Bodies and Souls Read online

  Praise for John Rechy:

  “Fresh, beautiful, totally courageous—and totally cool, passionate … John Rechy doesn't fit into categories. He transcends them. His individual vision is unique, perfect, loving and strong.”—from Carolyn See's introductory remarks presenting PEN-USA West's Lifetime Achievement Award

  “[He] is one of the heroic figures of contemporary American life … a touchstone of moral integrity and artistic innovation. He is the great champion of desire. … In his endlessly inventive style, he is entirely modern.”

  —Edmund White

  “Hugely intelligent … I think history, the final arbiter, will vindicate [Rechy's work] … alive and sensual.”

  —Michael Cunningham, New Times

  “What he has given us for more than thirty years is a wonderful and terrifying gift. … He has given us life and literature.”

  —Michael Bronski, presenting The Publishing Triangle's William Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award

  “A major American novelist.”

  —Richard Hall, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

  “[Rechy] has spent his life excavating the cracks at the periphery of American culture, feeling his way toward that place within each of us where the ecstatic teeters on the edge of psychic abyss. … A substantial artist.”

  —Frank Browning, Salon.com

  “One of the most talented writers of his generation.”

  —Bruce Benderson, Paper

  “His tone rings absolutely true, is absolutely his own, and he has the kind of discipline which allows him a rare and beautiful recklessness. He tells the truth, and tells it with such passion that we are forced to share in the life he conveys. This is a most humbling and liberating achievement.”

  —James Baldwin

  “John Rechy shows great comic and tragic talent. He is a truly gifted novelist.”

  —Christopher Isherwood

  “Eloquent, convincing, basically unsparing.”

  —Herbert Gold

  “Rechy's writings are carefully conceived and executed, with as much emphasis on symbolism and structure as on developing characters.”

  —Jameson Currier, New York Blade News

  ALSO BY JOHN RECHY

  Novels:

  City of Night

  Numbers

  This Day's Death

  The Vampires

  The Fourth Angel

  Rushes

  Marilyn's Daughter

  The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez

  Our Lady of Babylon

  The Coming of the Night

  Nonfiction:

  The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary

  Plays:

  Rushes

  Tigers Wild

  Momma as She Became—But Not as She Was (one-act)

  Copyright © 1983 by John Rechy

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  An excerpt from Bodies and Souls has appeared in Oui magazine.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rechy, John.

  Bodies and souls: a novel / by John Rechy.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 9781555847241

  1. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction. 2. Mexican American families—Fiction. 3. Runaway teenagers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3568.E28 B6 2001

  813′54—dc21 2001040158

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  01 02 03 04 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Michael Earl Snyder …

  … and for the memory

  of my mother

  and of tía Ana

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Kent Carroll for his invaluable encouragement and excellent suggestions during the writing of this book; Beverle Houston, for a singularly cherished friendship and years of supportive, abundant kindness; Marsha Kinder, for her astute observations and a special friendship; and Michael Earl Snyder, for his sustaining love and his creative comments, a major contribution from the inception of this novel to its end.

  Introduction

  “It always astounded him, this city of bodies and souls. He did not consider it the flippant land of the inherited cliches. To him it was the most spiritual and physical of cities, a profound city which drew to it the various bright and dark energies of the country.” So reflects one of this novel's main characters about Los Angeles.

  It is that view that I wanted to convey in this novel (which I consider to be one of my very best and which took over three years to write). In it, I intended to explore beneath the cliches too often expressed about Los Angeles: its spurious obsession with artifice, not substance, its lack of defining center, its courtship of extremity, its mindless narcissism—that is, its want of profundity, of soul.

  Early on, I found a metaphor for my view of Los Angeles. Along the rim of the Pacific Ocean, at dusk on certain days, clouds and light conspire to create a twilight known as “the blue hour,” when everything is said to be most sharply seen. An awed silence spreads along the horizon as people come to stare into the dusk. Flocks of birds gather on the sand, beaks pointed in ambiguous signal toward the ocean. Then, lithe perfect bodies often perform a slow dance at the edge of the water, a dance of graceful motions, bodies artfully challenging—and acknowledging—the approach of night.

  That challenging acknowledgment, I felt, was at the core of Southern California's restless psyche. Indeed, one might view the City as the place of exile chosen by banished angels after expulsion from Heaven for disobedience, angels still restive.

  This “rage to live,” in a phrase borrowed from Alexander Pope, is heightened by the fact that Los Angeles is a city of daily apocalypse. Sant'Ana winds, fires, earthquakes, simultaneous flood and drought, mud slides—no tiny disasters in Southern California. They're grand, dramatic, melodramatic. The City waits for each with stubborn defiance, and survives with tattered elegance, always pushing closer to the edge.

