Telegraph Avenue (33 page)
Authors: Michael Chabon
“Huh,” said Archy. “So you want me to be Saint Leibowitz of the Funk.”
“More like, T., who was it? In that, what’s it?
Foundation
.”
“Hari Seldon,” Taku said.
“You can be Hari Seldon,” Goode said. “Preserving all the science till civilization gets reborn, man had a whole planet—”
“Terminus,” said Archy, right before the bodyguard could come out with it. Taku nodded once, solemn.
“Planet of the Negroes,” Walter said. “That’s what you should call your band. Y’all still play, right? You and your boy Nat?”
“When we can get the gigs.”
“What instrument he play, piano?”
“Some guitar. Mostly piano.”
“Like Bill Evans.”
“A touch.”
“Elton John. Barry Manilow.”
“Lennie Tristano,” Goode suggested.
“Actually,” Archy said, “Nat digs Tristano. Tristano sang at his birthday party, bar mitzvah, some kind of shit like that. And we already got a name, Walter, the Wakanda Philharmonic.” He looked at Goode, calling him out on the boyhood reminiscences, the secret comics-nerd lore. “I know, given our history, you can dig the reference.”
“I like it,” Goode said. “And speaking of names. How do you like this: the Cochise Jones Memorial Beats Department?”
“That’s nice. That’s a nice tribute. You ought to do that.”
“Come over, then. I will. I know you don’t believe me. But I’m not in it for the money. Record stores, brick and mortar, they’re dying. Large and small. Any fool can see that.”
“And so alls I have to do in return for this generosity? Is come up with an address for my pops. Is that right? Let Bank and Feyd pay the man a visit so they can give Luther something he wants very badly.”
“I don’t know too much about that,” Goode said. “Don’t want to know. Less I have to do with Luther Stallings, the better.”
“You know him?”
From behind his
Shonen Jump
, Taku made a kind of rhinoceros noise.
“We met,” G Bad said. “Brother came to see me, to be honest, I have to say, he actually did help me out with this Golden State deal. For real. But that was an accident, a side effect. Luther wasn’t trying to help nobody but himself.”
“You do know him.”
“I’ll say this: The man already got himself mixed up in it. Nothing you going to do can mix him up worse.”
“Mr. Goode,” Archy said. “Truly, I thank you for your generous offer, and how you took me up in your zeppelin, and fed me some truly delicious prawns. Oh, man! That hint of mole in the marinade? But even if I, like, followed my general lifelong policy and left the old man out of it? I already
have
a record store. A whole store that’s my own, half mine, not just a department in somebody else’s chain outlet, with bar codes and inventory software and probably a little badge with my name on it.” He tried to look through the lenses of Goode’s sunglasses, to send some Nat Jaffe–style gamma rays right on through that polarized plastic. “ ‘If you feel me.’ ”
“By this time next year,” Goode said, “you won’t have a store. You know that. You already dipping one wing in the water. I got three storage units in West Covina, any one of them carries inventory bigger and just as motherfucking deep as what you and your partner have on offer, at an average of three to five dollars less per disc, not to mention all the new music, too. Compilations, box sets, books and video relating to music, I open my doors four blocks away from you with all that, you are through.”
“No doubt,” Archy said, turning away from Goode to face the wide strip of windows at the front of the car.
“Aw,” Goode said. “You’re just being
stubborn
now. Stubbornness in the service of a mistaken notion is a vanity and a sin.”
“I have proven that many times in my life,” Archy agreed.
Gibson Goode joined Archy at the front window. They had turned east of north, and a great barren stretch of empty land forked with silver stretched out below them.
“That’s Port Chicago down there,” Goode said. “You know about that?”
“Yeah. Munitions ship exploded in World War II. Killed a mess of black sailors. Had to work as longshoremen in the Jim Crow navy. My grandfather was there, he got blinded, burned his lungs. Died like a year later.”
“My mom’s uncle was left deaf in both ears,” G Bad said. “Standing outside having a cigarette on a cargo pier almost a mile away.”
“I heard it was really a A-bomb,” Walter said. “That’s what I heard.”
