“Uh, yes.” Wilford was seldom hesitant.
“Something you prefer not to tell me. Why didn’t he answer me?”
Wilford was too honest to disguise further. “He just said he’d prefer not to write.”
“Why the hell not?” I was determined to have him tell me or to show me the letter.
He pulled it out of the envelope and handed it to me, pointing to a paragraph:
“Please tell that guy that I don’t want to hear from him again. I have no interest in anyone who gives so little of himself and seems to know even less about himself.”
Wilford touched my hand lightly. “He’s just being Harry Partch. That’s all.”
“To hell with the goddamned asshole,” I said.
As if in compensation—he not yet reacted to Pablo! a fact that annoyed me—he told me that the college seemed very willing to have him direct there. “Would you like that, witch boy?”
When I saw my sister Olga next—“You must be very busy, little brother, I haven’t seen you in ages”—I was tempted to tell her about the prospect of the play at the college, about my friend Wilford, and about what the vile aunts had told my mother. But, just as I had withheld telling her about the debacle in Balmorhea, at the last moment I decided to retain the information, assuring myself that if I did decide at any time to tell her about those matters, she would “understand,” being my steadfast ally. Even if I had decided otherwise, she would not have given me a chance to do so today. She announced excitedly:
“Alicia Gonzales is in New Orleans! She’s claiming she was born in Spain.”
“Olga, you’re making that up. How the hell could you know that? What movie are you borrowing from?”
“I know it from Tina, that’s how. Alicia’s father hired a detective to locate her,” she poured out more words eagerly. “She works in a fancy place that serves only tea. She claims she was born in Madrid, that her parents were connected to a long line of arees-to-crats.” The last word, spoken with sly contempt, wasn’t a word my sister had ever used before, although like me she had been born among people who sometimes loftily claimed such an association, which had never impressed her. “She’s changed her name legally. So now she’s really Isabel Franklin.”
I tried to place Isabel Franklin where my sister had identified her. Why in New Orleans? The girl I remembered, and the girl who was emerging in my sister’s accounts, would have a distinct purpose. If what my sister was telling me was true, not only had Isabel erased parts of her identity, but she was trying to re-create her background. To invent what new identity?
“Maybe they’ll send her to the plague island,” I heard my sister say.
“What!”
“Wasn’t it New Orleans from where they sent Bette Davis in Jezebel to the plague colony? Maybe that’s where they’ll send that creature, too, and it would suit her right.”
When I arrived that evening at Wilford’s apartment, he took a letter he had been writing and he placed it on a table before the couch where I usually sat; he cleared everything else away. Then he excused himself. No question that he wanted me to read the letter. More about Partch? His defense of me to the weird musician? Still, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it, although I couldn’t locate a reason for apprehension, for a sense of something disturbing being imminent. I glanced down. I saw my name. OK, good, he was putting that Partch guy in his place. I read: “… is John Rechy … magical combination …” Without hesitation, I read now: “His name is John Rechy. He is a magical contradiction of masculinity—and aching sensitivity. He is talented in a way that. …”
I stopped reading, not knowing what I would do when Wilford returned to the room. It was obvious that he had intended to make his description of me flattering. But I wasn’t all certain that I was flattered. What had he meant by “aching sensitivity”?
When he returned, he stood looking at me. I looked away, not wanting to convey that I had read any part of his letter, although he would know I had from its altered position on the table.
“I just dropped in to tell you I can’t stay today; I have a test tomorrow.”
“He wants to meet you,” I told Barbara, using the occasion to break my determination to avoid her. She had been on her way to the student union building. “Why have you kept away from me?” she asked me, and she looked prettier than ever. I shrugged. “Just busy.”
We agreed to meet and go to Wilford’s apartment. Just as I had expected, and hoped for, they immediately took to each other. She and I sat on one couch; he sat on a canvas chair. He told her about the probability of a production at the college.
