The Lucky Star

by William T. Vollmann

  Help me audition at the Pink Apple. I’ve lost eighteen pounds—

  What put you up to that?

  There was this dancer named Starfire who used to work the chorus line in Vegas, and she said she could see me in King’s Row. She said I have potential. She—

  Oh, come on. Why don’t you audition to be a Slimways Sexmate? We’ll call you the cover model cow.

  You promised Neva you’d help me.

  Oh, she told you that?

  No, you did.

  Did I? Well, what the hell; I’ll give you another friggin’ lesson. You want to succeed as a dancer?

  You know I do.

  Well, you’re losing weight. Your legs aren’t quite so ugly, and your belly’s showing twins instead of triplets. That’s good. Lose a lot more. And your boobs are okay but your face is horrendous. Go get some work done.

  Okay, but—

  And don’t ask me what and where. Now. What’s success?

  Applause. Everyone wanting to date me—

  Wrong. Success equals money. That’s all there is. Now do you fucking get it?

  Yes, Xenia.

  What a good submissive. You never know how much money you’re gonna make. Sometimes you don’t make your rent. A lot of people don’t wanna pay. Just now at the Y Bar I don’t see anyone who’s gonna pull out the big money. And when my radar tells me the same thing at the Pink Apple, you know what I do?

  You go home.

  Good girl.

  But you’re a performer; you’re a, I mean, a sexy woman—

  I don’t see myself as sexual. I don’t care what they think. If they call out something insulting it can’t ruin my night, whereas you get one insult and you go home boo-hooing. Do you think a real woman would act like that?

  How would you know if you’re the most beautiful?

  Judy, you’ll never have to worry about that.

  But how would you know?

  The only way I’d know is if I was making the most money. Or if I . . . Look. I mean, I just do my job. I just come and get naked and then go home. You go home when you’re done. Isn’t that how it is for you when you’re sucking dick behind some garbage can?

  Not exactly. Sometimes I feel really happy to do that, because—

  Oh, shut up, freak. Now what mistake are you making right now?

  Caring—

  Right. So enough with that fuckin’ caring. On Tuesdays at the Pink Apple it’s just me and Eva and sometimes Starfire, who as I happen to know quite well never said you have potential, because she fuckin’ hates you, but usually she takes Tuesdays off to be with her son. So me and Eva, we do three songs on and three songs off. When I’m on I don’t care and when I’m off I don’t care. Because I don’t really sell a lot of dates. I get turned down; they don’t want ’em. My energy’s not super inviting. That’s how it works for me in the real world, so that nobody can get to me, ever. That’s why Hunter thinks I’m frigid. Well, that’s just old Xenia! I know I’m lucky. Sure, I’d be better off if I could sell myself at the Apple or even here, but the way I am, I can’t just turn that off. So maybe I’m not getting rich, but they can all kiss my ass.

  I’ll kiss your ass—

  Neva’s is more to my liking. All I ever gave you was a pity fuck. Anyway, I mostly don’t do sex anymore, but I used to. There was this four-foot-and-something black gentleman named Miles and he’d meet me anywhere, and he made up a rule that after three a.m. he’d only snort cocaine off a stripper’s titties. So he’d snort and snort; it went on and on. Yeah, I used to work in a much more fast-paced club, so I used to have a lot more fun, but . . .

  So you did care.

  So what if I did? You work some more on your not caring! When they can’t hurt you, you can stay onstage as long as possible. It’s hard to pull yourself away from money talking. You want to show dance? Getting money is putting on a show. So. Lose another fifteen pounds. Fix your ugly mug. Then come to me, and we’ll try it—only so I can get Brownie points with Neva . . .

  13

  Staring me up and down in that all-seeing way of his (in his way he knew us all even better than did Neva), the retired policeman inquired: Have you ever heard the term the shitting burglar? There’s the thrill of the burglary itself. They lose their bowel control. They could become dangerous, because they want the thrill to continue. Psychologically, Neva’s slaves are like that. Do you get it, Richard? I’m talking about you.

