Telegraph Avenue

by Michael Chabon

  “Who’s in the box, Kung Fu?” Archy said.

  Walter stayed behind his glasses, saying nothing. He picked at the zipper of his midnight-blue tracksuit, stitched with the name Ali in huge red script, slumped in a bentwood-back chair reserved around here for the worker, often one of the younger nephews, who was supposed to sit up with the body, keep it company when there was nobody around. A job that, in former days, often fell to little Walter Bankwell. Boy and a Sports Illustrated could feign wakefulness for hours on end.

  “That is Mr. Padgett,” Flowers said. He uncrossed his legs and, reaching out a hand, got up to give Archy a straight up-and-down funeral-director special. “He was a teacher. Called home last Tuesday. He’s our two o’clock.”

  “Terrell Padgett? From Oakland Tech? I had him for algebra.”

  “Least he survived that,” Luther said.

  “He was a pussy,” Walter said from behind his hand, into which the entire lower portion of his face was sunk glumly.

  Flowers uncurled an index finger and jabbed it three times at Walter as if shaking out an umbrella full of rain. “Not. Another. Word.”

  Walter lost himself in the false-color planet charted across the surface of his late-model kicks.

  “Councilman,” Archy said. “Chan. What is all this? What are you doing?”

  “I—I apologize, Archy, for how this went down. I think, if you hear me out, you’re going to acknowledge that I did not have a choice but to do it in this manner. Please, sit down.”

  Flowers looked at Bankwell, Feyd. “Go on, clear out, now. Ms. Moore, my apologies. You want to go, you are free to go. Feyd, help Ms. Moore to the door.” He turned to Walter, narrowed his eyes to lizard slits. “You, too, fool.”

  Valletta warned away Feyd when he came to clear her out, and set about doing what was necessary to remove herself from the room, sweeping herself up off the mourners’ couch, a cyclone gathering its skirts for a run at a trailer park. For a second or two she hung above Luther, looking down at his bald spot like she was willing it to widen, to engulf him in a hairless shine of ruin. Or maybe the poor girl loved him in some way that was even more incomprehensible to Archy than his own love for Luther, under its bell jar of years, flickering impossibly on. Maybe as she stood there, she was wishing that bald spot away, ungraying the hair, unlining the face, unburning the days. As far as Archy knew, Valletta had been in love with his father, on and off, high or straight, treasure to trash, since the Monday morning in 1973 when he first walked onto the set of Strutter. You had to figure thirty years of on-and-off love was some kind of heroic feat. Not even God could hold onto the love of Israel in the desert without the jewelry getting melted down, now and then, to make a calf.

  “Give it to him,” she said to the bald spot.

  Luther didn’t move or otherwise acknowledge her words, smiling at Flowers as if he had come of his own free will to sell him a magazine subscription or the formula for eternal salvation.

  “Motherfucker,” she said, “you don’t give it to him, I’m gone. I’m serious. You won’t be able to find me with a satellite and a X-ray machine.”

  Luther and Valletta had been costars in their mutual disaster for too long not to milk the beat, Valletta darting her eyes back and forth to read Luther’s the way that only actresses in close up ever did, reading his gaze like the screen of a teleprompter.

  “Go, then, bitch,” Luther said, not without tenderness. “I ain’t folding on two pair.”

  Valletta rocked back. Wavering in her resolve. Knowing she should make good on her threat and go, but trained by the Pavlovian bell of love to confuse contempt with affection and indifference with reserve. Then she shrugged, kissed the air between her and Archy, flashed her palm like a badge. “Bye,” she said.

  Archy watched her and that swinging ass of hers as they headed for the door, pendulum going tick, tock. Waiting to see if she would look back at Luther, but she was true to her promise and gone. The three nephews trudged after her, and it turned out to be old Kung Fu who cast a backward glance—at Archy—as he stalked out, head down, hands shoved into the muff pockets of his track jacket. Backward and sidewise, filled with reproach, as if all this were Archy’s fault. Maybe resenting the fact, on a more basic and juvenile level, that Archy got to stay in the room and he did not. Embroidered across the back of the jacket in big red letters were the words I AM THE GREATEST. Greatest bitch, Archy thought, as Walter slammed the door behind him.

