Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  “You are having good luck right now,” Chan said. “Good luck is good. But that’s all it is, you dig? Not any kind of a substitute for doing what you have to do.”

  Luther nodded, said, “No doubt, no doubt,” thinking about the ads you used to see in the pages of Ebony and Esquire selling the long, low, smiling crocodile of 1970, the slogan across the top of the page: WOULDN’T IT BE NICE TO HAVE AN ESCAPE MACHINE?

  “I know what it means,” Luther said.

  “Huh?” Chan said. “What—”

  “I can define ‘toronado.’ ”

  Chan frowned, remembered, frowned more deeply. “Do it, then,” he said.

  Luther shook his head. “You don’t need to know,” he said.

  Then he strapped himself into his escape machine, and headed for the Nimitz Freeway, San Jose, Los Angeles: the world and the fortune that awaited him.

  Popcorn Hughes, Luther heard afterward, was shot to death early that morning in his bed at Summit Hospital. The only suspect was the unknown, unidentified black male who had been described, by witnesses to the first attack at the Bit o’ Honey Lounge, as wearing a mask that was meant, it was generally agreed, to resemble the one worn in Marvel comics by the Black Panther, the first black superhero.

  The killer was never apprehended. The Toronado overheated in the Grapevine just north of Lebec and had to be towed across the L.A. County line.

  “He’s looking for investors,” Archy guessed.

  Valletta affected to study some scene or detail in the distance, beyond the playground, beyond Berkeley, beyond Mount Lassen, saying nothing, infinitesimally shaking her head, mouth down-twisted in a way that might have been disapproving of Archy, Luther, herself, or some combination thereof, arms crossed furiously under her breasts: unable to believe, finally, that she was party to this latest bullshit scheme of Luther’s, or that Archy declined to be party to it, or perhaps that the world did not and never would appreciate the genius of Luther Stallings.

  “He still talking about that damn movie?”

  “What d’you think?”

  She rummaged around in her bag and took out what appeared to be a boxed set of three DVDs entitled The Strutter Trilogy. Its cover featured a handsome close-up shot of the long-jawed, Roman-nosed, Afro-haloed, 1973-vintage Luther Stallings as master thief Willie Strutter, and it promised restored or digital versions of three films: Strutter, Strutter at Large, and Strutter Kicks It Old-School. But it was an empty hunk of packaging with no disks inside, and on closer inspection, it proved to have been painstakingly crafted from the cardboard case to a Complete Back to the Future box set over whose panels had been pasted vivid but crudely executed cut-and-paste computer artwork, a minor but necessary bit of imposture, since, as far as Archy knew—and he knew far; too far—there was no such movie as Strutter Kicks It Old-School.

  “Strutter 3. Is that right? Going to write and direct and star! Triple threat! Going to make it fast, cheap, and badass, like they used to do back in the day. Old-school. And you’re going to be his leading lady. That the story he sent you here to tell me, Valletta?”

  Out of gentlemanly impulses and, worse, feeling sorry for this woman, one of a string he had auditioned during his childhood for the role of Archy’s New Mother, Archy struggled to keep a tone of derision from creeping into his voice as he offered this bit of informed speculation as to Luther’s line—phrases such as “triple threat” and “fast, cheap, and badass” having formed part of his father’s formulary of bullshit over the years. He did not entirely succeed. The only thing lamer than the piece-of-shit plan Luther had come up with for peeling money loose from Archy, for a film that he had not the least intention of making, was the idea that Luther thought his son would give him anything ever again.

  “He’s going to put in a nice big part for you. That right, Valletta? Maybe somehow it turns out Candygirl wasn’t dead all along?”

  He detected a ripple along the muscles of her cheek. She held on to her silence, watching as Tibetan flags strung from the front porch of the Sandersons’ house across the park bade their random prayers farewell.

  “We’re in preproduction,” she said at last. Defiant, lying the lie.

  “So you, what, you have a script?”

  “Nah, but your dad, he has the story all figured out. Told me the whole thing, every character, every shot, every minute of screen time, told it ten different ways five hundred times. Archy, it’s gonna be good.”

