Sarah: A Novel

by J. T. LeRoy Narrated by Winsome Brown

Overview

A reissue of the national bestselling novel by JT LeRoy/Laura Albert

Sarah never admits that she is his mother, but the beautiful boy has watched her survive as a “lot lizard,” a prostitute working the West Virginia truck stops. Desperate to win her love, he decides to surpass her as the best and most famous lot lizard ever. With his own leather miniskirt and a makeup bag that closes with Velcro, the young “Cherry Vanilla” embarks on a journey through the Appalachian wilds, dining on transcendental cuisine, supplicating to the mystical Jackalope, encountering the most terrifying of pimps, walking on water, being venerated as an innocent girl saint-and then being denounced as the devil.

By turns exhilarating and shocking, magical and realistic, Sarah brings urgency, wit, and imagination to an unknown and unforgettable world.

Editorial Reviews

New York Times Book Review

'A deft and imaginative first novel.'

Bookforum

'[LeRoy is] a hungry writer with the instincts of a person who fishes to eat. Once he hooks the reader he doesn't let go...quick

LA Style

'Never can I remember a debut this impressive, by someone this young...This is a writer to watch.'

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Who would have thought that there were so many truckstop devotees of cross-dressing children in West Virginia? In this disturbing debut novel by 19-year-old LeRoy, they appear to be everywhere. The narrator, a 12-year-old boy, has renamed himself Sarah after his whorish mother because he has learned from her example that "Most anything you want in this world is easier when you're a pretty girl." Following in her footsteps, he plies his trade at the Doves, a truckstop/gourmet restaurant run by Glad, a despotic pimp with a heart of gold. When his mother rejects him, Sarah runs away from the Doves and finds his way to the hellish Three Crutches, a rival truckstop run by the evil Le Loup. Taken for a girl, and then advertised as Saint Sarah in a money-making ploy by Le Loup, Sarah is expected to bless truckers and then walk on water. Will these experiences convince Sarah to resume the life of a full-time boy? And will he discover that there's no place like home? Sometimes Sarah's masochistic attention-getting strategies and desperate need to be loved are genuinely moving, but the freak-show world LeRoy conjures up never quite gels. In the self-consciously bizarre gallery of misfits and fetishes he assembles, potentially resonant themes like the interchangeability of saints and whores are obscured, and the novel remains but a curiosity. (Apr.) FYI: LeRoy has edited several anthologies under the pseudonym Terminator. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Catherine Texier

For a first novelist, LeRoy is astonishingly confident. His language turns the tawdriness of hustling into a world of lyrical and grotesque beauty, without losing any of its authenticity . . . His sweet and pure vision makes even the nastiest scenes bearable.
—The New York Times Book Review

Taylor

This narrative unfolds in a West Virginia that is wildly imagined, but described with a quiet sureness, and is the source of Sarah's considerable originality..Taking in the baroque, polysexual details of this world, it's hard to separate those that testify to LeRoy's knowledge of trucking hustling, and Appalachian language, food, and wildlife from those that derive from his wonderful ability to just make up beautiful things.
—Village Voice

David Bahr

J.T.LeRoy's fictional debut, Sarah, about the wild, whacked-out jorney of an Apalachian male hooker, is that rare bird indeed: a work that manages to be so fresh, sad and utterly enchanting, it's the literary equivalent of-to quote one of Sarah's characters-"a toe sack full of puppies." The fact that much of the narrative is inspired by the 20-year-old LeRoy's actual teenage experiences as a truck-stop prostitute (coined "lot lizards" by those on the road) only makes it that much more mind-blowing. But while the book may be grounded in fact, it reads like pure fantasy.
—Time Out New York

Spin Magazine

Literary Wonderboy.

Richard Wirick

Not since Jim Carroll's Basketball Diaries have we had a terrifying, beautiful and completely plausible portrait of the teen hustling underworld..Long may J.T.Leroy live, and he is very, very young indeed. The world that spawns and saves his protagonist Sarah, that of Glading Grateful the truckstop pimp, is drawn with a palette as bright and hoping and yet horribly flaking as anything in this purgatory of Loretta Lynn and mountain toadstools...

Forget Hilary Swank. Sarah is so gender bent that she plays with dolls to please her pedophiles, and soon becomes a sort of Lourdes saint...The passages on Sarah's holy tenure are well-sustained and approsimate to the burlesque and vaudeville.

