City of Night (6 page)

3

           In the morning of the day I was to meet him again, I moved out of the Y—away from the never-stopping showers and the fixed looks along the hallways; the doors opening and closing all night.

           And I moved into that building on 34th Street known as The Casbah for its menagerie of Twilight people, and I added to the shadows in one of those thousands of hallways in New York City in immense apartment houses erected in the large American cities before buildings grew tall and skinny rather than short and fat. They squat self-consciously in the midst of slick skyscrapers waiting sullenly to be bought, torn down, replaced: And this one has four cagelike elevators corresponding to each of the building’s wings; moving up and down grudgingly like tired old ladies constantly grumbling about their present, unmerited station of life....

           As I stand in the hallway opening the door to the room I had rented, a woman with burningly demented eyes just seems to appear. “Im Gene de Lancey, sweetie,” she said. “I live down the hall with my husband—his name’s Steve. And I want you to consider us your Best Friends.” Then she disappeared, leaving behind her the odor of strong perfume and wine....

           At night, on my way to meet Mr. King, I walk through Times Square. And along that street—outside the Italian restaurant featuring squirming spaghetti for 40¢ a plate; before the racks of magazines with photographs of almost-naked youngmen like an advertisement for this street; along the moviehouses, the subway entrances; along that fourth-of-july colored street: I saw the army of youngmen he knew so well—like photographs in a strange exhibition: slouched invitingly, or moving back and forth restlessly; pretending to be reading the headlines flashing across the Tower—but oblivious, really, of the world those headlines represent (but an integral part of it); concerned only with the frantic needs of Inside—
Now!!

           I move on, that cold, autumnal newyork night, and this time the sky was dotted with sad cold stars—and I walk through Bryant Park behind the library, the fallen leaves crunching beneath my feet like spilled popcorn—I walk past the shadows of staring lonesome men along the ledges, suddenly astonishingly real in the instant flickering light of a struck match—then shadows again, faceless—
and I get the feeling in the park now that silence is a person listening to Me, watching....
I walked into the library, from 42nd Street, through the echoing halls, toward the Fifth Avenue entrance.

           Through the door, I see him standing on the steps, between the two lions, waiting for me. He is even more neatly dressed than before. Smoking. He looks at his watch, looks toward either side of the street I can almost smell the sweet cologne. Carefully dressed and talcumed, clothes freshly pressed, his grayish hair combed neatly....

          
Frantically trying to look good for me!

           Suddenly I turned back, away from him, down the hall and the stairs, out the 42nd Street entrance, through the park waiting somehow like a Trap—through the popcorn-crunching leaves, the shadows of the trees grotesque in the faint autumn moon like in a witchstory... the stars hugely unconcerned.

           And I take the subway back to 34th Street, to that giant spider building I had moved into....

           And days later I saw him again, on Times Square, as he crossed the street cockily with a hoodylooking black-haired boy to get into a cab. He glanced at me, turned away quickly.

           His hat still slouched defiantly to one side.

CITY OF NIGHT

           FROM THE THUNDERING UNDERGROUND—THE MAZE of the New York subways—the world pours into Times Square. Like lost souls emerging from the purgatory of the trains (dark rattling tunnels, smelly pornographic toilets, newsstands futilely splashing the subterranean graydepths with unreal magazine colors), the newyork faces push into the air: spilling into 42nd Street and Broadway—a scattered defeated army. And the world of that street bursts like a rocket into a shattered phosphorescent world. Giant signs—Bigger! Than! Life!—blink off and on. And a great hungry sign groping luridly at the darkness screams:

F * A * S * C * I * N * A * T * I * O * N

           I had been in the islandcity several weeks now, and already I had had two jobs, briefly: each time thinking now I would put down Times Square. But like a possessive lover—or like a powerful drug—it lured me. FASCINATION! I stopped working.... And I returned, dazzled, to this street. The giant sign winked its welcome: FASCINATION!

           I surrendered to the world of Times Square, and like a hype who needs more and more junk to keep going, I haunted that world not only at night now but in the mornings, the afternoons....

