Late at night, as I smoke cigarettes, I can hear my telephone ringing through the open door downstairs. It’s just past last call and I know the ringing won’t stop for hours. I stand and smoke in the chill until it’s quiet. The man across the street tries to speak to me when I let myself into Larry’s with the key I took from his pocket. I ignore him. It makes him mad and he yells, and his yells inspire the dog, and I close my door on the decaying block and all of its angry inhabitants.
In the night, it is the hardest to be here; when I come back from a call and the television greets me. I have thousands of dollars in my box. I’ve been working so hard, so very hard.
Lately, I imagine I can smell him-the scent of Larry’s collapsing body coming out from under the bathroom door on a terrible breeze. Certainly it is time to leave. I think I would like to live in Russian Hill; in a glinting apartment with a chandelier in the lobby and a man who holds the door open as I come and go.
I stand on the back stairs in the afternoon light; and when my cigarette is half-done, I look down and see that man-the one who lives in his undershirt-standing in the weeds beneath me, looking up. And I know before I see her that Jenny is behind him.
THE OTHER BARRIO BY ALEJANDRO MURGUÍA
The Mission
It stood on the corner of Sixteenth and Valencia-the Apache Hotel, a once elegant residence for out of town visitors, more recently a rundown joint for several dozen single men and some desperate families. Every time I go by the spot I still hear the screams, the cries for help of those who were caught in the fire the night the Apache Hotel burned down.
The newspapers screamed the headlines the next day: SEVEN DEAD IN FIRE. It didn’t state the cause, but I knew I would be dragged into it. And I didn’t want to be dragged into it. I had cited the place three times, but not for fire hazards, just the common stuff-garbage and rodent infestations. Had there been a fire hazard, God himself could not have stopped me from making sure the owner took care of it that very day. Now it was going to come down on me. That’s why Choy had taken me off the case. He was my shithead boss at the Department of Building Inspections, and my job was on the line if my report had failed to mention a fire hazard, which it did not. Seven people had died and I wasn’t going to carry those dead. They weren’t my dead. Let whoever killed them carry them.
It was Friday evening, and Choy’s order to report for a Monday morning meeting had appeared on my desk as I was leaving work. I decided to take my file on the Apache Hotel with me; I had the weekend to find the cause of the fire. Sometime after my Wednesday inspection, maybe thirty-six hours afterwards, the place had burned down in a raging fire. It’s not easy for a building that size to burn that fast. No one downtown was talking, to the papers anyway. This wasn’t going to be easy or fun to be involved with. But it wasn’t just my skin on the line-there was my own outrage at what had happened. There was no reason for those people to have died. No reason at all.
The fire had likely started early Friday, about 3:00 in the morning. The newspapers mentioned witnesses and I had to track them down and get their story firsthand. In particular, the person who’d called 911. They’d been identified as workers leaving a nightclub. I’d have to hang around the ’hood till 2 a.m. to interview them. In the meantime, I was nursing a beer in a little dive on Twenty-fourth Street; mindlessly staring at the yellow spot on the brown bottle neck, trying to make sense of this case and my own life.
I was living in a former can factory on Alabama Street, now converted into a den of unwashed but creative folks, who’d taken the iron-age dinosaur and made it somewhat habitable. Now the dot-comers were popping up like mushrooms in cow shit. Or you’d see them cruising in their beemers, calculating how much it would take to run everybody out of here. And in all irony, I was working for the city as a building inspector. I wasn’t interested in being a cop, I just made sure that rental units were habitable for human beings. My girlfriend Amanda had left me. Going to our formerly happy loft usually put me in a funk of depression, so I stayed away as much as I could. Usually in places like this, bars without names outside, a couple of Mexicanos shooting an easy game of pool, and Miss Mary from San Pedro Sula, with her smile wide as her hips, pouring a beer.
Don’t get me wrong, the city is beautiful, but I live in another barrio. The dirty, low-down, underbelly side of town. Places that practically make the hovels of Calcutta look like the Taj Mahal. The garages turned into in-laws where three families live packed tight and desperate as boat people. Closets redone into bedroom suites. Such is life. And death. I was going to go visit death at 9 o’clock in General Hospital. In the morgue where the dead are kept. She wasn’t dressed liked you expect but there is no mistaking her when you meet her.
At 9 o’clock I met La Pelona face-to-face in the basement morgue of General Hospital. A Samoan in scrubs and flip-flops led me into a walk-in cooler the size of a taquería. Inside were row upon row of gurneys, each with their own stiff. He pointed out a corner where seven of them were stretched out on the floor. “We ran out of tables,” he laughed. I took no offense.
When I lifted the sheet on the first one, I was surprised to see the face was contorted like those mummies of Guanajuato, but unburned. “What happened?” I asked.
“They died of smoke inhalation,” the Samoan said.
Nobody even knew these poor bastards’ names. I could see the process that would now start: immigration tracking clues, an envelope with a name, or perhaps a phone number in one of their pockets. Find their hometown, relatives most likely, and tell them. Arrange for transportation. These guys were human sacrifices-but to what god? Why did I go see them? I wanted the rage to keep me going.
Valencia Street on a Friday night is an hormiguero. Suburbanites afraid of their own shadow crawling around in groups of ten. Sometimes more. One of them was standing on the corner, speaking into his little cell phone, asking for directions, looking like a character in that TV show Lost. It’s for them the ruins are being created, the families forced out, the murals destroyed. The other night I overheard one of them ask, “What’s this neighborhood called?” And her blond friend replied, “I don’t know, but it used to be called the Mission.”
I slid behind the counter at the Havana Social Club, the walls covered with the photos of poetas, famous and obscure, many of them dead. I ordered the specialty of the house, ropa vieja. Don Victor had the box booming “Chan Chan” by Compay Segundo. I’d just heard that Compay had checked out after ninety-three years of smoking cigars and that his real name was Francisco Repilado. This year my poet-friend-brother Pedro Pietri had moved to the other barrio, too. And today was the anniversary of my comadre’s death, whom I’d known thirty years. Now there were seven more checked into the other barrio.
The dead were all around me, urging me to keep on living, to keep their memory alive.
I paid up about midnight and still had two hours to kill.
I stepped outside and there was a white SUV with its engine running at the curb. Two creeps with necks like wrestlers sat inside. The uglier one rolled out.
“You Morales?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Mike Callahan wants to speak with you.”
“I’ll have to check my social calendar.”
The creep said nothing but opened the back door for me. He was maybe six-feet-four, three hundred pounds with his suit on.
“I was going that way myself,” I said.
I named the muscle-head driving Huey, and the ugly one Dewey. I knew Callahan, Irish Mafioso, head of a renegade builder’s association; he moved around City Hall like a man with a lot of muscle behind him, which he had. Muscle, but not the brains. The thugs he’d sent to pick me up were quiet the whole time they drove. Except when Dewey farted and Huey said to him in all seriousness, “God bless you.”