  It was Archy’s fucking plan in the first place: Meet back at Brokeland after the burial, smoke a bowl, put a dent in the mess from the old man’s funeral. Spin a few records, restore some order. Say what there was to say, see where things stood: Dogpile, COCHISE, their lives. As friends, partners, bandmates, fathers. Decide to go down fighting on the burning deck of the Brokeland, or scuttle her and try to jump clear of all the flaming flotsam.

  “He say anything about Belize?” Gwen wanted to know.

  They were in her BMW on their way to pick up the boys, KMEL playing some 120-bpm thumper, girl singer, the usual combination of finger-crooking and sass homiletics. Gwen had fitted herself improbably into the space between seat and wheel like some novelty marvel, a ship in a bottle, a psalm on a grain of basmati. Still a great-looking woman, even this close to the event horizon, maximum gravidity. Hair wrapped up in a Ghanaian head scarf, sunset reds and oranges. Pistachio ice cream–colored cat’s-eye sunglasses. Those hands of hers gripping the wheel, beautiful freaks, almost as big as her husband’s but long and supple, fingernails clipped man-short but glossy as meringue.

  “He didn’t say anything, is my point,” Nat said. “Dude never showed up. At the cemetery, he got into his car, he waved, that was the last time I saw him.”

  “I wish I could say the same,” Gwen said. “I’m still not sure how Kai fits into it all. If I wasn’t already messing things up for Aviva, I’d say she was fired.”

  “I mean, at least you know Archy didn’t fuck her.”

  Gwen said, at least that.

  “So, wait, you really are quitting?” Nat said, the news seeping in along with the first fizzy milligrams of panic and dismay. For years his life had balanced like the world of legend on the backs of great elephants, which stood on the back of a giant turtle; the elephants were his partnership with Archy, and Aviva’s with Gwen, and the turtle was his belief that real and ordinary friendship between black people and white people was possible, at least here, on the streets of the minor kingdom of Brokeland, California. Here along the water margin, along the borderlands, along the vague and crooked frontier of Telegraph Avenue. Now that foundational pileup of bonds and beliefs was tottering, toppling like the tower of circus elephants in Dumbo. Not because anybody was a racist. There was no tragic misunderstanding, rooted in centuries of slavery and injustice. No one was lobbing vile epithets, reverting to atavistic tribalisms. The differences in class and education among the four of them canceled out without regard for stereotype or cultural expectation: Aviva and Archy both had been raised by blue-collar aunts who worked hard to send them to lower-tier colleges. The white guy was the high school dropout, the black woman upper-middle-class and expensively educated. It just turned out that a tower of elephants and turtles was no way to try to hold up a world.

  “You think I was playing with the poor woman, saying I was quitting when I’m not?”

  “No.”

  “Nat, do you seriously think I was taunting her?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Sounding annoyed, she said: “So, okay, you went back to the store.”

  He told her how he had found himself alone in the horror that was the aftermath of Mr. Jones’s wake. Bones and scattered beans, puddled sauces inter-oozing on discarded plates in Mandelbrot sets of grease and tomato. A stack of uneaten tortillas swollen and curling like the pages of a book that had fallen into the bathtub. And Cochise Jones officially and forever dead. Over everything, over life itself, that sense of encroaching shadow Nat was always left with when some
one he loved had died. A dimming, the world’s bulb browned out. He remembered taking Julie to the Gardner Museum on a trip to Boston a few years earlier, seeing a rectangle of paler wallpaper against the time-aged wall where a stolen Rembrandt once hung, a portrait of the very thing that perched atop the stool where Mr. Jones used to sit: emptiness itself. Empty cans, empty bottles, empty store, empty night, Nat’s empty life lived fruitlessly and in vain.

  “A Nat Jaffe alone,” Gwen summarized, “is a dangerous thing.”

  “Bitch,” Nat said, trying to jaunt himself out of it. “I’m always alone.”

  “Hello, and welcome to another exciting episode of Existential Drama Queen.”

  “Born alone, die alone.”

  Nat keeping up his end by saying what was in his heart, leaving out only the secret central event of his proposed human time line, namely Do a bunch of stupid shit alone, repeatedly, because you can’t control your dumb-ass self.

