The Mars Room_A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  Cop walks into a brothel.

  He could never remember that one, either.

  There was Las Brisas on a rangily barren stretch of Sunset Boulevard near Dodger Stadium, where cars went seventy miles an hour. You could have sex with the bartender in the stockroom of Las Brisas, and she was gentle and maternal-sensual. She smelled of beef tamales and Fabuloso, a floral-oily fragrance that was not unlike the smell of Cell Block 64, come to think of it. His visits to Las Brisas started out with tight embraces and groin-to-groin hugs with various ladies who hookered at that establishment, but the visits always finished in the stockroom with the bartender who smelled like Cell Block 64. She squirted it in her hand and oiled Doc and herself and then they did the slippery in-out standing up, Doc pinning her against a stack of cases of canned beer. Generous lady always acted happy, like Doc’s orgasm was her pride, he was her big baby boy bringing her a dozen long-stemmed red roses by coming all over the insides of her thighs.

  Doc takes a deep breath but quietly because the door has popped: it will remain unlocked for the next ten minutes, on automatic timer. His roommate returns, sits down on the bunk below.

  Red roses. There were red roses going full bloom outside the gates of Old Folsom, where he had served time first. He saw them through the closed and secure prison bus window, flowers that were heavy and oversized, and he was sure he was smelling them, never mind the smell on the bus of bleach and body rank. He smelled those big lazy-headed roses. They were the scent of someone else’s freedom. The free world of elderly women in cat-eye glasses and cardigan sweaters. Women with upright pianos they do not play and photos of grandchildren who do not visit. Deceased husbands with pre–civil rights buzz cuts. The big, creased, flabby ears of retirees. Men with names like Floyd. Or Lloyd. The dead husbands of these elderly women with their needlepointed freedom and their perfect gatepost roses. Women who shook their heads as if saying no all the time, a tic of old age, or medication. Women who were permanently disapproving, like the ones in his own family, who did not love him and had given him to foster care.

  They didn’t have Sensitive Needs back then, when he first arrived at Old Folsom. People had needs, sure, but there was no unit dedicated to protective custodizing a prison population of rats and cops. He didn’t wander out much. He’d gotten a threatening letter that was obviously somehow from Betty LaFrance even though she could not write to him directly, a letter in psycho blocky print from one Fred Fudge announcing that inmates on his yard would soon know he was nothing but a dirty cop. That was her thing. Come fuck me, dirty cop. And he’d gone for it. He was naive. It was her big mouth that had gotten them busted, and he was sure she was still talking to whoever would listen. He lay in his cell and dreamed of escape. The walls of Old Folsom were giant granite molars extending down into the ground farther than they rose, built by earlier convicts whom Doc resented and envied: their labor locked him in, and also, they’d been given something to do, an actual project. The American River was the rear boundary of the prison, boiling rapids with a guard tower perched over them.

  “Folsom Prison Blues” had been a popular song when Doc was young. Doc was ambivalent on account of Vic, his foster dad, who loved it and was a sadist toward young Doc. Later, as a grown-up with a shotgun bolted to the floor of his squad car, a man with weapons and badges who could no longer be Vic’s punching bag, Doc heard that song again. It was on the jukebox at Toppers, and the part about shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die was a truth Doc knew better than most, because he had quite sincerely shot people for that exact reason, although never in Reno.

  Johnny Cash was a cokehead, which was another thing he and Doc had in common. The singer had the creases in his face, that gaunt strained look of exertion like you see on a track athlete clearing the hurdle but it’s from freebasing all night.

  Vic’s only addiction had been beating and raping little Doc. He was otherwise an insurance adjuster who smoked exactly six cigarettes per day and occasionally had a glass of Lancers. Vic maniacally policed his yard to be sure Doc raked every last leaf.

