MONTAGE: The City
LATE ONE SUNDAY a fire swept acres of forested canyons, threatening the outskirts of the city. At first it was only a cloud on the horizon, like the fog that invades the beaches. But this time the cloud came from inland. It thickened. The lacy white darkened, tinged with gray. It floated across the city toward the ocean as if to connect with the smog. At night the air hung heavy with ashy clouds.
The next morning the sun came out hot, a luminous orange as if everything were on fire without flames. An eerie phosphorescence covered Los Angeles. As the afternoon sun attempted powerfully to penetrate the clouds of smoke, the city turned fiercer orange. On the sidewalks, through the patches of palmtree shadows, the glow created pools of frozen fire.
As the residents fled dark with ashes, the ravaging flames devoured hilly acres.
In the city, you stepped out and tasted the ashes, felt them on your face. The odor of fire singed your senses. Behind smoky clouds, the sun was an incandescent balloon.
When the fire was over, the residents returned doggedly to rebuild their homes in the exact areas scorched, and they braced for the rains, recalling the months-long storm in the sixties when an avalanche of mud swallowed the rebuilt houses.
In Southern California.
Shaped on the map like a coffin—center of prettydeath, flowers already here for the burial, or miraculous recovery. Death or purification. By fire, water, quivering earth.
Shaped too on the map like a twisted handmirror— world center of narcissism. The silver, colored movies, the golden weather, the white beaches from Zuma to Laguna invite the glorious burnt bodies to perform a ritual of exhibitionism under the adoring sun.
And until the impotent citizens rose in wrath to ban it, a nude beach beyond sand and craggy rocks nestled under steep cliffs. Nude men. Nude women. (The male outlaws climbed the rocks farther on, to dangerous secluded caves just barely above the roaring tide threatening to enter. Against the rocks bodies meshed with bodies under the promiscuous sun.)
City of lost angels.
Death, narcissism, and fire.
Health cults and criminal smog. Sick cops and saintly sinners. Beach and forest. Paradise and hell.
Hot Santa Ana winds pant into the city.
The city that thrives on disaster. A huge street painting at the corner of Santa Monica and Butler depicts its collapse—truncated freeways, ocean flooding the desert. Daily, radio stations document freeway disasters: truck jackknifed, car overturned, pedestrian wandering on freeway. … The reports have the rhythm of a song, and the unspoken refrain is: Survive!
Life is lived at least seven degrees—to choose a number—more fully here than elsewhere. Los Angeles is a metaphor for the future. It will happen here first, the best and the worst.
After all, isn't this the last frontier?—here that all the expectations bunched tightly and seeded—when there was no more land to push into. Here that the country ends, its energy now electrified by intimations of disaster. Beyond— is suicide, where the country plunges into the waiting ocean.
Survive!
Fire swallows, the earth rumbles, mudslides crush. Homes collapse like toys. But new houses and lives are rebuilt on the brink. SLIDE AREA—signs along the awesome coast boast proudly. Jagged cliffs challenge along the ocean:
Survive!
SCIENTISTS PREDICT MASSIVE EARTHQUAKE IN L.A. WITHIN YEAR, the newspaper proclaims. You incorporate the knowledge and live life eight degrees more fully now.
At the corner of Highland and Franklin, when Hollywood traffic is a crush of metal and chrome in the sweating sun, skinny shirtless boys take turns standing on their heads on a crumbling stone wall—exhibitionistically breaking records before the involuntarily captive audience.
Survive!
If the earth shrugs and thrusts this glorious city into the ocean, the rest of the country will follow, with hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, tidal waves, and killer winds.
5:12 P.M. Hollywood Boulevard.
HE PARKS ON A side street. He's wearing Levi's and cowboy boots, no shirt. Sunglasses. Though his muscles have lost their pump from the morning's workout, they are beginning to ache deliciously, a signal of the body's rite of resurrection.
Traffic jammed, Hollywood Boulevard is at its trashiest under a stoned white sun. This street—a tattered crazy old woman, sweet at times, dangerous at times—is clashing rows of tawdry clothes shops, smelly quick-food counters, mangy arcades, patchy stores, movie theaters. Beyond the tops of frayed buildings, palmtrees look away disdainfully.
