Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  “He doesn’t have the permits and whatnot,” Archy pointed out. “My boy Chan Flowers has him all tangled up in environmental impacts, traffic studies, all that shit.”

  The owner and director of Flowers & Sons funeral home, directly across Telegraph from the proposed Dogpile site, was also their Oakland city councilman. Unlike Singletary, Councilman Chandler B. Flowers was a record collector, a free-spending fiend, and without fully comprehending the reasons for his stated opposition to the Dogpile plan, the partners had been counting on it, clinging to the ongoing promise of it.

  “Evidently something has changed the Councilman’s mind,” said S. S. Mirchandani, using his best James Mason tone: arch and weary, hold the vermouth.

  “Huh,” Archy said.

  There was nobody in West Oakland more hard-ass or better juiced than Chandler Flowers, and the something that evidently had changed his mind was not likely to have been intimidation.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Mirchandani. Brother has an election coming,” Archy said. “Barely came through the primary. Maybe he’s trying to stir up the base, get them a little pumped. Energize the community. Catch some star power off Gibson Goode.”

  “Certainly,” said Mr. Mirchandani, his eyes saying no way. “I am sure there is an innocent explanation.”

  Kickbacks, he was implying. A payoff. Anybody who managed, as Mr. Mirchandani did, to keep a steady stream of cousins and nieces flowing in from the Punjab to make beds in his motels and wash cars at his gas stations without running afoul of the authorities at either end, was likely to find his thoughts running along those lines. It was almost as hard for Archy to imagine Flowers—that stiff-necked, soft-spoken, and everlastingly correct man, a hero in the neighborhood since Lionel Wilson days—taking kickbacks from some showboating ex-QB, but then Archy tended to make up for his hypercritical attitude toward the condition of vinyl records by going too easy on human beings.

  “Anyways, it’s too late, right?” Archy said. “Deal already fell through. The bank got cold feet. Goode lost his financing, something like that?”

  “I don’t really understand American football,” said S. S. Mirchandani. “But I am told that when he was a player, Gibson Goode was quite famous for something called ‘having a scramble.’ ”

  “The option play,” Nat said. “For a while there, he was pretty much impossible to sack.”

  Archy took the baby back from Nat Jaffe. “G Bad was a slippery motherfucker,” he agreed.

  Mr. Nostalgia, forty-four, walrus mustache, granny glasses, double-extra-large Reyn Spooner (palm trees, saw grass, woodies wearing surfboards), stood behind the Day-Glo patchwork of his five-hundred-dollar exhibitor’s table, across a polished concrete aisle and three tables down from the signing area, under an eight-foot vinyl banner that read MR. NOSTALGIA’S NEIGHBORHOOD, chewing on a Swedish fish, unable to believe his fucking eyes.

  “Yo!” he called out as the goon squad neared his table: two beefy white security guys in blue poly blazers and a behemoth of a black dude, Gibson Goode’s private muscle, whose arms in their circumference were a sore trial to the sleeves of his black T-shirt. “A little respect, please!”

  “Damn right,” said the man they were escorting from the hall, and as they came nearer, Mr. Nostalgia saw that it really was him. Thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, forty watts too dim, maybe: but him. Red tracksuit a size too small, baring his ankles and wrists. Jacket waistband riding up in back under a screened logo in yellow, a pair of upraised fists circled by the words BRUCE LEE INSTITUTE, OAKLAND, CA. Long and broad-shouldered, with that spring in his gait, coiling and uncoiling. Making a show of dignity that struck Mr. Nostalgia as poignant if not successful. Everybody staring at the guy, all the men with potbellies and back hair and doughy white faces, heads balding, autumn leaves falling in their hearts. Looking up from the bins full of back issues of Inside Sports, the framed Terrible Towels with their bronze plaques identifying the nubbly signature in black Sharpie on yellow terry cloth as that of Rocky Bleier or Lynn Swann. Lifting their heads from the tables ranged with rookie cards of their youthful idols (Pete Maravich, Robin Yount, Bobby Orr), with canceled checks drawn on long-vanished bank accounts of Ted Williams or Joe Namath; unopened cello packs of ’71 Topps baseball cards, their fragile black borders pristine as memory, and of ’86 Fleer basketball cards, every one holding a potential rookie Jordan. Watching this big gray-haired black man they half-remembered, a face out of their youth, get the bum’s rush. That’s the dude from the signing line. Was talking to Gibson Goode, got kind of loud. Hey, yeah, that’s what’s-his-face. Give him credit, the poor bastard managed to keep his chin up. The chin—him, all right—with the Kirk Douglas dimple. The light eyes. The hands, Jesus, like two uprooted trees.

