Peter Maravelis - San Francisco Noir

Michael was impressed. He was always moved by hope. He introduced himself and held his hand out. She didn’t take it. He took a deep breath. He didn’t normally give in to impulses, he was one of those people who tended to mull things over and act only when it was too late, but it was as if a spirit had taken over him. He wrote something down on the back of a chopstick wrapper and handed it to her.

“Here’s my number. Call me when you get to Canada.”

“What for?”

“I just want to know if you get there, like you said.”

“Who are you?”

He looked around. “The only white person in this restaurant, it looks like.”

She laughed at that. She wrote something on the wrapper and handed it back to him. “This is the number of the restaurant my girlfriend works at. Call a year from now and ask her if I got there. Okay? Bye bye.”

With that, she dragged Cletus off into the cool San Francisco night. Only after they were out the door did Michael realize everyone in the restaurant was staring at him. Francis just went about opening his fortune cookie. Michael couldn’t help grinning. He was aglow. Here, in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant he in all likelihood would never be able to find his way back to again, in Chinatown, where it seemed, for someone like himself, it was all but impossible to make a human connection, he’d had one. Not just any connection, either, but with her. The people in the restaurant eventually went back to their business. Michael couldn’t understand a word above the din they were making. They could have been talking about anything within the confines of those four walls, and without.

The following summer, Michael traveled back to the Midwest to see some old friends and to have his draft physical. He wore a T-shirt with Mao Tse-tung’s face silk-screened on the front and the phrase, “ All political power grows from the barrel of a gun ,” on the back. He flunked the physical.

Before he flew back to the Bay Area, he took a detour to see a fellow RU member of high standing.

Ariel Rabenstein was a former CPUSA member, who now lent RU a certain legitimacy. Like Michael and Francis, he was employed by the post office. Unlike most of the young cadre, he had actual experience with mass organizing mayhem on a grand scale. The rest of RU were in comparison children, working in a vacuum, sealed off from history by McCarthy and the fact that the Soviet Union had stopped being revolutionary. Ariel was hiding in Chicago after having been out of the country for a number of years. He had run afoul of the police in San Francisco when a reporter for the Examiner , acting as an FBI informant, had exposed him, and he had to leave the country. He took a freighter to China and somehow made it into circles that reached as high as Chou En-lai. There had been a handful of Americans in China then, a collection of outright defectors, Korean War deserters, double agents, and old CPUSA and Soviet sympathizers who’d run into bad police situations, all of whom knew each other and did similar things like teach English. The Chinese premier’s group became Ariel’s main contact, and they arranged for Ariel to bring $600,000 back to the States, where he was “to start organizing a new revolutionary group.” This was in 1968. It wasn’t clear what the significance of the six-hundred-thousand figure was, but when Michael first heard the story, he assumed it must have been a round or lucky number in Chinese.

Ariel’s apartment was located in a weathered brick tenement on the South Side. It was around eight million degrees that day and seemed hotter inside the tortuous hallways. Michael had been told Ariel had something for him, nothing more. It could have been materials or it could have been information. After winding his way through the building’s infernal interior, he was prepared for just about anything, except what greeted him there.

A beautiful, young black woman with a natural, wearing a wine-colored Chinese silk robe, answered the door. She escorted him in without a word. The apartment looked like the interior of a souvenir store on Grant Avenue, full of things Ariel had brought back with him-lanterns, screens, embroidery, bronzes, scrolls. Ariel, in a black robe, waited for Michael in the inner room, seated with one knee upright on a kang, smoking from a copper water pipe, writing in a notebook. Michael didn’t know how old Ariel was, but he looked a hundred, and not a good hundred. He’d lived a hard, uncompromised life, and he smoked from that water pipe nonstop.

Ariel and the woman exchanged some words in what must have been Mandarin. She left and then returned with a freshly brewed pot of tea and performed what seemed like a brief ritual involving pouring the tea from the pot into variously sized cups and then repouring them into other cups. When she was done, she left the room.

“We met in China,” his host explained, going into no further detail. “Drink up. This pot and these cups are made of yi-hsing clay. It’s said to enhance the flavor of the tea. Let me know if you taste anything. My taste buds are shot.” He stuck his tongue out.

Michael declined because he was dying in the heat, but his host insisted, saying the Chinese believed drinking hot tea actually cooled the body, which sounded like utter madness.

“You’re to be sent somewhere,” Ariel declared. “You’ll be traveling with me to pick up some money. I can’t say when or where, for now. Everything will be conducted on a ‘need to know’ basis. We don’t want you to lose your job at the post office, where you’re doing good work. So as we get closer to the date, we’ll tell you how long you’ll be gone.”

“It won’t be that long then?”

“About a week.”

“Will it be just you and me?”

“There will be checkpoints and handoffs. But yes, most of the time it will be just you and me. That’s all I can tell you for now.”

Michael nodded. Ariel stopped talking. It was very odd, regardless of the bizarre trappings of the apartment, to see this rough-hewn man taking such delicate sips from a teacup the size of a thimble. Ariel didn’t have any materials for him to bring back. Probably the purpose of this visit was just to check Michael out. Michael took a sip of the offered tea, now lukewarm, before he left. It was green and stronger than it looked.

On his way back, he felt an uneasy sense of elation. When Ariel mentioned money, he immediately thought of the $600,000 the old man had delivered from China. Michael could only assume they were going there for more. That he was being sent to the command center of world revolution at this juncture in his young career, for such a sensitive task, was quite unbelievable. Very little in his life, besides a few trips to Chinatown to discuss tactics with Francis, had prepared him. “China” had always been to him more a revolutionary ideal than an actual place, existing only in cloudy rumors he and the other local cadre, like courtiers stationed in a distant colony, attempted to decode, or else otherwise in those abstract, stiffly translated tracts they were sent, their lifeline to inter-pretation. Very few of them had access to cleaner information-Francis, who could understand some Chinese, and Ariel, with his contacts there, among them-and even their throughlines were questionable, though enough to lend them a certain priestlike authority. But the more Michael thought about it, the more he was convinced his life, so far, had been a preparation for such a trip. What, for instance, had led him that night to the lecture by the former Red Guard, which sent him off on his own trajectory into the revolution? As an advocate of science, Michael didn’t believe in fate, but he trusted the unconscious. His life so far had been defined by great, blind leaps. He had gone from the Midwest to the Ivy League to San Francisco. He had never left the country before. Now he was going to China.