Telegraph Avenue
Telegraph Avenue
Michael Chabon
From Michael Chabon, the bestselling author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; his first novel in 5 years is a lovingly painted pop-culture epic.
One street in Oakland, California. As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are hanging in there, co-regents of Brokeland Records. Their wives, Gwen and Aviva, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary midwives.
When former star quarterback Gibson Goode announces plans to dump his latest Dogpile megastore on Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear the worst for their vulnerable little enterprise. As behind Goode's proposal a nefarious story lurks.
While their husbands struggle to mount a defence, Aviva and Gwen find themselves caught up in a professional battle that tests the limits of their friendship. And into their already tangled lives comes Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged.
An intimate epic set to the laidback beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all of its own, Telegraph Avenue is Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet, and a must-read for fans of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity’.
Telegraph Avenue
A Novel
Michael Chabon
Dedication
To Ayelet, from the drop of the needle to the innermost groove
Epigraph
Call me Ishmael.
—Ishmael Reed, probably.
Contents
Dedication (#uc05a89b1-054a-5a3e-a194-a9bd341b4610)
Epigraph (#ue3e23c70-7620-5583-a26e-6d43980ad6c0)
I (#ue146fd8b-db12-51b8-9bb6-919dfb122ad2)
Dream of Cream (#ue146fd8b-db12-51b8-9bb6-919dfb122ad2)
II (#litres_trial_promo)
The Church of Vinyl (#litres_trial_promo)
III (#litres_trial_promo)
A Bird of Wide Experience (#litres_trial_promo)
IV (#litres_trial_promo)
Return to Forever (#litres_trial_promo)
V (#litres_trial_promo)
Brokeland (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Michael Chabon (#litres_trial_promo)
Credits (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
I
Dream of Cream
A white boy rode flatfoot on a skateboard, towed along, hand to shoulder, by a black boy pedaling a brakeless fixed-gear bike. Dark August morning, deep in the Flatlands. Hiss of tires. Granular unraveling of skateboard wheels against asphalt. Summertime Berkeley giving off her old-lady smell, nine different styles of jasmine and a squirt of he-cat.
The black boy raised up, let go of the handlebars. The white boy uncoupled the cars of their little train. Crossing his arms, the black boy gripped his T-shirt at the hem and scissored it over his head. He lingered inside the shirt, in no kind of hurry, as they rolled toward the next pool of ebbing streetlight. In a moment, maybe, the black boy would tug the T-shirt the rest of the way off and fly it like a banner from his back pocket. The white boy would kick, push, and reach out, feeling for the spark of bare brown skin against his palm. But for now the kid on the skateboard just coasted along behind the blind daredevil, drafting.
Moonfaced, mountainous, moderately stoned, Archy Stallings manned the front counter of Brokeland Records, holding a random baby, wearing a tan corduroy suit over a pumpkin-bright turtleneck that reinforced his noted yet not disadvantageous resemblance to Gamera, the giant mutant flying tortoise of Japanese cinema. He had the kid tucked up under his left arm as, with his free right hand, he worked through the eighth of fifteen crates from the Benezra estate, the records in crate number 8 favoring, like Archy, the belly meat of jazz, salty and well marbled with funk. Electric Byrd (Blue Note, 1970). Johnny Hammond. Melvin Sparks’s first two solo albums. Charles Kynard, Wa-Tu-Wa-Zui (Prestige, 1971). As he inventoried the lot, Archy listened, at times screwing up his eyes, to the dead man’s minty quadrophonic pressing of Airto’s Fingers (CTI, 1972) played through the store’s trusty Quadaptor, a sweet gizmo that had been hand-dived from a Dumpster by Nat Jaffe and refurbished by Archy, a former army helicopter electrician holding 37.5 percent—last time he’d bothered to check—of a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from SF State.
The science of cataloging one-handed: Pluck a record from the crate, tease the paper sleeve out of the jacket. Sneak your fingers into the sleeve. Waiter the platter out with your fingertips touching nothing but label. Angle the disc to the morning light pouring through the plate window. That all-revealing, even-toned East Bay light, keen and forgiving, always ready to tell you the truth about a record’s condition. (Though Nat Jaffe claimed it was not the light but the window, a big solid plate of Pittsburgh glass vaccinated against all forms of bullshit during the period of sixty-odd years when the space currently housing Brokeland Records had been known as Spencer’s Barbershop.)
Archy swayed, eyes closed, grooving on the heft of the baby, on the smell of grease coming off of Ringo Thielmann’s bass line, on the memory of the upraised eyes of Elsabet Getachew as she gave him head yesterday in the private dining room of the Queen of Sheba Ethiopian restaurant. Recollecting the catenary arch of her upper lip, the tip of her tongue going addis ababa along the E string of his dick. Swaying, grooving, feeling on that Saturday morning, just before the boots of the neighborhood tracked bad news through his front door, like he could carry on that way all day, forever.
“Poor Bob Benezra,” Archy said to the random baby. “I did not know him, but I feel sorry for him, leaving all these beautiful records. That’s how come I have to be an atheist, right there, Rolando, seeing all this fine vinyl the poor man had to leave behind.” The baby not too young to start knowing the ledge, the cold truth, the life-and-death facts of it all. “What kind of heaven is that, you can’t have your records?”
The baby, understanding perhaps that it was purely rhetorical, made no attempt to answer this question.
Nat Jaffe showed up for work under a cloud, like he did maybe five times out of eleven or, be generous, call it four out of every nine. His bad mood a space helmet lowered over his head, poor Nat trapped inside with no way to know whether the atmosphere was breathable, no gauge to tell him when his air supply would run out. He rolled back the deadbolt, keys banging against door, working one-handed himself, because of a crate of records he had crooked up under his left arm. Nat bulled in with his head down, humming low to himself; humming the interesting chord changes to an otherwise lame-ass contemporary pop song; humming an angry letter to the slovenly landlord of the nail salon two blocks up, or to the editor of the Oakland Tribune whose letters page his anger often adorned; humming the first fragments of a new theory of the interrelationship between the bossa nova and the nouvelle vague; humming even when he wasn’t making a sound, even when he was asleep, some wire deep in the bones of Nathaniel Jaffe always resounding.
He closed the door, locked it from the inside, set the crate on the counter, and hung his gray-on-charcoal pin-striped fedora from one of nine double-branched steel hooks that also dated from the days of Spencer’s Barbershop. He ran a finger through his dark hair, kinked tighter than Archy’s, thinning at the hairline. He turned, straightening his necktie—hepcat-wide, black with silver flecks—taking note of the state of box 8. Working his head around on the neck joints a few times as if in that creak of bones and tension lay hope of release from whatever was causing him to hum.
He walked to the back of the store and disappeared through the beaded curtain, laboriously painted by Nat’s son, Julie, with the image of Miles Davis done up as a Mexican saint, St. Miles’s suffering heart exposed, tangled with a razor wire of thorns. Not a perfect likeness, to be sure, looking to Archy more like Mookie Wilson, but it could not be easy to paint a portrait of somebody across a thousand half-inch beads, and few besides Julius Jaffe would ever contemplate doing it, let alone give it a try. A minute later Archy heard the toilet flush, followed by a spasm of angry coughing, and then Julie’s father came back out to the front of the store, ready to burn another day.
“Whose baby is that?” he said.
“What baby?” said Archy.
Nat unbolted the front door and spun the sign to inform the world that Brokeland was open for business. He gave his skull another tour of the top of his spinal column, hummed some more, coughed again. Turned to his partner, looking almost radiant with malice. “We’re totally fucked,” he said.
“Statistically, that’s indeed likely,” Archy said. “In this case, how so?”
“I just came from Singletary.”
Their landlord, Mr. Garnet Singletary, the King of Bling, sold grilles and gold finger rings, rope by the yard, three doors up from Brokeland. He owned the whole block, plus a dozen or more other properties spread across West Oakland. Retail, commercial. Singletary was an information whale, plying his migratory route through the neighborhood, taking in all the gossip, straining it for nutrients through his tireless baleen. He had never once turned loose a dollar to frolic among the record bins at Brokeland, but he was a regular customer nonetheless, stopping by every couple of days just to audit. To monitor the balance of truth and bullshit in the local flow.
“Yeah?” Archy said. “What’d Singletary have to say?”
“He said we’re fucked. Seriously, why are you holding a baby?”
Archy looked down at Rolando English, a rusty young man with a sweet mouth and soft brown ringlety curls all sweaty and stuck to the side of his head, stuffed into a blue onesie, then wrapped in a yellow cotton blanket. Archy hefted Rolando English and heard a satisfying slosh from inside. Rolando English’s mother, Aisha, was a daughter of the King of Bling. Archy had offered to take Rolando off Aisha’s hands for the morning, maybe pick up a few items the baby required, and so forth. Archy’s wife was expecting their first child, and it was Archy’s notion that, given the imminence of paternity, he might get in some practice before the first of October, their due date, maybe ease the shock of finding himself, at the age of thirty-six, a practicing father. So he and Rolando had made an excursion up to Walgreens, Archy not at all minding the walk on such a fine August morning. Archy dropped thirty dollars of Aisha’s money on diapers, wipes, formula, bottles, and a package of Nuk nipples—Aisha gave him a list—then sat down right there on the bus bench in front of the Walgreens, where he and Rolando English changed themselves some foul-smelling diaper, had a little snack, Archy working his way through a bag of glazed holes from the United Federation of Donuts, Rolando English obliged to content himself with a pony of Gerber Good Start.
“This here’s Rolando,” Archy said. “I borrowed him from Aisha English. So far he doesn’t do too much, but he’s cute. Now, Nat, I gather from one or two of your previous statements that we are fucked in some manner.”