           That world of Times Square that I inhabited extends from 42nd Street to about 45th Street, from grimy Eighth Avenue to Bryant Park—where, nightly, shadows cling to the ledges: malehungry looks hidden by the darkness of the night; and occasionally, shadowy figures, first speaking briefly, disappear in pairs behind the statue with its back to the library and come out after a few frantic moments, from opposite directions: intimate nameless strangers joined for one gasping brief space of time. Periodically the newyork cop comes by meanly swinging his stick superiorly, sometimes flashing his light toward the bushes—and the shadows scatter from the ledges, the benches, the trees—walking away aimlessly.

           But that world exists not only along the streets; it extends into the movie theaters. And the moviehouse toilets on 42nd Street and the toilets in the subways—with the pleading scrawled messages—form the boiling subterranean world of Times Square. Steps lead down from the moviehouse lobbies as if into a dungeon—and in the toilet, the purpose may be realized, and you walk up the steps—aware of the danger after the danger is over—you and he complete strangers again after the cold intimacy. You may move from the dungeon into the cavern of the moviebalconies and try to score again: swallowed instantly by that giant wolfmouth of dark at the opening of which the dreamworld of a certain movie is being projected: the actors like ghosts from an altogether Different world....

           By now winter was approaching in New York. Hurricanes and threats of hurricanes had stopped, and the air was clear. Daily the leaves turned browner, the orange disappeared. Along the walks in the parks, leaves fell like rejected brown stars.

           As the weather had changed, from hurricane warnings to cool, I had stood along 42nd Street and Bryant Park waiting to be picked up, and with the changing season I felt a change within me too: a frantic lonesomeness that sometimes took me, paradoxically, to the height of elation, then flung me into depression. The figure of my Mother standing by the kitchen door crying, watching me leave, hovered ghostlike over me, but in the absence of that overwhelming tearing love—away from it if only physically—I felt a violent craving for something indefinable.

           Throughout those weeks, on 42nd Street, the park, the moviehouses, I had learned to sift the different types that haunted those places: The queens swished by in superficial gayety—giggling males acting like teenage girls; eyeing the youngmen coquettishly: but seldom offering more than a place to stay for the night. And I could spot the scores easily—the men who paid other men sexmoney, anywhere from $5.00—usually more—but sometimes even less (for some, meals and drinks and a place to stay); the amount determined by the time of the day, the day of the week, the place of execution of the sexscene: their apartment, a rented room, a public toilet; their franticness, your franticness; their manner of dress, indicating affluence or otherwise; the competition on the street—the other youngmen stationed along the block like tattered guards for that defeated army which, Somehow, life had spewed out, Rejected.

           I found that you cant always tell a score by his age or appearance: There are the young and the goodlooking ones—the ones about whom you wonder why they prefer to pay someone (who will most likely at least not indicate desiring them back) when there exists—much, much vaster than the hustling world—the world of unpaid, mutually desiring males—the easy pickups.... But often the scores are near-middle-aged or older men. And they are mostly uneffeminate. And so you learn to identify them by their method of approaching you (a means of identification which becomes instinctively surer and easier as you hang around longer). They will make one of the standard oriented remarks; they will offer a cigarette, a cup of coffee, a drink in a bar: anything to give them time in which to decide whether to trust you during those interludes in which there is always a suggestion of violence (although, for some, I would learn later, this is one of the proclaimed appeals—that steady hint of violence); time in which to find out if you’ll fit their particular sexfantasy.

           I learned that there are a variety of roles to play if you’re hustling: youngman out of a job but looking; dont give a damn-youngman drifting; perrenialhustler easy to makeout; youngman lost in the big city please help me sir. There was, too, the pose learned quickly from the others along the street: the stance, the jivetalk—a mixture of jazz, joint, junk sounds—the almost-disdainful, disinterested, but, at the same time, inviting look; the casual way of dress.

           And I learned too that to hustle the streets you had to play it almost-illiterate.

