Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  Garnet Singletary pressed his fingers against his sternum as though feeling for the bullethole.

  “We need to fight!” said the lady who lived over the Self-Laundry, goosing her dog on the word “fight” as though encouraging it to second the motion. The dog abstained.

  “HELL, YES,” intoned the Stephen Hawking guy through his vocoder, rolling his Mars rover out of Archy’s way.

  “Huh,” said Archy quietly. “Is that right? Fight, okay.”

  Nat noted the passage across his friend’s wide, mild features of what appeared to be genuine distress. Eager to ascribe that painful sight to anything other than the fact that, in an access of hypomania, he had convened—without consulting anyone, in the middle of a “transitional” neighborhood in a city that was largely black and poor and hungry for the kind of pride-instilling economic gesture that the construction of a Dogpile Thang represented, however gestural and beneficial only to Our Beloved Corporate Overlords it might turn out to be—this motley gathering of freaky Caucasians united, to hazard a guess, only by a reflexive willingness if not a compulsion to oppose pretty much anything new that came along, especially if it promised to be big and bright and bangin; in the process, creating and abandoning an unholy mess in his own kitchen, a mess that, his rapidly cycling brain chemistry began to whisper to him, was probably a metaphor, a prophecy of how this whole thing was going to turn out; hoping to forestall this realization, Nat sought explanation for Archy’s evident dismay in the picture frame. Archy had used it to mount the sleeve of his cherished copy of Redbonin’, with its starkly lit, extreme close-up Pete Turner photograph of Cochise Jones looking lean and hale but far more menacing than he ever had in life, cheeks printed with a calamitous history of freckles.

  “I just came by to hang this picture up,” Archy said.

  “Aw, man, condolences,” said Moby, letting loose some kind of absurd dap congeries which, remarkably, Archy returned slap for slap, flutter for flutter, pound for pound. Then, like sparring bears, they fell into a woozy clinch. “So fuckin sorry to hear about that, bro. Mr. Jones was a legend and a hella nice guy.”

  “True, true,” Archy said, wading toward the front counter with everybody goggling silently at him in a way that reminded Nat of Jesus among the moneylenders. Archy took note of the remaining fried chicken, beans and rice, collards, and biscuits laid out on the counter. He pressed his lips together as if in token of a Juddhist detachment from such worldly (not to say unclean) productions. Exchanged with the King of Bling a curl-fingered clasp of Zen simplicity. Went to a shelf on the wall behind the counter, moved aside an old Seth Thomas digital clock, a James Brown bobblehead, and a stack of AT&T bills one or the other of the partners was long since supposed to have gone through with a highlighter pen. He unfolded the cardboard foot at the back of the frame and propped up the album sleeve with its matte-finished border of funereal black. He stepped back to contemplate it and heaved a big old big-man sigh. Then he turned to face the inexplicable room and reached for a chicken leg. He bit and chewed and swallowed without apparent pleasure, by which token Nat saw that his partner was truly angry.

  “Arch—”

  “I’m here to listen,” Archy said to Nat. “You listen, too.” Chomp. “Excuse me, Councilman. Please continue.”

  “Okay,” Rod Abreu said. “Well, like I explained, Mr. Stallings, just a minute ago, at this point in the game, I actually don’t think we should be thinking of fighting anything. I was just saying . . .” He looked sheepish. “What was I saying?”

  “Go A’s,” said Dr. Milne.

  “Right. Football. Yes. Folks, there is no question, if you don’t know, take it from me, Gibson Goode has done great things for the community down in L.A., a community where not a whole lot of great things were happening before. I commend and admire him for that, and I commend the people, some of my colleagues on the city council, who look at what Mr. Goode has done in L.A. and say, hey, wouldn’t it be great if we could make something like that happen here in Oakland. And hey, he’s a hometown boy, right? A homeboy. Wouldn’t something like that be awesome? A shot in the arm. Well, yes, maybe it would be awesome. It sounds awesome. It looks awesome on paper. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, and hey, I’m a homeboy, too? Born in East Oakland, right at Highland Hospital? It’s this: I have seen a lot of impressive people come through this city over the years with a lot of awesome ideas that looked good on paper. Hey, when you look like I do, on paper’s your only hope.”

