The Royal Family (83 page)

The doors locked only from the outside, because it would be ruinous to offer retarded girls the keeping of keys.

Brady put the slapper on salary. It became one of his recreations to watch that tall, easygoing fellow standing in the corner in ducky and tails, smiling and squeezing a rubber ball, or ever so delicately touching the flats of his hands together.

He informed the backers in L.A. that he’d even come in under budget, and they upwardly adjusted his benefit package in the most laudable possible way. They sent out feelers. They printed up stock certificates in Fraktur type. Everything was peachy. Maybe they’d go public in two years.

At last they brought them in from their cages, pretty girls, sweet girls, girls who filled the rooms with the scent of hot milk . . .

The golden-clad croupiers were patting the red tables in a dozen motions, each arm fanning out from an almost stationary body so that these employees resembled octopi. Their customers waited unsmiling for cards and chips to be presented to them, and I remember that Jack Williamson science fiction story called “With Folded Hands,” about an overly leisured future in which human beings are not allowed to do anything that might be dangerous or sad or bad for them; attended by robots all the way to the cemetery, they sit and await the next course in a banquet of sanitized irrelevancies, like the inmates of an old folks’ home. That nightmare story brooded with me for years, and here
it was—worse, in a way, because in Williamson’s story the robots were well-meaning and gave people only the very best, whereas here they gave you the least they could get away with to hide the hollowness.

The slapper drowsed and drank ice water from tall thin glasses. Brady’s agents fanned out across the hot wide streets, putting up flyers for Feminine Circus in blistering parking lots and the ivied shade beneath freeway overpasses, making discreet calls at the pay phones between the wigwag roofs of fast food factories, wending cannily among the long low chiropractor’s office style architecture that bulged with air conditioners. When their friends asked them what they did for a living now, the agents replied: I’m in limbo; I’m with recruiters! I ask for a decent wage, and the guys want something for ten K or less! Well, it’s a soft market right now. You have to do a little of everything. I spent the last six or eight years of my life doing one thing. —The agents learned the ways of sunglare on dusty windshields and the windows of phone booths, so bright as to bring tears to their eyes. It was straight comission. A few among them, the good ones, grew into cool offices where only their sluggish fingers had to move like snails on hot lawns after a morning’s rain; they got results. Yes, Vagina, another dinner with the publicity people in purple Feminine Circus windbreakers . . . (There’s one fellow in this town who’s not a believer, an agent reported. He takes down my fliers. So I don’t acknowledge him. To me he doesn’t exist. The Bible says, if there’s a nonbeliever among you, put ‘em away. But I don’t go out of my way to be mean to him, either.)

The media relations spokesman for the Feminine Circus supply office gave interviews and explicated everything most helpfully to the American people: A pimp commits an illegal act, he’s kicked out immediately. This is a
professional
procuring organization. And, remember, all we procure are ONES AND ZEROES. Those girls are not real. They’re a miracle of modern technology, is what they are—gigabytes and trilobites just to digitize their smiles! And since they’re not real, nobody’s getting exploited, and there’s no disease to worry about.

Can you tell me why you want to repeal the federal income tax? asked the interviewer.

That is the goal. A whole basis for the collection of income to the government would have to be arranged. One way would be to have virtual prostitutes raise the money.

What’s your position on illegal prostitution?

Illegal, immoral, unhealthy, unsafe! Don’t do it, America! Come to Feminine Circus and indulge your fantasies in a safe, healthy and
tasteful
manner.

(Tasty is right! laughed vulgar Brady.)

There were a few picketers, it’s true, but the Associate Vice President of Marketing, Mr. Marlowe W. Slapper, explained: I do know that the circles they move in are definitely of an anti-sexual nature.

So you don’t believe that there’s any substance to these protesters’ claims?

Protesters as a class will sit there and lie, said the Associate Vice President of Marketing. It’s hard to debate someone who lies. If you want to really look at this, you take some objective fact of theirs and check it. For instance, what about this red herring they raise regarding coercion, of retarded girls being forced to perform fellatio? Me, I never met a whore who didn’t enjoy giving head. And, like I says, they’re not real anyways.

