Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  “So, what? You going to just give us the records?”

  “Now, how can I do that? These are Mr. Jones’s records. They are not mine to give. You know that. But maybe the estate could advance them to you all on consignment. And you all could pay the estate back at some later date. Once you done selling them in France and Japan.”

  “Huh,” Archy said. “Well, thank you, Garnet.”

  “It must be the funeral has me feeling sentimental.”

  “You’re a good man.”

  “You put that around, I will have to deny it.”

  “Same with what I said about Nat being what I said, to me. Do not tell anybody. Least of all Nat. It’d go right to his head.”

  “Maybe after he earn a few more merit badges, we let him in the club.”

  “All right.”

  “Meantime, you need to figure out what you want to do about yourself, Archy Stallings. You need to make up your mind.”

  “Common refrain,” Archy said.

  When they went back upstairs, they passed Mr. Jones’s living room, which had a denuded air but with that fussy feel, crewel and fake fruit, as if it had been decorated by ladies of a former age, maybe by the Portuguese lady herself. In the center of the room, two steel suit racks waited side by side, hung thick with the dead man’s leisure suits. The collective palette ran to bold, even heedless, in the seventies manner, or to muted potting-clay tones, something a touch Soviet or even Maoist in the olive tans and rose grays. The plaids had left Scotland far behind and struck out for new worlds of gaudiness, including one in red, white, black, and sky blue that always reminded Archy of a place mat at IHOP.

  “Look at that,” Archy said. “Look at those things. And I’ve seen him wear them all.”

  “Believe it or not there is actually a lively market,” Singletary said. “I looked into it.”

  “Maybe I need to get into a new line,” Archy said.

  “Here go Airbus.”

  The big man met them at the top step, wearing a beautiful midnight-blue tracksuit, his hair razored down to a glaze on his scalp. Singletary’s car, a late-model Toyota Avalon, stood double-parked in the street, flashers going. Kai Fierro, Gwen’s receptionist, got out of the passenger side. She wore her hair greased back à la Fabian Forte and carried her sax in a soft gig case. She had on a blue brass-button high school marching-band jacket like they all wore in Bomp and Circumstance, corny yacht-captain hat complete with scrambled eggs on the visor.

  “This suppose to be the, uh, leader of that Chinese marching band,” Airbus said as though humoring the ranting of a nutjob, so as to keep her calm. “Was outside your store with another white chick named, uh, Jerry something, and two older ladies, trumpet and a sax. She say they made a appointment with Stallings. Want to know what the deal is, what the route is.”

  “Hey, Arch,” Kai said. She shook hands with Garnet Singletary, all square and manly, telling him, “I’m Kai.”

  Something kind of a turn-on for Archy, funny, in the way she shook Singletary’s hand. “Thanks for coming,” he said.

  “It’s an honor,” Kai said. “Cochise Jones, that’s a name that, well, a lot of us in the band, it means something to us.”

  “You know he was born in New Orleans,” Archy said. “That’s why he loved the whole funeral-band thing. Always said Chinese people was the only ones around here really knew how to do a proper funeral.”

  “Tell you what, though, those guys over in the city, it’s not like New Orleans. They don’t really swing,” Kai said. “Stuff we rehearsed for today, Archy, I mean, it’s all that straight-ahead military funeral stuff. Is that okay? A lot of hymns, ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ and that type of deal.”

  “Okay,” said Airbus, big man looking positively offended, “ ‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’ now, how is that Chinese?”

  “But we practiced a lot, you know. And plus, I have to say we put together a pretty swinging arrangement of ‘Redbonin’ ’ that we’d like to do.”

  “That sounds just fine,” Archy said, but he was frowning as he took in Kai’s tacky little tenth-grade band jacket. “Now, let me ask you this. What size you wear?”

  Softly, under the sound of traffic from Telegraph and the idling of Singletary’s car, almost beneath the threshold of audibility, a bass note sounded and then went up a step. To the south, down over West Oakland, a black zeppelin sniffed at the sky with its pointed snout.

  “A’s playing Tampa today,” Archy said. “Everybody’s going to look up, see that, get all excited. Talking about, ‘There go the Dogpile blimp!’ ”

  “I was in the Dogpile down in L.A.,” Kai said. “It was awesome.”

  “You’re killing me,” Archy said.

  God said, “What the fuck is this shit?”

