The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

  “You want to know what they did with the children?” Laura Lipp asked me. “That old lady and her sicko husband at Magic Mountain?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You won’t believe it,” she continued. “It’s inhuman. They—”

  An announcement exploded through the bus PA. We were to remain seated. The bus was stopping to let off the three men caged separately near the front. Guns were pointed at them and at us while the transfer took place.

  “Crazy mothers up here,” Conan said. “I was in six months.”

  The woman in front of Conan got excited, as in mad. “You a dude for real? For real? Shit. Officer! Officer!”

  “Settle down,” Conan said. “I’m in the right place. I mean, the wrong place. Nothing right about it. But they fixed my file. They were confused and put me with the caballeros downtown, at Men’s Central. It was an honest oops.”

  There was laughing and snickering. “They put you in the men’s joint? They thought you was an actual dude?”

  “Not just county. I was at Wasco State Prison.”

  Disbelief rippled down the aisle. Conan did not challenge it. Later, I learned the details. Conan really was at a men’s prison, at least in receiving. He truly did seem like a man, and that was how I thought of him from the moment I met him.

  * * *

  I regret the Mars Room, and Kennedy, but there are other things you might want me to regret or expect me to that I don’t.

  The years I spent getting high and reading library books I do not regret. It wasn’t a bad life, even if I would probably never go back. I had an income from stripping and could afford to buy what I wanted, which was drugs, and if you have never tried heroin I have news for you: It makes you feel good about yourself, especially in the beginning. It makes you feel good about other people. You want to give the whole world a break, a time-out, a tender regard. There is nothing so soothing. My first dabble in it was morphine, a pill that someone else melted in a spoon and helped me inject, a guy named Bill and I hadn’t thought much about him or what the drug would be like but the careful way he tied off my arm and found my vein, the way the needle went in, so thin and delicate, the whole experience of this random guy I never saw again shooting me up in an abandoned house was exactly what a young girl dreams love can be.

  “This is a pins and needles high,” he’d said. “It’ll grab you by the back of the neck.” It grabbed me by the back of the head with its firm clench, rubber tongs, then warmth spread down through me. I broke into the most relaxing sweat of my life. I fell in love. I don’t miss those years. I’m just telling you.

  * * *

  Back on the highway, I turned from Laura Lipp as far as I could and closed my eyes. Five minutes into my attempt to sleep, she started whispering to me again.

  “This whole situation is because I’m bipolar,” she said. “In case you were wondering. You probably are. It’s chromosomal.”

  Or maybe she said, “chromosomical.” Because that was the kind of people I had to be around now. People who thought everything was a scientifical conspiracy. I didn’t meet a single person in county who wasn’t convinced that AIDS had been invented by the government to wipe out gays and addicts. It got difficult to argue with. In a sense it seemed true.

  The woman who had been hissing and shushing everyone turned around as best she could in her restraints. She had a faded and blurry teardrop tattoo and pencil-drawn eyebrows. Her eyes glowed a grayish green like this was a zombie film and not a bus ride to a California state prison.

  “She’s a baby killer,” she called to us, or maybe to me. She was talking about Laura Lipp.

  A transport cop came down the aisle.

  “Well if it ain’t Fernandez,” he said. “I hear one more word from you I’ll put you in a cage.”

  Fernandez didn’t look at him or respond. He returned to his seat.

  Laura made a face, a slight smile, as if something mildly embarrassing but not worth acknowledging had just taken place, like someone had accidentally passed gas, definitely not her.

  “Dang, you killed your child?” Conan said. “That is fucked-up. Hope I don’t have to room with you.”

  “I’d guess you’ve got bigger problems than a roommate assignment,” Laura Lipp said to Conan. “You look like the kind of person who spends a lot of time in jails and prisons.”

  “Why you say that? ’Cause I’m black? At least I fit in here. You look like a Manson chick. No offense. I got nothing to hide. Here’s my file: counter-rehabilitatable. ODD. That’s oppositional defiant disorder. I’m criminal-minded, narcissistic, recidivistical, and uncooperative. I’m also a prunaholic and horndog.”