But the story is ultimately a fable of rescue, and that fable vibrates with the band of Good Bad Angels crossing the Styx to carry Sarah back from the Bad Bad Apples. The characters here are so powerfully and vividly drawn that visualizing them would never do them justice...

The "felt life" of this novel.is infinitely rich and varied indeed. Never can I remember a debut this impressive by someone this young. Think of it: he has fifty years, at least, of writing life ahead of him, and he is leagues beyond David Eggers and Danielewski and the rest of the pimpled horde. This is a story of battling angels, of true affection and real redemption, and of what love delivers us to more than anything: transformation with all of its new freedoms and winding-stair back glances of enlightenment. This is a writer to watch. His fire is leaping up out of the homeless shelter lot and up onto the picket fences of our expectations. It's a marvelous, pungent, very vibrant conflagration. Those whom the Gods love grow young, and their hands are wondrous strong.
—L.A. Style

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177281681
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	11/17/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Glad holds the raccoon bone over my head like a halo. `I have a little something for your own protection,' he says, leaning down over me so close that I can't help but stare up at the brown patches of skin that mottle the pure whiteness of his face.

    `Glad, you look like you're sharecroppin' out your own private patch of cancer,' some of the lot lizards would tease him. But I know the truth of it. Glad told me himself. It's the Choctaw in his blood. That's why he's got good medicine. That's why he's a good pimp for a lot lizard to have.

    `These patches of brown be the In'ian in me, making themselves known,' he tells me over a trucker special breakfast at The Doves Diner: a huge mound of hollandaise eggs and thick-as-a-Bible persimmon pancakes. I know he wants me to work for him. His stable is known for being the finest from coast to coast. Glad's little bits don't have to stand outside the truck stop like other goodbuddy lizards usually do. Truckers call in to arrange their appointments months in advance. All Glad's pavement princesses dress so comely in the most delicate silks from China, fine lace from France, and degenerate leather from Germany. If you didn't notice them wearing a raccoon penis bone necklace, and if you didn't know what that meant, you'd never know they were actually male. Most of his boys are either runaways rounding up some cash before heading out with some driver one of these days, or they are like me, have family working the main lot. Nobody bothers with Glad's boys. Some of the lizards say it's because he pays off anyone that would ever havea say. Sarah told me it is because all the ex-con truckers make sure they have Glad's finest boys to look forward to and the local law wouldn't want to start no riot by depriving felons of their sweet reminders of the penitentiary. But I know it is because of the raccoon dick.

    He holds it over my head.

    I lean down and let him slip the rough-cut leather cord around my neck. I always see Glad's boys in the diner, fingering their coon pricks in a real show-off way. They never have to pay their checks. I always hear the waitress saying when she puts in the boy's order, `It's for them two of Glad's with the mountain man toothpick.' And a bill never comes.

    The lizards say Glad just pays their tab like any sugardaddy. Sarah says all the waitresses secretly are in love with Glad and his boys so they don't charge them. But Glad tells me it's neither. `They know most of their business is hungry tricks that work up their appetite after a visit with my boys, and they count on my boys leaving their tricks in a generous and lavish mood.'

    `This better than a policeman's badge,' Glad says as he adjusts the necklace over my black sweater. I knew he was going to give me my bone today, so I borrowed a black sweater from Sarah.

    `Gettin' boned today is what I heard,' she called from inside the bathroom of the little motel room one of her regulars on the green bean run pays for. I knew she was soaking in the shower.

    `I don't care how cheap the room and the hoe, a woman needs a soak same as a coal miner.' She clogged up the drain with wet menstrual pads and towel-lined the shower rim to add an inch or two to her bath. She sat in the corner huddled like an orphan in a flood with the shower pouring down. `You'll be soaking your pump knot in here too once Glad puts you out.'

    I went through the always half-packed plastic attaché case and picked up her black sweater. I pressed it to my face and inhaled her familiar scent of stale cigarettes and alcohol ineffectively masked by powder-scented air freshener.

    `You better not swipe my leather skirt,' she yelled over the shower water streaming down.

    I leaned into the Sheetrock bathroom door. `I'm going as a boy,' I shouted.

    I heard her make a `that's what you think' laugh. I kicked the door and it shook harder than I'd meant. `You ain't the first person to kick in this door.' She laughed and I felt relieved she didn't come after me, but more than a little pissed she didn't even take me half serious enough to try to whip me. It's 'cause she's in her soak, I told myself. I could smell the baby powder scent of her bubble bath and felt excited to come home after a long night of trucker lovin' and deserve my soak just like she did. She never let me use her bubbles. `Buy your own when you work your own!' she'd tell me when she'd see me fingering the bottle covered in pictures of naked baby bottoms.

