San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics

by Peter Maravelis

  “… one money sale, the window smoke waits. One money and inside an hour we’ll find the paste that lives and chews, prices slashed, three money and we’ll throw in a …”

  He paused on the corner. There: the Crossroads Hotel. A piss-in-the-sink hotel, the sort filled with junkies and pensioned winos. Crammed in between other buildings like the Casa Valencia had been. He was afraid to go in.

  Across the street: whores, with crotch-high skirts and bulging, wattled cleavages and missing limbs that waved to him with the squeezed-out, curly ends of the stumps. (It’s not true that they have no feet, that their ankles are melded into the sidewalk.)

  “One money will buy you two women whose tongues can reach deeply into a garbage disposal, we also have, for two money …”

  The whores beckoned; the crowd thickened. He went into the hotel.

  A steep, narrow climb up groaning stairs to the half door where the manager waited. The hotel manager was a Hindu, and behind him were three small children with their faces covered in black cloth (the children do not have three disfigured arms apiece), gabbling in Hindi. The Hindu manager smiling broadly. Gold teeth. Identical face to the bartender but long straight hair, Hindu accent as he said: “Hello hello, you want a room, we have one vacancy, I am sorry we have no linen now, no, there are no visitors unless you pay five money extra, no visitors, no—”

  “I understand, I don’t care about that stuff,” Ash babbled. Still carrying the backpack, he noted, taking stock of himself again. You’re okay. Hallucinating but okay. Just get into the room and work out the stress, maybe send for a bottle.

  Then he passed over all the money in his wallet and signed a paper whose print ran like ink in rainwater, and the manager led him down the hall to the room. No number on the door. Something crudely pen-knifed into the old wooden door panel: a face like an African mask, hyena and goat and man. But momentum carried him into the room—the manager didn’t even use a key, just opened it—and momentum, too, closed the door behind him. Ash turned and saw that it was a bare room with a single bed and a window and a dangling naked bulb and a sink in one corner, no bathroom. Smelling of urine and mold. The light was on.

  There were six people in the room.

  “Shit!” Ash turned to the door, wondering where his panic had been till now. “Hey!” He opened the door and the manager came back to it, grinning at him in the hallway. “Hey, there’s already people in here—”

  “Yes hello yes they live with you, you know, they are the wife and daughter and grandchildren of the man you killed you know—”

  “What?”

  “The man you killed, you know, yes—”

  “What?”

  “Yes they are in you now at the crossroads and here are more, oh yes—” He gestured, happy as a church usher at a revival, ushering in seven more people, who crowded past Ash to throng the room, shifting aimlessly from foot to foot, gaping sightlessly, whining to themselves, bumping into one another at random. Blocking Ash, without seeming to try, every time he made for the door. Pushing him gently but relentlessly back toward the window.

  The manager was no longer speaking in English, nor was he speaking Hindi; his face was no longer a man’s, but something resembling that of a hyena and a goat and a man, and he was speaking in an African tongue—Yoruba?—with a sound that was as strange to Ash as the cry of an animal on the veldt, but he knew, anyway, with a kind of a priori knowledge, what the man was saying. Saying …

  That these people were those disenfranchised by the old man’s death: the old armored-car guard’s death meant that his wife would not be able to provide the money to help her son-in-law start that business and he goes instead into crime and then to life in prison, and his children, fatherless, slide into drugs, and lose their hope and then their lives and as a direct result they beat and abuse their own children and those children have children which they beat and abuse (because they, themselves, were beaten and abused) and they all grow up into psychopaths and aimless, sleepwalking automatons … Who shoved, now, into this room, made it more and more crushingly crowded, murmuring and whining as they elbowed Ash back to the window. There were thirty in the little room, and then forty, and then forty-five and fifty, the crowd humid with body heat and sullen and dully urgent as it crowded Ash against the window frame. He looked over his shoulder, peered through the glass. Maybe there was escape, out there.

