Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  “Said, be here Saturday,” Mr. Jones said.

  “I know I did.”

  “Black man my age, that could be asking a lot.”

  “But here you are,” Archy said.

  “Here I am.”

  Here he was, sixty-six and still, in fact, lean and strong. The brown and gold plaid giving off that good casino-lobby smell of leisure suit fresh from the cleaners. Bird on his shoulder freely dosed with dandelion tablets mashed into a dish of Quaker grits. Van gassed up to the tune of fifty dollars, backed into the boy’s driveway. It was a white ’83 Econoline, odometer rolled over twice, napped with gray dust. Sitting there, rear doors open, empty as a promise. Boy had told him last week he was finished with the job.

  “Mr. Jones, damn, I’m sorry, what else can I say?” Archy said. “It’s been a lot going on.”

  “Told me it was finished.”

  “Yeah, it pretty much was, but then, huh, turned out your treble driver went bad. I had to go all the way to this dude up in Suisun, pick up another one.”

  Archy dialed the padlock on the garage door, unhooked the clasp. Stooped to grab hold of the door handle. Nine o’clock in the morning, boy in his pajamas. Slept in some kind of kung fu getup, satiny red with BRUCE LEE INSTITUTE stitched in white silk across the back.

  “It really is almost done. Two, three hours, tops. Definitely for sure in time for the gig. When they expecting us?”

  “You don’t know that, how you know you be ready in time?”

  Archy shot a look at the bird, a roll of the eyes to say, Can you believe this man, waking me up at 8:57 in the goddamn morning to bust my balls with feats of logic? Archy Stallings to this day the only person besides Fernanda ever tried to engage the bird in conversation about Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones remembered the way Fernanda used to do it, how she would slam a bottle of pills down on the kitchen table, maybe, turn to the bird on its perch by the window, say something like You want to make sure he takes his medication, Fifty-Eight. Day he dies, I’m selling you to KFC.

  “Nah, but seriously, Mr. Jones. I just need to put it back together, then you ready to go.”

  “Young man,” Mr. Jones said, “I need to play it before the gig. See it works, how it sounds.”

  The garage door swung upward on its hinges with a ringing of springs. The bird, a pound of warmth and steady respiration on Mr. Jones’s shoulder, greeted the Leslie speaker by reproducing the whir of its treble rotor when it powered up. But the Leslie, gutted, said nothing. Its cabinet was even emptier than the van, which at least had some furniture blankets piled into it, a tangle of rope and bungee cords, the dollies. All of the Leslie’s motors, wheels, drivers, rotating horns, and drum, its amplifier like a Kremlin of vacuum tubes, lay ranked in an orderly grid across the workbench at the back of the garage. Mr. Jones could see that everything had been cleaned and oiled and looked correct.

  That gravitation toward correctness was something Mr. Jones had always liked about Archy Stallings. Even when Archy was a boy of five or six, kept his fingernails clean and square, never an escaped shirttail. Wrapped his schoolbooks in cut-up grocery bags. When he got older, fifteen, sixteen, boy started working those old-school hipster suits, the hat and a tie, styling himself somewhere between Malcolm and Mingus. Always reading some Penguin paperback, translated from the Latin, Greek; penguin the most correct of all birds, made even the fastidious Fifty-Eight look like a feather duster.

  “I’ve been distracted,” Archy said. “And I dropped the ball. Between this thing with Dogpile, you know? And some other things . . .”

  “You got to maintain focus,” Mr. Jones said, though the sound of his words made him wince. He recalled with perfect clarity the irrelevance of old men’s maxims to him when he was young. Rain against an umbrella, a young man all but sworn to the task of keeping dry. Archy was not so young anymore, and Mr. Jones had been raining down the pointless counsel on him for a good long time. No more able to restrain himself than a heavy-bellied cloud. “You made a commitment.”

  “Oh, no doubt,” Archy said, shaking out his umbrella. “No doubt. Tell you what. You don’t have somewhere you need to be, I can put the whole thing together right now. That work for you? Take me, like, seriously, an hour. Then we can go over to your place, plug the Hammond into it, test out the whole rig. Thing needs adjustments, I make them right there. Then I help you load everything up into the van.” He straightened, tightened the string of his kung fu robe. “And you’re one. Ready for tonight. Okay? Sound like a plan?”