    `I'm coming home with some of my own bubbles!' I shouted into the door.

    `And leave the keys till you pay me half this rent.' Her voice raised some and that gave me a tinge of pleasure and fear. I grabbed up the black sweater and opened the front door. I walked back over to the Sheetrock bathroom door and said as loud as I could without yelling, `You don't even pay for this room your own self, but since I'll be making more than you As a boy, I'll kick you down some change.'

    Then I ran. Heard her pulling herself up before I finished. I slammed the front door and didn't even look back once.

`This bone stands out nice against your sweater,' Glad says after he is done adjusting it on me.

    I turn and look in the plate glass and there it is, on me, yellowish white like tobacco chewers' teeth. I always wanted to glide my fingers along its curvaceous lines.

    `Shape always 'minded to me like half a waxed moustache ... how they get it in their women's privates is all but beyond me,' he says with a snort, and some unswallowed Kentucky coffeetree drink sprays out at me.

    I carefully wipe the Kentucky coffeetree spray off my face. I've heard truckers talking in low voices how Glad is known to have murdered a few drivers that did his boys a bad turn. He did it with his coffeetree drink, some in the know say.

    `It would only be a Yankee with no manners or sense of self-pride that would hurt a young defenseless boy trying to make a night's wages,' I once heard Big Pullsman Todd say between forkfuls of his Wellington of king salmon with truffle mashed potatoes. `Yankee drivers,' about ten other truckers swore and spit in their spittoons that were fixed directly a foot and a half to the sides of each of their booths. Most would usually miss and make spattered lizard designs on the fake marble with sparkles in its linoleum.

    Every now and then a trucker would sit in the diner and boast of busting up a faggot goodbuddy.

    They didn't notice how the room went quiet. I heard it said that one northerner sat there laughing, wearing one of Glad's boy's raccoon bones around his own neck. He didn't look up from his medallions of chicken fried Ahi when the boy came in—face bruised and misshapen like a sat-on plum, Glad at his side. The boy nodded in the Yankee's direction. Glad sent the boy into the arms of Mother Shapiro, the den mama, to one of his caravans he kept for the boys with no homes of their own.

    I heard that the noise got louder as everyone made a show of acting real regular so they could claim themselves so engrossed in the conversations going on, they never noticed anything foul afoot.

    But everyone heard the song. It has its place in the middle of the jukebox, an inconspicuous number as any: 24B. The A side is worn out skipping 'Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.'

     Everyone made a show of not watching Glad walk real slow, through the swing doors and into the kitchen. Via the open order station window, everyone pretended not to be looking at Glad taking off the leather thong around his neck and removing one of two identical leather pouches he wore next to the hugest raccoon penis bone anyone had ever seen. Bolly Boy stopped checking on his tuna-noodle souffle and took the pouch from Glad. It was well-known Bolly had once been one of Glad's boys, but retired when he fell in love with a john that drove a custom. He swore he'd be true, but he was so used to giving pleasure to all the truckers he was sure his pledge would be in vain. But Glad fixed him with a job as a chef and paid for chef lessons, so Bolly Boy could stay chaste and still deliver pleasure, which made everyone happy. Bolly's sous-chef, Paxton Maculvy, was another one of Glad's who retired when he fell in love with the faces the drivers made when consuming the creations Bolly made. 'No trick ever rolled his eyes to heaven like that when eating me,' Paxton sighed. So Glad sent him to chef school, but on account of Paxton being illiterate, he dropped out and studied with Bolly in the truck-stop kitchen instead.

     The Yankee never noticed the corners of all the truck- ers' eyes following Paxton as he strode over to the jukebox and used a special key to open the box up. If Bolly hadn't been such a great chef, the northerner might've had a chance to take a break from his side dish of liver with crème fraîche strudel. He could've taken note of the subtle hush in the diner as Paxton fingered his coon penis bone with one hand while press- ing the buttons to put song 24B on for ten continuous plays. If Bolly had been less of a chef, the Yank might've done more than just hum along unconsciously to the old TV song theme blasting from the juke. He could've recognized that, like an Indian war whoop warning before the attack, the Davy Crockett song was being played. If the calf liver reduction sauce on the fresh corn ragout had been a little off, he might've got the mental picture every trucker had in the diner. Davy Crockett in his raccoon hat. He might've lit a wet rag out of that diner and escaped with his life.

