1. The Baby Molester and I talked only twice. The first time, she knocked on my door and asked for four eggs. I remember being amused by the anachronism—what sort of person still asks her neighbor for eggs?—until I realized it had been years since I’d had a single egg in my refrigerator, much less four.
The second time she knocked, it was well past midnight on some blown-out Tuesday. I was clicking through Craigslist w4m’s, my head swimming in a desperate, almost haikulike fog—“oh my loneliness / it rolls through the foggy bay / here it comes. Again!” When I heard the knock, I hurried to the door, anticipating some new girl, the sort of beautiful girl who, when her hair is wet from the rain, looks more like a planet than a girl. But it was just the Baby Molester in a peach slip. And one limpening sock. The light from an earth-friendly bulb cut through that electric hair, exposing a fragile, mottled quail egg of a skull. A look somewhere close to smugness hovered over her shiny face. She asked for a cigarette and, after an awkward pause, asked for two. She had a guest, she explained. I gave her five and really considered asking her some questions, but did not.
2. It was Kathleen who came up with the name Baby Molester. This was three years ago, at a concert in Golden Gate Park. I had just moved to San Francisco from New York. Staring down at the mass of dank heads, I asked Kathleen, “Who knew an entire city could be filled with ugly white people?” She said, “Calm down. This is a bluegrass festival.” On a dirt patch by the stage, this old hippie was stomping up a cloud of dust. Two young girls danced at her feet, clapping like drunken seals. A woman, hopefully the mother, hovered nearby, forcing the sort of smile that is forced more in San Francisco than anywhere else in this country.
Later, at a dustier, abandoned stage, we saw her again. This time she was dancing with someone else’s little boy. His red beret stayed on his head by some miracle of centrifugal force. His chubby, inscrutable face was contorted into the look of a young child who is contemplating whether to cry—the wide-open eyes, the twittering chin designed to stop even the most militant of spinster armies. Kathleen murmured, “There are so many reasons why a woman that age would feel the need to molest other people’s babies.” After a pause, she added, “And each one of them is heartbreaking.” I murmured my agreement, said something devastating about the failure of the sixties, and spent the rest of the night feeling superior to the entire state of California.
Two weeks later, when I moved into my own apartment, the Baby Molester was sitting on the stoop. I called Kathleen and marveled at the smallness of the city. She said, “Yeah, it’s a small city. But all cities are small, you know?”
I tried to not hate her for saying something so stupid. But, you know.
3. I confess: I slept through the whole thing. Through the gunshots, the police sirens, the ambulance, the detective who might have knocked on my door, the hushed discussions of the neighbors. And since there was no real reason to leave the apartment the next day, I did not witness any of the police tape or the shattered glass or the crime reporters or the wary gang members walking up and down the street just to make sure.
I LEARNED ABOUT the death of the Baby Molester because I was bored and Googling myself. I had found nothing but the same shit I always find—a five-hundred-word essay I had written for a now-defunct blog about how Illmatic had helped me grieve for my dead parents (number 14 in search), a published excerpt of my ultimately unpublished novel (number 183 in search), a pixelated photo of me, fatter, reading at a bar in Brooklyn (number 2 in image search). I was once again humiliated to know that my version of “Philip Kim” could elicit nothing more than those three flags stuck in the landscape of all the other Philip Kims of the world. Desperate (again) to find something else, I added my address into the search with a litany of hopefully descriptive keywords: ASIAN, THIN, ATHLETIC, LONG-HAIRED, BROODING, CHEEKBONES.
My hope was that some girl might have watched me lean up against a tree or maybe light a cigarette or pet an agreeable dog or frown over a burnt cup of coffee and maybe she might have caught my eye and maybe she might have decided to post something cute and short in “Missed Encounters” or some forum like that, on the decent chance that I might, in fact, be trolling the Internet for her.
When I narrowed the search by Googling my cross-streets, a link appeared to a story in the Chronicle’s crime blog: WOMAN SLAIN IN MISSION DISTRICT. The details were spare—the location, the age of the victim, the adjective “elderly.”
