Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

He’s down, but coming to. The cellmate, wow. Has wacked him in the back of the head. With Doc doesn’t know what. Something major.

He can’t get air. Doc is being choked now by a homemade garrote.

Is there any other kind of garrote?

The mind wanders, even at critical moments. They always say “homemade garrote.” Doc reaches for it—it’s strong, it’s made of—

He cannot breathe!

Dental floss? Guitar string?

He is sputtering and grunting with an animal’s desire for life. Doc tries to—

He can’t—

I felt free of Kurt Kennedy in Los Angeles, though several times I had to double-take men who shared his generally repulsive physical qualities, thick bunched calves, ruddy skin, bald and dented cranium, and once I mistakenly thought I heard the gravelly voice. But Los Angeles was a new planet, with Creamsicle sunsets, sandals in January, giant birds of paradise, supermarkets with gleaming rows of tropical produce. I began to relax, to feel free of the suffocating familiarity of San Francisco.

In truth I moved me and Jackson to Los Angeles not only to get away from Kurt Kennedy, but so that I could be with Jimmy Darling after he got the teaching job in Valencia. The property he sublet belonged to an eccentric old painter who was away in Japan. Most of the structures on the ranch had burned in a forest fire, so the old painter lived in an Airstream trailer. He’d built a wood trellis over it that had vines on it, to keep the place cool. Jackson loved it there, because it was almost like camping. Off a ways from the trailer was a milk-green Andy Gump port-a-potty, its door permanently wired open. I went up there to lie in a hammock in the shade with Jimmy, eat purple prickly pear that grew along the property borders, and let Jackson feed apples and weeds to the retired Arabian mares that grazed in a big soggy pasture. We would spend the night but always left first thing in the morning and made the long drive back to my own borrowed place, my so-called reality. I didn’t want to live with Jimmy. He was not the sort of person you move in with, make a life with. He did his thing and I did mine, and every few days we got together and entertained each other but kept it light. We walked around the property. He and Jackson whittled together. Scratched the neck of a potbellied goat that was the old painter’s companion. When it rained up there, the abandoned swimming pool of the burned-down property next door was overtaken by frogs, whose chorus of croaks delighted Jackson. After I put Jackson to sleep on a mat on the trailer floor, Jimmy Darling and I would drink tequila at a picnic table under a tarp, and then have gratifying and drunken sex in the one bed in the trailer, both bed and trailer too small for two by intent and design.

The painter who lived on the horse ranch was escaping the clutches of various women, Jimmy said. The port-a-potty was a message that women should not get too comfortable. The bed was a twin. Jackson and I only went there on weekends. Jackson was in kindergarten so it wasn’t practical to go during the week. The arrangement was fine with me, but sometimes, as I drove toward downtown LA with Jackson in the backseat, I felt I was going down into a solitude that was too airy and roomy. Jimmy, on the other hand, probably just went out into the old painter’s studio and started building and making, because he was a builder and maker and had little tendency toward destructive introspection. I would drive past the ugly power plant in Burbank and see the steam billowing from its reactor mouths and be faced with what I did not like to admit, which was that Jimmy Darling was free of worry, and he had a place in the world. He was a somebody. Take the inverse of that, and it was how I felt about myself.

This feeling didn’t seem like it derived from something I could fix or improve. It was simply who I was compared to who Jimmy was, which put my life in negative relief. But it would not have comforted me to date someone who was worse off than I was. Right after I moved to LA, I ran into a guy from San Francisco, a guitar player who dated a girl I knew and had been in a band that everyone thought was cool. He told me fifteen horror stories about his relapses into heroin and his roommate overdosing and his brother overdosing, too, and something about someone named Noodles, a girl who had tried to pin the roommate’s death on him, claiming he was at fault for supplying the drugs, and how finally now he was putting his life together, how glad he was to be out of San Francisco, we should hang out, et cetera. He had tattoos I didn’t remember from when I’d known him, monster faces up his arms. They seemed like gargoyles meant to ward off bad energy, except he was radiating it, and I wanted to get away from him as quickly as possible.

The apartment I’d sublet was near Echo Park Lake, on a curving street of collapsing Victorians just above downtown. It belonged to a girl I knew from San Francisco, a stripper who was away in Alaska, working up there at the gentlemen’s clubs. Lots of girls would go to Alaska to make money, but they never came home with much. They made a lot at the clubs, but life was so dull and confining that everyone drank all the time, and the drinks were expensive like everything there was expensive. Girls returned with an experience of Alaska and no money saved. This girl had a nice apartment because at home in LA she made great money at the clubs in the San Fernando Valley. They had a reputation and, as I discovered, it held up. Discovered, that is, after a rocky start, at clubs in Hollywood that were just havens for tourists, couples who were there to gawk and had no intention of paying for a lap dance. There is nothing worse than when people your own age come along and jeer. It’s always better to deal exclusively with customers who know the rules and play by them. The ones who are looking for the game, pretending there are girls in rhinestones and canary-yellow stilettos who truly get off on drowning the faces of middle-aged men with their breasts. The customers we want are those who believe that the girls choose the rhinestones and stilettos because they are the type to wear them, and not because they are merely pretending that type exists. Once I found the right places to work, I was cleaning up. But in terms of exact figures, keep in mind that every service worker paid in tips, whether they are a bartender or waiter or stripper, exaggerates what they make. It seems to be human nature. People don’t outright lie. They take their very best day ever, their most outstandingly lucrative shift, historically, and they tell you it is what they average. Everyone does this. So I can tell you how much I made on a Friday night in the Valley, as if it were a typical shift, but I’m quoting my best Friday of all time, which was not typical. The lunch shifts, what I was given when I started, were not great money. Men came for the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, and not for company. I sat in the back of the theater, bored, trying not to smell the sweet and sour pork, as I listened to David Lee Roth say, All you got to do is jump. “He designed his own clothes for the video,” another stripper told me about six times. It seemed to be the only fact she had on hand, or knew.

Jackson’s school was a block away from the sublet, so I could walk him there in the morning. And if I was working, my new neighbors, a large family with four children who all attended that same school, would pick him up and watch him for me. Quickly he was transforming from Jackson into Güero, which was what they called him. The grandmother was from Mexico and ironed every article of the entire family’s clothing, including socks and underwear. They were loving people who probably didn’t quite understand what I was about, but children involved no judgment or need to understand.