The Sexual Outlaw Page 4

  He asks: “Does your ‘numbers’ trip help you avoid the realization that time is passing?”

  Again. I answer nervously: “Of course.” I don't tell him what I'm remembering, the initial terror I experienced on returning to Selma after years away. I go on: “In my book Numbers there's a place where Johnny Rio thinks that if he keeps going sexually, time and death can't reach him.”

  (I began—literally—to write Numbers as I drove out of Los Angeles back to El Paso, with my mother—who had stayed with my sister—holding a writing pad on the console and me steering with one hand, writing with the other, veering off the road now and then, and my mother warning gently, “Be careful, my son.” … I had returned to the sexual arena of Los Angeles after years of relative seclusion in El Paso, preparing my body with weights—and the arena soon centered in Griffith Park, that Eiffel Tower of the sexual underground. I went there every day, counting sexual contacts, the frenzy increasing to make up for “lost time”—which, of course, is never done; and years later I would spookily return to break “Johnny Rio's”—my character's, based on my own—”record” in that park. That book was written in three months with a compulsion as fierce as that which had propelled the sexual hunt in the park.)

  I should have told the interviewer that perhaps I feel totally alive only when I'm working out with weights, when I'm having sex, and when I'm writing a book.

  The interviewer asks, “Where does a sexual life like yours lead?”

  The outlaw hunt, the precarious balance, dangers, excitement, the joy, freedom, defiance, the aloneness (the times when I can taste aloneness like ashes in my mouth), all that—and the acute sense of being in touch every single moment with life.

  I answer: “I'll just go on becoming better—or, if things get grim, there's always suicide.”

  Too grim. I say:

  “I think it's important to make an attractive death, and that's where the concept of suicide comes in. One's autobiography as novel. My life is so intertwined with my writing that I almost live it as if it were a novel. When do you end a novel? At its most dramatic moment. Your life, if you make it a work of art, should end at exactly the right moment. Like a novel. So I simply conceive of things going on and on until I don't want them to any more. Then they can be stopped.” Still too grim. I laugh again. “Finally, that's the only freedom you have … the freedom to die.”

  7:01 P.M. Selma. The Hustling Bar. Selma.

  RENDERED GLORIOUS BY the deadly smog, the setting sun burns brilliant red. Palmtrees cut long shadows as Jim walks along Selma. The blond hustler is gone. Many other hustlers are out in the warm evening.

  “MOVE ON! THIS IS A NO-LOITERING AREA! YOU ARE SUBJECT TO ARREST IN FIVE MINUTES!”

  The harsh voice coming suddenly from the bullhorn of the cruising cop car jars the early night. The car following slowly, the malehustlers saunter away. But they'll return in a few minutes.

  Jim will last out the cops. Hell go to the hustling bar a few blocks away, until the street cools.

  A yellow-lighted bar—two rooms, a pool table in one, a dirty umbrella of smoke encloses it. Later tonight this bar will be jammed with drifting, sometimes dangerous, young-men, slightly older than most on the streets. In the back room a few—it's too early yet—shoot pool, displaying tight bodies in slow motion. A man offers Jim a drink, but he doesn't want that slow commitment, not now, not when the outlaw stirrings are already demanding a night drenched in sex.

  On his way out, he's stopped by a tough-looking lean youngish man wearing an eye patch. Jim recognizes him as a male pimp who runs a motel; different types of available men mill in the lobby late at night. “I could use a guy like you,” he tells Jim. “Safer this way—and more bread.” Jim takes the man's card, a printed card. Safer. He knows he won't call.

  On the street the cops are gone for now, and the outlaws are back.

  8:05 P.M. Dellwith.

  He ate at a restaurant; meat, rare, and vegetables and salad and milk. He imagines the nutrients coursing to feed his muscles.

  Now he drives along the grand old houses of Los Feliz Boulevard, elegant Hollywood; palmtrees are haughtier at the foot of once-fabulous estates hiding in the hills. The sun floats eerily low for orange moments.

  He drives into Dellwith, a section of Griffith Park. A brook feeds lush trees and burning-bloomed flowers.

