Telegraph Avenue

by Michael Chabon

  “Oh my goodness,” Archy said, aching with the beauty of the car as he swung his bulk into it, favoring his old running buddy with a long, slow head-to-toe of mock admiration. “Uma Thurman! Love your work.”

  Walter broke off a piece of a smile and tucked it into his left cheek as if reserving it for future use. Giving off a vibe of irritation, of feeling put upon, as if he had better things to do, wilder geese to chase. He had e-mailed Archy from a Dogpile domain, destination and intentions left unstated and mysterious apart from a terse if not insulting (however accurate) allusion to Archy’s inability to decline a free meal.

  “ ‘Uma Thurman.’ ” He shook his head, sorry for Archy, disappointed in him. “That ain’t even a insult.”

  Archy considered. “You may be right.”

  “When the mosquito bites her? And my girl Uma comes out that coma . . . ?” Walter laid two fingers against the wheel. “It’s, like, a simple two-step process. Step one, regain consciousness. Step two, tear it up.” He marveled. “When she chews that guy’s tongue right out his head . . .”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “Matter of fact,” Walter continued, ignoring the question, “I wish I was Uma Thurman. Then I would surely not have to be riding around the tired end of Temescal with no beret-wearing, soul-patch dee-vo-tay of Negritude, Charles Mingus–impersonating motherfucker.”

  Walter put the GLH in gear, and they loped away from the curb with the engine blowing low notes.

  “Ain’t like you got the way you are from people changing their minds about feeding you.”

  There was merit in this reasoning that Archy could not discount. So he removed and folded on his lap the jacket of his linen suit, caramel brown, one-button, knife-narrow 1962 lapel; found the bar that let the seat roll back, all the way back; hooked his feet, shod in sugar-brown size-15 alligator ankle-zip boots, together at the ankles; adjusted the angle of his genuine Basque beret, also the color of brown sugar; and shut the fuck up. He had a feeling this mystery trip might be a sequel to his conversation yesterday with Chan Flowers, but his conscience wouldn’t let him take the idea any further than that. As they pulled out, he looked over his shoulder out the rear window to make sure Nat wasn’t standing there on the sidewalk.

  Old Kung Fu, check him out. All those years scuffling and fucking up down in L.A., offering up his face to any door that cared to shut on it, trying to keep distance between himself and the uncle who loved him too strongly. Now here he was, back in Oakland, working for the fifth richest black man in America, driving this flawlessly restored piece of carflesh, blasting some Zapp or maybe it was solo Troutman on the in-dash factory cassette player, and in general, as he and Archy would have put it during their salad days, keepin it surreal.

  “So, like, seriously,” Archy said. “Where we going?”

  But Walter’s only reply was to get on the 24 heading west, and before long they were on the 880 with only Hayward, San Jose, and Los Angeles between them and the bleak unrestauranted expanse of Antarctica.

  “Someplace by the airport?” Archy guessed. Still one or two old-school dives there, tucked in among the union halls and standardized burger units along the renovated stretch of Hegenburger, dark subaquatic holes for labor lawyers to crawl into, bikers, baggage handlers, short-haul stews adding up their croutons in their Weight Watchers booklets. Nothing to look forward to that Archy knew about, except insofar as he lived in constant expectation of discovering or being led, even along the most unlikely and brand-blasted frontage road, to some great unknown plateful of marvels.

  “Supposed to surprise you,” said Walter. Boy had that raspy voice anyway, but something seemed to catch at the back of his throat, a pill of hesitation. Archy replayed the e-mail in his mind, certain that it had included words that could be paraphrased as I will buy you lunch. “Case you too blind, dumb, and stupid to come along under your own recognizance.”

  “It’s a restaurant, though. Right?”

  “Keep that a surprise, too,” Walter said. “Just for a little bit longer.”

  Archy’s imagination starting to run wild on him, picturing maybe some kind of farm-food bullshit where you had to slaughter your own pig, a deep-fried termite stand, something like that.

  “Because, swear to God, if you’re trying to punk me—”

  “Whoa, ease up, Turtle. I straight-up guarantee, you going be in the hands of a excellent chef. All right?”

