City of Night (25 page)

           But I avoid looking at them now. I study this familiar bar: the exotic plants painted to suggest a jungle: a giant butterfly, trying futilely to
Escape!
—the canvas from wall to wall drooping heavily from the ceiling, shelteringly or oppressively. Pinpoints of colored lights dart into the darkness from the pinball machines... feeble childhood sparklers, expiring.... In the booths, figures huddle intimately—shadowy clustered vulture forms when you first walk into the smoky twilight, features swallowed by the darkness, emerging into the splashes of light like flotsam out of shallow water; then eyes become visible, incessantly finding a new object to focus on.

           Like buyers in a market place, scores in groups, before scattering singly about the bar for the actual Hunt, may exchange remarks about the malehustlers: discuss them openly, weighing one against the other—as if, like inanimate objects, the hustlers cannot hear.... And like conspirators against a common enemy who must nevertheless be used, the malehustlers, also momentarily together, braggingly discuss how much a particular score is worth.... So the two armies—scores and hustlers—meet here nightly.

           And nightly a game of charades is played at Harry’s. Unlike the ones who haunt the streets, even the most masculine scores here usually—but not always—become effeminate in groups, their gestures progressively more airy as the night advances toward the desperation of after-midnight; as the liquor releases the feminine self. And the hustler emphasizes his masculinity in one of various poses—one leg propped against the wall; cigarette held between thumb and finger—eyes veiledly following a likely prospect: the rehearsed, inviting Tough Look.... Bodies sprawl on the benches along the booths. There is the swaggering unceasing exodus to the smelly toilet at the end of the long bar—a gaping toothless mouth....

           An air of determination is in every gesture here, in every look, every move. People come to Harry’s primarily for one of two purposes: to buy or to be bought.

           Occasionally the femmequeens from the 1-2-3 or Ji-Ji’s breeze in like wilted flowers, carried on the currents of smoke: giggling, regally scanning the bar—making studied defiant exits with great airs, grand queenly shrieks of exiled laughter. And they indicate a kind of contempt for those other men in the bar who only desire other males, without posing, as far as the law allows them, as real women the way the queens do....

           The skinny man has been raking the bar, putting everyone down with a bitchy comment. Defensively, he must reject this alluring, disturbing world to which the fatman is connivingly exposing him. “My God!” the skinny man says, “look at that one—his pants are about to fall off his waist!... And there goes that one to the restroom again!”... Suddenly, his eyes abruptly stopping their swirl about the bar, he blurted unexpectedly, as if his thoughts had pushed the words out without his control: “I like
that
one!” He points with his cigarette holder at Skipper, who is standing by the jukebox while obviously avoiding buying his own drink. The fatman slapped his forehead in affected amazement, and in a highpitched, incongruous voice shrieked: “Oh, no, Mary, you cant mean
that
one!” His blubbery lips envelop the stub of the cigar, almost swallowing it. “You dont mean the one in the black T-shirt!”

           “Yes, I do mean the blond one,” said the skinny one, having gone this far. Then he said to the fatman: “And dont call me ‘Mary’.”

           Skipper, aware of the skinny man’s interest, brings his hands together, fingers intertwined, and flexes his body slowly. The light from the jukebox weaves colors sinuously on him—and from the distance he looks like a very youngman, a boy....

           “Honey,” the fatman was going on, addressing the skinny one, who still holds the cigarette aimed at Skipper as if it were a magic wand thai would bring him over, “I could have had him when he was Young and Pretty!”

           On the stools next to us, sit two middle-aged men. They have been talking in whispers, but now, as they glance surreptitiously but obviously at the fatman, one word emerges clearly from their sibilant sounds: “Fat”

           The fatman drops the cigar butt suddenly on the floor, letting it fall from his mouth; brings his ovaled fatfoot heavily on it, squashing it angrily into the debris of cigarettes on the floor. The two middle-aged men, aware he has heard them, turn away nervously, making rushed incoherent conversation as they clutch at their beers as if for protection—as they move against the wall.

           The fatman’s eyes follow the two doggedly. With renewed venom now, he goes on about Skipper: “I’ll bet hes over 30—hes been around longer than just about any of them.”

