The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  I get it, said Tyler, rubbing his chin.

  I get pity for someone like you when someone’s among us and lonely instead of having the right attitude, and they worry why won’t the Queen play with me?

  Well, Mary, that’s my worry all right.

  The tall man took him aside and said: Henry, lemme give you some advice.

  I appreciate it.

  That new Irene of yours is no goddamned good. She’s just a crackpipe waiting to be lit. She’s gonna smoke up all your money.

  I’ll keep my eye on her.

  You never know what’s gonna happen with bitches, the tall man said. Take that Strawberry over there. One day she came at me with a butcher knife when I was on the telephone. A big old knife, round about oh I’d say eight inches long.

  And then what? said Tyler, already knowing what he would hear.

  I beat that bitch flat on her ass, laughed the tall man. I says to her, Strawberry, you bitch, I’m gonna make you look at me with eyes of fear.

  All right.

  You’re not gonna do it, are you?

  Do what?

  Beat that ho flat on her ass.

  Probably not.

  I knew it. I can smell your goddamned kind. You think you’re better than me?

  Nope.

  I said, you think you’re better than me?

  Oh, dry up. I have nothing against you, Justin. Thanks for trying to help. I figure that—

  You’re just a john. You johns are all the same.

  Listen, Tyler said. The Queen gave her to me to love and to take care of. Do you get that?

  I know. And I said what I said.

  | 175 |

  Domino! said the Queen suddenly.

  Yeah, Maj, what is it?

  Do you trust that Tyler?

  Hell, no, said Domino.

  | 176 |

  He went to meet the false Irene, who never appeared. She refused to tell him where she was sleeping. That night as he walked down Sixteenth he felt coming from the blackness of the streets what he could only call a bad energy. His friend Mikey whom he sometimes saw at the racetrack had been a Marine at Iwo Jima; Mikey said that the main thing to keep him alive had been that feeling. When it tingled in his fingertips and made the back of his neck coldly itch, then Mikey knew to duck down or hide until he could see whatever was trying to get him. Something was trying to get Tyler now, something or somebody evil who knew Tyler and was thinking about him and wanted to harm him, something that could see him right now. Maybe it was waiting in that alley up ahead, or maybe it was closing in from behind, intending suddenly to leap upon him and choke him. He leaned his back up against the wall by the bank machine where three or four years ago someone had gotten stabbed to death. Slowly he let his head turn back the way he had come. Past Pancho Villa’s restaurant the street remained very well-lit, swarming with coffee-houses and fancy new restaurants like the Spanish place and the creperie. Nobody was approaching. He allowed his gaze to turn the other way, down toward Mission Street. At the entrance to the subway station three tall and filthy men stared back at him. He was not intimidated. He knew that he could walk right through them and they wouldn’t do anything, because he might be police. Beyond them lay darkness.

  It was peculiar how different every night was. Last night and the night before, the Mission had been filled with energetic crowds. Now there was not even a whore to be seen and the streets were almost empty except for the occasional police cruiser. He crossed Mission Street, having passed easily through the group of men, and descended to Capp Street, which stank and was dark; and between Capp and South Van Ness, one black man was helping another walk. The one who was being helped shouted with pain. He had no wound that Tyler could see. There were no whores on South Van Ness, but he passed a succession of doorways in which watchers sat, studying him without friendliness or pity. He didn’t much care. The creepy feeling came, departed, returned.

  At Harrison Street he went to call the false Irene’s pager from a very dark pay phone booth beside a warehouse and the pay phone swallowed his quarter and then said he still owed it a quarter; he pressed the change release lever and his quarter slowly ever so slowly dribbled back into his hand. He didn’t like this place. He inserted the quarter again and redialled. The phone was silent like the night without even a dial tone and suddenly he became convinced that the evil person or the evil thing was right here beside him or near enough to be almost here, that it was creeping up on him in the darkness; and he forefingered the change release again, hung up, and walked very quickly out of there. He turned up Mariposa where it was more brightly lit near Project Artaud and the evil one was beside him. From a parked and curtained van there suddenly commenced as he drew level with it a slow, cautious, remorseless creaking as if something were stealthily trying to come out. He walked on quickly. Maybe I’m just getting old, he said to himself, and what I see and fear is my own death. Well, of course that would be the evil thing in any case. It would always be my death, whether it were some reified cancer or heart attack thirty years hence slowly swiming toward me, or a bad person coming to get me right now.

