The Dead Do Not Improve by Jay Caspian Kang Read Free Book Online Page A

padlocks. But until then, people like me are just going to have to feel ashamed.

    I PUT ON my pants and walked down to the twenty-four-hour Laundromat/Internet café. Nobody was there save the old Chinese woman at the attendant’s station. She pointed at the empty row of Internet kiosks and then at a sign. I put five dollars on the counter and sat down.
    There was an e-mail from Bill admonishing me for not giving my opinion on a bukakke video and another, sent a couple minutes later, asking if I was planning on coming in to work tomorrow. I opened up the drafts folder to see if there were any e-mails I had started but never bothered to finish. I read a couple of lit blogs, but they weren’t depressing enough, so I read the local news. The Baby Molester led the crime section. The story hadn’t changed, save for the proliferating comments, which were all awful because they made the world seem like it was filled only with people who cared very deeply about the fate of the world.
    At the bottom of the third page, there was an ad for something called the Dignity Project.
    CLICK TO GO TO THE DIGNITY PROJECT. WE PROVIDE YOU WITH MORE THAN THE CHRON’S POLICY OF TURNING VICTIMS INTO STATISTICS!
    I complied.
    THE DIGNITY PROJECT
    thedignityproject.com
    … MORE THAN JUST STATISTICS
    DOLORES ALLISON STONE
    B: DECEMBER 15 1951. BAKERSFIELD, CA
    D: MAY 12 2009. SAN FRANCISCO, CA
    Dolores Allison Stone was born in Bakersfield, California, on December 15, 1951, the third child and second of twin daughters born to Frederick Jackson Stone and Elizabeth Davis Stone. Like so many young women who grew up in Southern California, Ms. Stone was drawn into acting at an early age, appearing in minor roles in a series of television sitcoms. At the age of seventeen, most likely frustrated by her seeming lack of headway in show business, Ms. Stone ran away to San Francisco, where she quickly became a Haight Street celebrity named Brown Beaver, best known for her brazen sexual exhibitionism and her revival (political) of ancient Native American dress. This second San Francisco act led to much media exposure for Ms. Stone, who most notably appeared in
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
, Joan Didion’s fabled essay on Haight Street during the Summer of Love. Not much is known about Ms. Stone’s life in the 70s. A marriage certificate from Modesto, California, shows that she was married to an Andrew Stein on April 5, 1975, a union that, according to state records, ended less than a year later. There are no tax records for Ms. Stone during this period.
    Ms. Stone reentered the public record in 1978, when she starred in a series of adult films for Stable Abel Productions, a SanFrancisco–based company led by fabled pornographer Abel Brill. According to a variety of sources, most notably Ms. Stone’s much-updated livejournal.com page, she and Mr. Brill shared an on-again, off-again romance for the good part of a decade before Brill succumbed to liver cancer in 1987. Throughout that period of time, Ms. Stone appeared in over 350 Stable Abel films under a variety of aliases.
    Starting in 1992, Ms. Stone worked as a volunteer at a Hunters Point orphanage. Although the details of her duties cannot be adequately confirmed, it is assumed that she did mentoring work for at-risk urban youth.
    In addition to her film and philanthropic work, Ms. Stone remained actively involved in the local music scene, rejoicing in the Bay Area’s wealth of concerts and festivals. Here is an excerpt from her live journal, dated December 12, 2005.
    Music is everywhere! Every morning, I wake up to the sweet, somber sounds of ranchero music floating up the alley by my bedroom window. How wonderful and soul affirming to wake up to all those sad men weeping over lost loves. Then I walk out to my front stoop and hear the music of the block, the grinding of the cars, the flutterings of paper being blown over the sidewalks, the honking horns and the thump-thump of the neighborhood kids