City of Night (37 page)

           We drove to Arrowhead, early that morning—to the lake there and the beach, almost like a New England Village: imitation-cottage buildings, small logged shops. Today, there was no uncomfortable silence between us. My decision, from the beginning, to ease the usual street role had proved a right one.... There was an easy communication between us which the other scene would have strained. Usually, the appeal of the jivetalking street-hustler is stronger for the more jaded, in direct proportion, it seems, to the time they have actually been sexhunters....

           When he paid at the places we went to, this man did so without the flashy display of the score. It was not in payment for companionship that he did it—it was as if indeed I were his friend and he had money to share with me. Too, when he spoke about his job in advertising, there was not the usual note of many of the others I had known who pick you up and try to put you down by flaunting their real or imagined Position.

           Eating breakfast as we sat by a window looking out at the clear greenness of the surrounding hills, he had brought up a subject which he had dropped yesterday afternoon: “Those two people I told you I’d almost been with before,” he said, “when it came to actually going through with it, I couldnt—I walked out. I wanted to forget I had even—desired them. I wanted to take a shower right away, to get clean again—without having done anything. I’d return to my wife—but of course that didnt change anything—only for those few moments when I was so grateful for her.... Last night, after—well, after I came over to your bed—I wondered if it would be the same. And afterwards, yes, I felt guilty.... It was the first time—and it was all very strange—although, years ago, once, someone did that to me.... But I guess I always knew that I wanted to do it—that if I ever did go with another man, that would be the role I would play. Last night—after it happened—I sat there smoking after you feel asleep, and I thought, Well, Im not exactly young—and I suppose, as I sat there thinking—I suppose I told myself that it’s wrong to fight yourself, when so much is fighting you already.... This morning, though, I feel great!”

           When he got out his wallet to pay for breakfast, I saw the photograph of a young woman holding a child in her arms.... He closed the wallet quickly.

           We returned to Santa Monica that afternoon.

           Crossing the bridge leading to the amusement park, he said: “Im glad you decided to hang around with me. My vacation will be over soon—then I have to go back. I hate to think about it.... But if you want, I can see you on weekends, when I drive in. I’d like that—if you would.”

           Before I could answer—as we crossed the small bridge that spans the park into the beach—he said: “Lets not go to the queer part of the beach.”

           We sat close to the water where it rolled in fleecy waves toward the shore. Young girls were playing on the sand with their boyfriends. Couples sat with their families....

           Then we both saw it, almost at the same time looking up. Both stared into the sky, watching it.

           A bird was swooping down from the blue, blue sky, swiftly as if determined to crash into the dark ocean. Within what looked like mere inches of the waiting water, it spread its wings gloriously and escaped into the blue of the welcoming sky.

           The man said thoughtfully: “It’s sad—isn’t it?—that people dont have wings too.”

           A beachball rolled past us. A little boy, about seven, came chasing after it. The man grabbed the ball, threw it back playfully at him, stared after the kid rushing back to a man and a woman sitting watching the kid fondly.

           “Lets leave,” the man said.

           We’re now on the beach where I met him yesterday. In extravagant, colorful trunks, in brief bikinis, they lie on the sand, straining their necks to look at the new arrivals.

           We lay there watching the parade. One fairy is wearing a suit in the style of the 20s, but made of a flesh-colored material which, when wet, was almost transparent. He would go into the water, just long enough to get the suit wet; then he would stand there at the edge of the beach, looking completely naked.

           “Gay people—they—” the man started, interrupting himself: “I hate that word—‘gay’—there should be another word: not ‘homosexual’—that sounds too clinical—not ‘queer’, not ‘fairy,’ either—... Anyway, they seem to cancel out so much that could be. I mean: Ive seen some of them—not all of course, or even the majority—Ive seen them shrieking on the beach—neither men nor women. The effeminate ones—I told you this yesterday, I think—they frighten me. They seem sometimes to know so much. With a look, they can make you feel—so—well—so—... Like youre trapped,” he finished.

           I think of Miss Destiny—and I remember what Chuck had once said about queens—and I say now: “But you have to admire them for living the way they have to.”

