Peter Maravelis - San Francisco Noir

In my kitchen there’s a note. It’s on the back of a takeout menu, scrawled in a dried-up Sharpie. It’s faint and hard to read. I could decipher the word “you” and the word “fucking” and there was an arrow that went in the general direction of my back door, which was also wide open. Kicked open, busted. I felt a swell of anger. Whoever did this had to break my front door in order to get in. Okay, I get that. But the back door was easily unlocked from inside my house. Whoever did this broke my door just for the fuck of it, just to be a dickface.

I grabbed the menu and walked toward the door. I tried to study the text in the sunlight that shot down from the sky and pooled in the slight clearing of weeds outside my door. The phrase “nice fucking life” was visible at the bottom of the page.

Out in my yard, there was a clear path where the weeds had been trampled. I followed it, barefoot, my feet getting all gunked up. In the middle of the yard, I looked up at Larry’s apartment. What a jackass. What a totally useless landlord. He makes no repairs; he lets the yard turn into a jungle and my apartment into a mold-ridden health hazard. The only thing he was good for was simple presence; he was reliable like that. He rarely left his upstairs apartment, save for beer runs. He sat up there and drank and watched cable. He was a bulky guy with a lousy attitude, and I figured I could at least rely on him to ward off burglars, a simple crime deterrent. But he wasn’t even good for that. The sun reflected off his windows, making it impossible for me to see into his place. He could have been standing at the window looking out at me. I flipped him off just in case.

I followed the skinny trail of crushed weeds to the back of the yard. There was a depression there, a cement clearing that maybe an optimistic former tenant had once tried to garden in. It was filled with dirt that had turned muddy with trash and pooled rainwater. Who knows what else was in there. Today my life savings was. I could see the tips of bills sticking out from the sludge, like they’d been packed into the wet dirt and then stomped deeply into the skank of it. Yeah. There were footprints mashed into it, overlapping footprints going in all directions, like someone had just freaked out and moshed my money into the ground. The box it had all been stored in was off to the side, lying in the weeds, open and empty to the sky above us.

At first I felt nothing; and then quickly, swiftly, I wanted to die. As I stood there wanting to die, I could feel the sensation morph. I could feel it become energized and then it became the more dynamic feeling of wanting to kill. Then it lessened, became heavy, and I was filled with the desire to just kill myself.

I looked down at the mud. Maybe it was salvageable. I gently tugged the protruding corner of a hundred-dollar bill and it came off in my fingers. The mud was sopping, it was like coffee with a lot of grounds in it. It was, as I probed it with my fingers, more of a puddle than anything. I scooped up a liquidy pile of cash. I draped the paper across some bent stalks of weeds and it tore there, slunk into the ground like slurry.

My life was dissolving. I plunged my hands back into the puddle and brought out some more palmfuls of dark, indistinguishable nothing.

I started to cry. I started to hyperventilate. I thought of all the guys I’d fucked. I thought of all the mouths, gummy and slick, that had suctioned themselves to my breasts. I thought of my sweet, chafed pussy, and all it had been through. The gropes. The sweat-that beaded chests like the condensation on my bedroom walls-how it had splattered upon me. Oh, the noxious grunts, the gross sounds they made, the plain and hideous sight of their nudity. It was as if I had fucked them all for free. All I had were the bills in my purse, and rent was due today.

Fucking Jenny. Fucking sick Jenny. She didn’t even steal it. She was as broke as me, broker even, with a bigger drinking problem, more of a need for cash, and she didn’t even steal it. Her need to hurt me had blotted out even basic self-preservation. Under all my despair was a new fear now; fear of Jenny. She might as well have killed me, I thought, or at least sent someone to kick my ass.

I thought again about the men. The simple destruction of the money, the basis of those consensual trysts, now made every call an act of violence survived. I was shaking. I went back into my room and laid down on my futon. With both doors open to the beautiful day, I passed out.

When I awoke it was evening. The wind had stirred up on the hill and was blowing through my apartment like a little hurricane. My broken doors whined on their hinges. I padded into my kitchen, still in my whore clothes: a shimmery skirt-cheap from Ross-and a blousey lady-shirt, sheer, the ghost of my push-up bra a hazy vision beneath the fabric. Jenny had loved me in my whore outfits, months back when we had first hooked up. She had thought the getup hilarious, and it was. I remember her sitting squat on the dank wooden floor of my bedroom, her tiny hand spidering out around the fat bottle she was drinking from. Red-cheeked and giggling, she watched my transformation. I strung the lingerie around my body, pulling back my fried hair, removing my heavy horn-rimmed eyeglasses, and dusting my lids with shimmery powder. We’d fucked that first time, there on the floor, the splintery wood scraping my ass, scuffing my Payless pumps, and I didn’t even care; her mouth cold from the beer and tasting of bubbles.

Three months is not a long time for a relationship unless you’re a dyke. After the first few days, we were together all the time; I knew her story and she knew mine. We had one real good month together, and then things started to slip. She’d get moody and I’d turn bitchy in reply. We stopped fucking at home and instead did it in bar bathrooms, when the first flush of alcohol-induced good mood washed over her. By the time we got back to one of our places she’d be in a different state, sour, and we’d fight. I always regretted it. I know better than to argue with a drunk person-both my folks were drunks and it’s like trying to have a logical conversation with some loony on the street. My points may have been good, may have been right, but in the morning Jenny wouldn’t remember anything I said. It took a full month of things being real lousy between us for me to call it off, and I was ashamed that I’d stuck around that long. But she never stopped looking good to me; and she had charm, a glow that the beer both fed and ruined.

In my kitchen, I startled a small, feral cat; a black thing mottled with bits of orange. So tiny, it hissed ferociously and darted out my back door into the weeds. I tried to jam the door shut but it was useless. Same with the one upstairs. I made coffee and emptied the dregs of a box of cereal into a bowl, dousing it with soy milk. I tried to get a plan together. Even though I always had my rent ready on the first of the month, I made a point not to pay Larry until the fifth. I liked to put off spending my money until the last possible moment. The first was four days ago; at the time I had had all my rent and more. Today was the fifth and I had one hundred and fifty dollars. Rent for this damp but spacious basement apartment was seven hundred dollars. People liked to tell me I had a good deal. They would gasp when I told them. Seven Hundred Dollars? And You Live All By Yourself? They would moon dreamily. I suppose it was a good deal, and that said a lot about this town. I would have to tell Larry that I didn’t have the money. I decided against telling him about the break-in. I didn’t want him knowing I kept my cash in a box rather than a bank; didn’t want him to know about my romantic drama, or anything about me whatsoever. It was none of his business. I’d tell him that I’d have it for him as soon as possible, and leave it at that. Let the fucker evict me, what did I care. I seemed to have awoken at a certain bottom. All I could figure to do was call my service and have them put me on call twenty-four hours a day for the indefinite future, and then try not to think too hard about what that would really entail.