Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  “Uh-huh. Not smoking dope.”

  “Just crack. And a little opium. Just, like, this much.” He pinched an imaginary pellet between his fingertips. “Fuck, Dad.”

  “Because you know it would be all right if you did.”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Not all right, but I mean, if you were getting high, I would want you to tell me about it, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Not feel like you have to hide it or anything.”

  “I get it.”

  “Because that’s when you start to drift into stupid.”

  Julie said that he planned to continue his lifelong policy of avoiding stupid at every opportunity.

  “So,” his father said. “Just sitting here, what, feeling sorry for yourself?”

  “I don’t need anybody’s pity,” Julie replied, seeing the words scrawl themselves across the page of his imagination in the florid hand he had affected when writing in his Moleskine with his fountain pen. “Least of all my own.”

  That raised a smile on his father’s face.

  “Why are you even here in the middle of the day?” Julie said.

  “I, uh, came home,” his father said. “I guess I should probably go back.”

  The shorter his father’s stories got, the more unwise or embarrassing his behavior turned out to have been. His father’s eyes wandered unseeing for the one thousand and seventh time across the artwork that Julie had drawn and pinned to the lath ceiling, the portraits of cybernetic pimp assassins and blind albino half-Jotun swordsmen and one cherished sketch of Dr. Strange produced with Crayolas and a Flair pen when Julie was five or six. A Nausicaä poster, the Israeli one-sheet for Pulp Fiction. The gatefold inner sleeve of a record called Close to the Edge (Atlantic, 1972), with its world of cool, enigmatic waterfalls that endlessly poured their green-blueness into infinity. His father seeing nothing, understanding nothing, searching for the line, the signal, the telling bit of repartee. Recently and unexpectedly, the fiber-optic cable between the continents of Father and Son had been severed by the barb of some mysterious dragging anchor. His father stood there in the attic doorway with his hands in the jump-jive pockets of his suit jacket, loving Julie with a glancing half-sly caution that the boy could feel and yet be certain of the uselessness thereof, that love occupying as it did only one small unproductive zone of the Greater Uselessness that seemed to pervade his father’s life from pole to pole.

  “Did something happen with Archy?” Julie said.

  “With Archy?”

  “Something at the store.”

  “At the store?”

  “Question with a question.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing, I didn’t, I just kind of blew my stack.”

  “Oh, Dad.”

  “At Chan Flowers. Councilman Flowers.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Yep.”

  “Is that guy kind of, like, scary?”

  “I have always thought so, yes.”

  “Kind of a creeper?”

  “At times he gives off that vibe.”

  “But he buys a lot of records.”

  “An all too common conjunction of behaviors.”

  “And you yelled at him?”

  “Threw him out, actually,” Nat said. “Then I threw out every other shmegegge in the joint.”

  “Oh, fuck, Dad—”

  “Then I closed the store for good. How do you like that?”

  “You what? For good?”

  “As in out of business.”

  “You closed the store?”

  “I really felt I had no choice.”

  “For good?”

  “Question with a question,” his father said. “Look, I’m fine. I got over myself. Now I’m going to go back, say I’m sorry to Arch. I’ll apologize to Flowers, Moby, everybody else who needs it. Apologies are cheap, Julie, and effective all out of proportion to their cost. My father used to say, ‘Carry ’em like a roll of bills in your hip pocket, pass ’em out freely.’ Remember that.”

  “Cool, okay.”

  “Used to say, ‘They are good for business, and they make the world a better place.’ ”

  Clearly, his dad was cycling high today, getting that Groucho Marx quality to his delivery. For years he had been on and off various medications whose names sounded like the code names of sorceresses or ninja assassins. Disastrous from the first dose or disappointing in the long run, each wore out its welcome in his father’s bloodstream without ever managing to lay an insulating glove on the glowing wire inside him. His moods had little in the way of pattern or regular rotation apart from a possible intensification in Septembers and Februarys, but if Julie had over time learned to live unshaken by his father’s unpredictable temblors of mania, he had grown inured as well to their completely predictable aftermaths, however heartfelt, of apology and remorse.

  “Say sorry,” Nat said. “Then open the store back up like I was, you know, on a little mental lunch break. False alarm. Everybody go about your business.”

