Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  “Valletta,” he said, thinking she still looked good, then abandoning all wisdom and ignoring his Spidey sense long enough to let her take him in her arms, the skin of her bare shoulder in a halter top cool against his shoulder, the lady most definitely giving off that heavy 1978 Spencer’s smell of love candles and sandalwood incense but, laid over top of it, the stink of cigarette, the instant-potatoes smell you might find in the interior of a beat-to-shit Toronado. “Damn.”

  It was only when she let go of Archy that he saw the tight line of her lips. She looked left, right. She was worried, hiding, running: running to Archy. In the pit of his sensitive belly, neurotransmitters registered with a flutter of dread whatever kind of trouble his father was currently getting himself into. Already thinking it might have something to do with Chandler Flowers, his father’s best friend, back in the day. How Flowers had come into the store today, asking, of all things, Your dad around? Luther reported to have been down in West Hollywood someplace, last Archy heard, not that he ever sought the least news or information of Luther’s who-, what-, where-, when- or whyabouts.

  “Well, it sure has been a long time, Valletta,” he said cheerfully, deciding to pretend that he believed she had been driving Luther’s car down Sixty-first Street, happened to see him on his front porch, and decided to stop and say hello. As if she could have stared clean through 175 pounds and thirty years to recognize the teenager in whose dreams she briefly but intensely featured. “I do have to be running, because I got to, you know, get to the store, but, hey—”

  “Archy, no, no, wait, hold up—”

  “You have a good day, now. All right? No, really. I’m sorry. But you have a positive day.”

  Back when he was a boy, there used to be a gentleman named Joseph Charles, man would stand out every day at the corner of Oregon and Grove wearing a pair of dazzling yellow gloves. Waving to every car that passed him, extending to its driver, regardless of race, creed, or receptivity, one (1) genuine, heartfelt greeting. Mr. Charles’s manner bold and cheerful but a touch formal, hinting, though not in any unkind way, at the impersonal. No intention of greeting you in particular; simply reminding you that, like all humans, you partook in the noble human capacity for being greeted. It was Mr. Charles’s manner that Archy tended to adopt around women when he sensed they might be about to pose him some kind of problem. He gave Valletta’s shoulder a fond squeeze, started away. In his heart, he already knew that he was not going to get anywhere; not yet. Like many abandoned sons, he was conscious of owing a mysterious, unrepayable debt toward the man of whom, in truth, he was the eternal creditor.

  “Archy, it’s your dad,” she said, tendering that unpayable IOU, “it’s Luther.”

  She raised the sunglasses at him and hit him straight on with twin blasts of yellow-brown fire, with the shock of the bitter work of time and corruption. Cakes of mascara cobwebbed her lashes.

  “Yeah?”

  Valletta checked out the shadows and rustlings up and down both ends of the street one more time, ran the broom of her paranoia up the quiet little pond of a street built around a pocket playground that some unknown amateur of children had tucked, like an Easter egg, onto an island of grass in the midst of Sixty-first Street. Archy wondered if Valletta might not be high, cashed out on something that was making her go all Pynchonesque. The last time he found himself unable to prevent hearing news of Luther, it was a tale, grand and heartwarming, of cleanness, sobriety, redemption. Luther had drawn a judge down south who remembered Strutter and, never having been the man’s son, was willing to take a chance on Luther Stallings, divert him to a drug court. Luther went around after that, supposedly, making amends to 17,512 people on two continents. That was at least a year ago, and the amends that Archy consented to allow his father to make to him at the time had consisted, in full, of a sober, clean telephone promise to leave Archy the fuck alone from now until the end of time.

  “Can we go in?” she wanted to know, sighing, impatient, maybe, he thought desperately, only needing to pee. “Inside your house?”

  “Huh-uh,” Archy said, not trying to charm or work her anymore, the deep 1978 El Cerrito–apartment sullenness starting to seep out of him as he remembered how Luther and Valletta used to leave him there all night by himself, nothing on the television but Wolfman Jack and some movie where a shark-toothed devil doll was biting Karen Black on the ankles. Only thing he wanted to know now: what kind of bullshit trouble Luther Stallings was trying to get Archy into this go-round and how much it was going to cost in blood and treasure. “Just say what you came to say. No joke, Valletta, I really do have to go.”

