The Lucky Star

by William T. Vollmann

  I nodded.

  She said: For each person that I’ve been with, I’ve learned something about myself. The women I was with in my twenties I think helped shape the woman I am now. I’ve had more than fifty partners, and there’s only a few of them I regret. That’s one thing about lesbians: When we break up, we stay friends.

  I said: I don’t know what I’ve learned.

  Then pay attention, dearie.—No thanks, Francine; I’m off to a hot date with some island mermaids . . .

  I decided to pay better attention when my turn came up. Here is what came of it:

  Neva was bleeding on the last occasion of our intimacy. As soon as I first kissed her, my nipples sprang up harder than hers! Seeing what I wanted and laughing a little, she sat on the edge of the bed, spreading her thighs so that I could kneel down to worship. I remember this whenever I see that diorite statue of the goddess Hathor with her great sundisk and cowhorns, staring pupillessly down before her, plump-cheeked, smooth-faced, full-lipped and gentle, with wheels around her nipples. My heart was pounding so rapidly with pleasure that I longed to vomit up all my own blood and die into peaceful darkness. When she had made me perfect, I might have cried out, but it is difficult now to project myself back into that lost place. My face was bloody from her. Lying down as if in death, I waited until she bent over me and breathed her breath into my mouth. Her breast was the horizon. My heart was at peace.

  Just as the Egyptians sometimes painted eyes on their sarcophagi so that the corpses could see out of them, so I now daubed my areolae round and round with that fresh menstrual blood of Neva’s, absorbing her divine female proteins into my need, so that I would be a little more like her, and maybe my nipples would even come alive like hers.

  V

  How Francine and I Coped

  Nothing had ever happened to me that a good piece of apple pie couldn’t cure!

  JUDY GARLAND, 1942

  1

  The dealer, who was young and handsome, lived in an elegant apartment on the twenty-eighth floor of the Erskine Towers. Being accustomed to street transactions, I was surprised that the doorman made Xenia and me sign in. Well, what did I know about success?

  I looked out his window. I told him he had a nice view. He did not care.

  No, he advised us, the brown is more natural than the white. It comes from Indonesian sassafras. Of course that stuff has blood on it. When ten guys go out with machine guns to poach those trees, and eleven guys with guns meet them, the ten guys all get killed. So you buy from me, you have blood on your hands.

  And you’re saying point one five grams is the right dose?

  He nodded.

  Sometimes it takes me point three to get high, maybe because of my body weight. Do you think that can harm me?

  Just experiment, he said, not very interested.

  How often can I safely use it?

  Do your own research, he said.

  Xenia, who was our go-between (she kept getting high and wringing her hands over her daughter who must soon go out into the nightmare jungle of maleness), now said: I try not to use it more than once every ten days.

  I mean, I said, you’re the expert. Can you give me any advice? Does it cause brain damage?

  He replied: Ask your friends if they see any change in you. I just sell the stuff. What it does to you, I don’t care.

  Is it addictive?

  No.

  If I take more than I need to get high, am I just wasting it?

  It’ll kill you, he said. I sold to one kid who thought, well, if point one five grams is good, a whole gram will be great. He went into convulsions. His party friends waited too long to call the ambulance. What it does is alter your thermoregulation. If you want to play with the dosage, check yourself with a thermometer. When your core temperature goes above one oh six, you’re gone.

  Xenia had given me a gram of cocaine, just to be kind. Now she said: Did you bring that with you? Anyone else feeling like doing a line?

  I got out the little baggie. She did a line and he did a line. His professional assessment was that it was good stuff. Then I put the coke away.

  Now for business. Xenia bought a gram of his brown molly, and I bought two grams. He offered to vacuum pack the stuff, but we were both going to use it soon. I thanked him for the happiness he had sold me.