  “Consider yourselves fortunate, gentlemen,” Mr. Nostalgia called as they swept past his table. “That man could kill you with one finger if he wanted to.”

  “Awesome,” said the younger of the goons, head shaved clean as a porn star’s testicle. “Long as he buys a ticket first.”

  Mr. Nostalgia was not a troublemaker. He liked to smoke prescription indica, watch television programs about World War II, eat Swedish fish, and listen to the Grateful Dead, in any combination or grouping thereof. Undoubtedly, sure, he had issues with authority, his father a survivor of two camps, his mother a marcher on Washington, Mr. Nostalgia unfit to hold down any job requiring him to answer to a boss. Great as he might be in circumference, however, Mr. Nostalgia was only five-six, almost, in his huaraches, and not quite in fighting trim. His one reliable move, if you hoped to base a style of kung fu on it, you would probably have to go with Pill Bug. Mr. Nostalgia avoided beefs, quarrels, bar fights, and showdowns foreign and domestic. He deplored violence, except in 1944, in black and white, on television. He was a merchant of good reputation and long standing who had forked over a hefty fee to the organizers of the East Bay Sports and Card Show, some of which money had gone to pay for the protection, the peace of mind, that these goons in their blue blazers would, at least in theory, provide. And peace of mind, face it, was not merely a beautiful phrase; it was a worthy ambition, the aim of religions, the promise of underwriters. But Mr. Nostalgia, as he would afterward explain to his wife (who would sooner eat a bowl of mashed Ebola than attend another card show), was deeply outraged by the rough treatment to which a hero of his youth was being subjected, for no reason other than his having managed to ninja himself onto the floor of the Convention Center without a ticket. And so, on that Saturday morning in the Kaiser Center, Mr. Nostalgia surprised himself.

  He came out from behind the ramparts of his neighborhood—replete as a Vegas buffet with choice offerings in the nonsports line that he had made his specialty and métier, among them a complete set of the 1971 Bobby Sherman Getting Together cards, including the very tough number 54. Mr. Nostalgia moved with a stately glide that had led at least one uncharitable observer over the years to remark, seeing him go by in one of his floral numbers, that the Pasadena Rose Parade appeared to be missing a float.

  “Wait up, let me get the man a ticket,” he called after the retreating security escort.

  Gibson Goode’s bodyguard glanced over his shoulder for half a second, like he was verifying that he hadn’t just stepped in dog shit. The goons in the blue blazers kept walking.

  “Hey, yo!” Mr. Nostalgia said. “Come on! Hey, come on, you guys! That’s Luther Stallings.”

  It was Stallings who came to a stop first, digging in, bucking his captors, turning to confront his redeemer. The familiar smile—its charm gapped and stained by drugs or prison dentistry or maybe only by the kind of poverty that would lead you to try to skirt an eight-dollar admission fee—put an ache behind Mr. Nostalgia’s breastbone.

  “Thank you, my good man,” Stallings said. Ostentatious, showing up the goons. “My dear friend . . .”

  Mr. Nostalgia supplied his actual last name, which was long, Jewish, and comical, a name for a type of cheese or sour bread. St
allings repeated it flawlessly and without the hint of mockery that it typically inspired.

  “My friend here,” Stallings explained, shouldering free of the goons like an escape artist shrugging out of a straitjacket, “has kindly offered to float me the price of admission.”

  A slight rise in intonation at the end, almost putting a question mark there. Making sure he had his facts right.