  “Kind of a, what, Strutter comes out of retirement, one last job, gets his revenge type of thing?”

  “You want to hear how it goes?”

  Archy closed his eyes, anticipating the tedious madness of the scenario that he was about to be pitched, some kind of incoherent mashup of Ocean’s Eleven, The Matrix, and Death Wish, his father’s favorite movie, interlarded with a thick ribbon drawn from the saga of whatever kind of bullshit landlord trouble or IRS trouble or dental trouble his father and the lady had gotten themselves into. But Valletta fell silent again, and he opened his eyes to find a lone tear lingering on her cheek, a tiny solitary pool of outrage or shame. He felt his heart sink and drew another draft on his endless reserve of misplaced guilt. He took out his billfold and conducted a sorry inventory therein.

  “Nah,” she said, pushing away from her the bills that emerged, four crisp twenties, a faded five, and two soft, crumpled ones. “Nah, never mind. Keep your money. I didn’t come here to bother you for money. I know you don’t believe that—”

  “Sure, I—”

  “And I did not come here to bother you with that motherfucking movie you and I both know ain’t ever going to get made.”

  “Okay.”

  “I know if I told you your dad was in trouble because of the drugs, you wouldn’t feel inclined to help him in any way, shape, or form, and since I got with the program, fourteen months and nine days clean and sober, I respect that position, and so does he. What I want to ask you is, what if we was in some other kind of trouble, didn’t have nothing to do with using? Would you possibly be willing to help him out then?”

  “What did he do?”

  Again the careful study of the street, the neighboring trees and houses. “I don’t really know,” she said. “But hypothetical.”

  “Hypothetical? Hypothetical, if that man’s hair was on fire, I would not piss on his head to put it out.”

  She put her sunglasses back on.

  “That’s just a theory, though,” Archy said. “We don’t need to test it.”

  She nodded, chewing her lip, and he saw that under the lipstick, it was already ragged with chewing.

  “Go on, Valletta,” he said, pressing the money on her. “If you promise not to tell me where he’s living at, or what he’s doing, or how bad he looks, or give me any information at all, that’s worth eighty-seven to me right there.”

  She considered it. Her tongue emerged from her lips and ran around her mouth once hungrily. Then she knitted up the money in her long fingers and made it vanish so quickly and completely that she might have been alluding to the length of time it was likely to spend in her pocket. She would not take the empty DVD box.

  “Nah, y’all keep that, anyway. He got five more just like it.”

  “All right.”

  He took the box, Jack with a handful of beans, already awash in eighty-seven dollars’ worth of regret over his own stupidity.

  “Maybe I should come back next week,” Valletta said, and a smile lacking one lower bicuspid made a brave appearance along the lowermost regions of her face. “Come up with a few more things about him you don’t want to hear, see what that gets me.”

  “Funny,” Archy said.

  “Don’t worry, you won’t see me again.”

  “Valletta—”

  She’d started for the Toronado, but he called her back.

  “Come on,” he told her. “You got to say it.”

  During the summer of 1978, Valletta’s summer, the T-shirt shops of urban America had offered for sale an i
ron-on transfer that depicted Valletta Moore in a bell-bottom zebra-print pantsuit, surrounded by the glitter-balloon letters of the catchphrase with which she would forever be associated, first spoken in Strutter at Large. The iron-ons were produced by Roach, kings of the rubber transfer, who had divided all the profits, presumably considerable, with retailers and the movie’s distributors.

  “You want me to say it?” she said, doubtful, pleased.

  “I think eighty-seven dollars buys me that,” Archy said.

  She sighed, pumped her fist once, like it was the head of a very heavy hammer, and said, “Do what you got to do.” The fist burst apart in slow motion, fingers blooming. “And stay fly.”

  She wrestled with the steel of the car door, resuscitated the engine by patience and finesse, and rolled, shocks creaking, away.

  “Stay fly, Valletta,” Archy said.

