City of Night (15 page)
And although youll soon discover youre still separated from the Sky, trapped down here now by the blanket of smog and haze locking you from Heaven, still theres the sun, even in winter, enough—importantly—to tan you healthy gold... and palmtrees drooping shrugging what-the-hell... green-grass... cool, cool blessed evenings even when the afternoons are fierce.
And flowers...
Roses, roses!
Orange and yellow poppies like just-lit matches sputtering in the breeze. Birds of paradise with long pointed tongues; blue and purple lupines; Joshua trees with incredible bunches of flowers held high like torches—along long, long rows of phallic palm-trees with sunbleached pubic hair....
Everywhere!
And carpets of flowers even at places bordering the frenetic freeways, where cars race madly in swirling semicircles—the Harbor Freeway crashes into the Santa Ana Freeway, into the Hollywood Freeway, and when the traffic is clear, cars in long rows in opposite lanes, like cold steel armies out for Blood, create a
whooooosh!
that repeating itself is like the sound of the restless windswept ocean, and the cars wind in and out dashing nowhere, somewhere....
Anywhere!
Along the coast, beaches stretch indifferently.
You can rot here without feeling it
.
All that, I would see and realize later.
Now it’s the Greyhound station in the midst of the Westcoast Times Square, the area about Los Angeles Street, Main Street, Spring, Broadway, Hill—between about 4th and 7th streets.
(From El Paso—knowing that my journey had somehow just begun—I had returned to New York. Again to the sexual anarchy.... In a period of about a month, I lived on East 16th Street, then 70th Street, finally Riverside Drive, in a once-mansion converted now into rooms-for-rent: From a large window I could see the trees along the strip of park—the river gray beyond it—and as those trees turned bare, sighingly releasing their leaves, I knew New York for me had been exhausted. I must find another city.)
I walk along Main Street, Los Angeles, now. The jukeboxes blare their welcome. Dingy bars stretch along the blocks—three-feature moviehouses, burlesque joints, army and navy stores; gray rooming houses squeezed tightly hotly protesting against each other; colored lights along the street: arcades, magazine stores with hundreds of photographs for sale of chesty unattainable never-to-be-touched tempest-storm leggy women in black sheer underwear, hot shoeshine clipstands, counter restaurants... the air stagnant with the odor of onions and cheap greasy food.
Instantly, I recognize the vagrant youngmen dotting those places: the motorcyclists without bikes, the cowboys without horses, awol servicemen or on leave.... And I know that moments after arriving here, I have found an extension, in the warm if smoggy sun, of the world I had just left.
As I stand on the corner of 6th and Main, a girlish Negro youngman with round eyes swishes up: “Honey,” she says—just like that and shrilly loudly, enormous gestures punctuating her words, “you look like you jest got into town. If you aint gotta-place, I got a real nice pad....” I only stare at her. “Why, baby,” she says, “dont you look so startled—
this
is L.A.!—and thank God for that! Even queens like me got certain rights!... Well,” she sighs, “I guess you wanna look around first. So I’ll jest give you my number.” She handed me a card, with her name, telephone number, address: Elaborately Engraved. “Jest you call me—anytime!” she said.
And the spadequeen breezed away, turned back sharply catching sight of another youngman, with a small suitcase. I heard her say just as loudly and shrilly: “Dear, you look like you jest got into town, and I—...”
I turn the engraved card over, and on it there is written in ink: WELCOME TO LOS ANGELES!
I walk into a bar by the corner, next to the loan shop. HARRY’S BAR.... It’s a long bar with accusing mirrors lining its back. A canvas hanging across the ceiling from wall to wall makes the bar resemble an elongated circus tent.... Although it is early afternoon, there are many people here. I realize immediately that this is a malehustling bar. Behind the counter a gay young waiter flutters back and forth, all airy bird-gestures. The scores sit eyeing the drifters who are stationed idly about the bar, by the jukebox, leaning against the booths.
I sit at the counter and ask for a draft beer. The fluttering bartender winks. WELCOME! his eyes beam.... Now the man next to me says: “You shouldnt be spending your money.” He slurs the words, hes very drunk. He pushes my money back toward me, replaces it with a dollarbill of his own on the counter. “Wottayadrinkin?” he asks me. I change from draft to bourbon.
