City of Night (39 page)

           Feeling the perversity seething inside me, I shot back at him, aiming at what I knew would be his weakest spot: “Im not your type,” I said, watching him blanch.

           Outside, Buzz said: “Why did you play square? You wanted to bug him, didnt you?” It wasnt asked in annoyance—almost, instead, in amusement. “You knew the scene. You kept putting him on.”

           “I hope I didnt screw up anything for you.”

           “Hell, no. Wanna know something? I kind of dug seeing you put him down. Hell, most of the people hes got there—I got for him. When he needs someone, he calls me. He’d called me that he needed someone—well—you know—your type—to replace that kid that left.”

           “The skinny one,” I laughed.

           “Why did you play square?” he repeated.

           In my mind I could still see clearly the delirious face of that man with the bleeding nose.

           “I don’t know,” I said.

           Throughout the time I will be in San Francisco, I wont see Buzz again. I’ll hear a few days later that he was busted for “harboring” two youngmen involved in a robbery.... People just disappear, in one way or another. You seldom know what really happened to anyone, except as your own life may have touched theirs....

           And even then—

           The fastidiously dressed man next to me at the Stirrup Club on Turk Street has been wordlessly drawing on a piece of notebook paper. Earlier today someone had mentioned this bar to me, and I had come here for the first time tonight—knowing what I would find.... Now the man slides the paper toward me.

           On it is the lightly outlined figure of a man wearing tall boots, lovingly and in detail drawn so that they shine. The figure also wears a wide garrison belt and an open jacket, both as sharply and shiningly indicated as the boots.

           About us in this malebar are a number of men—some young, others not so young—dressed similarly: black shiny jackets, boots. The goodlooking ones—and sometimes the not-so-good-looking ones—pose imperiously for the others ogling them. Just as the queens become a parody of femininity, many in this leathered group are parodies of masculinity: posing stiffly; mirror-practiced looks of disdain nevertheless soliciting those they seek to attract.

           I was ready to push the slip of paper back to the man beside me, resenting it, when I heard him say: “Thats how you should be dressed, youngman. Those Wellington boots youre wearing arent nearly enough. Really, Im a good judge of character.”

           I faced him for the first time. In his late 30s, he looks like a college professor. He is obviously trying to suggest elegance.

           “I dont know what youre talking about,” I said curtly.

           “Dont you really?” he said delightedly. “How marvelous!” He calls the bartender and orders two drinks. “Dont be annoyed,” he said, pushing the drink toward me like the momentary bribe it is. “I merely want to be friendly.” He changes the conversation: “How long have you been in our fair San Francisco?... Are you working?... Where are you staying?...” He is trying to determine how aware I am of the scene and whether Im here to score. “You intrigue me,” he said, his eyes flirtatious—and the more he speaks, the more effeminately coy he becomes. “Well, of course, a large part of it is that Ive not seen you before—and one grows oh so bored with the same tired nelly faces trying so hard—and so unsuccessfully—to look butch in leather.... But there is something else—... I wonder,” he says cautiously, “if youd care to join me at my home for a drink. I have a bar there,” he says to impress me. “We can talk—better—and I would like that.” Seeing me hesitating, he says, waving his hand dismissing it impatiently, “Oh, dont worry. Ill make it worth your while.”

           We sit now on Russian Hill, in his apartment, which, like him, is impeccable. If I stand by the wide window, I can see the city, fog-covered tonight: tiny pinpoints of smothered lights trying to penetrate the mist.

           Distrusting his Grand Show, I have asked for the money first—which he gives me unquestioningly.

           “You really didnt know why I drew that sketch for you?” he asked me. “Or why I suggested thats what you should wear?”

           “No,” I said, but of course, vaguely, I did.

           He went into another room. When he returned, hes holding a black jacket, high boots, black belt—the same items he had drawn so adoringly in the sketch. “Try them on,” he said.

           I remember the man on Times Square. But I know that this time I will not be expected to walk around the streets in this man’s clothes.

