by J. T. LeRoy
THE HEART IS DECEITFUL
ABOVE ALL THINGS
JT LEROY
CONTENTS
Disappearances
The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things
Toyboxed
Foolishness Is Bound in the Heart of a Child
Lizards
Baby Doll
Coal
Viva Las Vegas
Meteors
Natoma Street
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Author
Copyright
For Dr. Terrence Owens
To Sarah
To Dennis
To Gus
My heart to Patti Sillivan
Praise for JT LeRoy and Sarah
‘Extraordinarily, LeRoy manages to lace this horrific story with tenderness and humour. Not for the fainthearted, these few raw pages constitute a breathtaking debut.’
Guardian
‘Turns the tawdriness of hustling into a world of lyrical and grotesque beauty, without losing any of its authenticity . . . his language is always fresh, his soul never corrupt.’
The New York Times
‘Surprising, upsetting, offensive, and fun. It’s everything a good read – or good sex for that matter – should be.’
Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club
‘An unsettling, funny novel. Priscilla Queen of the Desert meets William Burroughs.’
Esquire
‘Sarah has a strong seductive quality, and it is impossible to forget. LeRoy’s ability to present trauma and tenderness simultaneously is entirely his own. “This book is nothing short of a miracle,” LeRoy has said. I have to agree.’
New Statesman
‘Like a cross between Nathanael West and Mark Twain, drunk out of their minds and collaborating on Charlie’s Angels meets The Headless Horseman – Sarah is a wildly comic tour de force and a brilliant debut.’
Mary Gaitskill, author of Two Girls, Fat and Thin
‘Extraordinary . . . LeRoy writes with astonishing flair and confidence, making Sarah a very impressive debut indeed.’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Sarah is weird, darkly funny and haunting. JT LeRoy has a gift, to be able to articulate his world so clearly and astringently, with grace and humor, but without glossing over the pain and brutality of it.’
Suzanne Vega
‘Full of Virginian folklore and miracles, at times Sarah reads like a fairy story. But it’s also about abuse, addiction, and the pain of motherly rejection: a beautiful, scary, sad and funny book.’
The Face
‘JT LeRoy’s Sarah is a revelation. It makes you realize how overused words like original and inspired have become. LeRoy’s writing has a passion, economy, emotional depth, and lyric beauty so authentic that it seems to bypass every shopworn standard we’ve learned to expect of contemporary fiction. This is a novel gripped by an intense, gorgeous, yet strangely refined imagination, and its experience is unforgettable.’
Dennis Cooper, author of All Ears and Period
‘LeRoy is exceptionally astute on the anonymous, grubby landscape of Western Virginia and writes cooly, yet profoundly, of his skewed childhood sexual identity . . . [an] amazing story.’
The Times
‘JT LeRoy has given us a beautiful, haunting tale of the survival of the spirit.’
Allison Anders, director of Mi Vida Loca and My Grace of Heart
‘Sarah is a phantasmagorical work of extreme originality. Beautiful but perverse . . . a wonderfully executed journey into strange and unforgettable territory.’
Big Issue
‘An extraordinary novel . . . darkly comic.’
Time Out
‘This intensely autobiographical debut novel is a maverick work. LeRoy shapes his story into a tragic tale of denied childhood and relinquished masculinity. A wildly original novel that no one should miss. For once, believe the hype!’
Uncut
‘A harsh but beautiful tale: moments of self-destructive drug taking and extreme violence sit beside magic and the quirky ballsiness of young Sarah himself.’
Attitude
‘A modern version of the traditional gothic tale of sexual repression, imprisonment, evil tyrants, flight and pursuit, set against a religious background, with an added comic twist . . . Sarah is exciting, genuine, funny, more thought-provoking than it first appears, and is highly recommended.’
Gay Times
‘Unsettling and trippy . . . as disturbing as it is compulsive . . . Very odd, and very good.’