  “Mm-hmm, yeah, you ain’t changed,” she said, lighting up icy diodes at the heart of those eyes that, in the summer of 1977, had stared not only into Archy’s soul but into the soul of young black America from the covers of Jet and Sepia and from the feathers-fur-and-leather kung fu splendors of her role as Candygirl Clark in one of the last blaxploitation films of that era, Strutter at Large, in which she costarred with a lean, wiry, and beautiful Luther Stallings in his most famous part. “Still walking around all pinch-up and pouty-face, giving everybody a fish-eye, most of all your father or his friend.”

  “Y’all are still friends, then.”

  “We took up with each other again. Third time, you know what they say.”

  Archy had contrived to miss the second near-fatal intersection of Luther and Valletta by cleverly timing his service in the United States Army to coincide with the geopolitical hard-on of Saddam Hussein.

  “He back in town, then?”

  She stared him down, challenging him, not wanting to give up anything if he was going to make her stand out on the damn sidewalk to say it.

  “And now you come around here. Saying Luther sent you, is that right? Come around here hoping to find out what, exactly?”

  “Luther don’t know nothing about it. Man knew I was here . . .” She chewed on the earpiece of her sunglasses, seeming to rehearse Luther’s anger in her mind. “He knows how you feel, he wants to respect that.”

  “So you don’t want money.”

  “Truly,” she said, “I do. I’ll take whatever you can spare me. We need to get far away from here and stay there.”

  It did not take a lot of effort for Archy to harden his heart against his father; that clay was well fired, long and slow. Anger, resentment, scorn, disgust, Luther’s son kept these handy in the pocket of his soul as surely as the copy of Meditations at his hip. So it must testify to something, some abiding foolishness peculiar to the sons of broken fathers, that it took any effort at all. Thirty-six years of this shit, and Archy was still willing to let the man disappoint him.

  “I’m not going to ask why,” Archy said. “Because if you don’t tell me, then I won’t know.”

  “Archy, I can’t get into it out here.”

  “I am so fine with that, Valletta.”

  “Your daddy . . . Luther . . .” She tried for a couple of seconds, pursing her lips, tapping them pensively with her right fist, to put it into words. Then she gave up. “He been clean and sober thirteen months now.”

  “Uh-huh. Good for him.”

  “And, like, now he got some irons in the fire.”

  “I bet he does,” Archy said, thinking that was the perfect expression to describe the future as it stood in permanent relation to Luther Stallings: a big pile of irons glowing red-hot, to be snatched from the fire only at the cost of singed flesh. “Investment opportunities, that right?”

  She fell back once more on her optic beams, but either this time Archy was ready or the effect had begun to dull. She lowered the sunglasses again.

  “Let me guess,” Archy said. “Because I am experiencing premonitions.”

  Chan and Luther unhooked a heavy chain between two pillars, left the Toronado tucked into a fold of midnight at the back of a gravel parking lot. Crunched up a hillside through fumes of eucalyptus, Chan carrying the shotgun, to a lookout they at one time favored for planning their conques
ts of the world. At their spot Chan turned and swung the gun, let it fly. It helicoptered out into the night and came whipping down with a clang of pipe somewhere in the woods behind them. Then they sat on their bench, perched side by side on the high shoulder of Oakland. Looked out at streets and bridges and highways embroidered, stitched out, in lights onto dark panels of water and sky.

  In the interest of furthering his stone-cold pistolero legend, of which purity was to form a key component, the Undertaker never drank and rarely smoked. Luther passed him a package of Kools, and the Undertaker took one and lit it. Luther fished a fifth of Rumple Minze from his jacket pocket. The Undertaker surrendered the last fragment of his stillborn legend to the possibility of solace offered by the bottle of schnapps.

  “He grabbed hold of his wrist, sat there looking at it,” Chan said, wiping his lips. “Meat and blood. A stump. All calm and collected, cuff of his jacket shot up to threads. Just a rag where his hand used to be, looking at it.”

  “Popcorn Hughes,” Luther said admiringly.

