The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  | 561 |

  He went to San Francisco, and all the shelters he knew about were full. On Irene’s birthday he had to sleep in the street, in an alley south of Market. Two other men were already there, both of them black, and he asked them to help him. He was looking for a slender little black woman, maybe in overalls and suspenders.

  Oh, it’s not so bad, one of them said. Lots of pussy around here. Trash can pussy, I call it.

  That’s nice.

  What’s your name?

  Henry.

  Henry, you a sharin’ type?

  Sure.

  Good. ’Cause if pussy come my way, if I got it, I share it.

  Her name was Africa. And her shot-caller was a tall man named Justin. She . . .

  Probably skipped all the way to Spokane by now, bro. Forget her. Keep your eye on reality. In this place we all gotta watch each other’s backs.

  What’s your name?

  Marcus.

  So, Marcus, you telling me we have a few bad people around here?

  When I first laid down on the streets, every night I wondered would I wake up alive. It goes farther back in your mind as the years go by, but it’s still there. I’ve had guns pulled on me, machetes pulled on me. But I used to teach martial arts, thanks to God’s grace. That man with the gun, I tripped him, slammed him into the wall. His buddy ran off. The store owner across the streets called the cops, and I’m glad to say the guy got five years in jail straight off . . .

  Tyler sighed.

  Don’t sweat it, bro, said the other man. Marcus always dwells on the bad side. Actually the best thing is the easiness, so to speak. You can leave your stuff, take a shower. A thief comes by, next guy will get him.

  Does that mean you trust me? he asked in surprise.

  Sure, we’re apprehensive about everyone at first, Henry. Don’t take it personal. But nobody gonna try to coerce you. Trust is building. We give you the rope to hang yourself.

  A little more rope is all I need, he muttered, turning his face away from the garbage can.

  | 562 |

  He wanted to embrace life more and more. While his new brothers still snored, he buried his head in the garbage can, smelling John’s odor, the strong, sweaty scent he remembered so well from their boyhood. At John and Irene’s he’d once opened the laundry can with its dead frog smell. There’s been Irene’s panties with the precious golden dot of dried urine; he’d never forget that. Before the tramps woke, he reached deep into the hot, wet, stinking garbage with both hands and shoveled it over his face, feeling closer than ever to his adorable Queen.

  | 563 |

  The easiest course would have been to forget all about the Capp Street girls, but the next morning he walked down there in his heel-flapping shoes to satisfy himself one more time that nobody knew anything about the Queen, and his absurd hopes were burning like cigarette-ends in an ashtray. First he walked slowly past the fences and zigzag grillwork of Valencia Street where now a man stood holding a greasy cardboard sign which read HOMELESS—PLEASE HELP ME and where long ago Tyler used to meet the false Irene, who’d always stuck her abscessed tongue in his mouth, then mumbled: Hey, can you gimme five dollars? Just five. Or ten would be okay, ’cause then I could really really truly get well for a couple hours . . . —and her diseased body had been red and white just like one of these tacqueria-fronts. Here he was, gaping at a row of white-painted grilles between Fourteenth and Fifteenth, with the low whitish skyscrapers of the inner Mission District to remind him that things might well endure for a time. He hesitated, however, to wander far from his obligations. Perhaps he had never belonged here. He yearned to be safely back at Coffee Camp, or, better still, on a boxcar on a long, long train hitched to at least three or four locomotives so that he knew he was going somewhere far away because that was how you did an extended trace. But he ought to take advantage of his stay in San Francisco to get information for the details description sheet he now kept inside his cranium. At Capp and Seventeenth, the very intellectual-looking black prostitute who wore spectacles at first refused to even return his greeting since by his appearance and odor he probably possesed insufficient financial means to fulfill her expectations of life, but when he humbled himself, when he implored her, when asked after the old Queen, whom she’d never met, she relented a little and said: I don’t know about that. But Strawberry used to know her. Strawberry passed away. I found her, and it was pretty icky. The cops came and the EMT came and I told ’em to please cover her face but they couldn’t do anything till the coroner came.

