The Dead Do Not Improve

by Jay Caspian Kang

  Phil Davis

  “How do you do it?” Adam was reading over my shoulder.

  “Control-C, Control-V.”

  “That’s awful, man.”

  “You’d get used to it.”

  “They make you sign with your slave master’s name?”

  “Nobody trusts an Oriental with love advice.”

  “Control-C, Control-V, indeed.”

  “Hey, did you send this e-mail as a joke?”

  “What? No.”

  “Check out this name.”

  “Richard McBeef?”

  “I assumed it was you.”

  “Nope. Are you hungry?”

  I pointed at the flaky remains of my croissant.

  “Pastries don’t count. Too much air.”

  “I guess.”

  “Okay. Nachos, then.”

  10. We walked onto Valencia Street into the grayness of another foggy morning. In places like San Francisco that are choked by fog, even the bluest, clearest day always carries a tinge of remembered gray. So this housing project, painted canary and cardinal red, surrounded on all sidewalks by plots of pioneer flowers, still pulses grayly up Valencia to 16th, where the anonymous buildings are all hotels like the Sunshine Hotel or the Hotel 16 or the Hotel Mission or the Hotel Ignacio or even the Hotel St. Francis, where the sign in the window reads, “WE NO LONGER RENT ROOMS BY THE HOUR,” a hopeful declaration, somehow. When I voted for Obama, I stood in line with a man from the Hotel St. Francis who looked exactly like Cornel West, but insane and with bits of powdered doughnut stuck in his beard. He asked me if this was the polling station for the Hotel St. Francis, and when I shrugged, he said he was being disenfranchised because you can live in the Hotel St. Francis for years—the man at the front desk will know when you’ve gone on your run, the girl who is too young to live in the Hotel St. Francis will fall in love and buy you a pair of socks—but you certainly cannot have a voter registration card delivered there. During a childhood road trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains, my father explained the difference between hotels and motels. Hotels, he said, are more expensive. Now I know he was wrong. Hotels are just motels, but romanticized somehow. These collapsing buildings are hotels to the people who keep L’Étranger and Howl stashed under their pillows, who try heroin once before realizing they only like the literary strain of the drug, who see a bit of crazy wisdom in the shit-stained, misspelled cardboard signs of the homeless, who stand in front of the Hotel St. Francis and look in through the smoggy picture window at the backboard, where forty-two actual keys dangle the same way they might have dangled in a more humane time. Beyond the front desk, the lobby opens up, green as a Barnes & Noble bathroom. Twenty or so plastic Adirondacks are clustered in hostile little arrangements, each one angled at a five-hundred-pound television. A chandelier, dusty, incomplete, provides a rebuttal to the fluorescent stringers overhead, a soft, nearly sepia rebuttal, which, on more than one occasion, lulled up the slouching figures of Arturo Bandini, Steve Earle, Fuckhead, Jim Stark, Knut Hamsun, and Ronizm in those Adirondack chairs. But then, invariably, the fluorescent stringers will flicker or one of the tenants will stand up or a dead smell will gather and my old favorite literary losers will turn back into the crackheads of the Mission who are all defeated in the same way.

  Still. I admit it. There were times when I stood in front of the window of the Hotel St. Francis, stared in at the squalor, thick and silent as an oil spill, and wished my prospects had shaded a bit blacker.

  11. In the rust-girded doorway to the Taqueria Cancun, five kids in oversized white T-shirts huddled around two lit cigarettes. Last week, Mission Dishin’, a neighborhood events blog targeted at the seventh wave of gentrifiers, had broken the story that these Latino kids in oversized white T-shirts were, in fact, gangsters.

  Adam and I belonged to an earlier generation of hipster/gentrifier dinosaurs and were therefore too old to take Mission Dishin’ seriously. Meaning, even though neither of us really liked the Taqueria Cancun, and even though both of us were scared of the Mara Salvatruchas, we had to keep going there.

  There is no logic to this, sure. But I keep doing shit for these exact reasons.

  We pushed past the kids without incident.

  After retrieving our nachos and beer, we sat down at the end of a heavily lacquered picnic table. I asked Adam, “What do you want to do later?”

