The Lucky Star

by William T. Vollmann

  Hi, said that individual. She looked fifty at the least.

  Do you know Neva, or are you just another rusty link in Baby’s chain of command?

  I kind of resent that, mister.

  Well, here’s ten.

  That’s all I get? I just spent six dollars on this Bloody Mary and it’s no damn good.

  There’s your life lesson. What they pour, they adulterate. Got that? They water down the fucking vodka. Then they extend the tomato juice. They cut spice mix with whatever. So as you go through life, my girl—

  You gonna give?

  Another ten after. So who’s Neva?

  Karen Strand.

  How do you know?

  See, we’re the same age, but maybe we’re not because in that picture Baby e-mailed me she still looks like some high school glamor chick, which I don’t understand, because her mother’s ancient, and Karen’s gotta be up there with me and Baby. It’s definitely her in the picture, except she looks hella pretty now. A lot better than I remember. But they say nine-tenths of that is confidence. I just heard somebody say that. Some retired dancer bitch. Well, back then Karen was skanky. A sick, nasty, skinny little thing that just to look at made me mad. She shoulda been drowned at birth. At Vallejo High I still went by Janet, and me and Marcie was like sisters. See, Marcie hated Karen, because Karen was a lez. I’m not prejudiced; I did what I could, but she . . .

  Then what?

  Nothing. Some older bitch turned her out. Karen was a bull dyke slut even in sophomore year, and by the time we graduated she was experienced.

  Go on.

  That’s all. I saw her on the street with that hard old dyke; once Marcie and me, we ran into ’em in a bar, I’m gonna say Jingle’s, but we just looked at them and they looked at us. No love lost. And until Baby showed me this picture, I never did see her since.

  Where’s Marcie?

  We fell out.

  What’s your e-mail?

  Lemme just write it for you on this napkin. I’m darkbitch64 at—

  When did you graduate?

  Class of 1983 and proud of it. Go, Apaches! Go, go, Valley Joe!

  What about Karen?

  Oh, she was a year ahead of me, but small and kind of immature for her age. Me and Marcie, well, it wasn’t too nice, but we used to kind of tease her. Not that I’m prejudiced or nothing.

  How did you tease her?

  Oh, spit on her, stuff like that. We was just foolin’ around. One time Marcie stuck a bloody tampon in her hair. That Karen was like a cockroach almost. Something about her . . . We all wanted to . . .

  How did she react?

  She never did nothing. I said to her, go on, Karen, you like to eat pussy, so put Marcie’s tampon in your mouth and . . . And she fuckin’ did. Just looked at me, didn’t say a word. We got so grossed out—

  Yep, you did everything for her. How were her grades?

  Outstanding at first. Mousy little kiss-ass! Acted like she was going places. But after she started eating fur taco, she got Cs and Ds like us. So that was . . .

  Here’s ten.

  Thank you. Am I done?

  Keep talking.

  For ten more, right? I’m starting to like you. Well, that older dyke I was telling you about, actually, for what she was she was sort of hot: silver crewcut and black nail polish, with almost a vampire look, and she was mean as fuck, so we gave her respect. Call her a lesbo and she’d right away start throwing rocks! I do remember that she drove a red Pontiac Conspiracy, which impressed us, and she called herself, well, some made up nickname, and once they started messing around, Karen would cut classes and—

  And what?

  They was even going into hotels. Back then, see, they never checked I.D.—

  Which hotels?

  I have no idea. But Marcie said—

  You’re on the outs with her.

  That’s no lie.

  Can you find her?

  Well, said Latoya, I think she goes on that bigdoughnut.com site, you know, the one where middle-aged ladies show off their titties; you have to be at least a thirty-eight double D—

  Ask her the girlfriend’s name.

  No fuckin’ way. I’m not reaching out to that doublecrossing—

  If she doesn’t have the name, get the names of the hotels. If she remembers something there’ll be twenty for each of you.

  That’s not much.

