The Royal Family

| 239 |

As autumn came on, the police sweeps of Capp Street almost ceased, but in the Tenderloin everyone frenziedly told and retold rumors, of which the most extreme and exaggerated were forwarded to the Queen’s parking garage, of approaching calamities for which no remedy existed except patience. Of course this ill wind increased in force only gradually, like Beatrice, who sucked men off as slowly as her Papa used to fill his wheelbarrow with dirt and stones. On Irene’s birthday (August ninth) it was scarcely a fetid breeze. But by late September it could not be denied. It was up to the Queen to interpret the keening and take steps to protect her family. As for the queenless others, they lay low, mumbling evil prophecies from the innermost wrinkles of their gaunt souls. The great street organism braced itself, expecting some nervous shock. (Imagine, if you will, some suspicious streetwalker holding herself rigid in the headlights of oncoming cars, her hands twisted nervously behind her back as if they concealed frightening weapons.) Meanwhile there was a minor construction boom of new multinational hotels and upscale restaurants, the kind that John and Celia liked; these establishments chipped away at the Tenderloin, like roads, camps and waystations penetrating into virgin forest. The inevitable result, since street life, like any other kind, determinedly struggled to survive, was that as certain blocks were “cleansed” to resemble the wide, skylit stalls of the mul-titiered parking garage at Saveco, the remainder became more concentrated, thick and rank and wiry like underbrush now teeming with animals which have fled an oncoming forest fire. When the Queen was questioned about the meaning of this strange feeling which made the whores’ short hairs prickle on their necks, she replied only to wait and see. She continued to expand her operation, as if she could go on supplying protection to everybody forever, maybe because she believed it or maybe because it was too late for her to stop or maybe because she thought it the upright thing to do, like the moral calculus of a man who cannot swim but dives into deep water in hopes of saving a drowning child. And so, in this whimsical world of ours where pickled intestinal worms may resemble high-quality ginseng roots, the Chinese prostitute Yellow Bird, whom careerism required to drink the colored water which her customers believed to be alcohol, decided to leave the bar in North Beach where she had sipped away at her hopes for months now, because she’d heard of the Queen. — China was better under Chairman Mao, she told the tall man. In that time, no money-money-money. Not do bad thing for money so cruel to the customer. My madam she cursing and screaming if I drink too slow. — Indifferent to Mao’s merits, the tall man led her past a dusty window with a red grating whose bars and squares resembled I Ching ideograms, then up tall narrow grey stairs ascending toward a single immensely powerful light. That light became her Queen. Her heart became as quiet as Chinatown on a rainy midnight.

My name it mean like Yellow Bird, she was explaining to Beatrice over her glass of colored water, while the tall man stood just beyond the doorway swivelling his head from side to side. I wanna be free like other yellow birds but my life is no good.

A Chinese was yelling.

What’s he saying?

He say some bargain with bartender. He want make qvarrer. Every night I see him. Sometimes he go with two girls. — Very ugly, she added venomously.

Beatrice was sorry for her. She wanted to bring this new girl to the Queen.

Today I go to my friend’s place to get some money, Yellow Bird said. I keep some money in her place for my mother. Just in Chinatown I go vin-dow shopping.

A few days later Beatrice saw Yellow Bird on the street and Yellow Bird said: Because I qvarrer wiv the boss. I buy a new suit, and she say new suit not from me, but from customer. I say no, and she swear at me. Then I say I don’t want to work here anymore. Then she want to give me another chance, and she say she love me, but I say no. Bar is no good for me. Now I try to find another job.

Just remember one thing, the tall man said. Nobody gonna force you.

I know somebody who wants to meet you, said Beatrice in the same breath.

The Queen agreed to meet her. Yellow Bird bowed four times. — All rightie, sighed the Queen. Now I’m going to spit in your mouth. I want you to…

But she was noticeably distracted now by her friendship with Tyler. A few of the whores had begun to question her fitness to rule, but then, they always did and always would.

Right now I would say the Queen is my best friend, but they change, Lily explained. Strawberry used to be my best friend but that was before I met the Queen. Domino used to be my best friend. Shit, she started stealing my tricks and then she broke my arm.

And where did you meet her? asked the trick. (He was really a vig. Later he’d make a report.)

From this guy in the salmon-packing plant.

But when the vig asked Domino where she’d met Lily, the blonde curtly replied: We met in jail. Some cop caught me kicking a crack pipe in a doorway…

Is she your best friend?

Who the fuck do you think you’re asking?

Needless to say, Domino was the most outspoken, but even she never said publicly that she had become unfriends with the Queen. Outwardly she and the Queen continued to be on the same loving terms as before. And inwardly, too, perhaps, little had changed.

Dan Smooth, who always heard everything first, said that the city was going to tear down all the crack hotels on Mission Street — surely an exaggeration. Dan Smooth said that vigs would get the Queen someday. Dan Smooth, one of whose eyebrows was higher than the other, sweated gloom and doom like some Mexicali bar from whose dark edges women flowed, the ceiling omniously tinseled like a rattlesnake’s scales. Bad stories flowed now even from the lips of the Wonderbar regulars with their crutches and moustaches and their caps pulled low over their eyes. Surely it couldn’t have been true about the hotels, though; nothing was true that Saturday night on O’Farrell and Jones, that night comprised of black women in translucent pastel skins which were neither bikinis nor raincoats; they shimmered like jellyfish in a dark sea.

Well, so what’s your story? they said. You want some company or not?

Well, you’re just so beautiful, I don’t know which to choose.

Don’t worry, Strawberry said, not seeing the man’s ferocious sarcasm about to un-sheath itself and attack her, it’s our business, her and me. You won’t hurt my feelings if you don’t pick me.

So you’re friends then, the man said.

Yeah, friends, the two women said in agreement.

If you don’t pick me, I’d rather have your money go to her than some stranger, Strawberry explained.

So can you buy me a pack of cigarettes? Domino said.

Sure, sweetheart. Here’s a dollar.

It’s more like three dollars. You’re living in the dark ages.

Grimacing, the man reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a five. — Can you give me change for that? he said.

You bet, said Domino, who considered herself a class act.

You ever done any time?

What kind of a question is that?

I was just wondering.

Wondering what?

What’s jail like? the trick asked brightly.

I just got out of jail. I don’t want to talk about it.

I only wondered…

Look, buster, said Domino. I’m not an animal in a zoo. You want a date or not?

You look expensive.

Well, you just go to your little ATM and take out a hundred dollars, Domino said. Your wife will never miss it.

My wife keeps me on an allowance, he said. He exuded playfully self-satisfied indiscipline, in just the same way as when barrel-shaped Brady went into a restaurant determined to be good and order the salad but when he opened his lips he heard emerge strict orders for pork chops and deep-fried calamari. — Can I get in touch with you again? he asked the two prostitutes.

I’m sorry but you can’t, said Strawberry.

Can I get in touch with the Queen? the trick said.

With who, dear?

With your Queen. You know. That little black lady…

No, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Strawberry said. You a cop?

I don’t know what the fuck this cocksucker is up to, said Domino, but he obviously mistakes us for somebody else.

The man said: Hey, if I just give you fifty in hard cash…

Honey, said Domino, that just ain’t gonna cut it. Now, either you walk or my homegirl and I are gonna walk. And my feet are tired. So won’t you please, please, please go away?

The man pulled out twenty and said: Then can I just get some head?

Now he’s acting weird, said Strawberry.

Head costs fifty from me, said Domino. I’m a self-respecting girl. I don’t go down on anybody for less than fifty dollars.

I told you I have fifty dollars, the man said happily. Let’s go.

Don’t go, said Strawberry. I got a bad feeling.

Why don’t you keep an eye on us and I’ll share with you later, said Domino.

How much?

I’ll give you a piece.

Oh, all right, sighed Strawberry.

