Whores for Gloria by William T. Vollmann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gloria, Gloria, Gloria

Bill rang me and said do you want to come and meet Jimmy, so I said yes, I’d heard so much about him from Bill, he was going to write a piece, an article or a story about him for some magazine, he was infatuated with some whore, an ex-girlfriend, Gloria, who’d just up and disappeared six months ago, Bill didn’t know whether she was dead or in prison or had gone back to her family to have a baby, Bill had never even met her or seen a photo, all he had to go on was a description from Jimmy, none of the other whores in the ‘Loin remembered her, they’d all arrived since she’d left, once Bill even speculated that she might never have existed, and Jimmy heard about it, and next time he saw him, he punched him in the side of the jaw and loosened a tooth, though they’re good friends now, well good enough to have a drink with and to introduce me to, though as the editor of the novel he was supposed to be writing (I didn't "officially" know about the article) I had to pay of course, not that Bill needed or wanted an editor, he just got me for free, and I had a modest expense account.

We were supposed to meet him at the Black Rose, but he wasn’t there, so we went on a virtual bar crawl, HaRa, Summer Place, Nite Cap, and the Geary Club, nobody had seen him, so I said why don’t we check if he’s at home, it was almost noon and I was ready for a drink, I hadn’t had one since I downed a couple of Bloody Mary’s in the hotel bar for breakfast. We ran into Pearl in the lobby of Jimmy’s building, but she hadn’t seen him yet, so we walked up three flights of stairs until we got to his floor and located room 19, the door was open and the light was on, so we walked in, when this beautiful tall amazonian woman with a great shock of long hair, says, what the fuck are you doing here, we’re looking for Jimmy, we said, well he’s not here, do you know where he is then, no, she said, but if you see him first, tell him I’m looking for him, and if he’s with some whore, he’d better watch his back. Who the fuck are you then, Bill asked, unusually cocky for the writer Bill I knew. Only Jimmy needs to know that, and he’s smart enough to work it out himself. She turned around and continued to unload groceries out of plastic bags into the pantry. Go on, you two can fuck off. She was beautiful, but she had a foul mouth.

We went back to the Black Rose and sure enough, there was Jimmy, sitting at a table, half a Bud in his hand, but it wasn’t his first of the day, he looked like he’d been drinking all day or had started last night and hadn’t stopped. He was talking to a big-breasted whore named Luna, who looked pretty good for her age, behind her sunglasses, we sat with them for five or six rounds, while Jimmy’s head set more and more into his folded arms on the table, all the time calling Luna Gloria, and insisting that she wear a wig he’d brought along in a plastic shopping bag.

To be honest, Bill and I totally forgot to mention the woman in his room, we’d got to talking as soon as we arrived, then some other girls arrived and asked both of us if we wanted to go upstairs, we both said yes, I thought Bill was going to fuck his girl, the younger of the two, but he reckoned afterwards, all he did was talk to her with a recorder going the whole time. My whore, a melancholy one, was an ex-med student who wanted to be a writer, so she was all over me when she found out what I did, she sat me down on the red velvet couch, unbuttoned my shirt and flung it over the side chair, I struggled to get my trousers off, but she stopped me as she crept onto my lap and started to play with my hair, which I hate being messed up, then she ran her hands over my chest, I’m still pretty fit for my age, and she squeezed me, while my grin struggled not to become a grimace, then suddenly, Jesus, fuck, what did you do? I looked down at my left nipple and she had run a six inch safety pin through the soft flesh at its base and closed it before I even knew what was happening. A trickle of blood emerged from the puncture mark at each end, but once the initial shock wore off, it didn’t seem to hurt at all. Still, I wasn’t about to have the other one done. Come on, put your shirt back on and have another drink with me, big boy.

We went back downstairs to our table, from which Jimmy and Luna had departed. I ordered another round of drinks, and the German beer wench asked if I wanted to get a drink for Jimmy and Luna, they were just in the alleyway. I took their drinks out, but the two of them were busily fucking against the wall of the Chinese Restaurant next door.

I put their drinks on the pavement, and returned inside to our table. By this time Bill had come down, we were both thinking it was time to go, he said he wanted to transcribe his tape, I didn’t believe him until later when I saw the transcript of what happened that day. Then there was a commotion at the front door. The woman from Jimmy’s room had arrived and knocked over somebody’s bourbon. The German woman panicked behind the bar, scheiss, Gloria, she said, I thought you were dead. She didn’t bother to return the greeting, she just said, where the fuck is Jimmy, the German hesitated to answer, but her eyes gave her away, they had unknowingly pointed towards the alley, so Gloria went out into the alley and past the Chinese restaurant, not knowing that she would find not just Jimmy, but Jimmy flatbacking Luna on the hood of a car. She wasn’t to know that the whole time he fucked her, he was saying, Gloria, Gloria, Gloria. And that’s just about all I can remember.


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