Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  Taking advantage of the sudden darkness, Julie turned to look back at Titus Joyner. The kid reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a set of massive spectacles, at once square and rounded, a style somewhere between early Spike Lee and Miles Davis on the cover of Get Up with It. In the flickering light from the projector lens, the kid saw Julie looking at him, and a smirk drew a fishhook at the corner of his mouth. Then he turned to the screen, and the disc spun inside the Panasonic projector, and the fan whirred, and the soundtrack scratched, and the cymbals clanged, and Julie dreamed for two hours with his eyes open.

  It was a dream Kill Bill, angelic and ghastly, more beautiful, more simplistic, bleaker. More, he tried, existential. At least the Bride, Beatrix Kiddo, had known love and happiness, companionship, hope for the future. Even at her lowest, even comatose and raped by crackers, she carried the memory inside her, in the place vacated by the baby she had lost. Her revenge was haunted by the ghost of happiness. From birth, Yuki Kashima—Meiko Kaji, so delicate, so badass!—had never known anything but the curse of her bloody and useless use. And the swordplay! Criminals and rogues, masters and pupils, slashing and hacking, fatal parasols. And the blood! Severed limbs flying, blood on fresh fallen snow, curtains and cataracts of blood!

  When the lights came up at the end, Julie’s reptile brain was dimly aware of Van Eder apologizing for having exceeded the time allotted for class, the rustle of papers, and the scrape of chair legs. The biomass designated as Julie Jaffe stood up, and its autonomic systems took over and propelled it toward a beige corridor, along beige linoleum tiles, through a beige world, while in another universe, his traveler soul honed its katana and ate rice with chopsticks by a fire and tied a thick topknot in its wild black mane. Julie was halfway to the snowy courtyard where the existentially absurd and beautiful combat between Yuki and her final enemy was appointed—halfway to the glass doors of the Southside Senior Center, which opened onto a cement plaza with a sculpture fountain—when he heard a strange howl behind him, canine and low at first, then rising to articulate a screech of mock Japanese challenge.

  Julie whirled just in time to see the kid, Titus, coming at him, glasses returned to his shirt pocket, eyes twisted up with homicidal glee, kick-flying through the air while whirling an imaginary blade over his head.

  “Hi-yah!” he cried, alighting only inches away and bringing his sword down as if to cleave Julie from cranium to coccyx. Julie drew and parried in a single swift motion, then stepped back in a shower of sparks and let the other kid’s crazy momentum carry him forward with an ungainly lurch. As the kid went past, Julie jabbed downward with his left elbow (stopping just short of striking the small of his back).

  “Yah!”

  The other kid regained his feet and swung around, and they exchanged a quick series of attacks and parries, simulating with their mouths the clash and clang of steel on steel as Titus backed out of the glass doors of the Southside Senior Center and into the summer night.

  Yah!

  Hah!

  Hah-YAH!

  As the ladies and the geezers in their ball caps shuffled past, Julie and his opponent hacked and ducked, slashed, feinted, thrust. They dashed around the wide floodlit plaza with its random scattering of concrete oblongs, hopping up and off, circling the fountain at the center. Julie, with two disappointing years of fencing lessons in his recent past, had the advantage of knowing what you could do with a sword if you actually held one, while Titus had the advantage that he always would have: The whole thing was his idea. He was the one causing things to happen, driving them, taking them seriously long enough and intensely enough—and in public—to make them somehow be. Julie chased him, and Titus ran, laughing. He leaped up onto the broad lip of the fountain and took a deep breath. Three concrete-jacketed light fixtures led like stepping-stones across the water to the sculpture, a big mutant hand of steel entitled Dancing Group II that grasped at the night sky from the center of the fountain. With the tip of his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth, Titus island-hopped the lights along to the sculpture. He scrambled up onto the steel palm of the open hand and stood there, beaming at Julie. Way down along Fourth Street, the train for Sacramento mourned its own passage. The air smelled of chlorine from the fountain, of cut grass from the soccer field on the other side of the Southside Senior Center.

  “Dude, what’s your name again?” Julie called, though he knew it was breaking the spell. “Are you— Is Mr. Jones your, like, grandpa or something?”