The three of them set out, trisecting the Tenderloin night where everything was yellow against granite, and Strawberry dully realized that there were more and more Vietnamese establishments and more murals on the walls than there used to be. Glowing beads of sensation went round and round inside her skull like fireflies. Passing the 441 Club through whose open door the jukebox sang My, my, MY Delilah, Strawberry gazed in, remembering when it had been a black bar; now it was a Korean bar, shiny-surfaced, with red paper lamps which hung down like breasts. These changes vaguely upset Strawberry. She did not know what the world wanted of her. It was so much effort to learn how things were that she preferred no changes. The other girls kept saying that something bad would happen soon, and Strawberry felt anxious, waiting for portents. Down at Turk Street where the double rows of lights faded they went into the alley which the blonde preferred, and Strawberry kept her back turned to the orally copulating pair, trying simultaneously to block them from view. She heard Domino smacking her lips, and then the man grunted, and Domino coughed and spat.

She turned around. The man was zipping up his pants, leaning rapturously on the top of Domino’s head. Domino was retching.

How about a tip for me, mister? said Strawberry. I kept you from bein’ hassled…

I didn’t ask you to guard me, the man said. I bet you get off on listening. I know how you whores are.

Oh, really? said Domino brightly, rising to her feet. How do you know that?

The man sniggered and started to walk away.

I’m looking for your Queen, he said. And when I find her, I’m going to beat her ass.

Think he’s a vig? said Strawberry when he was out of sight.

I dunno, said Domino. Probably just an idiot.

Well, I think we should tell Maj.

Go ahead. See what I care, the blonde said wearily.

And you said you was gonna cut me in…

I’ll save you some rock, okay?

Please, Domino, I need to get well.

Oh, all right. Here’s ten dollars. But you have to pay the Queen’s cut out of that.

But Queen’s cut is ten dollars!

Oh, get lost, said Domino. Can’t you see I’m feeling blue? I’m so tired.

| 240 |

Are you ready, honey? the Queen whispered. Is it okay if I make you a little uncomfortable for a while?

Yes, said Tyler, swallowing.

Sitting astride him, she eyed him glowingly, a tender smile on her lips. His penis leaped up.

She bent and kissed his cheek. Then she straightened, wiggled smilingly on top of him like a little girl settling herself bareback on a trusted and docile family horse, and after that the smile slowly cooled upon her mouth until she was gazing at him in an appraisal which objectified and instrumentalized him for her purposes.

She slapped his cheek.

He blinked.

She slapped his face hard enough to make both his ears ring.

He swallowed.

Don’t resist me, she said in a hard voice, striking him across the face again and again.

His heart thrilled.

Turn over, she said.

He turned over, and she touched his buttock with something cool and thin and gentle, and then the cool thin gentle thing whizzed across the backs of his naked thighs, causing him instantaneous pain which then increased for almost five seconds before it began to fade.

The cane came down again and again. She was careful; she never gave him a stroke before the previous stroke ceased to hurt. She was making it easy on him this time.

She welted his thighs, buttocks and shoulders, then turned him over again and whipped him on the front sides of his thighs. He could see the long, straight, red and white welts rise up where she touched him.

She took his nipple between her teeth and slowly bit until the hot, cold, steely pain made him cry out for the first time.

Ahh, said the Queen, smiling.

Put your hands behind your head, she said. Don’t move. You’re not allowed to move at all.

She seated herself on his penis and took him, grunting, her face hardening and straining like a man’s. As commanded, he didn’t move a muscle. No one had ever possessed him like that before. Sweet sweat exploded from her and fell upon his chest. His wrists ached behind his head. He longed to begin thrusting inside her. He longed to crown her with something. He longed to place flowers in her hands, to give her pennies, dollars, diamonds, boulders of pure crack cocaine. Her mouth was wide open now and she was throttling him and spitting in his face. — Fuck me now, she growled thickly. That’s a good boy. Now you can come. Come for Mama. Oh. Oh. You’re Mama’s good little boy.

After he came, shouting and groaning while she pressed down on him with all her strength, she kissed him deeply and they lay together, glued by sweat, panting. She took his face in her hands and whispered: Are you okay?

He said: I want you to give me anguish.

Ohh, she said happily, embracing him. Oh, you’re the one.

| 241 |

You know I love you or you don’t know?

I know, he whispered.

| 242 |

He fell asleep in her arms and woke ashamed. Actually his dream had been this: Irene had sat on his face, grinding her pelvic bones hurtfully against his skull, then pissed long and loud into his opened mouth; he was suffocating; he swallowed her reeking, foaming stream; she shifted and squirmed and mashed herself down over his nose — he couldn’t breathe! He was dying! He struggled but she bore down harder; he had a tremendous erection; everything was going red.

Don’t feel down, baby, said the Queen. I know everything. Lot of men like that. And you never got a taste from her?

Once, he blurted out, but she didn’t know. I was… — and he remembered Irene and John’s laundry basket, and what in his desperation he had found there: the sour smell of life, the sour smell of death.

He’d dreamed the very same dream before, when Irene was alive, and he’d said to her only: I dreamed about you. That’s what I wanted to tell you.

Irene said nothing.

I know you don’t love me the way I love you… he muttered.

His face flushed. He didn’t remember the rest. But the Queen knew it all.

Lie still now, she said, clambering onto his face. He opened his mouth obediently. She gripped his head firmly between her thighs and began to make water in his mouth, more and more and more until he couldn’t swallow anymore; he was retching, and her urine was coming out his nostrils. It felt as though her piss had become his tears. Desperate and confused to the very bottom of his soul, he struggled among square tomblike openings far-spaced in the yellow walls of death, wanting to escape back into pure numb death but the Queen would not let him. It hurt so much! Tear-streams gushed like pale urine from his eyes. He was weeping for Irene and gagging on his own grief; grief was trickling out of his nose; but the grief was really the Queen’s painful water which she was giving him so that he wouldn’t feel so all alone. Her piss was in his lungs now and he was coughing and vomiting but she wouldn’t let go until her bladder had given its last drop. Then she lifted herself off him and sat on the soaking sheet, laying his head on her lap. His chest ached. She stroked his hair while he vomited. — That’s a good boy, she whispered. Queen’s good little boy. Never be ashamed, Henry. Irene’s crying for you, too. Never mind. Never mind. Now you’ve cried my tears, and it hurt you. Never mind, baby. Henry, you’re my baby. Can you breathe now? Try to breathe. You’re gonna feel better now, ’cause you cried so hard and it hurt you. You got punished, and now it’s all right, so never mind. Queen knows everything about you, Queen adores you, Queen’s good little boy…

And, exhausted as he was, he realized that his sadness had been eased. He’d come out from a tunnel into the wide, stinking, sunlit world.

| 243 |

Hurt me, the Queen whispered.

| 244 |

He hardly slept all night, and in the morning felt headachey and nauseous. He wanted to vomit up the Queen’s urine, but he also longed to retain it. A double cappuccino picked him up slightly, but almost made him puke, so he drove to Muddy Waters with its bad paintings and ordered a double espresso with the brownish-yellow foam in the little cup, and some exciting crazy music that he’d never heard before was playing, causing him to grin and laugh. He was happy. He drank coffee until suddenly his fatigue shattered like windowglass and he was in the world of excitement and joy.

I will pay you back today, the snowy-bearded panhandler said. I live right here in the neighborhood.

Don’t worry about it, said Tyler.

I will pay you back when I see you again.

Okay. And if you don’t, why, don’t worry about it.

Tyler wanted to give away everything he had. He was so proud, because his Queen loved him. He felt as if he had been cured of an incurable wound. For Canaanites, such moments are the most treacherous.

| 245 |

So many girls in the rain like black rubber butterflies! It was Friday night in the Tenderloin, and Justin leaned up against a grating, glaring. — Gun up! said the Queen. Keep yourselves sharp, now. — Long black and blonde hair waterfalls illuminated the hearts of heat-seeking men; ivory legs glistened in the rain. (It’s those legs that just jump out! Brady always used to say. — Wet, bare legs. But Domino, sideways against the wall, bent herself into a backward letter C, her breasts and belly jutting out.) There was Beatrice, leaning up against her private piece of streetwall with one knee up and the sole of her foot planted firmly against that wall as if she were a competition swimmer getting ready for the referee’s signal to push herself into the water of her life, racing to be the first to reach that same sad finish line which Sunflower and Irene had already crossed. Heat-seekers auto-crawled down from the heights of Jones Street, looking out across a plain of lights toward the horizon and then descending with the regularity of cable cars, lizard-silver in their swift inclinations. Heat-seekers emerged from the financial district, their wallets full of cash. Heat-seekers came from Chinatown. They sought wordlessly or garrulously, but they all sought without knowing why, each of them an animal, a body like some monstrous imbecile-prostitute at Feminine Circus, some speechless being deep red and swollen like a pregnant sow.

