Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  Titus put in an order for six egg rolls and two glazed raised donuts; Julie paid the bill. Valletta Moore, taking no notice of either boy, ordered a chicken chow mein and a dozen egg rolls to go.

  She paid for her food using coins of small denomination, slowly, seeming to get angrier with each one that she snapped down on the counter, as though the Asian lady at the cash register were rushing her or fouling up her math. The Asian lady said nothing at all, and her face gave away little, but in her very silence and patience, there was something that might have passed for contempt. Settling the tab took every nickel that Valletta Moore could raise in the clatter of her handbag. When the Asian lady offered to make up the four cents’ change, Valletta stared at the proffered pennies with distaste, as though they were something the Asian lady ought to take care of with a Handi Wipe. Then she carried her white paper bag out to the sidewalk, where the boys, cleverly, were already hot in advance on her trail. Their cover: two boys patronizing Loving Donut. Easy to remember, diabolic in its simplicity.

  Julie declined to touch the paper bag that Titus held out to him, let alone its contents, whose reek of cabbage and burnt sugar caused his stomach, already twisted by the dread and bus-borne hand job and the thrill of pursuit, to seethe. “Did you see the oil they had those things cooking in?” he said.

  “Biodiesel,” Titus said. “Run a Jetta.”

  If you recorded Titus eating the six egg rolls and two donuts on film, Julie thought, and then ran the film in reverse, it would look as though he were firing them out of his mouth, pop, pop, like cannonballs from the mouth of a cannon. Thirty seconds after commencing his meal, he went inside to wash it down with a half pint of milk, also on Julie.

  When Titus came back out of Loving Donut, he was just in time to witness the arrival of a very unfortunate Toronado. It juddered, and heaved, and disputed with unseen antagonists like some kind of Telegraph Avenue hobo. Rust had left bloody tooth marks along its underbelly and wheel beds. It might once have been gray or green, but since that remote era, the most irresolute painter in the history of automotives appeared to have tested out every known make and formulation of primer on all of its surfaces. Its driver slowed without stopping and leaned over to unhook a loop of yellow nylon that connected the right-side grab handle to the lock button of the passenger door. The door groaned open. Valletta effected a kind of flying hurdle into the passenger seat. She slammed the door shut and relooped the nylon cord over the lock button. Without missing a beat, she and the driver seemed immediately to resume some earlier argument, the report of which contended, as the car pulled away from the curb, with the hawking and rattling of the car’s emphysema, arthritis, TB.

  At the wheel, indisputably, unmistakably: Luther Stallings.

  “Damn,” said Titus, not without an air of truest wonder.

  The hunt would have ended there, with the boys left to find their way back from Franklin Street, if Julie had not happened to spot a man in a turban coming out of the one-story office building next door to Loving Donut. He was holding a package of Rolaids and a small spray bottle of Febreze.

  “This is going to be incredibly racist,” Julie warned Titus, or himself, or the censorious gods of his hometown.

  The pathetic Toronado hit a red light at the corner of Twelfth and Broadway. Julie approached the gentleman in the turban and asked if he was, by any chance, a taxi driver, and if so, did he happen to have his taxicab handy?

  Julie was to be spared having the racist underpinnings of the structure of his consciousness exposed to the world, at least for now, because it turned out that the door from which the man in the turban had emerged belonged to the dispatch center and main office of Berkeley-Oakland Yellow Cab of Oakland, Inc. Thus Julie’s rude and bigoted inquiry was transformed by chance proximity into a reasonable if not logical inference.

  The man in the turban looked them up and down, holding the bottle of deodorant spray with a hint of admonishment, as though to suggest that he might be obliged, if they were planning to fuck with him, to Febreze them. “Who is wanting to know?” he said.

  They found Mr. Singh’s Crown Victoria parked around the corner, bearing across the bottom of its doors, under the stenciled logo of Berkeley-Oakland Yellow Cab of Oakland, Inc., in slanted capital letters, the surprisingly furious legend GOD DAMN INDIA IMPERIALIST DESTROYER OF PURISTAN! The boys got into the back. Julie had twenty-one dollars left in his wallet. He hoped it would be enough to get them wherever they were going.

