City of Night (7 page)

           “Doing what?” I asked him, trying for some strange reason to make him believe I am not the same person he has seen on Times Square—hoping very much to watch him retreat. But he didnt.

           “Cawnt you guess?” he asked coquettishly. “Now dont tell me you go to Times Square just to see the pretty Fascination lights!” He made an attempt to mime the word “pretty” with a frivolous flutter of his hands.... “Why dont you give being in my... employ... a spin, youngman? We’ll try it for, say, a week—or a few days. Youll move in of course. And if were both satisfied, well, we’ll make it permanent. And if it doesnt work out,” he shrugged, “I have many, many friends.... I can easily place you.”

           I feel a sharp resentment. I got up.

           “If you let me ‘employ’ you,” he persists cunningly, “you wont have to be on the streets—or advertise in the papers.”

           At the door as I left, he snapped: “Oh, yes
do
keep the change for the cabfare....”

           The door slammed.

           Outside, I quickly removed the tie I had been wearing.

           I walked along the river—the sad horns from the boats mourning. Several obvious homosexuals sat on the benches under the pale lights.

           “You got a light?” one asked me lonesomely. I gave it to him, and walked on.

           Behind me, this islandcity glittered like an electric, magnetic animal....

           With that silver-haired man just now, I had realized this: It would not be in one apartment, with one person, that I would explore the world which had brought me to this city.

           The streets... the movie theaters... the parks... the many, many different rooms: That was the world I would live in.

           I walked back. The man who had asked me for a light still sat there.

PETE: A Quarter Ahead

1

           THERE WAS A YOUNGMAN I HAD seen often around Times Square. Like me, he was there almost every night; and like me, too, he was, I knew, hustling. I would learn later his name is Pete. Although each of us had noticed the other—and it was obvious—we avoided pointedly more than glancing at each other whenever we met: He was very cocky, a wiseass; and, I figured, I struck him much the same way.

           One night I saw him by the subway entrance on 42nd Street talking to an older man dressed in black. It was a warm night. After a series of wintry ones, the warmth returned miraculously and the street is crowded tonight, each person clutching for one last taste of a springlike night.... Theyre glancing at me, Pete and the older man. They talk some more, the older man nods yes, and Pete swaggers up to me. He said: “That score digs you, spote—” (He said sport like that: “spote.”) “—he’ll lay ten bucks on you—and itll be like cuhrazy,” rolling his eyes. Pete’s in his early 20s, not tall, very well built, dark; knowing eyes, sometimes moody, dreamy. Hes wearing an army fatigue cap rakishly almost over his eyes, so that he has to hold his chin up to look at you.... I turned and looked at the black-dressed man, and he smiled broadly at me, walked toward us. If he had worn a white collar, he would have looked like a priest. Pete says to me: “This is Al,” indicating the older man, pats my shoulder—“Later, spote”—and disappears jauntfly into the street, almost bouncing into the crowd.

           “I havent seen you before—youre new?” the man in black was saying. He didnt wait for an answer: If he asks too many questions, he exposes himself to the possibility that he will get an entirely different answer from the one he wants to hear and it will shatter his sexdream.

           I went around the corner with the black-dressed Al, down from 42nd Street—wordlessly—to a large room in an apartment house. “I dont live here,” he explained as he opened the door into an almost-bare room: a bed, a table, two chairs. “I just keep this place—well—as a Convenience.” He asked me to take my clothes off, but, “Not the pants, theyll do,” he tells me. He went to a large closet, and brought out some clothes. Theres a black leather jacket with stars like a general, eagled motorcycle cap, engineer boots with gleaming polished buckles. He left the closet door open, and I could see, hanging neatly, other similar clothes—different sizes, I knew. On the floor were at least seven pairs of engineer boots, all different sizes. “Ive reached the point,” Al said, “where I can tell the exact size by just glancing at the person, on the street... Here, put these on.” I did, and they fitted. “Fine!” he said. “Now lets go.” Im startled. “Where?” I asked him. “Outside,” the man says, then noticing me hesitating suspiciously: “I just want us to take a little walk. Dont worry—I’ll pay you.”

