Free Sarah by J.T. LeRoy

Kenworth’s Limited Edition truck with a heated waterbed in the cab and for the strange burning sensation in their groin areas to be cast from them. Le Loup lit candles and shook the trucker’s hands a little too hard until they were more generous in the collection plate.
    The TV crews and reporters didn’t show up, but all the lizards still took Mary Kay Cosmetics lessons and stocked up on camera-friendly earth tones so they would be well prepared.
    Pooh told everyone that would listen that she now had the ability to know what every trick wanted without them ever having to utter an often humiliating word of it. She just knew. The Jackalope had given her the second sight. But not many folks listened. Le Loup stuffed the money she handed him into his boots then pushed her away. Pooh would drag her astonished customers up to Le Loup’s for them to testify about her extraordinary capabilities, but when her johns saw the glowing halo above my head they were struck dumb. The carefully concealed lights Le Loup had rigged did cast quite a glow, similar to that of the Jackalope’s natural effulgence. Le Loup explained that it was necessary to highlight my subtle luminescence to the truckers whose sight had been ruined by driving long night hauls. Pooh’s customers would overhear the other truckers attesting to the miracles their visits with me had wrought, and they’d drop to their knees. The large tips they were to hand to Le Loup in gratitude for Pooh’s newfound aptitudes were quickly placed on the collection plate with an extra fifty dollars or so along with an attached prayer that they too might have the blessing of being able to haul overloaded rigs right through weigh stations without nary a blink from an inspector. Pooh would nudge and then slap at her dates to try to bring them around to their original mission. But they ignored her and muttered their praises to me, the new patron saint of truckers. Pooh would try to regale Le Loup with what her johns were to say, then she’d grab at her tip as her trick placed it on the offering plate. I’d shout to her as soon as I saw Le Loup’s fist rise back behind him. She’d raise her eyes from the money to look at me, her eyes burning with indignant rage. The fist would get to her before I could find words.
     
     
    Le Loup never baptized me. He never climbed atop me and took me like a wild animal in the night, as I heard all his lizards tell of as they displayed his claw marks. He never sank his teeth into my neck, giving me his brand for life, depositing his saliva into my blood so the need to sate his appetites would pump through my heart forever with ever-increasing urgency.
    Le Loup only pats my head and fluffs my socks. Just like Glad had done. No truckers diddle me, even. Like a museum piece, no one is permitted any physical contact with me, except for private specially arranged sessions for those who wish to contribute more profusely to the collection plate. As the patron presses my hand to his heart, I close my eyes under the radiating heat from the spotlights. Sometimes the patron squeezes my hand so hard it feels as if it is breaking, but I bite my lip and say nothing that would cause Le Loup to take the touch away.
    The dresses Glad had me wearing look like potato sacks next to the frilly, lacy dresses Le Loup has me in. I feel like a doily quilt displayed on the bed.
    Le Loup doesn’t even touch me to help me get dressed. If I tell him I can’t reach a zipper down my back, it goes unzipped.
    ‘He’s not wanting to soil you,’ Stella says while feeding me in bed, as she does all my meals. ‘Once he sees that smooth puerile sacred skin of yours’—she quivers—‘well, he might be tempted to baptize you and damn his soul forever.’
    ‘And his fuckin’ collection plate,’ Pooh spits.
     
     
    ‘What’s that lump under your blouse?’ Le Loup says one day when I’m wearing an unusually tight silken top.
    ‘It’s a cross, isn’t it? She always