The Dead Do Not Improve Read online

  I stopped reading and clicked over to Mission Dishin’.

  It had been updated. The front page now read:

  BEATINGS IN MISSION LINKED TO LOCAL GANG. TECH WORKERS TARGETED. MISSION DISHIN’ EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH TWO OF THE VICTIMS.

  I complied.

  Mission Dishin’ has learned that the recent rash of savage beatings in the Mission District are the work of the infamous Mara Salvatrucha 13 gang, also known as the MS-13. While we are forced to withhold certain details about the gang’s intentions, for fear of endangering more of you people, we have obtained an exclusive interview with GLEN MARCUS (read: not his real name), one of the victims of the attacks.

  Let us set the scene: I have known Glen Marcus for years and he has always been a tall drink of water. His demeanor, frosty, yet compelling, might remind a casual observer of Mifune’s turns in the great Samurai films of Kurosawa. Despite this aloofness, which has served him well, both in living in the heat of the Mission, and in attracting his fair share of women, Marcus was savagely attacked last weekend while walking home to our apartment on WITHHELD and WITHHELD (far, far east of the trendy Valencia corridor). The attackers, dressed entirely in black, beat Marcus with baseball bats.

  It went on like that for another three paragraphs. Glen Marcus, predictably, was a fucking idiot. He had suffered a broken arm, a fractured skull, and abrasions on his knees and elbows. They had taken his wallet, his phone. The reason why he suspected the Mara Salvatrucha 13 was because they were wearing blue and had done things like this in the past.

  The only evidence offered to corroborate the MS-13 theory came from the editors of Mission Dishin’. Apparently, they had been in contact with three of the victims (there had been about eight in all), and all three had worked for prominent but not Google-prominent companies in Silicon Valley. All three companies could be described as “social media.”

  I admit, the last part gave me pause. To deflect some of the accusations that we were nothing but a $50 leech on heartbroken men, the founder of getoverit.com had registered us as a social networking site.

  Were the letters from Richard McBeef some weird intimidation tactic? Why would the MS-13, who I assumed were drug dealers, suddenly move into low-level terrorist activities?

  Below the byline, there was a link to the San Francisco Gang Prevention Society’s website. I clicked on it. All it was, really, was a phone number and a collection of other links. The other links, though, confirmed Performance Fleece’s worst plausible scenario. The evidence—descriptions of citizen intimidation, initiation rituals, neighborhood blog posts about knifings, muggings gone wrong—proved, indisputably, really, that we were both fucked. My right hand throbbed uncontrollably. I clicked through hundreds of photos—all those proud kids posing in red, the brutal accounts of violence, the efficiency of gang logic. My panic now had a face, hundreds of them. When the sun finally came up and the fresh-faced morning people started coming into the Laundromat with their loads for the wash-and-fold service, I had already known, for several hours, really, that I could never go back to my apartment.

  2. When I walked into the office, Bill was sitting at my desk. He said his computer had a virus. We both knew he was lying. He just liked my desk better because he’s that sort of guy. Flattery kept my mouth shut.

  Bill said, “I can’t get rid of this.”

  “What?”

  “This pop-up. It’s on my shit, too.”

  “That’s that giant.”

  “The Big Friendly Giant. Roald Dahl.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “I have no idea. Just sitting there. Being gay.”

  “Is there a movie coming out?”

  “Already checked.”

  “You can’t get rid of it?”

  “I’ve been trying for thirty minutes.”

  “What are you doing on my computer, anyway?”

  “Looking for a job.”

  I looked over my shoulder and made the international sign for “Do you have any weed, and if you do, can I smoke some?”

  Bill nodded and motioned with his head toward the elevator.

  It was a coin flip: either the weed would make me so paranoid that I would have to figure out what to do about the Baby Molester and the Advanced Creative Writer, or that pleasant fog would set in and I’d find things funny and any decision could be delayed. Either way.