  That got a laugh, Shoshana in her chemo scarf nodding, other people nodding. Abreu worked those doleful eyes, those Marrano eyes, abreu meaning “Hebrew,” as Nat would have liked to inform Archy, in Portuguese, or maybe it was Catalan.

  “Whenever you have a proposal as ambitious as this one, and folks, no doubt about it, this is a very ambitious proposal, you have to be careful. People tend, when you have a charismatic guy like Gibson Goode, a genuine superstar, hey, somebody like that generates a lot of excitement, people get kind of caught up, right? And when people get excited, they get carried away, then they rush into things. And that’s why we are here today. Because somebody has to kind of hang back a little, say, okay, let’s slow down. Let’s take our time with this. That’s the message I’m bringing you today.”

  Slow down, admittedly not quite the message that Nat had envisioned when he first began to lay his fevered plans, but his nose detected subterfuge in Abreu’s words, and he did not believe that a mere retarding action was all the councilman had in mind.

  “And it’s the message that I’d like to take back from you and share with my colleagues on the city council.”

  S. S. Mirchandani leaned in close to Archy. “I have been reliably informed,” he said in a portentous and inadequate whisper, nodding toward Abreu, “that he was the one getting Chan the Man’s sister fired from the port of Oakland.”

  Like Archy, making his joyless way through a biscuit that might have brought joy to Eeyore, Nat affected not to have heard Mr. Mirchandani, but he glanced over at the likely source of the information. Singletary arched an eyebrow, then, after taking a look around the room, smiled a dubious but encouraging smile, the way you might smile at someone about to depress the ignition button of a homemade jet pack. He did not look too impressed by the putative founding membership of COCHISE, their ranks drawn largely, as Nat would have been obliged to concede, from the recipients of an e-mail sent in bee-meets-bonnet haste to those addresses in his personal contacts file who shared a zip code with Brokeland, a relatively modest number (Nat at best a fitful electronic correspondent) amassed over a period of several years from a disparate set of social contexts.

  “Now, I want to thank our hosts today, you two are really pillars of this neighborhood, for organizing this get-together.”

  “Huh,” said Archy.

  Abreu turned at the sound and caught Nat in the midst of offering his landlord an elaborate shrug, lips down-twisted asymmetrically into an expression meant to convey 1) that his willingness to concede both the unlikeliness of COCHISE’s success and the regrettable preponderance, thus far, of white faces among its membership was accompanied by 2) a respectful suggestion that Singletary reserve judgment, because hey, you never knew what might happen, and a second, still more respectful suggestion that 3) Singletary go fuck himself; such elaborate, densely layered shrugs being a particular specialty of the Jaffes going back to their days of never knowing what might happen along the banks of the Vistula.

  “No, really,” Abreu said, misinterpreting Nat’s shrug as modesty. “Brokeland Records, right, I mean, this place is so much more than a store. It’s a neighborhood institution. I know a lot of you folks have spent a lot of your time and money in this place over the years.”

  “Lot more time than money,” Archy said, and Moby, who had dropped thousands over the years, loyally laughed.

  “It’s the kind of independent, quirky, welcoming place . . .” Abreu went on, voice wavering as though he were picking up on the crackle of poli
tics that troubled the air between the partners. The Spinozan sadness in his eyes seemed to balloon, and the thumbprints beneath them to deepen: “. . . that gives a special character to this part of the city. And it’s that special character we’re going to have to really consider as we look at the Dogpile plan going forward. There are also possibly some environmental-impact issues to look at. Now, I understand, from talking to, uh, Ms.—”

  “Sandy,” said the former light in the eye and wag in the tail of poor Jasper. “That’s why I was told we couldn’t put a dog park there. The back end of the property used to be a factory or something. I heard there was mercury. You can’t dig it up without doing some kind of big cleanup.”

