City of Night (27 page)

           “How long did you stay there?” the fatman persisted.

           “A month—more—maybe two—” Skipper says at last

           “Why didnt you stay longer?”

           Again Skipper dodges the question. “Well—see—this director—says I got the looks—the personality—but Ive got to study—lots—to get ahead in the flix—and—see—well—I was in one of his movies—”

          
(The director says to Skipper: “Youve got what really matters
—
Looks. But youll need training. Talent is important, too—there are many very beautiful boys in this town.... I know a man, a wonderful drama coach—I’ll take you to him.” And Skipper will have publicity photographs made, and the coach will tell him, “Youre a very beautiful boy
—
and thats Important.” And the director tells Skipper theres a part for him in his new picture: “Not a big part
—
but the next one, when youve learned more—” He smiles reassuringly. “Theyll get to see you, at least, and thats important, In my next film therell be a bigger part, youll get to speak
—
theyll hear you this time.” And Skipper tells himself he is certainly meant for this life.)

           “What movie was that?” the fatman says.

           Skipper looked into his empty glass. He turns to the bartender. “Hey! More drinks!”

           The bartender calls back: “come get em yourself, honey; I ain no waitress!”

           The fatman extends money again to the skinny man. “More drinks,” he orders.

           The skinny man rose—the cigarette holder rolls and drops on the floor, and he almost stumbles on it.

           “What was the name of the movie you were in?—I might have seen it.” The fatman again shoves his own drink at Skipper as the skinny man sits down, sinks into the booth resignedly.

           “It was called—” said Skipper, “—it was called
That’s Life.”
He laughed mirthlessly.

           “I dont remember you in it—of course, it was such a long time ago,” the fatman said inevitably. “What role did you play?”

           “I didnt have a name,” Skipper said.

           “Why, I was sure you were going to tell us you got an award for it!”

           “Shit, man!” Skipper blurts drunkenly, “you couldnt—couldnt even see my face!”

           “And afterwards?” the fatman’s implacable questioning continued.

          
(One evening, a cool breeze invading the garden from the hills
—
one evening, Skipper will refer to “his” room, like the youngman I would see there later—and the director will frown, look at Skipper; “You mean the east bedroom,” he’ll correct him ominously
....
Soon Skipper detects the impatience in the director’s eyes, he sees the new group of youngmen from the studio that come again to swim in the pool
—
and one especially
—
and he hears the director announce to that new youngman, emerging out of the pool while Skipper sits on the marble bench: “I believe youll be a sensation in the movies.” And he turns to Skipper and says, “Go tell Mattie we’ll have a guest for dinner.)

           “Well,” said Skipper, “see—after that—he tells me I need more lessons—I gotta—gotta learn more about acting.”

          
(“He hasnt got the Magic,” the director will say to his friends later about Skipper. “But there is this young boy at the studio, I just talked to him today about his Possibilities
—
and: he is A Very Beautiful Boy.”)

           “You must have been a very beautiful boy,” the skinny man muttered.

           Skipper winced. He looked at the skinny man, startled. He looks in bewilderment about him—as if the echo of the words he had heard through those precious years of his life had momentarily transferred him somewhere else: the director’s mansion, the homes he had been in, progressively less and less extravagant. In his look now I see, blurred, the slow surrender.

           “What happened then?” the fatman said. Exhaling two fat cylinders of smoke through his nostrils, he resembled a charging bull.

           “Oh—I—well—later—I moved out. But I kept going to this acting teacher—and, well, see—I moved in with him—and then—see—I had met lots of other people—when I was living with this Director—and then through this teacher—and—I—well—they liked me.... Shit man,” he said suddenly, “I lived with them all, one right after the mother-fucking other.”

           “And after them?”

           “Others,” Skipper said dully.

           “And then?” the fatman persists.

           “Then—then I got fed up, see? Put it all down—I split. Then—when I came back—hell—I didnt even wanna—didnt even wanna see those people. And some of them—” he adds bitterly, “—they didnt wanna see me. Theyd call someone else—put me up for a while—with a friend of theirs.... Then I hung around Schwartz’s, that movie drugstore—Hollywood Boulevard—the beaches: the whole scene.... So I came back—to Main Street—I didnt even wanna see Hollywood anymore—not even think about it... Then—Christ!—I even got inna mess in fuckin Pershing Square.... Pershing Square!” he says contemptuously.

