City of Night (Rechy, John)

by John Rechy

  “I had them made especially,” Neil is explaining, eyeing the dummies like an infatuated lover. “Theyre not always dressed this way. I change their clothes to whatever suits my mood.... Incidentally,” he added proudly, “most of these clothes Ive designed Myself (Im a very Talented freelance artist, you know)—and then I have them custom-made.”

  Stirring himself out of his awe, he slid open a panel of doors, displaying an incredible array of costumes—a mesh of colors, of brocade, studs; jackets, pants, vests. He stands to one side like a painter undraping his Masterpiece. “Dozens and dozens and dozens,” he points out, “all different sizes, all different periods!” Beneath the costumes are about fifty pairs of boots, all kinds, all colors.

  From a shelf on top, Neil pulled a large brown leather box, carefully pushing away stacks of hats (cowboy hats, military and motorcycle caps; plumed helmets). Inside the box are whips, leather gloves, handcuffs, straps. He exhibits these like a woman showing her most precious jewelry—or her trousseau. “All of this is insured,” he explained.... He even had a leather handkerchief.

  He returned to the costumes, pulling out a jacket here, a vest there, a pair of chaps, pants—holding them before me—his expression rapt; his voice awed (the tone one would use in a church); his movements ritualistically careful (as a bride would touch her wedding gown). Throughout this display, he studies me as he presents each item; awaiting any reaction he can grasp, any clue as to my interest. I know instantly that I would like to see myself in these costumes. And he knows it too. He sighed contentedly.

  “Would you like me to dress you up?” he asked me.

  I feel suddenly apprehensive, but I dont answer.

  “I’ll use the very basic this first time, I’ll go slowly, nothing too elaborate.” He coaxes me like a doctor with a child. “Another time, when Ive studied you more, I’ll really show you. This time I’ll just open the door just—oh—about a fourth of the way.”

  He interprets my silence as acquiescence. With sureness, he removes clothes from the closet, becoming progressively more excited as he touches them adoringly, worshipingly, reverently. His trembling hands reject an elaborately studded jacket, which he held treasuringly for a long moment—choosing more “conventional” clothes; admonishing himself: “Not the first time, not the first time”—but vaunting each idolized piece of clothes he nevertheless rejects.

  He has forgotten the restrained movements that the clothes hes wearing demand. His shirt is bulging out over his stomach. He has loosened the belt, the vest. Straps dangle. The shirt protrudes in a satanic tail behind him. Hes becoming sadly disheveled. The whole costume sags. Prespiration runs down his flushed face. Hes huffing.

  Ritualistically, like a servant who adores his job, whose purpose in life is subservience, he begins to remove my clothes (not as another person might, for the sake of the nakedness emphasizing the sexuality of the act: no, not at all like that: with him, it seems to be the actual act of obeisance that is exciting him). He had led me carefully away from the mirrors. When Im stripped, he doesnt touch my body, hardly even glances at me.

  First a pair of skintight black denim pants; a tapered shirt, russet-colored, which he leaves open halfway down my stomach. I wonder what this costume will ultimately be. It seems he is improvising for over-all effect: to create a fantasy which, like the furniture, will merely suggest something rather than be anything specific.... A pair of black boots which come to the knees; when he slips the boots onto my feet, his head bends brushing the slick leather with his cheek.... Black leather gloves. A hat which arches slightly on the sides. He added a thick large-buckled belt about my waist. Rushing to the leather box in the closet, he removed a long coiled whip, which he planted firmly in my hand. And he announced apocalyptically:

  “A plantation overseer!”

  Automatically I turn to face the panel of mirrors; but Neil blocks my view quickly. “Not yet!” After a few moments, he steps aside dramatically.

  “I present you to you—to You as You have always wanted to be,” he said solemnly.

  Clearly, this is me as he wants to see me. But I feel excited by the reflection of myself. Possibly noticing this, Neil stands before me again, once more blacking my reflection, as though my own fascination threatens to shut him out of the fantasy.

  “It’s just a hint,” he said in that awed tone. “Nothing extraordinary. Another time, I’ll Really Show You!” I notice his voice is changing strangely. What is he trying to convey by those vaguely recognizable accents?

