The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  Shyly, the transvestite hung his head. —You got any rock? he whispered.

  How many friends you got? said the Queen. I mean real friends?

  Not so many. I got a fortune cookie once that said it’s easier to make friends than it is to keep them, and, man, is that ever true. If I needed to fix or I was going to be sick, if I was hungry or needed a place to stay and I had no money, then there are two or three places I could go. Yeah, three friends. Three good friends. That’s better than a lot of people can say.

  What’s your name?

  Libby.

  You remember me?

  No.

  You was stayin’ at that Hotel Seville last year, an’ your visitor fees be gettin’ too high, so Justin here had a little talk with ’em . . .

  Oh yes yes yes yes yes.

  An’ what if I was to say you could always stay with me, no questions asked?

  What are you, some kind of cult?

  Not exactly, child. Look into my eyes. What do you see?

  Why, I see Christopher! He’s my boyfriend—well, my ex-boyfriend I guess I should say. . .

  Hell! Sooner or later they’re all ex-boyfriends, the blonde put in with her trademark crooked smile. You know why? Because they’re all shitty! And I’m warning you, too, Maj—

  Hush up, darling. You know I love you . . .

  I—gosh . . . uh, after Christopher left me—well, that was two months ago but we were together for two years so I guess I can still talk about it—I started getting these waves of sadness. I knew I could never meet anybody like him again—smart, handsome, generous, a lawyer—’cause it had taken me fourteen years before I met him. And I’m not getting any younger.

  Why did he leave you? asked the Queen.

  He didn’t like my lifestyle.

  Your whorin’?

  Uh huh. And one day he was going to fly off to Boston, and he didn’t invite me. So I said: Well, if you’re not taking me, at least give me some money to get high tonight, because I’ll be missing you. —And he didn’t want to indulge my habit was how he put it, although I don’t have a habit; I try lots of different drugs, don’t stick to any one thing, so how could he have been so insensitive as to call me addicted? So I threw a tantrum and half wrecked his apartment. Then he gave me the money, but he said: You’ve thrown your last tantrum. —I didn’t pay him much attention, ‘cause he was always saying that . . .

  So you didn’t pay him no mind, agreed the Queen. And then what?

  And then it was over. And waves of sadness like an ocean kept filling up inside my room. I felt like I was drowning. I can’t stay in my room very long or I start to choke. That’s why you found me sitting outside in the hall . . .

  How much you charge for head?

  I go as low as five dollars. That’s rock bottom, you know, when I’m feeling really really needy for some medicine.

  That’ll work, said Domino. Because we have a rule. If you’re one of those expensive prostitutes who charge five hundred bucks before you’ll swallow, then we can’t let you in. Because we’re exclusive.

  Domino . . . sighed the Queen.

  We’re the downtrodden. We’re the wretched of the earth. We’re inscribed—and I mean indelibly inscribed—with the Mark of Cain.

  We feel happy, ’cause Mama always gives us presents, Beatrice said, smiling with every inch of her car-crash-ruined face. —If you want to be my brother and Domino’s brother you can be, and we’ll respect you, I promise, because we . . .

  What do you mean, presents? Hey, can you spare a little rock, like just a little teeny-weeny bump, just so I can get a taste? I need the taste, I—

  Hell, no, said Domino.

