The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  But on the Strip it’s pretty safe?

  Casinos have got such a strong security force that they’ve eliminated crime in their area, but as a result of getting that security, they can also keep crime from getting to press. Every now and then there’s violence, but they hush it up. That’s what I say, but course you’ll never be able to prove it.

  Vacant lots that smelled like piss, a bar, a dry cleaner and laundromat, these were all good clues as Mr. Private Eye Tyler might have said, but although Tyler and the driver kept looking for the good stuff (the driver half-heartedly) they could not find any crackhouse that was open. Tyler didn’t really care.

  The driver was telling him a story about a fare who wanted crack:

  I picked ’im up at a nudie place and he asked me to take him downtown, and he pulled over in one of those light industrial places. I said, look, I don’t want you doing that business in my cab. He throws me a ten (it was like a four dollar fare) and he says to me: Drive around the block, and if you don’t get another fare come back and pick me up. Well, so I came back and got ’im, and boy was he hopping mad! Man, but they’d sold him some rock—real rock! He’d paid for crack cocaine and what he got was a quartz crystal.

  That was Las Vegas ersatz for you, Tyler thought. Casinos and the crackhouses, it was all the same.

  Feminine Circus is a product of Circus-Circus and Excalibur, the driver was saying. They know everything there is to know about making money. They only operate out of cash flow. They do everything reasonably well . . .

  Yeah, that applies to crack dealers, too, said Tyler.

  The driver chuckled.

  So you think Brady’s pretty smart, huh?

  He’s the man of the hour. He’s the great American untouchable. And Feminine Circus, well, I’m just amazed no one ever thought of it before. It sums up the national mood, you could almost say. It’s brilliant. It’s as real as you want it to be. It’s . . .

  Have you been there? asked Tyler.

  Hey, man, you getting nosy on me? What are you, some kind of cop?

  I didn’t mean it like that. I was just wondering if Feminine Circus is worth going to, that’s all.

  Well, it’s pretty wild in there, the driver said. Everybody tries it once. I guess I don’t mind telling you I’ve tried it. You go in, and they have all these ugly girls who stink, and they drool all over you. That Brady, I have to say, I respect his balls, when everything else in Vegas is so pretty-pretty, to come up with something that looks like where we are now. . .

  So those girls of his, those virtualettes—

  Oh, that’s a standing joke, said the driver. Don’t tell me you believe those girls aren’t real . . .

  They were swinging back in to town again, passing the Satin Saddle, a topless place, and the Palomino, which was bottomless, and the driver said: The Palomino has a cover of ten bucks and a two drink minimum at six bucks apiece, and Tyler thought: why, that’s a step ahead of the crack dealers! I never met a crack dealer who charged a cover.

  You think Feminine Circus will do well? he said idly.

  You mean, will they get raided?

  Well, if they’re real girls . . .

  See, that’s Brady’s genius, said the driver. Nobody cares about retarded girls. But sooner or later some feminist will bust his balls. If he’s smart he’ll make his bundle and leave the country . . .

  | 323 |

  You build a new one and it’ll always be full, the driver went on. Whether that’s going to be enough to make the whole city go, I don’t know. I don’t see that the owners care, either. If Brady’s new seven thousand bed fuckhouse creates seven thousand vacancies someplace else, Brady won’t care. But you have to believe that the stock market will keep going up in the long run, and Vegas will keep growing, and people will keep spending money on products no one’s even thought of yet. Me, I’m working on a certain kind of virtual pet. If I can just unkink one glitch, then you won’t see me driving this cab anymore . . .

  * * *

  •BOOK XX•

  * * *

  “Demons Are Here”

  •

  * * *

  For the lips of a strange woman drop as a honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil. But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.

  PROVERBS 5.3–5

  * * *

  •

  | 324 |

  On Larkin and McAllister just past the old library rose another grimy granite mausoleum, whose neoclassical statues on high were speckled and pitted by polluted air so that they now resembled the flesh of a Capp Street girl, and beneath these poxed entities rose from a sleeping bag, not unlike those of a priest elevating the host, a pair of arms. The arms embraced a dog, which opened its mouth and softly panted, while the hair of homeless outcasts blew in the wind. The dog was tied to the left arm with a length of clothesline because he sometimes liked to wander beyond his own good. He almost never barked. When he was a puppy, the biker he’d then belonged to had trained him in the ways of silence by biting his ear whenever he uttered any sound, even a whimper. The biker had moved to Ohio, abandoning this dog now skilled in silence. It was evening, and the arms were both tired. Their owner was a man named Crutches, who whispered: They tried to gimme a ticket for littering. Can you believe it? Yeah, well, I be rollin’ it up so quick so they don’t see . . . Well, I be movin’ so fast . . .

