San Francisco Noir

by Peter Maravelis

  “You’re still with Brillstein? Jerry’s psychiatrist? The Freudian with the high colonics and weekend mud baths?” Zoë stares at her, so startled she’s almost sober.

  “He’s eclectic, I know. But it’s like a family plan. I’m grandfathered in at the original price,” Clarissa says.

  The stylish phone opens, the keyboard glows like the panels on an airplane. It’s the millennium and we have cockpits on our wrists and in our pockets. Clarissa’s phone is voice-activated. She says, “Driver.” Then, “Pier 39. Now.”

  “Does your arm hurt?” Zoë wonders. Her shoulder feels like it’s on fire.

  “No pain, no gain. My dear cousin,” Clarissa smiles, “keep your finger on the trigger. We must soldier on. The cause is just.”

  Zoë realizes Clarissa has already moved on. The conference is over. The documents will be studied. Further discussions to be scheduled. My people will calendar with yours. We’ll synchronize by palm pilot.

  Suddenly Zoë feels she is on a borderless layover. It’s last Christmas in India again. She began in a broken taxi five hours from Goa. Then the six-hour delay in the airport and the run across the tarmac for the last and totally unscheduled miraculous flight to Bombay. A day room for seven hours. The flight to Frankfurt and another day room and delay. Finally the fourteen-hour flight to New York. Seventy hours of continual travel and she was just finding her rhythm. She could continue for weeks or months, in a perpetual montage of stalled entrances and exits, corridors and steps, tunnels and lobbies of vertigo in free fall where no time zones apply.

  Clarissa and Zoë no longer hold hands. A distance of texture and intention forms between them. The geometry is calculated. Not even their shadows collide.

  “Another bittersweet reunion barely survived,” Clarissa says. “My beloved cousin.”

  “And you, my first and greatest love,” Zoë says. “Another high-risk foray we deserve purple hearts for.”

  “We’ll get red hearts around our names next time. Our next tattoo,” Clarissa smiles.

  They kiss on both cheeks. The glitter has departed from their eyes. They have slid into an interminable foreign film neither of them has interest or affection for. She knows the name of Clarissa’s lipstick now. It’s called Khmer Rouge.

  There is a certain pause just before sunset, when the bay is veiled in azure.

  It’s the moment of redemption or drowning. Inland, cyclone-fenced freeways carve cement scars beside bungalows with miniature balconies where parched geraniums decay in air soiled from the fumes of manufacturing and human wounds. The bay is a muted defeated blue, subjugated and contained. At night, they pump the antidepressants in. Or maybe there’s enough Prozac and beer already in the sewage. Pollution turns the setting sun into strata of brandy and lurid claret, smears of curry and iodine. It looks like a massacre.

  “My car can take you where you’re going,” Clarissa offers.

  Clarissa’s driver has short hair, a thick neck, sunglasses with an ear attachment she imagines CIA field operatives employ. Clarissa indicates the car door. It is open like a dark mouth with the teeth knocked out. And she’s waving the purple scarf like a banner. Zoë refuses to admit that she doesn’t know where she’s going. She turns away and starts walking. If those are words issuing from Clarissa’s mouth, which needs immediate surgical attention, Zoë can’t hear them. There are shadows along the boardwalk now, in the alleys and sides of residential streets with ridiculous, insipid seaside names. Bay Street. Marine Drive. North Point View. Who do they think they’re kidding?

  Keep walking and shadows find you. They are the distilled essence of all harbors and bays. Such shadows taste like a wounded sherry you can drink or pour on your cuts. Use them for bath oil and become immune to infection. Shadows are graceful and do not require explanations. They know you are more dangerous than they imagine. They cannot fill in your blanks. Simply surrender and they do everything.

  There are no neutral zones. They’re an illusion, a delu-sionary construct, like movie and real-estate contracts. Satellites map each zip code and tap every telephone. Cities are enclaves between combat arenas. We are born with weapons of mass destruction. They’re in our genes, passed down the generations, like poisonous heirlooms. It’s ground zero now and forever. Zoë senses the car moving behind and away from her, and she is grateful. She never wants to see Clarissa again.

  LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR

  BY ALVIN LU

  Chinatown

  For K & T

  Face à face avec la profondeur, l’homme, front penché, se recueille.

  Que voit-il au fond du trou caverneux? La nuit sous la terre, l’Empire d’ombre.

  —Victor Segalen

  The young people in Chinatown are afraid and confused. We don’t know what to do with our lives,” Michael Munroe read in the February 1970 issue of Getting Together, a mimeographed newsletter published by I Wor Kuen, a Chinatown-based anti-imperialist group somewhat ludicrously named after the late-nineteenth-century Chinese secret society whose members believed mystic rituals and spirit possession would make them invulnerable.

  Three years out of Princeton, Michael had thrown in with the revolution. He had turned his back on a life of privilege, by any standard, and left his home in Illinois for the West Coast.

  He worked as a postman in the East Bay, inside a stretch of black neighborhoods, and organized there. Recently he had been coming across the bridge to discuss tactics with another postal organizer, Francis Chao. Organization was effective in the post office. The P.O. had a high percentage of black workers, who in those days were highly politicized.

  Meeting Francis in Chinatown, coming from the East Bay, was an abrupt transition. Walking routes in West Oakland, Michael felt he had miraculously made the great leap from one world to another; his role as deliverer of welfare checks afforded him access to ordinary black lives few white men experienced. But Chinatown was different. There were a few of the cadre there, both American- and foreign-born, who could move, not always with ease, through that underground world, an entirely other country only two blocks wide extending from Bush to Broadway, and they offered Michael glimpses of how it worked. Francis was one of them.

  The struggle for Chinatown’s soul between Kuomintang and CPC (Communist Party of China) sympathizers was then at its peak. IWK and Wei Min She (literally, the “Serve the People” Association) opened storefronts in the basement of the International Hotel, located in Manilatown on the corner of Jackson and Kearny Streets, and plotted to overthrow the power structure. Radical activists, propelled by Third World strikes at San Francisco State and Berkeley, descended on the bewildered community, some of them calling themselves Red Guards, talking about Yellow Soul. Politics in turn exacerbated already existing petty rivalries between American-born and foreign-born gangs. A pool hall–soda fountain run by a group of reformed American-born at 615 Jackson was adorned with posters of Huey P. Newton and Mao Tse-tung, while a large gang known as the Jo-Boys amounted to strongarms for the tongs, who continued to assert their fading influence.

  What all these groups, including the ruling Six Companies oligarchy, fought to represent could be narrowed down to one square block, Portsmouth Square, in the heart of the community, which had been recently defaced by stenciled graffiti bearing the image of Chiang Ching. It was the site of innocuous fairs, well-meaning rallies, and, increasingly, conflicts. One could imagine, in the years of the Barbary Coast, when it was the makeshift center of San Francisco’s gambling traffic, a gallows being erected there. But most of the time now, it was just the immortal old men, playing Chinese chess or a variation on bridge. Some nights, the fog would stroll down the hills of Washington and Clay Streets, you could hear the foghorns, and the Stockton bus would roll up. No one knew the future.

  Michael and Francis regularly met at the Hunan Cafe, across the street from the I-Hotel, but the atmosphere there had grown too thick with intrigue, and Francis suggested a little-known restaurant elsewhere, frequented entirely by locals who
spoke only in Toisan dialect. The two of them were to meet an acquaintance of Francis’s there, who was researching a documentary film on the nascent Asian-American “movement” and wanted to interview Francis incognito.

  Francis wore a blue Mao tunic, jeans, and black kung-fu shoes. He was clean-shaven, and a helmet of straight hair covered his ears. Though smallish, he projected confidence and power—rumor had it that he was a black belt, and even Michael, who was a big man and a star college lacrosse player before he blew out his knee, felt tough walking beside him. The two of them, as members of the rather rigidly Maoist Revolutionary Union, worked closely with WMS, their Chinatown affiliate, and tended to regard IWK, who after all were from New York and were behind the curve that way, as suspiciously reformist. Nevertheless, at this optimistic time, there was still hope a united front could be built in Chinatown.

