Telegraph Avenue (32 page)

Goode lifted a hand to his cheek and patted it as if checking the closeness of his morning shave or monitoring a toothache.

“You used to read comic books?” Archy said.

“Most definitely.”

“You were reading a comic book.” Archy took hold of the line with both hands and hauled up the afternoon, streaming years like water. “I’m thinking it was a Marvel book, but—”

“It was
Luke Cage
,” Goode said, picking off the memory from Archy like a bobbled pass. Too positive about it, stripping the ball.

“Was it?”

“Yeah,
Luke Cage, Power Man
. And we got into a discussion, a long discussion,” turning to Walter, who lifted his head from his hands and stared, the food on his plate sitting there untouched. “Got ourselves way down deep.”

With the sunglasses, the smile that twisted Goode’s mouth could not be read for levels of irony or nostalgia.

“Well,” Archy began.

“This motherfucker was peeling off all these sophisticated interpretations. Inner meanings. In
Luke Cage
. Talking about the American penal system as portrayed in Marvel Comics. Referencing all kinds of heavy reading materials. Eleven, twelve years old, telling me what, like, Frantz Fanon has to say about the possibility of black superheroes in a white superpower structure and whatnot.”

“Huh,” Walter said, looking doubtful, life returning to him in the form of irritation. This claim was almost certainly 90 to 97 percent false. The shimmer of what Archy remembered from that afternoon at House of Wax was only an awkward mutual series of passwords exchanged, the chance encounter with a random nerd brother in an unexpected location. Right up to this very instant Archy possessed no theory of black superheroics, only a vague idea of who Frantz Fanon was, and apart from the redoubtable Black Panther, particularly during the operatic run of McGregor-Graham on the book, Archy had never taken particular interest in the skin color of the comic book
superheroes he loved, most of whom, now that he thought about it, had been white. The world in which those characters lived and operated was plainly not the world in which Archy lived, and on the whole that was the way he preferred it. On that long-distant afternoon at House of Wax, there had been no theory spun, no deep knowledge displayed. Goode was flattering him, either because he was a flatterer or because he wanted to see if Archy was a hound for flattery. Archy had to admit that there was something gratifying about the flicker of envy he saw in Walter’s eyes as Goode falsely lionized his critical acumen at eleven.

“You have a better memory than I do,” Archy suggested, guarded, leery, unable to shake a feeling not just that he was stepping out on Nat Jaffe, up here dining on shrimp and flattery and all kinds of piquant sauces, but that he was in over his head, that he was going to be edged into doing something or agreeing to something that he did not want to do or agree to, into something at least that he did not understand, some kind of business being transacted by Goode and Flowers that would prove costly to Luther Stallings, maybe other people, too. To judge from things Archy had read about G Bad, as well as from memories of watching him on television as he conducted instantaneous Einstein-deep analyses in the pocket under a heavy rush (not to mention the simple fact that he was visiting the man in the cabin of his personal zeppelin that flew on the gas of burning dollars), Gibson Goode was smarter than Archy on many levels. “But I remember you, and I remember your uncle.”

Goode got up and went over to a beautiful Thorens semi-automatic, perched atop a low plastic cabinet that formed part of the plastic wall of the cabin. On a shelf along the bottom of the cabinet, beneath the turntable, a row of LPs lounged like boys at lazy angles. Beside the albums, a steel mesh box held a couple of dozen 45s. Goode flipped through them, chose one, and did what he needed to do to the turntable to switch it over to forty-five revolutions per minute.

“Name that tune,” he said.

He lowered the tonearm, and from a pair of speaker grilles, a drum pattern emerged and repeated itself,
b-boom boom CHICK!
in 4/4 time, the kick muffled, mixed very dry and miked with the attention to detail that marked 1970s recording of drums but partaking, through having been sampled so many times by subsequent hip-hop acts, of a timelessness beyond period or style.

“Manzel,” Archy said, knowing that he was being tested, thinking it was kind of a bullshit move and yet incapable of resisting the challenge, which was hardly a challenge at all. “ ‘Midnight Theme.’ That was on the, uh, Fraternity label. 1975.”