  | 251 |

  One night Strawberry ran away or maybe went to jail although if she had gone to jail one would have thought that she’d have used her statutory phone call on Dan Smooth, who was always willing to forward bail requests, but nobody heard from her; and while it was possible that she’d been murdered like the Capp Street girls who kept winding up in various zones of San Francisco either strangled or with their throats cut (one whore who’d gotten away said that it was two Hispanic men in a pickup truck, and another whore assured her neighbors with equal vigor that it was a greyhaired ex-cop), it seemed equally likely, if not more so, that she had simply grown exhausted with the tall man, whose self-denying rage (akin to holy asceticism) inevitably broke down everything and everybody whom he loved into a might-have-been; so after two or three days Beatrice spied his fists like shooting stars around a pay phone, ringing and ringing against that nickel-plated metal until his hands began to tear open; just as dark juice runs from the winepress, so the black blood spewed and spurted at every noisy blow, the flesh merely raw and superficially exposed, but the sight nonetheless pitiable for that, which is why a black whore in a metal kettle-hat and a shawl like a shower curtain kept lumbering around the incensed and despairing man as if she were a dancing bear, terrified yet fascinated, uttering hysterical laughter as she had done just two nights past when the cocktail glass on the sign for Jonell’s bar intoxicated her—a horrible sight, so Beatrice, whose sense of duty rose up with all the high dark corrugations of the border wall between Mexican and American California, flew panting to her Mama the Queen, who was sleeping inside the hulk of the Grand Southern Hotel on Mission between Fifteenth and Sixteenth, the Grand Southern having lately been burned out by accidents or ruthlessness unknown; Beatrice told the news, crying: I come running, running! but when those two arrived back in the Tenderloin by taxicab forty minutes later the tall man had gone and the phone was clean, so the Queen sleepily grumbled and clucked and laid her head in Beatrice’s lap on a bench in Boedekker Park ten yards from the black preacher who cried out: I was more wretched than you, but Jesus saved me. Jesus took my wretchedness away. Are you listening? Hallelujah! He died for me, I said! He took my wretchedness away. I was a user, but He took my wretchedness away, and now I ain’t no user no more. The Queen very faintly snored and blew a bubble through her nostril; Beatrice, bending over her, inhaled her familiar smoked-leather odor, closed her own eyes, and had begun dreaming of when she was a little girl in Oaxaca and she had seen them burning a wooden statue in a bonfire to complete some ceremony whose significance she had never understood; when she was shaken awake by the blood-caked hands of Justin. His dusty face had been worn clean by two tear-tracks. When Beatrice awoke, the Queen awoke also. She sat up and looked into his bloodshot eyes and then said to Beatrice: Okay, baby. Here’s five dollars. You go buy some powder for Sapphire . . . —and when Beatrice had risen and gone a few steps, she turned back, brushing her skirt, and saw the tall man sobbing in the Queen’s arms. —C’mere, little boy, the Queen whispered. Come closer to me. . . . —Beatrice turned away, jealous. She heard the Queen say: Maybe you need to make amends to her, Justin. Maybe she just don’t want you to beat her up no more . . . —to which the tall man chokingly replied: But she . . . —She gonna come back to you in two days, said the Queen. I know it. Try an’ cherish her. You hear me, child? —Passing a police wagon which loomed so black in the hot evening light, Beatrice, worrying about Strawberry but believing the Queen, returned to the hotel room where she was living that week, the room with incandescent doughnuts wrapped around the burnt-out light bulbs and knocked on the door of one-eleven where she got five dollars’ worth of powder from a dealer named Scoreboard, and after taking a little snort for herself (the Queen would never have minded), she knelt down, longing to pray to her dear friend the Virgin for Strawberry’s safety and happiness, but she knew that it was not permitted for her to pray to the Virgin anymore. Besides, the Queen was herself the Virgin, the righteous one who loved Beatrice, Strawberry, Justin, Domino and everyone, the dear lady who feasted them and cared for them and could do any of the things Beatrice remembered from the devotional stories; but two things had occurred to weaken Beatrice’s faith in the Queen. The first was her realization that wherever the Queen dwelled there was never any altar. The second was the episode j
