Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

We had to fake nice-nice to the customers but that was really it, the only thing we had to do, and we didn’t even have to do that. We did it to make money, so the incentive was easy enough. Jimmy the Beard and Dart, you had to stay off their shit lists. But that was easy, too. Flirt with them, and everything was fine. It was almost comical how weak their big egos were.

Jimmy the Beard, by the way, is not to be confused with Jimmy Darling. They have nothing in common except the name Jimmy. Jimmy the Beard was a bouncer at the Mars Room and Jimmy Darling was, for a while anyway, my boyfriend.

I said everything was fine but nothing was. The life was being sucked out of me. The problem was not moral. It was nothing to do with morality. These men dimmed my glow. Made me numb to touch, and angry. I gave, and got something in exchange, but it was never enough. I extracted from the wallets—which was how I thought of the men, as walking wallets—as much as I possibly could. The knowledge that it was not a fair exchange coated me in a certain film. Something brewed in me over the years I worked at the Mars Room, sitting on laps, deep into this flawed exchange. This thing in me brewed and foamed. And when I directed it—a decision that was never made; instead, instincts took over—that was it.

Although Jimmy the Beard and Jimmy Darling did have more in common than just a name. They had me in common. And then they didn’t have me in common.

Now I can see that certain targets of my anger weren’t the real targets. Like the man who wanted the girlfriend experience, the one who corrected my table manners: the reason I disliked him was that he reminded me of someone from the recesses of childhood, a man I’d asked for directions. I was eleven and had gone downtown to meet Eva, to see a midnight show at a punk rock club. It was late, and I was lost. Rain began to pour. Downtown San Francisco is deserted late at night, but there was an older gray-haired man locking a beautiful Mercedes and he asked me if I needed help. He looked like someone’s father, a respectable businessman, dressed in a suit. I did need help. I told him where I was trying to go and he said it was too far to walk.

“I could give you money for a taxi.”

“Really?” I asked hopefully. The rain was soaking me.

He said he’d be happy to help me and we should go to his hotel, and then he would. He would be happy to help me, but we should first go up to his room and have a drink.

The man in the Mercedes was no more a someone than the man who wanted the girlfriend experience and corrected my table manners. I didn’t know the name of either. And in fact they both wanted the same thing.

Our bus hurtled along the downhill grade into the Central Valley.

“Lot of people talk shit about prison but you got to live your destiny every minute,” Conan said. “Just live it. Last time I was up in the big house, I had parties like you wouldn’t believe. You would not know it was prison. We had all kinds of liquor. Pills. Killer beats. Pole dancers.”

“Hey!” Fernandez was shouting to the guards seated in the front.

“Hey, this lady next to me, you better check on her.”

The transport cop who knew Fernandez turned around and told her to quiet down.

“But this lady—something’s wrong with her!”

The large woman next to her was slumped over, her head on her chest. That was how everyone was sleeping.

You would not have gone. I understand that. You would not have gone up to his room. You would not have asked him for help. You would not have been wandering lost at midnight at age eleven. You would have been safe and dry and asleep, at home with your mother and your father who cared about you and had rules, curfews, expectations. Everything for you would have been different. But if you were me, you would have done what I did. You would have gone, hopeful and stupid, to get the money for the taxi.

Somewhere deep in the Central Valley, the sky still dark, I looked out the window and saw two massive black shadows looming up ahead. They looked like dark oily geysers fluming upward on the side of the highway. What terrible thing was spewing into the sky like that, filling it with soot? They were huge black clouds of smoke or poison.

I had read about a gas leak, about pounds of pollution issuing into the sky in Fresno or someplace. When gaseous quantities are measured in pounds you know there’s trouble. Maybe this was some kind of environmental disaster, crude oil that had burst its underground pipe, or something too sinister for explanations, a fire burning black instead of orange.

As our sheriff’s department bus approached the giant black geysers, I got a close-up glimpse.

They were the silhouettes of eucalyptus trees in the dark.

Not an emergency. Not the apocalypse. Just trees.

At daybreak, we were in thick fog. The entire Central Valley had drifted out to sea. Damp tufts blew across the highway. I could see nothing but smoke gray.

Laura Lipp had been waiting for me to wake up.

“Did you read about the woman they found murdered in her car? Guy came up to her with a knife or something, some kind of weapon, says take me to a bank machine. He gets in her car and he ends up killing her, bashes her head in for no reason. No reason at all. They didn’t even know each other. City life has become so crude and dangerous, imagine, two in the afternoon. Sepulveda Boulevard. A few hours later, police found her. This guy had been released from jail that morning. Wandered around until he found someone to kill. I’m telling you, we are safer in custody. Won’t catch me out there, nuh uh. No way. No.”

We were surrounded by agriculture. I saw no human beings working in the fields. The fields were abandoned to machines and I was abandoned to Laura Lipp.

“If they hadn’t let him out she’d be alive. For some people reality is just too thin. For some people the light shines right through, a certain kind of person, a crazy kind of person, a person with a mental illness and I know about that—like I said, I’m here because I have a bipolar disorder—and I’m glad they have this AC pumping because the heat triggers my condition. Brings it on real fast.”

As the sun rose, the fog evaporated. Wind buffeted the big bushy oleanders on the highway divider, their peach-colored blossoms bending moodily, crazily, then restoring themselves, the wind then whipping their peach-colored heads around again.

The bus filled with cow stink, which seemed to wake up Conan. He yawned and looked out the window.

“The thing about cows is they’re dressed all in leather ,” he said. “Head to toe, nothing but leather. It’s badass. I mean when you really think about it.”

“Poor woman had a child,” Laura Lipp said to me. “Kid’s an orphan now.”

There were eucalyptus trees on the side of the highway, trees that I had thought, in the dark of night, were black shadows of the apocalypse. Now they just seemed dusty and sad. In Southern California, the same exact leaves stay on the same trees for decades. Trees that don’t lose their leaves do something else: they collect dust year after year, load up with dirt and car exhaust.

“I heard about this steak they got now at Outback. The cows are given beer,” Conan said, as he watched the miserable-looking creatures huddled in the dirt, nothing but dirt, so that the animals, too, seemed like dirt, living dirt, organic breathing shitting dirt, no grass anywhere in sight. “Budweiser, to be exact. They force-feed it to the cows. Force-drink it. Makes the meat tender. But hey, are those cows old enough to drink? I want to try that steak. That’s what I’m doing when I get out of this bitch: Outback.”