The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  Sure, boss, said the tall man with a white grin. Us plantation darkies like nothin’ better than ’pologizin’. Hey, bitch, sorry I called you a bitch.

  Oh, fuck off, said Loreena. Why do I even bother.

  I’m sorry, the tall man whined with sarcastic obsequiousness. I really need a drink. If I be good, will y’all let me be a house slave?

  Shut up, John said.

  If I shut up will you buy me a drink?

  I’ll call the police, said Loreena. Both men saw she didn’t mean it.

  The tall man moved two stools down and said: Loreena, I’ll have me a tequila sunrise.

  Fine, said John.

  Thank you, said the tall man while Loreena mixed and poured. Now lemme tell you something.

  I thought the deal was that you wouldn’t tell me anything, said John. Just for once, can’t you shut your fat mouth? I don’t give a damn about you. Period. Okay?

  You lookin’ for pussy, mister?

  Oh, please, said Loreena, amused in spite of herself.

  The tall man leaned back in his stool with a lordly air and said: Me, I’d rather jerk off than scratch the open sore between some bitch’s legs. If I can’t bring her somewhere, go out with her, show her off, it’s not worth it. Say, why don’t you take me out to lunch?

  I’ve got some private business with a friend, said John as curtly as he could.

  That’ll be four-fifty, sweetie, said Loreena. John gave her a five.

  What kind of business? said the tall man.

  Private business.

  Say, white boy—

  Hey! shrilled Loreena. You say one word to my customers and you’re out of here! They’re good people.

  Right on! Right on, right on! an old drunk shouted.

  Say, I’d sure like to know what your private business is. You gonna deliver him a couple of keys?*

  Something like that. Now shut up or I’ll throw this drink in your face.

  The tall man rose, opened his mouth wide, and uttered a cawing, sneering laugh which showed his epiglottis and all his teeth. Then he advanced on John, who leaped to his feet.

  Gentlemen, gentlemen! cried Loreena, rushing between them with the baseball bat upraised. The tall man stalked back to his seat.

  You know what? said John. This man is threatening me. Either you get him out of here or I’m going out. This is no way to run a business.

  Loreena picked up the phone. —This time I mean it, Justin. Get out.

  Cursing, the tall man swilled his drink. He spat one ice cube on the floor and went out crunching another between his teeth.

  The sights you see when you don’t have a gun! laughed Loreena. John refused to look at her.

  He sat there waiting for Domino for ten more minutes. Then he left also.

  | 403 |

  Back again, said Loreena.

  Yeah, said John, clearing his throat.

  She just went out on a date. She’ll be back in fifteen minutes, I’d say, or an hour at the absolute latest.

  Fine.

  I hope you mean to take good care of her. She’s a keeper.

  John said nothing.

  Oh, we love her, Loreena went on. We take care of her. We leave her alone. She’s still beautiful.

  Hey, Domino loves me! shouted the drunk two barstools away.

  What the fuck, another man sneered. Domino kicks your ass.

  Another round, Bentley? Loreena asked the sneerer. That whitehaired gentleman nodded and leaned back with a happy smile on his face because now that Louis Armstrong was singing on the jukebox and Loreena would serve him, he was momentarily King.

  A black woman whom John did not know was Bernadette vomited on the floor. —Sorry, Loreena, she said. ’Cause I drank that Tom Collins on top of my pills I’m almost ready to pass out . . .

  John drank two beers. Then through the swinging double doors came Domino.

  | 404 |

  Domino raised the candle (dark crimson because dark wax burns hotter) and told the john to be quiet. Looking him up and down, she smiled, then abruptly tilted the candle so that a molten ball of wax fell glowingly out. The john screamed.

  Oh, do shut up, said Domino. It’s not that bad.

  The man shut up.

  Roll over on your stomach, said Domino. Head to the right. Close your eyes.

  The box opened. Then she lovingly stroked the john’s back and bottom. She placed her palm on his buttock, then patted it, then spanked it. Then suddenly he felt a stinging blow. —What was it? A hairbrush, a paddle, a cord? —Another thud—harder, then harder. Another. One on his back which made him grunt. He knew that Domino was happy then, although he couldn’t see her (he wasn’t allowed to).

