Telegraph Avenue (47 page)

“That ain’t him,” Singletary said to Airbus. “I never heard that bird do anything but sound like a Hammond B-3.”

“Can’t rule it out, though,” Archy called. “Bird knew all kinds of unlikely shit.”

“Maybe I should have gone into business with
him
,” Nat said.

“Oh, okay, now you’re all mad at me.”

Nat didn’t answer. He ran a furry finger along the printed spines of the records in a nearby crate. Archy saw that it was all Mr. Jones’s label-mates from his time on CTI. Hank Crawford, Grover Washington, Jr., Johnny Hammond. A number of them would be records that Mr. Jones had played on. Archy had probably owned most of the Creed Taylor catalog at one time or another, but it made an impression, seeing the records all together in that crate and those immediately above and below it, all those discs produced by Taylor or Don Sebesky back when Archy was a youngster, recorded by Rudy Van Gelder, pressed at some plant in New Jersey, then shipped by the scattered millions to the vanished mom-and-pop record shops of America, to the local chain stores of the seventies that had long since folded or been absorbed into national chains that had in turn folded, all those tasty beats and (mostly) tasteful string arrangements marbled together in a final attempt to reclaim jazz as popular music to be danced to and not just an art form to be curated, all those beautiful records with their stark jacket photography and their casually integrated personnel, reunited through the efforts of Mr. Jones. Archy had been breaking up estates for years and selling them off in pieces, but until now he had never felt the vandalism inherent in that act, his barbarity amid the crates of so many ruined empires.

“Nice,” Archy admitted, running his own finger along the spines of the records.

“Beautiful,” Nat said, giving the word the full benefit of his residual Tidewater accent.

“Nat,” Archy said, “nothing would make me happier than to let you take twelve thousand five hundred dollars you don’t have and buy these records for us, then you and me sit on top of them for two, three years like a couple of dad penguins. Listening to Idris Muhammad all day long, all that crazy old Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith he had, that Versatile side he did with Grant motherfucking Green that never got released, I mean—”

“I know, you saw that?” Nat hung on, fanning the little spark of it.

“But I have been fucking off, fucking up, and fucking around for too long. I need to get real, else I’m going to end up living in an auto body shop. I need insurance, a paycheck, all that straight-life bullshit. Gwen goes out on maternity, she doesn’t work, I’m going to need to take care of her, the baby. I got to settle some shit with Titus, Nat, that boy—”

“You guys back together?”

“Huh?”

“You and Gwen. She moved back in?”

“Last night.”

“Hey, all right.”

“Uh-huh, she moved in, then she threw my ass out. Said it was her house, too, and so on. She came home, I don’t— Something got into her. Had the gain on the flamethrower turned
all
the way up.”

“Yeah, I heard she was in fine form yesterday. I heard she did the full mau-mau routine on those assholes at Chimes.”

“Is that the term Aviva used to describe it, ‘mau-mau’?”

“That was just my interpretation.”

“Black midwife standing up for herself to a bunch of white doctors, that makes it a mau-mau?”

“I don’t have a problem with mau-mauing,” Nat said. “It’s a valid technique.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Archy said. “Black folks been holding off on the mau-mauing lately, till we got a ruling from you.”

“Where are we?” Garnet Singletary said, sounding prepared to be disappointed by the answer. He filled the space at the end of the narrow alley in which Archy and Nat seemed to have lodged.

“Where we are is, Archy is ‘getting real,’ ” Nat said.

“That doesn’t sound like an offer,” Singletary said.

“Nat, man, please. We can get into all of this tomorrow. We don’t need to get into it now. Mr. S., respect, I know you’re in a hurry, but today I am about trying to do this one thing of sending off Cochise Jones how he expected and how he deserved. I can’t be about anything else.”

“Are you going with Gibson Goode?” Nat laughed, a single incredulous bark. “Ho! Wait! Is that what you’re doing right
now
? You already took the job! Jesus Christ, Arch, is that why you’re here? Did he, did your friend Kung Fu give you his checkbook, tell you, go ahead, get in there, start stocking your
Beats Department
?”

“Hold up, Nat. Now you’re getting toward paranoid.”

“A short journey,” Garnet Singletary observed.

“I seriously doubt if the offer is even out there anymore,” Archy said. “Maybe I put the man off too long.”

“I can’t
believe
I told you what my number would be.”