  But outside the window it was a straight drop four floors to a trash heap. It was an air shaft, an enclosed space between buildings to provide air and light for the hotel windows. Air shafts filled up with trash in places like this; bottles and paper sacks and wrappers and wet boxes and shapeless sneakers and bent syringes and mold-carpeted garbage and brittle condoms and crimped cans. The trash was thicker, deeper than in any air shaft he’d ever seen. It was a cauldron of trash, subtly seething, moving in places, wet sections of cardboard shifting, cans scuttling; bottles rattling and strips of tar paper humping up, worming; the wet, stinking motley of the air shaft weaving itself into a glutinous tapestry.

  No, he couldn’t go out there. But there was no space to breathe now, inside, and no way to the door; they were piling in still, all the victims of his shooting. The ones killed or maimed by the ones abandoned by the ones lost by the one he had killed. How many people now, in this room made for one, people crawling atop people, piling up so that the light was in danger of being crushed out against the ceiling?

  One killing can’t lead to so much misery, he thought.

  Oh but the gunshot’s echoes go on and on, the happy, mocking Ishu said. On and on, white devil cocksucker man.

  What is this place? Ash asked, in his head. Is it Hell?

  Oh no, this is the city. Just the city. Where you have always lived. Now you can see it, merely, white demon cocksucker man. Now stay here with us, with your new family, where he called you with his dying breath …

  Ash couldn’t bear it. The claustrophobia was of infinite weight. He turned again to the window, and looked once more into the air shaft; the trash decomposing and almost cubistically recomposed into a great garbage disposal churn, that chewed and digested itself and everything that fell into it.

  The press of people pushed him against the window so that the glass creaked.

  And then thirty more, from generations hence, came through the door, and pushed their way in. The window glass protested. The newcomers pushed, vaguely and sullenly, toward the window. The glass cracked—and shrieked once.

  Only the glass shrieked. Ash, though, was silent, as he was heaved through the shattering glass and out the window, down into the air shaft, and into the innermost reality of the city.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  AMBROSE BIERCE (1842–1914) was a journalist and satirist who contributed to and edited a number of newspapers, including the San Francisco News Letter, the Californian, and the Wasp. His best-known works include the scathing collection The Devil’s Dictionary and the short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which has been adapted into film, radio broadcasts, and teleplays.

  CRAIG CLEVENGER was born in Dallas, Texas and currently lives in San Francisco. He is the author of two novels, The Contortionist’s Handbook and Dermaphoria, and is currently working on his third. He can be found at www.craigclevenger.com.

  JANET DAWSON created Oakland, California private investigator Jeri Howard, who has sleuthed her way through nine novels. Jeri’s first case, Kindred Crimes, won the St. Martin’s Press/Private Eye Writers of America contest for Best First Private Eye Novel, and earned Shamus, Macavity, and Anthony award nominations as well. Her short story “Voice Mail,” in the collection Scam and Eggs, won a Macavity Award. Another story, “Slayer Statute,” received a Shamus Award nomination. She works at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at the University of California, Berkeley.

  FLETCHER FLORA (1914–1968) wrote over sixty mystery and noir stories for major crime publications such as Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. He also wrote sixteen nove
ls and coauthored many more, including Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene, a crime novel about the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco.

  JOE GORES, a former San Francisco–based private investigator, is the author of dozens of screenplays, television scripts, biographies, short stories, and novels, including the acclaimed DKA detective series. A Northern California resident, he has won three Edgar Awards and Japan’s Maltese Falcon Award.

  DON HERRON is best known for leading the Dashiell Hammett Tour in San Francisco since 1977, giving him a long working acquaintance with the city of the 1920s and hardboiled stories pounded out for publication in the pulp magazine Black Mask. He is the author of various books, including The Literary World of San Francisco & Its Environs and Willeford, a survey of the life and times of cult noir author Charles Willeford.

  JACK LONDON (1876–1916), a San Francisco native, is best known today for his adventure novel The Call of the Wild and his pro-socialist dystopia The Iron Heel. But during his lifetime his greatest successes were his prolific short fiction, many of which are set in the Bay Area.