     The place almost jumped when Bolly himself, with his raccoon prick hanging almost in the Yankee's face, bent over to set down with a thud a pecan flambé and lit it up with a flash at the man's table. Before the Yank could protest that he had ordered no such thing, Bolly whis- pered in his soft voice, 'This, sir, is on the house.'

     The Yank never would've thought that was the last conversation he would ever have in this world. Every- one's eyes were pretending not to be on the flambE, so the steaming brown coffee mug Bolly casually placed next to the pie was paid no mind. And only the folks that knew what was in Glad's leather pouches knew that it was the steaming brown mug that would do the Yank in and not Bolly's work of art pecan soufflE. Though again, if Bolly had been less of a chef and the souffle not as dense, yet airy and so sweet you couldn't help but roll your eyes to heaven and give a praise of thanks, well, the Yank could've had a chance to notice that the coffee had a distinctly strange flavor to it. If he had been a local he might have recognized that he was sipping on a coffee substitute made from the seeds of the Kentucky coffeetree used by poor miners. If he had been a botanist he might have known that unless those seeds and leaves are roasted to a crisp brown, they are as poisonous as a deep mine with a broken vent. The Yank had to sip his coffee against the richness of Bolly's desert. Somewhat immediately he started to get a stomach cramp, but there were still pecans, shiny in their sugar web, to be fished out of the white goblet, so he ate greedily through the discomfort.

    The talk got extra loud as the truck driver from up north wearing a stolen love bone too tight around his neck paid his check and left for his truck. Everyone noted, as they watched him climb into his cab, that the man was bowed over some, rubbing his stomach as if it were a genie lamp.

    The Department of Health and the sheriff made a visit to the diner not long after they found the northerner's stiff body curled up in a fetal position in the back of his vomit-festooned cab. He was pulled off to the side of the Interstate for a day and night before the highway patrol found him. It was the raccoon prick bone around his neck that brought the sheriff in and the crumpled napkins saying The Doves Diner that brought in the Health Department.

    The sheriff nodded as he spoke to one of Glad's boys that wore no bone. The boy, through spit-wet eyes, told him a tale of love and a gift he had made to the Yankee. The Health Department collected mouse droppings and Roach Motels so full they could be used as maracas. The sheriff tried to comfort the boy and handed him back his bone. The Department of Health shut the diner for seventy-two hours and gave it a several-hundred-dollar fine. No one ever noticed it was Glad who paid the fine. And no one ever said a word about the known fact that Bolly's kitchen was kept so clean that when he invited many a trucker to eat off of his floor, many took him up on it.

    Nobody ever said a word about it. Except in hushed tones of gossip you could overhear if you had good hearing.

    I subtly finish dabbing up the Kentucky coffeetree droplets off my cheeks. I knew Glad had never hurt one of his boys, even when he had reason to. But I couldn't for the life of me tell the difference between the two pouches around his neck. What if he made a mistake and didn't notice he had Bolly make his mug from the pouch that held the unroasted seeds and leaves?

    `You live with family? In the Hurley motel, don't you?' Glad asks, blowing in his mug and accidentally spraying me again.

    `Yes, sir.' I nod and pat my face with a napkin. I'm not sure what Sarah is supposed to be to me so that's all I say and Glad says nothing more on it either.

    `I've seen her working the lots. Pretty lady. I'm sure she does well.' Glad nods and I nod. `Girls, 'specially pretty blonde young girls, can do themselves quite a turn.'

    I look down at my bone again. I hope everyone saw him putting it on me. I don't think it would be exaggerating to say I heard a dip in the volume when he did—not as much as when Glad murdered the Yankee, but along those lines somewhat.

    `I heard it said you look fetching in a leather miniskirt yourself,' Glad says.

    Sarah used to dress me up herself. She would do my makeup. I loved watching her lick her finger and run it gently under my eyes. It always reminded me of those nature films of a mother bird regurgitating food into its baby's mouth and left me feeling as full as if she had. When we'd go shoplifting, it was better for me to be a girl, even if I couldn't be as pretty as her.

