“Thought you’d like to eat here, real quiet, and we can relax.”
I didn’t want that, no. Nor did I want the hamburgers, which as he took them out dripped with grease.
He saw my apprehension. “I’m kinda low on cash now,” he explained. “Otherwise, we’d go out to dinner, like I said in the showers. Stick around and we’ll go out tomorrow. I’ll be loaded,” he added when he saw me hesitating. He bit into a hamburger, limp pieces of lettuce and tomato dangling from his lips. “I sure wish you’da been at Mary’s Bar in the Village last night—that’s a hustling bar.” His eyes were probing my reaction.
A hustling bar … a phrase, foreign to me … no, the cop in El Paso had used it. I moved farther into the room.
“Yeah, last night I woulda taken you out to a real fine restaurant—and youda been fifty bucks richer.”
Fifty bucks richer. Pieces of a puzzle about to be solved. Solved or found.
He laughed. “I know, I know, seems like a story. Fifty bucks!—when the going rate’s five, maybe ten. I was drunk, hot for the guy, and I’m real generous when I’m flushed. Let me tell you, kid, he wasn’t near as good-looking and sexy as you are. You’re a beaut, kid. Come on, sit down, we’ll figure all this out. We’ll just eat this stuff now and talk. Tomorrow I get my paycheck—I’m a merchant marine, get paid good—and we’ll do the town up. How’s that?” He slurped the Coke.
I shook my head, feeling conned, pegged as green. “I’ll see you around tomorrow.” I was almost out of the room.
“Hell, kid,” he said to me, forcing, I was sure, a yawn, and I realized he’d spiked the Cokes; a sour smell mixed nauseatingly with the odor of greasy burgers. “If you’re really hard up for ready cash, go to Times Square, always good for ten—good-looking guy like you; just stand there—”
Hustling … I had looked the part … fifty bucks, ten … Times Square.
Rain slashed in sheets at the city; tall buildings were under assault by waves of water. Yet Forty-Second Street was crowded; people were hurrying along with umbrellas, suddenly upended by rainy wind. Although it was still afternoon, the day had turned a dull gray.
At the desk at the Y, I had inquired where Times Square was; the man there had smiled knowingly. Now I stood on Forty-second Street without shelter, allowing the rain to drench me, feeling my body soaked with wetness as if I was naked.
I stood there until the rain abated, became only steady. A pale sun was struggling out of entrapping clouds. The city glistened, for startling moments. The electricity of the storm had made the approaching dusk hotter, steaming up the streets.
For the first time I noticed a sign blinking over an arcade across the street.
F*A*S*C*I*N*A*T*I*O*N
It seemed like a powerful invitation I had already accepted. Looking about the grimy street—of blinking neon lights and pinball arcades, scruffy movie theaters, the open mouths of the subway spewing out people; cars crowding the street, inching along in traffic, horns protesting—I saw young men lolling about, standing out even among the surging crowds. They would pause briefly, swagger on. I spotted them easily, studying them, their stances, their slouched poses as if uncaring; but their heads turned often, toward mostly older men, some in business suits, who walked along at a faster pace—as if determined to convey that they had a definite destination while really only scouting. One or another would pause, exchange a few words with a loitering young man. The two might move away together, or split up, moving to others.
I recognized the dance of the streets, but it was not as slow here. This was an extension of the world I had entered in Paris, yes, but another avenue, a territory I felt now I had been waiting to enter. The earlier interludes, in Paris and Dallas, were only the first steps into it. Easily, I assumed the studied posture of the others, the posed unconcern, the slouch.
Then all the anticipation that had led me here breathless, and had kept me here through the rainstorm, was washed away. I could not remember when I had felt this alone, this afraid, this lost, this bewildered—lost, longing to return to the safety of El Paso, the warmth of my mother’s love, the comfort of my brothers and sisters. l would rush back for my duffel bag and my typewriter at the Y, buy a ticket back to El Paso, I would—
“I’ll give you ten bucks, and I don’t give a damn for you.”