  “Absolutely,” Mr. Nostalgia said. He remembered sinking deep into a greasy Herculon seat at the Carson Twin cinema, a Saturday afternoon thirty years ago, an elephant of joy sitting on his chest, watching a movie with a mostly black cast—it was a mostly black audience—called Night Man. In love with every single thing about that movie. The girl in her silver Afro. The hand-to-hand fighting. The funky soundtrack. A chase involving a green 1972 Saab Sonett driven at top speed through streets that were recognizably those of Carson, California. The gear, tackle, and explosives carried by the bank robbers. Above all, the movie’s star, loose-limbed, still, and taciturn like a McQueen hero and with the same willingness to look silly, which was another way of saying charm. And—indisputably, in 1973—a Master of Kung Fu. “It’s truly an honor.”

  The goons zoomed in on Mr. Nostalgia, training their scopes, scanning the green two-day exhibitor’s pass hanging from a lanyard around his neck. Faces going dull, losing some of their bored swagger as they tried to remember if there was anything about this type of situation in the official goon manual.

  “He was harassing Mr. Goode,” said Goode’s bodyguard, stepping in to shore up morale in the muscle department. “You buy him a ticket,” he told Mr. Nostalgia, “he just going to harass him some more.”

  “Harassing?” Luther Stalling said, wild with incredulity. Innocent of every crime of which he ever had or ever would be accused for all time. “How I’m harassing that man? I just want to get with him, have my thirty seconds at his feet, standing on line like everybody else. Get my autograph off him, go about my way.”

  “Straight autograph from Mr. Goode going to cost you forty-five dollars,” the bodyguard pointed out. For all his girth, height, and general monstrousness, his voice was gentle, patient, the man paid, basically, to suffer fools. Maintain a fool-free perimeter around G Bad without making his employer look like a dick. “How you going to pay that, you ain’t even have eight?”

  “Buddy, hey, yo,” Stallings said, then got the name right again with another painful flash—painful to Mr. Nostalgia, at any rate—of that scrimshaw smile. Whatever the man had been doing, apart from simply getting old, to have so brutally pared himself down, hollowed himself out, since his glory days, it didn’t seem to affect his memory; or maybe he wasn’t doing it anymore. “I hope, I, uh, wonder,” going all in with the question mark this time, “if maybe I could persuade you to help me out?”

  Mr. Nostalgia stepped back, an involuntary move ingrained by years of tangling with the hustlers, operators, schnorrers, and short-change artists who flecked the world of card shows like weevils in flour. Thinking there was a difference of more than thirty-seven dollars between offering to pick up the price of admission, a gesture of respect, and springing for the man to buy himself, of all things, a Gibson Goode autograph. Mr. Nostalgia tried to remember if he had ever seen or even heard of a celebrity (however well forgotten) who was prepared to stand in line to pay cash for another celebrity’s signature. Why did Stallings want it? Where was he going to have G Bad put it? He did not appear to be carrying any obvious signables, book, photograph, jersey, not even a program, a napkin, a Post-it. I just want to get with him. To what end? Mr. Nostalgia never could have flourished in his trade without maintaining a keen ear for the slick lines of grifters and bullshit artists, and Luther Stallings was definitely setting off Klaxons, up to something, working some angle. Had already blown his play, in fact, until Mr. Nostalgia for some reason had felt it necessary to leave the safety of his neighborhood and stick his nose where it didn’t belong. Mr. Nostalgia could hear his wife passing the sole necessary judgment on the matter, another in the string of endless variations on her single theme, What in God’s name were you thinking? But Mr. Nostalgia’s title was not a mere honorific; his d/b/a was his DNA. Remembering the weight of that elephant of happiness upon him, on that Saturday afternoon at the Carson Twin in 1974, he chose to believe in the truth of Luther Stallings. A man could want things far stranger and less likely than a quarterback’s signature on a scrap of cash register tape or a torn paper bag.

  “Maybe I can do better than that,” Mr. Nostalgia said.

  He reached into the back pocket of his denim shorts and took out a folded, sweat-dampened manila envelope. Inside it were the other two green badges on lanyards to which, at his level of participation, he was entitled. He fished out one badge and pushed his way through the screen of goons. Luther Stallings bowed his head, revealing an incipient Nelson Mandela bald spot, and Mr. Nostalgia bestowed the badge on him, Oz emboldening the Lion.