  On the bright side, thanks to me your beautiful friendship with Marcie will come screaming back to life. Besides, you hate Karen and I’m trying to get her in trouble.

  For real?

  Yeah. I hate her same as you. You graduated in 1983?

  Sure.

  That would make her class of 1982.

  Whatever. Buy me a drink?

  Here’s ten, he said, and trudged away without another word to her or Baby because he despised both of them.

  3

  The dietician was a bespectacled young woman with an oval face—and slender, of course; he had to give her that. He enrolled her in the type that rarely winds up in court (especially nowadays, thanks to no-fault divorce) but likes to drop a dime on that scofflaw parked in a red zone, or the renters whose music gets too loud on Friday night, or the half-senile retiree who waters his lawn on a forbidden day. Well, he could live with that. All the time he was thinking about Judy, feeling sick because they had quarrelled again and she might not come back.

  And you brought your meal calendar? the dietician began.

  Yeah, here it is, he said. I gave up pastries in the morning—

  That’s excellent!

  And I try to walk at least fifteen minutes a day. You see, my feet hurt when I—

  Did your primary care doc refer you to a podiatrist?

  That’s not covered by my insurance.

  I understand . . .—and he almost laughed, to watch her swivel away from that ugly subject, as if the limitations of his insurance were the result of his own free choice.—Well, you do know, Mr. Slager, that a minimum of thirty to sixty minutes a day would be a better starting point. Has anyone gone over your labs with you?

  No.

  All right. Can you see the screen, or shall I make the font larger? No? All right. Well, here’s your blood glucose, and it’s through the roof. And your triglycerides, your blood pressure—

  The retired policeman, who knew exactly what it means when the suspect announces that she will now begin to lie, cut in as follows: Just tell me what the hell I’m supposed to do about it.

  For starters, you need to lose at least ten percent of your body weight. How much did you weigh when you got your labs?

  Two hundred and forty.

  So twenty-four, even twenty-six pounds should be your initial weight loss goal. And have you made any other changes to your diet?

  I’ve cut way back on the alcohol. I try to have no more than two shots at lunch time, and five or six shots at dinner. Is it true that beer is worse than whiskey?

  A straight shot of hundred-proof whiskey is certainly less caloric than a twelve-ounce beer.

  All right, I’ll cut out the beer, he replied—an easy bargain to make, since he never drank it except with Xenia and the straight man. Now they were going places!

  But this dietician bitch wasn’t satisfied.—Mr. Slager, she patronized him, we generally recommend an absolute maximum of two shots a day. And you need to start eating more vegetables.

  Yeah, well, I live in the goddamn ghetto. I go to the store, and the only vegetable I see’s a bag of potato chips.

  Do you have a freezer at home?

  I used to have a refrigerator, you know, to chill the beer, but it quit working. Anyway, you heard me say I’m giving up beer.

  We’re just about at the end of our time, Mr. Slager. Any other questions you care to ask me?

&nb
sp; How about dried fruit? I could keep a big bag of that around, and then when I got hungry—

  The trouble is, it takes awhile to eat one apricot, but no time to eat six dried apricots, which means six times the sugar. But I think you’re off to a good start, cutting out the pastries and walking a little.

  Yeah, I feel slightly better than I used to . . .

  Then let’s check your weight on the way out. You were at two hundred and forty before, and that was how long ago?

  Oh, three or four months . . .

  Then you might have lost a couple of pounds already. Right this way. Do you want to take off your shoes?

  Sure. Anything to get my weight down, he said, trying to make a joke of it. But that did not seem funny to her.

  He stepped on the scale, and the red digits reported that he now weighed two hundred and fifty-six pounds.

  The dietician inspected him in sadness and disappointment. He wanted to say: Don’t look at me like I’m a motherfuckin’ liar. Then he wondered how on earth he could possibly be heavier after his multitude of sacrifices.

  He said: Well, I guess the best weight loss program for me’s a bullet.

