The Mars Room(83)

She sat with him when her stage show was over.

“Know what I like about you?” It was a setup, for him to answer his own question. “Everything.”

He liked to be the one to do the talking. He felt good with her. He felt comfortable. He loved to touch her. His hands were everywhere.

He gave her twenty after twenty, went out and got more money, and gave her that, got more, and gave her that, too, because he really, really, really liked this girl.



* * *



He started going more frequently to the Mars Room. He was on workman’s comp and had a lot of free time. And he was under a spell. He spent everything on this girl. All she had to do was turn and look at him, seated in his lap, and he’d hand over the bills.

Before he’d gotten his job as a process server, which paid well but almost killed him, he had worked security for the Warfield Theatre, which was a block down Market from the Mars Room. Boy, did he have stories. Eight nights of the Jerry Garcia band. Ten nights of Jerry Garcia. Pathetic hippies would camp out on the broad sidewalk, make their own disgusting street village, with drumming and people freaking out on drugs, and security had to keep clearing out their encampment and maintain order. He was still friendly enough with some of the security guys at the Warfield, and when he started going to the Mars Room, he parked in front of the theater and asked them to watch his bike.

There were women in San Francisco who rode motorcycles. This bothered him. Because women, how did they understand the physics of it. If you don’t get physics you can’t be in control of speed. Wouldn’t catch Vanessa riding any motorcycle. She wore little high-heeled shoes and short dresses when she was leaving the Mars Room. He could put her on the back, though. Teach her how to hold on tight, lean with him as he leaned. So many broads didn’t even know how to be a passenger, leaned the wrong way when he cornered. Hold on like you’re part of this, he tried to explain, but they didn’t get it.

He was supposed to be at home recovering from his accident, but he got bored at home. He’d crashed outside the projects on Potrero Hill and mangled his leg, slid all the way across the intersection with his knee trapped underneath the very large and heavy gas tank of his K100. Had four operations and walked now with a limp. They called it an accident but to Kurt it was attempted murder. Kids in the projects had dumped motor oil in the middle of the street so he would wipe out. He had tried to serve legal documents, simply doing his job, to an address in the projects repeatedly without luck. On his sixth visit, he knew, as soon as he hit the intersection and went into a slide, what they’d done to him. But there was no way to find the actual kids and prove it.

He was stuck at home, waiting for his knee to heal. He was told it might not. His apartment on Woodside became a waiting room with no end to the waiting. He would shuffle around, sit on his couch, flip through a magazine, change the TV channel, stare into the fridge, watch cars move down the street, do his ten exercises, watch cars try to parallel park, hardly anyone knew how to properly parallel park, he’d sit on the bed, read the same sentence over and over in his book, Chickenhawk, realize he was doing that, put the book in its Ziploc, change TV channels, and finally, get up, ride over to the Mars Room, and limp in to see if Vanessa was working.

He knew a lot of girls there now but the only one he liked was Vanessa. He told her he was a homicide investigator. It wasn’t a total lie. He wanted to investigate the kids who tried to kill him by putting a lake of motor oil in the intersection near the projects. He had learned not to tell people he was a process server because when he explained how you serve papers, the tactics you are forced to use, it didn’t sound noble. People treated him like he was some kind of scumbag repo man.

He talked to Vanessa about all the tensions in his life without giving details. He talked and talked.

He touched her bare skin with his hands and said things, expressed feelings, and got attached. He got attached to her.





30


I ran a row of almond trees. I went two over, and a row down, and two more over, and again down, down, down. My only option was to run. Run, and find a place to hide until night.

Because of the mountains, I knew east. The lines in the orchard are straight, and when I got to the edge of one and met a road, I saw that the roads were also straight, which was how I remembered them from the bus into prison. I crossed and kept running, crossed and kept running. If they were already after me, they might have trouble locating me exactly, on account of my zigzagging. I zagged but kept eastward, toward the big mountains.

I came upon a drainage ditch. It had an open pipe that I could fit into, where I could hide until it got dark.

In the ditch I saw that I was bleeding. I hadn’t felt it, not even the wetness on my pants. The cold water seemed to stop the bleeding. There was a long gash in my thigh, from the razor wire.

After listening for some time to the sound of the water, I was able to hear through it. To distinguish other sounds: Insects. A crow. The drafty whoosh of a car passing on the nearest road. I drank with my hands, from the water in the irrigation ditch.

At nightfall, I got out of the pipe. I walked quickly in my wet and tattered prison clothes. I could not see the mountains, but I knew which direction they were. Everything was straight here. I was inside a giant grid; empty of people, but made by people. The whole world, at least this one, the Central Valley, from the mountains to the western horizon, was a gigantic prison. Orchards and power lines instead of razor wire and gun towers. Unmanned, and man-made.