Hes a slender not-yet middle-aged man—well dressed—although in his juiced-up state, his clothes are slightly disheveled. He is not effeminate, but from the way hes looking at me calculatingly, I know hes a score. I sit there next to him for long minutes, and he doesnt say anything. I begin to think hes lost interest. I go to the head, through the swinging door. The odor of urine and disinfectant chokes me. There are puddles of dirty water on the floor. Over the streaky urinal, crude obscene drawings, pleading messages jump at you. Someone has described himself glowingly, as to age, appearance, size. Beneath the self-glorifying description, another had added: “Yes, but are you of good family?” Another scrawled note—a series: “Candy is a queen.” “No she isnt.” “Yes I am....” And in bold, shouting black letters across the wall:
IN THE BEGINNING GOD CREATED FAIRIES & THEY MADE MEN
The drunk man walks into the head. “You broke?” he asks me abruptly. I wasnt; I said yes. “Wanna come with me?” he said.
We leave the bar—the bartender calls after us: “Have a good time!”... Outside, we turn left, past the burlesque house with the fullblown tantalizing pictures of busty women. We enter the hotel next door.
A ratty-looking man with a cigar barely glances at us, opens a splotchy old register book, we scribble phony names. “Three dollars,” the man behind the counter says. The man Im with opens his wallet. Bills pop out. He counts out three. The man behind the desk says: “That rooms open, you can lock it from the inside.” He doesnt give us a key.... We go up the long grumbling stairway. Along the hall a door is half-open, a youngish man sat alone on a bed, in shorts, rubbing the inside of his thighs. We move along the maze of... lost... rooms, until we reach ours. Inside, the room is almost bare. For an ashtray theres a tin can. No towels. The walls are greasy, sweaty plaster peeling in horrendous childhood-nightmare lepershapes snapping at you—no window-screens. Paper curtains with ripped edges like saws hang dismally over the window: a room crushed in by the brief recurring lonesomeness that inhabits it throughout the days, the nights. The bed is slightly rumpled—as if only a hurried attempt had been made to straighten it after its previous occupancy.
The man almost reels. “Heres money,” he says, again opening his wallet, some bills flutter carelessly on the rumpled bed. I take them. He stuffs the other bills clumsily back into the wallet.
“You gonna rob me, boy?” he asks me suddenly.
Then he grins drunkenly. “Hell,” he says, “Idon-givfuck—happens—happened—manytime.... Don-givfuck.” His look sobered momentarily. His eyes, which are incredibly deep, incredibly sad, look at me pleadingly. “Gonna rob me?”
Im thinking: He wants to be robbed, thats why he came up here with me, hes asking me to rob him.... I feel a sudden surge of excitement—as if Im being tested. He pushes the wallet loosely into his back pocket.
After a few frantic moments during which I didnt even take off my clothes but merely lay in bed with him touching me, he sighed: “Whew!”—closed his eyes. He turned over on his stomach and seemed to pass out. His wallet is almost sliding out. With an excitement that was almost Sexual, I reach for it. It slips out easily. He didnt move.... I stand over the bed looking steadily at him, very long, fixing the scene in my mind, experiencing the same exploding fusion of guilt and liberation I had felt that first time, with Mr King. I hear the man almost-sob: “Gonna rob me?”
The monotonous beat from the jukebox outside invades the room persistently.
I replace the money I had just removed from his wallet. I lay the wallet—intact—beside him. And I walk out, past the unconcerned glance of the man at the desk.
Outside, in the rancid air, I stand looking at the carnival street. Through the grayish haze of the smoggy afternoon, the sun shines warmly but feebly—the great myopic eye of Heaven....
Somehow—I knew—in that room just now—I had failed the world I had sought.
A few minutes later I was in Pershing Square.
I walk about the teeming park for the first time—past the statues of soldiers, one on each corner of the Hill Street side—past an ominous cannon on Olive, aimed defiantly at the slick wide-gleamingwindowed buildings across the streets: the banks, the travel agencies (representations of The Other World, to which I will flee recurrently in guilt and feel just as guilty for having abandoned, if never completely, the world of the parks, the streets)—past the statue of Beethoven with a stick, turning his back fiercely on the Pershing Square menagerie.