  Universal and catholic in his appetites, Archy sat back, soothed by this information, allowing the prospect of an enigmatic luncheon—maybe al pastor sliced from the rotisserie by some obscure genius in a taco truck—to drive from his mind worrisome thoughts of the boy who was, by some loop in life’s tangling, now his responsibility. Stone-face, built and colored so much like Luther Stallings, the sight of the boy like the touch of pincers to Archy’s heart, stinging him in the past and the present at the same time, an ache that leaped decades, skipped a generation. Or maybe one of those Korean barbecues where the lady came and dealt out a whole deck of little plates and bowls of kimchi on the table in front of you like she was going to tell your fortune in chili and pickles, let you cook your own short rib sliced thin as lunch meat over your own private grill. For a minute Archy allowed a Korean cook-fire in his mind to burn away the bitter consciousness, pressing at him all the time, of the hurt and disappointment he had caused and would no doubt go on causing, through his scanlessness and shamelessness, to the woman he loved. A waffle truck, a gleaming chrome bus that dished up chicken and waffles, where the fate of Brokeland Records, of his long and tricky friendship with Nat Jaffe, could all be drowned in a ribbon of pancake syrup, spreading across the crisp grid of an imagined waffle to impinge, with its sweet hint of smoke, on a crispy drumstick. All those problems, and the loss of Mr. Jones, the calls and arrangements Archy needed to make—so much smoke and vapor to be sucked up into exhaust fans roaring over Hunan woks, bubbling pots of birria, grill tops hissing with onions for a patty melt or a Joe’s Special.

  Then Archy saw, and realized, the surprise. It swung with a slow majesty from its tether at the end of a high steel mast that was in turn mounted on the bed of a tractor-trailer, at the farthest reaches of the Oakland airport, along a bleak, half-wild stretch of marshland.

  “The blimp,” Archy said. It filled the windshield of the GLH, shiny and black, emblazoned on its flank with a red paw print and bold red slab-serif type. “The Dogpile blimp.”

  “Ain’t a blimp, it’s a zeppelin.” That raspy Q-Tip voice of Walter’s turned soft, choked. Betraying, Archy might have said, possibly the slightest hint of fear. “Got the rigid structure.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Blimp’s just a bag.”

  They rolled up to a checkpoint manned by a pock-faced rent-a-cop where Walter exchanged his driver’s license for a long hard fish-eye, which, upon return of his license, he steadily countered. Walter rolled the car right up into the shadow of the airship, and they got out, slammed doors. The zeppelin appeared to be as long as a block of Telegraph Avenue, as tall as Kaiser Hospital.

  Standing there, righting his beret, verifying the tuck of his shirttails, smoothing the wrinkles from the front of his butterscotch suit, Archy regarded the big black visual pun on centuries of white male anatomical anxiety and felt it trying, like Kubrick’s melismatic monolith, to twist the wiring of his brain. The late-August sun goaded him, the way Walter had always goaded him, urging him to give the slip to the thunderbolt-throwing aunties who dwelled in his soul, to emerge from the doomed cavern of Brokeland Records and the gloomy professional prospect of endless Dumpster dives and crate digs, every day dropping like a spindled platter on top of the next, Z out the cash register with its feeble tally, get home at the end of the day humping your box of scratched and moldering treasure to have your wife harangue you in instructive tones with quotes from some self-help book on the moral imperative to strip all that was not essential from one’s life. To throw over all ballast and soar. Starting with
, say, your record collection, just shed the whole off-gassing pile in a scatter of 180-gram Frisbees and rise up. The high blue curtain of sky overhead, the tender wetlands reek of Alameda on the breeze that took hold of Archy’s necktie, seemed to hold a promise to redeem the unredeemed promise that he had always carried around, creased and tattered, in the billfold of his life.

  “Lunch, motherfucker,” Walter explained.

  Like a hoard of family diamonds sewn into the hems and hidden pockets of an exile’s cloak, Oakland was salted secretly with wonders, even here, at its fetid, half-rotten raggedy-ass end.

  The zeppelin’s gondola was a streamlined dining car formed from some black polymer glossy as a vinyl record. It hovered just above the ground, a cushion for the reclining god. Through its front viewports, a pair of typecast pilots in captain’s hats saluted the arriving passengers, then resumed their preparations for ascent, fiddling with knobs, dialing in shit on their big old zeppelin mixing board. Between the new arrivals and the gondola, a laterally oriented brown man in a toque and white smock stood at a pushcart grill, practicing relentless artistry on two dozen big prawns with a pair of brass tongs and a brush. Wild-style lettering sprayed onto the front of the grill read THE HUNGRY SAMOAN.

