The Royal Family (56 page)

When Sanchez met a new prostitute named Angel, Irene became jealous, but talked herself out of feeling that way. She sat on the edge of the bed with her chin in her hands while Sanchez and Angel were fucking. Afterward, Angel approached her with the self-satisfied yet anxious expression of a dog which has just devoured its master’s dinner. —It’s all right, Irene mumbled. I don’t care. —Sanchez looked her up and down in his usual silence. That night Irene began sleeping on the floor. Angel said that Irene had
heart.
She showed respect, so Irene tried to do likewise. Angel and Sanchez fucked like wild beasts all night. They were so loud and vulgar that Irene was ashamed. She shot every last grain of heroin into her thigh just to put herself out of there, like Thoreau’s untamed soul flying loftily away. In the morning she was alive again, on the floor, with scabies, sick with the need to fix. She went out and peddled pussy on Capp Street for two hours with no luck, but then Tyler paged her and gave her ten dollars.

Angel was a tall good-looking darkskinned girl who had probably been truly pretty once before she got her habit. Irene began to feel shy in front of her. She waited to learn whether Sanchez would speak to her at last, commanding her to leave; in fact, she almost hoped for that, because then necessity would instruct her exactly what to do, whereas right now she did not completely trust Tyler even though she had become accustomed to Tyler’s money. But Sanchez never said a word. Unable to abandon this sanctuary, Irene determined to make Angel “feel welcome,” which is to say that she strove to play on the shadow of hostess-power she retained due to Sanchez’s taciturnity and her own seniority. She said to her: Sweetie, welcome to our house. (Sanchez smiled ironically.) —Treat it like a home, Irene babbled on. If you need something, just ask. We have a few rules, but only a few.

The first rule was never to open the window because their room lay only one storey
up from and directly over an alley of garbage which in summer stank much worse than Irene and therefore disguised her so that she lived easily with the old man, who could scarcely perceive odors anyway because he chain-smoked. Sanchez had kept that cracked and dusty light-hole sealed for most of his twenty years of residence. Indeed, the paint had long since sweated, becoming glue so that had he ever longed for a breath of dumpster-air he would have first been forced to run the point of a putty-knife along the sash . . . Sometimes it got a little stuffy in there, as Irene delicately put it, and then he turned on the fan.

Thus ran the main rule, but Sanchez was equally particular about certain other matters. He disliked anyone to knock on his door. Also, he hid his treasures, and expected them not to disappear. Angel of course immediately began going through his wallet whenever she could, her grubby fingers twitching at high speed. Irene had sometimes done the same, but only to give
back
the money to show him how honest she was—minus five or ten dollars, of course, which she needed for expenses. Sanchez comprehended this and tolerated it; otherwise he would have hidden his wallet. Wasn’t it really an invitation to Irene to take whatever she required, if Sanchez left his wallet on top of the dresser at night instead of sliding it under his side of the mattress along with his special things? Irene, believing this in utter confidence, flourished therefrom like a modest righteous flower blooming from the edge of a heap of dung. Angel, however, instantaneously began abusing the wallet privilege.

The next thing she did was to ask to use the phone. Sanchez, needless to say, made no reply. —
Sure
you can use the phone, sweetie, said hostess Irene, and Sanchez grinned sarcastically.

Can I, um, give my mother this number? Angel wanted to know.

Sure, said Irene. Sanchez sighed and kept quiet.

Well, um, can I also, um give this number to my boyfriend?

Sure, answered indulgent Irene. But don’t give it out to everyone. Sanchez and I are trying to make you feel special. Not very many people have this number, sweetie, and we’re trying to keep it that way.

