Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

I walk along Main Street, Los Angeles, now, for the first time: the jukeboxes blaring their welcome. Dingy bars . . . threefeature moviehouses . . . burlesque joints . . . army and navy stores . . . sweaty rooming houses arcades spotting the blocks. The air is stagnant with the odor of onions and cheap greasy food.

     I recognize the vagrant youngmen dotting those places — the fugitives from now-cold Times Square, not-yet-Mardi-Gras New Orleans, fuzz-heavy San Francisco — and I know that moments after arriving here, I have found an extension, in the warm sun, of the world of night-cities I had just left in New York.

     As I stand on the corner of 6th and Main Street, a girlish Negro youngman with round eyes swishes up: ‘Honey,’ she says — just like that and shrilly loudly, enormous gestures punctuating her words, ‘you look like a youngman who jest got into Our Town, and if you ain gottaplace, I got a real fine pad....’ I only stare at her. ‘Why, baby,’ she says, ‘don you look so startled — this is LA — and thank the good Lawd for that! Even queens like me got certain rights! . . . Now maybe in Russia it’s different. But I’m an American queen! And I Got Freedom! . . . Well,’ she sighs, ‘I guess you wanna look around first. So I’ll jes give you my number.’ She handed me a card with her name, telephone number, address: elaborately engraved. ‘Jes call me — anytime-hear?’ she said. And the spadequeen breezed away, turned back sharply, catching sight of another youngman, with a small suitcase. I heard her say just as loudly and shrilly: ‘Dear, you look like you jes got into Our Town, and I —’

     I walked into a bar near the corner: COCKTAILS 15C. HARRY’S BAR. It’s a long, long bar with accusing mirrors lining its back. A type of canvas hanging across the ceiling from wall to wall makes the bar look like an elongated circus tent. . . . Although it was afternoon, almost every stool is taken. Behind the counter a gay young waiter fluttered back and forth, all airy bird-gestures. The older interested men — the scores — homosexuals who pay men for sex — sit eyeing the available drifting youngmen who stand idly about the bar, by the jukebox, leaning against the walls in studied masculinity.

     I stood at the counter and asked for a draft beer. The fluttering bartender winks. WELCOME! his eyes beam .... Now the man next to me says, ‘You shouldn’t be spending your money.’ He slurs the words, he’s almost drunk. He pushes my money back toward me, replaces it with a dollarbill on the counter. ‘Wottayadrinkin?’ he asks me. I change from draft beer to bourbon.

     For a long while he stares calculatingly at me — doesn’t say anything. I think he’s not really interested, I go to the head. The odor of urine and disinfectant chokes me. There are puddles of dirty water on the floor. Over the streaky urinal, crude obscene drawings, pleading messages are scrawled.

     The drunk man walks into the head. ‘You broke?’ he asks. I said yes. ‘Wanna come with me?’

     We leave the bar — the bartender calls: ‘Have a good time!’ . . . Outside we turn left, past the burlesque house with the fullblown tantalizing pictures of busty women. We go to the Denver Hotel.

     A ratty-looking man with a cigar glances at us, opened an old splotchy register book; we scribble phony names. ‘Three dollars,’ the man behind the counter said. The man I’m with opens his wallet. Bills pop out. He counted out three. The man behind the desk says: ‘The room’s open, you can lock it from inside.’ He doesn’t give us a key. . . . We go up the long grumbling stairway. Along the hall a door is half-open. A youngish man sits alone on a bed, rubbing the inside of his thighs. We move along the maze of. . . lost... rooms until we reach ours.

     It’s familiarly bare inside. For an ashtray there’s a tin can. No towels. The walls are greasy, sweaty plaster peeling in nightmare shapes — no windowscreens. Paper curtains with ripped edges like saws hang dismally over the window: a room crushed in by the brief recurring lonesomeness that inhabits it throughout the days, the nights. The bed is slightly rumpled — as if only a hurried attempt had been made to straighten it after its earlier occupancy.

     The man almost reels. ‘Here’s money,’ he says, again opening his wallet; some dollarbills flutter carelessly on the rumpled bed. I take them. He stuffs the other bills clumsily back into his wallet.

     ‘You gonna rob me, boy?’ he asks me suddenly.

     Then he grins drunkenly. ‘Hell,’ he says, ‘Idongivdamn — happens — happened — manytime.... Dongivdamn.’ His look sobers momentarily. His eyes, which are incredibly pale, incredibly sad, look at me pleadingly. ‘Gonna rob me?’

     And I’m thinking: He wants to be robbed, that’s why he came up here with me, he’s asking me to rob him. I feel a sudden surge of excitement. ... He pushes the wallet loosely into his back pocket.

     After a few minutes, he seemed to pass out: He sighed: ‘Whew !’ — dosed his eyes, turned over on his stomach. His wallet is almost sliding out. With an excitement that was almost Sexual, I reach for the wallet; it slips out easily.... I stand over the bed looking steadily at him, fixing the scene in my mind, experiencing the same exploding feeling of guilt and liberation I had felt that hst time in New York, when I had first gotten money from another man for sex.... I hear the drunk man now in this room with me almost-sob:

     ‘Gonna rob me?’

     The monotonous beat from the jukebox outside invades the room persistently: the moaning rock-n-roll sounds.

     I lay the wallet, intact, beside him, and I walk out, past the unconcerned glance of the man at the desk.

