The Dead Do Not Improve (2 page)

When he saw me walking down the steps to the sidewalk, the guy shrugged, but with meaning. Because I am a bit of a coward, I shook my head, approximating his meaning. My way of saying, “It’s a damn shame.” To those people.

5
. I wandered around for a while before admitting there was nowhere to go, so I ducked into BEAN and took a seat near the bathrooms. I hated everything about BEAN—the unfinished ceilings, the Eames-wonderful chairs, the sanitary tables, the architectural cappuccinos, the barrel-aged indie rock. Still, I was always finding myself there, partly because it was a half block from my apartment, but also because I, demographic slave, am always finding myself in the places I hate the most.

I ordered a cappuccino and read the
Chronicle
’s crime section. Someone got beaten badly on 26th and Treat. A pizza shop was held up in Oakland. Under a footbridge in the Tenderloin, police found a homeless man who had been stabbed to death. My mind drifted to some detective story I had read back in college, and although I could recall the author’s name and the particulars of the story, I could not translate what any of it was supposed to mean. I did remember that the corpse in the story was not a corpse until it became a corpse again. And that at the end, through some trick of logic, which might or might not have been inspired by Schrödinger’s cat, it turned out the corpse had never been a corpse at all. I remembered not really understanding anything, really, but I did remember a girl in the class who everyone called Pooch Cooch, and remembered Pooch Box wore white and pearl earrings, and remembered that I, absurdly, had felt sorry for her. And finally, I remembered that my confusion over the story had, in part, helped convince me to give up my scholarly ambitions.

As I was sitting in BEAN, amid the city’s aesthetically unemployed, the memory of my stupidity still embarrassed me. Since college, I had read maybe two hundred, three hundred books and even tried my hand at writing a difficult novel. Did it not stand to reason, then, that I might have
somehow, unknowingly, developed the skills to understand the meaning of the corpse? I really considered walking up the street to the used bookstore to have a crack at redemption, but I had spent two hours in there a few days back. The girl behind the counter had a perfectly symmetrical haircut and stared impassively at everyone who entered the store. Her recommendation shelf floated nicely between the listless ether of Joan Didion’s female narrators and the histories of hardscrabble things: car bombs, prison gangs, crystal meth. How could I face her twice in a week?

I sat in my seat instead. Read the paper, jotted pretend notes to myself on a napkin. One read: “WILLIE MCGEE.” Another read: “You say, I talk slow all the time.” A couple hours passed like that. By the time Adam walked into BEAN, I had completely forgotten about the Baby Molester.

6
. Adam was from my time in New York. We both entered Columbia’s graduate creative writing program at the age of twenty-three. Neither of us really ever had anything to write about, but we held to the credo that all young, privileged men in their twenties should never ever discuss their lives in any meaningful way. Our stories were about boredom, porn, child geniuses, talking dogs.

We spent three, four years that way, telling the same jokes. Adam eventually picked up a variety of drug habits because he thought they would provide a grittier spin on the traditional American Jewish experience. They did not. As for me, all my morose, nameless narrators had two living parents, and, although people were always dying, nobody ever succumbed to stomach cancer or a car wreck. To all those raceless men,
death was funny or it was strange, but it was never talked about, at least not directly.

When it became clear that the thriftily coiffed girls of the publishing industry were just not that into me, I moved to San Francisco to follow Kathleen. Adam had just started dating a hard-luck porn star in North Hollywood. A year and a half later, he showed up in San Francisco with his father’s car and a new girlfriend.

At some point, it became clear we had to find work. Adam started teaching creative writing at a school for the criminally insane. I got a job editing content for a website providing emotional help for men recently abandoned by loved ones.

7
. Adam sat down at my table without a word of welcome. It could no longer count as coincidence, us finding each other here. We talked about TV, fantasy football, breasts. Outside, the fog had condensed down to a drizzle. The baristas started up their chatter. One was worried the rain would drive the crackheads underneath the awnings, meaning she would have to perfectly time her trip to the bus stop. Another said she liked the rain because it reminded her of her favorite soul song. Adam took a bad novel out of his jacket and began to read. I took my laptop out of my bag and read through my dumb e-mail. After a while, Adam asked, “What’s good?”

“Good?”

“Good.”

“Odd word choice.”

“Why?”

I pointed at the computer screen. “What could be good?”

“You on Craigslist?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s your problem. On Craigslist, things can be good.”

The mention of Craigslist loosed a current of shame. I thought about the grainy, dimly lit women of the previous night—the camera angles that soften noses, the anonymous, truncated breasts, the loose attempts at dignity, the unabashed anatomy, the ball-crushing loneliness, the labyrinthine possibilities of hyperlinks; all of it reminded me that my neighbor had been murdered the night before.

I told Adam about it. He arched his eyebrows and asked, “Through the window, just like that, huh?”

“Yeah. I don’t think it was a stray bullet, though. Somebody had taken the time to smear some pink shit all around the window.”

“Fucking biblical, man.”

“It wasn’t blood.”

“You said it was pink?”

“Like lipsticky pink.”

Adam stuck his pinkie in his coffee and frowned. He said, “Easy explanation. Gang violence. Nortenos. That’s their color.”

“She was like a sixty-year-old white woman.”

“Exactly. They want los gringos like us out of their neighborhoods.”

“I feel it necessary to remind you that I’m not white.”

“Did you read
Mission Dishin
’ this morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Some dude got beat up. A tech nerd.”