  After he had counted our money, he showed off ten thousand hits’ worth of blotter acid with the old Beatles logos on it.—On the house, he joked. Although it was in a clear plastic bag I did not touch it, not caring for the surprise of hallucinogens absorbed through the skin. He was proud of his product, and maybe I should have praised it more, but, to tell you the truth, just then I was feeling pretty sad about Neva. I managed to smile and say something complimentary. Then he locked the LSD back into his safe.

  He showed us a big bag of psilocybin mushrooms.

  Thinking grandly, just in case some year I became a success, I asked: If I ever bought in a large quantity, would you give me a discount on your ecstasy?

  Sure.

  And how much can I safely carry before it’s considered possession with intent to sell?

  You’re white and getting old, so what do you care? he said. You’ll get some pricey defense lawyer, and he’ll get you off. He’ll go to the D.A., who’ll say, no, I have to convict on this one, and then he’ll sell five black guys down the river and you’ll get probation.

  Then he wanted to do another line, so I broke out the coke again. I asked how well coke went with ecstasy, and he said it went great. Then I hid the stuff away again, right next to my molly, and said goodbye to both of them. As soon as I got home, I made a date with Francine.

  She showed up ready to party hard; her eyelids were red from weeping. She had called in sick at the Y Bar; Alicia AKA Bubbles swooped in to score those extra hours. I poured us each a rum and sodapop. Then we choked down point four grams apiece of that sickeningly bitter stuff. (Here’s to blood on our hands, I said.) Half an hour later I vomited, but it wasn’t so bad. Francine barely felt nauseated.

  2

  I worshipped her body all day. She moaned, sang and exclaimed. Whenever I held her tight, she whispered in the voice of a little girl at church that she had never been so happy. The longer I caressed the undersides of her sweaty little breasts and messed up her hair, the closer to her I felt. This time she had shaved her slit, supposedly for me but more likely for Neva. I couldn’t get enough of going down on her and listening to her long soft moans. After awhile, she would pull me back up to her face so that we could resume kissing.

  I had imagined doing it with Francine the way I liked it with Neva, which is to say, her lying on her side with one thigh clasped across mine and her pussy rubbing against my leg while I began to masturbate and she promised that she loved me. But with Francine in my arms it was all so good I didn’t care which way was up.

  After five hours, when we had just begun to come down, I broke out the cocaine. She wanted it up her ass, so I licked my finger, covered it with powder and slid it in.

  Oh, she said. Oh, I’m getting high in my butt! Feels so good . . .

  So I packed the rest of it into myself. Having given her most of it, I didn’t feel much, but the light whitened and a pleasant alertness cut through the dreaminess of the ecstasy. I fingered a little more brown powder into each of our mouths. Soon I was massaging her darling buttocks, whispering to her while she sang to me, and everything felt right. Later on we played dress-up, and it was so sweet to be en femme with my arm around a real woman who desired me that for a moment I could almost imagine I was Neva.

  It was all eternal so long as it lasted. Eight hours later, when we were coming down from the molly, afflicted by stomach cramps and vicious headaches, we went our separate ways. Through the window I heard the throbbing of a gravel truck, and the tuned sibilance of brakes. Of course we were sorry to part. But
what was the use? After that respite we got right back to jonesing for Neva.

  3

  I ventured into the Cinnabar and told the retired policeman all about it.

  He said: You should have dated Judy. She could use the money.

  But Francine could use the love.

  Well, Freud would ask, does Francine feel tender toward you? If not, she’s not in love.

  She says she needs me.

  That’s not love.

  What is it then?

  Ask your friggin’ Goddess.