  Crutches’s comrades were squatting and smoking.

  One of them pointed. Brady’s Boys were patrolling past.

  Vigs! Better let the Queen know, whispered Crutches with a wink.

  I saw one right over there, a vig was saying. Right behind the sheriff’s office.

  And I seen you, too, said Crutches to himself. You can’t slip nothin’ by me.

  Ready to do it again? said the first vig.

  Okay, his colleague replied. Here’s an easy one. Leviticus 18.3.

  Let’s skip the Egypt part. That’s irrelevant. God says to Moses: You shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you.

  Good, but you forgot to say Amen. Now Leviticus 20.23.

  And you shall not walk in the customs of the nation which I am casting out before you; for they did all these things, and therefore I abhorred them. Amen.

  Sighing, Crutches got up, gripping one of his eponymous instruments of locomotion in each armpit while the dog waited patiently, then slowly grated, dragged and clattered his weary way down to the Turk Street parking garage, outside of which Strawberry was trolling for sex work. As Crutches wheezed and cackled Aintcha an eyeful now? the dog with surprising initiative lunged forward, almost pulling the homeless man down, and licked her miniskirt.

  Aw, ain’t that sweet, the whore said. He wants to kiss me.

  Hey, Killer, cut that out! Listen, Strawberry. Tell your Big Bitch there’s new vigs in town. They got like uniforms and everything. It looks bad. I told Maj before, I . . .

  Okay, Crutches, I’ll tell her. She’s already heard. But I gotta go now. I’m kinda busy right now, okay?

  Any luck?

  Oh, my regular shoulda showed up half an hour ago. I was hoping to do that one quick flatback and . . .

  An’ tell her I don’t want no reward or anything, but . . .

  But you didn’t tell us just out of the goodness of your goddamned heart, right?

  Amen, sister! Sure has been one tough month. And they got these red jerseys, well, maybe vermillion you might call it, with the letters B.B. embroidered on the front. They say it means Brady’s Boys . . .

  All right, Crutches, thanks. I appreciate it. Now lemme do my job.

  I guess I’ll never see it. I guess you streetcrawling bitches won’t send one goddamned rock my way. Do I get cynical? Sometimes I don’t feel like doing my job.

  | 325 |

  Now, did anyone see my little encounter with the man across the street? said Rodrigo.

  Yes, we posted you.

 
That man is scum. That man’s a Queen’s man. Put him in the database. His name’s Crutches. He talked back to me. He practically threatened me. But I got the last word. Remember that, troops. The last word must be yours. Sometimes you gotta draw your line in the sand. Form up, form up!

  Rodrigo paced like a tiger and went up to the flag-wavers who were ignoring him, and he cried: Hey, why aren’t you training with us to stamp out dirt?

  A teen approached, and soon Rodrigo was shaking his hand, saying: Good to meet you, man!

  The tall gangbanger types would smile, wad Rodrigo’s leaflets up and toss them. Rodrigo kept smiling. —You gotta be loud, he told his shyest soldiers. You’re Brady’s Boys.

  Can I take a picture of you with my little girl? a grandmother said.

  Sure, lady. Right over here. Post me, boys.

  Someone threw a bottle on the sidewalk, and a Brady’s Boy rolled it carefully away with the toe of his boot . . .

  | 326 |

  Shyly and halfheartedly, a Brady’s Boy got out a leaflet and handed it to the small, slender black woman.

  Mm hm, said the Queen.

  And, ma’am, if you’d care to help us with a small d-d-donation . . . said the boy.

  What is it you’re tryin’ to do, honey? Put the hookers out of business?

  That’s right, ma’am.

  What do you have against hookers?

  We have n-n-n-nothing against them, ma’am. We want to help them. They’re all abused . . .

  You mean raped.

  Th-th-that’s right, ma’am.

  Here’s a dollar, said the Queen. You seem like a nice boy. Have you ever been with a prostitute?

  No, ma’am. Excuse me. Ma’am?

  Yes.

  Wh-wh-where are you from, ma’am?

  And you ask everybody that, don’t you?

  Yes, ma’am, said the boy, remembering his squad leader’s instructions: Royce, you gotta smile at ’em, say hi, how ya doin’? Then you’re gonna ask ’em: Are you interested in getting involved?

  Well, I’m from the South, said the Queen.

