I can't write that part first, I barely know these people yet. I need to take them through lots of adventures first, and I have to do background research. For this one, I was reading some terrific Asian-American history books recommended by a friend, because I knew the "Monica" character (I don't think that's going to be her name in the final draft but I'm rolling with it for now) was mixed-race like a lot of San Franciscans but I wasn't exactly sure of the details and how they all got together. And I'm still not, but I have a few touchstones that are all going into Ruth's closing argument.
Plus I got fascinated by the Abuela Livia character and the idea of Filipino dance halls where folks would get together to flaunt stupid American laws regarding who could get married and who was guilty of the crime of miscegenation. The Foghorn Theater is kind of a composite of the Mabuhay Gardens, the Fillmore Ballroom, and the Warfield. And I name-check the historic drag bar Finocchio's, which was right near the Mab and the Stone and the Condor Club back when it had light-up nipples.
In fact, I really wouldn't be surprised if this novel ends up having a dream sequence in which Abuela Livia appears to perform a big song-and-dance number about why her granddaughter needs to win this lawsuit. And this, ladies and gents, is why I'm not particularly afraid of AIs replacing me as a novelist.
--Yer Humble Author
CHAPTER ONE
The walls of the Foghorn Theater were vibrating as the current band stormed through their cover version of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, now with electronic percussion and an extended keyboard solo. Ruth was sitting upstairs, in an alcove reserved for ushers like her, along with other employees. Looking at a framed photo of a sixties rock star whose name she couldn't recall, sitting on the Foghorn stage holding an acoustic guitar.
Ruth hadn’t recognized him, or any of the other acts showcased in the photos and posters covering the walls. She had grown up home-schooled and isolated from pop culture, until the Miracle Of The Scholarship had happened, nearly ten years ago, thanks to the late Dottie Roberts. Who had grown up in the same small Wisconsin town as Ruth, and left for the greener grass of Minneapolis, and then Tampa Bay, and then San Francisco, where she had settled down, purchased a Victorian apartment building, and focused her attention on making money.
Dottie made quite a bit. Since she skipped past the husband-and-children stage, she left it all to a scholarship fund which granted ten lucky students a full ride through their bachelor’s and continuing all the way to doctorhood if they were so inclined. For one of those lucky students, the deal came bundled with the seventh floor apartment in said aforementioned Victorian apartment building. Which had no heat or elevators or laundry, and occasional spiders, but it was very close to a decent law school. From which Ruth had recently graduated.
Passing the bar had been easy. The hard part would be snagging a grown-up lawyer job before the apartment was passed along to the next lucky student, because it would take a lawyerly kind of salary to rent a new place. Ruth currently was only making an usherly kind of salary, which was enough to keep her fed, dressed, and supplied with electricity, but didn’t allow for many luxuries. She was signed up with seventeen different recruiters but was having trouble getting attention from employers. She was discovering most of them had a distinct preference for candidates who had gone to high school.
“I can’t get into this band.” Ruth’s co-worker Monica sighed. She was dressed the same as Ruth, in a retro usher’s uniform with a pillbox hat, a bib-front shirt and a floppy bow tie. In dark maroon, to compliment the polished redwood and wine-colored carpet.
Aside from the identical clothes, the two of them looked very different. Ruth had straight brown hair tied back in an elastic band, a minimal smudge of eyeliner, and sturdy black ankle-high boots with low heels.
Monica’s hair was currently both teal and purple, with a band of undyed black roots signifying it wouldn’t be long before she changed it to something new. Last month it had been pink and orange. She had piercings in her nose and left eyebrow, and four on each ear. Each of her fingernails was a different color. Colorful tattoos peeked from her wrist-length sleeves and knee-length skirt. She also had ankle-high boots, but they were Doc Martens in teal and purple paisley, matching her hair. Monica owned many colorful pairs of Doc Martens, and Converse high tops too. She also liked jewelry, and today she had on three necklaces and at least nine bracelets. Not the delicate kind made of metal, the cheap kind that popped with color.
