The Mars Room(49)

When I was a kid there was a large Woolworth’s at Powell and Market, with a wig department in the center of the store. Eva and I would go in and pretend we were wig shopping. The old ladies who worked there helped us pin our hair up in special nets and fitted us with grand and curly hairdos. We laughed and played around in the mirrors, sneaked makeup and hair products into our purses, and took pictures in the photo booth that was inside the store. Sometimes we went to Zim’s on Van Ness afterward, ordered a lot of food and left without paying. It was something different from dining and dashing at the more familiar Zim’s on Taraval. We felt sophisticated downtown. Sometimes we went into the museum, up Van Ness, to hide after booking from Zim’s. There was a painting inside that Eva liked. It was called The Girl with Green Eyes. Among the kids we knew, you weren’t supposed to be into going to museums, but Eva was into whatever she was into, this painted girl with a long neck that looked like it was squeezed into a napkin ring. She stared at us, and we stared back.

The whole long era of my childhood I had run around like a street urchin, no more rooted than the teenagers on the posters in the Greyhound station on Sixth Street. Tall figures in silhouette, like long shadows, and the words RUNAWAYS, CALL FOR HELP. A hotline number. My childhood was the era of the hotline. But we never called any, except as a prank, and I wasn’t a runaway. I even had a mother. I might have gotten to know her, but I had not, not really. By the time I was sixteen, it was too late for me and my mother. When I went to prison, it seemed really and finally too late. But I was wrong. It was only too late when she died.



* * *



I told Hauser I read Pick-Up. He asked what I thought.

“That it was good and bad at the same time.”

“I know what you mean. The end is a surprise, right? But it makes you want to reread the book, to see if there were earlier clues.”

I told him I’d done that. And that it was good to read a book about San Francisco, that I was from there.

“Oh, me too,” he said.

He didn’t seem like it to me, and I said so.

“I mean, near there. I’m from just across the Bay, Contra Costa County.” He named the town, but I hadn’t heard of it.

“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.