    `Girls have more cubbyholes to hide things in,' she'd say, shoving cigarette packs down my dress and into my empty bra and cold wet chopped meat into my panties. `Men only want to stuff those with themselves—they don't ever see what we hid in `em!' She'd laugh at the guards staring at our legs and I laughed with pleasure at being included in her `we.' But she'd stopped dressing me even though it's easier to make your way in the world as two girls. Easier when you're sitting at a diner, loudly fretting over only having enough for a Jell-O salad when a baconburger would go down real nice, to get a man to lean down over you and say, `Let me take care of this, little darling.' Easier to get invited to stay the night at a man's place instead of sleeping in the car. Most anything you want in this world is easier when you're a pretty girl. She stopped letting me dress when it got too easy for those men to crawl from her bed into mine.

    But I didn't stop. Sometimes I would put bows and sparkle gel in my curly shoulder-length hair until it shimmered, just like Sarah's. Now and then, when I knew she had gone with a trick to gamble out on a delta boat, I would wander the tic-tac-toe-like board lines between the trucks and act like a new girl, a new dress for sale, out on the stroll. I kept to the dark and ran if a john or another lizard called to me. I showed enough to make them interested in who this mysterious girl could be. I thought no one ever saw me enough to know it was me. I convinced myself I was like a comic book hero, hiding in the shadows, my magic stiletto heels clicking away all evil. I watched the lizards climb in the trucks and I giggled to myself as the cab suddenly started a-rockin' and a-rollin' till the lizard would just as abruptly leap from the truck stuffing dollars in her boot. I only got whipped once for using Sarah's things and that was 'cause I was sloppy and she found me out. I had stepped in a deep puddle, and because I had stuffed newsprint in her shoes so I could walk in them, I lost my balance and fell. I broke her heel and put a bad stain and tear in the fine leather of her skirt I had paper-clipped high around me. I tried to get it fixed, but she noticed right off. Before that no one had ever told on me. But folks knew. Glad tells me how much the men are all of fond of seeing me dash under the lamplight like a forest sprite. Even the girls think it's sweet, and that I would make an excellent lizard for real. That was what had brought me to his attention.

    `Those divine golden curls of yours are very much admired,' Glad says, with a raise of his eyebrows and a sweet bowing of his head; asking my permission to touch them.

    I lean forward and tilt my head like a cat under his caress. `Soft as pig belly.' I almost fall flat on the table pressing my head into his hands.

    `You'll be my guest when you dine here, so maybe you can fleshen up some. Our customers tend to like a little meat on their girls.'

    I thought of Sarah saying, `I told you so!' So I say to Glad, `I could be a boy too. I know what to do.'

    `Lots of boys want to work for me.' Glad takes my hand and genteelly holds it. `What a man looks for in a boy is a lot different than what he looks for in my boy-girls.' He flips his long braid past his shoulders. I squint at him to try and see the Indian in him. He always spoke about being Indian, but aside from his long black braid and his facial spots, I can't see it.

    I heard it said that his hair isn't really black anyway. It's just hair-care-product black. His eyes are too blue, even though he tries to downplay it with his heavy lids, keeping them half closed. His nose is flat, more like an Irishman's then like an Indian. But the story is, his great-grandmother or maybe it was his great-great- or great-great-great-grandmother was a Mississippi Choctaw. No one knew which, not even Glad himself. Mother Shapiro was the only one that had seen the truth of it. She is the oldest and wisest lot lizard at any truck stop in any state, and it is widely known that the sheriff visited her trailer every now and then. She was a long time ago from the North, but no one holds it against her. She likes Sarah. I'd often see Sarah and her cuddled up in one of The Doves' booths. Sarah would lean in against Mother Shapiro's Hawaiian Muumuu-covered mounds of flesh and eat banana crème brulée while Mother Shapiro stroked her hair curls.

    `His name is Glading Grateful ETC ... The ETC is in capitals with three dots after the ETC sitting there like a trail into the sunset,' Mother Shapiro had told Sarah as they sat in Mother's round bed snuggled under goose-down blankets from Hungary. Sarah told me all about it. And I knew she was trying to make me jealous, so I pretended not to listen and kept saying, `What? What?' until Sarah did stop and I had to beg her to tell me what Mother told her.

    `Mother Shapiro saw an authentic copy of Glad's driver's license,' Sarah finally continued. `The Sheriff showed it to her because he couldn't believe anyone would put ETC and three dots in a name just because he don't know how far back the first Glad was.' Sarah loves to tell gossip when she is drunk. Even if she had sworn to hate me forever, if she found out any information about anyone at one of the bars she always stopped at after she was through for the night, she would talk to me. I watch all the gossip shows to arm myself with material.