  “Follow that car,” Titus said. There were a lot of ways to play the line; Titus chose to go with a touch of BBC, John Steed from The Avengers. That left Julie to fill out the role, at least in his mind, either of Mrs. Peel or of Tara King. It was not an easy decision to reach; each had its appeal.

  “No, no. No games,” said Mr. Singh. “No, no, no. When you are getting onto an airplane, you do not tell the pilot, ‘Follow that Boeing.’ ”

  “Maybe I might,” Titus said. “You don’t know.”

  “I know this, ‘Follow that car,’ that is the way a taxi driver gets shot. No, no. No ‘Follow that car.’ Leave that car alone.”

  “No, that lady left her wallet on the bus,” Julie said, brandishing his yellow plastic 21 Jump Street number. “We just want to give it back to her.”

  “This is clearly a lie.”

  “Seriously, yo,” Titus said, assuming a ghetto accent as freely and sincerely as he had the voice of Patrick Macnee. “Tha’s my moms in that car, aight? She been drinkin and dopin all day, and she don’t really, like, know that guy she with? And he be all dangerous and shit? Come on, man. We just trying to keep an eye out for my moms.”

  A quaver came into his voice as he made the speech, authentic enough to spook Julie. The scenario came to Titus’s lips with a freedom, a note of faithfulness to lived experience, that made Julie ache as surely as the little boy with his one-armed gargoyle on the bus.

  “That is sounding to me like a police matter,” Mr. Singh said.

  “Nah. They just gon say it a waste of they valuable time. Know’m sayin?”

  Mr. Singh considered Titus’s reflection in the rearview. Mr. Singh’s eyes in the mirror, in Julie’s opinion, were of a doleful beauty.

  “I will try to catch up with them,” Mr. Singh said, putting the car in gear. “But I will not exceed the speed limit.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Titus said. “Not too close, though.”

  Mr. Singh looked disgusted. “Playing games,” he said.

  Ghost Town, Dogtown, Jingletown, there were large swaths of Oakland all but unknown to Julie, among them that ragged old ill-used selvage between the bay and the tangles of the 880 and 980: abandoned army bases and naval stations, depopulated blocks where everything seemed to have been flattened by some economic meteor impact, tattered wetlands ribboned with egret. And, of course, the string of loading cranes massed along the westernmost edge of town, the 1st Oakland Cavalry readying a charge on San Francisco, shipping containers stacked around their feet, like bales of hay by giant quartermasters, to fuel the final assault. The container boxes of the port of Oakland, as seen from the Bay Bridge, were a lifelong source of fascination to Julie, monster piles of colored brick like stabs at some ambitious Lego project left unfinished, interchangeable as casino chips and yet each filled potentially with something new and surprising, soccer balls, polyurethane replicas of sushi, blue lasers, Santa hats, twenty-pound bags of chicharrones. In theory they were in constant motion, imports, exports, transshipments caught, swung, and dangled over the beds of trains and eighteen-wheelers and over the decks of the dull ships that brought and carried them away. Julie could never seem to catch the cranes in motion, and the loose but tidy piles of containers never seemed to move, as if the business of the port were a magical one like that of the toys in Toy Story, a secret work that would be spoiled if he observed it.

  “You see those?” said Mr. Singh as they followed the Toronado down a broad avenue that cut across the former site, according to a historical ma
rker at the old entry gate (tagged with an orc-ish graffiti rune), of the Oakland Naval Depot. Immense railway buildings of concrete and gray stucco awaited damnation on the east side of the avenue. Along the harbor side, a fence of steel unscrolled in woven sheets, topped with razor wire, beyond which the steel cavalry readied its attack. “The big metal things, some people say they are looking like horses?”

  “George Lucas,” Julie predicted under his breath. “AT-ATs.”

  “You know in Star Wars?” Mr. Singh said. “Those big walking things. Big walking robots.”

  “AT-ATs,” Julie said. “In the snow.” He knew that his father, were he present, would feel compelled to point out that this was an urban myth of the East Bay, like the claim that the name itself had been bestowed upon the region by a pioneering coven of Satanists who spoke pig latin. It was very difficult for Julie, committed as he was to being like his father in no respect or particular, to resist the temptation to correct Mr. Singh.

