“I’ll miss my friends,” my mother sighed, “but they can come and visit me in my new house.” She moved away to my brother’s car to be driven to her new home.
Now I would see it. I drove there in an old 1954 Studebaker I had bought for $150.
My mother greeted me at the door. She smiled her most radiant smile as she took my hand and led me outside to her garden, a rose garden now in bloom. I felt I had truly succeeded.
In the house with her—she furnished the living room and her bedroom not unlike a doll’s house—I felt a happiness I had not felt before.
I remained in El Paso, in my mother’s house. I converted a handsome wood-paneled den with a wall-size window into my study. I took my mother out to lunch, dinner. I hired a woman to help her with the household chores.
I heard from Bob less and less,. I supposed he finally had faced the fact that I had never been the person he had picked up hitchhiking. In my lasting affection, he joined Wilford.
Time passed.
Intending to leave “next month,” I stayed in El Paso.I took long rides out into the desert. I climbed Mount Cristo Rey, up the steep incline, clasping rocks, to the very top, as I had done years ago when I had seen the family of Mexicans ensnared by the border patrol.
I delighted in the fact that my mother was able to invite her friends from the projects for visits, and to watch the wondrous color television, extravagant for the time, that I had bought her. She would serve sweet wine for her guests, having baked a cake to accompany it.
President John Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. With my mother and my brother Robert, I watched the developing drama. My mother held her rosary steady in her hand, whispering prayers for the slain president.
I went with her to a Mass held for him, a man beloved among Mexicans. The church was crammed; people knelt outside, unable to find a place inside. Sobs punctuated the Mass recited by a cadre of priests. Throughout, El Paso was somber, in personal mourning.
The vicious aunts came over to watch the funeral on my mother’s color television. Both wept constantly, making sure they were heard. Their weeping was interrupted once:
“That wife of his isn’t crying!” one of the aunts announced in shock when Jackie Kennedy went by.
“Imagine!” the other aunt said. “She should be fainting from sorrow after every step of the way to the grave.”
Weeks later they returned to our house, the malicious aunts. I was in my study, reworking Pablo! to finally show Don Allen. In the living room, my mother was serving the aunts coffee and cake.
I heard my mother say, “My son made all this possible for me, this house.”
One of the aunts raised her voice, so that I would be sure to hear:
“Yes, and do you know what he wrote about?—to get you this house, your son?”
“God save us for the lengths we travel,” said the second aunt.
I headed for the closed door, to confront them; but I paused, hearing my mother say:
“Yes, I do know what he wrote. He wrote a beautiful book. He’s read parts of it to me. And, Maria, Adela,” she addressed them pointedly, “I know there are envious people smarting at his success. I know this, too—Maria, Adela—he can go in through the front entrance of places that wouldn’t allow you in through the kitchen.”
I never again felt I had to come to her defense with regard to me.
The reaction from the rest of my family was different. My beloved brother Robert, leafing through a copy of Big Table that contained “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny,” had pushed it away from him wordlessly as I watched. It was the only time in my life I would feel betrayed by him. After City of Night was published, he and my brother Yvan and my sister Blanca followed my literary success proudly—congratulating me abundantly, bragging about me to everyone, giving a family party for me—but until many, many years later, they would not, and this included my sister Olga, discuss the subject of my books. Never would there be any reference to my having lived the life I had written about—almost as if they disbelieved it.
And I preferred it that way, never distrusting their unconditional love.
In El Paso, I took up bodybuilding, partitioning a section of my study to serve as a gym. I could not much longer be a slender “youngman.” But I could be a muscular man, another figure of desire. Muscles came easily. Although I continued to extend my time in El Paso, my chosen isolation—long, longer—I was, I suppose, preparing for my return to the arena that was, daily, luring me back, its summons increasingly strong.
With more royalties coming in, I bought a classy Mustang, tan with a black top and with a wooden steering wheel. I saw it as a projection of myself.
31
Los Angeles was on fire.
In Watts, on a day of steamy heat, a black woman was stopped for a routine traffic violation claimed by barking white cops. Anger waiting during years of outrage only for the flicker of a match. A car was overturned, a white-owned shop was set ablaze—and six days of riots flared, leaving many dead, mostly black people, and thousands wounded. Smoke drenched the city and went far into the ocean, even into mansions in Bel Air.
My sister Olga had lived in the far periphery of Watts, among friendly neighbors who included Negro families. When the riots occurred, the black families had distanced themselves from her and her children, ignoring her expressions of sympathy about the conditions that had ignited the rage, evoking some of the outrages she knew about against Mexicans in Texas. But every seemingly white face had become the enemy. My sister’s husband was fired at, a shot he managed to dodge.
We traveled, my mother and I, to Los Angeles to visit my sister Olga, staying overnight in a suite in the gaudiest, most expensive motel I could find in Phoenix—so that my mother would not tire from the long drive. More than a year had passed since the riots, soothing fears for now. The open wounds were turning into deep scars.
My mother stayed with my sister and her family in a small rented house in Torrance, miles from the conflagration; I rented a room in a nearby motel with a pool.