Take Sapphire to the little girls’ room, would you, Bea? said the Queen. Sapphire’s got to pee.

Let’s go, angel; doan be scared, said Beatrice, taking the retarded girl’s hand. Sapphire went with her trustingly to the alley.

A Ford Escort pulled up for Chocolate. The man inside said: How do you stay so beautiful?

I just keep prayin’ it up, the black woman chuckled, leaping in.

All right, muttered the tall man. I got that sonofabitch’s license plate number in my head.

A black-in-white rolled by, and the Queen waved at the open passenger window and said: How you all doin’, officers?

Shaking their heads in disgust, the cops rolled on.

Justin, go on by the parking garage and get our messages, please, said the Queen.

Just lemme…

Do as you’re told, Justin.

Swearing, the tall man strode off. He came back and said: Vigs. That’s all they talk about now. Rumors of vigs and more vigs.

All rightie. We got enough trouble night by night. Thank you, Justin.

Maj, I got a bad feeling about these vigs.

Okay. We’ll talk about it later. In private.

You gonna let me go now?

Where to? This here’s the busy time.

Gonna make a run. Gonna score a big rock of white girl.

Who wants white girl? laughed the Queen, and all the prostitutes eagerly raised their hands, like schoolchildren who knew the answer to the most important question of all.

I’m sick of that shitty yellow rock you’ve been bringing back, Domino said. We can hardly get high off that stuff.

Know what we call that kinda crack? laughed the tall man. Call it Oriental girl.

Are you prejudiced? What the fuck do I have to be around prejudiced people for?

Chill out, Dom, said the Queen.

Don’t you tell me to chill out! I don’t like it when you pay forty dollars for a twenty dollar feeling. I never would have copped from that connection again.

Oh, lordy, said the Queen.

Chocolate returned from her trip around the block. She gave the Queen five for the general fund, and the tall man ten for crystal meth. Now she was whispering into the Queen’s ear, relating how a free agent named Feather had passed on a complaint about the management of the Mehta Hotel on Mission Street, whose managers insulted both the hookers and the tricks they brought. — Shit, that’s fucked up, Chocolate commiserated. Somebody I know is gonna hear about that. Why the fuck they gotta do that? Specially when it’s us girls that be bringin’ ’em in their money. ’Less that’s how they get down, she chuckled. — All rightie, sighed the Queen. I’ll look into it.

Another black-and-white came. The Queen waved; the cops waved back. When Beatrice waved, too, the tall man snarled: Don’t suck up to the bulls. — Beatrice, scared and silent, ran to embrace the Queen. — Mama, I were be very happy, she said. — There was an air of sweetness and patience in her face, with its red-brassy cheeks.

All rightie now. That’s my good little girl.

Maybe on November the twenty-sixth, I’m gonna make a party, said Beatrice. I’m gonna be nineteen. Maybe I can ask my Mama for this.

’Course you can have a party, child, said the Queen.

Fuck, you look thirty, said Domino.

The same black-and-white came circling back, and this time the cops didn’t wave. Strawberry, high on crank, informed the world: Two five-o’s come an’ slam me down on the street and I do jail time for trying to knife them — oh, my lymph nodes!

Shut your face, the tall man said.

Heads up now, everybody, said the Queen. How you all doin’, officers?

Just fine, Maj. You’re going to have to break up the party. These girls are blocking traffic. If we see you here in ten minutes we’re going to have to write you up.

Lordy lordy, sighed the Queen. Okay, officers. Justin, can you help Sapphire? Beatrice, I want you to run down to that place, you know that place I was tellin’ you about…

Sapphire turned her head quickly and shyly, smiling with her pale face, and even while she smiled her tongue was hanging out.

| 246 |

Pull in here, pull in here, pull in here, said Domino impatiently; and the dark car crept into the sunset fog.

Are you going to tip me? she added.

Here’s five more, said the trick. You were really good. You’re always so good.

You just need a little petticoat government, that’s all, the blonde explained. And did you buy me anything?

Didn’t have enough… the trick whispered.

See you, the blonde laughed, jumping out of that long black car. A condom fell out of her purse.

Wait! called the poor desperate trick.

She ran across the street to the tall man, shouting: Justin, Justin! That sonofabitch keeps asking about you. Get his license plate number. Get his—

But the car was already speeding away.

| 247 |

Last week, Thursday or Friday, they hurt that girl up there, Beatrice was saying. They hurt her, and she was bleeding and everything. Why the police doan do anything about the ones taking money away from people that works? They just want us to be stealing and for us to do nothing.

Vigs, said the tall man bitterly.

Who were they, honey? said the Queen. Come an’ whisper in my ear.

They talk about some Mr. Brady, I think I see him before, the fat man with big money, one time I give him a nice blow job…

Brady’s Boys, huh? said the tall man. I heard about them in Chicago. Fuckin’ vigs.

| 248 |

The tall man, like the security guard at the War Memorial Opera House, who always locked his hand upon his head, leaned the resultingly reinforced elbow against a pillar, thrust his belly out and waited for time to go by, believed less in anticipating events than in seizing them when they began to appear like crow-dark ghosts and specters. From the window of darkened hotel rooms he watched light ooze down the immense brick and stone hips of the Tenderloin like a woman’s skirt slowly falling down around her fleabitten ankles. In the mouths of the Queen’s many tunnels he awaited doom. — I can’t get a fix on it yet, he muttered. Just how those godamned citizens tryin’ to fuck us up… Sometimes he squatted against the wall of the 101 Restaurant, watching. Abruptly, as if he could see his enemies, he rose and walked off, pulling the whore Strawberry by the hand.

The next morning he was walking up Eighteenth and at South Van Ness saw a cop arresting a Latino boy who pleaded: Yes, I know, but I’m sorry; you gotta trust me! and he walked on feeling terrible for the boy.

They’re all vigs, he said later. Vigs and citizens and everybody but us, all of ’em, all just one set, vigs and pigs…

| 249 |

Lily, peering at everyone in a half-blind fashion like an old welder, said brightly: That corner, right there, was where they found the two girls. And I saw them, too. You know, with their hands and their heads and their mouth kind of screaming. So you saw how they died.

It’s only a dream, said Smooth. Like eating pure chocolate. Nobody really dies. But nobody ever gets to eat pure chocolate. It’s always cut with strychnine. But the dream, now—

Stop eating goofballs, said Strawberry. You’re a goof.

It’s like they never ate peanut butter, Smooth explained. And I’m passing out peanut butter.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, said Strawberry.

What is real? Smooth asked her. What is true happiness?

The whore didn’t answer.

I said, do you know what real happiness is?

I thought we were talking about those dead girls, said Strawberry. Now, Mr. Smooth, I don’t mean to disrespect you, and the Queen says you’re okay, but I hope that dead girls don’t have anything to do with your happiness.

Can dead girls give head? said Smooth. Are they young enough? Are their little lips fresh enough?

God, mister, you are twisted.

Dan Smooth of course had the run of the new Sacramento coroner’s facility with its one hundred and eighty single or double tables and its special gurneys for decomposed patients, so he had seen a few things. He admired and complimented the ultraviolet lights which were used to decontaminate the room between autopsies by breaking down corpse-DNA into meaningless atoms of putrescence.