  * * *

  People had quieted into themselves, and eventually some fell asleep. Conan was snoring like a bulldozer.

  “We have some real characters going up valley with us,” Laura whispered to me. “And listen, I’m no Manson girl and I know what I’m talking about. I know the difference. We had Susan Atkins and Leslie Van Houten at CIW. They both had the scar in between their eyes. Susan put special cream on hers but nothing hid it. She was an uppity snob with an X carved in her forehead. Had fine things in her cell. Fancy perfumes. A touch lamp. I felt bad when one of the girls got a guard to pop Susan’s cell and they took all her nice stuff. That’s what I thought about when I heard she died. Missing part of her brain and paralyzed and they still wouldn’t let her go home. When I heard about it, I thought of them popping her cell at CIW, taking her touch lamp and her lotions. Leslie Van Houten is more of what you’d call a convict. Some people think that’s a term of respect. But not to me. It’s nothing but groupthink. She’ll die in prison just like Susan Atkins did. They aren’t letting her out. Not until Folgers coffee isn’t brewed anymore, and that’s as good as never because what are people going to drink in the morning? One of the victims was an heiress of Folgers, see, and they don’t want Leslie out and they are individuals of high influence. As long as there is Folgers, Leslie will die in prison.”

  * * *

  Her mother had an affair with Hitler. The mother of the German film star. The one after whom I’m named. Her mother had an affair with Hitler, but back then, from what I understand, who didn’t?

  * * *

  “How come you don’t speak German?” Jimmy Darling once asked me.

  The idea of my mother teaching me German had never occurred to me. The idea of her teaching me anything was difficult to imagine.

  “She was too depressed to bother.” Some parents raise their children in silence. Silence, irritation, disapproval. How could I learn German from that? I’d have to learn it from phrases like “Did you take money from my wallet, you little shit?” Or “Don’t wake me up when you come in.”

  Jimmy said he only knew one German word.

  “Is it angst?”

  “Begierden. It means lust, desire. Their word for desire is beer garden. Makes sense.”

  * * *

  I tried to sleep, but the only position for sleeping that the restraints allowed was chin to chest. Aches pulsed up my arms from the handcuffs, which were attached to the belly chain around my middle, immobilizing my hands at my sides. The air-conditioning on the bus felt like it was set to fifty-five degrees. I was freezing and uncomfortable and this was only Ventura County. We had six hours to go. I started thinking about those kids forced into wigs in a bathroom stall at Magic Mountain, outfitted briskly with sunglasses and different clothes. They would end up unrecognizable not only in their new disguises, but in their new lives. They would be strangers, different children, ones who were tainted and ruined by their own kidnapping, long before they ever got used for whatever evil purpose was their new and abrupt destiny. I saw the kids in their wigs and the scattered crowd of amusement park–goers who would not know to help a lost and stolen child. I saw Jackson, as if he was being torn from me by an old woman knitting on a bench, and there was nothing I could do but watch the pictures of his little freckled face in my mind, pictures that floated and
pulsed and would not fade or disperse.

  * * *

  Jackson is with my mother. It’s the single grace in my life that he has her, even if I don’t like her much myself. She is not a psycho-grandmother who knits on a bench. She’s a gruff and chain-smoking German woman who gets by on marriage, divorce, and remarriage. She has a glacial manner with me, but she is loving enough to Jackson. We had a falling-out, years ago, but when I was arrested, she took Jackson. He was five then. He’s seven now. During the two and a half years I was in county, as my case made its way through the courts, she brought him to see me as often as she could.

  If there had been money for a private attorney, I would have hired one. My mother offered to mortgage her condominium, a studio apartment on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, but because she had already mortgaged it twice, she owed more than it was worth. The old famous stripper Carol Doda, whose neon nipples had blinked red above Broadway when I was a child, lived in my mother’s building. I used to see her in the hallway, struggling with grocery bags and a yapping dog, when I went to visit my mother. She didn’t look so good, but neither did my mother, who was unemployed and suffering from a painkiller addiction.