  “I need to hide myself, Luther.”

  “Where at?” Dread inflated a taut balloon in Luther’s rib cage. He could barely muster breath to get out the next syllables: “L.A.?”

  For that was the obvious solution: Swing by Luther’s mother’s house and pick up the canvas suitcase and the three Berkeley Farms crates, packed and ready to go. Hit L.A. by morning, Chan could buy what he needed when they got there. Track down some shitbox safe house where Chan could hole up. Wave goodbye then. Engage in the theater of turning their separate ways, meeting their respective fates, until the next of his friend’s schemes went wrong, the next time Chan found himself confronting the truth that his faith in himself was misplaced, his intelligence fated to go unrewarded because it was no substitute for luck, no proof against the world’s massive, even hostile, indifference to the productions of a black man’s intellect. Like the Party he had joined too late, too young, Chan was a lost claim check, a series of time-lapse photos of a promise as it broke. He was a king of finite space, bound in a nutshell. And Luther was sick of it. He rued all the time he had wasted since the call came from his agent, feeling guilty, feeling sorry for Chan.

  “Or,” he said, trying to be helpful, “uh, lot of Panthers in Chicago, right?”

  Chan didn’t say anything.

  “Morocco, then. Or Spain.”

  “Spain,” Chan said. Luther could hear the hard little smile creasing his face. “Good thinking. Go to Spain. Become a toronado.”

  “Why not? All the revolutionary Negroes been skipping to Morocco, Spain. Paris. You were doing their business. They got to take care of you.”

  “Who?”

  “The Party.”

  “Luther, if I had the kind of clout, get myself that far away from here? I wouldn’t have needed to impress anybody in the first place with the fool thing I just tried to do.”

  Somewhere right around here, Luther remembered, if you went farther up the path behind the picnic tables, you would stumble across a pyramid of built-up stones left behind by some crazy old beard-faced poet back when Oakland was nothing but a slough and a stables and a cowboy hotel. In school they came here on field trips, checking out the poet’s little white farmhouse, a big lumpy statue of him riding on a Mongoloid-looking horse. A pyramid of stone and, farther back, a stone platform the man had built, intending it to be used for his funeral pyre. Out here in the hot sun, day after day, the man piling up rocks like lines in one of his boring poems. Dreaming, the whole time he was stacking those rocks, about how all those olden-time gangsters of Oakland, those whoring, robbing, land-grabbing Indian killers, opium addicts and loot seekers down there in the flatlands, how some fine night they were going to look up here at this green slope and marvel at the spectacle of a burning poet. Nothing ever came of that plan, far as Luther could recall. But then that was the general tendency of plans.

  “If you’re a fool,” Luther said, “what’s that make me?”

  This was a question that could never be answered, and Luther carried swiftly on to the next.

  “Why’d I want to go and mess up my good thing driving your murder taxi around West Oakland?” he said. “Tell me that? So the Marxist gangsters can roll over the running-dog capitalist gangsters, take over their drugs and cash flow?”

  “Leave, then,” Chan said. “You’re not in this. You go on and get.”

  Before Luther could begin to feign that he was not entertaining this generous suggestion, there was a flicker of moonlight, like the bright quick of a fingernail, at the corner of his eye. Chan was pondering a handgun. Taken like the shotgun, no doubt, from the Party arsenal that it was Chan’s official duty to keep inventoried, secret, and in fighting shape. A .45, a handsome piece, probably brand-new. Luther’s heart misgave at the way Chan was balancing it on both palms, weighing it like a heavy book that held a heavy answer.

  “What you going to do with that?” Luther said.

  “Try again,” Chan said at last. “Find out what hospital they took Popcorn to.” He found a solid grip on the pistol. “Get it right the second time.”

  “Maybe you ought to talk to somebody first. Maybe Huey be satisfied with what you already did to fuck Popcorn up for him.”

  A fog began to blur the prospect of Oakland spread beneath them. Silence gathered around the friends until it felt like something profound. The coals of their cigarettes flared and crackled. The fog hissed like carbonation in a drink.