QX
DISAPPEARANCES
HIS LONG WHITE buck teeth hang out from a smile, like a wolf dog. His eyes have a vacant, excited, mad look. The lady holding it, crouched down to my height, is grinning too widely. She looks like my baby-sitter, without the braces, the same long blond braid that starts somewhere inside the top of her head. She shakes Bugs Bunny in my face, making the carrot he’s clutching plunge up and down like a knife. I wait for one of the social workers to tell her I’m not allowed to watch Bugs Bunny.
‘Look what your momma got you,’ I hear.
Momma.
I say it softly like a magic word you use only when severely outnumbered.
‘Right here, honey,’ the woman with the bunny says. She smiles even wider, looking up at the three surrounding social workers, nodding at them. Their tilted heads grin back. She shakes the rabbit again.
‘I’m your momma.’ I watch her red, glossy lips, and I can taste the word, metallic and sour in my mouth. And I ache so badly for Her, the real one that rescues me.
I stare out at the blank faces, and from deep inside I scream and scream for Her to come save me.
When we first get back to the tiny, one-bedroom bungalow, I throw myself on the floor, kicking and screaming for my real momma.
She ignores me and makes dinner.
‘Look, Spaghetti-Os,’ she says. I won’t move. I fall asleep on the floor. I wake up in a narrow cot with Bugs Bunny next to me, and I scream.
She shows me the few toys she’s gotten me. I have more and better at my real home. I throw hers out the window.
One of the social workers comes by, and I cry so hard I throw up on her navy blue tassel shoes.
‘He’ll get used to it, Sarah,’ I hear her tell my new mom. ‘Hang in there, honey,’ she tells her, and pats her shoulder.
At lunch she gives me peanut butter and jelly with the crusts on. My real momma cuts the crust off. I fling the plastic Mickey Mouse plate off the table.
She spins around, hand raised into a fist. I scream, she freezes, her fist shaking, a foot away from my chest.
We both stare at each other, breathing hard. And something passes between us, and her face seals up. I don’t know what it is exactly.
As my sobs start she grabs her denim jacket and leaves. I’d never been alone before, not even for five minutes, but I know something has changed, something is different, and I don’t scream.
I run to my bed, curl up tight, and wait for everything to be different.
The phone’s shrill ringing wakes me up. It’s dark without the dinosaur night-light I used to have.
‘Thank you, Operator, it works,’ I hear her say quietly. Then, almost yelling, ‘Hello? . . . Hello? . . . Yes, Jeremiah is here . . .’
My heart starts pounding. ‘Jeremiah, honey, are you awake?’ she calls out, her shadow haunting my partly opened door.
‘Momma?’ I call out, pushing my sheets away.
‘Yes, honey, it’s your foster parents.’ I run to her and the phone.
‘Oh yes, he’s here.’ I reach up for the phone with every muscle.
‘What . . . oh . . .’
She frowns. I jump up and down, straining.
‘Bad? . . . Well he hasn’t been very bad . . .’ She turns away from me, the black phone cord wrapping around her.
‘Momma!’ I shout, and pull on the phone cord.
‘Yes . . . I see,’ she says, nodding, turning away from me farther. ‘Oh, is that why? OK, I’ll tell him.’
‘Gimme . . . Momma!’ I yell, and yank hard on the cord.
‘So you don’t want to speak to him?’
‘Daddy!’ I yell, and grab hard. The phone receiver flies out of her hands, bounces on the blue, sparkled linoleum, and slides under the table. It spins like a bottle, the mouthpiece facing up. I spring for it, sliding like my daddy taught me when we played whiffleball. Just as my finger touches the dull, black plastic of the phone, it jerks and flies out from under the table and away from me.
‘Got it!’ I hear her gasp. ‘Hello? . . . Yes! Yes! He did that . . . Fuck yeah, I’ll tell him.’
I twist around and drag myself from under the table.
‘OK, thanks.’ She smiles into the phone.
‘No!’ I reach up with my arms.
‘Y’all take care . . .’
‘No!’ My feet skid under me, leaving me back on my stomach.
‘Good-bye.’ In slow motion she swirls like a ballerina, a grin wide on her face.
‘No!’
Her arm rises into the air, the spiral cord swinging in front of me. I grab for it, her hand sweeps backward, and I catch nothing.