After that, all Angel’s business dates kept calling day and night. Sanchez’s sister had to go into the hospital for triple bypass surgery and Sanchez was waiting for the doctor to call him and tell him how the operation had gone, but Angel stayed on the telephone for two hours. Finally Irene had to tell her to get off. Angel freaked out. She called Irene a rotten cunt and disinvited her from living with her and Sanchez. So Irene spat in her face. Angel shouted out to Sanchez to defend her, but Sanchez merely picked his nose. —Why, you lazy old fucker! cried Angel. You—you—why do old men always get so
greasy?
—Her accusation was not entirely truthless, at least in the case of its target, because Sanchez always tried to make his clothes last as long as he could, to save money. Irene wasn’t that way. Like most of us, male and female, she considered herself to be clean in body and soul. Nobody, including Tyler, ever told her that she reeked. She sometimes went to thrift stores even if for reasons of addiction she should have been dating instead. That proved her desire to present herself nicely in society, a magnificent Christmas present for anyone who could pay. Sanchez, on the other hand, wore his clothes for a week or more at a time. It might well have been that he smelled; Irene was the wrong one to ask . . .

Angel promised never to bring any business home. Soon, tall lustful men were pounding on Sanchez’s door at all hours.

Sweetie, please don’t tell lies in my house, said Irene, believing in the present necessity of abrasive words.

What do you mean? said Angel with a false smile. I was in jail, I really was; I swear it—

Yeah? Then where’s your plastic bracelet? Where’s your papers?

You know what, cunt?
It’s not your house. Not no more.

