The Mars Room

by Rachel Kushner

  “It’s an armpit behind an oil refinery. It’s not glamorous, like being from the city.”

  I said I hated San Francisco, that there was evil coming out of the ground there, but that I liked Pick-Up because it reminded me of things about the city that I missed.

  He had gotten me two other books, Charles Bukowski’s Factotum and Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. I would read the others next, I told him.

  “Factotum is one of the funniest books ever written.”

  I said I knew of the other book, the Jesus one, because I saw the movie. Which was good except the people in it were supposed to be living in the seventies. “The girl in it, she’s got her midriff showing, and wears a leather jacket with a fur collar like San Francisco hipsters in the nineties.”

  “But those people you’re describing—maybe you, I don’t know—they’re all borrowing from the seventies to begin with.”

  It was true. I told him how Jimmy Darling used to go to this bookstore in the Tenderloin to buy 1970s-era copies of Playboy, which they had in stacks on the floor in the back. An old man once tapped Jimmy on the shoulder and whispered, “Sonny, they have the new ones up here,” nodding in the direction of the plastic-sleeved monthlies, Busty and Barely Legal, which were on display in the front of the store.

  “And Jimmy is—”

  “My fiancé. He teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute.”

  “Are you . . . still engaged?”

  “He’s dead,” I said.

  * * *

  That night, after lights out, I thought about North Beach and tried to revisit places I went with Jimmy Darling, who lived and worked over there, and before Jimmy, when I was a kid and North Beach was an exciting place to wander on a Friday night with your friends. We would hover around the outdoor tables at Enrico’s and finish people’s drinks when they got up to leave. I saw the lights along Broadway. Big Al’s. The Condor Club and its vertical sign, Carol Doda’s nipples glowing cherry red, Chinatown red. The Garden of Eden down the street, its pink and green neon bright against the fog.

  Later they took the sign of Carol Doda down, but for me it remained. All those lights stayed on, in the world that had been, and that still existed in me, the one I contained.

  There was a club on Columbus where feminist strippers made eleven feminist dollars an hour. It was very little for what they gave out, and took in, watching men masturbate in the little booths around the stage. Regal Show World was a regular peep show without the feminism. The Regal’s strange and uncomely accountant moonlighted with us at the Mars Room and, as far as I knew, never found a single customer, but showed up, night after night, a big awkward lady in thick glasses and discount lingerie who den-mothered us in the dressing room with snacks, and compliments on our makeup and costumes. She handed out baby carrots and called them “crudités.” She was especially fond of my friend Arrow, whom she regarded as her dressing room daughter.

  Arrow had made it into the pages of Barely Legal. She was my age, early twenties, but she had a lazy eye that gave her an innocent look, or at least the innocent look of women who pose as girls in Barely Legal. Arrow and I both took shifts sometimes at the Crazy Horse, where I first encountered Jackson’s dad. He was good-looking and funny, the only doorman the girls at the Crazy Horse let in the dressing room. He pretended to read articles from the local newspaper out loud as the girls put on makeup, but inventing Weekly World News–type headlines as he flipped pages: Woman Lifts Volkswagen Beetle to Save Last Cigarette from Storm Drain; Man Who Lost Two Hundred Pounds on Chocolate Chip Cookie Diet Run Over by Milk Truck. Breaking News: Toledo, Ohio, Is a Figment of People’s Imagination. Jackson’s dad did not lack intelligence, he just wasn’t smart about life, which is to say, about authority. But he was smart enough to escape. He climbed a fence at a San Mateo county jail and ran all the way to San Francisco. I had heard that story before I knew him. I pictured a guy running along the side of the highway, as if to get from San Mateo to San Francisco you’d have to go the way a car would travel, but without the shell of the car, the motor. Just a man, running and sweating in the breakdown lane. I’m sure that’s not how he traveled, but it was what I saw. He was caught almost immediately.