  3. New Montgomery Street was surprisingly empty for an hour so close to lunch. We walked toward our usual alleyway on Minna. On the corner of Mission and 6th, we saw Frank Chu, the city’s most famous protester, the man who SF Weekly had named the city’s Best Pathological Citizen, silently holding up his black and neon sign.

  Today, it read:

  MENARD

  475,000 GALAXIES

  ZEGNATRONIC

  AWTROCENTENNIAL

  CBS: JUXTAGRONIKUL BROADCASTS

  As we walked by, Bill raised up a fist and screamed, “Fuck CBS!” Frank Chu looked at us through his aviators and shrugged. Today was just another day in his interminable war, I guess. For the past fifteen years, while trudging around Montgomery Street, he had been calling for the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Chu believed that Clinton had once green-lighted a television show called The Richest Family, which had covertly documented the lives of Chu and his family. According to Wikipedia, Chu believed that Clinton was working on behalf of the 12 Galaxies conspiracy, the interplanetary organization that had profited wildly off of The Richest Family.

  Chu’s demands: the impeachment of President Clinton and $20 billion in damages for the humiliation inflicted upon him and his family by the 12 Galaxies conspiracy. To help supplement his daily protests, Chu sold ad space on the back of his sign for $100 a week. Today, he was hocking Quizno’s new Tuscan Ranch chicken sandwich.

  TWO SFMOMA STAFFERS were cracking whip-its in our smoking alley. I recognized them by their butchered haircuts and the ambient green badges pinned to their black uniforms.

  When they finally left, giggling and superior, Bill and I huddled in their vacated space. We passed around the bowl and talked about a couple of bands and I brought up Ronizm and Bill accused me of being boring because I never really talked about anything other than hip-hop from the nineties and I reminded Bill that the reason why this happened was because he never wanted to talk about anything but how much he hated our job and, when that became overbearing, music. It wasn’t a bad time. The coin flip, at least to date, was going my way. The SFMOMA staffers came back with more whip-its and matching cups of frozen yogurt. We passed the bowl around again. They cracked some whip-its. Between balloons, I told them about the Baby Molester and they cautioned me, more implored me, to not go seek the police. The SFMOMA staffers lived in Outer Excelsior, which was like the supergrimy Mission, and they knew some things about what happens to snitches.

  When we got back to work, the Google transplants were standing in our kitchen, stealing our cereal, watching the new Family Feud. Bill e-mailed me my day’s work and went off to go harass the Google guys.

  FROM: RICHARD MCBEEF

  TO: PHILIP DAVIS

  Philip,

  It is great to hear from you. Yes, the pressures of IT are immeasurable, especially what with these assholes treating you like a slave. Hope your friend from college is over his particular bitch. Where did you go to college? You don’t have to be specific, but I went to school at a small college in New England and my perspective on things has changed a lot as a result. Just wanted to know if the guy I was paying for here came from a similar place.

  Thanks,

  Rich

  Richard McBeef again? I still couldn’t imagine why Adam would pay $50 for a joke he just as easily could have sent over e-mail. All non-Adam-related explanations were too weird, too coincidental. I put it out of my mind.

  Mostly, the responses to follow-up e-mails were attempts to recoup the $50 credit card charge. A good percentage of them tried to explain the initial e-mail as a prank
by friends at either a bachelor party or a college reunion. We were instructed to respond by cutting and pasting part of the agreement form they had clicked on, which stated that all sales were final. However, in our goodwill, we were supposed to offer a $5 credit for any future uses of the site. The few customers who followed up to our follow-up were either lawyers, insane, or suicidal. We were instructed to strongly urge them to seek out psychiatric help and consult the Internet to see if a conflict of medications might be causing an abnormal mood swing. Then, as gently as fast will allow, we were instructed to get the fuck out of Dodge.

  It was rare to get a follow-up e-mail that asked specific questions and actually tried to use the advertised service. Anyway, I wrote him back.

