San Francisco Noir

by Peter Maravelis

  That other girl lives here, he informed me. The redheaded one? Forgot her keys this morning and busted her own damn door in. He chuckled with affection for who I could only imagine was Jenny, breaking into my house.

  Oh, Yeah, I nodded. She Lives Here, Too.

  Uh-huh, he nodded, looking me up and down. Stalling briefly on the gauzy outline of my bra and moving on up to my face. You all keep leaving your keys behind and breaking your doors down, that man up there’s gonna get rid of ya. He gave his chin a chuck in the general direction of Larry’s apartment. He your dad? You two sisters?

  Six months I’ve lived on Porter Street and this guy has never spoken to me beyond clarifying that I’m not a criminal. He picks this moment, this bizarre and creepy moment on this strange and terrible day, to inquire about my life.

  No, I tell him. Larry’s The Landlord. Me And That Girl, We’re Just—Roommates.

  Norma, he nods.

  Right, I’m Norma. I’m losing patience. He frowns.

  No, that other girl, she said her name was Norma. Now he’s suspicious again.

  Well, She’s Fucking With You. She Likes To Do That. And Actually, She Didn’t Lose Her Keys. She Broke The Door Down Cause She’s Crazy, And If You See Her Around Here Again Breaking Things, I’d Appreciate It If You Could Call The Cops.

  The man took a step back, as if the breath my speech had been carried out on was laced with something noxious.

  No need to use language like that. I don’t believe in calling police. I don’t think our tax dollars should be going to a gang of government thugs. I don’t believe in a police state. You’ll have to handle your differences with Norma yourself, she seemed like a nice person to me. We had a nice little talk about the government out here this morning, all about the unconstitutionality of the present tax system. He swallowed and nodded. That’s right. You girls just settle your grievances without bringing the government into it, why don’t you. Can’t go crying to the government every time life throws a problem your way.

  All Right, I agreed. All Right Then. Thanks A Lot.

  Down the street the lesbians who bought the house on the corner paused at their SUV, watching us.

  Then there’s all that, the guy said, gesturing toward them.

  Yeah, I said.

  You okay over there? the butchier one yelled over in an uncharacteristic display of neighborliness. Where were all these concerned citizens when my house was being robbed? I ask you. Well, we know where the guy was. He was chatting up and befriending Jenny, perhaps even helping her out with a weighty hip-chuck to my front door.

  Fine, Thanks! I gave a wave. They paused a moment and turned to look at one another, perhaps communicating via a special telepathy lesbian couples acquire when they manage to stay together past three months. Then they climbed into their mammoth automobile, lumbered over the crest of our street, and were gone.

  SUVs, the man said. He flung a meaty hand at the wake of dust and trash their car had stirred. Don’t get me started.

  This Has Been Nice, I said. It’s Nice To Be Neighborly. But I’ve Got To Run.

  Maybe you girls want to leave a spare set of keys with me, he suggested. If you’re always locking yourself out.

  I Don’t Think It’ll Happen Again, I told him.

  Better safe ’n sorry, he said.

  I turned my back on him and descended into my subterranean apartment. I stood at the bottom of the stairs and watched the crack of light in my busted door, expecting him to follow. I waited there for a few minutes and when he didn’t come, ran through my house and out the back door, climbing the shabby back stairs to Larry’s. The stairs shook with the slam of my feet, a snowfall of dried paint sifted down onto the weeds.

  Larry! I banged on his back door. My voice carried out into the quiet.

  Larry was an unconscious heap at his front door. I don’t know why I was attracting all this attention to myself when I knew I was going to have to break into his place. I pulled and pushed and otherwise strained at his back door. I wasn’t good at this. I’d never broken into a place before; my particular illegal inclinations hadn’t ever brought me to such a situation. I’ve picked a pocket, shoplifted, and been guilty of an occasional drunken assault on equally drunken men behaving rudely in bars or on street corners. But I’d never broken into a home. I rattled the dully gleaming doorknob. It figures that Larry’s doors have adequate locks. Doesn’t that just sum up the whole thing?

