Telegraph Avenue (63 page)

Authors: Michael Chabon

BOOK: Telegraph Avenue

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“Yo, check it out,” said Titus. “It’s Johnny Cash.”

Julie tugged out each earbud, pop, pop. He crossed his eyes at the baby, kissy-faced him. Reached out one finger, touched the tip of it to a teardrop that clung to Clark’s cheek. “Why was he crying?”

“Boy don’t really need a reason,” Titus said.

“I saw you coming out of Fred’s Deli, uh, yesterday.”

“Yeah.”

“With Kezia. She’s pretty.”

“She’s all right.”

“I knew her at Willard. Actually, I went to kindergarten with her. She was always really nice to me.”

“She remembers you, too.”

“And those guys, Darius and, um, Tariq, I know them, too. They’re okay.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, they aren’t the worst. It’s good you made friends or whatever.”

“Julie.”

“I’m sorry.”

Titus looked away. Watched the traffic, lips compressed, an air of imposing patience on exasperation. “Everybody crying,” he observed.

Without quite looking at Julie, he handed over the cloth diaper that had come along with his brother, stuck to his pj’s by static electricity. Julie used the diaper to wipe his eyes. It came away bearing the calligraphy, painted in smeary guyliner, of his sadness.

“Sorry,” Julie said. “I’m such a loser.”

“Nah, whatever.”

“I made a couple friends, too.”

“I know.”

They stood there along the shoulder of the street that had carried them, rolling, into the darkness of a few lost summer mornings.

“Oh, fuck, what time is it?” Julie said at last.

“Like around three?”

“Fuck. My dad can’t be late. My mom sent me to get him, he must have his phone turned off. They upstairs?”

“Yeah. Can’t be late for what?”

Julie waited before replying, took a deep breath. Rolled his eyes. “Picking up trash by Lake Merritt,” he said.

“Ho.”

“I know, right? How could I
not
be a loser?”

“Stealing a zeppelin, though. I mean, that’s kind of badass.”

“No, it isn’t. He just
untied
it. It went up. It came down in Utah. I better get him.”

After Julie went inside, Titus sat down outside, on the topmost step. He propped Clark next to him on the step, holding him up by the armpits, and they pretended for a minute that Clark knew how to sit. At this point, that was about as much fun as the boy knew how to have. A few minutes were lost to this pastime, and then Julie came back out of the building with Nat behind him. Titus returned Clark to the crook of his arm.

“Archy’s just locking up,” Nat told Titus. “He’ll be right down.”

“Okay.”

“Say hi to your stepmom for me.”

“All right.”

Nat walked over to the Saab, which bore the marks of its cruel treatment at the hands of a hurricane fence, got in, and drove off to Lake Merritt to pay down his debt to society amid its eternal snows of goose shit.

Titus and Julie clasped fingertips—one bare-handed, one gloved—yanked loose, brought their fists together in a soft collision. Then Julie laid down his board.

“Yo, Artist Formerly Known as Julie,” Titus said. Julie turned. “I’ll probably be on tonight. Like around ten, all right? Meet me in Wakanda.”

“If I get my homework done,” Julie said. “Okay.” Then he hopped onto the deck of his skateboard and pushed off, rumbling down the sidewalk away from Titus.

“Y’all not going to hang out?” Archy said, coming out of the building swinging the empty car seat, locking the front door with a key from the jingle-bell key ring.

“Maybe I’ll see him on MTO. Here, you take him. Go on,” Titus told Clark, turning custody of the baby over to their father. “Y’all smell like Monterey Jack.”

Archy and Clark were reunited on friendlier terms than those under which they had last parted. “What’d you do?” Archy said to Titus.

“Nothing.”

They watched Julie skate away into the late-October afternoon, looking back over his shoulder only once.

“He still play as a girl?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s his name?”

“Dezire. With a z.”

Archy shook his head slowly, a gesture that put him somewhere between admiration and disdain. “That’s how you friends now. In a game. With him being a girl and you being, what’s it?”

“Black Answer.”

“Right. Dezire and Black Answer, hanging out in downtown Wakanda.”

“No, but we mostly meet up in the Blue Area of the Moon.”

“Of course.” Archy buckled Clark into the car seat, snapped the seat into its base in the back of the station wagon. “Right, shorty?” he said to the baby. “I mean, where else?”

Clark, as yet unfamiliar with the secret domed refuge postulated, in the pages of Marvel Comics, to lie forever hidden on the moon’s far side, said nothing.

“That’s pretty much the only place,” Titus said.