“I ran into Singletary.”
“And he gave you some insight.”
Nat spun the crate of records he had carried in with him, maybe thirty-five, forty discs in a Chiquita crate, started idly flipping through them. At first Archy assumed Nat was bringing them in from home, items from his own collection he wanted to sell, or records he had taken home for closer study, the boundaries among the owners’ respective private stocks and the store’s inventory being maintained with a careless exactitude. Archy saw that it was all just volunteers. A Juice Newton record, a bad, late Commodores record, a Care Bears Christmas record. Trash, curb fruit, the bitter residue of a yard sale. Orphaned record libraries called out constantly to the partners from wherever fate had abandoned them, emitting a distress signal only Nat and Archy could hear. “The man could go to Antarctica,” Aviva Roth-Jaffe once said of her husband, “and come back with a box of wax 78s.” Now, hopeless and hopeful, Nat sifted through this latest find, each disc potentially something great, though the chances of that outcome diminished by a factor of ten with each decrease in the randomness of the bad taste of whoever had tossed them out.
“‘Andy Gibb,’” Nat said, not even bothering to freight the words with contempt, just slipping ghosts of quotation marks around the name as if it were a known alias. He pulled out a copy of After Dark (RSO, 1980) and held it up for Rolando English’s inspection. “You like Andy Gibb, Rolando?”
Rolando English seemed to regard the last album released by the youngest Gibb brother with greater open-mindedness than his interlocutor.
“I’ll go along with you on the cuteness,” Nat said, his tone implying that he would go no further than that, like he and Archy had been having an argument, which, as far as Archy could remember, they had not. “Give him.”
Archy passed the baby to Nat, feeling the cramp in his shoulder only after he had let go. Nat encircled the baby under the arms with both hands and lifted him, going face-to-face, Rolando English doing a fine job of keeping his head up, meeting Nat’s gaze with that same air of willingness to cut people a break, Andy Gibb, Nat Jaffe, whomever. Nat’s humming turned soft and lullaby-like as the two considered each other. Baby Rolando had a nice, solid feel to him, a bunch of rolled socks stuffed inside one big sock, dense and sleepy, not one of those scrawny flapping-chicken babies one ran across from time to time.
“I used to have a baby,” Nat recalled, sounding elegiac.
“I remember.” That was back around the time he first met Nat, playing a wedding at that Naturfreunde club up on Joaquin Miller. Archy, just back from the Gulf, came in at the last minute, filling in for Nat’s regular bassist at the time. Now the former Baby Julius was fifteen and, to Archy at least, more or less the same sweet freakazoid as always. Hearing secret harmonies, writing poetry in Klingon, painting his fingernails with Jack Skellington faces. Used to go off to nursery school in a leotard and a tutu, come home, watch Color Me Barbra. Even at three, four years old, prone like his father to holding forth. Telling you how french fries didn’t come from France or German chocolate from Germany. Same tendency to get caught up in the niceties of a question. Lately, though, he seemed to spend a lot of time transmitting in some secret teenager code, decipherable only by parents, designed to drive them out of their minds.
“Babies are cool,” Nat said. “They can do Eskimo kisses.” Nat and Rolando went at it, nose to nose, the baby hanging there, putting up with it. “Yeah, Rolando’s all right.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Got good head control.”
“Doesn’t he, though?” Archy said.
“That’s why they call him Head-Control Harry. Right? Sure it is. Head-Control Harry. You want to eat him.”
“I guess. I don’t really eat babies all that much.”
Nat studied Archy the way Archy had studied the A-side of the late Bob Benezra’s copy of Kulu Sé Mama (Impulse!, 1967), looking for reasons to grade it down.
“So, what, you practicing? That the idea?”
“That was the idea.”
“And how’s it working out?”
Archy shrugged, giving it that air of modest heroism, the way you might shrug after you had been asked how in God’s name you managed to save a hundred orphans trapped in a flaming cargo plane from collision with an asteroid. As he played it off to Nat, Archy knew—felt, like the baby-shaped ache in his left arm—that neither his ability nor his willingness to care for Rolando English for an hour, a day, a week, had anything whatsoever to do with his willingness or ability to be a father to the forthcoming child now putting the finishing touches on its respiratory and endocrine systems in the dark laboratory of his wife’s womb.
Wiping a butt, squeezing some Carnation through a nipple, mopping up the milk puke with a dishrag, all that was mere tasks and procedures, a series of steps, the same as the rest of life. Duties to pull, slow parts to get through, shifts to endure. Put your thought processes to work on teasing out a tricky time signature from On the Corner (Columbia, 1972) or one of the more obscure passages from The Meditations (Archy was currently reading Marcus Aurelius for the ninety-third time), sort your way one-handed through a box of interesting records, and before you knew it, nap time had arrived, Mommy had come home, and you were free to go about your business again. It was like the army: Be careful, find a cool dry place to stash your mind, and hang on until it was over. Except, of course (he realized, experiencing the full-court press of a panic that had been flirting with him for months, mostly at three o’clock in the morning when his wife’s restless pregnant tossing disturbed his sleep, a panic that the practice session with Rolando English had been intended, vainly, he saw, to alleviate), it never would be over. You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Not even if you died. Alive or dead or a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling on you to do, perform, or say anything at all. Archy’s own father had walked out on him and his mother when Archy was not much older than Rolando English, and even though, for a few years afterward, as his star briefly ascended, Luther Stallings still came around, paid his child support on time, took Archy to A’s games, to Marriott’s Great America and whatnot, there was something further required of old Luther that never materialized, some part of him that never showed up, even when he was standing right beside Archy. Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.
“Yeah,” Nat said. For a second the wire in him went slack. “Babies are cute. Then they grow up, stop taking showers, and beat off into their socks.”
There was a shadow in the door glass, and in walked S. S. Mirchandani, looking mournful. And the man had a face that was built for mourning, sag-eyed, sag-jowled, lamentation pooling in the spilt-ink splash of his beard.
“You gentlemen,” he said, always something elegiac and proper in his way of speaking the Queen’s English, some remembrance of a better, more civilized time, “are fucked.”
“I keep hearing that,” Archy said. “What happened?”
“Dogpile,” Mr. Mirchandani said.
“Fucking Dogpile,” Nat agreed, humming again.
“They are breaking ground in one month’s time.”
“One month?” Archy said.
“Next month! This is what I am hearing. Our friend Mr. Singletary was speaking to the grandmother of Mr. Gibson Goode.”
Nat said, “Fucking Gibson Goode.”
Six months prior to this morning, at a press conference with the mayor at his side, Gibson “G Bad” Goode, former All-Pro quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, president and chairman of Dogpile Recordings, Dogpile Films, head of the Goode Foundation, and the fifth richest black man in America, had flown up to Oakland in a customized black-and-red airship, brimming over with plans to open a second Dogpile “Thang” on the long-abandoned Telegraph Avenue site of the old Golden State market, two blocks south of Brokeland Records. Even larger than its giant predecessor near Culver City, the Oakland Thang would comprise a ten-screen cineplex, a food court, a gaming arcade, and a twenty-unit retail galleria anchored by a three-story Dogpile media store, one floor each for music, video, and other (books, mostly). Like the Fox Hills Dogpile store, the Oakland flagship would carry a solid general-interest selection of media but specialize in African-American culture, “in all,” as Goode put it at the press conference, “its many riches.” Goode’s pockets were deep, and his imperial longings were married to a sense of social purpose; the main idea of a Thang was not to make money but to restore, at a stroke, the commercial heart of a black neighborhood cut out during the glory days of freeway construction in California. Unstated during the press conference, though inferable from the way things worked at the L.A. Thang, were the intentions of the media store not only to sell CDs at a deep discount but also to carry a full selection of used and rare merchandise, such as vintage vinyl recordings of jazz, funk, blues, and soul.
“He doesn’t have the permits and whatnot,” Archy pointed out. “My boy Chan Flowers has him all tangled up in environmental impacts, traffic studies, all that shit.”
The owner and director of Flowers & Sons funeral home, directly across Telegraph from the proposed Dogpile site, was also their Oakland city councilman. Unlike Singletary, Councilman Chandler B. Flowers was a record collector, a free-spending fiend, and without fully comprehending the reasons for his stated opposition to the Dogpile plan, the partners had been counting on it, clinging to the ongoing promise of it.
“Evidently something has changed the Councilman’s mind,” said S. S. Mirchandani, using his best James Mason tone: arch and weary, hold the vermouth.
“Huh,” Archy said.
There was nobody in West Oakland more hard-ass or better juiced than Chandler Flowers, and the something that evidently had changed his mind was not likely to have been intimidation.
“I don’t know, Mr. Mirchandani. Brother has an election coming,” Archy said. “Barely came through the primary. Maybe he’s trying to stir up the base, get them a little pumped. Energize the community. Catch some star power off Gibson Goode.”
“Certainly,” said Mr. Mirchandani, his eyes saying no way. “I am sure there is an innocent explanation.”
Kickbacks, he was implying. A payoff. Anybody who managed, as Mr. Mirchandani did, to keep a steady stream of cousins and nieces flowing in from the Punjab to make beds in his motels and wash cars at his gas stations without running afoul of the authorities at either end, was likely to find his thoughts running along those lines. It was almost as hard for Archy to imagine Flowers—that stiff-necked, soft-spoken, and everlastingly correct man, a hero in the neighborhood since Lionel Wilson days—taking kickbacks from some showboating ex-QB, but then Archy tended to make up for his hypercritical attitude toward the condition of vinyl records by going too easy on human beings.