  A-a-ah, said the boy uncertainly. That’s good.

  Yeah, but now it changed a whole lot since I been there last time, it seems.

  Like how?

  Like it’s raggedy now. The house I was raised in, that’s gone. Just an empty lot. I was hopin’ to see the house I was raised in.

  The boy had run entirely out of utterances. Returning the leaflet to his hand, the Queen returned to Justin’s side, sighing: The younger generation . . .

  Marching proudly back on down the parade path, the boy reached HQ: a small, grimy storefront on Golden Gate just past Polk, where beneath a wall of plastic cartons filled with empty beer cans his colleagues were being videotaped by Channel Seven News. He was afraid, and ran to go get doughnuts.

  Hey, at that Tenderloin street fair there were about fifty of the Queen’s guys bothering us, a guy with a long greasy ponytail was telling Channel Seven. —Really badmouthing us, you know. They’re always armed. But I’m right there, where my family is. I’m a Brady’s Boy, and I’m ready for ’em.

  I have a very bad background, one of the vigs, big-armed, bearded, and sideburned, was explaining to a starry-eyed reporter. See, I used to sell heroin, crack, cocaine. I even got my own sister addicted so I could pimp her out and make money to buy more powder. I turned her into a devil worshiper. Oh, Lord Jesus, can you believe my sin? She was worshiping at the altar of the Black Queen, ma’am, you know, the Queen of the Wh—the Prostitutes. But Mr. Brady gave me like a window. He let me look through that window and I saw the promised land. He turned me around. So I’m grateful to him and his organization.

  What about your sister?

  She just completed a recovery program. She’s married, with four lovely kids.

  Clean green jackets hung on hangers in the niche under the loft. The vigs sat on dirty sofas. Some were bounty hunters, good people who helped tight-smiling Mr. Cortez get ninety-six percent of his bail-skippers back (whoever cosigned the bail form had to reimburse Mr. Cortez for the bounty hunters’ fees). Others were saved persons, zealots, saints, careerists, thugs, depressives, world-fixers, henchmen, ideologues, devotees, compassionate Buddhas, sadists. Maybe it didn’t matter what they were. By the trash can, trays of half-eaten turkey lay on the table by the microwave; the homeless delegation hadn’t come for it yet. This was HQ; this was the throne-hall of judgment.

  For the benefit of the starry-eyed reporter, the vig held up a fuzzy toy leopard—a gratitude-offering from a girl he’d rescued from the Queen last week. (Actually, Brady’s slapper had bought it at Macy’s.)

  Rodrigo, would you tell us all the story behind this leopard?

  Yes, ma’am. This young lady, she was at Turk and Jones, which I don’t mind telling you is kind of a bad corner, and, well, you know, she was working, and then this pimp she’d tried to run away from started bothering her, because she wasn’t bringing in money for the Queen no more; she was on her own, so that pimp was under instructions to punish her and bring her back into the fold. The Queen’s murdered young girls for less. Justin’s this pimp’s name. He’s got a record as long as the Bay Bridge. Well, I politely asked him to leave her alone, ’cause I could see she was scared, and he pulled a knife on me, so I socked him good and then called for backup. A couple of my buddies was witnesses. We held him until the cops got there, and we helped the girl press charges for assault. Now the Queen don’t mess with her no more.

  And is she still—working?

  No, ma’am. She’s a paralegal. She’s helping battered women. Especially rape and incest cases. She told me she wants to devote her life to stopping prostitution at the roots.

  And what’s the best way to do that, Rodrigo?

  We gotta start a public awareness campaign. Go after the johns who are exploiting the women, go after the pimps, get the Queen who’s at the heart of it all.

  | 327 |

  Ah, but easier said than done! Looking down from the summit of Jones Street into the grey canyons of the Tenderloin into which tricky johns sometimes spurted like drops of semen (all right, baby! croaked Strawberry in her sexy druggy voice, flinging her arms around the man), how could one hope to see the Queen lurking in her squat tunnel with its twin rows of steadily diminishing ceiling-eyes, or the Queen’s spidery spies like Crutches and Kitty and the crazy whore scuttling to and from the parking garage?

  You’re not supposed to give witnesses anything, laughed Smooth, because then you’re paying for the testimony and it’s not objective, you see.

  Oh, fuck that, growled Crutches.

  Give the man his little rock, sighed the Queen. Thank you, Crutches.

  Thanks, Maj, said the homeless man, hobbling off.

  Any other business to take care of? Anything else this Queen’s gotta do? I know I need to help Strawberry change Sapphire’s clothes—

  I can do that, Maj.