“They didn’t draw much of a crowd,” Ruth said. Which was the reason the two of them were lounging on the couch in the employee alcove, waiting for it to be time to gesture the patrons toward the exit.
There were several other framed photos on the wall, and one of them depicted a women who strongly resembled Monica, standing in front of a big square microphone, flanked by horn players. Instead of loud jewelry she had flowers in her hair, which was styled in an intricate post-flapper cascade of curls. Instead of piercings, she had a heart-shaped mole on her cheekbone. Instead of an usher’s uniform she ore a dress slathered in beads and feathers. But the smile was the same.
The lady in the photo was Monica’s grandmother, Ruth had learned when she’d first started here. The Foghorn had began as a vaudeville theater where crooners and comics entertained the pre-television masses. In the twenties the floor seats were removed, transforming it into a dance hall, and that was when Olivia XXLASTNAME had charmed crowds with her vocals. The place fell into seedy disrepair in the sixties, but in the late seventies it became a punk club, and by the nineties, it was successful enough to deserve restoration, with new velvet seats and repainted ceiling cherubs. That burst didn’t last long, and these days it was a venue for up-and-comings, down-and-fadings, and never-going-anywhere-but-that’s-okays.
And Ruth still didn’t know much about all the pop culture she’d been shielded from. She occasionally encountered a song she wanted to hear again but eventually it all became ignored background noise as she dived into some wall of text, eyeballs first.
She liked being an usher, though. Right this way, spacy disoriented people. You’ve just been dazzled by a performance but fortunately I am immune to that sort of thing, so I shall be your guide. The alcohol is this way, in case you’d like to obliterate a few brain cells, but please don’t look like you’re about to barf, or I shall summon the bouncers.
“That band last week was fire,” Monica said. “Kind of Cajun hip-hop dance funk.”
Ruth and Monica had bonded in spite of their differences, or possibly because of them. Monica took her role as Ruth’s pop culture emissary quite seriously, patiently explaining terms like “shoegaze” and “ska.” She was as nerdy about music as Ruth was about her studies. In fact, both of them were likely to drone on happily about their obsessions to each other, even if only five or ten percent of it actually registered.
They were both nerdy about San Francisco. Monica was a fourth-generation San Franciscan and knew all kinds of cool historical details. She was always recommending out-of-the-way attractions like mosaic staircases and tiny parks, and Ruth had never been disappointed by her suggestions.
She thought of Monica as a friend. They had never been to each others’ houses or formally gone anywhere together, but they spent three to five nights a week at the theater, depending on the schedule, and there always seemed to be a slow moment where they could chat.
And Monica would have a drink. She liked her alcohol. She always smelled of it. After they’d been working together for a few years she mentioned to Ruth that she’d lost her license, so it was a good thing she lived in a place with good public transit. She wasn’t technically supposed to be drinking at work, but Ruth didn’t care. She never got sloppy and disruptive like some of the patrons occasionally did.
Ruth didn’t drink; instead she’d smile and shake her head, and apologetically say she wasn’t very good at vices. She didn’t like the taste of alcohol, or the effects, and she’d grown up in a completely dry household where it had no particular mystique.
She’d inhaled considerable amounts of second-hand cannabis, which was a popular thing in her neighborhood, and it didn’t do much for her. She wasn’t bothered by it, but she’d never sought it out on her own. She knew there were lots of other drugs available in San Francisco, such as the one that made people stand on the sidewalk bent over at a sharp angle, but she wanted nothing to do with them.
She wasn’t particularly interested in sex either. She knew that lots of people came to San Francisco for the sexual expression. She came here because it was free, but also because it was faraway, and exotic, and regarded with suspicion by her conservative family. Love hadn’t factored into the equation. Sometimes Ruth wondered if she was a lesbian, since she had zero interest in men, but then she had to reflect that she was probably straight, since she had zero interest in women.