  (I feel a little nervous, Strawberry had said to the two men as they held the door for her, but you gotta do what you gotta do.)

  And suddenly Tyler turned away in a revulsion of frustration and rage against that sinister world he used to know well. He couldn’t believe that the concrete hereabouts even held the impressions of his Queen’s darling footprints. He longed now for light and space, where his exalted Queen might perhaps be flying overhead.

  | 564 |

  Daringly he breached the eastern border of the Tenderloin (which the Queen’s girls always used to call the other side of the mountain) and came into the financial district, John’s kingdom, where the phony welcomingness of light fixtures in galleries, the groanings of cable cars, the promenading tourists, the slamming of car doors as passengers in a hurry ran away from stalled traffic, their high heels emphatically clicking, infected him with vindictive shame. Everybody literally turned up his nose at Henry Tyler! Just as booted feet sometimes twitch uselessly, scratching one another’s unscratchable itch, so he scratched together Queen and Irene in his head, and experienced only the same old disaster. He approached the old lady whose fur collar was twice the size of her head, and she departed him in disgust, as did the young black girl who was trying to be cool but who was obviously embarrassed by her own ghetto blaster. Another cable car passed by, the driver jazzily jangling his bell.

  I just wanna show you this place, a father was explaining to his two sons, one of whom cast scared eyes on Tyler. The cable car’s bell jingled, its festiveness as brassy and fake as the bright warm diamonds of lamplight across the street.

  Tyler thought to himself: I should really have it out with John. I should really . . .

  | 565 |

  On one of the columns of the Pacific Stock Exchange, a bas-relief girl with granite hair turned her head against the snow, diagonally bisected by shadow while with a superhuman lack of awkwardness she gazed across the street at the floral nipples and lion-heads which studded the facade of the eleven-storey building occupied in part by Radio Shack; around the corner (Pine and Sansome) rose a stubby brick building of about the same height overtopped by an immense white tower whose flag streamed in the cold sky, shrunk by distance to the slenderness of ribbon, a scarlet ribbon. Just as the skyscraper overshadowed the granite woman, so she in turn dwarfed the kiosk a mere twenty feet high on one of whose curving sides a sultry, Italian-looking model with rouged and parted lips gazed straight at the steps, all the more fiery by contrast with her icy-blue halter-top above which the necessary hint of cleavage began; the advertisement (for what, lurking Tyler couldn’t see) had frozen her in the act of cocking her hip, which had a black leather belt-pouch slung on it. Perhaps the granite woman was actually looking down at her; that must have been the reason her turned head was pressed so uncomfortably against the stone she was made of. The model, however, did not seem to perceive her elder sister. Flushed and ready, she gazed vaguely into space. Amidst the river of human beings now approaching on Sansome Street came John in a pinstripe shirt. He barely made it up to the model’s knees, which of course remained hopelessly far beneath the soles of the granite woman’s feet. Then Celia in her sunglasses and high heels came hurrying up the sidewalk, holding an iced latte. Neither of them looked up at the Queen of Mammon. They clasped arms around each other’s shoulders. John needed her to try on a new pair of shoes. After they departed, a swarthy pigeon landed and kissed the specks of filth at the granite wom
an’s feet.

  Four o’clock, and the downtown streets were stricken with a bad case of the shadows as John’s colleague and rival, Roland, bought a newspaper and stood on the corner with his bulging attache case, waiting for his wife to pick him up and drive him to Sutter and Kearney. (John for his part used to like to have Irene drive up California Street when she was chauffeuring him home from the office. The Pacific Bank’s golden letters passed on his left, then the obsidian tower of Great Western Bank, and at Montgomery the trolleytrack-grooved street shot up into the sun where a summit of flags and domes awaited him.) Advancing on him, Roland saw a black man in a black skull cap who was licking a cigarette, his sign saying HELP IF YOU CHOOSE. Roland looked away.

  Tyler remained. A rich man approached. Tyler extended his hand.

