All this story needs as an introduction, I think, is that it happened in the early sixties and that it is not a story. It is what I perhaps mistakenly consider a report, a reportage. It is straight plain telling.
All this story needs as an introduction, I think, is that it happened in the early sixties and that it is not a story. It is what I perhaps mistakenly consider a report, a reportage. It is straight plain telling.
I went up to Reno from San Francisco after a long illness, to break a pattern of convalescence. Most people go there for amorous or marital or financial reasons, but I went to get a divorce from myself, the sick or malingering self. It was early spring, and I felt like a refugee from the clinics and the test tubes.
On the train, which I took in Oakland, across the Bay, I looked with deliberate interest from my window as the land and water slid by. I liked the movement of heading into something unknown, although the cars crowded with people already stripping themselves and stretching out for the long sit-up ride to Kansas City were not attractive. Men took off their coats and shirts and hung them above their heads on the luggage racks and put their feet out into the aisles and turned off all but the little blue night-lights, so that from the end of the car it looked like the scene of a large accident, with bodies sprawled grotesquely in the dimness. In the seat across the aisle from me, an old woman settled into her feathers like a tired hen and then rustled slowly through a paper bag until she found a hard roll. Holding it with both hands, she chewed on it sleepily, half dozing.
I staggered through the cluttered aisles to the club car, and after a martini I went on to the diner. I ate simply and well, and everything tasted mildly exhilarating, the way it should when a person stops being ill and suddenly is not too afraid to be well and vertical again. Reno came along fairly soon after I had walked back through the tilting, lurching cars, over all the legs, to my assigned seat. I pulled my coat and makeup box off the rack, and we slowed down.
I had gone through Reno once before, a good many years ago, on the same train, perhaps, but heading West. Then, I was sitting in the club car with my husband, and just before we got to the station a kind of squeal went up and the train seemed to tip to the left, like a rowboat, with the weight of people peering out of the windows, piling over each other to see the bright lights. This new night, as I climbed out of the train, I recalled that strange feeling of excitement of so long ago in the travelers from the Midwest gazing at the sinful city of gambling and divorce and high life. With that one quick look up the main street of the little town, they were breathing and touching vice, and without any danger of infection. On one side of the train had been darkness, empty and unheeded, and on the other, for a quick flash—like a peep show—was a glimpse of a gaudily lighted street banked with neon and arched by an electric sign. It was dramatic, so quick a brightness after the long rocking ride across plains and deserts and through mountain gorges. As I got off the train, I wondered if it was still that way.
Out in the cold grey station, it was complicated to get two suitcases that had been checked into the baggage car in Oakland. A polite sleepy porter turned up finally and managed it for me, in spite of locked doors and dark rooms and a general air of disuse about the place. He and I seemed to be the only people who still believed this silent building was a railroad station. He carried my things out to the empty street and put them beside a lamppost. “You be all right here,” he said gently. “I call for a cab. Take some time but be along.”
I stood there passively under the thin light. The air, too, was thin, and cold. I felt doggedly detached about the whole dream-like procedure, and only an Olympian curiosity when two very thin men, dressed in shabby, decent clothes, came silently down the street toward me, pulling along a baby coyote on a piece of string.
“Hi there,” one said in a meek voice. “You ever see a real baby coyote?”
His companion leaned over, miming, to pat the little animal, which was sitting down as if it had walked a long way, and the talking one said, on cue, “He’s real nice. Tame as a kitten.”
“How old is he?” I asked.
“Maybe couple weeks. You want him? Five bucks.”
“Not tonight. No, not now,” I said, and without even shrugging—almost without a sound—the two men went up the hollow street again with the little wild puppy trotting behind them at the end of the piece of string.