“Anyways, it’s too late, right?” Archy said. “Deal already fell through. The bank got cold feet. Goode lost his financing, something like that?”
“I don’t really understand American football,” said S. S. Mirchandani. “But I am told that when he was a player, Gibson Goode was quite famous for something called ‘having a scramble.’”
“The option play,” Nat said. “For a while there, he was pretty much impossible to sack.”
Archy took the baby back from Nat Jaffe. “G Bad was a slippery motherfucker,” he agreed.
Mr. Nostalgia, forty-four, walrus mustache, granny glasses, double-extra-large Reyn Spooner (palm trees, saw grass, woodies wearing surfboards), stood behind the Day-Glo patchwork of his five-hundred-dollar exhibitor’s table, across a polished concrete aisle and three tables down from the signing area, under an eight-foot vinyl banner that read MR. NOSTALGIA’S NEIGHBORHOOD, chewing on a Swedish fish, unable to believe his fucking eyes.
“Yo!” he called out as the goon squad neared his table: two beefy white security guys in blue poly blazers and a behemoth of a black dude, Gibson Goode’s private muscle, whose arms in their circumference were a sore trial to the sleeves of his black T-shirt. “A little respect, please!”
“Damn right,” said the man they were escorting from the hall, and as they came nearer, Mr. Nostalgia saw that it really was him. Thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, forty watts too dim, maybe: but him. Red tracksuit a size too small, baring his ankles and wrists. Jacket waistband riding up in back under a screened logo in yellow, a pair of upraised fists circled by the words BRUCE LEE INSTITUTE, OAKLAND, CA. Long and broad-shouldered, with that spring in his gait, coiling and uncoiling. Making a show of dignity that struck Mr. Nostalgia as poignant if not successful. Everybody staring at the guy, all the men with potbellies and back hair and doughy white faces, heads balding, autumn leaves falling in their hearts. Looking up from the bins full of back issues of Inside Sports, the framed Terrible Towels with their bronze plaques identifying the nubbly signature in black Sharpie on yellow terry cloth as that of Rocky Bleier or Lynn Swann. Lifting their heads from the tables ranged with rookie cards of their youthful idols (Pete Maravich, Robin Yount, Bobby Orr), with canceled checks drawn on long-vanished bank accounts of Ted Williams or Joe Namath; unopened cello packs of ’71 Topps baseball cards, their fragile black borders pristine as memory, and of ’86 Fleer basketball cards, every one holding a potential rookie Jordan. Watching this big gray-haired black man they half-remembered, a face out of their youth, get the bum’s rush. That’s the dude from the signing line. Was talking to Gibson Goode, got kind of loud. Hey, yeah, that’s what’s-his-face. Give him credit, the poor bastard managed to keep his chin up. The chin—him, all right—with the Kirk Douglas dimple. The light eyes. The hands, Jesus, like two uprooted trees.
“Consider yourselves fortunate, gentlemen,” Mr. Nostalgia called as they swept past his table. “That man could kill you with one finger if he wanted to.”
“Awesome,” said the younger of the goons, head shaved clean as a porn star’s testicle. “Long as he buys a ticket first.”
Mr. Nostalgia was not a troublemaker. He liked to smoke prescription indica, watch television programs about World War II, eat Swedish fish, and listen to the Grateful Dead, in any combination or grouping thereof. Undoubtedly, sure, he had issues with authority, his father a survivor of two camps, his mother a marcher on Washington, Mr. Nostalgia unfit to hold down any job requiring him to answer to a boss. Great as he might be in circumference, however, Mr. Nostalgia was only five-six, almost, in his huaraches, and not quite in fighting trim. His one reliable move, if you hoped to base a style of kung fu on it, you would probably have to go with Pill Bug. Mr. Nostalgia avoided beefs, quarrels, bar fights, and showdowns foreign and domestic. He deplored violence, except in 1944, in black and white, on television. He was a merchant of good reputation and long standing who had forked over a hefty fee to the organizers of the East Bay Sports and Card Show, some of which money had gone to pay for the protection, the peace of mind, that these goons in their blue blazers would, at least in theory, provide. And peace of mind, face it, was not merely a beautiful phrase; it was a worthy ambition, the aim of religions, the promise of underwriters. But Mr. Nostalgia, as he would afterward explain to his wife (who would sooner eat a bowl of mashed Ebola than attend another card show), was deeply outraged by the rough treatment to which a hero of his youth was being subjected, for no reason other than his having managed to ninja himself onto the floor of the Convention Center without a ticket. And so, on that Saturday morning in the Kaiser Center, Mr. Nostalgia surprised himself.
He came out from behind the ramparts of his neighborhood—replete as a Vegas buffet with choice offerings in the nonsports line that he had made his specialty and métier, among them a complete set of the 1971 Bobby Sherman Getting Together cards, including the very tough number 54. Mr. Nostalgia moved with a stately glide that had led at least one uncharitable observer over the years to remark, seeing him go by in one of his floral numbers, that the Pasadena Rose Parade appeared to be missing a float.
“Wait up, let me get the man a ticket,” he called after the retreating security escort.
Gibson Goode’s bodyguard glanced over his shoulder for half a second, like he was verifying that he hadn’t just stepped in dog shit. The goons in the blue blazers kept walking.
“Hey, yo!” Mr. Nostalgia said. “Come on! Hey, come on, you guys! That’s Luther Stallings.”
It was Stallings who came to a stop first, digging in, bucking his captors, turning to confront his redeemer. The familiar smile—its charm gapped and stained by drugs or prison dentistry or maybe only by the kind of poverty that would lead you to try to skirt an eight-dollar admission fee—put an ache behind Mr. Nostalgia’s breastbone.
“Thank you, my good man,” Stallings said. Ostentatious, showing up the goons. “My dear friend . . .”
Mr. Nostalgia supplied his actual last name, which was long, Jewish, and comical, a name for a type of cheese or sour bread. Stallings repeated it flawlessly and without the hint of mockery that it typically inspired.
“My friend here,” Stallings explained, shouldering free of the goons like an escape artist shrugging out of a straitjacket, “has kindly offered to float me the price of admission.”
A slight rise in intonation at the end, almost putting a question mark there. Making sure he had his facts right.
“Absolutely,” Mr. Nostalgia said. He remembered sinking deep into a greasy Herculon seat at the Carson Twin cinema, a Saturday afternoon thirty years ago, an elephant of joy sitting on his chest, watching a movie with a mostly black cast—it was a mostly black audience—called Night Man. In love with every single thing about that movie. The girl in her silver Afro. The hand-to-hand fighting. The funky soundtrack. A chase involving a green 1972 Saab Sonett driven at top speed through streets that were recognizably those of Carson, California. The gear, tackle, and explosives carried by the bank robbers. Above all, the movie’s star, loose-limbed, still, and taciturn like a McQueen hero and with the same willingness to look silly, which was another way of saying charm. And—indisputably, in 1973—a Master of Kung Fu. “It’s truly an honor.”
The goons zoomed in on Mr. Nostalgia, training their scopes, scanning the green two-day exhibitor’s pass hanging from a lanyard around his neck. Faces going dull, losing some of their bored swagger as they tried to remember if there was anything about this type of situation in the official goon manual.
“He was harassing Mr. Goode,” said Goode’s bodyguard, stepping in to shore up morale in the muscle department. “You buy him a ticket,” he told Mr. Nostalgia, “he just going to harass him some more.”
“Harassing?” Luther Stalling said, wild with incredulity. Innocent of every crime of which he ever had or ever would be accused for all time. “How I’m harassing that man? I just want to get with him, have my thirty seconds at his feet, standing on line like everybody else. Get my autograph off him, go about my way.”
“Straight autograph from Mr. Goode going to cost you forty-five dollars,” the bodyguard pointed out. For all his girth, height, and general monstrousness, his voice was gentle, patient, the man paid, basically, to suffer fools. Maintain a fool-free perimeter around G Bad without making his employer look like a dick. “How you going to pay that, you ain’t even have eight?”
“Buddy, hey, yo,” Stallings said, then got the name right again with another painful flash—painful to Mr. Nostalgia, at any rate—of that scrimshaw smile. Whatever the man had been doing, apart from simply getting old, to have so brutally pared himself down, hollowed himself out, since his glory days, it didn’t seem to affect his memory; or maybe he wasn’t doing it anymore. “I hope, I, uh, wonder,” going all in with the question mark this time, “if maybe I could persuade you to help me out?”
Mr. Nostalgia stepped back, an involuntary move ingrained by years of tangling with the hustlers, operators, schnorrers, and short-change artists who flecked the world of card shows like weevils in flour. Thinking there was a difference of more than thirty-seven dollars between offering to pick up the price of admission, a gesture of respect, and springing for the man to buy himself, of all things, a Gibson Goode autograph. Mr. Nostalgia tried to remember if he had ever seen or even heard of a celebrity (however well forgotten) who was prepared to stand in line to pay cash for another celebrity’s signature. Why did Stallings want it? Where was he going to have G Bad put it? He did not appear to be carrying any obvious signables, book, photograph, jersey, not even a program, a napkin, a Post-it. I just want to get with him. To what end? Mr. Nostalgia never could have flourished in his trade without maintaining a keen ear for the slick lines of grifters and bullshit artists, and Luther Stallings was definitely setting off Klaxons, up to something, working some angle. Had already blown his play, in fact, until Mr. Nostalgia for some reason had felt it necessary to leave the safety of his neighborhood and stick his nose where it didn’t belong. Mr. Nostalgia could hear his wife passing the sole necessary judgment on the matter, another in the string of endless variations on her single theme, What in God’s name were you thinking? But Mr. Nostalgia’s title was not a mere honorific; his d/b/a was his DNA. Remembering the weight of that elephant of happiness upon him, on that Saturday afternoon at the Carson Twin in 1974, he chose to believe in the truth of Luther Stallings. A man could want things far stranger and less likely than a quarterback’s signature on a scrap of cash register tape or a torn paper bag.