  “Don’t know. Probably stay in.”

  “Are you still watching that Ronizm video?”

  “It’s research.”

  “Have you figured anything out?”

  “These are terrible.”

  “I told you we should’ve gone up the street. They use fucked-up cheese here. It’s, like, Swiss or something.”

  “Up the street is five blocks away.”

  “I meant about the video. If you’ve figured anything out.”

  We kept picking at the nachos until they devolved into a block of congealed cheese, soggy chip shards, dehydrating, graying beans. Every twenty minutes on the dot, the neon jukebox would light up on its own, announcing, with a fanfare of horns, accordions, the start of yet another sad ranchera song, which, although I, sad dinosaur, would never admit it, sounded just like every other sad ranchera song.

  A threesome of girls in glasses sat down at the other end of the picnic table and asked us some questions about the neighborhood. We both muttered something about the Phone Booth and got up to leave. There is no pretty way to finish off a plate of nachos. Our beers were gone.

  Outside, the five kids in the doorway had become nine, the two cigarettes a stubby four. Something, a furtive look, a slight swing of the shoulder, must have given us away. The spaces between the bodies squeezed tighter. Just as I was prepping my best-learned reaction, the shoulders parted and let me pass. I looked back. Through a hedgerow of bushy black ponytails, Adam’s face blanked out into a practiced hey-we’re-cool smile.

  The tallest of the kids stepped directly into Adam’s path and asked, “Dude, what are you doing here?”

  Adam, deflating, said, “Hey, David, how’s the story going?”

  “Not bad, man. What you getting, some food?”

  “Yeah, food.”

  “Burrito?”

  “No.”

  “Tacos?”

  “No.”

  “Nachos?”

  “Yes.”

  I understood his shame. It was a bit embarrassing to admit to these kids, or anyone, really, that you were eating nachos. Again, I felt the shitty lack of my own minority status. Despite my most silent, most earnest wishes, people were never embarrassed to tell me about their latest adventures with kimchi.

  “They’re terrible here.”

  “I know.”

  “If you knew, why didn’t you just go to Farolito? Too far away?”

  “Yeah.”

  The kid cocked his head back in my direction. He asked, “Adam, who’s that?”

  It occurred to me that I should act as naturally as possible. With hands spread at my sides, I craned my head up toward the sky and announced, “It’s still raining.”

  “Yo, Adam, you gay?”

  “Why?”

  “Who is that?”

  “My friend. From New York City.”

  “His pants are tight as fuck, man.”

  It was true. I worried, of course, about my bulge.

  “We gotta get going, David. But I’ll see you in class on Monday, right?”

  “Of course. I got some more fucked-up shit for you, Adam.”

  The huddle parted. Adam came out smiling, nodding. We walked away. When we were a good two blocks away, I asked, “One of your students?”

  “Advanced creative writing.”

  “Advanced? Is he good?”

  “Really fucked-up shit. Like lions with guns, lots of dead hookers.”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad.”

  “It’s not.”

  “He called you by your first name.”

  “Where are you living, man?”

/>   12. We ended up at Adam’s apartment. A menorah, mottled, oxidized green, stood in the only window. Cigarette butts had long since replaced the candles. There was a futon, I guess. A sparkling flat-panel television provided the apartment’s only light—an interring blue that lacquered the scarred bamboo floors, the checkerboard linoleum of the kitchenette, the brass of the menorah, the matte of Adam’s guitar cases and amps, even the blue-orange coat of Geronimo Rex, Adam’s morbidly obese cat, which greeted our entry with an upraised paw.

  It was a horrible place. But it had that big TV, so it was better than my place.

  Adam put on the video.

  THREE MONTHS AGO, as a gesture of reparation to the rappers she had condemned in years past, Oprah aired a special on Ronizm, a Queensbridge emcee who blew up in 1993 when his debut album, All the Words Past the Margin, went generational. Adam and I were both twelve when All the Words dropped, too young to bump it in our mother’s car but just old enough to recall our first encounters with it, the way an adult, recently bruised, might suddenly remember a childhood sledding accident.

