The Mars Room_A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  For years, whenever I thought of that image on the cover of Killed Twice I felt sick. Now I can see that what I experienced was normal. You learn when you’re young that evil exists. You absorb the knowledge of it. When this happens for the first time, it does not go down easy. It goes down like a horse pill.

  * * *

  At age ten I fell under the spell of an older girl named Tyra. She had glassy eyes and olive skin and a husky, tough-girl voice. The night I met her I was in someone’s car, driving around drinking Löwenbräu lights. Lowie lights, green bottles with a baby-blue label. We picked up Tyra on Noriega, at a house that was an informal foster home for girls. The man who ran it, Russ, forced himself on the girls at night, unpredictably but predictably. If you stayed there, sooner or later you were going to be visited at night by Russ, who was old, and muscular, and mean. The girls complained about being raped by him as if it were a form of strictness, or rent. They were willing to endure it because they didn’t have other options. The rest of us did nothing about it because Russ bought us liquor and what were we to do, call the police? One of them was known for taking girls out to Point Lobos instead of to the police station on Taraval.

  Tyra called shotgun in a menacing way and got in the front, put her feet on the dash. She was already buzzed, she told us, slurring her words in a way I found glamorous. She wore diamond earrings. They flashed from her little-girl ears as she drained a Lowie light and pitched her empty from the window of the car. Maybe Tyra’s earrings were fakes. It didn’t matter. Their effect was the same. For me she had the magic.

  That year I’d had a chance to know a nice girl, with two parents, middle-class. She came to my house for a sleepover. The next week at school she told everyone that at my house we ate Hostess pies for dinner and threw the wrappers under the bed. I have no memory of that. I’m not saying it isn’t true. My mom let me eat what I wanted for dinner. She was usually with whatever guy she was seeing, someone who didn’t like children, so they’d be shut up in her bedroom with the door locked. We had an account at the corner market and I’d go down there and get goodies, chips, liters of soda, whatever I wanted. I didn’t know to pretend to live some other way to make an impression on another kid. It made me sad what this girl said about me and about our house. I was sad even as I stuck a pin in her ass as she got off the 6 Parnassus after school. Stood by the back doors, and as she exited I jabbed her, right through her pants. Everyone did that. We stole the pins from home economics. It was normal, but it made tears roll down your face if someone did it to you.

  * * *

  That diamonds are supposedly forever was something Jimmy Darling joked about. Every mineral here on earth is forever, he said. But they make it seem like diamonds are especially forever, in order to sell them, and it works.

  A few days later Tyra called me and we made a plan to go to Golden Gate Park on a Sunday, to the bridge, where people roller-skate and hang out. Tyra came to my house, since I lived a few blocks from the bridge.

  She said, “I need to beat this bitch’s face in.”

  I said okay and we went to the park.

  The girl whose face Tyra had an appointment to beat in was already there, with two older brothers. They were not from the Sunset; later I learned they lived in the Haight. The brothers were adults, both mechanics at a garage on Cole Street. The girl, Tyra’s opponent, was tall and delicate-looking with a shiny black ponytail. She was wearing pink shorts and a shirt that said WHATEVER. Her lips were tinged with the bluish effect of opalescent gloss. Tyra was athletic and tough. Nobody wanted to fight her. She and this leggy girl with the ponytail took off their skates. They fought on the grass, in their socks. The socks softened nothing.

  Tyra threw a fierce kick, but the other girl grabbed her foot, and Tyra lost her balance and was on the ground. The girl jumped on top, pinned Tyra’s chest with her own knees, and began punching Tyra in the face, alternating fists, left right left, like she was kneading dough, punching it down to size. Punching it and punching it, dough that was a face. Her brothers shouted encouragement. They were rooting for her, but if she were losing, they would not have stepped in, I knew. They were there as believers in the honesty of a fight and the pride of fighting well. She punched and punched. Her arms seemed too skinny to carry any force on contact, fist to face, but eventually they produced their damage. It never occurred to me to jump in. I watched Tyra get pummeled.

  When the girl felt she had sufficiently made her point, she let up. She stood, retightening her ponytail, and pulled her shorts out of her ass crack. Tyra sat up, trying to wipe away her tears. I went to help her. Her hair was tangled. She was covered in dead grass clippings.