  She said: How are you feeling?

  Okay.

  Do you want more?

  Up to you.

  Ask me for more.

  Please give me more.

  Thud, thud, slap in the flesh.

  Do you want more?

  Up to you, John repeated. The more tightly he closed his eyes, the more vividly he saw Celia’s face.

  Ask me for more.

  Please give me more, he groaned out.

  Thud, thud, slap in the flesh. The pain pooled all over him like the merging streams of hot wax on his belly, like a trail of crimson blood. The john looked into her happy exalted face as the wax came down, and he looked again later when she peeled the congealed wax off his pubic hair. After a while he began to feel the sting all over. Timidly, he squeezed her naked thigh to share the pain with her. She told him to leave her alone.

  When they were finished, he tipped her. Domino grinned and slapped him on the back. —You’re a real sport, honey, she said.

  Where are you staying?

  Oh, with this old black man, Domino lied heartily. Every night he gets drunk and violent. Every day he has prostitutes coming over, which offends me. He’s no damn good.

  You want me to break his legs? said John, thrilled with his own boldness.

  | 405 |

  Oh, he’s not that bad. Okay, I gotta go. Anytime you need me, just whistle four times. What did John want, but success? His vocation, although to most of us it seems as stale and tortuous as some medieval allegory, offered slow, strenuous accomplishments. Other souls preferred what gets disparagingly called “instant gratification”—that is, happiness sufficiently present to count on, like the joy crouching inside a perfect crystal of crack cocaine lying in the palm of a whore’s hand, ready to be combusted into pleasure all for her. It is related of Saint Ignatius that when his Jesuits spoke of tomorrow or next year, he’d cry in astonishment: What? You can be certain that God will allow you to live so long? —This too is the crack whore’s philosophy, and the strategem of the vultures who sent Tyler the form letter which advised: The CASH you NEED is in your CAR. Tap into your autmobile equity TODAY. BORROW and REPAY! Introductory rate: 6.25%. Tyler wanted cash; of course he did. And Irene—ah, what did Irene want? Maybe I’ll start swimming, Mom, she’d said to Mrs. Tyler, who shook her head as she replied: Irene, honey, you shouldn’t take up swimming unless you have the kind of hair that you can do up yourself. —But Irene wanted freedom. She wanted not to be told what to do. —As for Dan Smooth, he envisoned Paradise as a hot Italian beach with long jetties and a breakwater, a hotel room with metal blinds halfway up a hill of olive trees, vineyard-terraces twisting on and on. Smooth needed this for his stage set, but center stage was the place where cobalt blue ocean expressed itself in a frothy white line, then became an olive-brown kingdom of wet sand. There the young children squatted and built their sandcastles. Hexagonal beach umbellas, striped like candy, cooled candied, taffyed flesh which lived and quivered on the sand. Here his eye could freely hunt among the dimpled thighs of old age; youth had a certain color—how could he describe it? He’d never stop revering it. Pubescent breasts and prepubescent breasts and the slender ribcages of children, these comprised his spiritual food. A little pinkish-brown girl, too young for breast-buds, too young not to be nak
ed-chested, licked an ice cream cone. Now she was playing with the bottom of her bathing trunks. Smooth, nostrils flaring, withstood the craving to lean forward in his beach chair. He waited. Suddenly the child pulled her bathing trunks midway down her thighs—right there amidst the beach-umbrellaed crowd! —displaying her creamy bikini zone, and as she turned toward him, evidently perceiving his gaze, he glimpsed her long narrow mound, as white as new photographic paper, and the slit-lips in the middle, so soft and white like slices of mushrooms in a perfect salad. Meanwhile a matchstick-legged boy fiddled with the back pockets of his swimsuit.

  And Domino, what did she want? She resembled a purring cat in heat rubbing up against a human being, circling, mewing, hoping for the impossible.

  | 406 |

  Check it out! cried Chocolate with a wink.