  She tightened her mouth. He glared at the floor, humiliated.—But as soon as he limped into the elevator and out of the lobby his spirits reascended, and he practically sang to himself: Fuck that disapproving twat anyhow. And fuck that fuckin’ fuckin’ American General Hospital and every whitecoat who looks down on me. And fuck my swollen ankles; Jesus God, why don’t I saw them off?

  He caught a 38 Geary bus downtown, and hobbled the six blocks to the Y Bar. Now his best years marched back ahead of him.

  The usual? said Francine.

  Double it up!

  You mean four shots?

  Good gal; you actually know how to multiply.

  Make it ten dollars. What’s new?

  Keep the change.

  He wished that Judy would breeze here right now. Tonight, if she forgave him, he would tell her all about that snotty dietician and how he should have put her down.

  4

  Of course Judy did, so he did, until four in the morning, when his swollen ankles impelled him to send her clipclopping away—straight home, she claimed, but he supposed aloud that she might hustle along the way since her very first shift at the Pack and Ship (mazeltov, bitch!) would not be until two in the afternoon. She grinned in embarassment. What did he care? With her out of the picture, he booted up his screechy old desktop and prepared to punish his bleary eyes.—He told himself: You know what? I hate almost everything.—Well, not everything: He was already logged in on the good old SpiderWeb! Among other eternally glowing black-and-white ghosts pertaining to the Vallejo High website shone Karen Strand’s senior portrait, a forlorn thumbnail on a graveyard page of the 1982 yearbook. His screen froze twice; he had to deploy a control-option-backslash-escape to get back to the homepage and start over; to hell with your so-called user interface. Click by goddamned click, he zoomed in, until her much reticulated likeness filled the screen: young, pale and troubled—Neva, but nonmagnetic, barren, defective (we in the business describe that as a leave-me-alone look). Regressing through the previous three years, he found her appearing progressively worse. As for Latoya, which is to say Janet Smith, she had certainly been prettier in her youth. But Karen and Neva, well, he could not figure that out. Was it impersonation or what? She had to be fifty-one years old.

  Logic, he liked to remind Judy, can best be described as the orderly and sensible review of facts, conditions and events in a consistent and regular fashion. All fuckin’ right! So we go back in time and Neva turns into something hardly worth spitting on. What occurred between then and now? Who did it?

  He texted darkbitch64: Will pay $20 for contact to Karen S’s HS gf. Then he took a drink and three sleeping pills.

  Judy at School

  Without love, the outward work is of no value; but whatever is done out of love, be it never so little, is wholly fruitful.

  THOMAS À KEMPIS, 1413

  Those whom nature has sacrificed to her ends—her mysterious ends that often lie hidden—are sometimes endowed with a vast will to loving, with an endless capacity for suffering also, which must go hand in hand with their love.

  RADCLYFFE HALL, 1928

  1

  And while I was dreaming of a giant angel who wore ten thousand eyes on her greenish-grey wings, Judy mouthwashed away a new friend’s semen and lay down to think about Neva. To facilitate her thought processes, she masturbated: Oh, Neva, I’m sucking you inside out! (Nothing was as perfect as the taste of the lesbian’s tongue, which was so long she could practically tickle her partners’ throats; one time she and Shantelle were having a contest to see who could slam whose tongue in whose mouth the farthest, and the lesbian won when Shantelle started choking.—Stick yours out, the loser commanded, and was surprised that Neva’s tongue did not appear exceptional; compared to it, however, hers was nothing but a broad little paddle.) And Judy climaxed roaringly. Then she fell asleep as thoroughly as if Shantelle had knocked her out cold.