           “Maybe hes not as young as some of the delinquents around here,” said the skinny one, “but I still feel rawthuh Intrigued.”... And then, in an uncontrolled burst, in which the Mask slid off shockingly, he said: “I think hes positively
Savage!”
He flung his eyes ecstatically toward the smoky Heaven. Quickly, realizing what hes just said, he composes himself, adjusting his pose consistent again with his earlier charade of Maiden. He sips his drink, shifts his skinny hips; says:

           “This whole place is Positively Indecent; it should be razed!”

           The fatman roars with laughter. “Why dont you go talk to him?”

           “But what will I say to him?” the skinny man asks in renewed interest. He brought his hand to his chest in a gesture of uninitiated Helplessness.

           “Nothing.” The fatman contracted the mountains of flesh into a shrug.

           “You mean
he’ll
talk to me?”

           The fatman says viciously: “No. I mean, Mary, that all you have to do is wave a few bills before him and he’ll drop his pants for you—right here!”

           Even in the orangy dark, I can see the skinny man blanch; he tightens his lips, sucks them in between his teeth, breathing deeply. His eyes hurl their hatred at the fatman. For a long time, the two men look at each other, resenting the common knowledge that binds them together. “I-dont-believe,” the skinny man said pitifully, at last wresting his eyes in defeat from the embattled stare of the other, “that-men-take-money-from-other-men-for-sex.”

           “If you dont want to pay for him,” the fatman said ruthlessly, driving his words into the skinny one like a pike, “Ill buy him for you.... Easy enough.”

           The skinny man flings a frantic look of Deep Hurt at him.

           “Go on, honey,” the fatman pursues mercilessly. “You got to learn. You aint pretty yourself, you know.” He buries his fat elbow in the skinny man’s ribs, almost knocking him off-balance.
“Go on!”

           “I—have—Never—paid—for—sex,” the skinny man murmurs.

           “I told you: I’ll buy him for you—if you haven’t got the guts to do it yourself,” said the fatman pitilessly. “Go on, offer him a drink—bring him over and I’ll fix it up for you. Leave it to me, honey. I mean, your blond ‘savage’ is certainly—uh—entertaining.”

           “If
you
want him.” said the skinny one, “why dont
you
go after him?”

           “I like the one I have,” the fatman said. In his voice, nevertheless, there is a tone of deep resentment.... If I make the scene with him, he will probably yawn after it’s over; say something to put me down. He will give me the money contemptuously—but necessarily. Bigly. He will adjust his expensive tie carefully, pointedly emphasizing what he would be trying to convince himself the real difference between our worlds is: trying to forget the previous one-sided desire—which will recur in him again and again for whomever.... “Good luck,” he might even say, but I’ll know that hes looking forward to the time when whatever of desirability he may have seen in me—as he has seen it in others, from night to night—will have evaporated.... Looking up, I see my own reflection now in the panel of mirrors; and reflected behind me, that life that has fascinated me greets me victoriously: All along this long closed-in bar, the composite face of this submerged world stares defiantly at me.

           “Your blond in the T-shirt is really too much,” the fatman is going on. “You just wont believe it!” he says to the skinny one. “He carries some clippings—and those photographs!”

           “What Photographs?” said the skinny one.

           “Shes interested all right,” the fatman says, winking at me, trying to ally me with him against the skinny one.

           “I—Told—You,” said the skinny one firmly. “Don’t Call Me ‘she.’”

           “On, Mary, get off it!” the fatman says impatiently with a fatwave of his hand, as if he were stripping off tne skinny one’s mask. “Who do you think youre fooling? Youve got the hotpants—and youll pay for it—just like I do—
because you have to!”
he lasned. “So stop your goddam pretending—And Face It!” He turns his swollen round back to his skinny friend.

           Mouth ovaled, a look of enormous indignation on his face, the skinny man moved away. He stood momentarily in the middle of the bar—then he marched rigidly toward the door. I watch him as he stands there undecided. And then, abruptly, he turns back.

           “Did he leave?” the fatman asks me.

           “No.”

           “I Knew it!” he says triumphantly, transferring the pounds and pounds of his fleshy body on the stool to face the door. He stares at the skinny man, now stanuing only a few feet from the jukebox, glaring back at the fatman. I look at the fatman. in the pudgy pigfeatures there is something indefinably sinister.