  For answer, Titus leaped from the sculpture into the air, out over the turbid pool water and the scattered wishes of pennies and dimes, helicoptering his blade over his head, legs outstretched fore and aft like a hurdler’s, clearing a gap of six horizontal and four vertical feet to land with a dainty stutter step on the lip of the fountain. Julie stopped breathing.

  “Titus Joyner from Tyler, Texas,” he said. “And I am here to dismember your pink bicycle−riding, plastic shoe−wearing, Jethro Tull−singing, faggoty Mr. Spock ass.”

  Julie’s heart seized, and then a strange fizz of wonder seemed to engulf him, as if he had been dropped like an ice cube into a glass of sparkling water. The previous evening, he and his parents had gone to Archy and Gwen’s for fish tacos, a specialty of the house. After a while, Julie had grown restless with the trend of conversation at the table and had wandered outside with his eight-track player to kill some time. On the little grass island where the neighborhood children were wont to abandon their toys, Julie had come upon a girl’s bicycle, pink with white handlebar grips and white rubber tires. Wearing a blue science-section Star Trek T-shirt with a black collar and the little flying “A” over the left breast, from which he had cut away the sleeves, Julie rode the pink bike around and around the cul-de-sac, singing along with the eight-track at the top of his lungs about how a bungle in the jungle was all right with him. He had not been aware that even then he was being observed by a cold intelligence from another world. Now he gaped up at Titus Joyner as the other boy brought down his weapon hard, and Julie, deeply interested and intensely embarrassed, allowed himself to be killed. He died.

  “I can stay here?”

  Julie jumped. Titus lay motionless under the shelter of the comforter, eyes closed, somniloquent.

  “Uh, okay, yeah,” Julie said. “My dad went back down to the store, he probably won’t be home for a while. I think my mom’s at a birth, so she’s probably gone all day. You can shower. And I could, I have to do some laundry. I could wash your clothes.”

  Julie, under the guise of a sudden blossoming of self-reliance and a desire to help around the house, had been washing Titus’s clothes secretly along with his own for the past two weeks. Titus had only three pairs of pants, three shirts, and five pairs apiece of socks and briefs, but he was obsessive about keeping himself neat and clean. He had a horror of bad breath that approached the pathological, and he spent an aggregate hour a day, at least, in the maintenance of his modest little ’fro.

  “Nah, nah,” Titus said. “I mean can I stay here.”

  “You mean— What? You mean, like, can you move in?”

  From the time of his arrival in June on a flight out of Dallas, Titus had been cribbing, as he put it, in West Oakland, in an undisclosed location; at any rate, he would not disclose its location to Julie. Mr. Jones and Fifty-Eight were neighbors, that was all Julie knew. The house held nine people in three bedrooms, cousins and unrelated relations, all living under the furious, disregarded administration of Titus’s ancient auntie, who was actually a great- or maybe even a great-great-aunt. No one in that house, which—in Julie’s imagination—teemed at every window like a cartoon asylum with madmen and psychotics, knew or cared if Titus came or went, if he dressed and fed and cleaned himself, if he lived or died, smoked crack, or built himself a suitcase bomb in the basement. And yet every day, more or less, he appeared before Julie in crisp jeans and a bright white T-shirt, with the white oxford or one of two plaid short-sleeve button-downs, a blue-black and a g
reen-black, worn unbuttoned over the tee. And the starship shoes, scrupulously tended. Julie was obscurely moved by this scrupulousness, so helping Titus maintain it felt not like a chore but an honor. An offering of love.

  The eight-track cassette punched to the next program with a loud clunk, and Titus sat up, wild-eyed and startled. He reached into his pocket for his glasses, and Julie noticed for the first time the coiled plug of black electrician’s tape holding together, at the nosepiece, the right and left halves of his big Spike Lees. Titus had seemed weird last night when they first rendezvoused in Frog Park, but it was too dark then for Julie to spot the evidence of trouble.

  “What happened?” Julie said. “Did you get in a fight? Did somebody— Did they say you had to leave?”

  Titus appeared to be awake, blinking, swallowing, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, but it took a long time for a reply to emerge.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he finally managed, his voice little more than a whisper. Then he shook it off. “Shake it off,” he told himself.

  He got up and came over to Julie’s bed, staring down through his lenses, and his expression was mocking, of himself, of Julie for his solicitude.