  And then he said: The Queen gave her to me. The Queen loves me. She wants to help me. Even if somebody murders me, I have to follow my Queen. I have to accept my gift. I’ve tried everything else.

  | 177 |

  She was on Seventeenth and South Van Ness at six in the morning, considerably less beautiful than in the dark, exhausted, swollen-eyed, stinking of excrement.

  Hey, I feel so bad that I didn’t show that time, she said quickly. You know what happened? I went to Sixteenth and Mission and I couldn’t cop.* I spent two and a half hours trying to cop, until I finally found some stuff that could halfway do it. The hotels all got raided at once. My friend Beatrice—you know her? she works with me sometimes; she’s people; she’s real cool; she’s got spunk—she got so freaked out I found her crying later ’cause the the police just busted into the room next door with rifles and whatever. I think she ran back to the Queen. She told me to come with her but I knew you’d be . . . Oh, I feel shitty. My leg hurts. And I was so stressed out I just completely forgot about you for four days. Then I remembered, like, hey, that nice guy was waiting on the street corner for me, but by then it was too late. But I knew I’d see you in the neighborhood sooner or later and then I could make it up to you.

  Yeah, that’s all right, he muttered.

  No, it’s true. Do you believe me? I can prove it. I can verify it.

  He was sorry for her, but even more than that he pitied himself for being a mere servile appendage to this decaying body bent only on greedily destroying itself. Again and again, however, he spoke with himself, persuading himself to obey his Queen. He strove to remember and comprehend Sunflower, whom the Queen had pronounced perfect. Did he believe her? Was the Queen perfect? And how could the false Irene be perfect when she was such a slave to her own poisonous needs? In one of the essays, “Civil Disobedience” he thought but John would know for sure, Thoreau had defied his jailer with the statement that no matter where his body might be detained, his mind could wander in and out between the bars as it pleased, like a whore’s dark head flashing back and forth. The serenity, the comforting calmness of this conception had amazed Tyler when he first read it in high school. He’d reflected at that time, and still thought: Even if I end up with nothing, even if I’m starving or physically broken, I retain the freedom of my own self. —He hadn’t, of course. He’d fallen in love with John’s wife. Now he was in the Queen’s orbit. But the false Irene was even worse off, sick and crazed, selfish, isolated by her own addiction. Cut off a man’s airway, or deprive him of sleep long enough, and he will not enjoy Schubert. Most, perhaps all creatures are vulnerable to the despotism of suffering, but the false Irene was more vulnerable still. Her body might wander in and out of the Tenderloin alleys, but her consciousness remained in Thoreau’s cell. She was the jailer of herself, and she’d lost the key. The Queen’s fundamental principle was at fault.
>
  But what if some sacred vapor infused her ecstasies and depths? What if her endless struggle for junk and more junk were a meditation of perpetual equilibrium as valid as Buddha’s stillness on a lotus leaf? What if a brainless sea-sponge which spent its entire life weakly straining food from the currents actually experienced perfect fulfilment because its sensations were unmediated by consciousness? Was this what the Queen meant?