           “Hows that?”

           “This cop—this Sergeant Morgan. Man—he rousts me once, takes me downstairs—where they interrogate you. We’re alone—tries to put the make on me—I slug him. Man! A cop! But, hell—dig: hes scared shitless—scared Im gonna tell on him. He lets me go—tells me if I ever show, he’ll bust me—...” He holds his glass in both hands, squeezing it tightly. “Motherfuckers,” he says, shaking his head, as if he were passing judgment on all the people crammed into his life.

           The fatman eyed him stonily. Then he yawns, looks at his watch. “It’s past one,” he says.... About us the desperation to find a partner has begun: Make it! During the past hour many couples have left, for the hotels along the block, for apartments, homes—parties that will last into the next day. But the bar is still jammed. The music seems louder, the laughter is more piercingly shrill, more forced. A sustained roar of words crowds you almost physically. The poses have become more effeminate on one side, more masculine on the other.

           Like a bull ready to charge, the fatman lowers his head, places his hands on the table. “I’ll tell you,” he says to Skipper, and in acute awareness of what will happen, I want suddenly to stop his words. I start to get up, but the fatman is already saying to Skipper: “My friend here,” indicating the skinny man, “would like you to go home with him. He hasnt got the guts to ask you, and so I offered to buy you for him—no big deal like youre used to: just for tonight.”

           The skinny man, even drunk, blinked incredulously.

           Skipper passes his hand dazedly over his face, as if trying to place the scene in his mind. “Yeah?” he mutters. “Yeah?”

           Again I want to leave quickly. This blacked-in scene, in focus, has become excruciatingly real. But helplessly aware that the bull is already charging—the beer and hard liquor churning vilely inside me—I hear the fatman’s words go on ineluctably: “Will you go with him?” he has asked Skipper.

           The skinny man, grasping all at once for the vestiges of sobriety, said, almost in tears: “Leave me alone, will you? Will—you—please—leave—me—alone—please!”

           “Well?” the fatman asks Skipper.

           “I’ll go with him—” Skipper muttered.

           “Good,” said the fatman. But he seems disappointed; as if somehow he has expected another climax.

           “—for thirty bucks,” Skipper finishes.

           And by the way the fatman blows out the smoke in relief, I know this is what hes been waiting for. “Thirty dollars!” he roars. “One for every year, huh?—and a few years thrown into the bargain? Is that how you figure it?”

           “Thirty bills,” Skipper repeated. His head almost touched the table.

           “I can get several for that price,” the fatman boasts. “Any of them! Take my pick of em!”

           “Leave me alone,” the skinny man is muttering.

           “Twenty-five bucks,” Skipper said, clenching his fists.

           “Too much,” the fatman says laughing.

           Painfully, I see the bewilderment on Skipper’s face as he looks up now from the table in amazed stupor—to face the fatman, the score—the Enemy.... As Skipper reaches into his pocket, removing the group of pictures from an envelope, I hear something inside of me shout to him:
Dont!
... realizing that Skinper is about to barter for his Youth. But already there are two frayed clippings in Skipper’s hand. “Look,” he says triumphantly to the fatman. “I was in the columns.”

           The fatman reaches for the clippings. He looked at them carefully. “Oh,” he said dully, “you escorted a young actress to a nightclub.” He reads the other. “This one doesnt have a name. All it says is that she was escorted by a young actor.”

           “Yeah,” says Skipper, “but it was Me....”

           The fatman returns the clippings to him.

           Now Skipper shoves the pictures at him, they scatter on the table, among the bottles and the glasses and the smoked cigarette butts. “Thats Me!” he says. The figure of a youngman—Skipper—lies among the debris on the table: the almost-naked body caught gleamingly young by the camera.

           The fatman stares at the pictures indifferently. “You werent wearing much, were you?”