Mr. Slapper, don’t you feel that the name “Feminine Circus” is a bit unfair to women?
asked a journalist. Shouldn’t the name encourage women to come and play also? I mean, right now, isn’t Feminine Circus mainly for men?

We’re in the final phases of a pilot program to introduce a special division for female customers, Mr. Slapper explained. For health and safety reasons we’ve decided to keep areas separate, as indeed we’re required to do under federal law. You wouldn’t want coed bathrooms, now, would you? No coed orgasms, either, because that would be prostitution. The way we have it planned, the men will go and do their thing among the bits and bytes, and the women will do a similar thing in their own area. Of course free daycare and a shuttle service will be provided.

(Leaning back in his chair, Mr. Rapp narrowed his eyes and grimaced, studying John as if he were the most important entity in the world. He nudged John and said: You remember what Engels used to say? Do quote Engels, son. It sounds so good when you say it.

(John smiled and said:
For savagery—group marriage; for barbarism—pairing marriage; for civilization—monogamy, supplemented by adultery and prostitution.)

The Senior Vice President of Sales raised his wineglass and quipped: I have one of the easier jobs on the property. My job is to fill seven thousand beds a day.
Double
beds.

Every week there was a glowing article about Feminine Circus in the entertainment section.

Now the famous men rose to the occasion, gathering in the foyers to meet the ladies belly-to-belly, nose-to-anus, tongue-to-armpit—whatever their own honor cried for. The senator was there, jovially uptilting an Alsatian beer. The junked-out salesman was there. Last night he’d wanted a hooker, and he’d gotten a hooker. She took him into the hotel room and the pimp said: you’re fucking my wife! —The salesman pulled a knife. The pimp pulled a knife, too, and held it to his throat for about five hours. Now the salesman wanted a nice slow fat retard girl to slap around a little, before he stuck it into her mouth. That would put him right with the world again. After all, she wasn’t real anyhow. He was a good man; he always paid cash. —The successful dentist was there, laughing and shouting:
If she finds out . . . !
while the mortician stood waiting sweet-eyed beneath the lighted paper cylinders, which is to say the red and white corrugated glow-in-the-dark leeches; when his turn came, the customer support specialist drew him down beneath the rows of translucent stalactites and fluorescent macaroni which continually winked and blinked; she took his hand as gently as an easy death and pulled him down the velvet passageway to the second sinus where the halfway-approved clients sat at kidney-shaped marble tables, six men each, either ignoring each other as if on the bus, or smiling at each other, freeze-dried instant friends. (To the press the bellman would only say that everything was great, that they had a
commitment
to their employees.)

Everything
I don’t even wear
I send to the dry cleaner’s! the dentist was shouting.

Ah, replied the mortician, sipping his beer. You can do that, pal—indeed you can—but once the shirt’s starch is gone it never comes back again . . .

You’re going to get me pissed off, said the dentist in a low voice. You won’t like it when I’m pissed off.

That’s your privilege. That’s the privilege of your urine. But when you’re lying on my marble slab, colder than a frozen clam, how much urine will you work up then?

Hey, asshole, why are you even
here?
Why are you talking that way? You’re here to do a root canal on those girls, just like me. What do you keep going on about
dying
for?

Dying? said the mortician. Oh, dying. That was a great movie. It came out of nowhere. I remember when I saw it in Westwood, on the way to the dry cleaner’s.

The mortician’s number was called just after the senator’s. The hostess took him down the spiral velvet corridor, deeper and deeper into good repose. In a circular room that smelled like cherry cough drops, they sat him down at a video screen to watch the play of the overhead cameras in the girls’ rooms (the busy rooms being blacked-out like air raid Saturdays); so he watched the prey, rubbing his hands, watched a girl banging her head against the wall, twisting in her urine-soaked bed; another, hyper-sexed, squatted masturbating with a toy snake’s head like a good washerwoman twisting and massaging the wet garment against itself; a third rushed blindly blundering from wall to wall like a trapped bottle-fly; a fourth lay catatonic with her stuffed giraffe; a fifth crouched over the toilet, splashing her hands in and laughing; a sixth was trying to dance to the nursery rhyme muzak that the establishment piped in like the will of God; and the mortician said: Number six looks lively enough. That’s very good. You see, I love life.

