even the heart rebels
by Douglas Messerli
John
Rechy City of Night (New York: Grove
Press, 1963)
Somewhat
inexplicably, after finishing my essay above on The Hustler by John Henry Mackay, I was immediately reminded of a
book I had never before read, John Rechy’s City
of Night. As I mention in my brief afterword to this, I had several reasons
perhaps for never reading the 1963 fiction until now. And it was clear that
2015 was an appropriate year in which to finally attend to that work, given my
connecting topic and the concerns with life in Southern California, issues to
which this work, I presumed, might attend.
Indeed, City of Night is very much about identities separate from those of
the majority of society, and it does reveal a world that, until its
publication, was basically unknown to everyday readers. What I was not prepared
for, however, is just how remarkably written this book is and, although it
certainly presents events of the underbelly of ordinary sexual behavior, that
it is not really at all a book about sex. While the “hero” dives in and out of
beds and other sexual locations with the regularity of an overweight adolescent
munching on a bag potato chips, Rechy’s work, nonetheless, only rarely portrays
the actual sexual act, and when it does so, it is with such a polite
abstraction that would probably not even bring a blush to the cheek of a maiden
librarian. Here’s a scene from our unnamed hustler’s sexual encounter with an endlessly
speaking “professor,” who obviously ends his verbal encounters with an oral
encounter of another kind:
He snuffed out the cigarette
he had been smoking, looked
through the box by the bed, found the
lavender one. Held it
up toward me. “Now comes the time for the
lavender,” he said.
He lit it, inhaled it deeply, this time, placed
it on the ashtray;
said: “Now, Angel, come here, stand near me—but first,
lower the bed for Tante Goulu please.
Thats it. Now come closer,
you see I have great difficulty moving.
There, thats nice, thats
fine—stand a little this way—that's--
just—fine.
Youre a good boy, an angel….”
When he had finished, he
leaned back on the bed.
In numerous other situations, such as his
encounters with “Mister King,” who wants only to be seen with the hustler, who
he dresses up in leather, no sex is even involved. And in the hustlers’
attempts to pretend that their gay sexuality is simply a way of making a living
and not the sexual reality of their own lives, sex between one another is
generally forbidden, as the central figure purposefully ignores the touch of
the hustler Pete who is determined to stay, one night, in the hero’s flat:
The lights are out now. The
darkness seems very real,
like a third person waiting. I lay on the
very edge of the
one side of the bed, and he lay on the very edge
of the
others. A long time passed. Hours.
“Are you asleep” he
asked me.
“No—I can’t sleep.”
“Me neither,” he says.
“Maybe I should go.” But he
didnt move.
More silence.
And then I felt his hand, lightly, on mine.
Neither of us moved.
Moments passed like that.
And now his hand closes over mine,
tightly.
And that was all that happened.
In
short, the well-read and quite intelligent figure who tells the tales of City of Night is not as interested in
the actual sexual activities in which he is almost endlessly engaged as he is
in searching for the reasons for why he is so driven to seek out those brief
and almost meaningless interchanges
Indeed the real “focus” of this hero’s
travels from New York to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to San Francisco and back,
from San Francisco again to Chicago and New Orleans, is not is not upon flesh
or even the often disinhibited bodies of those he meets, but is their words and
actions in the bars, plazas, and streets outside of the shabby rooms where they
have sex and sleep. Rechy’s hero in portrayed as a rather laconic being,
instead of playing the loquacious confabulator of someone like Djuna Barnes’
Dr. O’Connor in her gay underworld fiction Nightwood
(he purposely plays dumb, learning early on that his clients don’t want to bed
somewhat who has read books and might know more than they do), letting his own
characters speak exuberantly for themselves, City of Night, like Nightwood,
nonetheless, is a Menippean satire or anatomy like Petronius’ Satyricon, which usually features a
pedant.
Like the other works of that genre, Rechy’s
fiction takes us from party to party with a large range of sexual types who
represent various social classes of American society. Rechy’s book is
structures around these speaking figures (very much like Barnes’ living statues),
each of their sections named after the figures, alternating with briefer
sections titled “City of Night,” which sets the next location and place of
action through which the nameless hero meanders in time and space.