    Sarah was on the bed, her head between her spread-out legs to keep from puking. But it didn't keep her from telling me what she'd learned from a night with Mother about Glad's Great-Grandmother ETC ...

    `A missionary devoted his life to taking her from a Choctaw to a Christian. He gave her lessons on how she could put Christ's joy and love into her heart.' Sarah rolled her head up and down in a little vibrating laugh and I knew it was a move she copied from Mother Shapiro. `So he went about gladening her and making her grateful and ...' She laughed and let her whole body shake as if she were round and undulating like Mother. `Glading Grateful the First was born some nine months later.'

    I moved myself slowly till my side was next to Sarah's arm and I cautiously let my head rest on her shoulder. We sat there in the dark of the room, occasionally lit up too bright by the glare of a truck heading out. I slid my feet under the nubbly bedcover, slowly like a crab under sand, to be next to hers. And we stayed like that until we both were asleep.

    `Well, I would like very much to have my own skirt of leather and my own makeup bag that closes with Velcro,' I say to Glad.

    `I can get you a big sight more than that,' he says and thumps the table.

    We start my training right away in the caravans back behind The Doves. I try to tell Glad I know what to do, that I've been with enough of Sarah's boyfriends and husbands, that if they had paid me I could buy a gator farm. Glad tells me I have to unlearn bad habits learned by watching drunken whores, no disrespect intended.

    `You have to learn to read a man and know when he's just lookin' for fun and when what he really needs is for you to hold him so he can cry his eyes out like a babe,' he told me as we drank strawberry Yoo-Hoos and sat on custom satin-covered beanbag chairs. `You have to learn how to listen. There is medicine in that penis bone to help you learn how to love like a real professional.'

    I take daily lessons from various boys of Glad's, who affectionately refer to each other as baculum, which Glad tells me means `little rod' in Latin.

    I practice rolling a condom on a man with my teeth without him knowing. I practice how to take every bit and grain of a man in my mouth. I already knew that one. I'd have contests with Sarah. We'd lie on our backs side by side on some motel bed, with our heads hanging, tilted back over the edge of the bed, till our mouths, esophagus, and throats would all line up. Then we'd put in a carrot as deep as we could without gagging. We'd mark the carrot with our top teeth and after we'd see who was the better head giver. Sarah always won.

    `You win 'cause you're older and bigger,' I told her once and she slapped my face so hard I saw stars.

    `Don't you ever call me old and big,' she said and ran out crying.

I acquire tricks, like spraying Binaca on your right hand, so if a date is not on top of his hygiene, you can breathe in the scent of fresh mint from your hand and think of the snowy Alps instead of inhaling his ammonia scent and being reminded of a dirty Porta-potty.

    I learn how to trick with men who want to dress in lacy frilly things.

    `That's the most difficult one,' Pie tells me. Pie was born a woodscolt—a bastard, and half white on top of that. To his Chinese mother from a traditional Chinese family that ran the only traditional Chinese restaurant in the upper reaches of the Appalachian Mountains, it was a disaster. They tried to keep him hidden by making him tip long beans and slice bitter melon all day and night. All Pie wanted to do was be a Japanese geisha, and as soon as he was old enough he hitchhiked all over, ending up in San Francisco. He came back home when his Great-Aunt Wet Yah was dying. His Great-Aunt Wet Yah was the only one who let him wear her silky undergarments and read to him from a forbidden book on the great geishas she had happened to possess. Wet Yah died and now Pie was working for Glad, saving up to move back to San Francisco and open his own geisha training school for men.

    `You have to listen very carefully when you are with a man that wants to dress.' Pie uses his hands while he talks, gracefully waving them back and forth as if he were icing a cake in the air. `He might only want to show you how nice he looks in his pink panties and discuss how much he enjoys the feel of the smooth material against his privates. Or he might want to be a lesbian and make love to you as a woman making love to another woman.' Pie moves his body in a flowing S, making the silk of his kimono ripple so sinuously as to suggest two women making love. `Or the gentleman might wish to be called a little sissy pantywaist, teased and otherwise humiliated.' Pie shakes his hips and mimics a femmie boy. `You can often make extra by making the gentleman pay to bring in other bacula to laugh at him.' I nod and scribble notes in a notebook Glad has given me.