I was not thinking one way or another, about Time or anything else, but a cab did come, although I never saw the sleepy porter again. On the way to the hotel at which I had made a reservation, suddenly there was a flash of almost audible light, and, sure enough, I had not forgotten the street of neon and thick gaudy signs with the arch blazing over it. I was in Reno, symbol of sin, of quick divorce and quicker marriage, of unlicensed license, and the hotel lobby seemed a normal projection of the flash-by of the street from that earlier train window—a glitter and glow under the low ceiling, with hundreds of slot machines crashing and flickering and ringing bells, and chaotic decorations twirling in the air to say that even if Time meant nothing, Easter and daffodils and bunnies were next on the calendar.
There were rows of tables for roulette and whatever other games are played on tables, and the people around them were mute—an old Ernst Lubitsch movie of Monte Carlo. It was the slot machines that seemed alive—certainly more alive than the unsmiling men and women who stood woodenly in front of them, not even blinking or twitching when lights flashed for a jackpot. Plump little cash girls packed into white satin shirts and black slacks moved through the voiceless crowds, changing bills into dollars, dollars into nickels. Very loud mariachi music blanketed us raggedly.
In one corner, hidden, was the hotel desk. A trim young man in tight frontier pants and high-heeled boots carried my bags there, and then, when I had registered, he crowded me into a minuscule elevator and we shot past a few floors smoothly. In the room, he did a kind of precision dance of turning on lights, flicking his eyes here and there over ashtrays and such, showing me how to adjust the heat, taking the tip. At the door, he smiled warmly and drawled, “Y’all have fun, now.”
The room was from a hyped-up motel, somewhat elegant. I sniffed it like a cat, and was there. In the bathroom were packets of aspirin and a hangover remedy, and courtesy samples of hand lotion, and free shoe polishers. The drinking glasses and the toilet seat and even the telephone by the bed were marked Sterilized for your protection, and there was a little package of buttons and threaded needles on the television set. One wall of the room was glass, and, below the balcony outside, the Truckee River rushed backward and ducks fought the high water and clutched at the banks in the colored, shifting lights from the lobby, a few floors beneath me.
I began to feel more like a person. I flicked the TV on and off, and then the radio on and off. I read through all the folders on the desk about what was at my fingertips—my beck and call—and what I could eat in the various dining places and when, and mostly what I could drink. For an odd sum like $7.84, or perhaps $14.23, I could have almost instantly a hospitality kit containing fifths each of vodka, scotch, bourbon, rye, gin, ice, and my choice of setups, brought to my room by a smiling cowboy.
It seemed ridiculous to me to pass up the one chance of my life to take a long cool look at the ground floor of this place. I felt that my vision was ready, cleared by illness. I would never again, if I lived here a thousand nights instead of one, be able to see it as I would this night. I called for room service.
The same bellboy who had shown me to my room came, almost as if he had been outside the door. He was neatly strong, and short in spite of his heels, and as impersonal as a geranium in a pot. “Y’all want me?” His smile was a really nice one.
I asked him if he thought it would be all right if I went downstairs by myself, to look around.
He figured me financially, logistically, alcoholically, sexually, in one quick look. I passed. “Y’all’s safer here than in your own home,” he said. “Once you get accustomed, this place is real fun, and no harm done. They keep an eye on things downstairs. Go right ahead.”
I said, like a docile child, “Thank you very much. I really didn’t want anything else.”
He beamed kindly at me and said, “Just go right on down,” and closed the door on a silhouette of slim solid hips and tiny gleaming boots.
Back in the incredible lobby, I felt stiff and shy. I wandered from one aisle of slot machines to the next, trying not to stare too much, not to goggle as the automatic people pulled at the handles and fed in coins and then did or did not scoop up more coins and feed them back again. I told myself that I was invisible, but very soon I knew that I was not. I was being watched covertly by the small plump girls wearing sailor caps marked cash, and by the tellers on their raised platforms, and by the nonchalant plainclothesmen chatting here and there. Probably the cowboy had told them that I was loose in the place—not because I was going to drink too much or even play too much or pick up a man or a girl but because I was a strange one, not yet identifiable. I was not dressed like the rest, basically. I was alone. I might perhaps be a suicide? I had no perceptible rendezvous arranged, in or out of the hotel, so if I was a go-between, between what and what? The eyes were on me.
