Telegraph Avenue (36 page)

Now the cover of
Night Man
, one of the DVDs that Titus and Julie had rented from Videots on College Avenue last night, seemed to catch the man’s eye, to register for the first time. He picked up the case, turned it over, read the hype, scholarship, and bullshit written there.

“ ‘Quentin Tarantino Presents,’ ” he said. “Huh.”

As he made a study of the DVD box, his stance widened, his posture grew straighter. The anger making landfall, moving inland. Feeding on itself, was Titus’s impression—and he was schooled in the repertoires of anger. Rifling through the other DVD cases scattered up and down the table. Tarantino was right:
Night Man
was the best thing in the Stallings filmography, a straight bank heist, cops and robbers, light on the cheese, scored by Charles Stepney, shot by Richard Kline, who shot
Soylent Green
and some other cool movies of the day, one of the
Planet of the Apes
movies. Cheap, rough, and uneven, it made plain and proclaimed for all time the truth of Luther Stallings’s physical grace in 1975, the beauty of his winged nostrils, the lowdown way he smiled, the fatal architecture of his hands.

Man said, “What is this shit?”

Titus was about to say “It’s your father” but, at the last instant, realized it might sound like he was saying that Luther Stallings, his grandfather,
was
shit. When, to the contrary, Luther Stallings at one time had stood in full possession of a definite article, not to mention two capital letters. Was most definitely The Shit.

Before this summer, before last week, the name of Luther Stallings was not a memory to Titus but the memory of someone else’s memory, like a minor hit or the vice president of the disco years. A scatter of images caught like butterflies in the grille of his mind. First: an article in an old, a very old, a King Tut–old copy of
Ebony
tucked into a drawer in his grandmother’s nightstand. Titus remembered little about the article apart from the name of its subject, the title
Strutter
, and a shot of Luther Stallings sitting in a Los Angeles living room, in tight black pants and white ankle boots, tossing a baseball to a blur of a boy. Second: a scratchy, washed-out clip in a Wu-Tang Clan video, no more than a few seconds long, showing a lean light black man causing grievous harm with his fists and feet to a gang of homicidal Taoists. Third and faintest: the memory, really the acrid residue—and no more—of the low opinion, bottled like smoke in the name Stallings, held by his granny for all the fathers to whom Titus was heir.

None of these echoes prepared Titus for the truth of the greatness of Luther Stallings as revealed in patches by the movies themselves, even the movies that sucked ass. None readied him for the strange warmth that rained down onto his heart as he sat on the couch last night with the best and only friend he’d ever had, watching that balletic assassin in
Night Man
, with those righteous cars and that ridiculous bounty of fine women, a girl with a silver Afro. Luther Stallings, the idea of Luther Stallings, felt to Titus like no one and no place had ever felt: a point of origin. A legendary birthplace, lost in the mists of Shaolin or the far-off technojungles of Wakanda. There in the dark beside Julie, watching his grandfather, Titus got a sense of his own life’s foundation in the time of myth and heroes. For the first time since coming to consciousness of himself, small and disregarded as a penny in a corner of the world’s bottom drawer, Titus Joyner saw in his own story a shine of value, and in himself the components of glamour.

Man said, “You all having a Luther Stallings film festival?”

“He was good,” said Julie.

“No, Julie, he was not.”

“Well, at kung fu or whatever.”

The man did not look up from the plastic case. He spoke with a soft and furious enunciation. “I don’t want this motherfucker in my house,” he said. “Not in any form. Not flesh and blood. Not in electrons, pixels. Not even the damn name out your damn mouth. Okay? Got that?”

The man scooped up the rented elements of their Stallings film festival, stacked them haphazardly, and tried to hand them off to Titus. Titus just looked at them. The man shoved them at Julie instead.

“Get them out of my house!” he said.

“Okay, okay,” Julie said. “Jeez, Archy, what the
hell
?”

Boy stunned by the abruptness, the violence, of how he found himself in possession of the DVDs. Looking at the man like he was about to cry. “I’m sorry, Archy. I didn’t—”

“That’s your
daddy
,” Titus heard himself say, to his surprise if not horror. “Man was a motherfucking movie star! You should be feeling
proud
of him.”

“Huh.”