           That night, for about an hour, I walked with him through Times Square, from block to block in that area, into the park, silently—just walked. A couple of times I was tempted to leave, walk away with his clothes—but Im curious and I need the money. At the end of the hour we returned to the room, I removed the clothes. He didnt touch me once. He hands me $10.00. I looked at him surprised. I thought somehow I had disappointed him, and I felt grossly rejected. “Thats all,” he said; he smiles. “You were fine, just fine,” he says, sensing whats troubling me. “But, you see,” he said, rather wistfully, “thats
all
I want; to be seen along Times Square with a youngman in those clothes.”

           A few minutes later, I was back on 42nd Street, and Pete was still there, slouched outside the spaghetti place. He smiled at me. “Some scene, huh?” he said.

           “Did he give you anything for it?” I ask him.

           “What do
you
think, spote? He gives me five bucks for everyone I get him. I meet him once every two, three weeks. He spots someone he digs, I introduce him. Hes too shy to talk to anyone, so I do it for him, and he lays some bread on me—and I dont have to do nothing,” he says smartly.

           “Did you ever go with him—
spote?”
I said.

           “Oh, sure!” He laughed. “And thats all he digs, spote. He dresses everyone he goes with in that motorcycle drag—and it bugs him for me to call it that. Then he walks around with them. Hardly anybody ever walks away with his clothes—theyre too curious. Hes hung up on that drag, thats how he gets his Kicks.... Oh, sure, I been with him.” Then proudly—his gaze shifting back and forth from me to the street, pegging people—he adds. “Im the only cat he walked around with
two
nights—
in a row!”

2

           Pete was a familiar figure in that world of Times Square. With his slouched army fatigue cap and his thick shaggy army jacket which he had dyed brown, his bouncing walk—it was easy to spot him in any crowd.

           After that first night, I would meet him often, never by arrangement, but always at about the same time, around the same place. We would hang around together for a while, and then, compulsively, we’d split. Often, minutes later, we would meet again standing in the same place.

           Although he wasn’t much older than I—but because, as he told me, he’d been hustling the streets since he was 16—Pete liked to play the jaded, all-knowing street hustler, explaining to me how to make out. He had a series of rules: Walk up to people, dont wait to be asked; if you do, you may wait all day. Forget about the vice squad, and you’ll never get caught. A quick score in a toilet for a few bucks can be worth more than a big one that takes all day. Stand at the urinal long after youre through pissing. At the slightest indication of interest from someone in one of the cubicles, go up to him quickly before he gets any free ideas and say. “Ill make it with you for twenty.” But go for much less if you have to.

           As we sat in Bickford’s in the cold light, he told me without embarrassment that once he’d gone for 75¢. “It was a slow day”, he explained, “and I had only four bits, just enough to make the flix. I thought, Do I buy a Hotdog or make the flix and try to score? It was raining—no one on the streets. So I made the flix. No scores. Then someone wants to give me 75¢, and Im in the balcony anyway, so I let him. Hell, man,” he adds pragmatically, “I was a quarter ahead—I could still have that Hotdog.” And he goes on: “Youll learn; sometimes youll stand around all day and wait for a 15-buck score, a 10-buck score, even a deuce—all day—so, hell, take what comes, spote—so long as it dont louse up all your time—but always ask for the highest. Ask for Twenty. That way they think they got a Bargain.”

           Part of Pete’s technique as a hustler was to tell the men he’d been with that he knew other youngmen like himself, and if they wanted, he would fix them up. Like a social secretary, he kept mental dates when he’d meet certain people. If he still didnt have someone for the score, they would walk around Times Square until the man spotted someone he wanted. Pete would make the introductions—as he had that night with me and the black-dressed Al—and would get a few bucks for it... There was one problem, Pete explained: As the score got to know more and more people, he’d dispense with Pete’s services.

           Occasionally, we sat in the automat, talking for a long time, Bragging, exaggerating last night’s Big Score. Soon it would turn bitter cold, he warned me (and, already, the wind raked the streets savagely), and the hustling would become more difficult; the competition on the streets keener. “You can shack up with someone permanent, though,” he told me, looking at me curiously as if he were trying to find out something about me; “but me,” he added hurriedly, “I dont dig that scene—I guess Im too Restless.”

