City of Night (24 page)

           He winked broadly—and then in a genuine cowboy gait, he swaggered toward the girl, who, aware now that he was coming after her, wiggled her butt cutely.

        
CITY OF NIGHT

           AMONG THE BANDS OF MALEHUSTLERS that hang out in downtown Los Angeles, there are often a few stray girls: They are quite young, usually prematurely hardened, toughlooking even when theyre pretty. They know all about the youngmen they make it with and sometimes live with: that those youngmen hustle and clip other males. And aware of this, they dont seem to care. Occasionally, one of those girls will go into the park with a malehustler, sitting there until he will maybe spot a score; and then, as if by tacit agreement, theyll split: the youngman going off with the score, the girl back to Hooper’s coffee-and-donuts, where, in the afternoons at that time, they usually hung out.

           One among them intrigued me especially. She was the prettiest—about 19, with long ashblonde hair and hypnotic eyes. She always looked at you with a half-smile that was somehow wistful, as if for her the world, though sad, still amused her. I knew from Buddy, who had been with her and who dug her (“But shes kinda strange,” he said, “like she aint always there”), that she lived with three malehustlers in a small downtown apartment—one of them the squarefaced youngman I had been interrogated with that afternoon in Pershing Square.... She was very hip—she talked like all the rest, and very tough. But with her, somehow, it all seemed wrong, incongruous in a way I couldnt really understand. It wasnt only that she was so pretty; some of the others were too. It was something else, something altogether different about her from the others.... A kind of toughmasked lonesomeness.

           One afternoon, at Hooper’s, I sat near her at the counter. Outside, the cops had stopped a madeup queen. The girl next to me smiles and says: “Oh, oh, another queen busted—for “jay-walking.’” I moved next to her, and for the next few minutes we spoke easily. Then I caught her looking at me very strangely. She says unexpectedly: “You know, man, theres something that bugs me about you. Ive seen you in the park and around here, and you look like all the others—but theres something else.” I was surprised to hear her say about me precisely what I thought about her. At the same time, I panicked: I don’t like people to know me too well.... “I mean,” she went on, “like you never really hang around too much with the others—and you dont talk to anyone too much.”...

           We left Hooper’s and went into the park, sitting there briefly, listening to the afternoon preachers. It felt good to be sitting here with this girl, to be seen with her by some of the men I had scored from.

           Abruptly, as if suddenly bugged by the park, she asked me to come up to her place. “I live with three guys,” she said, “but they’re always out here in the afternoon.”

           The door to the apartment is open. “It’s always unlocked,” she said. “If you ever need a pad, come up—we got lots of room.”

           The cramped apartment is completely disheveled—unwashed dishes piled in the sink, frozen-food trays and beer cans discarded on the floor—her clothes and those of the others strewn all over the rooms. There were two beds in the one bedroom, a couch, and a mattress on the floor.

           Again I catch her looking at me in that strange way—and she said—just like this—just as abruptly and unexpectedly at this: “I bet you dig Bartok.”

           I told her yes.

           “Me, too, man,” she said. “See, I knew it.... Thats what I meant when I said something about you bugged me. I mean, you
look
like you belong but—...Why do you hang around this scene?” she asked me.

           “I dont know,” I answered her.

           “I dont really know why I hang around either,” she said.

           From under one bed, she pulls out a cheap record-player, and there was a record already on the turntable. “It’s the only one Ive got,” she said. It begins to play: Bartok’s
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
. Scratchily on the cheap machine—but still beautifully—it plays the haunting, haunted music.

           I lay beside her on the rumpled bed, and I hold her hand—which is very cold—while the music played; and she pressed herself suddenly against me with a huge lost franticness.

           “Man,” she said, “I know the scene: Youve got to pretend you dont give a damn and swing along with those that really dont—or you go under....”