  Larry had a few ceramic pots on his back stairs. The plants inside them were long dead, all dried up. Cigarette butts were stubbed out in the dirt. I grabbed one and hurled it against his kitchen window, where it shattered in a rain of terra cotta and dirt that plunged to the yard below. I threw a second pot at the window and experienced a similar explosion. Jesus, I whined. The dirt was in my hair, smudged over my blouse. I grabbed a shard of pottery and used it to gouge a hole in the screen, tore it away. Now it was just the glass and me. The third pot bust through, sending a whole mess onto Larry’s linoleum floor. Huh. Linoleum. Must be nice.

  As I climbed in through the shattered window, ruining my fishnet stockings on a jutting piece of glass, I realized I had never been inside Larry’s apartment. I stepped gingerly onto a recycling box piled high with beer cans.

  Larry? I called.

  I walked into a small pile of dirt and plant roots. Broken glass glittered. I skipped quickly to the fridge and leaned onto it for balance.

  Larry? I cried out again, my voice little more than a croak.

  Oh fuck. I pulled open the fridge and spied a lone Budweiser, its plastic loop of rings still noosed around its aluminum neck. I yanked it out, set it free, cracked it.

  I moved through Larry’s place. It was nice, much nicer than my watery grave below. Good stove in the kitchen, ample cabinets. The floor was linoleum, and where it wasn’t, carpet provided a soft relief on my feet. The living room was in disarray. The rest of the six-pack rolled empty on the floor alongside a glass bottle of something stronger. The television was set to ESPN. Some electronic device whirred in the corner. I studied it and discovered it was a dehumidifier. Fucking genius. I made a note to buy one when I had money again. Then I remembered that Larry was almost certainly dead and I could probably just take it.

  I crept to the edge of the hall stairs, took a deep breath, a gulp from the can, and then switched on the light. There was Larry. His head was smooshed against the front door at an awful angle. His neck looked incorrect. His eyes were disturbingly open, as was his mouth. He was not alive.

  Larry? I asked, just in case.

  Nothing. Outside, the dog barked and barked. In the living room a sports team won something and the crowds in the stands cheered in unison. I finished my beer.

  * * *

  That was all about a month ago, perhaps a little longer. San Francisco’s autumn summertime is all but gone, and the winds have brought their cold damp; they lash the house with it like a locker room of jocks snapping soggy towels. The wind is so forceful that it actually shakes the house. Before I became used to it, I would wake in the night thinking an earthquake had struck. I would stare at the ceiling in terror and wait for the upstairs apartment to cave in onto my bed in the basement. Then I would remember that I was upstairs, and it was only the wind. I would turn up the heat that hummed gently out from the vent in Larry’s bedroom and fall back asleep.

  I haven’t seen Larry since I drug him into the bathroom and heaved him into his claw-footed bathtub. I shut the door with a click and I do not open it. I pee in an empty pickle jar and, when I must, slip out into the backyard and shit in the weeds like that tiny black-and-orange cat who lives out there, too. I shower in the hotels and private homes of the men that I trick with. One shower before and a longer one after. I can’t bring myself to return to my basement, not even to use the toilet. I poked my head in only once, and it was as if the mold had accelerated in my absence. The moisture seemed heavier, wetter; the decay, palpable. It scented the very air of the place. There was an animal
turd in plain view on the wooden kitchen floor, and a scurrying sound in the corner I did not investigate.

  Upstairs, in Larry’s place, I can hear my broken doors squeak like a strange wind chime in the gusting air. Upstairs, in Larry’s place, I watch cable TV and eat the last of his food; bring home six-packs for the fridge. I drive his car to my calls. I’ve taken up smoking. When I cannot sleep, which is more and more frequent, I stand out on the back porch amidst the dirt and smashed pottery, and I smoke. The kitchen window is secured with cardboard and shiny gray duct tape; the light from inside does not shine on me there.

  I stand in the dark night and the powerful wind steals the smoke as it streams from my mouth. I know that this will all end soon, and the understanding makes me jumpy. Last night, as I stood smoking, I saw beams of light in the wild hill below; the wide swath of land between my home and the housing projects at the bottom. It was a cop or two, prowling with flashlights, searching in the unruly grass. It seemed an omen. I’m not sure what I’ve done or what sort of punishment I need to outrun.