  In the cabin of the Minnie Riperton, Walter Bankwell did not bother to try to look at ease. He did not enjoy the experience of flying in the dirigible, too nervous to have a drink, get loose. And he did not like it when everybody else got loose on board the Riperton, either, though the primary, express purpose of the airship (apart from its function as an irresistible eye magnet) turned out to be corporate entertainment of high-rolling clients, actors and singers and rappers, media folk, athletic shoe barons, that bunch of inner-city librarians won some kind of contest or something, got up there in the sky with G Bad and his posse and went completely out of control.

  Walter was not afraid of heights per se; it was the gasbag that worried him. He understood perfectly that there was a difference between helium and hydrogen, but inert and gigantic as it might be, there was something fragile, insufficient, about the Riperton; its name, with its hint of tearing fabric, didn’t help matters. Zeppelins had had their chance, and they had failed. The world had moved on, like with eight-track tapes. Though an eight-track, sure, it might gum up, eat its own innards, one of the little plastic wheels might crumble away to dust. But it was never going to blow your ass up.

  Walter felt ill at ease; and surely the truth was that he was not meant to feel at ease, even if he had been willing to drink and get loose. That, and not public or client relations, was the true point of owning a zeppelin; it affirmed the godhood of Gibson Goode, living in his heavenly mansion. Today Walter had been summoned to the throne in the sky to learn of His displeasure.

  God picked up the Oakland Tribune that lay on the little plastic hump of a coffee table. “You saw this?” he said.

  Headlines, thought Walter bitterly. “ ‘VINTAGE RECORD STORE OWNER TURNS IT UP TO 78 IN BATTLE AGAINST NATIONAL CHAIN,’ ” he read. “Yeah, I saw it. Man comes off sounding like a dick. Turn it up to seventy-eight all the time, you end up sounding like Donald Duck.”

  “That is a valid comparison,” Gibson Goode said. “In those kind of environments, I don’t know why, sports cards, rare magazines, autographs, the dicks tend to, like, attract a following. But that ain’t even what I’m worried about,” Goode said. “Man, I could give a fuck about that little squirrel-nut-zipper white boy trying to rile up twenty-seven lactose-intolerant white people.”

  “All right. Then what are you worried about?”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  A large white envelope, a mailer with green hash marks around the edge, had been exposed when Goode lifted up the newspaper. The man had at hand all the materials he needed for his presentation, including the bodyguard, Taku, sitting in the dining nook, seriously compromising the vehicle’s vertical lift. Carrying a gun on board an airship, accidental discharge might happen anytime.

  “This came to my office in Fox Hills,” Goode said. “Looking like it was sent by a nutball.”

  It was a color photograph printed on plain paper, the colors at once sickly and vivid, a starfish thing, purple-blue twisted against a moiré of pale blue-green. A scan, on second thought: a 3-D object laid on the glass and photocopied, dark against the infinite, blank, pale blue-green dazzle of whatever you were taking a picture of when you left the cover open on a Xerox machine. The unscannable wo
rld.

  “Looks like a glove,” Walter said.

  “Letter that came with it says it’s a glove.”

  “Letter from who?”

  “Luther Stallings. Saying how it ties your uncle to the killing of Popcorn Hughes, has blood on it, DNA, kind of thing they can test even after all these years.”

  “Huh.”

  “Chan Flowers having some history he’d like to keep hidden? That was fine back when him and me were on two different sides of the question. Know what I’m saying? Now that we’re on the same side, I am not comfortable having all this, uh, memorabilia, floating around out there. Getting photocopied and shit.”

  “A purple glove?” Walter said.

  Goode threw the photograph at Walter’s head. “How the fuck do I know?” he said. He got up and went to the window and looked down at the bowl of the stadium. “You know I was drafted by the A’s,” he said. “As a pitcher.”

  “I saw you,” Walter said. “USC against Cal, like ’85, I was after this girl Nyreesa, used to work food service over at Evans Field. Everybody was talking about how there was scouts there from the A’s and Giants both.”

  “I threw a two-hitter. Had no run support. One guy gets a cheap little inside-out hit, then I left a mistake hanging over the inside corner to the next guy. RBI double. That was all they needed.”

  “I got shut out, too,” Walter said. “Only by Nyreesa.”