  “I’ve seen things,” he said, looming over Julie, close enough for Julie to smell the orange and cloves of his own brand of underarm deodorant, smeared somehow across Titus as they had grappled that morning in the dark. “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.”

  “C-beams in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. You can’t stay here.”

  “Just tell them I’m your imaginary friend,” Titus said. “A only child, come on, you got to have a imaginary friend.”

  “I did when I was little.”

  “Yeah? What was his name?”

  “His name was Cherokee.”

  “Cherokee. He still live here?”

  Before he could quite dismiss the question as the joke it was intended to be, Julie had a quick look around the attic. When he was four or five years old and sleeping in the room next to his parents’, he used to come up here to hide and conspire with his imaginary playmate. Now there was nothing left of Cherokee but the dry cool pulse of Indian fingers against his palm.

  “Second, okay, that’s first, but second, you promised me, T.”

  “What I say?” Titus gave the question an offhand spin and turned to examine, in a dish on the dresser, the orrery of small glass planets that Julie had made over the years at the Crucible. Trying to play it off, to persuade Julie that whatever rash thing he might have said was a joke, insincere, forgotten. “Only thing I promised you,” he continued, “is that when I’m a A-list Hollywood auteur, you get to help me out on the screenplays. I remember promising you that. Isn’t any other promise I remember.”

  “You said you would . . . you know.” Julie felt his voice get very quiet. “If I came with you.”

  Like Galactus, like some giant, timeless celestial older than the stars, Titus scooped up a handful of planets, tumbled them between his fingers, let them splash chiming back into the dish. “True,” he said. “But check it out, man.” He laughed, bitter laughter, contemptuous. “I’m afraid of her. I heard her one time kind of like whispering to him from the porch when he dropped a garbage bag all over the sidewalk. Reminded me of this principal I had back in Texas, had that same quiet way of getting angry, talking all soft and reasonable, then suspend your ass for three days ’cause you threw a pencil.”

  “Yeah,” Julie agreed. “She gets all Eastwood.” Then, “How often do you go by there?”

  “I followed him home a couple times.”

  “Just, what, stalking him or something?”

  “Just looking.”

  Julie envisioned Titus pedaling past Archy and Gwen’s house at twilight, the sagging porch with its freight of bougainvillea, the life in which Titus was not permitted or could not bring himself to share passing back and forth like a movie to be memorized shot for shot across the screen of the big bay window. Then Titus turned around, and Julie was shocked to see that he had tears in his eyes.

  “I am not going back to my auntie’s, tell you that,” Titus said, and a flat, genuine twang of Texas crept into his voice. He took off his glasses to wipe away the tears with the back of his arm, and the two halves fell apart, the wad of black tape giving way, the sections of broken frame rattling against the plywood subfloor of the attic. “No way I’m ever going back to that house.”

  They stood there with six inches and an adamantine membrane of the multiverse between them. Julie longed to put his arms around Titus, to console him, but he could not be sure that Titus would welcome such a touch. Indeed, he suspected Titus would reject it. Julie could only guess, the intuition guided if not shaped entirely by the dubious and histrionic hand of ghetto melodramas, cop shows, and the brutal lyrics of rap songs, at the latest trauma that Titus had undergone.

  Julie knelt and picked up the pieces, then carried them over to the bare pine table, its surface an action painting of Testors paint, scorched black in patches by the glue guns and the glowing elements of soldering irons, inscribed with an illegible cuneiform of X-ACTO-blade scars, where he had been wont, in the limitless trances of his loneliness, to assemble his scale models of AT-ATs and Gundam Wing fighters, and to ornament his little metal armies of orcs and paladins, and to invest the unspent and endlessly compounding principle of his inner and only life. There were three neat plastic racks of screw and nail drawers, and he rummaged among them until he came up with a tube of superglue, the crusted tip of its nozzle forever pierced, like some allegorical wound in a story of King Arthur, by its tiny red-capped pin. He squeezed out two drops and then eased the acrylonitrile halves of Titus’s glasses together with the practiced touch of a modeler until they held and there was not even a fissure visible. Then he handed them back to Titus, who gingerly tested the join. Without his frames, his face looked vulnerable, raw.

