Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  “What happened?” Luther said to Chan, affecting lightness. Only then, in the wake of posing this awful question, did he begin to feel something like dread. Chan just turned up the volume on the music. “Chan, you did it?”

  Luther could see Chan struggling to frame the story of what had transpired inside the Bit o’ Honey Lounge in some way that did not infuriate him. One thing Chandler Flowers hated more than being underestimated for his intelligence was giving evidence of any lack thereof. The light turned green. Luther steered, for mysterious reasons and in the absence of counterinstruction from his companion, toward the image in his mind of that westernmost angel blowing that apocalyptic horn. A minute went by which Joe Beck and his guitar organized according to their own notions of time and its fuzztone passage. At last Flowers emitted, as through a tight aperture, four words.

  “Shot off his hand.”

  “Left or right?”

  “The right hand.”

  “He a righty or a lefty?”

  “Why?”

  “Is Popcorn a righty or a lefty?”

  “You are suggesting, if Popcorn Hughes turns out to be right-handed, maybe I messed this job up a little less. Because at least now Popcorn only has the hand he doesn’t use.”

  Luther reflected as they rumbled up Tunnel Road toward the spot where, invisibly as a decision turning bad, it became the Warren Freeway. “No,” he conceded at last.

  After this, they did not speak at all. Luther went on reflecting. At seven in the morning, Monday, he was expected to report to a rented soundstage down in Studio City to film his first scenes for Strutter, a low-budget action movie in whose lead he had recently been cast. He was driving around tonight in the up-front money from that job. There was ten grand yet to come, and after that, anything: sequels, endorsements, television work, the parts that Jim Brown was too busy to take, a costarring role with Burt Reynolds. Now, through some damned interlocking of bravado, loyalty, and the existential heedlessness that had helped him to become the 1972 middleweight karate champion of the world, Luther had knotted his pleasantly indistinct future like a sackful of kittens to the plunging stone of Chan Flowers.

  Tonight had gone wrong, but even if Popcorn, as planned, had caught a fatal chestful of lead shot and pumped out his life in a puddle under a table by the stage, the situation would have been no better. True, the seed of Panther legend that Chan Flowers hoped to cultivate as Chan “the Undertaker” Flowers, killer of men—a real one, not some make-believe hard-ass in a low-budget grind-house feature—would have been planted. True, the ongoing mental distress caused to Huey Newton by the continued existence of Popcorn Hughes might have been assuaged. But there still would have been no benefit whatsoever to Luther Stallings. Success of the mission would have been another kind of failure, even deeper shit than Luther was in now.

  Luther had no politics, no particular feelings toward drug dealers like Popcorn or toward the Black Panthers who had targeted them. He did not care who controlled the city of Oakland or its ghetto streets. He had seen Huey Newton once in his life, black leather jacket, easy smile, talking some shit about disalienation at a house party in the Berkeley flatlands, and had marked him right away as just another stylist of gangster self-love. Luther Stallings, future star of blaxploitation and beyond, had no call to be here, no interest in the outcome either way. Chan asked him to drive, so Luther drove. Now, instead of a murder in his rearview mirror, there was the bloody trail of a fuckup. Meanwhile, the image of the golden angel of the Mormons soloing atop his spire worked its strange allure on Luther’s imagination.

  “Take a left,” Chan said as they rolled off the freeway at the Park Avenue exit.

  Luther was about to protest that a left turn would lead them away from the temple when he realized that he had no real reason to want to go to that place. The vague longing to bear some kind of witness to the glory of the angel Moroni winked out inside him, crumbled like ash. Luther aimed the Toronado up Joaquin Miller Road.

  “Where we going?” he said.

  “I need to think,” said the smartest boy in the room. He stared out at the night that streamed like a downpour across the windshield. Then, “Shut up.”

  “I didn’t say nothing,” Luther said, though he most definitely had been tossing around some combination of words along the lines of Ain’t it a little late for that now?

  “Yeah, I was in that Dogpile one time,” Moby was saying. “Down in L.A.?”