           The merchant marine at the Y had been the first to tell me that With Mr. King I had merely acted instinctively. But I was to learn it graphically from a man I had met on Times Square. As he sat in his apartment studying me, I leafed through a novel by Colette. The man rose, visibly angered. “Do you read books?” he asked me sharply. “Yes,” I answered. “Then Im sorry, I dont want you anymore,” he said; “really masculine men dont read!” Hurriedly, his sexfantasy evaporated, he gave me a few bucks. Minutes later I saw him again on Times Square talking to another youngman....

           And so I determined that from now on I would play it dumb. And I would discover that to many of the street people a hustler became more attractive in direct relation to his seeming insensitivity—his “toughness.” I would wear that mask.

           By now, of course, I have met several of the shadows along Times Square.

           There was Carlo, an actor, whom I met coming out of the subway head, who took me home and for a week came on strong—“helping me out”: How sad that I should hang around the streets. If I move in with him, he’ll give me Everything I Need. And when I was almost conned, he got a job in Hollywood, and, with apologies, split, giving me $5.00 that night—and a smiling! triumphant! goodbye!...

           And Raub—a bastard—whose frog-shape and inclinations make me remember him as a “fraggot”—the fraggot with the enormous black-velvetdraped bed on Park Avenue: I was swiftly succeeded by, as I had very briefly succeeded, a string of others.... And there was Lenny from New Jersey, whom I saw twice a week, until one night he didn’t show; and I learned later he’d been arrested for selling pornographic pictures.

           There was, too, Im perversely glad to tell you, a cop met in an extension of the same world of 42nd Street. After midnight walking from the west to the east side, I crossed Central Park, and he was out rousting the bums sleeping in the park—the wagon parked a distance away. When he stopped me, I came on I was square: Just Now Came To The Big City. And he goes through the identification scene. “Well, you havent really seen New York then,” he said. “Maybe I can meet you somewhere on my day off and I’ll show you around.” I saw him a couple of times, but My Pride won out: To be with a cop—even for scoring—humiliated me, and that stopped.

           Feeling that recurrent guilt which will come on me unexpectedly in that life, I placed an ad in the Sunday paper for a job: “YOUNGMAN desires gainful employment”—and the number of the telephone in the hallway where I lived.

           “Can you come up now?” the faintly-British-accented male voice on the telephone said. It was Sunday evening. I took down an address on Sutton Place. “Take a cab,” the voice said, “and I’ll reimburse you when you get here.”

           In a fashionable apartment overlooking the East River, I face an elegant silver-haired man. At the door he had started, looked at me in surprise.

           “What kind of a job are you looking for?” he asked me after offering me a drink.

           “Anything that I like and that pays.”

           “Oh?” he said. “That must cover a lot of territory.... I have an opening,” he said.

           “What kind of work?”

           “Oh, thats such a boring subject, isnt it?” he said. “Why not lets just get to know each other first” He sits very close to me. “Youre nervous,” he said. “Maybe it’s the suit youre wearing. You dont seem to be used to it,” he said slyly. “You neednt have worn it, you know. Oh, Im terribly informal myself!” Yet he wore a cuff-linked shirt, vest, tie, coat. “Are you desperate for money?” he asked in an amused tone, as if he were reading a line out of a familiar play.

           “I need it,” I said.

           He gave me a $10 bill. “For the cab,” he winked.

           “This job—” I started.

           “I like you,” he said, touching my arm.

           “I have another appointment—with someone else,” I lied, suddenly bewildered, realizing that hes obviously taken for granted that Im available.

           “You know, youngman, I have to make a confession,” he said, like someone exhibiting a trump card, “Ive seen you before. On Times Square.... When I called you, of course, I had no way of knowing it would be you. No idea in the world. But when you turned up, well, I was delighted.... I never speak to anyone on the streets.... And, incidentally, Im glad to see youve graduated out of Times Square and into the want-ads of the newspapers!” He went on with amused sureness: “Anyway, about the... uh... job. Ive got... an opening.”