The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

  I didn’t know what she was talking about. She’s better when it’s just about money, or her legs that are insured for millions.

  “The lion is killed by Samson,” she said. “He opens the lion’s body and there’s a beehive inside. Bees make honey, see?” She said “honey” like it was the key to her riddle, and now I was supposed to understand everything. Like honey was some kind of code.

  “There’s honey in the carcass. Sweet honey,” she said. “But you don’t get it unless you kill the lion. First, you have to kill the lion. I put a hit on him. I got him cornered.”

  She started talking about the war, but I had tuned her out.

  “Are you even aware we are at war?” she asked, after I’d stopped responding.

  “I know about it,” I said. But I didn’t know much. In county lockup there’s no news on the TV. Too dangerous or something. They give us reruns of Friends. Everyone in jail loves Friends. The characters are practically our bunkies.

  “There are American soldiers over in Iraq,” Betty shouted, “protecting your freedom.”

  “They can have my freedom,” I yelled back. “It sucks.”

  When I was in county, someone on my tier heard from her family that we’d invaded Iraq. I went around asking people if they knew where that is, and not one lady knew. Even the educated people in jail didn’t know. It’s like these places don’t exist until we bomb them.

  Betty started bothering the guard downstairs. I could hear her through the vent, asking him to pray with her for the troops.

  * * *

  Talking to Romy got me thinking about the past. I dreamed one night about the Snooty Fox. I was walking along the balcony outside the rooms. It was daytime and I could hear the traffic on Figueroa. I kept passing rooms with the Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob, the curtains closed. I came to a room with an open door. The room was vacant and clean and I went in and shut the door and lay down on the bedspread and fell asleep. I think prison makes you so tired that in the very best dreams you have, you’re actually sleeping. That’s what we dream about. Sleep. When I woke up, I felt like I had gotten much better rest than usual. After Big Daddy put my breakfast through the flap, I shouted to Conan on the end of the tier, told him about my dream. I said I feel like I got double sleep, since I was sleeping in my dream at the Snooty Fox.

  Betty LaFrance shouted up the pipe, “The Snooty Fox? The Snooty Fox? How do I know that name? What is it?”

  “It’s a motel,” I said.

  “I think Doc used to go there,” she said.

  Typical Betty. Everything always has to be about her.

  The Snooty Fox was my spot. The nicer rooms had a red velvety covering on the bed, and the bed was a massager. You put in coins and it comes to life underneath you. The showers had two nozzles, one in the usual place up high and another at the level of the privates. A john of mine, an old man who worked downtown at the courthouse, told me a famous president, Lyndon B. Johnson, had a shower like that, with a crotch nozzle. Lyndon B. Johnson, with a shower to wash his balls just like at the Snooty Fox.

  The less fancy rooms were ten dollars an hour. I would negotiate with a john and tell him the room was twenty an hour, or thirty, and take that profit on top of what he paid me. But we were only in the room together for maybe twenty minutes. I had people coming in one after another, sometimes five customers in a single hour.

  One night the Korean lady from the front office comes and bangs on the door while I was with a customer. She was yelling, “TOO MANY UNCLES! TOO MANY UNCLES!”

  What’s she saying? the guy asked me; he had no idea what was going on. I was laughing so hard.

  Eventually I switched to the Hub Motel on Long Beach Boulevard in Compton, where they didn’t bother with how many uncles I brought to the room. Long Beach Boulevard was where I met Rodney, right there in the Hub. Not the motel. The Hub was also Compton.

  I was with Green Eyes and we’d both just done customers and wanted to buy a rock, but my dealer wasn’t around. Green Eyes said she knew someone so we went to an apartment where this dealer lived. We walked in, and the dealer was Rodney. I thought he was the ugliest person I’d ever seen. He goes to Green Eyes, “Who’s that?” pointing at me, and Green Eyes is like, that’s Sammy. And he says to me in a blunt, gruff way, “You like fruit?”