I decided to go right on drifting, and gradually I knew where the rest rooms were (they were large and comfortable, and a woman in Levi’s and a shabby catskin coat was writing postcards in German script), and where the coffee shop kept open twenty-four hours a day, and where a boy in a high white bonnet made hot roast-beef sandwiches twenty-four hours a day for the gamblers, who forgot whether it was time for what—breakfastlunchdinner. There were people eating orange-juice-coffee-poached-eggs-on-toast, with the preoccupied shaving-lotion look of suburban commuters at 7:22 a.m. At the bar, to which the main aisle through the slot machines led, people were meeting for a cocktail, the women looking very wives-of-suburban-commuters in short brocade sheaths and pearls and mink scarves, and it was long after midnight instead of 7:22 a.m.
Behind the bar was a small stage, somewhat above the bottles, and first there was the blasty mariachi band I had heard when I came into the hotel and then, with a special blink and blare, there was a small jazz combo of four men, with a girl singer. They were Navajo Indians, with an impervious disdain behind their show-biz smiles but dressed snappily and playing fairly well.
Feeling weary, I sat down at one of the small tables between the active part of the lobby and the bar. Around me were several other single men and women, but there did not seem to be any open interest in pickups. I ordered a double Gibson from the motherly waitress. I felt curious about how a drink which I consider an apéritif would taste at that incongruous hour, in that unbelievable place, with no meal to follow. It was good, and I enjoyed it slowly.
The m.c. of the Navajo band was clumsy about being Indian, and angry. He made one too many jokes about it, and told one too many too long stories, and gradually I realized that in the aisle leading to the bar two groups of six or eight young men had gathered, not one-arming but just standing there. They were blond and sharply dressed, and they were getting ready to make trouble with the increasingly racist man at the mike—prearranged trouble. The men in the combo were watching, as they beat and tootled, and the girl, who was perhaps more Mexican than Indian, and almost white-skinned, was watching, too, from behind her trite, sexy singing. All the eyes that I had felt on me before were fastened now on the two groups of boys gathered closer and closer to the bar, the bottles, the stage.
The m.c. told another barely funny story of how the Indian would be here to live on his land again after the atomic bomb had taken care of the white man, and the boys slid on in—and with them, as gently as the flanges of an oyster or the spreading hood of a cobra, the security men in their well-tailored business suits moved in, and the boys, tense with racial hatred and envy and whatever else it may have been, moved on out and away.
The music kept on, but the young sweating m.c. mopped his face and let the girl singer take over and handle the act, and disappeared. The people at the bar and the little tables kept on drinking. I ordered a single Gibson, and felt that I had just taken the last step to safety from a plank stretched across boiling oil. The mariachi players came grinning onstage, and a fat castrado yelped and whimpered through “Guadalajara.” It was time for me to go.
Upstairs, I was painfully hungry. The discreet meal on the train was a century behind me. The folded cards and menus on the Formica desk said I could order almost any dish at almost any time, and by now I knew that downstairs day and night did not mean what I had always thought. Why should I not call room service and ask for scrambled eggs and a glass of milk, a bottle of beer, a split of champagne, or perhaps a hospitality kit? If I poured some milk or beer or wine—or even a double Gibson—into a saucer, maybe the little wild dog would come and lap it up. Far below the balcony, the Truckee still flowed backward, uphill. There were no ducks now, clutching at the banks against the swift water.
I adjusted the heat, turned the TV and the radio on and then off, and decided that I did not want to see the smiling cowboy again, ever, even bringing me nourishment with his good smile. The sun would be along soon, and meanwhile I knew that I was not ill anymore. The divorce had been granted. I had complete custody of myself.
—St. Helena, 1962