The Dead Do Not Improve Read Online Free Page A

border. Mouth full of chicken, he pointed at the tape deck and said, “I can’t understand ninety percent what he say. Can you understand?”
    YEARS LATER, I told my history of jazz professor about this trip with my father to go see Dylan. I think I used the word “overrated.” He shook his head and said that I would never understand because I hadn’t been around to witness
Blonde on Blonde
, at least not in its proper context. As for my father, he said, “It’s hard to imagine how someone who didn’t live in America at the time could really
feel
Dylan, because, as you know, so much of Dylan is about the history, of course, within its proper musical context.”
    That was the first time I’ve ever really considered killing somebody. I really considered cracking his skull open with some funny object—a saxophone, a dildo, maybe.
    Something awful, dark, must have flashed across my face. He asked what was wrong.
    I CAN STILL feel that violence within me, but its pathways have become more twisted, serpentine, and, ultimately, inert. At least once a week, I’ll weigh the option of hurting someone. There’s never any pattern, or specificity, really.
    I used to think I could turn that violence into fiction—this idea was inspired, more than I’d like to admit, by Eminem—but fiction requires a steadier logic of who and why, good and bad, absurd and real. Violence, even when it’s supposed to be chaotic, is never truly chaotic. Poe’s ourang-outang, who rips apart the women of the Rue Morgue and stuffs them up in the chimney, is studied as the solution to a puzzle, or, misguidedly, as a racist allegory. What he is not, however, is simply a lustful orangutan who got away and killed some women. He is not a symbol of insanity.
    Were I a better writer, I’d make myself into that symbol.
    14 . Adam nodded off on the couch. It was four in the afternoon. I let myself out and walked back home. At the end of my block, I stood in front of the Laundromat’s exhaust and stared out at the lime trees as a whorl of fuzzy-smelling steam swirled around my feet. I thought, “This is a Stygian scene,” and then thought about the movie
Taxi Driver
, and then
Meet the Parents
. Despite my efforts, the steam and the fog rolling down from Noe Valley, the visions of Travis Bickle, and the repetition in my head of the words “The Baby Molester is dead,” all those signifyingthings couldn’t convince me that hell lay ahead. Instead, I wondered about my e-mail.
    Up the block, a blond head popped out of a gentrifier window. It was Performance Fleece. She was staring down at a sky blue Astro van double-parked outside my building. I didn’t want to make eye contact, so I took out my cell phone and started hitting random buttons. The word I spelled, incidentally, was “FLAMER.” I would’ve kept texting all the way to my front door, but as I passed the gentrifier condo’s graffiti-proof metal door, something splattered on the sidewalk next to me.
    It was a yogurt cup.
    I looked up. Performance Fleece jerked her head in the direction of the van.
    I wasn’t getting it. I worried my gigantic head would look even bigger from three stories up. Does distance, with its inexhaustible cache of favors, extend the same grace to us bobbleheads that it extends to the tanned, snaggle-faced gym addicts of San Diego?
    Something behind me buzzed. It occurred to me that professional basketball players, when viewed from the upper deck of an arena, always look like normal-size people. So, given that my head was approximately the size of a basketball, a woman’s basketball, it stood to reason …
    A second yogurt cup hit the sidewalk, this time accompanied by a plastic spoon. Performance Fleece’s head reappeared in the window. She looked disappointed in me. Not knowing what to do, I pointed at the yogurt cup and smiled. She shook her head in disbelief and mouthed something. From where I was standing, it looked like, “The gay, the gay,” but, after a