Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences, plus six years, at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility. Outside is the world from which she has been permanently severed: the San Francisco of her youth, changed almost beyond recognition. The Mars Room strip club where she once gave lap dances for a living. And her seven-year-old son, Jackson, now in the care of Romy’s estranged mother.
Inside is a new reality to adapt to: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive. The deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner details with humour and precision. Daily acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike. Allegiances formed over liquor brewed in socks, and stories shared through sewage pipes.
Romy sees the future stretch out ahead of her in a long, unwavering line – until news from outside brings a ferocious urgency to her existence, challenging her to escape her own destiny and culminating in a climax of almost unbearable intensity. Through Romy – and through a cast of astonishing characters populating The Mars Room – Rachel Kushner presents not just a bold and unsentimental panorama of life on the margins of contemporary America, but an excoriating attack on the prison-industrial complex.
Rachel Kushner’s debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and a New York Times bestseller. Her follow-up novel, The Flamethrowers, was also a finalist for the National Book Award and received rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s and the Paris Review. She lives in Los Angeles.
ALSO BY RACHEL KUSHNER
Telex from Cuba
The Flamethrowers
I feel the air of another planet. Friendly faces that were turned toward me but now are fading into darkness.
I
Chain Night happens once a week on Thursdays. Once a week the defining moment for sixty women takes place. For some of the sixty, that defining moment happens over and over. For them it is routine. For me it happened only once. I was woken at two a.m. and shackled and counted, Romy Leslie Hall, inmate W314159, and lined up with the others for an all-night ride up the valley.
As our bus exited the jail perimeter, I glued myself to the mesh-reinforced window to try to see the world. There wasn’t much to look at. Underpasses and on-ramps, dark, deserted boulevards. No one was on the street. We were passing through a moment in the night so remote that traffic lights had ceased to go from green to red and merely blinked a constant yellow. Another car came alongside. It had no lights. It surged past the bus, a dark thing with demonic energy. There was a girl on my unit in county who got life for nothing but driving. She wasn’t the shooter, she would tell anyone who’d listen. She wasn’t the shooter. All she did was drive the car. That was it. They’d used license plate reader technology. They had it on video surveillance. What they had was an image of the car, at night, moving along a street, first with lights on, then with lights off. If the driver cuts the lights, that is premeditation. If the driver cuts the lights, it’s murder.
They were moving us at that hour for a reason, for many reasons. If they could have shot us to the prison in a capsule they would have. Anything to shield the regular people from having to look at us, a crew of cuffed and chained women on a sheriff’s department bus.
Some of the younger ones were whimpering and sniffling as we pulled onto the highway. There was a girl in a cage who looked about eight months pregnant, her belly so large they had to get an extra length of waist chain to shackle her hands to her sides. She hiccupped and shook, her face a mess of tears. They had her in the cage on account of her age, to protect her from the rest of us. She was fifteen.
A woman up ahead turned toward the crying girl in the cage and hissed like she was spraying ant killer. When that didn’t work she yelled.
“Shut the hell up!”
“Dang,” the person across from me said. I’m from San Francisco and a trans to me is nothing new, but this person truly looked like a man. Shoulders as broad as the aisle, and a jawline beard. I assumed she was from the daddy tank at county, where they put the butches. This was Conan, who later I got to know.
“Dang, I mean, it’s a kid. Let her cry.”
The woman told Conan to shut up and then they were arguing and the cops intervened.
Certain women in jail and prison make rules for everyone else, and the woman insisting on quiet was one of those. If you follow their rules, they make more rules. You have to fight people or you end up with nothing.
I had learned already not to cry. Two years earlier, when I was arrested, I cried uncontrollably. My life was over and I knew it was over. It was my first night in jail and I kept hoping the dreamlike state of my situation would break, that I would wake up from it. I kept on not waking up into anything different from a piss-smelling mattress and slamming doors, shouting lunatics and alarms. The girl in the cell with me, who was not a lunatic, shook me roughly to get my attention. I looked up. She turned around and lifted her jail shirt to show me her low back tattoo, her tramp stamp. It said
Shut the Fuck Up
It worked on me. I stopped crying.
It was a gentle moment with my cellmate in county. She wanted to help me. It’s not everyone who can shut the fuck up, and although I tried I was not my cellmate, who I later considered a kind of saint. Not for the tattoo but the loyalty to the mandate.