           “Please,” he coaxed, extending the clothes toward me. A disturbing note—almost a whine—is creeping into his voice.

           “I’d rather not,” I said.

           He shrugs. “Suit yourself. You will eventually. If not with me, with someone else. Remember that.” And then burying his finger into the collar of his shirt to exhibit a tiny chain on which dangles an “M,” he announced proudly: “Do you know what this means? It means Im a masochist. It means I
adore
pain.” He spoke with alarming aloofness. “It excites me because I really do believe youre new to this—to this aspect of it,” he adds. “And the best experiences Ive had are with such people.”

           In one fierce movement, he planted one of the heavy boots harshly on his crotch, grinding it in savagely. His previous look—impeccable, composed—disappeared, became rapt. His face contorted ecstatically as he utters a pained
“Ugh!”
And he coaxes me: “Put them on please.” His voice has become a complete whine. “Please—? Please command me to do whatever you want!”

           I stare fascinated at him.

           “Is that a glimmer of interest I detect in your eyes?” he asks me, laughing. The boot is still pinioned between his legs.

           “You dont detect anything!” I said angrily.

           “I feel cheated, then,” he said. “Not because of the money—but because I somehow expected so much of you.... Wont you... let me... Idolize you?” he said slowly. “Won’t you be brutal?”

           I have always been repelled by pain, either inflicting or receiving it. Why then did I feel a dart of excitement at the man’s words? To squelch that feeling, I walked out quickly.

           There is a theater on Market Street that changes features daily: One of those enormous swallowing buildings with a dark, dark balcony. Its back rows fill quickly with men, and there is constant movement. The most intimate sexscenes are sometimes played out here, at times in groups gathered like dark vultures....

           As I sat down, halfway up the balcony, a man moved hurriedly from another aisle to sit directly beneath me, where my legs were propped on his seat almost straddling his shouders. In a quick movement, he turned his face sideways, brushing the Wellington boots with his tongue. When I didnt move, he got up, startlingly gasped at me:

           “I like
mean
sex, I’ll pay.”

           My stomach contracted violently. With excitement? With revulsion?... I didnt wait to find out

           Three people haunted me now much like that man whom I had first attempted to steal from: the man with the bleeding nose, the man with the boot hammered into his crotch, and the man in the theater.... I told myself I had seen enough. I stayed away from the Stirrup Club.

           In the afternoons, at the Y, I would go to the highest part of the sundeck where you could make it. Late at night, into the mornings, the showers ran unstopping. Eventually it became too hectic, and I moved out of the Y and into an apartment on Bush Street.

           Now in the afternoons I would go to Aquatic Park: a short beach curled along the bay, a section like a truncated stadium—concrete stairs—where you sit and wait.... Other times I would go to a cliff outside the city—where, walking along a path that seems completely deserted, you suddenly may discover men intimately locked with each other.

           With someone met in that journey through other lives, I went to Carmel. To Monterey.... To Big Sur: craggy awesome cliffs outlined by twisted trees.

           Back in San Francisco, to North Beach, usually to the Raven bar—which, at that time, was the best scoring bar in the city—especially on weekends, when a queen would go through a parody of an opera, playing all the female parts.

           Market Street by the magazine store, and you stand pretending youre watching the toylike trolley swinging around to begin its weary ascent up Powell....

           Pickup places scattered from the Embarcadero to the fashionable sections of the city....

           Walking through North Beach one silver afternoon—a few blocks beyond a flowered park where people on their lunch-hours sit in the sun (and where another afternoon a sad drunk woman, angered when I turned down her offer of a drink, started yelling hysterically: “He tried to snatch my purse! Catch him!”), I looked up at the huge statue of a monk before a church.

           And I went into that church.