  To middling applause, Ronizm was wheeled out onto Oprah’s stage by DJ Speck. Old clothes on old sticks, Ronizm’s trademark denim coat hung badly off his shoulders, his Wayfarers dangled awkwardly off the tip of a collapsing nose. Although they tried, the blacked-out lenses couldn’t quite obscure the ruins of big chief cheekbones sunk into their own hollows.

  When the applause puttered out, Oprah said hello. Then she asked Ronizm something about his childhood.

  In his gravelly monotone, Ronizm said, “My pops was this alto saxophonist from Queens and my mom raised me and my sister there, but my pops was always all over the place—Manhattan, Jersey, Philly, the Chi, LA, Mobile, wherever his next gig was at, but when he was home, he would introduce me to all the coolest cats up in Queensbridge.”

  Oprah interrupted to ask something. Ronizm continued: “You know, even now, when I listen to the songs off my first two albums, I realize the pushers, players, pimps, and whatnot in the songs aren’t the cats from back in my day, but actually they’re the pushers, players, and pimps from way back in the day, when my pops was young, like back in ’69, ’72, back right when I was just being born.”

  Oprah asked a follow-up question, but before Ronizm could answer, I wrestled the remote control away from Adam and hit fast forward.

  “What are you doing? It was getting good.”

  “Who can watch this shit?”

  “Just watch him do the song.”

  We watched in 4x speed for a bit. When Oprah finally cleared the stage, I hit play. Ronizm, feet dangling off the edge of a high chair, mic clasped in hands, bopped his head to Strictly Legal’s opening instrumental: the loose snare, the Primo scratches, the wandering horn. (Once, while on ecstasy in college, I sat down naked at my computer, put on Strictly Legal, and wrote 4,200 words on why, if I were to die and be reincarnated as a deaf man, my only phantom sounds would be the perfect rattle of these opening bars.) But while the twin miracles of recording technology and nostalgia kept the track pristine, Ronizm, himself, was mostly gone. His voice was bombed out. What was once heraldic, hard, weatherproof, was now a spume, sputtering and depleted.

  It’s a weird hurt, isn’t it, to watch a dying rapper? Ronizm, my number three emcee of all time, following Nas and Big L, had become a gushy old man, talking, like all gushy old men, about the good old days, the good old days.

  13. After my mother died of stomach cancer in 1995, two months short of my sixteenth birthday, my father, clumsy bear, did his best to corral us into a renewed paradigm of fatherhood. It was an admirable resolution, sure, but one without a target audience. There wasn’t much wrong with my sister, so he just kind of checked over her homework and monitored her always-modest hemlines. My own algorithm of GPA (4.67 weighted), test scores (1,480 SAT), athletic achievement (two years of JV baseball), extracurricular activity (two-time North Carolina policy debate champion), and socialization (virginity lost in 1994 to Ruth Stein), while not optimal, wasn’t bad enough to warrant attention. My assorted troubles (two suspensions for mouthing off to teachers, five reported fights, two wins over Amos Mays, two clear losses to Daunte Degraffenreid, one inconclusive with Javon Jeffries, marijuana possession, general surliness) fit in somewhere in his conception of an appropriate youth.

  Hungry bear, my father, he rooted around until he found something. Try to understand, his brother lost his liquor store in the Rodney King riots. When my father heard the news, he grabbed a wrench and banged out a dent in the pole that held up my basketball hoop. Who knows if he intended the troubling symbolism, but there it was. And so, three years later, when he witnessed his only son accumulate a very specific set of affectations—the slurring of mannered syllables, a darkening of denims, Clark Wallabees with disastrous dye jobs (candy apple red and the blue ones on the Ghostface album cover), camo hoodies, Maxwell tapes wrapped in poorly photocopied images of project buildings, a copy of Soul on Ice (never read), a legal pad filled with doodles of imagined teks and snippets of my very own battle punch lines (mostly involving rhyming “mental” with “Oriental”)—how could he have not seen my slow, accessorized descent into blackness as his great cause?