  “Okay, now,” Gwen said, “ease up, big guy.”

  On the dilapidated sign of Steele’s Scuba, a ghostly diver confronted the lost submarine mysteries of Telegraph Avenue. Gwen slowed as the bus in front of them knelt like a cow before the newborn Jesus to take on, was it, yes, the Stephen Hawking guy. Nat watched the poor bastard increment himself and his chair, patient and stubborn, onto the bus’s power lift. Talk about alone. But look at him, dude was unstoppable, ubiquitous. Basically, a head on a meat stalk, strapped into a go-kart, motherfucker would take a bus to Triton if AC Transit ever put it on a route. Nat might have felt ashamed of the self-pity in which he currently wallowed, if self-pity knew any shame. He looked away, left, right, and then, tasting his hangover at the back of his mouth like a flavor of dread, up at the sky. Afraid he might see above him, at any moment, the evidence of last night’s stupid shit, looming and vengeful as Spiny Norman in the old Monty Python sketch.

  “Whatever,” Nat said. “I’m going to tell this or not?”

  “Let me guess. You started drinking.”

  “I found a six-pack of warm Corona. Some miracle it didn’t get drunk.”

  Nat had opened the first beer, found a slice of lemon, poked it through the mouth of the beer can. Knocked the photograph of Mr. Jones from its ceremonious stool with a satisfying sense of desecration. Got up into the old man’s chosen spot, maybe trying to dispel the emptiness that had gathered there. Figuring he would wait for Archy, who lived in his own personal CP time zone, his own little Guam of lateness. In the meantime have a beer, try to think his existential drama-queen way out of—or anyway, around—the situation. Then, for sure, do a little cleaning up.

  By the fourth Corona, Archy had not showed or called, the store was no nearer to being clean, and Nat no longer bothered with the lemon. The goal was still to think his way out of or around the situation, but by this point, admittedly, his grasp of the complexity of the situation was pretty diminished. The improvidence, carelessness, and lack of acumen that he and Archy had shown in operating their business; their tendency to view the taking on of responsibility for every task, errand, or chore that Brokeland Records required—to conduct their lives, mutual and individual—as a prolonged if not infinite game of chicken, each waiting for the other to blink, to give in; the rise of electronic file sharing of digital music; the low revenue generated by the bargain-hunting and transient crew of dormitory DJs and homeboy mix-tapers who made up the greater share of their customer base, far outnumbering the high-roller collectors; the collapse of the Japanese and overseas markets generally; not to mention Archy’s evident dissatisfaction with the nature of their partnership and the algae bloom of financial panic, of provider anxiety, in the normally tranquil pond water of Archy’s soul: All these proximate and precipitating causes of the imminent failure of Brokeland Records seemed by the fourth Corona to have been rinsed from Nat’s mind, leaving only a mildew-black residue of rage against Gibson Goode. Alcohol as helpful to the making of scapegoats as mud to the shaping of golems.

  When the beer was gone, Nat poked around amid the dead soldiers stacked on and under the folding tables until he came up with a bottle of Hungarian slivovitz, God knew who had brought it. It was a quarter full. Nat sloshed a little into a red hot-and-cold cup, then quickly knocked back two or possibly three shots. Slivovitz was the cordial of grief, the mourner’s brandy. Nat could remember his newly widowed father, the first Julius, lost in a helpless scrum of uncles in somebody’s kitchen after his first wife’s funeral, gasping at the fire in his chest as the slivovitz went down.

  Nat climbed back onto Mr. Jones’s stool with his glass of burning wine, put on A Love Supreme. Reliably, it destroyed him. Yes, it had passages of lyric majesty, passages that embodied the modernist union of difficulty and primitivism, and some kind of groove beyond groove, funk beyond funk; and yes, it had been intended as a kaddish of sorts, an expression of praise in the face of all sorrow for the Creator of John Coltrane, with thanks from His magnificent creation; but to Nat, it had always come off as music that was—like Nat himself— secretly powered by currents of rage. Probably that was a projection of Nat’s own feelings toward his own fucked-up Creator, some lesser cousin twice removed of the Perfect Being that had made John William Coltrane. But as he listened to the A-side, with its furious repetitions, the saxophone bashing itself over and over against some invisible barrier, a bee at a windowpane seeking ingress or escape, Nat felt his low-frequency rage with motherfucking Gibson Goode and his motherfucking Dogpile Thang begin to spike. The stylus dragged itself to the locked groove, and he needed to take a piss, and it was at this point, as far as he could remember, that he decided it would be a good idea to forgo the routine pleasure of pissing in his own toilet, in the bathroom behind the curtain with its bug-eyed portrait of Miles Davis. He decided that he would walk down to the future site of the Dogpile Thang and piss on that instead.

