The Royal Family (130 page)

Tyler possessed his own list of such people. He called every one of them, and could hardly believe that these were the same “sources” who’d been so grandly infallible in years before.

Tightly gripping his heavy and reliable old telephone, made back in the monopoly days when such devices were rented, not owned, he called Mike Hernandez in Vice, who had first brought him knowledge of Dan Smooth so long ago. Usually he got that detective’s answering machine, but this time he reached the man himself, who jovially said:
Yeah?
as shouts of office glee rang out in the background—some party, some practical joke; maybe it was April Fool’s Day . . .

Mike, it’s—

Henry, old chum! How’s the life? You ever find that Queen of the Whores you were bugging me about last year? I figure she’s probably related by incest to the Loch Ness Monster . . .

That kind of rings a bell, said Tyler.

Listen, what can I do for you? Things are kind of in chaos around here, so I—

Wondered if you guys had picked up a Miss Africa Johnston.

What’s her social?

No social.

What do you mean, no social?

I took her prints, but even the FBI couldn’t find a match.

Then she must not be a U.S. citizen.

She’s a—

One of your whores?

Yeah, said Tyler, narrowing his eyes.

Look, buddy. I’ve been in Vice for fourteen years. If she’s been in the business, she has to have been busted. Now misdeameanors drop off the record, for the most part, within ten years. That’s the paperwork Reduction Act. But I’m sure if she’s
in the life,
as they say, then she must have committed some felonies. She’s the one you were looking for last year, right?

Yeah, but I found her. She exists. She—

Okay. Then you lost her. Listen, buddy, gotta go, but let’s have a drink sometime. Happy trails, eh?

He tried the National Death Index, current up to three months before, and by then it had been four months, and she wasn’t there, not on that computer-web version, at least. (Irene was there.) Well, why
should
the Queen be there? He called the San Francisco Department of Health but they didn’t have any death certificate, either. (They had one for Lily.)

Well? the tall man had said.

All right, Tyler had said. (She had been missing for less than twenty-four hours back then.)—So if she’s arrested on the street, she’ll be brought in and booked, and they’ll keep one copy of that booking in the jail and send another copy to the state and another copy to the FBI. I guess we’d better not go to the FBI, so that leaves the state and the jail. Now, Mr. Cortez checked out Eight-Fifty Bryant and found nothing, so we’ll go to the state. You have any quarters? Lemme make a few phone calls . . .

You don’t even have any quarters? Man, you are solid horseshit.

Well, we’re billing a hundred and fifty, two hundred grand a year, but usually they don’t pay in quarters, Justin. Still, if you have the patience it’s kind of good. In other word, you’re doing twelve—

Will you stop babbling like a fucking crackhead bitch?

Ordinarily they pay in million dollar bills, laughed Tyler. He left the tall man and broke a five on a shot of whiskey at Jonell’s bar. He got three dollars back. One he used for a tip, and the barmaid brightened. When he asked her to transform the other two bills into quarters, she smilingly obliged. He tried to smile back, but couldn’t.

What’s wrong? she said.

Oh, just a minor emergency, he chuckled, showing his stained teeth. He went back into the darkness near the men’s restroom where the pay phone was and began calling various minions of the state of California, confident of imminent success.

Later, when he stepped back onto the street, the tall man was gone and three drunken Brady’s Boys laughed at Tyler, shouting:
God save the Queen!
His car was in the towing yard, so he took the bus home and stayed up all night trying to do an extended trace . . .

The Queen of the Tenderloin is really three people put into one person who’s the illegitimate son of the Queen of England, explained the crazy whore, whose eye-blinks were more numerous even than late afternoon Tenderloin pigeons. In the thirties she was a teenager and then a movie star. In the forties she married the Duke of Windsor by mistake. But when she was aspiring to be a movie star she abandoned seven children. My grandmother is one of those children. That’s why I’m dyslexic with a not very well formed thyroid gland connected to my urine by electricity. And the name of the Queen, the one and only true Queen, is and always has been Domino. You know why? Well, first of all, the strongest woman of all is a male that’s stuck in a female’s body. Then there’s the second sort of men who just dress as women, just to snoop around and see what men
do to women. Isn’t that lucky for them? But Domino’s the first kind. She has a penis. She rapes me. She’s my Queen.