‘Momma!’ I scream, and I watch the receiver lowered into its cradle on the couch’s white plastic end table.
I scramble to the phone and snatch it up. ‘Momma, Momma, Daddy!’ I shout into it.
‘They hung up,’ she says. She sits on the opposite end of the couch and lights a cigarette, her bare legs pulled to her chest, tucked under her large white T-shirt.
Even though I hear the dial tone humming, I still call for them. I press the receiver to my ear as tightly as I can, in case they’re there, past the digital tone calling to me like voices lost in a snowstorm.
‘They’re gone,’ she says, blowing smoke out. ‘You wanna know what they said?’
‘Hello? . . . Hello?’ I say quieter.
‘They didn’t want to talk to you.’
‘Hello?’ I turn away from her and wrap myself in the cord.
‘I said they did not want to talk to you.’
‘Uh-uh,’ I whisper. I twist more, and the receiver slips out of my hands, banging on the linoleum.
‘Don’t you throw my phone!’ She gets up quickly and grabs the receiver at my feet.
‘You ain’t gonna be throwing things no more,’ she says, and unwraps the wire snaked around me, jerking it violently around my Superman pajamas like a whip.
She hangs up the phone and goes back to the couch, crossing her legs. She twists backward to look at me.
‘I went through a lot to get you back, and you’re going to be grateful, you, you little shit.’
A loud gasp pops out of me, a silent sob. I’m beyond regular crying.
When Momma and Daddy go out without me, leaving me with Cathy the baby-sitter, I always cry a while. Sometimes I even scream and lay on the wood floor near the front door, smelling the leftover trail of sweet perfume Momma left. But I always stop crying, remembering my special treats left in the top drawer for being a good, grown-up boy. Cathy and me watch the Rainbow Brite video, and she reads three books to me, and when I wake up they’re back, Momma and Daddy are always back in their place. ‘We always come back,’ they tell me.
‘Do you want to know what they said about you?’ I hear her puff hard on the cigarette. I stare at a huge water bug scurrying under the couch past her foot. I shake my head no, turn around, and go back to my bed.
I grab Bugs Bunny from under the cot where I’d shoved him, wrap my arms around him under my blankets, and between hiccups whisper in his oversize fuzzy ear, ‘When you wake up, they’ll be back, they’ll be back.’
That was the first night I wet. I woke up feeling a cold dampness under my blankets as if an air conditioner had been turned on somewhere beneath me. I’d never wet before, unlike Alex, my best friend from preschool when I lived with my real parents. When he spent the night, my momma had to put the special plastic cover under the galaxy sheets. ‘He has accidents,’ I repeated to my momma as I helped her stretch the opaque white plastic over the mattress. ‘I don’t,’ I told her.
‘No, you use the toilet like a big boy.’ She smiled at me, and I laughed with joy. I had a giraffe ladder I’d climb up on. I’d stand tall as a giant, raise the seat myself, and I’d rain down my powerful stream. I used to float my toy boats in the toilet and pour down on them, sinking them, till my mom explained that’s not good to do, so I did it in my bath instead, making my speedboats and tankers suffer under my forceful gale.
When Alex and I lay in bed discussing who had a bigger rocketship that went fastest to the moon, I felt proud every time I heard the aluminum foil-like crinkle of him moving on his sheets against the smooth swishing of mine. ‘It’s okay,’ I’d tell him in the morning, patting his shoulder. ‘It’s just an accident. You’ll use the giraffe one day, too.’
I peel the wet blanket and sheet off me carefully and look down at the wet, my wet. Bugs Bunny grins up at me, his fuzzy cheek fur matted and damp.
I sit up slowly and stare at the bright yellow room around me. I had had dinosaurs painted all over my old walls. Here, tacked up, is a poster of a large clown, frowning, maybe crying, holding a droopy flower.
‘Look at the clown, look at the clown, isn’t he funny?!’ my new momma had said. I nodded but didn’t smile. In my old room my momma would complain, ‘There’s no place to put all these toys.’ Two blue milk crates side by side hold all my clothes and toys now, and they’re not half-full.