A short man, compactly built, perhaps in his middle forties, had stopped before me, hat slouched, posture cocky, looking me up and down knowingly.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
I had, but I wanted to hear the thrilling words again, although I knew exactly what he meant.
“Well?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
“You eaten yet?”
“No.”
“I’ll buy ya dinner, come on,” he said.
He dashed into the street and stopped a cab that was shifting to pick up another man. He jumped in, motioned me in, and closed the door quickly, exiling the other, protesting man. “Gotta keep on your toes in this fuckin’ town,” he laughed.
He took me to dinner at a good restaurant—“the best we can go to, with you dressed like that.” We took another cab to his apartment, well furnished, nothing fussy, solid furniture. He led me to his bedroom, a large bed, neatly made up. He put a ten-dollar bill on a table. He went to another room and returned wearing a robe.
Coaxing me back onto the bed, he took my clothes off. He stood looking at my naked body. He touched my body, his hands moving slowly along my thighs, my chest, my arms. I felt as if I would explode, with excitement—or fear—both. He bent his head over my groin. He licked my aroused cock. I twisted away, holding my breath audibly. My body relaxed.
He blew me until I came, gasping with a force I had never experienced before, as if in those moments I was pushing out, into his mouth, not only my cum but all the fear with which I had begun this welcome initiation.
He gave me twenty dollars.
“My name’s Klein,” he said with braggadocio. “Mister Klein,” he emphasized as if grabbing for something he felt he had compromised.
“Johnny,” I introduced myself.
“See you again, Johnny.”
“Sure, Mr. Klein.”
“Call me Ed.”
“Sure, Ed.”
“Library steps, Fifth Avenue, tomorrow seven o’clock. Be there, kid, OK?”
That encounter was the beginning of the birth of a new person, myself, another self, the first step I took to live a life that, years later, I would write about, although at the time I had no intention of doing so, in a novel titled City of Night.
22
I returned to the rented room at the Y. I slept and woke startled because I had gone to sleep with the sound of the rain, to its rhythm, and had been wakened by its absence. I had placed on the table the twenty bucks Mr. Klein—Ed—had paid me last night. “I’ll give you ten bucks and I don’t give a damn for you”—those words returned like a mantra. This was the world I had been seeking in its periphery. It was a world in which I would be desired and not be expected to desire, and I would be paid in confirmation of that powerful fact.
Until I was at the library on Fifth Avenue, I wasn’t sure I would turn up to see Mr. Klein again. Still undecided, I had walked through the library toward the Fifth Avenue exit. Through glass doors, I saw him waiting outside for me on the steps, between the two stone lions there. His hair was trimmed. He wore a sport jacket fitted trimly to his stocky body, probably tailored. He was trying to look his best for me. What he expected from me, I would not be able to give; that was not allowed in the world I was choosing to live in, indifferently. He was too kind to deserve my indifference.
I turned back into the library and walked away from him.
* * *
When I went to the apartment of a man who spoke only the words needed for the proposition—what was involved, for how much—I learned more rules for existing on the street.
Next to the man’s bed was an open book by Colette.
I leafed through it.
“You read much?”
“Yes.”
“Colette?”
“Some—yes.”
“Here.” He paid me. “I don’t want you, I want a tough man.”
So, like the others on the street, I would be street-smart but not smart, tough but not smart.
I moved out of the YMCA Sloane House and rented a room in a huge gray building on Thirty-fourth Street. On one corner, where Park Avenue declined into Fourth Avenue, an old army building, the Armory, squatted like a medieval fortress; on the other corner was a building known then as the Casbah.
The building had the look of something abandoned from long ago—five stories, six wings, creaking elevators. Once the various wings had been spacious, elegant apartments. Now each wing was broken up into rooms, united by long dark corridors, with a community kitchen and two bathrooms in each branch. I paid eight dollars a week for a small room whose single window faced another room only a few feet away in the neighboring wing. I opened the case with my typewriter and placed it on a table.