I knew it was her. Our block is short and lined with lime trees, and every other old lady I’ve seen walking around is Mexican.
After some deliberation, I called Kathleen. She sounded weary and practical, and although it had been over a year since we had spoken last, she politely consoled me over the murder of my neighbor, citing statistics, the fragility of our lives. One day, you take the 31 to Golden Gate Park to dance with the children of people who see you as nothing but a testament to the exhausting reality of idealism. Sometime later, an illegal immigrant fires a gun on your street, and the bullet, by force of infinitesimal chance, or God, shatters your sole window and, deflected slightly by the impact, travels exactly to the spot where you have decided to put your head for the night.
She said, “Crazier things happen all the time. You know?”
I said, “That’s retarded.”
She said, “What?”
“You’re being retarded.”
“Why do you even care so much? You told me you talked to her twice.”
“Why don’t you care?”
“Because it’s senseless and insane to worry about stray bullets. Think of the odds.”
“Well, I have to care about it. I don’t have your luxury.”
“What?”
“She lived next door to me.”
She snorted.
A cautious distance colors us all banal. At least that’s the tendency. I said someone was waiting for me and hung up the phone.
After twenty, thirty minutes on the couch, I was over it. I put on my pants and left the apartment.
4. Outside, the only remaining evidence was a shattered window-pane and a sagging, trampled perimeter of police tape. Someone had smeared a pinkish substance on the white slatting that framed the window. Upon closer inspection, the pink stuff appeared to be lipstick.
Across the street, a young couple stared woefully at the crime scene. They lived in one of the gentrifier condos. The guy was always making an effort to talk to the block’s indigenous Mexicans. In two years, neither the guy nor the girl had ever said a word to me because their safety was not compromised by my presence. The girl was the sort of girl who looks best in jeans and a performance fleece. She had an extraordinary ass. The man owned, but rarely rode, a turquoise Vespa.
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.”
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.”
“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:
FROM: bill <bill@getoverit.com>
TO: phil <phil@getoverit.com>
phil. here are today’s gold members. get back to me.
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.
FROM: phil <phil@getoverit.com>
TO: Richard McBeef <rmcbeef22@yahoo.com>
Hey Richard,
This is Phil from getoverit.com, your Personal Break-Up Coach. Just wanted to introduce myself and let you know how excited I am to start working with you. My buddy from college works in IT, so I understand the stress and pressures of the profession. Like you, this buddy of mine had a girlfriend who couldn’t handle his success and ended up sleeping with some absolute loser. Let’s talk about it. Whenever you’re comfortable.
Phil Davis
FROM: phil <phil@getoverit.com>
TO: Tom Nichols <tdnichols@imagineengines.com>
Hey Tom,
This is Phil from getoverit.com, your Personal Break-Up Coach. Just wanted to introduce myself and let you know how excited I am to start working with you. My buddy from college works in engineering, so I understand the stress and pressures of the profession. Like you, this buddy of mine had a girlfriend who couldn’t handle his success and ended up sleeping with some absolute loser. Let’s talk about it, bro. Whenever you’re comfortable.
Phil Davis
“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?”
“Don’t know. Probably stay in.”
“Are you still watching that Ronizm video?”
“It’s research.”
“Have you figured anything out?”
“These are terrible.”
“I told you we should’ve gone up the street. They use fucked-up cheese here. It’s, like, Swiss or something.”
“Up the street is five blocks away.”
“I meant about the video. If you’ve figured anything out.”
We kept picking at the nachos until they devolved into a block of congealed cheese, soggy chip shards, dehydrating, graying beans. Every twenty minutes on the dot, the neon jukebox would light up on its own, announcing, with a fanfare of horns, accordions, the start of yet another sad ranchera song, which, although I, sad dinosaur, would never admit it, sounded just like every other sad ranchera song.
A threesome of girls in glasses sat down at the other end of the picnic table and asked us some questions about the neighborhood. We both muttered something about the Phone Booth and got up to leave. There is no pretty way to finish off a plate of nachos. Our beers were gone.
