City of Night (28 page)

           “Whats the matter, queenie?... Aint you never seen a
man
puke?”

        
CITY OF NIGHT

           AFTER ALL, THERES THIS TO CONSIDER:
The world’s no fucking good. “Youve got to pretend you dont give a damn and swing along with those that really dont
—
or you go under
.”

           I needed hungrily to feel wanted—but when someone tried to get too close—someone met in that daily excursion through moviehouse balconies, bars, the park—I immediately moved away from him. I seldom saw the same person more than a few times during those months.

           Recurrently, around the others hustling those places, I felt a peculiar overpowering guilt because I was convinced I was not trapped by that world, as I was certain they were. Yet there were those other times when I felt even more hopelessly a part of it for having searched it out. It was a quandary so strangely disturbing—so difficult to understand—that I tried to force myself not to think about it—perhaps because I sensed even then that the answer to the riddle would entail something much too harsh to face.

           Increasingly now there were moments of craving for a form of revenge on life—to get even with it. And for what reason specifically? I didnt really know. More and more, revenge became a conscious craving.

           There is a bar in Los Angeles a block from Pershing Square, on Sixth Street. It’s called the Hodge Podge. At that time it wasnt exclusively a hustling bar—many went there to make out mutually with each other. But often you can score much better in such a bar.

           From the street, you descend into it, as if into a cellar. It is dark and like a cave: partitions separating it into small ghettos, where groups huddle in the semidarkness. As you walk in, a youngman who looks like a hood may check your I.D. Because he hadnt seen me there before, he asked me for mine. Before I could pull it out of my wallet, a Negro queen I had seen briefly, at the most twice at the 1-2-3—Miss Billie—comes rushing over to me and the youngman checking I.D. “Oh, baby,” she says to him indignantly, “hes All Right—why, Ive known him
for years!
You just go ahead and let him in like your sister says, hear?” She turned to me: “Im working here now, baby—to attract a new crowd—and you just rely on Miss Billie whenever you need help to get in this bar.” Someone called to her for drinks. “I’ll talk to you later, sweetheart,” she said, moving away.

           Before you can make out the faces here, your eyes have to wait a few moments to adjust to the light. As my eyes focused, there was one person I saw immediately, and he was looking at me: a well-dressed man, not yet middle-aged, sitting alone at a table.... Immediately I realized I knew him—from somewhere, sometime. It could even have been New York. Perhaps I had merely talked to him somewhere—Main Street, the park. But I knew it wasnt just “somewhere, sometime.” I knew him from a time somehow important....

          
“Baby!”
I saw Pauline coming toward me with two drinks, one of which she handed to me. She is fiercely madeup around the eyes tonight—still trying to look like Sophia Loren, her lips round and pouting. I wonder what shes doing away from the 1-2-3 and Ji-Ji’s—the two places preferred by queens because they could get away with higher drag. “I
knew
I should come here more
often
. Ive
heard
it’s
really
getting to be a
kicky bar.” She comes on like this with everyone—soon she’ll be promising me all kinds of things. She’ll be talking about her beauty shop—still Soon To Open. And she’ll be telling me, as she tells everyone else, how Im the only
person she has
ever
loved.

           “I
just
moved into this
grand
apartment, out in
Hollywood,
baby,” she gushed, “and you
must
come out and
live
with me. And we’ll live in
grand
style.... You know, my Beauty Shop is
about
to open—and my customers are the
wealthiest
women in Beverly Hills, and I
just
—...” She goes on familiarly.

           The man at the table is still staring at me. I wonder if he too is trying to remember from where he knows me. As much as I tried to avoid looking at him, I kept turning to face him. In that bar—among all the giggles and the loud laughter, amid the jukebox rocking—he appears strangely to me now as if sitting in some kind of judgment. On me? But I still cant remember.

           “Ive got to split,” I told Pauline abruptly.

           “But you
just
got here, baby!” She poses at being offended. “Are you being
unfaithful?
—to the person who loves you the
most
in this wide, wide world? Now,
confess
—are you being
unfaithful
to me?... Youre
bugged
by this place, arent you? I can
tell
.... I’ll tell you
what!
I am
loaded
tonight, sweet heart. Lets go out to this
real wild
place I know of, where we can pick up some
really fine
maryjane. Then we’ll go to my
pad
and get
high
.... Of course, I
wish
I could take you out to my
new
apartment—in
Hollywood
(though
actually
it’s closer to
Beverly Hills)
—but as a matter of
fact,
I havent
really
occupied it,
yet
. You see, theyre
remodeling
it and the interior decorators want it to be
just so
—you know how those girls are—and
so,
in the
meantime,
Im still living on
Spring Street
....”

           We walked out together, Pauline shrieking to attract attention as she makes her exit. At the landing leading up the steps to the street, I glanced back at the man. He was still looking at me.

           This time, for once, it turned out Pauline is telling the truth. She was indeed loaded. We took a cab to a place on upper Broadway.

           The bar turns out to be mostly a spadebar.

           On the dance floor, spade chicks with classic butts squeezed into gold and orange and red hugging dresses dance with gleamingfaced Negro men. This is not a queer bar—it is an outcast bar—Negroes and vagrant whites, heads and hypes, dikes and queens. On the dancefloor, too, lesbians—the masculine ones, the bull-dikes—dance with hugely effeminate queens, the roles of course reversed but technically legal—broadshouldered women and waspwaist-squeezed youngmen. The dikes are leading the queens.

