City of Night (20 page)

           “Let me
tell
you about
Destiny
—” Pauline said. “You
left
before she got
married
—well, she had her wedding all right, she didnt
invite
me, but I
heard
, and it was
Hor-ri-ble
. It was
A-tro-cee-ous
. She had her winding staircase all right, too, and she
stumbled
on her train and
ripped
her veil and came
face down!
Then the place was
raided
. And
thats
where Miss Destiny the college co-ed is now,
busted!
—in the
joint
—
again!
—for
masquerading
—and this is not the first time she gets knocked over so she will be cooling it there
for quite a while!
And can you imagine the
sight?
Miss Destiny in bridal drag sitting crying in the paddywagon this is her
wedding day?
...”

           Trudi claims Miss Destiny is living in Beverly Hills with the man who sponsored the wedding (though Trudi didnt go either, afraid theyd raid it, but they didnt, and she says she wishes now she’d been a beautiful bridesmaid like Destiny asked her, and it broke Destiny’s heart when Trudi said no but thats the beads). “And I hear the Destiny looked simply Fabulous in her gown and red hair,” says Trudi, “and, honey, it just goes to show you some more about those goddam beads—here the Destiny meets this rich daddy who wants to see a queen get married in drag to a butch stud-hustler, and the Destiny says does he have a winding staircase? and he does....” Well, anyway, Trudi says, so far as she knows, Miss Destiny is still living in Beverly Hills (Skipper says oh no, Bel Air, if she really made it Big) with the rich daddy and her stud husband.

           “The rich cholly,” says Skipper knowingly, “I bet he digs Destiny’s stud, not Destiny—but he gets kicks watching them make out, jack. You know, hes queer—” and Skipper goes on to tell me how hes tired of the small hustling and how hes ready to push back into the Bigtime—and Trudi says, “Don’t be nervous, babe, youll shake the beads.”

           And so, of Miss Destiny’s Wedding there are many versions.

           No one seems to have gone to it.

           But everyone has heard about it.

           Only one thing is certain. Miss Destiny is no longer around.

           And I wondered if somehow she had escaped her Evil Angel.

           And again for a period I avoided the park and the bars—and when I came back, Chuck of course was still around. And now we’re sitting in Pershing Square at the same place where I first met Miss Destiny.... (And Jenny Lu is in the park too, as if The Angel had got
her
number—woe-
uh!
... and Holy Moses... and Saint Tex, who outstayed The Word and was reconverted by Saint Thunderbird to California... and the five white angelsisters with Christ still bleeding wax....)

           Suddenly Chuck said:

           “Oh, man, did you hear about Miss Destinée?—you remember her, that far-out queen with the redhair? Well, man, some queen was saying how she got this letter from Destinée. An remember this ah this ah head doctor she was going to, man?—the one she said she would have on the couch next time? Well, he finally cured Miss Destinée, man—Miss Destinée wrote she ain a queen no more, she has honest-to-jesus-gone-Christ turned
stud
, man!—an that ain all, man!” he goes on gleefully “—Miss Destinée wrote she is getting married, man!—
to a real woman!...”

           And Chuck pushed his widehat over his eyes’ as if to block his sudden vision of a world in which such crazy things can happen.

           I imagine Miss Destiny sitting lonesomely in Somewhere, Big City, America—carefully applying her makeup—and I think:

          
Oh Destiny, Miss Destiny! I dont know whats become of you, nor where you are—but that story Chuck just told me, as you yourself should be the first one to admit, is oh Too Much to believe!

        
CITY OF NIGHT

           FROM FACE TO FACE, FROM ROOM to room, from bed to bed, the shape of the world I had chosen emerged—clearly but without definable meaning. Each morning the pale sun rose in the imitation-blue sky of Los Angeles, and the endless resurrection of each new day began. Like the palmtrees that lined the streets of the city, the world seemed to be shrugging indifferently.