    `The gentlemen often do not tell you what kind of cross-dressers they are. You have to listen and take their clues.' Pie sits down on a beanbag and looks at me studiously, the slight slant of his eyes accentuated by broad strokes of black liquid liner. `It is your job to figure out: do they want to pretend you are a woman completely, do they want you to be sweet and gentle, do they want you to be forceful and fill their hungry mouth, do they want abuse or gentle guidance? The faster you can figure this out, the more famous you will become.'

    And Pie is famous. Cross-dressers come from as far away as Antigua to see him. But I don't need to be told which boys are the best. All I have to do is look at the raccoon bones around their necks. The better the whore, the bigger his bone. I heard it said that the bigger bones aren't real, that Glad just melts waxed dental tape onto a small bone until it is bigger. I look at Pie's and it looks authentic. Big and genuine.

`You're ready for your first date,' Glad says to me two months after I've started my training. I haven't lived at the motel room in a month. I stay at the caravans. Sarah took off with a rich crooked cargo inspector, and I check the room every day to see if she is back. The plastic attaché case is gone, but her bubbles are still there in the bathroom so I know she'll come back eventually. I plan to have my own bubbles on the shelf next to hers by the time she gets back.

    `You think you're ready? You feel okay?' Glad asks as he helps me get dressed in a muted pink leather miniskirt I couldn't wait to show Sarah when she came home.

    `Ready as snipers at bull-ball cuttin' time,' I say, borrowing Sarah's line. I put finishing touches on my makeup the way Sarah taught me. Glad makes me go light on the makeup, though. I want to take an iron and straighten out my hair so it flows like floss, but Glad won't hear of it.

    `You really oughten not to be wearing any makeup. The natural look will make ya more lettuce than a face palette. Men pay for freckles and curls,' Glad says and wipes up my face with his hankie.

    `Glad, you are a sight worse than a mother dressing her daughter for prom night,' Sundae laughs.

    Sundae is a Texas honey-blonde with a bone bigger than Pie's. Sundae's specialty is cheerleaders. `You'd be surprised by how many football players want a cheerleader with cock,' she says adjusting the miniature pom-poms in her hair.

Glad picked out a truck driver everyone knew.

    `He's a nice man that only wants to diddle you,' Sundae says.

    `Remember to watch the clock on the dash,' Pie says and gracefully kisses the air next to either side of my cheeks. `Good luck.'

    Glad just wrings his hands and makes me feel nervous.

I walk, in the flat white Mary Janes Glad made me wear instead of the spike heels I wanted, out of the caravans with everyone seeing me off, past The Doves, and into the lower-lit fluorescent night-time of the overnight truck lot. The Nice Man's truck is right where Glad said it would be, five rows in and seven across. It is a plain truck, nothing special. No custom anything. The door is a dark blue and I can see my face mirrored on it. I squint my eyes so I can pretend I am seeing Sarah's reflection. I am supposed to tell the Nice Man my name is Cherry Vanilla, but after I knock and he says, `Who is there?' the name `Sarah' just comes out of my mouth.

    At first I'm scared of the Nice Man. He reminds me of a New Orleans voodoo priest, his eyes rimmed with a thick black tattoo. Then I realize, after I sit on his lap a little and he talks to me in his near indecipherable Appalachian twang, that he is just a laid-off coal miner. And it's true what they say; the dust settles in every crease of skin like a new layer of pigment.

    `Started in the mines when I was ten,' he says and places his charcoal-lined hands gently on my waist.

    He is from Mingo County, West Virginia. Everyone in West Virginia, no matter how bad off they are, gives thanks at least they don't live in Mingo County.

    `I used to lie in the bed with my brother at night while my mama listened to The Christ Cure Radio Show and my daddy sucked on a piece of coal to help his graveyard cough,' he tells me while bouncing me tenderly on his knee. I thought about asking him if he heard my grandfather's sermons too, as his show came on not too long after The Christ Cure Radio Show and was very popular in Mingo County, but I remember what Glad told me about not getting personal about my life.

    `It ruins the fantasy of who they want you to be,' Glad had said.

    `I do love Jesus,' the Nice Man says and begins to run his hands up under my pink skirt and to my peach panties. `And you are such a sweet thing.' I hope he will say the name I told him. I want to hear her name while his

hands begin to diddle me. I close my eyes and let him rock me and caress me. 'Sarah,' he finally whispers into my ear. 'I'm here,' I whisper back, 'not going nowhere.' I let my eyes roll back into my head in pleasure.

