Whores for Gloria by William T. Vollmann

Whenever Jimmy needed the smell of a woman or the soft weight of a woman's embrace, why, he had the whores being themselves for Gloria who partook of them all and lived on them all like some sky-goddess feasting upon the smoke from sacrifices. As for the rest of what he needed, the airy loveliness and happiness, he had that always with him; it floated at his arm like a helium balloon; no one could see it or ask about it or take it from him. So, having the hair, he really only needed the memories. Jimmy sat alone in his room, drinking tequila until his lips went numb. That's right honey babe (he said to Gloria) I have you I'm not lying I never lied to you I haven't told the truth for so long now that I've given up lying.

Jimmy is a Vietnam vet living in San Francisco's Tenderloin District. He lives entirely on the social security checks he gets from the government; these go to rent, to the bar, and to the prostitutes who make the Tenderloin their home. Sometimes he has sex with them (though when he does, he ends up obsessing over whether or not he has contracted a venereal disease), but mostly he only wants to hear their memories, which he appropriates for the woman of his dreams: Gloria. Gloria is Jimmy's one true love, his wife, whom he has known since childhood, and who represents everything good and beautiful--glory--about the world. But she's not real.

Jimmy spends his days "searching" for Gloria. Sometimes this seems to take on a literal aspect, as in searching for a woman who has hidden just behind the next corner, then the next. But mostly it means memorizing the stories told to him by the real prostitutes, sanitizing them and replaying them in his mind as a memory belonging to he and Gloria together, or just to Gloria. It's a difficult process, because the prostitute's stories are often grim ones. It's easy enough to assign to Gloria a lovely childhood memory of going on a road trip or sitting in a dark movie theater, but what can Gloria do with the memory of being nearly killed by a serial killer who targets prostitutes? Or the many stories of torture and rape that feature in these women's lives? Jimmy's quest makes him sort of an odd duck among the johns, and when his methods escalate--because when you chase what cannot be caught, your methods must escalate as a matter of course--it alienates him more and more from the life of the Tenderloin, already characterized by its alienation from the larger world. He begins to ask not just for stories but locks of hair, talismans to make Gloria real, and then it's an easy step from locks to entire wigs.

It seems likely that the stories that make up Gloria's imaginary life are ones told to Vollmann by the prostitutes of the Tenderloin, or fictionalized versions of them. A brief appendix, "A Profile of the Tenderloin Prostitute," is almost certainly taken verbatim from such conversations. No writer throws himself into his subject like Vollmann; after being embedded with the mujahideen, the Tenderloin was probably an easy assignment. Vollmann's engagement with the Tenderloin surpasses what one might call research or journalism; he (later?) famously developed a female alter ego to live among the women described here. (What Vollmann calls, in the language of the time and place, "Transvestites" or "Transformers," are as central to the construction of Gloria's identity as AFAB women.) For this reason, Vollmann's books always have an honesty and authenticity that few other books, especially novels, can match. Whores for Gloria crackles with the real life of the Tenderloin.

Ultimately, Whores for Gloria is a story about the nature of our desires. Jimmy both does and does not believe in Gloria; he consciously and intentionally cobbles an identity and memory for her from those of the Tenderloin women, but after he does so he must forget that he has done this, and in a sense persuade himself that the image he has made is a representation of the world. Of course, this is what all our desires are: images that we have made to persuade ourselves that they are real. In Jimmy I recognize the power of the fantasy life that dwells within, as well as the fear that descending too far into the fantasy can leave one alienated and unfit for the world. Such desires are principally about sex and romance; you might even say that all sexual desire is structured the same way as Gloria. But Vollmann captures the way that even our yearnings for other people are rooted in a deeper yearning for abstractions like beauty and goodness that need images to cling to, but which can only be failed by them.