  Moby was one of the noontime regulars. He was a lawyer, none too unusual a career path for a three-hundred-dollar-a-month abuser of polyvinyl chloride, except that Moby’s clients were all cetaceans. His real name was Mike Oberstein. He was notably—given the moniker—white and size 2XL. Wore his longish hair parted down the center and slicked back over his ears in twin flukes. Moby worked for a foundation out of an office in the same building as Archy’s wife, bringing action against SeaWorld on behalf of Shamu’s brother-in-law, suing the navy for making humpbacks go deaf. He was a passionate and free-spending accruer of fifties and sixties jazz sides.

  “It was pretty tight,” Moby added.

  “Was it?” Nat said. Giving a bottle to Rolando English, who sat fastened safely into an infant carrier, propped up on the counter by the cash register. Nat kept his gaze fixed on the baby so that, Archy understood, he would not have to kill Mike Oberstein with gamma rays shot out of his eyeballs. “Was it bangin?”

  Archy knew—could not help knowing all the man’s rants and treatises on the subject—how it bothered Nat that Moby tried so hard (to be honest, probably wasn’t even trying anymore) to sound like he was from the ’hood, from round the way, as Moby would have put it, even though he was a sweet-natured white guy from Indiana, someplace.

  “It was straight-up bangin,” Moby said, so well armored in his sweetness and his imaginary Super Fly fur coat that he was impervious if not oblivious to the eyeball lightning Nat was always forking in his direction. “No joke. Found me this crazy side called, Nat, get this, Jimmy Smith Live in Israel. Thought it was a myth. I been looking for that for, like, years.”

  Nat nodded, watching the formula steadily disappear from the bottle, while in his imagination, as Archy could infer by the knot of Nat’s shoulders, he took a pristine pressing of Jimmy Smith Live in Israel (Isradisc, 1973) out of its sleeve and snapped it over his knee. Twice, into quarters. Then handed it back to Moby without a word, not even needing to say, Man, fuck Dogpile. And the motherfucking Dogpile blimp.

  “Part I don’t understand, all due respect, is why y’all act like it some kind of invasion,” said the King of Bling. “Dogpile coming into this neighborhood.”

  Garnet Singletary, Baby Rolando’s grandfather, was sitting beside Moby at the glass display counter that ran nearly half the length of the south wall of the store, at the end farthest from the window, in order to preserve a certain distance between himself and the parrot. Fifty-Eight, the African grey, sat perched on the shoulder of Cochise Jones, who occupied his usual stool tucked into the corner by the window, Mr. Jones with that inveterate hunch to his spine from fifty years conducting experiments at the keyboard of a Hammond B-3. Decades of avian companionship had raised a fuzz of claw marks at the shoulders of Mr. Jones’s green leisure suit, tussocks on the padded polyester lawn. Restless as a radio telescope, the parrot’s head with its staring eye plowed the universe for invisible signs and messages. Every so often Fifty-Eight, whose public utterances tended to be musical, would counterfeit the steely vibrato of his owner’s B-3, break out into a riff, a stray middle eight, the bird programming its musical selections with an apparent randomness in which Singletary, who feared and admired the bird, claimed to find evidence of calculation and ironical intent.

  “Gibson Goode was born here,” Singletary continued when no explanation was forthcoming from either partner.

  Singletary was in his mid-fifties but looked thirty. Hair sprang carefully from his head in micro-dreads no thicker than his grandson’s fingers. His smile easy and w
arm, his eyes as cold as pennies at the bottom of a well. Like Fifty-Eight’s, those eyes missed nothing, cloaking in a universal fog of conversation the ceaseless void of his surveillance. Archy wondered if the man’s unease around the bird arose from recognition of a rival or a peer.

  Singletary said, “Man grew up down in L.A., but his granny still living over in Rumford Plaza. Y’all was operating in Atlanta, New York, and this dude showed up in his great big black blimp, I might understand how you could feel some resentfulness. But Gibson Goode is a semi-local product. Like”—the eyes teaming up with the smile to give notice that he was about to mess with Nat—“if you was to put you and Archy together. Half local, half out of town.”