Archy had heard this, too. A test bomb, pre-Hiroshima, that detonated prematurely as it was being loaded on a ship bound for some Pacific atoll. The whole thing covered up without too much trouble, all the victims of the blast being black, with no recourse except to keep on being dead. He did not entirely disbelieve it, thinking of the breast cancer that afterward clustered in Marin County, in the women of his family.
“Fireball was three miles wide,” Goode said. “Air was filled with burning Negroes falling out of the sky. Only thing they ever did wrong was try too hard and work too fast to fight somebody else’s war.”
“It was their war,” Archy said.
“Maybe. And Oakland was their town. Our town.”
“Giving me a history lesson,” Archy observed. “Going to tell me now’s my chance to make history as the presidente for life of the Cochise Jones Department of the Oakland Dogpile Thang. And strike a blow for the race by bailing out on my white oppressor, on the Man who was forcing my granddaddy to load so many carpet bombs so fast that he came raining down in pieces.”
“I might of been headed in that direction,” Goode said, rubbing his chin, little crooked smile. “Be honest, I was pretty much scrambling.”
“Got me up here with my old running buddy. Put those classic sounds on through an excellent system, maybe have too much bottom in your EQ settings, but whatever. Start me reminiscing about Luke Cage, House of Wax. Feed me all that good food. Playing on my nostalgia
and
my stomach, that is a highly effective approach.”
“So forget about the mission, Turtle,” Walter said. “It’s a damn job.” He had stationed himself on a bench at the precise center of the gondola, equidistant and out of view of all the windows. “Take it or don’t. Sooner you say something, sooner we can land this motherfucker.”
“It is a job,” Goode said. “And from what I understand, congratulations are in order, right? Got a baby on the way? Based on my observations of what you have going on down there at Brokeland Records, you all living up to the name so well, I’d say you might soon be looking for any kind of job. Forget about a sweet opportunity like this one, which, furthermore, as I tried to explain, has a chance to give you something important and meaningful to do with your life. Make your son proud of you.”
His son. Goode meant the unborn one, possibly a daughter who would be highly likely not to give anything resembling a fuck about the transition of the James Brown band from the Bernard Odum to the Bootsy Collins era; but Archy thought at once of Titus, face like a false panel, some unknown and possibly hostile intelligence peering out at his father and the world through the Judas holes of his eyes. Archy had only to consult the map of his own feelings toward the father who had abandoned him to know that a feeling of filial pride was the farthest kingdom, unreachable, beyond deserts and ice caps and seas. A job. A baby. Sons, daughters, wives, and lovers. Paychecks and payrolls.
“How far you can go in this thing?” Archy said abruptly, as they sailed beyond the void of dust and brackish silver where seven hundred Negroes had come to grief. Bearing for Mount Lassen, the Yukon, the moon.
“Huh?” Goode said.
“What’s the effective range?”
“On a tank of fuel? Five hundred miles. Except for gas and supplies, I mean, she don’t ever have to come down.”
“That sounds good,” Archy said. “That sounds like a plan.”
If sorrow is the consequence of pattern spoiled, then the bird was grieving, seeking comfort in the patter and tap of the baby’s shoes against the wooden floor, Rolando whaling away like Billy Cobham with the heels of his little Air Jordans, working himself around the room on his back, a human dust mop making a knight’s tour of the emptied-out living room, brown eyes grooving with vacant fixity all the while on the red tail feather and black eyebead of the parrot, for whose care, removal, or ultimate disposition no instructions had been given to Rolando’s mother when she was directed to clear out the place by the executor of the Cochise Jones estate, a modest affair carefully depleted by sixty-plus years of foolishness, most of what remained of it tied up in vinyl records, the rest in vintage leisure suits (Aisha had counted twenty-two), the fatal Hammond, a Yamaha keyboard on a cross-legged metal stand, furniture fit only for the Ashby BART flea market, and the Antarctic architecture of Mr. Jones’s so-called files, towers and peaks and drifts of paper everywhere, which Aisha shoveled into cardboard banker boxes—gas bills, doctor bills, communications from Musicians Local 6, photos of people who meant nothing to Aisha, a photo of Mr. Jones at the front counter of his favorite haunt saying something that was making Archy Stallings smile his big slow smile, door-hanger menus, bank statements of the mid-nineties, medical and insurance documents, the yellowing ongoing history of Mr. Jones’s battles against record labels and their departments of legal affairs—before turning at last, with a sinking heart, to the parrot, Fifty-Eight, wordless during the whole time that Aisha had devoted to sorting out the old man’s belongings, the bird expressing itself only by emitting a throaty musical purr that put her in mind of the old Wurlitzer organ at her church, singing or playing—or neither or both—an instrumental version of a song you would hear on an oldies station,