“Maybe I can do better than that,” Mr. Nostalgia said.
He reached into the back pocket of his denim shorts and took out a folded, sweat-dampened manila envelope. Inside it were the other two green badges on lanyards to which, at his level of participation, he was entitled. He fished out one badge and pushed his way through the screen of goons. Luther Stallings bowed his head, revealing an incipient Nelson Mandela bald spot, and Mr. Nostalgia bestowed the badge on him, Oz emboldening the Lion.
“Mr. Stallings is working for me today,” he said.
“That’s right,” Stallings said at once, sounding not just sincere but impatient, like he had been looking forward for days to helping out in Mr. Nostalgia’s booth. His eyes had flicked, barely, across the badge as Mr. Nostalgia hung it on him; he said, not missing a trick, “In Mr. Nostalgia’s Neighborhood.”
“Working how?” said the older of the two goons.
“He’s doing a signing at my booth,” Mr. Nostalgia said. “I got a complete and a partial set, no Bruce Lee, of the Masters of Kung Fu series, I got a few other things Mr. Stallings has kindly consented to sign. A lobby card from Black Eye, I’m pretty sure.”
“‘Masters of Kung Fu,’” Stallings repeated, barely managing to avoid sounding like he had absolutely no idea what Mr. Nostalgia was talking about.
“Donruss, 1976, it’s a tough set.”
Four clueless looks sought enlightenment at the hands of Mr. Nostalgia.
“Uh, guys?” Mr. Nostalgia said with a circular sweep of his hands, taking in the echoing space all around them. “Trading cards? Little rectangles of cardboard? Stained with bubble gum? Pop one in the spokes of your bicycle, make it sound like a Harley-Davidson?”
“Damn, seriously?” Stallings could not keep it back. “Masters of Kung Fu. They got a Luther Stallings in there?”
“Naturally,” Mr. Nostalgia said.
“Luther Stallings.” The older of the two blue blazers, lank dark hair, the flowerpot skull and triangle chin of a Russian or a Pole, about Mr. Nostalgia’s age, tried out the name. Scrunching up one side of his face like he was screwing a loupe into his eye socket. “Okay, yeah. What’s it? Strutter. Seriously, that’s you?”
“My first part,” Stallings said, seizing upon this unexpected opportunity to preen. Loving it. Putting one of those massive antler hands on Mr. Nostalgia to let him know he was loving it: doing what he must do best. Restoring the goon squad to their proper roles as members of the Luther Stalling Irregulars. “Year after I won the title.”
“Title in what? Kung fu?”
“Wasn’t one at that time. Was in karate. In Manila. World champion.”
“World champion, bullshit,” said Goode’s bodyguard. “I give you that.”
Stallings flat ignored the big man. Mr. Nostalgia, feeling fairly balls-out pleased with himself, tried to do the same.
“We all done here, gentlemen?” Stallings asked the blue blazers.
The security guys in the blue blazers checked in with the bodyguard, who shook his head, disgusted.
“I tell you what, Luther,” the bodyguard said. “You even flick a boogie in Mr. Goode’s general vicinity, I will come down on you, motherfucker. And I will show no mercy.”
The man turned and, with a forbearing hitch in his walk, rolled back to the signing table where his boss, head shaved to stubble, wearing a black polo shirt with a red paw print where the alligator would have gone, armed with nothing but a liquid-silver marker and a high-priced smile, sat fighting his way through an impressively long line of autograph seekers. Game-worn jerseys, game-used footballs, cards, ball caps, he was going to clear nine, ten thousand today.
“Yeah, whatever,” Stallings said, as if he could not care less about Gibson Goode.
Working up a surprising amount of swagger, he followed Mr. Nostalgia to the booth. You would have thought the man had just saved himself from being tossed out of the building by the goon squad. Mr. Nostalgia recognized objectively that he ought to be annoyed, but somehow it made him feel sorrier for Stallings.
“Wow, check this shit out.”
Stallings worked his gaze along the table, taking in the sealed wax packs of Garbage Pail Kids and Saturday Night Fever, the unopened box of Fleer Dune cards, the Daktari and Gentle Ben and Mork & Mindy board games, the talking Batman alarm clock, the Aurora model kits of the Spindrift and Seaview in their original shrink-wrap.
“They even got cards for that ALF, huh?” he said.
His voice as he made this observation, like his expression as he took it all in, sounded unhappy to Mr. Nostalgia, even forlorn. Not the disdain that Mr. Nostalgia’s wife always showed for his stock-in-trade but something more like disappointment.
“Used to be pretty standard for a hit show,” Mr. Nostalgia said, wondering when Stallings would get around to hitting him up for the forty-five dollars. “Nothing much of interest in that set.”
Though Mr. Nostalgia loved the things he sold, he had no illusion that they held any intrinsic value. They were worth only what you would pay for them; what small piece of everything you had ever lost that, you might come to believe, they would restore to you. Their value was indexed only to the sense of personal completeness, perfection of the soul, that would flood you when, at last, you filled the last gap on your checklist. But Mr. Nostalgia had never seen his nonsports cards so sharply disappoint a man.
“ALF, yeah, I remember that one,” Stallings said. “That’s real nice. Growing Pains, Mork & Mindy, uh-huh. Where the Masters of Kung Fu at?”
Mr. Nostalgia went around to a bin he had tucked under the table that morning after setting up and dug around inside of it. After a minute of moving things around in the bin, he came out with the partial set, the one that was missing the Lee and the Norris cards. “Fifty-two cards in the set,” he said. “You’re number, I don’t know, twelve, I think it is.”
Stallings shuffled through the cards, whose imagery depicted, bordered by cartoon bamboo, labeled with takeout-menu-style fake Chinese lettering, a fairly indiscriminate mixture of real and fictitious practitioners (Takayuki Kubota, Shang-Chi) of a dozen forms of martial arts in addition to the eponymous one, including bartitsu (Sherlock Holmes) and savate (Count Baruzy). At last Stallings came up with his card. Stared at the picture, made a sound like a snort through his nose. The card featured a color still from one of his movies, poorly reproduced. A young Luther Stallings, in red kung fu pajamas, flew across the frame toward a line of Chinese swordsmen, feet first, almost horizontal.
“Damn,” Stallings said. “I don’t even remember what that’s from.”
“Take it,” Mr. Nostalgia said. “Take the whole set. It’s a present, from me to you, for all the pleasure your work has given me over the years.”
“How much you get for it?”
“Well, the set, like I said, it’s pretty tough. I’m asking five, but I’d probably take three. Might go for seven-fifty with the Bruce Lee, the Chuck Norris.”
“Chuck Norris? Yeah, I went up against the motherfucker. Three times.”
“No joke.”
“Kicked his ass all over Taipei.”
Mr. Nostalgia figured he could look it up later if he wanted to break some small, previously unbroken place in his own leaf-buried heart. “Go on,” he said. “It’s yours.”
“Yeah, hey, thanks. That’s really nice. But, uh, no offense, I’m already so, like, overburdened, you know what I’m saying, with stuff out of the past I’m carrying around.”
“Oh, no, sure—”
“I just hate to add to the pile.”
“I totally understand.”
“Got to keep mobile.”
“Of course.”
“Travel light.”
“Right-o.”
“How much,” Luther Stallings said, lowering his voice to a near-whisper. Swallowing, starting over, louder the second time. “How much you get for my card by itself.”
“Oh, uh,” Mr. Nostalgia said, understanding a microsecond or two too late to pull off the lie that he was going to have to tell it. “A hundred. Ninety, a hundred bucks.”
“No shit.”
“Like around ninety.”
“Uh-huh. Tell you what. You give me this one card, Luther Stallings in . . . I’m going to make a wild guess and say it was Enter the Panther.”
“Has to be.” Mr. Nostalgia felt the play begin again, the game that Luther Stallings was trying to run on him and, somehow, on Gibson Goode.
“And I’m a sign it, okay?” Here it came. “Then I’m a trade it back to you for forty-five bucks.”
“Okay,” Mr. Nostalgia said, feeling unaccountably saddened, crushed, by the pachyderm weight of a grief that encompassed him and Stallings and every man plying his lonely way in this hall through the molder and dust of the bins. The world of card shows had always felt like a kind of true fellowship to Mr. Nostalgia, a league of solitary men united in their pursuit of the lost glories of a vanished world. Now that vision struck him as pie in the sky at best and as falsehood at the very worst. The past was irretrievable, the league of lonely men a fiction, the pursuit of the past a doomed attempt to run a hustle on mortality.
“If that’s how you want it,” Mr. Nostalgia said. He was not averse, in principle, to raising the five-dollar value of the Stallings card by a factor of three or four. But as he handed Stallings the gold-filled Cross pen, a bar mitzvah gift from his grandparents that he liked to use when he was getting something signed for his own collection, he wished that he had never come out from behind the table, had let the security guards sweep Luther Stallings past Mr. Nostalgia’s Neighborhood and clear on out of the Kaiser Center.