  “Except Gibson Goode, right?”

  “Whatever,” his father said. “Man has a right to sell what he wants, where he wants. Bring him on. Meanwhile, you. Cheer up. You got two more weeks of summer to get through.”

  With a wan crackle, the Field of Silence fluttered back to life between them.

  And he tried. But before he could tell us he died.

  His father closed the door. Julie listened for the creak of his passage down the twisting stair.

  The narrow, mirrored door of the old art deco chifforobe swung open, betraying the folded articulate span, half dressed in pressed blue jeans, of Titus Joyner.

  “Yo yo yo,” Titus said. Bit by careful bit, he took himself out of the chifforobe and reassembled himself on the floor of Julie’s bedroom, a hit man snapping together the pieces of his rifle. He looked tired. He smelled like the locker room at the Y. “Five more minutes,” he said.

  He unrolled himself along the floor of Julie’s room, on the coiled braids of a rag rug, and stretched out. He closed his eyes; his breathing turned solemn and slowed the rise and fall of his chest. He was a prodigy of furtive and impromptu sleep. The nightly bed that fate had furnished him was a zone of danger and dark insomnia. If you closed your eyes in that unsafe house, they would rifle your nightmares and violate your dreams.

  “Titus,” Julie said. “Yo, T.”

  Nothing; gone. Julie pulled the quilt from his bed and laid it over Titus. It was an antique of the ’80s, Michael Jackson in a tacky spacesuit with a motley crew of robots and aliens. Julie stared at the boy on his floor, a mystery boy fallen from the sky like the Wold Newton meteorite, apparently inert and yet invisibly seething with the mutagenic information of distant galaxies and exploding stars.

  Julie was in love.

  The title of the course, offered through the summer evening enrichment program of the city of Berkeley’s Southside Senior Center, was “Sampling as Revenge: Source and Allusion in Kill Bill.” It was scheduled to meet every Monday for ten weeks through August, amid the folding furniture of a beige multipurpose room where, in the past, Julie had taken classes in puppet making, clay sculpture, and ikebana. Always the youngest in the room by decades, half centuries, and happier there among the elderly than ever seemed possible in the company of his so-called peers.

  That first Monday in June, a week after his graduation from Willard, Julie had taken his seat in the front row of five chairs at the exact center of the room, midway between the video projector and Peter Van Eder, whom Julie had always imagined, from his irritated tone in the Berkeley Daily Bugle, to be this one pudgy bald gentleman with aviator glasses and a square-tipped knit tie whom he would see from time to time at the California, glumly suffering the opening night of Planet of the Apes (perhaps the greatest disappointment in the movie life of Julie Jaffe, a mad Tim Burton fan) or Steamboy (another tragic dud). But Van Eder turned out to be a bony young guy not far past c
ollege age. Big Adam’s apple, big wrist bones, one shirttail untucked, his hair long and stringy and flecked with dandruff or ash from his cigarettes or both. On his chin, a hasty pencil sketch of a goatee.

  Julie took a glue stick and a bright orange notebook, quadrille-ruled, out of a Pan Am flight bag. Neatly, he folded and glued to the inside front cover the syllabus of films that Peter Van Eder proposed to screen and discuss:

  Lady Snowblood (1973) d Toshiya Fujita

  The Doll Squad (1973) d Ted V. Mikels

  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) d Sergio Leone

  Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972) d Shunya Ito

  Ghetto Hitman (1974) d Larry Cohen

  The Tale of Zatoichi (1962) Kenji Misumi

  The Band Wagon (1953) d Vincente Minnelli

  A Clockwork Orange (1971) d Stanley Kubrick

  36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978) d Gordon Liu

  Coffy (1973) d Jack Hill

  Julie studied the syllabus as Van Eder waited for the last two names on his roster, one of them, Julie was interested to learn, being Randall Jones. Mr. Jones had both given and attended classes at the Southside Senior Center, and it was through him, a few years ago, that Julie had learned of the puppet-making class. Mr. Jones, whose taste in film ran strongly to violent western and crime, was a regular attendee of Peter Van Eder’s film series at the Southside.