Periodically, campaigns will be mounted to clean up the boulevard. Merchants will call for a return to its former elegance. Yet no one can remember when Hollywood Boulevard, unworthy symbol of glamor, was elegant. Even stars' names nobly engraved in bronze into the sidewalks have turned gray and sullen. Castouts from the American myth glorified by films have taken over like locusts. Without even noticing it, the outcasts step on the names of the great stars. This is the exiles' turf now, fought for in blood skirmishes with merchants, cops, citizens' groups. The outcasts endure on the carnival street.
Jim walks shirtless along it. Even when the weather is cool, he wears little—partly discipline of his body, partly proud exhibitionism. He nods to other outlaws. Other malehustlers. Though on the beach he cruised only for excitement, on the boulevard—and on Selma, the tacky side street he will soon move into—he will hustle for money; then he will most often pretend to be "straight"—uncomfortably rationalizing the subterfuge by reminding himself that those attracted to him will usually—though certainly not always—want him to be that, like the others of his breed.
They stand now, his breed, in clusters outside the Gold Cup Coffee Shop, the Pioneer Chicken. Youngmen— younger certainly than he, he knows, though he doesn't show his age—who recognize him easily as one of them and feeling the bond of exiles nod and say, What's goin on? Masculine men with shifting eyes, watching for clients and cops.
Jim may pause for a few words, but not for long; he's an outsider among outsiders.
At Highland and Hollywood, the queens, awesome, defiant Amazons, are assuming their stations. The white queens are bleached and pale, the black ones shiny and purple. Extravagant in short skirts, bouffant hairdos, luminous unreal mouths and eyes. The transsexuals are haughty in their new credentials.
"Ummmm-ummmmm," a black queen approves Jim's bare muscles as he moves toward Selma.
Men in cars, off work for the weekend, are circling the streets for male prostitutes.
5:39 P.M. Selma.
A semi-residential district just one block south of the boulevard, the area of Selma at first seems unlikely as a main area for malehustling: Old squeaky houses have been broken up into rooms populated by old ladies and gentlemen who keep birds, maybe parrots. A shocked Baptist church, white and pure, glowers at the hustlers who use its steps and pillars to display their bodies for sale, occasionally strumming guitars until the cops come by. A large parking lot sits dully behind the Catholic church—all grand steeples and mute mystery—on Sunset Boulevard. A small deserted playground is locked behind meshed wire. Car-repair garages, crumbling closed hamburger stands patched with torn cardboard, more parking lots—this, at first, is Selma. But soon after, it's male prostitutes standing singly or in groups along the street, at corners, before rooming houses providing ready access for paid contacts.
Jim walks along this familiar street.
"What's happenin?" A blond hustler who like himself has survived many streets, many cities, many nights asked Jim that question.
"Not much—with you?" Jim answers. He pauses; the two stand eyeing the prospective clients cruising the blocks.
For long, the two, Jim and this blond man, were hostilely aware of each other—a hostility conveyed by the fact that they would cross the street to avoid direct encounter. Why? Mutual recognition. Although Jim is dark, the other blond, both are husky, and each is much classier, yes, than the younger, much younger, boys and men who flash and sputter in their gaudy—beautiful—youth; who will not survive, no—the streets devouring them and replacing them with fresher bodies, each day; who will remember the times when they glimpsed other worlds, glimpses made possible only by their young bodies and only for interludes.
But Jim and this blond hustler have other than that, a certain street elegance which speaks of rare street survival. Yes; and that was what formed the mute hostility, now mute bond, the unstated secrets each knew intuitively about the other's survival: You're older than you look. You love the streets even when they fight you—and you go on, with style. You're smarter than you act, and you're not so tough. And we both know—… But that remains unexchanged.
"Making it, making it," the blond hustler answers. He's wearing a tanktop which shows off broad shoulders.
Jim expands his. They laugh briefly, glancing at each other and away.
After many nights avoiding direct encounter, they spoke; a night when each decided not to cross the street in avoidance. In a sense they startled each other into speaking, and the blond one said, "What's happenin?" and Jim answered, "Not much—with you?" "Making it, making it." And so it became a litany, a rote message of survival, repeated each encounter afterwards, except that they would alternate in asking the first question, assuming a mutuality. Today it was the blond man's turn.