           Startlingly, as I rolled over on her, she gets up suddenly. Suddenly she looks mean. “Why dont you get out of that scene?” she snaps. “All of you keep telling yourselves youre straight—and you make it with chicks to prove it—and when you make it with other guys, you say it’s only for the bread—and besides, with them, you dont do anything back in bed—if you dont!... Sure, maybe it’s true—Now!” She turns the record off. “Why dont you split the scene, man—
if you really want to!”
she said. Then in a tone that was as much bitter as mean, she challenged: “I bet youve never even clipped a wallet from those guys you go with.”

           I remember the almost-time.... “No.”

           “Get out of it—now!” she said. “Get a job!”

           “I’ve worked more than you think,” I said, strangely defensive.

           “But you always come back,” she thrust at me quickly.

           “Yes.”

           “Then why?”

           “I dont know,” I said again.

           She returns to the bed. And now she begins to remove her clothes.... As we clung to each other in a kind of franticness, she said:

           “My name is Barbara.”

           I would meet her at Hooper’s after that, and later we’d go to her apartment. Always, she plays that one record. I would hold her while the music played. And yet, always, the meanness would recur. “Cool it,” she said once, when I was coming on with her. She went into the bathroom, returned with a rubber. “You never know what the hell you guys have had your pricks in,” she said brutally.

           “What about you?” I came back at her just as brutally. “Every hustler in the park’s had you—several times.” I regretted it instantly.

           “I know,” she sighs almost sadly....

           Afterwards, for those times I was with her, she would lie like a lost child, huddled and small and warm now. And somehow terrified....

           Then for several days she didnt show at Hooper’s. Buddy told me she’d asked the three malehustlers she had been living with to move out. “You getting hung up on that chick, or something?” he asked me. I told him no. But the next day, when she didnt turn up, I went to the apartment.

           For the first time, the door is locked. I knocked very long before anyone answered. Now the door opens. She stood there in her slip—and she looks strangely prettier than I had ever seen her: those strange eyes staring at me, into me.

           “Im sorry,” she said hurriedly, breathlessly, “I cant see you now.” She was about to close the door.

           “Now or later,” another voice said—a woman’s voice. I looked beyond the door, and a tall, slender girl I had never seen before is standing there, dressed in black slacks. She looked at me with almost-hatred. “Shag, man,” she said roughly, “I mean, split—Barbara dont need you guys any more.... Shes got me.”

           And she put her arm intimately about the other’s bare shoulders.

           Now, seized by a feeling of loss which had to do with Barbara—but also with something unrecognized which extended beyond her—I went to clean-aired San Francisco (where I would return—later—and stay much longer)—but soon I was back in Los Angeles.

           The park, then, was hot with cops. Days earlier, a young vagrant had murdered a girl who had just arrived in town—and during the time that followed—vengefully—vengefully for not having spotted the psyched-up stud before the papers implicated them—the bulls stormed the park. And all the young drifters stayed away.

           And Main Street, though also fuzzhot, is even more crowded now.

           When the bars close on Main Street, their world spills into the streets. Malehustlers, queens, scores—all those who havent made it yet in one way or another—or have made it and are trying again—disperse into the night, squeezing every inch of nightlife from the streets.

           They stand pretending to be looking into store windows—continue their searches into the all-night moviehouses—the burlesque-movie theaters, where along the dark rows, in the early jammed hours of the morning on weekends, men sit, fly open, pulling off.... Or the scattered army goes to Hooper’s on Main Street—where periodically the cops come in, walk up and down the counter sullenly, picking you out at random—and youre suddenly intensely studying the cup of coffee before you.

           Life is lived on the brink of panic on the streets, intensifying the immediate experience—the realness of Today, of This Moment—Now!—and panic is generated by the threat of the vice-squad (plainclothesmen sitting in the known heads licking their lips; sometimes roaming the streets, even offering you money before they bust you); by the copear driving along the streets—a slowly moving hearse. Like a gang looking for a rumble from a rival gang, cops haunt this area, personally vindictive....