Over the course of the next half hour, he checked on Stallings a couple of times as the man made his way to the end of the signing line for Gibson Goode, then inched his way to the front one lonely man at a time. In the middle of selling a 1936 Wolverine gum card, “The Fight with the Shark,” for $550 to a dentist from Danville, Mr. Nostalgia happened to glance over and see that Luther Stallings had regained his place at the front. The bodyguard got to his feet looking ready, as promised, to suspend mercy, but after a brownout of his smile, Gibson Goode reached for the bodyguard and gently stiff-armed him, palm to the big man’s chest, and the big man, with a mighty headshake, stepped off. Words passed between Goode and Stallings—quietly, without agitation. To Mr. Nostalgia, reading lips and gestures, sometimes able to pick up a word, a phrase, the conversation seemed to boil down to Gibson Goode saying no repeatedly, with blank politesse, while Luther Stallings tried to come up with new ways of getting Goode to say yes.
There was only so much of this that the people in line behind Luther Stallings were willing to put up with. A rumor of Stallings’s earlier outburst, his near-ejection, began to circulate among them. There was a certain amount of moaning and kvetching. Somebody gave voice to the collective desire for Stallings to Come on!
Stallings ignored it all. “You asked him?” he said, raising his voice as he had done an hour ago, when the blue blazers came to see how he might like to try getting himself tossed. “You asked him about Popcorn?” Talking loudly enough for Mr. Nostalgia and everybody in the neighborhood to hear. “Then I got the man for you. Hooked him. You know I did.”
The expressions of impatience, general down the line, rose to outright jeering. Stallings turned on the crowd, trying to scowl them into silence, snapping at a man in a Hawaiian shirt standing two guys behind him. The man said, “No, fuck you!”
Wading into the signing area, arms windmilling to reach for Stallings in a kind of freestyle of aggression, came the two blue blazers, Shaved Ball and the Soviet. They took brusque hold of Stallings’s arms, faces compressed as if to resist a stink, and jerked his arms back and toward his spine.
Two seconds later, no more, Shaved Ball and the Soviet were lying flat on their backs on the painted cement floor of the hall. Mr. Nostalgia could not have said for certain which of them had taken the kick to the head, which the punch to the abdomen, or if Luther Stallings had even moved very much at all. As they’d gone tumbling backward, the line of autograph seekers had shuddered, rippled. Human turbulence troubled all the surrounding lines, people waiting for Chris Mullin, Shawn Green.
“Bitch,” Stallings said, turning back to Gibson Goode, in his polo shirt, with his sockless loafers. “I want my twenty-five grand!”
Gibson Goode, being Gibson Goode, Mr. Nostalgia supposed, might have had no choice in the matter: He kept, as his legend said he must, his cool. The same quiet, restraining hand against his bodyguard’s chest. Unintimidated. Still smiling. He took out his wallet, opened it, and counted out ten bills, rapid-fire. Slid them across the signing table. Luther Stallings studied them, head down, chest rising and falling. The money lay there, exciting comment in the line, ten duplicate cards from the highly collectable Dead Presidents series. Luther shook his head once. Then he reached down and took the money. Resigned—long since resigned, Mr. Nostalgia thought—to doing things he knew he was going to regret. When he went past Mr. Nostalgia’s table, without so much as a thank-you, he had not managed to get his chin up again.
It was only later, as a voice on the PA was chasing stragglers from the hall and the lights went out over the signing area, that Mr. Nostalgia noticed Luther Stallings had walked off with his gold pen.
On a Saturday night in August 1973, outside the Bit o’ Honey Lounge, a crocodile-green ’70 Toronado sat purring its crocodile purr. Its chrome grin stretched beguiling and wide as the western horizon.
“Define ‘toronado,’” said the man riding shotgun.
Behind his heavy-rimmed glasses, he had sleepy eyes, but he scorned sleep and frowned upon the somnolence of others. In defiance of political fashion, he greased his long hair, and its undulant luster was clear-coat deep. His name was Chandler Bankwell Flowers III. His grandfather, father, and uncles were all morticians, men of sobriety and pomp, and he inhabited a floating yet permanent zone of rebellion against them. Nineteen months aboard the Bon Homme Richard had left Chan Flowers with an amphetamine habit and a tattoo of Tuffy the Ghost on the inside of his left forearm. The shotgun, holstered in a plastic trash bag alongside his right leg, was a pump-action Mossberg 500.
“‘Define’ it?” said the driver, Luther Stallings, not giving the matter his full attention. His eyes, green flecked with gold, kept finding excuses to visit the rearview mirror. “It’s the name of a car.”
“But what does it mean? What is the definition of the word ‘toronado.’ Tell me that.”
“You tell me,” Luther said, more wary now.
“It’s a question.”
“Yeah, but what are you really asking?”
“Toro-nah-do.” Chan strumming the “R” like a string of Ricky Ricardo’s guitar. “You’re driving it. Talking about it. In love with it. Don’t even know what it means.”
Luther massaged the leather cover on the steering wheel as if feeling for a cyst. He took another glance in the mirror, then leaned forward to look past Chan at the Bit o’ Honey’s front door. Where Chan ran to dark and stocky, Luther Stallings was long and light-skinned, with an astronaut chin. He had served one tour in the U.S. Army, most of it spent splintering planks with his feet for a hand-to-hand combat demonstration team. He was dressed as for dancing, tight plaid bell-bottom slacks, a short-sleeved terry pullover. His hair rose freshly stoked into a momentous Afro.
“I believe it is Spanish,” Luther said. “A common expression, can be loosely translated to ‘suck my dick.’”
“Vulgar language,” Chan said, drawing on his rich patrimony of improving maxims. That stiff mortuary grammar, hand-beaten into him by his old man, had always embarrassed him when they were youngsters. In this hoodlum revolutionary phase he was going through, Chan flaunted the properness of his speech, a lily in the lapel of a black leather car coat. “Always the first and last refuge of the man with nothing to say.”
Luther broke free of the mirror to look at Chan. “Toronado,” he said, employing the imperative.
“You don’t know, do you?” Chan said. “Just admit. You are driving around, you paid three thousand dollars for this vehicle, cash, for all you know, a toronado’s, what, might be some kind of brush you use for cleaning a Mexican toilet bowl.”
“I don’t care what it—”
“Juanita, quick, get the toronado, I have diarrhea—”
“It means a bullfighter!” Luther said, rising to the bait despite long experience, despite needing to keep one eye on the rearview and one on the diamond-tufted vinyl door of the lounge, in spite of wanting to be a hundred years and a thousand miles away from this place and this night. “A fighter of bulls.”
“In Spanish,” Chan suggested in a mock-helpful tone.
Luther shrugged. When Chan was nervous, he got bored, and when he got bored, he would start trouble, any kind of trouble, just to break the tedium. But there was more to this line of questioning. Chan was mad at Luther and trying to hide it. Had been trying for days to hold his anger close, like the Spartan boy with the fox in his shirt, let it feast on his intestines rather than cop to hiding it.
“‘Bullfighter,’” Chan said with bitter precision, “is torero.”
He bent down to scoop a handful of twelve-gauge cartridges from a box between his feet and pocketed them at the hip of his tweed blazer. His hair, heavy with pomade, gave off a dismaying odor of flowers left too long in a vase, putrid as envy itself.
“Then uh, ‘tornado,’” Luther tried.
This was such a contemptible suggestion that Chan, who generally never lacked for verbal expressions of contempt, could dignify it only with a smirking shake of his head. Luther was about to point out that it was he, the ignorant one, who’d just laid down thirty-two hundred-dollar bills for the beautiful car with the mysterious name, while Professor Flowers remained a frequent denizen of the buses.
“Chan, you captious motherfucker—” he began, but then stopped.
From another pocket of his tweed blazer, patches on the elbows, Chan drew a pair of sateen gloves, dark purplish blue. Shoddy things, busted at the seams, tricked out with pointy fish fins. Last Halloween, Chan’s little brother, Marcel, out trick-or-treating in a Batman suit, had been hit by a car and killed. Drunken negroes in a Rambler American, boy stepping off the curb with his face too small to really fit the eyeholes of the mask. Chan had some tiny hands, but even so, the gloves were a tight fit, and as he pulled them on, they split some more.
When Luther saw Chan wearing Marcel’s purple crime-fighting gloves, he didn’t know what to say. He threw another glance at the rearview: Telegraph Avenue nocturne, a submarine wobble of light and shadow. Chan reached into the garbage bag, came out with a bat-eared mask stamped from flimsy plastic. He slipped the elastic string over the back of his head, parked the borrowed face at the top of his forehead.
“Okay,” Luther said at last, the second smartest boy in the room every day of his life from 1955 to the day in 1971 that had Chan shipped out, “tell me what it means.”
A girl, at key points also constructed like the car along a beguiling x axis, came out of the Bit o’ Honey Lounge. She wore tight white jeans whose flared legs bellied like sails. Her hair was tied back shiny against her head to emerge aft in a big puffball. Her feet rode the howdahs of swaying platform sandals. As she sauntered past the car, she pulled the tails of her short-sleeved madras shirt from the waist of her jeans, knotting them together under her breasts.
“That’s it,” Luther said. He pressed down on the clutch and readied his hand on the gearshift. “Go if you’re going.”
Chan lowered the mask over his face, and Luther saw that it had been painted top to bottom, matte black paint effacing the line that marked the bottom edge of Batman’s cowl, paint sprayed over the heroic molded chin dimple, the affable molded smile. Behind the mask, Chan’s eyes glistened like organs exposed by two incisions.
“Jungle action,” Chan said behind the baffle of the mask. “Oh, and by the way.” He shouldered open the passenger door and sprang out of the car. The shotgun in the garbage bag hung by his side like a workaday implement. “‘Toronado’ doesn’t mean shit.”
