William Vollmann - The Royal Family

On the bulletin board it said Lesbian Housemate Wanted and SELF-DEFENSE FOR WOMEN and Piano Lessons and Hookers, Watch Out for These Men! Tyler read this last. It was a warning about the Capp Street murders. Two prostitutes from that business district had wound up in dumpsters down by China Basin. A third had gotten away and given a description of the killers.

Well, he thought to himself, let’s go take a stroll down Capp Street.

It was a cool spring night in the Mission. Beyond his coffeehouse, where two girls were snuggling as their fingers pecked out destinations on the electronic highway, two men chatted yawning like sentinels, their hands on their heads, and past them an old lady was panhandling. The old lady had tears in her eyes, and she kept shifting her aching feet. Tyler suddenly thought to himself: She knows as I will never know how hard a sidewalk can be. — She asked Tyler for fifty cents, so on principle he gave her a quarter. A minute later she wandered into the coffeeshop, then back out again as he stood irresolute on that corner, wondering how he could drum up more business; and with no recognition she asked him for fifty cents. He’d asked her name, which was Diane, so he knew to say: Why, hello, Diane! and she jerked awake for a moment, then stumbled away.

His friend Roberta the stripper just happened to be passing with her shiny new bike, and cried out: Hi, Henry! I saw that! That old woman must be in Nirvana.

He knew that this was a sarcastic and even hateful remark because Roberta hated Buddhism. — No, he said earnestly. She’s desperate, so she can’t have reached Nirvana yet.

Hey, I’ve gotta go meet my friend Mollie up on Haight Street, said Roberta. You wanna come have coffee with us?

Oh, that’s really nice of you, Roberta. I just don’t have any energy tonight. — He was longing for Irene.

Are you depressed? I’m depressed. My boyfriend really used me. I fucked him because he was in a rock band but after that I fell in love. I would have married him. But then he turned out to be quite the sonofabitch.

I’m sorry to hear that, Roberta, he said.

You want to buy me coffee? Actually you don’t have to buy me anything. I have money.

You’re a nice person, Roberta, he said. I’m sorry you’re having a rough time.

So, how’s the job? You track down any interesting people? Hey, you can stay at my place if you want. You can sleep on the living room couch. My roommates are pretty cool about it.

Roberta, do you know anything about the Queen of the Whores?

I’m just a stripper, not a whore, remember? I mean, I believe in the sacred Whore-Goddess. Maybe that’s what the Queen is. You sure you don’t want to stay over?

I wish I could, but I have scabies, he lied.

Oh. Oh! And I’ve been holding your hand! Let me go wash my hands! Nothing personal, but I don’t want to get that again.

After Roberta left him he entered a clean and pleasant secondhand bookshop which played music from the time when he was young. He browsed through The Patriarchy at Work and Difficult Women and Sisterhood Is Global. There was a cat on the sofa. The pretty Asian girl who was shelving books smiled at him. He wanted to sit down and read for a while. Instead he bought a used Steinbeck paperback and strode out, past the singing panhandlers, the bright lavender hotel doorways that said VACANCY. He saw a tattoo parlor that he didn’t remember from before. — Of course he didn’t get down to the Mission that much. The Tenderloin was more his area. — At a phone booth he called his answering machine, discovering no message from Brady, who perhaps was busy enjoying the carnal knowledge of some cottonwood tree. Down on Mission Street the tall hooded bullies were yelling and the hard girls were bending over the sidewalk, saying: You dropped a rock. Where’s my rock, bitch? — Gonna fix that motherfucker up, save me a little bit, he heard a pimp say. He returned to the subway station’s cold night sun of radiating tiles, stood by the pay phone trying not to call Irene, picked up the phone, put it down, took a quarter out of his pocket, thought some more, and then walked away with the quarter in his hand. Capp Street was empty — strange, since the beginning of the month was long past, and the whores’ welfare checks long spent; maybe they were scared of the Capp Street killers. On the other hand, this evening had hardly progressed to lateness. Maybe it wasn’t strange at all. He strolled to Seventeenth and Eighteenth; still not seeing any oral or vaginal workers, he turned around and at once somebody began to follow him from the darkness just beyond Eighteenth, dodging between the mountainously laden garbage cans. He felt a prickle of fear. — I know the Queen, Tyler called over his shoulder. — The footsteps stopped. — Well, he thought to himself, what’s in a name?

In a fast food restaurant he bought french fries and then entered the men’s room to count his wallet. Two hundred and three dollars. Enough.

Can you give me a room without too much crack smoke? he asked at the Rama Hotel. Last time there was crack smoke coming in through the wall and I didn’t get much sleep.

That must have been some other hotel, said the manager, bored and angry.

Okay, said Tyler. I believe you. I’m sure the room will be great.

He went up to his room, which cost twenty dollars plus a five dollar key deposit, and sat there for a while. Then he wrote a letter to the Queen of the Whores, politely requesting a meeting. He copied it out four times. Each letter he put in its own envelope addressed to the Queen of the Whores. Before sealing these literary efforts, he took four eyedroppered vials from his pocket. Each one contained a differently keyed locator fluid. Marking them separately with that treacherous spoor, he licked the envelopes shut. He left one on top of the dresser. The second he took down the hall to the bathroom and hid in the toilet tank, taping it underneath the lid, right on top of somebody’s heroin stash. The third and fourth he kept with him. Descending the stairs, he swung the grating open, and peered out into the night. Mission Street was getting worse every month. Two tall men waiting outside snarled at him. His hand was in his jacket pocket where the pistol was. Perhaps they saw the lack of fear in his face (although he actually did fear them), or perhaps they meant no harm, for they let him through. He walked back along the night sidewalk where homeless men rattled their shopping carts, got into his car, drove across town to the Queen’s parking garage in order to add another stultifying line to his surveillance report, dropped the car off there so that no one would smash the windshield, slid the third letter to the Queen under the grating by the third floor, took the bus back, and got off at Sixteenth and Mission where the subway station was now a crack cocaine bazaar. He saw two hulking pairs of shoulders enter the gratinged street door of the Rama, and strode quickly to grab it so that the manager would not have to buzz him in, but the closer he got, the higher loomed those shoulders, and suddenly he was apprehensive again. He wondered whether he might be getting ill. Once his brother had hired him — probably out of pity — to do a little investigative work on a toxic dumping case which was of interest to a certain realty corporation, and late one night as Tyler approached the factory warehouse he’d suddenly been almost overcome by a panic which seemed causeless. He went home, lay down, and was sick for a week. This performance, needless to say, did not endear him to John’s firm. Pacing half a block up and half a block back to give those shoulders time to disappear, he rang the buzzer at the Rama. When the hideous cawing of unlocking sounded, he pulled the grating open. A whore and a pimp stood in the hallway. — It’s not enough, the whore was whining. — You argue with me, you’ll go back in the penitentiary, said the pimp. — Their mouths kissed the long yellow crack-flame as Tyler said excuse me and passed up the stinking stairs to the second grating, whose button he had to lean on for a long time before the manager buzzed him in.