  “I got a good lick in,” she said. “Did you see how I kicked that bitch in the chest?”

  Both of her eyes were swollen almost closed. Her cheeks had turned to hard shiny lumps. She had an open gash on her chin from the girl’s ring. “I got a pretty good lick in,” she repeated.

  It was the best way to look at things, but the truth was she had been brutally beaten up, and by a prissy girl in a WHATEVER T-shirt, an unlikely winner who was not an unlikely winner, it became clear the moment the fight began. The winner was Eva.

  * * *

  I did not become friends with Eva that day, but later. Whenever that later was, a year maybe, the memory of her and her punches was undiminished. I knew something about her. Most girls talk a big game, and then they scratch and pull hair, or don’t show up for the fight.

  I suppose you could say I traded Tyra for Eva, like I traded Ajax for Jimmy Darling. But in both cases, the first was there to lead me to the second. Life allows for assessments, and reassessments. And anyhow, who wants to be stuck with a loser?

  Eva was a professional. One of those girls who always had a lighter, bottle opener, graffiti markers, flask, amyl nitrate, Buck knife, even her own sensor remover—the device that department store clerks used to remove theft prevention clips from new clothes. She stole it. The rest of us ripped out the sensors forcibly before leaving the store with our stolen loot. A sensor in a dressing room was a giveaway, so we took them with us, crammed up under our armpits, which muffled the sensor, deadened it to the detection alarm. We were not kleptomaniacs. That’s a term for rich people who steal by compulsion. We were finding innovative ways to acquire makeup and perfume and purses and clothes—all the normal things a girl would be expected to have and want, and which we could not afford.

  All my clothes had holes in them from where the sensors had been attached. Eva removed them from her stolen clothes properly, with her magic device. Once, she walked right into I. Magnin, clipped the wires from a rabbit fur coat with wire cutters, put it on, and ran for it. The wires fit through the arms of the fur and leather jackets, with large hoops dangling from the ends of the sleeves like giant handcuffs.

  Eva went through a tomboy phase and stopped wearing fur jackets. She dressed like one of the Sunset guys, Ben Davis pants with a janitorial key ring dangling from a belt loop. The more keys on the ring, the better. It didn’t matter if they opened anything, except beer bottles. She wore a black Derby jacket, with the gold paisley padding on the inside, the trademark shoulder-to-shoulder seams. Like the boys, she completed that look with steel-toed boots—for kicking peoples’ heads in should the need arise.

  One night I encountered a group of guys sitting in the dark drinking 151 in Big Rec, older people I had never seen, from Crocker Amazon, which was something like enemy territory. They wanted to show me Polaroids of Eva. Is this your friend? In the photos, Eva was passed-out drunk and stripped of her tough-kid uniform, with a baseball bat between her naked thighs.

  Eva fist-fought guys and won. She one-upped everyone with drugs and drink. These boys with their photos, they knew what it meant to have done that to Eva and they wanted me to see.

  I never told her, and even thinking of what happened later, Eva a crack addict in the Tenderloin, the Polaroid photos with the bat was still the worst thing that anyone had done to her.
She did plenty to herself, but that is different.

  * * *

  Some kids have a powerful drive to take drugs. They can’t help it. Eva was like that. The first time she stole Valium from her mom, we each took one and went to West Portal. I don’t feel anything, do you? she asked. No, not yet. Let’s take another. I still don’t feel anything, do you? A little. Let’s take another. Are you high yet? I’m not sure. We took the whole bottle and woke up several hours later with our faces warm from the surface of a sit-down Ms. Pac-Man video game at Round Table Pizza. We both stumbled home and slept for three days.

  Not long after, I was at the bus stop on Laguna Honda, across from Forest Hill Station. It was midnight and the buses were on their late-night schedule, once an hour. There was one other person waiting, a man who offered me a cigarette and light, and then asked if I knew where he could get any pills. He was probably young—in his twenties, but at the time I didn’t think about his age. Anyone over eighteen seemed old to me. He knew how to talk to young girls, to flatter. I boasted that I could sell him some Valium. It was a lie. I was a twelve-year-old whose friend had lucked into her mother’s temporary supply. Still, I said I could probably get him some. Can I buy them now? he asked. I said I had to call my friend. He wanted to give me his phone number so I could call him after I spoke with her. Neither of us had pen or paper, and I secretly doubted I could get more Valium, but I was trapped in my lie. He took off his shoe. They were old-men-type shoes, suit shoes, and he used the black heel to write the seven digits of his phone number on the rough stucco of the retaining wall next to the bus shelter. I watched as this man, sweat-soaked on that cold night, scratched out his number on the wall with the heel of his shoe, so that I could call him when I got what he needed, and I thought, what have I done.