  Into the park. A restroom hides among quiet trees. Beyond it, small forests of brush shelter paths into the soft hills. Many cars are parked on the sides of the dirt road. Jim can see men floating in the darkening greenery.

  A youngman approaches him. “Wanna come home with me?”

  He's not that attractive, and Jim wants more than one person now. “Uh—I just got here.”

  “I'd go in the bushes with you,” the youngman understands. He blurts out the hateful memory: “But I'm scared. I was almost busted here a couple of weeks ago. We were in the bushes, and two vice cops yelled Freeze! I ran away, I stumbled, I thought I'd broken my ankle, I couldn't move. I just lay there hiding in the bushes for hours, till it got real dark, and then I crawled to my car.”

  Rage rising orgasmically, Jim walks into the dangerous area. A man sits hunched on a rock. Jim stands before him, letting the man blow him openly. Jim's rage ebbs. Nearby, pressed darkly against the trunk of a tree, hugging it tightly, pants to his ankles, a man is being fucked by another. The man against the tree invites Jim to join. But the thought of the earlier youngman's painful flight, the hiding for hours, persists. Past men cruising, Jim walks back to his car.

  9:08 P.M. Downtown Los Angeles.

  Moodily he decides to drive to downtown Los Angeles, in search of ghosts.

  Wilshire. LaFayette Park. Often on late warm nights he would lie on the concrete ledge in back of the closed branch library, surrendering to a daring mouth…. West-lake. He pauses in his car, remembering. Ducks clustering coldly on a small island on the lake made strange sounds while silent outlaws gathered in alcoves or in a grotto under a gently flowing fountain, water splashing bodies lightly…. Oh, and the theater across the street—the enormous balcony where Jim was “wounded” one late night. He stood on the steps, his cock in someone's mouth. Footsteps! He pulled up his zipper, it caught the skin of his cock. Panicking, he pulled down, and the zipper bit the skin again. He bears the tiny wound of battle, an almost indiscernible scar, like the ghost of a butterfly.

  Hunters have long abandoned this area to the jealous cops and the senior citizens waiting sadly to die.

  Jim drives on.

  Downtown Los Angeles. Hope Street, where he lived years ago.

  Pershing Square. Preachers bellowed sure damnation, always for tomorrow. Malehustlers sat in the benign sun. Queens dared to appear in make-up. Torn down, the square rebuilt. The outlaws fled. To Hollywood Boulevard.

  Jim parks his car on Spring Street. He drinks from the thermos of protein. He puts on a brown leather vest. No shirt; his chest gleams brown.

  Tattered hopelessly, Main Street is a gray area smothering in grime. Afloat in dope and the odor of cheap fried chicken. Harry's Bar. Smoky yellow. Years ago, the main hustling turf. Now the hustlers here are older, meaner, heavily tattooed. Deeply, deeply exiled. Fussy old men wipe their bar glasses secretly, eyeing the rough hustlers. Jim doesn't stay long.

  To Wally's Bar. Once it was the wildest; clients, queens, hustlers coming together to drink in an often-festive mood. Euphoria tinged with hysteria.

  Now rough black, Chicano, and white transvestites and transsexuals reek of vile perfume and violence. Black pimps and tattooed convict lovers. Violent hustlers.

  “Hey, muscle baby, you oughtta be in the movies!” a towering giant of a queen tells Jim. “Porno movies, honey I”

  Not a hostile statement, no, it is an acknowledgment that he doesn't look defeated, like the others; his is not a wasted body. Jim feels trapped in the tightly coiled violence of this snakepit of exile.

  A stoned white queen—six-inch platforms, foot-high bouffant wig,
stars pasted on siliconed breasts—suddenly pulls a knife on a black queen with purple lips. The glittering stars scatter onto the filthy floor.

  Has memory transformed reality? Was it always like this? A casbah of the dazed dead?

  Jim drives back to Hollywood.

  10:32 P.M. Greenstone Park.

  You drive in a curve and you park in an arc a few feet below a slope of well-tended grass. Across the road is a concrete alcove. Beyond it and another grassy slope a stone ledge separates this part from a treed down-sloping hill. To the other side of the alcove, the path curves through thick dark trees for a distance of perhaps a block.