but it’s too late, baby, now, it’s too late
, the parrot sounding like a funky church organ and making its musical selection, given the circumstances, with what seemed to be a disturbing sense of the apropos, the endless organ solo after a couple of hours kind of sort of starting to work on Aisha’s last nerve, the latter a strand of bodily tissue notorious among her friends and family for its thinness and stretched as well by her ADD-ass little son lying there on the rug kicking his ADD-ass little feet, and also by an eerie dead-old-man vibration troubling the air in the house, a smell of decrepitude and neglected houseplants, water drops hitting the bathtub from a leaky tap like a ticking clock, year after year of debts and depositions, old record albums, the elegiac smell of leisure suit, all of it starting to creep Aisha the fuck out, but at last she got everything tagged and bagged and boxed and, having buckled Rolando back into his car seat for safekeeping, made five trips to the street, arms loaded with exiled shit to put out for curbside pickup, trying, as she climbed and descended the front steps, to reckon once and for all in her mind what was the right thing to do about the parrot, her analysis determining that it could be 1) sold for money, 2) put down, or 3) set at liberty to forge its own fate in the wild, but when she returned for the last time to Cochise Jones’s house, having decided to turn the question over to the executor, who was also her father, Garnet Singletary, in spite of the certainty that in consulting him, she would incur the risk of his electing to choose option 4) keeping the gray parrot for himself, a fate that she placed somewhere between 1) and 2) from the parrot’s point of view, and worse, from her own, since she had a serious case of birdophobia and, what was more, believed firmly that her father’s house already smelled bad enough, thank you very much, she came back into the living room to find her baby just sitting there in his car seat, sucking on his bottle, no longer kicking, studying the bird while the bird, fallen silent, contemplated the baby, and Aisha understood how the part of Rolando that was like a wild animal, all eyes and reflexes, was a part already fading and soon to vanish from the world, understood how fragile was her child and how contingent that world, to her, on Rolando, understood the price in heartache that her child would extract from her in exchange for the ever passing joy of him, and then the parrot aimed a quick eye at her, and there was something about its expression, an air of sympathetic reserve, of pity kept politely to itself, which unnerved her further, so that though it was time to call her father and hand the bird over, time to tell the baby, “Okay, mister, we got to bounce,” Aisha looked at the two little animals caught up in some kind of moment, and felt something long-stymied inside her pop loose, and now, at last, the parrot spoke, saying plainly, in the voice of Cochise Jones, “Quarter to three in the
got
damn morning!” and that was when, short story long, Aisha went over to the bedroom window and threw it open to a fine August afternoon, blue sky and green trees and any old thing a parrot might want, some dim memory chiming in her brain of rumored colonies of parrots, or was it parakeets, flying wild over San Francisco and, picturing Fifty-Eight making some local East Bay scene down in Trestle Glen, or up in Tilden Park, and holding fixed in her mind that happy image of sociable birds running loose in the trees, Aisha screwed up her courage and got in close to the bird, scary close, close enough to grab the pole of the perch, to smell the hot-newspaper funk on its feathers, then carried perch and parrot over to the open window, brusquely exhorting the bird to go free, an invitation of which the parrot did not hesitate to avail itself; a rousing of neck feathers, a sidestep, then flap, flap out into the day with no word of valediction, a bird of wide experience and rare talent set free over Telegraph Avenue, catching a scent of eucalyptus in its olfactory organs, banking left and heading north across Forty-third Street, up two blocks, passing over the Bruce Lee Institute of Martial Arts, in whose secret room, at the back of the stairs leading up to the roof, where exiles and religious fugitives and, for nine nights, a Living Buddha from the mountains of Sichuan, had all known bitterness and safety, Luther Stallings and Valletta Moore prepared to flee, neither of them quite clean but both of them dreadfully sober, zipping what all they had into suitcases and gym bags, Luther sending Valletta down to the tiny parking lot out back to load up the car, then at her honk—she was not supposed to honk—coming down himself, careful as a cat, bringing out what he called “the crown jewels,” though Valletta was uncertain whether the term referred to himself or to the contents of the bulging portfolio and plastic storage bin that he carried: the conceptual artwork, promotional designs, notes, treatments, screenplay drafts, and other creative materials that, in the event he predeceased the start of production, might someday be packaged and assembled, as it pleased him to imagine, into a special slipcovered edition entitled, with becoming modesty,