           About to speak to Skipper—almost hypnotized by him—the skinny man backed away quickly. He looked at the fatman—the fatman challenging him from the distance. Suddenly, abandoning in bewildered rashness the pose of virginal novice, the skinny man says something to Skipper, who turns slowly to face him, answers. The skinny man rushes to the bar. Avoiding looking in our direction, he returned with a drink, which he handed hurriedly to Skipper, as if he were giving away, at last, a treasured, guarded part of himself which he was nevertheless compelled to give....

           “Well!” the fatman sighs triumphantly. He seems somehow vindicated by the skinny man’s submission, like a bullish sergeant justifying his own existence by enlisting recruits.

           “Do you know him—the guy in the black T-shirt?” he asks me. Without the cigar, his face looks blank, incomplete, the dough-flesh smeared carelessly over his face.

           “Sure—hes a great guy.”

           “Well, Christ, why doesnt he give up—hes been around for years!”

           Since that first night, at the 1-2-3, when Miss Destiny had introduced him to me as a “model” who had been in the movies, I had of course seen Skipper often. That same night, I had been with him—with Chuck and the girls we picked up on Main Street. With compulsive determination—I remembered—he had crossed the wires to start Buddy’s car; as if he were terrified of inertia.... Later, he had put one of the girls down for coming on that she wanted to get into The Movies. “Go home,” he said curtly.... Often, I saw him in the bars, playing the pinball machine, struggling with it to get a high score, until inevitably the TILT would light up mockingly. Or I would see him playing the shuffleboard, smashing the pins angrily, the disk spinning back dizzily toward him. But I never saw him in Pershing Square. There are stories that something had happened between him and Sergeant Morgan—stories that after an incident of which there are different versions, Sergeant Morgan ran him out. Skipper merely said: “That park’s for chippies, man!—hell, they go for pennies there!”... One night, high, he had talked everyone into driving to Hollywood, and then, moodily, had put it down: “Hollywood’s nowhere.”... Off and on he stayed at Trudi’s near Silverlake—a neat, feminine unit in a flowery court, paid for by Trudi’s “daddy.” And in that world youll hear that Trudi’s daddy really wants Skipper but wont admit he (the daddy) is a fruit, and so he makes it with Trudi, forgetting, maybe—which is easy—that Trudi, too, is, technically, a man. Once I had gone to score marijuana at Trudi’s house—she always had some—and Skipper was there, sitting at the table eating, while Trudi lovingly served him like a young infatuated wife.... When Skipper was gone for longer than a few days—and he would disappear periodically—Trudi would come into the bars, hardly madeup, looking like a mournful little girl, asking if anyone had seen him. When theyd tell her no, she’d shake her head: “Those goddam beads,” she’d mumble. Other times, at the 1-2-3, she would come in Grandly, completely madeup, to meet Skipper.

           There is a consuming franticness about Skipper which seizes you the moment he begins to talk—the words coming often in gasps—his eyes burning—at times as if about to explode with intensity, at times on the brink of closing, giving up. Constantly, he flexes his body, looking down at it, studying it, as if to make sure it is still intact.... He hangs around in one place only a few minutes; if he doesnt score immediately, he’ll leave, go to another bar; come back—and when he is sitting down, he constantly drums his fingers to the frenzied music—and even when the music is slow, the frantic drumming persists, as though the sounds he hears are coming from within; veiling his eyes—lowered lids—or looking down at the bar—as if he doesn’t want to see too Clearly; creating circles on the surface of the bar with the water from the glass, then erasing them abruptly with his hand.... By midnight, he is usually drunk.

           After being around him a few times, I began to avoid him; stifled by the knowledge of the sad, sad loss of Youth, of the terrible hints that life, perversely, may make one a caricature of oneself, a wandering persistent ghost of the youngman that was, once—the attitudes of youth lingering after the youth itself was gone, played out With Skipper, this loss was concentrated, emphasized because life had given him nothing but physical beauty, an ephemeral beauty relying on Youth.... That sense of loss had seized me acutely one day when, sitting with him and two scores, I watched him remove from his wallet a set of photographs, about six of them, all of him in different poses, showing him—almost nude, much younger—a glowing youngman of about 20. “Thats me!” he had said, almost challengingly, as he passed the photographs to the two scores. And he carried, too, mysteriously, some frayed clippings, in an envelope, an envelope which, once, I saw him replace with a newer one, with great tenderness: the frayed clippings becoming older and older—the envelope, new.