William Vollmann - The Royal Family

Lily took the trick’s hand and started to lead him to her room when the manager forcibly broke their grip, shook Lily’s shoulder and shouted: Get behind me and shut up, bitch! Don’t you ever walk in front of me!

He scared her. He tried to hurt her. She fled, and joined the Queen…

The question of the Queen’s origin, and related questions such as: Was she the only one, or do the unsubdued powers of old Canaan continually form new Queens for the benefit of this world’s outcasts? and then all the unrelated but predictable questions of divinity students, such as: Did blood or celestial ichor flow in her veins? all lack depth and force. We need only know that she was beseeched, and she came. There were no omens of her coming, although retrospective omens are easily invented by those who wish to make life less mysterious than it is, which is why many of the beseechers, Strawberry in particular, would later tell the most extravagant tales. (Extravagance, by the way, is really a form of simplicity. Consider, for example, the magic four-digit Department of Motor Vehicles access number which allows a private eye to read his target’s address and personal description — how wonderful it all is! But the DMV, staffed in part by corrupt incompetents, presents to the world an unedifyingly error-ridden database. If you ask Henry Tyler how he found the Queen, he might say: Well, Dan Smooth helped me, but I matched her social with the DMV database. — And yet we know that she had no social security number. She didn’t exist. Extravagance, simplicity!) Strawberry insisted to the end that a full year before ever being crowned, the Queen appeared down on Second and Mission in front of the old Van Heusen furniture store and at that moment Strawberry felt a strange and thrilling feeling. Could the real truth have been that, wearied almost to death with the dark stale silence of her life, which never thrilled her anymore even when the needle went in, she needed to imagine some transcendent joy at sufficient remove from her that it could not be destroyed by examination? Or maybe the Queen had actually descended into reality before Strawberry’s eyes. Trying to harvest literalness from Strawberry’s myth-fields, I fear, is as exhausting as trying to compare the hard, brilliant comebacks of the Tenderloin girls with the dumb stench of their Capp Street sisters such as Sunflower whose soul had long since closed down for routine business like a fire department on a Sunday afternoon and who arguably never remembered or even perceived her Queen at all. That other beseecher, Sweetpea, who offered the world a whole museum of teardrop tattoos on her forehead, and later insisted that she’d been ready from the very first to do anything on the Queen’s behalf, actually claimed at the time in question that “the girls” could never get together because they were all on drugs and their minds were clouded, that if any Queen asked them to unite with her for mutual protection they’d just laugh. For that matter, Sweetpea herself laughed, and her laugh was more bitter than a flash of winter lightning. Oh, but to hear her tell it! — Soon’s I saw that dear little bitch, I knew, she told Dan Smooth. I knew she was my bitch an’ I was her bitch, forever and ever and ever. — Later, during the reign of Domino, she altered that story considerably.

No, there couldn’t never be a Queen here in the Mission! Chocolate insisted. Maybe in the Tenderloin, because those girls are more high class than us. But not here. Well, actually, since we’re so bad off, maybe we need a Queen more here.

When she said these words to Strawberry, she was not postulating, only playing, and her eyes resembled the grinningly cruel white-set windows of Alcatraz.

But Strawberry, faithful to postulates and to material possibilities, quietly replied: You saying you want to be the Queen?

No, I don’t have means to support the other girls, Chocolate said, condescending to acknowledge that faith because patience and politeness were her profession. — You think if I had means I’d be out here doing this? I worked in a shipyard out in San Diego before this, and then I was a house painter in Portland, Oregon. This is the only I guess you’d call female job I’ve ever had.

You ever get lonely out there? Strawberry asked.

Hell, yeah. Don’t we all?

You want somebody to take care of you?

Sure. But I don’t know any sugar daddies. Who the fuck’s gonna take care of me?

Chocolate, don’t you have family?

Oh, family. Gimme a break!

Well?

I got brothers. They’re the biggest bunch of crooks, theieves, and headaches this side of the earth. And becase of what I do, they don’t know me. Well, I can see that, but ’cause I do what I do, I’ve supported their drug habits; I’ve given them a place to stay when their women kicked them out.

Chocolate, do you want family?

Then in sentences of purest oxygen, which surpassed those of any fat lawyer whispering sweetly into a shackled felon’s ear, Strawberry told her about the Queen, about how if you came in after a long night on the street and hadn’t been able to score any dates, the Queen would front you your drugs until you made good; she’d give you a place to stay, too…

Sounds like a pimp, said Chocolate irritably.

No, a pimp keeps all your money. The Queen’s not like that. She just takes ten percent, like insurance, to share with the girls that need it. She does it out of love.

Bullshit.

I’m telling you true, baby.

Then the other pimps are gonna run her out, unless she maybe stays in some warehouse south of Market…

Chocolate, what would you do if a lady said she was the Queen and offered to take care of you?

Tell her to kiss my ass and fuck herself.

At the same time, honey?

Oh, go to hell, said the black woman, her eyes lidding just like the automatic plastic window slowly sliding back down over the keypad of a bank machine after a transaction.

So much for Chocolate, who soon would love her Queen with an almost bestial tenderness. Who knows where the bright light truly comes from, and who can foresee the whirlwind? Not even the crazy whore. And Tyler, wandering near home on a dismal Sunday morning, or eating breakfast in some sad diner, with Ocean Beach seen through saltblasted windows, likewise understood less than we might imagine; his lust for logic seduced him into retrospective explanations as sterile as those detail description sheets of his profession, which can hardly begin to categorize the world bright, blue, green, and blurred, the world with its many suns of sparkling cars flashing like Phaëthon’s chariot down the track — hardly that, let alone the old, old Queen in her otherwordly glory.

Domino’s induction into the ranks of the Queen’s women was, as may well be imagined, pregnant with difficulties for all concerned. The blonde began as one of those solitary runaways unabsorbed by the crowd at Golden Gate Park; she did not want to be absorbed. Around her swirled the street people with their feuds, hugs, dogs and bicycles. She remained aloof. Tattooed backpacker boys pestered her, and the eyebrow-pierced girls who sat on their duffel bags on the sidewalk tried to befriend her, but Domino remained too honestly and incorruptibly angry to join any crowd (even though inside the runaway still dwelt the little girl who had read a lot of romances and loved talking about conspiracy). When her new profession became known, one of her many enemies wrote on the wall DOMINO SUCKS — LUV SPREADS GERMS but Domino, her eyes stinging with hot tears, merely stood in front of this monument to herself when she waved at cars. A week or two later someone else’s enemy wrote MIKEY IS A TAR BABY on the same spot, and then the antagonism of the world, like its sympathy, quickly faded, leaving Domino alone, which is to say bitterly emancipated, like the tall man with his obscene war-cries against all citizens as he called them, all greengrocers, steadyjobbers, bourgeois taxpayers. “Dating” the longbearded old white men and the blacks in their wool caps of all seasons, and every now and then getting paid to do what she loved with two scowling lesbians in the hardware store, she strode proudly up and down the street in her new jean jacket, panhandling couples in gold-tinted mirror sunglasses and later screaming at them if they ever dared to say: I helped you, she kept her righteousness, and yet life grew worse and worse until after a stint of lap dancing and some cell time in San Bruno, she became just another kid in a dirty hooded jacket sitting on the sidewalk with her backpack on, panhandling and giving blow jobs; then she got another exotic dancing job, from which she was quickly fired; then for a while she became the greenhaired girl whose sign lied: