Gloria, Gloria, GloriaBill 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.
"For we all must build our worlds around us, bravely or dreamily, as long as we can we shelter ourselves from the rain, walling ourselves in gorgeously." (53)The true cleverness and weight of this novel comes after the main story has ended and the book lists a sociological glossary of terms used in the book, then proceeds to outline generalized descriptions pulled from Vollmann's presumed field work in SF's tenderloin among the pimps and prostitutes in the area. The moment you read this last part is the moment you understand how Vollmann's stolen stories worked to create the narrative you just read. His own abstractions, like Jimmy's desperate attempts at forming Gloria, are how he wrote the novel and are, of course, also a construction.The insight forced by the end bring the novel around to many interesting ideas mainly plotted around constructions formed from abstractions: gender identity, heroism, love, even adulthood."That’s what being a kid is about, pretending. You’ve got to pretend you’re this, pretend you’re that, pretend you’re a grownup, pretend you’re not, pretend you’re somebody else. –That’s right Melissa, sighed Jimmy to himself sitting on his bed, and when you’re a grownup you’ve got to pretend you’re with somebody else. What a lot of work and trouble everything is." (91)...and how could I possibly read a work like this without thinking of Marx's dialectic of abstract and concrete labor? By slicing down a cross-section of San Francisco's tenderloin and showing us its layers, Vollmann can't help but reveal the origin of the discarded in the exchange of bodies for cash, bodies which can transform and distort."…and then the light dawned on Candy: to get money she only had to threaten to leave, to become unavailable and therefore perfect like Gloria, and then she glowed with the light of a good thing coming to an end and easily achieved that perfection and they paid her and paid her." (152)The prose here is poetic, and rises above the murk of its gritty subjects. Take lines like the following: "In the windowpanes of bars all around the blue neon Budweiser signs, reflections made cool jungles in which blurs pursued blurs."(58) Has there ever been a more perfect description of a dive bar late at night. The poetry of this novel is that it takes descriptions of the area and turns them in on the characters so that you aren't reading about a Budweiser sign, but Jimmy's state during a night of habitual drinking.I discovered this author through a trustworthy reviewer on this site and I am so grateful. Vollmann has already begun to influence my own work and I intend to read a lot more of his generous oeuvre.
What do You think about Whores For Gloria (1994)?
4.5 starsThis is my first Vollman; an easy way in I thought because it is short. I should have known better because it raises all sorts of issues and defies neat classification. The novel is a series of vignettes and short chapters. The main protagonist is Jimmy, who is a Vietnam veteran; middle-aged and living in a flophouse, surviving on his regular cheque and spending much time drinking in bars. It is set in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. Jimmy is obsessed with Gloria, who seems to be an idealised woman (possibly a prostitute, or maybe not) who he may or may not have known in his past. He pays a variety of prostitutes; some for sex, others for stories, sad and happy. He starts to build a composite picture of Gloria from stories, memories and individual character traits and physical attributes of the women he meets. He even asks for a lock of hair. Gloria is usually almost within reach for Jimmy, but just beyond what he can conceive and bring to reality. Vollman has done his research, at the back of the book is a glossary of terms (necessary) and he interviewed many prostitutes in the Tenderloin area as part of his research. There are notes on these interviews at the back of the book and these make the book more powerful being authentic voices. There is also a price list for the period 1985-88. We follow Jimmy in his encounters with prostitutes, some of whom are transvestites and transgender. Other characters include the barmaids in various bars, a number of pimps and Code Six, Jimmy’s Vietnam buddy who is even worse off than Jimmy, living in an alley.This is not a novel in the same genre as American Psycho et al; the difference being that Vollman clearly has great compassion for those who inhabit the world he draws. John Rechy has drawn a comparison with Don Quixote with Gloria as Dulcinea and in an odd sort of way I can understand that. This is the first of a trilogy and it has been noted that Vollman does seem to focus on prostitution quite a lot. When asked about this he makes a point about it being an intersection between love, sex and money and contends that in terms of our materialistic society prostitutes do openly what the rest of society do covertly and so by looking at them we see ourselves more sharply. This is in a way a love story; the language is very strong and the descriptions vivid. The women who work as prostitutes are portrayed with understanding and warmth. It is never really clear whether Gloria is real and in some ways Jimmy is also a composite of one of the denizens of the area. It could be a ghost story. It is all the more powerful because of the knowledge that many of the stories Vollman uses are real. Vollman clearly has a strong moral sense. The pimps, although as lost as everyone else, are using the structure and agency society gives them to control the women; backed up of course by physical violence. It is moving and harrowing and very bleak. Vollman leaves open a lot of questions about gender relations and how men and women negotiate relationships. But he does leave the reader with some explanation;“For we must all build our worlds around us, bravely or dreamily, as long as we can shelter ourselves from the rain, walling ourselves in gorgeously”
—Paul
As i was adding the Vollmann title that i am just beginning, imagine my surprise and delight to recognize one of those titles as a random book from the library that i read without really noting the author or even the correct title: this book. which i remember as hilarious if a bit tedious. One of my dearest friends was an older, somewhat crotchetity woman called Gloria and i think that was why i grabbed it as a bit of a joke; and i remember being blown away by the skill and imagination of this guy none of us feminist readers at the bookstore had ever heard of before
—Magdelanye
Brutal and hallucinatory. You don't really know who is alive or dead or made up or just a part of stores told by prostitutes. It is possible that it doesn't matter if anyone is alive or dead or imagined, which is a hard possible truth to swallow. There is a sentence in there where it says we are nothing but stories and hair, and maybe he is on to something. The terror the book mines is that that lies below the surface of the terror we can romanticize: the hooker with the heart of gold, the omnipresent wino, the voyeuristic tingle of kinkiness. We may think the world is a terrible place, but we have to remember we are only seeing the part it presents to us. It's darker than we think in the real darkness.It is a book full of degrees of debasements and the dubious redemptive quality of debasing stories being told. It's a hard sea to sail at a lot of points, but the electrified writing drags you through its dark waters.Terrible and gorgeous, this short book is the first Vollmann book I've read, a mere foothill before his mountain range of human struggle.
—Alex V.