  Julie found himself dizzied by his ignorance of Van Eder’s choices, only two of which, the Sergio Leone and The Band Wagon, he had seen. Unless, as seemed likely, there was another movie called The Band Wagon, because The Band Wagon that Julie had watched with his maternal grandparents one Christmas in Coconut Creek, Florida, was a delicious musical with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, whose thighs stirred ancient and somewhat distressing longings in Grandpa Roth. A couple of the other titles and directors were familiar. Zatoichi. Kubrick, duh.

  Somebody said, “Look at the bird!”

  Cochise Jones, wearing a leisure suit with a faded houndstooth check, stepped into the multipurpose room with Fifty-Eight manning the poop deck of his left shoulder, trailing a kid, perhaps a grandson, about Julie’s age, light-skinned, light-eyed, broad at the shoulder, and slender at the hips. Though as far as Julie knew, Mr. Jones didn’t have any family apart from the bird. When he noticed Julie, he frowned, looking thoughtful, hesitating, as if trying to make up his mind about bringing over the kid to meet Julie.

  “He a friend of Fifty-Eight,” Mr. Jones explained straight-faced, apparently deciding that no harm could come of the introduction. “Also a fan of Mr. Tarantino.” Only he pronounced the name as if it rhymed with “Tipitina.”

  “Hey,” said Julie, twisting a finger in the tattered selvage of his denim cutoffs until the blood ceased to circulate in his fingertip. His index finger in its noose of cotton thread swelled and pulsed and throbbed and in general served as symbol or synecdoche for its owner and his fourteen-year-old heart, for that all-encompassing, all-expanding disturbance in his skinny little chest that was the love of Tarantino, the world, or all mankind. “I like him, too.”

  Titus Joyner nodded, mildly amused (if that) by the spectacle of Julie in his cutoffs and sleeveless T, his portable eight-track on the floor by his feet in their clear white jellies, with his bright blue flight bag like one of the moon stewardesses in 2001. He didn’t say anything. A slender, loose- and long-limbed kid, skin the color of a Peet’s soy latte. Hair worn in a neat, modest Afro with an air of studied retroism. Eyes wary, derisive, cold apart from that ghost of amusement, or maybe it was a flicker of recognition, as if he thought he knew how best to label Julie. Cleft chin. Clothes neat and spotless: dark jeans, short-sleeved, button-down oxford-cloth shirt. Nothing fancy, but somehow the crisp white shirt and the sharp creases ironed into the front of his trouser legs gave him an air of formality. On his feet he wore those imperial star-destroyer kicks.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  Julie took a card, newly printed, from his wallet, and passed it to the kid, one that read:

  JULIUS L. JAFFE

  Ronin ·HIRED BLADE

  The look of mockery was still on the kid’s face as he studied the card, but he studied it. Slipped it into a pocket of his jeans. Then went to the back of the room to scatter his limbs across an upholstered armchair tucked into a corner.

  “I’m sorry, sir.” It was one of the other students, a man in a wheelchair, speaking through a robo-box. Julie had seen the guy racing around Temescal, in the neighborhood of Brokeland, his body a toy in the paws of some brutal ailment. His voice came sparking through its Hawking box. “Sir? I’m sorry, but I have a bird allergy.”

  “A bird allergy,” Mr. Jones said, looking blank, failing to see how this assertion could pertain to him. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Maybe you could— Can he wait outside?” said Peter Van Eder.

  “Or . . . ?”

  Fifty-Eight browsed politely through the silvery down at its breast, appearing to find no offense in the turn things had taken, but Mr. Jones, either because he had been looking forward to this series, or maybe on Fifty-Eight’s account, appeared to be heartbroken.

  “It’s quite severe,” said the man in the wheelchair, the torsion of his neck giving him, no doubt unfairly, a sidelong and mendacious look as he said it, like maybe he was really just afraid of parrots or had something against Fifty-Eight personally. “I’m so sorry.”

  Mr. Jones sighed. Even if he and Fifty-Eight had not been inseparable, there was no way you could leave a rare and costly bird sitting out in a hallway somewhere. He turned to the kid at the back of the room and raised a sheepish eyebrow. The kid stared at the dude in the wheelchair with open and admiring horror.

  “You can get a bus?” Mr. Jones said. The kid knit up his limbs and gave a fractional nod, about to be left alone in this roomful of cripples and old people.