Strutter Kicks It Old-School: The Second Greatest Film That Never Was
, the number one greatest film that never was being, of course, Stanley Kubrick’s
Napoleon
, curating the bin and portfolio down the stairs with a tenderness rarely shown, in her opinion, to Valletta, out onto a back porch of painted two-by-fours which the director of the Bruce Lee Institute, Irene Jew, was sweeping with a crazy-looking Chinese broom, just a bunch of long twigs witch-knotted together on a bamboo pole with a piece of straw, a tool for sweeping away demons, sifu Irene a woman schooled in the art of being haunted, so that two young black men in ill-fitting suits, trying to appear as if they had parked randomly outside the Institute earlier that day, in their hearse, had posed zero challenge to her skills at the kung fu of ghosts, the apparition sending her straight upstairs to tell Luther that his cover was blown, Mrs. Jew leaving off her sweeping long enough to say “Don’t worry” to Luther as he passed, because, he understood, she was worried, so that all he could reply was “Should have left yesterday,” then let her get back to her sweeping while he loaded the storyboards of his dream into the trunk of the Toronado, like some kind of deposed tin pot from Haiti or the Philippines about to get into a Sikorsky and fly to a tax haven, only without the title, the helicopter, or the income to be taxed, a king in ruins, still the most brilliant product of the Bruce Lee Institute and the most talented student Mrs. Jew had ever taught, shoving Valletta’s wig box into the trunk alongside his practice
bokken
, nowhere to really go, no one to help him, Archy never going to drop his permanent eternal state of beef with Luther, though Luther had tried to make amends, take responsibility, tried all twelve steps, some of them two or three times apiece, got the degree in regret and done the postgraduate work in sorry, but Archy wanted nothing to do with Luther, would not listen, would not even listen to people, the man’s own wife, telling him to listen, meanwhile Luther living, in spite of sobriety and its promised advantages, so broke and destitute that he was forced to seek refuge in the bosom of crazy old Irene Jew, God love the little Chinese lady, desperate enough to reach out to Gibson Goode, to undertake the long-contemplated shakedown of Chan Flowers, which he had always been too fucked up before this to attempt, a Hail Mary from the bottom of a deep dogpile indeed, at the far-distant end of whose majestic arc lay enough money—Goode had
promised
—to finance Luther’s dream too long deferred, every shot of the film worked out in his mind from the classic slow strut through the streets of Oakland Chinatown on a busy Saturday morning, under the opening credits, Cleon Strutter come out of retirement to pull one last funky heist job, a blast from the past in a three-piece suit and Borsalino, a whup-ass Rip Van Winkle, to the final freeze frame, Luther always having found a strangely fraught pleasure in movies that ended like that,
Butch Cassidy,
Fists of Fury
, a shot of Luther and Valletta jumping out of an airplane into an ocean full of sharks with a suitcase full of gold, every detail thought through over the course of long years, from the ad campaign to the casting, so that when the film came out, Luther would star not only on screen but at the center of his own comeback story, saved by no one, unlike Pam Grier or John Travolta, but himself, and by nothing but his own genius, and fuck that little whiteboy Tarantino anyway, passing Luther up for the part of Winston in
Jackie Brown