  Using the placating tone he took with Mr. Jones, understanding like no one living, apart from one feathered savant, that Cochise Jones was in secret an angry man, prone to impatience, outrage, injury of the feelings. In the liner notes of Redbonin’, Leonard Feather called him “the unflappable Mr. Jones,” and at the time, in the chaotic midst of the seventies, that was the rap on Cochise, laid-back and taciturn like some movie Indian, Jeff Chandler in Broken Arrow. Nowadays people took him for this harmless, smiling, quiet old parrot-loving gentleman who, from time to time, at the keyboards of a Hammond, adopted the surprising identity of a soul-jazz Zorro, fingertips fencing with the drawbars and keys. Mr. Jones felt as trapped inside that nice old gentleman, smiling, chuckling, as he had inside the wooden-Indian cool of his youth.

  “Day I need help moving that thing,” Mr. Jones said, “is the day I give it up for good.”

  The Hammond B-3 was diesel-heavy, coffin-awkward, clock-fragile. To gig with one, a man needed to be strong-limbed or willing to impose on his friends. From the day in 1971 when he bought it off Rudy Van Gelder, Mr. Jones had always gone with the former course.

  “Find me a chair, then,” he said. “And maybe someplace I can put this damn bird.”

  Archy went into the house, came back with two mugs of black coffee, a computer chair, and a broomstick that he rigged with a C-clamp for Fifty-Eight to perch on. He spread one of the furniture blankets from the back of the van on the floor of the garage. Turned out to be Count Basie’s birthday: KCSM was playing the Lambert, Hendricks & Ross version of “Li’l Darlin,” the Count himself taking a rare spin at the keys of a B-3, holding on to the mournful churchliness that the instrument had carried over coming, right around that time, into jazz.

  Mr. Jones got out his pipe and his pouch of tobacco and settled in to observe the boy work. He found it satisfying to watch Archy’s meaty Jazzmaster fingers take up one by one the Leslie’s unlikely components, items could have been scrounged from a kitchen drawer, a toy box, and a U-boat, then oblige them, one by one, to cohabit inside the cabinet. His pipe, an angular modernist briar, a gift from Archie Shepp, seemed to draw particularly well today. Alongside the driveway, bees lazed among the honeysuckle bells, and a hummingbird sounded its mysterious ping. Fifty-Eight rummaged idly with its black bill in its dappled breast. The Leslie would be fixed, and they would play their gig tonight up in the Berkeley hills. Everything was manifestly all right. And yet something continued to rankle at Mr. Jones, like a sour finger of acid in the windpipe, a failure that loomed ahead of or lay behind both Archy and himself.

  “What ‘other things’?” Mr. Jones said.

  Fifty-Eight pinged like a hummingbird.

  “Huh?” Archy had the treble assembly mounted in the uppermost of the cabinet’s three stories, belted to the AC motor. He crouched, peering in, listening to the well-oiled silence as the disk with the two horns, the real horn and its dummy brother, whirled on the bearing tube. Blades of a propeller on a cartoon beanie. “What other things what?”

  “You distracted by.”

  Archy switched off the power, and the treble rotor came to rest with an audible sigh. He swung around to face Mr. Jones, laborious and purposeful as a bus turning a tight corner. Rocked back on his haunches, contemplating. Breathing through his nose. Making up his mind whether or not he wanted to start in on it.

  “Turns out I got a son,” he said. “Fourteen years old. Showed up at the store yesterday out of the motherfucking blue. Turns
out he’s been living right here in Oakland since June.”

  Enough time went by for Archy to fairly conclude that Mr. Jones might have nothing to say. Even though Mr. Jones had suspected, even hoped, that Titus might be the “distraction,” the word “son” had caught him off-guard, which in turn left him nonplussed on a deeper level, irritated that the word should still, after all these years, reverberate. At one time you could drop it like a tray of dishes on a tile floor, cut off every conversation taking place inside of Mr. Jones. Now it played only with a soft tremolo of regret, more or less like any other regret that might be audible to the heart of a man of sixty-six. Mr. Jones sat there, confounded by grief, turning Archy’s information this way and that, a paperweight, something small and heavy cut with a lot of facets. Wanting to say something to this fine and talented young man, something lasting and useful about sons, loss, and regrets. The longer the silence stretched between them, the more irritated Mr. Jones became. Archy swung back to the Leslie. Unplugged it, picked up the bass rotor, and slid it into place, tightened the mounting nuts.

