City of Night (22 page)

           Now, I told Chuck how it had turned out.

           “Great, man,” he said. “An dig: No one got hurt—he got his kicks, same as if he had smoked the real stuff.... An what the hell, if it hadda been the real stuff, it wouldda been his luck to get busted or something. Maybe he’dda become a real strong head, even!” And now he smiles and said: “I even used some of that there men-tho-lated tobacco.”

           And so, for Chuck, the scene had been the Good Deed of a Boy Scout.

           Enter Darling Dolly Dane!

           “Im positively deadass tired,” she says, rushing over to us. “Babies, there just aint no one at the 1-2-3—someone’s been spreading rumors that theres so much junk being sold there that the cops are gonna knock it over any day!”

           Queens usually avoid the park in the daytime, and when they do come in, they tone down their effeminateness—necessarily: they are too easily spotted by the cops. Even so, Darling Dolly is wearing a shirt that could easily have been a blouse.

           Chuck: “Darlin Dolly, huccome you ain got no makeup on this afternoon?”

           Darling Dolly sighing: “Sweetheart, the fuzz just aint as Tolerant as you are, God Bless You.... Have you seen Trudi? No? My God!—the poor girl’s in a State of Nerves. Skipper has disappeared—Again!”

           “That ain new,” said Chuck, “he disappears all the time.”

           Darling Dolly Dane, adjusting her collar so it sticks up higher. “Of course it aint new—but Trudi worries each time like it is—and the way Skipper’s been drinking lately!... And this time she aint seen him for More Than Three Weeks. Now you know how he stays with her, and goes away, and comes back—but he dont stay away
that
long. And! Poor Trudi’s even checked the joint, and those nasty hulls there and all! (And, babies, this is The Real Truth, I cross my heart: One of the bulls thought Trudi was real fish—she went in drag, and you know how Real she looks—and one of them, he tried to put the make on her, and Trudi said, ‘Fuck off, fuzz!’)... And Trudi says they told her, no, Skipper aint been busted.... Poor Trudi—my God!—youd have to look Far and Wide to find a more Loyal Woman!... Well, honeys,” says Darling Dolly, “your baby sister’s gonna be on her way now.... Honestly, if the fuzz dont stop bugging us, there just aint gonna be a Decent place where a Respectable Queen can go to in the afternoons.... Why, we’ll just have to start cruising the tearooms, and then theyll call us a menace.... And By The Way!” planting her hands indignantly on her hips, “have you seen that Buddy?!”

           “Whats he done to you this time?” said Chuck.

           “Do You Know What He Done?” Shes dragging out the obvious for dramatic effect.

           “Again?” asked Chuck.

           “Yes.”

           “Well,” said Chuck, “I bet he clipped your dragclothes an hocked em.”

           “Thats right!... Now I let him, Out of the Goodness of My Heart, stay with me—again! And! After he hocked all my very best drag!—for ten measly bucks, mind you! And then! He comes knocking on my door he aint got no pad to stay. And, honeys, I am a gentlewoman, and I let him stay in my pad. I-never-was-no-good-at-learning-my-lessons. And! That cunthungry sonuvabitch—he done it again—and someone told me he
gave
one of my bracelets to some ugly cunt hes been after.... Oh, if I see him! Oh, if I just see him! I swear: Im gonna make the wildest scene ever, no matter where I find him! Right here in Pershing Square, even!... And if the cops come, why, I’ll just let them know he stole my drag, and, honeys,” she adds slyly, eyes twinkling with cop-bitchiness, “the cops got so many queens on the force themselves that theyll certainly understand what a girl feels like with all her drag clothes in hock! Why! She feels: Lost!... And did I ever tell you who I saw at the Long Beach Drag Ball last Halloween?” she goes on gleefully-bitchily. “Sergeant Lorelei—thats who! And honey, he was the maddest drag youve even seen. She looked like Sophie Tucker—simply the maddest drag
I
ever laid eyes on! I guess he thought nobody would recognize him out of his uniform.”

           She looks furiously now about the park, remembering her stolen drag again. “That Buddy!... Now you know I aint opposed to clipping no one, especially scores that wanna pay you a couple of bucks for all kindsa kicks and tricks,” she adds—and Im remembering the man whose pants she clipped and left him in the head. “But! When a thief! clips a thief!—well! That Is Too Much! The line has gotta be drawn somewhere—or we’ll all be: Lost! And, for me, This Is The End.... And, babies, it’s no secret: I got a weakness for Buddy—although—” she adds flirtatiously, pursing her lips as if in a kiss “—I love you two too. Still and all, I do got a weakness for Buddy. He may not have the world’s biggest piece of meat—but never mind: I aint one to go around flipping over size. Still, he is just as cute as can be—and that sonuvabitch, he knows I am hung up on him. So He Does This—takes advantage of my gentle nature!... Anyway, cute or not, this is definitely The End!” She glanced about the park. “Oh, oh, here comes Miss Sergeant Morgan. I’d better split!” With a wave of her hand, she left us, weaving her way along the walk, peering into the park to see if she can spot Buddy.