           “They were in the body magazines,” Skipper said. “I even made a movie for them—and there was more pictures—you could order enlargements, even—pay for them—and—”

           The skinny man drunkenly reaches for the pictures. He studies them carefully. “Why—this looks like—isnt this the same—?” he started.

           And the fatman interrupts him abruptly: “Give him back his pictures!” he shouted angrily.

           “Yes—it looks like—just like the picture youve got framed in your room—the big one!” the skinny man said to the fatman. “It is—it’s the same pic—
“

          
“Give him back his pictures!”
the fatman commands, snatching them from the skinny man....

           And now, his motives discovered, the fatman turns with undisguised ferocity on Skipper. “You were much younger then,” he said.

           “I was!... I had just got outta the marines—I told you—I—when—see—”

           “Thats a hell of a long time ago!” the fatman shouts.

           I see Skipper’s face turned down again toward the table in crushed defeat—and I hear the fatman say to him: “I’ll give you ten bucks—and I dont want you myself—I’ll buy you for that one—” He points at the skinny man, who recoils from the fatman’s finger extended pitilessly toward him.... “Ten bucks—for you—... and the pictures....” the fatman says pitilessly, trying now, by degrading even the memory of Skipper’s youth, recorded in the photographs, to erase his own years-long desire.

           “Not the pictures,” Skipper muttered.

           “No deal then,” the fatman announces victoriously. He still holds the photographs in his hand.

           Suddenly Skipper lunges across the table, snatches the photographs from him. “Take your filthy hands off them!” he shouts. The pictures scatter on the floor.

           The fatman looks with undisguised cold hatred at Skipper. He organizes his spilling flesh, to rise—ripping his gaze away from Skipper.

           Skipper gets up unsteadily now. In one swift unexpected motion, he shoves the fatman into the booth, the leather creating a sucking protesting sound as the fatman’s form sinks into it.

           Skippers shouts: “Sit down—
fatso!”

           In an instant the demonic composure of the fatman shatters like a wall crumbling under the impact of a wrecker.

           “You son of a bitch!—dont call me that!” he whines.

           The people in the bar, sensing excitement, crowd about the booth.

           Skipper stands menacingly over the fatman. “You even
smell
fat!” he says.

           They stare at each other like two soldiers in opposing armies who realize that neither will be the victor—that each has been mortally wounded.

           Skipper repeats: “You even smell fat!”

           The fatman—the bull rallying once more after having been stabbed—yells at me: “Well—you comin with us or not?”

           “Fuck yourself,” I said.

           He roars over to the skinny man, lifts him from the booth, dangling him like a puppet. The skinny man, lashing out with his nails, burying them into the fatman as if to puncture the inflated body, wrests himself free of the bear clutch.

           “You do!” the skinny man shouted—and he is crying now. “You really do! You really smell fat!” He begins to laugh, repeating over and over: “Fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat... FAT!...” until the word was drowned in the hysterical laughter, as the fatman—dodging Skipper’s drunkenly aimed fist—thrusts his arms almost pitifully into the encircling crowd and rams his way into the escape of the sheltering night.

           As he stormed out, I heard a familiar voice saying, “Let me through, let me through,” and in the fatman’s wake—pushing her way insistently toward the booth and Skipper—Trudi emerged out of the curious crowd. Small, frail, completely made up—understanding instinctively what had gone on—she gathered the spilled photographs from the floor—neatly—with the clippings, and she put them carefully into the envelope. Her head barely reached Skipper’s shoulders, and she looked at him with the compassion that only one outcast can feel for another. Now she put her arms about his waist, whispering softly to him: “Cummon, baby—screw the beads—lets go home.” She leads him through the crowd, unsteadily but firmly—Skipper willingly surrendering now completely to the drunkenness.

           Outside, the air is cool. Night embraces Main Street blackly.... I stand watching the people as they leave the bar in pairs or in desperate aloneness. A few feet away, I see Skipper bent over the curb, vomiting.

           Now a queen passes by, stands staring at Skipper.... And I hear Trudi—holding Skipper lovingly as he vomits rackingly into the street—challenge the queen’s suddenly bewildered stare: