The Mars Room(56)

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The apartment I’d sublet was near Echo Park Lake, on a curving street of collapsing Victorians just above downtown. It belonged to a girl I knew from San Francisco, a stripper who was away in Alaska, working up there at the gentlemen’s clubs. Lots of girls would go to Alaska to make money, but they never came home with much. They made a lot at the clubs, but life was so dull and confining that everyone drank all the time, and the drinks were expensive like everything there was expensive. Girls returned with an experience of Alaska and no money saved. This girl had a nice apartment because at home in LA she made great money at the clubs in the San Fernando Valley. They had a reputation and, as I discovered, it held up. Discovered, that is, after a rocky start, at clubs in Hollywood that were just havens for tourists, couples who were there to gawk and had no intention of paying for a lap dance. There is nothing worse than when people your own age come along and jeer. It’s always better to deal exclusively with customers who know the rules and play by them. The ones who are looking for the game, pretending there are girls in rhinestones and canary-yellow stilettos who truly get off on drowning the faces of middle-aged men with their breasts. The customers we want are those who believe that the girls choose the rhinestones and stilettos because they are the type to wear them, and not because they are merely pretending that type exists. Once I found the right places to work, I was cleaning up. But in terms of exact figures, keep in mind that every service worker paid in tips, whether they are a bartender or waiter or stripper, exaggerates what they make. It seems to be human nature. People don’t outright lie. They take their very best day ever, their most outstandingly lucrative shift, historically, and they tell you it is what they average. Everyone does this. So I can tell you how much I made on a Friday night in the Valley, as if it were a typical shift, but I’m quoting my best Friday of all time, which was not typical. The lunch shifts, what I was given when I started, were not great money. Men came for the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, and not for company. I sat in the back of the theater, bored, trying not to smell the sweet and sour pork, as I listened to David Lee Roth say, All you got to do is jump. “He designed his own clothes for the video,” another stripper told me about six times. It seemed to be the only fact she had on hand, or knew.

Jackson’s school was a block away from the sublet, so I could walk him there in the morning. And if I was working, my new neighbors, a large family with four children who all attended that same school, would pick him up and watch him for me. Quickly he was transforming from Jackson into Güero, which was what they called him. The grandmother was from Mexico and ironed every article of the entire family’s clothing, including socks and underwear. They were loving people who probably didn’t quite understand what I was about, but children involved no judgment or need to understand.

I did not see any doom in the road. I was at least away from Kurt Kennedy, and Jackson seemed happy.

I witnessed doom, though. It was around me. But at the time, I thought the bad luck of other people reaffirmed that I was doing okay.



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Take the plumber. This girl I was subletting from had a plumber who was always coming around. He was from Guatemala and really friendly. Too friendly. He had a lot of plans for me. Do you like it when your plumber has a lot of plans for you socially? He made it seem like he and the girl whose place it was had been good buddies and so he expected the same from me. I was trying to start a new life, and this plumber kept calling me to talk about how one Saturday he was going to take me to Home Depot so I could pick out my own sink console, which the landlord was supposed to pay to install, and I said I don’t care, just bring one over, I’m a subletter, Victor (that was the plumber’s name), what does it matter. But Victor said, as if out of consideration for me and for what I really wanted (whenever people do that, beware), no, no, we’ll go together. I’ll take you, it’s no problem, really.

It was a problem to me because I didn’t want to spend my Saturday with Victor. He showed up on the agreed day wearing a shiny patterned shirt and soaked in cologne. So much cologne he seemed to be tapped into the original fount, the place from which it all flows. I dropped Jackson off with the Martinez family, and the grandmother, whom Jackson was starting to call Abuela, looked at Victor and nodded like she understood everything.

Victor and I went to get the sink and the hours doing that were lost for me, because I didn’t want to be in his van. I didn’t want to be subjected to his happiness, which seemed to be based on nothing, a thin layer of good cheer stretched over emptiness. I missed Jackson, I missed Jimmy. I wanted a life I did not have. But I also was not ready to admit that. I wanted to get rid of Victor so I could drink beer on my porch as the ice cream truck broadcast its warped and moronic tinkle, and Jackson and the neighbor kids all lined up for type 2 diabetes. It was good to be a stranger in Los Angeles. It was bad to be a stranger in Los Angeles with the company of another stranger in a loud shirt. If everything were so great for this Victor, why was he wasting his Saturday blindly ignoring the blunt and unwelcoming cues from a woman who had no interest in him? I felt desperate, but not in the way Victor was desperate.

After unloading the sink at my apartment, he tried to get me to go drink flaming margaritas with him at a Mexican place on Sunset. I said those give me a headache. They use butane to make them burn, I told him, although that’s probably not true. And he says we can have white wine, figuring I was that classy white wine type. Because I’m a nice person, I lied and said I had to work, although I was not working that whole weekend; I was planning to spend a lot of time thinking, sitting on the edge of this gone-to-Alaska girl’s bed with my chin in my palm, hearing the ice cream truck, sitting with a blank mind, which might fill later with thoughts on how to live like an adult. I was busy with that. It was important to me. No one bothering me, watching me, harassing me, calling me, following me, sneaking up on me. I’d had that for months with Creep Kennedy, and now I was free and did not want this Victor shading in.