The Hotel Liverpool on Turk Street had been taken over by Romanians since the last time he’d stayed there, which had been a good six or seven years ago. Tired burly middle-aged men worked in Reception and mopped the floors. When he saw somebody mopping the floors he was impressed. Upstairs, of course, the same old carpet lingered on, fuzzed, linted, worn and grimed, with pale stain-islands of urine and beer and toothpaste. Thirty-five by the day, one forty-five by the week. His room was spacious. On its blue walls some creative tenant with a felt tip marker had portrayed whores in fishnet bras and fishnet stockings, and then all around the lintel marched well-rendered ants and spiders. There was an attached bathroom with a tub and toilet; on its walls one of the middle-aged men had too frugally attempted to whitewash away those magnificent insect studies, but as only one coat of paint had been employed the great spiders still lurked, more cunning and sinister now than ever, because they seemed to be hiding themselves in ambush.

He opened the window to let the smell out. The room quickly filled with flies.

It wasn’t a bad place, though. The lock on the door was solid, and the dresser had all its drawers.

He went out to search for the Queen, street by street. The Tenderloin was nothing but a blighted, darkened, stained place in his heart. Shadows oozed beneath the signs of the Oriental massage clubs. Returning in the darkness, he learned where the entomological inspiration on the wall had come from, for upon that sea of mildew called “carpet” sailed a goodly fleet of cockroaches.

Seven o’clock, eight o’clock, night. His throat was raw; maybe he was crying in his sleep. Night, then night. (When the crazy whore finally believed and accepted that the Queen had been taken, she cried:
No hope for my electricity!
then threw herself headfirst out of a fourth-storey window.) Early in the morning his sleep was ended by the cheeps of a backing truck almost drowned out by rain, while somewhere nearby the new Queen was butt-fucking the other girls with dildoes. He parted the grimy curtain and saw that the streetlamp still burned; at that instant a pale seagull occluded that fierce yellow globe and then flew on up Mason Street. His eyes watered and he sneezed. A fly crawled on his hand. On the street, a man shouted. A pigeon uttered its liquid purring from some nearby window-ledge. Two leaners stood under the awning of the Greek food place because it was not yet seven-thirty and so the Greeks didn’t know or care that their home island was being used by non-payers. He listened to the rain. The sidewalk sweepers were all wearing yellow raincoats. The streetlamp was the same color. He had a sore throat.

His mind fled down long halls made longer and spookier by the peephole’s lens. He yearned for the lamp’s warm shadows.

It rained all day. Finally he flicked the switch and watched the lamp’s groping wings of light and shadow upon the wall’s sad blue sky.

That night Red was loudly singing:
Baby, baby, oh-h-h-h-h, bay-bee
in the street-garbage. Someone had smeared an immense brownish-red turd across the sidewalk where Red pranced.

Halloween dawned rainy. He feared Halloween because it was the day of the dead.
Now that his Queen was gone, she wouldn’t be able to protect him anymore from Irene’s ghost. He found a Gideon’s Bible, but it spoke to him artificially, like Irene’s drab voice on the telephone toward the end, her sad voice which told him nothing; which was why for her, because she had never really let him into her heart, he’d begun to cultivate dislike, even hatred, thinking to kill his love and make the sadness go away, the result being that he ached for her when he thought of her, and whenever he saw her was cold to her (as was she to him) and he longed to get away from her; his wish being gratified, he then immediately despaired once again. By seven o’clock the bearded old panhandlers with top hats and cane were already leaning or squatting under papered-up windows, sharing cigarettes, rubbing their eyes, too hung over to sing. In the hallway a new tenant, longterm most likely from all the trouble he was going to, had been banging and creaking already for over an hour, trying bullheadedly to fortify his door with screw-eyes and padlocks.

Just before eight the sun came out. The tops of the grubby old brick buildings looked almost handsome in that new light. Somebody was vacuuming. A black-and-white eased softly round the corner, stalking criminals and undesirables. A man crept across the sidewalk, his face and cigarette angled straight down.

On Mission and Fifteenth he saw Beatrice with a little bag of bananas, and she greeted him gladly, so he put his arm around her and asked where she was off to. She said: In Mexico my people teach me how to feed the dead ones who we love. Now I want to do that for Mama my Queen.

What do they do?

They make like a little house and fill it with fruits and
mole
and stuff for the dead people. You have to go in the window.

Where are you going to do that?

In the tunnel, you know, by South Van Ness.

I get it.

Because I believe.

You believe that the dead people come?

Maybe I doan know if I believe or if I doan. My Mom does, my first Mama, but she passed away. There are signs that tell you that the dead people arose. Like the animals are nervous, or a little bug running like around for the food. They say the bug is the dead person coming back for his stuff. If you eat before the dead, you get a stomach-ache.

