The Mars Room(21)
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The rest of us lined up for debugging and muumuus. The lieutenant was called Jones, a big Mack truck–shaped lady who was, I later came to understand, partly shaped like that on account of her stab-proof vest. The vests make the men look gym-pumped and the women look like packing crates.
We slathered ourselves with Lindane Lotion to kill lice and whatever else. It’s a poison; twice before I’d used it for scabies I’d contracted at the Mars Room and both times I started menstruating within hours. They wanted the girl, the fifteen-year-old who looked eight months pregnant, to use it as well. I told her not to. We were next to each other in the showers. They forced her, and she cried while applying her Lindane. If she were officially declared pregnant, she could be excused from certain procedures, but that designation had to be on her bed card, and none of us had bed cards yet. She would have to wait like the rest of us until her scheduled medical exam, and then for the requisite paperwork from her pregnancy test, which she had to have, even if you could practically see the baby kicking. Eventually she would be issued a CDC PREGNANT designation, with state clothing that announced it in enormous block letters on the back of her shirt and her state-property rain jacket. She’d be allowed no extra food, no prenatal exams, no vitamins, no counseling. All she would get was a bottom bunk, and extra time to go prone when the alarm sounded on the yard. That’s why the jacket said PREGNANT. It was like SWAT. It meant DON’T SHOOT (I’M SLOW).
Next was the strip search, which I was accustomed to from jail. The guards were yelling at us to spread wider, especially at women with thicker pubic hair. They shone their lights on us, as we bent over for them. Some of the girls were crying. Fernandez, who had yelled at the young pregnant girl to shut up when we first got on the bus, was yelling again at the girls who were crying about the strip search. The cops all knew her. “Fernandez, back again,” they kept saying, and she would either be friendly and joke or tell them to fuck off. The other girls seemed afraid of her.
They gave us one-size-fits-all polka-dot muumuus and three-sizes-fit-most canvas slippers. Even big and burly Conan with his jawline beard was forced to wear a muumuu. He threw his shoulders back to show the cops the muumuu was too small.
“I need pants and a shirt. I can’t wear this. It ain’t right, Sarge.”
He kept raising his arms. “It’s too tight in the shoulders.”
Jones said, “What are you planning to do in it, ma’am, conduct an orchestra? Shut up and put your arms down.”
The muumuus made me think of that expression lipstick on a pig. No woman should be compared to a pig nor made to wear the garment they gave us. And no Conan, either. The slippers were okay. They reminded me of winos, the shoes we wore growing up, which you could purchase at the army-navy place on Market Street. It was where I got my school gym uniforms as well. Later, I passed it as an adult, on my way to the Mars Room. Both were near the corner where the businessman getting in the Mercedes had promised money for a cab on a rainy night. San Francisco was like that, a city where the layers of my history all compressed together onto a single plane. Between the army-navy place and the Mars Room was Fascination, where Eva and I spent many hours as teenagers while Eva flirted with the cashier, before she was lost to the Tenderloin, north of Fascination, up in the boisterous and dirty hotels that formed the pearls on the chain of her bare life, barer even than mine.
The last time I saw Eva was at the wedding of another friend, a former prostitute who got clean, met another guy in recovery, and joined, with him, the Church of Christ. We all went to an alcohol-free wedding where people smiled like we were on Christian TV. They had done something to our friend. I could see it in her face. She sobbed at the altar. It was clear to me that there had been a reckoning. They’d broken her down, and now they were her moral overlords. She looked beautiful like an arrangement of plastic flowers in a funeral home. Another Sunset District girl at the wedding kept making references to her boyfriend and how he couldn’t come with her because a guy in his club had died and there was a funeral for him that morning. His club. There was a big public funeral that day for a Hells Angel. She wanted to brag, but she wanted to seem like she was being discreet. She kept talking about what good money she made as a waitress on Pier 39. She said, as if she somehow knew what I did for a living, “I make my money respectably.” Pier 39 is garbage.
Eva showed up halfway through the ceremony. Walked in with this greaseball. They looked like they’d been up for three days. Eva’s face was coated in foundation that was a full shade too light for her skin. She kept her sunglasses on inside. Turned to me in her half-erasing makeup.
“Romy, what the fuck is going on here?”
It was the right question, was the thing.
The greaseball was probably her dealer. She said boyfriend but that distinction doesn’t matter. The year before, Eva had been with a guy who was originally a john. He became a regular, and then he didn’t want her seeing any other johns. He started funding her drug habit so she didn’t have to work the streets. This guy was waiting outside the Mars Room one night to talk to me. He was looking for Eva. He was distressed. He said he’d spent eighty thousand dollars on her cocaine habit that year and now she was gone. What did he expect? I didn’t question that he loved her, or at least that he knew he’d never get a woman like Eva, that gorgeous and free, without doling out the money, and without her being first and foremost an addict who needed something from him. “Get away from me,” I said, and left him standing at the entrance to the theater.