“Let’s move to the Mission,” Maggie says. We’re lying diagonally across the bed, my prick turning soft beneath the covers.

It’s hard to hear her over my post-coital breathing. “You could use a change in scenery, and there’s so much going on.”

“Uh-huh,” I grunt. She knows how much I hate that neighborhood.

On the sidewalk, bums sell crap that’s clearly stolen: mismatched socks and frayed paperbacks and bent silverware. It’s a pain to drive with all the accordion buses choking intersections, surrounded by hundreds of oblivious Mexicans piled into pickup trucks, as if driving a beater extra slow counts toward a green card. Once at 16th and Valencia, I saw a drunk guy pass out and dent a Mercedes with the back of his skull. And if you’re into shootings, just walk down Capp Street after dark wearing red.

“Give it a chance, Mr. Rock Star,” she murmurs, her hands buffing my chest. “The Mission is so… alive.”

“Really alive,” I agree. “That’s what you get with so many wild animals in one place.”

“Andy, come on. They’re working-class people trying to make a living.”

“With criminals and illegal immigrants heavily overrepresented.”

She pulls away, her forehead messed with lines. “Don’t be a jerk.”

I pop out of bed, throw on some sweats, and grab my cigarettes.

The wind blasts into me when I open the door, and I charge through a sustained gale up the hill to the blistering viewpoint at the top of Lafayette Park. The electric city slopes down to the bridge, early wisps of fog, stars pricking the night. Russian Hill is a classic San Francisco neighborhood, with inspirational vistas and world-class restaurants and nice clean sidewalks where I can walk Maxwell without worrying he’ll poke his nose in human feces. The Mission, on the other hand, has more of a Mexico City feel, possibly with more dirt. I sit on a log and smoke amid the swirling gusts, thinking how this wind’s nothing compared to subzero nights back in Minneapolis, saliva freezing on cigarette filters and frozen brick hands and guitars warping out of tune, rehearsing in my grandma’s icy basement and taking turns in front of a shitty electric heater. I resolve to boycott the Midwest for the rest of my life, and when the pack’s gone I head home feeling better, the urge to fight flushed out of the system.

She’s watching a classic movie in the theater, tin voices and overbearing orchestral arrangements. I yell over cheerfully that there’s no way we’re moving, then call up my favorite Thai joint to bring over some curry. I’m all settled in with Maxwell, watching football when Maggie shuts off the lights and unplugs the TV. It takes me forty minutes to talk her out of the bathroom, and she only comes out when I agree to look into it.

Couple days later, I call up my manager about finding a place. He sends over a broker named Maurice, smiley and suited, a former fan club president.

“It’s a real honor to meet you,” he says. Soft hands and long watermelon- rind ears, a chubby puppy. “I saw Viper back in ’97,” he tells me.

“I was in Paris on my honeymoon. You blew the roof off.”

The European tour remains a source of great pride for me. We were still clean and honest, prophylactic users, tourists really. The music came first. “Thanks,” I say.

“I’ve heard rumblings about a comeback tour,” Maurice continues.

“Any truth to that?”

I give him my boilerplate blank look, not a drop of enthusiasm.

“I’m working on some solo projects. We haven’t talked about it.” But our agents have, scheduling tentative dates and monster profits but still unable to track down Jalil, the goddamn star singer, off somewhere in the Himalayas meditating and screwing sheep.

Maurice straightens his back and holds his arms out wide. “You’re not gone yet,” he sings, a husky but decent Jalil impersonation. “You’re not gone yet.”

“Not bad,” I admit. It’s gratifying to find people who remember our music, a corner of their memory filled with our songs instead of their anniversary or the capital of Indiana. I decide that Maurice will soon be the owner of an autographed CD.

“The Mission,” he says. “Never woulda guessed.”

A week later he sends me a secret pre-market listing, for rich guys only. Four bedrooms, granite countertops, Jacuzzi tub, wood-burning fireplace, sweeping views. On the computer screen it looks palatable, and I authorize a private viewing appointment for the next day.
I meet Maggie when she gets off work and we cab it down Mission Street. Buildings mutate from high-tech malls to windowless compounds to a jumble of cheap crap, roach restaurants and abandoned movie theaters, paint peeling off signs, discount stores, porn shops. On the sidewalk gangbangers slap-fight amid piles of litter; crackheads piss in alleys. I have to roll up the window from all the cha cha music, the tubas slamming against my brain.