  FROM: PHILIP DAVIS

  TO: RICHARD MCBEEF

  Hey Rich,

  Good to hear from you. Thank God, that friend of mine who worked in IT and got snaked by his bitch has gotten over it. It’s the only reason why we’re still friends today. Weird you mention it, but I did go to a small college in New England, and much like you, it did help shape a lot of how I see the world. Good to know we’re a good match off the start.

  Write me back at your leisure. Till then, I would say that New England guys always have a tough time showing emotions. Allow yourself to show emotions.

  Sincerely,

  Philip

  I found Bill in the kitchen with the Google guys. Someone was trying to figure out how to open the window. There was a lengthy discussion about windows in office buildings and insurance and the sound a body must make when it hits cement after a fifteen-story fall. We all watched the rest of Family Feud, said good-bye, and headed off to the bar.

  It was only two-thirty, but the bartender agreed to start happy hour a half hour early. Bill and I bitched about the Google transplants, talked to the bartender about funny commercials, and drank down a few pints. When the mass of people who had jobs like us flooded the bar at around three-thirty, we took a cab down to the Mission. Bill knew a few girls who were going to be at a bar. He promised, unnecessarily, really, that each one of them was hot.

  They weren’t, but they asked a lot of questions and had encouraging things to say about writing and the creativity process. Bill had clearly lied to them about our work. It was okay, though. The room was spinning, and the second hottest girl was buying me drinks and yelling something about wanting to work in microfinance if only she could find something she truly believed in. I think, at some point, I went to the bathroom and threw up and put Sam Cooke on the jukebox and might have even danced with my second-hottest casualty of capitalism and goodwill.

  The bar closed down. I didn’t know where to go and the second hottest girl punched her number in my phone and disappeared with her friends. Bill offered me his couch, but I waved him off and headed off in the general direction of Adam’s apartment.

  4. I stumbled toward 16th. After a long night of drinking, I usually find myself at whatever taquería or pizzeria will have me. That night, as the soft edges of a blackout crept over my vision, I remember craving a jalapeño slice at the old hippie pizza parlor that was now run by doughnut tycoon Cambodians. I am a very dark shade of Korean, a fact that was the subject of years and years of family jokes, and I always had the feeling that the polite service afforded to my drunken ass by the Cambodians might come from an ethnic misunderstanding on their part. As I rounded Shotwell and 18th, a man in black stepped out from behind a relic of a station wagon. He was wearing a black ski mask and black gloves.

  I remember crossing the street. Another man, dressed identically, materialized from behind a hedgerow. He had something that looked like a remote control in his right hand. My fate seemed inevitable. But just as I was getting psyched to take a punch, the man behind the hedgerow jabbed me in the chest with his remote control and the edges of my vision went from numb to electric blue. When I was done convulsing around, one of the two men stepped down hard on my neck. In a calm and even voice, he said, “We will not allow you to corrupt our society any longer. All vermin will be silenced. The lion will rise again.”

  5. The police had no idea what the hell anything meant. They suggested I might be imagining things. They pointed out that my phone had not been stolen, which, according to them, explained everything. They asked if I had health insurance, and when I laughed, they offered me a ride to Adam’s.

  Adam had his own theory.

  “It was David.”

  “Who?”

  “The Advanced Creative Writer.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Think. The confrontation on your block, the talk about silence. The heightened, weird diction, and the lion.”

  “The lion?”

  “This kid always writes about this fucked-up hierarchy of animals. Lions are the highest. I always imagined it was gang symbolism.”

  “Oh no.”

  “You’re sure he said ‘all vermin will be silenced’?”

  “Pretty sure. Sixty percent sure.”

  “That’s right in his linguistic wheelhouse. His characters all talk like extras in a Goebbels biopic.”

  “Oh no.”

  His logic was unassailable. I was screwed. All the Advanced Creative Writer would have to do was look up Adam’s address on the school’s directory and I would be caught. But where to go? Adam was my number one friend in the city, Bill my number two. I couldn’t think of a number three; I suppose if someone held a gun up to my head, I’d say Performance Fleece. If the Advanced Creative Writer had been following me around that night and had any access to social networking sites, he would know all the peripheral details of Bill.