Chan’s right arm snaked into the mouth of the garbage bag as, with his left hand, he grabbed hold of the brass handle of the upholstered front door of the club. He yanked the door open, flinging his right arm out to the side. The garbage bag flew off, revealing the riot gun that Chan had checked out that afternoon from the basement arsenal of a Panther safe house in East Oakland. There was a gust of horns, palaver, and thump, and then the door breathed shut behind Chan. The garbage bag caught on a thermal hook and spun in the air, teased and tugged by unseen hands.
Luther lowered the volume on the in-dash eight-track. City silence, the sigh of a distant bus, the tide of the interstate, Grover Washington, Jr., setting faint, intricate fires up and down the length of “Trouble Man.” Beyond that, nothing. Luther felt his attention beginning not so much to wander as to migrate, seeking opportunity elsewhere. Far down the coast highway, at the wheel of his beautiful green muscle car, he made his way to Los Angeles, capital of the rest of his life. In a helicopter shot, he watched himself rolling across an arcaded bridge with the ocean and the dawn and the last of the night spread out all around him.
He heard the stuttering crack of a number of firearms discharging at once. The door of the Bit o’ Honey banged open again, spraying horns and shouts. Chan came out at a running walk. He got into the car and slammed the door. Blood streaked his left shoe like a bright feather. The shotgun gave off its sweet, hellish smell, electricity and sizzling fatback.
Luther shifted into first gear, standing on the gas pedal, balanced on it, and on the moment like the trumpeter angel you saw from the Warren Freeway, perched at the tip of the Mormon temple, riding the wild spin of the world itself. Everything Detroit could muster in the way of snarling poured from the 450 engine. They parlayed a dizzying string of green lights all the way to Claremont Avenue. It had been a case of love at first sight for Luther and the Toronado two days before, at a used-car lot down on Broadway. Now, as they tore up Telegraph, something slid coiling through his belly, more like a qualm of lust. Chan tossed his brother’s Halloween mask out of the open window, slid the gun under the seat. He peeled away the gloves and started to throw them out, too, but in the end seemed to want to hold on to them, the right one bloody and powder-burned, a while longer. He sat there clutching them in one fist like a duelist looking for someone to slap.
At the Claremont intersection, with no one after them and no sign of the law, Luther eased the car into a red light. Just an ordinary motorist, window down, elbow hooked over the door, grooving on the passage of another summer evening. Somewhere in the vicinity, he had once been told, covered over by time and concrete, lay the founding patch of human business in this corner of the world. Miwok Indians dreaming the dream, living fat as bears, piling up their oyster shells, oblivious to history with its oncoming parade of motherfuckers.
“What happened?” Luther said to Chan, affecting lightness. Only then, in the wake of posing this awful question, did he begin to feel something like dread. Chan just turned up the volume on the music. “Chan, you did it?”
Luther could see Chan struggling to frame the story of what had transpired inside the Bit o’ Honey Lounge in some way that did not infuriate him. One thing Chandler Flowers hated more than being underestimated for his intelligence was giving evidence of any lack thereof. The light turned green. Luther steered, for mysterious reasons and in the absence of counterinstruction from his companion, toward the image in his mind of that westernmost angel blowing that apocalyptic horn. A minute went by which Joe Beck and his guitar organized according to their own notions of time and its fuzztone passage. At last Flowers emitted, as through a tight aperture, four words.
“Shot off his hand.”
“Left or right?”
“The right hand.”
“He a righty or a lefty?”
“Why?”
“Is Popcorn a righty or a lefty?”
“You are suggesting, if Popcorn Hughes turns out to be right-handed, maybe I messed this job up a little less. Because at least now Popcorn only has the hand he doesn’t use.”
Luther reflected as they rumbled up Tunnel Road toward the spot where, invisibly as a decision turning bad, it became the Warren Freeway. “No,” he conceded at last.
After this, they did not speak at all. Luther went on reflecting. At seven in the morning, Monday, he was expected to report to a rented soundstage down in Studio City to film his first scenes for Strutter, a low-budget action movie in whose lead he had recently been cast. He was driving around tonight in the up-front money from that job. There was ten grand yet to come, and after that, anything: sequels, endorsements, television work, the parts that Jim Brown was too busy to take, a costarring role with Burt Reynolds. Now, through some damned interlocking of bravado, loyalty, and the existential heedlessness that had helped him to become the 1972 middleweight karate champion of the world, Luther had knotted his pleasantly indistinct future like a sackful of kittens to the plunging stone of Chan Flowers.
Tonight had gone wrong, but even if Popcorn, as planned, had caught a fatal chestful of lead shot and pumped out his life in a puddle under a table by the stage, the situation would have been no better. True, the seed of Panther legend that Chan Flowers hoped to cultivate as Chan “the Undertaker” Flowers, killer of men—a real one, not some make-believe hard-ass in a low-budget grind-house feature—would have been planted. True, the ongoing mental distress caused to Huey Newton by the continued existence of Popcorn Hughes might have been assuaged. But there still would have been no benefit whatsoever to Luther Stallings. Success of the mission would have been another kind of failure, even deeper shit than Luther was in now.
Luther had no politics, no particular feelings toward drug dealers like Popcorn or toward the Black Panthers who had targeted them. He did not care who controlled the city of Oakland or its ghetto streets. He had seen Huey Newton once in his life, black leather jacket, easy smile, talking some shit about disalienation at a house party in the Berkeley flatlands, and had marked him right away as just another stylist of gangster self-love. Luther Stallings, future star of blaxploitation and beyond, had no call to be here, no interest in the outcome either way. Chan asked him to drive, so Luther drove. Now, instead of a murder in his rearview mirror, there was the bloody trail of a fuckup. Meanwhile, the image of the golden angel of the Mormons soloing atop his spire worked its strange allure on Luther’s imagination.
“Take a left,” Chan said as they rolled off the freeway at the Lincoln Avenue exit.
Luther was about to protest that a left turn would lead them away from the temple when he realized that he had no real reason to want to go to that place. The vague longing to bear some kind of witness to the glory of the angel Moroni winked out inside him, crumbled like ash. Luther aimed the Toronado up Joaquin Miller Road.
“Where we going?” he said.
“I need to think,” said the smartest boy in the room. He stared out at the night that streamed like a downpour across the windshield. Then, “Shut up.”
“I didn’t say nothing,” Luther said, though he most definitely had been tossing around some combination of words along the lines of Ain’t it a little late for that now?
“Yeah, I was in that Dogpile one time,” Moby was saying. “Down in L.A.?”
Moby was one of the noontime regulars. He was a lawyer, none too unusual a career path for a three-hundred-dollar-a-month abuser of polyvinyl chloride, except that Moby’s clients were all cetaceans. His real name was Mike Oberstein. He was notably—given the moniker—white and size 2XL. Wore his longish hair parted down the center and slicked back over his ears in twin flukes. Moby worked for a foundation out of an office in the same building as Archy’s wife, bringing action against SeaWorld on behalf of Shamu’s brother-in-law, suing the navy for making humpbacks go deaf. He was a passionate and free-spending accruer of fifties and sixties jazz sides.
“It was pretty tight,” Moby added.
“Was it?” Nat said. Giving a bottle to Rolando English, who sat fastened safely into an infant carrier, propped up on the counter by the cash register. Nat kept his gaze fixed on the baby so that, Archy understood, he would not have to kill Mike Oberstein with gamma rays shot out of his eyeballs. “Was it bangin?”
Archy knew—could not help knowing all the man’s rants and treatises on the subject—how it bothered Nat that Moby tried so hard (to be honest, probably wasn’t even trying anymore) to sound like he was from the ’hood, from round the way, as Moby would have put it, even though he was a sweet-natured white guy from Indiana, someplace.
“It was straight-up bangin,” Moby said, so well armored in his sweetness and his imaginary Super Fly fur coat that he was impervious if not oblivious to the eyeball lightning Nat was always forking in his direction. “No joke. Found me this crazy side called, Nat, get this, Jimmy Smith Live in Israel. Thought it was a myth. I been looking for that for, like, years.”
Nat nodded, watching the formula steadily disappear from the bottle, while in his imagination, as Archy could infer by the knot of Nat’s shoulders, he took a pristine pressing of Jimmy Smith Live in Israel (Isradisc, 1973) out of its sleeve and snapped it over his knee. Twice, into quarters. Then handed it back to Moby without a word, not even needing to say, Man, fuck Dogpile. And the motherfucking Dogpile blimp.
“Part I don’t understand, all due respect, is why y’all act like it some kind of invasion,” said the King of Bling. “Dogpile coming into this neighborhood.”
Garnet Singletary, Baby Rolando’s grandfather, was sitting beside Moby at the glass display counter that ran nearly half the length of the south wall of the store, at the end farthest from the window, in order to preserve a certain distance between himself and the parrot. Fifty-Eight, the African grey, sat perched on the shoulder of Cochise Jones, who occupied his usual stool tucked into the corner by the window, Mr. Jones with that inveterate hunch to his spine from fifty years conducting experiments at the keyboard of a Hammond B-3. Decades of avian companionship had raised a fuzz of claw marks at the shoulders of Mr. Jones’s green leisure suit, tussocks on the padded polyester lawn. Restless as a radio telescope, the parrot’s head with its staring eye plowed the universe for invisible signs and messages. Every so often Fifty-Eight, whose public utterances tended to be musical, would counterfeit the steely vibrato of his owner’s B-3, break out into a riff, a stray middle eight, the bird programming its musical selections with an apparent randomness in which Singletary, who feared and admired the bird, claimed to find evidence of calculation and ironical intent.
“Gibson Goode was born here,” Singletary continued when no explanation was forthcoming from either partner.