  PETER MARAVELIS has had a lifelong involvement in the world of arts and letters. For over twenty years, he has been a bookseller and events producer. He is currently the events director at City Lights Bookstore. He was born and raised in San Francisco, where he currently lives.

  SETH MORGAN (1949–1990) published only one novel, Homeboy (1990), which won him high critical praise in many cities including San Francisco, where the work is set. The novel’s preoccupation with heroin addicts and convicts perhaps best captures Morgan’s own troubled life of drugs and crime. He won the PEN essay contest for convicts while incarcerated for armed robbery in the mid 1970s.

  MARCIA MULLER, a native of the Detroit area, has authored thirty-five novels, three of them in collaboration with her husband Bill Pronzini; seven short story collections; and numerous nonfiction articles. Together she and Pronzini have edited a dozen anthologies and a nonfiction book on the mystery genre. The Mulzinis, as friends call them, live in Sonoma County, California, in a house full of books.

  FRANK NORRIS (1870–1902) was born in Chicago and moved to San Francisco at the age of fourteen. After attending Berkeley and Harvard, Norris embarked on an expansive writing career as a news correspondent in South Africa, an editorial assistant for the San Francisco Wave, and a war correspondent for McClure’s Magazine during the Spanish–American War in 1898. Heavily influenced by French naturalism, Norris’s most notable work, McTeague (1899), explores the life and trials of a dentist at the dawn of twentieth-century America in the city of San Francisco. McTeague has also been captured in different film versions and as an opera. His other works include The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) and The Pit (1903).

  OSCAR PEÑARANDA left the Philippines at the age of twelve. He spent his adolescent years in Vancouver, Canada, and then moved to San Francisco at the age of seventeen. His stories, poems, and essays have been anthologized both nationally and internationally. He is the author of Full Deck (Jokers Playing), a collection of poetry, and Seasons by the Bay, an award-winning story collection.

  BILL PRONZINI has published seventy novels, including three in collaboration with his wife, novelist Marcia Muller, and thirty-three in his popular Nameless Detective Series. He is also the author of four nonfiction books, twenty collections of short stories, and scores of uncollected stories, articles, essays, and book reviews; additionally, he has edited and coedited numerous anthologies. His work has been translated into eighteen languages and published in nearly thirty countries. In 2008 he was named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, the organization’s highest award. He has also received three Shamus Awards, the Lifetime Achievement Award (presented in 1987) from the Private Eye Writers of America, and six Edgar Award nominations.

  JOHN SHIRLEY is the author of numerous novels, including Cellars, Wetbones, City Come A-Walkin’, Eclipse, A Splendid Chaos, and, most recently, The Other End. He was coscreenwriter of the film The Crow, and his recent novel Demons is in development as a movie at the Weinstein Company.

  MARK TWAIN (1835-1910), born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is among the finest contributors to the canon of American literature. He began to gain fame when his story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” appeared in the New York Saturday Press in 1865. His book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is widely considered the Great American Novel. Its predecessor, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), is also remarkable for Twain’s play with language and his attention to the innocence and imagination of childhood. Twain’s literary career evolved when he headed west for San Francisco. There he continued as a journalist, began lecturing and met his wife, Olivia Langdon.

  WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN was born in Los Angeles in 1959 and attended Deep Springs College and Cornell University. He is the author of various books, including The Atlas (winner of the 1997 PEN Center West Award), You Bright and Risen Angels, The Rainbow Stories, and a series of novels entitled Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes. In addition, Vollmann’s works of nonfiction include An Afghanistan Picture Show and Rising Up and Rising Down, a seven-volume treatise on violence that was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003. His journalism and fiction have been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Spin, Gear, and Granta. In 1999, the New Yorker named Vollmann “one of the twenty best writers in America under forty.” His most recent work, Riding Toward Everywhere, was published in 2008 to great critical acclaim. He lives in California with his wife and daughter.