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.
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.”