           “Isnt this
positively
mad, honey?” says Pauline, playing for tonight—or until her money lasts—the wealthy woman out on the town with her “escort.” “I have a
fine
connection here, baby, and we’ll get
tanked
on
bees
and
pod
and
then
I’ll
really
show you a
sex-scene
. Ive been
waiting
since the
first
time I
saw
you.... Huccome youve never made it with me, baby?—youre the
only
one Ive
ever
loved!... My
God!
Those
queens
dancing with
lesbians
—ugh! They must be
perverts!”

           I went to the head, and there, sweat-bright spade and fay faces focus intensely on dice, cramped bodies in the tiny room exploding with the odor of maryjane smoke. A droopy-eyed Negro hands me a tiny joint, offers what is hardly a roach now: “Turn on?”

           “You took so
long,”
said Pauline when I returned to the table where we were now sitting. “I hope nobody was being
naughty
with you. I’ll scratch their
eyes
out!” She goes on like this—but I wasnt really listening. I was still thinking about that man at the Hodge Podge. Somehow, whatever had happened with him, whenever and wherever it had happened, or not happened, was important. I knew that much with certainty.

           “Why are you so
nervous,
baby?” Pauline asks me.

           And then I remembered, suddenly and distinctly. Abruptly, I got up from the table.

           “Where are you
going?”
Pauline asked.

           “I just remembered,” I told her, “I have to see someone downtown. Ive got to split, Pauline. I’ll see you some other time—at your Hollywood pad, okay?”

           “Why,
baby!”
she exclaimed. “You havent even
finished
the drink I
got
you!”

           I drank it in a gulp.

           “Something is
wrong
,” she said. “Or dont you
love
me anymore?”

           “Ive just got to go back,” I said. “I just remembered someone I have to see, thats all.”

           And now she became mad. “Go to hell, for all I care—youre not so dam tough anyway,” she growled in a man’s voice.

           “Sorry, Pauline—Ive got to go.”

           At the door I looked back, and she was storming across the dancefloor; stood staring back at me for a moment, to see if I would follow her. Realizing that I wasnt going to, she rushed into the ladies’ room, dabbing at nonexistent tears. The scene, for her, although not what she had intended, was nevertheless complete. She was now the hurt, wronged woman....

           Shortly after, I was back at the Hodge Podge. As I walked in, looking through the dark clouds of smoke, I thought for a moment that the man had left, and my heart sank. But then I saw him. He had merely moved farther into the dark. And now that he was high—as he had been the first time I had seen him—I was certain who he was. I had the sudden feeling that he too was waiting for me. I stood near him.

           “Drink?” he said. I sat down. He called Miss Billie. “Hi, hon,” she said to me. “Why’d you leave so quick justa while ago?... And come to think of it, why aint I seen you in such a long time?—but then of course I’ve been in the hospital myself for about a week. I had this operation—and when I—”

           “An abortion?” an eavesdropping white queen asks.

           “Shut your nelly mouth, Mary,” said the Negro queen—“or I’ll have you eight-sixed out of this bar so fast you wont even be able to hold on to your makeup!”

           “Honey,” said the other queen. “I wasn’t trying to dish you, sweetheart... Why, dearest,
I’d
like to get pregnant myself!” They all tittered now, including Miss Billie: suddenly all sisters again.

           The man Im sitting with doesnt speak for a long while. He doesnt even look at me. He stared down at the table, playing with his drink.... But Im almost certain that he remembers me too—that hes been waiting for me to fulfill something vastly, if perversely, important.

           “Will you come with me?” he asks me.

           Without answering, I stood up. We walked out.

           We went to a hotel nearby, much better than the ones on Main Street. Coldly, we went up the elevator, into his room... Outside, he hadnt appeared as drunk as he seems now, and I wonder if somehow it’s necessary that he be drunk—and if not really that drunk, that he pretend to be.

           He removes only his coat, places it carefully inside-out on a chair, his wallet showing half-out from the pocket

           In bed, when he touched me, it was all quick, frantic.... Then he lay back as if in drunken sleep.

           Instantly—doing what I had come up to do—I reached for his wallet. I removed all the money. I left the wallet, open, on the chair.

           And I walked out feeling strangely triumphant for having just clipped the man with whom, that first afternoon in Los Angeles, I had failed the world I had searched.

        
Part Three

“He’s got the wind and the rain        in His hands,

He’s got both you and me     in His hands,

He’s got the whole world in His hands.”

           —
He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands

        
CITY OF NIGHT

           HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD IS THE HEART OF the heartless Hollywood legend. Like special moths attracted to the special glitter of the nihilistic movie capital, the untalented or undiscovered are spewed into the streets by the make-it legend.

           You came here to find the wish fulfilled in 3-D among the flowers; the evasive childworld projected insistently into adulthood (some figurative something, that is, to hold hands with like you used to with Mommie until you discovered Masturbation); the makebelieve among the awesome palmtrees that the invitation of technicolored gold-laced Movies (along with Sodafountains and Stardom and the thousand realized miracles which that alone implies), of perpetual sun (seldom the lonesomeness of gray... lost... winter, say, or of the shrieking wind), and the invitation of The Last Frontier of Glorious Liberty (go barefoot and shirtless along the streets) have promised us longdistance for oh so long.

           The invitation to rot obliviously, to die without feeling it, to grow old looking young, is everywhere in this glorious, sunny, many-colored city. And you sense this even before you enter the technical boundaries of the world called Hollywood: The sign on Crenshaw, surrounded by giant roses, said: WE TREAT THE SOLES OF YOUR FEET FOR INNER PEACE—and on Melrose you see a happy-faced Christ before a church: His splendid robes uncommonly festive.