  If he could find Bill, he could find me, and all my thirty-seven Internet friends.

  I left Adam’s, despite his deflated protests. At a dollar store across the street, I bought two pairs of socks, a packet of boxer shorts, and a plastic cutlery set. Then, with a weight on my heart alternating between heavy and giddy, I walked into the lobby of the Hotel St. Francis.

  Finch walked up 14th. Erected in 1912 during the city’s great rebuilding campaign after the earthquake of 1906, the 200,000-square-foot building now known as the Porn Palace served for seventy-four years as an armory for the National Guard. In 1976, the National Guard transferred its operations down south to Fort Funston, and the armory, a block-swallowing Borg of a building, was abandoned to the city’s skateboarders, who converted the front stairs into a spot called Three Up–Three Down. The fate of the building was left in the hands of competing community concerns, which meant that it was left to rot, save for a short period of time when George Lucas drove his trucks across the Bay Bridge and filmed some of Star Wars in the old armory’s drill court.

  In 2006, after thirty years of inaction and mounting disrepair, one of the community concerns won out. A pornographer specializing in BDSM and niche films purchased the old armory, citing the building as the ideal place to house his studios. The building was redubbed the Porn Palace.

  To the right of the Porn Palace’s studded Moorish front door, Finch noticed a small white placard that read PLEASE PUSH BUTTON. The location of the button was pointed out by a friendly blue arrow. Finch pushed the button. A woman’s voice, transmitted through some unseen speaker, asked, “Hello?”

  Finch said, “Hello.”

  “Can I help you?”

  “SFPD. I’m here about Dolores Stone.”

  “Who?”

  “Dolores Stone.”

  “I heard that, but who are you?”

  “SFPD.”

  “SFPD who?”

  “Sid Finch. SFPD. Homicide.”

  “Coming right down.”

  While he waited, Finch flashed through a series of fantasies about the woman who was coming right down. Would she be a black drag queen wearing some jewel-encrusted, solid-gold bikini? A six-foot-nine Amazon in leather? A petite Asian girl whose monstrous implants doubled as a double-barreled fuck-you to the Hippocratic oath? Just as he was measuring out the cont
ours of the Asian girl’s cookie nipples, the door swung open, revealing a woman who, unfortunately, sat squarely within his expectations of the women of San Francisco. Finch, still pricked up by his prior expectations, gave her the up and down, starting at her Chinese-ish shoes, her pale, follicle-stippled legs streaked pink from a careless shave, the soft bulge of thigh hanging unathletically over well-scrubbed knee. The heavy, two-tone skirt—cordovan and a deep purple—hung stiffly and unevenly from sharp hips, revealing a flash of midriff that ended at the hem of an overwrought, vaguely African halter top. A wooden bead held the neck together. Her mousy hair had been butchered straight across her forehead before giving way to two wings that hung damply over her ears. She was ugly, of course, but like so many of San Francisco’s ugly girls, she buried the fact behind an earnest expression, as if every doorway was a wardrobe and the entirety of Narnia lay across the threshold.

  “Come on up,” she said. “Miles has been expecting you.”

  MILES HOFSPAUR, ENTREPRENEUR, sat behind an industrial desk in a bare room on the second floor. Again, Finch felt let down. Where was the approximation of Hefner life, the blond twins, the stained casting couch? Hofspaur—bald, blotchy, unevenly hefted—was dressed in a tight black T-shirt that barely hemmed in his bulk. He stood up and shook Finch’s hand. On the desk, Finch noticed a drawing, not quite finished: Lisa Simpson, on her knees, holding Bart’s snail cock in her hand. Through a feat of neck contortion only allowed by 2-D, the viewer could see Lisa’s face, the look of tired guilt. Were there a speech bubble sprouting from her now-defiled mouth, it would have read, “I guess you caught us, so what are you going to do?”

  In a nasally, giggly voice, Hofspaur said, “Sorry.”