  4

  Looking out the window past the rusty strut which helped support the signboard, letting my gaze descend the windows of the Pierce-Arrow showroom, I saw a locked door three gratings away, and sitting up against it, stretching out their legs on the sidewalk, a white man and a black man, passing the time not unlike me, with a tall can of malt liquor beside each one. I mixed myself an extra tall rum and sodapop, even stronger and sweeter than what Francine prepared at the Y Bar. My head was pounding, so I chewed up three of Neva’s Menstru-Bliss tablets. Then, because I had developed cavities in three teeth, I recovered the scrap of wax paper which Francine had incompletely licked, and scored seven more grains of brown molly to rub on my gums. The narrow, piercing pains in those teeth, which if they were sounds would have been shrill piccolo-notes, did not go away, but they began to annoy me less. My flulike aches, chills and hot flashes required more treatment. So I deployed the big guns: two five-hundred-milligram Narcodans—a departing gift from my loving Francine. Now I felt self-reliant; I had solved my own problems. In a mellower state of mind (barely even missing Neva), I returned to the corner window, watching a line of double-breasted cars sizzle toward me, shining their little yellow nipples, then passing beneath my notice. I wondered why it felt as if I were wasting these instants of my life. Couldn’t I, as Californians say, be in the moment, as I had so successfully done with Francine in my arms?

  On either side of the two men, but not close enough to rescue from an aggressive snatch, lay their piled blankets and duffels. I disapproved; I told myself: If I’m homeless, I’ll travel more lightly, with my baggage right beside me.—But what did I know about how and why they lived?

  Ten steps up the hill from the black man, on a long bier of cardboard, lay what appeared to be a blanket-wrapped corpse, its knees drawn up; hour after hour it never moved.

  After a long time, two policemen marched up and rewarded the two homeless men with tickets. The men held the long strips of paper up into the light, trying sincerely to apprehend their mysteries. Then they discussed the universe’s future heat-death with the officers, considering all phases and possibilities even while accepting the ultimate outcome, and so the discussion went for a good quarter-hour, gradually becoming emphatic, then impassioned, after which the authorities rode away on their motorcycles, and the two men leaned together, reading each other’s citations.

  The corpse-thing continued not to move. I watched it quietly, not minding my room’s faint stink, which Francine claimed not to notice. Because this rented time drained away so slowly, I seemed to be getting more for the money. To enhance the moment, I poured myself another rum and sodapop, looking down at the walk signal, watching its orange numbers count back and back until the orange hand of forbiddenness overruled them. I closed my striped blue curtains, then opened them again.

  It almost seemed as if one could see very far from that window, block after block up the line of glowing-nippled taxi cabs and yellow-starred black limousines, all the way to where the twin lines of butter-yellow streetlights folded into each other on the black horizon.

  Then rapid heavy steps approached the room, and a key turned in the lock. A man strode in.—Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry! said the man mechanically, turning on his heel.

  I had never seen him before. Why his key fit my lock I was better off not understanding. Congratulating myself that no molly lay in sight, I told him: That’s all right, and because further words might have been appropriate I added: Oh, so this is how it is.—After that I solved my worry by means of deadbolt and chain.

  At dusk I spied sweet black Shantelle in her black parka dancing across the crosswalk’s white skeleton.

  I was still looking down at the two dark men-figures at midnight, wishfully half-mistaking one of them for the lesbian.

  I put my feet up, remembering my happiest time on meth, when I stood counting the yellow bricks on the facade of the grand apartment building on Sutter and Jones.

  I wondered whether this story could ever have happened (of course not), and why on earth it had to be Neva, and why E-beth, and all the rest—as if the question of why any one of us exists at all was not sufficiently bemusing in and of itself to pass at least three songs’ worth in the jukebox that once used to occupy the back corner of the Y Bar by the ladies’ room, until they had pulled the jukebox out and junked it, then replaced it with that giant television which they kept always muted on the sports channel.

  Unable to sleep, fighting off the molly headache with the last of my rum, I watched another yellow-windowed rainy dawn, as a man in a dark parka and a white cap began rolling up a long white tarp on the sidewalk while the same two men from yesterday sat miserably against the grating; now he was unrolling it again and fixing its corners to the frame of that doorway, enclosing the two men in a lean-to, but it kept coming down on them, so he got angry and began to jump on it and kick it. Who were they to him? I felt too tired to understand anything but the sparkle of traffic seen through headlights, like tears creeping out from mascara.