  As a child Doc had seen Johnny Cash on television performing the famous concert in the cafeteria at Old Folsom, the very cafeteria where Doc later ate his meals when he had the courage to go to chow without fear of being stabbed. There was a riot in the cafeteria the second month Doc was at Old Folsom. Someone didn’t get a big enough slice of cake and two hundred sixty men exploded in rage. The guards rushed out of the cafeteria, outnumbered. Doc went under one of the spider tables and watched the floor as utensils, blood, and bits of food hit it. The metal meal trays were used as head-smashing instruments, practically made for that. The cops came back but on the perimeter, the narrow fenced outer lane, separated from the cafeteria by a shatterproof wall. They were suited up in riot gear. They threw a tear gas canister into the cafeteria. Someone, a prisoner, caught the tear gas canister and threw it back out. It started to spew, in that small lane populated by cops bulked up in riot gear, squeaking and pushing to get past one another and away from the gas that was choking them. The prisoners roared, even as the gas leaked over the wall back into the cafeteria and made them cry, too. Tear gas cry.

  * * *

  What Doc liked about the bartender at Las Brisas was a sense of radical acceptance she offered. Sometimes ejaculating all over someone is a way for that person to communicate to you that they take you completely and totally as you are.

  And there was the old man who sat at the bar at Las Brisas, and winked at Doc as he exited the stockroom, and no he was not a pimp, he was just an old Mexican man with a baked sundial face who liked to sip his Tecate and wink at the men and his wink said, I’m happy to see what I see and know what I know.

  Guy goes on a blind date. Doc had that one, the blind date joke.

  Guy named Richard goes on a blind date with a woman named Linda. They set it up over the phone. This Linda says, “Meet me at the soda fountain.” The guy Richard goes to the soda fountain and waits.

  A young woman walks up to him. “Are you Richard?” she asks.

  He says yes.

  She looks him over. Says, “I’m not Linda.”

  * * *

  Doc was once married to a girl from Bulgaria. A temporary arrangement was how he later thought of it. He could never really justify or understand why he’d married her. He would fuck her now, if he had the chance. He imagines lifting the Sears nightie he’d bought her long ago, and putting his dick into her and moving it around. Sex was so simple he didn’t understand why people had hang-ups about it. He liked to screw. He never had a problem with it. The girl from Bulgaria was deathly quiet while they had sex, which had creeped him out a little. She didn’t even breathe differently while he pounded into her, reaching his critical point, when he was going to explode and put his snow on her belly. Doc is thinking about that now, as his roommate shifts in his bunk below. He’s not thinking about why she was quiet. That does not concern him in the slightest. He’s recalling what it felt like to pound into her.

  It’s very sad how normal it becomes to masturbate in broad daylight with your cellmate right there in the bunk underneath you, Doc almost does not need to tell you.

  Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Doc thinks he can hear the entire cell block whacking off. A low chorus of wet rhythms. Gross, you are probably thinking. Doc would like to remind you these are human beings. Blood rushes into their penises whether or not they are incarcerated, and when a human penis is engorged and there’s no imminent possibility of sex, the male human will instinctively wrap his fist around his engorged member and pull on it in an up-and-down motion.

  Which makes him think of that joke.

  It’s the only joke he can ever completely remember. All the jokes that come and go—horse walks into a bar. How many cholos does it take to—To what? He can’t even remember the opening.

  In all his years, only one joke ever lodged reliably in his mind.

  Guy and his wife are having marital problems. They don’t sc
rew is the problem. So they go to a what do you call it, a sex therapist. The therapist says it sounds like they aren’t good at communicating their needs. The man and his wife agree that it’s embarrassing to talk about sex. The therapist suggests they build a language of physical cues, a way to let the other person know when they’re in the mood. The wife says, “Okay, honey, how about this: if you’re feeling frisky, pat me on the stomach twice. And if you’re not in the mood,” she tells him, “pat me on the stomach once.” The husband says, “That sounds good, dear. One pat, I’m saying not tonight; two pats, let’s get this party started. And here’s the code for you: if you feel like fucking, rub my dick one time. If you’re not in the mood, rub it one hundred times.”