  “Mr. Stallings is working for me today,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Stallings said at once, sounding not just sincere but impatient, like he had been looking forward for days to helping out in Mr. Nostalgia’s booth. His eyes had flicked, barely, across the badge as Mr. Nostalgia hung it on him; he said, not missing a trick, “In Mr. Nostalgia’s Neighborhood.”

  “Working how?” said the older of the two goons.

  “He’s doing a signing at my booth,” Mr. Nostalgia said. “I got a complete and a partial set, no Bruce Lee, of the Masters of Kung Fu series, I got a few other things Mr. Stallings has kindly consented to sign. A lobby card from Black Eye, I’m pretty sure.”

  “ ‘Masters of Kung Fu,’ ” Stallings repeated, barely managing to avoid sounding like he had absolutely no idea what Mr. Nostalgia was talking about.

  “Donruss, 1976, it’s a tough set.”

  Four clueless looks sought enlightenment at the hands of Mr. Nostalgia.

  “Uh, guys?” Mr. Nostalgia said with a circular sweep of his hands, taking in the echoing space all around them. “Trading cards? Little rectangles of cardboard? Stained with bubble gum? Pop one in the spokes of your bicycle, make it sound like a Harley-Davidson?”

  “Damn, seriously?” Stallings could not keep it back. “Masters of Kung Fu. They got a Luther Stallings in there?”

  “Naturally,” Mr. Nostalgia said.

  “Luther Stallings.” The older of the two blue blazers, lank dark hair, the flowerpot skull and triangle chin of a Russian or a Pole, about Mr. Nostalgia’s age, tried out the name. Scrunching up one side of his face like he was screwing a loupe into his eye socket. “Okay, yeah. What’s it? Strutter. Seriously, that’s you?”

  “My first part,” Stallings said, seizing upon this unexpected opportunity to preen. Loving it. Putting one of those massive antler hands on Mr. Nostalgia to let him know he was loving it: doing what he must do best. Restoring the goon squad to their proper roles as members of the Luther Stalling Irregulars. “Year after I won the title.”

  “Title in what? Kung fu?”

  “Wasn’t one at that time. Was in karate. In Manila. World champion.”

  “World champion, bullshit,” said Goode’s bodyguard. “I give you that.”

  Stallings flat ignored the big man. Mr. Nostalgia, feeling fairly balls-out pleased with himself, tried to do the same.

  “We all done here, gentlemen?” Stallings asked the blue blazers.

  The security guys in the blue blazers checked in with the bodyguard, who shook his head, disgusted.

  “I tell you what, Luther,” the bodyguard said. “You even flick a boogie in Mr. Goode’s general vicinity, I will come down on you, motherfucker. And I will show no mercy.”

  The man turned and, with a forbearing hitch in his walk, rolled back to the signing table where his boss, head shaved to stubble, wearing a black polo shirt with a red paw print where the alligator would have gone, armed with nothing but a liquid-silver marker and a high-priced smile, sat fighting his way through an impre
ssively long line of autograph seekers. Game-worn jerseys, game-used footballs, cards, ball caps, he was going to clear nine, ten thousand today.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Stallings said, as if he could not care less about Gibson Goode.

  Working up a surprising amount of swagger, he followed Mr. Nostalgia to the booth. You would have thought the man had just saved himself from being tossed out of the building by the goon squad. Mr. Nostalgia recognized objectively that he ought to be annoyed, but somehow it made him feel sorrier for Stallings.

  “Wow, check this shit out.”

  Stallings worked his gaze along the table, taking in the sealed wax packs of Garbage Pail Kids and Saturday Night Fever, the unopened box of Fleer Dune cards, the Daktari and Gentle Ben and Mork & Mindy board games, the talking Batman alarm clock, the Aurora model kits of the Spindrift and Seaview in their original shrink-wrap.

  “They even got cards for that ALF, huh?” he said.

  His voice as he made this observation, like his expression as he took it all in, sounded unhappy to Mr. Nostalgia, even forlorn. Not the disdain that Mr. Nostalgia’s wife always showed for his stock-in-trade but something more like disappointment.