“Why don’t you tell
me
your number?” Singletary suggested. “I’m the one selling the damn records. No, I tell you what. Do it this way, I give
you
a number. Seventeen thousand dollars.”

“I am supposed to give you seventeen grand to buy back a bunch of records I already bought and sold once before,” Nat said. “Some of these records are like children to me, you’re going to make me pay for them twice.”

“Give me a offer, then,” Singletary said, declining to acknowledge that Nat was starting to get bothered. “Then you get to sell them twice, too.”

“Fuck it,” Nat said. “We’re already having one funeral. Let’s bury everything. Right here and now. Have done with it.” He brushed past Singletary, in his pointy little loafers went banging back upstairs.

“Seem like maybe you been putting a
lot
of people off a little too long,” said Singletary.

“I know it,” Archy said. “I wish I knew what was wrong with me.”

“I got a theory.”

“Which is?”

“Maybe you are sick to death of mold-smelling, dust-covered, scratched-up, skipping, wobbly old vinyl records.”

“You said ‘no blaspheming.’ ”

“Maybe you sick of Nat Jaffe. Man started to get on my nerves five minutes before I met him.”

Archy experienced a certain temptation to assent to this theory, but it felt disloyal, so he only said without enthusiasm, “Huh? Nah, man, Nat’s my nigger.”

Singletary seemed to weigh this claim. “Was just a question of knowing how to fry a chicken leg,” he said, “I might almost be prepared to agree to that description.”

“So, yeah. I guess you better call Amoeba or whoever. Call Rick Ballard down at Groove Yard.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Singletary said. “Okay, now, hold on. Let me just ask you. What was his number going to be?”

“He said something about eleven. Fifty-five apiece, but I don’t have it, and as far as I know, neither does he.”

“And if he did, if he came up with the money, and you all acquired Mr. Jones’s collection here for something south of fifteen but north of eleven, would you be able to make money on that?”

“Hard to say.”

“Oh, no doubt.”

“A little, maybe. Maybe a little more than a little. Nat was saying about France and Japan, but that’s no sure thing. It would improve our inventory, I mean, damn, there is some tough stuff here. Maybe if we expanded our website, did more of the shows. Put a little more push into the business side of the business, spent a little less time shooting the shit around that counter.”

“Aw, no, don’t say that,” Singletary said. “I might back off from the fool offer I am about to propose. Because you know, truth is, I don’t give a shit about some scratched-up vinyl Rahsaan Kirk, Ornette Coleman sound-like-a-goose-trying-to-fuck-a-bicycle bootleg pressing from the rare Paris concert of 1967. I spend five minutes listening to that, I’m like to want to slap somebody. I don’t really like
any
jazz, to be honest. The kind of style Mr. Jones played, mostly have a steady groove to it, that was all right, but when I get home at the end of a working day, Miller time, put some music on, you know what I like? I like Peabo Bryson.”

“Peabo had his due share of jams.”

“Here’s my concern in this matter. I know you think I am messing around in all that protest shit your partner’s stirring up to annoy Chan Flowers. Just because I maintain historically cool relations with the councilman. And true, that is part of the reason. But the real reason is something that’s not that. The reason, I remember when that record store used to be Eddie Spencer’s. And before that, when I first got out of the army, right after the war, it was called Angelo’s Barbershop, and those old Sicilian dudes used to go in, get their mustaches looked to or whatnot. I have known Sicilians, and so I feel confident saying, your store been full of time-wasting, senseless, lying, boastful male conversation for going on sixty years, at least. What that Abreu said the other day at that meeting, he was right. It’s an institution. You all go out of business, I don’t know. I might have to let in some kind of new age ladies, sell yoga mats. Everybody having ‘silence days,’ walking around with little signs hanging from their neck saying ‘I Am Silent Today.’ I would take that as a loss.”

“Garnet Singletary,” Archy letting amazement show on his face. “One-man historical preservation society. Turning soft on me.”

“Lot of bad things happen once you start to get old.”

“So, what? You going to just
give
us the records?”

“Now, how can I do that? These are Mr. Jones’s records. They are not mine to give. You know that. But maybe the estate could advance them to you all on consignment. And you all could pay the estate back at some later date. Once you done selling them in France and Japan.”

“Huh,” Archy said. “Well, thank you, Garnet.”

“It must be the funeral has me feeling sentimental.”

“You’re a good man.”

“You put that around, I will have to deny it.”