           And indeed! Sergeant Morgan is making his rounds of the park—flanked by two cops as usual. As he passes us, his giant ass swings like the stick he carries.

           “You really think he went to that drag party like Darlin Dolly said?” Chuck asks me.

           I imagined the fat body in drag as Darling Dolly Dane had described it, and I laughed. “Sure. Why not?”

           And Chuck says: “Man, you gotta admire those dam queens like Darlin Dolly an them.... They sure have got guts. They live the way they gotta live....”

        
2

           The sun is shifting, shadows stretching. And the Pershing Square panorama, in preparation for the night, is exhibiting itself in all its flashy afternoon shreds. The dismal old tramps sit in wrecked heaps. New preachers have invaded the park. New hustlers. New scores. Jenny Lu is at it again. And the angelsisters are hymning in the distance about how much Jesus loves them. A man in black preaching charity is saying: “Give!—instead of selling! Giving! is an act: of Right-eousness!”

           Chuck said: “You notice lately in the park how many guys want you to go with them for free?”

           The preacher shouts:

          
“Idleness!”

           Chuck: “Man, I am gettin tired jes sittin here.”

          
“Ignorance!”

           Chuck: “You know, I never could stay in school without cutting. Man, I used to look out that window an then jes run out—an that old teacher, man, she even throwed a rock at me once.”

          
“Selfishness!”

           Chuck: “Yeah, a lot of guys you think are scores—they wanna get you for free.” He shook his head.

           Now, in the increasing warmth, he rolled up his shirt sleeves, scratched his arm—lovingly—where the tattoo is, proclaiming, amid leaves and rosebuds: DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR.... “My old lady,” he explained, “she akchoolly went with me when I had this here Tattoo put on me. Ma, she says: ‘It’s kinda sweet, having somethin like “Mom” on your arm’—but I guess, she figures—well—”... He smiled brightly, remembering the longago scene with apparent fondness. “Did I ever tell you that story?”

           I shook my head. During the months I had been in Los Angeles, I had been with Chuck many times, sitting often on this very corner with him—but, before, he had never been this talkative. Something about the afternoon is making communication easier. And for me, in the midst of the turmoil of my own life, he seems like a kind of symbolic anchor.... Yet I constantly expected a contradiction to the easiness. But there had been none.

           “See, when I got this Tattoo,” he was saying, “it was back in Georgia where I was born....”

           “Georgia? I thought you were from Texas.”

           He smiled embarrassedly. “Well, see, I always tell people I am from Texas—cause I was hung up on being a Cowboy—an I akchoolly lived there, too.... See, when I was a kid, I used to go to these movies—Westerns—... Oh, no, man, it was not Texas. It was Georgia all right—...”

           I smile now at the thought of his Texas and the Texas I had known: the city, not the plains of which he had dreamily conceived in Georgia, longing for Cowboy Country. The cactusstrewn desert... not the cactus which for me had grown in a feeble cluster outside that window, in that vacant lot... The Texas I knew.... Memories of the wind... the dirt... tumbleweeds... my dead dog.... That wind blowing not freely across the plains but threateningly sweeping the paved streets into that injured house... El Paso... Texas... for me, not the great-stretching, wide-plained land of the movies—but the crushing city where I had been raised in stifling love and hatred.

           Chuck said: “I was gonna tell you about Ma an this Tattoo.” He fixes his grayish eyes straight ahead, on nothing immediate: on the past, maybe, remembering the scene. “See, I was, oh, just a kid—an one day, Christ, when I was 15, that little town in Georgia, well, I jes got tired of it... I mean, it wasnt bugging me or nothing—I jes knew it was time to split. Like something calling you. My old man, he died long ago. There was five of us—all brothers—an Ma. She took care of us, on a kind of farm like, outside that town, see? So I tole her one day, I am gonna split that town—go somewhere else. Man, she was cool, my Ma. She did not say: ‘Dont go,’ ‘Wait’—or nothin. She jes looks at me an nods, understanding like. Then she asks me when am I leaving. Tomorrow, I tells her. An, man, she says—dig this—she says: ‘Well, we are gonna go into town, you an me.’”

           (I see my own mother standing before the glasscase with the angel figurines: arms outstretched, waiting to reclaim me....)

           “We had this old Ford,” Chuck said. “I remember it real good—an I remember her drivin it into that ole town like she was on a hotrod! Yippee!...” He adjusted his hat firmly on his head as if the wind, even remembered, were powerful enough to blow it off.