He got into the backseat so that he could, when required, make faces at Clark or give him a bottle. Archy started for home along Telegraph, but then when they hit Sixty-first Street, he missed the turn.

“Where we going?” Titus said.

“To Wakanda,” said Archy.

“Where?”

“The Blue Area of the Moon.”

He didn’t stop when they got there, though. Just slowed down, in his drag-ass, baby-smelling, style-free Subaru wagon, long enough to check out a banner announcing, in baseball-jersey script, the imminent opening for business, between the United Federation of Donuts and the King of Bling, of a trading card store called Mr. Nostalgia’s Neighborhood. Beyond the fourth grade or so, Archy had never taken much interest in baseball cards, but he could feel the underlying vibe of that particular madness. Although he knew he would never be able to set foot in that building again without breaking his heart, he understood that the new operation held promise, and in principle, at least, he approved. The merchandise was not the thing, and neither, for that matter, was the nostalgia. It was all about the neighborhood, that space where common sorrow could be drowned in common passion as the talk grew ever more scholarly and wild.

“I hope you make it,” he said to Mr. Nostalgia, whoever the dude might be. “Truly, bro, I really hope you do.”

He eased his foot off the brake, thinking as they rolled away that, after all, perhaps one day a few years from now, he might have recovered enough to feel like he was ready to stop in. Say hi, drop a little lore and history on the man, tell him all about Angelo’s, and Spencer’s, and the Brokeland Years. See how they put the world together, next time around.

Berkeley, California

September 30, 2011

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

T
he following creditors, progenitors, enablers, verifiers, sustainers, readers, and supporters of this book are hereby indemnified against blame for its flaws:

The MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire; Dagmar and Ray Dolby; Steven Barclay and Garth Bixler; Philip Pavel and the staff of the Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles, California; the Headlands Institute, Sausalito, California; the Mesa Refuge, Point Reyes Station, California;

Zak Borovay (
Music
); Kent Randolph (
Vinyl
); Beah Haber and Nancy Bardacke (
Midwifery
); Adam Savage (
Dirigible Liberation
);

Ta-Nehisi Coates; Daniel Mendelsohn; Dave Eggers;

Jennifer Barth; Mary Evans; Amy Cray; David and Arla Manson; Jonathan Burnham; Michael McKenzie; Howie Sanders; David Colden; Scott Rudin; Sophie, Zeke (
MTO
!), Ida-Rose, and Abraham Chabon;

Wax Poetics magazine, Andre Torres, Editor-in-Chief;
Blaxploitation Cinema: The Essential Reference Guide
, Josiah Howard;
Women of Blaxploitation
, Yvonne D. Sims;
Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party
, Flores Alexander Forbes;
The Death of Rhythm and Blues
, Nelson George;

Blaxploitation.com (www.blaxploitation.com); Oakland Geology (http://oaklandgeology.wordpress.com/); Funky16Corners (http://funky16corners.lunarpages.net/); Birth Stories Diaries (www.birthdiaries.com);

and James Rouse, dreamer of the original Brokeland.

This novel was written using Scrivener on Macintosh computers.

About the Author

About the Author

MICHAEL CHABON is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
,
Wonder Boys
,
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
,
Summerland
(a novel for children),
The Final Solution
,
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
, and
Gentlemen of the Road
; as well as the short story collections
A Model World
and
Werewolves in Their Youth
; and the essay collections
Maps and Legends
and
Manhood for Amateurs
. He is the Chairman of the Board of the MacDowell Colony. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.

michaelchabon.com

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www.AuthorTracker.com
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Also by the Author

Also by Michael Chabon

Summerland

The Final Solution

Manhood for Amateurs

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

A Model World and Other Stories

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

Werewolves in Their Youth

Gentlemen of the Road

Maps and Legends

Wonder Boys

Credits

Credits

“Portrait (He Knew)”. Words and Music by Kerry Livgren and Steve Walsh. ©1977 (Renewed 2005) EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC. and DON KIRSHNER MUSIC. All Rights Controlled and Administered by EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used By Permission. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

Cover design by Milan Bozic

Cover photograph © by Shutterstock

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

TELEGRAPH AVENUE
. Copyright © 2012 by Michael Chabon. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chabon, Michael.

Telegraph Avenue : a novel / Michael Chabon.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-06-149334-8 (Hardcover) 1. Oakland (Calif.)—Fiction. 2. Berkeley (Calif.)—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.H15T45 2012

813’.54—dc23

2012001355

12 13 14 15 16
OV/RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

About the Publisher

About the Publisher