San Francisco Noir

by Peter Maravelis

  Usually I’m nice to the cabbies. I have them drop me off at the tip of the sharply angled, dead-end block my ramshackle house sits, melting, at the end of. I walk myself careful down the steeply sloping sidewalk, gashes cut into the concrete sidewalk for traction. Getting to my front door is like rappelling down the side of a cliff. If you ask me, houses shouldn’t have been built down here. These little block-long streets cease abruptly at the open space that remains on the side of the hill, and the hill is angry that development has crept so close. It whips these pathetic homes with a battering, constant wind. It sends soggy clouds to sit damply atop the roofs, trickling stagnant moisture, birthing deep green molds. It sends its monsters, the horrifying Jerusalem crickets, up from the soil to invade basement apartments, looking like greasy, translucent alien insects. They drive me crying into the bathroom to strategize their eviction from my home.

  The hill hates the houses, and my dead-end street is a study in bad feng-shui—the sinister vibes rising on the wind. It’s my plan to move someday, when I’ve saved enough money to afford it. It’s my hope that the rents will go down in this town. I’m biding my time here on the side of the hill, a growing stack of cash in a box on my bookshelf. I worry about it there, the soft paper of it. I check in on it daily, to make sure the damp hasn’t dissolved it into a mushy lump of pulp.

  Anyway. My street is difficult to drive down, harder to get out of. You can back up but it’s sort of scary. You can turn around in the driveway across the street, but that’s a bitch. Plus, the scrappy little dog that lives there will bark at you the whole time, making the task even more hellish. Usually I tell the cabbies to let me off at the corner and I hike down to my door.

  That morning I felt surly and bossy, like a tired old whore, even though I was only twenty-five. I’d been up till 4 a.m. fielding late-night alcoholic phone calls from my recent ex, Jenny. They’d started around last call, from the pay phone mounted on the wall at the bar. I could hear the rumble of voices behind her, smacked with sharp laughs and the sound of glasses, music low from the jukebox at the other end of the room. Jenny was louder than all of it. She must have thought I couldn’t hear her, but I heard her fine, she was screaming. I heard her fine and I bet half the bar did, too; heard all my business and Jenny’s drunk opinion of it. The call would last until her money ran out and then I’d have a break as she hit the bar for more change or bummed some off her friends. I’d lay on my futon in the silence, listening to the subtle ping of water falling somewhere in my apartment. Waited for the phone to ring and it did. Heard the bartender holler last call; later heard her say, Hey, Jen, Don’t You Got A Phone At Home, Come On. We’re Closed. Mentally tracked the eight-minute walk down Mission, to Jen’s place upstairs from the produce and piñata store. Counted minutes for the huffing climb of the stairs, the drunken fiddle with the locks. Imagined her pause at the narrow closet that held her toilet, to piss out a bunch of what she’d just drank; figured in some time for her trip into the kitchen to check the empty fridge for beer; then another sixty seconds for her to stomp into her room, fling herself onto her bed, and start calling me again. I picked up the phone; I didn’t have anything else going on. I laid the phone on my ear and stayed rolled on my side upon the futon.

  She sounded crazy because she was crazy. This was good for me to remember. These phone calls were the best breakup present Jenny could have given me. I listened to her psycho-ramble, and sometimes, when it was appropriate, I’d say, Yeah, I’m Sorry For That. Sometimes, the sharp reality of her pain really got me and I’d feel it, too; a haunting glimpse of what it must be like to be trapped on the inside of Jenny’s brain. As shitty as our tortured relationship was for me—this shitty, dramatic ending was worse for Jenny. I was getting away, but she was going to be stuck there inside her head for the rest of her life.

