Telegraph Avenue

by Michael Chabon

  “Who was who?” Titus said.

  Take it in, feed it right on back at them.

  “You were talking to somebody, sounded like a woman. Was it Gwen?”

  “Who’s Gwen?”

  “Boy, you know who Gwen is. My wife.”

  Titus produced an elaborate shrug, three-part, multilayered like a Vulcan chessboard. “I guess.”

  “You guess.”

  “She was here.”

  At this news, his father got hollow-eyed, his big old Yogi Bear cheeks going all slack. Standing there by the bedroom door where his wife had stood a few minutes ago. Tying and retying an unsuccessful bow in the sash of his playboy bathrobe. Man took in the socks littering the hallway floor, the stink of male habitation in the house. He closed his eyes, working on must be like two, three hours of sleep, eye sockets purple with fatigue. No doubt picturing the devastation in the kitchen, the trash heaps in the living room, the skinny little underpantsed white boy tangled up out there in that crusty old sleeping bag. Reconstructing in his mind the likely path of her visit. Understanding how disgusted she had been by it all. Running through the whole scenario like the flashback at the end of a detective film that shows the murder as it must have gone down, everybody sitting around the parlor or the conservatory or whatever, under the framed butterflies and the stuffed tiger heads, while the detective laid it all out. She was standing right there; you needed only to wake up and you would have seen her. But you did not wake up, did you, Mr. Stallings? He dragged one hand across his face slowly and with intent, like he was hoping to erase its features. He opened his eyes.

  “Fuck me,” he said. “Look at this shit.”

  He kicked on down the hallway, trailing that lemon Pledge smell he had, almost but not quite brushing against Titus as he went by. When he came into the living room, what he discovered there seemed not only to confirm but to deepen or dwarf his worst fears.

  “What she want to be coming here today,” he said, his voice barely loud enough to hear. For once it did not sound like a question.

  So Titus didn’t answer. Not—this time—because he made it a point of pride to spurn or duck his father’s and all the pointless questions of the adult world, but because what was he going to say? Mention had been made of a body pillow, but Titus understood that a body pillow explained nothing, was only what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin. The swell of the woman, the arc of the brother who deformed her, the serious way she had of speaking to Titus, looking at him not boy-you-best-get-yourself-together serious, like Julie’s mom, but scientist serious, skeptical, fascinated by what she saw. How was he going to put any of that into words?

  His father said, “Jaffe, get up.”

  Julie sat up at once, pink nipples like a pit bull pup’s, not a hair on him anywhere except for, under his left arm, if you knew about it, one coarse wire like an eyebrow whisker, about which it was not unknown for Titus to tease him. Julie blinked, focusing on the man, cross-eyed and hungover on the vapors of his last dream of the night.

  “Gwen was here,” the man told him.

  Julie nodded, then saw that something more was wanted. He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he tried.

  “Not asking you. Titus says Gwen was here. Just now.” He turned to Titus. “In this room?” Titus nodded again. “In the kitchen?”

  “Had a drink of water from the sink.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” Archy said. He looked back at Julie. “So you didn’t see her, then?”

  “I was asleep,” Julie said.

  “Yeah, I was asleep, too. Only one wasn’t asleep was my boy Titus, here, and as usual, he don’t have too much to say on the subject.”

  Titus got that a criticism was intended by this last remark, although he did not consider it to be so. You could damn yourself with silence but never so effectively as by running your mouth. He hung back as his father approached the disordered and, at best, to be honest (owing to the poor quality of the original film stock, subpar camerawork, third-rate video transfers, routine yet crazy story lines, and wooden dialogue), broken evidence of Luther Stallings’s having, at one time, shone forth from the screens of ghetto grindhouses. At first the man seemed not to notice the DVDs, preoccupied instead by the crumpled napkins, the twenty-four-ounce cups, the greasy packages of leftover food. With the hopeless energy of someone trying to save worthless knickknacks from an impending wildfire, he gathered up the cheese-edged clamshell packages, the used forks and straw wrappers, and all the other refuse the boys had left out last night when, at three-thirty A.M., man still not home from a gig in the city, they finally switched off the television and went to sleep. Stacked it all precariously in his arms as if there were a chance that the wife might return any second.

