The Royal Family (57 page)

The false Irene, who barely heard him and was sure that he had no conception of what pain was, said: Can I stay with you?

Let’s see how it goes, he said. He had faith, but not so much. He was afraid that her stench would infect his apartment forever. He feared that she would steal his computer and try to sell it. God knows what she would do . . .

You mean you don’t care about me? The Queen promised you’d take care of me . . . And I . . . You see, if I could just cop some china white . . .

What is it you want, baby?

He was so shallow. He knew what she needed, and he would not give it to her. Look at him! He had nice shoes! If he cared for her, he could sell his shoes. He must have money in his wallet. If he would only give her ten dollars, just ten dollars . . . That was what her happiness cost.

Well, my connection got busted, she began to explain, making a great effort to help him comprehend, and . . . and after the raid, I didn’t know anyone to cop from, so me and Domino, we had to go downtown to meet someone on Turk Street . . .

Oh, come on, said Tyler. Domino cops from the Queen.

All right, so I was lying to you, said Irene. I don’t know why I lied, I just . . . Hey, you got any money on you?

Remember you said that I didn’t have to have sex with you if I didn’t want to? said Irene. Well, I’m thinking that maybe I won’t have sex with you tonight, because I’m starting to like you and I want to see . . .

Okay, sweetheart.

Thanks for the ten dollars. I really appreciate it. You saved my life, Kenny.

Henry.

Oh, did you say your name was Henry? I thought you . . . Listen, I gotta go. I need more heroin. I’ll be back in forty-five minutes and then we can just cuddle, okay? I’ll whistle outside your window. Don’t worry. You’ll wake up. You ain’t never heard me whistle.

The darkness about them was close and cool and stone-flavored like a cathedral’s, and within it, like candles offered to the memories of souls, glowed the flames of many crack pipes. The happy sense of love, of trust, of grateful sharing between two people who have just smoked crack together temporarily allowed him to believe in her. (He had a sudden memory of Irene rushing about most soundlessly in stockinged feet on the carpet at John’s place, making dinner. He’d become agitated, as was usually the case whenever he had to see Irene. But he never showed it. He remembered Irene standing with her left hand on her hip, clicking the remote control, her lips parted as she gazed at the crawling colors in the TV. He could see her sitting on the carpet, dialling John’s portable phone, her dark lips parted, smiling politely at him but withdrawn; he knew that she was irritated at something. He remembered her high small breasts.) She kept giving him more hits of crack and he kept rubbing her neck.

She kissed him on the lips and said: I never kiss.

You got any more money? she said.

(Tyler stood in the locked bathroom, counting his money from the nylon under-the-pants moneybelt which smelled like his balls. The false Irene was moaning and snoring.)

Okay, she mumbled. I gotta go. I need my medicine. I’ll be right back.

She didn’t come back, of course.

He loved the false Irene with sincere desperation for more than three weeks.

In the fourth week he was walking past Sixteenth and Capp at around nine in the morning and saw Angel, although he did not know that she was Angel; then he spied Lily across the street, thin and false-blonde, with her hair, skin and clothes all grey and pitted like an old barn door or a hammer which had been left outside in an Arctic wind for years and years; she was standing on the corner, looking patiently at every passing car, and seeing him Lily smiled and waved until he waved; then she strutted halfway over to him with her miniskirt riding high up her hips and her hairy thighs all crusted with some yellow substance, so for politeness he approached her and she came closer and soon was at his side.

How about the morning special? said Lily.

What’s that? said Tyler, taken aback.

Ten dollars.

Ten dollars for a blow job, I guess, he thought.

Well, how about if I buy you coffee? he said, anticipating that good happy coffee feeling, the same feeling almost as of crack cocaine.

She was already starting to move back to her corner, just a step or two back so that she might still be able to return quickly to get something out of him, and looking coolly into his eyes she said: Well, you could just give me a dollar. That would work.

That’s Domino’s line, he laughed.

Oh, her. She’s full of one-liners, but I’m better. My hole’s better. You wanna see my hole?

One of these days, Lily.

Well, then, how about that dollar?