  A number of people nodded and murmured that they had heard reports of some kind of problem with the site, but many more seemed to be hearing the information for the first time, and Nat was gratified by the concern that it appeared to engender, news of the danger forking outward, in his imagination, along a network of gossip and bloggery until it reached a crescendo of outrage that would doom the Dogpile proposal now and for all time, bring it with a creak and a crumble and a great cloud of dust to the ground. He wanted to turn to Archy, standing irritated next to him, turn to Aviva as in his imagination she ran screaming from the devastated kitchen of the home that was, after all, also threatened by the advent of the Thang, turn to the ghost of Opal Starrett, who always used to say, not without affection, that Nat was incapable of organizing an empty drawer, throw out his arms, and cry, Da-deeda-la-dee-dop!

  Just as Nat was congratulating himself and mentally boasting to the living and the dead for his remarkable aim with the ancestral Davidic sling, he saw Singletary sit up electric-shock straight, then nod cool and wary at someone beyond the frame of the front window, out of Nat’s line of sight.

  “So the Dogpile folks are probably going to run into some questions right there. And of course, and here’s the end of what I have to say, the city council and the planning commission are going to be looking for a lot of input and comment from you—”

  And then in walked Chan the Man, in his Sergio Leone hat and funereal suit, steps precise, eye bright and quick as a rooster’s. He stopped in the doorway with two of his nephews paired behind him. “Oh my goodness,” he said. “I am sorry. I did not realize.”

  He raised a hand to his mouth and looked embarrassed. Dumbfounded to discover his favorite record store almost if not quite packed with people in the middle of the day. Far more people, perhaps, than had ever been almost but not quite packed into this space at any time in its history, even back when it was Spencer’s Barbershop. For a kinescoped instant Nat cut away in his imagination from the scene at Brokeland to an afternoon forty years earlier, men and boys, maybe Chan Flowers and Luther Stallings among them, jostling around a portable black-and-white to watch Cassius Clay take down the Big Bear. Nat wished intensely that this gathering could be that gathering, these people could be those, with all the years of ferment and innovation in the music and the life of black America ahead of them. Hope unfulfilled, not yet betrayed.

  The crafty old fucker, acting surprised. It was barely possible that he felt surprised by the decent turnout Nat had managed, but Nat did not buy for a second that the guy was embarrassed, that he just happened to walk in on the organizational meeting of COCHISE, oh my goodness, so sorry to interrupt, I see I will have to come back later. Flowers made a more rapid but careful survey of the human contents of the room. When he reached the King of Bling, he paused.

  “Mr. Singletary,” he said with cold affection. “Well, well. An august presence.”

  Singletary said, “Mm-hmm.” Savoring it, all at once content to be there in the room, the King of Bling kicked back on the stool. He smiled slowly. Chan the Man smiled right back.

  “So many faces I don’t know,” he said as if fault for the ignorance were entirely his. “Oh, now, Elisheva, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, hello,” said the lady rabbi from Neshama, wagging three fingers Girl Scout–style.

  “Making your preparations for the High Holidays?”

  “They’re getting close,” Elisheva said.

  “That’s right! Rosh Hashanah!” On Flowers’s lips, the name of the holiday sounded like something much grander to Nat’s ear, roarsh ha-shanah!, a Klingon affair involving ritual combat and lunar howling. “And who else? Oh, excuse me, there, brother.”

  The Steven Hawking guy joysticked his chair around to make room, causing Abreu to take a step back and thus come into Chan Flowers’s line of sight for the first time. He had been concealed by the certificate, mounted on a piece of foam core, advising all comers that in 2003 readers of the Express had declared Brokeland records to be the Best Used Record Store in the East Bay, a conclusion they had reached in seven out of the past ten years. Then Chandler Bankwell Flowers III looked, for real, dumbfounded.

  “Councilman Abreu,” he said. “And very much at large.”

  “This is terrific,” Abreu said with that untouchable chipperness, so like tedium, which must serve him well in his line of work. “I was just about to open it up to questions from these good people here. And you are so much more informed about this project than I am. I’m sure you all know, do you all know? what a big supporter of Dogpile and Mr. Goode the councilman has recently become after a certain period of sharing the reservations that I know many of us in this room also feel. So, Mr. Flowers, I don’t know, maybe you’d like to tell us some of the things you learned, or the decisions you came to, that helped you change your mind about this project.”

