The Mars Room(82)
Next day he got up and went to the Mars Room. It was a Saturday and Vanessa always worked Saturdays.
She wasn’t there.
He had been gone one week in Cancún and while he was away, she apparently quit the Mars Room, according to the cashier in the lobby. Kurt didn’t know the cashier and figured the guy didn’t understand who he was, a regular who spent a lot of money in the club. He looked up—the cashier’s booth was on a platform like a chip dispensary at a casino—and told the cashier to get the manager. The platform dwarfed all who approached, and yet the cashier could have himself been a dwarf, the platform was that high, although it was unlikely. The manager came out and shook Kurt’s hand. Kurt was a regular and the manager wasn’t going to blow him off completely. But he said what the cashier said: we don’t have a Vanessa on the schedule. A Vanessa. As if there might be various Vanessas and none were working Saturdays, or even at all.
* * *
He went to Clown Alley for a burger, because he had nothing else to do. Clown Alley was in North Beach, around the corner from a place Kennedy used to frequent, when he didn’t know better. Didn’t know about the Mars Room, and about Vanessa.
The place near Clown Alley was a stage with private booths. The women pranced around and play-touched themselves, while the men, in private booths along the edges of the stage, watched the women play-touch while they touch-touched themselves in their private booths. You could pick if you wanted two-way glass or one-way glass, so that the women who play-touched could see you, or not see you, touch-touch. If you wanted eye contact or were some kind of Henry the Flasher you could get what you needed but it cost, like everything in life does. He liked that place okay because he didn’t know better. After he started going to the Mars Room, on Market Street, he never went back to the place with the booths, but he still ate at Clown Alley because they cooked a good burger and he could park his motorcycle, a BMW K100, in front of the glass windows and be on watch in case some shit-for-brains knocked it over, one of those people, and there were a lot of them, who careened around the sidewalk like a zombie.
He returned to the Mars Room that Saturday night, hoping she was working, but Vanessa was not on the schedule.
Could she have changed her stage name? Some girls changed frequently. One week they were Cherry, or Secret, and the next week they were Danger, or Versace or Lexus or something stupid like that. Vanessa was a traditional and believable woman’s name and it suited her and she had not changed it, he didn’t think, because he paid the entrance fee and went in, spent an hour scanning the room, and didn’t find her, not that night or the next day or night, or on any of the ones following those.
* * *
The first time Kurt ever saw her, he had been keeping company with a hothead named Angelique. He and Angelique were dancing in the tunnel-thing at the back of the Mars Room. They called it dancing but the whole time you’re just trying to rub up on them. There was another couple in the tunnel thing, a businessman and Vanessa. Her body was pressed against the businessman. She danced with the guy like she really meant it. She was glued to this man in a suit, in her bra and underwear. Angelique said loudly that Vanessa was breaking a rule and was she high, what drug was she on, because you can’t fuck in the tunnel. It was fine to massage men’s laps with your buttocks but if you did that frontally, other girls would get on your case.
“Yeah, I’m high,” Vanessa said, swaying into the businessman. “It’s a drug called happiness. You should try it sometime.” She continued to grind against the businessman, the man himself taking no notice of the argument between the two women and instead moving against pretty Vanessa like a man might dance with his wife on their golden anniversary, or in a TV commercial spotlighting an occasion like that, to sell Viagra.
Kurt thought it was funny. Later Vanessa passed him on the aisle and he told her so. She said I don’t like to talk but if you want a lap dance I’m twenty a song. So he gave her an Andrew Jackson, as the girls called them, and that’s how it started. The usual way it started with any girl at the Mars Room, except this chick was not just using him for the money. Something was happening between them.
They all did a stage show or were supposed to and when it was Vanessa’s turn, he sat closer to the stage than usual. When Angelique saw him alone and tried to offer company he told her to get lost.
Vanessa had a song that was clearly hers to perform to. She moved inside the song like it was about her. The singer had a weird voice. Kurt didn’t know if it was a man or a woman and that seemed pretty odd but it fit with this chick even if she herself was one hundred percent girl. “Come on down to my place, baby, we’ll talk about love.” Vanessa wore mirrored sunglasses that gave a comic edge to her performance. She put her legs up and they were the most gorgeous legs he’d ever seen. Some of the girls there had pale and flabby legs, shapeless tubes that reminded him of glass syringes. Vanessa’s legs were leg-legs, long and tapered. It was a joke—comedy—that this world-class chick was onstage at the Mars Room. He was in on it, you better believe it. She was high on life the way everyone ought to try sometime but hadn’t or couldn’t because they were not free the way she was, this sexy chick with her amazing legs. Cute ass. Her tits were cute, too. Grab-able. Handful-sized. And then she showed the whole thing, bending upside down from behind. That was his favorite, the way it all looked suspended from behind, when they bend over. She was doing it just for him. She knew. This chick really knew. That was the thing about Vanessa. She wasn’t an idiot barking up the wrong tree. It was all the right tree. She understood how to turn him on and she was doing it.