  Titus didn’t say anything. He just kept watching the back of the Toronado, the same way he watched the back of Valletta Moore’s head on the bus.

  “Exactly! And there! Look at them! You see? George Lucas used very often to drive, you know, back and forth across the Bay Bridge, from what I have been told, he came originally from Stockton or Fresno.”

  “Modesto,” Julie said.

  “Modesto, still worse. Driving up to San Francisco as a young man to drink espresso coffee and experience French cinema, then returning in the small hours of the night to Modesto, which is a real armpit, I am attesting personally to that. And this, you see, was the inspiration for the AT-AT walking machines of the Star Wars films.”

  “Cool,” Titus said, taking his eyes off the Toronado long enough to relive those giant legs astride the ice of Hoth, those darting starfighters trailing cable from their spinnerets. “Hold, hold up.”

  They had come to a stretch of old rail yard where the buildings had been maintained and even renewed. In the trackless void of concrete, a number of metal sheds and depots huddled together around one immense train barn, like a feudal stronghold. A totem pole of signs advertised the services of welders, makers of specialty furniture, tool cutters, fiberglass fabricators and, at the foot of the pole, Motor City Auto Body and Custom Jobs. As the Toronado rolled, popping gravel, into the commons and slowed, its fits and spasms increased. It executed a kind of drunken rumba toward one of three open bay doors in the front of Motor City Auto Body, heaved itself halfway into the bay, and then, with one final shake of its castanets, died. The Toronado’s driver got out, and the shadow of Valletta Moore slid across the front bench to take the wheel.

  He wore a Raiders jersey, number 78 with the name SHELL across the shoulders. Kung fu pants, some kind of sandals or leather flip-flops. He was carrying a long billy club, a kung fu bo—no, it was a walking stick—twirling it like an old-school beat cop.

  “Okay. I am now leaving,” Mr. Singh announced as Stallings emerged from the car swinging his truncheon thing. “And I am taking you with me, no charge.”

  Stallings did not look in their direction or appear to notice the taxicab at all. He came around the back of the spavined Toronado and studied its trunk for an instant. Then he raised the walking stick, reared back on his long scarecrow shanks, and gently thrust the stick against the circular keyhole in the lid of the trunk. He bent one knee, gave his wrist a twist, and either by means of qi or pure panache—should there prove any difference—gave the Toronado a baby push. It rocked back, then surged forward and rolled the rest of the way into the body shop. With Blofeldian alacrity, a steel door rolled down behind it. Luther Stallings stood studying the sealed steel door as though it allegorized something. Then he whipped around and pointed the end of his cane at the Crown Victoria.

  “Ho, shit,” Titus said.

  Mr. Singh and Julie came to rapid agreement on the advisability of their turning around now and driving as far as Mr. Singh felt twenty-one dollars would go.

  Before Mr. Singh could put the car in drive, Titus got out. He took from his shirt pocket a small number of bills folded tight with origami precision. It might have been a packet containing some kind of sterilized pad. He unpleated a twenty and handed it, halfway to a peace crane, to Mr. Singh. “I got this,” he said.

  Julie climbed out of the taxi. Titus had never paid for anything before.

  “Here is my card,” Mr. Singh said, passing an oblong imprinted with his name, his contact information, and the surprising avocation of PUNJABI CHEF.

  “Okay,” Julie said, too awed or afraid or embarrassed to mention that while he traveled with a portable eight-track player, he did not own a cell phone. “Thanks.”

  He reached into his Johnny Depp wallet and pulled out one of his business cards at random and had already handed it to Mr. Singh before he noticed it was the one that read:

  JULIUS L. JAFFE

  libertine

  This was a word he had encountered in the pornographic Victorian novels kept by his mother in a shoebox in her closet, among the ordinary shoeboxes. It was less pragmatic though no less hopeful a declaration of calling than Mr. Singh’s. The Punjabi chef eyed the card, then glanced over at Luther Stallings. Leaning on the cane, Stallings had begun slowly to walk in the general direction, without any set goal, of Titus. Mr. Singh’s mustache did a slow hula over his pursed lips as he contemplated Julie’s card. Then, with a number of backward looks, Mr. Singh turned his taxicab around and drove away.