  “I’d love to,” Flowers said. “Nothing would make me happier. Unfortunately, today I do not have the time. I’m just on my way from one appointment to another. Not even time to stop and browse the new-arrivals bin. Leave a little more of my hard-earned pay in that cash register over there.”

  This got a bigger laugh than any Abreu had managed to scrape together from this crowd, admittedly, a tough Berkeley/Oakland crowd, its sense of humor reduced, like the sperm count of a man who wore his underwear too tight, by the heat of two dozen outraged brains. It occurred to Nat that Chan the Man appeared to be in fine form and might take it into his head to make a speech. Might even have come today prepared to make one. An address that would reach out to the core of Nat’s constituency: the soreheads of the neighborhood, the purists, the lovers of minutiae, the inveterate hearers of invisible bees. All gathered together in one room, to be scooped up into the stern but forgiving arms of Flowers. Delivered at one blow like the brave little tailor’s flies. Courtesy of Nathaniel Jaffe, let his epitaph be: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  “Actually, I was just looking for you, Mr. Stallings,” Flowers said. “If you’ve got a minute?”

  It was an artless and genial question, and when the meeting resumed with a question from Dr. Milne about a peculiarity of Oakland zoning ordinances, no one paid it any mind apart from Nat, who happened to be looking at Archy when Archy, wary, unwilling, replied, “Yeah, you bet.”

  In the cool penumbra of Chan Flowers’s office, Archy dropped into a wingback chair. It was big and soft as a grandmother, trellised cream chintz overwhelmed with pink roses. A chair for swooning in, for surrendering one’s dignity to, safe within the air-conditioned preserve of sympathy where, installed behind his desk, Chan Flowers received death’s custom with magisterial detachment, a gamekeeper crouched and watchful in a blind. Sweat cooled in cobwebs on Archy’s arms and forehead.

  “Thanks for taking a minute, son,” Flowers said. “Didn’t seem to me you were necessarily involved in that mess over there.”

  “Not necessarily,” Archy allowed. He fought the armchair, resisting its invitation to conform his frame to its armature of grief. Grief was itself a kind of chair, wide and forgiving, that might enfold you softly in its wings and then devour you, keep you like a pocketful of loose change. He found himself slouching in it, off-kilter, legs outflung, bare knees akimbo, covering his mouth with one hand like he was trying to bite back a smart
remark.

  “I thought maybe if it was convenient,” Flowers said, “you and I might have some details to go over for the funeral and all. One or two points that have come up in the fine print, so to speak.”

  Archy nodded, already feeling some undercurrent in the conversation, this audience with the councilman, that he didn’t like. Bankwell and the other nephew, Feyd, stood guard at either side of the office door like a couple of foo dogs, too close to looming for Archy’s taste. They were the undertaker’s muscle, no doubt or question about that. At a funeral, if things turned unruly, a Flowers nephew might have to step in, keep the peace. If Flowers was burying a murder victim, somebody dropped by the logic of retaliation, if there was some history of blood and bad feeling abroad, a nephew might have to go strapped among the mourners. Bankwell and Feyd, in their copious suits, wore faces you could interpret as reflecting the tranquility of iron harbored at the hip. Archy remembered Bankwell obese and twelve, head too small for the rest of him, a neighborhood scandal after it was discovered that Bank had been getting his addled granny to pay him five dollars per book to solve her Dell Word Searches for her. Helping her to maintain her dignity, he claimed, so she could leave the books around her house with letters neatly circled, words crossed out. Archy wondered why Flowers felt that muscle was a necessary or desirable element for their rendezvous. He craned around to extend the nephews, by means of a bored slow stare, an invitation to go fuck themselves, saluting Feyd by hoisting his chin high. Feyd raised his own with an amiable coldness. He was reputed to be a tight and encyclopedic dancer, up on them all, from the Southside to turfing. Probably knew how to fight, too, did some capoeira, boy had that lean, springy malandro look to him. Bankwell, unquestionably, was grown to a very large size.