  With a jolt of awareness which almost took my breath I realize that he is now speaking in the slightly slurred Southern sounds of a field hand! My first impulse was to laugh; my next, to remove the clothes and leave this fantastic man.

  But Neil is already saying: “Now we’re ready. Now we can really begin The Initiation.” Like a well-trained acolyte, he bowed. His actions revolt and fascinate me. I am overwhelmed by the ritualistic attention, excited by the image of myself in the mirror. He knows it too. But I am sure hes misinterpreting that excitement, which is merely for myself in these clothes, narcissistically, not for what the clothes themselves must represent to him.

  He approached me slowly. Fascinatedly, he moved around me, arranging the mirrors so that both of us can see the reflections from different angles; careful, always, to be in the framed image. He led me to the elaborately carved chair before the mirror.

  He knelt.

  Without warning, he flung himself stomach down on the floor, and now all his actions will become astonishingly feverish. His bead burrowed between the boots; his tongue glides hungrily over the glossy surface; his hands caress the leather, reach now for the belt. He looped his fingers urgently behind it. Releasing the belt, his hands move treasuringly down the costume. His mouth gnaws into the opening at the top of one boot, then the other, his teeth cling to the straps inside. Frenziedly, he raised my foot with one hand, turned himself face up on the floor. And he held the boot poised over his face. From his throat emanate gasping groans; his eyes are deliriously wide, as if to magnify the scene beyond his ordinary vision. With one desperate hand, he pressed down on my leg from the knee, attempting to bring the boot against his craving mouth.

  Swiftly—angered—I moved away from him—leaving him a shattered heap of studs and leather straps sprawled grotesquely on the floor.

  “What’s the matter?” he whispered almost inaudibly.

  “Im not interested,” I said harshly.

  As I took off the clothes he had dressed me in, to leave, he eyed me curiously from where he still lay pitifully like a smashed doll on the floor.

  2

  But I came back.

  He indicated not the slightest embarrassment over what had occurred the first time. In fact, he seemed to have been expecting me.

  “Im glad you came over. I want to take some photographs of you,” he said. Today hes dressed in a vaguely Western costume. “Oh, dont worry—I’ll just dress you up for the pictures,” he promised. “Nothing else.” But he eyed me slyly.

  He knows now that I am, at least, intrigued by his masquerade.

  When he presents me to myself in the mirror (again: “You as you would like to bet”), Im an exaggerated cowboy, with spurs, chaps. Looking at myself, I feel slightly silly; but soon the seducing attention obliterates the feeling of absurdity: I feed hungrily on his glorified adulation, as Neil, speaking this time in a Western drawl, prepares to take the pictures.

  We move into the other room.

  The cowboy first. A Prussian officer. A pirate. He poses each scene at the point of arrested violence. A whip in my hand as if about to unfurl at him behind the camera. Boots always prominently displayed. Fists clenched. Body lunging. Now he brings in one of the manikins—heterogeneously “dressed up” —studs, straps, chains.... Neil executes—crouched, contorted, sweating—“to get the feel of it,” he explained—the cringing positions that the dummy will ultimately assume, menaced, for the pictures. The camera keeps clicking as Neil vac
illates from acolyte to High Priest.

  “Now I’ll improvise!” he exclaimed joyously.

  When he was ready to take the picture, he announced triumphantly: “An Executioner!”

  And Im standing before the camera in black tights, boots to the hips, a leather vest, a black braided whip in a swirl about the boots. Im surrounded by the shield, the lance, the metal sun, and a long medieval axe propped against the wall.

  The shutter closes....

  Neil rushed toward me, his eyes begging, and in a terrifying, shaken voice he pleaded with me to execute with the whip the movement which the camera had just frozen.

  But I didnt.

  He was disappointed and nervous.

  Sulkingly, he went about preparing lunch. Then something strange happened: As he stood over the stove, dressed as he was in the Western clothes—and an apron over all of that—he turned to me (dressed now in my own clothes—although he had insisted I leave the “Executioner’s” costume on), and he asked me this:

  “Tell me truthfully: Do you find me effeminate?”

  I studied him as he stood by the stove. That apron over the costume—... He was holding the spoon limply in the air. Realizing that, he grasped it tightly. Seeing the look he was throwing at me, exhorting me to say what he wanted to hear, I said: “Of course not, Neil.”