Outside, the five kids in the doorway had become nine, the two cigarettes a stubby four. Something, a furtive look, a slight swing of the shoulder, must have given us away. The spaces between the bodies squeezed tighter. Just as I was prepping my best-learned reaction, the shoulders parted and let me pass. I looked back. Through a hedgerow of bushy black ponytails, Adam’s face blanked out into a practiced hey-we’re-cool smile.
The tallest of the kids stepped directly into Adam’s path and asked, “Dude, what are you doing here?”
Adam, deflating, said, “Hey, David, how’s the story going?”
“Not bad, man. What you getting, some food?”
“Yeah, food.”
“Burrito?”
“No.”
“Tacos?”
“No.”
“Nachos?”
“Yes.”
I understood his shame. It was a bit embarrassing to admit to these kids, or anyone, really, that you were eating nachos. Again, I felt the shitty lack of my own minority status. Despite my most silent, most earnest wishes, people were never embarrassed to tell me about their latest adventures with kimchi.
“They’re terrible here.”
“I know.”
“If you knew, why didn’t you just go to Farolito? Too far away?”
The kid cocked his head back in my direction. He asked, “Adam, who’s that?”
It occurred to me that I should act as naturally as possible. With hands spread at my sides, I craned my head up toward the sky and announced, “It’s still raining.”
“Yo, Adam, you gay?”
“Why?”
“Who is that?”
“My friend. From New York City.”
“His pants are tight as fuck, man.”
It was true. I worried, of course, about my bulge.
“We gotta get going, David. But I’ll see you in class on Monday, right?”
“Of course. I got some more fucked-up shit for you, Adam.”
The huddle parted. Adam came out smiling, nodding. We walked away. When we were a good two blocks away, I asked, “One of your students?”
“Advanced creative writing.”
“Advanced? Is he good?”
“Really fucked-up shit. Like lions with guns, lots of dead hookers.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
“It’s not.”
“He called you by your first name.”
“Where are you living, man?”
12. We ended up at Adam’s apartment. A menorah, mottled, oxidized green, stood in the only window. Cigarette butts had long since replaced the candles. There was a futon, I guess. A sparkling flat-panel television provided the apartment’s only light—an interring blue that lacquered the scarred bamboo floors, the checkerboard linoleum of the kitchenette, the brass of the menorah, the matte of Adam’s guitar cases and amps, even the blue-orange coat of Geronimo Rex, Adam’s morbidly obese cat, which greeted our entry with an upraised paw.
It was a horrible place. But it had that big TV, so it was better than my place.
Adam put on the video.
THREE MONTHS AGO, as a gesture of reparation to the rappers she had condemned in years past, Oprah aired a special on Ronizm, a Queensbridge emcee who blew up in 1993 when his debut album, All the Words Past the Margin, went generational. Adam and I were both twelve when All the Words dropped, too young to bump it in our mother’s car but just old enough to recall our first encounters with it, the way an adult, recently bruised, might suddenly remember a childhood sledding accident.
To middling applause, Ronizm was wheeled out onto Oprah’s stage by DJ Speck. Old clothes on old sticks, Ronizm’s trademark denim coat hung badly off his shoulders, his Wayfarers dangled awkwardly off the tip of a collapsing nose. Although they tried, the blacked-out lenses couldn’t quite obscure the ruins of big chief cheekbones sunk into their own hollows.
When the applause puttered out, Oprah said hello. Then she asked Ronizm something about his childhood.
In his gravelly monotone, Ronizm said, “My pops was this alto saxophonist from Queens and my mom raised me and my sister there, but my pops was always all over the place—Manhattan, Jersey, Philly, the Chi, LA, Mobile, wherever his next gig was at, but when he was home, he would introduce me to all the coolest cats up in Queensbridge.”
Oprah interrupted to ask something. Ronizm continued: “You know, even now, when I listen to the songs off my first two albums, I realize the pushers, players, pimps, and whatnot in the songs aren’t the cats from back in my day, but actually they’re the pushers, players, and pimps from way back in the day, when my pops was young, like back in ’69, ’72, back right when I was just being born.”
Oprah asked a follow-up question, but before Ronizm could answer, I wrestled the remote control away from Adam and hit fast forward.