  He refused to believe in the goodness of sickness. He longed to worship the false Irene as he had been told, but could not.

  | 178 |

  Like Lily and the crazy whore and ever so many others, Irene never chose to belong to the Queen’s inner circle. She stayed in the Imperial Hotel on South Van Ness, in a second-storey room whose rent was paid by its other occupant, Sanchez, a seventy-three-year-old Indian originally from Oklahoma who had now been living at the Imperial for three months short of two decades. Throughout that time he had shared his lodging with prostitutes, doubtless for altruistic reasons. Each girl usually lasted two or three months, and then one day Sanchez would come back from the corner store to find her gone and his VCR gone, or her gone and his cassette deck gone; or her gone and his shoes and toilet paper gone. He had had pretty bad luck, Irene thought. Not being cursed with one of those personalities which worries about future calamities, she never wondered whether those girls always left of their own accord. She thought about the past as little as she did the future. Although she believed her mind to be as clear and fine as it had ever been, in fact she could not remember where she had stayed before Sanchez had tottered up to her on that first rainy night on Capp Street when she was cold, wet, hungry and junk-sick, and so Sanchez was God. She had now been with him for twenty-two months. Her superiority to her predecessors had thus been conclusively established, and yet it had taken eight months before she’d felt comfortable unpacking her suitcase, maybe because the room was so small, or perhaps because Sanchez continued silent and almost dark in his moods, unreadable to her, just as she herself was to Tyler. His penis was the most expressive part of him. So it had been on that very first night, which like so many other nights Irene could no longer remember. She spent much of her time on the toilet down the hall, trying to find a vein until somebody else began to pound on the door with both hands. Once when she shot speedball on his bed, Sanchez had struck her. And yet Irene was far from feeling unhappy with her new home. She had never had a sugar daddy before—not that she could recall, at least. Sanchez scarcely asked her anything, and because Irene felt that she had many things to hide, this silence of his gradually transformed its intimations from menace to acceptance. And so she began to indulge herself, leaving Sanchez himself out of her thoughts, considering his room and possessions to be hers. Sometimes if she’d had a good week she used to give him twenty or thirty dollars to help out with the rent, but she didn’t always have a good week and the precedent “put pressure on her,” as she put it, so she stopped. Sanchez didn’t seem to mind.

  Now she started considering leaving him to move in with Tyler. The Queen had spoken with her. The Queen said that Tyler was good (which of course could not be unconditionally believed). The Queen said that Tyler needed somebody to take care of. Irene, flattered by her personal audience with the Big Bitch, was trying to figure out which way to jump.

  Tyler presented certain disadvantages in comparison to Sanchez. First of all, he was younger—always an inconvenience to street prostitutes who prefer impotent octogenarians. Sanchez had never really been Irene’s old man. Indeed, he’d failed to get it up with her after the first month. All he wanted now was for her to lick his balls, which smelled like pigeons and urine. It was hardly a real sexual relationship. Irene needed to be fucked every so often or she started going crazy. But Tyler might ask too much. She was not well acquainted with him. What if in some fit of stubborn selfishness he insisted on penetrating her past boredom into pain, until he became a positive enemy like the man of rage she’d once serviced who would not let her go until she was almost dead? Worse still, he wanted to talk. Irene considered herself a very private person. Since she had to rent out the space between her legs to anyone and everyone, she reserved the space between her ears, as if it were one of those secret urban gardens which San Francisco offers, with their narrow, half-rotten wooden stairs, ripe plums overhead, everything mossy and full of flowers, a nice view of the Bay Bridge’s blue-grey silhouette. (John once went to look at real estate at one of these greeneries, in the steepest block of Filbert Street at Sansome, but the house was more than three million dollars. Maybe Mr. Rapp had that kind of money.)

  When Sanchez met a new prostitute named Angel, Irene became jealous, but talked herself out of feeling that way. She sat on the edge of the bed with her chin in her hands while Sanchez and Angel were fucking. Afterward, Angel approached her with the self-satisfied yet anxious expression of a dog which has just devoured its master’s dinner. —It’s all right, Irene mumbled. I don’t care. —Sanchez looked her up and down in his usual silence. That night Irene began sleeping on the floor. Angel said that Irene had heart. She showed respect, so Irene tried to do likewise. Angel and Sanchez fucked like wild beasts all night. They were so loud and vulgar that Irene was ashamed. She shot every last grain of heroin into her thigh just to put herself out of there, like Thoreau’s untamed soul flying loftily away. In the morning she was alive again, on the floor, with scabies, sick with the need to fix. She went out and peddled pussy on Capp Street for two hours with no luck, but then Tyler paged her and gave her ten dollars.