           For me then there followed a period of untrammeled anarchy as I felt my life stretching toward some kind of symbolic night, as the number of people I went with multiplied daily. With those many people—only in those moments when I was desired—the moments before we became strangers again after the intimacy—I felt an electric happiness, as if the relentless flow of life had stopped, poised on the very pinpoint of youth; and for those moments, youth was suspended unmoving.

           Now I began to feel that world demanding even further anarchy. Often I remembered the man I had met that first afternoon in Los Angeles, when, with his money already in my hands, I had suddenly found myself unable to steal from him. It was something that remained unfinished: a test prepared by that chosen world which I had failed.... The man’s face dimly mysteriously haunted me.

           There was still, too, the narcissistic obsession with myself—those racked interludes in the mirror—the desperate strange craving to be a world within myself. And I felt somehow, then, that only the mirror could really judge me for whatever I must be judged.

           As the weeks passed, under that hazily smeared sky, I would stand often in the midst of the masked turbulence of Pershing Square, watching it fascinated. At the same time, I felt an overwhelming sadness as intense as if I were the only person in the world who had ever felt it for this life: awed by the terrifying spectacle of this outcast boiling world.

           And so the park became the focal point of my life, those long, long afternoons.

           Like a lord surveying his kingdom, Sergeant Morgan marches through the park in the afternoons, nodding condescendingly at the familiar faces of the perennial park pensioners pinned to the benches.... I see him stomping along the sidewalk now, imperiously flanked by two younger cops. They walk like soldiers, in perfect step, the two on each side like younger, if slimmer, imitations of the fat one in the middle, marching as if to the cadenced rhythm of a drum heard only by them. I had seen the fat cop often—but he hadnt stopped me. Now, watching the determined march, I think: Hes after someone. As they approached me—and they were looking straight ahead—the fat one turns sharply, toward me. “Come on, you!” he barked.

          
Boom!

                    
Boom!

                             
Boom!

           Along the way they pick out two other youngmen: one a slim, sullenfaced boy of about 18; the other, squarefaced, older, smiling and composed, cocky even, as if this to him is routine.

           Now down the escalator we go. Into the parking lot below the park, across the lot: The people getting their cars stare at us, wondering what weve done, hoping for the worst.... Up the steps again, into the other side of the park. Down more steps, through a door, into a room, where, ostensibly, they keep park tools—but hidden in typical sneak-cop fashion, it’s a place for police interrogations, like a baby joint.

           Inside, another policeman is sitting at a desk. There are two small rooms. On a board behind the desk are many photographs of hardened wanted faces: staring stonily into the room as they had stared into the camera and at the cop behind it—as they had stared defiantly at the world. On a small bench facing the desk, the three of us theyd picked up sit waiting now for the identification scene to begin.

           They frisk us. They look through our wallets, our pockets, they ask how much money we have—what we’re wanted for, sneering when all three of us answer: “Nothing.” They check our arms for “tattoos”—hypo needle marks.... Then they run their hands slowly down our legs, between them—and I am amused at how lovingly, thoroughly, slowly they do that part. Now they glare at us disappointed when they find nothing incriminating on us. The one at the desk calls the police station. We hear our names, code numbers covering certain offenses. Again theyre disappointed: none of us here is Wanted.

           As the cop at the desk writes out spot-interrogation cards, the fat cop stations himself before us, stands fat-legged, bull-spread, the stick like a scepter before him. He reminds me of an arbitrary general-sir. He has a round chubby face, like a soft beachball, red; tiny mud-eyes. If he had a white beard and wore a red cap, he would resemble a fierce Santa Claus.

           He booms:

           “I

           Am

           Sergeant Morgan!”

           As If Announcing The Second Coming Of The Lord.

