Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  “I’m going to play a little now,” Nat announced, as if it were a procedure and he a periodontist. Making it sound like it was not going to be any fun for anyone. “And then Mr. Stallings is going to offer the eulogy.”

  Gwen tried to remember the last time she had heard Nat call Archy “Mr. Stallings.” She turned to Aviva to see if she might have picked up on something amiss between their men, but Aviva had eyes only for Nat. She was sitting up and watching him as carefully as Flowers was watching the body in the casket: wanting him to be perfect.

  Nat turned to the Leslie amplifier and honored it with a bow, snapped it on. It rose throbbing to life. A wind flowed through its mysterious antique machinery. Nat sat down at the Hammond that had taken, in every sense, Mr. Jones’s life. It was not Nat’s instrument, but he had a gift, could pick up pretty much any instrument and quickly figure it out well enough to fake it. He played piano, and Gwen assumed that his organ playing would resemble that: modernistic, angular, Monk-style stuff, hard to listen to.

  Nat loosened his tie. He mediated a dispute among his shirttails, his waistband, his belt, and his ass. He fiddled with the drawbars and switches of the Hammond, more for the sake of ritual than precision. With a count and a duck of his head on four, he began to play. She recognized the song as the old Carole King number “It’s Too Late.” The organ had a reedy, bluesy sound, smoke in its throat. Nat did not fool around with angles and flatted notes. His feet stoked the pedals. She did not remember any of the lyrics apart from those of the chorus, though those were enough to convey the melancholy of the song. She wanted to look for Archy, but she was afraid that if their eyes met while this song was being played, he would think she intended to send the message that Carole King had been sending to the man in her song.

  Part of her, call it most of her, knew that to some extent she had been playacting, licensed by her hormones to express through the theater of her departure and her return all the humiliation that Archy had forced her to endure. As Nat played, she avoided meeting Archy’s gaze and wondered if the sadness she had seen on his face was for her and him. Archy had decided to leave right after the funeral, she decided, his duffel bag and ten crates of records loaded into the back of his El Camino. She had thrown him out in pique, but now he would be leaving in earnest, just as she had always known and feared he would do. The certainty of his imminent departure came over her so strongly that she was confused by it and wondered if Nat had selected the music on purpose as a comment on her relationship with Archy.

  Aviva leaned over and whispered into Gwen’s ear without taking her eyes off her husband. “This was Mr. Jones’s theme song,” she said. “According to Nat.”

  Gwen understood then that whatever its ostensible subject or situation, “It’s Too Late” was about Cochise Jones. Lying useless in his casket. Sitting at the bedside of his wife when she had lain dying. The song was about the people gathered here who might never have had the chance to meet Mr. Jones, and those who might have spoken differently, said more, the last time they saw him, had they known. It was about Titus growing up with no father, and Aviva trying to hold on to her one and only baby, and the dream of Brokeland Records. It was about some large percentage of the aggregate wishes, plans, and ambitions espoused by the people gathered here today. Nat had not needed to choose “It’s Too Late” in order to comment directly on her situation with Archy. It was Mr. Jones’s theme song, and its sentiment was always appropriate.

  “Perfect,” Gwen said.

  “My name is Archy Stallings. All right, now. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Those of you, some of you who don’t know me, I am one of the co-proprietors of these premises, Brokeland Records, thank you, a neighborhood institution since, count it one way, twelve years, but really, you have to count back a lot further than that. For real. Back, like, before they had vinyl records, back before they even had Mr. Jones, and Mr. Jones was here a good long time. And I mean he was right here. Seriously. Right there, on that stool, where his picture’s looking at you, in prime form if I may say, got to love that Borsalino. Mr. Jones spent a lot of time and money at this address over the years, first when it used to be a barbershop. Spencer’s Barbershop, that’s right. I got my hair cut here quite a few times, I was a youngster. And then Mr. Jones spent even more of his money here, the past twelve years, buying records! A whole lot of records, from me and my partner, Nat Jaffe, who just now tore it up, am I right? Yes, I am. Tore it up on Mr. Jones’s signature tune, ‘It’s Too Late,’ thank you, Nat, for that.