“You’d make a wonderful Barbara Allen to John’s Witch Boy,” he told her. That seemed to please her. He had obtained copies of the play. He wanted to rehearse us in a scene, the scene where the Witch Boy first sees Barbara Allen and falls in love.
Facing her, as she assumed the character of the sensual young woman—standing seductively, hands on her hips—I was dumbfounded as to what to do, suddenly too embarrassed to perform before Wilford with Barbara. I opened my mouth to speak the first line; instead, I gasped. The moment was so awful that Barbara broke up laughing.
“If you hadn’t been wiggling so funny,” I accused her, restraining myself from a substitute defense of informing her that I had starred in a famous Spanish drama; what had she ever starred in?
“I’m sorry,” she apologized very seriously.
“Don’t worry,” Wilford told me later when we were alone. “I’ll rehearse you, and you’ll become the enchanted boy—and you’ll look terrific, barefoot, torn pants, no shirt.” He had a way of arching his eyebrows and smiling which signaled that he was appealing to my vanity. “Everybody will love you,” he said, “just like they love the dancer in your novel Pablo!”
“You read it,” I said excitedly.
“You’re very talented, Johnny; it’s exceptional. I’d like to send it to my agent in New York.”
“Thank you.” I kept myself from becoming effusive.
Wilford had easily become the first friend I thought I could trust, someone I laughed with, even when he gently satirized my vanity. I told him stories about my family—about my wonderful Tía Ana, who practiced white magic; about my mother’s stalwart nobility in keeping the family going through the worst times, her never wanting to speak English, her defense of the nun over the priest—and even about my father, deliberately sympathetic stories about his roaming around the courthouse to be appointed for jury duty, to enjoy the air-conditioning on hot days.
Out of those stories—about Tía Ana, my dauntless mother, and my father—Wilford, years later, would write and direct a play in New York, a unique musical comedy, touched with wistfulness, called Trapdoors of the Moon.
But no production of Dark of the Moon occurred in El Paso. Unexpectedly, Wilford received transfer orders. He would be leaving Fort Bliss, to be stationed in Virginia.
In the intervening days before he would transfer, I knew how enormous my loss would be, how very much I would miss him, how much he meant to me.
In my brother’s car, I picked him up at his apartment the night before he was to leave. We drove around town, talking; he had sent my novel to his agent and would let me know the agent’s reaction as soon as he received it. As I drove through Memorial Park, he suggested we park and talk.
He said, “I’ll miss you a lot, Johnny. Eventually, I’m sure you’ll leave El Paso. I’ll be out of the army soon, and eventually in New York. I hope that you’ll come.”
“Oh, sure,” I said. At the time, I did not try to imagine my future; most often I seemed to be anchored in El Paso.
Wilford touched my shoulder. His hand remained there.
I forced myself not to pull away from the unexpected gesture. I sat tensely, feeling the weight of his hand increasing, the weight of his touch, knowing that the gesture was about to become an embrace.
“John, I want to say that I—”
I pulled away, stopping words I inferred, words I
had naively dismissed from any place in our friendship. Now, even though not spoken, they had resonated in my mind as if, all along, they had been shouted but been left unheard.
“I’ll miss you a lot, too, Wilford,” was all I could say. I started the car. I drove back to the bus stop where I had met him—he wanted to be dropped off there—and where he would leave for Fort Bliss, his last time in El Paso.
He wrote to me almost every day, letters full of memories of our brief encounters. Without his friendship, El Paso had become for me more of a desert than ever before.
Another letter arrived. He had received a quick answer about Pablo! from his agent. He quoted the agent: “Of course, this novel has in it everything but the kitchen sink. That said, it is clearly the work of a very talented writer. I predict his talent may outshine a top half dozen of our highly praised writers. To submit this manuscript now would do him a disfavor. He is still very young, his talent growing.”
