William Vollmann: Whores for Gloria

Gloria

Now he remembered being five when Gloria was three and they took a train ride to Louisiana to see Gloria's great-grandmother, who was dying, and Gloria was hopping around the car like a sparrow so that Gloria's mother kept saying just calm yourself girl but Gloria said I want to jump as high as the tops of the mountains! and Jimmy said you be a mountain and I'll be a cloud so Gloria put her hands over the top of her head in a point like a steeple and said, see I'm a mountain and Jimmy puffed out his cheeks and blew her hair around and said see, I'm blowing over you to give you snow and Gloria rushed to the window to see snow and it was snowing then just like Melissa said. Gloria's mother said child don't reach out the window you'll fall out, but when she wasn't looking Jimmy stuck his hand out and caught snowflakes to give Gloria and then Gloria laughed. — When they were a little bigger Gloria and Jimmy used to go through the woods to a little brook where nobody had ever been before and the sky was so blue when they found it again beyond the raspberry brambles and there were water-striders in the little pools and Gloria said look how they live in bubbles all the time, I wonder if the bubbles are soft and Jimmy found caddis-worms building houses for themselves out of colored pebbles and some days they went upstream, leaping along the smooth flat boulders in the creek that helped them like water-stairs, and they passed an old house that the trees were growing through and then at last they came to the dam, which Gloria said was the end of their territory; other days they went the other way until the river flattened and widened in slow bends full of suckered carp and great clay cliffs rose above the plain with pine trees along the backbone of the ridge so that Jimmy and Gloria felt like grand explorers; there they used to make faces and idols out of the wet clay and leave them in the sun to dry until next time when the idols were hard and hot and smooth-baked. Then Jimmy was a little afraid and he said Gloria are they alive? and Gloria said oh, Jimmy, don't you know what alive is? I'm alive! and she jumped so high in the air and her face was in the sun and Jimmy cried I'm alive too! and he jumped even higher, and then they found a big warm flat rock in the middle of the river and lay down on it eating the sandwiches their mothers had made for them.

The next morning Jimmy was feeling troubled in his mind despite the happiness of the river, because there was something funny about fucking Melissa's memories instead of her cunt and then too he didn't know what to do with the memories that hadn't been made into Gloria's like the one about going to movies and sitting by herself in the darkness eating popcorn which couldn't really be Gloria's because he wasn't in it and anyhow could the memories ever be Gloria's and would she keep accepting them and what if the wrong one contaminated her like Melissa's German shepherd who kept barking and whimpering in Jimmy's nightmares (and he heard Melissa crying also when the dog got too big and her parents had to give him away and Melissa's mother said now stop that or I'll give you something to cry about and the dog kept running away from his new owners and coming back and scratching at the front door whining in the night and Jimmy woke up and was sure he heard the dog sobbing underneath the bed and he actually got up and turned on the light before he realized that it was just the whore downstairs with a customer and he sat blinking on his mattress and shaking his head and scratching at the insect bites on his legs and thinking: Christ I sure am glad I didn't give that dog to Gloria because even she wouldn't have been strong enough to keep it from being taken away howling and howling so sadly!) and Jimmy sat wondering what to do, James, what to do, so when it was midmorning and the alleys were hot and stinking he set out to see his old friend Code Six, who lived on Sixth Street.

The whole world was sleepy and crabby. The Vietnamese grocers rolled up their steel shutters with a slam and sat behind their cash registers, heads in hands, and an early bird whore stood on the corner yawning and scratching; for everyone who mattered these bright hours were but a wait until the shutters clicked up behind the eyelids of Spider the Pimp and his broad whore-wife they called the Hog, and Phyllis and Regina and Jimmy who grunted oof oof at the spot of beer-hurt at the back of his neck like an inner boil which could never be excised but he was very patient. Before he'd walked two blocks, the sunlight had begun to hurt his eyes and forehead so he stopped at a pay phone and called Gloria, not that he had anything new to say but it was easy like Melissa's brown tit slopping out of the striped blouse, Melissa turning her neck to tauten it, and then after he'd kissed the receiver goodbye, trying not to smell the breath of previous callers, he lingered as if he'd forgotten to do something when the truth was only that he was shy about his errand like a pom-pom girl who's never even had her cherry popped; Jesus James he said to himself you're putting on such a bad show anybody who paid is gonna want his money back! because he had gotten out of the habit of asking anyone save Gloria for advice but in this matter. . — and of course it would hardly do to ask Gloria; that would be like asking her what surprise he should get her for Christmas, so he walked more and more slowly and took a roundabout way of sidewalks and alleys, nodding at everyone he saw. — No one nodded back.

Now let's calculate it fine, thought Jimmy to himself. What am I going to tell him exactly? Do I need to tell about how it first came to me in the clinic when I thought that maybe Nicole gave me some disease? No, that's not his business. I don't want that thing about disease getting around. I'd better not say anything about that.

But I do have to tell him what's happened since it came to me. About her. He knows her. It won't be bad.

I don't know why it seems so bad all of the sudden. It's not like he and I keep secrets from each other.

He plodded past the massage parlor on Larkin and turned the corner where a rusty Lincoln sat beside the street wall watching him through its shattered windshield. The car had been abandoned months ago and was not really good for much except fucking in which many people had done or else the gende lycanthropy of transvestites who ducked in to adjust a new wig and pat makeup on under the guidance of the mirror on the sun visor in the passenger side; no one had smashed that yet. The black whores from Oakland also used it sometimes to change hair and dresses one two three times a night when they or their pimps robbed tricks. Jimmy had never paid much attention to the Lincoln until Code Six found a full bottle of Thunderbird in a paper bag, right beside the bumper. — Now it kind of gives me a feeling that Larkin Street is Larkin Street, said Code Six. — After that, Jimmy had a good feeling whenever he saw it. He laughed inside himself and kicked the sagging tires. — That was a good thing you did for my friend, he said.

He ambled past the junk shops, the gilded eagle shops, the shops that sold toys which would break right away, the ripoff hardware stores that sold flimsy locks for too much, the boarded up shops in whose doorways leaned ironing boards and broken bicycles, Jimmy thinking, Lord I am rolling along. It was very hot. On the sidewalk, a shitty kleenex did not stir. He saw Spider the Pimp and said top of the morning! but Spider just spat. He passed a sign that said HELP WANTED and said yeah, right but then he remembered and stroked the blue-grey stubble on his chin and said hmm. With both of us working, thought Jimmy excitedly, and her so quick at learning everything, we'll be able to buy that house so soon that Code Six's head'll spin and we'll give him the spare room if he promises to clean himself up and every day I'll come down to the Tenderloin and give money to my friends who right now are sleeping like invisible stars all around us.