Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  “Oh ho ho,” said the King of Bling as Nat backed, carrying the milk crate, through the steel mesh door of the eponymous establishment. Singletary reigned from his stool behind the glass counter in his cave of gold, atop his pile of rope and finger rings. Apart from the treasure in the cases, there was nothing else to look at in the shop: plain white tile floor, bare walls paneled in Masonite. Singletary himself devoid in his person, as always, of the least gleam or half-ounce of bling, filling out a guayabera shirt, looking sweaty-hot in his Jheri curl, toward which he took a studiously historicist stance. Strapped like Bullitt over the arm with a licensed .44 that, as he never tired of assuring the curious, had more than once, in the service of the King, been called upon to do what its manufacturers had intended. “I had a feeling. Soon as I saw that little flyer you was passing around.”

  “Did you, now,” Nat said, doubting it.

  As his trade demanded, Garnet Singletary was a keen assayer of human alloy, though he would say what he needed to say, Nat knew, to induce among the general public, whether buying or pawning, that he was even sharper than that. But it wasn’t like Nat was attempting some subtle bit of statecraft, or considered himself inscrutable, a master of neighborhood diplomacy. This was a fairly straight-ahead play.

  “Read me like a book,” he said.

  He winked at Ervis Watson, more often known as Airbus, who quite amply served as muscle for the King of Bling, a six-five, three-hundred-pound first line of defense in a velour tracksuit, weaponless apart from his ordnance arms and his howitzer legs, beyond whose bulk, events rarely penetrated to the point that the services of Singletary’s sidearm were required. King of Bling was half the size of Brokeland, dividing with the United Federation of Donuts the former premises of an Italian butcher, and between Singletary, Airbus, and the stock in trade, arranged in two long and two short table showcases on the floor and a tall cabinet that ran the length of the north wall, there was not a lot of room to turn around.

  Airbus did not acknowledge the wink or indeed move the slightest feature of his face. Nat understood that the attempt to elicit a superficial comradeship by winking was a standard gambit of the environmentally nervous white man. He was not the least bit nervous, having grown up in the black part of Richmond with a black stepmother, black friends, black enemies, black lovers, black teachers, and culture heroes who, barring a few Jewish exceptions, were almost exclusively black. But he had so profound a horror of black-acting white men, such as Moby, that he drove himself with a near-pathological rigor to avoid any appearance, in manner or speech, of trying to pass. He would let his chicken do the talking.

  “I brought you guys some lunch,” he said. He set the milk crate on the counter behind which Singletary sat on his stool. “Thought you might be getting a little tired of the Big Macs.”

  Singletary squinted at the crate, then looked at Nat, running through possible negative scenarios that might arise once Nat opened the containers stacked in the crate: hustles, robbery schemes, some kind of nasty hummus or shit you were supposed to eat off a leaf. Then the smell coming from the food, a breeze off the coast of the past, worked its way into his nostrils, well defended as they were by his Billy Dee Williams mustache, and a wild surmise lit up the chilly precincts of his face. Nat lifted the platter of chicken and paused, milking the moment, fingers ready to peel back the blanket of aluminum foil at any time. All that was required was a sign from the King of Bling.

  Singletary stared at Nat with a curious mixture of hopefulness and misgiving. He glanced at Airbus as if uncertain whether to split or double down on a soft eleven. Then he nodded once: Hit me. Nat ripped away the sheet of foil.

  “Ho, shit,” said Airbus.

  “I was expecting maybe you might have a few more people around,” Nat said as he set out the containers of beans, rice, and greens and tore open the foil packet of biscuits. Forks, knives, paper plates. A small ottoman of foofy Marin County butter. “Maybe feed a couple of your customers, too.”

  “Aisha was here, but she getting the baby’s picture taken up at Hilltop Mall,” Singletary said. He smiled. “I might have scared away some of the other people like to waste my time and theirs sitting around here all the damn day. Medication I been taking for my blood pressure have a tendency to make me a little irritable, from what I hear.”

  Airbus looked prepared but declined to comment on this rumor.

  “Customers,” Singletary continued. “That I don’t know. Business been a little slow this morning.”

  “Fuck the customers,” Airbus said. “More for me.” He skyhooked a plate piled high with some of everything.