Singletary was in his mid-fifties but looked thirty. Hair sprang carefully from his head in micro-dreads no thicker than his grandson’s fingers. His smile easy and warm, his eyes as cold as pennies at the bottom of a well. Like Fifty-Eight’s, those eyes missed nothing, cloaking in a universal fog of conversation the ceaseless void of his surveillance. Archy wondered if the man’s unease around the bird arose from recognition of a rival or a peer.
Singletary said, “Man grew up down in L.A., but his granny still living over in Rumford Plaza. Y’all was operating in Atlanta, New York, and this dude showed up in his great big black blimp, I might understand how you could feel some resentfulness. But Gibson Goode is a semi-local product. Like”—the eyes teaming up with the smile to give notice that he was about to mess with Nat—“if you was to put you and Archy together. Half local, half out of town.”
“Half and half,” Nat said, humming to himself, pouring the formula into Rolando English. The boy definitely had an appetite; they had run through the bottles of Good Start by eleven this morning and were working on a can of Enfamil powder mixed with water at Brokeland’s bathroom sink, the Enfamil provided by S. S. Mirchandani from a deep, remote, and spidery shelf over at Temescal Liquor, which he owned. The infant carrier came courtesy of the King of Bling.
“Look at him go.” Cochise Jones watched the baby formula work its way like mercury in a falling thermometer down the graduations. Intent, pleased, doubtful, as if he had money riding on the outcome. He winked at Archy. Mr. and the late Mrs. Jones never had children of their own. “Boy making me thirsty.”
“Yes, I am feeling quite thirsty myself,” said Mr. Mirchandani, and Archy felt a flutter of anticipatory dread. “You know, Nat, you really should put in an espresso machine or other form of beverage service.”
Archy plunged himself deeper into the mysteries of crate number 8. The theoretical espresso machine was a sore subject, the most recent of many arguments between the co-owners of Brokeland having begun over the question of whether, as Archy had been hinting with increasing heavy-handedness for a couple of years, the time had come to offer more at the counter than unlimited supplies of music and bullshit on tap. Because the truth was, they were already fucked, with or without Gibson Goode and his Dogpile empire. They were behind on the rent to Singletary. Their inventory was dwindling as their ability to purchase the better collections ran afoul of cash flow problems. Probably if you looked at the matter coolly and rationally, an activity in which neither partner could be said to excel, they were on their last legs. So many of the other used-record kings of the East Bay had already gone under, hung it up, or turned themselves into Internet-only operations, closing their doors, letting the taps of bullshit go dry. Brokeland Records was nearly the last of its kind, Ishi, Chingachgook, Martha the passenger pigeon.
Every time Archy broached the subject of trying some new angle, branching out, beefing up their website, even, yes, selling coffee drinks and pastries and chai, he ran into heavy resistance from Nat. Not just resistance; the man would shut down the conversation, shut himself down, with that infuriating, self-righteous Abraham the Patriarch way he had sometimes, acting as if he and Archy were not a couple of secondary-market retailers trying to stay afloat but guardians of some ancient greatness that must never be tainted or altered. When really (like any religion, Archy supposed), it was a compound of OCD and existential panic, a displaced fear of change. Reroutings of familiar traffic patterns, new watermarks and doodads on the national currency, revised rules for the bundling of recyclables, such things were anathema to Nat Jaffe. Fresh starts, clean slates, reboots: anathema. He stood against them like an island in the flow, a snag of branches.
“You want a fucking macchiato?” he had said a couple of days earlier, throwing a record album at Archy, nothing too valuable, just a copy of Stan Getz and J. J. Johnson at the Opera House (Verve, 1957), Getz sitting in with Johnson, Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, and Connie Kay. “Here’s your fucking macchiato!”
Meaning, sweet light froth of a white guy on top of a dense dark bottom of black. The shot had gone wide, but damn, a flying record, the thing could have sliced Archy’s head off. Archy found himself annoyed just thinking about it now. It annoyed him as well that Mr. Mirchandani had mentioned the espresso machine, even though he knew that Mr. Mirchandani was only trying to help out, take up the cause, join the chorus of those who did not want to see Brokeland die. There was no mistaking the fact that Nat was on high simmer today, perhaps two bubbles away from a full-on roll.
“Gentlemen.”
It was a mild voice, the voice of a man trained to extol the highest in men and women while seeing them at their lowest. Trained to seemliness, to keeping itself soft and low under the pall of remembrance and grief that forever hung over Flowers & Sons. At the sound of that funereal voice, its head cocked in Singletary’s direction, the African grey parrot began to give out, note-perfect, Cochise Jones’s reading of the old Mahalia Jackson spiritual “Trouble of the World,” found on Mr. Jones’s only album as a bandleader, Redbonin’ (CTI, 1973).
“Look out,” Mr. Jones said, but as usual, Fifty-Eight was way ahead of him.
In the shade of a wide-brimmed black hat whose vibe wavered between crime boss and Henry Fonda in Once upon a Time in the West, pin-striped gray-on-charcoal three-piece, black wing tips shined till they shed a perceptible halo, Chan Flowers came into the store. Slid himself through the front door, ineluctable as a final notice from the county. Straight-backed, barrel-chested, bowlegged. A model of probity, a steady hand to reassure the grieving, a sober man—a grave man—solid as the pillar of a tomb. A good dose of gangster to the hat to let you know the councilman played his politics old-school, with a shovel in the dark of the moon. Plus that touch of Tombstone, of Gothic western undertaker, like maybe sometimes when the moon was full and Flowers & Sons stood empty and dark but for the vigil lights, Chan Flowers might up and straddle a coffin, ride it like a bronco.
“Looks like we have ourselves the hard core here today,” he said, quickly tallying the faces at the counter before settling on Archy, a question in his eyes, something he wanted to know. “Wait out here,” he told his nephews.
The two Flowers nephews stayed out on the sidewalk. Like all of Mr. Flowers’s younger crop of nephews, they seemed not to be wearing their ill-fitting black suits so much as to be squatting inside them until some less embarrassing habitation came along. They had the solemn faces of practical jokers waiting to spring a gag. One of them took out a book of Japanese math puzzles and started working them with a stub of pencil.
“Mr. Jones!” Flowers said, starting in, with that politician resolve, to fill the boxes of this human sudoku.
“Your Honor,” said Cochise Jones.
Flowers reached for Mr. Jones’s octave-and-a-half hand, its nails like chips of piano ivory.
“The honor is indeed mine,” Flowers said, “as always, to bask in the reflected luster of the legacy you represent. Inventor of the musical styling known as Brokeland Creole.” Mr. Jones was also, as far as Archy knew, the first person to use the term Brokeland to describe this neighborhood, the ragged fault where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted. “Hello, Fifty-Eight.”
There was a silence. The bird regarded Flowers.
“Say hello,” Mr. Jones said.
“Say hello, you little jive-ass motherfucker,” Fifty-Eight said.
The voice was that of Cochise Jones, the unmistakable smoker’s croak, but way more irritable than Archy had ever heard Mr. Jones become. Everybody laughed except Chan Flowers. His eyes kept aloof from the smile on his lips.
“Keep it up,” Flowers told Fifty-Eight. “You know I have a deluxe cherrywood pet casket sitting on my stockroom shelf right now, waiting to house your remains.”
This was true; Cochise Jones had made funeral arrangements of Egyptian exactitude for himself and his partner in solitude.
“Brother Singletary.” Flowers pointed a slender finger. “The King of Bling, how are you, sir?”
“Councilman,” Singletary said, looking at Flowers the same way he looked at Fifty-Eight, with a mix of curiosity and distaste, as if touching his tongue to something bitter at the corner of his mouth.
The two of them, Singletary and Flowers, had beefed often and openly over the years, always in a civilized way. Lawsuits, real estate, a long cold war fought against a backdrop of redevelopment money using proxies and attorneys. West Oakland rumor traced the source of beef to the late 1970s, tendering the story that Singletary had married his wife out from under a preexisting condition of Chan Flowers. Rumor further added the dubious yet somehow creditable information that her reason for choosing Singletary over Flowers came down to an ineradicable odor of putrefaction on the undertaker’s hands. “I’m all right, ’less you here to tell me otherwise.”
“Now, you know,” Flowers said, half addressing the room, the voice modulated, genial, but not, in spite of the rhetoric, orotund. Cool and dispassionate, as ready to express disappointment as flattery. “Back in the Bible, only a king could even wear the bling. They did not call it that, of course, did they, Mr. Oberstein? King Solomon, in his book of Ecclesiastes, do you know the vernacular he employed to allude to that which we now style ‘bling’?”
Moby guessed, “Frankincense and myrrh?”
“He called it vanity,” said the King of Bling. “And I got no argument against that.”
“Well, that’s fine, because I did not come in here looking for an argument,” Flowers said. “Mr. S. S. Mirchandani, a latecomer to these shores, but wasting no time.”
“Councilman Flowers.”
“Good for you, sir. And Mr. Oberstein . . .”
Flowers frowned at the whale attorney, plainly searching for the kind of fitting summary he liked to bestow on people, an epitaph for every headstone.
“‘Keepin it real,’” Nat suggested.
“No doubt,” said Moby, beaming. “True dat.”
“Mr. Jaffe,” Flowers concluded. He pressed his lips very thin.
“Councilman.”
A silence followed, deeper and more awkward than it might have been because Archy had forgotten to turn over the record on the turntable. It was rare, very rare, to see Flowers at a loss for words. Was there guilt on his conscience over changing his mind about the Dogpile deal? Had he come in, this lunchtime, manned up to break the bad news himself? Or was he so caught up in running his own big-time playbook, in setting up his line to defend against the scramble, that he’d forgotten he might run into some resistance at the front counter of Brokeland?