  “Okay.” Goode whirled from the window, catching Walter off guard. Walter jumped back, lost his footing, and fell on his ass. Goode came to stand over him, staring down at him, his eyes not entirely devoid of contempt. “After he puts in an appearance at the funeral, Councilman Abreu is going to join me at the game at his own suggestion. I thought he might enjoy sitting in a corporate box, but he said he likes to sit in the stands. I got us seats right behind the A’s dugout.”

  “Abreu.”

  “For some reason, he got the idea that it might be worth looking into the tax structure and other elements of the deal I’m making with the city, thanks to the hard work of your uncle, to develop the old Golden State market site. How the EIR was conducted, what kind of ties I have to the planning commission, et cetera.”

  “He’s shaking you down, too.”

  “What is it about Oakland? Dumb-ass city always has to do the last-minute Gilligan, fuck it up for itself somehow or other. Okay, not this time. This time Skipper’s going to do what’s necessary. And if I decide your uncle Chan’s carrying too much liability? Up here, I have to, you know, you got to consider the excess weight.”

  Kung Fu thought in that case, maybe they should have left Taku back at the airport, but he kept the thought to himself.

  “You show your uncle the picture, show him this letter that came with it, all about the night of Popcorn Hughes. Show him the whole mess. See what he wants to do about it. Tell him I would like it smoothed over. Tell him I require reassurance. Else maybe I can get that reassurance from Councilman Abreu, know what I’m saying?”

  “Most definitely,” Walter said. “Now, when do we land?”

  After the fathers left to meet Singletary in the dead man’s basement, the boys worked. Rolling the big bins out of the way, carrying stock into the back room, elbow-deep in the smell, the leaden gravity of records. The revealed floor of Brokeland, a palimpsest of red and white linoleum worn here and there to an underlayer of green and cream, proved to be skankier than Archy had suggested. Titus grabbed the broom and assigned Julie to the dusting. They were being paid for their time, and this had the interesting effect of making Titus happy. He had located a sister of his mother’s somewhere down in Los Angeles. She would not send him any money, but she had told him that if he could make his way to her, she would take him in. He had a purpose in life; that purpose was to break poor Julie Jaffe’s heart.

  There was an old-fashioned feather duster, comical blue plumes plucked from an old lady’s hat or the ass of an ostrich in a Warner Bros. cartoon. Julie went after the dust with it, feeling like Bugs Bunny, keeping an eye all the while on Titus. Titus took his broom work seriously, gridding the floor with grit and bug legs, neatly collapsing everything into tidy mounds, crouching to whisk it into the pan. His undershirt white against the skin of his shoulders, no belt, the plaid of his boxer shorts visible where the waistband of his jeans gapped. Julie, flicking here and there with his feather duster, felt that confusion of desire, remembering how, when he was little, he used to get turned on by Bugs Bunny, something in the hips, the pert cottontail, the way Bugs Bunny’s ears lay back when he was pretending to be a girl, lipsticked, kittenish.

  “Who’s that suppose to be again?” Titus was resting on the broom, looking at the beaded curtain Julie had painted the summer before last, literally all summer, from the end of fifth grade to the beginning of sixth, one infuriating bead at a time.

  “It’s supposed to be Miles, but—”

  “Miles Davis? Trumpet? See, I’m learning it.” Titus turned and caught Julie studying the long, lean Bugs Bunny arc of his waist and hips. Julie pulled a feather out of the duster without quite meaning to. “We all done for now?”

  Julie pretended to take a look around the store. They had brought nice shirts and clean pants for the funeral, neatly folded by Aviva, in a Berkeley Bowl tote bag in the back room.

  “They’ll be back in a few minutes,” Julie said. “We could get dressed, or—”

  They went into the back room. Julie pulled his pants down and opened himself up, and Titus spit into his hand and put his dick into Julie for a minute. It hurt, but in a way that Julie found interesting. The pain, he felt, bore further examination; he would have liked to study it for a while. There was something that happened every time Titus drew back for the outstroke that was closer to relief than to pain. But Titus pulled out after a minute or two. “I thought I heard the door,” he said.

  He went into the washroom and got up over the little sink, straddling the basin. Julie took off his dusty jeans. The foaming soap, Titus’s fingers, the astonishment of his penis.