The first two days in Los Angeles, I spent with my sister and my mother, driving around with them to see the beautiful city of palm trees and flowers.
Now I was ready to return, anonymous and with full allegiance, to the world that I would prove to myself I had not betrayed, had not left.
As soon as I drove up to Selma Avenue, I saw that the hustling scene had changed. Some of the hustlers looked even younger than when I had first turned up. A few were effeminate. Before I had left, street hustlers were masculine—and, yes, those were still there.
I parked on a side street, so that I could scout the altered territory. What if time had thrust me out of this arena? I waited about half an hour for twilight, gathering my courage to test myself in an arena whose raw cruelties I had witnessed, had contributed to.
Undoing yet another button of my denim shirt, to open it almost to the top edge of my Levi’s, my new dark boots shiny, I got out of the car. I paused. I took a few steps toward the main stretch of hustling, more steps, quickening. I saw several young men on a corner. They looked so young! I halted. Terror gripped me. I turned back. I ran. I fled to my car. Before I had reached it, a man walking toward Selma stopped before me.
“Wow,” he said, studying me.
I was back, someone else, a muscular man—not the lithe young man I had first been on these streets.
In the evenings, I joined my mother and my sister Olga and her family for dinner; warm gatherings I welcomed, although I had not yet been alone with my sister to hear all her news. Earlier, at the motel, I lay by the pool, tanning, preparing. Later, each night, I returned to Selma to hustle.
But now hustling wasn’t enough. There were long empty days and a vast craving to fill.
Years ago, hustling, I had heard gay men talking about all the sexual encounters they had had during an afternoon in a territory for sex hunting known by almost everyone who cruised the city. It was a miles-long field of sexual anarchy in
Griffith Park, a vast park, acres and acres, in the midst of the city. There was no hustling in the gay areas, just mutual cruising.
I found the area by entering the park and following a car whose driver had looked over at me in a way I understood.
It was a warm summer day in the luxuriant park, which had fields of green and bramble spotted by wildflowers. Driving up the paved two-lane road that winds and curves about hills, I had seen hundreds of gay men sex hunting, many good-looking, athletic, sensual. I saw many variously slipping down the slopes onto many paths. I knew immediately: sex occurred in coves formed by overhanging branches and clusters of trees.
Shirtless, my torso oiled, I parked my Mustang on the side of a sandy islet off the main road and stood there waiting.
Soon, a car parked nearby, just as I counted on. Instinctively joining the rhythm of the hunt, I slipped down an incline into the bushes, knowing I would be followed. I was. The man went down on me. I pulled back before coming. Another man had slipped down the decline to join us. I turned to him—and then to a third man. When I left, they turned to each other.
Three! Three sexual contacts in less than one hour.
Leaving the park at dusk to visit my mother at my sister’s, leaving again after dinner to hustle on Selma, returning to the motel room to sleep, I went to the park day after day, increasingly early, as early as before noon.
I found a spot that I preferred. It formed a kind of proscenium, a “stage” shaped by trees whose branches clustered into an arc.
In this arena saturated with the lure of sex, my need to be desired intensified. Encounter after encounter; I began to number each. As the numbers grew, so did the craving—like a geometrical progression that keeps on multiplying; a demand, a command for more and more unreciprocated contacts, making up now, surpassing, what I might have abdicated during the reclusive years in El Paso. Although I mutually desired many of the good-looking men who approached me, I still refused to allow myself to respond to them, as if that would compromise the posture I still asserted when, later, I went hustling on Selma.
Another evening with my family. No further gossip about Isabel Franklin, my sister drew me aside to tell me, somewhat desolately.
Another night hustling.
Another afternoon in the park.
More numbers: thirty in one week.
My mother was eager to return to her home; I had promised her we would be away only ten days, and she had counted them strictly. When I suggested extending our stay, she grew tired, sad.
As we drove into the desert back to El Paso in my tan Mustang, I looked in my rearview mirror and I saw a reflection of the city of lost angels enshrouded within a gray cloud of fog and smog, like an enshrined biblical city in which I had performed a sexual ritual. Right then, on a tablet of paper my mother held steady on the console between us, as I drove back to Texas, I began writing in pencil my second novel, Numbers.
In El Paso, trying to match in the prose the franticness of the sexual hunt I had embarked on, I finished that novel in exactly ninety days, on the same Underwood typewriter that I had rented, now mine. It was a novel about Johnny Rio, an ex-hustler, who, returning to Los Angeles, begins numbering sexual encounters in Griffith Park. I located the character modeled after myself in a trap from which he can’t escape, the “numbers” being finite. Perhaps I was still trying to assuage my guilt for having an out from a world that trapped so many others. I conceived of this novel as being about the attempt to stave off time, to stave off death with sex. As the book progressed, the imagery turned increasingly dark; the beautiful park became almost sinister, a presence—“the Park” spelled with a capital P in the latter part of the book—warring with Johnny Rio.
Like City of Night, that book became a scandal and a best seller. The fact that the cover had featured a photograph of me, leaning against a wall in what was said to be a “suggestive” pose, a photograph reproduced hazily enough so that I would not generally be recognized from it, created even more criticism. The book’s somber meaning and structure were overlooked; the criticism focused on the graphic sexual encounters.
