Berkeley Noir

by Jerry Thompson

  The "party" was mostly on the couch, blue Naugahyde, or, in the case of Dino, on the floor up against a matching ottoman. They were in black, awash in blue walls and furniture, except Dino, as usual, in seersucker. It was always seersucker or white linen, any season, with a gray sweater under the jacket in cold weather. It wasn't cold so it was a blue oxford button down. Just Dino, Marvin, and Patti O'Hara. I hadn't seen her in a couple of years.

  My first impression, after that couple of years, was that she had been working out. Muscles bulging from a black wifebeater. "Still boxing, Patti?" and she went into her stance because she did, in fact, do some boxing. So, my best friend and the two people in the world I would most like to sleep with. Okay, a party, I guess.

  Marvin hadn't yet read the Killian and so was suitably impressed. Dino: "I am astounded, dear Clay," and then a wet kiss. Life is good sometimes.

  Dino went into the kitchen and came out with a shaker. Negronis, my favorite drink, not really Marvin's though. He favors bourbon-based cocktails. I wondered about the occasion. Was I the guest of honor? Decided to let that one go. Why argue with Boodles and Campari, and why interrupt Dino Centro midshake?

  Cheese Board snacks and smart talk. Conversation turned to the high cost of living, everybody leaving Berkeley. Where do we go? Bay Area out, East Coast also too expensive, flyover states opioid and Trump-soaked. Emigrate? Marvin suggested Montevideo but not yet. Too many friends still here, and there were "battles to be won and lost."

  This from Marvin, soldier for the revolution even when there isn't one.

  And then, third drinks in hand, talk about the neighborhood, those cheap-rent war stories. You could get a whole house for a few hundred! I paid a hundred bucks, down the street, for a walk-in closet in a house full of commies! True civilization starts with cheap rent and ends with gentrification. I wasn't aware that the CEO of TalkLike had moved into the neighborhood. This set off a negroni-infused discussion of "the pig down the street" at high volume.

  "You have to see this place! From warehouse to palace! An oppressor work space in Berkeley. Fuck Berkeley." From Patti O'Hara, leaning a little too close to my ear.

  Marvin suggested that we all "go for a stumble" and have a look at the CEO's "bunker." We helped each other off the couch, Dino's scent mingling with Patti's in the warm late afternoon. We walked past SPD and in a sort of circular way toward Gilman. The gourmet burgers, the free-trade coffee, the vegan joint, the Whole Foods. Chunky guys with beards, buried in their devices.

  It was looming, almost as big as the Whole Foods down the street. Truly bunker-like although too tall, maybe three stories. Military-style brushed chrome, brick facade, blackout windows. There was still a loading-dock entrance in keeping with the industrial chic. A place to house the Tesla, perhaps. Workers used to sweat in places like this. Now they're luxury homes. Where are the sweaty workers? I wondered what it was like inside, curious, but also a little queasy, that way the hoi polloi view the aristocracy. And the poor love it / and think it's crazy. We looked up at the thing like apes before a monolith, then walked silently back to Marvin's place.

  Plopped on the couch between Dino and Patti, the mingling scents a little stronger, feeling sleepy but a little excited. Marvin in the kitchen making coffee, humming, then, "Well, we could blow it up," followed by, "You can't blow up all of capitalism," from Dino, who has a smidgen of the capitalist left in him.

  Dino almost asleep on my shoulder, oxford shirt unbuttoned, Patti lying head in my lap, legs over the couch arm. Dino, "A little graffiti wouldn't hurt," then Marvin, booming from the other room, "A bullet in the head would send a better message," and Patti, "Well, we all have guns."

  Coffee, kisses goodbye, and I returned southside, back to the Chandler Apartments, at the corner of Telegraph and Dwight. Fed the cats, worked at some poetry. A perfect Sunday.

  * * *

  Following Wednesday, I was out buying books and the phone buzzed. Dinner at Marvin's. Got into the old Honda Civic and headed out to the Gilman District. Happy to find that it was the same group. Marvin cooking pasta. Eggs on the counter so I guessed carbonara. He was pouring an Italian white, kind of thin but in a good way. We started downing it like water. There was some music on and Dino and Patti were dancing. A nice group. Pasta and lots of jokes. Some pot with a silly name, something like Purple Urkel, but maybe I have it wrong. We were on the couch again, sides touching sides, and I was thinking about the different ways you can melt into somebody's flesh, how the luckiest accident of birth is to be bisexual.