           He made it, instead, from place to place, week to week, night to night. Or, he told me, he’d stay in one of the all-night movies. Sometimes he would rent a room off Seventh Avenue where they knew him. “And if you aint got a pad any time, spote,” he said, “you can pad there too.” Then he changed the subject quickly. “I dig feeling Free all the time,” he said suddenly, stretching his arms.

           And I could understand those feelings. Alone, I, too, felt that Enormous freedom. Yet... there was always a persistent sensation of guilt: a strong compulsion to spend immediately whatever money I had scored.

           I still lived in that building on 34th Street, its mirrored lobby a ghost of its former elegance.

           I paid $8.50 a week for the room. Opposite my window, in another wing of the same building, lived an old man who coughed all night. Sometimes he kept me awake. Sometimes it was the old, old woman who staggered up and down the hallway whistling, checking to see that no one had left the water running in the bathrooms or the gas burning in the community kitchen. At times it was Gene de Lancey—the woman with the demented eyes I had met the first day in the hallway—who kept me up. Once she had been Beautiful—she had sighingly shown me pictures of herself,
then!
—now she was sadly faded, and her eyes burned with the knowledge. She seldom went out, although I did see her on the street one late afternoon, shielding her face with her hand. She’d knock on my door sometimes early in the morning, often as I had just walked in: I would wonder if she listened for me to come in. I would open the door, and shes standing there in a Japanese kimono. “Lambie-pie,” she’d say in a childish whimper, “I just couldnt sleep, I just gotta have a cigarette and talk—Steve’s asleep—” That was her present husband. “—and I knew you wouldnt mind, sweetie.” She would sit and talk into the morning, with such passion, such lonesomeness, that I couldnt bring myself to ask her to leave. She would tell me about how everyone she had ever loved had left her: her mother, dead—her father, constantly sending her to boarding schools as a girl—her two previous husbands, Gone—her son, disappeared. “Theres no love in this harsh world,” she lamented. “Everybody’s hunting for Something—but what?” When, finally, she would get up, she would Kiss me on the cheek and leave quickly....

           I mentioned her to Pete, and he says: “Great, man, she sounds like a swinging nympho—lets make it with her together sometime!”

           Like the rest of us on that street—who played the male role with other men—Pete was touchy about one subject: his masculinity. In Bickford’s one afternoon, a goodlooking masculine youngman walked in, looked at us, walked out again hurriedly. “That cat’s queer,” Pete says, glaring at him. “I used to see him and I thought he was hustling, and one day he tried to put the make on me in the flix. It bugged me, him thinking I was queer or something. I told him fuck off, I wasnt gonna make it for free.” He was moodily silent for a long while, and then he said almost belligerently. “Whatever a guy does with other guys, if he does it for money, that dont make him queer. Youre still straight. It’s when you start doing it for free, with other young guys, that you start growing wings.”...

           And because this is such a big thing in That life, youll hear untrue stories from almost everyone whos paid someone about the person hes paid. It’s a kind of petty vindication, to put down the hustler’s masculinity—whether correctly or not—at the same time that they seek it out.

           Standing on the street, Pete would always come on about the young girls that would breeze by like flowers, the wind lapping at their skirts coyly....

           I found out Pete can be vengeful. I saw him in Bryant Park and he was fuming. The manager of a moviehouse one block away had refused to let him in. (I had seen the manager—a skinny, tall, nervous, gaunt, pale-faced man. The theater is one of the gayest in New York. Late at night men stand leaning along the stairways, waiting.) “Hes a queer,” Pete said angrily, “he dont give a fuck what goes on so long as it dont go on for money—thats why he wouldnt let me in.” Later, Pete tells everyone the place is
crawling
with plainclothes vice squad, ready to raid it: Stay Away! And the theater balcony was almost empty for weeks.

           He also told me that another hustler had taken a score from right under his nose in the park, and Pete went around telling people the other hustler had the clap.... “Make it anyway you can,” he said when he finished telling me that, “and when you cant make it, get even.”