  “Fuck me,” he said again. He stomped into the kitchen, growling once when he comprehended the full disastrousness thereof. Banged around under the sink until he found a garbage bag, tumbled into it all the garbage he was holding. Folding anger up into himself like a hurricane gathering seawater, he swept through the kitchen picking up trash. Came stomping back into the living room, fat ghetto Santa with the soul patch, slinging his Hefty sack.

  “I cannot believe you little motherfuckers left my damn house looking like this,” he said, accurately but without justice, since in so leaving it, they had only been following the principles of housekeeping as laid down after his wife’s departure by the man himself. The dire state of the kitchen was as much his fault as anyone’s. “Can’t believe she came this morning.” As if, say, she came yesterday or tomorrow, whole place would have been done up shiny and correct, and today was some freak of the housekeeping schedule. “House looking like a garage full of crackheads. She should of— Wait. Hold up.”

  Now the cover of Night Man, one of the DVDs that Titus and Julie had rented from Videots on College Avenue last night, seemed to catch the man’s eye, to register for the first time. He picked up the case, turned it over, read the hype, scholarship, and bullshit written there.

  “ ‘Quentin Tarantino Presents,’ ” he said. “Huh.”

  As he made a study of the DVD box, his stance widened, his posture grew straighter. The anger making landfall, moving inland. Feeding on itself, was Titus’s impression—and he was schooled in the repertoires of anger. Rifling through the other DVD cases scattered up and down the table. Tarantino was right: Night Man was the best thing in the Stallings filmography, a straight bank heist, cops and robbers, light on the cheese, scored by Charles Stepney, shot by Richard Kline, who shot Soylent Green and some other cool movies of the day, one of the Planet of the Apes movies. Cheap, rough, and uneven, it made plain and proclaimed for all time the truth of Luther Stallings’s physical grace in 1975, the beauty of his winged nostrils, the lowdown way he smiled, the fatal architecture of his hands.

  Man said, “What is this shit?”

  Titus was about to say “It’s your father” but, at the last instant, realized it might sound like he was saying that Luther Stallings, his grandfather, was shit. When, to the contrary, Luther Stallings at one time had stood in full possession of a definite article, not to mention two capital letters. Was most definitely The Shit.

  Before this summer, before last week, the name of Luther Stallings was not a memory to Titus but the memory of someone else’s memory, like a minor hit or the vice president of the disco years. A scatter of images caught like butterflies in the grille of his mind. First: an article in an old, a very old, a King Tut–old copy of Ebony tucked into a drawer in his grandmother’s nightstand. Titus remembered little about the article apart from the name of its subject, the title Strutter, and a shot of Luther Stallings sitting in a Los Angeles living room, in tight black pants and white ankle boots, tossing a baseball to a blur of a boy. Second: a scratchy, washed-out clip in a Wu-Tang Clan video, no more than a few seconds long, showing a lean light black man causing grievous harm with his fists and feet to a gang of homicidal Taoists. Third and faintest: the memory, really the acrid residue—and no more—of the low opini
on, bottled like smoke in the name Stallings, held by his granny for all the fathers to whom Titus was heir.

  None of these echoes prepared Titus for the truth of the greatness of Luther Stallings as revealed in patches by the movies themselves, even the movies that sucked ass. None readied him for the strange warmth that rained down onto his heart as he sat on the couch last night with the best and only friend he’d ever had, watching that balletic assassin in Night Man, with those righteous cars and that ridiculous bounty of fine women, a girl with a silver Afro. Luther Stallings, the idea of Luther Stallings, felt to Titus like no one and no place had ever felt: a point of origin. A legendary birthplace, lost in the mists of Shaolin or the far-off technojungles of Wakanda. There in the dark beside Julie, watching his grandfather, Titus got a sense of his own life’s foundation in the time of myth and heroes. For the first time since coming to consciousness of himself, small and disregarded as a penny in a corner of the world’s bottom drawer, Titus Joyner saw in his own story a shine of value, and in himself the components of glamour.