“What are you doing? It was getting good.”
“Who can watch this shit?”
“Just watch him do the song.”
We watched in 4x speed for a bit. When Oprah finally cleared the stage, I hit play. Ronizm, feet dangling off the edge of a high chair, mic clasped in hands, bopped his head to Strictly Legal’s opening instrumental: the loose snare, the Primo scratches, the wandering horn. (Once, while on ecstasy in college, I sat down naked at my computer, put on Strictly Legal, and wrote 4,200 words on why, if I were to die and be reincarnated as a deaf man, my only phantom sounds would be the perfect rattle of these opening bars.) But while the twin miracles of recording technology and nostalgia kept the track pristine, Ronizm, himself, was mostly gone. His voice was bombed out. What was once heraldic, hard, weatherproof, was now a spume, sputtering and depleted.
It’s a weird hurt, isn’t it, to watch a dying rapper? Ronizm, my number three emcee of all time, following Nas and Big L, had become a gushy old man, talking, like all gushy old men, about the good old days, the good old days.
13. After my mother died of stomach cancer in 1995, two months short of my sixteenth birthday, my father, clumsy bear, did his best to corral us into a renewed paradigm of fatherhood. It was an admirable resolution, sure, but one without a target audience. There wasn’t much wrong with my sister, so he just kind of checked over her homework and monitored her always-modest hemlines. My own algorithm of GPA (4.67 weighted), test scores (1,480 SAT), athletic achievement (two years of JV baseball), extracurricular activity (two-time North Carolina policy debate champion), and socialization (virginity lost in 1994 to Ruth Stein), while not optimal, wasn’t bad enough to warrant attention. My assorted troubles (two suspensions for mouthing off to teachers, five reported fights, two wins over Amos Mays, two clear losses to Daunte Degraffenreid, one inconclusive with Javon Jeffries, marijuana possession, general surliness) fit in somewhere in his conception of an appropriate youth.
Hungry bear, my father, he rooted around until he found something. Try to understand, his brother lost his liquor store in the Rodney King riots. When my father heard the news, he grabbed a wrench and banged out a dent in the pole that held up my basketball hoop. Who knows if he intended the troubling symbolism, but there it was. And so, three years later, when he witnessed his only son accumulate a very specific set of affectations—the slurring of mannered syllables, a darkening of denims, Clark Wallabees with disastrous dye jobs (candy apple red and the blue ones on the Ghostface album cover), camo hoodies, Maxwell tapes wrapped in poorly photocopied images of project buildings, a copy of Soul on Ice (never read), a legal pad filled with doodles of imagined teks and snippets of my very own battle punch lines (mostly involving rhyming “mental” with “Oriental”)—how could he have not seen my slow, accessorized descent into blackness as his great cause?
Toothless bear now, the slowness of my mother’s death had sapped out his meanness. Instead of simply beating the hip-hop out of me, he took me to a Bob Dylan concert up in Richmond. He let me drive. I can still remember the trees along the 85 and how each one looked the same, cut in a straight line, and how my father, at ease in the passenger’s seat, had his small hands folded on his flat stomach. When the endlessness of Virginia became intolerable, he told me about how he and my mother would order takeout black bean noodles to their apartment in Seoul and crouch over the radio in their cramped, grimy kitchen. Every Wednesday at 6 P.M., their friend had a show on their college’s station. He played anything in English but always ended the show with his favorite Bob Dylan song: “I’m a Believer.”
I didn’t correct him, but the damage was done. I pictured my father and my mother sharing a bowl of noodles in their apartment in Seoul. In the photos they have from that time, even poor lighting and communist film cannot hide the cracked paint on the walls, my mother’s incandescent beauty. A small radio is playing the Monkees, and my parents, equipped with two years of college English, are feverishly trying to decipher the revolutionary message in “I’m a Believer”:
“I’m in rub. Now I a be-ree-vah. I a be-ree-vah, I couldn’t reave her if I try.”