  She dreamed that she was front page news in a style magazine: Coming down the stairs in a goldensilver dress with her knees shinily perfect and a smile that would make even Sandra so jealous, she would be singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

  She awoke at noon, leaping happily out of bed, rushing to shower and moisturize, first shaving her chin (where electrolysis treatments had prematurely ceased for financial reasons), then razoring away every last hair on arm and leg and crotch, because tonight she had a date with Neva! She concealed, blushed, eyeshadowed, eyelined, lipsticked and glossed herself. Pouffing out her hair, which she generally pampered with five-dollar conditioner and which even Shantelle agreed was her best feature, she then chose exactly the right earrings, the bloodstone pair which the retired policeman had given her two birthdays ago. Going out to the hallway, she raised the window shade. Today it was drizzling again; each square stone of the sidewalk had become its own silver-grey, and a woman hurried by almost hidden in her lavender umbrella; then a blonde passed slowly with her sodden hair clinging to her shoulders and an unlit cigarette in her mouth; reflections of shop-lights shone in soft yellow parallel diagonals as people walked over and through them. The transwoman’s joy increased by the minute, like a steadily building euphoria of methamphetamine, until she grew almost fearful of it, so she approached the mirror and told her needy face: Buck up, girl! You’re having a pretty good time right now. Right, girl? Right, girl? So snap out of it!—And she laughed at herself (turning away, however, from the reflection of her stained teeth).

  At 1:55 in the afternoon she arrived at the Pack’N’Grin. Sweating, Bertha the manager said: Judy, see if you can help this man.

  This man said: So I fail to see why you insist on my using Form 71-Z when even Cloud Express accepts a Form 3232, as this clip from their website absolutely proves.

  Oh, said Judy. Oh, I’m really sorry.

  Well, you may be sorry, but what the fuck does that do for me?

  At that, the devil flew into our sweet, submissive Judy, who said: I’ll do anything to make it right, absolutely anything.—She flickered her tongue and wriggled her hips. Then she pulled down her pants.

  Bertha fired her right then. Judy told her: I sure did dodge a bullet.

  Since she now had six hours to fill, she visited the Y Bar, where Sandra happened to be whispering something to Francine. Left out, Judy ran both hands through Sandra’s long red hair.

  Do you mind? said Sandra.

  Insulted, she rushed out to the Cinnabar, where Erin sat texting somebody a secret. Judy sat down next to her, trying to read that communication.—What’s up? inquired her special friend.

  Will you tell me a story, pretty please?

  Why that little girl voice?

  Because I wanna be cute.

  We
ll, you actually sound kind of fake. Why not just be yourself?

  Because you got to be a little girl and I didn’t.

  Okay, sighed Erin. Desisting from her text, she turned the cell phone discreetly over, stroked back her hair and waited.

  Carmen the barmaid marched bustily over, and Judy ordered a bourbon and ginger ale. Erin chose a fizzy water. Judy paid for both drinks: here’s to unemployment!

  All right, said Erin. I wasn’t happy getting breasts. I got breasts when I was around nine, and it felt really odd. I thought other girls were excited about getting their breasts, and I thought, you can keep ’em; I don’t want mine! I started wearing a lot of layers, trying to hide them. And I got acne; that’s really not fun. I like big breasted women, but I always thought smaller breasts were more sexy. I wanted to be more androgynous. I liked boys that were more androgynous, boys that liked wearing makeup . . .

  But how did you feel? How does a pubescent girl feel?

  I don’t remember, said Erin.

  I mean, did you want to get penetrated? I feel so female when they—

  I thought about just the simple science of it, you have the penis and the vagina and one is being penetrated and one is the penetrator, and if you talk about control issues, I don’t know, it feels so complicated to think about. I love men who like getting it in the ass. Some guys like it rough, and that’s easy for me since I’m not the most practiced person, but I don’t like to hurt people; I don’t like to hurt my lover.

  I like to be hurt, gushed Judy.

  We all know that! Well, there’s different personalities, and a woman could maybe take on more of a role by playing that she does have a penis, or . . . Don’t you have one? Anyway, I’ve gone down on a woman; I’ve made a few women come; I don’t feel the need to have ass play with women, because I don’t feel that they’re out to penetrate me, whereas I feel psychologically penetrated by men all the time.

  Judy said: You can do anything you want to me.

  No thanks, said Erin.

  But why? I mean, I’d really do anything.

  Because there’s only been a few women that I’ve been comfortable with. I think they were bisexual and open to exploring.