  Check what out? said John wearily.

  Check it out, check it out, check it out! You blowjobbin’ it or what?

  Not with you. I’m looking for Domino.

  Oh, that bitch! She’ll give you venereal warts. I guarantee it. But I’m clean. I’m Chocolate clean. I’m the Queen. I can suck a baseball bat through thirty-five feet of garden hose.

  Where is she?

  Where you from?

  None of your business. Where is she?

  Well, la-di-da. If you won’t tell me that, at least tell me where you were born. I’m into astrology.

  Sacramento.

  Sac’s real different. San Francisco and Oakland, they’re real party towns, huh? In Sacramento, when they do party, they get violent. I don’t like violence so much. Leave that to the younger generation. I always say—

  Where is she?

  In there. Asshole.

  Domino sat listlessly at the Wonderbar reading a science fiction novel. Her hair was greying and she had bruises on her thighs.

  What’s up? said John.

  Oh, just killing time.

  It’s already dead.

  Excuse me? Are you making fun of me?

  Oh, for God’s sake, said John in disgust.

  In the doorway old Tenderloin George was crying out: Shoeshine? Wanna shine?

  Don’t give him anything, said Domino angrily. He always comes when I’m trying to pick up dates and he sits on the fire hydrant and plays with himself. He’s a pervert.

  Give me a smile, baby, John said.

  My face is crooked, Domino replied in a low voice. I always smile crooked, because two years ago some fourteen-year-old kids jumped me and hit me in the mouth with a two-by-four and broke my teeth and I didn’t get any of them reset right because I . . . oh, fuck it. Hey, mister, why don’t you buy me a car?

  I’m not mister. I’m John.

  I want a Land Rover. Forty-five grand’s the invoice price.

  Invoice prices are not exactly what they pay for the car, John said learnedly.

  Oh, fuck off.

  Look, Domino. I know dealers. I can get you a much better price than that.

  How much better?

  Maybe thirty-two. I’m looking for a new car myself. The E class you can’t buy any more cheaply, because it’s really hot.

  So. You’re going to give me thirty-two grand for a Land Rover or not? I don’t have time to fuck around.

  That’s a piece of shit car anyway. You’ll have to change everything.

  Are you married?

  You already asked me that.

  So sue me. Are you?

  Not anymore.

  Oh, so she left you, huh? Serves you right, you tightass prick. You wanna get married again? You wanna marry me, John?

  Marrying you would be like buying a cheap Mercedes, John said. You’re buying a name, so why buy at all when you’re just buying some generic heap of shit right off the assembly line?

  You’re too fuckin’ much, the blonde laughed. I like you. You’re honest. You’re hard-boiled. Know who you remind me of?

  Clark Gable.

  Shit. You remind me of Henry.

  What?

  You gonna buy me a car?

  What about me reminds you of Hank?

  It’s gotta happen for me, John, Domino whispered. It’s just got to. I need a car to get away and to—oh, fuck, I feel sick. I gotta puke . . .

  | 407 |

  You’re sure friendly with that guy, said the tall man sarcastically.

  Are you accusing me of being a hypocrite?

  Dom, I don’t give a goddamn what you are. But he insulted me. Someday I’m gonna break his whitebread ass.

  Being nice with the customers like that is just good business, the blonde said defensively. It’s not false. It’s just exhausting.

  And yet, strange to say, Domino kept seeing John, and not merely for money. She said there was a difference between being used and using (although all her other customers would have been amazed that there was any such distinction between themselves and John).

  Sometimes he paged her, and she called him back. His voice sounded quite tender on the phone. She wondered if he were holding his dick in his hand.