  The morning of my call with the guy from Seattle, my face was puffy and I was almost hallucinating with sleep deprivation. I smeared some Preparation H under my eyes, which had submitted to a bit of crying during some of Jenny’s more expressive calls. I learned the Preparation H thing from a girl I worked with at a house in Oakland. It shrinks the little red saddlebags under my eyeballs right down. I wobbled into an outfit, packed my purse with the minimum; no toys, too early, just the condoms and the lube, my wallet, key, and that smear-proof lipstick. I swear, a million whores rejoiced when they finally came out with this stuff. Blowjobs require enough of a sacrifice of dignity without having to worry about looking like a clown, red smears all over the place, when you’re done.

  The call was easy; the guy was still sleepy himself. I left him fumbling with the hotel coffee pot and hailed a cab outside. Down there? the cabbie asked as he crested my street. Yup. He sighed. I could feel him asking if he could just dump me out at the corner. Not that morning, not in those shoes, not in the condition I was in. I was ready to plunge back into my damp bed and sleep the day away. Barely 10 a.m. and I’d already made my money. The cab turned down my block, crawling carefully.

  That little fucking dog started its yapping. The poor thing never saw the inside of a house; it was just roped there to the chain-link fence that separated our paltry civilization from the wild roll of hillside. Its hair was long and its body was small. It looked like a bad wig someone had tossed onto the street, sort of matted and dingy. I bet it’d look like a real fancy pooch if someone ever cared to clean it up, but for now it looked like a piece of trash come to life. I tipped the driver well. If he were a good driver he’d be off my precarious street in about two minutes; if he were a hack he’d be out there forever, the dog ruining the day with its noise.

  I knew something was wrong right away, because my door was open. The latch that held it shut had been busted off. It hung there on its hinge, the door. Thankfully, we were experiencing this summery weather up here, or else the wind would have been flapping it open and closed, open and closed, like that damn dog’s mouth, advertising to the shady neighborhood that my apartment was accepting explorers.

  My neighborhood consists of: a gang of young boys who try to be intimidating and usually succeed; a shiftless family who occasionally steal my mail; the dude across the street who owns the dog, an Archie Bunker–type who looks like he’s stockpiling weapons and has American flags hung in his window in lieu of curtains; the little boy who lives downstairs from him whose efforts to befriend the ragamuffin canine result in bellows from the patriot and a scolding from the boy’s squat grandmother; a lesbian couple who bought the nicest house on the block—a dubious compliment—and who’ve allowed fear of their new surroundings to turn them into hostile bitches. Oh, and there’s Larry, lord of the mold, the man I pay rent to, who lives in the apartment above mine. It’s not exactly Mister Roger’s Neighborhood here. It’s like everyone has Seasonal Affective Disorder and we spend a good ten months of the year ensconced in clouds. The serotonin has all gone away, we’re unhappy people here on Porter Street.

  I kicked off my heels and grabbed one in my fist, stiletto out, as a weapon. My front door gaped open behind me. I descended into the cave that was my home. Hello? I yelled. Hello, Motherfucker? Show Yourself, Fucker! I paused. Larry? I called. He has been known to come into my apartment on landlordy business, unannounced, totally illegal, I know, but what am I really going to do? Like I said, I’m biding my time here.

  In my kitchen there’s a note. It’s on the back of a takeout menu, scrawled in a dried-up Sharpie. It’s faint and hard to read. I could decipher the word “you” and the word “fucking” and there was an arrow that went in the general direction of my back door, which was also wide open. Kicked open, busted. I felt a swell of anger. Whoever did this had to break my front door in order to get in. Okay, I get that. But the back door was easily unlocked from inside my house. Whoever did this broke my door just for the fuck of it, just to be a dickface.

  I grabbed the menu and walked toward the door. I tried to study the text in the sunlight that shot down from the sky and pooled in the slight clearing of weeds o
utside my door. The phrase “nice fucking life” was visible at the bottom of the page.