THE CROWD THAT day was a chorus of satisfied exhales. We found a spot on a hillside, just a stone’s throw from a historical preservation placard, but neither of us could quite make out the text. I said it was probably something about the Civil War. The crowd filled in, the air thickened. My father, starving bear, shrank in the grass and disappeared.
On the drive back, he leaned up against the door with his eyes shut and toggled the power locks in time with the music from the oldies station. When we began to drift out of range, he asked if I had brought any of my rap tapes along. I only had The Shogun’s Decapitator. When it was over, we grabbed a snack at a Bojangles drive-through near the Virginia–North Carolina border. Mouth full of chicken, he pointed at the tape deck and said, “I can’t understand ninety percent what he say. Can you understand?”
YEARS LATER, I told my history of jazz professor about this trip with my father to go see Dylan. I think I used the word “overrated.” He shook his head and said that I would never understand because I hadn’t been around to witness Blonde on Blonde, at least not in its proper context. As for my father, he said, “It’s hard to imagine how someone who didn’t live in America at the time could really feel Dylan, because, as you know, so much of Dylan is about the history, of course, within its proper musical context.”
That was the first time I’ve ever really considered killing somebody. I really considered cracking his skull open with some funny object—a saxophone, a dildo, maybe.
Something awful, dark, must have flashed across my face. He asked what was wrong.
I CAN STILL feel that violence within me, but its pathways have become more twisted, serpentine, and, ultimately, inert. At least once a week, I’ll weigh the option of hurting someone. There’s never any pattern, or specificity, really.
I used to think I could turn that violence into fiction—this idea was inspired, more than I’d like to admit, by Eminem—but fiction requires a steadier logic of who and why, good and bad, absurd and real. Violence, even when it’s supposed to be chaotic, is never truly chaotic. Poe’s ourang-outang, who rips apart the women of the Rue Morgue and stuffs them up in the chimney, is studied as the solution to a puzzle, or, misguidedly, as a racist allegory. What he is not, however, is simply a lustful orangutan who got away and killed some women. He is not a symbol of insanity.
Were I a better writer, I’d make myself into that symbol.
14. Adam nodded off on the couch. It was four in the afternoon. I let myself out and walked back home. At the end of my block, I stood in front of the Laundromat’s exhaust and stared out at the lime trees as a whorl of fuzzy-smelling steam swirled around my feet. I thought, “This is a Stygian scene,” and then thought about the movie Taxi Driver, and then Meet the Parents. Despite my efforts, the steam and the fog rolling down from Noe Valley, the visions of Travis Bickle, and the repetition in my head of the words “The Baby Molester is dead,” all those signifying things couldn’t convince me that hell lay ahead. Instead, I wondered about my e-mail.
Up the block, a blond head popped out of a gentrifier window. It was Performance Fleece. She was staring down at a sky blue Astro van double-parked outside my building. I didn’t want to make eye contact, so I took out my cell phone and started hitting random buttons. The word I spelled, incidentally, was “FLAMER.” I would’ve kept texting all the way to my front door, but as I passed the gentrifier condo’s graffiti-proof metal door, something splattered on the sidewalk next to me.
It was a yogurt cup.
I looked up. Performance Fleece jerked her head in the direction of the van.
I wasn’t getting it. I worried my gigantic head would look even bigger from three stories up. Does distance, with its inexhaustible cache of favors, extend the same grace to us bobbleheads that it extends to the tanned, snaggle-faced gym addicts of San Diego?
Something behind me buzzed. It occurred to me that professional basketball players, when viewed from the upper deck of an arena, always look like normal-size people. So, given that my head was approximately the size of a basketball, a woman’s basketball, it stood to reason …
A second yogurt cup hit the sidewalk, this time accompanied by a plastic spoon. Performance Fleece’s head reappeared in the window. She looked disappointed in me. Not knowing what to do, I pointed at the yogurt cup and smiled. She shook her head in disbelief and mouthed something. From where I was standing, it looked like, “The gay, the gay,” but, after a flurry of angry pointing, it became clear that what she meant was, “The gate, the gate.”
I nodded. She ducked away. The buzzing started up again. It was, indeed, the condo’s front gate. I pushed my way inside.
