San Francisco Noir (16 page)
“I hope so. There are a lot of Chinese people in America, especially in San Francisco.”
“I would like to see them. There are a lot of things I would like to see in the world.”
“Light out for the territory, huh?”
“Excuse me?”
“‘
I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.
’ That’s from
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain.”
“Marx…?”
“Not Karl Marx. Mark Twain. American author.”
“I don’t know him. Have you read any Chinese authors?”
“Just Mao.”
She took him down to the basement, where he met the hotel kitchen staff. Nobody could speak English, but they all waved at him, smiling. A crowd began to grow around him. He was, he supposed, something of an attraction. The enthusiastic reception he received seemed to go beyond mere obligation. The spontaneity was a welcome relief from the uptightness of the bureaucrats and flunkies he’d encountered so far. His guide asked the staff to show him what they were making, and they took him around the kitchen. In one spot, a group of women were wrapping what looked like won tons. The people there had the friendly, unpretentious appeal of blue-collar workers who, while they weren’t exactly happy, weren’t as miserable as they once were. It reminded him very much of the post office.
The next day, he and Ariel were taken out for a drive to a village on the outskirts of Peking. He got a good look at the countryside surrounding that gray city. It was a brisk autumn day, and the trees were in full color.
Their hosts were going to treat them to a banquet and took them to a restaurant that resembled a union hall. Michael and Ariel and a group of men in blue suits sat around a table and ate and drank. One of those in attendance, Michael believed, was Wang Hung-wen, the former Shanghai cotton mill worker who had been promoted by Mao to the number-three position in the party hierarchy, and who later joined Chiang Ching in promoting the “Criticize Lin Piao, Criticize Confucius” campaign.
Their hosts ordered a number of “delicacies.” There was an ugly thing that felt like eating a dead rat. Then they ordered a round of sea slugs, which didn’t have any taste at all. It was like sucking down snot. What fucking culture considered this sort of thing a delicacy? Michael thought their gracious hosts were bringing out these dishes out of sheer perversity—they weren’t delicacies at all. By the end of the night, their hosts had drunk them under table with
moutai
, a clear liquor that tasted like turpentine. They repeatedly toasted the Americans in Chinese and laughed, and the whole time Michael thought they were saying, “
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the revolution in the U.S.A. This is the best we got! Ah ha ha ha!
”
That was their last day in China.
Michael picked up his luggage at the carousel. There was the suitcase he’d originally packed, and following, the suitcase he’d received in Vancouver, which he hadn’t seen since he’d checked it in for the Pan Am flight to Tokyo. It felt heavier than he remembered, but that was hard to say. He looked at Ariel once he had it, expecting some kind of response, a raised eyebrow, smirk, or nod, but Ariel had his poker face on. They went through customs. The officer checked his luggage ticket and waved him through.
They entered the arrivals lobby. There was no one to pick them up.
In the seconds that he scanned the crowd again, looking for the people who should have been there but weren’t, a flood of thoughts went through Michael’s mind. He was sure the exact same thoughts were now going through Ariel’s mind. Michael was carrying the suitcase. It wouldn’t be hard for him to outrun the old man. Pushing him down or hitting him would only cause a disturbance that would draw attention to him. If he just ran, it would take the sparse crowd around them awhile, whatever Ariel’s response, to realize what was going on, and even then, if that, security was light. Ariel didn’t have a chance.
He could lie low in Canada. There would be a lot of people out to kill him. It was a lot of money. He could steal the money and become a capitalist.
The two men from the Seattle group came running up.
“Sorry we’re late. Traffic.”
They followed them to their car.
In Seattle, the four met another two, and the money was handed over. The two with the money left in a separate car. Michael and Ariel were driven back to Seattle HQ.
Michael thought he was driving to San Francisco with Ariel, but Ariel told him he would be staying on.
At the curb, Ariel stopped him. “You weren’t thinking about running off with the money back there, were you?”
Michael just smiled. They didn’t say goodbye or shake hands. It was the last they saw of each other.