The cops had put me with another white woman on the bus. My seatmate had long limp and shiny brown hair and a big creepy smile like she was advertising for tooth whitener. Few in jail and prison have white teeth, and neither did she, but she had that grand and inappropriate grin. I didn’t like it. It made her seem like she had undergone partial brain removal surgery. She offered her full name, Laura Lipp, and said she was being transferred from Chino up to Stanville, as if we each had nothing to hide. Since then, no one has ever introduced themselves to me by full name, or attempted to give any believable-seeming account of who they are on a first introduction, and no one would, and I don’t, either.
“Lipp double p is my stepfather’s name, which I took later,” she said as if I’d inquired. As if such a thing could matter to me, then or ever.
“My father-father was a Culpepper. That’s the Culpeppers of Apple Valley, not Victorville. There’s a Culpepper’s shoe repair, see, in Victorville, but there’s no relation.”
No one is supposed to talk on the bus. This rule did not stop her.
“My family goes back three generations in Apple Valley. Which sounds like a wonderful place, doesn’t it? You can practically smell the apple blossoms and hear the honeybees and it makes you think about fresh apple cider and warm apple pie. The autumn decorations they start putting up every July at Craft Cubby, bright leaves and plastic pumpkins: it is mostly the baking and preparing of meth that is traditional in Apple Valley. Not in my family. Don’t want to give you the wrong impression. The Culpeppers are useful people. My father owned his own construction business. Not like the family I married into, who—Oh! Oh look! It’s Magic Mountain!”
We were passing the white arcs of a roller coaster on the far side of the big multi-lane freeway.
When I’d moved to Los Angeles three years earlier, that amusement park had seemed like the gateway to my new life. It was the first big vision off the freeway hurtling south, bright and ugly and exciting, but that no longer mattered.
“There was a lady on my unit who stole children at Magic Mountain,” Laura Lipp said, “she and her sicko husband.”
She had a way of flipping her shiny sheet of hair without using her arms, as if the hair were attached to the rest of her by an electrical current.
“She told me how they did it. People trusted her and her husband because they were old. You know, sweet gentle elderly people, and a mother might have children running in three directions and go off to chase one and the old lady—I bunked with her at CIW and she told me the whole story—she would be sitting there knitting and offer to keep an eye on the child. As soon as the parent was out of sight, this child was escorted to a bathroom with a knife under his chin. This old lady and her husband had a system worked out. The kid was fitted with a wig, different clothes, and then that sneaky old couple muscled the poor thing out of the park.”
“That’s horrible,” I said, and tried to lean away from her as best I could in my chains.
I have a child of my own, Jackson.
I love my son but it’s hard for me to think about him. I try not to.
My mother named me after a German actress who told a bank robber on a television talk show that she liked him a lot.
Very much, the actress said, I like you very much.
Like the German actress, he was on the talk show to be interviewed. Interviewees did not generally cross talk, while sitting on the chairs to the left of the interviewer’s desk. They moved outward as the show progressed.
You start outward, some prick had said to me once about silverware. It wasn’t a thing I’d ever learned, or been taught. He was paying me for the date with him, and in this exchange he felt he didn’t get his money’s worth unless he found small ways to try to humiliate me over the course of the evening. Leaving his hotel room that night, I took a shopping bag that was by the door. He didn’t notice, figured he was off-duty from the vigilance of demeaning me and could luxuriate in the hotel bed. The bag was from Saks Fifth Avenue and contained many other bags, all with presents for a woman, I assumed his wife. Dowdy and expensive clothes I would never wear. I carried the bag through the lobby and shoved it in a trash can on the way to my car, which I’d parked several blocks away, in a garage on Mission, because I didn’t want this guy to know anything about me.
The outward chair of the TV show’s set held a bank robber who was on the show to talk about his past, and the German movie actress was on next and she turned to the bank robber and told him that she liked him.
My mother named me after this actress, who spoke to the bank robber instead of to the host.