Other times she assumed her libido was just hiding until she established herself in life. Education, job, income, home – once those things were nailed down she’d be free to think about finding a partner. Until that moment, she was quite aware that becoming overly fond of vices could destroy her plans.
And Monica had never initiated any kind of flirtation of any kind. That had happened to Ruth a few times when she was new in the city. Monica was more like an older sister, which made it slightly shocking to find out Monica had a daughter the same age as Ruth. Which she completely avoided mentioning until they’d known each other four or five years.
It had happened after Ruth dealt with a drunk patron who grabbed her butt – or tried to, but she managed to avoid him while signaling the bouncer. Who escorted the harasser to the sidewalk as he screamed about how he was the sexiest guy who had ever tried to be grab her, and she should be more appreciative.
“I wish my daughter was that good at rejection,” she’d said, impressed.
“You have a daughter?” Ruth had blinked.
“Oh yeah,” Monica replied. “She probably would’ve been appreciative.”
To be fair, Ruth never talked to Monica about her family, other than one time when they’d both been working Christmas Eve, and she’d matter-of-factly said she’d probably never see her family again. Monica had blinked at that.
They talked about everything else. Politics. School. Lawyers. Pop culture.
And Olivia XXLASTNAME, who was “the Mexican Peggy Lee” according to one of her posters. Monica explained that there was a time in the recent past when Filipinos, as well as other people of Asian descent, were not allowed to be United States citizens, just resident aliens. And there was a huge gender imbalance, so most of them were men. It wasn’t legal for white American women to marry Asian men, although some of them found solutions like conducting the wedding ceremony aboard a boat in international waters.
But they could marry Mexican-American women, and then their children would be American citizens, so lots of them did. Like Olivia, who had married her Filipino bandleader. And like quite a few of the women who frequented the Foghorn Theater in its dance hall days, to the consternation of the local Mexican-American men.
“She told me it was a lot like what the gays went through, having to meet in special bars and clubs, and sneaking around. You could get in all kinds of trouble for dating outside your race back then. She always loved her gay fans. She used to drag me to this bar called Finocchio’s. I was too young but people knew people, ya know, and I got to watch all these outrageous drag queens, and sometimes they’d dress up just like Abuela Livia back when she used to perform, except with bigger hair.”
Abuela Livia was merely one of Monica’s colorful ancestors. There was also a real live 1849er gold miner, a Honolulu picture bride, a Chinese waiter, the daughter of a Japanese strawberry farmer who lost his farm due to the internment during World War Two, a French-Canadian luthier who briefly ran a guitar shop in the lower Haight before becoming a meditation instructor at Esalen, a Russian restauranteur renowned for a trio of multilingual and blasphemous parrots who lived in a massive cage behind the bar.
Ruth, an adoptee, was in the dark regarding her own family tree. She enjoyed hearing about Monica’s. People back home had occasionally speculated Ruth might be part Mexican or Chinese or some other kind of person with dark straight hair, since quite a lot of the people living nearby had lighter and curlier hair. Especially in the summer, because she tended to tan fast.
“Are you working tomorrow, for that tribute band? I’ve got the night off. I’m getting sworn in tomorrow, so I’ll be officially allowed to practice law. A bunch of us are going to dinner after. I’m not going to drink but I might do karaoke if we go there.”
“Wow, sworn in! I remember when you were in your first year. Yeah, tomorrow’s sold out, but don’t sweat it. Their fans aren’t going to get rowdy. They’re all older than my mom. It’s gonna be -- ”
Monica’s phone, which was perpetually turned to silent, visibly vibrated in the pocket of her uniform. She sighed again and pulled it out.
Ruth saw “San Francisco Police Department” flash across the screen.
“Oh shit.” Monica stared at her phone for a moment before accepting the call.
Ruth stood up and moved away, giving her some space. “I’ll just go check on the –”
Monica’s phone clunked heavily to the floor. Ruth could hear a small amplified voice saying “identify the body. Hello?”
Monica was sitting absolutely still, with tears flooding from her eyes, streaking her mascara down her cheeks.
