in renewed interest. He brought his hand to his chest in a gesture of uninitiated Helplessness.
“Nothing.” The fatman contracted the mountains of flesh into a shrug.
“You mean he’ll talk to me?”
The fatman says viciously: “No. I mean, Mary, that all you have to do is wave a few bills before him and he’ll drop his pants for you—right here!”
Even in the orangy dark, I can see the skinny man blanch; he tightens his lips, sucks them in between his teeth, breathing deeply. His eyes hurl their hatred at the fatman. For a long time, the two men look at each other, resenting the common knowledge that binds them together. “I-dont-believe,” the skinny man said pitifully, at last wresting his eyes in defeat from the embattled stare of the other, “that-men-take-money-from-other-men-for-sex.”
“If you dont want to pay for him,” the fatman said ruthlessly, driving his words into the skinny one like a pike, “I’ll buy him for you.... Easy enough.”
The skinny man flings a frantic look of Deep Hurt at him. “Go on, honey,” the fatman pursues mercilessly. “You got to learn. You aint pretty yourself, you know.” He buries his fat elbow in the skinny man’s ribs, almost knocking him off-balance. “Go on!”
“I—have—Never—paid—for—sex.” the skinny man murmurs.
“I told you: I’ll buy him for you—if you haven’t got the guts to do it yourself,” said the fatman pitilessly. “Go on, offer him a drink—bring him over and I’ll fix it up for you. Leave it to me, honey. I mean, your blond ‘savage’ is certainly—uh—enpertaining.
“If you want him.” said the skinny one, “why dont’ you go after him?”
“I like the one I have,” the fatman said. In his voice, nevertheless, there is a tone of deep resentment.... If I make the scene with him, he will probably yawn after it’s over; say something to put me down. He will give me the money contemptuously—but necessarily Bigly. He will adjust his expensive tie carefully, pointedly emphasizing what he would be trying to convince himself the real difference between our worlds is: trying to forget the previous one-sided desire—which will recur in him again and again for whomever.... “Good luck,” he might even say, but I’ll know that hes looking forward to the time when whatever of desirability he may have seen in me—as he has seen it in others, from night to night—will have evaporated.... Looking up, I see my own reflection now in the panel of mirrors; and reflected behind me, that life that has fascinated me greets me victoriously: All’ along this long closed-in bar, the composite face of this submerged world stares defiantly at me.
“Your blond in the T-shirt is really too much,” the fatman is going on. “You just wont believe it!” he says to the skinny one. “He carries some clippings—and those photographs!”
“What Photographs?” said the skinny one.
“Shes interested all right,” the fatman says, winking at me, trying to ally me with him against the skinny one.
“I—Told—You,” said the skinny one firmly. “Don’t Call Me ‘she.’ ”
“On, Mary, get off it!” the fatman says impatiently with a fatwave of his hand, as if he were stripping off the skinny one’s mask. “Who do you think youre fooling? Youve got the hotpants—and youll pay for it—just like I do—because you have to!” he lasned. “So stop your goddam pretending—And Face It!” He turns his swollen round back to his skinny friend.
Mouth ovaled, a look of enormous indignation on his face, the skinny man moved away. He stood momentarily in the middle ot tne bar—then he marched rigidly toward the door. I watch him as he stands there undecided. And then, abruptly, he turns back.
“Did he leave?” the fatman asks me.
“No.”
“I Knew itl” he says triumphantly, transferring the pounds and pounds of his fleshy body on the stool to face the door. He stares at the skinny man, now stanuing only a few feet from the jukebox, glaring back at the fatman. I look at the fatman. in me pudgy pigfeatures there is something indefinably sinister.
About to speak to Skipper—almost hypnotized by him—the skinny man backed away quickly. He looked at the fatman -the fatman challenging him from the distance. Suddenly, abandomng in bewildered rashness the pose of virginal novice, the skinny man says something to Skipper, who turns slowly to face him, answers. The skinny man rushes to the bar. Avoiding looking in our direction, he returned with a drink, which he handed hurriedly to Skipper, as if he were giving away, at last, a treasured, guarded part of himself which he was nevertheless compelled to give....
“Weill” tne fatman sighs triumphantly. He seems somehow vindicated by the skinny man’s submission, like a bullish sergeant justifying his own existence by enlisting recruits.
“Do you know him—the guy in the black T-shirt?” he asks me. Without the cigar, his face looks blank, incomplete, the dough-flesh smeared carelessly over his face.
“Sure—hes a great guy.”
“Well, Christ, why doesnt he give up—hes been around for years!”
Since that first night, at the 1-2-3, when Miss Destiny had introduced him to me as a “model” who had been in the movies, I had of course seen Skipper often. That same n
ight, I had been with him—with Chuck and the girls we picked up on Main Street. With compulsive determination—I remembered—be had crossed the wires to start Buddy’s car; as if he were terrified of inertia.... Later, he had put one of the girls down for coming on that she wanted to get into The Movies. “Go home,” he said curtly.... Often, I saw him in the bars, playing the pinball machine, struggling with it to get a high score, until inevitably the TILT would light up mockingly. Or I would see him playing the shuffleboard, smashing the pins angrily, the disk spinning back dizzily toward him. But I never saw him in Pershing Square. There are stories that something had happened between him and Sergeant Morgan—stories that after an incident of which there are different versions, Sergeant Morgan ran him out. Skipper merely said: “That park’s for chippies, man!—hell, they go for pennies therel” ... One night, high, he had talked everyone into driving to Hollywood, and then, moodily, had put it down: “Hollywood’s nowhere.” ... Off and on he stayed at Trudi’s near Silverlake—a neat, feminine unit in a flowery court, paid for by Trudi’s “daddy.” And in that world youll hear that Trudi’s daddy really wants Skipper but wont admit he (the daddy) is a fruit, and so he makes it with Trudi, forgetting, maybe—which is easy—that Trudi, too, is, technically, a man. Once I had gone to score marijuana at Trudi’s house —she always had some—and Skipper was there, sitting at the table eating, while Trudi lovingly served him like a young infatuated wife.... When Skipper was gone for longer than a few days—and he would disappear periodically—Trudi would come into the bars, hardly madeup, looking like a mournful little girl, asking if anyone had seen him. When theyd tell her no, she’d shake her head: “Those goddam beads,” she’d mumble. Other times, at the 1-2-3, she would come in Grandly, completely madeup, to meet Skipper.