“He
was
good,” Titus said. “He could really act. Better than Fred Williamson, and fight better, too. Better fighter than Jim Kelly, who wasn’t no kind of actor. Better than all them white guys, Chuck Norris, dude with the eyebrows—”

“John Saxon,” Julie said.

“John Saxon. Better than most of them classic Chinese dudes, too. Sonny Chiba, Sammo Hong. You
know
you love that type of shit, got that screen capture from
The
Game of Death
for a desktop. Fighting that big dude, looks like some kind of giant emu. It don’t even make
sense
for you to not appreciate Luther Stallings. He can play piano. He’s like a expert at barbecue and shit.” These facts he’d cribbed from a bonus feature on the
Night Man
disc. “But, I mean, even if you don’t like him, you got to still
respect
him.”

Titus saw that he had afforded the man a fresh surprise on this unusual morning.

“Two weeks you don’t say ten words,” the man said. “Now you going to make me a whole speech, huh? Telling me what I’m supposed to feel.”

“It’s your father.”

“Uh-huh. So then, by that logic, I guess you must respect me?”

“Nah,” Titus said. “Because you just a sperm donor.”

It left his bow with a snap of inspiration and hit its target with a thwack you could almost hear. It rocked the man back before he rallied.

“Okay, first of all,” he said, “that shit was not ‘donated,’ okay, it was
bestowed
. Second, that ‘emu’ is Kareem Abdul motherfucking Jabbar. Third, all right, and listen to me now, I got enough shit to worry about, all right, laying my actual father figure to rest day after tomorrow, providing food and drinks for like a hundred people. Rounding up a marching band. Tracking down a parrot. In my garage, okay, I have the Hammond organ that killed Cochise Jones just, like, sitting there, need to be patched up so we can give the man a fitting tribute. I got all this personal shit piling up everywhere, baby coming, wife going out of her motherfucking
mind
. Got like three hours sleep. Got this skinny little motherfucker here, wandering around in his underpants, wearing a sleeping bag around one ankle like it’s some kind of fucked-up giant
sock
. You two little faggots,” yanking out the last couple of Jenga blocks from the tottering pile of his cool, “you come in here, dropping DVDs all over the place, disrespecting me, disrespecting my wishes, messing up my gotdamn house—”

Julie looked up accusingly. Disappointed in the man, wanting him to know it. “Hate speech,” he pointed out.

“Think so?” the man said. “Because, brother, that is fucking
mild
compared to what you
about
to hear. You little fuckers can put your clothes on, pack your bags, and get the fuck out, both of you. Leave the premises. And take those piece-of-shit movies with you. I am bouncing your cinephile asses.”

“Seriously?” Julie said.

Man seemed right then to want to show Julie that he was in earnest. He picked up the copy of
Strutter
in its box, Luther Stallings’s first film, made when he was only eight years older than Titus was today. Threw it on the ground, stomped it four times.

“Get. The. Fuck. Out.”

The plastic gave way twice, but on the third blow, the case snapped in half. The last time the disc broke. Three shining pieces of rainbow lying on the rug.

“Asshole,” Titus said.

Murderous, hopeful, he took a swing at his father. Twisted stylishly back around on himself, lost his footing, fell. The hand that broke his fall got caught up in the pieces of the shattered case. A piece of broken rainbow cut him, enough to bleed a little, hurt a lot.

“I fucking
hate
you,” Titus said, his voice sounding, even to his own ears, dismayingly girlish and shrill. “I hate you so motherfucking much!”

Man stood over him, looking down, hands on his hips, breathing in big wheezy lungfuls of the air they all had soured.

“Now, that,” he said, “is what I call hate speech.”

T
wo blocks from Brokeland, backing into a space on Apgar Street with a furious swipe of the El Camino’s steering wheel, sucking the last charred millimeter of usefulness from a fatty while trying to confirm an order for twenty pounds of
al pastor
, twelve dozen tortillas, and a gallon of pico de gallo from the Sinaloa taco truck down on East Fourteenth, Archy Stallings tripped some inner wire tied to hidden charges of remorse. Remorse for his unmanly and irresponsible outburst with the boys, for the hurt done to Gwen, for Gwen’s unveiling of the unanimous squalor into which her leaving had sunk him. Remorse, at last, for his Ethiopian adventure—Archy recalling, with the remorseful acuity of marijuana, the ink of melancholy that flooded the pupils of Elsabet Getachew whenever she looked up at him with his jimmy in her mouth. Regret for his general inability to holster said jimmy, for his last quarrel with Mr. Jones, for his choice of brown wing tips with a suit that had more blue in its glen plaid than he remembered. He cut the engine and sat, a hi-hat of regret, struck hard and resounding.