  * * *

  I usually wasn’t planning on getting wrecked until Eva knocked. One morning she arrived with two hits of something called Delcourt, which was acid and PCP mixed together. We each took one. That was in the summer after sixth grade, one more dull and foggy day with nothing to fill it, maybe play video games at Café Roma on Irving, get a piroshki, which was a donut stuffed with ground beef and American cheese, drink dirty socks ale called Mickey’s in the park, talk to the clerk at the comic book store, who told me what blue balls was (I was probably blue-balling him by asking).

  To make that day different, we dropped the acid/PCP mix and walked the streetcar tracks all the way to Ocean Beach. We stopped at 7-Eleven on Judah. I bought a Butterfinger and took a bite and the candy bar turned to sand in my mouth. I thought, I hate my life. Later, we sat in a van in someone’s garage listening to Slayer, and Eva threw her head back and closed her eyes and I looked at her face and her long black hair in profile and was convinced the devil was in charge of the future, mine and Eva’s, and that nothing could save us.

  That was before people started going to Anton LaVey’s house, where everyone worshipped Satan together as a group. It was in the Richmond, on the other side of Golden Gate Park. I never went there, but kids I knew did. You had to be from a conventional background to go full tilt into devil worship. My mother was an atheist and would have teased me if she thought I’d gone into religion, even a satanic one. The Norse, my future woodshop partner in Stanville, would have loved to get an invite to Anton LaVey’s house. But she is in prison, and Anton LaVey’s house is in the past. Anton LaVey is dead and his black house is gone, too, replaced by condominiums.

  The house that interested me more belonged to a group of people called the Scummerz. Eva took me there. It was on Masonic, near Haight. A typical rambling old Victorian building with the bubble glass bay windows that rattled as diesel buses passed by going down the hill. The 43, headed toward Sears on Geary, where we would lie down on the beds in the furniture department when we were tired. I didn’t know anything about the Scummerz, who they really were or how long they had been in that large apartment. Inside, it had never stopped being 1969. Every room was painted with tennis balls. The balls were soaked in different-colored paints and then ricocheted around the rooms—walls, floor, ceiling, a spaghetti-strands riot of color that gave the place a sameness that was not at all calming. It was the scribbling of a brain in chaos projected up over the walls, a kind of ambient filth. Many non-family-related people lived at the Scummerz, all of whom were part of a family business selling purple microdot. A huge woman sat in the kitchen parceling the microdot with a butcher knife into glassine baggies. The microdot did not go to waste. She apportioned the bags, and if you were there to buy, you sat at the table and when she was ready she looked up at you and took your money and gave you your bag. The first time I went there, a shirtless boy with a sleepwalker’s vacated look stood behind her at the stove boiling water for macaroni and cheese. He was thin and lithe with hair as blondly colorless as lice egg casings. He had a concave area in the center of his chest, a divot that made him even more ghostlike as he waited for his water to boil. The sound his dry noodles made sliding from their box gave me a bad feeling. He opened the cheese and powdered it into the pot. He ate from the spoon he used to stir the noodles. He was barefoot, and his pants needed a belt. He looked about ten years old.

  * * *

  Who were those people, the Scummerz, and where did they go? A lot of history is not known. A lot of worlds have existed that you can’t look up online or in any book, even as you think you have the freedom to find things out that I cannot, since I don’t have access to the internet. Google the Scummerz and you’ll find nothing, no trace, but they existed.

  And if someone did remember them, someone besides me, that person’s account would make them less real, because my memory of them would have to be corrected by facts, which are never considerate of what makes an impression, what stays in the mind after all these years, the very real images that grip me from the erased past and won’t let go.

  * * *

  The bar on the upper Haight where Eva’s mother spent her time was called the Pall Mall. They let kids in the bar and people bought us Love Burgers, which were just hamburgers, except you could get curry on the bun if you wanted it and that part maybe was the love, a sauce that stained your hands a bright pollen yellow. Outside the bar, you gave what you weren’t going to finish to Leatherman.