  Out in my yard, there was a clear path where the weeds had been trampled. I followed it, barefoot, my feet getting all gunked up. In the middle of the yard, I looked up at Larry’s apartment. What a jackass. What a totally useless landlord. He makes no repairs; he lets the yard turn into a jungle and my apartment into a mold-ridden health hazard. The only thing he was good for was simple presence; he was reliable like that. He rarely left his upstairs apartment, save for beer runs. He sat up there and drank and watched cable. He was a bulky guy with a lousy attitude, and I figured I could at least rely on him to ward off burglars, a simple crime deterrent. But he wasn’t even good for that. The sun reflected off his windows, making it impossible for me to see into his place. He could have been standing at the window looking out at me. I flipped him off just in case.

  I followed the skinny trail of crushed weeds to the back of the yard. There was a depression there, a cement clearing that maybe an optimistic former tenant had once tried to garden in. It was filled with dirt that had turned muddy with trash and pooled rainwater. Who knows what else was in there. Today my life savings was. I could see the tips of bills sticking out from the sludge, like they’d been packed into the wet dirt and then stomped deeply into the skank of it. Yeah. There were footprints mashed into it, overlapping footprints going in all directions, like someone had just freaked out and moshed my money into the ground. The box it had all been stored in was off to the side, lying in the weeds, open and empty to the sky above us.

  At first I felt nothing; and then quickly, swiftly, I wanted to die. As I stood there wanting to die, I could feel the sensation morph. I could feel it become energized and then it became the more dynamic feeling of wanting to kill. Then it lessened, became heavy, and I was filled with the desire to just kill myself.

  I looked down at the mud. Maybe it was salvageable. I gently tugged the protruding corner of a hundred-dollar bill and it came off in my fingers. The mud was sopping, it was like coffee with a lot of grounds in it. It was, as I probed it with my fingers, more of a puddle than anything. I scooped up a liquidy pile of cash. I draped the paper across some bent stalks of weeds and it tore there, slunk into the ground like slurry.

  My life was dissolving. I plunged my hands back into the puddle and brought out some more palmfuls of dark, indistinguishable nothing.

  I started to cry. I started to hyperventilate. I thought of all the guys I’d fucked. I thought of all the mouths, gummy and slick, that had suctioned themselves to my breasts. I thought of my sweet, chafed pussy, and all it had been through. The gropes. The sweat—that beaded chests like the condensation on my bedroom walls—how it had splattered upon me. Oh, the noxious grunts, the gross sounds they made, the plain and hideous sight of their nudity. It was as if I had fucked them all for free. All I had were the bills in my purse, and rent was due today.

  Fucking Jenny. Fucking sick Jenny. She didn’t even steal it. She was as broke as me, broker even, with a bigger drinking problem, more of a need for cash, and she didn’t even steal it. Her need to hurt me had blotted out even basic self-preservation. Under all my despair was a new fear now; fear of Jenny. She might as well have killed me, I thought, or at least sent someone to kick my ass.

  I thought again about the men. The simple destruction of the money, the basis of those consensual trysts, now made every call an act of violence survived. I was shaking. I went back into my room and laid down on my futon. With both doors open to the beautiful day, I passed out.

  When I awoke it was evening. The wind had stirred up on the hill and was blowing through my apartment like a little hurricane. My broken doors whined on their hinges. I padded into my kitchen, still in my whore clothes: a shimmery skirt—cheap from Ross—and a blousey lady-shirt, sheer, the ghost of my push-up bra a hazy vision beneath the fabric. Jenny had loved me in my whore outfits, months back when we had first hooked up. She had thought the getup hilarious, and it was. I remember her sitting squat on the dank wooden floor of my bedroom, her tiny hand spidering out around the fat bottle she was drinking from. Red-cheeked and giggling, she watched my transformation. I strung the lingerie around my body, pulling back my fried hair, removing my heavy horn-rimmed eyeglasses, and dusting my lids with shimmery powder. We’d fucked that first time, there on the floor, the splintery wood scraping my ass, scuffing my Payless pumps, and I didn’t even care; her mouth cold from the beer and tasting of bubbles.