  Julius Jaffe was rereading his memoir in progress, working-titled Confessions of a Secret Master of the Multiverse. He had begun to write it two months earlier in a six-inch Moleskine, in a fever of boredom, drug-sick on H. P. Lovecraft, intending to produce an epic monument to his loneliness and to the appalling tedium he induced in himself. That first night he had cranked out thirty-two unruled pages. Page one started thus:

  This record of sorrow is being penned in human blood on parchment made from the hides of drowned sailors. Its unhappy author—O pity me, friend, wherever you lie at your ease!—perches by the high window of a lightning-blasted tower, on a beetling skull-rock beside the roaring madness of a polar sea. Chained at the ankle to an iron bedstead, gnawing on the drumstick of a roasted rat. Scribbling with tattered quill on an overturned tub, his sole illumination a greasy flame guttering in a blubber lamp. A prisoner of ill fortune, a toy of destiny, a wretched cat’s-paw for gods of malice who find sport in plucking the wings from the golden butterfly of human happiness! Thus shorn of liberty and burdened with the doubtful gift of time do I propose to ease the leaden hours in setting down this faithful record, the memoir of a king in ruins.

  The night after he penned these words, Titus Joyner had appeared on the scarp of Julie’s solitude, swinging his grappling hook. Since then Julie had not added a word to his chronicle of boredom. He closed the Moleskine, fitted his memoirs with the little elastic strap, his own heart cinched with a tender compassion for their boy author in that distant age.

  The front door slammed and the secret master of the multiverse said, “Shit.”

  “Titus,” Julie said. “It’s my dad. Get up.”

  Titus Joyner lay on his back with a pillow mashed down over his face, held in place by the hook of an arm. That was how he slept: shielded. Titus from Tyler, in Julie’s imagination a sunblasted and horizonless patch of infinite Texas, a necromantic Dia de los Muertos city of prisoners and roses, where Titus had been raised by a forbidding grandmother known as Shy. In Julie’s imagination, Shy was all in black, lit by lightning. Dead now, and Titus cast to his fate, claimed like a lost hat by an auntie from Oakland, a stranger from a house of strangers.

  “Dude!” Julie said in a whisper. “T!”

  Julie reached for the portable eight-track cassette player Archy had picked up for him at the Alameda swap meet. It was tank-corps green, styled like a field radio, and it had a webbed strap so that a Soldier of Funk, Julie supposed, could march his groove around. He popped out Innervisions (Motown, 1973), one of the few among the small stock of eight-track cassettes he had managed to scrounge that Titus would consent to listen to, and shoved in, with a meaty thunk, Point of Know Return (Kirshner, 1977), aware of how it would irritate his father.

  “Julie? You up there?”

  Enigmatic white midwesterners of the 1970s aired curious ideas about the role of the violin and the organ in a rock-and-roll context. Titus dragged the pillow from his head and sat up. Awake, looking right at Julie; then, before Julie was quite aware of it, scrambling up out of the bed. Buck-naked, as Titus called it. Titus crumpled his clothes into an armload, went to the window, spun around, and confronted an art deco chifforobe that had belonged to Julie’s great-grandmother. It opened with a great-grandmotherly creak, and Titus climbed inside.

  Julie accepted this move without considering whether it was necessary or desirable.

  He knew. He knew more than me or you. You can tell by the pictures he drew.

  “Hide the hookah,” his father said. “I’m coming up.”

  With a solemn intake of breath, Julie activated his secret master training. He would use his Field of Silence, he thought, in combination with his Scowl of Resounding Finality. The door swung open and his father looked in, eyes bright and sunken, cheek nicked by the razor, in one of his old-time hepcat suits. He had that shifty-eyed look he got whenever he had just done something he probably ought not to have done. This might not be a bad time, Julie saw, to confess or at least allude to his own most recent instance of bad behavior. Yet there was something he loved about the way Titus had entered into conspiracy with the chifforobe.

  His father covered the fact that he was sniffing the air of the room for the molecular residue of burnt cannabis by making a show of sniffing the air of the room. “You just sitting around?” he said.