           “Maybe so,” he said. “But I dislike them. They make me feel as if I—...” But he stopped, noticeably uncomfortable. “Tonight I’ll get the same room we had last night,” he said, burying his hand under the sand and touching my arm, withdrawing his hand quickly in sudden embarrassment: The sun is too bright, too nakedly accusing.

           As we walk toward Venice West, past the tourist “international” restaurants like a small hybrid town—beyond Pacific Ocean Park, past the beach stores and food counters, past the old retired people who sit on the benches dozing throughout the day, past bearded Bohemians playing bongoes softly, he asked me again if I would spend the rest of his vacation with him. I said yes.

           “And weekends?” he asked.

           I answer casually: “Oh, sure.”

           “Theres a bar around here,” he said, “Ive seen it, but Ive never had the guts to go in. I think it’s called the Merry-Go-Round.”

           “You mean the Carnival.”

           “Yes, thats it. Have you been there?”

           “Yes.”

           “I’d like to see it,” he said.

           “Lets wait till later,” I said. “The sun’s still out—I want to get more sun.” I tried to analyze a sudden ominous feeling at his mention of the Carnival bar.

        
3

           The Carnival is one of many crackerbox buildings along a row of crumbling stores that make Venice West. Its windows are painted purple, green—black-smeared—so that you cant look inside. There is a forbidding wooden door. You push it open, and at the entrance is a huge bulldike like a truckdriver: a masculine lesbian with wide shoulders and hair cut in a man’s ducktail. Shes wearing levis, a sweat-shirt, no makeup. She may check your I.D.—and then in a gruff bulldog bark, allows you to pass:

           And youre inside a bar with long splintery wooden tables, names carved on them; uncomfortable benches without backs—the actual bar, small, winding toward a side door leading to the head outside. The walls are colored dark purple. It’s typically semidark; dimlights and thick clouds of smoke. From the ceiling hang three hideous monster faces and a facsimile of a giant snaring cobweb. Like an electric monster, a huge jukebox radiates fantastic colors.

           Jammed into the benches are the malehustlers, usually shirtless, coming here directly from the beach; with them an occasional toughfaced young girl. Scores are here, too; and masculine homosexuals cruising each other; queens in semibeachdrag; lesbians—femme and bull types; even a few well-dressed women, slumming with their well-dressed husbands or escorts—but, usually,
knowingly
slumming.... Junk is pushed here—usually soft stuff: marijuana, pills—but you can also score for hard. Ratty pushers scrutinize the crowd for teaheads, hypes.... Some of the faces are like slightly mellower representations of the set monster-masks dangling from the ceiling.

           In a small clearing surrounded by the tables and benches, a line of six young males danced the Madison: without touching—making it legal.

           With the man, I stand purposely toward the back of the bar, expecting that he wont want to stay. But already hes suggested we sit and have a drink. The people on the bench move closer to each other to make room for us, welcomingly (their bodies can touch more intimately).

           The Madison ends. The youngmen disperse into the bar. The jukebox is rocking, sounds monotonous but exciting: African-drumming, jungle-moaning; the insistent beat-beat: sexually, primitively: the sound of this world, I think, not the moody sounds of jazz—but that monotonous pounding of cannibalistic music wearing at your senses....

           From somewhere, lured by the jungle sexsounds—a dark Latin queen rushed frenziedly onto the small clearing of the dancefloor: beach-hat with lurid dyed feathers, red-polka-dotted loose-sleeved blouse tied at her stomach, white knee-length beachpants glowing purplish in the light, a gaudy gold butterfly pinned to her hip, several bracelets—beaded, multicolored, on her long brown arms. Dark body gleaming, thin and sinewy, she twists, grinds—lips parted, teeth gnashed. In convulsed, savagely rhythmic movements, accompanied by guttural groans, she writhes the reptile body, contracts it suddenly—simulating a woman’s orgasm. She crumbles near us on the floor in a dark, sweating, panting, violently colored heap.... More than a dance, it has been a demand for Recognition of her mutilated sex.

           I look at the man, and his eyes are staring down at the table.