  Jimmy the Beard had worked as a doorman at various strip clubs around town since the 1960s. He told stories. There was one about a crazy movie director who was in love with a porn star named Magic Tom. Magic Tom performed at a gay hard-core theater where Jimmy the Beard worked the door. Magic Tom wasn’t interested in the movie director. Used him, and then left him for someone else. The spurned, angry movie director got on a Greyhound bus and went all the way to Syracuse, New York, where Magic Tom was originally from. The movie director knocked on the door of Magic Tom’s mother’s house. In the story Jimmy the Beard tells, the mother opens the door, a prim and buttoned-up old woman in upstate New York. Says, “Yes, can I help you?” The filmmaker says, “No, ma’am, just thought you’d like to see something.” He holds up a nude pictorial of Magic Tom and Magic Tom’s identical twin brother in hard-core poses. They worked together doing porn. Jimmy the Beard was laughing so hard by this point he could barely spit out the story. “The guy shows this old lady in Syracuse, New York, a photograph of her two sons fucking each other.” He thought that was the funniest story he’d ever heard. It starts to explain Jimmy the Beard’s sense of humor. Thinking it was funny to blow my cover with Kurt Kennedy. After I left San Francisco for Los Angeles, Kurt Kennedy persisted until he found out where I was. Jimmy the Beard told him.

  15

  By the time Gordon Hauser was into his second year at Stanville, he would not have mistaken the shriek of an animal for the shriek of a woman. The cry he had heard on that early night in his cabin had been a mountain lion. Not a woman, and not in trouble.

  When snow blanketed the ground his first winter, paw prints went up around his property, scooped divots that matched exactly in pattern and spread those in his field guide, according to which, the voice of the mountain lion had been variously described as sounding like the screaming, yelling, or moaning of a female human.

  He never saw a mountain lion, only heard them. In the early morning, on his way down the mountain toward Stanville, he sometimes glimpsed gray foxes, their lustrous tails trailing after them, as he followed the curves of the winding road, passing huge drought-desiccated live oak, their jagged little leaves coated in dust, and banks of rust-red buckeye and smoke-green manzanita. The buckeye branches without leaves glinted bone-white in the sun. The grasses were the rich yellow of wet straw. He’d never seen such beautiful grasses.

  On the straightaway toward the brown basin, the scenery changed to oil pipeline and derricks, whose axles wound and wound. After the derricks was a dusty orange grove, one farmhouse with two palm trees in front, where the road split. The two palms were a curious variety, thickly shaggy and luxurious like an Inuit’s snow boots.

  On the valley floor, the temperature was twenty degrees hotter and the air heavy with the smell of fertilizer. There were no more oranges, no oil derricks, just power lines and almond groves in huge geometric parcels all the way to the prison.

  * * *

  Like all California prisons, Stanville flew three flags: state, nation, and POW MIA. The POW flag had always seemed pathetic to Gordon, since it was for those left behind in Vietnam, a war the U.S. had lost and badly. Any prisoners not returned were probably long dead, and either way, no one was going back for them, but prison guards at every state facility muscled up a flag in their honor. When people were captured now, it was different. A lot of them were private contractors, and they got beheaded live on the internet. President Bush went on TV and said he was building hospitals and schools for the Iraqi people. Most of the cars in staff parking at Stanville had the yellow ribbon on the bumper.

  The prison was complicated to navigate. It all looked the same to Gordon, one- and two-story detached cinder-block buildings in a vast expanse of dirt and concrete surrounded by shrouds of razor wire. He went through
three electronic sally ports to get to his classroom, which was in a windowless trailer near the vocational workshops and central kitchen. From the kitchen pumped a constant smell of rancid grease, overpowered only by the drift of solvents from the auto body shop, where a row of trucks—guards’ private vehicles—were lined up for super-discounted paint jobs by inmates.

  Gordon had clearance to enter this part of the grounds, but the housing units and yards were off-limits to him, with the exception of one cell block on A yard, 504, where he could work with people from death row and administrative segregation.

