Prologue

A letter came through the offices of Grove Press in New York, forwarded to me in Los Angeles, where I lived in a room in a downtown hotel on Hope Street. The letter was from a man responding in admiration to two stories I had written, recently published.

The first one, titled “Mardi Gras,” had appeared in the leading literary quarterly of the time, Grove Press’s Evergreen Review. The second, titled “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny,” appeared soon afterward in what would become a famous but short-lived literary journal, Big Table. I had sent that second story first to Evergreen Review. When it was twice rejected there, I sent it, on the recommendation of one of the Grove Press editors, Don Allen, who continued to champion it, to Big Table, recently founded. Its editors had broken away from the Chicago Review when, after they had announced their intention to publish sections of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and all of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” its publications board said no to both, fearing a censorship battle.

“Mardi Gras”—which began as a letter to a friend, but was never sent—had recounted, as closely as I could remember out of the fog of hallucination, what I thought of as my season in hell, when, during the Mardi Gras carnival in New Orleans, drunk and drugged and sleepless for sex-driven nights and days, I saw leering clowns on gaudy floats tossing cheap necklaces to grasping hands that clutched and grabbed and tore them, spilling beads; and revelers crawled on littered streets, wrestling for them, bleeding for them on sidewalks; and beads fell on spattered blood like dirty tears—and I saw costumed revelers turn into angels, angels into demons, demons into clowning angels; and in a flashing moment the night split open into a deeper, darker chasm out of which soared demonic clowning angels laughing.

During the purging of Ash Wednesday, as the mourning bells of St. Louis Cathedral tolled, the withering grass of Jackson Square nearby became a battleground of bodies, of men and women besotted with liquor and pills and drugs, passed out like corpses under a frozen white sun; and I fled the hellish city.

My story of Miss Destiny was about a spectacular drag queen who longed for a white wedding and who threatened to one day “storm heaven and protest”; and it was about other queens, male hustlers, and denizens of what was then called the “sexual underground” of Los Angeles. I had lived, and was still living, among those outlaws—lost angels—living the life of vagrant hustlers who inhabited the city’s downtown bars and Pershing Square, a daytime sex-hunting pickup park in the midst of the city, under rows of shrugging palm trees.

Both “Mardi Gras” and “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny” were narrated in the intimate voice of a male hustler, with discernible connections to my own life; and both would, in altered form and years later, become chapters in my first novel, City of Night, a book not yet even contemplated.

In bold black ink, the writer of the letter praising my stories said: “You have opened the door into a world that few people know exists, and you have revealed it with all its exuberance, which I love, and its hellishness, which you describe in one place as dominated by—I admire this very much—demonic clowning angels.”

At the bottom of the letter, the writer invited me to join him for the summer on his private island, an inland island.

Escape!

My life had become entangled in Los Angeles, an entanglement of anonymous sexual encounters that only seldom extended even into morning, a situation I welcomed and guarded. Unwanted demands for affection had kept me for years running away from the large cities I had lived in since my release two years earlier from the army’s 101st Airborne Infantry Division, stationed in Germany, a country still scarred by heavy bombing during the Second World War.

I wrote to the letter writer, thanking him for his praise and, noncommittally, for the invitation, anticipating more details—and airfare, not sure his invitation was legitimate. The man wrote to me again, at the address in Los Angeles I had given him. If I would like to join him on his island for the summer—this letter was brief—he would send me the airfare.

Yes, escape!

I packed the duffel bag I had kept from my army days, and I waited for the air ticket.

Two weeks passed without further contact. I unpacked my duffel bag.

The plane ticket arrived.

I left Los Angeles and said good-bye to no one, wondering whom I would be meeting and why exactly I had been invited: certainly because of the stated admiration for my writing, yes, that; and perhaps because my stories, along with the photograph of me that accompanied the first one, had aroused some fantasy or other, yes, that, too.

I was twenty-four years old, and it was 1960.