  Man said, “You all having a Luther Stallings film festival?”

  “He was good,” said Julie.

  “No, Julie, he was not.”

  “Well, at kung fu or whatever.”

  The man did not look up from the plastic case. He spoke with a soft and furious enunciation. “I don’t want this motherfucker in my house,” he said. “Not in any form. Not flesh and blood. Not in electrons, pixels. Not even the damn name out your damn mouth. Okay? Got that?”

  The man scooped up the rented elements of their Stallings film festival, stacked them haphazardly, and tried to hand them off to Titus. Titus just looked at them. The man shoved them at Julie instead.

  “Get them out of my house!” he said.

  “Okay, okay,” Julie said. “Jeez, Archy, what the hell?”

  Boy stunned by the abruptness, the violence, of how he found himself in possession of the DVDs. Looking at the man like he was about to cry. “I’m sorry, Archy. I didn’t—”

  “That’s your daddy,” Titus heard himself say, to his surprise if not horror. “Man was a motherfucking movie star! You should be feeling proud of him.”

  “Huh.”

  “He was good,” Titus said. “He could really act. Better than Fred Williamson, and fight better, too. Better fighter than Jim Kelly, who wasn’t no kind of actor. Better than all them white guys, Chuck Norris, dude with the eyebrows—”

  “John Saxon,” Julie said.

  “John Saxon. Better than most of them classic Chinese dudes, too. Sonny Chiba, Sammo Hong. You know you love that type of shit, got that screen capture from The Game of Death for a desktop. Fighting that big dude, looks like some kind of giant emu. It don’t even make sense for you to not appreciate Luther Stallings. He can play piano. He’s like a expert at barbecue and shit.” These facts he’d cribbed from a bonus feature on the Night Man disc. “But, I mean, even if you don’t like him, you got to still respect him.”

  Titus saw that he had afforded the man a fresh surprise on this unusual morning.

  “Two weeks you don’t say ten words,” the man said. “Now you going to make me a whole speech, huh? Telling me what I’m supposed to feel.”

  “It’s your father.”

  “Uh-huh. So then, by that logic, I guess you must respect me?”

  “Nah,” Titus said. “Because you just a sperm donor.”

  It left his bow with a snap of inspiration and hit its target with a thwack you could almost hear. It rocked the man back before he rallied.

  “Okay, first of all,” he said, “that shit was not ‘donated,’ okay, it was bestowed. Second, that ‘emu’ is Kareem Abdul motherfucking Jabbar. Third, all right, and listen to me now, I got enough shit to worry about, all right, laying my actual father figure to rest day after tomorrow, providing food and drinks for like a hundred people. Rounding up a marching band. Tracking down a parrot. In my garage, okay, I have the Hammond organ that killed Cochise Jones just, like, sitting there, need to be patched up so we can give the man a fitting tribute. I got all this personal shit piling up everywhere, baby coming, wife going out of her motherfucking mind. Got like three hours sleep. Got this skinny little motherfucker here, wandering around in his underpants, wearing a sleeping bag around one ankle like it’s some kind of fucked-up giant sock. You two little faggots,” yanking out the last couple of Jenga blocks from the tottering pile of his cool, “you come in here, dropping DVDs all over the place, disrespecting me, disrespecting my wishes, messing up my gotdamn house—”

  Julie looked up accusingly. Disappointed in the man, wanting him to know it. “Hate speech,” he pointed out.

  “Think so?” the man said. “Because, brother, that is fucking mild compared to what you about to hear. You little fuckers can put your clothes on, pack your bags, and get the fuck out, both of you. Leave the premises. And take those piece-of-shit movies with you. I am bouncing your cinephile asses.”

  “Seriously?” Julie said.

