Bad, bad LeRoy's book

>> Sarah is a dark portrait of transvestite child prostitution

by JULIET WATERS

If I hadn't read an interview with 20-year-old J.T. LeRoy in which he apologized to his mother for using her name in his debut novel, Sarah, I never would have guessed it was autobiographical. The only hint that there might be a link between author and narrator is a reference in the first chapter to that old Jim Croce classic "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown."

It's not that Sarah isn't realistic. It's horrifyingly realistic. You wouldn't want to wish on anyone the life of a 12-year-old cross-dressing (boy as girl) truck-stop prostitute who's learned everything he knows about giving a blowjob from his mother. (Here's a good tip: spray your hand with Binaca to distract yourself from a bad hygiene situation.) The dialect of West-Virginian hookers is eerily perfect ("You're wetter than deer guts on a stick shift"). And the parade of white-trash characters is so rough, LeRoy makes Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina look like a Julia Roberts vehicle.

Still, it's not the kind of realism that you usually find in the "I was a teenage prostitute" genre. The word "bleak" is usually applied to that kind of novel and usually meant as a compliment. For all the brutality one encounters in Sarah, the language is so rich, the humour so genuine and the plotline so quirky that "bleak" isn't quite right. Without sentimentalizing his world, LeRoy manages to maintain a pubescent innocence along with the perversity. And manages, somehow, to make a violent, sordid tale often feel like an Appalachian Wizard of Oz. The best word to describe Sarah is dark.

Cherry Vanilla is the professional name chosen for our narrator by his pimp, Glad. But Cherry decides early on he'd rather go by his mother's name, Sarah. His clientele is a steady stream of desperate pedophiles and "panty-wearing" truckers whom Sarah enthralls with his long blond curls and pre-pubescent figure.

Being dressed up as a girl is nothing new to him. Sarah Sr., a seasoned "lizard"--as hookers are called here--used to dress him up in girls' clothing all the time when they went on shoplifting sprees. Not only do girls have more places to hide stuff than boys, his mother teaches him, but a pretty, virginal-looking girl can get just about anything she wants in the world. One of Sarah Sr.'s favourite tricks is to carry around a packet of Burger King ketchup in her bra so that when the time comes, she can convince her clients that her wide-eyed innocent look is no act.

Despite their closeness, however, Sarah Sr. is still young enough to think of her own son as competition and an undercurrent of jealousy starts to become a danger. After a nasty mother-son/daughter fight, Sarah Jr. hits the road, not to escape prostitution, but to expand his range. Glad, who is like a Gilda-the-good-witch of pimps, is holding him back, trying to keep him too innocent for too long.

But his new truck-stop pimp, Le Loup, keeps him even more apart from the action he craves. Le Loup is way more violent and creepy than Glad, but he realizes that Sarah Jr.'s magic over truckers stems from an aura of virginal saintliness that the pimp doesn't want to mess with. What he doesn't realize, though, is that Sarah is a boy. And when his gender is discovered, the plot becomes more Boys Don't Cry than Tootsie.

The bizarre fairy tale soon becomes a more predictable nightmare. Still, the masterful tone and astonishingly sophisticated writing in this novel redeem a lot of the awkwardness. There's no question at the end of this book that LeRoy is more than just a bad kid with a sad tale. He's a writer to watch.

Sarah by J.T. LeRoy. Bloomsbury, hc, 168pp, $31