“Same with what I said about Nat being what I said, to me. Do not tell anybody. Least of all Nat. It’d go right to his head.”

“Maybe after he earn a few more merit badges, we let him in the club.”

“All right.”

“Meantime, you need to figure out what you want to do about yourself, Archy Stallings. You need to make up your mind.”

“Common refrain,” Archy said.

When they went back upstairs, they passed Mr. Jones’s living room, which had a denuded air but with that fussy feel, crewel and fake fruit, as if it had been decorated by ladies of a former age, maybe by the Portuguese lady herself. In the center of the room, two steel suit racks waited side by side, hung thick with the dead man’s leisure suits. The collective palette ran to bold, even heedless, in the seventies manner, or to muted potting-clay tones, something a touch Soviet or even Maoist in the olive tans and rose grays. The plaids had left Scotland far behind and struck out for new worlds of gaudiness, including one in red, white, black, and sky blue that always reminded Archy of a place mat at IHOP.

“Look at that,” Archy said. “Look at those things. And I’ve seen him wear them all.”

“Believe it or not there is actually a lively market,” Singletary said. “I looked into it.”

“Maybe I need to get into a new line,” Archy said.

“Here go Airbus.”

The big man met them at the top step, wearing a beautiful midnight-blue tracksuit, his hair razored down to a glaze on his scalp. Singletary’s car, a late-model Toyota Avalon, stood double-parked in the street, flashers going. Kai Fierro, Gwen’s receptionist, got out of the passenger side. She wore her hair greased back à la Fabian Forte and carried her sax in a soft gig case. She had on a blue brass-button high school marching-band jacket like they all wore in Bomp and Circumstance, corny yacht-captain hat complete with scrambled eggs on the visor.

“This suppose to be the, uh, leader of that Chinese marching band,” Airbus said as though humoring the ranting of a nutjob, so as to keep her calm. “Was outside your store with another white chick named, uh, Jerry something, and two older ladies, trumpet and a sax. She say they made a appointment with Stallings. Want to know what the deal is, what the route is.”

“Hey, Arch,” Kai said. She shook hands with Garnet Singletary, all square and manly, telling him, “I’m Kai.”

Something kind of a turn-on for Archy, funny, in the way she shook Singletary’s hand. “Thanks for coming,” he said.

“It’s an honor,” Kai said. “Cochise Jones, that’s a name that, well, a lot of us in the band, it means something to us.”

“You know he was born in New Orleans,” Archy said. “That’s why he loved the whole funeral-band thing. Always said Chinese people was the only ones around here really knew how to do a proper funeral.”

“Tell you what, though, those guys over in the city, it’s not like New Orleans. They don’t really
swing
,” Kai said. “Stuff we rehearsed for today, Archy, I mean, it’s all that straight-ahead military funeral stuff. Is that okay? A lot of hymns, ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ and that type of deal.”

“Okay,” said Airbus, big man looking positively offended, “ ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’ now, how is that Chinese?”

“But we practiced a lot, you know. And plus, I have to say we put together a pretty swinging arrangement of ‘Redbonin’ ’ that we’d like to do.”

“That sounds just fine,” Archy said, but he was frowning as he took in Kai’s tacky little tenth-grade band jacket. “Now, let me ask you this. What size you wear?”

Softly, under the sound of traffic from Telegraph and the idling of Singletary’s car, almost beneath the threshold of audibility, a bass note sounded and then went up a step. To the south, down over West Oakland, a black zeppelin sniffed at the sky with its pointed snout.

“A’s playing Tampa today,” Archy said. “Everybody’s going to look up, see that, get all excited. Talking about, ‘There go the Dogpile blimp!’ ”

“I was in the Dogpile down in L.A.,” Kai said. “It was awesome.”

“You’re killing me,” Archy said.

G
od said, “What the fuck is this shit?”

In the cabin of the
Minnie Riperton
, Walter Bankwell did not bother to try to look at ease. He did not enjoy the experience of flying in the dirigible, too nervous to have a drink, get loose. And he did not like it when everybody else got loose on board the
Riperton
, either, though the primary, express purpose of the airship (apart from its function as an irresistible eye magnet) turned out to be corporate entertainment of high-rolling clients, actors and singers and rappers, media folk, athletic shoe barons, that bunch of inner-city librarians won some kind of contest or something, got up there in the sky with G Bad and his posse and went
completely
out of control.