The figures of City of Night—the already mentioned seasoned New York “youngman”
(Rechy’s word for hustler) Peter; the absurdly overweight, bed-bound pedant “The
Professor”; the determined-to-marry drag queen, Miss Destiny; the now
devastated, formerly “beautiful” hustler, Skipper, who carries his youthful
photographs with him wherever he goes; the still-larger-than-life, handsomely-chiseled
would-be movie-star Lance O’Hara and the elderly gay Esmeralda Drake III from
whom O’Hara swindles a grand Hollywood house; the crew-cut-topped, good looking
married man attracted to the hero but unable to abide the “fairies”; the
S&M, Nazi-supporting, leather-dressed Neil, with a closet of costumes
through which he hopes to help his devotees discover their true violent selves;
the tough gay bar owner, Sylvia, who lovingly protects her clientele out of
guilt for how she has treated her son upon his revelation of his gay sexuality;
the tall, heavily muscled drag queen Chi-Chi posed against the wall in order to
call out to all the New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrants; the dying transgender
beauty, Kathy; and, finally, our hero-hustler’s would-be savior, Jeremy, of the
white sheets, who begs the narrator to stay just a little longer while he
skillfully enters a dialogue that might just awaken the narrator to his
self-destructive addiction to loveless love—each speaks his piece, behaving as
bizarrely as do all human beings on the prowl for love, self-respect, and
meaning in their lives.
And yes, we do laugh at the outsider
outrageousness of Rechy’s types—at the very same moment that we, through Rechy’s
non-judgmental and fair-minded depiction of them, come to admire and feel for
them as individuals. Who might have imagined that a fiction about the illicit
gay underworld—and, it is important remember, that during the time of this
work, all the actions of the characters are not only against the law but often
resulted in their arrestment—might bring the reader, at least this reader, to
tears over and over again.
Finally, one wonders why this
considerably intelligent work, although quite popular in its time, was never
completely respected by Rechy’s readers or fellow writers, or why, perhaps, the
author himself was not more lionized. This work is most certainly way ahead of
its time with regard to its liberated and liberating attitudes toward the gay,
lesbian, and even transgender communities. And Rechy’s detailed portraits of
gay environs such as Times Square in New 
York, the New
Orleans French Quarter, and Los Angeles’ Pershing Square and its bars, along
with the streets of Hollywood Boulevard depict a series of lost worlds being
destroyed at the very moment in which Rechy was recording them.
York, the New
Orleans French Quarter, and Los Angeles’ Pershing Square and its bars, along
with the streets of Hollywood Boulevard depict a series of lost worlds being
destroyed at the very moment in which Rechy was recording them.
David Hockney, Building, Pershing Square, Los Angeles
(inspired
by Rechy’s fiction)
One might theorize that some of the
distance that both the gay and literary communities have kept from this near
masterpiece has to do with the author himself, who like his narrator, was so
addicted to his lifestyle that even after becoming a university teacher of
writing still moon-lighted as a hustler, his students sometimes discovering him
near local cruising areas shirtless in dungarees. Rechy himself, although for
years now in a long-term gay relationship, admits to hustling even into his
70s.
One of the most repeated of motifs is
how the hustlers perceive their own desirability, the fact that they are paid
to have sex, as representative of their beauty and youth, in opposition to the
reality of death. This book makes it clear that the author, although so wise in
his perceptions of that world, could never himself quite escape that need to be
wanted for his youthful looks. Obviously—and it does in fact became more and
more obvious as the story continues—both the author’s and his hero’s addictions
have more to do with deeply ingrained psychological issues than with authorial
logic. Even after a long dialogic encounter with the man who wishes to save him,
ending in the stranger’s insightful statements--
There isnt any difference,
really, between the hunter and
the hunted. The hunted makes himself available—usually
passively, but available nonetheless. Thats his way of
hunting….
I’m sorry,” he said, relenting, “I just wanted
to see you defend the
very innocence youve probably set
out to violate…You see,” he said,
again smiling so that I
cant tell how serious he is,” “even the heart
rebels—finally
against its own anarchy. And that’s the most powerful
rebellion.—
even
then the hero returns to the fray, joining the Mardi Gras celebrations,
drinking, doping, sucking, and fucking until he and those around him collapse,
becoming the ghosts of which they are in terror. If the fiction seems to end
with the possibility of a transformation, as the hero returns, if only briefly,
to his native El Paso, the life of the author went on as if nothing in this
profound work had truly meant anything, the reality suggesting that nothing had
truly changed from what the narrator says in the first paragraph of City of Night:
Later I would think of America
as one vast City of Night
stretching greedily from Times Square to
Hollywood Boulevard—
jukebox-winking, rock-n-roll-moaning: America at
night
fusing its darkcities into the unmistakable shape of
loneliness.
—Los Angeles,
September 5, 2015
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