In his opinion the double homicide referred to by Lily was of the same bemusing order as the coroner’s policy on freezing bodies, which is why Lily herself thought him to be freezing cold. But Smooth said: Do you believe in the resurrection of Lazarus? And, if so, do you believe that Lazarus truly wasn’t better off dead? Do you believe that Sunflower’s in Heaven now? Do you believe it’s right what she did?

Hey, said Strawberry. I knew those girls. Those girls didn’t wanna die.

| 250 |

Only a few people ever saw the Queen and knew her when they saw her, and in those anxious days when the vigs began to arrive in force like gnawing vermin blind-set on uprooting every hotel in the Mission, every brickwork old massage parlor in the Tenderloin, they glimpsed her even more rarely, which is why some gaunt harsh old street men began rumoring that she was already gone; meanwhile she continued to do what she always did, hovering like a light above the waters so that no soul which rented out its flesh had to be alone any longer. Like the improverished old people in Sacramento who lurked air conditionless in their homes with the blinds pulled down against the glowing sun, she hid from vigilante-radiance, fulfilling her purpose on the dark landings of hotel stairs, wearing castoff clothes which sometimes crawled with lice or scabies; Tyler’s flesh was inflamed, scratched and bleeding now like that of all the rest of her crew; and Domino once with her saturnine humor hypothesized that the real Mark of Cain comprised scratch-marks behind the knees or around one’s crotch. The Queen smiled at this almost with docility, and Beatrice, uncomprehending, flapped a stained T-shirt up and down upon her unwashed breasts to cool them down, burning as they were with the bites of hungry insects and of lonely men. And that little figure with the old, old face, sitting on the bed in this hotel room for which Beatrice’s trick had paid for an entire night, then used merely for an hour as he had used Beatrice, then departed, giving the key into Beatrice’s hands with his own variety of secondhand kindness, that witch, that arch-Canaanite, that ancient Maj sighed, and said: Domino, go and get that T.V. in the hallway there. Bring him in and we’ll talk to him about his happiness.

And so the half-toothless old transvestite, thirty-two years of age, came in and sat down on the bed between Domino and Beatrice and said: I came to San Francisco and started whoring at sixteen. Most of the people I started out with are gone or dead. There are only three of them around now.

Oh, come on, said Domino. Doesn’t that go for any group of people in sixteen years? She was actually trying to brighten him in her backhanded way. After his initial pleasure that somebody actually wanted him he’d become uneasy, almost alarmed. He could not comprehend why these women had requested his presence. — You got any bump? he whispered. I sure could use a little bump to bring myself like back into focus… — The blonde, who now grinned uproariously at the notion that she might under any circumstances give away drugs to strangers, felt as a rule entirely at home in the company of transvestites because they weren’t men anymore, so they did not want to use her sexually, and since they were also not quite women, they hardly competed with her for men. Exhausted by her own hatreds, she was pleased to express friendliness or even helpfulness, as she did toward, for instance, children, whenever they did not annoy her. And this quasi-female, skinny and ill, displayed sufficient signs of acquired immune deficiency for her to pity him and actually think good about him as she would of someone already safely dead.

This here, this my sister, said Beatrice with a big black-toothed grin, formally introducing Domino. — And that one over there, that’s our Mama. And she defends us and doan never hit us, so we love her so much.

Shyly, the transvestite hung his head. — You got any rock? he whispered.

How many friends you got? said the Queen. I mean real friends?

Not so many. I got a fortune cookie once that said it’s easier to make friends than it is to keep them, and, man, is that ever true. If I needed to fix or I was going to be sick, if I was hungry or needed a place to stay and I had no money, then there are two or three places I could go. Yeah, three friends. Three good friends. That’s better than a lot of people can say.

What’s your name?

Libby.

You remember me?

No.

You was stayin’ at that Hotel Seville last year, an’ your visitor fees be gettin’ too high, so Justin here had a little talk with ’em…

Oh yes yes yes yes yes.

An’ what if I was to say you could always stay with me, no questions asked?

What are you, some kind of cult?

Not exactly, child. Look into my eyes. What do you see?

Why, I see Christopher! He’s my boyfriend — well, my ex-boyfriend I guess I should say…

Hell! Sooner or later they’re all ex-boyfriends, the blonde put in with her trademark crooked smile. You know why? Because they’re all shitty! And I’m warning you, too, Maj—

Hush up, darling. You know I love you…

I — gosh… uh, after Christopher left me — well, that was two months ago but we were together for two years so I guess I can still talk about it — I started getting these waves of sadness. I knew I could never meet anybody like him again — smart, handsome, generous, a lawyer—’cause it had taken me fourteen years before I met him. And I’m not getting any younger.

Why did he leave you? asked the Queen.

He didn’t like my lifestyle.

Your whorin’?

Uh huh. And one day he was going to fly off to Boston, and he didn’t invite me. So I said: Well, if you’re not taking me, at least give me some money to get high tonight, because I’ll be missing you. — And he didn’t want to indulge my habit was how he put it, although I don’t have a habit; I try lots of different drugs, don’t stick to any one thing, so how could he have been so insensitive as to call me addicted? So I threw a tantrum and half wrecked his apartment. Then he gave me the money, but he said: You’ve thrown your last tantrum. — I didn’t pay him much attention, ‘cause he was always saying that…

So you didn’t pay him no mind, agreed the Queen. And then what?

And then it was over. And waves of sadness like an ocean kept filling up inside my room. I felt like I was drowning. I can’t stay in my room very long or I start to choke. That’s why you found me sitting outside in the hall…

How much you charge for head?

I go as low as five dollars. That’s rock bottom, you know, when I’m feeling really really needy for some medicine.

That’ll work, said Domino. Because we have a rule. If you’re one of those expensive prostitutes who charge five hundred bucks before you’ll swallow, then we can’t let you in. Because we’re exclusive.

Domino… sighed the Queen.

We’re the downtrodden. We’re the wretched of the earth. We’re inscribed — and I mean indelibly inscribed — with the Mark of Cain.

We feel happy, ’cause Mama always gives us presents, Beatrice said, smiling with every inch of her car-crash-ruined face. — If you want to be my brother and Domino’s brother you can be, and we’ll respect you, I promise, because we…

What do you mean, presents? Hey, can you spare a little rock, like just a little teeny-weeny bump, just so I can get a taste? I need the taste, I—

Hell, no, said Domino.