How about when I see you? he said, not wanting to give her anything if she wouldn’t even sit with him for a minute, not that he blamed her.

Fine.

Do you remember me? he hazarded.

I know I’ve seen you before. I just . . .

I’m Henry.

Henry? Oh, that’s right. You’re Maj’s . . .

How’s the Queen?

She said to ask about you, but I forget what she wanted me to ask. I bear so many messages at so many times, and sometimes the first message overshadows the last message, because I . . .

Tell her I’m trying really hard but I’m having problems. Can you remember that, Lily?

A dollar would sure help my memory . . .

Every morning Lily went out to Capp Street walking skinny and crusted, spookily laughing from her tired cunt unmuffled by any underwear; then Domino usually came and started yelling as she did every night: Bitch, bitch bitch, you stole ten dollars off me, bitch! and Lily just squatted there on the curb, ignoring her, so Domino kicked her onto her ass and triumphantly laughed:
Bitch!
while Lily laughed, gurgled and cycled like an old dishwasher in some not yet vandalized apartment, remembering her black nightgown in which she always used to do business because she thought that it made her more pretty; in fact it got so that she didn’t like to take it off even during a fuck because it made her look and feel so special. Some customers disagreed, but Lily knew that even if she wouldn’t fuck naked they were nonetheless happier in her company than alone, especially because in those days she had a nice thing that she did for the men (like Sunflower or the Queen, she wanted to give them all something). She would spread a rubber sheet on the mattress and grease it, and then tell the john to take off his pants and everything else and lie down on his back on the greased rubber sheet while she went to mix him a free drink, and afterward she’d give out her choice of one of three nude photos of her, which she’d then package in an Amaretto box; but so many times the men said: Hey, I’m married, I don’t want no photo of some hooker, so then she started saying: And if you’re not married you can have this if you want . . . but even then they sometimes worried that it might be incriminating, so Lily learned to say more tentatively: Well, if you’re not married and if you don’t think it would incriminate you, I can give you a picture of me, but half the time after the men had left and she went outside to get some milk and tomato soup for her mother she’d find the nude picture of her lying on the street, or jocularly stuck behind a stranger’s windshield wiper, or face-up or face-down in the trash.

Did that make you sad? Sunflower had asked her.

Sad! choked Lily, laughing and crying. Hell, no. But it made a lot of other people sad. Ugly me, and my ugly pussy,
saddening
people all through the neighborhood . . .

She continued to wear her black nightie because she knew it made her into the most beautiful girl. Somehow that nightie was magic. Okay, so on request she’d lift it above her weary breasts but it never came off when she was doing men, never, ever, especially after she started to get older (well, almost never; sometimes she might relent if a man tipped her), until after a while it began to look and smell a million years old and the men started making comments, so she went to the five and dime and found another just like it, being a creature of habit in more than one way. That find made her very happy. She took the old black rag, threw it into her favorite dumpster, and wore the new black rag. When it ripped, she trimmed it into a miniskirt like Beatrice’s; Bea had shown her how. . .

Meanwhile Domino stood halfway down the block, showing tit and whistling. Humiliating Lily always put her in a fine mood. That bitch was so out of it, so perpetually robbed and broken, that she’d never tell Maj. Truth to tell, Lily really
had
borrowed ten from Domino and shot it into her veins, so we cannot accuse the blonde, who needed money as much as anyone, of being evil—Domino wasn’t that, merely mean.

So what’s new? said Domino, each of whose eyes resembled in hue the blue star which said
S.F.P.D
. on the white door of the black police car with its shiny twin upturned mirrors like mandibles and its blocky multicolored roof-light.

Oh, you remember that cat I had? the false Irene said.

That
little shit? chuckled Domino. How could I forget?

Hey, that’s my cat you’re talking about.

That’s your diseased pussy I’m talking about, the blonde muttered to herself.

Oh, fuck you, said the other whore.

All right, fine. What about your darling cat? Wasn’t that like a year ago you had that cat?

I think I told you that it was one of two that they had at this clubhouse. And the other, this Samoan gangster stomped it to death. So when they got the next litter, I took all three. I figured I could sell them to some friends. And I got money for two, but I had to take them back, because the two girls I sold them to weren’t taking decent care of them. And one had a litter, so now I have eight cats. That’s my news.