  “I am not gay,” Titus said when he came out of the bathroom. “If I was gay, I would tell you. I would not tell anybody else, but I would tell you.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s like, I don’t want to kiss you or nothing. Like, be your boyfriend.” He shook his head firmly. “I’ll fuck you, though.”

  “Okay.”

  “But you are. Gay.”

  “Uh.”

  “You know that, right?”

  “I guess.”

  They put on the clean jeans, two short-sleeved shirts with button fronts, new from Target for the occasion. They might, Julie thought, have been brothers. In Berkeley it was far from impossible.

  Titus reached his right hand to Julie, slow, fingers spread, arcing toward him. They hooked hands at the thumbs and bumped chests. Titus wrapped an arm around Julie. Julie felt protected in the lingering embrace, though he knew that when Titus let go of him, he was going to feel nothing but abandoned.

  Nat left the basement of Cochise Jones’s house prepared to impose on his erstwhile partner a life sentence of silence. At the peak of his game, he could maintain a state of angry monosyllable for days on end.

  For the first hour or so, he proved able with no trouble to sustain a nice meaty silence as he, Archy, and the boys moved aside the record bins and humped piles of rare vinyl into the back room, set up tables for the food and the booze, and hung the place with photographs of Cochise Jones. On Mr. Jones’s customary stool, they set a large-format photo of him dressed in chaps, vest, and Stetson, riding a piebald horse in the Black Cowboy Day parade. Julie appeared to mistake his father’s reticence for due funereal solemnity. Titus seemed not to notice or to give a shit or both. As for Archy, he was used to weathering Nat’s silences. It was going to take longer than an hour for Nat to begin to see any effect in that quarter.

  But then the Olds 98 showed up at the store to deliver the guest of honor. Two of the Flowers nephews wheeled in the re
mains of Cochise Jones, inside a coffin that looked like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, everything but the candy-stripe wings and Dick Van Dyke. Archy directed Flowers’s crew to install it behind the glass counter. When they had everything squared away, the nephews palmed the lid, preparing to lift it off the coffin, and that was when Nat found himself obliged to ruin a perfect start on one thousand years of silence and converse with his betrayer.

  “We really are doing the open casket?” he said.

  “You have a problem with that?” said one of the nephews.

  “Just, I’ve bought records in a lot of sketchy joints,” Nat said. “None of them ever had a dead body you could look at.”

  Archy seemed to weigh this as if searching for a counterexample, a used-vinyl store on the South Side of Hades or Philadelphia. Then he turned to the nephews. “Well,” he said. “How’s he looking in there?”

  After a few seconds of mutual consultation, the larger of them nodded slowly, once.

  “Real nice,” the other one said.

  Archy said, “Go on, pop the top on that thing, we can take a look.”

  The Flowerses lifted the lid, and Julie and Titus pressed in close to see what would be revealed. Julie’s first dead body: Nat felt a sudden panic at the thought. He had prepared no words, no commentary, no sidebar or protective formula to contextualize or cushion the moment for Julie or, for that matter, for himself. In his lifetime, Nat had seen maybe half a dozen people laid out dead, and each time the sight seemed to brown the page of life, to tarnish the world’s silver and dull its gold. For no good reason but the paralysis of masculine panic, he suppressed the urge to put his arm around Julie, turn him away from the sight.

  “Damn,” said Titus with unfeigned admiration.

  “Come on, Nat,” Archy said. “How you going bury that, not even take a look?”

  The leisure suit that Cochise Jones had prescribed for his interment was nothing so common as loud, ugly, or intensely plaid. The gem of his collection, it was profound and magical in its excess. White, piped with burnt orange, it had a rhinestone-cowboy feel to it, except at the yoke and at the cuffs of its sleeves and trousers, where it flamed into wild pseudo-Aztec embroidery, abstract patterns suggesting pink flowers, green succulents, bloodred hearts. Cochise had worn this suit, which he always called “my Aztec number,” three times before: once backing Bill James at the Eden Roc on the night when Hurricane Eloise hit; once at the Sahara in Las Vegas, where it attracted favorable comment from Sammy Davis, Jr.; and once, with improbable consequences, before a hometown crowd at Eli’s Mile High. After that storied night in the annals of Oakland rumpus, Cochise had retired the Aztec number, sensing that it was a leisure suit of destiny. A suit not to be squandered on an ordinary day in a man’s life, even if that man, on an ordinary day, rocked the B-3.