The backers in L.A. thought that there ought to be a floor show. Feminine Circus stock had just gone public and was rising fast. Brady decided to hire a starlet to be Queen of the Whores. At that time he remained unaware that there was in fact a
real
Queen of the Whores, and had he known he wouldn’t have cared. The slapper found an enthusiastic girl named Babycakes Reed who could croon Lotte Lenya-esque songs as she strode about the stageboards, licking the head of the cordless mike and hiking up her black sequin gown.

Gluing himself like a ruby to the silver rail, the successful dentist had brunch at Feminine Circus. The waiter opened the champagne bottle with a deep echoing pop. The dentist’s orange juice glass remained eternally filled; his champagne glass was poured very slowly by a black paisley arm that waited until the foam stopped. On the table, a white orchid nuzzled his hand. Outside the curved window, palm trees, a waterfall . . . Babycakes Reed (or one of her fifty lookalikes) had just given him her autograph. Her stage name was Queen Zenobia. The successful dentist browsed among the mountains of bread and the row of silver reliquaries, each the size of a small child’s casket, whose tops slid open at his command to show hash browns, pork chops, sausages and bacon, ravioli, potatoes au gratin . . . Then there was the fruit mountain, the calving ground of waffles, the omelette stand, the towering eagle made of ice, the parlsey-floored sashimi terarium.

The last red thing is not a bicycle like the first blue thing, said the dentist.

He’d heard that from the mortician and was trying to figure out what it meant.

Oh, that tricky dog! he shouted, eating another omelette.

He liked the mortician now. When he’d gone too far inside that paralyzed girl with
Niemann-Pick’s disease, until she became turquoise like a seal rushing underwater, the mortician had come with a little stinger kit of embalming chemicals to make it look like natural causes. (Not that she was real, of course, but when you ordered take-out, that virtual blood stayed on your living room floor. —We need to sacrifice the unprofitable giveaways, said Brady.) Later the mortician had even rerouted her from the crematorium, preserved her perfectly, and plasticized her. After that, the dentist started giving the mortician free X-rays and cleanings—professional courtesy, he called it. He got the senator to sponsor a pro-undertaker’s bill in Congress. They all stuck together like dogs fornicating in epoxy. They loved each other.

The successful dentist laughed. —Yes, I’m just bursting with seminal fluid!

As for the lord of it all, Dan Smooth, as for him who’d killed so many hearts (but that was a long time ago, those days of thick-and-fast), he swindled himself into nothingness (aside from the occasional tryst with a certain retarded girl named Sapphire), whereas Brady sat in a hightower suite which was loaded with blue hydrangeas. Three perfect pears, a grapefruit half as big as a basketball, and a leopard-spotted banana reclined in a silver vase, cushioned softly from the metal’s preciousness by leaves. —Message for Mr. Brady, apologized the concierge every ten minutes. Beside the banana stood a foot-high stack of the latest newspapers from around the world. Inside the credenza lurked a modem pre-dialled to the Brazilian Stock Exchange. Then there was a sliding panel behind which special cameras and telescopic lenses gave him a twenty-four-hour view of the guts of Feminine Circus, the engine room ceilinged with vast pipes shuddering, messes of heavy boilers, gauges, boilerplates; the utility halls of burning hot corrugated metal, the disposal rooms manned by illiterate, moustached, oily-fingered crews who ran and sweated in sandals, hauling shrouded bundles to the grinder well, the Lobotomy Factory’s diesel-powered unshielded belts turning, their condensers sucking up the desert water table; then more shuddering pipes, whirling spools, grey shouts he couldn’t hear . . . On the table where the third phone squatted, he sat drawing up new price lists, idly flipping through personnel figures. His accountants projected a thirty-two percent margin on property without the theme park; the theme park could make forty-five or fifty percent.