Whores for Gloria

by William T. Vollmann

  CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION

  WHORES FOR GLORIA

  William T. Vollmann was born in Los Angeles in 1959. He attended Deep Springs College and Cornell University, where he graduated summa cum laude in comparative literature. In 1982 he crossed into Afghanistan with Islamic commandos, and afterwards lived for several years in San Francisco. Vollmann's books include the novels You Bright and Risen Angels, The Ice-Shirt, Fathers and Crows, and Whores for Gloria (all available from Penguin); three story collections, The Rainbow Stories, Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs, and The Butterfly Stories; and a work of nonfiction, An Afghanistan Picture Show. Vollmann won a 1988 Whiting Award in recognition of his writing achievements and the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Award in 1989. He is currently engaged in writing a series of seven novels exploring the repeated collisions between North American native populations and their colonizers and oppressors; the sixth volume, The Rifles, will be published by Viking in February of 1994. William Vollmann lives in California.

  * * *

  "Lucid, lyrical, acrobatically imaginative, William T. Vollmann is one of the few writers around who remind us there are some explorations into the human condition that can best be accomplished through fiction."

  —Paul Gediman, Mirabella

  "A touching, wonderfully uncharacteristic novel. . . . [William Vollmann] is a genuine writer . . . [and] the intricate sympathy he [establishes] among his subjects [is] an essential part of his achievement."

  —Eli Gottlieb, Voice Literary Supplement

  "Whores for Gloria is a fascinating narrative attack. . . . Vollmann writes with deceptive simplicity—very talented and daring—[and] he is part of an important new movement in American fiction, vital and brutally contemporary."

  —Vince Passaro, New York Newsday

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in Great Britain by Pan Books Ltd, 1991

  First published in the United States of America by Pantheon Books,

  a division of Random House, Inc., 1992

  Reprinted by arrangement with Pantheon Books

  Published in Penguin Books 1994

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  Copyright © William Vollmann, 1991

  All rights reserved

  Frontis photograph by Ken Miller

  PUBLISHER'S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously,

  and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE HARDCOVER AS FOLLOWS:

  Vollmann, William T

  Whores for Gloria/William T Vollmann.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-679-40432-6 (he.)

  ISBN 0 14 02.3157 9 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS3572.0395W4 1992

  813'.54—dc20 91-52626

  Printed in the United States of America

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This book is for my family.

  . . . love consists in a mutual interchange by the two parties . . . .

  Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises (1533)

  1

  The Album

  We all know the story of the whore who, finding her China white to be less and less reliable a friend no matter how much of it she injected into her arm, recalled in desperation the phrase "shooting the shit", and so filled the needle with her own watery excrement and pumped it in, producing magnificent abscesses. Less well known is the tale of the man who decided to kill himself by swallowing his athlete's foot medicine. Loving Gloria, he died in inconceivable agony. When they collected a sample of his urine, it melted the plastic cup. — That, it is safe to say, is despair. More obscure still, because fictitious, is the following. All of the whore's-tales herein, however, are real.