I think he enjoyed that I stole the shopping bag. He wanted to see me regularly after that. He was looking for the girlfriend experience and a lot of women I knew considered that the gold standard: these men would pay a year’s worth of rent, up front; all you needed was one of them and you were set. I’d gone on the date because my old friend Eva had convinced me to. Sometimes what other people want is wantable, briefly, before dissolving in the face of your own wants. That night, while this square from Silicon Valley pretended we had a complicity like lovers, which meant treating me like trash, telling me I was pretty in a “common” sort of way, using his money to try to have power over me socially, like this was a relationship but since he was paying for it we would interact on his terms, and he could tell me what to say, how to walk, what to order, which fork to use, what to fake like I enjoyed—I realized that the girlfriend experience was not my thing. I would stick to hustling my income as a lap dancer at the Mars Room on Market Street. I didn’t care what was honest work, only what wasn’t repulsive to me. I knew from lap dancing that grinding was easier than talking. Everyone is different when it comes to personal standards and what they can offer. I cannot pretend to be friends. I didn’t want anyone getting to know me, although there were a couple of guys I gave crumbs to. Jimmy the Beard, the doorman, who required only that I pretend his sadistic sense of humor was normal. And Dart, the night manager, because we were both into classic cars and he was always saying he wanted to take me to Hot August Nights, in Reno. It was just banter, and he was just the night manager. Hot August Nights. It wasn’t my kind of car event. I went to the Sonoma dirt track with Jimmy Darling, ate hot dogs and drank draft beer as sprint cars chipped mud against the chain link.
Some girls at the Mars Room wanted regulars and were always looking to cultivate them. I didn’t, but I ended up with one anyway, Kurt Kennedy. Creep Kennedy.
I sometimes think San Francisco is cursed. I mostly think it’s a sad suckville of a place. People say it’s beautiful, but the beauty is only visible to newcomers, and invisible to those who had to grow up there. Like the glimpses of blue bay through the breezeways along the street that wraps around the back of Buena Vista Park. Later, from prison, I could see that view like I was ghost-walking around the city. House by house, I looked at all there was to see, pressed my face to the breezeway gates of the Victorians along the eastern ridge of Buena Vista Park, the blue of the water softened by the faintest residue of fog, a kiss of moisture, a glow. I did not admire those views when I was free. Growing up, that park was a place where we drank. Where older men cruised, and snuck off to mattresses hidden under bushes. Where boys I knew beat up those men who cruised, and threw one off a cliff after he’d bought them a case of beer.
On Tenth Avenue at Moraga, where I had lived with my mother when I was a kid, you could see Golden Gate Park, then the Presidio, the matte red points of the Golden Gate Bridge, and behind it the steep, green-crinkled folds of the Marin Headlands. I knew that for everyone else in the world the Golden Gate Bridge was considered something special, but to me and my friends it was nothing. We just wanted to get wasted. The city to us was clammy fingers of fog working their way into our clothes, always those clammy fingers, and big bluffs of wet mist hurling themselves down Judah Street while I waited by sandy streetcar tracks for the N, which ran once an hour late-night, waited and waited with mud caked on the hems of my jeans, mud from the puddles in the parking lot of Ocean Beach. Or mud from climbing Acid Mountain on acid, which was what Acid Mountain was for. The bad feeling of extra weight tugging me downward, from the mud caked on my jean hems. The bad feeling from doing cocaine with strangers in a motel in Colma, by the cemetery. The city was wet feet and soggy cigarettes at a rainy kegger in the Grove. The rain and beer and bloody fights on St. Patrick’s Day. Being sick from Bacardi 151 and splitting my chin open on a concrete barrier in Minipark. Someone overdosing in a bedroom in the white people projects on the Great Highway. Someone holding a loaded gun to my head for no reason in Big Rec, where people play baseball in the park. It was night, and this psycho attached himself to us while we were sitting and drinking our forties, a situation so typical, even if it never happened again, that I don’t recall how it resolved itself. San Francisco to me was the McGoldricks and the McKittricks and the Boyles and the O’Boils and the Hicks and the Hickeys and their Erin go bragh tattoos, the fights they started and won.
Our bus moved into the right lane and began to slow. We were getting off at the Magic Mountain exit.
“They taking us on rides?” Conan asked. “That would be dope.”
Magic Mountain was left, across the freeway. Right was a men’s county correctional facility. Our bus turned right.
The world had split into good and bad, bound together. Amusement park and county jail.
“It’s cool,” Conan said. “Wasn’t really up for it. Tickets hella expensive. Rather go back to the big O. Or-lan-do.”