  How Sandra Coped

  You won’t be a really happy person unless you also achieve success as a woman. And for most women, that includes a happy marriage.

  JUDY GARLAND, 1946

  At times I have been pretty much of a walking advertisement for sleeping pills.

  JUDY GARLAND, 1950

  And in Sandra’s dream it was the middle of a summer morning whose temperature lay exactly between clammy and humid; kirkstones loomed like chimneys out of the daisy-starred grass. She was now a girl of about sixteen, wearing a red tartan skirt. Two grey wood pigeons and one white gull stood atop the grassy wall of the roofless old church. And Sandra went seeking Neva. She wandered into a garden of black and red roses. It became late morning, and the sun came glaring out, brightening the gilded weathercocks still on the pointed roofs as the tinny bill tolled eleven. Where was Neva? Despondent, the girl searched among boulders shagged with orange lichen. Just behind the cupola of an old stone tomb was a stone wall and then a thickly nettled forest with a squat volcanic peak rising above it like a castle. Now her sorrow wearied her, and she sat on the wall, wondering whether she would ever again see the lesbian. The breeze brought the smell of roses. Her loneliness was comforted by the stately strutting and lordly nodding of a wood pigeon who marched round and round her feet just in case there might be a breadcrumb. Sandra felt sorry that she had nothing for him. He cooed and gurgled up at her; he was plump and grey. Since she could do nothing else for him, she began to stroke his bluish-grey head and white collar. At once he grew and blossomed into Neva. Delighted, Sandra tried to kiss her, but Neva turned her mouth away. Sandra felt more hurt than she had ever been in her life. But Neva held her tight and carried her up into the air. Looking back, she glimpsed a vast maple, shaped like a rounded pyramid, towering over the church wall, and then they were already flashing oceanward, and in the dark sea appeared a familiar great grey rock that whitened with increasing nearness, then began to give off a urinous smell; now the whiteness was glaring; it was comprised of gannets by the thousands. The birds rose up screaming around them. The ones who remained nesting on the dark rock reminded her of pale rose-petals on green grass; and suddenly the smell of guano became the smell of flowers. Neva carried her gently down onto a hillock of moss. Smiling, she turned her face toward Sandra at last. They began kissing forever, with Neva’s tongue in her
mouth, but then Sandra woke up.

  Narrower Than It Used to Be

  My body is the beloved; my heart is the beloved. It is the beloved who is my life.

  BULLHE SHAH, bef. 1759

  I am in the darke to all the world, and my nearest friends behold mee but in a cloud.

  SIR THOMAS BROWNE, ca. 1643

  1

  In Dishonored, when Marlene Dietrich sashays to her execution in a fur-trimmed suit, a certain tone was established; as for the lesbian, when it came time to fulfill her own obligation she did not even apply lipstick.

  Before marrying, of course she had had to visit her mother.

  By the time she picked up her car from the garage in Richmond she was already bearing that slightly rundown sensation as if from too much ecstasy, not enough sleep, maybe not enough water and then drinking vodka first thing in the morning (which was one in the afternoon), but why be a drama queen? Let’s just say she had a headache.

  A black-and-white pulled her over.—Your registration’s expired, said the officer.

  I’m sorry, said the lesbian.

  I mean, seriously expired, said the officer. There must be a glitch in our system. Ma’am, let’s see your license.

  The lesbian gave it to him.

  That’s your actual date of birth? said the officer. I don’t fuckin’ believe this.

  Well, said the lesbian, it is.

  You sure don’t look your age, said the officer.

  The lesbian replied: I love you, officer.

  He said: You’ve got a screw loose. Oh, fuck it, and he drove off.

  First she rolled past E-beth’s old apartment; why not? It was yellow-painted, gentrified, subdivided. Accordingly she drove to Jingle’s. She decided that she’d drunk enough Hot Bitches in her life. So she rounded that corner: Go, go, Valley Joe!