  “Thank you very much,” he said almost humbly.

  Shrugging his shoulders, dipping vigorously into whatever he was cooking, he laughed goodhumoredly, looking very much like that ebullient, beer-drinking Bavarian. “One time,” he said, “I was walking along Market Street—oh, I was really Dressed Up—a cowboy! And a carload of teenage boys drove by and shouted: ‘Hi Tex!’”

  I realized the telling of this story amounted to presenting his credentials for “realness.” Yes, having seen him in the extreme clothes, I cant help thinking that what hes just presented as proof of his Realness had been, instead, more of a derisively hurled insult.... He was waiting for me to comment on the story. When I want, he said: “I know I look very Real”—but theres a questioning tone in his voice, as there had been, I remember, in Miss Destiny’s when she too had proclaimed her “realness.”

  We were hardly through lunch when I heard the obstreperous roar of a motorcycle outside, then an insistent knock at the door.

  “Damn it!” Neil said, looking out the window. “It’s Carl! Whenever hes been drinking, he comes over!” Opening the door, he pretended surprise: “Carl!—how nice to see you!”

  Carl, a large, masculine, somewhat goodlooking man in his 30s, strutted in arrogantly in motorcycle clothes. His breath reeked of liquor. “Just seeing how the leather half lives,” he said, and sat down—unasked, and much to Neil’s evident chagrin.

  “Well, of course, Im always glad to see you, but we—” Neil began.

  Carl interrupted: “Oh, just pretend Im not here.”

  “difficult to do,” Neil muttered. Then (and I can almost hear him thinking, “Well, Whu-I NOT?”): “Well. Carl, if you are going to stay—for a little while—you can take some pictures for us. That way I can be in them too.”

  “Sure ... sweetie,” Carl said. Neil stared warningly at him, evidently annoyed by the endearment.

  Now both Neil and I are dressed in cop uniforms, and Neil is going down on me. Now we’re cowboys, and hes on the floor begging (not) to be hurt. Now hes in a seventeenth-century costume, and Im a pirate threatening him.... He acted out each scene impassionately....

  Protesting again when I got into my own clothes, Neil is now dressed in a tight “improvised” costume—boots, belt, straps, glittering studs.

  “Dont let him fool you,” Neil said maliciously to me when the picturetaking was over and Carl had gone to the head. “Carl’s not quite as butch as hes pretending to be. Hes really the end!—but even people like him serve a function....I’ll tell you something about him, before he gets back. Sometimes, when he plays the sadist (though hes more often the masochist now), he picks up the nelliest queens—the most effeminate types, types I wouldnt even talk to! Theres this one little queen -a chorus boy—who goes around telling about when he went home with Carl. Carl put on a uniform (he has an insignificant collection) and stood menacingly over the little queen and said: ‘I am your fuehrer; you do everything I tell you. And the queen—ho-ho—you know what she said to him? She broke her wrist and lisped at Carl: ‘Oh, Mary, youre too much!’—and she swished out. You can imagine how Carl avoids her like poison! ... Youd never believe it, to look at him now, but when a friend first brought Carl over—oh, several years ago—you should have seen him: shy; he wouldnt do anything. But now! ... Poor Carl—the things that happen to him.... I’ll tell you something else—very funny—ho.ho! One time he stomped into a bar and slid on some spilled beer. (He drinks a lot now—and for some strange reason, as I say, he always comes here when hes drunk.) Anyway, he slid on the spilled beer and fell with legs up—and the queen was there and she shrieked: ‘Highheels and all!’ ... Carl is the one who gave me that silly leather handkerchief.... And Carl, in the middle of summer—...”

  Carl came back. Neil finished tactfully: “In the middle of summer I usually go to Los Angeles to see how things are going. Ive bought many fine items there.” Now he turned to Carl, baiting him like this, perhaps to drive him away: “I heard something hilarious, Carl. You know what that little chorus-boy queen told me?—you know the one I mean.”

  Carl blanched.

  Neil continued: “She told me that the height of sadism is the sadist who lets the masochist win! Ho, ho, ho!” He laughed raucously like a department store Santa Claus.