  My brain came up for air. Marvin back in the kitchen making coffee. Said something about a neighborhood association, but not an official group. They would like us to talk to the CEO, a sort of delegation. I spaced out again since I don't live in the neighborhood. My corner of Southside is still scruffy. Gentrification is months away. When I zeroed back in, they were talking about fleets of luxury cars and drones flown from the roof. The kind of thing you'd expect from techie CEO types. I was beginning to get bored, but then they asked me to go along because he had a bodyguard and an extra presence could help. I used to box Golden Gloves and I stay in shape, and occasionally I need to defend myself when doing my "detective" work, but I don't look like a bouncer either.

  I was feeling a little floaty and thinking that the walk would do me good. The Gilman District isn't pretty. I guess somehow that's part of its charm, or always was, but now it's different. Couples making midsix figures or more sucking up the urban experience, then spitting it out cleaned up and with a get-off-my-lawn mentality. Live-work castles full of toys, set among the junkyards and bad roads.

  For some reason we were walking close together, lots of touching. At some point I turned into Dino, kissed him, and all at once everybody giggled. I felt something hard in his pants—not the thing I was looking for, though. A handgun. Old joke. Dino lives, um, outside the law, so no surprise, but I was hoping for something sweeter.

  And again to this palace that rose gleaming from the squalor yet was somehow uglier than the street where it lived. Patti stepped back and faced a security camera, announced us. Gilman District neighborhood watch. The warehouse-style door opened slowly, old-fashioned pulley, and it seemed that someone had called central casting and found a goon. Square jaw, shaved head, you know . . .

  Patti sucker punched him, then kicked him going down. Great pair of boots! I wondered where she found them. The action seemed very stylized, or does now in retrospect, like a scene in a Melville policier. Her short hair shook just right and I zeroed in on the back of her neck. I wanted to fuck her.

  They seemed to know the way upstairs. Recognizance? Looking back, I'm surprised that I went along. I've been through cases and capers with these people, but I didn't even know the circumstances. I knew he owned TalkLike. Tried to remember his name. Something vaguely Swedish.

  No need to describe the enemy. "You're either at war or you're not," Marvin told me later. The guy had no idea. They played with him for a while, doing up the neighborhood association drag. We'd like you to turn down the security lights, we'd like to see you at the meetings. He smiled and clichéd for a while, then was "tired" and would like us to go.

  I turned to go, then looked back and Patti was Ingemar Johansson, Hammer of Thor. She had donned a single black leather glove, left hand. Solar plexus, then again a kick to the CEO's head. Dino pulled out the handgun. Three shots. Who would hear shots in a bunker? And then, who hadn't heard shots in this neighborhood?

  I felt some panic. I had touched the desk, possibly something else. Thought about DNA and started to sweat.

  "Shall we go?" This from Marvin, and so we did, but not before Dino hit the bodyguard with a couple to the head. Did it kill him? Wouldn't it have to?

  We go, but not fast. Just walking. I shoot Marvin a puzzled expression.

  "Don't look so worried. A fixer will be along soon to clean up our mess, and, yes, they'll break the cameras. It's all set." And then, walking ahead a little, "We piss on them from a highe
r place."

  It isn't easy to get to Marvin's roof, not simple like mine. You have to crawl out a window and lift yourself on a makeshift ladder, and after all that, the view isn't much, just a bunch of buildings, the view of the bay blocked long ago by upscale rental properties. We did it anyway. It was a warm night, rare for Berkeley, and we needed a little air. We didn't talk about what happened, we just sat there close until it got cooler, then went downstairs and showered. When there's shooting and fighting, you need to wash it off. Marvin disappeared into the kitchen and I bathed with Patti and Dino. This was our after-party, skin and soap.

  Came home late, fed the cat, looked out my window at the traffic triangle where Telegraph meets Dwight then runs south into Oakland. The usual scene, homeless guy playing conversational solitaire, a couple of sleeping dogs, a couple of lumps under ratty sleeping bags. I reflected a little on the day's "work," if that was what it was. Revolutionary fervor would have carried Patti and Melvin, but Dino must have been paid. My motivation was a mystery even to me. Sometimes you just go on your nerve.