  Man seemed right then to want to show Julie that he was in earnest. He picked up the copy of Strutter in its box, Luther Stallings’s first film, made when he was only eight years older than Titus was today. Threw it on the ground, stomped it four times.

  “Get. The. Fuck. Out.”

  The plastic gave way twice, but on the third blow, the case snapped in half. The last time the disc broke. Three shining pieces of rainbow lying on the rug.

  “Asshole,” Titus said.

  Murderous, hopeful, he took a swing at his father. Twisted stylishly back around on himself, lost his footing, fell. The hand that broke his fall got caught up in the pieces of the shattered case. A piece of broken rainbow cut him, enough to bleed a little, hurt a lot.

  “I fucking hate you,” Titus said, his voice sounding, even to his own ears, dismayingly girlish and shrill. “I hate you so motherfucking much!”

  Man stood over him, looking down, hands on his hips, breathing in big wheezy lungfuls of the air they all had soured.

  “Now, that,” he said, “is what I call hate speech.”

  Two blocks from Brokeland, backing into a space on Apgar Street with a furious swipe of the El Camino’s steering wheel, sucking the last charred millimeter of usefulness from a fatty while trying to confirm an order for twenty pounds of al pastor, twelve dozen tortillas, and a gallon of pico de gallo from the Sinaloa taco truck down on East Fourteenth, Archy Stallings tripped some inner wire tied to hidden charges of remorse. Remorse for his unmanly and irresponsible outburst with the boys, for the hurt done to Gwen, for Gwen’s unveiling of the unanimous squalor into which her leaving had sunk him. Remorse, at last, for his Ethiopian adventure—Archy recalling, with the remorseful acuity of marijuana, the ink of melancholy that flooded the pupils of Elsabet Getachew whenever she looked up at him with his jimmy in her mouth. Regret for his general inability to holster said jimmy, for his last quarrel with Mr. Jones, for his choice of brown wing tips with a suit that had more blue in its glen plaid than he remembered. He cut the engine and sat, a hi-hat of regret, struck hard and resounding.

  Just before the taco lady returned from running his deposit to take Archy off hold and inform him, employing a deft and broken phraseology, that the operation was a failure and his Visa card had not survived the procedure, Clifford Brown, Jr., came on KCSM to back-announce a cut he must have played before Archy got in the car, Freddie Hubbard’s 1970 cover of “Better Git It in Your Soul,” “featuring,” as Junior put it, “on the organ, Oakland’s late, great Mr. Cochise Jones,” and Archy found himself unexpectedly on the verge of tears. That verge was as close to tears as Archy usually allowed himself to come. Regret, hurt, bereavement, loss, to permit the flow of even one tear at the upwelling of such feelings was to imperil ancient root systems and retaining walls. Mudslide and black avalanche would result and drown him.

  It was just something in the way Clifford Brown, Jr., said, Late, great.

  “I knew my card was hurting,” Archy conc
eded to the taco lady, weeping freely. “I did not know it was that sick.”

  “Is okay,” the taco lady said, mistaking the wobble in his voice for simple grief over the loss of Mr. Jones, almost as loyal a customer of Sinaloa as he had been of Brokeland Records, prone to fall into an almost musical rapture at the spectacle of all those rotating slabs of glazed and crispy pork stacked on a spindle like tasty 45s. Or maybe she was making no mistake at all. “You pay me cash when you pick it up, okay? Day after tomorrow, eleven A.M.? Okay?”

  Archy said that would be okay. He worked to get a grip on himself. Thinking of Tony Stark, Iron Man, with that shrapnel lodged in his heart’s scar tissue, doomed to a life encased in armor, flashing his repulsor rays. That Gwen’s departure may have stirred echoes of the death of Archy’s mother’s—FOOM! Repulsed. That if you went back in time and informed Archy Stallings, at the age of fourteen, one day his own son would be filled with nothing but reproach and contempt for the worthless man who had, Wile E. Coyote–style, left a hole in his life in the precise shape of a fleeing father—FOOM! Repulse the motherfucker.