  I was looking at Green Eyes for a sign, like how am I meant to answer this, because we were trying to score and you can’t anticipate about people until you’ve dealt with them a few times. I was hoping to get a signal from Green Eyes, like what do I answer? Do I like fruit? And Green Eyes whispers, “Say yes, stupid.”

  See, he was asking me a personal question. It caught me off guard. What did this guy care what I liked?

  He says, “You want a orange or an apple?”

  I told him I only like strawberries and watermelon, that those were my favorite fruits. We left with our rock, me and Green Eyes. Later I was sitting at the bus stop working and a car pulls up and I negotiate but the guy didn’t have enough money, so I let him go. Another car pulls up all slow. The window goes down and it’s Rodney. He says I could get hurt on the street and should be careful. I didn’t have a customer, so I agreed to go with him to the store. He bought me some strawberries and we took them to his house. I stayed there all night, smoking rock, talking, eating the strawberries, and that was how it started. Now he has my name tattooed in twenty-six different places on his body.

  Rodney was from Gonzales, Louisiana. He was in Angola from age seventeen to twenty-two. He wears a mustache to cover the scar they gave him with the switch they used for whipping the horses. He had to work planting okra. His feet are ruined from standing in water without rubber boots. When he got out of Angola they banned him from the state. He took the Louisiana with him out to Compton. He was country and superstitious. No cooking when you’re on your menstrual. And his idea of clean was obsessive. It was a lot like how some people act in here, me included. I like it clean. It’s a way to have some control, probably. I can laugh at it, though. It’s funny that most of us were doing tricks to maintain a crack addiction, living in tents and shitting in buckets on skid row, but in here, as shot-callers, we make the other women shower three times a day and bleach the bathroom after they brush their teeth. We run the room like it’s the army, with rules and inspections and yelling and abuse and I’m the one dishing it. I’ll come down on you hard if there’s a single drop of water in the sink basin.

  Rodney used to beat me like a dog. I really did think that he did it because he loved me, that it was a form of care, like the strict side of care and love. And I was an addict. I was like every other lost girl with a dealer, girls crippled by dope, and these ballers controlling them with money and power.

  Rodney had eccentricities. He was a strange person. He ate only bland foods: no salt, no pepper, no ketchup, no hot sauce. No drinking, no drugs, no rap music, no R and B. I mean nothing. He was into money. That was it. Cash. Nothing else.

  In the morning I’d get up and drink a forty of Olde English. Rodney would drink a carton of milk, and that was how we each started our day. We dealt together; I worked the night shift. We had three security doors along our apartment hall, one, two, three, so no one would rob us. And we kept our stash and money and weapons in a lockbox that was in the floor, under the refrigerator, which had a panel you could lift up, to get to the lockbox. The guy who installed it was a smoker, so we paid him in rock like we paid everyone. Keep them all dirty, just like in here. I used to keep my whole room dirty, handing out free dope to my cellmates so that no one could rat on me.

  Rodney was respected in Hub City but he wasn’t a gangbanger. He had a card. A pass. He could deal and they let him be, as a loner and non-affiliate. Not everybody gets to walk solo like that, but Rodney was connected to influential bangers, had done a lot of favors for people and earned his status.

  We dealt mostly from Rodney’s apartment. We handled the sales ourselves. We never had kids on the street corner doing it, like ho
w it goes now. The way they exploit these children. You find a kid with a clean record to sell for you. When he gets busted, he won’t go to jail, since it’s his first violation, but he’s not useful anymore so you get a new kid. Go from kid to kid and they all get records. We dealt only in fives and tens, because the twenties were the bills that narcotics officers marked. I remember a girl came to the gate with ones and Rodney shoved her into the street and said never to try to buy from him again with her loose change.

