San Francisco Noir

by Peter Maravelis

  “There ain’t no such church,” said Revancha.

  “Heard there was.”

  “The devil got your ear, son,” said Vermillion, “way he go about flatterin’ folks. He do that. Vain man fallin’ for the devil’s malarkey, all that is.”

  “What you had to go smackin’ me around like that for, anyway?” asked Revancha. “Use me so bad.”

  “Standin’ in satan’s shoes,” said Vermillion, “even back then.”

  “Man spoke the truth,” said Ray.

  “What man?” asked Revancha.

  “One you saw in church, stole all the candles. No place to hide.”

  “John the Baptis’,” said Vermillion.

  “I know him, I know that man.”

  “How could you?” asked Revancha.

  “Look at him, sugar, a child of darkness. All the devil’s children the same. Ask him can he sing, Revancha. Go on.”

  “Can you sing, Ray?”

  “’Course I can sing.”

  “Tell him go ahead and try,” said Vermillion.

  “Sing, Ray, sing ‘He’s My Friend Until the End.’”

  Ray opened his mouth to sing but no sound came out. He tried again with the same result.

  “I can’t.”

  “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” said Vermillion. “You ain’t got no gift left, Mr. Church of Ray Sparks.”

  Ray got up and walked away.

  “Damn, Miz Chaney,” said Revancha, “that’s hard.”

  “He ask for it.”

  Revancha began to cry.

  “Only time I ever have an orgasm,” she said, “is when I imagine the man doin’ me’s the one dressed in rags come in the church the day my father died.”

  “God bless you, girl,” said Vermillion.

  “God bless you, too, Miz Chaney.”

  PART II

  In Memoriam to Identity

  THE NEUTRAL ZONE

  BY KATE BRAVERMAN

  Fisherman’s Wharf

  Zoë and Clarissa meet at irregular intervals at Fisherman’s Wharf. This is the neutral zone. The landscape of perpetual unmolested childhood. The carousel spins in predictable orbits and the original primitive neon alphabet does not deviate. These hieroglyphics are permanent and intelligible in all hemispheres and dialects. No translation is necessary. The carousel does not require calculus, rehab, or absolution. No complications with immigration or the IRS. Just buy a token.

  “I’m here,” Zoë says from her cell phone.

  “At the wharf?” Clarissa must clarify the conditions.

  “Little anemic waves at my feet. Corn dogs that give you cancer. Old men catching perch with so much mercury they explode as they reel them in,” Zoë reports.

  “What color is the water?” Clarissa asks.

  “Last-ditch leukemia IV drip blue,” Zoë decides.

  “Half an hour,” Clarissa assures her. “I’m coming.”

  Zoë has no interest in who Clarissa will abandon or strand at a conference table, restaurant, or health club. No callbacks, a medical emergency, cancel everything, Clarissa will inform her staff. It’s a day for experimental time travel.

  They meet episodically. Conventional friendship, with its narrative of consensual commitments and behaviors, has proved too intimate and demanding. Between them are houses never seen, husbands dead or divorced, known only by anecdote or photograph. Entire strata of their lives are less than footnotes. Years passed when they did not know one another’s addresses or current last names. Decades when they could have been driftwood to one another, vessels lost at sea. A drowned stranger, perhaps, why bother?

  “This litany of blame is becoming tedious,” Zoë once recognized.

  “Human perimeters are collective background razor wire. We’re too hip for that shit,” Clarissa responded. “It’s residual static from a Baptist radio broadcast in Mississippi. It’s irrelevant and obsolete.”

  “We’ll bite it off with our teeth,” Zoë offered. “Napalm it. Grenade launchers and M-16s. Tec-9s. We’ll have our own Cultural Revolution. We’ll go post-modern, but fully armed.”

  “We’ll invent rituals appropriate for our circumstances. We’ll whisper endearments while strolling the killing fields,” Clarissa was enthusiastic. “We’ll crawl our Ho Chi Minh trail, hand-in-hand, trusting each other with our lives.”

  “But we’ll abide by the Geneva Convention,” Zoë prompted. “Despite our emotional residue.”

  “Directed psychological evolution. It’ll be more brutal than weight training,” Clarissa agreed. “But we’ll become better human beings.”

  “We’ll redefine and transcend ourselves,” Zoë said.

