The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  | 106 |

  A trick went up the stairs of the Odin Hotel with Lily; and the manager, after having buzzed them into the dark green moldy stinking lobby, slammed the grating behind them and then advanced on Lily, snarling: Bitch, you gotta pay your fuckin’ rent, bitch!

  Don’t you call me a bitch!

  You don’t interrupt me in front of my Mom, bitch! he cried, and then the trick saw the tiny creature which cowered in the corner—evidently the manager’s mother, although the trick would not have imagined that the manager could have had a mother.

  Lily took the trick’s hand and started to lead him to her room when the manager forcibly broke their grip, shook Lily’s shoulder and shouted: Get behind me and shut up, bitch! Don’t you ever walk in front of me!

  He scared her. He tried to hurt her. She fled, and joined the Queen . . .

  | 107 |

  The question of the Queen’s origin, and related questions such as: Was she the only one, or do the unsubdued powers of old Canaan continually form new Queens for the benefit of this world’s outcasts? and then all the unrelated but predictable questions of divinity students, such as: Did blood or celestial ichor flow in her veins? all lack depth and force. We need only know that she was beseeched, and she came. There were no omens of her coming, although retrospective omens are easily invented by those who wish to make life less mysterious than it is, which is why many of the beseechers, Strawberry in particular, would later tell the most extravagant tales. (Extravagance, by the way, is really a form of simplicity. Consider, for example, the magic four-digit Department of Motor Vehicles access number which allows a private eye to read his target’s address and personal description—how wonderful it all is! But the DMV, staffed in part by corrupt incompetents, presents to the world an unedifyingly error-ridden database. If you ask Henry Tyler how he found the Queen, he might say: Well, Dan Smooth helped me, but I matched her social with the DMV database. —And yet we know that she had no social security number. She didn’t exist. Extravagance, simplicity!) Strawberry insisted to the end that a full year before ever being crowned, the Queen appeared down on Second and Mission in front of the old Van Heusen furniture store and at that moment Strawberry felt a strange and thrilling feeling. Could the real truth have been that, wearied almost to death with the dark stale silence of her life, which never thrilled her anymore even when the needle went in, she needed to imagine some transcendent joy at sufficient remove from her that it could not be destroyed by examination? Or maybe the Queen had actually descended into reality before Strawberry’s eyes. Trying to harvest literalness from Strawberry’s myth-fields, I fear, is as exhausting as trying to compare the hard, brilliant comebacks of the Tenderloin girls with the dumb stench of their Capp Street sisters such as Sunflower whose soul had long since closed down for routine business like a fire department on a Sunday afternoon and who arguably never remembered or even perceived her Queen at all. That other beseecher, Sweetpea, who offered the world a whole museum of teardrop tattoos on her forehead, and later insisted that she’d been ready from the very first to do anything on the Queen’s behalf, actually claimed at the time in question that “the girls” could never get together because they were all on drugs and their minds were clouded, that if any Queen asked them to unite with her for mutual protection they’d just laugh. For that matter, Sweetpea herself laughed, and her laugh was more bitter than a flash of winter lightning. Oh, but to hear her tell it! —Soon’s I saw that dear little bitch, I knew, she told Dan Smooth. I knew she was my bitch an’ I was her bitch, forever and ever and ever. —Later, during the reign of Domino, she altered that story considerably.

  No, there couldn’t never be a Queen here in the Mission! Chocolate insisted. Maybe in the Tenderloin, because those girls are more high class than us. But not here. Well, actually, since we’re so bad off, maybe we need a Queen more here.

  When she said these words to Strawberry, she was not postulating, only playing, and her eyes resembled the grinningly cruel white-set windows of Alcatraz.

  But Strawberry, faithful to postulates and to material possibilities, quietly replied: You saying you want to be the Queen?

  No, I don’t have means to support the other girls, Chocolate said, condescending to acknowledge that faith because patience and politeness were her profession. —You think if I had means I’d be out here doing this? I worked in a shipyard out in San Diego before this, and then I was a house painter in Portland, Oregon. This is the only I guess you’d call female job I’ve ever had.

  You ever get lonely out there? Strawberry asked.

  Hell, yeah. Don’t we all?

  You want somebody to take care of you?

  Sure. But I don’t know any sugar daddies. Who the fuck’s gonna take care of me?

  Chocolate, don’t you have family?

  Oh, family. Gimme a break!

  Well?

  I got brothers. They’re the biggest bunch of crooks, theieves, and headaches this side of the earth. And becase of what I do, they don’t know me. Well, I can see that, but ’cause I do what I do, I’ve supported their drug habits; I’ve given them a place to stay when their women kicked them out.

  Chocolate, do you want family?

  Then in sentences of purest oxygen, which surpassed those of any fat lawyer whispering sweetly into a shackled felon’s ear, Strawberry told her about the Queen, about how if you came in after a long night on the street and hadn’t been able to score any dates, the Queen would front you your drugs until you made good; she’d give you a place to stay, too. . .

  Sounds like a pimp, said Chocolate irritably.