  Rodney and I had two Cadillacs. One was root beer brown and it had an airbrushed painting of me on the trunk hood, like I was the virgin of Guadalupe, and underneath it was written, “Let me tell you about the blues.” I was often the only Latina in the room. I got to know a lot of black women. But I’ve always mixed well with all kinds of people; I’m not into hanging with one race. I can talk to anyone. Rodney would take me to the players clubs. The girls there are something to look at. They get their hair and nails done every day. If they wait a day on the hair, they sleep with their hands propped under their cheek, so their hair won’t rub the pillow. You go to the club and everyone is buying bottles of Hennessy. They have strippers on the bar.

  We liked to travel. We went to Vegas. San Francisco. We always dealt on our trips, and we carried weapons. We would go up to Sierra Madre, where there was an illegal shooting range, to practice. It’s past the big rock up there. You have to go with the dudes who run it, on a dirt road, in their huge four-by-four. I remember it had a skull for a shifter knob. These crazy white people. They sell hot, clean guns up there. We bought SKSs from them, which came straight from Iran. The kick on those was amazing. I was a better shot than Rodney.

  Sometimes we did not agree about how to do business. One morning there was a guy painting a building on the corner near our apartment. He was doing exterior work and started talking to Rodney and they exchanged information. Later the guy—a white dude—calls and says he wants to buy a large amount of cocaine but that he’s stuck in Laguna Niguel and wants us to come down there. It was pretty clear to me that if he was all the way in Laguna Niguel and a serious buyer, he would have a connection there. Why did he need us? I thought it was an unnecessary risk to go there, but Rodney was stubborn about it because he felt this deal could expand his business. We went. It was a fancy area, just as Rodney had suspected. The houses had long driveways with a call box at the bottom. We get to the box and say who we are and this huge gate opens by itself, presto. We motor up to a house with a circular driveway, and the guy comes outside. He hands Rodney the money and Rodney gives him the dope. Next thing I know, these people came out of the trees. Twenty or thirty of them, all in black, with face masks. There was a gun to the side of my head. I had an unlit Camel cigarette in my mouth. It was trembling up and down; the cigarette was bobbling like crazy. I was not scared to be arrested. Fuck no. I’d been to prison twelve times already and considered it part of life. I thought this guy was about to shoot me in the head; that’s why I was scared. They pulled Rodney out of the car and pepper-sprayed him. We each got eight years flat. The dude from Laguna Niguel was a rollover. He had set us up, in order to clear his own case. Showed up in court, pointing us both out for the prosecution. No shame.

  Rodney never pursued vengeance on that, but he could have. What you do is hire a private investigator to find the rat. The PIs get a lot of their clients that way in Los Angeles. People think what they do is all about cheating spouses. No. Most of their business is from dealers and bangers who need to hunt someone down. Sometimes it’s to transact a hit. The PIs, they know not to ask questions. They find the person and that’s it, they step back because their job is done. Of course they are aware of what comes next. If it’s not a straight hit, the rat gets picked up and taken to a torture garage to learn a lesson. The garages are in secret locations all over South LA. I’ve been to two. They hang you from the ceiling. That’s not a place where you want to end up.

  Rodney didn’t need a torture garage to punish and control me. Now it seems like he’s old and I’m old and we don’t bother with each other anymore.

  After I ran away from Keath, I knew I’d get picked up. I didn’t care. It’s hard to live on the streets. In prison, you can be someone. Life has order if you know how to do time, and I know. I’m an expert. Living in a tent is a temporary thing. You do it until you go back to prison. That’s just how it works.

  What happened to me is I got tired. Being an addict is a constant hustle; it takes so much energy. When I was in county after they picked me up, I had to kick because I had no access. After I kicked, I just knew, like a light got turned on. I was going to stay clean. Life was going to be different this time around.

  14

  “Miss Hall, can you stop crying, Miss Hall?” If an inmate can’t stop crying, they check a box on the suicide risk form. They weren’t hoping to spare a life. They were trying to avoid paperwork and internal investigations.