“Unacceptable,” I declare.

“Limón is around here,” she says. “And Delfina.”

The new executive chef at Limón is Leon Gonzales, probably the most exciting cook of the past decade. His tandoori salmon surpasses anything else I’ve ever put in my mouth, a list which includes several pairs of coveted celebrity breasts. “Huh.”

“And Dolores Park is nearby,” she says, “for Maxwell.”

“Maxwell doesn’t like parks,” I clarify. “He’s far too ruminative.”

“I know,” she says, and tickles my chin.

A few blocks later live drums slap down the street. More tuba. Lots of yelling, blended crowd noise. Up ahead I see police motorcycles, a river of people dressed in black. We’re stuck at the light for three rotations as the death march saunters by.

“For fuck’s sake,” I say. “Can’t you go around?”

“Dia de los Muertos,” the cab driver says. “There’s nowhere to go.”

I open the door and get out. Skeletons cartwheel through the intersection, dwarfed by tall, bony, plastic puppets hopping in place. Hundreds of candles flicker inside handheld paper cones. Patchwork bands plomp out funeral marches, the musicians parading in black clothes, black shoes, black socks, skin painted black like commandos, a euphoric anarchist carnival. “No formal parade route,” the cab driver explains, “they just traipse around wherever.”

“We’re pretty close,” Maggie says, opening her purse. “Why don’t we just hoof it?”

I watch the people hollering, flouncing, dancing jigs, twisting in circles. Sputtering and laughing, joyous with death.

Two Latina teenagers stick out their tongues at me and giggle.

“Come on,” Maggie says. “Andy?” She takes my arm and pulls me through the crowd. She thinks I’m sad because of Jalil. That’s what it usually is.

“How about a drink?” I propose. “We have time.”

“You’re on antidepressants.”

“So what?” I respond, and pull her toward a dive called The Bus Stop. I get liquor. The joint is packed with masks and tattered clothes, ghouls and demons galore.

“Wasn’t Halloween Sunday?” I ask. I’m pretty sure it was Monday morning when Maggie reported that no kids came by, the jack-o-lantern drum set on the front steps that I carved myself all for naught, like I was too washed-up even for free treats. I stayed down in the basement all night, listening to old records and chain-smoking.

“It’s Day of the Dead,” she says. She swirls her vodka with one firm shake. “It’s about saying goodbye to people who’ve passed away.”
“Cool name for a song.”

“An excellent name for a song. Even an album.” She pulls my hand toward her and pushes her thumbs into my palm, a new massage technique she’s learning. It hurts at first but gets soft and fuzzy as the wires loosen.

“So you really want to live with all these corpses?”

“There’s a spirituality in the Mission,” she says, tracing my fingers.

“A depth. I think it will help your music.”

I want to tell her that the only thing that matters in music is luck, bumping into bona fide geniuses like Jalil and following directions with minimal mistakes. I want to tell her that my music is not majestic or even all that proficient, but I know she loves the sounds I make on the drums, gimmicky pops and cheat-sheet thuds and overcompensating cymbal crashes, and if I don’t have that for her I don’t know what’s left.

A round arrives unordered. We look the bar over. All the dead ignore us, a bubble around our table. But as I watch the room closely I detect surreptitious glances from the corners of cocktails, scruffy-haired grim reapers sneaking cell-phone pictures under tables.

“They recognize you,” Maggie whispers.

“It’s possible,” I allow.

“You love it,” she observes. “And I love that you love it. You’re not ashamed.” She pulls my hand onto her steel-hard legs and gives me a small, gentle kiss that activates every hormone in my body.

Ecstasy curls over me and instantly departs, replaced by the gravity of somber truths. Maggie’s gorgeous and sensual, runs her own chiropractic clinic, never asks for money, but still she won’t marry me no matter how much I ask.