  “Hope I brought enough,” Nat said.

  Singletary contemplated the well-encumbered plate that Nat had made up for him, but held off from tasting the food. He reached around behind him, shuffled through some papers, pulled out one of the flyers printed on blue paper. Nat had typed it up on the store computer, got it copied at Krishna. Singletary lifted to his face the plain black half-rims he wore around his neck on a thin rubber thong—another spurned opportunity to model his wares. He studied, or affected to study, the text Nat had composed last night in a fever of righteous defiance.

  “ ‘COCHISE,’ ” he said. “That’s for Mr. Jones.”

  “Another little tribute.”

  “Funeral’s Saturday?”

  “At the store, two P.M.”

  “ ‘Conserve Oakland’s Character against Homogenization, Impact, and Stress on the Environment.’ ”

  “I’m open to suggestions.”

  “That works.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Homogenization?”

  “In the corporate sense. Chain stores, franchises.”

  “I see. Yeah, that’s real clever.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  Singletary put down the sheet of paper as though it weighed ten pounds, as though, contrary to his stated opinion, its text left him, on the whole, unimpressed. He returned the half-glasses to struggle for purchase, belayed by the rubber thong, atop the Half Dome of his belly. His eyes were the steel pans of a precision scale.

  “Let me see if I understand,” he said. “In your opinion, the opening of a Dogpile shopping center on the site of the old Golden State market at Forty-first and Telegraph, which has the support of some highly respected figures in the community, such as Chan the Man, coming out of a company that works hard to lift the economic status and neighborhood pride of black people, is actually something that would have a negative impact.”

  “It’s called a Thang,” Airbus said through a mouthful of beans and rice. “It’s really more like a mall.”

  “Sixty thousand square feet,” Nat said. “Two levels of parking. The equivalent of five stories tall. Built right out to the sidewalk all the way around. It’s going to dwarf everything around it.”

  “A lot of things in this neighborhood, I hope you don’t mind my saying, could get dwarfed by a midget. Ain’t like we got a lot of mansions and terrazzos and whatnot. Historical landmarks.”

  “True,” Nat said. “We also don’t have a traffic or a parking problem, but we will if that Thang gets built. As far as economic uplift of the community? Gibson Goode is looking out for himself. I mean, come on, King. I came in here for two reasons, and one of them is that of all the people up and down this avenue for two miles in either direction, white, black, Asian, or from Tajikistan, you’re the only one more willing than I am to come out and say you hate that community-uplift bullshit.”

  Singletary weighed the intended compliment in those proving steel pans. “The enemy of bullshit,” he said at last. “That’s you, huh? And this whole thing”—he flicked the sheet of paper—“don’t have nothing to do with the fact that a Dogpile Thang moving in two blocks from here, it’s liable to put you and Archy Stallings out of business so fast you going to have to declare bankruptcy last Christmas to catch up?”

  “Of course it does,” Nat said. “I should have led off with that. You’re right. I g
uess I just got a little tired of walking around all day saying, ‘We’re fucked.’ ” He rubbed at his chin. “I’m going to come all the way out with it, Garnet. I talked to a guy at Councilman Abreu’s office.” Abreu was the at-large member of the Oakland City Council. He had no particular interest in Brokeland or music generally, as far as Nat knew. Based on his past record, Abreu would have no particular philosophical, environmental, or other beef with a project like Dogpile. But Abreu was rumored to dislike Chan Flowers, and their clashes in session were a matter of record. “He said that Abreu might be willing to show up, talk to COCHISE, hear what we had to say. But not if—”

  “Not if at”—checking the flyer—“twelve-thirty or so, you got a store full of sniffy old white people.”

  “I could use some influential people of color there,” Nat said. “For sure. Prominent local merchants.”

  The King of Bling considered his next words. “Chan and me, we don’t see eye to eye on too many subjects,” he said. “And he has said things, both to my face and in a way that it got repeated back to me, about my line of business, comparing the sale of gold rope, et cetera, to a cancer, a plague, and so forth. But if this neighborhood have a heart and soul, Chan the Man got to be a candidate for that position. And you ought to know better than anybody, because you a smart, intelligent man with a lot of experience and credibility, that just because it’s all right for a cold-eye, skeptic motherfucker like me to go around saying all that community-uplift jive is a bunch of bullshit, don’t make it all right for you.”