  Late at night, as I smoke cigarettes, I can hear my telephone ringing through the open door downstairs. It’s just past last call and I know the ringing won’t stop for hours. I stand and smoke in the chill until it’s quiet. The man across the street tries to speak to me when I let myself into Larry’s with the key I took from his pocket. I ignore him. It makes him mad and he yells, and his yells inspire the dog, and I close my door on the decaying block and all of its angry inhabitants.

  In the night, it is the hardest to be here; when I come back from a call and the television greets me. I have thousands of dollars in my box. I’ve been working so hard, so very hard.

  Lately, I imagine I can smell him—the scent of Larry’s collapsing body coming out from under the bathroom door on a terrible breeze. Certainly it is time to leave. I think I would like to live in Russian Hill; in a glinting apartment with a chandelier in the lobby and a man who holds the door open as I come and go.

  I stand on the back stairs in the afternoon light; and when my cigarette is half-done, I look down and see that man—the one who lives in his undershirt—standing in the weeds beneath me, looking up. And I know before I see her that Jenny is behind him.

  THE OTHER BARRIO

  BY ALEJANDRO MURGUÍA

  The Mission

  It stood on the corner of Sixteenth and Valencia—the Apache Hotel, a once elegant residence for out of town visitors, more recently a rundown joint for several dozen single men and some desperate families. Every time I go by the spot I still hear the screams, the cries for help of those who were caught in the fire the night the Apache Hotel burned down.

  The newspapers screamed the headlines the next day: SEVEN DEAD IN FIRE. It didn’t state the cause, but I knew I would be dragged into it. And I didn’t want to be dragged into it. I had cited the place three times, but not for fire hazards, just the common stuff—garbage and rodent infestations. Had there been a fire hazard, God himself could not have stopped me from making sure the owner took care of it that very day. Now it was going to come down on me. That’s why Choy had taken me off the case. He was my shithead boss at the Department of Building Inspections, and my job was on the line if my report had failed to mention a fire hazard, which it did not. Seven people had died and I wasn’t going to carry those dead. They weren’t my dead. Let whoever killed them carry them.

  It was Friday evening, and Choy’s order to report for a Monday morning meeting had appeared on my desk as I was leaving work. I decided to take my file on the Apache Hotel with me; I had the weekend to find the cause of the fire. Sometime after my Wednesday inspection, maybe thirty-six hours afterwards, the place had burned down in a raging fire. It’s not easy for a building that size to burn that fast. No one downtown was talking, to the papers anyway. This wasn’t going to be easy or fun to be involved with. But it wasn’t just my skin on the line—there was my own outrage at what had happened. There was no reason for those people to have died. No reason at all.

  The fire had likely started early Friday, about 3:00 in the morning. The newspapers mentioned witnesses and I had to track them down and get their story firsthand. In particular, the person who’d called 911. They’d been identified as workers leaving a nightclub. I’d have to hang around the ’hood till 2 a.m. to interview them. In the meantime, I was nursing a beer in a little dive on Twenty-fourth Street; mindlessly staring at the yellow spot on the brown bottle neck, trying to make sense of this case and my own life.

  I was living in a former can factory on Alabama Street, now converted into a den of unwashed but creative folks, who’d taken the iron-age dinosaur and made it somewhat habitable. Now the dot-comers were popping up like mushrooms in cow shit. Or you’d see them cruising in their beemers, calculating how much it would take to run everybody out of here. And in all irony, I was working for the city as a building inspector. I wasn’t interested in being a cop, I just made sure that rental units were habitable for human beings. My girlfriend Amanda had left me. Going to our formerly happy loft usually put me in a funk of depression, so I stayed away as much as I could. Usually in places like this, bars without names outside, a couple of Mexicanos shooting an easy game of pool, and Miss Mary from San Pedro Sula, with her smile wide as her hips, pouring a beer.