  Carl, of course, wasnt amused. “Have you heard anything more about your stolen guns, Neil?” he asked. Neil winced. Carl apparently had aimed directly.

  “No!” Neil said curtly.

  Making himself at home—and smiling for having wounded Neil back in a way which I did not understand—Carl goes to a cabinet and brings out a decanter of wine, begins immediately to drink from it thirstily; and as he drinks, he becomes more pugnacious toward Neil—and his voice will become progressively more high pitched, his gestures airier—hinting, shockingly, because of his masculine appearance, at girlishness.

  Turning toward me, Carl startled me by saying this: “You may have discovered this yourself (I dont know how long youve known Mr Neil), but hes insulated himself with his costumes, the way other old men insulate themselves with money—or dirty pictures.” It is more than the previous embarrassing reference, by Neil, to the interlude between Carl and the chorus boy—more than the liquor—that is making Carl abandon so swiftly even the barest trace of civility between him and Neil, as though a years-long tacitly undeclared war had at last flared into open conflict. “Thats how youve prepared for your old age, isnt it, darling?” he asked Neil.

  Sensing the direction of the conversation, Neil tried to remove the wine, but Carl reached for it quickly, poured out another glass. Resigned to the fact that Carl was staying, Neil said: “Lets take more pictures. I have a good idea for one! ... And dont call me nelly affectionate names, Carl—Ive warned you before! And dont call them ‘costumes’!”

  Carl ignores him, goes on flaunting his deeply rooted anger. “Anyway,” he says, “Neil lures people with his fantastic makebelieve—and in a world—...”

  Neil: “Why dont you tell us instead about your experiences —like with the chorus boy.”

  “—and in a world like ours that deals, from the beginning, largely in repressed sexdreams,” Carl goes on, “Neil fills his sexual needs by attracting others with his—... Collection. Look at those boots—the belt—...” He shook his head, smiling wryly. “Has he shown you his collection in the basement?” he asks me.

  “Carl, Im going to have to ask you to leave,” Neil said angrily.

  But Carl went on: “Do you know bow he makes his contacts? —and, again, I dont know how he met you—” More wine. The masculinity has relaxed into a girlish wistfulness of the face, the body. “Well, sometimes, he adve
rtises sales of leather goods, in the newspapers. Then he makes the people who turn up. Or he invites people over for ... tea!” He chortles. “Neil is so buried in his fantasy that he cant acknowledge that several of these people come to him to get something else from him—at first: food or whatever—to stay if they dont have a place.... Why did you come?” he asked me.

  “What youre saying isnt true,” Neil said severely. “I get calls from Los Angeles—as far as Seattle—farther!—people wanting to meet me—just to talk to me, see my Collection!”

  “Collect?” Carl asked.

  Neil: “I said Collection. My Collection.”

  Carl: “I mean the calls from Seattle—are they collect?”

  “Prepaid!” Neil said annoyedly. “Although,” he added, making Carl smile, “if I help people out, what difference does that make? After all, a convert—...”

  “Is a convert,” Carl finished for him.

  “Well, you dont have to talk as if youre not!”

  Carl asked me: “Has he told you he considers himself a Saint?”

  Neil: “I lead people in the direction they want to go. I fulfill—...”

  Carl raised his glass in a toast. “To Saint Neil of the Leather Jacket!” He said to me: “I was brought over by a ... ‘friend,’ and Nei!—how do you put it so cleverly, dearheart?—oh, yes! He ‘opened the door—a quarter of the way only’—the first time. And all that attention he heaps on you! Whew! And then -then he pushed the door open!” He made a harsh gesture of shoving an invisible door. He laughed, straightening up decorously on the chair, realizing he was getting high. “And it was quite a world, Saint Tex—oops!—I mean: Saint Neil of the— of the—... What? Leather Jacket. Thats it: Saint Neil of the Leather Jacket!”

  “You were anxious to come in, whether you knew it then or not,” Neil hurled at him.

  “Was I?” Carl said, passing his hand over his eyes for clarity. “It was such a long time ago.... Remember, Neil, when you advertised one of your phony sales—and the man called, and he came over with his mother and his wife? He’d probably been warned about you. Did you dress all three up?”