           There were only a few noon people inside. Automatically, I knelt, crossed myself with the holy water: iron-binding echoes of childhood you cant shed no matter how you try. Mechanically I said some childhood prayers. It was serene and peaceful here—yes—but it was also Empty, infinitely Empty. The painted statues with blind eyes fixed into the air were remote and distant, like that heaven which doesnt exist. Whatever was to be found was not in here. It was in the World.... I made the sign of the cross—again embarrassedly—and I walked out.

           If I relented now in that journey through this submerged world, whatever meaning I might have found would evade me forever.

           Now those three haunting faces which had invaded my life were turning a searchlight into my soul. I had to follow that penetrating glare no matter where it took me.

        
NEIL: Masquerade

        
1

           “WILL YOU HAVE SOME TEA?”

           The man who has just asked me that question is dressed like this:

           In black mounting police pants which cling tightly below the hips revealing squat bowlegs; boots which gleam vitreously and rise at least a foot above his ankles—silver studs forming a triangular design on the tip of each boot, then swirling about the upper part like a wayward-leafed clover.

           “One lump or two?”

           The belt—futilely trying to squeeze his large stomach (squeezing it—although he was not otherwise excessively fat—to the point where even his breathing has to come in short, sharp gasps) but actually causing it to bulge out insistently over and under it in two sagging, lumpy old tires of flesh—is also black. Looping in waves like a wildly zigzagging snake, the ubiquitous studs (and each silver stud is haloed by tiny gleaming beads) join in front at an enormous buckle at least five inches wide on which is engraved a large malevolently beaked, bead-eyed, spread eagle.

           “Do you take cream?”

           Over a dark vinyl shirt, he wore a black leather vest, tied crisscross with a long leather strap from his chest to his stomach. On each lapel of the vest is reproduced the triangular clover-leafed pattern as on the boots (and each silver stud, again, is encircled by the beaded haloes). The vest, the shirt, the legs of the pants are so tightly molded on his stubby body that his movements are restricted. Cautiously, he reaches for the teapot, the sugar, cream—each gesture threatening to burst a seam somewhere.

           “Perhaps you prefer lemon?”

           He himself, when you can pull your gaze from the hypnotizing costume in disbelief, is a florid rather short man, in his early 50s. Actually he looks much like what is depicted in American movies as the typical pre-war Bavarian who sits goodhumoredly drinking beer out of a giant stein, bellowing ebulliently in beered-up delight as a blonde-braided girl and a lederhosened man dance to the accompaniment of a merry accordion.... But dressed as he is, he resembles a somber, heavily silverlighted Christmas tree.

           It is not Halloween.

           It isnt even New Year’s, and we’re not even at a costume party.

           No.

           We’re sitting, instead in the early afternoon, in the living-room of a neat house in a lushly treed area in Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco.

           The room is decorated in “antique” style—but of what period, it is impossible to determine. Rather, it seems to have been decorated to suggest an indefinable time somewhere, nebulously, in The Past. Over a bursting metal sun pinned to the wall, are two crossed swords. A shield. A lance. The drapes are wine-purple velvet and droop to the floor in highlighted folds. There is a small replica of a suit of armor by the brick fireplace. An oriental-looking statue of a monkey is poised as if to spring from a small, arch-legged desk.... The sun pours in through a windowed wall in a warm rush of light which accentuates the colors of the chairs, upholstered in striped gold and red, striped silver and blue.... It struck me that this room, which is all Ive seen so far of the house, is much like a conglomeration of movie furniture acquired from many period films.

           (This is how I happen to be here now, drinking tea, selfconsciously, with this man: Only a few nights earlier, at the Stirrup Club, I had noticed a man wearing knee-length boots, a dark leather jacket with a goldsewn insignia of a rapacious bird, a cap much like that of a policeman, and a silver chain around his left shoulder. I asked the person I was with who he was. “Neil,” he answered, “the weirdest character in San Francisco. I’d keep away from him if I were you.”... Later that night, Neil had come over—he knew the man I was with—and introduced himself. Brazenly, he asked me to have lunch with him the next day. Considering him the most ridiculous man I had ever seen—but still greatly intrigued—I said yes.)