In El Paso, I remained reclusive. I drove into the desert, climbing the familiar mountain, not taking the easy cleared path; clinging to sliding rocks to reach the top.
El Paso was stifling me, the craving for sexual anarchy of Los Angeles commanding, summoning. I had to return—this time alone, my mother increasingly unhappy at the prospect of being away.
I rented a motel room in Hollywood. To extend the anticipation of returning to Griffith Park, and because I was eager to see her, always missing her, I called my sister and she invited me to dinner.
When she instructed the rest of her family to leave us alone, I knew she had delicious information to convey. “Now, sister Olga, tell me what you’re so eager to tell me. I’m sure it’s about Isabel—”
“Maria,” she insisted on correcting, “and about the midget writer’s famous party!”
Of course, she was referring to Truman Capote’s famous black and white masquerade party. Tabloids, newspapers, magazines, all thrived on its details and the caravan of famous guests, including Jackie Kennedy, and—I was sorry to learn—Norman Mailer, whom I would expect to have stayed away. Capote’s so-called “non-fiction novel”—how, I wondered, was that different from fiction, and how, then, was it a “new literary form”?—had brought him a fortune, and with what I considered bloodmoney made from the doomed lives he had ransacked, the lives of the killers and their victims, he had given what was called “the party of the century,” inviting “everyone who matters”—along with some of the people involved in the murder trial, including the prosecutor. For me, that party was a cruel celebration of the murders and the executions. The simpering of the writer and the giddy responses of the invited added to my reaction of disgust. All of that confirmed my decision not to publicize my novels; I rejected requests for interviews and stories (until, much later, when it became necessary to call attention to the fact that my books were facing censorship). I saw my separation as a way to respect lives “borrowed”—arrogated.
“Tina’s friend in San Francisco read about it in a newspaper. It said ‘everyone who is anyone’ was invited to that party.” My sister held her breath dramatically: “And so was Maria—
“Isabel,” I insisted.
“Can you believe that the airline sent her bag to the wrong hotel—with her gown? She claimed the maids in her hotel were all praying that it be found in time for the ball. I bet if it hadn’t been found just in time, she would have gone naked rather than not go and be seen there with all those famous people.”
My sister inhaled, long, her eyes closed, as if to be able to tolerate what clearly disgusted her. “Can’t you just hear her screaming at the Mexican maids and preening like a princess?” She threw up her hands. “I’ve given up wondering how she continues to pull if off, even with that snobbish midget writer.”
“Well, you have to admit, sister, that she has pulled it off.” Yes, the Mexican girl I had dated—who had nervously dropped a cigarette on the floor of my rich uncle’s Cadillac—had duped them all, including Capote’s famous troops.
I stood on a sandy indentation off the main road in Griffith Park. A man drove by, U-turned swiftly. He parked near my car and got out.
“Did you know that someone wrote a book about you?”
“Who wrote a book about me?” I asked, disoriented.
“I don’t know the author’s real name. No one would write a book like that under his own name.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, wanting to choke off this encounter. I walked to my car and opened the door to get in.
The man called out:
“Good-bye, Johnny Rio.”
He had assumed I was the character in Numbers. I had become my own character. I had become Johnny Rio.
But he had not recognized me as the author. I was still anonymous. I rejoined the cruising ballet.
Hustling on S
elma that same night:
A young man stopped. “Hey, I heard you’re real famous.”
How the hell could he know? I prepared to deny being the writer I was sure he was going to refer to. Earlier, in the park, I had suspected the same, and had been reprieved.
“Someone said you’d been a famous model once, man,” he said.
Being a “model” on the streets then meant being a “physique model” in the proliferating gay magazines of the time, glossy magazines that featured nude males; to be a “physique model” was a cherished goal among hustlers. This young man had pushed the fancied accomplishment of mine into the past. It didn’t reassure me to see that he was no more than eighteen years old.
“But, hey, you still look good, man,” he said. “Still good enough to be hustling, huh? I hope when I’m your age—”
I hurried away from him, forcing myself not to hear what he was adding. He had whipped up my doubts, doubts that now could be exorcised only by more sex, multiple manifestations of my desirability to fill the deep emptiness exposed.
Those times, I plunged into the anarchy of new territories I was discovering, quick unpaid contacts in darkened alleys, infamous garages, street underpasses, small parks that thrived at night, streets of nighttime cruising, encounters in parked cars.
Then there were the deadly times when nothing worked out, when no connection succeeded, when rejection smashed at my stomach like a brutal fist. I would rationalize. I told myself I was conveying an urgency that made those who wanted to approach me flee from me instead—anything rather than feel undesired. I would force myself to continue the hunt, demanding that I be wanted.
Those monstrous times, I would drive from one sex-hunting area to another. I would get out, cruise among hunting strangers, and, then, no one would solicit me—or someone would, and the encounter would dissipate. Deep in the night, I would still be hunting in known alleys, seeking out whatever light there was from whatever source—a mothy distant light from a nearby street—so that I would not become only a body, any body.