  2

  Jimmy

  Once upon a time when Laredo the blonde police decoy was working on a drug bust she watched a man speaking into a pay phone; and as it got dark the sky filled with clouds like rushing bombs and Laredo stood on the corner of Jones and Sutter picking at wrinkles in her skirt and acting like a whore and trolling for whores and pimps and Johns and dealers and whatever else might come her way and the man kept talking into the pay phone and the longer he talked the less notice Laredo took of him because her prey usually looked both ways and placed the call and spoke for five seconds and then walked away with rapid steps glaring around with nervous bloodshot eyes but this man kept talking and talking and holding the receiver tight in both hands; once upon a time Laredo leaned up against the fire hydrant crossing her legs and waiting for some stupe to offer her money so she could write him a ticket; and old people hobbled home to their hotels to double-lock their half-rotten doors for the night and it got darker and darker and the whores came out and sat on the hoods of old station wagons and Laredo spied on them with the all-seeing eyes of a snorkeler; and behind a dark curtain inside a dented van across the street her partner Leroy, who was new, sipped at his Orange Crush and spotted her like a good boy. The street was full of night-sharks. It was alarming at first for Leroy to see their faces so close in the field of his binoculars, thinking that surely they must see him, and when the faces scowled directly at him and came closer, closer like rushing sinister meteors he flinched, knowing then that surely they must be coming at him, but at the last moment the faces flicked to the side. Light ran upon the moving cars like quicksilver. A man in a grey jacket swung his arms bitterly. A man in a raincoat reached into his pocket and pulled out something twisted up in a toilet paper and another man looked both ways and gave him twenty dollars for it. A man was talking on the pay phone as he had been doing for a good quarter-hour; Leroy, who could read lips, focused on him every now and then and saw that he was saying Gloria and Gloria and Gloria. He did not know, evidently, but Leroy knew that the fat lady with the dirty-blonde hair knew because she had been there when Laredo got out of the van hours ago saying wow Leroy this is great! no one can see past the front seat!—and the fat lady was still there and she paced back and forth on the corner and men came by and gave her little pieces of paper which she tucked away into her coat pocket and she kept looking straight at Leroy and walked up to the van and never looked away from Leroy and then turned and walked away.—Is the light glinting on my binoculars? Leroy asked himself. But surely Laredo would have told me. —So he sat there unhappily.—A man in a blue cap stood on the corner; he smiled and winked at Leroy. Two young women stood laughing and leaning against a lamppost; then they suddenly became serious and directed their gaze straight at Leroy.—Did they all see him? Did any of them see him? He would never know. With his binoculars he was like a young bird that has just learned to fly, but does not trust its wings. The new power that the binoculars had given him was not something that he could trust.—Yet the girls did not
move away or shield their faces from him, and soon they were looking in other directions; soon a car honked and pulled over and one of the girls smiled and smoothed her skirt and got in. An aged blonde clopped by like a horse as she inhaled on her cigarette, and her face was lined with grief.—Laredo shifted her aching feet, wishing that the night would end although she was well aware that by the laws of astronomy the night would not end till morning; neither, it seemed, would the drunk on the pay phone. Well fuck it she could take it because in two more weeks she and her husband would be going on vacation, this year to Hawaii to rent a condo on the Kona coast where there were many restaurants with big open windows through which at night the ocean was black and white and green, roaring in with its boiled-snake smell right below the railing where you sat by candlelight trying to make out the menu while the other patrons laughed loudly and threw cigarette butts out to sea, and even after the sea killed their glow you could still see them there in the water, so white and clean-looking. Every morning Laredo's husband went surfing and Laredo watched him with warm and sleepy smiles in between nibbling reads at her paperback and then commenced the real business of the day by fitting on her rented mask and tube and flippers and tightening the straps just so and then gathering everything in her arms like an offering as she began to wade into the warm water, feeling cautiously with her toes for sharp coral and enjoying the hot sun on her back and stepping out deeper and deeper until the waves slopped gently at her belly and she put the mask around her neck and popped on her flippers one by one and took a deep breath and slid the mask down onto her face and bit hard on the breathing tube and stretched out her arms and raised her legs and put her head under, and for a second her face felt cold and funny around the edges of her mask and then there was the sea-world again, of which she was the Empress, ruling proudly over the coral hills, which were not unlike the cactus-studded sandhills of the American southwest—for each coral-bush and coral-flower, no matter how many layers of delicacy it may possess, can be seen through to hardness; and the red sea-urchins brisded their spines like yuccas, and the little pale ones were like chollas: — across this desertscape (which was comprised of mountains in miniature, for no coral hill was more than two or three feet high, and Laredo floated in touching distance of them all) swam hundreds of brighdy colored fish: long thin green ones, with red stripes and blue fins; round yellow fish like swirling eucalyptus leaves; great silvery fish whose cool bellies she could have stroked, had she wanted to, with her quick fingers; tiny blue fish with black bandit-masks, and ever so many more. They swam in schools, or in cross-currents; they seemed entirely unaware of Laredo as she hung there with her face in the water like a drowned corpse, watching them through her mask-window, on the inner pane of which crawled the droplets of her tears (but actually they were only sea water), and Laredo, being a policewoman, believed that if she floated there long enough she would know everything about them, and she drifted along in the warm waves, while just outside this world the sun warmed her back and tanned it more and more perfectly right through the slick salt sea-drops; and Laredo flew over coral canyons in which the fishes unheedingly flurried; but presendy the valleys grew deeper; the bottom began to drop away, and the coral became grey and lifeless, so that had Laredo looked the merest yard ahead (which she did not do) she would have seen a rich blue wall of shadow where the ocean was a hundred feet deep. That was where the damned drunk still stood, talking and talking into the pay phone as if he had a direct line to the Whore of Wisdom, while the cars crawled slowly down the street with glowing red eyes and a cold wind turned the pages of newspapers on the sidewalk (for the air was eagerly reading the news), and the strap of Laredo's handbag (in which she kept her little back-up revolver) dug into her shoulder as she stood with bored patience watching the man leaning forward inside the phone booth as if that would somehow diminish the distance between him and the person he was talking to, and the soft bulk of the yellow pages padded his thighs; — once upon a time a man made a phone call, and the man was crying. Only Laredo and Leroy could see that he was crying. The person to whom he was talking would never have known it. His voice was very low and gende and even. His voice was patient and tender. The phone did not shake his hands.

