City of Night (38 page)

           Suddenly I brought out some change from my pocket, dropped it into the queen’s hat.

           And with an almost mortal groan, she rose from the table, her long legs thrust out into the clearing on the floor; and she swept the feathered hat in a loop. And with a peal of piercing laughter which seemed to emanate from the very depths of her slaughtered being, she placed the sacrificial hat on the floor.

           And in an insane gesture—hissing demoniacally—she shook her beaded arms fatally before the man’s face—and disappeared in a flash of tawdry colors beyond the door.

           I surrender to the sounds about us, now released.

           The man’s hand holds the bottle of beer before him as if for some kind of futile, transferred protection. The vein on his neck has begun to pulsate again.

           “Lets go,” he said.

           The sky is black.

           We walked along the beach, wordlessly. An old bent man combs the sand for lost coins. The fog hangs gray and ragged over the ocean.... We walk through Pacific Ocean Park—the gay sounds of the many people still on that candy-colored strip only emphasizing the thundering silence between us. We’re on Crystal Beach now. Inside Sally’s bar, there are only about seven people. Two youngmen play the pinball machine, rainbow-shattered, tap-tapping the players’ scores in colored numbers. The teeming screaming crowds have already left, but the beach seems somehow haunted, as if a part of their lives had been left buried in the sand, which will be carried into the ocean by the water and the wind which will rise.

           The desolate beach was purplish before us. Where, earlier, the desperate people had strained to look at each other and the false laughter had risen into a crescendo that rivaled the beating of the ocean, now I see only one lone figure—a youngman in white shorts—walking the sandy lonesomeness. I sat with the man on the concrete ledge—where I had first talked to him, only yesterday: trapped almost physically now by the roaring sound of the waves against the sand and by the silence shouting between us.

           Now there was another figure on the beach—a shadow obviously pursuing the youngman in the white shorts. Soon, another lonesome figure appeared. The three formed a kind of strategic triangle on the sand—the focal point being the youngman in the white shorts. They disappeared toward the water....

           In the light along the bridge as we walk to the car, the man looks much older. The wrinkles on his face are sharply etched—or perhaps I notice them for the first time. Still wordlessly, we got into the car.

           He drove a short distance, along the quiet park.

           Then, brakes screeching, he stopped the car suddenly.

           “Ive decided to go back tonight,” he said. “Where shall I leave you?”

           “I’ll stay here,” I said.

           He was looking intently into his hands, as he had done—only yesterday—when he had told me about his son.

           I opened the door, got out.

           Without a word—and before I could say anything to him—he drove off.

           But a distance of only a few feet away, he stopped the car sharply. And he waited there.... And with a knifing awareness I thought:
Just as I paused outside of Dave’s door!

           Then the car, stopped only for those few decisive moments, roared away along the street.

        
CITY OF NIGHT

           YEARS, YEARS, YEARS AGO, I HAD stared at my dead dog, buried under the littered ground of our barren backyard and dug out again, and I had seen in revulsion the decaying face. Now, as if I had dug beneath the surface of the world, I saw that world’s face.

           And it was just as hideous.

           For many, San Francisco is an escape, in that coffin-shaped state, from the restless neon-forest of Los Angeles.

           Its whitewashed, closely pressed houses cuddle each other as if from the chilly invigorating breeze that invades its streets every day around noon, washing them with rain-specked fog almost nightly. In the crystalline mornings, the sky blazes triumphantly clear. Whitewashed, rain-cleansed, breeze-swept, the city itself ascends vigorously in steep hills before diving toward the bay. All this gives San Francisco an aspect of purity—a magnificent impressionistic prettiness. Even its inevitably shabby streets—around Mission, say, or toward the Embarcadero, into Italiantown—exhale that fresh, fresh bay-air.