“Listen to this fool,” someone said. “You ain’t been to no Orlando.”
“I dropped twenty G there,” Conan said. “In three days. Brought my girl. Her kids. Jacuzzi suite. All-access pass. Alligator steaks. Orlando is dope. A lot doper than this bus, that’s for sure.”
“Thought they were taking you to Magic Mountain,” the woman in front of Conan said. “Stupid motherfucker.” She had a face full of tattoos.
“Dang, you got a lot of ink. Just looking at this group of us here I’m voting you Most Likely to Succeed.”
She clucked and turned away.
What I eventually came to understand, about San Francisco, was that I was immersed in beauty and barred from seeing it. Still, I never could bring myself to leave, not until my regular customer Kurt Kennedy forced me to, but the curse of the city followed me. In other ways she was a miserable person, this actress after whom I am named. Her son climbed a fence and cut a leg artery and died at fourteen, and then she drank continuously until dying herself at forty-three.
I’m twenty-nine. Fourteen years is forever, if that’s what I have to live. In any case, it’s more than twice that—thirty-seven years—before I will see a parole board, at which point, if they grant me it, I can start my second life sentence. I have two consecutive life sentences plus six years.
I don’t plan on living a long life. Or a short life, necessarily. I have no plans at all. The thing is you keep existing whether you have a plan to do so or not, until you don’t exist, and then your plans are meaningless.
But not having plans doesn’t mean I don’t have regrets.
If I had never worked at the Mars Room.
If I had never met Creep Kennedy.
If Creep Kennedy had not decided to stalk me.
But he did decide to, and then he did it relentlessly. If none of that had happened, I would not be on a bus heading for a life in a concrete slot.
We were at a stoplight past the off-ramp. Outside the window, a mattress leaned against a pepper tree. Even those two things, I told myself, must go together. No pepper trees, lacy branches and pink peppercorns, without dirty old mattresses leaned up against their puzzle-bark trunks. All good bound to bad, and made bad. All bad.
“I used to think those were mine every time,” Laura Lipp said, peering out at the abandoned mattress. “I’d be driving around Los Angeles and see a mattress on the sidewalk and think, hey, somebody stole my box spring! I’d think, there’s my bed … there’s my bed. Every time. Because honestly it looked just like mine. I’d go home and my bed would be where I left it, in the bedroom. I’d tear the covers and sheets off to check the mattress and be sure, see if it was still mine, and every time, it was. I always found it still there, at home, despite having just seen my exact mattress flopped out on the street. I have a feeling I am not the only one, and that this is something like a mass confusion. Fact is they cover all the mattresses with the same exact material, and quilt them the same way, and you can’t help but think it’s yours when you see it dumped at a freeway exit. Like what the hell did they drag my bed out here for!”
We passed a lit billboard: three suits $129. It was the name of a business. Three Suits $129.
“They’ll hook you up in that place. Walk out looking like a baller,” Conan said.
“Where they get this fool?” someone said. “Talking about cheap-ass suits.”
Where did they get any of us. Only each of us knew and no one was telling. No one but Laura Lipp.
“You want to know what they did with the children?” Laura Lipp asked me. “That old lady and her sicko husband at Magic Mountain?”
“No,” I said.
“You won’t believe it,” she continued. “It’s inhuman. They—”
An announcement exploded through the bus PA. We were to remain seated. The bus was stopping to let off the three men caged separately near the front. Guns were pointed at them and at us while the transfer took place.
“Crazy mothers up here,” Conan said. “I was in six months.”
The woman in front of Conan got excited, as in mad. “You a dude for real? For real? Shit. Officer! Officer!”
“Settle down,” Conan said. “I’m in the right place. I mean, the wrong place. Nothing right about it. But they fixed my file. They were confused and put me with the caballeros downtown, at Men’s Central. It was an honest oops.”
There was laughing and snickering. “They put you in the men’s joint? They thought you was an actual dude?”
“Not just county. I was at Wasco State Prison.”
Disbelief rippled down the aisle. Conan did not challenge it. Later, I learned the details. Conan really was at a men’s prison, at least in receiving. He truly did seem like a man, and that was how I thought of him from the moment I met him.
I regret the Mars Room, and Kennedy, but there are other things you might want me to regret or expect me to that I don’t.