  “Anyway, they just glass,” he said.

  “Seriously?”

  “I got like twenty-ten. I just wear them to, uh, make me look smart.” He put them on again, and something armored, sealed off, unassailable resumed its dominion over the features of his face.

  “You could stay here tonight,” Julie told him, and as he said the words, he felt a pang of regret for them, intuiting the valediction they contained. If Titus accepted the terms with which Julie was about to present him, the period of their secret friendship would come to an end. After today, the world would know about Titus Joyner, and knowing that, would begin to know, or believe that it knew, Julius Jaffe, too. Yet he felt so far from being ready to know himself or contend with the world and its definitions. “After that, I don’t know, we’ll see.”

  “Cool,” Titus said. “Damn, thank you.”

  “Okay, it’s on one condition.”

  “I’m not eating any more of that tempeh. Shit is nasty.”

  “We don’t actually eat that much tempeh,” Julie said, feeling himself blushing at the thought of the hopeless Berkeletude of himself and his family. “I don’t know why it was even in our fridge. And no, that’s not it.”

  “What, then?”

  “You know.”

  “No,” Titus said. “No way. I’m not—”

  “You have to. I mean, even if my parents let you stay, and I don’t even want to think how I’m going to explain it all to them, I just have to, like, rely on the fact that they are going to get off on the idea that I have a troubled young African-American friend they can, like, help out or whatever. But you can’t just keep riding your bike past his house all the time. That is just sad.”

  Julie went down to the bathroom to brush his teeth and, strangely modest, change into his clothes. When he came out of the bathroom, he found Titus sitting on the bottom attic step, fully dressed, upright, hands on his knees, as if awaiting a court date.

  “What if he doesn’t like me?” he said.

  Julie thought about squeezing in next to Titus, between him and the wall of the stairwell. P
ut his arm around the boy, lay his head against his shoulder, hold his hand. If he were Titus’s girlfriend, it would be the easiest thing in the world.

  “I wish I were your girlfriend,” he said.

  “Shut up, faggot,” Titus said gently.

  “Hate speech,” said Julie. He sat down on the other side of Titus, where there was room for them to share the stair without touching. “Just do what I tell you. It’s going to be fine.”

  Titus wiped his cheek with the back of one hand and snuffled once. Julie offered him a Kleenex. Titus waved it off.

  “Tears in the motherfuckin’ rain,” he said.

  On his way back to throw open the doors of Brokeland to the winds of doom, Archy decided to take a detour, drive past the site of the former Golden State market, corner of Forty-first and Telegraph, from whose shelves, as a pup, he had shoplifted all kinds of tasty and desirable items. The Golden State chain, small and local to the Bay Area, had suffered some kind of implosion while Archy was over in the Gulf. The site at Forty-first was sown with the salt of failure, and since then no enterprise had taken root at the cursed spot. Not the plastic-plant nursery. Not the store that sold novelty floor coverings, the kind you usually saw for sale draped over hurricane fences along vacant corner lots, shag-rug portraits of Malcolm X and shag-rug Aztec warriors cradling dead Aztec ladies in the deep nylon pile of their arms.

  Archy parked and got out of the El Camino. In the same spirit of research that made him borrow Rolando (he hadn’t gotten the chance to tell Gwen about that, to show her he was capable, willing, and at this point, telling her would be like dropping a penny in a parking meter), Archy applied himself to the study of this slab of failure hewn from the greater zone of vicissitude that was his hometown. He tried to see it the way a successful businessman and top-ranked rich person like Gibson Goode was seeing it: as something that, unlike a plastic houseplant, could be made to grow. He studied the boarded-up plate windows, the rusting iron barrier around the empty cart corral. The mysteriously virginal circle of white concrete where, at the nexus of all earthly desire, there had stood a coin-operated peewee carousel with fiberglass horses, grinding around their tiny orbit in a way that only a kid could have found magical. As he ambled toward the back of the building to the shuttered and chained loading dock, he saw a pudgy man wearing a turquoise tracksuit and sneakers like a pair of tropical birds, murmuring into a cell phone. Big sunglasses made of turquoise plastic concealed the upper part of the man’s face, but the lower part gathered itself into a troubled pout. The man said softly, “Hey.”