| 251 |

One night Strawberry ran away or maybe went to jail although if she had gone to jail one would have thought that she’d have used her statutory phone call on Dan Smooth, who was always willing to forward bail requests, but nobody heard from her; and while it was possible that she’d been murdered like the Capp Street girls who kept winding up in various zones of San Francisco either strangled or with their throats cut (one whore who’d gotten away said that it was two Hispanic men in a pickup truck, and another whore assured her neighbors with equal vigor that it was a greyhaired ex-cop), it seemed equally likely, if not more so, that she had simply grown exhausted with the tall man, whose self-denying rage (akin to holy asceticism) inevitably broke down everything and everybody whom he loved into a might-have-been; so after two or three days Beatrice spied his fists like shooting stars around a pay phone, ringing and ringing against that nickel-plated metal until his hands began to tear open; just as dark juice runs from the winepress, so the black blood spewed and spurted at every noisy blow, the flesh merely raw and superficially exposed, but the sight nonetheless pitiable for that, which is why a black whore in a metal kettle-hat and a shawl like a shower curtain kept lumbering around the incensed and despairing man as if she were a dancing bear, terrified yet fascinated, uttering hysterical laughter as she had done just two nights past when the cocktail glass on the sign for Jonell’s bar intoxicated her — a horrible sight, so Beatrice, whose sense of duty rose up with all the high dark corrugations of the border wall between Mexican and American California, flew panting to her Mama the Queen, who was sleeping inside the hulk of the Grand Southern Hotel on Mission between Fifteenth and Sixteenth, the Grand Southern having lately been burned out by accidents or ruthlessness unknown; Beatrice told the news, crying: I come running, running! but when those two arrived back in the Tenderloin by taxicab forty minutes later the tall man had gone and the phone was clean, so the Queen sleepily grumbled and clucked and laid her head in Beatrice’s lap on a bench in Boedekker Park ten yards from the black preacher who cried out: I was more wretched than you, but Jesus saved me. Jesus took my wretchedness away. Are you listening? Hallelujah! He died for me, I said! He took my wretchedness away. I was a user, but He took my wretchedness away, and now I ain’t no user no more. The Queen very faintly snored and blew a bubble through her nostril; Beatrice, bending over her, inhaled her familiar smoked-leather odor, closed her own eyes, and had begun dreaming of when she was a little girl in Oaxaca and she had seen them burning a wooden statue in a bonfire to complete some ceremony whose significance she had never understood; when she was shaken awake by the blood-caked hands of Justin. His dusty face had been worn clean by two tear-tracks. When Beatrice awoke, the Queen awoke also. She sat up and looked into his bloodshot eyes and then said to Beatrice: Okay, baby. Here’s five dollars. You go buy some powder for Sapphire… — and when Beatrice had risen and gone a few steps, she turned back, brushing her skirt, and saw the tall man sobbing in the Queen’s arms. — C’mere, little boy, the Queen whispered. Come closer to me…. — Beatrice turned away, jealous. She heard the Queen say: Maybe you need to make amends to her, Justin. Maybe she just don’t want you to beat her up no more… — to which the tall man chokingly replied: But she… — She gonna come back to you in two days, said the Queen. I know it. Try an’ cherish her. You hear me, child? — Passing a police wagon which loomed so black in the hot evening light, Beatrice, worrying about Strawberry but believing the Queen, returned to the hotel room where she was living that week, the room with incandescent doughnuts wrapped around the burnt-out light bulbs and knocked on the door of one-eleven where she got five dollars’ worth of powder from a dealer named Scoreboard, and after taking a little snort for herself (the Queen would never have minded), she knelt down, longing to pray to her dear friend the Virgin for Strawberry’s safety and happiness, but she knew that it was not permitted for her to pray to the Virgin anymore. Besides, the Queen was herself the Virgin, the righteous one who loved Beatrice, Strawberry, Justin, Domino and everyone, the dear lady who feasted them and cared for them and could do any of the things Beatrice remembered from the devotional stories; but two things had occurred to weaken Beatrice’s faith in the Queen. The first was her realization that wherever the Queen dwelled there was never any altar. The second was the episode just now with the transvestite Libby. When Domino led him in, Beatrice had been certain that she would now have a new brother, or sister, or whatever Libby desired to be, because her Queen, who could do everything, had sent for him and invited him into the royal family. And of course the Queen behaved as splendidly as the Virgin in continuing to love Domino most tenderly no matter what she did, and transform the blonde’s faults, even her gravest defect of malice, into childish stumblings which should in no way be blamed. But if the Queen were really Beatrice’s good friend Maria, then why had Domino succeeded in scaring Libby away? The Queen had not uttered a word of reproach. Yet surely the real Virgin would have dissuaded and prevented anyone who sought to block another from entering the house of God. (The Queen, who did indeed remain mostly as mild with Domino as Irene’s mother reminding her daughter not to soak the New Year’s rice cakes too long on New Year’s Eve, perhaps hoped — if she hoped at all — for titration between Domino and the world, that interesting chemical term referring to the slow and gradual addition of an acid to a base, or vice versa, until a neutral pH is reached. But any such strategy would have remained diabolically irrelevant to the Mexican girl’s doubts.) What a luxury it had been, to believe that the Queen and the Virgin were one! And now Beatrice did not know what to do. Lying down on her back, she pulled up her sweaty T-shirt and slowly masturbated, hoping to relax herself, but suddenly she glimpsed herself in the bathroom mirror and was ashamed. She went back out to find Sapphire, glimpsing through the doorway of a bar a black girl in a straw hat who, smiling faintly, slammed the dice down on the counter with a sound like cracking ice. Sapphire was supposed to be on Minna Street but she wasn’t there. Beatrice, heavy Beatrice, went sighing and panting to Clementina but Sapphire wasn’t there, either. On Sixth Street a man whose face resembled lava’s dull fire gazed at her. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt and a red skirt; and because the lava-faced man thought that she had a nice if black-toothed smile and a nice round face, almost clean and very shiny, because he liked big women, especially olive-faced ones like this one, this wide-hipped one with the colored bracelets hanging from her arms, he called out: Baby, you gonna go back with me today? I’m lonely! but Beatrice, whose feet were hurting so much now and whose back ached, turned and snarled: Doan play with me! I’m not up for it today! so he said: How about tomorrow? — Beatrice bent over and allowed herself to be sodomized beneath the murky blue mirrors of office windows, keeping up her spirits with the thought of the forty dollars which he had promised her, so that it didn’t hurt at all. Afterward he tipped her so that she got fifty. He was a nice man. In her heart Beatrice sang thank you to God and resolved to trust His plan for her, which meant believing in the Queen, for after all there was no purpose in going home. — A black-and-white pulled up. The cop beckoned her with one finger. She approached him with respect, hoping that he was Officer O’Malley, with whom she was in love a little because he never slapped her down like so many other policemen but joked with her instead, and sometimes even gave her a break if she whined long enough. Just the other night, when he’d busted her, his partner took a Polaroid of Officer O’Malley with his arm around Beatrice, the two of them standing against the white wall of the Mission Street substation with her head resting on his shoulder. But this policeman was not Officer O’Malley. She abased herself, so he let her off. — Thank you, officer, thank you! she cried. — Walk, said the cop. — I hear you, said Beatrice. She shuffled wearily halfway up the block, then flashed her fat and tired breasts at cars without result. — Should be right around the corner, said the tall man at dusk, so, thanking him, Beatrice turned the corner, met the Queen, kissed her lips. Returning to her hotel, she snorted the rest of Sapphire’s powder, then bought forty dollars’ worth of coal tar heroin from Scoreboard, longing to experience even by chemical means the tranquility which was the gift of nuns. She wanted to be a nun. Closing her eyes, she saw once again the old master of ceremonies in Merida with his death’s head face. He tipped his hat to her, crying out: Our Queen of the Yucatan — sweet as a pastry, hot as a candle, bright as the sun! And suddenly she wondered whether he might be the Devil. She had never considered that before. It was he who by filling her heart with the desire to dance before multitudes had led her into dancehalls and prostitution. And if that were true, what must the Queen be? How could Domino continually distrust the Queen, unless either the Queen or Domino herself were morally deficient? Beatrice, pierced now by a terrible anxiety, resolved to remake her life. Then she prepared the heroin and squezed it lovingly into her favorite vein, the big one on her left thigh, two hands below the crotch. Ay, it was good — so good! Her soul became incense-smoke rising up from the censer of her flesh; she was holy and excellent forever. The higher she rose, the more she could see, until it seemed to her that the whole world most preciously shimmered below her. Far to the southeast she could spy Oaxaca; there was her Papa’s house on its concrete platform, with ladders going up to the roof; and when she closed her eyes she could almost hear her dead mother calling her to come and eat. She cried. Against the pitted concrete wall of the house, a broom leaned. The concrete porch was clean. Now she was happy and drowsy. There were ladders and buckets in the dry dirt. There was a wheelbarrow halfway down the canyon. At that moment, shrugging off the blanket of heroin’s saintlike peace, Beatrice longed to go home even though she knew that there was nothing in that place for her. — Do you have children? a john had asked her just the other day. — No, I want one but I kinda think I can’t have one no more, she laughed. I can’t have any kids. The dumb doctor said I could. The clinic said no. — Her son, the rape-child with his tripas hanging out, where was he now?

| 252 |

The next time she saw Sapphire, which was three nights later, under the Stockton tunnel, Beatrice, who after trying and trying to get business late on that streetlit evening, raising her T-shirt, flashing her big round breasts at the stunned drivers in their torpid little cars, had finally made twenty for blowing a fat black businessman, ran out and bought five dollars’ worth of powder, and after taking two snorts for herself (didn’t a girl deserve a commission? Wouldn’t Sapphire tell her go ahead if Sapphire could speak?) gave the rest to Sapphire, who swarmed mewlingly into her arms. Strawberry was back, and the tall man was already cursing and punching her face.