  “Half and half,” Nat said, humming to himself, pouring the formula into Rolando English. The boy definitely had an appetite; they had run through the bottles of Good Start by eleven this morning and were working on a can of Enfamil powder mixed with water at Brokeland’s bathroom sink, the Enfamil provided by S. S. Mirchandani from a deep, remote, and spidery shelf over at Temescal Liquor, which he owned. The infant carrier came courtesy of the King of Bling.

  “Look at him go.” Cochise Jones watched the baby formula work its way like mercury in a falling thermometer down the graduations. Intent, pleased, doubtful, as if he had money riding on the outcome. He winked at Archy. Mr. and the late Mrs. Jones never had children of their own. “Boy making me thirsty.”

  “Yes, I am feeling quite thirsty myself,” said Mr. Mirchandani, and Archy felt a flutter of anticipatory dread. “You know, Nat, you really should put in an espresso machine or other form of beverage service.”

  Archy plunged himself deeper into the mysteries of crate number 8. The theoretical espresso machine was a sore subject, the most recent of many arguments between the co-owners of Brokeland having begun over the question of whether, as Archy had been hinting with increasing heavy-handedness for a couple of years, the time had come to offer more at the counter than unlimited supplies of music and bullshit on tap. Because the truth was, they were already fucked, with or without Gibson Goode and his Dogpile empire. They were behind on the rent to Singletary. Their inventory was dwindling as their ability to purchase the better collections ran afoul of cash flow problems. Probably if you looked at the matter coolly and rationally, an activity in which neither partner could be said to excel, they were on their last legs. So many of the other used-record kings of the East Bay had already gone under, hung it up, or turned themselves into Internet-only operations, closing their doors, letting the taps of bullshit go dry. Brokeland Records was nearly the last of its kind, Ishi, Chingachgook, Martha the passenger pigeon.

  Every time Archy broached the subject of trying some new angle, branching out, beefing up their website, even, yes, selling coffee drinks and pastries and chai, he ran into heavy resistance from Nat. Not just resistance; the man would shut down the conversation, shut himself down, with that infuriating, self-righteous Abraham the Patriarch way he had sometimes, acting as if he and Archy were not a couple of secondary-market retailers trying to stay afloat but guardians of some ancient greatness that must never be tainted or altered. When really (like any religion, Archy supposed), it was a compound of OCD and existential panic, a displaced fear of change. Reroutings of familiar traffic patterns, new watermarks and doodads on the national currency, revised rules for the bundling of recyclables, such things were anathema to Nat Jaffe. Fresh starts, clean slates, reboots: anathema. He stood against them like an island in the flow, a snag of branches.

  “You want a fucking macchiato?” he had said a couple of days earlier, throwing a record album at Archy, nothing too valuable, just a copy of Stan Getz and J. J. Johnson at the Opera House (Verve, 1957), Getz sitting in with Johnson, Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, and Connie Kay. “Here’s your fucking macchiato!”

  Meaning, sweet light froth of a white guy on top of a dense dark bottom of black. The shot had gone wide, but damn, a flying record, the thing could have sliced Archy’s head off. Archy found himself annoyed just thinking about it now. It annoyed him as well that Mr. Mirchandani had mentioned the espresso machine, even though he knew that Mr. Mirchandani was only trying to help out, take up the cause, join the chorus of those who did not want to see Brokeland die. There was no mistaking the fact that Nat was on high simmer today, perhaps two bubbles away from a full-on roll.

  “Gentlemen.”

  It was a mild voice, the voice of a man trained to extol the highest in men and women while seeing them at their lowest. Trained to seemliness, to keeping itself soft and low under the pall of remembrance and grief that forever hung over Flowers & Sons. At the sound of that funereal voice, its head cocked in Singletary’s direction, the African grey parrot began to give out, note-perfect, Cochise Jones’s reading of the old Mahalia Jackson spiritual “Trouble of the World,” found on Mr. Jones’s only album as a bandleader, Redbonin’ (CTI, 1973).

  “Look out,” Mr. Jones said, but as usual, Fifty-Eight was way ahead of him.