Slowly she unwraps my fingers, pats my knee, fishes her cell phone out of her purse, and dials. Air squeezes from my throat, my arms turn weightless. I am a hundred miles removed, watching myself through high-powered opera glasses. I chug the rest of my Jack and Coke and look wildly around the room until I find the pool table, draped with blinking orange lights, faux spider webs strung down from an overhead lamp fashioned out of Corona bottles.

“Maurice? Just wanted to let you know we’re running late. Stuck in traffic.” Maggie winks at me. “Oh, you too? That’s funny!”

“Gonna play some pool,” I huff, and pry myself out of the booth.

The pool table is plush green velvet with shiny balls and cubes of chalk chained to the corner pockets. Two overweight girls are playing, black hoodies and noses stitched with silver beads.

“Can I get in?” I ask.

“Wait, aren’t you Andy Springs?” one of them asks.

“Yep.” It’s my default answer to band-related inquiries, accurate but not cocky, though a little flippant to some.

“Cool. You get winner.”

I lean against the wall and watch them play an atrocious round, laughing through scratches and flat-out misses, the fog of celebrity botching their shots. Back at the table, Maggie chats with a couple of scrawny guys dressed up as devils, their hair streaked with gold and topped with rubber horns. They’re probably grilling her about me, do I still talk with Jalil, how long is my prick. When they eventually look over I freeze them with my blank stare, then turn back to the game just in time to watch the cue ball sail off the table.

Finally one of the girls downs the eight ball. “I’ll rack ‘em,” I say, and as I push in my quarters “Electric Dawn” comes on the juke, easily our greatest track, the song we always saved for encores and award shows, with a nifty drum fill in the bridge that took me six weeks and a rhythm consultant to come up with.

“Hey!” the girl I’m playing yelps. “Isn’t this you guys? With the music video on the sun?”

“Yep.”

“Awesome!” She beats her hands against her thighs, her cadence charmingly wrong. “That one drum part, it’s so cool. You can feel the sun coming up.”

Usually I say that’s exactly right, I was replicating dawn’s first light, morning hope vaporizing dark. But it’s not the truth. “It was just something cool I came up with,” I explain. “It took a long time to figure out.”

Jalil starts the first verse motor-voiced. All around us ghosts are dancing.

“Well, it’s a real ass-kicker,” the girl shouts over the music.

“Yep.” The word Jalil always used was “epic.” He wanted us to be remembered for scope. I feel an urge to explain this, and am about to do so when the chorus kicks in and the entire bar sings along in fifty-part harmony. The floor sways, the bartenders stop mixing. A couple guys standing by the jukebox break through the din, really belting it out, eyes closed and arms wrapped around each other, tottering sideways like baby penguins.

I run to the bar and grab the nearest bottle. “Here,” I say, and pull a hundred-dollar bill from my wallet. The bartender holds it against a lamp and squints while I trot back to the pool table and unscrew the top. “To kicking ass,” I proclaim, and take a long swig. Tequila scrapes my stomach and I pass the girl the bottle.

She smiles big and sloppy. “OK,” she says, and sucks it. I stamp my feet and pound the pool table, pacing Jalil’s peaks and valleys. Maggie slides behind me and puts her hands on my waist. The lights dim as the song gains steam; the tequila bottle floats across the room. When the break comes my hands move on autopilot, notch for notch, a blast of light, everyone in the bar watching me knock it down, and then Jalil brings it back with his wrenching, longing call that always hurts to listen to.

Maggie clasps me tight. She knows how the song stabs me.

“If only that assface would listen,” I mutter, and the pool-playing girl bobs her head, in agreement that it was Jalil who made us heroes, the Buddhist megastar with pipes of glass.

“You’re not gone yet,” she sings with Jalil’s wasted voice, “you’re not gone yet.”

Matt Stewart’s fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, Iron Horse, Pindeldyboz, and other literary journals. A former Mission resident, Matt nurses his love-hate relationship with the Mission from his home in neighboring Bernal Heights. His latest project is a father-son bike trip through Eastern Europe in search of family roots. Follow along at http://stewartbiketrip.blogspot.com.

Art by Veronica de Jesus. Veronica was born in Cleveland. Her Catholic Puerto Rican father raised her. She currently lives and makes art in Oakland. Many of her drawings shown in issue 6 are included in her book, A Handful of Some Pretty Special People, available at SF’s Dog Eared Books.

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