           “Why I brougnt you down here,” he says, “is I never talked to none of you before—but I been keeping my eye on you—I seen you hanging around the park.” Eyes snap cal-culatingly from one of us to the other. “And I gotta know everyone in this park.... Now I dont know what youre after. But I suspect!... What Im saying is: Watch out! I wont have no wise guys in My Park.... No pickpockets, No hypes. No heads.... No hustlers! Understand?” He studied each of us for a reaction. We look at him in deliberate blankness. “Im getting a good look at you now” (and he was) “and I got cards on allayou. If I keep seeingya in the park, I can grabya on open charge. And I’ll do it; and when they let you out, I’ll grabya again. This here aint no warning. It Is A Threat... Ever-one’s hearda Pershing Square, and I figure thats why youre here—cause you heard what goes on. Well, it aint so easy as you think—and it aint gonna be, not while Im around—no sir!” He swings his stick menacingly. I get the feeling one of the other cops is a rooky and the fat one is trying to impress him. “Now lotta people in this park knows me and likes me,” he went on, “they tell me things I wanna know—so I always know wot goes on. And Im gonna let you innonna secret: We got plainclothesmen all over, watchinya. You wont get away with nothin! Now maybe I cain tell you stay outta the park cause it’s public—but I sure as hell can make it Rough for you.” He stopped abruptly, as if for applause.

           “Go on now, get out!” he snaps like a tough cop in a movie. He turns his back on us—petulantly.

           Outside, the sullenfaced boy walks a short distance into the park with me, says: “Im beginning to think this town is nowhere, man, I aint scored for nothing today—but I get stopped by the fuzz.”

           Then catching sight of an obviously intrigued man-in-a-suit, he goes and sits next to him.

           Like all the others warned to stay out of the park, I continued to return and the fat cop didnt bother me. And this is how they do, unless youre wanted for something definite: They warn you to stay out, they leave you alone—and then when the heat is on (when some robbery supposedly involving a young Pershing Square vagrant has been headlined in the papers—or, as I had heard Trudi describe it once at the 1-2-3, “when Officer Morgan is going through her period”), they pick you up for vagrancy. And the papers gleefully announce:

          
RAID IN PERSHING SQUARE.

           Now, as the anarchy welled inside me, I went through each day on pills and marijuana.

           And then one afternoon, High, sitting in the park, hearing the convulsed chanting, the spiritual singing—in the midst of the lonesome hunting, the sexual hunger in the eyes all around—the franticness to fill each space of time with
something!
—I imagined—
Suddenly!
as if in a nightmare—as the crowds emerged from the depths of the subterranean garage, swarmed from across the streets—that all the world was pouring into Pershing Square in a tidal wave of faces—that frantically each person would shout his Loss—into Eternity—to an uncaring Heaven!

           In panic, I returned to that rented room on Hope Street I shut the windows, drew the shades, bolted the door.

           Still, I could hear life shrieking at me....

           Now again there came a time when I stayed away from the streets. I took a job.... Again the guilt. At night I found relief from the strange terror in the joints of marijuana which I smoked on the roof of that hotel. As the false clarity of the weed seized me, I would look onto the city showered by the black of the Night—and imagine, as if in a dumb show in which all emotion is muted, that I was separated from the world: as I had felt as a boy watching out the window, separated from life.

           The world was revealing its death to me by the process of slow discovery: the slowly gnawing loss of innocence; and I found myself longing for the God in Whom, unquestioningly, I had believed as a child. But this world of loneliness and desperation belied Him. The sky was now a black cave where once it had been limitless, stretching into that Heaven of childhood angels and peace.

           As the doleful sounds of the bells from the church across the street mourned into the night, I looked from the roof in the direction of Pershing Square:

          
One day, in sorrow at His own creation, God plunged into Hell.... Now the world spun dizzily like a ferris wheel out of control
.

        
CHUCK: Rope Heaven by the Neck

        
1

           “HEY, MAN!—HOW YOU MAKIN IT?... Cummon over—jine me.” Chuck sat familiarly on the railing at Pershing Square under the statue of a World War I soldier valiantly facing the street. Wearing a new pair of cowboy boots—resplendently Bright (orange, brown, traces of yellow)—which hes showing off by rolling his levis an extra turn—Chuck sits there as if on his own frontporch. “Where you been?” he asks me.