The Queen said to Beatrice: You’re carryin’ some bad blood in your heart. I can smell it.

Seeing that her dear lady with the old, old face was not judging her but merely worrying over and sorrowing over her, Beatrice, who was chewing Mexican candy, felt ashamed and tender all at once. At that moment she would have died for her Queen. How much easier life would be, if such moments endured! Running into the black woman’s arms, she sobbed, her brittle English cracking and breaking as it always did when she was agitated: And Santa Claus didn’t give me nothing for Christmas, but he give me my Mama. You always my Mama. I wanna love you. I wanna be with you. I wanna marry with you. If you ever come Mexicali, you doan never pay your hotel, come my house. I ask my other Mama already and she say okay. And I gonna come running, running to get you and take you home so you can stay with me forever. I’m gonna meet your bus and fuck you all night ’cause you’re my Mama.

Oh, please, said Domino. How can you ask your other Mama anything? She’s dead.

Hush up, Dom. Let the girl be. And you hush up, too, Beatrice. Try an’ enjoy life. When you gonna teach us all those Mexican dances you know? I never been to Mexico; I wanna learn ’em. We could have a party with some music and everything.

Why don’t you ever listen to music, Maj? Domino interrupted eagerly. You can borrow my headphone radio anytime.

Thank you, darlin’. You know that song “Gypsy Queen”? That’s my song.

Angry and jealous, the Mexican girl whispered rapidly in the Queen’s ear: I told my Mama I lose my money, I lose my twenty dollar from my new boyfriend I meet last night, and my Mama doan say nothing but Domino say stupida, you always stupida, Beatrice! and then I cry.

She thrust her half-eaten candy at the Queen. The Queen took a bite, but not a big enough one to please Beatrice, who shouted no, no, no! bit off a big piece, chewed it, then tongued it passionately into the Queen’s mouth.

| 253 |

The summer’s back broken, Tyler drove unsweatily past Q Street but did not turn off to Dan Smooth’s house even though the traffic light winked meaningfully. His mother was not well. Looking right and left, he glimpsed bunkered lights and light dripping out of dingy Victorians. Then he drove on, proceeding an entire block to the Zebra Club, and parked beneath a billboard which proclaimed him and all other creatures LUCKY.

He tried to decide what he was going to say to his mother, who had scarcely addressed him since the last time he’d visited her, when he mentioned the false Irene. Should he tell her that he and that one were quits, and that he’d taken up instead with a crack-addicted ghetto prostitute who practiced black magic? The eyes narrowed in his grey, grey face, and he sat unmoving in his car.

A long train went dully by; he heard the sound. At the shopping malls when the trains passed on the levee, a fence kept you so far away that you couldn’t really hear them. They seemed to glide in silence. But when you lived close enough you could hear that long, slow, heavy sound.

He sat there for half an hour. (Meanwhile Dan Smooth was reading an anarchist quarterly called The Raven which contained an article called “Children Abusing Adults — Rule 43.”) Finally he started the engine again and drove to the supermarket, where he bought his mother groceries.

| 254 |

A shot of tequila? said Loreena.

Yeah.

That sounds good. Fuck it. Only half an hour before closing time. I’ll have one, too.

Cheers, said Tyler.

Cheers. I’ll need some money now, dear.

How much?

I knew you’d do that to me. Let’s see… I’m a little bit fuzzy… Two twenty-five.

Here.

Thank you. You’re always so generous, Henry. Man, that tastes good. I just love that tequilla. That’ll put hair on your chest. Or maybe take it off.

In my own case I can’t remember, so maybe I can see your chest and dope it out.

Now you’re pushing the bucket, mister, said Loreena, but then to his astonishment she lifted up her T-shirt and flashed rosy-nippled, round and perfect breasts.

Thank you, he said. That was good of you.

I learned that trick from Beatrice.

Surprise, surprise.

You know, it’s such a hot night, Loreena said. I figured after I got off work I’d head for Jonell’s and then maybe the Cinnabar, and after that I’d love to go skinnydipping out at Ocean Beach.

Tyler immediately became sad because he wanted to be with the Queen and now he would have to disappoint Loreena. — I’ll be back if I can, he said. I have to go make some money.

Loreena’s ancient face grimaced back down into its habitual mask of weary disgust, and she said: Well, drive carefully, Henry, okay?

And he wondered which would have been the more enlightened act — to go with Loreena and make her happy for an evening, loving her as the Queen loved everybody, or to go to the Queen and literally love her? — I don’t know where I’m going anymore, he muttered.

| 255 |

That was what he did now, night after night. Passing Strawberry up against the wall of the twenty-four-hour carwash with the hollows of her eyes filled with unreadable light and light drooling from her mouth like some customer’s sperm, passing Chocolate who was grinning and clenchfisted as she leaned up against the slimy wall-tiles of the Wonderbar late at night, trying not to shiver and making sure she stared down every car that came, Tyler wandered in through the back door to the red stools and red love seats, the kingdom of the Wonderbar where Domino, waiting to do business with someone whose identity would soon shock Tyler, said to him: Are you married?

Only to my brother’s dead wife, he replied. How’s the Queen today?

You know, said Domino, I don’t exactly have contempt for you; I don’t exactly think you’re a coward…

Well, I’m glad to hear that, said Tyler sarcastically.

Are you laughing at me?

No, sweetheart. I would never laugh at you.

Well, then why do you — oh, fuck it.

Like all the brilliant women he knew who kept crying out that people made no sense and whose dream it was to flee everything and work at a Dairy Queen somewhere in Mississippi, Domino had visions which life would never live up to. Her brightest vision was that everyone would love her. Her life asserted that everyone hated her.

So how’s the Queen? he said.

You have a thing for her, huh? That’s rich. That’s fuckin’ rich. To think that ole Maj herself is finally getting a piece of dick! That sleazy old lowlife Maj — ha, ha! Hey, Henry, how does it feel to be dating a nigger?

Feels okay to me.

And your sister-in-law was a gook, wasn’t she? Smooth told me…

Oh, so you’re dicking Smooth? he said, trying to get off the subject of Irene and the Queen.

No, he’s a honky. I don’t do honkies, since I’m one myself.

My, my, said Tyler. Just who enjoys the honor of being done by you?

You wanna do me, Henry?

You’re a mighty beautiful woman, Domino.

Well, then I guess you have quite an opportunity, now, don’t you, she said with her trademark venomous bitterness. (When she was a little girl there was something wrong with the car. They went to the mechanic’s. He was greasy and smoking. There was a naked picture on the wall. It made her ashamed. She couldn’t have been more than three. Her mother was changing her brother’s diapers.)

Of course I’d love to sleep with you, Domino, Tyler said. Buy you a drink?

Rum and Coke, she purred instantly.

Rum and Coke for Domino, please, he said to the barmaid.

Okay, dear.

Now, tell me this, said Domino. What are your intentions regarding the Queen? Because it affects all of us. Don’t think we haven’t all seen you sneaking around.

What are my intentions? he muttered. I don’t know.

Smooth said you’re a detective. He said you’re a lousy stinking cop.

I bet he didn’t put it quite that way.

Well, are you a cop?

Nope.

Are you a detective?

Yes I am.

Why, you sonofabitch. You even admit it. You’re spying on us all. You want to bring us all down. And you enjoy it, don’t you? You’re good at it.

Oh, once you get used to the databases, you just kind of whip in and out, he muttered.

And you’re not ashamed?

I’m not out to hurt you, he said. I promise.

What are you about?

Just chilling out with your Queen, he said.

You want to get her? You want to destroy her?

No.

But you like her?

Sure.

You love her? That stinking old Maj!

I don’t know her that well, he said.

And how do you feel about the rest of us?

I think you’re all great. But you’re the best, of course, Domino.

Oh, don’t fucking patronize me. You men are all the same. All you want is to use us. You don’t give a damn, really, do you? You don’t give a fucking damn.