  Let’s see if I have more than three cents, sighed Mr. Rapp, dropping three shiny copper pennies into the panhandler’s palm. —Let’s see. Yup. You caught me at a good time. Here’s a quarter.

  Thank you, bro, said the panhandler gravely, and Mr. Rapp felt strangely pleased that he was someone’s brother. The top of his head gleamed in the autumn sun as he crossed Grant Street, swinging his briefcase of Italian leather.

  | 566 |

  Tyler wanted to go to City Lights. He believed that he could remember every book he’d ever seen there. When Allen Ginsberg died, in April 1997, Tyler had paged through a glorious monograph on Soviet photography, compiled by Margarita Tupitsyo, he was pretty sure. He always used to drive there back in those days, penetrating the Broadway tunnel, which was yellow, tiled, curvy and sometimes empty; its light-strings had reminded him of the vertebrae of a dead snake. The Queen had done her business in that tunnel sometimes. One he’d picked her up there and given her a ride someplace in his car, maybe to one of those cafes just north of City Lights where the capuccinos in their snow-white cups were not just foamy but full-bodied, the foam itself stiff and striped, gilded and brown, like crème brûlée. He remembered the smell of cigarettes and the sound of Italian speech. But no; that hadn’t been the Queen he’d been with there, but the false Irene. And since the false Irene had been involved, maybe it actually hadn’t been very much fun. Where had he driven the Queen? It couldn’t have been to City Lights; he’d never seen her reading any book except the Bible. It had always been difficult to find a parking place around City Lights. At least he didn’t have that problem anymore. He started to walk up Columbus Avenue but by the time he got to City Lights he realized that he was too ashamed of his own stench to go inside.

  | 567 |

  Joining the long line of human beings in sweaters, coats, caps and boots who waited for a meal at Glide Memorial, he remembered very well how many times he’d driven by them in the old days when he had a car and a job and was following some unfaithful banker through the Tenderloin or was going to meet Irene. He remembered that dinner with Irene so long ago now at the Kabuki Cho restaurant with its sashimi dashboard clocks. —Please don’t tell any of this to John, she’d said. —The man in the yellow GLIDE STAFF windbreaker ignored everyone until four, when he suddenly began taking meal tickets, chatting on a walkie-talkie while the first bunch went through. Majestically, he held up his hand to halt the line. Tyler was still far away, about two-thirds of the way down. He felt very hungry. The staff man was pawing through a trash can with one gloved hand. Then he yawned and turned away from the homeless ones, gazing up at skyscrapers and signs with a disdain entirely befitting the representative of a despotic theocracy. Tyler shifted his aching feet and blew on his hands. A cigarette stub in a scowling mouth shot past. He remembered one day when the Queen in her black high-heeled boots was dancing to the radio while the tall man sat with his head in his hands.

  Now the man in yellow was accepting the second batch of tickets. They moved quickly and happily past him, heading for the entrance beneath the blue awning. One unauthorized being tried to creep in, but the man in yellow extended a long black gloved finger and he tumbled back to his place. Everyone halted at the next silent command, waiting with their hands on their hips or folded behind their backs or hidden in their pockets. Tyler felt very tired now.

  The Queen walked by swinging her purse and singing. No, it wasn’t she; it wasn’t she.

  | 568 |

  One more time and one more time he strolled the Tenderloin and actually found Strawberry, who wasn’t dead at all. He remembered her out in front of the Wonderbar, her eyes wild and glassy as she leaned against the door. Now her hair was greyer, that was all. Maybe nobody ever died. Maybe he’d find Irene, or his dearest and most adorable little Queen, the Queen of his love, the keeper of his spirit, his tender Queen.

  Don’t you remember me? he said.

  What the fuck? Oh, yeah. You’re the Queen’s trick. About time Maj got up off her ass and used it for something . . . Oh, that’s right. Maj is gone. It’s Domino now . . .

  Strawberry, you’ve got something in your hair.

  Well, why don’t you touch me? You afraid to touch me? Whatcha afraid for? I fuck everybody.

  Okay, honey, he said. See, it’s chewing gum.