  Once upon a time a man made a phone call.—What else did the doctor say? the man asked gently. —Gloria? Gloria, what did the doctor say? Are you crying, Gloria? If I can buy you a plane ticket tonight will you come tonight? Yes, Gloria, you can take a taxi cab to the airport, can't you? Gloria? Gloria? I got some money. I can give you some money. —So is my little baby kicking inside you? Is it a girl or a boy? I didn't forget about you. I never forgot about you, Gloria. I never stopped thinking about you. Are you going to have my baby? I got lots of money now. I can take care of you, Gloria. When are you going to get the abortion? Are you smoking a lot of cigarettes? Gloria? Gloria, are you still there? How's it goin', Gloria? Gloria, I'll be waitin' for you.

  The man hung up at last, very carefully and gently, as if the weight of the receiver inside the cradle might break something inside the woman. Then he turned the yellow pages with a frown and scratched the stubble on his cheeks and finally dialled another number.—Yeah he said I want to make reservations on the night plane tomorrow for Gloria Evans that's right from L.A. OK that's right OK ten o'clock you said? Whatever's cheapest.—How much? Eighty bucks? You're fucking kidding.—What do you mean watch my language just find something cheaper . . . that's the best you can do? I heard that one before. Hey babe you got a beautiful voice what's your name how old are you?—Why you sweet young thing, you're old enough to be my mother so just pretend you're my mother; think of me and help me out. Can you- give me a discount; can I jerk off to you? Wow, you're NICE; you didn't even hang up on me! All right now babe I'm counting on you to make sure Gloria's on that plane because she can't take care of herself she needs help in everything she does so you take care of her then you take care of me. Let's get together.—Aw, come on! Hey, I'm clean—you just ask any whore in the Tenderloin! I've never cheated on any one of my women even when I was goin' out with all three of 'em at the same time.

  The man laughed. He hung up. He winked at Laredo and sauntered off whisding. But Laredo was no fool. She knew that the pay phone had been broken for weeks. And she knew that the man was still crying.

  3

  Decision, Decisions

  When everything—EVERYTHING—about life makes you want to grin, and it just gets sunnier and funnier until after a while you can only see the teeth in the smiles and then you feel . . . —well, not "on the edge", exactly, for the world has no edge; but as if you have always been over the edge, and the smiling and laughing is a sort of spastic reflex like crying or retching (really, it's all the same);—when you drink red wine in a cup and try to categorize the geometry of the gleam-patterns you see on the liquid's surface—and you may find, my friends, that you can almost do it: you agree with yourself upon the existence of a light-shape like the outline of a hemisphere drawn in concave at the equator; but another sip and it changes to a gleam-ring all around the rim of the wine circle; and another and it is reddish-black everywhere with the unsteady image of your face in it, your skin redder and your mouth blacker than the wine, and another and you see white specks swimming in the cup: they are not reflections at all, but bits of grease or rice or cereal, or maybe cheek-cells that got washed out of your mouth (the age-old question: is the imperfection, the filth, in you or in the glass?);—but then your attention is diverted forever by the ugly purple stain around the edge of the cup where your lips have been; when everything is so confusing that you can never be sure whether or not your whore is a woman until she pulls her underpants down; when nothing is clear, and whore-chasing is a merry-go-round of death (if you don't catch a disease that will kill you, why, you will go around again, not because you want to die but because until you do everything remains unclear); when you get drunken crushes on women whose drunken mothers used to try to stab them; when the names of streets are like Nabokov's
wearisome cleverness; when only the pretty shapes of women have integrity and when you close your eyes still see them leaning and crossing their legs and milking their tits at you, THEN you may on occasion like Jimmy find yourself looking down a long black block, down the tunnels of infinity to a streedamp, a corner and a woman's waiting silhouette. —Or else like Jimmy you may have another drink.

