I had been asked by one of its editors to contribute to an adventurous short-lived quarterly,
Big Table,
which had broken away from
The Chicago Review
in a dispute over censorship. Soon, Miss Destiny debuted there, among Creeley, Mailer, Burroughs.
As sections from the growing book continued to appear in
Evergreen Review,
I began getting encouraging letters from readers, agents, and other writers, including Norman Mailer and James Baldwin. When several editors—at Dial, Random House, others—expressed interest in the book, and there were two offers of an advance, I telephoned Don; I could not conceive of this book’s appearing other than through Grove Press. Not only was Barney Rosset, its president, publishing the best of the modern authors—and battling literary censorship—but
Evergreen Review
had created the interest in my writing that others were responding to. As my now-editor, Don came to Los Angeles with a contract and an advance for the book I had begun to call “Storm Heaven and Protest.”
But I still didn’t write it.
I plunged back into my “streetworld.” Hitchhiking I met a man who would become instrumental in my finishing this book. I saw him regularly, but I kept my “literary” identity secret; I had learned early—but not entirely correctly—that being smart on the streets included pretending not to be. Not knowing that I had graduated from college and had already published sections from a novel I had a contract for—but concerned that I might be trapped in one of the many possible deadends of the streets—he offered (we were having breakfast in Malibu, the ocean was azure) to send me to school. I was touched by his unique concern, and when he drove me back to my rented room on Hope Street, I asked him to wait. I went inside and autographed a copy of “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny” and gave it to him. He looked at it, and then at me, a stranger.
Then I needed to flee the closeness increased, perhaps, by the fusion of my two “identities.” Consistent with another pattern, a letter arrived from a man who had read my writing: he would be happy to have me visit him on an island near Chicago. A plane ticket followed. Painfully trying to explain to my good friend who had picked me up hitchhiking that I
had
to leave Los Angeles, I left and spent the summer on a private island. When summer was ending, I migrated to Chicago, quickly finding its own Times Square.
But I was pulled back to Los Angeles. Extending the understanding that makes him, always, deeply cherished and special in my life, my friend who had wanted to put me through school—and whose “voice” is heard in part in the character of Jeremy in this book—now offered to help me out while I went to El Paso to finish—where it had begun—the book I again longed to write.
I returned to my mother’s small house and wrote every day on a rented Underwood typewriter. My mother kept the house quiet while I worked. After dinner, I would translate into Spanish and read to her (she never learned English) certain passages I considered appropriate. “You’re writing a beautiful book, my son.” she told me.
It was difficult to write that book. Guilt recurred as I evoked those haunting lives. Oh,
was
I betraying that anarchic world by writing about it—or even more deeply so if I kept to myself those exiled lives? I increasingly found “meaning” in structure: In “Between Two Lions,” I wanted to create out of the reality of Times Square a modern jungle in which two of its powerful denizens connect momentarily, but because of their very natures inevitably wound each other. The story of Miss Destiny found fuller meaning in the childhood game of “statues.” I attempted to tell the story of Lance O’Hara as a Greek tragedy, the chorus of bar-voices warning of the imminent fall of the demi-god, the almost-moviestar on the brink of aging, the whispering Furies conspiring to assure the fall. From my early fascination with mathematics, I “plotted” the chapter on Jeremy as an algebraic equation drawn on a graph, the point of intersecting lines revealing the “unknown factor”—here, the unmasking of the narrator. Memory itself, being selective, provides form; each portrait-chapter found its own “frame.” (The most difficult chapter to write was Sylvia’s.) My rejected Catholicism was bringing to the narrator’s journey a sense of ritual—and the bright colors of garish Catholic churches are splashed in descriptions throughout this book. As I wrote, stirred memories rushed the “stilled” present, and to convey that fusion I shifted verb tenses within sentences. The irregularly capitalized words I hoped would bring a visual emphasis that italics could not.
Before writing, I often listened to music: Presley, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, Bartok—to absorb the dark, moody sexuality of rock, the formal structure of classical music, the “ordered” dissonance of modern composers.
Each chapter went through about twelve drafts, some passages through more than that—often, paradoxically, to create a sense of “spontaneity.” The first four paragraphs that open this book were compressed from about twenty pages. The first chapter was written last, the last one came first. Although four years elapsed between the time I began this book—with the unsent letter—and the time it was finished, most of it was written during one intense year in El Paso.
Three titles had been announced with published excerpts:
Storm Heaven and Protest, Hey, World!
and
It Begins in the Wind.
The intertwining chapters that connect the portraits were called “City of Night” from the start. But I did not conceive of that as the book’s title. I did consider:
Ash Wednesday, Shrove Tuesday, The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny, Masquerade.
Finally, I decided:
Storm Heaven and Protest.
Then Don Allen—always a superb editor—suggested the obvious:
City of Night.
The book was finished. That night—and this is one of the most cherished memories of my life—my mother, my oldest brother, Robert, and I were weaving about my mother’s living room, bumping into each other, each with great stacks of the almost-700-page typescript, collating it—I had made three or four carbon copies.
The manuscript was mailed. I went to return the rented typewriter, but I couldn’t part with it. I bought it; I still have the elegant old Underwood, now comfortably “retired.”
Proofs came. As I read, I panicked. In print, it was all “different”—wrong! About a third of the way through, I began changing a word here and there, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph; then I started back at the beginning. By the time I had gone through the galley proofs, the book was virtually rewritten on the margins and on pasted typewritten inserts. But
now
—I knew—it was “right.” I called Don, then in San Francisco, to “prepare” him. He was startled but agreed with the alterations. Despite Don’s preparation, others at Grove reacted in surprise at the rewritten galleys. Knowing how expensive the resetting would be, I had offered out of my royalties to pay for it—a contractual provision. But Barney Rosset made no objection to changes, and he refused to charge me. Publication was rescheduled, and the book was reset.
