City of Night (48 page)

           She sat quickly beside the blond boy doubled over in the booth; she dressed the wound deftly, urgently. Responding to her authority—and shes in complete command—the two of us who brought the wounded boy here lift him and follow Sylvia through the lighted room, which is a kitchen—with a long table and several chairs, an old coiled refrigerator; through a corridor; into another room. There are several rollout beds, couches, mats on the floor; and we laid the blond boy on a bed.

           “We gonna git the guy that done this,” says the youngman with me.

           Sylvia looked at him uncertainly, as if undecided whether to chastise or praise him. She merely turned from him, looking down sadly at the wounded boy. “Let him sleep. Hes just scared,” she said with a note of what could be contempt. She drew a cover over him, at first tenderly. Then she tossed it over him impatiently. Again, relenting in the impatience, she sighs, touches him lightly on the bandaged face. Asleep, the boy looks like a peaceful young kid....

           When we returned to the unlighted room with the eyeless panels of removed mirrors, the man was gone; the youngmen, the girl, the queen have disappeared, probably to other sections of this strange building. Like the underground stations for Negro fugitives from the South, this place must provide temporary shelter for the Carnival vagrants.

           “Are you hungry?” Sylvia asked me and the youngman with me. I said no. The other youngman said yes. She directed him to the kitchen. As he helped himself to food from the old refrigerator, the woman and I sat in one of the booths, facing each other.

           With her hand she quickly wiped away a few drops of blood that had dripped onto the table—as if to erase the fact of their existence.

           She looked at me questioningly, knotting her eyebrows as if to ask me something, the answer to which, though vastly important, she will nevertheless find perplexing, or even painful. “Why—?” she began. Instead, she shifts the questioning look. Her face had mellowed for a moment. Now the toughness crept back into it. She fixed her eyes stonily on the deserted gray bar. At first, I had thought she hadnt recognized me; now she calls me by my name. “What happened to that kid?” she asked me.

           Interrupting my narration of the fight before I could get beyond the girl’s goading of her boyfriend, Sylvia shook her head wearily as if she had already heard too much. “I know the girl youre talking about,” she said. “Shes always trying to make others prove something—but shes really trying to prove it to herself.”

           And I think of Barbara, perhaps still somewhere in the maze of downtown Los Angeles....

           Sylvia said: “I’ll take that knife from that kid, if hes still got it—he probably doesnt even know how to use it.” She shook her head again in bewilderment. “You should have taken it from him when you first knew he had it,” she said, as if I had failed in some established duty. “All of you—” she started, compelled to approach a certain dangerous subject which, barely neared, must be avoided. She was silent. I felt uncomfortable with her right now—mysteriously guilty, blame-ridden, as if
I
had done something to her.

           “Is this your bar too?” I asked her, only to fill the powerful silence.

           “Yes,” she answered. “It’s been closed for quite a while, though—it was too far from the Quarter. I bought that other one instead. The Rocking Times.” She added the name with deep sarcasm. “Hell, I couldve sold this place, many times. But I prefer to keep it—for a while anyway.” Like a person prepared to fight even before a hostile situation exists, she added defensively, abruptly belligerently. “Yeah, sure, this was a hustling bar too: hustlers! queens! butch homosexuals! Everything!” She pronounced each word with bravado, like a child who must prove he can use dirty words; and, as with that child, each word had sounded unconvincing. “What else?” she challenged, as if I had been questioning her.

           “When those bars swing, they make a lot of money, I guess,” I said clumsily, still trying to ease some of the strain I felt with her.

           She flashed a ferocious look at me. In the gray darkness, I could almost feel her eyes burning on my face. Predictably, she relented, changing the subject. “Usually, by this time,” she was telling me, “Im already at the bar. But what the hell? Everyone whos there now will be there later—or theyll come back.”

           “You know everyone who goes there?”

           “I see everyone,” she said. “And I know most of the regulars—the ones who stay here all year. It’s mainly during Mardi Gras that the gay scene really changes in this city.... I hate that word, ‘gay’—‘queer’ too, even more,” she said quickly.

           I remember the man on the beach, that afternoon in Santa Monica, with whom I had sat on the sand watching that bird Escape into the sky. He had made much the same protest against the unfairness of the labels thrust at that world—a protest echoed over and over in that life.... But this woman? Was her resentment of those labels bred by a consuming guilt for catering in her bar to a world in which, I suspected, she didnt really belong?