  Let’s say that Domino actually did care for John in a way. (She thought him realistic.) That didn’t matter. He could neither predict nor control her. His predicament sickened him even though he knew that he didn’t love her in the least; the fascination she cast on him might well have been the result less of her own person or soul than of her actions. No one had ever before slapped John in that vicious yet teasing way which he found to be so desperately erotic. The blonde’s regular customers did not return to her solely to be gaffled and humiliated; she had about her at times a playful quality which allowed them to feel, however briefly, that they were her playmates, carefree like rich vacationers, because they could laugh when she laughed as she pissed on their faces. Tyler saw only the sadness and frailty in her; John saw the dominatrix. Being dominated by her, he could not hope to understand her more than a worshiper understands his God. She was fitful, terrible, dangerous. John was afraid of her. His work would soon begin to suffer if he weren’t careful. Celia would suspect something. —Actually, Celia did not, because his guilt drove him to be kinder and tenderer than ever before, so that she smiled upon him with an innocent joy which increased his guilt almost to the point of agony. But John could compartmentalize, as they say of organization men; he went on with everything just as before, and it certainly never struck him that the blonde might be approaching her own sea-change.

  She wanted to be loved—how she wanted that! And she could never believe it when someone loved her. The Queen had loved her genuinely, but her affection hurt almost as much as cruelty, because since no possible attestation could ever suffice, Domino suspected and sometimes rejected the Queen’s caresses, which must someday turn out to be mocking, expedient, sadistic. Her heart ached with anxiety that the Queen might be speaking against her. One night at this time she dreamed that she and Henry Tyler stood facing each other across an open grave, and she was drunk and cried out: I know now she loved me. I can believe that, ’cause she’s gone. And I—

  She wanted love. And she believed that she wanted status, but would she have really been any happier had she metamorphosed into one of those high-class women who while away afternoons and evenings in vast hotel lobbies whose recessed ceiling-bulbs make up dully regular constellations far outdazzled by the brass handles of the sliding doors through which money just might come walking, with its hands in the pockets of its silk suit?

  She trusted Dan Smooth because he was her ruthless friend whose interests coincided with hers, and because his patronizing ways allowed her to convince herself that she’d “seen through him” to the mockery, which was not so very bad and thus did not alienate her. She herself, however, never reasoned any of this out.

  I have a secret, she said to him.

  No secrets from your old Uncle Dan! laughed the pedophile, wagging his fingers as if she’d been naughty. You have designs, you see. You have buried treasures, and I don’t just mean your hot little—

  Oh, cut it out, said Domino. My secr
et is that I’m topping* Henry Tyler’s brother, and he’s a stinking rich lawyer connected to that Brady man who runs the vigs . . .

  Ah, very good! And what’s your plan? You can cause Brady some headaches, or you can betray our Queen, or both, or neither. Or maybe you can find out from John if Henry really screwed Irene, and somehow use that to make Maj drop him. If this were a novel, I’d scream here comes the suspense! But somehow it doesn’t feel too suspenseful. I suppose I know you too well . . .

  Look. I’m not a bad person. I’m not ungrateful. I just need a chance to better myself, and if you can’t understand that, then go fuck yourself.

  Smooth grinned. He loved the blonde. He’d seen her cry silently at romantic movies, her lower lip trembling as she wiped her eyes with her forefinger; then she sat straight up with her jaw clenched, obviously hoping that no one had seen. At disaster movies she wrung her hands, her mouth wide open while the movie heroine wept over her dead lover.

  | 408 |

  May I tell him who’s calling, please? said the receptionist.

  Oh, he knows me, said Tyler, with a wink at the Queen. She gazed back sadly.

  Sir, you’ll have to give me your name and the place you’re calling from, said the receptionist. Otherwise I can’t put you through.

  Tell him it’s his brother, Tyler said wearily.

  And where are you calling from?

  Could you please tell him that his brother is on the line?

  And your name, sir?

  Henry, said Tyler, defeated.

  Just a moment.

  He leaned against the wall, waiting. The Queen stroked his cheek.

  Sir, he says to tell you that he’s busy right now. Is there any message?

  He was silent for a moment, smelling the humiliation which soiled him like vomit. —Tell him I’ll call again later, he said.

  He hung up slowly.

  No go, huh? said the Queen.

  No go.

  Don’t be sad, baby. It’s gonna take some time. That’s all.

  He said: It’s the same as when I visit Irene at the cemetery. I know that I can never ever reach her, not ever again.