  “Right again,” Nat said. “Point taken.”

  “What’s the second reason?”

  “Oh. Well, I know how much you like collard greens.”

  Singletary nodded and picked up his fork. He got himself a nice mouthful of the collards and chewed, reflectively at first and, it seemed, with a hint of doubt. Abruptly, he closed his eyes and took a deep, slow breath as though surrendering the burden of many long years. When he opened his eyes, they were brimming with emotion in a way that would have astonished the hangers-on recently banished from the premises by his ill temper.

  “What time you need me?” he said.

  Solemn, smiling, mildly puzzled, or with a beneficent swish of Glinda the Good, each Concerned Person put down his or her alphanumerics, then passed along the clipboard and the souvenir pen from Children’s Fairyland that was tricked out with pink and purple tinsel as a magic wand: Shoshana Zucker, who used to be the director of Julie’s nursery school, a chemotherapy shmatte on her head; Claude Rapf the urban planner, who lived on a hill above the Caldecott Tunnel in a house shaped like a flying saucer, where he once threw a party to mark the unwrapping of a pristine original pressing of In a Silent Way (Columbia, 1969), which he then catalyzed on a fifty-thousand-dollar analog system; a skinny, lank-haired, Fu Manchued dude later revealed with a flourish to be Professor Presto Digitation, the magician from Julie’s fifth birthday party; two of the aging Juddhists who had recently opened a meditation center called Neshama, a block down from the old Golden State, the male Juddhist slurping with a vehement mindfulness from the rubber teat of a water bottle while the female rummaged with melancholy chopsticks through the strips of flesh-gray tofu skin interleaved in her bento box as if ruing the slaughter of innocent soy plants that her appetite had ordained; Moby; that freaky Emmet Kelly–as Gloria Swanson–impersonator lady from the apartment over the Self-Laundry, holding her Skye terrier; Amre White, godson of Jim Jones, now the pastor of a rescue mission adjacent to the Golden State site, his ears, nostrils, and the ridges of his eyebrows cratered with the ghosts of renounced piercings; a city of Berkeley arborist named Marge whom Aviva once shepherded through a grievously late-term abortion; that Stephen Hawking guy who was not Stephen Hawking; the lady who owned the new-wave knitting store, teasing into life from the primal chaos of her yarn bag what appeared to be a doll-sized pair of cock-socked Eldridge Cleaver pants but also might have been a pullover sweater for her pet wyvern; weirdly, the accountant who got caught embezzling minor sums from a number of her clients, among them Brokeland Records, and was obliged (as a result of a bee that flew into a previous bonnet of Nat’s) to settle in small claims court; a noted UC Berkeley scholar of Altaic languages who specialized in collecting independent-label seven-inch soul releases of the mid-to-late sixties, carrying on his right shoulder without acknowledgment and for unspoken reasons a ripe banana, onto the nub end of which he (or someone) had drawn in black felt pen a smiling cartoon face; one of the eleven shrinks Nat had seen over the past ten years, a Dr. Milne, who spent the whole time casting a restless diagnostic eye across the framed album covers on the walls, the inoperative iron fuchsia of the fan whose downrod receded into the time-furred webs and shadows of the high tin ceiling, Julie’s painted bead curtain looking more like Sammy than Miles Davis, the battalion of miniature plastic Shriners in their miniature tuxes and fezzes massed along the plate rail of the wainscot at the back of the store, architectural relic of some pre-Spencerian establishment rumored but not confirmed to have been for a time the Oakland headquarters of the Black Hand; Sandy the dog trainer, who had been lobbying the city for nearly a decade to convert the Golden State site to a dog park and who had taught the Jaffes’ beagle-schnauzer mix, Jasper, later slain by cancer, to play dead; and S. S. Mirchandani, there only because he was always around that time of day, the wandering star of his mysterious system of motels, nephews, and liquor stores. Last to sign his name, grunting and shifting and looking like he would have preferred to consult beforehand with his attorney, the King of Bling on his usual stool, minimally fulfilling the racial requirement imposed on Nat by an anonymous aide to Councilman Rod P. Abreu; though Airbus, unrecorded by wand, was also present, way at the back, to sew a second patch of verisimilitude onto the motley cloak of diverse community support behind which Abreu, in his ongoing struggle with Chan the Man for control of the Oakland City Council, might plausibly clothe his presence and his intentions.