  Angel was a tall good-looking darkskinned girl who had probably been truly pretty once before she got her habit. Irene began to feel shy in front of her. She waited to learn whether Sanchez would speak to her at last, commanding her to leave; in fact, she almost hoped for that, because then necessity would instruct her exactly what to do, whereas right now she did not completely trust Tyler even though she had become accustomed to Tyler’s money. But Sanchez never said a word. Unable to abandon this sanctuary, Irene determined to make Angel “feel welcome,” which is to say that she strove to play on the shadow of hostess-power she retained due to Sanchez’s taciturnity and her own seniority. She said to her: Sweetie, welcome to our house. (Sanchez smiled ironically.) —Treat it like a home, Irene babbled on. If you need something, just ask. We have a few rules, but only a few.

  The first rule was never to open the window because their room lay only one storey up from and directly over an alley of garbage which in summer stank much worse than Irene and therefore disguised her so that she lived easily with the old man, who could scarcely perceive odors anyway because he chain-smoked. Sanchez had kept that cracked and dusty light-hole sealed for most of his twenty years of residence. Indeed, the paint had long since sweated, becoming glue so that had he ever longed for a breath of dumpster-air he would have first been forced to run the point of a putty-knife along the sash . . . Sometimes it got a little stuffy in there, as Irene delicately put it, and then he turned on the fan.

  Thus ran the main rule, but Sanchez was equally particular about certain other matters. He disliked anyone to knock on his door. Also, he hid his treasures, and expected them not to disappear. Angel of course immediately began going through his wallet whenever she could, her grubby fingers twitching at high speed. Irene had sometimes done the same, but only to give back the money to show him how honest she was—minus five or ten dollars, of course, which she needed for expenses. Sanchez comprehended this and tolerated it; otherwise he would have hidden his wallet. Wasn’t it really an invitation to Irene to take whatever she required, if Sanchez left his wallet on top of the dresser at night instead of sliding it under his side of the mattress along with his special things? Irene, believing this in utter confidence, flourished therefrom like a modest righteous flower blooming from the edge of a heap of dung. Angel, however, instantaneously began abusing the wallet privilege.

  The next thing she did was to ask to use the phone. Sanchez, needless to say, made no reply. —Sure you can u
se the phone, sweetie, said hostess Irene, and Sanchez grinned sarcastically.

  Can I, um, give my mother this number? Angel wanted to know.

  Sure, said Irene. Sanchez sighed and kept quiet.

  Well, um, can I also, um give this number to my boyfriend?

  Sure, answered indulgent Irene. But don’t give it out to everyone. Sanchez and I are trying to make you feel special. Not very many people have this number, sweetie, and we’re trying to keep it that way.

  After that, all Angel’s business dates kept calling day and night. Sanchez’s sister had to go into the hospital for triple bypass surgery and Sanchez was waiting for the doctor to call him and tell him how the operation had gone, but Angel stayed on the telephone for two hours. Finally Irene had to tell her to get off. Angel freaked out. She called Irene a rotten cunt and disinvited her from living with her and Sanchez. So Irene spat in her face. Angel shouted out to Sanchez to defend her, but Sanchez merely picked his nose. —Why, you lazy old fucker! cried Angel. You—you—why do old men always get so greasy? —Her accusation was not entirely truthless, at least in the case of its target, because Sanchez always tried to make his clothes last as long as he could, to save money. Irene wasn’t that way. Like most of us, male and female, she considered herself to be clean in body and soul. Nobody, including Tyler, ever told her that she reeked. She sometimes went to thrift stores even if for reasons of addiction she should have been dating instead. That proved her desire to present herself nicely in society, a magnificent Christmas present for anyone who could pay. Sanchez, on the other hand, wore his clothes for a week or more at a time. It might well have been that he smelled; Irene was the wrong one to ask . . .