           For me, San Francisco was the inevitable step in that journey toward the loss of innocence. Although I didnt realize it then (telling myself that I was coming here to separate myself—
again!
—from what had become a guilt-obsessed life; that there was a resurrective atmosphere in San Francisco which would make this possible), I understand now that I came here instead to initiate myself in a further rite which that world would only too willingly expose me to: hinted at subtly the previous time I had been here: when I had explored, but shortly, the netherworld of that city.

           And I did get a job. Yet in fairness I must say that, even then, I knew that on the slightest pretext, if any—as before—I would quit.

           Looking out the window where I worked on Market Street, I saw an older man stop to talk to a boy who had been loitering at the corner obviously trying to score. Together, they moved away. Minutes later, I walked out on that job.

           Away from those streets, I was wasting my Youth. The end of youth is a kind of death. You die slowly by the process of gnawing discovery. You die too in the gigantic awareness that the miraculous passport given to the young can be ripped away savagely by the enemy Time.... Youth is a struggle against—and, paradoxically, therefore a struggle
toward
—death: a suicide of the soul.

           Like a repentant lover, I returned to that previous way of life. And so had I come, under the guise of separating myself from Los Angeles, to search, in this seasonless city, under that bright clear cold sky, not only the life I had left behind but a new aspect of it?

           And the side of that world I will explore now in San Francisco is one that will scorch my consciousness.

           There are, recurrently, things that you realize only in retrospect, things that could have been observed as signals at the time of their occurrence.

           So it had been with several of the people I had been with, in New York and Los Angeles, but mostly in that previous time in San Francisco: the urgent whispered sexmutterings (“I am a—...” “Make me do—...” “Call me a—...”). There had been too, as clearly in retrospect, the insistence on pressure at certain moments, the hands reaching for you eagerly pleading for that pressure.... The motorcycled bars of Los Angeles.... Yet I had not really
wanted
to know.

           Buzz is a youngish score in San Francisco, who generally made his pickups at the arcade on Market Street. He was obviously fond of his nickname, which, in its jivy sound, made him feel much closer to the youngmen he picked up than the ordinarily remote score. Among the hustlers, he was well liked. Whether or not Buzz still wanted you sexually after the first time (and he seemed to prefer many people rather than one), you could always count on him. On weekends he would be at the arcade playing the machines with the young vagrants. If someone was hungry and without money, he would give him enough to eat on, without demanding anything back. Unlike those other scores who, their desire satisfied, bitchily try to put you down for the very things that initially attracted them, Buzz was more like a friend.

           I was with him two nights (going to the movies, eating with him, driving around the city in his car) before he came on with me; but at the end of each of those previous nights, he had driven me to the Y on Turk Street, where I was staying, and he would give me money.

           On the third night, at his apartment, we made it.

           “Have you ever been busted?” he asked me in the morning.

           It was a square question, especially since, last night, two youngmen from the arcade had come up to leave some mysteriously acquired things which Buzz had accepted un-questioningly.

           “No,” I answered.

           “Im not coming on square,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. “I dont give a damn, myself. The reason I asked is I want you to meet someone who can help you. See, San Francisco isnt like L.A. The street scene here can get pretty mean after a while. This guy I want you to meet—well, you cant have been busted.”

           The next day he took me to a Turkish bath, to meet the man he had mentioned.

           The bath is in one of the seamier sections of the city—down a flight of gray stairs, leading to a small booth where customers pay to get in. I had walked through this area before—one of the hustling bars is nearby—but I had never realized there was such a place: It is almost hidden, gobbled by the other buildings on the street and then it sinks underground. To get to it, you have to know it’s here.

           Behind the registration booth, a short squat, muscular man of about 40 is working on a ledgerbook. Hes wearing a T-shirt. His arms are covered with a thick mat of black hair, and he looks like a wrestler.

           “This is the kid I told you about,” Buzz said to him.

           “Wait for me in the lounge,” the squat man said peremptorily. In the lounge were several couches—a coke machine in one corner, several doors leading to other sections: to a row of whitedoored cubicles, the steam room, the head, the showers. It was not a wellkept place, although it appeared superficially clean. Even the lights were grayish. It looked improvised, as if someone, deciding to open a bath, had merely adapted whatever was readily, cheaply, and most concealedly available.

