The Mars Room(6)

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.