  At the lot, Jim pauses by his car. He knows the dangers.

  Remembers the night the darkness lit up as if by a wrathful white sun. Sexhunters froze in the light-slaughtered night. The strange glare came from a demonic cop helicopter hovering over the park. It spewed its vengeful light while vice cops on the path rushed at the outlaws. Jim plunged down the slope of trees to the safety of the street.

  And then there are the recurrent nights when gay-haters terrorize the paths, with knives, stones, broken bottles.

  Still, the park flourishes.

  There is always a mistiness here, you'll notice, created in part by the feeble mothy lights from antique lamps, and by the fans of lacy trees filtering it, a mistiness emphasized by a hypnotized silence broken only by the sound of feet on moist, crushed leaves, or by sex sounds. Or violence.

  FLASHBACK: Greenstone Park. A Year Ago.

  It was past 2:00 in the morning. Thick mist draped the cruising shadows along the paths that night. Figures squeezed like clinging limbs against dark tree trunks.

  Crack!

  The unmistakable sound of a bullet tore the silence and the fog. A gasp. A body fell on dried leaves. Squish.

  Crack!

  Another shot. Again the muted sound of wet leaves, scattered by grasping, dying hands. Another gasp, softer, the sound of spitting blood. A figure staggered onto the concrete alcove and fell back dead. The other still moaned.

  The murderer—the outlaws had rushed along the path to see his car speeding away—entered the courtroom with his smiling girlfriend.

  MIXED MEDIA 1

  POLICE REFUSE TO ARREST

  STABBING SUSPECT SEEN AGAIN, ESCAPES AGAIN

  “… a prime suspect in [the] stabbing of a … 15-year-old boy … at the headquarters of the Radical Gay Christians … was spotted… preaching through a bullhorn at a [rock] concert [and] condemning … homosexuals, and all anti-Establishment people and praising Jesus, the Bible, and the police….Police refused to arrest him [despite being informed] that there was a felony warrant out for his arrest.”

  —The Advocate,

  account of incident occurring

  November 25, 1975, in Los Angeles

  “Middle America's visceral distaste for sexual deviation is not… easily put down…. In New York City, the City Council seems about to vote [a civil-rights bill for homosexuals] down. In Missouri, a bill has been introduced that would require all homosexuals to register with the state…. In Boulder, Colorado, a university town with a reputation for easy-going liberalism, voters rejected by a 2-to-1 margin an ordinance that would have forbidden job discrimination against homosexuals….

  “[In the fight in New York City] the Uniformed Fire Officers, in a $10,000 ad campaign, charged that it ‘would force an employer to hire a pervert… expose our children to the influence of sodomites … destroy the teamwork of the fire department … permit sodomites, perverts, and deviates to live and work where they choose.’ The archdiocese newspaper Catholic News called homosexuality ‘a menace to family life….’”

  —Newsweek,

  May 20, 1975

  CHURCHES REVIEW ATTITUDE ON ‘GAYS’

  “… The American Lutheran Church drew some fire recently when it was learned that a $2,000 grant was made to the gay caucus in its ranks…. Tor a major board of one of the country's major denominations to identify through its budget with an organization promoting blatant transgression of the revealed word of Cod is a sign of a sinking back to the level of official immorality ….’”

  —Los Angeles Times,

  July 7, 1975

  “A last and particularly important finding [based on a study of the effects of liberalized laws in certain states], given the present concern for crime control, was that 50% of the police reported that decriminalizing private homosexual behavior had allowed them to spend more time on serious crime….”

  —Los Angeles Times, Op-Ed Page,

  October 16, 1975

  INTELLIGENCE UNIT RULES ELUDE POLICE PANELISTS

  “… The current 1975-76 PDID [Public Disorder Intelligence Division, a Los Angeles police division which gathers information on dissident groups and individuals] budget of $3.26 million pays for 91 sworn personnel and 15 civilians. This is nearly double the number of sworn personnel—52—assigned to robbery-homicide and compares with 44 assigned to burglary-auto theft, 63 to bunco-forgery, 144 to administrative narcotics, and 72 to administrative vice.”

