City of Night (Rechy, John)

by John Rechy

  Dregs of memories chum.

  Remembering....

  This:

  Once, walking along Hollywood Boulevard in the afternoon, I saw a woman coming out of Kress’s: a wild gypsy-looking old woman, like a fugitive from a movie-set—she was dark, screamingly painted ... kaleidoscopic earrings ... a red and orange scarf about her long black hair ... wide blue skirt, lowcut blouse—an old frantic woman with demented burning eyes, and as she stepped into the bright Hollywood street, this old flashy woman began a series of the same strange gestures: her right hand would rise frantically over her eyes, as if to tear some horrible spectacle from her sight. But halfway down, toward her breast, the gesture of her hand mellowed, slowed, lost its franticness.... And she seemed now instead to be blessing the terrible spectacle she had first tried to tear from her sight....

  Stupidly, now, I raised my hand as if to imitate that woman’s benediction.

  Then smash!

  Smash! Smash! Smash!

  The world collapsed.

  And it happened exactly like this:

  Suddenly, in one moment—in one single solitary crazy one-unit moment, I was both drunk and sober: I was two people. And the sober me was looking on at the drunk me, and it’s terrifying to see yourself so beaten and scared. Soberly and clearly I saw myself drunk—drunk worth all those days and nights of determined sobriety. And I saw myself folded over vomiting in the head of The Rocking Times; and I knew it was happening, that the nightworld was caving in—because the terror of a lifetime can be contained in one inexplicable moment. And why that moment? I dont know. But it was then.

  It was then that the ugly tortured world whirled. It was then that a perimeter of black surrounded the area of my sight, closed in swiftly, heavily, darkly.

  And it was then that the sober me saw the drunk me reel to the floor and fall. Felt the drunk laughter like cotton in my mouth choking.

  It’s Ash Wednesday.

  Im out on the streets.

  There are only a few stray people, some foreheads smeared with ashes. The city is strangely quiet. It’s late night.

  The demons, the clowns are gone.

  After the smothering black-out, I remember—only hazily, as if my mind had been rubbed over with an imperfect eraser —waking up on a cot in a back room of Sylvia’s boarded-up bar where we had taken Sonny that afternoon. Others were still passed out about me when I walked out. I remember walking the streets of the Lenten city, away from the Quarter.

  Now, too tired to walk any farther, I enter an all-night moviehouse. The air is excessively hot. Derelicts sleep on the floor. I slump on a wooden seat. A few rows away, I see Sonny, dejectedly asleep: deserted. The two scores are no longer with him.

  I close my eyes. I try to sleep. But I cant. Because when I close my eyes, that recurrent nightmare I had had as a very little boy comes again: And Im being crushed by wooden stones, over which theres a thin, flimsy veil. I try to push them away. But even when I open my eyes, the stones keep crushing me, the veil melting like wax over my face.

  Finally it was gone.

  Sleep is coming—not that slow entering into a state of momentary beinglessness. No. It was as if for a long, long time I struggle to open an enormous black door—beyond which I shut myself at last in sleep.

  Wide awake suddenly, I opened my eyes.

  I saw three cockroaches crawling on my arm.

  And in the flickering light of the movie, I looked down on a man squatting before me on the floor, his hungry hot hands on my thighs, his moist lips glued to the opening of my pants.

  The first church I telephoned was St Patrick’s. “I cant see you,” said the priest, “not until morning, we’re closed now.” And he hung up. I called St Louis Cathedral. “I cant see you —of course not—I get these calls all the time.” A third one—and I said hurriedly: “Dont hang up, Father. Ive got to talk to someone!” And he listened only a few moments. “You must be drunk,” he said angrily, and he hung up. And I called The Church of Eternal Succor, and I called other churches—and they all said: “No.” “Go to sleep.” “Come tomorrow to the confessional.” (Where life doesnt roar so loudly—in whispers, it can be listened to....) “Some time else.” “When we are open.” One even said: “God bless you,” before he hung up.

  And I was experiencing that only Death, which is the symbolic death of the soul. It’s the death of the soul, not of the body—it’s that which creates ghosts, and in those moments I felt myself becoming a ghost, drained of all that makes this journey to achieve some kind of salvation bearable under the universal sentence of death. And the body becomes cold because the heart and the soul, about to give up, are screaming for sustenance—from any source, even a remote voice on a telephone—and they drain the body in order to support themselves for that one last moment before the horror comes stifling out that already-dying spark.

  And I was thinking that although there is no God, never was a God, and never will be One—considering the world He made, it is possible to understand Him—or that part of Him that had forbidden Knowing, because—Christ!—at that moment I longed for innocence more than for anything else, and I would have thrown away all the frantic knowing for a return to a state of Grace—which is only the state of, idiot-like, Not Knowing.

  I called one more church. St Vincent de Paul.

  And a priest who sounded very young answered, and he didnt hang up and he was the one I had tried to reach, I knew, and he spoke to me and spoke—and I can remember only one thing he said—and the rest doesnt matter because all I had wanted was to hear a voice from a childhood in the wind.... And what I do remember that priest saying is merely this:

  “I know,” he said. “Yes, I know.”

  And I returned to El Paso.

  Here, by another window, I’ll look back on the world and I’ll try to understand.... But, perhaps, mysteriously, it’s all beyond reasons. Perhaps it’s as futile as trying to capture the wind.

  And it’s windy here now.

  No matter how you close the windows or pull the curtains or try to hide from it or shelter yourself from it, it’s there. It’s impossible to escape the Wind. You can still hear it shrieking. You always know it’s there. Waiting.

  And I know it will wait patiently for me, ineluctably, when inevitably I’ll leave this city again.

  And what has been found?

  Nothing.

  A circle which winds around, without beginning, without end.

  The clouds are storming angrily across the orange-gray sky. They rush at each other as if to battle. You know how it is in Texas each year before spring. One moment theres the stunning awareness that soon spring is coming, with the yellow-green clusters of leaves budding on the skeleton trees, hinting of a potential revival—soon, soon.

  And the next moment the fierce wind comes screaming, whirling the needle-pointed dust, stifling all hope. And you know then that what has not happened will never happen. That hope is an end within itself.

  And the fierce wind is an echo of angry childhood and of a very scared boy looking out the window—remembering my dead dog outside by the wounded house as the gray Texas dust gradually covered her up—and thinking:

  It isnt fair! Why cant dogs go to Heaven?