And then
noon
and
sunny
and
cool
were the labels for this moment of Tyler’s life. The smell of piss and dirt from the pigeon-trees in front of the bus terminal were almost garden-fresh; piss-rain even if from drunks and unclean persons had brought out the good smell of soil even in that abused earth studded by cigarette butts. Downtown’s cubescape coolly shadowed the emboldened Halloween ghouls already creeping out from under the tombstones which roof the collective unconscious—let’s be psychoanalytical! The woman at the Greyhound desk was witch-garbed. Two Brady’s Boys came as themselves, standing shinyshoed, the senior partner telling the other: You don’t wanna cover the same pattern. You have a sector. We’re working P Sector today. —But Tyler hardly ever saw Brady’s Boys anymore. Having accomplished their mission, they’d dwindled away. (He thought about burglarizing their headquarters to search their files, but by the time he’d gotten his courage or recklessness to full steam the office had closed.) The film guy downstairs at Adolph Gasser’s had come as a robot comprised of silver-painted cardboard boxes, his circuit-board heart upon his breast. Up First Street came a woman
dressed as a cow, with an immense pink rubber udder suspended from her crotch, the many nipples thrashing like keys upon a jailor’s belt.

A thin black boy in goggling sunglasses clung to a fire hydrant in the style of a praying mantis.

As he stared at the hydrant, Tyler felt himself begin to succumb to a terrible sense of filth and death because he had passed through here for too long; that was all anyone could do in that world, pass through: stay, and it ate you; go, and you were gone; and while you were there your alternatives were the stale and stuffy stench inside or the smell of piss outside—actually, it wasn’t that bad; he was forgetting the Vietnamese restaurants, the sheer beauty of the night women decked out for maximum sexual recognition; in other species that was most often the role of the male—but he could not deny that whenever he came out of one of those hotels he felt as if he just escaped being stifled, or as if he could practically unpeel from his face, like the gauze curtains in some bar which halftoned the passers-by into quasi-silhouettes, a film of congealed malice and despair; and whenever he went back inside, it was worse. Still, he had bars. Who could fail to value the Cinnabar’s late afternoon goldenness, its warmth like the inside of a whiskey bottle? —And I don’t mind being unable to explain it, said the television; would you call this a miracle? —Outside, rotten bananas, gorgeously black and yellow like some scrambled tiger, lay on top of the pay phone.

The Queen was gone, but the world did not end. The Tenderloin half opened one eye, smelled itself, scratched itself, and went back to sleep. (I’m the last to go to sleep and the first to get up, bragged a sad vig; he was almost the last of the Brady’s Boys.) Time will not stop. Living in the past is as illegal as possessing a fellow citizen’s rap sheet. Once upon a time, the Tenderloin used to be the Barbary Coast with its Chinese opium dens, which now have gone, obliterated in the great fire after the quake of 1906, and now the Tenderloin, too, with its danger and its hard, vibrant blackness has begun to slip away. Japanese high-life hotels and jazz clubs punctuate the streets. And Capp Street without the Queen, that was like some old Roman amphitheater revivified by the shouts and laughs of little Arab schoolgirls. Time-blasted columns rise everywhere around them, and, like the thistles and flowers, the girls don’t care. They form in a circle and dance around their teacher to cassette music played loud on a ghetto blaster, singing Arab disco songs. San Francisco without the Queen forgot the Queen. She’d been an interesting chapter, to be sure, as unforgettable
while she lasted
as the sensations of unlucky johns who sat clutching their balls, clipboards on their knees as they waited for the pain to pause so that they could complete their health questionnaires. —Wait a minute, said the lady behind the glass. Her muffled voice called the petitioners back and back. Children cried in the corner, playing with plastic toys which stank of anger. A little boy screamed. Domino was there too. She experienced a fiery feeling whenever she made urine. She pushed her blonde hair up, wrinkled her forehead and scowled at the baby. She was thinking about some money which she’d heard was hidden under a certain old man’s mattress. She wondered whether she could get him to stand up beside the bed so that he wouldn’t notice while her hand explored the boxsprings. Of course she could hold him close to her and give him a good suck to distract him while she . . . Meanwhile
Chocolate smiled and swirled her high heels, her eyes getting bigger and more frightened by the moment. Chocolate was wearing a black rayon windbreaker which she believed made her look glamorous. It stank of the streets. She got up when her name was called, slung her purse over her shoulder, brushed her hair back with one hand, stuck out her chin and approached the appointment window where a plastic bottle and a key attached to a theftproof plastic block were waiting for her. She took these items to the women’s toilet, which she unlocked with the key, then entered. Groaning with pain, she pissed into the plastic bottle. Then came the doctor, then the prescription, and three days later she’d forgotten all about it.