The single played on, adding textures, stacking up layers. A moody wash of piano, a stab of ARP strings. The swirl and growl of a Hammond B-3 played through the whirling orrery of a Leslie cabinet. Scritch-scratch guitar, coming in on the 2, along with paired lines of space-funk Minimoog that sidled in, late arrivals, to carry the melody and bass line, that Minimoog sound popping the bubble of timelessness and returning the track, comfortably, to its home in the mid-1970s.

“Sounds good,” Archy said. “Nice pressing.”

“Know where I bought it?” Goode said.

“W
as on Saturday afternoon,” Goode said. “Walter here had told me about you, your store. Thought I should check it out. I had to be up here anyway. So I came in the store, your boy was there. Nat, right? Said you was home, gone for the day, some shit.”

“Yeah, I had to meet somebody.” Archy kept his thoughts off that last encounter with Mr. Jones, ran back the tape on every conversation he’d had with Nat since Saturday that had contained the words “Gibson Goode,” looking for hints of guilty knowledge, a secret suppressed. “Damn. MVP quarterback media mogul comes in our store, cagey motherfucker never says a word to me.”

It did not strike Archy as the kind of thing Nat was likely to keep quiet about, let alone forget.

“He didn’t know me,” Goode said. “I was just a customer. Between you and me, dude didn’t seem too keen on making conversation. Up there at the cash register all mumbling to himself, making these fucked-up Keith Jarrett noises, like
hnnh
. Only wasn’t any piano around.”

“He has days like that,” Archy said.

“To be honest,” Goode said, “I mean, look here, y’all have a nice store and everything. Really nice. Lot of charm, inventory goes deep, goes wide. But it wasn’t just your partner that seemed kinda out of it. Business seemed pretty fucking slow.”

“We’re doing all right.”

“Oh, really? I stayed twenty-two minutes, I was the only one in the place the whole time. That place was
desolate
. On a Saturday afternoon.”

“But I mean, Saturday was a beautiful day,” remembering the scent of honeysuckle in sunshine, the knock-knock of Mr. Jones’s pipe against the sidewalk, “lot of folks were probably—”

“Your partner up by the cash register, all groaning and moaning. Felt like I was in the motherfucking
Omega Man
in there. Last man alive, trapped with a zombie.”

For the first time since they came in sight of the
Minnie Riperton
, Walter smiled and burped up something that sounded like a laugh. Archy turned away, watching the approach of Berkeley as they turned to the north. Anger and shame braided themselves like wires through his interior cabinetry, with shame carrying the greater flow. He did not like to stand there while G Bad or anyone tore off woof tickets about Brokeland, which, along with some of the sounds that had issued at times from his Fender Jazz Bass, Archy had always considered the only truly beautiful thing he had ever made. He knew that he and Nat were financially circling the spindle in an ever narrowing gyre. Now here came this man who could afford, even in these times of failing record chains and of infinite free downloadable libraries that fit in your hip pocket, to open a
bangin
used vinyl store, five times as big as Brokeland and tenfold deep and, just for the glory and goodness of it, let it fail, forever, inexhaustibly bankrolled by his media empire, his licensed image, his alchemical touch with ghetto real estate. Breezing into Brokeland on a Saturday afternoon, a king in mufti, come to lay his sandal upon the necks of the conquered.

Archy felt ashamed, too, remembering the longing that had stirred in him, not half an hour before, to throw over, once and for all, the burden of the store. Remembering the first time he had met Nat Jaffe, after that last-minute wedding gig up in the Oakland hills, Archy fresh from the Saudi desert, dragging his honorably discharged ass through the streets of Bush I America, disoriented, lonely, unable to connect to anyone, black or white. How he and Nat had sat on the floor of the Jaffes’ living room till five o’clock in the morning, little Julie asleep, Aviva out wrestling some other new human into the world. Nat rolled fat numbers packed with the Afghan butthair, threaded and hoary, that he routinely scored at that time, and stoned and cross-legged, they fell through the circular portals of Nat’s record collection, one after another, flat-out tumbled awestruck arm in arm like that team of chrononaut dwarfs in
Time Bandits
, through those magic wormholes in the fabric of reality. Archy was so impressed by the scope and detail but most of all by the passion—relentless, nettlesome, ecstatic, inspiring—of Nat’s knowledge when it came to music, “in all its many riches,” from Storyville whorehouse rags to South Bronx block-party sound-system battles. It had been a long time since Archy had seen a man so willing to betray himself by exuberance, by enthusiasm for things that could not be killed, fucked, or fed upon. Nat already dreaming of opening his own store, lacking only half the cash, half the records, and half the foolishness necessary for the undertaking.