The years I spent getting high and reading library books I do not regret. It wasn’t a bad life, even if I would probably never go back. I had an income from stripping and could afford to buy what I wanted, which was drugs, and if you have never tried heroin I have news for you: It makes you feel good about yourself, especially in the beginning. It makes you feel good about other people. You want to give the whole world a break, a time-out, a tender regard. There is nothing so soothing. My first dabble in it was morphine, a pill that someone else melted in a spoon and helped me inject, a guy named Bill and I hadn’t thought much about him or what the drug would be like but the careful way he tied off my arm and found my vein, the way the needle went in, so thin and delicate, the whole experience of this random guy I never saw again shooting me up in an abandoned house was exactly what a young girl dreams love can be.
“This is a pins and needles high,” he’d said. “It’ll grab you by the back of the neck.” It grabbed me by the back of the head with its firm clench, rubber tongs, then warmth spread down through me. I broke into the most relaxing sweat of my life. I fell in love. I don’t miss those years. I’m just telling you.
Back on the highway, I turned from Laura Lipp as far as I could and closed my eyes. Five minutes into my attempt to sleep, she started whispering to me again.
“This whole situation is because I’m bipolar,” she said. “In case you were wondering. You probably are. It’s chromosomal.”
Or maybe she said, “chromosomical.” Because that was the kind of people I had to be around now. People who thought everything was a scientifical conspiracy. I didn’t meet a single person in county who wasn’t convinced that AIDS had been invented by the government to wipe out gays and addicts. It got difficult to argue with. In a sense it seemed true.
The woman who had been hissing and shushing everyone turned around as best she could in her restraints. She had a faded and blurry teardrop tattoo and pencil-drawn eyebrows. Her eyes glowed a grayish green like this was a zombie film and not a bus ride to a California state prison.
“She’s a baby killer,” she called to us, or maybe to me. She was talking about Laura Lipp.
A transport cop came down the aisle.
“Well if it ain’t Fernandez,” he said. “I hear one more word from you I’ll put you in a cage.”
Fernandez didn’t look at him or respond. He returned to his seat.
Laura made a face, a slight smile, as if something mildly embarrassing but not worth acknowledging had just taken place, like someone had accidentally passed gas, definitely not her.
“Dang, you killed your child?” Conan said. “That is fucked-up. Hope I don’t have to room with you.”
“I’d guess you’ve got bigger problems than a roommate assignment,” Laura Lipp said to Conan. “You look like the kind of person who spends a lot of time in jails and prisons.”
“Why you say that?’ Cause I’m black? At least I fit in here. You look like a Manson chick. No offense. I got nothing to hide. Here’s my file: counter-rehabilitatable. ODD. That’s oppositional defiant disorder. I’m criminal-minded, narcissistic, recidivistical, and uncooperative. I’m also a prunaholic and horndog.”
People had quieted into themselves, and eventually some fell asleep. Conan was snoring like a bulldozer.
“We have some real characters going up valley with us,” Laura whispered to me. “And listen, I’m no Manson girl and I know what I’m talking about. I know the difference. We had Susan Atkins and Leslie Van Houten at CIW. They both had the scar in between their eyes. Susan put special cream on hers but nothing hid it. She was an uppity snob with an X carved in her forehead. Had fine things in her cell. Fancy perfumes. A touch lamp. I felt bad when one of the girls got a guard to pop Susan’s cell and they took all her nice stuff. That’s what I thought about when I heard she died. Missing part of her brain and paralyzed and they still wouldn’t let her go home. When I heard about it, I thought of them popping her cell at CIW, taking her touch lamp and her lotions. Leslie Van Houten is more of what you’d call a convict. Some people think that’s a term of respect. But not to me. It’s nothing but groupthink. She’ll die in prison just like Susan Atkins did. They aren’t letting her out. Not until Folgers coffee isn’t brewed anymore, and that’s as good as never because what are people going to drink in the morning? One of the victims was an heiress of Folgers, see, and they don’t want Leslie out and they are individuals of high influence. As long as there is Folgers, Leslie will die in prison.”
Her mother had an affair with Hitler. The mother of the German film star. The one after whom I’m named. Her mother had an affair with Hitler, but back then, from what I understand, who didn’t?
“How come you don’t speak German?” Jimmy Darling once asked me.
The idea of my mother teaching me German had never occurred to me. The idea of her teaching me anything was difficult to imagine.