           While we had been talking, a queen had entered surreptitiously through the side door. She seemed to be hesitating in approaching Sylvia. Suddenly she was there—standing before us.

           “Lily, I been looking for you,” Sylvia said harshly.

           “I
know,
honey,” the queen named Lily said querulously. “And—You Believe It Or Not—that is exactly why I have come over looking for you—to clarify certain points of a vicious, untrue, unfounded, utterly fabricated, bitchy story someone has been spreading About Me.... I aint been hidin from you or nothing—honestly, honey,” she said, oddly prematurely conciliatory. “I want you to know that. You
must
know that,” she said like Bette Davis. “It’s just that I been—Really and Truly—I have been Very Busy, what with Mardi Gras coming up.”

           “I know,” Sylvia said cuttingly.

           “Why, Sylvia, honey—it aint at all how you heard it, baby,” Lily protested, playing nervously with a long strand of beads about her neck.

           “Now how the hell do you know what I heard?”

           “Because I been
told!
—by mutual friends.” She avoids looking directly at Sylvia; guiltily studying the strung beads. “I did
not
clip that drunk sailor,” she says, plunging into the immediate matter. “And I know it was that old queen Whorina who told you I did. Honey, you know me well enough to know that-I-simply-do-not-clip-no-one-that-aint-lookin-to-be-clipped.” She strung out the words, obviously memorized, as if they constituted what she knew is a ready, forceful defense. “And that sailor was not! It just so happened I dug him, see, honey?—and ole Whorina was digging him too (oh, she was twisted out of her gay mind for him!—she even offered him money to make it, but he was digging Me)—and, well, Whorina, like the bitchy nelly queen she is, well, she was Bugged—fit to be tied, I wanna let you know.” She swung her beads in a defiant loop at the thought of Whorina. “Why, I even heard she—...”

           “Dont rattle your giddy beads at me, Mary,” snapped Sylvia. “I can tell when youre faking it. I know how you work with that studhustler—how you pick up someone and play the helpless, defenseless queen; youll even offer them money to get them to your pad, and then your studhustler boyfriend threatens to beat them up unless they hand over their bread!”

           The queen put her hand indignantly to her heart. In obviously posed amazement, she formed, soundless, the Astonished word “Me?” and left her mouth gaping in practiced disbelief.

           “I dont give a damn who you clip—as long as it’s someone who knows what hes getting into,” Sylvia went on; and I can feel her begin to relent toward the queen. “But a drunk sailor—and how many other drunk sailors?” she says in exasperation. “Well, Lily, this isnt the first time Ive told you: I wont have it. You go find yourself another bar—and thats that!... That sailor was so damn drunk—I saw you with him—he probably thought you were a girl. Either that or you offered him trade-sex, or money.”

           “Well, honey,” said the queen, smiling demurely, pleased at the former, ignoring the latter, “you know yourself how
real
I can look—and that particular night, I had my hair—...”

           “I told you to stop rattling your beads at me!” Sylvia interrupted her, forcing the queen to retreat a hurried step, her hand anxiously at her throat. “This is the last time I warn you: I wont have anyone in my bar that takes advantage of someone thats not hip enough to know better.”

           “I am Telling You The God’s Truth,” Lily protested, hinting, but somehow feebly, at tears—and crossing her heart spiritedly. “It was that washed-out queen Whorina—” She sneered at the name. “—that made up that Utterly Fantastic story—just because, like Im telling you—Cross! My! Heart!—I made it with the sailor she was after. If something happened to his wallet, well, I certainly had nothing to do with that.”

           I wonder whether Sylvia actually believes the queen’s story. Telling it, the queen seems too nervous, too quickly apologetic; I have a strong suspicion that Sylvia doesnt believe it—but, as if it is easier to believe her than face what disbelief will entail, she says to the queen, wearily, “Okay—all right; forget it,” like a judge not quite satisfied with the veracity of the defendant’s story but considering and bowing to the mitigating circumstances.

           “Thank you, honey,” sang the queen, enormously relieved. “Introduce me?”

           Sylvia introduced us.

           “Gotta place to stay, hon?” the queen said to me. “I got an empty bed.”

           “Yes,” I answered. There is something patently lubricous about her manner which turns me off.