I stand there leaning against the cot, staring at it all: the dark wet patch on my red Superman pajamas, the orange swirly-patterned linoleum lumpy and bubbled like little turtles are living beneath it, the whitish brown cottage-cheese stuff in the ceiling corners, the ABC books I’d outgrown six months ago buried in the crates.
And I know I won’t cry. I just know it isn’t possible. I undress quickly and repeat to myself all I need to dress myself. I dig in the milk crate: one shirt, two arms, one underwear, two legs, one pants, two legs, two socks, two feet. My old sneakers. I put on the ones I can close and open with sticky stuff by myself, not hers that she got me, ones you have to tie. Two sneakers, two feet.
‘You dressed yourself!’ she’d say.
‘All by myself’ I’d tell her, and I’d get a star on my chart. Twenty stars and I got a matchbox car. I had near a hundred of them.
I go into the living room quietly. She lies on the couch, curled under a fuzzy blanket with a lion on it. Open cans and cigarettes are strewn on the floor and coffee table. The TV is on with no sound, no cartoons, just a man talking.
I tiptoe past her, silently pull a chair over to the front door, climb up, and noiselessly turn the locks. I know how, my daddy taught me in case of a fire or an emergency and I needed to get out.
I climb down, turn the knob, and pull. The light makes me squint, and the coolness of the air makes me shiver, but I know I have to go, it’s an emergency. I have to get out.
I walk for a long time, staring at my sneakers, the only familiar thing around me. I concentrate on them, walking quickly on the cracked, weed-filled sidewalk, trying to escape the crooked bungalows, all with sagging, rotting porches, with paint cracking like dried mud. Dogs bark and howl, a few birds chirp now and then, and the slam of car doors makes me jump as people get home or leave for work.
A huge gray factory hovers up ahead, like a metallic castle floating in its thick, yellowish bellows of smoke. I watch my sneakers for directions. They’re from home. Like stories about carrier pigeons I loved to hear, I know they’ll return me to home. I survive crossing streets by myself for the first time. Even though no cars are visible, I ru
n, my heart thudding, expecting to be crushed suddenly. I walk fast, shaking my hands like rattles to keep me going, like a train’s engine forcing me forward, keeping me from stopping, keeping me from curling up in a tight ball and trying to wake up.
Past the heavy-gated factory, chugging and snorting so loud I can’t hear the soft padding of my sneakers on the gravel as I run. Run from the gaping, smoking, metal dragon’s mouth, trying to swallow me whole. And then I’m going uphill, through a field so thick with brown grass I can’t see my sneakers, but I know at the top I’ll see my home, my real home. I’ll run through the door and into their arms, and everything will be right again.
My foot catches on a half-buried rubber tire, and I fall forward, my chin and hands digging into the reddish brown earth.
I lie there quietly, too surprised to move. I lift my chin and stare at the tilted world around me. The dark clay earth’s spread out and glitters from the multicolored shards, as if a pane of stained glass is hiding beneath.
A slow stream of watery red fills the moats my sliding hands made, and the pain, stinging and sharp, stops my breath. I pull my hands back and there are wet dark slits in them. My white T-shirt catches the red tear in my chin.
And I know they’re really gonna be sorry now. I get up and run toward the top of the cliff. The tears are coming now and little yelplike screams slowly getting louder as I get closer.
Right over the hill is the house with the big green lawn, and swings and slides, and my castle in the back. My house.
I’ll burst through the door and scream till they come running like they did when I fell off my swing and scraped my forehead. But I won’t shut up, I won’t let them kiss it better. I’ll scream till the roof flies off, till all the windows shatter, till they themselves blow apart and explode. I’ll make them sorry.
I’m almost at the top of the hill. I can smell the eucalyptus scent of the living room, hear the tick tick of the wood clock that chimes with a colorful cuckoo every hour.
I scream and lunge for the top.
The grass is deep and thick on the flat hilltop. I push my way through the brush. I see the edge ahead where it all drops down, down to the yard fenced in white. I slow down, my breath hitching, my hands balled into soggy fists. I reach out a shaking arm and move aside the last weeds blocking my way home.