  Allrightie then. I’m gonna ghost away now.

  Naturally, said Domino from the side of her crooked mouth.

  You got a problem with that, Dom?

  What’s the difference if I have a problem or not? You’ll do what you want to do.

  Talk about the handwriting on the wall, chuckled Dan Smooth, who had come to find an acquiescent underage runaway of any one or more of the thirteen sexes; if the Queen could not be of use to him in this matter, he would go to Polk Street, where other wall-writings said LUVYBOYS. —How did it go, Maj? Can’t I borrow your Bible—you know, the one you keep between your breasts? Oh, but I remember now exactly what it said: Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.

  You implying I want to bring her down? shouted Domino, angry and unbalanced. Smooth was shocked now because his schoolboy pride in a perfect recitation had enticed him into the onionskin layers of Biblical exegesis; he’d forgotten what the gaunt blonde woman had said to call forth the allusion; he only wanted to be calm and pleasant like John in an expensive restaurant; he wanted everybody’s praise; he n
eeded the world to obey him and therefore validate his spidery intelligence which had so often been crucified with a dozen nails of humiliation and censure driven through every leg; but in this craving he was no different from Domino herself who in turn had scarcely two hours since hurled her needs against the needs of Chocolate, whose beauty had happily over-flowered hers all week because very late on Saturday night, hunting through the yellow darkness of Capp Street (white walls stained yellow like old photos fixed too long in the hypo bath), she’d spied a nebulous silhouette and pounced, imparting forgettable satisfaction to a forgettable man, so that on Sunday afternoon, ignoring the well meaning urgings of Beatrice, who patronized Mexicali Hair Design on Capp and Twenty-Eighth, she’d dropped some of her winnings at the African beauty parlor on Divisadero in order to get her luscious black hair combed, woven, greased and moussed into peaks like fragrant meringue so that she grew young and bulletproof again as she had been before dropping the first of her eight unacknowledged children now casually growing in the state of California’s foster homes, never knowing their mother or each other, waiting to swell in strength and cunning sufficiently to pay the world back since they could hardly pay back their multitudinous and anonymous fathers or their hidden progenitoress who now with her white white smile and her face thrown back goodnaturedly, almost funlovingly gazed into the windshields of oncoming cars, her eyebrows plucked, concertina wire’s shadows on her cheek. To the drivers whose saintly dispositions allowed them to give themselves what they wanted and forgive their own impending mistakes, Chocolate projected above all warmth and freshness like the affectionately sexual equivalent of bread baking in a bride’s kitchen, an impression which she did not consciously control but which was founded on her charming girlish manners and highspiritedness not yet completely stamped out of her even after those eight crack-addicted babies about whom Tyler had read in her medical record—in fact, one could argue that the insouciance with which she gave birth and walked away as if a baby were nothing more than excrement proved that highspiritedness and perhaps even strengthened it by endowing it with a certain expedient proficiency. She stood smiling clear-eyed right into the sun, made for love as it seemed to the drivers, her brown eyes friendly and seeking friendship; Chocolate loved to laugh; she allowed jokers to pay less, and because her memory was growing increasingly imperfect, she could hear the same joke any number of times and still be amazed by the punchline like a virgin on her first date or a true believer who reads the Gospels over and over. (Gosh, she’s too beautiful to be a hooker! cried a Brady’s Boy in wonder. —I dunno about hookers really, said his partner. I come from Philly. In my old preccinct our major crime was theft of auto.) She herself was entirely capable of banter but unable to recite any preconceived funny story, a deficiency which she would have preferred to correct, at least until late afternoon by which time her identity had usually become confused and temporary with too much cocaine tweaking which poisoned her with paranoia so that she became argumentative; and within the expanding bands of shadow on Mission Street, beneath the double row of palm trees, her drivers now descried an entirely different woman whose wildly angry eyes burned like acid through their illusions of love and pleasure. It was on one of these evenings—this very one, in fact—when, seeing silver-miniskirted Domino approach her (for like the tall man she could see everything coming; she could watch everything out of the very whites of her eyes), Chocolate remembered that night on South Van Ness when she’d betrayed the blonde, after which the Queen had pronounced her an evil little bitch and commanded her to apologize, warning: You got to bear your cross now, baby. Domino’s always gonna hate you. —Terrified, Chocolate now conceived the belief, the only possible belief, that Domino, who was looking old as she waggled her long expressive cigarette at the passing cars, was coming to settle matters because the Queen remained with Tyler somewhere on Ellis