  “I hear you’re going to be sent somewhere,” Francis said.

  “Where?”

  Francis leaned his head to one side, then made a kind of quarter-turn with it, his abbreviation for shaking his head. He took a gulp of very attenuated jasmine tea from a porcelain cup with the faded image of a red, green, and yellow dragon printed on it.

  “Why?”

  “To retrieve something.”

  That could mean anything. To San Leandro? For burritos? But Michael had an idea of what Francis was talking about. Both of them had joined RU around the same time, coming from very different directions, and they’d risen quickly through the ranks. In the spirit of competition, Francis liked to keep Michael off balance with hints that made it sound as if he were closer to directives being made in the inner circle, but Michael knew it was just smoke. Michael had personal ties to the upper echelons of the leadership that Francis didn’t have. On the other hand, one never knew what one faction might be planning without another’s knowledge. And there were plenty of factions.

  “So tell me about these Red Guard guys,” Michael said.

  “They have a lot less to do with the Red Guard in China than with talking black and acting like the Panthers, but without half the political commitment. Most are ex-Leway and are in it strictly for the image.”

  Francis had a way of sizing up, dissecting, and dismissing someone in a sentence or two that matched RU’s reputation for sectarianism. Michael, who was prone to see both sides of an issue, thought there was truth to the accusation that they didn’t get along with anybody, because they didn’t cut anybody any slack. He also knew it was worse cutting everybody slack all the time, over anything. One needed parameters. But even in their own group, Francis was thought to have a very refined palate.

  “Look at their position on militancy.” He pointed to a line printed in the newsletter. “Our Constitution says we have the right to bear arms. Our? This is about bringing the whole system down. As far as their politics go, it’s strictly ‘black cat, white cat.’”

  He was making reference to rifts that had grown within the ranks of the CPC itself, demonstrating a fairly high-level awareness of issues that Michael only understood in a blurry way. Groups like IWK and elements within RU’s own national ranks reflected the rightist thought of the Liu Hsiao-chi/Teng Hsiao-ping revisionist party clique that the radicals, including the student Red Guard and Mao himself, were resisting. Somehow that internecine struggle had radiated out from the capital of worldwide revolution to this remote outpost.

  Michael had only heard of the Red Guard less than two years ago, before he joined RU. He didn’t know much about China then, much less the Cultural Revolution. But there had been a great deal of hoopla around an American, a white man, who had returned to the Bay Area from China and had participated in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as a Red Guard himself. By chance, Michael had gone to his presentation and was mesmerized, particularly by the photos that were passed around, clipped from Life magazine. One showed a group of Red Guards in surgical masks ham-mering apart a Peking opera house. Michael didn’t understand exactly why they were destroying the building, but he thought it was probably because opera was something for rich people.

  In later, grimmer years Francis would go to jail for infiltrating a U.N. Security Council meeting and throwing plastic bags filled with pig’s blood at the U.S. and Soviet council-members.

  Francis’s acquaintance, the filmmaker Cletus Dong, arrived at the same time as the twice-cooked pork and honey walnut prawns. As he approached their table, conspicuous in cowboy boots and big silver belt buckle, Francis muttered under his breath, “Cultural nationalist,” which to Michael was a codeword for “reverse racist.”

  Cletus introduced himself as “the Chinese-American Jean-Luc Godard,” which struck Michael as an odd thing to aspire to be, considering Cletus was the only Chinese-American filmmaker he’d ever heard of. Couldn’t you pretty much call yourself the Chinese-American anything? But with a name like Cletus Dong he wasn’t going to be the Jean-Luc Godard of anybody.

  Michael’s attention was immediately taken away from Cletus anyway, because he’d brought a girl. At first Michael had taken her to be his girlfriend, but it later came out she was his sister, in the literal sense. Unlike the girls Asian “movement” guys tended to hang out with, the ones who wore granny glasses over humorless expressions, she had all the qualities of a classical Chinese beauty: green eyebrows, reedy silhouette, straight ass-length hair. There might be something too brittle about her, as in one of those lamenting maidens in a poem by Li Po, but on closer look one saw this was not the case, especially in the eyes, which were steely and unsentimental. Thick, bold strokes made up her face. She had dark eyes and a full mouth. Her name was Candy. She chewed gum.