  “You know your wife how long?” Mr. Jones said.

  “Ten years.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The pipe was dead, and Mr. Jones passed it to the bird. The bird nipped onto the pipe stem with a click of its beak, then flew off the perch and into the morning. Knock-knocking it against the sidewalk. Probably dropping its mess while it was out there, bird better housebroken than a child of five. A few seconds later, the bird came flustering back to light on Mr. Jones’s shoulder. Passed back the pipe with its freshly emptied bowl. Fifty-Eight had come equipped with that trick by some owner before Mr. Jones, before Marcus Stubbs, who had lost the bird to Mr. Jones in a poker game and who did not smoke a pipe and who furthermore could not have trained a shark to favor steak. Mr. Jones took the pipe, and the bird hopped back up onto the makeshift perch.

  “I didn’t tell my wife yet, by the way,” Archy said. “Case you were wondering.”

  “You didn’t know you had a son before now?”

  “I knew, but I mean, we never had, like, contact. Boy was off in Texas somewheres, uh, Tyler, I think it is.”

  “I know it.” Gigging at some corrugated-shack crossroads bar and grill, the night dense and humid and haunted by a smell of roses. Idris Muhammad on the drums back when he was a kid named Leo Morris. Going on half a century ago.

  “Boy had his granny, the mom’s mom, living there,” Archy said. “The old lady sent me a picture one time.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Mr. Jones poked another hank of his favorite perique into the bowl of his pipe, tamped it down with a finger.

  “Nobody ever asked me to be a daddy to the boy,” Archy said. “And I didn’t . . . you know. Volunteer.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Yesterday, boy shows up in my store, and I still don’t really understand why, but. He’s with Julie, you know.”

  “Julie?

  “Julie Jaffe.”

  “I didn’t know that boy had any friends.”

  “Julie got a full-on crush on the motherfucker.”

  “Oh,” Mr. Jones said. “So he’s like that?”

  “I do believe that he is,” Archy said.

  Nothing in that to disturb Mr. Jones. When it came to lifestyles and behaviors, Mr. Jones played it strictly live and let live. Gays, Wiccans, people who wanted to punch a metal grommet in their earflaps. But somehow it made Mr. Jones sad, without surprising him, to learn that Julie Jaffe had come out a homosexual. That felt to him like something too complicated, too heavy, for a boy so young to lay on himself. He did not disapprove, but he could not see any reward in it. “Boy that age,” he said, shaking his head. “Smart, too.”

  The bird beeped like Mr. Jones’s microwave, four times. Popcorn, popped. Then, following its own inscrutable logic, it began to articulate Groove Holmes’s version of the chorus to “American Pie.” A ghostly rotor whirring in its throat.

  “Said they met up at some film class,” Archy said, setting the woofer drum into place in the lower story of the Leslie. “Over at the Southside Senior Center.”

  “Is that right?” Mr. Jones said, staring at the parrot as if to warn it to hold his tongue about that evening in June.

  “It’s a Quentin Tarantino class. I don’t know, I guess they’re studying Kill Bill or some shit, watching a bunch of kung fu movies, B movies. Surprised you didn’t sign up for it, loving that Pulp Fiction like you do.”

  “Only I did sign up for it,” said Mr. Jones. “Sounds like you got to be talking about my boy Titus. No shit, that’s your son?”

  Archy raised up slow and careful. Came around on Mr. Jones a little at a time, like he expected to find himself looking down the barrel of a gun. “You know him?”