  I want the thrill to continue, I confessed.

  Good man! The guy who admits guilt right off the bat, that’s the guy I can work with. I’ve always liked you, buddy.

  Thanks, I said. I know I’m not worth much—

  That’s right. No one is. And you know it! You’re one of us—way ahead of the rest. Now tell me: What in fuck’s name’s gonna happen to you?

  I almost explained that what the lesbian offered was emancipation from anything quotidian such as washing dishes, going to work or buying toilet paper, all of which went far to wreck nearly any partnership-for-life. Must any equal marriage wind up use-stained like a yellowed tooth? None of us, even the marriageable few, wished to believe so. I for my part once washed our dishes happily, because it was for the one I loved, but there came the night when she yawned at me, and the morning when she snapped at me, and the week when she made it clear that I was to leave her alone; had she been telling this story she would have rolled out my own failures to tell, but to me it truly seemed that I had done everything to respect the glamor of our coupled lives—which she had broken. Although I must have done my part to break it, I would have sworn even to the lesbian that I had never been spiteful or even impatient, although perhaps I had been lazy without knowing it; whatever Michelle and I had done, the romance drained away, leaving a stain around the bathtub drain; let’s say I was the one to scrub it. Times with the lesbian were never long enough, but that was because they never got boring.—But instead of explaining, I finished my drink. Carmen topped us off, after which I said: Well, it’s got to end badly, because everything does. I mean, there’s that hole in the ground waiting . . .

  Neva’s preying on you, he said.

  But what’s she getting out of it?

  I agree she’s a pretty weird case.

  You must have seen a lot of villains, I said, because I loved to hear him talk.

  Licking the rim of his glass, he began: Most of the sociopaths that I’ve encountered I’ve not encountered as a cop. Passive-aggressive people like Neva, they’re the worst. But it’s all about categories: those who commit crime for profit, those who do it because it’s a lifestyle, and those who have sociopathic tendencies. There are thieves who would murder child molesters. There are people who see nothing wrong with being a child molester who would never steal anything.

  But why’s Neva the worst? I asked.

  I’m working on it, he said.

  I was coming down from her, and the headache tortured me. He could see that I needed to go. Returning home, I locked myself in and lay down to think about the lesbian, the one who cared with love and pain for all of our wounds; the recentness of our separation kept her so real that I could almost taste her, smell her and feel her as if her face were still against mine and my hands were worshipping her hot smooth buttocks, over and over forever; the warm happy sexy certainty remained in my heart but my legs were already starting to get cold; oh, God, I was coming down and down off my Neva . . . !

  14

  . . . And Neva wanted to desire the transwoman but could not even though she loved her, so she swallowed a dropperful of green extract from the herbal shop on Haight Street and in half an hour began to get what she called that feeling, oh, that wonderful feeling of wanting and even craving whoever would soon be in her arms.

  IV

  Without Shame or Limit

  All my life I have tried to do whatever was expected of me . .
.

  JUDY GARLAND, 1951

  Not many of us have the names and identities we were born with . . . You think, can this be me they’re talking about? . . . It’s as if people were confusing you with some role you played on the screen.