Street, leaving Chocolate alone just as Chocolate had left Domino alone to get her skull cracked by that monstrous Ada over money she didn’t own, and so, just like the Queen herself with her cracked Biblical prophecies, Chocolate shuddered beneath the weight of a satanic epiphany in which every circumstance pulsed with meaning aimed at her, as if she were imprisoned naked and paralyzed in the center of an immense crystal of methamphetamine whose cold facets let in the world’s eyes; she wanted to be dark like the darkness but her consciousness glowed, conspicuous to the point of peril. Had it been morning, Chocolate would have been equally certain (like Dan Smooth) that the world was a vast machine whose organization and purpose was solely to fulfill her wishes; now the machine was meant to crush her. The streetlamps were conspiring to fall on her head. The lunar shine of Domino’s ultrablonde hair flowed around her shoulders as she stalked among the parked cars. The Queen had sold herself to Henry Tyler for the night in order by her visible abstention from this malignant courtroom now called to order in these dark streets for retribution to be done. Strawberry had abandoned her on purpose. Bernadette had deliberately stayed in. Beatrice was pretending to suffer from venereal disease in order to excuse herself in the direction of the faraway clinic. And here came Domino, her crooked mouth twitching into a sneer which actually represented mere and simple happiness, she having copped prime heroin which could offer more kindness to her than any human being’s body or soul, but as her coarse, gaunt, greasy face loomed larger and larger, as her shadow came down upon her, Chocolate, unavailingly longing for her to break contact much as Mission Street suddenly veers beyond Twenty-Fifth to avoid a golden-bleached hill of white houses, could not puff out her breasts and strut proudly by but began to shiver, and the worse she shook, the more her longing cracked into shards of incontrovertible hopelessness until Chocolate, absolutely sure beyond terror or horror that within fifteen seconds the first hammerblow would break open her forehead, screamed: That money was mine. Where did you spend my money, you goddamned thieving honky bitch? meaning only to eloquently and passionately clear herself of all charges by atainting her accuser with the crime of prior betrayal; but of course Domino was not much given to self-abasement. For a moment she could not even comprehend to what Chocolate was referring, there having been so many transactions, exchanges, extortions and abuses like pale birds crossing dark Tenderloin windows between that night and this, but from the first, being accustomed throughout her tragic days and nights to expect ambuscades, she understood that the other woman now considered her alien,enemy, devil, animal; and without hesitation she withdrew from her battered silver purse one of her three naked razorblades, and held it aloft. Had it been just her and Chocolate, she would instantaneously have slashed the black woman’s face from cheek to cheek, leaving her screaming and bloody, because she knew as does the slender-boned snake that striking rapidly and repeatedly and above all first comprises the only answer to the menace posed by titanic creatures such as Chocolate, who outweighed her by at least thirty pounds. But between them lay the warm brown shadow of the Queen. Domino had never punished Chocolate for abandoning her to Ada that night because the Queen’s love for them both had ransomed her, and Domino had actually loved her afterward, no matter how fitfully, as on that night when her aborted fetus pursued and oppressed her, and she’d gone in to Chocolate so that her mourning would be heard. Did she truly love her? Maybe she didn’t, but both of them had been nourished from their Queen’s mouth. Or maybe it was simply that Domino did not want to go apart from the Queen anymore to live in a desert of fear as she must do should she hurt her sister, even if her sister meant to hurt her, so she strode slowly and impressively closer to the black woman, then said: You see this razor, bitch? Well, do you? You know what’s gonna happen to you now? and Chocolate started screaming and flailing, completely out of her mind. Domino recognized this. With a cruel smile she scooped up a broken bottle, flung it casually at Chocolate’s feet, and strolled away. The brokenhearted black woman didn’t try to follow her. Domino went home to the Queen, resolved not to snitch, trying to believe that she’d been good in her restraint, and she even compounded her lovin
gkindness by giving a little china white to Lily (who hadn’t been able to find a nice gentleman who would solve her withdrawal sickness), but she could not stop shaking and trembling just the same so that her heart fluttered like the crazy whore’s singsong sinsongs. It was the unnnaturalness of her reply to Chocolate which unsettled her. The natural thing to do would have been to fling herself on that nigger bitch and cut her up good so that her stinking guts slid slimily out. She longed to attack somebody, and here Dan Smooth with his smartass Bible quotations was insinuating that she meditated treason against her Queen, to whom she’d just proved her loyalty by that act of self-arrest, so, clenching her fists, she said to Smooth beneath her teeth: You don’t know a thing about me, you misogynist bastard. You just—