  “Bye, Fifty-Eight,” Julie said. “Bye, Mr. Jones.”

  “I feel terrible,” said the man in the wheelchair, but in the tonelessness of his voice-o-tron, it was hard to be sure whether he was referring to his remorse at the ejection of Fifty-Eight or the onset of anaphylaxis.

  “Come on, fool,” Mr. Jones said to the bird.

  Van Eder passed a syllabus to Titus Joyner, who thanked him softly, with an automatic “sir.” Then the kid’s eyes locked on the syllabus, scanned it. He frowned. Something written on the page dismayed him, filled him with outrage and confusion. He squirmed with it, deep in the armchair, until he was obliged to speak up.

  “The Band Wagon?” he said.

  His disdainful drawl intoned the title of the seventh film on the syllabus with a contempt so all-encompassing that it led one of the fearsome-looking, old, ex-nun-style, Communist, lesbian retired piano teachers who principally made up the enrollment of “Sampling as Revenge” to get up and start passing out oxygen masks and air tanks, so that all the other old people and Julie could go on breathing and not have the air sucked out of their lungs by the whooshing vacuum that followed this sally from the back of the room.

  Peter Van Eder blinked and looked mildly amused. “Do you have a problem with The Band Wagon?” he said.

  “It’s a musical,” Titus said. “It has, like, Sid Caesar.”

  “Cyd Charisse,” said Peter Van Eder harshly, flatly, the way Julie’s old fencing teacher Mr. DiBlasio had been wont to correct Julie’s form with an impatient flat of the blade on the buttocks.

  The kid nodded as if satisfied with this correction. He picked up his copy of the syllabus and held it at arm’s length in a display of nearsightedness that Julie took for mocking. “Gordon Liu,” he said slowly with a skeptic squint, pronouncing the Chinese name to rhyme with “shoe.” “Stanley Kubrick. Cyd Charisse.”

  The old ladies—there were seven of them, all white—and the three old gents (one of them an Asian-American in an Oakland A’s cap) and the wheelchair guy apparently saw nothing at all droll or absurd in the presence of a Fred Astaire–Cyd Charisse film on th
at inventory of mayhem and martial arts action. On the contrary, they appeared shocked, even mildly disgusted, by the kid’s show of disrespect, either because they were old or because they were white or both. Julie was certainly shocked.

  “Tarantino himself has often argued that his movies should be situated in the context of the big-screen musical, with the outbursts of violence serving the same structural narrative function as the musical numbers,” Peter Van Eder said. “Like a lot of Minnelli, The Band Wagon exhibits a strong female character of the kind that has come to be foregrounded in Tarantino’s work. More important—I’m getting ahead of myself, but whatever—the self-enclosed, self-reflexive world of actors and dancers it portrays prefigures exactly the hermetic, empty universe of physical artistry that we find in Kill Bill. It also showcases the technical virtuosity of Minnelli that is an acknowledged influence not only on Tarantino but on Martin Scorsese as well. In other words . . .”

  Van Eder smiled, a stiff, genuine smile made more horrible somehow by its genuineness, in which were intermingled an ingratiating familiarity and a desire to put this kid in his place.

  “. . . gots to be hip to Minnelli, my man.”

  Julie wanted to die of his own whiteness, to be drowned in the tide of his embarrassment on behalf of all uncool white people everywhere when they tried to be cool. Titus Joyner glowered at Van Eder. He pursed his lips, easing them pensively back and forth, wavering perhaps between giving Van Eder his due for wisdom imparted and taking offense at that horrible “my man.”

  “Lady Snowblood,” Van Eder went on.

  He addressed the class for ten minutes, reading from a set of four-by-six index cards in a soft, stupefied, increasingly breathless tone like an astronaut pleading with a mad supercomputer to open an airlock, the voice that, for unknown reasons, Van Eder relied on for the imparting of information. He touched on the ambivalent place of women in the postwar Japanese economy, feudal history and Western values, the popularity in Japan of comic books like the original Snowbird, the Japanese literature of revenge, the tension between the needs of the individual and the norms of the community, et cetera. Then Van Eder switched on the video projector, pulled down the screen, and put out the lights.