  For a brief period there was some charitable possibility for my legal aid, a gentleman friend of my mother’s, a man named Bob who drove a burgundy Jaguar, wore plaid suits, and drank premixed Manhattans. Bob, she said, was going to pay for a lawyer. But then Bob vanished; he literally disappeared. His body was later found under a log in the Russian River. My mother doesn’t have good connections; her connections are often dubious. I was assigned a public defender. We were all hopeful things would go differently. They did not go differently. They went this way.

  * * *

  Our bus groaned along in the right lane with the tractor-trailers. We were passing Castaic, the last stop before the Grapevine. I’d once been in a bar in Castaic with Jimmy Darling, after I’d fled to Los Angeles to get away from Kurt Kennedy, whose victim I was at that time. Jimmy Darling had moved down to Valencia to teach at an art school. He sublet a place on a ranch not far from Castaic.

  The things you aren’t allowed to say: I am still Kurt Kennedy’s victim, even though he’s dead.

  I knew this area, and the Grapevine, too, which was windy and empty and demanding, a test you passed to get to Northern California. In our closeness to the scumbly land beyond the meshed window, I longed for reality to twist itself like a bag and tear a hole from the twisting, rupture the bag and let me out, release me into that no-man’s-land.

  As if she could read my thoughts, Laura Lipp said, “I personally feel safer in here, with what all goes on out there. Sick, creepy, disturbing stuff, you can’t make it up.”

  I looked out the window and saw nothing but nature’s carpet of rocks and shrubs darting past in an endless bumpy scroll.

  “A lot of truckers are serial killers, and they don’t get caught. They’re on the move, see. State to state. The jurisdictions don’t talk, so nobody knows. All these trucks crossing America. Some of them with bound and gagged women in the back of the cab. They’ve got those curtains, for hiding the women. The murdered ones get dumped in rest stop dumpsters, part by part. That’s how dumpsters got their name. People dump bodies. The bodies of women and girls.”

  We passed a rest area. What an earnest and beautiful concept that was. Anything I could imagine was beautiful compared to this bus and this woman sharing my seat. What I would have given to be sleeping behind the rest area vending machines, whose cold light glowed as we flew past. Every person who might incidentally pass through a rest stop was my soul mate, my ally, against Laura Lipp. But I had no one, and I was fastened to her.

  “I’m alive,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean much. I had my heart cut out with a chain saw.”

  We were on a descent and passing a runaway ramp, dropping through the mouth of the Grapevine and into the valley. I knew that exact ramp. It was a steep, loose-gravel road that went nowhere, for vehicles with failed brakes. I would never see that runaway truck ramp again and I loved it, it was a good and wholesome truck ramp, I could see that only now, how good and wholesome and dear, fragile and dear, everything was.

  “You know how they say it’s a thing you don’t have, that you offer to someone who doesn’t want it?”

  I gave her a hostile look.

  “I’m talking about love,” she said. “Like, let’s say I go out there and pick up a small stone. I hold it up and say to someone, here, this stone is me. Take it. And they think, I don’t want that stone. Or they say thanks, and put it in their pocket or maybe into a rock crusher, and they don’t care that the stone is me, because it isn’t actually me, I just decided it was me. I let myself get crushed. See what I mean?”

  I said nothing but she kept going. She was going to talk all the way to Stanville.

  “In prison at least you know what’s going to happen. I mean, you don’t actually know. It’s unpredictable. But in a boring way. It’s not like something tragic and awful can happen. I mean, sure it can. Of course it can. But you can’t lose everything in prison, since that’s already taken place.”

  * * *

  The bartender in Castaic had flirted with Jimmy Darling the night we’d ended up there. It was one of the liabilities of dating him that I had to watch bimbos try to communicate a tacit message to Jimmy Darling of let’s-lose-this-bitch when he and I were together.