  Gordon had dreaded death row but found that it didn’t quite conform to his nightmares about it. He’d imagined iron bars, a medieval vision of misery. It was automated and modern, each tiny cell with a white-painted steel door and small glass window. There were twelve women, one to a cell, and a cramped alley with tables and sewing machines surrounded by meshed cage. A guard unlocked an entrance in the cage and led Gordon in to meet with students one-on-one, while others knitted or made hook rugs at nearby tables. Betty LaFrance, who was not Gordon’s student but always insisted on speaking to him, brought a radio from her cell and played elevator music as she crafted. The women made greeting cards by hand in emulation of a machine-printed corporate look: their best work resembled cards you could buy at Rite Aid, with blandly inspirational messages in a neutral script. The women were allowed to come and go from their cells, which smelled of Renuzit air freshener and were blanketed in homemade afghans, for privacy and probably to have some use for these afghans they churned on the oily axle of time.

  They called him Deary and Pumpkin and Doll. Deary creeped him out. It was what the old pawnbroker Elsabeta calls Raskolnikov before he carries out his plan to murder her, or at least that was the English equivalent the translator had chosen. Deary.

  Administrative segregation, on the floor above death row, had no common area, and there was no interaction among women except yelling. The women hollered from one cell to another, heckled guards, made noise to have something to do. Gordon waited in a small office as a student clink-jangled down the hall in her restraints and was put in a cage for the lesson with him. That was where he first met Romy Hall, who was in his class now. What he had noticed about her was that she looked him in the eye. Many of the women had this way of looking at his shoulder, or past him. Their eyes rolled every which direction to avoid his. Also she was attractive, despite the conditions. Wide-set greenish eyes. A mouth with a cupid’s bow, was that what it was called, an upper lip that swoop-de-swooped. A pretty mouth that said: trust this face. And the face said: this is not what it seems. She spelled well, read with good comprehension. He wasn’t looking for a good speller. He wasn’t looking for anything, among the women in Stanville.

  He’d seen her again in what the guards called a dog run—the outdoor cages where women in ad seg were placed for exercise. The walkway to 504 routed past a series of them, and his instinct was to avoid staring at the women trapped in these barren little enclosures. Hall had called to him in a casual way like a woman asking a man for a light, or if he knows what time the train stops here.

  He liked having her in class. She did the reading in earnest. A lot of his students thought Gordon was stupid, spoke in codes and laughed at him, but this seemed fair enough. They had state commitments he could hardly understand—LWOP, which was life without parole, or multiple life sentences. Even a single life sentence was difficult for him to get his head around.

  He passed out photocopied sections of books, Julie of the Wolves, Laura Ingalls Wilder, but he didn’t tell the prisoners they were children’s books, and it didn’t matter if the women enjoyed them. He kept it simple, since many had only an elementary school education. They wrote in bubble letters like adolescent girls. Even London, who the others called Conan and looked like a man, wrote in bubble letters. London was clever, it was obvious. Never did the reading but made the others laugh, which was something.

  “Is bosom plural?” London asked.

  “Depends on whose, maybe,” someone said.

  “The bosom of Jones. Sounds like an adventure film. Lieutenant Jones and the Bosom of Doom.”

  Geronima Campos, an old Native American woman, painted in her sketchbook all through class time. Gordon wondered if maybe she could not read or write. One day after class he asked her what she painted. If she admits she cannot write, he decided, he could suggest she work with him independently.

  Portraits, she told him. She opened her sketchbook to show him. Each page had an image and, under it, a name. She could write. But the images were not faces. They were wild streaks of color. “This is you,” she said, and showed him a scribble of black lines with a staining splotch of blue.

  When his class discussed a chapter of The Red Pony by John Steinbeck, the women talked about the mountains in the book and the ones they could see from main yard. They seemed afraid of the mountains, which surprised Gordon. He figured they’d regard the mountains as freedom, the one thing they could glimpse of the natural world. “You got to fight bears up there,” Conan said. “At least in here it’s just cubs. Cubs and scrubs. And I know I can win.”

  When they got to the third chapter, “The Promise,” about Nellie the pregnant mare, one woman raised her hand and said when she’d delivered, her belly was heart-shaped, “in two parts,” she said, “just like a horse, and even the doctor confirmed it, that horses have a heart-shaped womb.”

