The Mars Room(85)

31


One night Kurt Kennedy followed Vanessa as she left the Mars Room. He wasn’t any kind of creep. He was just so attached to this girl that he needed to be sure she was getting home safe. He watched as she got in a Luxor cab, and he followed that Luxor cab, on his motorcycle, to a residential hotel on Taylor Street. It was on the upper edge of the Tenderloin, at Nob Hill, the Tenderknob, a skeezier building than he would have pictured but it was where she lived. He watched her go in that night. And some other nights. A lot of other nights.

There were times she went to some scumbag’s house, an apartment in North Beach, instead of her own. Guy seemed a likely homosexual from Kurt’s point of view, and she didn’t go over there often enough for things to be serious.

He felt it was his job to watch out for her. It was a responsibility. He parked near her building some mornings, around the corner, on O’Farrell, with a good view of the entrance. Sometimes all day Sundays, since the Mars Room was closed. If she came out, he put his face shield down, circled on his bike, and was able to follow if she got on the Geary Street bus. Or if she got in a Luxor cab. Why did she only ride in Luxor cabs? He was worried the driver was another boyfriend or some guy trying to get in her pants, but he confirmed, through this work he was doing, that they were random, different drivers.

If she walked someplace instead of taking a cab, he circled, and kept up by going slow. Sometimes she emerged from the building with a little boy. Holding his hand. Isn’t that sweet. Like a mom, except he was sure she wasn’t the boy’s mother. It didn’t fit. Maybe the kid lived in the building. Once, she was with the kid and another woman and two other kids; Kurt thought it was a good bet all three kids were the other woman’s, it explained things. It bothered him that aspects of Vanessa’s life were walled off from him, even as he trailed her and knew exactly what she did, where she went, on a given day. As long as he could watch her leave the building, see where she was going, and know when she returned, he had not entirely lost the thread.

Keeping the line there, keeping track, staying focused on her, that was what he did, and wanted.

At first she had no idea. It was cleaner then. Those were the early days. But he encountered a period of time where she didn’t show up to the Mars Room, so he naturally wanted to talk to her. Was that so bad? It seemed like a small thing to him. He just wanted to say hello. He could not see her at the Mars Room, so he orbited closer to her home. Found her nearby. She acted like he was doing something illegal by shopping in her shitty little corner market. A store is public. Anyone can go to a store.

After she saw him in the store and got huffy and left, when she was finally back at work and he did his whistle thing in the Mars Room, his pssst, to get her to come sit, she ignored him, went down the aisle of the theater and sat with some other guy. Every day, same thing. No company. His money was suddenly not good enough. He kept showing up, kept trying. Waiting by the stage for her to dance.

Boy did he miss her. He really missed her. He tried to tell her. All he could do was keep trying. He sat with Angelique, gave her sweaty dollar bills, not even fives.



* * *



The way he got Vanessa’s number was by going through her trash, which was in an open dumpster next to the building. It was on the sidewalk, basically public. He’d seen her put a sack in that dumpster. He took the whole sack home, bungeed it to the bike. Sorted, and felt purposeful and happy. Her discarded utility bills were in there. He knew her name now, too, but he didn’t think of her by it. He felt it was a commitment she’d made, to him, or to somebody, a bigger thing, that she’d said, “I’m Vanessa.” He was sticking with it. It was an agreement and he wasn’t going to let her just back out of it like it was nothing.

The phone number was printed on the top of the telephone bill. He called it. She answered. He hung up. What choice did he have? If he said, “It’s Kurt,” she’d hang up on him. He knew this because when she saw him outside the Mars Room, or outside her building, or near her building, in her store, anywhere that he found a way to stage a manner of running into her, she ignored him. So when he called, he had only a moment to hear her voice, and then he hung up before she did, or would. He called, she answered, he hung up. He called, she answered, he hung up.

Sometimes, on a tough day, a day of boredom and excruciating knee pain and a feeling like the world he knew, lived in, was scratch paper some god had crumpled and tossed toward a wastebasket, crumpled, tossed, and missed, he was helpless not to call. He called twenty, thirty times, before she disconnected the phone, he guessed, pulled the little plastic thing from the box on the baseboard, and it rang and rang but was not ringing any longer inside her apartment. At which point, he had no choice but to go over there and park and wait for her to come out. He knew from process serving that it took vigilance to track someone down. He had done it plenty of times. People could not fool Kurt. He was a professional, even if he could no longer work.

He was more or less on twenty-four-hour surveillance when this trip he’d planned to Cancún came up. Cheap package thing he’d booked months earlier, before he met Vanessa. He used to like to travel, and it was sad how reluctant he was to go. But he figured it would be good to get a break from thinking about her. He would not get the money back if he postponed his trip. He’d prepaid so he had to go. He didn’t really get a break. He thought about her every moment he was in Cancún, trying not to think about her.