  “Don’t tell me,” Archy began, then stopped, for he was not yet prepared to understand or to accept what he knew to be the situation vis-à-vis lunch: that it was to be eaten in the sky. He eyed the smoke as it knit and unknit in dense skeins trailing from the grill top, catching along the flank of the airship.

  “Filled with helium,” Walter said, following the worried course of Archy’s gaze, looking worried himself despite the cool expository tone. Self-reassuring. “Shit’s inert. Can’t burn. Can’t interact with nothing.”

  Then a hatch in the side of the gondola sighed and swung open, divulging the airship’s secret cargo: a basalt monolith, the very thing to set half-apes dreaming of the stars. Black knit polo shirt, skull polished like the knob on an Oscar. Gold-rimmed sunglasses, gold finger rings, black Levi’s, Timberland loafers. Pausing at the top of a fold-down stair for a display of freestyle looming, brother looked like a celebrity golfer or as if perhaps he had recently eaten a celebrity golfer. Shoulders thrown back, chest out, he moved with a herky-jerk stop-motion fluidity, a Harryhausen Negro, mythic and huge. Behind him, tall and broad-shouldered yet dwarfed by the dude from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, came a tea-brown handsome man, lithe, slender. He stood considering his guests on the top step, then hopped down and made slowly for Archy and Walter, past the bodyguard, breaking out from behind his blocker, some kind of joint pain or old injury a slight hitch in his gait.

  “Archy Stallings,” said Gibson Goode, like he was repeating the sly punch line to a joke that had made him laugh recently. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Yeah, thanks for, uh, having me,” Archy said, his voice petering out at the pronoun and the unworthiness it designated. Walter put his fingers to his lips, corking a laugh as Archy fell all over himself trying not to fall all over himself. “Gibson Goode! I mean!” Archy laughing at himself now. “Goddamn.”

  Print it on the back of the man’s Topps card, six-six, 230 pounds, Emperor of the Universe in 1999 when he led the NFC in touchdowns, completions, passer rating, and threw three four-hundred-yard games. Still long and wiry, built more like a center fielder than a QB, mostly leg with that loose equine sense of motion, Gibson Goode, aka G Bad. Head cropped to leave a faint, even scatter of coal dust. Wearing a pair of heavy tortoiseshell sunglasses with dark green lenses that left his eyes to go about the cold business of empire unobserved.

  “What can I pour you?” he said.

  “I don’t drink . . .” Archy said, and stopped. He hated how this sounded whenever he found himself obliged to say it. Lord knew he would not relish the prospective company of some mope-ass motherfucker who flew that grim motto from his flagpole. “. . . alcohol,” he added. Only making it worse, the stickler for detail, ready to come out with a complete list of beverages he was willing to consume. Next came the weak effort to redeem himself by offering a suggestion of past indulgence: “Anymore.” Finally, the slide into unwanted medical disclosure: “Bad belly.”

  “Yeah,” Goode said looking appropriately sober, “I quit drinking, too. Coke, then? San Pellegrino? Sweet tea?”

  “You going to like my sweet tea,” said the Hungry Samoan gravely. It appeared to be in the nature of a command.

  “Yo, T.,” Goode said to the giant in the Timberlands, his bodyguard, majordomo. Wordless and obedient as a golem, the giant returned to the gondola. When Archy stepped up behind Goode into the cabin of the misnomered Dogpile blimp, the giant had a tall tumbler apiece of passionflower tea for Archy and Goode, and a can of Tecate for Walter, with a lime-wedge eyebrow.

  The interior of the gondola was cool and snug, the whole thing molded continuously into a glossy surface of black plastic trimmed with brushed aluminum and covered, wherever it was likely to encounter a pair of human buttocks, in spotted pony skin. On the spectrum of secret lairs, it fell somewhere between mad genius bent on world domination and the disco-loving scion of a minor emirate. The decor made references, of which Archy approved, to Diabolik and the David Lynch Dune.

  Goode dropped back to let Archy admire freely. “Welcome aboard the Minnie Riperton,” he said.

  Walter stole a look toward Archy, who rocked back, caught off guard.