  Michael immediately fell in love with her.

  She stuck her gum to a napkin and smoked a cigarette with heartwrenching elegance, while Cletus and Francis went over the details of the party platform. If it wasn’t for the entertainment Candy provided, Michael would have quickly grown bored. He respected Francis, because he knew he was dedicated, but even then, he always thought the worst thing about being a Communist were the endless meetings, speeches, and discussions over total abstractions. Despite his own class background, which he was still trying to live down, he tended to connect more with ordinary working-class people, the good citizens who lived on his delivery route.

  “Your idea of revolution, like most people’s, is romantic,” Francis concluded. “In fact, our work is like ‘washing one’s face,’ as Chairman Mao put it; that is, it takes place on a daily basis. Chinatown is capital-scarce, deteriorated, urban terrain. We have to be frugal and diligent and, as Mao says again, ‘do more with less money.’”

  “What’s so different about that from your run-of-the-mill penny-pinching Chinaman?”

  “Well, there are comrades, even when talking about revolution, who only see it in terms of economics and benefits. Of course, we should try to do more with less—as guerrillas we have no choice about that—but not at the expense of political awareness. Getting results is one thing, but isn’t it as important to understand how all the pieces fit together? The correct path is to see economic pragmatism and political consciousness as a dialectic. My point was, we can’t achieve our goals with sweeping gestures. That’s what the capitalists did when they wiped out Japantown and the Fillmore.”

  “Speaking of less money,” Candy suddenly broke in, “I have to get to work.”

  Francis acknowledged her existence for the first time by nodding his head.

  “I was giving her a ride to the Richmond,” Cletus mumbled apologetically.

  “Who do you think’s supporting this kid?” she went on.

  “And what do you do?” Francis asked.

  “I’m a bartender.”

  “What kind?”

  “What do you mean, what kind? What kind of question is that?”

  “I meant, are you happy with your work? Is it a good job?”

  “What do you mean? It’s the kind of job that makes money. What do you do?”

  “We’re postal worke
rs.”

  “You mean mailmen?”

  “Okay, so you make a lot of money. And what are you going to do with all of that money when, if, you get enough of it?”

  “Get outta this place! A girlfriend of mine just moved to Vancouver.” She pronounced it Van-koo-fah. “She says it’s real nice. Plenty of jobs. Big houses. No Chinese. Once I save up some money, I’m moving there.” She gestured theatrically to that promised land, like one of those actors in the opera house wrecked by Red Guards. “This time next year, I’ll be there, I promise. I hate this place. It stinks.”

  Michael was impressed. He was always moved by hope. He introduced himself and held his hand out. She didn’t take it. He took a deep breath. He didn’t normally give in to impulses, he was one of those people who tended to mull things over and act only when it was too late, but it was as if a spirit had taken over him. He wrote something down on the back of a chopstick wrapper and handed it to her.

  “Here’s my number. Call me when you get to Canada.”

  “What for?”

  “I just want to know if you get there, like you said.”

  “Who are you?”

  He looked around. “The only white person in this restaurant, it looks like.”

  She laughed at that. She wrote something on the wrapper and handed it back to him. “This is the number of the restaurant my girlfriend works at. Call a year from now and ask her if I got there. Okay? Bye bye.”

  With that, she dragged Cletus off into the cool San Francisco night. Only after they were out the door did Michael realize everyone in the restaurant was staring at him. Francis just went about opening his fortune cookie. Michael couldn’t help grinning. He was aglow. Here, in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant he in all likelihood would never be able to find his way back to again, in Chinatown, where it seemed, for someone like himself, it was all but impossible to make a human connection, he’d had one. Not just any connection, either, but with her. The people in the restaurant eventually went back to their business. Michael couldn’t understand a word above the din they were making. They could have been talking about anything within the confines of those four walls, and without.