“My partner is a cantankerous pain in the motherfucking ass,” Archy said, recalling the eagerness with which he had leaped at the chance to make up that holy trinity of shortfalls. “Also my best friend.”

He gazed down at Golden Gate Fields as it slid under them, the grandstand half full of losers, the horses blowing like confetti along the futile oval. They passed over the giant oil tanks of Richmond, ranked along the slopes like secondhand turntables on a pawnshop shelf. “Midnight” came to an end. The tonearm worked itself loose of the label’s edge and sought its well-deserved rest.

“Now,” Goode said. “I know you already know what it is we are planning to do in Temescal, and I gather the councilman already made a suggestion of what I might like to obtain from you in that direction.”

“You’re offering me a job,” Archy said.

“You could look at it that way. Or you could look at it, I am offering you a
mission
.”

“That’s right,” Walter said.

“I am building a monastery, if you like,” Goode said, warming up, “for the practice of vinyl kung fu. And I am asking you to come be my abbot. And, yeah,” with the enigmatic half-smile, “that does make me the Buddha, but don’t go too far down that analogy, ’cause, check it out, now I’m a bend it a little. What I am asking you to do, to be— Look here, did you ever read this book, Taku over there turned me on to it,
A Canticle for Leibowitz
?”

“Good book.”

“You know it. All right, then, look at it this way. The world of black music has undergone in many ways a kind of apocalypse, you follow me? You look at the landscape of the black idiom in music now, it is
post-apocalyptic
. Jumbled-up mess of broken pieces. Shards and samples. Gangsters running in tribes. That is no disrespect to the music of the past two decades. Taken on its own terms. I love it. I
love
it. Life without Nas, without the first Slum Village album, without, shit,
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
? Can’t imagine it. Can’t even imagine. And I’m not saying, just because we got sampling, we got no innovation happening. Black music
is
innovation. At the same time, we got a continuity to the traditions, even in the latest hip-hop joint. Signifying, playing the dozens. Church music, the blues, if you wanna look hard. But face it, I mean, a lot has been lost. A whole lot. Ellington, Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, we got nobody of that caliber even
hinted
at in black music nowadays, I’m talking about genius,
composers
, know what I’m saying? Quincy Jones. Charles Stepney. Weldon
Irvine
. Shit, knowing how to play the fuck out of your
instrument
. Guitar, saxophone, bass, drums, we used to
own
those motherfuckers. Trumpet! We were the landlords, white players had to
rent
that shit from us. Now, black kid halfway to a genius comes along? Like RZA? Can’t even play a motherfucking kazoo. Can’t do nothing but ‘quote.’ Like those Indians down in Mexico nowadays, skinny-ass, bean-eating motherfucker sleeping with his goat on top of a rock used to be a temple that could predict what time a solar eclipse was going to happen.

“I’m not going to blame nobody, and I don’t know what the reason is, because I haven’t studied it, and like with everything misfortunate in life, I bet there’s ten, twelve reasons for musical civilization getting wiped out by this here particular firestorm, what’s he call it in the book—?”

Goode glanced over at the bodyguard, Taku, who sat immersed in a copy of
Shonen Jump
magazine. “ ‘The Deluge of Flame,’ ” Taku said, not looking up.

“Record companies. MTV. Corporate radio. Crack cocaine. Budget cuts to music programs, high school bands. All that, none of that. Doesn’t make no difference. I’m saying we are living in the
aftermath
. All’s we got is a lot of broken pieces. And you been picking those pieces up, and dusting them off, and keeping them all nice and clean, and that’s commendable. Truly. What I’m offering you is a chance not just to hang them up on the wall of your museum, there, maybe sell one every now and then for some white dentist or tax attorney to take home and hang on his wall. I’m offering you, I’m saying, come on, let’s really put them out there where the
kids
are, where the future’s spending its money. Teach them. Explain what all those broken-up old pieces mean, why it’s all
important
. Then maybe one of those kids, maybe he’s going to come along, learn what you have to teach, and start to put things back together. If you feel me.”