  Honey, I hate to say this but you got some miles on your tires. Well, what the heck. You look like a nice date. Probably only do it for a couple of minutes . . .

  Thanks.

  Well, so what’s the story? said Strawberry. You want some company or what?

  Uh. . .

  Then her manner became as tight as the pussy of the skeletal whore whose face, like Beatrice’s, had been destroyed in an automobile accident, and she said to him: No hard feelings, Henry, but I need to make a little money out here. You mind moving away from me?

  | 569 |

  It was foggy in John’s neighborhood, with a white-chocolate fog that at ten o’clock in the morning persisted like a hangover. He strolled up to the front door, read on the nameplate the words J & I TYLER and found no courage, or perhaps simply no inclination, to ring the bell. Slowly he turned the corner. Half an hour later he was sitting in one of the coffee shops which had metastasized all over Union Street; and he sat among the backpacked, baseball-capped persons of leisure who, heads still glistening from the shower, read the newspaper: the President had declared tobacco an addictive drug. The FBI had found traces of explosive in a piece of the jet which had fallen into the sea. A woman of unknown name and address had been found dead on Capp Street. New cars were available for NO GIMMICKS—NO HASSLES.

  The two women at the adjoining table glared at him, wrinkling their noses and fanning the air. Enraged, humiliated, he tried to stare them down. He’d truly had no ill intentions! But that didn’t matter. He lived, so he stank. Presently the manager came and said: Sir, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to leave. You’re disturbing the other patrons.

  Tyler leaned toward his enemies and whispered: My body’s made of white sugar. That’s why I don’t take showers. C’mon, sweethearts, can I take a bath in your cookie jar?

  | 570 |

  He hopped a freight to Coffee Camp and then went to Loaves and Fishes to get his blue ticket for a free lunch. Then he got seconds. Drunks were sneering and scratching themselves beneath the arms. Nobody had heard of the Queen. No one knew the Hundred Thousand Dollar Boxcar Queen. He picked little grapes like blue ballbearings which left his sweaty fingers purple-black almost like railroad grime. Sitting high above the river on a log so rotten that he could scratch the word IRENE into it with his fingernail, he wondered whether this final most extended trace of his private eye career might not prove to be more than the waste that John would have thought it, because even if he could never find the Queen again, if he could at least prove her perpetual nonexistence then he would at least have destroyed one more lie in this world. He feared nothing now except a death of extended physical pain. He felt stronger and more honest than he’d ever been. Maybe he’d finally gotten to the point of living life with a flaming joy like a yellow California Northern train sliding through the yellow hills, not afraid of any risk (because anyway, no matter what you do, de
ath will find you out), just doing whatever he wanted to do and hoping for the best. —Look at that bum, said the trackman. Yep, he thinks he’s a hundred-car train! —Naw, he’s just goin’ to south Sacramento, laughed the engineer. Just switchin’. —The engineer was wrong. Tyler hopped a freight to Bakersfield, and another to Barstow via Los Angeles. Then he kept going, his train blowing sadness along the horizon in a lovely roaring wind which must be blowing white ripples upstream back at Coffee Camp which had become his home as much as the false Irene had once become the dead Irene. Soon it would be autumn there. The grass would be getting yellow, and spiny leaves would blow down his neck; there’d be star thistles in charge of the world, but not now because he was traveling southward into summer on a train as silvery as the river seen between grape leaves. Lonely, lost, hot and thirsty, he hoboed on his way increasingly free from preconceived intentions. He was freer every day. He needed nothing except water and a few excuses. Mosquitoes crawled under his hatbrim and on his sweaty cheeks. A slam, then a deeply reverberating squeak sent him farther outward into the world, as the huge, shiny wheel-disks slowly began rotating, their shining rims ready to hew off his leg if he were careless. On his boxcar someone had written in blue paint: TO LIVE ALONE IS TO DIE ALIVE. Sometimes he slept near unmoving trains, still trains, striped pale and grey in the darkness. In the morning he always shook his shoes out in case scorpions had crawled inside. Before he knew it, he was almost in Mexico . . .