           “Too bad,” she sighed. “That empty bed in my pad just gives me the cold chills.”

           “What happened to your stud boyfriend?” Sylvia asked cunningly.

           Thrown suddenly off balance, the queen blurted: “He split!—with all that money we been making!” And now shes genuinely shaken. Realizing, quickly, that shes trapped herself clearly, she excuses herself with enormous courtesy and slithers into the kitchen. She is now talking to the youngman still eating there.

           “Screwed-up world without laws!” Sylvia muttered disgustedly to herself. “Queens, hustlers, fairies—and me!” Suddenly angry, her words accused me harshly: “All of you!—guys like you—and that kid with the gashed head—what the hell are you trying to prove? Why, especially—....?” I was glad she stopped the uncomfortable words—but she had looked at me as if actually expecting an answer to the question that hadnt been asked. Then she reverted to what she had begun to say: “But even in a world without laws—and mostly, hell, we all know it—mostly it’s lawless because it’s a scene—... a scene people shun, are... afraid of, dont even want to know exists—even in that kind of world—well, Jesus, Holy, Christ—youve got to have some kind of—hell, yes—decency—some kind of rules. In my bar,
I
make those rules. And I dont give a damn who gets bugged and doesnt come back. Hell, I know everything that goes on. I watch it every day: scores coming in looking for youngmen. Some of them try to impress the hustlers with how Rich they are. So they end up clipped. That doesnt bug me. That kind of score asks for it.” She had begun with the familiar bravado, but it had faded quickly, and she dropped her eyes, unable to face me even in the darkness.

           “But if a hustler in my bar gets treated decently by a score (and I know most of the scores, too),” she went on, “if he agrees to what hes going to get paid—and exactly for what—and then I hear he clipped the score,” she warned, “then, God damn it, hes gonna answer to me or he doesnt come back. The same with the queens and their daddies.... Theres
got
to be some kind of morality!” she insisted. “Not the bull they teach you in Sunday-school. I mean; just living in the world you find yourself in—with its own rules, considering everything—yes—but theres
got
to be rules!” She stared into the empty bar, at the shattered mirror.

           Yes, it was exactly as if she had been clarifying something, rather unconvincingly, for herself—speaking words shes probably spoken to others many times, memorized now—as if she were torn between a compulsion to understand, to accept—and an innate tendency to reject.... And I wonder to what extent she really believes she can impose rules on the flagrant anarchy.

           “Why the hell did you come to New Orleans?” she asked me tiredly, as if shes used to getting an inadequate answer.

           “For the Carnival,” I told her simply.

           “And something else,” she said to herself. “Beyond the parades and—... the rest.”

           “I guess youre right,” I admitted uneasily.

           “Theres always something else,” she said. “Ive been in New Orleans—oh, several years. I came directly from New York—right after my last divorce,” she added pointedly; I had the feeling she was trying to indicate to me that shes been married several times.

           “Why did you come here?” I asked her.

           She waited a long while before answering. “I came down here—... for the Carnival. Like you,” she added with bitter sarcasm.

           Then she looked at me curiously, as if suddenly I had become a complete stranger with whom she had found herself accidentally speaking intimately. She got up quickly, and she went through the lighted kitchen—to take, I suspected, the knife from the wounded boy....

           Sailing in out of the dark in Sylvia’s wake, a painted queen stood over me.

           “Im Whorina, darling, and I like you,” she said.

        
3

           There are of course other bars in the French Quarter where the hunted and the hunting of that world gather.

           There was Les Petits, where, nightly, Love Face, a fat Negro woman with bleached hair, made panting, sighing song-love to the mike. And, outside, past the courtyard, was Sandy-Vee’s bar—and Sandy-Vee is one of the most flagrant, most famous drag-queens in America. Vaunting her imposed exile, defiantly she dangles his/her orange earring for the curious tourists. (And my first time there, exhibiting herself before the amused tourists—hating them but using them cunningly—as I walked in—she shrieked: “Theres muh new husband!”—and then she said to an ancestrally bored woman sitting with her fat, tired middle-aged companion: “Ahm doin much bettuh than you are, honey!—and theres more where he came from!”—and she underscored the flagrant put-down by squirting seltzer water, fizzing, into a glass and shouting at the woman: “Douche time!”)