Just before the taco lady returned from running his deposit to take Archy off hold and inform him, employing a deft and broken phraseology, that the operation was a failure and his Visa card had not survived the procedure, Clifford Brown, Jr., came on KCSM to back-announce a cut he must have played before Archy got in the car, Freddie Hubbard’s 1970 cover of “Better Git It in Your Soul,” “featuring,” as Junior put it, “on the organ, Oakland’s late, great Mr. Cochise Jones,” and Archy found himself unexpectedly on the verge of tears. That verge was as close to tears as Archy usually allowed himself to come. Regret, hurt, bereavement, loss, to permit the flow of even one tear at the upwelling of such feelings was to imperil ancient root systems and retaining walls. Mudslide and black avalanche would result and drown him.

It was just something in the way Clifford Brown, Jr., said,
Late, great.

“I knew my card was hurting,” Archy conceded to the taco lady, weeping freely. “I did not know it was that sick.”

“Is okay,” the taco lady said, mistaking the wobble in his voice for simple grief over the loss of Mr. Jones, almost as loyal a customer of Sinaloa as he had been of Brokeland Records, prone to fall into an almost musical rapture at the spectacle of all those rotating slabs of glazed and crispy pork stacked on a spindle like tasty 45s. Or maybe she was making no mistake at all. “You pay me cash when you pick it up, okay? Day after tomorrow, eleven
A.M.
? Okay?”

Archy said that would be okay. He worked to get a grip on himself. Thinking of Tony Stark, Iron Man, with that shrapnel lodged in his heart’s scar tissue, doomed to a life encased in armor, flashing his repulsor rays. That Gwen’s departure may have stirred echoes of the death of Archy’s mother’s—FOOM! Repulsed. That if you went back in time and informed Archy Stallings, at the age of fourteen, one day his own son would be filled with nothing but reproach and contempt for the worthless man who had, Wile E. Coyote–style, left a hole in his life in the precise shape of a fleeing father—FOOM! Repulse the motherfucker.

“Day after tomorrow,” Archy said, wiping his cheek with the overly blue sleeve of his suit jacket.

Then Nat Jaffe beeped in on the other line.

“I’m a block away,” Archy told Nat.

It was forty-seven minutes past the hour of eleven, only about twelve minutes beyond the usual frontiers of Archy’s lateness, and he wished sincerely but without much hope that his partner was not planning on pitching him shit about it. Not this morning.

“You have a visitor,” Nat informed him, sounding cool if not frosty.

Dread took hold of Archy, mostly at the scalp, like the lining of a too-small hat. The number of available candidates for the role of Dreadful Visitor was more than sufficient to stock his premonition of doom, but at the core of the feeling sat the memory of a visit paid to his third- grade classroom by the school principal, during current events, on the Tuesday morning of his mother’s passing. After that day every visitor was, in prospect, Mr. Ashenbach, all news going to be bad. Enemies, lovers, hitherto unknown children, cops and
federales
, process servers, debtors and creditors, vengeful Ethiopian fathers or brothers or clan elders, any one of the nine thousand and nine fools he had been plagued or influenced by over the years, folks time-traveling forward from any one of a number of doubtful periods of his life. Bankwell, Feyd, Titus, or Gwen. In the end he settled on his father as the likeliest Mr. Ashenbach du jour.

“Man by the name of Goode,” Nat said, the temperature of his tone dropping by another ten degrees Kelvin. “Says he’s a particular friend of yours. Came with his entourage.”

Turned out to be only Walter, skulking around in a five-hundred-dollar tracksuit behind that small moon.
That’s no moon, it’s Taku
, an earbud in his left ear, another dangling like a locket down his chest. A heavy burden of loot at throat, ear, and wrist, black tee, blue jeans, blue Top-Siders without socks.

“You fucking it up,” Walter confided to Archy in a murmur. Archy careful to have on his round tortoiseshell sunglasses, nobody going to catch Diz or Mingus crying over whatever stupid shit they might have done or left undone. “Don’t fuck it up.”