  “You remember what your uncle Oogie used to do on your birthday, at Christmas?” Chan said finally. “All ‘Yeah, uh, listen, I was going to get you a air rifle.’ ” His imitation of Oogie’s mumbly drawl was flawless. “Expecting you to be as grateful as if he did give it to you. Now I’m supposed to say, ‘Uh, yeah, Huey, I was going to kill Popcorn Hughes for you, but, uh . . .’?”

  “Why not?”

  “ ‘Why not?’ ” Chan said, making it come out high and childish. “Easy for you to say. Tell me this. You get down there on that movie set, are you going to forget your lines? Tell the director, ‘Uh, yeah, I meant to memorize that shit, but, uh . . .’?”

  “No.”

  “Are you?”

  “No!”

  “Then why do you want me to do it?”

  “Come on, then,” Luther said. “Let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Let’s, uh, let’s get out of here. You come with me. Down to L.A. Hide out down there. San Pedro. Long Beach.” Trying to summon or feign enthusiasm for his proposal. “Yeah, Ensenada.”

  It was too dark for Chan to see what was not in Luther’s eyes and too dark for Luther to see him missing it.

  Chan stood up and dropped the .45 into his hip pocket. It rattled against the extra shotgun rounds. “I woke up this morning,” he said, “had all kinds of beautiful intentions. Prove myself to the Supreme Servant of the People, take a major annoyance off his hands. Move in, move up, maybe in a year I’m running the Oakland chapter. Then I get my eye on the account books. See what kind of holes might be in them, waste and whatnot. Bring a little more structure, a little more discipline. Now, no. Nuh-uh. Now I just have to make it right. You go on, though. Go on, Luther, and get your good thing.”

  His voice broke, and from the crack in it emerged the voice of the boy he recently was. Fiercely shy and bookish, absorbing without saturation, on behalf of his sisters and his baby brother, the endless seep of the elder Flowers’s venom. At the memory of that vanished boy, Luther regretted, without entirely renouncing, his earlier disloyal thoughts. He put his arm around the professorial shoulders of his friend. “It’s already too wrong, Chan,” he said. “No way you can make it right.”

  “That is probably true.”

  “You got to leave. Come on. Come to L.A., hole up. Ride it out.”

  “I appreciate the gesture, Luther,” Chan said. “I already troubled you sufficiently.”

  “Then go somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywheres
that a bus could take you.”

  “Maybe I will,” Chan said, to end the conversation.

  When the peppermint brandy was drunk, they got up and left behind them the spot where a forgotten dreamer of the California dream had planned to have his glory notarized by fire. Turned and hiked, sliding, back down to the car. After a silent drive to the bottom of the city, the blue dome of the Greyhound station loomed before them like a promise of adventure. There was an OPD cruiser parked at the curb when they pulled up, but before they could consider bailing on the bus station plan, a cop came strolling out of the station, got back into the car, and drove away.

  Luther had three hundred dollars in his wallet, all that was left of his up-front money. He handed it over to Chan, “ ’Kay, then,” he said.

  They stood facing each other at the back of the Toronado. Its taillights were slits as narrow as the eyes in the Batman mask, a skeptical squint regarding them. The friends exchanged a couple of palm slaps. Each clasped the other briefly to his chest. Chan offered up some parting bullshit about catching a northbound up to Alaska, or maybe head south, work those shrimp boats down in the Gulf of Mexico. It was all smoke. Chan had never been a boy to leave food on a plate, a math problem without a solution, an open pussy unfucked. He wasn’t going to go into the bus station, get on a bus for North Nowhere. Soon as Luther left, he would get busy finishing, for the sake of finishing, the trouble he had started.

  “Seriously,” Luther said. “What you going to do?”

  “You don’t need to know, Luther. Tell you this, though, whatever it is? When I’m done, I’m going to be able to hold my head up high.”

  “I know that’s true.”

  “See you do the same down there. Comport your ass with dignity. Do what you have to do.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yeah.”

  Luther tried not to show his impatience, his eagerness to get quit of Chandler Bankwell Flowers III and his cup of clabbered ambition. To get quit of Oakland and Berkeley and all the local fools. The broken promises, the pyres that never got lit.