  Julius Lovecraft Jaffe (though on his passport the middle name, by one of those metaphysical clerical errors forever being committed by reality on the true nature of his being, read Lawrence), gazed calmly back at his father. He sat on his bed, cross-legged in his tie-dyed long johns. Not the tie-dyed long johns with the infinite Escher stairway silk-screened across the chest but the ones with the space galleon setting sail for Tau Ceti across a sea of stars, which he had purchased last spring in the women’s section at Shark’s, where they had been labeled with a handwritten tag on which was printed, in an architect hand and in terms guaranteed to finger the deepest chords of his soul, COOL 70S SPACE KITSCH. The Field of Silence pulsed steady and thick as a stream of annihilating syrup. The Scowl burned shimmering hot pathways in the air between Julie and his father.

  “What is that?”

  His father’s face seized up around the eyes, and his cheeks went hollow. He looked like a man with inner ear problems, halfway between disoriented and about to vomit.

  “My God,” he said. “Please tell me you aren’t listening to Kansas.”

  There was a small prog bin at Brokeland, but it spurned the pinnacles and palisades in favor of the dense British thickets, swarms of German umlauts. Wander into Brokeland hoping to sell a copy of Point of Know Return or, say, Brain Salad Surgery (Manticore, 1973), they would need a Shop-Vac to hose up your ashes.

  Julie took his wallet from the back pocket of his cutoff denim shorts. It was a yellow plastic wallet printed with a scratched image of Johnny Depp sporting hair of the eighties and the words 21 JUMP STREET in fake-wildstyle lettering. He unsnapped the wallet’s coin purse, in which he rotated a selection from the variety of business cards he had printed up for himself at Kinko’s at the beginning of the summer, just before he met Titus. A well-chosen card had served him well a number of times since then as a substitute for conversation, particularly with his parents. This time he chose one that read:

  JULIUS L. JAFFE

  curator

  “I have to admit,” his father said, sounding like the admission was not a costly one, “I’m getting pretty fucking sick of these fucking cards.” He passed it back to Julie, who returned it to his wallet and put Johnny Depp back in the pocket of his shorts. “What’s with the enormous shoes?”

  They were size-fifteen Air Jordans, white on white on white. They looked like a couple of scale-model Imperial destroyers docked neatly on a deck of the Death Star. Julie considered making this claim. He saw that he would have to collapse the Field of Silence, at least temporarily, and throw up a Snare of Deceit. “It’s that art project,” he said. “The one I told you about.” This strategy—Julie’s mother called it “gaslighting”—could be surprisingly effective on his father, who spent so much time lost in his own humming that he sometimes
missed out on real-world events.

  “Huh,” his father said.

  There was no good reason to lie; on some level, Julie knew that. His parents had to figure-slash-understand that Julie was semi-bicurious, or maybe even gay, or what have you. Twenty-five minutes to gay o’clock. But the confession felt like too much work; Titus was too hard to explain. He was, for example, straight-up-noon straight, both hands on the twelve, though that had not prevented him from accepting every last note and coin of Julie’s virginity over the past two weeks. There was so much more to it than sex, gender, race, and all that piddly shit. Julie felt that his life had suddenly, like amino acids in the primordial soup, begun to knot and pattern and complicate itself. How to confess that he had sneaked out with his skateboard every night to hook up with Titus, in slang but also quite literally joining himself by the hand to Titus’s shoulder as they rolled through the nighttime summer streets of South Berkeley and West Oakland, through the wildly ramifying multiverse of their mutual imagination? Titus preferred the street to the roof and walls within which a hard fate and a ninety-year-old batshit auntie had obliged him to shelter, and Julie preferred nothing to the feeling of Titus’s shoulder bone and muscle against his hand, preferred nothing to the grind of his wheels, each tree, parked car, and lamppost a whisper as they passed.

  “It’s that thing at Habitot,” Julie added for verisimilitude. “I have to decorate them.”

  His father nodded knowledgeably. There was no other way that he knew how to nod. “So what are you doing?” he said. “Playing MTO?”

  As a matter of fact, before Titus nodded off, they had been taking turns at Julie’s laptop, logged on to Marvel Team-Up Online. Leveling up their latest characters, Dezire and the Black Answer, running them in their capes and energy auroras through the teeming streets of Hammer Bay, on the island of Genosha.

  Julie said, “Filing my teeth.”