  It was an earlier autumn on Fisherman’s Wharf. It was bluer than Maui, bay studded with cobalt that looked charged, technologically modified. Zoë had lived two years without electricity in a shack on a nameless river of red orchids in the jungle near Hana. She wasn’t in contact with Clarissa then. Clarissa probably didn’t know there were sea-sons in Maui, too. A faint reddening, a moistening, and the mosquitoes went in temporary remission.

  “I like it conceptually. But let’s go further,” Clarissa suggested. “We’ll be molecular. Just strands of light from one radiance to another.”

  “Should we reject linearity entirely?” Zoë asked. “Sporadic moments of illumination in extreme altitudes requiring oxygen masks?”

  “Discreet and unpredictable meetings with spectacular voltage. We’ll communicate by blowtorch,” Clarissa replied. “We’ll wear asbestos jackets.”

  A process of accommodation and evolution was plausible, they agreed. True, they had failed the traditional strategies of giving and receiving. But the standard methods by which one registers recognition and regret do not apply to them. They would have a pact, an armistice, like aggressive radical improvisational surgery. Their psychiatrists were cautiously optimistic. The possibility of malignant complications was an acceptable risk. Then they had shaken hands.

  Now Zoë sees Clarissa. She is exiting a black Lincoln town car, wearing her standard business outfit—aerobics pants and jacket, Gucci sunglasses and Giants baseball cap. It’s the camouflaged movie star look designed to create the impression that you’re attempting to be incognito. Clarissa is carrying not a gym bag, which would be appropriate and predictable, but a Chanel purse with leather quilting and gold braid handles. It’s the uniform the narcissistic personality disorder dictates.

  They kiss on each cheek. “You forgot my birthday,” Clarissa begins. She dismisses the car and driver with a hand gesture.

  “I didn’t sign on as a soccer mom. I don’t decorate for holidays. I don’t bake or send thank-you cards. I don’t answer the phone. I throw away personal mail. You know this,” Zoë reminds her.

  “Don’t you go to bed before Thanksgiving and not get up until after Valentine’s Day?” Clarissa’s voice is light.

  “That was my mother,” Zoë says. “I simply leave the country at appropriate junctures.”

  Actually, Zoë is fond of Christmas in Southeast Asia. Ornately decorated pine trees in the air-conditioned hotel lobbies like vestiges from another planet. Bamboo balconies draped in green velvets, antique brocades, and holly wreaths. More fetishes. And Christmas carols rendered in versions so mangled by distance and erroneous translation they’re almost tolerable. Rivers smell of rotting vegetables, petrol, wood cooking fires, and hunger. Air is layers of decaying prayers that remind her of a satellite losing orbit, falling down not as metal but as streams of origami. In Bangkok, in December, it is 103 degrees.

  “Let’s just be here now,” Clarissa says. “We know the rules. It’s play time.” Her mouth glistens with a red lipstick that seems to have small stars encrusted within it. There are implications in the sheen Zoë doesn’t want to consider.

  The wharf is almost deserted. It’s mid-day, mid-week, in an undifferentiated season. It’s another windswept early November. They walk hand-in-hand down the pier past occasional immigrant men fishing and
stray teenagers who appear eager for corruption. Zoë and Clarissa know where they live. They, too, grew up in tenements designed for transience, already shabby decades ago, festering like sun sores. They were an integral part of the blueprint for the millennial slums in the sun. They were the penciled-in stick figures on the diagrams.

  “Don’t look,” Clarissa cautions. “They’re contagious. We’ll get a contact psychotic flashback.”

  The Last Edge Saloon perches on the furthest border of the pier. Their reunions begin here. They choose a booth facing the bay on three sides. They might drink coffee, perhaps with Dexedrine. Or get drunk on something festive, like White Russians or champagne. Since Zoë is technically in AA, she decides to let Clarissa set the tenor. Clarissa orders Bloody Marys. From a caloric standpoint, it’s the obvious choice.

  “You still look like a hippy,” Clarissa observes. She regards her with a smile that is speciously conciliatory, perhaps even condescending. Zoë interprets this as disturbing. Anxiety is inseparable from the air. It’s in the oxygen molecules and how their biochemistry fails to correctly process them. It’s a perpetual uneasy truce.

  “It’s my signature classic bohemian style,” Zoë replies. “And I want to formalize our alliance.”