Although several of the tenants were young semi-transients undisturbed by the ghostly quality of the place, it was occupied, permanently by older people: a menagerie of the rejected, the banished, existing in the tenebrous rooms.
“Lambie-pie, my name is Gene de Lancey.”
A woman of about sixty had pushed herself into the hallway to introduce herself. A haunted presence, she had moved soundlessly, barefoot into the corridor, as if not to call attention to herself until she spoke. She wore a bright silk kimono, now faded, and an artificial flower in her hair. In the murky light of the corridor, she postured before me, shifting from one pose to another, raising her chin often as if about to be photographed, choosing the best angle for her heavily made-up face.
“Lambie-pie,” she said, “I’m glad you’ll be our neighbor. Steve and I—he’s my fourth husband; my first was a count—we entertain often, we play roulette and you’ll be welcome, lambie-pie.” She spoke in a refined tone.
“Thank you.”
As noiselessly as she had appeared, she disappeared along the corridor. I wondered who would come to play “roulette” in her cramped apartment.
Since the time with Mr. Klein, I had hunted Forty-second Street nightly for paid sex, each time feeling a rush of fulfillment that lasted until the next paid encounter, a higher rush that, too, needed to be sustained with more. When—once or twice—I saw Mr. Klein picking up one of the other loiterers, I felt a pang of sadness, regret; but I avoided him. The initiatory interlude with him had provided all that I would allow it to. A rigid set of requirements was evolving for my life on the erotic streets; and the main one was this: to be desired without reciprocation.
Late one night, as I walked into the lobby of the Casbah, which still boasted a sleepy Jamaican doorman, I encountered a reed-thin man, about seventy, and a woman even more frail, who leaned on his arm so that both walked askew. He wore a frayed tuxedo, she a gauzy dress with a patched train. As I waited for the elevator, two more couples as old as the pair in the lobby were exiting. One woman wore an old tiara; the other carried a sequined fan. The men wore mothy tuxedos. They had to be Gene de Lancey’s guests.
The party had broken up. As I walked to my room, wanting to pass by Gene de Lancey’s rooms unnoticed, she slunk out in a gossamer gown, her face painted even more outrageously than when I had first seen her.
“Lambie-pie! Please come in. Please, please, please!”
“I’m—”
“Please!” she said, desperate.
I went into her apartment and saw what I thought was an odd, complex toy. It was an miniature roulette set. Around the apartment were remnants of what must have been an attempt to create a grand party: flowery paper cups, bottles of cheap champagne. The apartment was suffused with wilted desolation. On a couch a man snored. “My fourth husband,” she dismissed him.
“Lambie-pie, please sit down, please.”
“OK, for a short while, I’m—”
“For a short while, yes. Only a short while.”
Noiselessly she glided away to a shelf in the room. Noiselessly she returned, holding before me an old magazine, Vanity Fair, from decades ago. On the cover was a drawing or a photograph of a beautiful woman, her chin up, her eyes half-lidded, lips glowing, parted. One hand touched her cheek.
I looked up and saw Gene de Lancey, her chin up, her eyes half-lidded, lips glowing, parted. One hand touched her cheek. “Who?” She pointed at the illustration.
“It’s you,” I said. “Of course.”
She closed her eyes, her hand at her throat. Tears squeezed out. “You recognize me? I haven’t changed?”
“It looks exactly like you.”
She bent over me and kissed me. “Lambie—”
I stood up. “I’m tired, really tired, I’ve been up all night. I’ll visit another time.”
My room in the Casbah was so hot that, despite the fan I kept running, I left the door open so that air might be able to enter through the space that separated one wing from another. The typewriter remained dormant on the desk.
“Lambie-pie!”
I sat up.
Gene de Lancey was at the open door. She reeked of alcohol although it was, perhaps, ten in the morning. She was wearing one of her kimonos and was barefoot as usual; her face was already starkly made up, like a mask of someone who had died long ago. She was holding an offering toward me, a candied apple.