  “Now, if you talked to Mr. Jones for any length of time, and it took a long time to get anything out of Mr. Jones, man preferred to listen, witness, I bet most of you had no idea until this very afternoon, all due respect to Dr. Hanselius from the library, oh my goodness, Cochise Jones, look at you, dressing like that all the time, riding around town in your big old van with your gold toothpick, and all the time you secretly a Communist! Mr. Jones was like, almost like a father to me, used to pass me a little cash every now and then, kept an eye on me. Talked to me, and like I’m saying, that was, you know, it took an effort for him.

  “Anyway, if you could drag it out of him, you found out sooner or later that Mr. Jones came here to Oakland from somewhere down in Louisiana, outside of New Orleans, was it Slidell? Yes, when he was fourteen, fifteen. His dad got a job working at the cannery, the one where the DMV is now? The Lusk Cannery, yes. That is all long before my time. But Mr. Jones used to tell me things, you know, every so often the parrot would lay off talking, Nat there just about finished up with the daily rant, ha, ha, something used to bubble up out of Mr. Jones. About the neighborhood. Things he remembered. Coming up a little boy in Louisiana, hearing things from the old folks, some of those people went way on back, back up almost to slavery times.

  “I don’t know how many black folks came up to Oakland from Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, you know, back at the time when Mr. Jones and his family came here. Many, many thousands, tens of thousands. Yeah, so, they left most of what little they had down south, but they brought the music they liked, going back to like Congo Square or whatever. Jazz and boogie, church music. And then getting off the train in Oakland, everything’s booming. That’s when, if you came inside here, you most likely would be hearing that rocking postwar blues, that jump music, coming out of the radio Eddie Spencer used to keep on this shelf behind me.

  “You listen to that music now, like Joe Houston, it’s rock and roll, right? Same music. Joe Turner. And that’s the kind of music Mr. Jones started out playing in public. That and church music, and church music, that’s like, that’s the original rock and roll. I can tell, looking at his face, my partner has certain bones to pick with my theorizing on this subject, but hey, we did that roshambo and I drew the eulogy, so hang with me, all right? I think you are going to like where this is going.

  “Yeah, so, when he was in high school, Mr. Jones had a band, they were all black kids, played rhythm and blues, Drifters covers. But he also used to play sometimes with a bunch of white boys, I think they were called the Pearl Tones, was that it? Based out of Skyline High. Even when he first got known, in like ’64, ’65, playing straight-ahead jazz, kind of following on the organ a little bit what Ahmad Jamal was doing on the piano, even then he never totally lost that rocking touch. I know it always used to, not bother him, but make him a little sad the way people sat around listening to jazz. To those Eric Dolphy joints he played on, people nodding a little bit, tapping their feet, but not, you know, not up jumping around, getting wild, the way black folks generally, historically speaking, have tended to do.

  “Meanwhile, on the radio, Mr. Jones is hearing Jimi Hendrix, hearing Sly Stone. Not just white boys playing black music, like always, or even black dudes playing in a white style, but really, like, this moment, this one moment, lasted four, five years, when the styles and the players were mixing it all up. The Temptations, some of that late stuff is heavy in the true rock-and-roll vernacular. And Mr. Jones, he knew Sly Stone, they was even related
by marriage somehow, he started working some of that same idea into the jazz that he started to play.

  “And even though he never lost that smooth approach, that soft touch on the right hand, his left hand, ’67, ’68, it started to get extremely funky. But Mr. Jones didn’t call his style ‘funky,’ I don’t believe I ever heard him use that term at all. Church music, jump music, rock and roll, hard bop, soul-jazz, none of that. We get into a lot of, like, genre arguments around here, like, is Donald Byrd’s Street Lady soul-jazz, or is it more to the side of jazz-funk? Is ‘hard bop’ redundant? Mr. Jones never took part in those discussions. But one time, I do remember, he called what he played ‘Brokeland Creole.’