They split. Jim walks on. A man drives up behind him, stops, motions him over. Jim is suspicious, the man stopped too quickly—hardly had a chance to see him. "Looking to make some money?" he asks Jim. Convinced the man is a vice cop—and he's driving a suspicious Plymouth—Jim walks right up to the window. The driver leans over. Jim says, "Fuck off!" Looking back, prepared to warn him, he sees that the blond hustler too is avoiding the same man.
Despite its dangers, Jim loves this street. Despite— … He remembers with what anxiety he returned to it after years away. He blocks that memory.
Another car has slowed down. But Jim doesn't encourage him either; he's got to be extra cautious. He's on probation.
FLASHBACK: Selma. A Year and a Half Ago.
He hadn't even seen the man. It was a Friday, like tonight. He had just been driven back to the street by a man he had just made money from. He hadn't noticed the car parked by the lot behind the Catholic church until the driver blew his horn at him. Jim glanced at him. The man waved him over. Jim crossed the street, stood on the sidewalk near the car. The man, slightly out of shape, veering toward premature middle-age, opened the passenger door. "Get in?"
Jim did.
"I got some bucks burning a hole in my pocket," the man said.
"I could use them," Jim said.
"I know an alley we can go to—haven't got much time."
"Uh, first let's get straight how much and what for," Jim said "I, uh, don't do anything." He was not at all attracted to this man; Jim would merely allow him to blow him.
"Okay with me," the man said. "I just dig your body. How's twenty bucks for a few minutes on a dark street?" When Jim agreed, the man started the car, drove on, turned the corner, stopped at the intersection at Sunset Boulevard. Two hands thrust suddenly from the sidewalk through the open window pulled Jim roughly back by the shoulders. "Vice officers!—you're under arrest," both men said. Jim was handcuffed, taken to the Hollywood station, booked for prostitution, fingerprinted, frisked intimately about the groin. That night other street hustlers greeted each other noisily in jail throughout the night. Jim was bailed out by a friend. That same night—dark morning—he was back hustling on Selma.
5:55 P.M. Selma.
He's on probation now—for about six more months. What angers Jim most is that in his arrest report—to cover up the illegal entrapment—the cop said Jim had approached him and asked for sexmoney; it angers him fiercely even to remember, because such an approach would violate his rigid style.
A man has been circling the block, eyeing him, looking back, pausing, returning. After another U-turn, the man stops. Jim sees a large, blond, well-dressed man. Jim walks very slowly toward the open window.
"You look good enough to eat," the man calls out. "Where you headed?"
"Nowhere—just hanging out."
"Want to get in and talk?"
Jim doesn't. He wants to study the man further. If he even gets in the car, and the man's a cop, he'll have violated a condition of his probation.
"You've got a gorgeous body, worth paying for," the man says.
Jim loves to hear his body praised. He stretches it.
"Can we get together?" the man asks. "Say, you're not a cop, are you?"
Jim laughs. "Fuck no—are you?"
"Of course not." As verification, he allows his hand to dangle out the window and touch Jim's groin lightly. "Let's go to my place."
"I don't do anything," Jim says.
"I don't want you to," the man says.
6:17 P.M. Laurel Canyon. Someone's Home.
"Actually I'm a very well-known writer. I've written several books."
The man's home is all brown leather and plastic; glass windows for walls. Trees protect it all. Drawings and photographs decorate the bedroom.
"Yes," the large blond man continues, "I'm told I'm a very talented writer. So you see, I have my … intellect, and you, well, you have your body—that's your talent. We both have something beautiful."
Jim lies naked on the man's bed. The man sits beside him fully dressed.
"Of course I'd like to have a body like yours," the man goes on—defensively, Jim knows, because he desires Jim and will pay to have him and Jim does not desire him, "but not if it meant—well—that I'd be not as … creative—smart—as—well—… People with beautiful bodies aren't very— … They– …"
Jim listens with secret amusement. And indeed he believes in the construction of his body as equal art form. Determined hours of thrusting and pushing iron. The result, the muscular body, is put on display; his prize will be to be desired.
His naked brown body is stark on the white sheets. Jim feels the man's adoring tongue over his flesh.
Afterwards, the man wants to arrange to see him again. But Jim will not commit himself. Paying him twenty dollars, the man tells Jim: "I want to give you more than we agreed—but I don't have any more cash with me. I'll give you a check. What's your name?"
"It's—… Skip the check," Jim says.