  JUDY GARLAND, 1951

  1

  But still we tried to believe that it could go on like this forever, each of us drinking honey from between the lesbian’s thighs—honey like milk and fire, honey like moonlight; and no matter what happened there would always be more. Why not? Xenia imagined that she would someday amass enough pills, MGM planned to keep Judy Garland docile and prepubescent, I thought to live off my savings, the policeman dreamed of running Neva out of town, while the transwoman kept right on hoping to become as wholesomely pretty as the Olympic skating champion Nancy Kerrigan: Maybe a memory foam bra with the perfect measurements would make Neva not merely love her, but actually fall for her . . . !—Among the glittering glassware of the Y Bar went our darkhaired girl, carrying all our most precious desires. We watched as if we were far away—because we were—but our hearts opened wider than Shantelle’s legs. Starfire was somewhere in that picture; so was the woman who resembled Julie Andrews. Even the straight man, halfway determined as he was to become independent of the lesbian who had tormented him so much, watched his resentment altering back into fascination exactly as swiftly as she appeared, passing in and out of us, while we waited in ambush. Meanwhile Neva made herself vomit. (Judy kept doing that for beauty’s sake; even I tried it once, just to be like Neva.) Washing the glasses, Francine smiled without knowing it. The lesbian’s approach was moonrise. My emerald heart vibrated like the last drop hesitating on the lip of an upturned bottle of gin (I actually felt corroded with anxiety). Taking leave of her, but first following the reflection of a streetlamp across a dark puddle, I rushed off to have my loneliness sucked away by the transwoman. This felt very pure. (She tattled to the retired policeman, who grinned and clapped me on the back.) Meanwhile the lesbian made her bed and touched up her lipstick. She went next door to comfort Catalina, then down to Room 547 to take care of Victoria—but only in the absence of the latter’s sister Helga. Then she returned to the nest. Holding her phone close, she listened to a new voicemail from Shantelle: Hi, baby, it’s me. I know that even though this ain’t good for me I’m gonna think all about you tonight and I’m gonna say your name and touch myself when I think about you. I love you so much and wish everything was different because then half my problems would be solved.—Thus another typical communication from Neva’s fan club. And Neva ministered to each of us with the quiet kindness of the victim’s advocate who sits in the room while the police are taking evidence and then, when they warn her that she will get billed for the rape kit unless she agrees right now to press charges, gently, calmly informs the woman that she will never get billed and does not have to decide anything right now.—The knowledge that we could never believe her biography fatigued her, but that burden every goddess must bear. I suspect that when she looked in the mirror the emiserating beauty of her face occasionally aroused self-hatred (come to me, E-beth, come to me; Xenia, Richard, Shantelle and Victoria, come to me); more often, it relieved her, proving her still qualified to love us. She knew us all by heart: Sandra felt hornier when she was ovulating while Hunter got in the mood just before her period came on. Judy wanted to be done to; I wanted to do with; Victoria most needed caresses and slow romantic words.

  Now it was Samantha’s turn.

  You look tired, Neva.

  No, honey, I’m just . . .

  Look at that! A grey hair! Shall I pull it out?

  Sure.

  Poor Neva! Pretty soon you’ll be like the rest of us.

  I love you and I’m sorry for—for being different . . .

  Have you tried Etruscan Formula? It’ll cover you all the way to the roots. Don’t feel sad; I’ll never tell.

  Of course she rushed into the Y Bar waving the evidence and shouting: Look what I pulled out of Neva! The bitch is going grey. Now she can’t lord it over us anymore.

  Don’t be mean, said Xenia, who was strangely delighted at the news.

  As for me, I rejected Saint Augustine’s weird certainty that what suffers no change, is better than what can be changed. Now that I knew she could get old, the lesbian grew all the more loveable to me.* I still wonder how much power she had ever owned to light her way ahead, and whether in our times with her she withheld herself out of fidelity or selfishness.

  Francine took the grey hair out of Samantha’s hand and pretended to throw it out, but actually kept it among her secret treasures.

  2

  Meanwhile the retired policeman did unremitting justice to the investigation. (His most glorious time had been finding the night club owner hidden under garbage bags in the garage, shot over and over in the face; and in the den the night club owner’s mother beside the live-in stripper girlfriend, the former simply bludgeoned to death and the latter with her panties pulled down and her long hair glued to the carpet by coagulated blood.) To him the lesbian might as well have been lovely, merciless Athena, with her deep dark eyepits (whose inlaid pupils had long since washed away), her unfriendly lips and her ravishingly smooth skin, the Gorgon grinning blankly at her breast. His questions found her staring poutingly down, her concerns inhuman to ours.

