Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture

4. Wasted Dreams: John Rechy, Thomas Pynchon, and the Underworlds of Los Angeles, 1960s

4 / Wasted Dreams: John Rechy, Thomas Pynchon, and the Underworlds of Los Angeles, 1960s In September 1964, William Wilcox Robinson published a small, curious booklet titled Tarnished Angels: Paradisiacal Turpitude in Los Angeles Revealed, which offered a thumbnail sketch of the history of prostitution in downtown L.A. beginning with the city’s founding in 1781. In this long history, offered up in no more than thirty tiny pages, the 1890s stand out as the peak years of “open and gaudy” prostitution in Los Angeles , the same decade, as we saw in chapter 1, that Jacob Riis and Ernest Ingersoll fretted over the possibility of being tempted by the inviting eyes of a woman into the dark doorways of the Lower East Side’s brothels.1 If one bookend of Tarnished Angels’s history was 1781, the other was equally specific: 1909. It was the year, according to Robinson, “when the Los Angeles vice district was wiped out” (23). “Until eventful 1909 prostitution had been taken for granted by officialdom, with underworld orders recognized, also, by most of the local judges,” Robinson, from the distance of the 1960s, seemed to lament (24). The story of urban vice in 1909 was a tale of two cities. As I argued in chapter 2, 1909 was the exact year that urban planning was formalized as a discipline and the City Practical movement was initiated to administer cityspace around the mandates of efficiency and the rational allocation of land. New clampdowns on sexual delinquency in so-called underworlds of prostitution and queer sexuality in lower Manhattan and in Greenwich Village were immediate, while in L.A.’s downtown “the parlor houses, the brothels, the cribs were padlocked and the girls were scattered” (24). The selling point of Robinson’s little book was not its sketch of local 170 / wasted dreams history. It was instead the even tinier booklet wrapped inside it like a surprise: a facsimile of an 1897 brochure titled “LA Fiesta de Los Angeles , Souvenir Sporting Guide.” The brochure was a brief Baedeker for men visiting the city who might wish to mix sex-tourism into their time at the annual festival, “a joyous interval of parades, band concerts, and street gayety lasting several days and nights” (3). The brochure’s anonymous editors adopted a late Victorian posture of feigned innocence in their prefatory note as a set-up to the salacious information that their 1890s reader was seeking: “In presenting this little book to the public, we desire to have it understood that it is not for glory or renown, but for the sake of those strangers who visit our fair city and incidentally for the few shekels we get out of the advertisements.”2 With these niceties out of the way, the guidebook’s authors proceeded to facilitate their reader’s sexual slumming tour by providing advertisements for brothels in the downtown area, many of them clustered along rough-and-tumble Alameda Street, where a taste for racial fetishism ran thick. At “The Octoroon,” one advertisement promised, there awaited “a lively, good looking set of girls who will create sport enough to last for a year to come.” Hidden behind the scandalous contents of the brochure was a larger truth about the Janus-faced nature of sex and cityspace, which Norman Klein has remarked upon in The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (1997), “Cities for tourists often have twin images : one for families, one for the underground weekend. L.A. was famous for its underground world, including red-light districts set up by the city itself during the boom of the 1880s. But these shady services,” he adds, “had to be isolated carefully from the real estate promoted to white, prosperous tourists. The raunchy businesses were best left in, or near, non-white areas that tended to be permitted in the north and east of downtown, away from residential real-estate expansion, if at all possible .” 3 The real history of the American underworld, as I have been arguing all along, is a real estate story. But what did Los Angeles’s carnivalesque 1890s world of urban sexuality have to do with the 1960s? What were the parallels that Robinson was trying to imply, but which he left unarticulated? Robinson furnished no explanation for his decision to reprint in its entirety what he called “a rare sociological item for the collector of Los Angelesiana,” but the nostalgic tone of his prefatory history provides some clues...