The lobby was clean. That’s all I can really say about it. I did note a Paisley settee, but only because I had just learned the week before what a settee was. A loud thudding came from the staircase, and when it finally stopped, Performance Fleece sprang into view. It hurt, at least little a bit, to hear her clunk around in such a plebeian way.
With a withering, who-farted look on her face, she motioned me up the stairs. I followed her great ass up two flights and through a heavy door and into a condo that also doesn’t really need to be described.
Then (Hallelujah!), with all of Deerfield Academy behind her voice, she asked, “Are you retarded?”
“What’s up?”
She pointed out the window and said, “That van hasn’t moved for two hours now.”
I failed to see the problem. There were always cars double-parked on our block. I shrugged. Performance Fleece pointed a long, thin finger at my nose. I caught a whiff of cocoa butter. My mounting erection was confused by this. She asked, “Are you high? Mel says you always look high.”
“Mel?”
“My fucking boyfriend. You met him this morning.”
Women of America! Take note: Learn to say “fuck” and “boyfriend” with the same even mix of contempt and protectiveness and you will never be lonely again.
“Oh, he didn’t tell me his name.”
“That van hasn’t moved in two hours. About an hour ago, a kid got out and kind of kicked around in the dirt in front of your building.”
“Of course he lost something. He lost his bullets in that poor old lady’s face.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Yes.”
“Well, why would he come back to the scene of the crime? Wouldn’t he be in El Salvador by now?”
“Did you see the red paint smeared around the window? That’s a gang sign.”
My reason was returning to me. I asked, “Okay, okay. Can we think this through? Together?”
“You have to go down there.”
“What?”
“To establish a strong neighborhood presence.”
“Strong neighborhood presence?”
“Yes. Strong neighborhood presence.”
“Well, where’s Mel? Isn’t that his scooter parked on the sidewalk?”
“He takes the shuttle to work.”
“So, that’s like a weekend scooter?”
“Why are you talking about his fucking scooter?”
“Sorry, I guess I’m trying to say.”
“Yes?”
“Shouldn’t we both go down there?”
She turned around and bent over to open a drawer. My God, her ass! When my eyes found their way back up to her face, she was holding a fancy kitchen knife. I worried that she might have caught me staring, but then why would she have gone for the knife before the staring had even happened? Had she been looking for something else in the drawer and, during her search, felt my eyes on her ass, and, after the moment of violation passed, chosen the knife?
I asked, “What’s the knife for?”
She said, “I’m going down there with you.”
15. This was Performance Fleece’s plan. We would walk up and down the street, shoving our strong neighborhood presence down the throat of these gangsters.
It wasn’t the most complicated plan, but what grit from Performance Fleece! What determination! What poor freshman, on which field, at which New England factory of private education and goodwill, had dared to face down this dervish? Unstoppable force, Performance Fleece, running straight toward the goal.
We took our first lap of the street. My erection felt like it was going to tear through my pants leg. But how to adjust? The waistband tuck would be too obvious. And my pants, as the advanced creative writer had pointed out, were cockblasters. By way of nervous reflex, I asked, “Where did you go to college?”
She said, “This is not the time.”
“Sorry.”
She grabbed my hand but did not turn to look at me. Then, with flourishing modesty, she said, “Williams.”
“I went to Bowdoin.”
“That’s a great school.”
And then we were past the van.
We walked up and down the block three more times. At each pass of the van, I made sure to ask some stupid question. Perfomance Fleece’s hand was cold and well lotioned, but her palms were covered with calluses. She talked about Williams, her opinions of California, most of which had to do with political things that were foreign to me.
I talked mostly about small restaurants and small magazines. In response, she just kind of pursed her lips, asked me unrelated questions about who I knew at Bowdoin. It turned out we knew two people in common, but I only knew their names and not their faces. I took a risk and talked some shit about those two faceless people, and Performance Fleece laughed and agreed. Quickly, I forgot why we were walking or what we were doing out on the street. Girls just have that effect on me, I guess. On the fourth pass, without thinking much about it, I stared into the van.
