The Royal Family
Page 115
Mandy Aftel spent a good $250 photocopying and mailing this manuscript to the Proper Authorities. Dr. Janice Ryu gave me access to pertinent medical facts.
Larry McCaffery and his wife and Sinda Gregory introduced me to the Imperial Valley and in particular to Slab City, a place of some interest to Henry Tyler. I just may write another novel set there.
Most of all, I would like to thank the San Francisco and Sacramento street prostitutes whom I have gotten to know over the years. Without them I never could have imagined “the life.”
*Robbed; gypped.
* Crack cocaine.
*Execute.
*Supplemental security income.
*Literally, his tripes. A prostitute in Mexicali whom I knew for several years told me this story. I never met the little boy, and the woman is dead now. God rest her. The congenital defect might have been an umbilical hernia or an anal prolapse.
*Usually on account of failure to appear, or else for some probation violation.
*I also wish that every act classified as a crime were really evil.
*It has always struck me as horrid that the prosecution, not the defense, gets to call itself the people.—“I know we’re all working with the new law,” asserts a brisk woman in a pants-suit who until now has been cleverly employing the passive voice (“reports have been generated”), “but it’s the people’s position that the defendant comes within the parameters of this statute. What I would ask the court to do is to sign the detention order at this time.”—The public defender pleads against the people. Replies the judge: “Your objections are noted for the record. But I will sign the order.”
*Strawberry was entirely correct. Probation and parole violators frequently get no-bail warrants. One public defender described parole as A most vicious cycle. You’re entitled to a hearing before a parole officer, but you’re not entitled to a judge or a lawyer. “I know guys who can’t get off parole for fifteen years,” he insisted. “They just go back and back. You can get charged with violation just for not reporting to your parole officer one time, and then back you go to jail.”
*Gonzalez, reading this over: “Actually, that’s not the worst scenario. The DA could dismiss the case and then refile the same day, which would double the time to six months. I’ve seen that happen.” According to Mr. Daro Inouye in the same office, the average length of detention between felony arrest and sentencing in San Francisco is more than four months.
†Isaiah 19.4.
*Here is Locher’s rather politic answer to the same question: “The bail bondsmen in general perform a service, and it’s a service that’s established by law and actually recognized by the Constitution. Like any profession, there are some people in that profession who don’t meet the highest standards. There are others who do.”
*When I asked the bail commissioner about this, he remarked: “I don’t know of that ninety-four percent how many were O.R.’d before and were O.R. failures.” As for the D.A. man, Locher, when I raised Inouye’s statistic with him he was silent for a moment, then said: “It’s difficult for me to assess that. I don’t believe that that reflects the experience here in Sacramento. But look. To the extent that there is always going to have to be a certain class of criminal defendants who are unable to make bail, they are more likely to be the public defender’s clients. The others are more likely to get bail. In that sense, the system would be working.”—This conclusion amazed me not a little.
†Locher agreed with these statistics, but disagreed with Adair’s imputation that all but 342 of the 95,000 bench warrants were for O.R.s. In fact, he said, most of them were not for O.R.s. And Gonzalez remarked: “Outstanding bench warrants stay in the system for something like seven years. The system has a lot of bench warrants looking for deceased persons, or persons travelling out of their home state who do things they wouldn’t do at home, or multiple warrants for the same persons. Maybe one guy has ten failures to appear.”
*In 1998 a “basic flatback” from a San Francisco street-whore cost about fifty dollars. Back in the days when misdemeanors still required bail, it would have been around twenty-five or thirty.
*Gonzalez said: “Man, the number of times public defenders have heard the client saying, I don’t want to fight the case! One guy who’d been charged of assaulting his girlfriend, I remember him telling me: I don’t got time. Even if she’s been convicted of assaulting me in another county. I just wanna get out of here.”
*An eighth of a gram. In 1996–97 the street price was about ten dollars.
†Ten dollars.
*Score; obtain street drugs.
*Crack cocaine.
*“In the life” usually means being a prostitute, but is sometimes used to refer to other street activities such as pimping, drug pushing, fencing stolen goods, etcetera.
*Fifty dollars for the “flatback” and ten dollars for an hour in the room.
* Murder him; execute him.
*Old gangster.
*Reputation.
*The penal code for homicide is 187. Hence the street slang: “pull a 187.”
†Years of prison time.
*Kilos (of marijuana).
*A top is an S & M dominant. A bottom is a submissive.
*And there’s a good side to this, for (much to its credit) Geary Street remains immune to the sterile noblesse of the hedges and the fountain at Leavenworth and Green.
*Execute.
*Psalm 88:3.
† Isaiah 14:18–19.
Contents
•BOOK I•
•BOOK II•
•BOOK III•
•BOOK IV•
•BOOK V•
•BOOK VI•
•BOOK VII•
•BOOK VIII•
•BOOK IX•
•BOOK X•
•BOOK XI•
•BOOK XII•
•BOOK XIII•
•BOOK XIV•
•BOOK XV•
•BOOK XVI•
•BOOK XVII•
•BOOK XVIII•
•BOOK XIX•
•BOOK XX•
•BOOK XXI•
•BOOK XXII•
•BOOK XXIII•
•BOOK XXIV•
•BOOK XXV•
•BOOK XXVI•
•BOOK XXVII•
•BOOK XXVIII•
•BOOK XXIX•
•BOOK XXX•
•BOOK XXXI•
•BOOK XXXII•
•BOOK XXXIII•
•BOOK XXXIV•
•BOOK XXXV•
•BOOK XXXVI •
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE ROYAL FAMILY
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. Vollmann’s novels include You Bright and Risen Angels, Whores for Gloria, The Butterfly Stories, and four of a projected series of seven novels dealing with the repeated collisions between Native Americans and their European colonizers and oppressors: The Ice-Shirt, Fathers and Crows, The Rifles, and Argall. Vollmann is also the author of three short story collections (The Rainbow Stories, Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs, and The Atlas, winner of the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction), and a work of nonfiction, An Afghanistan Picture Show. Vollmann won a 1988 Whiting Award and the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Award in 1989. His journalism and fiction have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, Esquire, Outside, Spin, Gear, Granta, Grand Street, and Conjunctions. He lives in California.
Table of Contents
• BOOK I •
• BOOK II •
• BOOK III •
• BOOK IV •
• BOOK V •
• BOOK VI •
• BOOK VII •
• BOOK VIII •
• BOOK IX •
• BOOK X •
• BOOK XI •
• BOOK XII •
• BOOK XIII •
• BOOK XIV •
• BOOK XV •
• BOOK XVI •
• BOOK XVII •
• BOOK XVIII •
• BOOK XIX •
• BOOK XX •
• BOOK XXI •
• BOOK XXII •
• BOOK XXIII •
• BOOK XXIV •
• BOOK XXV •
• BOOK XXVI •
• BOOK XXVII •
• BOOK XXVIII •
• BOOK XXIX •
• BOOK XXX •
• BOOK XXXI •
• BOOK XXXII •
• BOOK XXXIII •
• BOOK XXXIV •
• BOOK XXXV •
• BOOK XXXVI •