Pretty stupid, said the blonde. How much do you spend on catfood?

Oh, shit, Domino! Catfood’s not good enough for them. I feed ’em fresh milk and chicken breast, said that wrinkled old whore who never ate decent food herself.

You have eight cats, huh? I just bet.

Come on to my house. I’ll bake you a cake.

A greedy light came into the blonde’s eyes at the thought of free food, and she thought to herself: This bitch makes fifty-sixty dollars a day because she represents herself. No Queen’s cut. She’s got her own place; she’s got her red light. I cannot deal with this. I gotta . . . —Where are you staying, honey? she purred.

I . . . I . . . Oh, this john named Henry . . . See where he . . . Hey, Dom, I feel faint. I need to cop. I need to take a leak . . .

So all that stuff about cats was just bullshit, wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
You’re just another stinking homeless tramp. You’d better run, honey. You’d better run fast and far. You know why? Because if the Queen sees you, she’s going to
cut out your eyes . . .

Screaming, the false Irene fled as fast as she could, step by shaking step, all the way to Magic Burgers & Donuts on Twentieth and Mission (
OPEN 25 HOURS
, said the sign), and then from inside her greasy bra she fished out four quarters with her blackened hands so that she could buy a doughnut and sit inside for an hour to hide and lurk and weep, while Domino laughed, her hands on her hips, and swaggered up and down Capp Street like the queen of the entire world.

You over thirty-five? said the old man at Muddy Waters coffeeshop, where Tyler had ultimately gone without Lily, and without giving Lily a dollar, either, being akin to Domino who in the course of business games which called into play all her calibrations of volition and capability could rapidly compute the prudence of any given expense. Tyler had computed that the dollar would be wasted. So he sat at a table drinking espresso as rich and reddish-brown as Chocolate’s flesh, wondering what to do. Perhaps this old man could see this, and was the latest incarnation of Christ come to help him, for as long as Tyler was willing to entertain such ideas about the Queen of the Whores, why not believe similar nonsense about any stranger?

Yeah, he said, waiting for the pitch.

Then marry for money, not for love, the old man advised. Love you can always pick up someplace else. It won’t last, so marry for money.

Good thinking, said Tyler, draining his espresso.

Some girl wants to marry me, but I says to her, I’m choosy. I like to pick my own wife, and that don’t mean you! the old man concluded gleefully.

Mm hm, said Tyler.

Having proven that he was the boss in this world, that not just any woman could have him, the old man went cheerfully back to his vocation, which was panhandling. On the way out, Tyler handed him a quarter.

He was so lost now like Dante’s pilgrim at the very beginning of the
Inferno
that this new love of his, which perhaps we should simply call an engagement, had already split his life into many additional doublings and halflings through which he wandered as if through a maze of dripping ice-caverns, the terrible directionlessness of his journeying growing and growing before him like concretions of solid hydroxic acid which his touch could melt only a little and so he felt wearily frozen, unable to visualize either his future or his past. Everything was good and bad together. Everything was mixed together like Domino’s grey strands of hair amidst the blonde. In other words, his way had become as open to the lamplight of all possibilities as the Mission, where you can leave the drug dealers literally waiting at the door when you go into some bluegrass-riddled bookstore or other to admire the acquerelles of Moreau or the engravings of Dan Smooth. Only a native California psychic can see all the way to the freeway sign which says
LAST SF EXIT.
Only a fast-talking Tenderloin girl can see half a block ahead to the car that
might
be slowing down, and so she’ll run out into traffic, beckoning, muttering: Come on, come on, come
on . . .
—Did Tyler stand on the threshold of infinity or of a narrow grave? How could he advance a step, not knowing? He remembered the time that Irene
had gotten lost in traffic when she was supposed to meet his mother and John for the weekend in Sacramento, and when she arrived two hours late she stood outside the door for another fifteen minutes, too afraid to go in. Inside, the three of them had just finished their cold dinner. It was Tyler who found her, when he went out in the dark to empty the trash.