  He didn’t lose me, though. Not until later, when I was in jail and called him, and I knew by the sound of his voice that it was over, but I defensively didn’t care. I needed to focus on what was happening to me. He asked how I was with polite formality. I said, “You just collected charges from an inmate at a Los Angeles County correctional facility, how the fuck do you think I am?”

  The era of me, the phase of me, really, had ended, for me and for him both. He wrote me once but his entire letter was about the fact that it was almost baseball season, and did not acknowledge that I was facing a life sentence.

  You might have done the same thing in Jimmy Darling’s shoes. Not written a letter about baseball, but cut ties with someone doomed. Any sensible person would give up on a me who was going to be sent away permanently, if they were just a boyfriend or lover, if it was meant to be something fun. It’s not fun anymore if it involves prison. But maybe it was me who pushed him away.

  * * *

  Jimmy Darling grew up in Detroit. His father worked at General Motors. As a teenager Jimmy Darling worked at an auto glass company. He told me that the first time he smelled the adhesive that was used to glue auto glass in place, he realized he had dreamed of that very smell, the smell of that particular glue, and that it was his destiny to work replacing auto glass. By Jimmy’s luck, he had multiple destinies. After dropping out of college, he began making films about the rust belt. His background was the gimmick, a shtick, he was Mr. Blue Collar Filmmaker. I teased him about it, but I also found his romantic attachment to Detroit touching. One of his films was his hand turning over every card in a General Motors deck that his father was given for his retirement after forty years on the assembly line. The company thanked his father for decades of loyalty and backbreaking labor with a pack of playing cards. “You know what’s in the GM headquarters on Cadillac Place now,” Jimmy Darling said. “A lottery disbursement office.” Jimmy stood outside it all day, waiting to film a winner walking inside to collect. None arrived.

  I met Jimmy Darling through one of his students, who I was sleeping with at the time. A kid named Ajax who was young and broke and lived south of Market in a geodesic dome on a warehouse roof. Ajax was a janitor at the Mars Room. People teased me about sleeping with the kid whose job was to empty trash cans filled with used condoms, but I was unbothered. Also his name is scouring powder, they kept saying, but he told me it was Greek. These women and their bogus standards, that you sell your ass but don’t date janitors. Still, Ajax was young and annoying; he’d come over with gifts for me but they were useless eccentric gestures, like a broken va
cuum cleaner off the street, and once he showed up tripping on acid and speaking in an Irish accent and when I told him to stop, he said he couldn’t. One night he took me to an art school party and introduced me to Jimmy and that was it. I left the party with Jimmy, who was handsomer and didn’t get on my nerves.

  * * *

  “How come you didn’t go to college?” Jimmy Darling once asked me. He thought I was smart, but he had that educated person’s naive way of presuming the reason some other people didn’t go to college must be because they simply could not hack it.

  “I was too depressed.”

  “That’s what you said about why your mother didn’t teach you German.”

  “Which doesn’t make it less true. You think it’s a surprise a girl who works at a strip club is clever? Every stripper I know is clever. Some are practically geniuses. Maybe you can go around with your little camera and ask each one why she didn’t go to college.”

  When I was growing up, they all said I had potential. I was told that, by teachers and other adults. If it was true, I didn’t do anything with it. I did manage not to end up like Eva, and that felt like an accomplishment, not to be hooking on Eddy and Jones at seven in the morning on a weekday. I quit drugs when I found out I was pregnant, but I don’t consider it an achievement, it was more that I averted disaster. I worked at the Mars Room, giving lap dances. It’s not even the best of the strip clubs in San Francisco. There isn’t any status in it unless you’d be impressed to know that the Mars Room is not a middling or mediocre strip club but definitely the worst and most notorious, the very seediest and most circuslike place there is. Maybe I had a taste for it the way Jimmy had a taste for me. It was something extreme, and in that, special and amusing, and some of the women really were geniuses.