Sarah comes back a month after I've started working. The green-bean truck-driver man had stopped by to see her while she was gone. Other lizards were more than happy to be helpful and let him know Sarah's where- abouts. He was so mad that she was carrying on in some other state, with a cargo inspector at that, that he got rid of our room and put everything she'd left out on the brown lawn. Someone rang up Glad and I came and gathered up all the things and took them back to the caravan. Except her bubble bath. I left that sitting there on the rotting grass.

Mother Shapiro paid for Sarah to get our room back at the Hurley motel, but mostly Sarah stays with Mother in her caravan. They're always together. Sarah even starts acting like she cares about the lizards' moons too. Mother Shapiro knows all the girls' monthly cycles by heart. At any given time, if Mother is sitting in The Doves, some lizard will holler out to her across the floor asking if they were ripe. Some want to know so they can force a driver they are fond of to settle down with them and a baby on the way. Some want to make sure they weren't gonna catch, so they can earn extra money risking sex without a rubber. Some just want to know so they can set aside enough money to get their feminine hygiene products ready. Mother Shapiro is pretty good at figuring out why a lizard wants to know. Folks say she has a second sight that way. Being a big believer in condoms she usually yells back across The Doves to the girl, 'Honey, you're as ripe to seed and as ready to take as a breeding sow!'

     The only problem is most girls know that when Mother Shapiro overreacts like that she's just being protective and the coast is probably all in the clear.

     Now Sarah acts like she knows the dates too, and discusses bleeding with Mother. I think about going up to Mother and telling her how many millions of times I've heard Sarah scream how she hates the 'plague.'

     Mother Shapiro would invite me over to their booth to share a caramelized kiwi and walnut tart tatin when she sees me hovering nearby. Mother Shapiro asks me about how my dates are going and Sarah rolls her eyes away from me when I answer. Despite myself I try to interest Sarah in some good gossip from the World News news- paper.

     'Said in the paper today that Elvis was really a her- maphrodite.'

'Read it already,' Sarah says and rolls her eyes again. 'Now, now...' Mother says. 'You two should really try to get along. You're family, aren't you?'

     I realize by the way Sarah's eyes dilate that even Mother doesn't know exactly how we're related. I slide out from the booth and before I walk away, I say with a small smile in a voice loud enough so those with good ears could hear, `She's my mother.'

I hope Mother Shapiro will send for me, invite me to her trailer to snuggle under the goose-down blankets from Hungary with the two of them. Instead no one sees either one of them for weeks.

    The candles in Mother's trailer blaze at night and Mother's broad outline can be seen lumbering past the drawn shades. It is said Sarah was taken with severe shock upon discovering she was my mother, and in public at that. All she could do was lie in bed and moan, while Mother Shapiro tended to her and tried to ply her with food.

    Bolly tells me, `She's got a freezer in there the size of a mare farm trough. I've been filling it for her with specials, in case a famine should hit.'

    From outside their trailer I can smell reheated Appalachian foie gras with apple crisp in vet jus with grilled tender mango, and microwaved cider-cured spit-roasted pork loin with grilled figs and sweet Vidalia onion purée. Paxton is the only one who's set foot in there in two weeks, and that was very briefly. He brought them over a Tupperware of osetra caviar dressing, which Mother had used her second sight to know Bolly had prepared.

    `That place is lit in hundreds of beeswax candles,' Paxton said gravely. `Your mother,' and I distinctly heard a tone of hostility directed at me as he said those words, `Is at death's doorknob.'

    When I enter The Doves I notice an audible dip in the volume, which especially alarms me after reading that stuffed quail eggs braised in fresh huckleberries with English pea ravioli and miso-butter-poached chard is the day's special. Even a loud smash-up in the lot right outside The Doves wouldn't cause any notice to be taken when the menu was what it is today.

    `Accusing someone of being your mother is a very serious thing,' Glad says to me sternly when I run back to the caravans in tears.

    `Are they gonna play Davy Crockett for me?' I ask and put my head on Glad's lap.

    `Oh no.' His hands slide through my curls. `It just gonna take everyone a little time to get over it, that's all.'

    I devote myself to proving I am not the inconsiderate scoundrel everyone thinks I am. I dedicate myself to being the best lot lizard ever, so one day I can walk in to The Doves with the grandest-ever raccoon penis bone and make the place hush in awe and respect.

(Continues...)

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