     Outside, in the rancid air, I stand looking at the carnival street. Through the grayish haze of the smoggy Los Angeles afternoon, the sun shines warmly but feebly — the great myopic eye of Heaven.

2

A few minutes later I was in Pershing Square.

     I walk around the teeming park, past the ominous cannon at the corner of 6th Street, aimed defiantly at the slick wide-gleaming windowed buildings across the street — the banks, the travel agencies: The Other World. I’m seeing the Pershing Square menagerie for the first time: that exiled world locked in a block-square outside-asylum among the roses and the shrugging palmtrees, the fountains gushing unconcerned.

     Throughout the park, preachers and prophets dash out Damnation! . . . Ollie, all wiry white hair, punctuating his pronouncements with threats of a citizen’s arrest aimed the hecklers . . . Holy Moses, Christlike, singing soulfully that Jesus loves him . . . Jenny Lu braggingly howling she was a jezebelwoman... a Negro woman sweating, quivering: ‘Lawd Ahs dribben out da debil! — Ahs cast him back to Hell ! — Lawd fill me wid Your presence!’ — groaning in a long religious orgasm.. . Saint Tex who, one wined-up Texas morning, read, scorched on the white horizon, the Holy Words that said: BRING THE WORD TO SINNING CALIFORNIA! . . .

     And while the preachers dash out their damning messages, the winos storm Heaven on cheap wine, .scores with money gather outside the head searching the homeless youngmen and wondering will they get robbed if — . . . and pickpockets station themselves strategically among the listening crowds while malehustlers (‘Fruithustlers/studhustlers’: masculine young vagrants) like flitting birds move restlessly about the park searching the fruits to score from . . . .

     And on the benches along the ledges, the pensioned old people sit serenely daily in the sun like retired judges separated apathetically from the world they once judged ....

     I’m standing in the midst of it now, feeling an overwhelming sadness at the terrifying spectacle of this outcast seething world — when I saw a fat cop marching along the sidewalk, flanked by two younger ones. They walked like soldiers, in perfect step, the two on each side like younger imitations of the fat one in the middle. They marched as if to the cadenced rhythm of a drum heard only by them. I thought: ‘They’re after someone. As they approached me, looking straight ahead, the fat one turns sharply, towards me: ‘Come on, he barked.

     Boom-boom!

     Along the way they pick out two other youngmen: one a slim, sullen-faced boy of about i8; the other, square-faced, smiling and composed as if being rousted by the cops is routine to him.

     Down the escalator. Into the parking lot under the park. Across it. Up the steps again, into the other side of Pershing Square. Down more steps, where, ostensibly, they keep park tools — but, hidden in typical sneak-cop fashion, it’s a place for police interrogations: a baby joint.

     Another policeman sits at a desk. There are two small rooms. On a board behind the desk are many photographs of hardened wanted faces: staring stonily into the room as they had stared at the camera and the cop behind it; as they had stared at the world.

     We sit on a bench facing the bullfaces of the four cops. We stand up, they frisk us — look through our wallets, our pockets, ask us how much money we have. Then they run their hands slowly down our legs, between them — almost lovingly thoroughly. They glare at us disappointed when they find nothing on any of us. Now the one at the desk calls the police station. We hear our names, code numbers covering certain offenses: Robbery, Vagrancy. . . Again they’re Disappointed: None of us is wanted.

     The cop at the desk writes out spot-interrogation cards.

     The fat cop marches before us, stands fat-legged-bull-spread, the stick like a scepter before him. He reminds me of an arbitrary general-sir, impressing the privates. He has a round chubby face like a soft beachball — red; tiny mud-eyes. If he had a white beard and wore a red cap, he would look like a fierce Santa Claus.

     He booms:

     ‘I’m Sergeant Temple!’

     He pauses as if he had just announced The Second Coming.

     ‘Why I brought you down here,’ he says, ‘is I never seen you before.’ Eyes snap calculatingly from one of us to the other on the bench. ‘And I gotta know everyone in this here park. Allayou say you just come to Los Angeles — and I don know what you’re after. But I can suspect if you’re already in the park. ... Now I am saying yes and I am saying no — but I am sayin: Watch Out! . . . I won’t have no wise guys in My Park: No pickpockets. No hypes, no heads. No hustlers.’ He studies each of us for a reaction. We look at him in rehearsed blankness. ‘I’m gettin a good look atya, and I got cards on allaya. If I keep seeinya in the park, I can bust ya for loiterin. I’ll keep you 42 hours, then grabya again. And I will. This here’s a Threat . . . Maybe you just strolled inna the park. I doubt it. Everyone’s hearda Pershin Square. And I’m gonna tellya: it ain as easy as you think.’ I get the feeling one of the other cops is new and the fat one is trying to impress him. ‘Now lotta people in this here park knows me and likes me,’ he went on, ‘and they tell me things I wanna know, so I know wot goes on. Always. And I’m gonna let you innanna secret: We got plain-clothesman all over, watchinya. You won’t get away with nothin!’ He stopped, as if for applause.

     ‘Go on now, get out!’ he said like a tough fat cop in a movie. He turns his back, almost petulantly, to us.

     Outside, the sullen-faced boy walks a short distance into the park with me, says: ‘This town is nowhere, man. I heard all about Pershing Square, and I am scored for nothing yet.’

     Then he goes and sits next to an intrigued middleaged man in a suit.