  The City's sense of urgency is augmented by the fact that this is the last frontier. This is where the country ends. It is the edge of night. Miles of coastline emphasize a literal edge. Abrupt cliffs jut along its coastline before land surrenders to the vastness of the ocean. It is on such a psychic edge—the last chance—that the characters in this novel exist.

  The fact that Los Angeles is a city without a center encourages restless individuality. A city of multiple personalities, it contains “cities” within the City: Bel Air, its mansions hidden behind small forests of trees and barred gates; downtown Los Angeles, glistening with glass towers over revolutionary murals that augur East Los Angeles; Hollywood, Venice Beach, Beverly Hills—these disparate worlds and their inhabitants are connected—only fleetingly as cars dash past each other—by swirling freeways, which, unwound, stretch into 597 miles, the distance between Los Angeles and Phoenix, Arizona, with 200 miles left to spare. Why would such a spectacular sprawl need a center?

  To convey a sense of banished angels, I titled the interlocking sections of this novel “Lost Angels.” That also describes the three central characters. All three yearn for what is impossible but is emphatically promised by American myth
ology, promises that, unfulfilled, nurture a sense of betrayal. These strains run deep, like scars, within the American psyche. Lisa longs for the fake sentiment of old movies; Jesse James yearns for the deceptive romance imposed on the violence of the American West; and Orin is in search of promised religious redemption, a longing so extreme that he turns to Gothic evangelists who guarantee communion with the dead.

  Beneath the maligned facades of characters often dismissed as Southern California “stereotypes” (which, no matter how derided, do exist, thrillingly alive, often revealing themselves to be archetypes), I attempted to locate their longings, fears, their impugned soulfulness. Mr. Universal perfects his body in an attempt to stave off death; the black maid's wish for vengeful fire is doused by a despairing tenderness; the pornographic actress longs for a purer pornography; a Bel Air matron craves to be free of her luxurious constraints.

  Behind the aging male stripper's macho bravado is a fear that a new world of impersonal desire will spit him out; the tattoo of a naked Christ on the Chicano punker may be sacrilegious, but it expresses the punker's longing for salvation. Two gay hustlers try to find love on the loveless streets. A wandering schizophrenic woman searches for a purifying ocean within the sounds of the freeways.

  To exemplify the edgy adventurousness of the City, I used a variety of stylistic techniques. Whereas the point of view of all the main characters is wide open, and each is explored closely, the point of view of the central character, Orin, is never opened. I hoped that would keep him as mysterious to the reader as he is to the two who follow him. To overcome that limitation in point of view, I resorted in a crucial passage to what I hope were successful “tricks.” After Orin has looked through a telescope at the Griffith Park Observatory of Rebel Without a Cause, Lisa peers through it, and through her we know what he has seen and carefully located. In a “narcissistic” chapter of self-reflectiveness, a university lecturer explores the novel itself and introduces the theme of fate as perfect accident.

  Another chapter is told only through a psychiatrist's rambling, bungled report of events involving the police shooting of a black woman. A chapter is narrated in fragments to suggest the hallucinations of a schizophrenic wandering woman. One entire chapter is a graphic sexual combat between a television anchor woman and an ambitious studio grip, a combat with overtones in the exploitive world of “in-depth” news reporting about “the lower depths”—no, I did not always find admirable soulfulness within my characters. A mean middle-aged woman who meanders through the novel mouthing petty banalities is transformed into a deadly Cassandra, an ally of disaster.

  Throughout, I reproduced scenes from classic movies, including White Heat and Duel in the Sun. My intention was to strip away romance and sentimentality from the old films in order to expose camouflaged violence. I opened the novel, deliberately, with perhaps the most passive of all syntactical structures—“There is— .” The suggested passivity would augur an impending apocalypse, like the stillness that precedes earthquakes.

  I often envision cities in Technicolor, sepia, or black and white. New York is always in sepia tones. Chicago is in sepia with patches of Technicolor; so is San Francisco. No matter how colorfully it is depicted, New Orleans is always in black and white in my mind, as is St. Louis. Los Angeles is in Technicolor. I sought to write this novel in Technicolor, and in black and white.

  The mansion that opens this novel no longer exists. There is now only a huge lot overgrown with yellowing grass and weeds. The mansion was owned by a Middle Eastern prince. Life-size nude statues with darkened pubic hair were located along a baluster. They boldly exposed themselves to Sunset Boulevard. It was those statues that supposedly outraged other denizens of Beverly Hills—and may have been the object of a mysterious fire that destroyed them, and the mansion.

  More than the fact of the statues, however, was the fact that the prince dared to display his gaudy wealth, that he flaunted excess, revealing what others in Beverly Hills hid behind fortresses of trees. I wrote the passages about that mansion, and other passages throughout, in “Technicolor” prose—and I juxtaposed that scene, and others, with scenes of violence, written in “black and white.”