  They had taken me to a different part of the prison, the nursing facility, where no one could hear me scream, no one but the cop on duty. They were following protocols on a behavior sheet. I was alone in a strip cell, no clothes, and no sheets on the bed, on a ward where they put mental cases.

  My mother had sat in the courtroom, unable to save me, but in a sense, she had saved me, by existing. Now there was no one for me, and no one for Jackson.

  Those days on suicide watch, I understood how it was that someone might come to believe that the way to get back at these people would be to kill yourself. Being given only spoons and soft food, no forks or knives, forced the mind to wonder in what way a forbidden utensil might be useful. Being given no sheets or pillow summoned a question into the room, of how to asphyxiate yourself, with what, and tied to what. But I was not suicidal. I was thinking about Jackson, and what to do, now that we were orphaned.

  Jackson was the grain of reality in the center of my thoughts. I could see his sweet open face, made even more open by the cowlick that gave him an old-fashioned, almost Brylcreemed hairstyle. He didn’t brush his hair. It swooped naturally off his broad forehead. Jackson was handsome like his father had been. Unlike his father, he was always looking to find a way to be happy.

  When we’d first moved to LA, Jackson heard the horn of the vegetable truck that parked on our street and went running outside to see what the commotion was. The man who drove the vegetable truck got out and opened the back. The old women lined up in their house smocks to buy groceries from the back of the truck. I felt like the truck was a Mexican thing, and Jackson and I would just go to Vons and shop the regular white-people way. But Jackson insisted we get in the line. We bought avocados, mangos, eggs, bread, and sausages the vendor had hanging from the ceiling of his truck, and the food was half what it cost at Vons. That was how we met all our neighbors.

  Jackson believed in the world. I searched his face with my closed eyes. Felt the dewy touch of his hand in my hand. I heard his voice, felt the warmth of his body when he wrapped his arms around my waist.

  I focused on the grain of Jackson, the sensation of him. Nothing they did could touch that grain. Only I could touch it, touch it and stay close.

  There was no way to contact him. They wouldn’t tell me anything. He needed me and there was nothing I could do. I lay in my tiny bare cell and tried to see Jackson, to visit with him.

  Jackson wanted me to know things that he knew, to study what he studied, and so he tested me on columns when he learned about them in a Greek coloring book my mother gave him. If there were a bunch of designs at the top, I knew to guess, “Corinthian.” He asked questions like I was someone he could rely on for the truth. “Is the heel this whole area of my foot, or just this part on the bottom?” He nodded when my answers corresponded to the world he was building in his mind, with correct names and definitions, with facts. Testing out his facts. “Mommy, that cat might not belong to anyone, because she doesn’t have a collar.” When a man came down Alvarado Street swinging a golf club, hitting telephone poles and then the side of
the bus shelter, Jackson said the man had a problem inside his brain, that it was a sickness and he hoped the man got better.

  Jones, who was my assigned intake counselor, came to check on me. Counselor doesn’t mean someone who counsels. Your prison counselor determines your security classification and when and if you get mainlined to general population. Your counselor keeps tabs on you and reports to the parole board, if you are headed for parole. Counselors have enormous power over what happens to us, and they are always assholes.

  I asked Jones if there was some way to find out if Jackson was okay. Was he in a hospital still? What were his injuries?

  “There are privacy rules in hospitals, Hall,” Jones said.

  “Do you have children, Lieutenant Jones?”

  “Only his legal guardian or a court-appointed advocate can verify that he’s in a hospital,” Jones said. “You are not his guardian, Hall.”

  “But who is his guardian? I need to find out the condition my son is in.”

  She was walking away from my cell. I adjusted my tone of voice, hoping to summon her back.

  “Please, Lieutenant Jones. Please.”

  It was happening. I was pleading with a sadist in a little girl voice.

  Jones stopped, pretended to react with decency.

  “Ms. Hall, I know it’s tough, but your situation is due one hundred percent to choices you made and actions you took. If you’d wanted to be a responsible parent, you would have made different choices.”