  The libertine without portfolio came up alongside his friend, who had fallen, perhaps helplessly, into an arrant imitation of his grandfather’s trademark gait, intensified by whatever injury or infirmity required the use of a cane, so accurate it verged on mockery. Stallings angled his head to one side, sizing Titus up; Titus hitched his to the same inquisitive angle. Neither of them appeared to notice that Titus was running a Harpo Marx on Stallings.

  “Huh,” Stallings said, and Titus duly said, “Huh.”

  Stallings’s hair was densely threaded with ashy gray. There was a good deal less flesh on him than in his heyday. His teeth had not done well; some were lost. Otherwise he seemed okay, not obviously fucked up or sick, and if he was not looking quite so fine as his former costar, he was in far better shape than his Oldsmobile; a state fairly close, all in all, to the original, right down to the chill twinkle in the conman eye. The shoes on his sockless feet were not sandals, Julie saw, or flip-flops, but Chinese cloth slippers, the kind sold out of tubs in Chinatown for five dollars a pair. The kung fu pants had the sheen of doll pajamas or a cheap Halloween costume. Without taking his eyes off Titus, he raised the outstretched walking stick. Leveled it, in a broad sweep, at Julie, the tip of it unwavering, locked as though dowsing at Julie’s soul, a move right out of Witchfinder General. Julie found himself blushing deeply, as if his pockets held henbane and mandragora.

  “Who’s the white boy?” Stallings asked Titus.

  Julie did not catch the reply, it was tendered so softly.

  “It’s who?” Stallings said. Not angry, not impatient, not unwilling yet to suffer fools or boys who muttered, but ready to go in any of these directions if need be.

  “My friend,” Titus said loudly, ashamed.

  Stallings lowered the cane and checked Julie out, once vertically, once horizontally, the process leaving him unconvinced if not outright skeptical. “Your ‘friend,’ ” he said, as if Titus had claimed that Julie was his invisible potato or his talking blue ankylosaurus.

  “What they want?”

  Valletta Moore stood in the second garage bay. She had her hand tucked inside her red handbag.

  “Archy’s my father,” Titus said.

  “Archy Stallings?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “For real? You my grandson?”

  Titus nodded.

  “Boy got kids all over town,” Valletta said.

  Luther came in a hurry, with a destination. Titus went stiffly into his grandfather’s arms. Holding back. But he went.
Luther Stallings—at one time, many, many years earlier, a viable pretender to the fiercely disputed title of Toughest Black Man in the World—brushed away a few ill-suited tears.

  “Well, goddamn.”

  He let go of Titus, stepped away, and cleared his throat. He took hold of the silver-tipped head of his cane with both hands and planted it square on the ground in front of him. Looked down the avenue across the barren expanse of the old depot, then up the other way where there was not much to see, at first glance, but razor wire and morning glory in wild contention. And sky. Lots of sky, torn into scraps of silver and blue. Eighteen-wheelers like beads on an endless strand, creeping along the flyovers toward the docks. And containers stacked everywhere you looked, painted with names that sounded to Julie like the names of opponents in Street Fighter: “K” Line, Yang Ming, Maersk, Star. Beyond that the gray planes and facets of San Francisco.

  “Best get inside,” Luther said.

  Titus started toward the garage. Stallings turned to Julie, who hesitated, paralyzed by a ridiculous fear that Valletta Moore might be keeping a gun in her handbag. Afraid, too, of the man with the cane, of this nether zone of Oakland, of certain shadows in the garage that he saw gathering into the shape of man, large and portly, with fearsome mustaches somewhere between biker king and generalissimo.

  “What?” Luther Stallings said to Julie. “You want a hug, too?”

  “Okay,” said Julie. Then he realized that Luther Stallings had only been joking, and even before the man turned and loped, without looking back, into the garage bay of Motor City Auto Body and Custom Jobs, he felt sharply bereft.