  I love Los Angeles, my adopted home—it is a main character in many of my novels, and in this one it is a central character throughout—and so I am pleased to see this novel, a favorite of mine, reissued by Grove Press.

  The quotation that opens this Introduction continues, expressing my view of the City of Lost Angels:

  “All its strains, of decay and rebirth, repression and profligacy, gathered here in exaggeration—as exaggerated as actors in Greek tragedies. Its desperate narcissism—which acknowledged death in extended summers under seasonless skies—and its vagrant spirituality—which burgeoned into excess—were manifestations of a fury to live, to feel, to be, here on the last frontier before the drowning land—the snuffed sun, the darkened shoreline, land's end.”

  John Rechy

  Los Angeles, California

  July 2001

  Contents

  Bodies and Souls

  PART ONE:

  Lost Angels: 1

  Amber: “Meat”

  Lost Angels: 2

  Manny Gomez: ‘The Frontal Christ”

  Lost Angels: 3

  Hester Washington: “Purified Fire”

  Lost Angels: 4

  Dave Clinton: “Slave Auction”

  Lost Angels: 5

  Mrs. Stephen Stephens III: “The Family Unit”

  Lost Angels: 6

  The Lecturer: “On Nothing‘’

  Lost Angels: 7

  PART TWO:

  Lost Angels: 8

  Mick Vale: “Mr. Universal”

  Lost Angels: 9

  Carla: “Roses in Hell”

  Lost Angels: 10

  Billy and Stud: “Bitter Street Love”

  Lost Angels: 11

  Mandy Lang-Jones: “The Lower Depths”

  Lost Angels: 12

  Officer Weston: “Internal Affairs”

  Lost Angels: 13

  Sister Woman: “Slain in the Spirit”

  Lost Angels: 14

  Epilogue

  “And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold … God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.”

  —Revelation 21:3-4.

  “Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America. Doom!”

  —D. H. Lawrence.

  “I see your body, Show me your soul, And I'll believe ya, I'll believe ya! Where's your soul?”

  —Revolver.

  Bodies and Souls

  There is a section in Los Angeles where all its freeways or their extensions converge into a twisted concrete star connecting all the parts of the city, its varied lives and destinations.

  Above this point of intricate connection—of sweeping cement arcs—land furry with grass and thick with pine trees rises into an uncultivated hill—an incongruous patch of forest in the midst of the vast city, its tall steel and glass buildings just blocks away.

  In the surrounding area of vacant lots, where pretty yellow weeds creep through tenacious remains of dusty foundations of houses long ago cleared away, fragments of streets, unused, remain. One, desolate and wide, separates the high hill from the grassy slope that borders the freeways here. Lavender-dotted vines dip to the very edge of concrete lanes.

  Orin, Jesse, and Lisa stood on that viny decline. About them, tiny white flowers erupted like miniature sparklers. Nearby, on another truncated street, Orin's indigo Cadillac—a classic of the finned models—waited next to crushed fields.

  Palm trees everywhere fringed the sky cleansed by new wind shoving away the dying heat of days and nights. Fires that had seared the distant canyons were contained at last. Only a slender glowing band rimmed an arc of the horizon.

  Jesse lean and tanned, Lisa go
lden and beautiful, Orin boyish and handsome—the two youngmen and the teenage girl laughed joyously as they stood over the clot of freeways. The chrome of automobiles captured the white sun in flashing silver blades.

  It was almost noon.

  Jesse held his shirt over one shoulder, Lisa held a frayed doll, and Orin held the rifle.

  Jesse pointed to a car on the freeway, and Lisa looked down at the blue automobile slowing as if to pull away from the flowing traffic. Ambushing wind plucked at their sudden words. With a cry, Orin raised the rifle. His finger touched its trigger.

  In one deadly instant, multiple bursts of fire spat into the freeways.

  PART ONE

  Lost Angels: 1

  Ten days before the slaughter on the freeways, and on an afternoon in late spring, early summer, Orin, Lisa, and Jesse James stood before the gates of an abandoned mansion on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Many tourists milled about the notorious house. From behind the elaborate gates, burly guards stared at the gathered spectators.

  Although unpredictable, June is often murky, even cool; but a Southern California day can go through a mild version of the four seasons—the blue coolness of morning moving to sweaty warmth. Today in that seasonless month, a breeze containing a hint of heat kept the smog against the watery horizon of an azure sky.

  “It reminds me of Tara in Gone with the Wind,” Lisa said. She had just turned eighteen. She had a prettiness saved from cuteness and nudged toward beauty by a full, sensual mouth. She had cultivated a crooked half-smile like Lauren Bacall's in To Have and Have Not.