  No, a pimp keeps all your money. The Queen’s not like that. She just takes ten percent, like insurance, to share with the girls that need it. She does it out of love.

  Bullshit.

  I’m telling you true, baby.

  Then the other pimps are gonna run her out, unless she maybe stays in some warehouse south of Market . . .

  Chocolate, what would you do if a lady said she was the Queen and offered to take care of you?

  Tell her to kiss my ass and fuck herself.

  At the same time, honey?

  Oh, go to hell, said the black woman, her eyes lidding just like the automatic plastic window slowly sliding back down over the keypad of a bank machine after a transaction.

  So much for Chocolate, who soon would love her Queen with an almost bestial tenderness. Who knows where the bright light truly comes from, and who can foresee the whirlwind? Not even the crazy whore. And Tyler, wandering near home on a dismal Sunday morning, or eating breakfast in some sad diner, with Ocean Beach seen through saltblasted windows, likewise understood less than we might imagine; his lust for logic seduced him into retrospective explanations as sterile as those detail description sheets of his profession, which can hardly begin to categorize the world bright, blue, green, and blurred, the world with its many suns of sparkling cars flashing like Phaëthon’s chariot down the track—hardly that, let alone the old, old Queen in her otherwordly glory.

  | 108 |

  Domino’s induction into the ranks of the Queen’s women was, as may well be imagined, pregnant with difficulties for all concerned. The blonde began as one of those solitary runaways unabsorbed by the crowd at Golden Gate Park; she did not want to be absorbed. Around her swirled the street people with their feuds, hugs, dogs and bicycles. She remained aloof. Tattooed backpacker boys pestered her, and the eyebrow-pierced girls who sat on their duffel bags on the sidewalk tried to befriend her, but Domino remained too honestly and incorruptibly angry to join any crowd (even though inside the runaway still dwelt the little girl who had read a lot of romances and loved talking about conspiracy). When her new profession became known, one of her many enemies wrote on the wall DOMINO SUCKS—LUV SPREADS GERMS but Domino, her eyes stinging with hot tears, merely stood in front of this monument to herself when she waved at cars. A week or two later someone else’s enemy wrote MIKEY IS A TAR BABY on the same spot, and then the antagonism
of the world, like its sympathy, quickly faded, leaving Domino alone, which is to say bitterly emancipated, like the tall man with his obscene war-cries against all citizens as he called them, all greengrocers, steadyjobbers, bourgeois taxpayers. “Dating” the longbearded old white men and the blacks in their wool caps of all seasons, and every now and then getting paid to do what she loved with two scowling lesbians in the hardware store, she strode proudly up and down the street in her new jean jacket, panhandling couples in gold-tinted mirror sunglasses and later screaming at them if they ever dared to say: I helped you, she kept her righteousness, and yet life grew worse and worse until after a stint of lap dancing and some cell time in San Bruno, she became just another kid in a dirty hooded jacket sitting on the sidewalk with her backpack on, panhandling and giving blow jobs; then she got another exotic dancing job, from which she was quickly fired; then for a while she became the greenhaired girl whose sign lied:

  * * *

  1. PREGNANT

  2. HUNGRY

  3. HOMELESS

  * * *

  and then gravity slowly dragged her backward by her ankles and she skidded down past all the girls whose hair was dyed red or blue, past stores selling slinky leopardskin polyester and skull beads, far past all those sunny Saturdays on Haight Street where couples with sweaters tied around their waists used to promenade and give Domino money; she sped down past the other panhandlers, who gazed severely at their boots, and before she knew it was a Tenderloin streetwalker, then one more time a dancer who got fired; she tried office work but the boss didn’t like her attitude, so there she was down in the hotels on Eddy Street where the rock was yellow these nights because they cut it with cornstarch instead of baking soda; there she was wiggling her buttocks and expapillating among the late afternoon leaners and swaggerers just across the street from the Mother Lode’s lavender-fringed windows (inside, on the screen of the ATTACK FROM MARS video game, SAY NO TO DRUGS advised the neon). A cloudless sky, almost as dark as the lavender hemispheres on the Empire Massage sign, helped her pretend that she was still young. Then her first pimp took her. He was as tall as a fire escape. She ran away, but he found her and gave her her first cigarette burn. She tried to run away again—oh, what’s the use? Street life pays its wages; it pays them regularly.

  At least we have a place here where we have some refuge, Strawberry said to her. We ended up friends, and it’s neat in a way, it is.

  But soon enough Strawberry, tormented and gaffled by the blonde, would be screaming at her: I’ll cut your head off!

  Come on, said Domino. Let’s go. Let’s just go down the road right now, just you and me. Come on, come on.

  After that, Strawberry was scared of her. When Domino got on the streetcar, Strawberry saw her and got on a different car. But the Queen forced the two of them to make up. . .

  Right now Strawberry still meant to be concerned and motherly in just the same way that Bernadette, now homeless, scolded her ten-year-old daughter (who lived under the foster care of her aunt) for taking the bus to Marin County alone because the girl was starting to “develop” as Bernadette delicately expressed it; Bernadette stashed her breakfast in the trash can and then walked her daughter to the bus station. Strawberry longed to show similar love for her new blonde sister, so she coaxingly said: I mean it, Domino. It’s really neat. What do you think?