  * * *

  The guys at Rampart referred to the Bulgarian girl as Doc’s mail-order bride, but no one from the outside ever understands about two people and why they get together. He was twenty-three years old, a rookie just out of the Police Academy. She asked him for directions on the street. He liked her dimples and how she could barely speak English. He gave her a ride where she was going and got her phone number. She was like an orphan in a huge unknown country. Doc adopted her, for a while, and she was good at cooking and cleaning. But she sulked a lot, and he realized quiet people can control you just as effectively as loud ones. They do it differently is all. He got tired of the sulking and crying and ended it.

  He was divorced at age twenty-seven and planned never to marry again. He enjoyed women and had quite a few. Didn’t love any of them. Had not loved the mail-order bride. Ten years after his divorce, he met Betty LaFrance and fell for her. Fell hard, for this woman who neither cooked nor cleaned and made a great deal of noise when he fucked her, although it might have been theater, and what was the difference? In what way would such a difference matter? The point was to get off.

  In a twisted way he misses Betty, even if he would love to have her murdered. He’s tried, but it seems impossible. She’s on death row and there is no way to get at her because women are too stupid to commit inspired acts of prison violence. In a men’s joint you can put a hit on anybody. People will do it for cup of noodle. They’ll kill for payment in bars of Irish Fucking Spring (smells good, makes a good jerk lather). But the only women who can get to Betty are the other sad psychos on death row, who probably lie around whining and crying, while the men exhibit resourceful qualities like filing a locker hinge to a chest-immolating point, or embedding a razor in a toothbrush handle so they can tomahawk someone’s face off.

  Betty, though, was a can-do broad, unlike most broads. In a way it was why he’d liked her. If he needed to put out a hit, Betty would be the one female who might be capable of such a thing, but since she was the target it wasn’t an option.

  * * *

  Betty used to nag him that his women issues were a mother issue. But what did Betty know about Doc’s mother? Doc himself knew little, since he’d only lived with his mother until age five. He remembered asking her what she did for her job because she was always bringing him to strange men’s homes and leaving him to sit on a couch by himself for what felt like small eternities. “Favors,” she’d told him. “I do favors.”

  Betty had said she wanted his baby but it turned out her uterus was broken. Or maybe his cock was broken. He means it worked fine for fucking, but she didn’t get pregnant even though he aimed his scrizzle inside her plenty of times for the sake of a possible Doc junior. (Normally, Doc would prefer to ejaculate on a body, or, ideally, a face.)

  Horse walks into a bar.

  Horse walks into a bar and the bartender says, “Why the long face?”

  Rub it one hundred times. The hilarity of that joke never dimmed for Doc, even though sometimes you wanted to do the rubbing all on your lonesome. In prison there’s little choice in whose hand beyond your own unless you want another man grabbing your cock. He once gave a hand job in here and if you’re a not-gay man and you’ve never done it, whoa are you in for a surprise. Another man’s erect cock to a straight guy feels like a root vegetable. Women are used to it and every guy knows the feel of his own hard cock, but with your own, you don’t feel it, you make it feel. When Doc touched someone else’s member, somewhat like his own, but not his own, it sent him into biofeedback brain-scramble. He pulled his hand away and did not go through with the act. It was one of those powder puff softball trannies. She was a pretty Latin honey, and he wanted her to beg and whimper and throw her head back like an actual lady might. It would be something different in a place where there is almost no variation from day to day, but then the chick had a huge erection in her pants and he doesn’t like to think about it, but sometimes he lets himself think about it, to remember not to do it again.

  The only penis he touches is his own. He is touching it now. Most men whack off most days. Then you wipe away the tears, the evidence, and everyone knows, and no one knows, and the truth is, you actually cannot hear that kind of activity on a collective or choral scale in Doc’s unit. The stroking and jerking are just something Doc assumes, which is how many kinds of knowledge function: you don’t wait for the empirical evidence. In this case you don’t want it, either. You know. You just know.

  * * *

  Betty had this way of challenging him to be a son of a bitch. She liked low-down dirty people and had a special thing for cops. She and Doc drank a lot, did a lot of cocaine. Betty liked to eat hers. He never had met anyone else who did that, ate cocaine; he himself preferred the efficiency of injecting it.

