The Mars Room(5)

“We have some real characters going up valley with us,” Laura whispered to me. “And listen, I’m no Manson girl and I know what I’m talking about. I know the difference. We had Susan Atkins and Leslie Van Houten at CIW. They both had the scar in between their eyes. Susan put special cream on hers but nothing hid it. She was an uppity snob with an X carved in her forehead. Had fine things in her cell. Fancy perfumes. A touch lamp. I felt bad when one of the girls got a guard to pop Susan’s cell and they took all her nice stuff. That’s what I thought about when I heard she died. Missing part of her brain and paralyzed and they still wouldn’t let her go home. When I heard about it, I thought of them popping her cell at CIW, taking her touch lamp and her lotions. Leslie Van Houten is more of what you’d call a convict. Some people think that’s a term of respect. But not to me. It’s nothing but groupthink. She’ll die in prison just like Susan Atkins did. They aren’t letting her out. Not until Folgers coffee isn’t brewed anymore, and that’s as good as never because what are people going to drink in the morning? One of the victims was an heiress of Folgers, see, and they don’t want Leslie out and they are individuals of high influence. As long as there is Folgers, Leslie will die in prison.”



* * *



Her mother had an affair with Hitler. The mother of the German film star. The one after whom I’m named. Her mother had an affair with Hitler, but back then, from what I understand, who didn’t?



* * *



“How come you don’t speak German?” Jimmy Darling once asked me.

The idea of my mother teaching me German had never occurred to me. The idea of her teaching me anything was difficult to imagine.

“She was too depressed to bother.” Some parents raise their children in silence. Silence, irritation, disapproval. How could I learn German from that? I’d have to learn it from phrases like “Did you take money from my wallet, you little shit?” Or “Don’t wake me up when you come in.”

Jimmy said he only knew one German word.

“Is it angst?”

“Begierden. It means lust, desire. Their word for desire is beer garden. Makes sense.”



* * *



I tried to sleep, but the only position for sleeping that the restraints allowed was chin to chest. Aches pulsed up my arms from the handcuffs, which were attached to the belly chain around my middle, immobilizing my hands at my sides. The air-conditioning on the bus felt like it was set to fifty-five degrees. I was freezing and uncomfortable and this was only Ventura County. We had six hours to go. I started thinking about those kids forced into wigs in a bathroom stall at Magic Mountain, outfitted briskly with sunglasses and different clothes. They would end up unrecognizable not only in their new disguises, but in their new lives. They would be strangers, different children, ones who were tainted and ruined by their own kidnapping, long before they ever got used for whatever evil purpose was their new and abrupt destiny. I saw the kids in their wigs and the scattered crowd of amusement park–goers who would not know to help a lost and stolen child. I saw Jackson, as if he was being torn from me by an old woman knitting on a bench, and there was nothing I could do but watch the pictures of his little freckled face in my mind, pictures that floated and pulsed and would not fade or disperse.



* * *



Jackson is with my mother. It’s the single grace in my life that he has her, even if I don’t like her much myself. She is not a psycho-grandmother who knits on a bench. She’s a gruff and chain-smoking German woman who gets by on marriage, divorce, and remarriage. She has a glacial manner with me, but she is loving enough to Jackson. We had a falling-out, years ago, but when I was arrested, she took Jackson. He was five then. He’s seven now. During the two and a half years I was in county, as my case made its way through the courts, she brought him to see me as often as she could.

If there had been money for a private attorney, I would have hired one. My mother offered to mortgage her condominium, a studio apartment on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, but because she had already mortgaged it twice, she owed more than it was worth. The old famous stripper Carol Doda, whose neon nipples had blinked red above Broadway when I was a child, lived in my mother’s building. I used to see her in the hallway, struggling with grocery bags and a yapping dog, when I went to visit my mother. She didn’t look so good, but neither did my mother, who was unemployed and suffering from a painkiller addiction.

For a brief period there was some charitable possibility for my legal aid, a gentleman friend of my mother’s, a man named Bob who drove a burgundy Jaguar, wore plaid suits, and drank premixed Manhattans. Bob, she said, was going to pay for a lawyer. But then Bob vanished; he literally disappeared. His body was later found under a log in the Russian River. My mother doesn’t have good connections; her connections are often dubious. I was assigned a public defender. We were all hopeful things would go differently. They did not go differently. They went this way.



* * *



Our bus groaned along in the right lane with the tractor-trailers. We were passing Castaic, the last stop before the Grapevine. I’d once been in a bar in Castaic with Jimmy Darling, after I’d fled to Los Angeles to get away from Kurt Kennedy, whose victim I was at that time. Jimmy Darling had moved down to Valencia to teach at an art school. He sublet a place on a ranch not far from Castaic.