John Rechy:
CITY OF NIGHT
Resuming my trawl through yesteryear gay fiction
with this ‘classic’ from 1963, John Rechy’s chronicle – which we assume to be
autobiographical – of a few months in the life of a nameless hustler haunting
the cruising zones of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Mardi
Gras New Orleans. It seems a bit dated today, but it’s one of the seminal books
in the literary gay canon.
Rechy sets the tone on the opening page: “One-night sex and cigarette smoke and rooms
squashed in by loneliness.” Every other chapter explores the life and
mindset of a fellow hustler or one of the punters (“scores”), those men who are
part predator and part prey. There is some humour, especially in the full-on
Attitude of the camper gays and drag queens – the most extravagant of these are
Miss Destiny, the self-crowned Queen of L.A.’s Pershing Square, and Chi-Chi, a
mixed-up Muscle Mary in New Orleans. But for the most part the tone is
unremittingly bleak. Sylvia, the bar-owner haunted by a guilty secret, is given
more depth than many of the scores.
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| John Rechy |
The narrator portrays himself as the macho street
kid who’s only doing it for money but occasionally, with another hustler or one
of the scores, he almost feels the tug of involvement. But that tug has to be
resisted, because it would undermine his conviction that he isn’t really a fag.
These are some of the book’s most revealing scenes. He never admits to love and
only rarely to desire. Desperation is what drives the denizens of the Cities of
Night onto “the lonely, crowded, electric
streets.”
John Rechy creates a syntax of his own, routinely
omitting the apostrophes in words like “isnt”
and “dont”. Fragmented paragraphs bristle
with dashes and ellipses (...). Past and present tenses are randomly mixed. He
sandwiches words together to create a vivid new vocabulary: “nightworld”, “malehustler”, “sexhungry”.
The hallucinatory writing recalls Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, so much
so that I wonder if either of them contributed to the edit. The fractured
narrative becomes repetitive, but there’s no denying the powerful impact of
this nightmarish journey through the Gay Underworld. “We’re trying to swim in a river made for drowning.”
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| the original 1960s cover |
This is not an erotic novel. The sex between hustler
and score is rarely described and never detailed. Rechy’s second novel – Numbers
– and its successors were a lot more explicit, and he abandoned the zonked-out
Beat-poetry style for the pared-down prose of Harold Robbins or Mickey
Spillane.
Reading City of Night in the 1960s, it seemed
exotically different and daring. London’s gay scene was a pale echo of New
York’s; Piccadilly and Leicester Square never quite had the lurid tawdriness of
42nd Street or Times Square. A few pages from the end Rechy seems to
foresee the rich harvest the Grim Reaper will gather from this relentlessly
promiscuous community two decades later: “death
lurking prematurely in a threatening black-out”. In 1963 John Rechy was a
kind of “Pied Piper” figure, and as we know, the Piper – one way or another –
has to be paid.