“She was too depressed to bother.” Some parents raise their children in silence. Silence, irritation, disapproval. How could I learn German from that? I’d have to learn it from phrases like “Did you take money from my wallet, you little shit?” Or “Don’t wake me up when you come in.”
Jimmy said he only knew one German word.
“Is it angst?”
“Begierden. It means lust, desire. Their word for desire is beer garden. Makes sense.”
I tried to sleep, but the only position for sleeping that the restraints allowed was chin to chest. Aches pulsed up my arms from the handcuffs, which were attached to the belly chain around my middle, immobilizing my hands at my sides. The air-conditioning on the bus felt like it was set to fifty-five degrees. I was freezing and uncomfortable and this was only Ventura County. We had six hours to go. I started thinking about those kids forced into wigs in a bathroom stall at Magic Mountain, outfitted briskly with sunglasses and different clothes. They would end up unrecognizable not only in their new disguises, but in their new lives. They would be strangers, different children, ones who were tainted and ruined by their own kidnapping, long before they ever got used for whatever evil purpose was their new and abrupt destiny. I saw the kids in their wigs and the scattered crowd of amusement park–goers who would not know to help a lost and stolen child. I saw Jackson, as if he was being torn from me by an old woman knitting on a bench, and there was nothing I could do but watch the pictures of his little freckled face in my mind, pictures that floated and pulsed and would not fade or disperse.
Jackson is with my mother. It’s the single grace in my life that he has her, even if I don’t like her much myself. She is not a psycho-grandmother who knits on a bench. She’s a gruff and chain-smoking German woman who gets by on marriage, divorce, and remarriage. She has a glacial manner with me, but she is loving enough to Jackson. We had a falling-out, years ago, but when I was arrested, she took Jackson. He was five then. He’s seven now. During the two and a half years I was in county, as my case made its way through the courts, she brought him to see me as often as she could.
If there had been money for a private attorney, I would have hired one. My mother offered to mortgage her condominium, a studio apartment on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, but because she had already mortgaged it twice, she owed more than it was worth. The old famous stripper Carol Doda, whose neon nipples had blinked red above Broadway when I was a child, lived in my mother’s building. I used to see her in the hallway, struggling with grocery bags and a yapping dog, when I went to visit my mother. She didn’t look so good, but neither did my mother, who was unemployed and suffering from a painkiller addiction.
For a brief period there was some charitable possibility for my legal aid, a gentleman friend of my mother’s, a man named Bob who drove a burgundy Jaguar, wore plaid suits, and drank premixed Manhattans. Bob, she said, was going to pay for a lawyer. But then Bob vanished; he literally disappeared. His body was later found under a log in the Russian River. My mother doesn’t have good connections; her connections are often dubious. I was assigned a public defender. We were all hopeful things would go differently. They did not go differently. They went this way.
Our bus groaned along in the right lane with the tractor-trailers. We were passing Castaic, the last stop before the Grapevine. I’d once been in a bar in Castaic with Jimmy Darling, after I’d fled to Los Angeles to get away from Kurt Kennedy, whose victim I was at that time. Jimmy Darling had moved down to Valencia to teach at an art school. He sublet a place on a ranch not far from Castaic.
The things you aren’t allowed to say: I am still Kurt Kennedy’s victim, even though he’s dead.
I knew this area, and the Grapevine, too, which was windy and empty and demanding, a test you passed to get to Northern California. In our closeness to the scumbly land beyond the meshed window, I longed for reality to twist itself like a bag and tear a hole from the twisting, rupture the bag and let me out, release me into that no-man’s-land.
As if she could read my thoughts, Laura Lipp said, “I personally feel safer in here, with what all goes on out there. Sick, creepy, disturbing stuff, you can’t make it up.”
I looked out the window and saw nothing but nature’s carpet of rocks and shrubs darting past in an endless bumpy scroll.
“A lot of truckers are serial killers, and they don’t get caught. They’re on the move, see. State to state. The jurisdictions don’t talk, so nobody knows. All these trucks crossing America. Some of them with bound and gagged women in the back of the cab. They’ve got those curtains, for hiding the women. The murdered ones get dumped in rest stop dumpsters, part by part. That’s how dumpsters got their name. People dump bodies. The bodies of women and girls.”