  They read from the chapter out loud. At the mention of pigs, a student interjected that her cousin wrote her from lockup in Arizona that they had a gas chamber where they put a pig one Sunday a month, to test the machine.

  Gordon tried to steer the discussion back to the book. What was the promise that Billy Buck made?

  The girl whose cousin had written her about the pigs gassed on Sundays said that when the pig “went up the pipe,” a smell settled down over the yard. “Smelt like peach blossoms,” she said. “That’s what my cousin told me.”

  Romy Hall raised her hand. She said Billy Buck promised the boy, Jody, a healthy foal. Earlier, Billy Buck had promised to look after the red pony and the pony had died. This new vow was Billy Buck’s chance to be a man of his word, by delivering the foal safely.

  Did he keep it, Gordon asked.

  She said that was the trick of the story. Technically yes, but in order to deliver the foal, he had to kill the mare. He killed the mare to save its breach foal. He smashed its skull with a hammer and that was a bullshit way to keep a promise. The mare could have had other foals that weren’t breach, but she had to die because some cowboy was hung up on himself as a man of his word.

  “It’s okay to make a promise,” London said to Gordon, as if summarizing for the teacher how life actually worked, “but it’s not always a good idea to keep one.”

  * * *

  One evening, as class ended, Romy Hall hovered. Gordon started collecting papers from an awkward position, on the far side of his own desk, in order to create more distance between them.

  She told him many things about herself in the span of about five minutes. She spoke them in a controlled voice. It seemed to Gordon she had been saving it up. He kept stepping back, to be farther from her, and she kept stepping toward him, and he was not going to be manipulated. One woman had tried to bribe him into smuggling cell phones for her, another tobacco. Staff and guards alike were involved in these schemes. Gordon wanted no part.

  She was a lifer, she told him, and the mother of a young boy. She apologized for troubling him. Said she woke up depressed. Could feel the fog in her cell, even without a window, and said the dampness of it reminded her of home.

  She wanted him to call a telephone number to find out where her kid was. She had it all written down and this was exactly the kind of thing he’d been backing away from, as she moved toward him. Just because he had bought her books or found her pretty, just because he thought about her sometimes, that didn’t mean he was looking for family dramas.

  * * *

/>   The assistance he gave on his own, and against the rules, had all started with Candy Peña on death row. Candy had cried like a child because she had no more wool and no money and so she couldn’t help the babies. The others on death row were knitting baby blankets that would go to a Christian charity in Stanville.

  He knew he could bring in wool. They almost never looked in his bag. He was eating breakfast at Baressi’s when he made the decision. The place soothed him, with its framed pictures of stock cars, victories from the local track. One side was a diner and the other a bar with a piano in the corner. On Saturday nights, a woman played it.

  You could not get dental work done in Stanville. There was no shoe repair. You could not buy a decent cook pot, not even one up to Gordon’s low standards, but there were three hobby and crafting stores. He went to one. Bought four colors of yarn. Candy had said wool, although the craft store sold no yarn that was made of wool, not even partially, but maybe wool no longer meant wool, but instead, fluffy knittables. The next day he gave what he’d bought to Candy. She melted in gratitude, which made him feel obscene. Not because it was against the rules, but because it had been almost no trouble and yet she cried and said no one had ever done anything so nice for her, not once in her life.

  The only remedy seemed to be to do favors for others, so that he wasn’t Candy’s saint, to neutralize the act of giving by giving more.

  Betty LaFrance asked Gordon if he would mail a letter for her, to an old lover, she explained, who was in a California state prison himself. Prisoners were not allowed to contact other prisoners without express approval from the Department of Corrections, this Gordon knew to be true, but he figured Betty probably imagined this romance she told him about. She’d been yelling to get the guards’ attention the first time Gordon met her. “Officer!” she’d called. “Please tell the parking lot attendant to reserve a spot for my hairdresser!” She snubbed the other women on death row, told Gordon they were not of her caliber. Once, she asked Gordon if he’d ever flown business class on Singapore Airlines. When he said no, she seemed to pity him. She was a deluded woman sentenced to die. He felt for her. He sent the letter.