  The Black Rose

  On one of those days when at two in the afternoon it was still morning because Jimmy had woken up with the dry heaves and the thought of a beer almost gave him the wet heaves, so he was sitting in the Black Rose drinking watery orange juice and nasty tomato juice and a whore came up to ask him for a quarter to do her laundry and it was more of an effort to get rid of her than to give her the quarter and the electronic sign-strip over the video screen said CECILY-CECILY—CECILY and Cecily stood behind the bar and said Hey, baby to Jimmy sofdy when he came in and he was not sure whether he had been there a long time or whether he had just gotten there but Cecily was looking so chubby and adorable in her sweater (but Jimmy knew that Cecily was a man) and Cecily trudged back and forth pouring bucketfuls of crushed ice into the beer cooler and men in cowboy hats sat in the back shadows nodding to the country music while outside the sunshine was so hot and bright that the pissy reek of Jones Street gave Jimmy ONE (1), TWO (2), THREE (3) dry heaves—on one of those early afternoon mornings, then, Jimmy decided to get drunk—not just drunk enough to enjoy life (here he grinned, and Cecily smiled back), not just drunk enough to fuck Cecily for instance up the ass without a rubber, not just drunk enough to hear bees buzzing round his ears and wake up in another bad place he'd never seen before with crushed bugs on the walls and men maybe standing over him looking down at him with their teeth drawn away from their lips, and puke cold and sticky all over his face again, puke being the concretization of Jimmy's disgust with Jimmy whose eyes would be burning and throat burning and stomach squirming like a guilty squid and every muscle aching, and the dry heaves inside him just like heartbeats, just like yesterday;—no, he wanted to be drunk enough to scientifically establish the existence of the whores that he could see all around him. (Jimmy had always liked whores.) So he started drinking. This kind of drunkenness required more alcohol than the buzzing kind; but the alcohol must be spaced out. He had his first Budweiser and he had his second. He had his first Corona with a lemon slice and that was all for the Coronas because they were more expensive; maybe that was why Cecily chose them when he said buy you a drink Cess?—What was her markup? Ten twenty thirty percent. And he tipped her, too. Jimmy would sooner go without than leave no tip. His friend Code Six who knew all the jokes thought Jimmy was soft that way but Jimmy always said they have to make a living too and if I tip them they'll look out for me.—They'll look out for you, all right, said Code Six. You and your wallet. If your wallet's got pimples they'll pop it for you.—You sure you don't want another Corona, baby? said Cecily.—Thanks anyhow, said Jimmy. You know how it is when you're hungover. That lemon kind of set your teeth on edge.—If Jimmy had been anyone else Cecily might have said aw come on I'll give it to you without the lemon but Cecily never pushed Jimmy because he was generous. He was not her best customer but he was a good one.—He had a shot of whiskey and his third Budweiser. Once when Cecily wasn't working she bought Jimmy another shot of whiskey, but he was not sure whether that was this time or last time; anyhow, here was the shot sitting in front of him on a new napkin, and he didn't see any of his money on the bar anymore so he must not have paid for it. More beautiful than the gleam of quarters on the bar was the feeling that there was something else that he would remember later, and more beautiful than that was the way Cecily took care of him, whisking away his napkin every time he crumpled it and rushing him a fresh one, or sweeping away his crumbs, or lighting his cigarette for him. Energy came into him with each beer, more energy each time so that everything seemed happier and happier, more and more energy leaping inside him like the bad bald men leaping into other bars with their Bomber T-shirts to make everyone cheer.