Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

Teardrop’s visitor collapsed on the table. The cops from the cop shop rushed over. The old man seemed to be having a heart attack. An alarm sounded. Medical technicians came rushing into the room.

“Visiting is over,” the intercoms boomed. “Visiting is over. Return to your units.”

Hauser had made it pretty obvious he liked me. Everyone in class knew. It became a joke, Conan humming “Here Comes the Bride” as I walked into the classroom trailer, sweaty and coated in woodshop dust.

Sammy went into overdrive about Hauser’s crush on me, speculating that maybe he’d adopt Jackson, when I told her I had given Hauser a number to call. Sammy was a walking historian of every person who had faced every adversity in prison and could produce examples of all the cases where staff, or even guards, had stepped in and raised the children of imprisoned women. She went on about it and meant well but it didn’t comfort me. I didn’t think she was reading things right, that any of her examples were relevant. I didn’t know how to explain it to her: this is a normal and nice college-educated boy who probably separates bottles and cans from the rest of his trash. He’s not going to adopt my kid. He’ll marry a nice girl like him who also recycles and they will have children together, their own.

But in truth I had begun to live for his GED class, even if I didn’t admit it. I was determined to work on him for Jackson’s sake, but I also worked on him for a more minor and less delusional reason. He knew places I knew. When I talked to him, I became a person from a place. I could roam neighborhoods, visit my apartment in the Tenderloin, with the Murphy bed, my happy yellow Formica table, and above it, the movie poster of Steve McQueen in Bullitt . If you’re from SF, you love Bullitt and are proud because it was filmed there. Plus, Steve McQueen had been a delinquent kid who became a star but stayed cool, did his own stunt driving. I teased Jimmy Darling that compared to Steve McQueen he was hardly a man. Jimmy was not offended by that, because, as he told me, he was not aspiring to become one.

Just up the block and around the corner from my Tenderloin apartment was a dive bar called the Blue Lamp where I sometimes went after work with a few girls from the Mars Room. The bartender, an adorable old lady who wore turtlenecks with a sparkly brooch pinned to the neck, was always happy to see me and my friends. She bought us drinks, and we tipped her generously in return. Around midnight the French cook would appear—not a chef but a cook—an alcoholic in a stained prep smock printed with the name of a downtown hotel. The cook was from Brittany and smoked foreign cigarettes that gave off a terrible stench. He told the same joke over and over and it wasn’t even a proper joke: he looked at us girls from the Mars Room and shouted, “I am lesbian!” punching his own chest for emphasis.

As the bar closed one night, there was a catfight out front. Hookers who worked that area, brawling down on the ground. People from the apartment building up above dumped buckets of water on the fighting women, like people do to cats, to get them to shut up. The women kept on, soaked, with ruined hair, wilted and torn outfits that were half off them from fighting. Everyone but me was laughing at the fighting women, wet, and struggling, rolling around on the pavement, trying to hurt each other. I was haunted by that scene, although I really don’t know why.

We were all waiting for afternoon count—you have to sit on your bed until it’s completed—when Laura Lipp announced to our room that she had a surprise for us, not a good one. She lay back in her bunk and gave us her Juggalo grin, elated to be the bearer of bad news.

“Spit it out, psycho,” said Teardrop.

“I know you all love nicknames, but I don’t answer to Psycho.”

Teardrop grabbed Laura’s hair and yanked. “Say it and shut up.”

Laura cried in pain, her hair in Teardrop’s fist.

“There’s a man in this prison! There’s a man here and they want to put him on C yard!”

What outraged people most, as the campaign grew, was that this prisoner, Serenity Smith, had killed a woman, before he operated on himself and became one. A hysteria brewed that a dangerous man was being placed among us, and that we would be left to fend for ourselves. We might have to share a room with him. Undress in front of him. Shower next to him. And he was evil, evil, evil.

Because Laura spilled the beans, they delayed mainlining Serenity Smith, hoping the situation would calm down.

Factions formed. Conan, who had to endure the daily humiliation of “Miss” and “Ma’am,” who had to get a series of psychological evaluations and fill out endless paperwork and wait years for approval in order to simply wear boxer shorts instead of granny drawers, was on the side of acceptance. He and some of the other stud broads on C yard, our version of men, had a community and they decided, as a group, that it was important to support Ms. Smith, as Conan respectfully referred to her. To welcome her. Because cops were assholes about anyone who didn’t conform to narrow gender norms, and we, they, hated cops, and needed to stick together. I wasn’t excited to possibly room with a woman who had been a man who had cut his own dick and nuts off. But as the tension brewed, and I heard about the plans to jump this person, clobber her, I saw the face of a woman I had known at the Blue Lamp, on Geary. She sat at the bar dressed like a secretary, in a glossy auburn wig. She was petite and exceedingly feminine. Pretty, but strange. She had a scratchy voice like someone with permanent laryngitis. I guess she was biologically a man but no less female, and fragile, for that. She sat alone at the bar, sipping at the needle-thin straw of her gin and tonic. She pursed her pink painted lips and waited to be approached by men. I remember her leaving with one, and returning, later, with a black eye covered in makeup. Is that woman from the Blue Lamp with her pink lips and her auburn wig, her ritual lonely post at the bar, is she still alive? Maybe not. Just because Serenity Smith had previously been a man didn’t mean she wasn’t vulnerable.

They kept Ms. Smith in protective custody. When they moved her, it was like they were moving someone on death row, double escort, with sharpshooters trained on her from the gun towers. Women screamed obscenities. She was gassed with jars of urine.

The anti-Smith struggle was a hate campaign, complete with biblical passages and claims about morality and Christian values. Laura Lipp used the copy machine in the clerk’s office to make flyers. She wrote letters to the governor, the warden, congresspeople, whoever else. Her mother was campaigning outside. Laura flipped her shiny sheet of hair and claimed outrage that a killer would be housed among us.

I had started helping Button with her homework for Hauser’s class. I took more pleasure in it than I would have guessed. It was a big-sister thing. Sammy was my big sister and I was Button’s, and Conan was something like the dad. We had a family. It was not that comforting, but it was something, even if Button was a pain in the ass. Always angry, and ready to fight. But when Teardrop ate Button’s pet rabbit, I saw a different side to Button.

Teardrop had boiled the rabbit in a pot with her stinger while the rest of us were programming. When we came back for afternoon count, the room was infused with the heavy smell of cooked meat.

“What kind of spread is that?” Conan asked.

Brunswick stew, Teardrop said.

Afterward, Conan kept saying, “Didn’t even have no seasoning, I mean nothing ,” as if that was the infraction, eating Button’s pet rabbit unseasoned. “Anyway, a proper Brunswick stew is squirrel, not rabbit.”