  —Los Angeles Times,

  December 28, 1975

  BURGLARIES ON RISE, D.A. SAYS

  “Substantial increases in burglaries during the last ten years in both the city and county of Los Angeles were reported…. In the city, the volume of burglaries climbed from 50,771 in 1965 to 67,799 in 1975. Last year 22.1% were solved.”

  —Los Angeles Times,

  December 5, 1975

  HOMICIDES LEAD

  3.6% JUMP IN

  LA. CRIME RATE

  “… Homicides in Los Angeles rose to 619—the first time murders had topped 600 for a year. The figure presented an increase of 17.5% over 1974 figures.”

  —Los Angeles Times,

  January 7, 1976

  “The Los Angeles City Attorney's … office now handles up to 500 gay-bar arrests a year, and many of them … involve offenses no more serious than patrons holding hands or dancing together.”

  —Los Angeles Times, Editorial,

  April 24, 1974

  ELDERLY WOMAN RAPED, ROBBED

  “An elderly woman was raped and robbed in her West Hollywood apartment, police said. It was the 37th such incident in Los Angeles’ West Side since police began their search for the so-called West Side Rapist in November, 1974.”

  —Los Angeles Times,

  May 10, 1976

  “We used to have to stake out in [a certain public] restroom—a lovely job, you can imagine. Talk about where have all the flowers gone, let me tell you. So we would have to make arrests down there, and one gay painted a sign on the wall—an arrow—and it said: ‘Vice Cops Watch Here.’ And it pointed up to a screen on the wall where, indeed, we would be concealed…. The L.A.P.D. has always maniacally prosecuted vice and victimless crimes far beyond what they have to do…. Well, the police will beat up anybody…. Let me tell you about reality…. If a guy [arrested] hits you, being a human being … you hit him back, only you don't hit him back once, you hit him back three times or four or five or however many it takes to get the rage out of your system, because you're a human being…. He knocks one tooth out, you knock all his teeth out…. Just life. So when a gay says: ‘Cops beat us up. The cop beat me up.’ Well, the fact of the matter is, I've nothing to brag about, but I was a vice cop and I probably arrested 300 or 400 gays in my life.”

  —Ex-cop turned writer,

  speaking on beatings, vice arrests, and being a “human being.”

  New West Magazine,

  July 19, 1976

  AN INSTANT CURE

  “… when the board [of trustees of the American Psychiatric Association] voted last December to cease classifying homosexuality as a ‘mental disorder,’ … opponents of the ruling circulated petitions, issued angry statements, and forced the APA into an unprecedented action:… for the first time in [its] 129-year history, a board decision is being put to a vote.”

  —Time,

  April 1, 1974


  “… Probably the most recent information in the matter [of child molestation] is [a] report by the State Department of Mental Hygiene, ‘Another Look at Sex Offenders in California.’

  “That study of 887 pedophiles (persons favoring children as partners) at Atascadero State Hospital-65% of them from Los Angeles County—revealed that 75% were heterosexual, while only 20% were [exclusively] homosexual.”

  —Los Angeles Times,

  October 28, 1973

  “Historical evidence has shown that homosexuals are prone to violence and other forms of criminal conduct, most notably … molestation of adolescents and children.”

  —Testimony of a Los Angeles policeman during hearings to review the penal code,

  —Los Angeles Times,

  March 25, 1974

  LAPD SEX SCANDAL

  MORALS PROBE REVOLVES

  AROUND POLICE, GIRL SCOUTS

  “A number of Los Angeles police are under investigation for alleged sexual misconduct with members of the Hollywood Division's girl explorer scouts … a youth auxiliary group for girls 14 and up….”

  —Valley News,

  August 24, 1976

  SOUTH PASADENA OFFICER CHARGED IN SEX CASE

  “A 10-year South Pasadena police department veteran was arraigned … on charges resulting from an alleged sexual encounter with a 15-year-old … girl.”

  —Los Angeles Times,