only because he believed the (perfectly true at the time) rumors about Luther Stallings’s uncontrollable drug use, Luther imagining in like detail every shot of his comeback story as well, which would end with himself tossing down, in front of Valletta, a pile of job offers from agents and producers, clearing the way for Luther to take on his dream after next, which was to work with Clint Eastwood, whom he considered, as known at this point by half of West Oakland living and dead, to be the single greatest leading man in Hollywood history, and on whose eloquent taciturnity he had modeled his own reticent style, a style in stark contrast, as much of West Oakland dead and living would also readily attest, to his voluble off-camera self, or hey, maybe at the other end of this Hail Mary pass, he would take all the money he squeezed loose from Gibson Goode, for services rendered in helping change Chan Flowers’s mind about the Dogpile Thang, and snort it right on up his nose, an option that, as he helped Valletta load her barbells into the car, struck him as possibly preferable to the comeback story, which was going to be difficult, so much more motherfucking hard than he ever allowed himself to consider; and just before they rolled out of the back alley, Luther saw against the afternoon sky the foreign profile of the fugitive parrot making its escape, taking its bearings generally along the hypotenuse of Telegraph Avenue while parsing light and scent and angles for their information, reckoning a course toward the eucalyptus hills, thrown eastward by a sensation of horror as it skirted the death cloud hovering above the Smokehouse hamburger stand, the sudden detour sending it over the street of forgotten toys, over the tan bungalow lost in flowers, where Fifty-Eight went unobserved by either of the house’s present occupants, a man and a boy, side by side on a yellow Swedish sofa from the 1950s that the man had bought because it somehow reminded him of a zoot suit, watching the A’s play Baltimore, Rich Harden on the mound working that devious ghost pitch, two pairs of stocking feet, size 11 and size 15, rising from the deck of the coffee table at either end like towers of the Bay Bridge, between the feet the remains in an open pizza box of a bad, cheap, and formerly enormous XL meat lover’s special, sausage, pepperoni, bacon, ground beef, and ham, all of it gone but crumbs and parentheses of crusts left by the boy, brackets for the blankness of his conversation and, for all the man knew, of his thoughts, Titus having said nothing to Archy since Gwen’s departure apart from monosyllables doled out in response to direct yes-or-nos,
Do you like baseball? you like pizza? eat meat? pork?
, the boy limiting himself whenever possible to a tight little nod, guarding himself at his end of the sofa as if riding on a crowded train with something breakable on his lap, nobody saying anything in the room, the city, or the world except Bill King and Ken Korach calling the plays, the game eventless and yet blessedly slow, player substitutions and deep pitch counts eating up swaths of time during which no one was required to say or to decide anything, to feel what might conceivably be felt, to dread what might be dreaded, the game standing tied at 1 and in theory capable of going on that way forever, or at least until there was not a live arm left in the bullpen, the third-string catcher sent in to pitch the thirty-second inning, batters catnapping slumped against one another on the bench, dead on their feet in the on-deck circle, the stands emptied and echoing, hot dog wrappers rolling like tumbleweeds past the diehards asleep in their seats, inning giving way to inning as the dawn sky glowed blue as the burner on a stove, and busloads of farmhands were brought in under emergency rules to fill out the weary roster, from Sacramento and Stockton and Norfolk, Virginia, entire villages in the Dominican ransacked for the flower of their youth who were loaded into the bellies of C-130s and flown to Oakland to feed the unassuageable appetite of this one game for batsmen and fielders and set-up men, threat after threat giving way to the third out, weak pop flies, called third strikes, inning after inning, week after week, beards growing long, Christmas coming, summer looping back around on itself, wars ending, babies graduating from college, and there’s ball four to load the bases for the 3,211th time, followed by a routine can of corn to left, the commissioner calling in varsity teams and the stars of girls’ softball squads and Little Leaguers, Archy and Titus sustained all that time in their equally infinite silence, nothing between them at all but three feet of sofa; and the parrot flew on, noting the potent sensory hum of Chimes General Hospital, baffled by the bright blast of humanity the hospital emitted, of which one soft electron pulse was being traced just then by the LCD display and ticker tape of a fetal monitor in one of the nicest LDRs on the fourth floor, an upscale Marriott feel, white curtains, plum walls, Pergo floor, the CTG a thread of lightning, a quickly sketched line of mountain peaks, a drumbeat metered on a mixing board, the dad and the mom holding hands beside the bed watching it, though the word “holding” could not really suffice, for they were engaged in more of a sumo move, a fighting hold on each other, waiting and watching the monitor as, on the other side of the door, not quite audibly, the attending, Dr. Bernstein, told the two midwives with evident regret that he would have to go in there and get the baby out, news that did not come as a great shock to either midwife, since each had seen the printout, and each knew how often hospitals