ust now with the transvestite Libby. When Domino led him in, Beatrice had been certain that she would now have a new brother, or sister, or whatever Libby desired to be, because her Queen, who could do everything, had sent for him and invited him into the royal family. And of course the Queen behaved as splendidly as the Virgin in continuing to love Domino most tenderly no matter what she did, and transform the blonde’s faults, even her gravest defect of malice, into childish stumblings which should in no way be blamed. But if the Queen were really Beatrice’s good friend Maria, then why had Domino succeeded in scaring Libby away? The Queen had not uttered a word of reproach. Yet surely the real Virgin would have dissuaded and prevented anyone who sought to block another from entering the house of God. (The Queen, who did indeed remain mostly as mild with Domino as Irene’s mother reminding her daughter not to soak the New Year’s rice cakes too long on New Year’s Eve, perhaps hoped—if she hoped at all—for titration between Domino and the world, that interesting chemical term referring to the slow and gradual addition of an acid to a base, or vice versa, until a neutral pH is reached. But any such strategy would have remained diabolically irrelevant to the Mexican girl’s doubts.) What a luxury it had been, to believe that the Queen and the Virgin were one! And now Beatrice did not know what to do. Lying down on her back, she pulled up her sweaty T-shirt and slowly masturbated, hoping to relax herself, but suddenly she glimpsed herself in the bathroom mirror and was ashamed. She went back out to find Sapphire, glimpsing through the doorway of a bar a black girl in a straw hat who, smiling faintly, slammed the dice down on the counter with a sound like cracking ice. Sapphire was supposed to be on Minna Street but she wasn’t there. Beatrice, heavy Beatrice, went sighing and panting to Clementina but Sapphire wasn’t there, either. On Sixth Street a man whose face resembled lava’s dull fire gazed at her. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt and a red skirt; and because the lava-faced man thought that she had a nice if black-toothed smile and a nice round face, almost clean and very shiny, because he liked big women, especially olive-faced ones like this one, this wide-hipped one with the colored bracelets hanging from her arms, he called out: Baby, you gonna go back with me today? I’m lonely! but Beatrice, whose feet were hurting so much now and whose back ached, turned and snarled: Doan play with me! I’m not up for it today! so he said: How about tomorrow? —Beatrice bent over and allowed herself to be sodomized beneath the murky blue mirrors of office windows, keeping up her spirits with the thought of the forty dollars which he had promised her, so that it didn’t hurt at all. Afterward he tipped her so that she got fifty. He was a nice man. In her heart Beatrice sang thank you to God and resolved to trust His plan for her, which meant believing in the Queen, for after all there was no purpose in going home. —A black-and-white pulled up. The cop beckoned her with one finger. She approached him with respect, hoping that he was Officer O’Malley, with whom she was in love a little because he never slapped her down like so many other policemen but joked with her instead, and sometimes even gave her a break if she whined long enough. Just the other night, when he’d busted her, his partner took a Polaroid of Officer O’Malley with his arm around Beatrice, the two of them standing against the white wall of the Mission Street substation with her head resting on his shoulder. But this policeman was not Officer O’Malley. She abased herself, so he let her off. —Thank you, officer, thank you! she cried. —Walk, said the cop. —I hear you, said Beatrice. She shuffled wearily halfway up the block, then flashed her fat and tired breasts at cars without result. —Should be right around the corner, said the tall man at dusk, so, thanking him, Beatrice turned the corner, met the Queen, kissed her lips. Returning to her hotel, she snorted the rest of Sapphire’s powder, then bought forty dollars’ worth of coal tar heroin from Scoreboard, longing to experience even by chemical means the tranquility which was the gift of nuns. She wanted to be a nun. Closing her eyes, she saw once again the old master of ceremonies in Merida with his death’s head face. He tipped his hat to her, crying out: Our Queen of the Yucatan—sweet as a pastry, hot as a candle, bright as the sun! And suddenly she wondered whether he might be the Devil. She had never considered that before. It was he who by filling her heart with the desire to dance before multitudes had led her into dancehalls and prostitution. And if that were true, what must the Queen be? How could Domino continually distrust the Queen, unless either the Queen or Domino herself were morally deficient? Beatrice, pierced now by a terrible anxiety, resolved to remake her life. Then she prepared the heroin and squezed it lovingly into her favorite vein, the big one on her left thigh, two hands below the crotch. Ay, it was good—so good! Her soul became incense-smoke rising up from the censer of her flesh; she was holy and excellent forever. The higher she rose, the more she could see, until it seemed to her that the whole world most preciously shimmered below her. Far to the southeast she could spy Oaxaca; there was her Papa’s house on its concrete platform, with ladders going up to the roof; and when she closed her eyes she could almost hear her dead mother calling her to come and eat. She cried. Against the pitted concrete wall of the house, a broom leaned. The concrete porch was clean. Now she was happy and drowsy. There were ladders and buckets in the dry dirt. There was a wheelbarrow halfway down the canyon. At that moment, shrugging off the blanket of heroin’s saintlike peace, Beatrice longed to go home even though she knew that there was nothing in that place for her. —Do you have children? a john had asked her just the other day. —No, I want one but I kinda think I can’t have one no more, she laughed. I can’t have any kids. The dumb doctor said I could. The clinic said no. —Her son, the rape-child with his tripas hanging out, where was he now?