  Three months is not a long time for a relationship unless you’re a dyke. After the first few days, we were together all the time; I knew her story and she knew mine. We had one real good month together, and then things started to slip. She’d get moody and I’d turn bitchy in reply. We stopped fucking at home and instead did it in bar bathrooms, when the first flush of alcohol-induced good mood washed over her. By the time we got back to one of our places she’d be in a different state, sour, and we’d fight. I always regretted it. I know better than to argue with a drunk person—both my folks were drunks and it’s like trying to have a logical conversation with some loony on the street. My points may have been good, may have been right, but in the morning Jenny wouldn’t remember anything I said. It took a full month of things being real lousy between us for me to call it off, and I was ashamed that I’d stuck around that long. But she never stopped looking good to me; and she had charm, a glow that the beer both fed and ruined.

  In my kitchen, I startled a small, feral cat; a black thing mottled with bits of orange. So tiny, it hissed ferociously and darted out my back door into the weeds. I tried to jam the door shut but it was useless. Same with the one upstairs. I made coffee and emptied the dregs of a box of cereal into a bowl, dousing it with soy milk. I tried to get a plan together. Even though I always had my rent ready on the first of the month, I made a point not to pay Larry until the fifth. I liked to put off spending my money until the last possible moment. The first was four days ago; at the time I had had all my rent and more. Today was the fifth and I had one hundred and fifty dollars. Rent for this damp but spacious basement apartment was seven hundred dollars. People liked to tell me I had a good deal. They would gasp when I told them. Seven Hundred Dollars? And You Live All By Yourself? They would moon dreamily. I suppose it was a good deal, and that said a lot about this town. I would have to tell Larry that I didn’t have the money. I decided against telling him about the break-in. I didn’t want him knowing I kept my cash in a box rather than a bank; didn’t want him to know about my romantic drama, or anything about me whatsoever. It was none of his business. I’d tell him that I’d have it for him as soon as possible, and leave it at that. Let the fucker evict me, what did I care. I seemed to have awoken at a certain bottom. All I could figure to do was call my service and have them put me on call twenty-four hours a day for the indefinite future, and then try not to think too hard about what that would really entail.

  Out on the street, I banged on Larry’s front door. I’d given it about a half-dozen whacks before I remembered the man had a doorbell. I guess I just wanted to hit something. The rag of a dog across the street responded to my violence with a series of futile yaps. The sky above was perfect and blue, but a bank of clouds were in the distance, blowing my way.

  Larry! I hollered. I banged and rang.

  The dog was barking itself a sore throat. Then I looked down. Coming out from under Larry’s door was a bit of hair, brown hair, sort of oily. Just a little greasy tuft, sliding out from inside the house.

  Larry? I asked, in a normal voice.

  I crouched down and touched it. It felt like real hair. A wig? Why would Larry have a wig? I had a flash of him, drunk and outfitted in attire common to the opposite gender, and then a flash of sympathy for him and his poor attitude. We all have our secrets, don’t we? I gave the wig a tug, but it didn’t shift. It felt attached to something heavy, like a body. I cracked open Larry’s mail slot and peered into the darkness. The crumpled mass lumped on the other side of t
he door looked like my landlord.

  You lookin for something?

  The voice made me jump; I sprung up in my stocking feet and spun around to greet my neighbor, the militia man. His belly preceded him, jutting out of his undershirt like a round, hard melon. He looked like he was sneering but it was simply the set of his face. A rifle would not have looked out of place in his arms.

  I Live Here, I reminded him.

  Every so often, this would happen. The guy would accost me as I fumbled for my keys, or as I lingered outside my door awaiting a taxi. I’d notice him peering out from behind his tattered flag, and then he’d be galumphing down his front stairs and confronting me in the street like I was set to burgle the neighborhood. I rapped my fingers on the door again, and moved a fish-netted foot to cover the lock of Larry’s hair, which protruded onto the sidewalk.

  You live here? he asked suspiciously. How come I ain’t seen ya?

  You Have, I said. We Do This All The Time. You See Me Out Here, Ask Me What I’m Doing, And I Tell You I Live Here. I sighed patiently.