Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

Eva showed up halfway through the ceremony. Walked in with this greaseball. They looked like they’d been up for three days. Eva’s face was coated in foundation that was a full shade too light for her skin. She kept her sunglasses on inside. Turned to me in her half-erasing makeup.

“Romy, what the fuck is going on here?”

It was the right question, was the thing.

The greaseball was probably her dealer. She said boyfriend but that distinction doesn’t matter. The year before, Eva had been with a guy who was originally a john. He became a regular, and then he didn’t want her seeing any other johns. He started funding her drug habit so she didn’t have to work the streets. This guy was waiting outside the Mars Room one night to talk to me. He was looking for Eva. He was distressed. He said he’d spent eighty thousand dollars on her cocaine habit that year and now she was gone. What did he expect? I didn’t question that he loved her, or at least that he knew he’d never get a woman like Eva, that gorgeous and free, without doling out the money, and without her being first and foremost an addict who needed something from him. “Get away from me,” I said, and left him standing at the entrance to the theater.

Henry was his name, the john obsessed with Eva. He started appearing almost everywhere I went, hoping I was on my way to meet Eva and he could trap her. But I hadn’t talked to Eva, didn’t know where she was, and she wasn’t the kind of person you can call on the phone. I had about ten numbers for her and none of them worked. Later, I forgot all about Henry and that episode, because soon I had my own stalker, Kurt Kennedy. Henry wasn’t really my stalker, but Eva’s. He only stalked or shadowed me in order to locate her. Eva disappeared to escape him. When I think of Henry or of Kurt, the tissue of my throat goes hard.

We were chained to a bench in a hall, waiting to be interviewed in a little concrete room about drug use, sexual history, mental health, and whether or not we had gang affiliations or enemies currently serving time at Stanville. After several hours of this, they gave us each a bedroll and a CDC Offender’s Handbook, as well as a forty-page Guide to the CDC Offender’s Handbook. Conan wondered out loud if we would also be getting a guide to the guide to the handbook.

“The failure to report a rule violation,” Conan said in a nasal voice, “is also a rule violation. The failure to report a rule violation of a failure to report a rule violation is another rule violation.”

Jones said, “Not even six hours in prison, London, and you just earned your first 115.”

I figured she was being sarcastic, but she went over to the cop shop and started writing him up.

“London,” someone said, “ London .”

Some of the girls laughed and snickered that Conan was getting written up. You’d think we would band together. Even our ragtag crew from the bus, with all sixty of us we could have subdued the two transport cops easily enough, hijacked that vehicle, and gone to Mexico. But there was no cooperation. Just people eager to see others fall under the hammer they suffered under themselves.

It had been like that in jail, too. When I first got to county I had lost my Styrofoam cup right away. It looked disposable but was the only cup I’d be issued. I didn’t know, and the other women had not told me. They laughed as I dug a soda can out of the trash. I used it to drink water out of for the next eighteen months. Jail is the perfect incubator for a police-like attitude, but there are cops in every environment. Backstage at the Mars Room women would critique other women for not having fancy costumes, or a choreographed and skillful floor show. Who cares—the job is about making money, not wasting it on costumes—and yet there were women in the dressing room who wanted there to be a set of rules to stripping. They believed you had to put on a good show and buy expensive costumes because it was more dignified and professional, respectful of some standard they wanted to uphold. But most of us worked in that environment because we were the kind of people who did not believe in standards and would never try to uphold any. You don’t have to believe in anything to work at the Mars Room. The Russian women, when they started dancing at the Mars Room, brought a new post-Soviet ruthlessness, a bracing lack of regard for costuming and glamour, for anything that wasn’t directly tied to profit. Most did hand jobs in the audience, which cut the rest of our business way back.

The sleaziest types of men arrived at the club in thin and slippery track pants for maximum contact, but many were less experienced, or more gentlemanly. Some didn’t even want a girl on their lap, but next to them, for talking. I found the track pants type preferable. There was almost no work involved. No smiling, no fake personality, no pretend complicity. They moved you around how they wanted and you didn’t have to exert yourself, and for twenty dollars per song. But after the Russian women invaded our club, the men all started requesting actual hand jobs for twenty a song. The Russian women undercut the rest of us. They siphoned the money out of all the wallets.

We gathered in the common area of our new housing unit while we waited for bed assignments. It was a big cinder-block building with rows of cells on two tiers. Everything was either raw concrete or painted a shade of dirty pink. Women in the cells pressed their faces to the narrow glass window of each door to stare at us. One woman shouted through the door that we looked like a bunch of ugly-ass scrubs. Hey, scrub! Hey, stupid! Come wipe my ass. Lick my cunt while you’re at it. She kept yelling until a guard hammered on her door with his baton.

Laura Lipp sat down next to me. I tried to move but Jones barked at me.

“You sit where I put you. This isn’t musical chairs.”

“Next to the baby killer,” Fernandez said, not quietly.

“You two are like the Bobbsey Twins,” Fernandez said.

Who are the Bobbsey Twins? No one seems to know. She meant we were alike, because white, and I was going to have to do something. Break away from Laura Lipp.

“How many of you are dyslexic?” Jones asked our group of sixty.

Every person raised their hand except me.

Jones did a head count and didn’t notice my own had remained down. That was fine with me. As I came to understand, the Americans with Disabilities Act was often the only barrier left preventing them from treating us with unlimited abuse. Laura Lipp took this moment as a chance for further bonding.

“I’m not really dyslexic but they give you extra time for filling out forms this way. Do you like to read?”

I looked away. I tried to catch someone else’s eye, but no one would look at me. “If you eventually make it to the honor dorm, the girls there share books, although most read trash.”

Jones began by deciphering for us loudly the signs in the day room, since we were all dyslexic or presumed illiterate. The signs all began the same way.

Ladies, report to staff if you have a staph infection.

Ladies, no whining.

Ladies, out of bounds results in an automatic 115.

The warning shots sign was more blunt. NO WARNING SHOTS IN THIS AREA.

The clock on the wall had a red wedge from five minutes to the hour until five minutes past the hour. This was for the women who could not tell time. Jones explained the red wedge. All you need to know, she said, is that when the big hand is on red, room doors are on unlock.

Everything in prison is addressed to the woman for whom the red wedge is painted on the clock face, the imbecile. I’ve never met her. Plenty I have met in prison cannot read, and some cannot tell time, but that doesn’t mean they are not shrewd and superior individuals who can outsmart any egghead. People in prison are clever as hell. The imbecile the rules and signs are meant to address is nowhere to be found.