Here’s your rum and Coke, dear, said Loreena.

Domino uplifted it without thanks and thrust her long grey tongue between the ice cubes.

And for you, Henry? said the barmaid like the dreamy Queen speaking through closed eyes, lips parted as if to kiss some ghost which he could not see. Your usual?

Yeah, why not, he said.

Look, said Domino. I’m reminding you of my interest in all this. I’m reminding you to cut me in. You never would have met the Queen without me.

Honk four times, he said agreeably.

Listen, she said. Listen. I’m trying to tell you that I…

I am listening, Domino.

Oh, go to hell.

I go there regularly.

You think you got the Queen pinned down now, don’t you, fucker? You think she’s yours? Well, you’re never going to own her. I can see you’re one of those types who just thinks he can own a woman. Well, women have got it in for men like that.

I don’t need to own her, Domino. Why buy when you can rent?

Yeah, how many other thousand guys you think she’s already fucked? the blonde snarled.

Dan Smooth, who’d just now strutted in, raised his forefinger, and Tyler thought: Okay, kiddies, here we go. Blessed art the peacemakers.

You remember the proverb of the Sadducees, Domino?

Fuck, no, pervert, and I don’t care, either.

Well, Smooth explained, not a bit perturbed by this less than eager pupil, the Sadducees asked Jesus about a man who’d married his dead brother’s wife according to the Law of Moses — you know, he had to take care of his brother’s gal — well, then he died, and his brother married her, and he died, and so on and so on, until all seven brothers had had her one by one, and then they all died, and so did she. Her cunt must have been tired by then. I wonder what it smelled like… But the Sadducees were trying to trip Jesus up, see. That’s why they raised the issue in the first place. It was a sting, you see; it was entrapment. We’ve all been there before. They said to Him: Whose wife is she going to be in Heaven? (Because they didn’t believe in the Resurrection at all.) But Jesus got them, Domino. Because you know what He said? He said: You are wrong, knowing neither the Scriptures nor the Authority of God. For in the Resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in Heaven. How do you like that?

So in Heaven she fucks them all or not? said Domino, intrigued in spite of herself.

What do you think?

Sure, said Tyler after a moment. Sure she does. She’s got to.

What do you mean, she’s got to? You misogynist!

Tyler rubbed his chin and said: No, no, I didn’t mean it that way. I meant, that would be the right thing to do. She would want to. They all took care of her and let’s assume they loved her, so let’s assume she was at least grateful — doesn’t it flatter you if a john loves you?

Now we’re getting personal, said Domino.

Yes we are, Smooth gloated. Go ahead. Domino. Tell us what it’s like for you, and what color their ooze is.

Oh, knock it off, Smooth, said Tyler.

You’re always telling me to knock it off. Why don’t you knock it off?

Knock what off?

I love it when men fight, said Domino.

I bet you do, said Tyler. And I concede in advance. I don’t have any answers. But Danny boy here knows everything. In my job, you know, I sometimes ask a lot of questions. If the witnesses are able to answer every question, you know that some of what they say isn’t true.

So they fall in love with you sometimes? Smooth pursued, paying no attention to this objection. Indeed, it seemed as if he’d taken complete charge of the conversation by now, not so much overcoming arguments as reducing them to demonstrations of disrespect equivalent to the loud cries of a scattered search party.

Uh, they do, uh huh, replied the blonde with surprising coyness.

And that’s personal?

Uh huh.

Well, my theory is that if you keep saying it’s personal you must be flattered, because otherwise you’d just say straight up that you don’t give a damn whether they love you or not.

Domino laughed. — Maybe so, she said.

Now, that being the case, I think you also would do the nice thing if you were in that Sadducee wife’s situation up in Heaven.

If all those angel husbands pay me first!

I need coffee, said Smooth. I’m falling asleep.

You want a toot? said Domino.

Oh, that’s nice of you. But let’s try this little coffee shop for a minute…

I mean, whatever, said Domino, irritated.

The Vietnamese coffee shop at Mason and Eddy had lace curtains around the windows so that you could see only the silhouettes of the shoulders inside. Smooth ordered a Vietnamese coffee, jet-black, slow-dripping into a metal cylinder of condensed milk. Tyler chose a can of root beer. — Nothing for me, said Domino. I don’t like these goddamned foreign places. I bet that coffee of yours is full of ground up cockroaches.

At the next table sat a mother with a six-year-old boy.

I’d like to get into that, Smooth said.

Cut it out, Tyler said.

The Queen ran silently in and kissed Tyler on the lips. Smooth got her a chair. She sat beside Tyler, holding his hand. — Hi, Maj, said Domino. I missed you…

Smooth craned his head, smiling and winking at the six-year-old, whose mother, desolate about something, sat close-eyed with her head in her hands.

Hello, mister, the child said.

Why, hello there! said Smooth in his most friendly manner. Are you full?

Yeah.

Is your smooth little tummy all full?

Yeah, said the child shyly.

Now I have a question for you. Do you like to answer questions?

Yeah.

All right then. Here it is. What do you think happens to all that food in your stomach? Smooth asked the child in a calm and even tone.

It rolls around and around and around, he said.

And then? said Smooth, leaning forward.

And then when you have to go to the bathroom it comes out and it’s all brown.

Hmm, said Smooth. Basically correct.

Oh, leave him alone, said the Queen.

Now, Maj, what’s really going on? Domino said.

With what?

With you and Henry. By the way, I need some rock. You got any white girl on you, Maj?

Hush your mouth, bitch. Can’t you see we’re in a public place?

Maj, I really need something…

The Queen sighed and embraced the blonde, pretending to kiss her while she spat into her mouth. Smooth, who did not use drugs, beamed ironically. Tyler felt a little jealous. Domino clung to the Queen, trembling as she gobbled her saliva down. Finally the Queen pulled away and said: That’s enough.

Thank you, Maj. Now I don’t hurt anymore.

Very tastefully done, Smooth said. Now, Maj, what’s the prophecy?

The Queen pulled the Enemy’s Book out of the pocket of her grubby parka, closed her eyes, opened it, and lowered her dark, scarred little forefinger onto the tiny print. She opened her eyes. But just as she was about to read, the mother at the adjoining table, who had been wandering the cobwebbed corridors of her own despair, leaned forward, her eyes shining, and said: Excuse me, lady, but have you been saved?

Why, how did you know, dear? said the Queen gently.

Well, I saw you have the Book… Now that I’m a born-again Christian I just feel so free.

I’m so glad, said the Queen.

Politically I hate so many people; politically I guess I hate almost everyone, so I’m so grateful to God for forcing me to love.

That’s nice, Tyler said.

The way I look at it, blurted Domino, if God is omniscient or however you say it, then when you’re stepping on an ant, God feels what that ant feels. You’re doing that to God.

Weren’t you two ladies kissing just now? the mother said. You’re not sodomites, are you?

Why, no, ma’am, Smooth inserted. Didn’t you hear what I was saying to your little boy? I was specifically warning him against such practices. In this world, you know, you have to beware. Nothing is as it seems.

Is that true? said the mother to her son. Did you say thank you to the nice man?

Thank you, the child said glumly.

And remember my advice, son, said Smooth in his best genially distinguished manner. You know. About digestion.

The mother inched her chair nearer to the Queen and inquired: Are you politically active?

Well, now, I guess that depends.

I just fell in love with Bob Dole.

Imagine that, said the Queen sarcastically.

I’ve always been a conservative at heart, but it wasn’t until Ronald Reagan became President that I really got politically active. Reagan — well, that man helped me find my roots. I guess I just fell in love with Bob Dole’s smile. I was out there campaigning for him so hard, going from door to door.

Allrightie, the Queen said. Well, ma’am, we all certainly have enjoyed visiting with you, but now we need to do a little prayin.’

What church do you belong to?

First Church of Canaan, Reformed.

I’m not familiar with that church. Well, God bless you.

And watch out for that Mark of Cain, ma’am. Now, Smooth, in answer to your question, I do believe we have a prophecy right down here. Are you ready?

Ready, but pessimistic.