I had no doubt that
City of Night
would be an enormous success. I was right. In a reversed way. I had thought it would sell modestly and that the book would be greeted with critical raves. The opposite occurred, dramatically.
Before the official publication date, my book appeared in the No. 8 slot of
Time’s
national bestseller list. Also before publication, I saw my first review. Even for the dark ages of the early 1960’s the title of the review in
The New York Review of Books
was vicious in its overt bigotry. What followed matched its headline. The book climbed quickly to the No. 1 spot on bestseller lists in New York, California. Nationally on all lists it reached third place. In a review featured on its cover,
The New Republic
attempted to surpass the attack of
The New York Review of Books;
it was a draw. The book went into a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh printing and remained on the bestseller lists for almost seven months. In its assault of about eight lines,
The New Yorker
made one factual mistake and one grammatical error.
Only the book’s subject seemed to be receiving outraged attention; its careful structure, whether successful or not, was virtually ignored. I was being viewed and written about as a hustler who had somehow managed to write, rather than as a writer who was writing intimately about hustling—and many other subjects. That persisting view would affect the critical reception of every one of my following books, and still does, to this day.
I remained in El Paso. Once again, a letter came with a plane ticket, to New York. A man who had read my book and was outraged by its treatment in
The New York Review of Books
invited me to attend the American premiere of Benjamin Britten’s
War Requiem
in Tanglewood. But I was waiting for an answer to a request I had made of Grove; and it arrived, a further advance on royalties so I could make the down-payment on a house for my mother.
I flew to New York to meet another major figure in my life, the man who had invited me to Tanglewood; and I spent the following months with him in a fourteenth-storey apartment overlooking the Hudson River (an enormous eagle appeared on the balcony one day and peered in through a glass wall), then in Tanglewood; and then we went to Puerto Rico, the Caribbean Islands. On a beach I read in a New York gossip column that I was a guest of Mr. So-and-so on Fire Island, a place I have never visited. That was the first I would learn of several men claiming to be me, impostures made possible by the fact that I had decided not to promote this book, to retain my private life; only my publishers knew I was in New York, in Riverdale.
In late September I returned to El Paso, to another of the most cherished memories of all my life, of my mother joyfully showing me the house I had bought for her, her new furnishings. She had a dinner-reception for me, with my brothers and sisters and my special great-aunt.
Strangers appeared at my house, creating ruses to be let in. One youngwoman came to the door, claiming to be the “Barbara” of this book. In school, in the army, and on the streets, I had been what is called a loner—very much so. These incidents increased my isolation. But it seemed appropriate to me, this period of “austerity”: I did not want my life to change radically while the lives of the people I had written about remained the same. In El Paso I began the transition from “youngman” to “man.” I created my own gym in my mother’s new home, and I began working out fiercely with weights.
Some excellent reviews began appearing, and eventually the book would be translated into about a dozen languages. Letters arrived daily—moving letters, from men, women, young ones, older ones, homosexual, heterosexual. I answered every one. When I went out, it was usually to drive into the Texas desert. I had only two or three friends. With the exception of brief trips to Los Angeles and one to New York, I remained in El Paso in relative isolation until my mother died and I left the city perhaps forever.
More than twenty years and seven books later, how do I feel about
City of Night
? It thrills me—not only for myself but for the many lives it contains, those always remembered faces and voices—that within my lifetime this book, so excoriated when it first appeared, has come to be referred to frequently as a “modern classic.” And I no longer feel the guilt I battled so long, about the “real people” I thought I would “leave behind.” No—they are a permanent part of my life, of that part of me—the writer—who tells of his journey as a “youngman.”
John Rechy
Los Angeles, 1984
Part One
“Children, go where I send you—how shall I send you?
I’m going to send you one by one....”
—Children, Go Where I Send You
CITY OF NIGHT
LATER I WOULD THINK OF AMERICA as one vast City of Night stretching gaudily from Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard—jukebox-winking, rock-n-roll-moaning: America at night fusing its darkcities into the unmistakable shape of loneliness.
Remember Pershing Square and the apathetic palmtrees. Central Park and the frantic shadows. Movie theaters in the angry morning-hours. And wounded Chicago streets.... Horrormovie courtyards in the French Quarter—tawdry Mardi Gras floats with clowns tossing out glass beads, passing dumbly like life itself... Remember rock-n-roll sexmusic blasting from jukeboxes leering obscenely, blinking many-colored along the streets of America strung like a cheap necklace from 42nd Street to Market Street, San Francisco....
One-night sex and cigarette smoke and rooms squashed in by loneliness....
And I would remember lives lived out darkly in that vast City of Night, from all-night movies to Beverly Hills mansions.
But it should begin in El Paso, that journey through the cities of night. Should begin in El Paso, in Texas. And it begins in the Wind.... In a Southwest windstorm with the gray clouds like steel doors locking you in the world from Heaven.
I cant remember now how long that windstorm lasted—it might have been days—but perhaps it was only hours—because it was in that timeless time of my boyhood, ages six through eight.
My dog Winnie was dying. I would bring her water and food and place them near her, stand watching intently—but she doesnt move. The saliva kept coming from the edges of her mouth. She had always been fat, and she had a crazy crooked grin—but she was usually sick: Once her eyes turned over, so that they were almost completely white and she couldnt see—just lay down, and didnt try to get up for a day. Then she was well, briefly, smiling again, wobbling lopsidedly.