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