City of Night (60 page)

           Suddenly the Devil leapt toward me!

           In red, with long black horns! He opens His arms to embrace me in His batwinged cape! And I lunge toward Him anxious to be claimed, and He encloses the flapping wings about me....

           Freed of his embrace, I look at the ghostly steeples of the Cathedral.
I’ll climb to that nonexistent Heaven!
...

           Now at Cindy’s bar a man is groping me, and gropes someone else—and all around, hands are searching—while Cindy herself, globs of frantic, shaking flesh, bouncing, moves chaperonely nervously sighing:

           “Please, please,
please
, boys! Be Nice!”

           Outside again, I recognized the ovaled fairy who had made it with me that first day in New Orleans; he is a freckled schoolboy, with a lollypop. With him is his youngman-lover who had turned femme—and he is, resignedly perhaps, a schoolgirl: bloomers peeking, ruffled, from beneath the starched skirt.

           “Tramp!” the ovaled one sneers at me—and he skipped quickly away as if I would menace or contaminate them.

           Past the giant burlesque picture of Holly Sand on Bourbon. And I imagine her making quite a breeze, creating quite a storm, fanning waves of flesh-desire (to go all the way), and the poster of Aloha twirled giant mechanical breasts like windmills—
whoosh!
and around;
whoosh!
and around.... I look about me searching Burlesque street, L.A. Instead, I see the costumed orgy of Mardi Gras.

           “Lover!” A fat woman embraces me tightly. We kiss. Now I turn to a young girl near me, shes dressed in a leopard suit I kiss her too, pushing my tongue urgently into her mouth, crushing her mouth—as if to erase from my own the stamp of Jeremy’s remembered kiss....

           The sky has darkened. The streetlights, turned on now, will prolong the naked street merriment to midnight.

           Tomorrow, I keep thinking. Tomorrow... When Ash Wednesday will hang like a pall over this city.

           “Lets make it, man!” Sonny shouted into my ear, his lips so near they brushed my face. Still shirtless, he embraced me drunkenly while the two suited scores hes still with look on disapprovingly.

           “Later,” I said dazedly, taking the pill he slipped into my hand. “Later....”

           The Cathedral is solemn like a tomb.

           I think groggily: Dave.... The man on the beach, now somewhere in this city.... Lance, Pete, Mr King.... Miss Destiny. Skipper.... Jeremy. Each in his own way.... Each in his own way what? And Barbara. And Jocko in his way....
What!
Nothing, I thought. “Nothing!” I said aloud, as face blends with hunting face.

           “Honey,” said Whorina, “youre twisted out of your swinging mind. Whatve you been taking? Here. I got something thatll straighten you out.” She hands me a strange pill which looks like a raisin. She says: “Nothing like it, honey, You Just Wait and See.” I pop it into my mouth and hurl myself back into the crowd.

           Although the star-tossed sky is clear—as if to reveal the city, Naked, to the sight of Heaven—I hope it will begin to snow suddenly: a sheet of snow covering this city drowning the shrieking colors.... The ice age of the heart.... But I forget about that quickly, forget about the snow which would purify the city....

           In the courtyard of The Rocking Times, moments later, I saw Kathy. Still with Jocko as if he can protect her from something shadowing her, she smiles as she stares at the mobs.

           God damn it, I want to shout to her, dont smile, dont laugh! I want to say to her: Cry, Kathy! But the smile is permanent as she seems to loom over the crowd—a luminous apparition: amused perhaps by the cruel knowledge of herself—the knowledge that shes been twice doomed: by the limbo sex and death lurking prematurely in a threatening black-out which will end, in her very youth, even her defiance of the despising world that tampered with her sex and stamped her face with Impossible beauty. Struggling through the crowd toward her, I said: “Kathy.... Kathy.”

           “Yes, baby?”

           “Why are you smiling?”

           “Because,” she said easily, “Im going to die.”

           “Babe, I’d like to eat you,” said the man in the ballet tights at Les Deux Freres.

           “I dare you,” I challenged.

           “You do?”

           “I dare you,” I repeated.

           “Right here?”

           “I dare you—right here,” I said, laughing, feeling out of control. He slid on his knees. He opens my fly, begins to go down on me in the thronged bar. And they started daring each other, and a youngman dressed only in a striped bikini pushed his trunks to his knees and stood there waiting, and immediately there was someone pressing behind him and someone squatting in front.

           I leaned groggily against the bar looking down at the bobbing head between my legs.

           Strangely, illogically—like a shadowy movie cut indiscriminately without logical order, I remember living next to the Y in Los Angeles, where I sunbathed on the roof of that apartment building, and by signals from the residents of the Y, I would meet them later on the street.... I remember Griffith Park—the hill where you could make it hidden by trees.... I remember the police, the many roustings, finger-printings, interrogations: the cops, the rival gang—the enemy: the world.... Laguna Beach, the sand drifting into the bar. Lance... poised on a cliff....
And I remember a Texas sky
.... I remember a party where three of us turned on with marijuana in the locked head, and I remember the indiscriminate partners, later, outside in the yard.... Remembering a man on the Boulevard who picked me up, who paid me to tell him what the others I had been with had done; and as he listened, he tried to conceal the fact that he was pulling off....
That sky recalled from a childhood in gray, gray shades....
I remember a steambath and the naked bodies pacing hungrily along the hallways, the sudden entrances and exits into the tiny cubicles; and, in the phosphorescent grayness, like nameless bodies in a morgue.... I think of St Louis Cemetery in this city, the stark graves above the Waiting ground....
And the wind had swept that sky, coming in a steelgray cloud....
I think of the beach in Chicago, deserted except for the maleshadows hugging the cold walls. And I remember the FASCINATION sign in New York.... In Dallas—remembering—the doors of rooms left open at the Y and the steamy intimacy in the showers.... I imagine Miss Destiny storming heaven, protesting to God, shaking her beads.... Remembering Sylvia, I think: And she slaughtered her son and he slaughtered her because they each had to.... And I remember:
Out of that Window during that windstorm which is now howling again in my mind, I watched a tree bend with the wind
.... Something searched, its fulfillment hinted by the fact that the heart craves it—but not to be found. Not found. And the heart weakens and resists even hope.... Twas the night before Ash Wednesday and All Through The City—... I remembered someone in San Francisco who had followed me and someone else to an apartment, and later I looked out the window and saw the man who had followed us still waiting, looking up forlornly to where we were, his hands in his pockets....
Finally, the wind had lashed furiously at the tree, tearing off the branches, which had hinted of spring.... And the dust rose, coming from the orange horizon, settling on my mind
.

           Dregs of memories churn.

           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.