We passed a rest area. What an earnest and beautiful concept that was. Anything I could imagine was beautiful compared to this bus and this woman sharing my seat. What I would have given to be sleeping behind the rest area vending machines, whose cold light glowed as we flew past. Every person who might incidentally pass through a rest stop was my soul mate, my ally, against Laura Lipp. But I had no one, and I was fastened to her.
“I’m alive,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean much. I had my heart cut out with a chain saw.”
We were on a descent and passing a runaway ramp, dropping through the mouth of the Grapevine and into the valley. I knew that exact ramp. It was a steep, loose-gravel road that went nowhere, for vehicles with failed brakes. I would never see that runaway truck ramp again and I loved it, it was a good and wholesome truck ramp, I could see that only now, how good and wholesome and dear, fragile and dear, everything was.
“You know how they say it’s a thing you don’t have, that you offer to someone who doesn’t want it?”
I gave her a hostile look.
“I’m talking about love,” she said. “Like, let’s say I go out there and pick up a small stone. I hold it up and say to someone, here, this stone is me. Take it. And they think, I don’t want that stone. Or they say thanks, and put it in their pocket or maybe into a rock crusher, and they don’t care that the stone is me, because it isn’t actually me, I just decided it was me. I let myself get crushed. See what I mean?”
I said nothing but she kept going. She was going to talk all the way to Stanville.
“In prison at least you know what’s going to happen. I mean, you don’t actually know. It’s unpredictable. But in a boring way. It’s not like something tragic and awful can happen. I mean, sure it can. Of course it can. But you can’t lose everything in prison, since that’s already taken place.”
The bartender in Castaic had flirted with Jimmy Darling the night we’d ended up there. It was one of the liabilities of dating him that I had to watch bimbos try to communicate a tacit message to Jimmy Darling of let’s-lose-this-bitch when he and I were together.
He didn’t lose me, though. Not until later, when I was in jail and called him, and I knew by the sound of his voice that it was over, but I defensively didn’t care. I needed to focus on what was happening to me. He asked how I was with polite formality. I said, “You just collected charges from an inmate at a Los Angeles County correctional facility, how the fuck do you think I am?”
The era of me, the phase of me, really, had ended, for me and for him both. He wrote me once but his entire letter was about the fact that it was almost baseball season, and did not acknowledge that I was facing a life sentence.
You might have done the same thing in Jimmy Darling’s shoes. Not written a letter about baseball, but cut ties with someone doomed. Any sensible person would give up on a me who was going to be sent away permanently, if they were just a boyfriend or lover, if it was meant to be something fun. It’s not fun anymore if it involves prison. But maybe it was me who pushed him away.
Jimmy Darling grew up in Detroit. His father worked at General Motors. As a teenager Jimmy Darling worked at an auto glass company. He told me that the first time he smelled the adhesive that was used to glue auto glass in place, he realized he had dreamed of that very smell, the smell of that particular glue, and that it was his destiny to work replacing auto glass. By Jimmy’s luck, he had multiple destinies. After dropping out of college, he began making films about the rust belt. His background was the gimmick, a shtick, he was Mr. Blue Collar Filmmaker. I teased him about it, but I also found his romantic attachment to Detroit touching. One of his films was his hand turning over every card in a General Motors deck that his father was given for his retirement after forty years on the assembly line. The company thanked his father for decades of loyalty and backbreaking labor with a pack of playing cards. “You know what’s in the GM headquarters on Cadillac Place now,” Jimmy Darling said. “A lottery disbursement office.” Jimmy stood outside it all day, waiting to film a winner walking inside to collect. None arrived.
I met Jimmy Darling through one of his students, who I was sleeping with at the time. A kid named Ajax who was young and broke and lived south of Market in a geodesic dome on a warehouse roof. Ajax was a janitor at the Mars Room. People teased me about sleeping with the kid whose job was to empty trash cans filled with used condoms, but I was unbothered. Also his name is scouring powder, they kept saying, but he told me it was Greek. These women and their bogus standards, that you sell your ass but don’t date janitors. Still, Ajax was young and annoying; he’d come over with gifts for me but they were useless eccentric gestures, like a broken vacuum cleaner off the street, and once he showed up tripping on acid and speaking in an Irish accent and when I told him to stop, he said he couldn’t. One night he took me to an art school party and introduced me to Jimmy and that was it. I left the party with Jimmy, who was handsomer and didn’t get on my nerves.