           Face shiny with perspiration, eyes almost demented: wide-blackcentered—the queen removes her hat and passes it along the crowd, collecting money—making comments as she moves still writhing; dishing the women flagrantly, insulting the men with them; calling the lesbians “mister,” the fairies “miss”; camping openly with the masculine hustlers, withdrawing her hat abruptly (“I’ll take it out later in trade, honey”)—subtly choosing those from whom she will
demand
recognition—and she is carrying it all off Triumphantly: her woman-act so exaggerated, so distorted, so uncompromisingly brutal in its implied judgment, that this crowd, hypnotized by her, momentarily sucked into her immediate world, responds mechanically: As if buying away her scorching-eyed judgment of them, they acknowledge her with the coin dropped into the feathered hat.

           She approaches us.

           And she passes the hat before me—withdraws it quickly with a wink and a kiss—and I breathe in relief at having expelled her implied judgment.

           But she leans over the table, extending the hat toward the man.

           He doesnt move.

           His eyes, rising slowly from the table where they had remained throughout the queen’s dance, meet hers. Pale-gray, they intercept the demanding look of the queen. With his look, clearly, he refuses to acknowledge her with the coin dropped symbolically into the hat, poised before him like a parody sacrificial altar to what she represents. He is the only one who will not acknowledge her on her own terms, the only one who is refusing—with that look—to accept her judgment and is therefore judging her.
Suddenly!
their eyes are tied to each other, begin to grapple ferociously in mutual carnivorous looks: deadlocked far beyond the immediate insistence of the queen now, in view of the glaring, uncompromising, but un-acknowledging look from the man, to get the token offering from him. And the feared staring back by the queen is visibly nailing the man in a strange way: more, I realized startlingly, than the scene with me last night. The world he has joined at last has stripped itself luridly Naked. The queen’s look, the symbolic—now—seduction by the demanded acceptance of her, beyond the mere insistence of a dropped coin, emphasizes it savagely. Their eyes refuse to release each other. And now others on this bench are aware of that mysterious struggle between them. A vein on the man’s neck begins to squirm like a tiny pinioned worm. The queen doesnt move, except for the heavy, now-racked breathing: Shes leaning—still leaning—across that table; and still both pairs of eyes are knotted frozen: the enormous burning dark eyes of the queen (and they are staring at the man with hatred, although her mouth is still spread in that wide-set forced smile); the pale eyes of the man icily refusing to acknowledge her, refusing to acknowledge that stripped, suddenly unmasked, rock-bottom revelation in that knowing, glazed look aimed so surely into him. I see the man trying to control his breathing. The squirming vein on his neck paused in its pulsing, as if the blood refuses to pound any longer. And even the frozen smile on the queen’s face is threatening to disappear. The eyes—those eyes—those two pairs of eyes wrestling relentlessly for stakes which perhaps no one but them can really understand. Those eyes steady and fixed, almost unblinking, brimming with something too enormous to be contained much longer. Neither will break the deadlock. I imagine that a match ignited now will burst in a streak of cold white fire gluing their eyes to each other forever. The queen’s tongue darts as she moistens her lips—darts hideously from the dark pit of her mouth like a lashing snake’s. I see the man blink, his eyes moist with the intensity of the staring in this murky smoke-oppressed box-bar; and the queen’s eyes open wider, slowly wider as if they will somehow be able to swallow the man: wider perhaps in order not to sever the emotional whirling currents forming an invisible vortex sucking the man further and further within himself. For moments that seems like hours, the staring continues—and even the people at the other tables are aware now; their eyes, too, focus on this scene. It cant last much longer, I keep thinking, searching for some way to stop it. But it goes on: that look like a doubly pointed knife on each side, stabbing each other mortally each moment it continues: the reflected pinpoints of each other’s eyes magnified like searchlights into their very souls; the reflections boomeranging, finding new, undiscovered, secret areas—mirroring their mutually ripped lives. The perspiration is running down the queen’s face in streams—the makeup melts from her painted eyelashes in waxlike smears: transforming her painted face now into a mask more terrifying than the ones that leer, eyeless, from the ceiling. And the man’s face is now a bloodless, hollow, tanned shell....
And his eyes!
—
the infinitely, infinitely, infinitely pale, unsurrendering eyes!