  “Do you want to get married?” Clarissa asks.

  “I want a document with terms, precise specifications,” Zoë realizes. “And I want a weapons check.”

  “Contracts are worthless,” Clarissa points out. “They’re a wish list for Santa.” She’s a lawyer, after all. She knows.

  “We could become cousins,” Zoë suggests. This appeals to her.

  Survivors of cataclysmic childhoods defined by poverty and isolation compulsively seek validation. They know they lack proper emotional documentation. Cousins evokes a blood connection that would both substantiate and obviate certain complexities, the ebbs and flows, droughts and monsoons of their relationship. Such a device would highlight and justify their erratic and pathologically intense con-junction. In regions of bamboo and sun-rotted petals, wind propels sand like tiny bullets, and there are always too few artifacts. Cousins is an inspiration.

  “I could draw up the papers,” Clarissa is expansive. “But adoption is superior.”

  Zoë came to San Francisco when she was seven. Her father, Marvin, had terminal cancer. Her mother was mentally ill. They were bankrupt. She used to think heaven was a foster home. If Marvin would just finally die, perhaps she could even get adopted.

  “I’ve missed you like a first love,” Zoë says.

  “I was your first love,” Clarissa reminds her. “And you mine.”

  They lean across the faux-wood table etched with knife-gouged gang insignias and logos of metal bands and kiss again. They are both manic this autumn day. Zoë and Clarissa share numerous personality disorders. They are both bipolar 2 with borderline features. Substance abuse is a persistent irritant. Recently, they have both been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome.

  Today, sun turns San Francisco Bay the purple of noon irises in country gardens in July. To articulate such facets, to know and chart them, is a spasm of thunder inside, a tiny birth the size of a violet’s mouth. If she extracted this entity from her body, she could give it to Clarissa like an infant.

  Zoë examines her almost cousin’s eyes. Even through dark sunglasses, they are inordinately bright. Zoë senses that she, too, is also glowing. Yes, her eyes are brass corridors reflecting fluorescent light. They are both candles today, unusually in sync, radiant with clarity and energy. Clarissa wears a silk scarf, a vivid purple implying motion. It might contain vertical waves.

  “Do you like it?” Clarissa asks. “Hérmes. Take it. I just stole it on Maiden Lane.”

  “You still shoplift?” Zoë holds the scarf. It feels moist and sanctified, an embrace around her neck.

  “It’s an attitude like guerrilla warfare,” Clarissa explains. They’ve finished their second round of drinks. “A thrill kill requires mental discipline. Put it on and keep walking. I know, I’ve had it for years. I bought it on the Champs-Élysées. It was raining. I was at the George V. I remember the details absolutely. No one could dare question me. And no one does. Let’s ride the carousel.”

  They carry their drinks across the stained wooden planks of the pier. The carousel is closed. Clarissa makes a cell phone call and a man appears. She produces three hundred-dollar bills. They wait for the right seats, choosing recently painted twin horses, white and intricately decorated like certain porcelain, and ride for half an hour. Clarissa vomits twice.

  Zoë searches her theoretical arsenal. Is it time for a hand grenade? Should she call for a chopper with medics? Then she remembers her mission. “Are you okay?” she manages.

  “I understand how children discover bulimia,” Clarissa reports, excited. “It’s an accidental miracle.”

  “Maybe you’ll get retroactive psychiatric insight points,” Zoë says.

  Despite the gym-suit camouflage, it’s obvious Clarissa has gained weight. But even they have taboos. Eating disorders are a forbidden topic. They meet on neutral ground, but there are still no-fly zones, areas of fragmentation bombs and landmines. Shrapnel is a constant.

  Clarissa borrows the purple scarf to wipe her mouth. She has contaminated the silk, but Zoë still wants it back. She thinks, suddenly, of flower bouquets and their inadequacy. The floral arrangements of her life have been too much and not enough. The petals stained. They were debris.

  “If a contract is insufficient, what can we do?” Zoë wonders.

  They are standing on the pier where the carousel is no longer operating. Gone are the circles they inscribed in the loitering too-thin aqua air. Her body carved the afternoon as they whirled and spun, engraving trails of midnight-blue ink like marks made by fins. Somewhere these etchings floated into a river winding down to a bay, more invisible origami.