In 1983, long after he’d stopped being a Communist, Michael came across an obit in the
Chronicle
. Ariel Rabenstein, a patient who had suffered from Alzheimer’s, passed away in a Jewish old folk’s home in East Oakland.
Some time after that, on a trip very unlike his first one there, Michael stepped into a bar in Vancouver and saw behind the counter a woman he believed to be Candy Dong. Her youthful beauty had long since withered away, but the vitality she had displayed that night in Chinatown was still in force.
He reintroduced himself, and she remembered him. He told her this story and mentioned how he had passed up a chance to run off with the money.
“I was going to take it and find you. I still kept the chopstick wrapper with your friend’s phone number on it.”
She looked at him with an unreadable expression. Then she mentioned she had left for Vancouver shortly after they’d met and hadn’t been back to San Francisco since. Was the restaurant still there?
He had tried looking for it, but couldn’t find it. Chinatown hadn’t changed much, though. In that way it seemed to exist in cyclical as opposed to linear time, life went on there much as it had before. Of course, politically, everything had changed. All the old battle lines that had been drawn up and which they’d all fought over so heatedly had been irrevocably erased. Things that used to matter, like the Kuomintang, now mattered little. The old I-Hotel, he didn’t know if she’d heard, had been torn down after a great struggle. All that was left on the corner of Jackson and Kearny was a hole in the ground that had remained for almost twenty-five years.
“And your friend Francis? How’s he doing?” she asked.
“He went to jail and kind of disappeared from view after that. What about your brother, the filmmaker?”
“He went into real estate,” she said. “He bought up properties all over the avenues, and now he’s immensely rich.”
I
t was the beginning of October and it felt like the height of summer, even way the fuck up on the rotting hillside that was my Bernal Hill neighborhood. Not that the weather would dry my moldering basement apartment; we’d need a year of San Francisco Octobers for my home to become livable, to staunch the flow of moisture that dappled my crumbling walls—my own little waterfall, I liked to think of it. This was when I wasn’t depressed, when I had some levity to spare. My own little waterfall, like I’m living in the tropics.
And it’s true that my back door opened up to a lush backyard, it’s true that though it was horribly overgrown and almost entirely weeds, it was green. On the days when my depression had receded like a landlord’s hairline, I could appreciate it all—the chest-high weeds tossing in the perpetual wind, the sheen of dew pimpling the walls of my subterranean apartment, my overall fungal existence. I was some sort of elf, a smallish person dwelling in a mushroom, which bloomed on the gloomy backside of Bernal Hill.
Two things happened that first week of October, and they both involved breaking and entering. First, I was the victim, later, the perpetrator. I’d come home from a call and I was feeling cranky. It was an early-morning client, unusual, a business guy from Seattle in town for a conference. I should pay more attention to what my tricks do. Some of them are almost certainly controlling the world—balding white businessmen, past middle age, with a lot of cash to blow on hookers. Their suits are expensive and their briefcases look like they come from the leather of a superior cow. I visit them at the Fairmont, at the Mandarin, at every single downtown hotel; a blur of elevator buttons and soft-carpeted hallways that muffle the clack of my heels. These guys are involved in dirty business, they’re profiting from the war, are Republican, are getting rich on the backs of girls like me, I know. Sometimes, I think I should be a spy, fuck them better, make them like me, seduce them into telling me the secrets of their occupations so that I could do—something. So close to these rulers, in plush locked rooms, with their curdled white bodies. Surely I could do something; a certain sabotage seems close, so close, but no. I zone out when they speak to me, leave my body when they climb onto me, give them the dullest fuck, and they don’t bat an eye. They’ve been having lousy sex since they were fourteen, they’ve been getting it on with women who want nothing to do with them since puberty, they can’t tell the difference. They roll off me and I’m gone. Down the elevator, I’ve got my hand jammed into my purse, wrapped around the money, counting the bills from touch, discretely. I’ve already forgotten what he looked like.
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.