           “So we go to this bar,” he went on, “an she orders beer. ‘Beer,’ she says to the bartender, ‘for a boy that is gonna be a man!’ Hell, man, I wasnt even old enough to be in that place. But everyone knowed Ma, an they did not care. She says we are gonna have one good Drunk, because, she figures, if my Old Man was aroun, he’dda taken me out, but he ain, so it’s up to her.... Shoot, I had juice before. Me an my brothers, we used to really get juiced up.” He sits up on the railing now, enthusiastically remembering—looking far beyond the park. “Once, man, we got so fuckin drunk—man—me an my older brother—we jes started throwin rocks at the sky! Throwin rocks at the sky, man! Crazy! Not mad or nothing—you know—but jes like, you know, to make sure it’s there.... Throwin rocks at the sky,” he echoes himself slowly, shaking his head, as if somehow, in some way he has not discovered and maybe never will and knows it, this is greatly important to him. “But those rocks, man, they jes kep comin right back at us. Didnt reach the Sky.... I guess—” he laughed, the barest trace of a mood disappearing instantly, “I guess we wasnt throwin them hard enough.”

           (And I remember my own longing to watch Heaven, punctured, spilling down to earth....)

           Now Chuck catches sight of a man standing before us, looking in our direction. “That is a cool score, man—I know him. You wanna score off im (I am feelin too tired myself)—or you wanna hear the rest of the story?”

           “The story,” I said, feeling, suddenly, a great closeness to him—and at the same time a huge, undefined sadness.

           And he seemed childishly pleased by the decision, as he continues: “An we’re in that bar jes drinkin up that beer, an Ma keeps sayin, This is what your Pa wouldda done—an dammit to hell I aim to do it for him an do it right!’... We split that bar, an the sun was going down—all red an crazy an everything—like it gets in the South.” He squinted at the hazy feeble Los Angeles sun—and again he seemed to be looking beyond it: to the memory perhaps of another—brighter—sun. “An then—get this—then Ma points to this house, an she says: ‘Cat-house.’ Thats what she said, an she says: ‘Thats where you are gonna go next, youngman.’ Hell, man, I’d been there before with my brother. In fack—but Ma didn know this—there was this real cute whoor there—she wasnt no young chick, exactly, but she looked real nice in bed—an man, she throwed a mean screw. She said she would not charge me nothin—cause I was bettern a truck-driver. An thats what she said, man—an that is the truth. She said, Them others, they are work; you are dayoff.” He said this not with the vanity, the bragging of the male exhibiting his masculinity, but with the pride of a child who has gotten an A in school and can prove it with his report card. “So, when I come outta that house, Ma’s waitin on me. She says: ‘Okay?’ I said: ‘Fine, Ma, fine.’...” He looks down at the Tattoo. “Oh, yeah, The Tattoo,” he remembers. “So we go get more juice. ‘Im gonna teach you right,’ she keeps tellin me. We’re wobblin aroun the town like a couple of drunk buddies—but Ma, like I say, she knowed everyone, an everyone figures we’re jes cuttin up some.” He chuckled. “Ma fall in a ditch, starts cussin up a mammy-screwin storm!—” and now he throws back his head laughing “—an she says shes gonna sue the city, she sprained her ankle or somethin—says shes gotta rest till the pain goes.... But I knowed she is jes high, that is all.”

           The score in front of us moves away, toward a youngman in an army shirt who has just strayed into the park. The youngman, recognizing the man as a score, let his hand dangle suggestively between his legs to attract the score more quickly.

           Chuck said: “So Ma spots this tattoo place, an she says lets go there an rest, plops down on a chair. Man, I can almost see her now—she is almost passed out: ‘Whew!’ she keeps sayin. An she keeps sayin how she is gonna sue the city! An all them tattoos starin her right in the bloodshot eye!... Well, for a while she falls asleep—dozes—an when she woke up, all them angels and flowers is starin her in the face, an she says: ‘Hallelujah it’s like Heaven!’ Thats what she akchoolly said—God’s Truth!... I said: ‘Ma, Im gonna get me a tattoo an remember you with when Im gone.’ An I have spotted this one of this chick with great big boobs, you know, nekkid—an Im lookin at that one. An Ma notice what I am lookin at—an she says: ‘Youngman, you better not remember me when you look at that!’... Well, the man there says he can put ‘Mom’ right on my arm, an thatll do it. But Ma—dig this—she says: ‘Sure, that will be real nice an everything, but I want something Prettier on my son’s arm—something pretty to remember his Ma by—something like flowers an leaves—the works!—an it’s gotta say something sweet, so it says it for me all the time when he is away.’ She sees this real mean picture there of a tattoo—an it says DEATH BE-FORE DIS-HONOR.” He reads it off his arm, exhibiting the tattoo proudly as if showing a medal. “This here one....”