A private detective is hired to find the “Queen of the Whores” who is the leader of all the street prostitutes in the Tenderloin, and has magical saliva which is like ecstasy to drink. Like Moby Dick, this 800 page novel is also scattered with various essays about San Francisco, smoking crack, train hopping, Cain and Abel, and the bail bond system.
First Sentence:
“The blonde on the bed said: I charge the same for spectators as for participants, 'cause that's all it takes for them to get off.”
DEDICATION: Funeral Sermon For A Fly
Who dies best, the soldier who falls for your sake, or the fly in my whiskey-glass? The happy agony of the fly is his reward for an adventurous dive in no cause but his own. Gorged and crazed, he touches bottom, knows he's gone as far as he can go, and bravely sticks. I sleep on. In the morning I pour new happiness upon the crust of the old, and only as I raise the glass to my lips descry through that rich brown double inch my flattened hero. I drink around his death, being no angler by any inclination, and leave him in the weird shallows. The glass set down, I idle beneath the fan, while beyond my window-bars a warm drizzle passes silently from clouds to leaves.
How to die? How to live? These questions, if we ask the dead fly, are both answered thus: In a drunken state. But drunk on WHAT should we all be? Well, there's love to drink, of course, and death, which is the same thing, and whiskey, better still, and heroin, best of all—except maybe for holiness. Accordingly, let this book, like its characters, be devoted to Addiction, Addicts, Pushers, Prostitutes, and Pimps. With upraised needles, Bibles, dildoes and shot glasses, let us now throw our condoms in the fire, unbutton our trousers, and happily commit THIS MULTITUDE OF CRIMES.
“But seriousness commands us to recognize that it's the multitude of laws that is responsible for this multitude of crimes.”--De Sade (1797)
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