When Angel finally persuaded Sanchez to throw her out, Irene was crushed. Strangely enough, it was the old man whom she hated more than Angel, even though the latter was the precipitating agent of her destruction. On her last morning in the Imperial Hotel, convinced that Sanchez had been scheming to bring about her departure all along, she refused to say goodbye to him, but embraced Angel, sobbing like a child. —It won’t be so bad, honey, Angel said. You’ll find a new home, I know you will! And we’ll meet on the street. It’s gonna be just like old times . . . —Irene gripped Angel even more tightly, and here the Queen’s intuition about her proved entirely true, because at that moment, even if only for that moment, she was willingly and proudly embracing her own degradation, like a Christian on the cross. And perhaps what she intended for Tyler (although one can never be sure about anything concerning the Queen) was for him to take to himself the embodied shame of Irene’s self-distraction, loving somebody who would be bad for him. And yet how depressing, indeed repulsive these plans for another appear, when we spell them out like this! Tyler, of course, had humbly laid his life in the Queen’s hands; it was incumbent on her to do something with it. As for Irene, incapable almost of choice, haunted by the insult she received, fearful of that grimy and dangerous street life which had now reclaimed her, she went silently down the stairs until for the last time she passed through the lobby, and the desk clerk wrinkled his nose. Then she left the Imperial Hotel forever. Suddenly dreading above all the possibility that Angel and Sanchez might be watching out the window, she refused to look back, and for this pride I admire her, especially when she would have done anything to be allowed to return. What then? She hobbled to Capp Street, clutching all her belongings against her stomach in a trash bag, which with extreme tentativeness she concealed in a garbage can. With its bruises, varicosities, scars, scabs, burns, bites and abscesses, her flesh resembled one of those Hungarian sausages which offers the buyer all the splendid colors of autumn: astonishing oranges from paprika, scarlets as delicious as any dead maple leaf, yellow pebbles of fat. But who would buy her? What would she do? It was only ten in the morning, and she was already beginning to feel junk-sick. Terrified of what would happen if she didn’t cop some heroin very very soon, she set out on a hunt for sanctuary, not knowing exactly what she was looking for, praying she would recognize it when she found it. Unlike Beatrice, who conversed with the Virgin in her straits, Irene retained no one to pray to but herself. Her ancient, bloodshot eyes saw the black-and-white come rolling from around the corner, and she was already shambling on before the police could accuse her of peddling pussy at that infamous corner. Today no one would help her to continue existing, and for her to pursue salvation through the one trade she could practice was to become a criminal, a temporary betrothed. She considered going to live with the Queen as Beatrice had advised, but she had been given to understand by Domino, who wished to keep the club exclusive, that the Queen was a very difficult and dangerous old bitch who sometimes cut women’s eyes out, and that her kindness to Irene during their private interview had been a treacherous device. Irene trusted
Domino more than Beatrice, because given two tales, the most frightening one was generally in her experience the truest. She had now put almost four blocks between her and the Imperial Hotel. Exhausted, she sat down on somebody’s front step and cried again. Although the heroin need grew nauseatingly inside her from moment to moment, more than anything she worried about the terrible pain in her leg which made it so difficult to walk. The hospital had told her that she had two blood clots. Irene wondered whether this had something to do with the fact that heroin had stopped her periods and somehow sent the bad blood from her womb into her legs. They’d given her some anticoagulant pills, but when her left leg started feeling better she quit out of a principle of general distrust, the bottle only half empty (and she was supposed to get three more refills); then her right leg began to hurt. She wanted to go to S.F. General and perhaps if she won extraordinary luck sleep that night in a high metal bed with clean sheets, but she had to earn ten dollars first, understanding all too well that even if she’d reported to the waiting room early in the morning (and it was no longer early), no doctor would see her until late afternoon, by which time she wouldn’t be able to handle the scanning and palpitating and poking unless she’d shot up in the ladies’ room. And how could she do that, without ten dollars? Ten dollars would save her or damn her! She tried to explain this to Tyler but he didn’t understand; it was as if he didn’t listen or something . . . (In fact, what she had said to him was: You see, I’m daydreaming. You see, I’m nodding. If I coulda had some coke instead of straight heroin I wouldn’t be nodding like this. I was a little more cool than my classmates. So I always hung around with people who . . . And I asked my mother . . . But she wouldn’t lemme . . . just make a joke about it . . . and then I told ’em—I told ’em . . .) Irene never felt so abandoned by God as she did that day. Ten dollars! She staggered all the way from Sixteenth up to Twenty-First in hopes of performing a ten-dollar blow job so that she could purchase white medicine from the tall man, who ran a side business outside the Queen’s circuit, but nobody would pick her up because she stank. Ten dollars! Closing her eyes, she could see her heroin spoon, not too thick, not too thin; she tapped the needle because even though she’d only used it once they were now cutting heroin with shoe polish, which gummed up the point. She could see it; she could taste it. Ten dollars! Forgetting all about her possessions in the trash can, she dragged herself far beyond the drunken swaggerers who were now too drunk to do anything but sit on their overturned shopping cart. Irene asked them: Hey, can you spare just five or ten cents? It would really make my day. That’s all I need. —They gave her nothing. A man in mechanic’s coveralls was coming, so Irene asked him: Can you spare just fifteen cents? and he walked by her. Ten dollars! Irene rounded the curve of a passed-out drunk’s buttock on the reddish sidewalk-tiles in front of Walgreens—
Walgreens!
she was going the wrong way! Turning around, she discovered an auto repair shop, then two more shopping carts side by side with a foam mattress folded over them both to marry them, clocks and towels and blankets stained with wine-flavored urine and stuffed animals tucked beneath them in what to Irene was utter senselessness. She passed Chocolate, who was prancing back and forth on Capp Street like a spirited warhorse, holding her white parka in her arms as she streetwalked because she didn’t want it stolen. Chocolate and Irene did not say hello to one another. She passed Justin, who leaned with his empty hand behind his back. At last she came to a weary black man’s blue stubble glowing like a patch of tiny alpine flowers as he slept under the subway lights. The palm of his hand was incredibly expressive. Ten dollars, ten dollars!
She was as wide open as Mission Street with its palm trees rising above squarish brickwork and woodwork. She passed Strawberry, who was scratching her forehead as she pulled her hair back, leaning against brickwork, urgently watching each car. Irene had irrevocably lost count of Strawberry before she even saw her. A quarter-hour later, the Queen emerged from the Thor Hotel with a cigarette in her mouth and her hands in her pockets; Irene did not see her. It was sunset now, and the sharp stench of urine on the sidewalk focused her consciousness like smelling salts applied to a fainting woman. If she only had ten dollars . . . Irene stumbled through bright bristling palms and fish markets and supermarkets and murals, spied on by informers with pawnshop eyes. Then she walked some more, her teeth sunk deep in her lower lip so that she would not scream with pain. Was she free like Buddha? Finally she remembered Tyler.

Tyler was drunk. Tyler was in need like Domino marching down the streets in her silver miniskirt muttering to herself: I gotta get me some bump.
*
—He said: All I have now is my pain, Irene. That’s all that ties me to you. Without that cord, I’d fall into the abyss of senseless happiness.