  “Seriously,” Archy said.

  “Seriously.” Goode was ready for it, had a line. “She’s black. She is beautiful. And she goes really high.”

  The five-octave F-above-high-C singing voice of Minnie Riperton, who died of cancer in 1977 at the age of thirty-one, was an avatar of Archy’s mother in his memory; always a vanishing quality to it, an ethereal warmth. The two women, Minnie and Mauve, even looked alike, Cherokee noses, eyes large, deep brown, and pain-haunted. At the unexpected invocation of the name, Archy’s heart leaped and he grew confused, assuming for a dreamlike instant that Goode had named the zeppelin in his mother’s honor.

  “Thank you,” he said. “That’s so nice of you.”

  Goode looked at Walter or, at any rate, appeared to be regarding Archy’s old friend from behind the blast shield of his D&Gs.

  Walter shrugged. “I told you,” he said. “You got to feed the man.”

  “Skip breakfast?” Goode said.

  Archy said, “Never.”

  Goode hung halfway out of the hatch, gripping the frame, and called to the chef to ask him how long it would be until lunch. Chef held up three thick fingers, then commenced plating lunch with DJ aplomb. Two minutes and forty-eight seconds later, Archy found himself sitting at a posse-sized plastic table topped with speckled laminate, called upon to conduct deep research into a plate piled with some kind of Thai-Samoan South-Central barbecued shrimp thing served, with plentiful Sriracha, over coconut rice. Black-eyed peas in a hoisin garlic sauce. A scatter of okra tempura doused in sweet and peppery vinegar.

  “Kind of a soul-Asian fusion-type deal,” Archy said.

  “Hey,” Goode said. “That’s your thing, right? Soul-jazz. Soul-funk. Walter tells me you like to work the hyphens. Walter— Ah, shit.”

  Walter had his eyes closed, holding himself like a plateful of water, as, with an eager kick at its traces, the airship bucked gravity and took to the sky. Goode smiled, slowly shaking his head. “Boy spent his life cutting up dead folks, telling a bunch of homicidal rapping gangbangers they got dropped by their label, but he’s afraid to go up in a damn balloon.”

  “Uhh,” said Walter.

  Swiftly, Oakland fell away beneath them. The Bay Area shook out its rumpled coverlet, gray and green and crazy salt pans, rent and slashed and stitched by feats of engineering. Twin Peaks, Tamalpais, then Mount Diablo rising up beyond the hills. Archy had flown in and out of his hometown a dozen times or more but never in such breathless silence, never with such a sense of liberation, of having come unhooked. An airplane used force and fuel and tricks of physic
s to fight its way aloft, but the Minnie Riperton was returning to its rightful home. It belonged in the sky.

  When they reached one thousand feet, Walter swallowed and opened his eyes. “Oh, the humanity,” he said.

  Archy got up to tour the windows, meet the captains, squint through the shipboard telescope at a far-off disturbance in the haze that he was told to call Lassen Peak. He checked out a bunch of snaps and candids pinned to a corkboard beside the jump seat where T., the bodyguard, sat behind his gold-rimmed sunglasses, containing, as a fist might contain a bauble, his unimaginable thoughts. Pictures of G Bad, the man posed against varied nocturnal backgrounds of city lights or flashbulb darkness with famous singers and actors, black and white, holding the Golden Globes they had won for directing or starring in Dogpile films or their Grammys for Dogpile records. Or caught up in the thick of various posses, or maybe it was the same posse, an ontogeny shaped by time and fashion and the whims of Gibson Goode. Brothers in caps and game jerseys, smiling or blank-faced, throwing up gang signs, holding glasses and bottles. Women of the planet dressed in candy colors, necklines taking daring chances, eyelids done up lustrous as one of Sixto Cantor’s custom paint jobs. Gibson Goode looking exactly the same in every picture, sunglasses, enigmatic half-smile, Super Bowl ring, might as well be a blown-up life-size picture of himself mounted on a sheet of foam core.

  “My peeps,” Goode said, taking the pin from one of the photos on the corkboard. “Check out last week.”

  He passed the picture to Archy. It showed a particularly unruly group of ladies, strewn as if by a passing hurricane along the laps of a number of gentlemen, among them Walter Bankwell, who peered out from behind the wall of horizontal sisters with an expression of evident panic.