  “We could get a tattoo,” Clarissa proposes. “Our names together in a heart.”

  “A tattoo?” Zoë repeats, delighted. “Won’t it be painful and dangerous? The possibility of AIDS and infection?”

  “But you love needles.” Clarissa is annoyed. “You’re a professional junky.”

  “I’m in remission,” Zoë replies quickly, unexpectedly defensive.

  In truth, during one particularly virulent carousel rotation, she began to think about a drug dealer she knew in North Beach. It’s walking distance, over a steep sequence of stone steps and hills, through a sudden unexpected gate. There is a combination lock. Within, a creek is dammed and trapped, the water a stalled green with slime and duck excrement. She knows this Victorian house, the grain in every wooden floorboard and the way sunset displays itself through each glass pane in every room. There is geometry to how sun impales and dissects the Golden Gate Bridge. If you comprehend this mathematics, you can construct spaceships and time machines with common household appliances. You listen to the radio and talk to any god. This is encrypted information she will be buried with.

  “You always relapse,” Clarissa observes, as if stating an historical date or chemical formula. “And don’t you already have AIDS?”

  Zoë is shocked. She stares at Clarissa. Even with Gucci sunglasses, there’s a distinct softening around the chin, a loss of definition in her cheeks. “No, dear potential cousin. I have hepatitis C. And you need to get your face done.”

  “What part?” Clarissa is concerned.

  They are walking from the pier toward a tattoo parlor on Columbus Avenue. Shops offer stacks of cheap plaster statues, saints and children, dwarves and frogs. Someone will purchase and paint these objects, display them, give them as gifts. And plastic replicas of Alcatraz and T-shirts that say Prisoner and Psycho Ward.

  “What part?” Zoë repeats. “It isn’t a fucking contract. It’s a composition. Just give the guy a blank check. And don’t use a Pacific Heights or Marin surgeon. You’ll end up looking like everybody else. I found an Italian in Pittsburgh.”

  “I noticed you finally got y
our father off your face,” Clarissa slowly admits.

  “Well, the police wouldn’t do it,” Zoë says. “And Mommy was so busy.”

  Slow swells are below the wharf now. The bay is a liquid representation of fall. It’s in continual transition. It’s a form of treachery. All fluid bodies are autumnal and promise betrayal. That’s what leaves changing mean, the reds and ochre, the yellows like lanterns. It’s about packing and disappearing. It’s a season for divestiture. That’s the fundamental imperative winds hint at. Time of the severing. That’s the obvious subtext. And it occurs to Zoë that her elation could dissipate. Emotions have their own seasons, inexplicable currents and random lightning storms.

  Zoë follows Clarissa into the tattoo parlor. “Let’s rock,” Clarissa says. “Lock and load.”

  The Eagles are playing. It’s “Hotel California,” of course. A tanned man with a blond ponytail who looks like a yoga instructor opens a book of designs. Dragons. Butterflies. Demons. Flowers. Guitars. Spiders. Zoë vaguely remembers negotiations including the procurement of a fifth of vodka, tomato juice, and a complicated argument about the aesthetic implications of script choices. Eventually they selected a gothic font. Then she may have passed out.

  Zoë realizes they are in an arcade on Pier 39. It’s three hours and six Bloody Marys later. They have gauze and adhesive tape on their shoulders where their names are carved into their left upper arms in identical navy-blue. They decided to leave the encircling heart in red ink for their next reunion. Banks of garish video games surround them; hip-hop music blasts from speakers in the ceilings and floors. Boys who all look part Asian or Mexican are armed with laser levers and plastic machine guns. They keep the real Glocks in their pockets.

  “This is not the global village I envisioned,” Zoë says.

  “That’s politically incorrect enough to get me disbarred,” Clarissa whispers. She places two fingers against her red lacquered lips in a gesture of mock fright.

  The automatic photographic booth is on the far side of the arcade. Four shots. They have been taking pictures here since they rode buses and walked from Daly City in seventh grade. Zoë remembers when it cost a quarter. Now it takes dollars. This photographic session is a ritual element in each of their meetings. It’s their sacrament. When they leave the booth, they cut the strip in half. Zoë saves her photographs in a shoebox where she keeps her passport and birth certifi-cate. She assumes Clarissa saves hers in her jewelry vault. Or perhaps she just throws them away.