Books

When John Rechy's first novel was published in 1963, the reviews in several of the country's prestigious literary pages were vicious nearly to the point of hysteria. Yet the book remained on the best-seller lists for eight months.

It wasn't the writing that had the critics in such lather. Indeed, City of Night is a work of uncommon beauty and power, and ugliness as well. It was the novel's subject that was hated. City of Night is the first-person story of a young male prostitute hustling the night streets and gay bars of cities across America.

In the "innocent" pre-assassination America where such "scandalous" novels as The Tropic of Cancer and Lady Chatterley's Lover had only recently been freed from governmental censorship, Mr. Rechy's novel violated even more literary taboos and offended even more self-righteous minds. But 45 years later, City of Night is a classic not only of gay literature but of American literature as well. And the young hustler (it's an autobiographical fiction) has built a distinguished career as author of such highly regarded novels as Bodies and Souls and The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez, and as a playwright and teacher of writing at the University of Southern California.

A constant Rechy theme is alienation – sexual, racial, economic – from dominant "respectable" America. The theme flows out of his childhood and youth as a half-Scottish, half-Mexican, not-yet-aware gay boy growing up poor in a housing project in the blistering El Paso desert. But he has always cast his characters' alienation, even outlawry, as fiction.

Until now. In About My Life and the Kept Woman Mr. Rechy presents his real-life story. Sort of. "This is not what happened; it is what is remembered," he writes in a two-sentence caveat emptor preface. "Its sequence is the sequence of recollection." To him, life, no matter how it's shaken out, is the stuff of art.

Mr. Rechy begins his story when he's 12 years old and his 16-year-old pregnant sister is about to marry her football-player sweetheart. The groom's autocratic father, known in the neighborhood as "Señor," objects mightily to the marriage but fails to keep it from happening. To add coals to Señor's outraged dignity, his long-banished daughter, Marisa Guzman, shows up at the wedding.

Marisa is called, among the Latina gossips of El Paso and Juárez, "the kept woman of Augusto de Leon," one of the richest and most powerful men in Mexico. Her father drove her from his family, threatened to kill her if she returned and demanded that she never again use his name as her surname.

The families and guests don't know how to deal with her presence at the wedding, so they pretend she isn't there. At the reception, Marisa goes into an empty room, sits alone and smokes a cigarette, unaware that 12-year-old John is watching her:

"A slender streak of smoke arose, lingered about her before it evaporated. The cigarette remained touching her lips as if reluctant to separate. Then her free hand rose and rested lightly on the elbow of the arm whose fingers held the cigarette, and she completed an intricately graceful choreography of slight movements as she withdrew the cigarette from her lips but kept it close, as if considering whether to inhale from it again, a moment of suspense."

The sight entrances the boy. The beautiful woman, her cigarette, her solitude and her self-knowing poise stick in his mind and become an ideal, an inchoate goal for the young Rechy in his own quest for truth in art and self and sex.

Also watching the kept woman smoke her cigarette, also secretly, is a girl named Alicia Gonzales, a.k.a. Isabel Franklin, who, unlike Marisa, will make a career of pretending to be someone she isn't. Alicia/Isabel's social-climbing career as a phony descendant of Spanish royalty forms a second leitmotif to Mr. Rechy's story. A scene near the end, in which Alicia/Isabel also smokes a cigarette, becomes the perfect bookend to Marisa's scene at the beginning.

Between those bookends, Mr. Rechy's story of himself unfolds with the color, energy, humor and teeming characters of a Dickens novel, as if Pip or David Copperfield had grown up in the El Paso barrio, where in spring tumbleweeds are "clawing their way into the city, urgent winds thrusting needles of dirt at our faces." There's a dangerous, terrifying father pickling his broken dreams in alcohol; a beautiful fortress of a mother; loving and supportive older sisters and brothers; nosy neighborhood gossips; tempters and temptresses; lecherous celebrities; brutal cops; and many honest friends.

Mr. Rechy's journey takes him to El Paso High School, where the affluent Anglos go, and Texas Western College (now UT-El Paso), where his handsome Anglo-fairness becomes both social blessing and curse, to Germany with the Army during the Korean War, to Paris, New York, Dallas, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and into the world of the street hustler, which he discovers that he loves because "this was a world in which I would be desired and not be expected to desire, and I would be paid in confirmation of that powerful fact." Finally he enters the world of letters, where he has earned a unique place.

Mr. Rechy wrote City of Night on a rented typewriter at his mother's house in El Paso. Then he bought the typewriter and in 90 days wrote his second novel, Numbers. Readers of those and others of his novels will recognize some scenes and characters from them that have been recast in About My Life and the Kept Woman. Back then they were fictional. Now they're autobiographical. If there's a difference.

Bryan Woolley is a journalist, author and past president of the Texas Institute of Letters.

A Memoir

John Rechy

(Grove Press, $24)

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