  | 252 |

  The next time she saw Sapphire, which was three nights later, under the Stockton tunnel, Beatrice, who after trying and trying to get business late on that streetlit evening, raising her T-shirt, flashing her big round breasts at the stunned drivers in their torpid little cars, had finally made twenty for blowing a fat black businessman, ran out and bought five dollars’ worth of powder, and after taking two snorts for herself (didn’t a girl deserve a commission? Wouldn’t Sapphire tell her go ahead if Sapphire could speak?) gave the rest to Sapphire, who swarmed mewlingly into her arms. Strawberry was back, and the tall man was already cursing and punching her face.

  The Queen said to Beatrice: You’re carryin’ some bad blood in your heart. I can smell it.

  Seeing that her dear lady with the old, old face was not judging her but merely worrying over and sorrowing over her, Beatrice, who was chewing Mexican candy, felt ashamed and tender all at once. At that moment she would have died for her Queen. How much easier life would be, if such moments endured! Running into the black woman’s arms, she sobbed, her brittle English cracking and breaking as it always did when she was agitated: And Santa Claus didn’t give me nothing for Christmas, but he give me my Mama. You always my Mama. I wanna love you. I wanna be with you. I wanna marry with you. If you ever come Mexicali, you doan never pay your hotel, come my house. I ask my other Mama already and she say okay. And I gonna come running, running to get you and take you home so you can stay with me forever. I’m gonna meet your bus and fuck you all night ’cause you’re my Mama.

  Oh, please, said Domino. How can you ask your other Mama anything? She’s dead.

  Hush up, Dom. Let the girl be. And you hush up, too, Beatrice. Try an’ enjoy life. When you gonna teach us all those Mexican dances you know? I never been to Mexico; I wanna learn ’em. We could have a party with some music and everything.

  Why don’t you ever listen to music, Maj? Domino interrupted eagerly. You can borrow my headphone radio anytime.

  Thank you, darlin’. You know that song “Gypsy Queen”? That’s my song.

  Angry and jealous, the Mexican girl whispered rapidly in the Queen’s ear: I told my Mama I lose my money, I lose my twenty dollar from my new boyfriend I meet last night, and my Mama doan say nothing but Domino say stupida, you always stupida, Beatrice! and then I cry.

  She thrust
her half-eaten candy at the Queen. The Queen took a bite, but not a big enough one to please Beatrice, who shouted no, no, no! bit off a big piece, chewed it, then tongued it passionately into the Queen’s mouth.

  | 253 |

  The summer’s back broken, Tyler drove unsweatily past Q Street but did not turn off to Dan Smooth’s house even though the traffic light winked meaningfully. His mother was not well. Looking right and left, he glimpsed bunkered lights and light dripping out of dingy Victorians. Then he drove on, proceeding an entire block to the Zebra Club, and parked beneath a billboard which proclaimed him and all other creatures LUCKY.

  He tried to decide what he was going to say to his mother, who had scarcely addressed him since the last time he’d visited her, when he mentioned the false Irene. Should he tell her that he and that one were quits, and that he’d taken up instead with a crack-addicted ghetto prostitute who practiced black magic? The eyes narrowed in his grey, grey face, and he sat unmoving in his car.

  A long train went dully by; he heard the sound. At the shopping malls when the trains passed on the levee, a fence kept you so far away that you couldn’t really hear them. They seemed to glide in silence. But when you lived close enough you could hear that long, slow, heavy sound.

  He sat there for half an hour. (Meanwhile Dan Smooth was reading an anarchist quarterly called The Raven which contained an article called “Children Abusing Adults—Rule 43.”) Finally he started the engine again and drove to the supermarket, where he bought his mother groceries.

  | 254 |

  A shot of tequila? said Loreena.

  Yeah.

  That sounds good. Fuck it. Only half an hour before closing time. I’ll have one, too.

  Cheers, said Tyler.

  Cheers. I’ll need some money now, dear.