  “Creole, that’s, to me, it sums it up. That means you stop drawing those lines. It means Africa and Europe cooked up in the same skillet. Chopin, hymns, Irish music, polyrhythms, talking drums. And people. Cochise Jones, his mother was mostly, uh, Choctaw, I think it was. Me, my father’s half Mexican, which is already half something else. Brokeland Creole. Around here used to be Mexico, before that, Spain, before that, Ohlone. And then white people, Chinese, Japanese, black folks bringing that bayou, that Seminole, that Houston vibe. Filipinos. Toss ’em on the grill, go ’head. Brokeland Creole. And some more Mexicans, Guatemalans. Thai, Vietnamese. Hmong. Uh, Persian. Punjab, Mr. Mirchandani. Mr. Mirchandani, here’s an example right here. All them good samosas back there, piled up next to the fried chicken? I— Yeah. I know I had a point I was going to make. Ha, seriously. Yeah, no, okay.

  “Only that Cochise Jones— Oh. Excuse me. Whoa. No, I’m good. Mr. Jones was like a father to me, which I seriously needed. That’s one point. And the other point is, since I’m here doing this eulogy, I have a responsibility to have us, you know, take a look at the life the man led and, like, extract some kind of wisdom out of it. Right? So here goes.

  “Seems like, I don’t know. When people start looking at other people, people not like them, one thing they often end up liking about those people is their music.

  “There’s sort of a, what, an ideal that I know Nat and me always had in mind for this store. Not, like, anything we ever planned out or talked about. But it’s something like this: on the old Silk Road, you know, between Europe and China. It’s all tribes and deserts, and then you’ve got this long, hard journey, take you a couple of years to get there if you go quick. It’s a hard road, it has bandits, sandstorms. You carrying the light of all the civilizations back and forth, but all around you, the tribes just want to keep up their warring, and killing, and keeping track of what makes them better than everybody else. Like you know how every tribe’s name, when you translate it, turns out to mean ‘the people,’ like nobody else but them is really human? But you keep on because you are trying to earn a little cheese, right, and you spreading the collective wisdom back and forth. Forging that Creole style. And every so often, every few hundred miles, maybe, you got these oases, right, these caravansaries, where they all get together and chill, hang out, listen to good music, swap wild tales of exaggeration. Nat, man, you know what I’m saying, right? That was kind of our dream. The Brokeland Creole dream.

  “Mr. Jones was a mainstay of this caravansary. He was, like, our idol in the corner, the household god. Now he is gone, and we, me and Nat— Whoa. Okay, yes, could I get that tissue, Aviva? Thank you.”

  “You can ride with us,” a voice was saying, sounded like the undertaker. “Funeral can’t start without the deceased.”

  In reply, only a silence, partial, intensified by the sounds of departure from the front of the store, chairs scraping, people offering rides, vouching for their own or somebody else’s sobriety. Burial-suit thugs from the funeral home handing out maps to the grave: Miss, a map?

  Titus zipped his pants. The way to play it, saunter out of the bathroom into the workroom, alone. Kid coming out of the toilet zipping up his Levi’s, so what? He communicated his intentions to Julie by means of Special Ops hand signs: I, turn out light. You, stay. I, go, create diversion. You, count thirty, exit bathroom, slip out the back. Julie nodded: Understood. That turned out not to be the case, because the minute Titus switched off the light, Julie just went and opened the bathroom door. Eased it open, at least a show of stealth, half an inch, an inch.

  Then the answer: “I’ll give you five minutes.”

  His father. Archy. Tightness in his voice. Fronting. Bored with the undertaker, bored with using boredom as a front. Angry, tired.

  Titus and Julie exchanged a look in the darkness: change of plan. The lonely science of eavesdropping, another mad love they shared. Two of Julie’s fingers keeping the door open that one little inch.

  “All I need is five seconds,” the undertaker said. “To say you are the stupidest, most self-defeating negro I have ever seen. And my experience in that category is long and bitter.”

  Archy said, “Let me save you the five seconds, then, ’cause I already know that.”

  “How about this, then? You have played yourself now.”

  “No surprise there, either.”

  Archy was leaning against one of the rolling bin tables they had humped into the workroom that morning, his wide ass in those ugly black suit pants pinned against a corner of the Disco section. On the tab of the white section divider behind him were written, intriguingly, the words YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA. Titus briefly imagined the warm, candy-flavored music that might go by that name.