  “They put that sign up,” he said to Gwen. “You’ve seen it? Big black and red sign. With the paw print, future home of.”

  “You peed on the sign.”

  “I thought it might feel good.”

  “Did it?”

  “Well, I mean, it always feels pretty good. But, like, in terms of my morale . . . ?”

  “And what, somebody saw you peeing on it?”

  “Oh,” Nat said, grabbing at this possibility, “do you think it’s that?”

  “Do I think what’s that?”

  “What the police want to talk to me about.”

  “Why, did you do something else?”

  “The whole,” deciding to adopt Gwen’s word, which sounded so much more innocent and harmless than “pissing,” “peeing thing, I don’t know. I was kind of drunk. But I wasn’t drunk enough to kid myself that it wasn’t kind of a lame thing to do.”

  “ ‘Kind of.’ ”

  “It pretty much made me feel more useless. So that’s when I decided to head out to the airport.”

  “You drove drunk.”

  “If you want to get technical.”

  “What’s with everyone making travel plans all of a sudden?” Gwen wanted to know. “Where did you think you were going? Belize?”

  “ ‘Travel plans’? How well do you know me?”

  “No, of course, right.”

  “I just wanted to get a look at that motherfucking zeppelin.”

  “Why? So you could pee on it?”

  “Pissing on a zeppelin,” Nat said, regretting bitterly the loss of this opportunity. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  He kept the radio off, making the argument to himself that if music divided his impaired attention, then logically, silence would augment it. It was a timeless, placeless transit through a strobe-lit hyperspace of beer and slivovitz, scored only by the quarter-note rumble of I-880 under his tires. Vaguely, he remembered someone reporting a sighting of the airship early that morning, moored somewhere off Hegenberger Road. If it had not already returned to its home base in Southern California, he might find it there, shiny and gigantesque as the ego of Gibson
Goode. Let it be huge, shiny, and awesome, then. Nat was prepared—maybe even hoping—to be awed. At least let a failure of his, just this once, partake to some measure, however indirect, of grandeur.

  He traced and retraced the barren cipher written in the darkness by airport roads whose names commemorated heroes of aviation. The silence in the Saab was replaced by humming as Nat’s original curiosity about the zeppelin, half larkish, half irritated, mounted in the darkness, until it became a full-blown longing and, as with Ahab’s fish, the airship came to bear the blame, in Nat’s imagination, for all the ways in which the world was broken. And then, right around the time Nat began to understand that he was drunk and lost and would never find the motherfucker, and furthermore had probably already attracted the notice of Homeland Security’s flying robot thermal cameras—around the time he realized that for some reason he was humming the chord changes to “Loving You”—it startled him: a zeppelin-shaped hole cut into the orangey skyline of San Francisco.

  What happened then: He must have swerved. Someone threw a big luminous net at the car. After that—all within the span of the three or four seconds it took him to crash through the chain-link fence—came a lot of really interesting sounds. A ringing of bells. A raking of tines. A boing, a thump, a scrape, a crunch. Finally, a gunshot bang, as the same clown who had thrown the giant steel net at the car decided it would be funny to give Nat a face full of airbag.

  After that there was a gap in the archive. The next things Nat remembered were a taste of salt in his nostrils, the blacktop sending the day’s heat up through the soles of his socks, the dwindling hiss of the Saab’s radiator, and the consciousness—alas, not yet sober—of having benefited from a miracle. He was fine, whole. And the God of Ahab at last had delivered him from his lonely quest. He stood a hundred feet from his beast in its nighttime pasture. He was not sure what had happened to his shoes.