Africa—

Henry, you know that’s my private name.

Sorry, Maj. But I was wondering something. If the prophecy’s bad, what happens if you don’t read it? If we don’t know it and refuse to acknowledge it, then maybe it can’t come true.

This guy’s a motherfuckin’ ostrich, said Domino, and the mother at the next table gasped at the obscenity.

Henry, magic don’t work like that. Well, maybe for some people it can, but not here, not for us.

If I’d done something or said something different, if I’d been somehow nicer or I don’t know what, then maybe I could have prevented Irene’s suicide. The future is—

How will you ever know? The future, well, I only ever seen it come by once. Now just keep quiet, Henry. Don’t say nothing; don’t do nothing. Whatever it says, we don’t have to be scared.

This is starting to give me the creeps, said Domino.

Well, it gave her the creeps! laughed the Queen, for the mother, seizing her child by the hand, had risen to run away, casting many a baleful glare.

Smooth opened his mouth wide, snake-flickered his tongue at the woman, and said: This is America, and I can look at you if you can look at me.

The woman flushed crimson. Tyler was ashamed of Smooth.

Now then, said the Queen. For the prophecy we got Numbers chapter 13 verse 17, and it says: Moses sent them to spy out the land of Canaan, and said to them, “Go up into the Negeb yonder, and go up into the hill country, and see what the land is, and whether the people who dwell in it are strong or weak, whether they are few or many…”

Okay, said Tyler. We get the idea, Maj. So the vigs are already sniffing around, or soon will be. But I figure it’s not the end yet, because they doubted God, so He delayed the conquest for forty years.

Well, no parallel is exact, Henry, and I wouldn’t push the issue with prophecy, either. It’s not as if there’s a Negeb Street on a hill in the Castro where somebody’s peeking at us, see. Let’s all agree that Maj’s finger is inspired. I believe in her. I know all of us do. But numbers don’t always translate—

Why not?

Oh, how the fuck should I know? Maybe because then the Egyptians would hear of it or the trumpets would resound or some dumb thing…

I don’t know, Tyler said stubbornly, narrowing his eyes. If this is true, and they’re here to spy us out, then why can’t we go spy them out? I’ll do it if you want; I’m expendable…

Hee, hee, hee! laughed Smooth. Was that what your sister-in-law thought?

| 256 |

In just the same way that in San Francisco it is often sunnier south of Market Street, so the prostitutes, pimps, thieves and dealers, tiring at last of their own rumors, began to regain their confidence that they could survive the epoch of the vigs. Some hoped to hide and sleep, others to set the streets on fire. Most, of course, remained convinced that nothing would ever happen to disturb their lives. The crazy whore was rapt with optimistic analysis and prophecy, clutching Domino’s sleeve and crying: I know one man who’s bragging that he’s got all the money in the world. And he’s known for going to coffee shops to suck the nipples of Oriental girls for at least half an hour. And he — but Domino wrinkled her nose and said: Shut up, you crazy old bug.

All the whores had faith. If something happened, they could look after themselves. Later, when everything was over, it would seem in retrospect that those last few months were easier and more pleasant than any other time they could remember. Drugs were cheap and dates were plentiful. They loved their Queen, of course, but without her, life wouldn’t be much different. Their lives possessed a certain wholeness now; they couldn’t imagine that the circle might ever be broken. But on a rainy night not long after that long conversation in the Vietnamese restaurant, the Queen, who on the streets and in warehouses, ghost factories, and crack hotels usually seemed to be as imperially at home as a Korean wife in that household command center, the kitchen, now sat staring moodily into the baby food jar which comprised the bowl of her crack pipe. Tyler was sitting at her feet watching her while big drops rang against the warehouse roof in a fusillade and she sighed and began to pick out bits of toilet paper from the turbid water inside the jar. — Any goldfish swimming around in there? he asked, but she only smiled faintly. Suddenly she dashed the liquid out on the concrete floor. He saw matchheads, a rust-brown powder, a dead ant.

Henry, I want you to do something for me, she said.

All right, he said.

I want you to go to Vegas and find out what that Brady man’s up to. I got a bad feeling. I got a real bad feeling.

Tyler smiled sadly, unable to reply. He was making a mess of a surveillance job he really couldn’t afford to make a mess of — another potentially lucrative infidelity case in Alameda, which meant that he could have padded hours and mileage; he already had the husband nailed; but the wife wanted photographs and she wanted them now. So much for that client. Anxiety localized itself in his stomach, then metastasized to his heart, and his hands began to sweat. He longed to please the Queen by doing something useful for her, and he also knew that no human being could really do anything useful for her. He wanted Brady’s venture to be innocuous, and he already knew it wasn’t. He wondered how difficult it would be. He was only Henry Tyler; he didn’t have what it took. He felt that he would honestly do more good by staying out of this and letting the Queen go, but if he did, then Irene’s skeleton would be sitting on his face again at night, pissing ants and spiders into his mouth. He knew that no matter what happened he would do the wrong thing. Suspended above his bottomless future, he hung clinging miserably to a stretching rope. He almost couldn’t bear it. His breastbone ached. Let it be cancer, he thought. Then at least it will be over. But he wanted to live. He wanted to be fulfilled. It was all hopeless.

I know what you’re thinkin’, child, said his Queen who loved him. It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.

Tyler knelt before her and sobbed.

Just as the tall man’s face gradually lightened from a deep black-brown upon the crown of his shaved head to fresh ocher pits just above his eyes, so the sky, too, dimmed down its darkness, then began to flush in parts. The Queen yawned. Dawn was coming.

| 257 |

The day that Tyler drove to the airport, passing many darkly spreading trees and white houses in Daly City on which fog came smearing and smooching down so that the world’s end, the end of all vision, lay very close, it was sunny in the Tenderloin where Justin, tall and lean, grew like a cornstalk in a dark army jacket beside the wall of Jonell’s Bar, his collar pushed up and his cap pulled down, listening and watching while he seemed to be but surveying inner space. The loud sermon across the street remained on an untuned channel of his soul’s radio.

Beatrice said to him: Well, the Christians, they have different beliefs. I doan believe in it. I go with our Queen or with Strawberry. She is a Christian. I go with her, and they sing or they cry, and they speak about that kind of happiness for the dead people.

Go and make some money, bitch, said the tall man, and she fled, pretending that she was back home in Oaxaca where a big turkey dipped its neck outside her mother’s house and inside it was very dark with the dirt floor. The walls were planks stamped SUPPLY OFFICER: AIRFORCE BASE — CA. Just behind the planks, an infant cried and cried: her little nephew. She tried to see her Papa but she couldn’t. And all her little brothers were grown up. The house was empty. Where was everyone she knew? She wanted to dance for them. The ceiling planks were black from cooking. When it rained, the water came in. Quiet little flies crawled everywhere. On the cement stood one big bed for the whole family, but the bed was empty. A little girl stood rapt with crossed legs, pressing her face against the bed while she looked at white cartoon cowboys and horses. That was Beatrice. Her little brother spat on the floor. So he hadn’t grown up after all.

One of the preacher’s lieutenants approached. The tall man raised a single eyebrow.

The lieutenant said: Man, I was paralyzed for fifteen years. I was a drug addict. Man, Jesus healed me. He healed me! So I wasn’t sick no more. You listening? Hallelujah!

You seen my forehead? replied the tall man in a gravelly whisper.

What about it, man? We ain’t got time for personal vanity here!

Look upon me, boy. Look upon my mark. You seen my mark?

That’s just an abscess, man. Listen to me. When a user gets touched by the Holy Ghost, he ain’t a user no more. He’s free! Amen!

Get the fuck away from me, said the tall man.

Jesus can save you, the lieutenant pleaded. Don’t stay with the Devil. Don’t let yourself be damned.

The tall man rose to his complete and immense height and almost playfully tapped the lieutenant in the chest. The lieutenant fell backward. He shouted: I said forgive him, turn away, praise God! But Brady’s Boys are gonna get him, hear me, Lord! Brady’s Boys are coming to town…