  “I hope you were not counting on going to work for Gibson Goode anytime soon. Because as far you are concerned, Gibson Goode has moved on.”

  Archy Stallings looked uncomfortable and unhappy, arms crossed, scowling, sharp corner of the record bin poking him in the ass. Maybe he was using the pain to focus himself, keep himself on his guard. Titus was not sure how loaded or sober the man was.

  He had made his funeral speech, flowing all over the place, Indians, Vietnam, gumbo, Sly Stallone. At the end of his disquisition on what an undifferentiated mess life was to him, the man had choked up. In that instant, Titus had played a scene in his mind: The pregnant lady got up, put her arms around her baby’s daddy, he put his hand on the giant-size belly, and they decided that in the end, as long as life was going to be an undifferentiated mess, they might as well not fight it anymore. Make a place in the mess for a baby, a baby who would have a mother and a father, one small victory for the good kind of doubt and confusion over the bad. But in reality, when the movie in Titus’s mind came to an end, it turned out to be Julie’s father, Nat, giving Archy the hug of consolation. The box of tissues got passed around.

  Then there was some drinking, for sure. Beer, wine, Cokes. People drank it all. They ate up the food, bum-rushed the buffet like freed prisoners, bees on a melting Popsicle. An hour later, it was all gone. A lone can of tonic water floated in a cooler, untouched among the ice cubes for quite some time, and eventually found its way into the company of a bottle of gin that never made a public appearance. The last Saturday afternoon of the summer went about its business, and it got to be time to ride on over to the cemetery, if you were going.

  When the food was gone, the undertaker gave out instructions to his nephews and organized the procession to the cemetery, suggesting to some people that they let others do the driving, speaking in a kindly whisper far from the warlock voice he was using on Archy Stallings. Then the lid got lowered for the last time on Cochise Jones, and Titus played a scene in which he persuaded a few trusted confederates to join him in a heist operation to steal the clothes off the dead man before they were lost forever to rot and darkness and oblivion. Trap the hearse between a couple of tractor-trailers at an intersection, pull up in another hearse, switch caskets. Never let that beautiful thing, the Aztec number, go wasted in the ground. By the end of the scene he was cutting in his head, Titus found himself deep into creeping himself out, picturing a piebald cadaver rotting in the stainless leisure suit. Thing was made of space-age materials, no worm was ever going to touch it. Eternal as a Twinkie.

  “So, you and he,” the underta
ker was saying, “you are calling it quits. Is that what I am to understand?”

  “I know you would be happy about that.”

  “I would only be partway happy,” the undertaker said. “Which is the same as not happy at all.”

  “We close the store, Nat’s bound to drop this whole protest thing. You won’t have to worry about that anymore.”

  “Your friend already did his damage to me,” the undertaker said. “Now Rod Abreu has come sniffing around this whole deal, acting to the world like he is trying to eighty-six it. Letting Gibson Goode think he’s an enemy and needs to be kept close, as the saying goes. Needs to be won over. Right now, today, Rod Abreu is sitting at the Coliseum, letting G Bad pick up the tab for the nachos.”

  Titus could not see the undertaker’s face, only the steely curl of the pompadour thing at the back of his head. But from the sound of his voice, he must be looking disgusted, contemptuous. It was an easy enough expression to imagine on the undertaker’s face.

  “Tell me this,” he said, “if you close your store, curl up in a ball like a little pill bug, what are you going to do for a job to support your child?”

  Only a second before, Archy had seemed fucked up, puzzled. He had this pudding look to his cheeks. Now it was all concrete and stone.

  “I am going to see Mr. Jones on home,” he said. “And we ain’t finished doing that yet. I don’t need to ride with you. I have my own car.”

  “Do you have a map to the gravesite? You’re going to need a map.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Mountain View, two hundred and twenty acres. Hundred and fifty thousand people buried there. Five, six funerals a day. You got the Jews in one place, Chinese over there. Black folks sprinkled all through it. Talk about Brokeland Creole. Mountain View Cemetery, that’s the only place you ever actually going to find it. But you need a map. You need guidance.”