  I didn't have occasion to see Marvin for a couple of weeks. When I did it was to do a book buy in Concord, art books and a few decent novels. After we did the deal, we stopped at a nondescript brewpub. "Okay, Marvin, what was up with the home invasion."

  A shrug, then, "It's a small step away from your other adventures but we wanted to take you there. It isn't your first righteous kill and it won't be your last. You wanted it, based on the guy's style and his toys. You got the gestalt and went along. If we weren't old pals I'd say this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. We will piss on them from a higher place."

  We finished our burgers and beer, got in his van, and headed back to the Gilman District.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Lucy Jane Bledsoe's short story collection, Lava Falls, came out in 2018, as did her most recent novel, The Evolution of Love, which takes place in the East Bay. Her fiction has won an Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, a Pushcart nomination, and an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award. Bledsoe has also participated in two National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists & Writers Fellowships, a Yaddo Residency, and a California Arts Council Fellowship.

  Summer Brenner is the author of a dozen books that include crime fiction, poetry, youth novels, and short stories. Her novel Nearly Nowhere was translated into French by Gallimard's imprint Série Noire. About I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport, and Sex, R. Crumb wrote: "It has a quality very rare in literature: a subtle, dark humor that's only perceivable when one goes deep into the heart of this world's absurd tragedy, or tragic absurdity."

  Thomas Burchfield's nomadic life began in Peekskill, New York, and eventually led him to the Bay Area. He's the author of the Prohibition-era gangster noir Butchertown and a contemporary vampire novel, Dragon's Ark. His film reviews and articles have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal, the Strand Magazine, and Filmfax. When not working on his next novel, Captain Zigzag, he is communing with nature, and hanging with his wife, Elizabeth.

  J.M. Curet (aka Jose Martinez) is a poet, writer, member of the Berkeley Writers Circle, and current student at the Writers Studio San Francisco. His short stories include "Wifebeater Tank Top" and "Papi's Stroke," for which he received an honorable mention for Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers in 2018. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where he teaches high school English and lends his voice to several local salsa bands.

  Aya de León teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley. Her 2020 novel Operation HOLOGRAM explores FBI infiltration of African American organizations. Her previous works include Side Chick Nation, the first novel published about Hurricane Maria. She is currently working on a black/Latina spy-girl YA series called Going Dark, and writes about race, class, gender, and culture at @AyadeLeon and ayadeleon.com.

  Susan Dunlap is the author of twenty-five mystery novels, featuring San Francisco stunt double and Zen student Darcy Lott, Berkeley police officer Jill Smith, forensic pathologist–cum–private investigator Kiernan O'Shaughnessy, and PG&E meter reader Vejay Haskell, She has also written many short stories and a suspense novel, Fast Friends. Dunlap has taught hatha yoga, worked as a paralegal, and been on the private investigative defense team in a capital murder case.

  Barry Gifford is a recipient of NoirCon's Anne Friedberg Award, and was the founder of the original Black Lizard Books, for which he was given the Maxwell E. Perkins Award by PEN West. He is the author of the world-famous novel Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula, among many other books, and cowrote the screenplay for the film Lost Highway.

  Owen Hill is the author of two crime novels, The Chandler Apartments and The Incredible Double, and he coedited the Annotated Big Sleep with Pamela Jackson and Anthony Rizzuto. Until recently he lived in the Chandler Building on the corner of Telegraph and Dwight in Berkeley.

  Mara Faye Lethem's work has recently appeared in the New York Times Book Review, BOMB, and A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, a best-selling collection of letters and illustrations. Her forthcoming translations include novels by Patricio Pron, Max Besora, Javier Calvo, and Marta Orriols. She splits her time between Brooklyn and Barcelona.

  Michael David Lukas is the author of the international best seller The Oracle of Stamboul, a finalist for the California Book Award, the NCIBA Book of the Year Award, and winner of the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. His second novel, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the ALA's Sophie Brody Medal. He was born in Berkeley, lives in Oakland, and teaches at San Francisco State University.

  Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including the Lovecraftian murder mystery I Am Providence and the supernatural thriller Sabbath. His short fiction has appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including The Best American Mystery Stories and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy. Mamatas's fiction and editorial work have been nominated for the Hugo, Bram Stoker, Locus, and World Fantasy awards.

  Kimn Neilson is a longtime Berkeley bookseller and editor. Her translations of the poet C.P. Cavafy appeared in TRY! and an article on Elizabeth David in PekoPeko. "Still Life, Reviving" is an offshoot of a longer piece she is working on about Berkeley in the years 1980 and 2000.

  Jim Nisbet has published twenty books, including the classic noir title Lethal Injection; six volumes of poetry; and a single nonfiction title, Laminating the Conic Frustum. Current projects include a fourteenth novel, You Don't Pencil, and a complete translation of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal.

  Lexi Pandell is a freelance writer and former Wired editor from Oakland. Her nonfiction work has been published by the New York Times, the Atlantic, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, Playboy, Creative Nonfiction, and others. She is an alumna of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and was recently awarded the Wellstone Center's Emerging Writer Residency for her novel-in-progress. She also hosts Desert Salon, an annual writing retreat in Joshua Tree, California.

  Jason S. Ridler is a historian and writer. He is the author of the Brimstone Files series, over sixty short stories, and several works of military history. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, he is a teaching fellow at Johns Hopkins University and a creative writing instructor at Google, YouTube, and other locations. Ridler is currently working on his forthcoming book, Harvest of Blood and Iron.

  Shanthi Sekaran is a writer and educator in Berkeley. Her latest novel, Lucky Boy, was named an Indie Next Great Read and an NPR Best Book of 2017. Her essays and stories have also appeared in the New York Times, Salon, and the LA Review of Books. She's a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, an AWP mentor, and teaches writing at Mills College.

  Jerry Thompson is a bookseller, poet, playwright, and musican. His work has appeared Zyzzyva and the James White Review. He is the coauthor of Images of America: Black Artists in Oakland. His fiction and prose have appeared in various anthologies including Voices Rising, edited by G. Winston James, and Freedom in this Village:
Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men's Writing, edited by E. Lynn Harris. He is the coeditor of Oakand Noir.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Liz Leger, Zelda, to the editors and publishers at the late, great Creative Arts/Black Lizard for reprinting the best of classic noir, and to Moe’s Books, Berkeley’s Taj Mahal.

  —O.H.

  Thanks to composer Milo Francis, my best friend. Thank you, man, for the soundtrack recording for Oakland Noir. Thanks to Rick Moss and Veda Silva with the African American Museum and Library at Oakland. To Calvin Crosby and the wonderful team at NCIBA, and to all the independent booksellers, for their support. Special thanks to Maria San Antonio and Bill Barham, for always having my back, and for the fried chicken. To Zach Embry, for all the inspirations and conversations. To Foster Douglas for overseeing the web and social media, and for the groovy Piedmont Avenue sound system. To Alice De Parres and Michael Ross, my angel network! Thanks to Bonnie and Michael Stuppin of the Alexander Book Company, for your incredible support and care. Thank you, Michael Calvello, for allowing our time together at Owl & Company to be so life-changing and rewarding. And thanks to Johnny Temple, for believing in me, a bookseller with a dream.

  —J.T.

  BONUS MATERIAL

  Excerpt from USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

  Other Bay Area titles in the Akashic Noir Series

  Also available in the Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  INTRODUCTION

  WRITERS ON THE RUN

  From USA NOIR: Best of the Akashic Noir Series,

  edited by Johnny Temple

  In my early years as a book publisher, I got a call one Saturday from one of our authors asking me to drop by his place for “a smoke.” I politely declined as I had a full day planned. “But Johnny,” the author persisted, “I have some really good smoke.” My curiosity piqued, I swung by, but was a bit perplexed to be greeted with suspicion at the author’s door by an unhinged whore and her near-nude john. The author rumbled over and ushered me in, promptly sitting me down on a smelly couch and assuring the others I wasn’t a problem. Moments later, the john produced a crack pipe to resume the party I had evidently interrupted. This wasn’t quite the smoke I’d envisaged, so I gracefully excused myself after a few (sober) minutes. I scurried home pondering the author’s notion that it was somehow appropriate to invite his publisher to a crack party.