It was the Advanced Creative Writer. He was crying into his hands. An older man with a Pancho Villa mustache was sitting in the driver’s seat. He was talking to the Advanced Creative Writer, but when he caught me staring, he shut up. The Advanced Creative Writer looked up.
Then, to my horror, his eyes narrowed in recognition.
16. Both men stepped out of the car, screaming about something. I caught a couple curse words—puta, pinche—but everything the Advanced Creative Writer said in English was lost on me. Performance Fleece blanched and stepped away. The Advanced Creative Writer took a giant step up onto the sidewalk and pressed his scowling face up to my own.
Try to understand. I spent most of my childhood split between a foreign model of grace and my father’s personal brand of macho. (I apologize for talking about him so much, but we must try to understand one another, and since we’ve all moved past the era when understanding was only a collection of Buddhas, zenny poems, fucking Tigers, weird pickles, and creative spins on rice, we are only left with fathers. Anyway.) After one of my fights in the middle school cafeteria with Daunte Degraffenreid, my father was called to take me home. When he walked into the office and saw me sitting on a bench next to Daunte, who, even back then, would have been described by even the most well intentioned of my friends as a “big black dude,” an unrecognizable look spread across my father’s face. Again, as with all of his looks, I cannot define this face as one thing or another, but with the benefit of the years (dead parents are easier to understand) and some photos of him at my sister’s high school graduation, I can say that the look on his face was something akin to pride. A few years later, when I listened to Ronizm rap about how some people have to scrap to maintain dignity that is not their birthright, my thoughts on the matter were confirmed and committed to instinct. Yes, there is something about the deference of white guilt and I have certainly had my flings with it, but in the end, I’ve always come back to this unspoken lesson from my father: Indulge in all the liberal politics you need, son, but when it comes time to fight, you don’t have the luxury to not fight.
Which is all a way of saying I slapped the shit out of the Advanced Creative Writer. It felt good. Of course it did. The man with the Pancho Villa mustache got out of the car, cursed at me, and collected the Advanced Creative Writer up off the sidewalk. As they staggered back to the van, the Advanced Creative Writer yelled, “You’re fucking dead. You and your fucking girlfriend.”
I looked over at Performance Fleece. Was she impressed? Had she heard the Advanced Creative Writer refer to her as my girlfriend? Ah, yes! She was chewing her lip, staring off at Mel’s faggy scooter, calculating a new possibility.
17. Performance Fleece called the police, but the dispatcher couldn’t figure out how the confrontation had been the Advanced Creative Writer’s fault. She suggested we try apologizing. I called Adam, but he didn’t pick up. While we waited for some idea to present itself, Performance Fleece and I passed around a bottle of Macallan and watched Access Hollywood. Performance Fleece told me that she never liked Jennifer Aniston. Through the drinks and the Access Hollywood, we put together the following plausible scenario: The Advanced Creative Writer, who clearly was involved in a gang, must have accidentally shot the Baby Molester during a turf war. Racked with remorse, the Advanced Creative Writer, who, despite his gang affiliation, was a sensitive soul (hence his enrollment in advanced creative writing), confessed the crime to his father, who promptly packed his son in the family van and drove to the scene of the crime to snatch up any evidence that might criminally implicate his son. After sweeping through the dirt for bullet casings, footprints, the father had forced his son to stare in at the destroyed window, the slackening police tape that still hung across the front of the building. At this point, the Advanced Creative Writer, sensitive soul, broke down in tears.
At each commercial break, one of us would sneak up to the window to see if the van had moved. It did not move until after Jeopardy. By then, Performance Fleece and I had already fucked twice. Her ass, I remember, was a bit of a disappointment, a trick of restrictive panties and $250 jeans, but she fucked like a real athlete with enthusiasm, impressive force, and limited grace.
I LEFT AT the end of a rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos because Mel had called to say he was finally heading back. Performance Fleece suggested that I sleep at Adam’s house and copied down two phone numbers on the back of a receipt. The first was her number. The second was the number of the detective who had come by the day after the shooting. She said, “His last name is Kim, just like you, not that it means anything.”
If I got in trouble, she said, call both numbers.