“I saw that.”

“Up on Treat.”

“I saw it.”

“That’s like eight dudes getting beat this month. And then your neighbor gets shot. You don’t think there’s something going on?”

I confess it made me feel a little important.

8
. Adam went back to reading his book. An e-mail from my boss arrived in my inbox:

A spreadsheet was attached. Twenty-six names in all.

The company had recently put a significant amount of money into targeted advertising, a departure from the previous strategy of placing banner ads on any porn sites offering free trailers. The old idea was that men who had recently broken up with their girlfriends would probably increase their porn intake, but not to the point where they would be willing to hand over a credit card number.

It was stupid, but it wasn’t my idea. The porn trailer idea resulted in the worst quarter in the company’s three-year history. Meetings were called. Surveys were passed around to the employees. In the end, some genius who wasn’t me figured out that if you could somehow probe a
person’s e-mail for certain keyword combinations—broken + heart, never + felt + so + lonely, dumped + me/her, ended + things, destined + to + end, what + happened, fucking + bullshit, slut + bag—you could more accurately narrow down your customer base. Contracts were signed with all the prominent social networking sites and every major e-mail provider. Within the first three months, the site saw a 550 percent jump in hits and a 300 percent jump in subscriptions. We expanded our services.

My job was to send out a personalized e-mail to each of the new clients, congratulating them for taking this courageous and worthwhile step forward.

9
.

“How do you do it?” Adam was reading over my shoulder.

“Control-C, Control-V.”

“That’s awful, man.”

“You’d get used to it.”

“They make you sign with your slave master’s name?”

“Nobody trusts an Oriental with love advice.”

“Control-C, Control-V, indeed.”

“Hey, did you send this e-mail as a joke?”

“What? No.”

“Check out this name.”

“Richard McBeef?”

“I assumed it was you.”

“Nope. Are you hungry?”

I pointed at the flaky remains of my croissant.

“Pastries don’t count. Too much air.”

“I guess.”

“Okay. Nachos, then.”

10
. We walked onto Valencia Street into the grayness of another foggy morning. In places like San Francisco that are choked by fog, even the bluest, clearest day always carries a tinge of remembered gray. So this housing project, painted canary and cardinal red, surrounded on all sidewalks by plots of pioneer flowers, still pulses grayly up Valencia to 16th, where the anonymous buildings are all hotels like the Sunshine Hotel or the Hotel 16 or the Hotel Mission or the Hotel Ignacio or even the Hotel St. Francis, where the sign in the window reads, “
WE NO LONGER RENT ROOMS BY THE HOUR
,” a hopeful declaration, somehow. When I voted for Obama, I stood in line with a man from the Hotel St. Francis who looked exactly like Cornel West, but insane and with bits of powdered doughnut stuck in his beard. He asked me if this was the polling station for the Hotel St. Francis, and when I shrugged, he said he was being disenfranchised because you can live in the Hotel St. Francis for years—the man at the front desk will know when you’ve gone on your run, the girl who is too young to live in the Hotel St. Francis will fall in love and buy you a pair of socks—but you certainly cannot have a voter registration card delivered there. During a childhood road trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains, my father explained the difference between hotels and motels. Hotels, he said, are more expensive. Now I know he was wrong. Hotels are just motels, but romanticized somehow. These collapsing
buildings are hotels to the people who keep
L’Étranger
and
Howl
stashed under their pillows, who try heroin once before realizing they only like the literary strain of the drug, who see a bit of crazy wisdom in the shit-stained, misspelled cardboard signs of the homeless, who stand in front of the Hotel St. Francis and look in through the smoggy picture window at the backboard, where forty-two actual keys dangle the same way they might have dangled in a more humane time. Beyond the front desk, the lobby opens up, green as a Barnes & Noble bathroom. Twenty or so plastic Adirondacks are clustered in hostile little arrangements, each one angled at a five-hundred-pound television. A chandelier, dusty, incomplete, provides a rebuttal to the fluorescent stringers overhead, a soft, nearly sepia rebuttal, which, on more than one occasion, lulled up the slouching figures of Arturo Bandini, Steve Earle, Fuckhead, Jim Stark, Knut Hamsun, and Ronizm in those Adirondack chairs. But then, invariably, the fluorescent stringers will flicker or one of the tenants will stand up or a dead smell will gather and my old favorite literary losers will turn back into the crackheads of the Mission who are all defeated in the same way.

Still. I admit it. There were times when I stood in front of the window of the Hotel St. Francis, stared in at the squalor, thick and silent as an oil spill, and wished my prospects had shaded a bit blacker.

11
. In the rust-girded doorway to the Taqueria Cancun, five kids in oversized white T-shirts huddled around two lit cigarettes. Last week,
Mission Dishin
’, a neighborhood events blog targeted at the seventh wave of gentrifiers, had broken the story that these Latino kids in oversized white T-shirts were, in fact, gangsters.

Adam and I belonged to an earlier generation of hipster/gentrifier dinosaurs and were therefore too old to take
Mission Dishin
’ seriously. Meaning, even though neither of us really liked the Taqueria Cancun, and even though both of us were scared of the Mara Salvatruchas, we had to keep going there.

There is no logic to this, sure. But I keep doing shit for these exact reasons.

We pushed past the kids without incident.

After retrieving our nachos and beer, we sat down at the end of a heavily lacquered picnic table. I asked Adam, “What do you want to do later?”