“How come you didn’t go to college?” Jimmy Darling once asked me. He thought I was smart, but he had that educated person’s naive way of presuming the reason some other people didn’t go to college must be because they simply could not hack it.
“I was too depressed.”
“That’s what you said about why your mother didn’t teach you German.”
“Which doesn’t make it less true. You think it’s a surprise a girl who works at a strip club is clever? Every stripper I know is clever. Some are practically geniuses. Maybe you can go around with your little camera and ask each one why she didn’t go to college.”
When I was growing up, they all said I had potential. I was told that, by teachers and other adults. If it was true, I didn’t do anything with it. I did manage not to end up like Eva, and that felt like an accomplishment, not to be hooking on Eddy and Jones at seven in the morning on a weekday. I quit drugs when I found out I was pregnant, but I don’t consider it an achievement, it was more that I averted disaster. I worked at the Mars Room, giving lap dances. It’s not even the best of the strip clubs in San Francisco. There isn’t any status in it unless you’d be impressed to know that the Mars Room is not a middling or mediocre strip club but definitely the worst and most notorious, the very seediest and most circuslike place there is. Maybe I had a taste for it the way Jimmy had a taste for me. It was something extreme, and in that, special and amusing, and some of the women really were geniuses.
I’m not saying I’m special or extreme, but Jimmy Darling had never been with a girl who pushed him out of her Impala while driving. We were going slow, five or ten miles an hour. After I did it the one time, because I was angry, he asked me to do it again, for kicks, but I refused. He had never known anyone who lived in a Tenderloin hotel, and was always a bit disoriented by the scene on the landing, the chaos and shouting, the fact that he had to pay to come upstairs. At a health food store he and I had run into a girl I knew who was spaced out and scratching herself. She asked Jimmy if he knew whether the juice she’d chosen was organic, and he acted like he’d never encountered that kind of contradiction, junkies who refuse non-organic juice. He was a little sheltered, like most people who come to the city from elsewhere. Normal, educated, had a job, felt there was a purpose to his existence and so forth, and he didn’t understand about people who grew up in the city, the nihilism, the inability to go to college or join the straight world, get a regular job or believe in the future. I fit into some kind of narrative for him. Which isn’t to say that Jimmy Darling was dipping down into a lower class bracket by hanging around with me. He wasn’t. He was as common as I was, commoner, but he was the one slumming.
Did you ever notice that women can seem common while men never do? You won’t ever hear anyone describe a man’s appearance as common. The common man means the average man, a typical man, a decent hardworking person of modest dreams and resources. A common woman is a woman who looks cheap. A woman who looks cheap doesn’t have to be respected, and so she has a certain value, a certain cheap value.
At the Mars Room, I did not have to show up on time, or smile, or obey any rules, or think of most men as anything other than losers to be exploited but who believed they were exploiting us, and so it was naturally quite hostile as an environment, even as it was coated in pretend submission—our own. The Mars Room was a place where you could do what you wanted; at least I had believed that. When I was dating Jackson’s dad, I broke a bottle over his head and he punched me back, in the face, and I showed up five hours late to work with a black eye and wearing sunglasses and no one said anything. I had arrived there on several occasions so drunk I could barely walk. Some girls, as part of their routine, spent the first several hours of their shifts nodding off in the dressing room with a makeup compact in one hand. There was no problem with that. The management did not care. There were girls who worked the audience in the standard uniform of lace bra and panties but with ratty broken-down tennis shoes instead of high heels. If you’d showered you had a competitive edge at the Mars Room. If your tattoos weren’t misspelled you were hot property. If you weren’t five or six months pregnant, you were the it-girl in the club that night. Girls maced customers in the face and sent us all outside, hacking and choking. One dancer got mad at d’Artagnan, the night manager, and set the dressing room on fire. She was let go, it’s true, but that was exceptional.
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.”
A guard came down the aisle to make a routine check.
“You ever had a bloomin’ onion?” Conan yelled at him. The guard kept walking. Conan yelled at his back, receding up the aisle. “They blow that sucker open, batter it, deep-fry it. Damn, it’s good. You can’t get that anywhere else. It’s copywrit.”
We passed a ranch house with a tire swing. A clump of shaggy