  Don’t get me wrong, the city is beautiful, but I live in another barrio. The dirty, low-down, underbelly side of town. Places that practically make the hovels of Calcutta look like the Taj Mahal. The garages turned into in-laws where three families live packed tight and desperate as boat people. Closets redone into bedroom suites. Such is life. And death. I was going to go visit death at 9 o’clock in General Hospital. In the morgue where the dead are kept. She wasn’t dressed liked you expect but there is no mistaking her when you meet her.

  At 9 o’clock I met La Pelona face-to-face in the basement morgue of General Hospital. A Samoan in scrubs and flip-flops led me into a walk-in cooler the size of a taquería. Inside were row upon row of gurneys, each with their own stiff. He pointed out a corner where seven of them were stretched out on the floor. “We ran out of tables,” he laughed. I took no offense.

  When I lifted the sheet on the first one, I was surprised to see the face was contorted like those mummies of Guanajuato, but unburned. “What happened?” I asked.

  “They died of smoke inhalation,” the Samoan said.

  Nobody even knew these poor bastards’ names. I could see the process that would now start: immigration tracking clues, an envelope with a name, or perhaps a phone number in one of their pockets. Find their hometown, relatives most likely, and tell them. Arrange for transportation. These guys were human sacrifices—but to what god? Why did I go see them? I wanted the rage to keep me going.

  Valencia Street on a Friday night is an hormiguero. Suburbanites afraid of their own shadow crawling around in groups of ten. Sometimes more. One of them was standing on the corner, speaking into his little cell phone, asking for directions, looking like a character in that TV show Lost. It’s for them the ruins are being created, the families forced out, the murals destroyed. The other night I overheard one of them ask, “What’s this neighborhood called?” And her blond friend replied, “I don’t know, but it used to be called the Mission.”

  I slid behind the counter at the Havana Social Club, the walls covered with the photos of poetas, famous and obscure, many of them dead. I ordered the specialty of the house, ropa vieja. Don Victor had the box booming “Chan Chan” by Compay Segundo. I’d just heard that Compay had checked out after ninety-three years of smoking cigars and that his real name was Francisco Repilado. This year my poet-friend-brother Pedro Pietri had moved to the other barrio, too. And today was the anniversary of my comadre’s death, whom I’d known thirty years. Now there were seven more checked into the other barrio.

  The dead were all around me, urging me to keep on living, to keep their memory alive.

  I paid up about midnight and still had two hours to kill.

  I
stepped outside and there was a white SUV with its engine running at the curb. Two creeps with necks like wrestlers sat inside. The uglier one rolled out.

  “You Morales?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Mike Callahan wants to speak with you.”

  “I’ll have to check my social calendar.”

  The creep said nothing but opened the back door for me. He was maybe six-feet-four, three hundred pounds with his suit on.

  “I was going that way myself,” I said.

  I named the muscle-head driving Huey, and the ugly one Dewey. I knew Callahan, Irish Mafioso, head of a renegade builder’s association; he moved around City Hall like a man with a lot of muscle behind him, which he had. Muscle, but not the brains. The thugs he’d sent to pick me up were quiet the whole time they drove. Except when Dewey farted and Huey said to him in all seriousness, “God bless you.”

  We drove to another part of the city. We were in that industrial area near the freeway. A long time ago, we used to play in these empty lots as kids; riding our bikes down Pot Hill, as we called it. Now, giant commercial buildings, all chrome and steel, were in the throes of birth. We went under the freeway, took a side road behind a construction site, and parked. We were in Mission Creek. I knew this place well, another childhood hangout where we’d gone swimming. Now, fancy houseboats were docked with an occasional massive catamaran or sailboat. The pier creaked like backpacks on Guatemalan Indians. Nearby, the freeway roared with traffic headed downtown, and I could see the skyline of the city like a giant neon dollar sign flashing billions.

  Huey indicated I should go to dock number 10. It was a fancy houseboat, but without any class; in fact, it was painted whorehouse-red. Callahan was alone in the back room, the air thick with scotch I could smell from where I was standing, ten feet away. He indicated I should sit down.

  “You smoke cigars, Morales?” He was about to light a big stogie with a gold-plated lighter.