           And for the homeless drifters there is also the panic that one day youll wake up to the fact that youre through on the streets, in the bars—that everyone has had you, that those who havent have lost Interest—that youve been replaced by the fresher faces that come daily into the city in that shifting wave of vagrants—younger than you now (and Youth is at a premium), and now the interest you once felt is focused on someone else. One day someone will say about you: “I had him when he was young and pretty.”

           And as a reminder of this, beyond Los Angeles Street, in the same area of the world of Main Street but not really a part of it, is Skid Row—and you see prematurely old defeated men, flying on Thunderbird or Gallo wine, lost in this sunny rosy haven—hanging shaggily like zombies waiting for the Mission to open; folded over in a pool of their own urine where theyve passed out along the alleys....

           If youre young, you avoid that street, you concentrate on Today.

           Tomorrow, like Death, is inevitable but not thought of....

          
At night, the fat Negro woman sprawled like chocolate pudding between Harry’s Bar and Wally’s mumblingly coaxes you to take a copy from the slender stack of religious magazines falling from her lap to her fat tired feet. The magazine shouts: AWAKE!

           And along that strip, the gray hotels welcome the scores and malehustlers: No Questions Asked. For a few minutes—unless you havent got another place and stay all night—you occupy the fleetingly rented room, where inevitably a neonlight outside will wink off and on feebly like exhausted but persistent lightning.... Throughout the night there are sounds of rapid footsteps running down the stairs.

           In the morning, if you stay, you walk out into the harsh daylight. The sun bursts cruelly in your eyes. For one blinding instant you see yourself clearly.

           The day begins again.... The same.

          
Today!

        
SKIPPER: A Very Beautiful Boy

        
1

           ALONG THE PANEL OF AMBER MIRRORS at Harry’s bar, a panorama of searching eyes emerges out of the orangy twilight of cigarette smoke and dimlights: a stew of faces floating murkily in the smoky darkness.

           In the mirror I see the fat man on the stool beside me as he extends money across the bar to buy my drink. I turn away from the image of myself sitting next to him. I face him directly.

           Like pale dough, his pudgy face—coagulating into a tiny upturned nose—seems molded about a cigar which he munches lewdly, his puffy rounded lips caressing it intimately. He reeks of cologne and beer, cigar smoke.

           With one fleshy hand he slides the drink in my direction—after counting his change ostentatiously and stuffing it into his wallet. “Drink up, sonny!—drink up and I’ll buyyanother-one.”

           The skinny man standing beside us at the crowded bar slices the air with a cigarette holder. “Who are you playing tonight?” he asks the fatman. “Santa Claus?” Emaciatedly skinny, in his late 30s—his eyes gaunt with years of frustration—he stands there—body curved vampishly, one hand on his hips, the other balancing the black cigarette holder like a parody trumpet, lightly—lightly—between long manicured fingers.

           “Dont pay attention to her, sonny,” the fatman says to me. When he smiles, the flesh squeezes his tiny eyes, almost shutting them. “Shes just in from New York,” he explains, indicating the skinny man, “and I told her she’d have to see Main Street.”... And so the fatman has been playing the role of initiated Guide to the other’s First-Trip-to-Main-Street-and-Vice amazement.

           “Dont—call—me—‘she,’” the skinny man said, stretching his lips across his face tightly in a straight pink line.... I can tell hes Gigantically intrigued with this bar; nevertheless hes affecting indifference. Crazily, I imagine him walking along Madison Avenue in New York, mincing in a tight olive-green suit as if his legs were tied at the knees; carrying a pencil-thin umbrella as affectedly as he carries—and he carried it—the cigarette holder; entertaining, in the evenings, his equally closeted friends—with Cocktails. Late at night, he will lonesomely pull off, looking at pictures of youngmen.... Sometime tonight, I felt certain—if I stuck around (twice I had started to leave, repelled by the fatman, and twice he had showily slapped a large bill on the bar for drinks: “Drink up; buyyanother-one”)—sometime tonight, I would hear the skinny one, in excited tones, claim surprise that “supposedly straight men” take money from homosexuals in exchange for sex.... Still, I felt strangely sorry for him for the mask which defensively he has to wear.