  Whenever Mr. Jones, again in the characteristic style of useless old men, wished to contemplate the brokenness of the world, or at least that part of the world bounded by the Grove-Shafter Freeway and Telegraph Avenue on Forty-second Street, he had only to look across and up two doors to the home of his neighbor Mrs. Wiggins. The woman already seemed old when he and Francesca first moved in with Francesca’s mother back in 1967. But Mrs. Wiggins was strong then, furious and churchgoing, pleased to be known for and to advertise her own iron rule over the tribes of loose children who flowed like migrants through her door—the late Jamila Joyner among them—taking what she could pay them in love and beatdowns, in clean clothes, food on the table. Years, decades, Mrs. Wiggins went on and on, like one of those Japanese soldiers who kept fighting in the Solomon Islands or wherever, nobody ever showing up to reinforce her, tell the poor woman to surrender. But time, crime, and misery in all its many morphologies had at last ground old Mrs. Wiggins down. Though she lived still, she was a gibbering ghost of herself. You had to pity any child who found himself consigned by the high court of bad luck to her care. When Mr. Jones was growing up in Oklahoma City, he had been taken to a carnival whose sideshow featured a man purported to be John C. Frémont and a hundred and twenty-odd years old. Bone hands, a mat of hair, and a pair of filmy eyes peering out from a heap of blankets, shivering. All around the staring thing, in the shadowed tent, stirred the freaks and bodily horrors, sly, embittered, and cavorting. That was how Mr. Jones thought of old Mrs. Wiggins now, in that little house across the street.

  “I might be the cause of this particular distraction coming your way,” Mr. Jones said. “Titus stays with Mrs. Wiggins. You know that house across the street from me?”

  “Yeah, okay. She was Jamila’s, like, auntie.”

  “I see the boy come out the house one day, something about him seemed familiar, you know? Boy had on a little sweater vest. Hair in order, crease in his jeans.”

  “He does present a neat appearance, I will give you that.”

  “We started talking.”

  In those three words, Mr. Jones condensed a two-week history of passing nods. The boy coming and going on his bicycle at any given time of the day or night, Mr. Jones looking for signs of creeping doom on the child but observing, day after day, nothing of note except a small and fiercely maintained repertoire of button-downs and blazing white tees. Then, all at once, a blast of conversation, Titus drawn in by a burst of eerie parrot zitherings coming through Mr. Jones’s kitchen window, KQED having shown The Third Man the night before.

  “Boy told me he wants to be a movie director,” Mr. Jones said. “Talking about Walter Hill, Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick. I’m thinking, well, all right.”

  “He has taste.”

  “Then he mentions how he likes Tarantino. So I told him about the class. Only when we got there, this one dude in a wheelchair.” Mr. Jones broke off, pressed his lips together. Took a deep breath, shaking his head in furious sorrow. “Says he has a bird allergy.”

  According to Dr. Hanselius at the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library, bird allergies were, quote, extremely uncommon, unquote, and something in the lingering sting of humiliation that Mr. Jones had felt that night, a sense
that he and the bird had been the victims of some esoteric form of bigotry, fed the anger that had been mounting in him since finding out that the Leslie wasn’t ready for tonight’s gig; since being thrown out of the Tarantino class; since the assassination of Marcus Foster or Dr. King; since 1953, 1938.

  “Son of a bitch probably sleeps on a feather pillow every motherfucking night,” Mr. Jones said.

  He looked at the bird, feathers giving off that faint parrot smell of scorched newspaper, in whom all his loneliness and outrage were distilled. Fifty-Eight screamed like a slide whistle.

  “So I had to leave,” Mr. Jones said, aware that his explanation of his role in bringing Archy his son had fallen somewhat off track. “Titus stayed. And Nat’s boy was, like, sitting right there.”

  “In the front row, right by the teacher?”

  “Right down front and center. Guess the two of them, they must have hit it off. I thought maybe it could happen, boy might find his way to you sooner or later.”

  “You mean you knew?”

  “Not for sure.”

  “But, I mean, Mr. Jones, how come you didn’t just tell me?”

  Mr. Jones squirmed at the question. “Figured I already played my part. Might be y’all’s turn next. You and him.”

  “Wow,” Archy said. “Huh. You are a cryptic old motherfucker sometimes, Mr. Jones.”

  “I can’t disagree.”

  “You move in mysterious ways. Did you tell them?”

  Maybe that was when Mr. Jones began to realize that he felt offended. “Think I would say something to them, not you?”

  “Must of taken some serious figuring between them, find their way to my doorstep.”

  “That where Titus is now, your doorstep?”