  Remember Leatherman? A lot of people from the Haight would remember Leatherman if you asked them about him. Leatherman wore black leather pants, a leather shirt, a black leather hat. His bare feet were sooted black from the streets. He stood outside the Pall Mall, or wandered the park’s eastern edge, along Stanyan, a shoreline he sifted. It was littered not with shells but trash from the McDonald’s franchise across the street. Leatherman was rumored never to remove his leather clothes. He had not taken them off in decades. Once, as Eva’s mother stood with us outside the Pall Mall, we watched Leatherman scrounge in a garbage can. Eva’s mother said, “You girls know what’ll happen if he takes those clothes off, don’t you?”

  We shook our heads.

  “He’ll die.”

  She exhaled smoke and flicked her cigarette into the street in a way I later copied, off thumb and pointer finger, a tiny gesture that made me feel tough.

  Leatherman picked up her cigarette butt and enjoyed the last few puffs that Eva’s mom was rich enough to part with.

  * * *

  Leatherman was not to be confused with Liverman, but no one who knows about both would do that.

  Liverman rode the 71 Noriega. I saw him only once and knew immediately that this was the infamous person I’d heard about. A hard plastic form that looked somewhat like meat, like liver, was melted or molded to his head. It was the permanence of the thing, affixed to him, part of him, that made him a brutal sight. A thick, shiny slab attached where hair might have been, or a scalp. Someone said he was a Korean War vet. A veteran of some trauma, which had resulted in the gluing of this object to the top of his head.

  The Shuffler was another occasional sighting. That was on the other side of the park, near the Baskin-Robbi
ns on Geary where I worked in high school. The Shuffler walked at a normal gait and then suddenly his legs stirred into quick action, like he was a machine designed to buff the sidewalk, buff it with shoe soles. He slid and shuffled all the way down the block, paused, then went back to regular walking. It could have been a kind of disorder, a nerve thing, but it seemed like destiny. He was the man who broke into a shuffle on Geary, and then broke out of one.

  Worked is a bit strong. We served ice cream and didn’t punch in all the sales on the register, took the stolen profits at the end of the night when we tallied our drawer. We hit the nitrous oxide tank that was used to fill whipped cream canisters. Mostly girls were employed there, and we let boys skateboard around inside the store, go behind the counter, help themselves to the nitrous tank, and scoop their own ice cream. We slopped water on the floor at the end of the night, to fulfill our duty to mop, after moving the clock forward, to close early. Place was run by kids, unsupervised, because the evening manager, a Scottish alcoholic named Helen, left early every day, after making the ice cream cakes, which was a specialized skill we did not possess.

  * * *

  The man in the bus shelter on Laguna Honda who wanted the Valium, it was his pushy optimism that alarmed me, the insistence of writing down his telephone number on a wall with the heel of his shoe. He needed his drugs and was ready to do business with a twelve-year-old girl. He needed to believe her, when it was plain she was probably lying.

  * * *

  Eva’s mom was white. Her dad was Filipino. Her mom was a heroin addict. Her dad was strict. He worked for a security service that had him posted at the entrance of the gigantic old Lucky Lager brewery in Bayview, which had closed down. We went there once, to get money from him. He crumpled it up and threw it at Eva and went inside the gates. A decade later, I was with some guys who broke into that place. My friends stole a bunch of equipment. One of them later returned with a rented backhoe, to take machinery that was too heavy to lift. Eva’s dad was retired by then. Eva was on the streets. Her mother was dead of an overdose. The Pall Mall was closed. The Scummerz were gone. The Sunset was transformed. The grocery store on Irving was gourmet. A girl I was friends with in high school worked the meat counter. People who looked like frat boys crowded the streets, wearing college sweatshirts and sipping health drinks out of giant Styrofoam containers. They even moved the old post office, which felt like a grievous insult. Everything got converted by money and I started to miss these grim places that offered no happy memories, but I wanted them back. The bars with sticky floors and French tickler dispensers in the bathrooms, like the Golden Grommet, which we called the Golden Vomit, for the old Irish men who slept in its doorway, waiting for it to open at seven a.m. I missed the lonely, unreliable streetcars, which now ding-dinged every eight minutes and were full of people in expensive shoes with careful hair.