I was exhilarated by the praise, but dejected just as quickly by the implicit decision—and then I was confused: Why hadn’t Wilford sent me a copy of the agent’s letter? Why had he only quoted from it? Had he invented those remarks, trying to smoothe something harsh from the agent?
One day Barbara and I ran into each other at the library. She appeared as if dazed. Although the day was hot, she wore a long-sleeved sweater over her blouse. She could hardly speak. When I asked her what was wrong, she ran out. I followed her outside. Under a sweaty Texas sun, she removed the sweater as if momentarily to cool off. She replaced it quickly when she saw me approaching. In those brief moments I had seen that both her wrists were bandaged.
“Barbara!”
“Johnny, please—”
There had been such an urgent plea—she had turned away quickly—to be left alone that I did not follow her.
I didn’t see her around for days. Baxter Polk, the librarian, took me into his office and told me that she had tried to kill herself. “That mother of hers,” was all he could offer. I remembered the gaunt woman who had refused to call Barbara the day I had gone to pick her up with Ross and Scott; remembered how when she returned, the woman had stood at the door like a guard. I remembered Barbara’s moody withdrawals, her choked laughter.
“Where is she now, Baxter?”
Baxter paused as if to prepare what he was about to say. “She’s married, Johnny, and she’s left El Paso.”
“What!”
“She married—”
He mentioned the man I had seen her with on campus.
Isabel Franklin had fled El Paso; Barbara was gone; Wilford was gone. I was still here.
The first issue of the college magazine with me as editor appeared. It created a furor I had not anticipated. Telephone calls were made and letters carried by a group of students to the head of the Journalism Department, protesting: What the hell was happening to El Burro? Why so few jokes, hardly any cartoons? Who the hell was interested in photographs of a girl in ballet poses? And the weirdo stories? And those ugly drawings—what were they? And worst of all, that whatever-it-was on “modern art”? What the hell was that all about?
I was summoned before the publications board and fired.
“What were you thinking?” Scott asked me, ushering me gently out of the student union building, where students with copies of my issue of The Donkey were glaring at the magazine, and then at me. “Look, John, guys are talking about you … being …”
“What, Scott?”
“Strange.”
I thanked him and didn’t ask him what exactly they were saying. I didn’t have to.
As I was walking alone out of the building, a tall, hulking guy intercepted me. “What the fuck is this, man?” He thrust the magazine at me, opened to the story about the smart kid and the athlete cheating on a test. “What’s with these two guys? Are they fuckin’ queers?”
“Fuck, no,” I said.
As I moved away, the rage I had withheld at them ricocheted on me, intensified incongruously by an image which I did not expect but which I now accepted.
… her free hand rose and rested lightly on the elbow of the arm whose fingers held the cigarette, completing an intricately graceful choreography of movements that extended as she withdrew the cigarette from her lips but kept it close, as if deciding whether to inhale from it again, extending a moment of suspense.
15
One more issue was pending before I would officially leave as editor. I rushed it into production. I wrote a prose poem titled “Babbitt Went to College.” It was a broad parody of school activities that attempted to echo Eliot’s The Waste Land. I illustrated it with recognizable cartoons of the students who had most loudly protested my version of The Donkey. Most prominent was the hulk who had accosted me. I drew other deliberately obscure cartoons. One was a box full of dots. The caption: “I’m one of the crowd.” Another was a cartoon version of the Mona Lisa. The caption: “I prefer the Mona Lisa.”
My swan song for The Donkey.
After that, El Burro returned to being what it had been before, with this exception: The next issue carried two pages of letters excoriating my ventures. The letters included one from the young man who had written the story about the close friendship between the athlete and the smart kid. He wanted to separate himself, he wrote, from having anything to do with those “sick issues of El Burro.”