  In the shade of a wide-brimmed black hat whose vibe wavered between crime boss and Henry Fonda in Once upon a Time in the West, pin-striped gray-on-charcoal three-piece, black wing tips shined till they shed a perceptible halo, Chan Flowers came into the store. Slid himself through the front door, ineluctable as a final notice from the county. Straight-backed, barrel-chested, bowlegged. A model of probity, a steady hand to reassure the grieving, a sober man—a grave man—solid as the pillar of a tomb. A good dose of gangster to the hat to let you know the councilman played his politics old-school, with a shovel in the dark of the moon. Plus that touch of Tombstone, of Gothic western undertaker, like maybe sometimes when the moon was full and Flowers & Sons stood empty and dark but for the vigil lights, Chan Flowers might up and straddle a coffin, ride it like a bronco.

  “Looks like we have ourselves the hard core here today,” he said, quickly tallying the faces at the counter before settling on Archy, a question in his eyes, something he wanted to know. “Wait out here,” he told his nephews.

  The two Flowers nephews stayed out on the sidewalk. Like all of Mr. Flowers’s younger crop of nephews, they seemed not to be wearing their ill-fitting black suits so much as to be squatting inside them until some less embarrassing habitation came along. They had the solemn faces of practical jokers waiting to spring a gag. One of them took out a book of Japanese math puzzles and started working them with a stub of pencil.

  “Mr. Jones!” Flowers said, starting in, with that politician resolve, to fill the boxes of this human sudoku.

  “Your Honor,” said Cochise Jones.

  Flowers reached for Mr. Jones’s octave-and-a-half hand, its nails like chips of piano ivory.

  “The honor is indeed mine,” Flowers said, “as always, to bask in the reflected luster of the legacy you represent. Inventor of the musical styling known as Brokeland Creole.” Mr. Jones was also, as far as Archy knew, the first person to use the term Brokeland to describe this neighborhood, the ragged fault where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted. “Hello, Fifty-Eight.”

  There was a silence. The bird regarded Flowers.

  “Say hello,” Mr. Jones said.

  “Say hello, you little jive-ass motherfucker,” Fifty-Eight said.

  The voice was that of Cochise Jones, the unmistakable smoker’s croak, but way more irritable than Archy had ever heard Mr. Jones become. Everybody laughed except Chan Flowers. His eyes kept aloof from the smile on his lips.

  “Keep it up,” Flowers told Fifty-Eight. “You know I have a deluxe cherrywood pet casket sitting on my stockroom shelf right now, waiting to house your remains.”

  This was true; Cochise Jones had made funeral arrangements of Egyptian exactitude for himself and his partner in solitude.

  “Brother Singletary.” Flowers pointed a slender finger. “The King of Bling, how are you, sir?”

  “Councilman,” Singletary said, looking at Flowers the same way he looked at Fifty-Eight, with a mix of curiosity and distaste, as if
touching his tongue to something bitter at the corner of his mouth.

  The two of them, Singletary and Flowers, had beefed often and openly over the years, always in a civilized way. Lawsuits, real estate, a long cold war fought against a backdrop of redevelopment money using proxies and attorneys. West Oakland rumor traced the source of beef to the late 1970s, tendering the story that Singletary had married his wife out from under a preexisting condition of Chan Flowers. Rumor further added the dubious yet somehow creditable information that her reason for choosing Singletary over Flowers came down to an ineradicable odor of putrefaction on the undertaker’s hands. “I’m all right, ’less you here to tell me otherwise.”

  “Now, you know,” Flowers said, half addressing the room, the voice modulated, genial, but not, in spite of the rhetoric, orotund. Cool and dispassionate, as ready to express disappointment as flattery. “Back in the Bible, only a king could even wear the bling. They did not call it that, of course, did they, Mr. Oberstein? King Solomon, in his book of Ecclesiastes, do you know the vernacular he employed to allude to that which we now style ‘bling’?”

  Moby guessed, “Frankincense and myrrh?”

  “He called it vanity,” said the King of Bling. “And I got no argument against that.”

  “Well, that’s fine, because I did not come in here looking for an argument,” Flowers said. “Mr. S. S. Mirchandani, a latecomer to these shores, but wasting no time.”

  “Councilman Flowers.”

  “Good for you, sir. And Mr. Oberstein . . .”

  Flowers frowned at the whale attorney, plainly searching for the kind of fitting summary he liked to bestow on people, an epitaph for every headstone.