  “Let me start by telling you folks,” Abreu said, “why, I think, we are not here.”

  Rod Abreu was a weary-shouldered, pudding-cheeked lawyer, at one time the attorney for the electrical workers’ union, younger and sharper than he looked, better educated than he sounded, scented with bay rum and endowed advantageously with large, moist mournful eyes the color of watery coffee that were set into his face in a pair of bruised hollows, prints inked by the malefactor thumbs of life. Yet in spite of his hangdog stoop and sorrowful countenance, his manner leaned aggressively toward an irrepressible and uniform pep, pep sprayed in snaky jets all over everything he said like concrete onto rebar.

  “We probably should not be here today at this time,” he put it to them, “thinking we’re going to try to stop or turn back the clock on the Dogpile proposal. All right?”

  Awaiting objection in a way that seemed to promise a swift overruling, courtroom-tested, Abreu held up his chin. No objection was forthcoming, though the lady with the Skye terrier looked disappointed. Nat was disappointed himself but, supposing this might be some kind of Brutus-is-an-honorable-man rhetorical gambit, settled in to hear what came next. The chin was duly lowered.

  “To say anything like that, all right, would not only be premature, it would also be unfair. Maybe even a mistake.” Talking to a jury, a labor board, people who believed themselves, no matter how scant the supporting evidence, not to be simpletons. “Yes, I have seen the initial proposal, my staff and I have had a chance to look it over, and I would say that the best word for it is ‘ambitious.’ It is an ambitious proposal, and Mr. Gibson Goode, a terrific athlete, a human highlight reel—I mean, seriously—is an ambitious dude, okay, who has made amazing use of his gifts and his competitive edge, those leadership skills. If you ever saw him play, you know he has the goods. He can do it all. Guy you want in the huddle, third and long, take the ball and run with it, I mean, pick your favorite football cliché, to be honest, I’m more of a baseball fan. Go A’s?”

  This tentative sentimen
t was seconded with scattershot but genuine fervor, the Oaklands a game and half out of first that August and seriously contending, and then the hinges of the front door let out a contrarian jeer. Everyone turned to see, hesitating at the threshold, a large man dressed in a stained Captain EO sweatshirt, sleeves cropped and curling at the shoulder seams to expose two high-reaching power forward arms. A pair of official Team USA basketball shorts as worn by that summer’s inglorious Olympic squad. White-on-white Adidas kicks, scarred as warhorses and wrinkled as elephants. The man looked flummoxed, lost, and, to his business partner, crestfallen, as if a grim fate that he had always feared might befall their establishment—say, a massive influx of strange white people—was now come to pass. He was carrying a square black frame from Blick art supplies, the kind they used to display album covers. He didn’t say anything, just stood there sweaty and breathing carefully through his nose.

  “My partner, folks, Archy Stallings,” Nat announced, aware of a change of pitch, a downshift, in the music he was hearing in his head. For the first time since he had begun to craft the flyer that summoned COCHISE into being, it occurred to him, maybe a bit late, that he might have wanted to drop some hint of his intentions on his partner, folks, Archy Stallings. If for no other reason—again a bit late, he saw that there might be plenty of other reasons—than to prevent the calamitous breach of personal-style code that his oversight had obliged Archy to commit. Every so often, maybe, if he was running way behind, Archy might stop by the store on his way from the courts at Mosswood Park, before he went home to shower and change. He never did so except with reluctance, discomfort, and apologies to whoever was at the counter to see him looking so raggedy-ass.

  “Sorry,” he told the room before settling on his partner as the likely source of his underdressed confusion with a frown and a furrowing of eyebrows. “I—uh. Whoa. Nat—”

  “Archy, this is Councilman Abreu,” Nat said, trying for the sake of appearances to make it sound like he was reminding rather than informing. “He graciously found some time to stop by today and talk to us, give us his views on the Dogpile thing. And,” he added, seized by a happy if disingenuous inspiration, “to hear what we have to say. Our neighbor and good friend Mr. Singletary—”