Often now, in the middle of the hot summer, I hiked out of the city, walking all the way from the projects, miles, into the desert, to the edge of the Franklin Mountains, up to Mount Cristo Rey. At the top, there was a crude stone statue of Christ, fifty feet tall, looming over the city. On holy days, gaudy processions, mostly Mexican men and women, some children, marched up to it, led by a trio of priests, praying, along the circuitous path that had been cleared for religious rituals up the mountain. Led by the priests, the congregants knelt before each of the crude representations of stations of the cross embedded in tall stones along the path to the very top.
On the days when I was sure no one else would be around, I climbed up by myself. I did not take the circuitous prepared path. I climbed up the steep slopes. I grasped the edges of rocks, dug my feet into crevices to keep loose rocks from crashing down. The resultant fissure often pulverized after I stepped higher. I reached the top, exhausted, drenched in sweat.
No religious inclination goaded me there. I had shed every vestige of my childhood Catholicism. What coaxed me to climb was the spectacle of the crude giant statue—arms outspread—overlooking the desert, El Paso, and Juárez, taken up stone by stone laboriously, the nearly impossible but triumphant labor of a Mr. Soler, who had envisioned it.
On a fiercely hot afternoon, after having rested briefly at the top of the mountain, I was climbing back down, shirtless, sweating, sunburned, thirsty—I never thought to bring water—I heard the distant clopping of horses’ hooves. I quickened my step, moving across the tracks that cut across the desert at the base of the mountain, where, a short distance away, a small village called Anapra huddled, all flimsy clay-patched hovels where only Mexicans lived.
From that far vantage, I saw two men on mounted horses—the border patrol—racing toward the river, which was full today, a rare occasion, a foot or more deep with dirty water. Moving ahead, I saw a group of people—a family?—in the river, attempting to cross the border. I could now make out a man, a woman, three children, plodding across the water, their pace slowed by the sluggish mud at the bottom. As the mounted men approached, the man and the woman tried to scatter, clutching their children’s hands. They all fell, splashing in mud, the man and woman pushing the children up. The patrolmen halted, as if to prolong their observation of the spectacle of the family, falling, rising, falling, thrashing in the mud. I heard the screams of children mired in the sandy river.
The hooves of their horses digging into the sand, halting, the patrolmen corralled the group, pulling them out with heaved ropes, bunching them together. Roped, the family members were marched, the horses seeming to prod them
on, to a station wagon that had been waiting on the nearest road. Pushed into the wagon, all five disappeared as the vehicle sped away, arousing angry dust.
Now at the river’s edge, holding my shoes and shirt above the water, I moved along carefully, the water deep enough to pull me down. When I reached the farther edge of the river, I looked up to see the same two border patrolmen waiting for me.
“Whoa, there, amigo!” one of them shouted at me.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“He speaks English good!” said one. “Where’d ya learn—?”
When he saw me close up—the horses snorting in protest against the abrupt order—one of the patrolmen, a heavy middle-aged man with a florid face, laughed. “Thought you was a wetback, sonny.”
“I’m American,” I said.
The other one joined him. “Shouldn’t go around wadin’ ’cross the river without a shirt, buddy, all sunburned and everything.”
“What were ya doin’? Fishin’ in the pond?” Now they were all humor and nasty camaraderie.
“I climbed up Cristo Rey Mountain,” I said.
“Well, you better say your prayers tonight that we recognized you as white, cause we coulda shot you if you’da run,” one tossed back as they both moved away on their horses.
I felt indignant and ashamed.
The Korean War, which had come into my awareness as bloody events in newspaper headlines and droning voices on the radio and television about devastating bombings and mounting casualties, became close when I graduated—with a BA degree in English literature—from what was now called Texas Western College. I faced the certain prospect of being drafted. I might have asked for a deferment to acquire a further degree, but I opted not to.
To get the intensifying menace of conscription over with, I volunteered to be drafted. That would allow me to be in the army only two years, as opposed to the three if I volunteered in the regular manner. By then, my father seemed to have exhausted his rage—his curses were only muttered to himself. I would be leaving without betraying my mother.