  I don’t want to talk about it.

  Leave Domino alone, said the Queen, caressing the blonde’s neck, but the blonde shrugged her off. The Queen regarded her sadly.

  The Queen had known what the matter was even without seeing in the newspaper that photograph of Domino’s sister, who, skinny and old, with a diamond-faced, sunken-cheeked face on a long snakey neck, had just been arrested for helping her boyfriend catch a thirteen-year-old girl whom Domino’s sister herself had dragged into the charcoal-grey van, then bludgeoned, bound, and gagged while her middle-aged boyfriend drove to a Tahoe motel. They left their victim in the van until it was dark. Then they wrapped her in a long bag and carried her into the motel room on their shoulders. They never took the gag out, so they weren’t able to make her suck them off, but the boyfriend, who in police file photographs appeared to be as bored and hangdog as an old security guard at some museum gallery, raped her with his penis while Domino’s sister raped her anally with a dildo and afterward licked the tears off her face. It was almost four in the morning by then, so they didn’t even bother to wrap her up or dress her when they carried her back to the van. The boyfriend had brought his face close to the girl’s terrified face and breathed on her, then promised to let her go, just to watch her face change expression while Domino’s sister masturbated. Then they started driving slowly toward the mountain pass. Domino’s sister got the clothesline.—They threw her corpse into a snowdrift. The police found it two days later. Domino’s sister’s boyfriend was smart enough to blow his brains out, but Domino’s sister thought she could beat the rap by blaming everything on him.

  Many months later, on a sickeningly hot summer day on South Van Ness when the Queen and Domino were alone, the blonde said: I knew about it before it went down.

  Mm hm, said the Queen.

  You gonna drop a dime on me?

  You make me so sad when you say that.

  Well, Maj, are you planning on dropping a dime on me or not?

  Lordy lordy day, the Queen muttered. You gotta trust . . .

  But that was months ahead.

  They got you brainwashed, dearie, the Queen had said to Domino on that first occasion. You’re a pretty, pretty girl. You just fell in with the wrong crowd. They just usin’ you for your body. You don’t have to suck nobody’s dick just to get your dope.

  Who are you to tell me what I don’t have to do?

  I’m a prostitute, the Queen told her. Same as you are. Well, a semi-retired prostitute. I’m busy now lookin’ after my girls. And I tell all my girls this: If you want to suck dick, go ahead. But they gotta pay you good money. If you want to get your dope, all rightie. But you have the right to buy the dope of your choice with your own money an’ not get gaffled, see what I’m sayin’?

  Domino tried to stare her down, rubbing a new burn on the back of her arm. —You’re just a control freak, aren’t you? I bet you want to tie me up and fuck me and then turn me out.

  Lordy lordy, sighed the Queen. Justin, find her pimp and bring him to me.

  The tall man came an hour later. —He said he’s not goin’ anywhere. He said he gonna ex* his runaway blonde bitch. Domino, your pimp gonna kill you!

  Oh, fuck off, the blonde said, trembling.

  Domino, you want to stay with me? said the Queen. I can talk with him. I can persuade him to set you free. An’ if you don’t like it here, you can leave anytime. How about it, child?

  Strawberry, still trying to soothe and befriend the blonde, laughed and said: Maj wanted me to move here a hundred years ago, but I was like, I wanna be independent. Now it’s just, I wanna be home.

  Well, that works for you maybe, Domino said. Me, I just want to be evil.

  These girls, man! marveled Chocolate. These girls like Domino! I look at ’em and say you stupid bitch.

  You just want me to to be your slave, Domino said.

  You know what? said the Queen, drawing Coptic crosses on the wall. I’ve treated you so good this past five minutes, Dom. I mean, you’ve got to be one of the best treated and best dressed slaves in my whole kingdom. You don’t even have your chains on today.

  Domino, sensing that the Queen was making fun of her, clenched her fists and said: Well, bitch, why do you do it, then?

  Why do I do what? Make people into my slaves? How about Strawberry here? Look her in the eye, Dom. You think Strawberry’s got slavey eyes?

  Domino, feeling suddenly so ashamed and sad as to be almost breathless, grunted something, her head hanging down as she gazed dully at Beatrice’s feet.

  Maj is waiting! shouted Chocolate, and this injunction revived the blonde’s raging suspicion and longin
g to be gone even though she had nowhere to go, so she shouted: You want my soul. Well, you can’t have it, ’cause it’s mine mine mine. And it’ll never come out.

  You know, you’re a rude little thing, laughed the Queen, long-legged, barefooted; the silver necklace on her throat. —You don’t care about what I’m saying, right? You think Beatrice here’s my slave? You think I’m a she-devil? Is that what you think?

  What do you want? the blonde wept. What do you want from me?

  I want you to lemme love you an’ protect you. Go now, honey. You don’t know what you want and I got things to attend to. That pimp he try to hurt you, I’ll take care of it.