act with precipitate caution, confounding impatience with efficiency, but each stunned nevertheless now that they were obliged to go back into the LDR and gravely disappoint their patient, the mom, whose first child had also come by emergency caesarean and who had been working and visualizing and chanting and Kegeling and meditating and undergoing hypnosis and submitting her perineum every night to be lavishly oiled by the dad with jojoba oil, readying herself for a Vaginal Birth After Caesarean like Beatrix Kiddo readying herself to take revenge on the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, until her identity, her sense of purpose, seemed to have become subsumed, against the advice but with the sympathy of the two midwives, in the successful passage of her child through her cervix, and who broke down crying when she saw Gwen and Aviva come through the door with tight non-smiles upcurling the corners of their mouths, just flat-out came unglued smack in the middle of a long contraction, the dad fighting to keep his eyes off the fetal monitor as Aviva explained that since the baby, having in its wisdom declined to engage its head with its mother’s pelvis, was beginning, after twenty-two hours of labor, to show signs of fatigue, they would all have to abandon their considered and wishful plan and concentrate on what the baby needed right now, an argument that rarely failed to re-lash a laboring mom to the mast of her purpose and produced its intended effect, the mom nodding as the contraction let go of her, Gwen nodding, too, but saying nothing, avoiding direct eye contact as she had done ever since she first determined, so many hours ago, back in the bedroom of the little bungalow on Ada Street, that the baby was floating, perched too high in the womb, stuck at a fetal station of minus three, running a small risk of cord prolapse that the Berkeley Birth Partners ordinarily would be inclined to take, carrying on with the mom’s plans for her home and vagina while they waited for the floater to descend, and even in the cloud of her pain and regret, the mother was not too far gone to notice how squirrelly Gwen was acting, and to wonder if perhaps Gwen felt herself to be somehow responsible for the turn things had taken, if her calm and supportive but somewhat reserved manner betokened some personal failure, or if perhaps Gwen secretly believed a C-section was unnecessary, had not wanted to transfer to the hospital, but for some reason felt like she could not speak up and so had to knuckle under to hospital policy, to her partner, even though the truth might very well be that floating babies were born at home all the time, all around the world, and turned out healthy and fine, but before the mom could ask Gwen what was going on, why she and Aviva did not appear to be on speaking terms except when some exchange of information became necessary, the room filled with strange new doctors whose air of consequence struck the dad as profound and frightening, while a team of nurses got busy with the magic act of converting the birthing bed into an operating table that was rolled through the door, trailing the dad, who had hold of his wife’s hand so tightly that Gwen was obliged to separate them, saying, “Okay, honey,” saying that it was time to let the mom turn this baby loose, then helping the dad into his scrubs and mask, getting him ready for the brief and relatively honorific series of duties whose execution would devolve upon him: cutting the umbilicus, taking pictures with his digital camera, rooting for good Apgars while his child squirmed under the french-fry lights, he, with Gwen and Aviva—the only three people in the building, the city, or the world, apart from the mom, who cared whether she gave birth through her vagina or through a slit in her belly—reduced to the three least powerful people in the room, an air of dreamy impotence permeating all the proceedings for the dad, who at one point, after the baby was hauled by the armpits from the hole in the mom, a girl at once entitled Rebekah with a K that would encumber her for the rest of her life, made the grave error, just as the doctors were reassembling his wife, of turning his head—he was supposed to be watching his daughter feel light, air, and water for the first time, the first day of creation—and saw things on the other side of the operating room that no husband was meant to see, blood-orange welter of Betadine and placenta and golden fat and chicken-white membrane, but in the end, apart from a disappointment that would linger for years in the mom’s heart like a burnt smell in a winter kitchen, everything was fine, a grainy fading vision of the smiling dad with the swaddled floater in his arms the last thing the mom saw before she closed her eyes, exhausted, down a pint, woozy, wheeled into the recovery room beside a tall slit window that gave onto a dazzle of implausibly green and blue afternoon, where the mom conked, and where she remained, still fucking