William Vollmann: Whores for Gloria

We all know the story of the whore who, finding her China white to be less and less reliable a friend no matter how much of it she injected into her arm, recalled in desperation the phrase "shooting the shit", and so filled the needle with her own watery excrement and pumped it in, producing magnificent abscesses. Less well known is the tale of the man who decided to kill himself by swallowing his athlete's foot medicine. Loving Gloria, he died in inconceivable agony. When they collected a sample of his urine, it melted the plastic cup. — That , it is safe to say, is despair. More obscure still, because fictitious, is the following. All of the whore's-tales herein, however, are real.

Once upon a time when Laredo the blonde police decoy was working on a drug bust she watched a man speaking into a pay phone; and as it got dark the sky filled with clouds like rushing bombs and Laredo stood on the corner of Jones and Sutter picking at wrinkles in her skirt and acting like a whore and trolling for whores and pimps and Johns and dealers and whatever else might come her way and the man kept talking into the pay phone and the longer he talked the less notice Laredo took of him because her prey usually looked both ways and placed the call and spoke for five seconds and then walked away with rapid steps glaring around with nervous bloodshot eyes but this man kept talking and talking and holding the receiver tight in both hands; once upon a time Laredo leaned up against the fire hydrant crossing her legs and waiting for some stupe to offer her money so she could write him a ticket; and old people hobbled home to their hotels to double-lock their half-rotten doors for the night and it got darker and darker and the whores came out and sat on the hoods of old station wagons and Laredo spied on them with the all-seeing eyes of a snorkeler; and behind a dark curtain inside a dented van across the street her partner Leroy, who was new, sipped at his Orange Crush and spotted her like a good boy. The street was full of night-sharks. It was alarming at first for Leroy to see their faces so close in the field of his binoculars, thinking that surely they must see him, and when the faces scowled directly at him and came closer, closer like rushing sinister meteors he flinched, knowing then that surely they must be coming at him, but at the last moment the faces flicked to the side. Light ran upon the moving cars like quicksilver. A man in a grey jacket swung his arms bitterly. A man in a raincoat reached into his pocket and pulled out something twisted up in a toilet paper and another man looked both ways and gave him twenty dollars for it. A man was talking on the pay phone as he had been doing for a good quarter-hour; Leroy, who could read lips, focused on him every now and then and saw that he was saying Gloria and Gloria and Gloria. He did not know, evidently, but Leroy knew that the fat lady with the dirty-blonde hair knew because she had been there when Laredo got out of the van hours ago saying wow Leroy this is great ! no one can see past the front seat! — and the fat lady was still there and she paced back and forth on the corner and men came by and gave her little pieces of paper which she tucked away into her coat pocket and she kept looking straight at Leroy and walked up to the van and never looked away from Leroy and then turned and walked away. — Is the light glinting on my binoculars? Leroy asked himself. But surely Laredo would have told me. — So he sat there unhappily. — A man in a blue cap stood on the corner; he smiled and winked at Leroy. Two young women stood laughing and leaning against a lamppost; then they suddenly became serious and directed their gaze straight at Leroy. — Did they all see him? Did any of them see him? He would never know. With his binoculars he was like a young bird that has just learned to fly, but does not trust its wings. The new power that the binoculars had given him was not something that he could trust. — Yet the girls did not move away or shield their faces from him, and soon they were looking in other directions; soon a car honked and pulled over and one of the girls smiled and smoothed her skirt and got in. An aged blonde clopped by like a horse as she inhaled on her cigarette, and her face was lined with grief. — Laredo shifted her aching feet, wishing that the night would end although she was well aware that by the laws of astronomy the night would not end till morning; neither, it seemed, would the drunk on the pay phone. Well fuck it she could take it because in two more weeks she and her husband would be going on vacation, this year to Hawaii to rent a condo on the Kona coast where there were many restaurants with big open windows through which at night the ocean was black and white and green, roaring in with its boiled-snake smell right below the railing where you sat by candlelight trying to make out the menu while the other patrons laughed loudly and threw cigarette butts out to sea, and even after the sea killed their glow you could still see them there in the water, so white and clean-looking. Every morning Laredo's husband went surfing and Laredo watched him with warm and sleepy smiles in between nibbling reads at her paperback and then commenced the real business of the day by fitting on her rented mask and tube and flippers and tightening the straps just so and then gathering everything in her arms like an offering as she began to wade into the warm water, feeling cautiously with her toes for sharp coral and enjoying the hot sun on her back and stepping out deeper and deeper until the waves slopped gently at her belly and she put the mask around her neck and popped on her flippers one by one and took a deep breath and slid the mask down onto her face and bit hard on the breathing tube and stretched out her arms and raised her legs and put her head under, and for a second her face felt cold and funny around the edges of her mask and then there was the sea-world again, of which she was the Empress, ruling proudly over the coral hills, which were not unlike the cactus-studded sandhills of the American southwest — for each coral-bush and coral-flower, no matter how many layers of delicacy it may possess, can be seen through to hardness; and the red sea-urchins brisded their spines like yuccas, and the little pale ones were like chollas: — across this desertscape (which was comprised of mountains in miniature, for no coral hill was more than two or three feet high, and Laredo floated in touching distance of them all) swam hundreds of brighdy colored fish: long thin green ones, with red stripes and blue fins; round yellow fish like swirling eucalyptus leaves; great silvery fish whose cool bellies she could have stroked, had she wanted to, with her quick fingers; tiny blue fish with black bandit-masks, and ever so many more. They swam in schools, or in cross-currents; they seemed entirely unaware of Laredo as she hung there with her face in the water like a drowned corpse, watching them through her mask-window, on the inner pane of which crawled the droplets of her tears (but actually they were only sea water), and Laredo, being a policewoman, believed that if she floated there long enough she would know everything about them, and she drifted along in the warm waves, while just outside this world the sun warmed her back and tanned it more and more perfectly right through the slick salt sea-drops; and Laredo flew over coral canyons in which the fishes unheedingly flurried; but presendy the valleys grew deeper; the bottom began to drop away, and the coral became grey and lifeless, so that had Laredo looked the merest yard ahead (which she did not do) she would have seen a rich blue wall of shadow where the ocean was a hundred feet deep. That was where the damned drunk