Sarah Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise for JT LeRoy and Sarah

  Title Page

  Sarah

  Acknowledgments

  Praise for JT LeRoy and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things

  Praise for JT LeRoy and Sarah

  ‘Sarah is surprising, upsetting, offensive, and fun. It’s everything a good read—or good sex for that matter—should be.’

  —Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club

  ‘Like a cross between Nathanael West and Mark Twain, drunk out of their minds and collaborating on Charlie’s Angels meets The Headless Horseman—Sarah is a wildly comic tour de force and a brilliant debut.’

  —Mary Gaitskill, author of Two Girls, Fat and Thin

  ‘JT LeRoy writes like Flannery O’Connor tied to the bed and plied with angel dust. Sarah is an exhilarating, hysterical and beautifully written disturbing novel. Whatever young LeRoy had to live through to write a book like this, we’re lucky he’s here. An off-the-map brilliant, brutally funny debut.’

  —Jerry Stahl, author of Perv: A Love Story and Permanent Midnight

  ‘Sarah is weird, darkly funny and haunting. JT LeRoy has a gift, to be able to articulate his world so clearly and astringently, with grace and humor, but without glossing over the pain and brutality of it.’

  —Suzanne Vega

  ‘JT LeRoy’s Sarah is a revelation. It makes you realize how overused words like original and inspired have become. LeRoy’s writing has a passion, economy, emotional depth, and lyric beauty so authentic that it seems to bypass every shopworn standard we’ve learned to expect of contemporary fiction. This is a novel gripped by an intense, gorgeous, yet strangely refined imagination, and its experience is unforgettable.’

  —Dennis Cooper, author of All Ears and Period

  ‘This book glows with perverse imagination and linguistic prowess. It hypnotized me. I couldn’t help entering its magical world or surrendering to its desperate, comic characters. These truckers, their prostitutes and their pimps are on hilariously ruthless survival trips, but even so, they are full of humanity. The protagonist is a brilliant, resourceful adolescent set adrift in a world of grifters, and he is unforgettably touching and poetic.’

  —Bruce Benderson, author of James Bidgood

  ‘Occasionally, very occasionally, a writer comes along who walks with God. I have known JT LeRoy since he was sixteen years old. Not only does he walk with God, he writes like an angel.’

  —Joel Rose, author of Kill Kill Faster Faster

  ‘JT LeRoy has given us a beautiful, haunting tale of the survival of the spirit.’

  —Allison Anders, director of Mi Vida Loca, Gas Food Lodging and Grace of My Heart

  ‘I am profoundly impressed by this amazing, absolutely brilliant new young writer, this JT LeRoy. His first novel is one of the most beautiful, shocking, disturbing pieces of fiction I’ve seen in years. You won’t believe it until you’ve read it. It makes Bastard Out of Carolina seem like a day at the beach. But like that book, it too is crafted from careful, perfect language and buoyed up by a spirit so strong as to draw tears from my eyes.’

  —Lewis Nordan, author of Lightning Song

  ‘JT LeRoy’s novel Sarah is road-kill beautiful. Road-kill in the sense that LeRoy’s next-to-heart prose style is raw, misspoken, scary, stunning, and goes directly to the sore place where we live. LeRoy has written a book for those of us who love to read. Despite the darkness of the journey there is always hope. Fiction has a new hero and his name is Sarah.’

  —Tom Spanbauer, author of The Man Who Fell in Love with

  the Moon

  Sarah

  a novel by JT LEROY

  Sarah

  All Rights Reserved © 2000, 2013 by JT LeRoy

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the author.

  First Edition published 2000 by Bloomsbury. This digital edition published by Dove’s Diner Inc. c/o Authors Guild Digital Services.

  For more information, address:

  Authors Guild Digital Services

  31 East 32nd Street

  7th Floor

  New York, NY 10016

  ISBN: 9781625360335

  For Trevor

  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 have a 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 ineffectivel
y 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 soufflé 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 truckers’ 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 pressing 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 whispered 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. Everyone’s eyes were pretending not to be on the flambé, 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 soufflé. Though again, if Bolly had been less of a chef and the soufflé 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 dessert. 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 mad
e 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.