January 2024. City of Night by John Rechy
1963, Serpent’s Tail, 532 pages. Written in English, read in English.
In 2004, a bug in the Amazon website caused all of the anonymous reviews to display the actual names of their authors, and a New York Times article had discovered that several authors have used this mechanism to include five-star reviews of their own books. John Rechy was one of them. This is not to condemn him — even if he did write these five-star reviews to allow his books to garner more sales, it is a legitimate and clever marketing ploy. But having read City of Night, I tend to think that for Rechy, these were not marketing strategies but a way to take his own basic facts, his scaffolding, and build on top of it a beautiful cathedral that is completely fictional — what would it have looked like, Rechy may have thought, if a five-star review would have been given this book? What would it say?
I’m saying this because City of Night can be read in two ways, considering you don’t know anything about the book itself. I’ve read it the first way, and then when researching the book, in order to write about it here, discovered that I could have read it a different way.
City of Night is a story of a young man exploring the hustling life in a variety of cities across the United States. His contemporaries, which Rechy calls youngmen in the book, and their society which includes trans women (the book does not detail whether they share the same trade as the hustlers), paint an interesting picture of a segment of the population most readers will not commonly know about. It is told in the first person, and contains enough of Rechy’s own biographical details (his birthplace and ancestral lineage, his travel and presence in various cities in various times) so that an uninformed reader can consider this an autobiography. Or, at least, an autobiographical impression of a certain culture.
Except it’s a novel — therefore, as far as we, the readers, know, it’s completely fictional. One does not know whether any, and how many, of the details provided in the book are real. One does not know if the names of characters have just been changed, if they are amalgams of multiple people Rechy encountered, or if they are completely fictional. We do know this, however — Rechy himself was a hustler, in at least one of the cities explored in the novel, and very likely in all of the others. In fact, he has continued to be a hustler even after the novel has become a celebrated best seller, even after Rechy has cultivated a successful teaching career (primarily in UCLA) which helped also to launch the careers of other authors like Michael Cunningham and Gina Nahai; even after Jim Morrison exclaimed the name of his debut novel throughout one of the Doors’ most famous songs. Which brings an interesting observation to light — one of the most important and interesting aspects of City of Night is that it opens a portal to a culture and a lifestyle that we, the readers, do not necessarily have the ability to observe. We may think, unwittingly, that hustling is a mode of survival. The only way for young men, lately arriving in a big city from a small town, to be able to afford a place to stay and food for the day. Rechy proves otherwise — as he himself has continued to be a hustler by night, while maintaining successful, more “mainstream” careers by daytime, he has shown both by his life itself and by his debut novel that hustling is a lifestyle, part of a culture, and that its participants, as long as they are participants of their own free will, should not be pitied but celebrated. It is easy to consider that the nameless, first person narrator of the novel, may consider his lifestyle in the same way.
The novel anchors around locations — El Paso, Texas, is the starting point, explaining the narrator’s origin story, and also its ending; then there are New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans and Chicago. Each section revolves around anecdotal tales of the narrators’ encounters with clients, contemporaries and friends, divided by stream of consciousness missives about the general condition of the youngman that are all titled City of Night.
The version of the novel I’ve read, a fiftieth anniversary edition, includes a very short epilogue by John Rechy. It is not a Where Are They Now kind of epilogue — Rechy wants to maintain the fictional nature of the novel and does not want to convey which, if any, of the characeters are real. But he does carefully describe the nature of the culture he has been part of then, when he based his novel on some of his own experiences as a young man and a youngman — some of the contemporaries disappear, some die, some stay, some new acquaintances are made, and the culture lives on, perhaps to make sure that a novel written in 1963 is, in its essence, still relevant.
The February 2024 selection for the David Bowie Book Club will be Strange People by Frank Edwards.