  Toothless bear now, the slowness of my mother’s death had sapped out his meanness. Instead of simply beating the hip-hop out of me, he took me to a Bob Dylan concert up in Richmond. He let me drive. I can still remember the trees along the 85 and how each one looked the same, cut in a straight line, and how my father, at ease in the passenger’s seat, had his small hands folded on his flat stomach. When the endlessness of Virginia became intolerable, he told me about how he and my mother would order takeout black bean noodles to their apartment in Seoul and crouch over the radio in their cramped, grimy kitchen. Every Wednesday at 6 P.M., their friend had a show on their college’s station. He played anything in English but always ended the show with his favorite Bob Dylan song: “I’m a Believer.”

  I didn’t correct him, but the damage was done. I pictured my father and my mother sharing a bowl of noodles in their apartment in Seoul. In the photos they have from that time, even poor lighting and communist film cannot hide the cracked paint on the walls, my mother’s incandescent beauty. A small radio is playing the Monkees, and my parents, equipped with two years of college English, are feverishly trying to decipher the revolutionary message in “I’m a Believer”:

  “I’m in rub. Now I a be-ree-vah. I a be-ree-vah, I couldn’t reave her if I try.”

  THE CROWD THAT day was a chorus of satisfied exhales. We found a spot on a hillside, just a stone’s throw from a historical preservation placard, but neither of us could quite make out the text. I said it was probably something about the Civil War. The crowd filled in, the air thickened. My father, starving bear, shrank in the grass and disappeared.

  On the drive back, he leaned up against the door with his eyes shut and toggled the power locks in time with the music from the oldies station. When we began to drift out of range, he asked if I had brought any of my rap tapes along. I only had The Shogun’s Decapitator. When it was over, we grabbed a snack at a Bojangles drive-through near the Virginia–North Carolina border. Mouth full of chicken, he pointed at the tape deck and said, “I can’t understand ninety percent what he say. Can you understand?”

  YEARS LATER, I told my history of jazz professor about this trip with my father to go see Dylan. I think I used the word “overrated.” He shook his head and said that I would never understand because I hadn’t been around to witness Blonde on Blonde, at least not in its proper context. As for my father, he said, “It’s hard to imagine how someone who didn’t live in America at the time could really feel Dylan, because, as you know, so much of Dylan is about the history, of course, within its proper musical context.”

  That was the first time I’ve ever really considered killing somebody. I really considered cracking his skull open with some funny object—a saxophone, a dildo, maybe.

  Something awful, dark,
must have flashed across my face. He asked what was wrong.

  I CAN STILL feel that violence within me, but its pathways have become more twisted, serpentine, and, ultimately, inert. At least once a week, I’ll weigh the option of hurting someone. There’s never any pattern, or specificity, really.

  I used to think I could turn that violence into fiction—this idea was inspired, more than I’d like to admit, by Eminem—but fiction requires a steadier logic of who and why, good and bad, absurd and real. Violence, even when it’s supposed to be chaotic, is never truly chaotic. Poe’s ourang-outang, who rips apart the women of the Rue Morgue and stuffs them up in the chimney, is studied as the solution to a puzzle, or, misguidedly, as a racist allegory. What he is not, however, is simply a lustful orangutan who got away and killed some women. He is not a symbol of insanity.

  Were I a better writer, I’d make myself into that symbol.

  14. Adam nodded off on the couch. It was four in the afternoon. I let myself out and walked back home. At the end of my block, I stood in front of the Laundromat’s exhaust and stared out at the lime trees as a whorl of fuzzy-smelling steam swirled around my feet. I thought, “This is a Stygian scene,” and then thought about the movie Taxi Driver, and then Meet the Parents. Despite my efforts, the steam and the fog rolling down from Noe Valley, the visions of Travis Bickle, and the repetition in my head of the words “The Baby Molester is dead,” all those signifying things couldn’t convince me that hell lay ahead. Instead, I wondered about my e-mail.

  Up the block, a blond head popped out of a gentrifier window. It was Performance Fleece. She was staring down at a sky blue Astro van double-parked outside my building. I didn’t want to make eye contact, so I took out my cell phone and started hitting random buttons. The word I spelled, incidentally, was “FLAMER.” I would’ve kept texting all the way to my front door, but as I passed the gentrifier condo’s graffiti-proof metal door, something splattered on the sidewalk next to me.