  I arrested a few sex offenders, he told Francine. Wand wavers. I think it can accelerate into rape and worse.

  Well, J. D., what the fuck do you think about us?

  I always saw prostitution and any kind of consensual sex as human behavior and that’s what you do and it’s none of my business. I remember I was in the military and this guy started buying me a beer, and he says, how would you like a blow job? I had nothing against him.

  No, you wouldn’t!

  Fuck you.

  Seven dollars.

  That’s all it costs to fuck you, honey? Then Judy’s ripping me off. Sometimes the bitch even demands a hot shower.

  You’re too much, said Francine.

  Look. The good guys would rather arrest rustlers than the barmaid that’s working. I think that’s right on. I got nothing against you, baby. If you had a dick I might even date you. Oh, God, but I did relish when I made a good bust, especially as a patrolman: high speed, well over a hundred miles an hour on Christmas Day; the road was slick, and I ran two of ’em down on foot and the third one ended up knocking on the door of a cop’s house, and I had to count the money and all the evidence! I was high. High on adrenaline! When I put the cuffs on them, I . . .

  The lesbian came in. His plans for her were not quite perfected, so he got up and went home.

  3

  Right away his Judy came clipclopping inopportunely upstairs like an ugly old horse. He started slapping her around because she loved Neva more than him. She screamed, sobbed and begged for forgiveness; that part was still perfect. Then she unzipped his pants, and he sighed. Afterward they got wasted on Old Crow and she said: I mean, don’t you feel like we have a connection, you and I?

  Judy, if I did, then you wouldn’t, because it’s all about my being cruel to you. Right, bitch?

  Please don’t send me away. I’ll do anything; I’ll mop the floor with my tongue—

  Run along now, he said, literally shoving her out the door while the neighbors watched delightedly.

  (Have you ever loved more than one person at a time? I feel so guilty, she sobbed, and the lesbian, who should have accepted all other loves, felt momentary horror and dread—because as the Scriptures ran: I am a jealous Goddess.)

  4

  He meanwhile tourniqueted off another of his attachments: Melba, who kept visiting the ladies’ room for a very long time with her bulky purse, after which she said that she had forgotten to pee. She had also forgotten to bring the lowdown on E-beth’s other little jailbait bitches. She then proposed to come into his room to smoke her h
eroin, which was in a vaporizer, and she promised that a vaporizer would not set off the smoke detector although she admitted that she felt unfamiliar with vaporizers. He said that he would keep her company anywhere while she smoked her heroin, only not in his room, that not being his most prized setting for a high-class felony; so then Melba became sullen and hateful and opened her cell phone to call a bearded boy in a rattletrap van filled with cigarette smoke; he was one of the several drivers whom Melba had on call for this or that undisclosed reason, and when the retired policeman got into the front seat to discuss their next meeting, the bearded boy at once began to drive toward some unknown place, at which the policeman explained that he would be getting out at the next corner. He who used to be unwillingly impelled toward her smile decided not to see Melba again. Waiting for Judy to come home, he settled back in bed and poured himself a shot, devouring old true stories of crimes against young girls.

  The buzzer rang. He struggled into his slippers and pressed the button on the wall. When Judy arrived, he said: Hey, babe, you’re looking thin and beautiful.

  5

  But Judy now glimpsed the lesbian with Victoria. That night she dreamed of spying on them. She dreamed of whispering lovingly to the retired policeman, and he became the woman he should always have been.

  The Paratrooper

  By oneself evil is done; by oneself one suffers; by oneself evil is left undone; by oneself one is purified. Purity and impurity belong to oneself; no one can purify another.

  BUDDHA, date unknown

  A bluehaired girl sat down and said: Do you remember me?

  I’m sorry, but—

  Good. My name’s Colleen.

  Oh, said the transwoman; then, just in case her forgetting this person was yet another failure to be compensated for, smiled widely and said: Where do you come from?