Throughout the park, preachers and prophets dash out
Damnation!
in a disharmony of sounds—like phonographs gone mad: locked in a block-square sunny asylum among the flowers and the palmtrees, fountains gushing gaily: Ollie, all wiry white hair, punctuating his pronouncements with threats of a citizen’s arrest aimed at the hecklers... Holy Moses, his hair Christlike to his shoulders, singing soulfully... the bucktoothed spiritual-singing Jenny Lu howling she was a jezebel-woman (woe-
uh!
) until she Seed The Light (praise the Lord-
uh!
) on the frontporch to Hell (holy holy Halleluj-
uh!
), grinding, bumping at each
uh!
in a frenzied kind of jazz; and a Negro woman, sweating, quivers in coming-Lord-type ecstasy: “Lawd, Ahs dribben out da Debil! Ah has cast him back to Hell! Lawd, fill me wid Yuh Presence!”—
uh!
-ing in a long religious orgasm.... Gone preachers wailing receiving God: Saint Tex, who got The Word in Beaumont scorched one wined-up morning on the white horizon: BRING THE WORD TO SINNING CALIFORNIA!... And five young girls, all in white, the oldest about 16, stand like white candles waxing in the sun, all white satin (
forgive my uncommitted sins!
), holding in turn a picture of Christ Crucified, and where the blood was coming, it was wax, which caught the light and shimmered like thick ketchup; and the five white angelsisters stand while their old man preaches
Sinners! Sinners!! Sinners!!!
—and the cutest of the angelsisters, with paradoxically Alive freckles snapping orange in the sun, and alive red sparkling hair, is giggling in the warm Los Angeles smog afternoon among the palmtrees—but the oldest is quivering and wailing, and one day, oh, I think, the little angelsister will see theres nothing to giggle about, Truly—her old man having come across with the rough Message, and of course she’ll start to quiver and wail where once she smiled, freckles popping in the sun.... And an epileptic youngman thanks God for his infirmity—his ponderous, beloved Cross To Bear....
Among the roses.
And while the preachers dash out their damning messages, the winos storm Heaven on cheap wine; hungry-eyed scores with money (or merely with a place to offer the homeless youngmen they desire) gather about the head hunting the malehustlers and wondering will they get robbed if— ...Pickpockets station themselves strategically among the crowds as if listening in rapt attention to the Holy Messages. And male-hustlers (“fruithustlers”/“studhustlers”: the various names for the masculine young vagrants) like flitting birds move restlessly about the park—fugitive hustlers looking for lonely fruits to score from, anything from the legendary $20-up to a pad at night and breakfast in the morning and whatever you can clinch or clip.... And the heat in their holy cop uniforms, holy because of the Almighty Stick and the Almightier Vagrancy Law; the scattered junkies, the smalltime pushers, the teaheads, the sad panhandlers, the occasional lonely exiled nymphos haunting the entrance to the men’s head; more fruits with hungry eyes—the young ones searching for a mutual, unpaid-for partner; the tough teenage girls making it with the lost hustlers.... And—but mostly later at night, youll find, when the shadows will shelter them—queens in colorful shirt-blouses—dressed as much like women as The Law allows that particular moment—will dish each other like jealous bitchy women, commenting on the desirability or otherwise of the stray youngmen they may offer a place for the night. And they giggle constantly in pretended happiness.
And on the benches along the inside ledges, the pensioned old men and women sit serenely daily in the sun like retired judges separated now stoically from the world they once judged....
All!—all amid the incongruous music of the Welkian-Lombardian school of corn, piped periodically from somewhere along the ledges! All amid the flowers!—the twin fountains which will gush rainbowcolored verypretty at night.... The world of Lonely-Outcast America squeezed into Pershing Square, of the Cities of Terrible Night, downtown now trapped in the City of Lost Angels....
And the trees hang over it all like some apathetic fate
.
MISS DESTINY: The Fabulous Wedding
1
THE FIRST TIME I SAW MISS DESTINY was of course in Pershing Square, on the cool, almost cold, moist evening of a warm smoggy day.