“Thank you, Gene.” I took the apple.
“Lambie—”
“Yes.”
“We never know—do we, lambie?—what we will become.”
Talking to herself? She had assumed a vague look. She shot up, rigid, her face so livid her mouth seemed to be bleeding red. She gasped, uttered a cry, fled.
During the time I remained in that building, I did not see her again, although, one night I heard the sounds of the miniature roulette wheel and the players in her rooms and a voice—trilling laughter, hers—over it all.
The cigarette remained touching her lips as if reluctant to separate… that memory of the kept woman … seeking connections … hinting of an essential discovery before evaporating.
* * *
I began extending my hunting turf, sometimes only exploring. I hung around the Village, the fountain. Queens lined some of the ledges, camping, screeching, commenting on passersby. If someone insulted them, or if they perceived an insult, they would lash out with the precision of expert swordsmen, uncannily locating the most vulnerable targets, a suggestion of sexual doubt masquerading as hostility. Made up as stridently as possible under the law, painted eyes scouring the streets restlessly, living on the edge—nothing to lose.
I explored Central Park at night. Along the edges of the park, men idled into the late hours, a shadowy silent choreography of exile courtship, the same slow, silent, universal dance I had witnessed in Paris. Although I knew this was not hustling turf, I would sit on one of the benches for hours watching attractive men moving in pairs melding into the shadows of the park.
My sister Olga forwarded a letter from Wilford, asking where I was now, telling me where I could reach him in New York. But I didn’t want to contact him, not yet; that close friendship from a different past would fit awkwardly in my present life on the streets.
My mother wrote as often as before. So did my sister Olga. She and her husband, now with two children, were moving to Los Angeles. Her husband had a good job lined up in an airplane factory. Now my mother would be even more alone. The separation money I had left her would be exhausted; Robert would, as always, take care of her. I would not—nor did I ever—send her street money.
I took a classified advertisement in the New York Times. I listed brief credentials from my army jobs. I received several calls at the public telephone in the hallway of the Casbah. The ringing annoyed the tenants after some—a few I had never seen before—poked their heads out of their rooms to ask, “It is for me?” Being told no, they sla
mmed their doors.
A man on the telephone invited me for an interview in his office on Fifth Avenue.
The lettering on the wide oak door of a glistening tall building identified a publication whose name I didn’t recognize. In an impressive suite, a secretary led me into an inner office. Behind an imposing desk sat a man, heavy, with dark hair, thick glasses, about fifty; he looked like a giant toad.
“And what is your real goal?” he asked me after I had recited my army credentials.
“To be a writer,” I was glad to say, since he was involved in publishing.
“Have you written anything?”
“Yes. A novel. It’s called Pablo!—with an exclamation mark,” I emphasized. That was significant to me, since only once in the novel was a character’s name announced, in an exclamation.
“Oh—and it’s about—?”
“A boy, a narcissistic boy who wants to be a dancer.”
He removed his glasses, as if to see me better, closer up. “I like that, I like that.”
I was thrilled. This seemed inordinately lucky, that on my first interview I would connect with someone who could help me artistically. Also, a job would allow me to call Wilford with confidence.
“Will you show it to me?”
The luck became unreal. “What about the job?”
“With your impressive army credentials?” He spread his hands to indicate how impressive. “Let’s discuss it all later—and bring your novel.”
He gave me a card and an address. We agreed on the time.
I turned up at another building, on Park Avenue, not far from the office I had been to, another glassy building. I assumed this was another office, perhaps that of someone else who would concur in my being given the job and, too, would be asked to read my novel, which I had brought with me excitedly.
“Is Mr. Taub expecting you?” asked the doorman.
“Yes.”
“Your name?”
“John Rechy.”
He scrutinized me before he called up, nodded, and led me to the elevator, providing me with a suite number.