           As I sit there with Buzz, several men walk from one door into another, glancing at us: the customers—older men, starved-eyed youngmen—in towels, the attendants in sweatpants. I notice how different each of the attendants Ive seen (and they all spoke familiarly to Buzz) is from the other—markedly dissimilar as if carefully selected as to
type.

           Im struck by the atmosphere of overwhelming debauchery here—beyond the feeling of the streets and the bars: a fantastic apparent anonymity as the various attendants and clients move about, somehow like shadows, lifeless manikin people.... It was as if what revealed itself on the streets and some bars as at least wild, alive determination had reduced itself here to its rockbasis, a cold, unquestioned, unquestioning Availability.

           The squat man appeared. “We can talk better back here,” he said, leading us into a small room lined with shelves on which are stacks of clean towels. “Im sorry I kept you waiting. One of my helpers—I told you—” he said to Buzz “—he left abruptly—just didnt show up.” His voice was incongruous with the rest of him. He spoke clearly, precisely. He has put on a pair of black-rimmed glasses and now resembles someone trying to look like an aloof businessman. He stares penetratingly at me. Already I dislike him.

           “Do you have a record—other than just being rousted?” he asked me.

           “Why?” I asked him.

           “Because I cant hire anyone with a record,” he said impatiently.

           “Hire?” I asked.

           The squat man turns to Buzz exasperatedly. “Didnt you tell him?”

           “Just that I wanted him to meet you,” Buzz says.

           “Ive got a vacancy here,” the squat man goes on officially. “That kid you sent me—the skinny one,” he said to Buzz, “hes the one that left.”

           Purposely Im looking blankly at him. He seems uneasy at my attitude. Buzz notices it.

           “Hes all right,” he tells the squat man, “Ive known him a long time.” He puts his hand intimately on my shoulder to emphasize it.

           “Umm,” the squat man said. “All youve got to do here,” he said to me, “is hand out towels to these guys—keep the place clean. I dont pay you much. But I leave it up to you how much you make—on tips.”

           Im still playing it square, not saying anything.

           “You sure this is the guy you told me about on the telephone?” the squat man asked Buzz again impatiently. Buzz nods. “Look, boy,” the squat man says, “I’ll tell you straight: I need a small slender guy something like you—some of these creeps prefer them; theyre pretty weird; you cant tell what they want...” Hes trying to indicate that he himself is uninterested, disassociating himself from “these creeps”; indicating that hes outside of the scene; that this, to him, is a business. I wonder how Buzz can take it.... Several times the squat man twisted a wedding band on his finger, to bring attention to it.

           As usual, I react negatively to being appraised that coldly, to being, if only by implication, talked about as if Im not around.

           Suddenly, from somewhere beyond this room, theres a shout. The squat man disappeared. We followed him into the lounge. I heard excited voices coming from the cubicles—snatches of talk: “Ive warned you—not so loud!” the squat man is saying. A man emerged from one of the cubicles, going to the head. His nose is bleeding profusely. As he passes us, I see on his oddly smiling face—which he doesnt bother to cover with a hand or a towel—an unmistakable look of pained satisfaction....

           Back in the room with the toweled shelves, the squat man says to me: “Well?”

           “Well what?” I glare at him, strangely filled with hatred for him.

           “I believe youve got it all wrong,” he says coldly. “I run a legitimate business. Sometimes things get out of hand. But the cops dont disturb me. It’s just that these guys—” again contemptuously “—theyre ‘strange’—and they like different types around them.” Im still staring at him, enjoying seeing him put on this way. Then I walked toward the door, to leave. “You—” he started and broke off abruptly. “I dont think I’d hire you, you wouldnt do very well here,” he said, opening the door—attempting to beat me to the gesture.