  Coked up and in love, he had stupidly assured her he was the dirtiest of cops. It was how they related. It was pillow talk. Stupid words people say to each other in the sack, about various abuses of their power, shit they got away with, people they’d killed.

  Betty, facing the death penalty, dredged forth everything Doc had ever told her. He was convicted for the killing of Betty’s original contract killer, and for another contract killing he’d been involved in years earlier, of the manager of a gentleman’s club. But there were two more people whom he’d wasted, although they had no proof on those, could not convict. One was a guy no one misses. The scumbag had just raped his own five-year-old son. A neighbor, fed up with the abuse, had called 911. Doc was the first officer to arrive on the scene, guy wasn’t even done zipping up his pants. Kid crying, bleeding from his anus. Doc told the suspect to relax, and as soon as he put his hands down Doc started firing.

  * * *

  The joke about Linda and Richard was actually Doc’s own. His story. But when he told it, people always thought he was kidding. He was in high school when that happened. It was a single experience but his whole adolescence, the life of Richard Lyn Richards, aka Doc, could be summarized in that moment of humiliation by a girl named Linda at the soda fountain on Magnolia Street in Burbank. You could fit his life story on the head of a pin. I’m not Linda.

  * * *

  Floyd and Lloyd were real people. Brothers who were married to Doc’s two great-aunts. One of Doc’s few recollections of those unfriendly old women and their brother-husbands was a joke he sometimes tried to tell. Floyd had a peach and took a bite. He turned to Lloyd and said, “This peach tastes like pussy. It’s incredible.” The juice rolled down Floyd’s chin. He handed the peach to Lloyd, who took a bite himself, but spit it in the grass. “Tastes like shit,” Lloyd said. Floyd told Lloyd he had to turn the peach around, that he’d bit the wrong side. Doc gets confused. The joke has to be told like a scene but it’s not a real scene that he witnessed as a boy. Floyd and Lloyd, his uncles by marriage, never spoke to each other. They were men of zero words to anyone, ever. They were men who lay watching TV, making women and children feel skittish and in trouble for existing. Plus, another thing, and everyone knows this, it is not about Doc’s tragic family, it is universal: peaches are delicious, truly delicious, and they do not, he repeats, do not taste like shit.

  13

  My cellie Romy got transferred but I didn’t know where. Big Daddy refused to tell me. “Mind your own business, Fe
rnandez,” he kept saying.

  I was alone now. Another lady on ad seg claimed they’d moved Romy to suicide watch. I didn’t believe her. Ad seg is a big rumor mill of people locked away and shouting through their door. Big Daddy would not do me any favors. I couldn’t even get any books to read. He was just, “No passing, Fernandez. Nuh uh.” Probably he was trying to get promoted.

  One year I read eight Danielle Steel novels in ad seg. She did a prison novel that is straight-up killer. Everybody was reading it. We tore the book into sections for passing under cell doors, and it was all people talked about. It blew through the prison like a forest fire. It never occurred to me it was odd women in prison would want to read about other women in prison. You want to read about a world you know, not just ones you don’t know.

  I had nothing to do, and no one to talk to. I was tired of Betty LaFrance shouting up the vent. I was eighteen years old when I met her, and she’d impressed the hell out of me. She was rich and called everyone “darling.” Taught manners to women at the county jail. But that was decades ago and you get sick of people. I’ll always love Betty because she’s part of my history, and she’s just too trippy and weird not to like. But sometimes you want her to quiet down.

  She kept yelling up through the air vent about her latest plans. She said she was finally going to get back at the rat-faced cop. I told her to hush. But she can’t. That’s Betty. She started rambling about the Bible. When I was young and stupid, Betty had me convinced the Book of Daniel is really about aliens coming to Earth. She spooked the hell out of me. This time, her ramble was all about Judges. “Hey, Sammy. What’s sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion?” She kept asking me that through the vent pipe. “Sweeter than honey, and stronger than a lion?”