“Archy Stallings,” Flowers said, and Archy, confused, knowing he probably should play it cold and hostile with Chan Flowers but in the lifelong habit of looking up to the man, gave himself up to a dap and a bro hug with the councilman.
“Your dad around?” Flowers said, not quite whispering but nearly so.
Archy drew back, but before he could do anything more than squint and look puzzled, Flowers had his answer and was moving on.
“I seem to remember,” he said, letting go of Archy, “somebody telling me you had left a message for me, Mr. Jaffe. At my office, not very long ago. Thought I would stop in and inquire as to what it might have been regarding.”
“Probably did,” Nat said, still without looking up. At times his protean hum took the form of an earful poured into the councilman’s office answering machine or, when possible, directly into the ear of one of his nephews, assistants, office managers, press secretaries, Nat complaining about this, that, or the other thing, trash pickup, panhandlers, somebody going around doing stickups in broad daylight. “Huh.” He feigned an effort to remember the reason for his most recent call, feigned giving up. “Can’t help you.”
“Huh,” the councilman repeated, and there was another silence. Awkward turtle, Julie Jaffe would have declared if he had been present, making a turtle out of his stacked hands, paddling with his thumbs.
“Now, hold on! Look here!” Flowers noted the baby, who had fallen asleep on the bottle. His eyes went to Archy with unfeigned warmth but flawed mathematics. “Is that the little Stallings?”
Flowers reached out his hand for a standard shake, and Archy took it with a sense of dread, as if this really were his baby and all his impotencies and unfitnesses would stand revealed.
“I know it might seem impossible,” said Flowers, holding on to Archy’s hand, still working the room, “but I remember when you were that size.” Everybody laughed dutifully but sincerely at the idea of Archy’s ever having been so small. “Child looks just like you, too.”
“Oh, no,” Archy said. “No, that is Aisha English’s baby. Rolando. Mr. Singletary’s grandson. My wife and I got like a month to go. Nah, I’m just babysitting.”
“Archy is practicing,” Mr. Mirchandani said.
“It is never too early to start,” Flowers said. Though well provided with nephews and nieces, little shorties all the way up to grown men who had played football with Archy in high school, Flowers was a bachelor and, like Mr. Jones, had no children of his own. “It can definitely sneak up on a man.”
“Maybe I should start practicing being dead,” Nat said too loudly, though whether the excess volume was deliberate or involuntary, Archy could not have said. Before any of them had the chance to fully ponder the import of this remark, Nat added, “Oh, yeah. I do remember why I called, Councilman. It was to ask you to come on by and slit my throat.”
Flowers turned, taken mildly aback. Smiled, shook his head. “Brother Nat, I will never tire of your sparkling repartee,” he said. “What a treat it is.”
“Also, I have that Sun Ra you were looking for,” Nat said, banking the anger, using his smile like a valve to feed it nourishing jets of air. “I don’t know, maybe you want to wait and pick it up at that new Dogpile store of yours. I hear their used-wax department is going to be straight-up bangin.”
“Nat,” Archy said.
“Duly noted,” Nat replied without missing a beat. “Warn me again in twenty seconds, okay?”
“I can certainly understand your distress at the possibility of the level of competition you are going to be facing, Brother Nat,” Flowers said with perfect sympathy. “But come on, man. Show some faith in your partner and yourself! What’s with the defeatist attitude? Maybe you want to consider the possibility your anxiety might be premature.”
“I have never actually experienced anxiety that turned out to be premature,” Nat said, always happy to keep punching in the clinch. “It usually shows up right on time, in my experience.”
“Just this once, then,” Flowers suggested. Itching to get out, tugging at the lapels of his jacket. “Premature.”
“Are you saying that Gibson Goode, the fifth richest— What is it?” Nat turned with an audible creak of his neck bones to Garnet Singletary, who drew back, tight smile noncommittal; in no way, shape, or form interested, not being a fool, in openly taking up against his favorite enemy from way back in the day. “Fifth—?”
“I believe I read in Black Enterprise that he is currently the fifth most richest African-American,” Singletary said carefully. “I didn’t see my own name anywheres on the list.”
Again all the men in the store laughed, happy to let Singletary break up the tension, all the same feeling sympathy for Nat, Archy was certain. The place was part of their lives, including the life of Chan Flowers, who had for years come every week to get his hair cut by Eddie Spencer and afterward never lost the habit of stopping by.
“Are you saying, Councilman, that Gibson Goode does not have an open field ahead of him, thanks to you, to start putting in this Thang two blocks down from here, thus effectively cutting not only my throat but the throat of this great big ex-baby of whom you are so very fond? Because what we heard, and I believe we even heard it from your lips, was that Mr. Goode was having serious trouble with some of your friends on the zoning commission, and that because of that, in this climate, was the term I believe you employed, the banks were giving him a hard time.”
“If I told you that,” Flowers said, “I was only reporting what I knew to be the case.”
“So what changed? Or let me rephrase that, how much change did it take?”
“Nat, here’s that warning,” Archy said.
“How much cheese. Right, Moby?”
“I— What am I agreeing to?” Moby said.
“Jesus, Nat,” Archy said.
“You had better watch what you say, Mr. Jaffe,” Flowers suggested. He was looking at Archy when he said it. Not quite in appeal, not quite making some kind of threat. Inquiry widening his eyes when he looked at Archy, something that he would have liked to know. Archy wondered if this question Flowers did not feel comfortable asking in front of a crowd, and not Nat’s call about a Sun Ra record, lay behind today’s visit from the councilman.
“I checked out Dogpile,” Nat said. He smiled at Moby. “Last summer Archy and I went down to play that wedding in Fox Hills. It was, truly, extremely bangin. They had a sweet Nubian Lady, Roy Meriwether. The pricing was more than competitive. What’s more, I got into a very interesting discussion, forty, forty-five minutes, with the manager of the used-vinyl department. Young guy, college guy, black, good-looking, very passionate about Ornette Coleman. Making a case that Coleman basically rediscovered the original tone of the New Orleans cornet players, basically thought his way back to it like Einstein thinking about passing trains. And that closed the circuit. The story ended. That was the end of jazz as we know it. Kind of an ouroboros thing, the snake swallowing its own tail. I don’t know if I completely agree, but it was an interesting argument. Oh, I also picked up a really decent Out There.”
“I don’t go in for the hyperbole the way my partner does, Councilman,” Archy said. “You know that. And I apologize on his behalf for the disrespect, which you won’t hear any more of, or I’m going to kick his ass from here to the Carquinez Bridge. Right, Nat? But look here, if you come through for Gibson Goode, after all this time you been such a good customer to us, not to mention, you know, blessing us with the example of your coming in here and meeting some of your music needs from time to time, then with respect, excuse me, but you really did turn your back on us. Seems like.”
Flowers’s gaze slid over to the sleeping baby. He seemed to be seeing little Archy himself lying there, hearing some wah-wah echo of 1968.
“I sincerely hope that is not true,” he said, returning to the present. “I would miss this place, I truly, truly would. But a Dogpile Thang is going to be a real boon to the community.”
“The community.”
Ho, shit, Archy thought.
“The community!” Nat repeated.
“Be cool, Nat,” Archy said.
“Oh, sure, I’ll be cool. I’ll be really fucking cool when I’m down the street selling my blood plasma!”
“Nat . . .”
Having to sell his blood plasma was always Nat’s worst-case scenario, the example he gave to his son, his wife, his partner, anyone he needed to persuade of the dire expedients and financial ruin that loomed before him.
“You know, Councilman, I don’t know why, but I was under the impression that this place right . . . here”—and Nat pounded the counter, Right! Here!—“was a community! But I guess I was wrong.”
Nat reached under the counter and pulled out a copy of The Soul Vibrations of Man (Saturn Research, 1976) and hurled it across the room. You could hear it crack, a snapping like wood in a fire. Along with fretting about having recourse to selling his blood plasma, Nat liked to throw record albums, usually the slag. Alas, this one was rare and valuable.
“You can ask Gibson Goode and the community to find you a sealed original mono copy of The Soul Vibrations of Man. Because we’re closing. Right now. As of this moment. Why delay it? Why draw out the suffering? We are closing this store today. You can all leave, thank you very much for your support all these years. Goodbye, gentlemen.”
Flowers started to say something, to remonstrate with Nat, reproach him for the destruction of that beautiful disk. Thought better of it. Fixed those searching peepers on Archy one last time, seeming to see some kind of answer in Archy’s blankness.
“Well, then.” Flowers touched his fingers to the brim of his hat, bowed to the men at the counter. He walked out of the store, and the nephews took up their places on either side of him. “Enjoy your day. Mr. Jones, Mr. Singletary.”
“Gentlemen, goodbye,” Nat said.
The customers turned, looking dazed, Mr. Mirchandani and Moby appealing to Archy. Archy shrugged. “Sorry, fellas,” he said.
Archy picked up Rolando, snoozing in his caddy, and made a formal transfer of custody to the grandfather, England turning over Hong Kong, mournful trumpets of farewell, a weird ache in Archy’s heart like the forerunner or possibly the distant memory of tears. The men slipped from their stools and trooped out.
Mr. Jones stopped in the doorway, unhunched himself from the perpetual ghostly keyboard, and turned back. He shot a look at Nat in which sympathy and scorn contended. Fished his pipe and tobacco out of his hip pocket. Then, gesturing with the stem of the pipe toward Rolando as the King carried out the baby, Mr. Jones nodded to Archy. “You keep on practicing, Turtle,” he said. “You going to get it.”
“I hope I do, Mr. Jones.”
“You got the good heart. Underneath all the other stuff. Good heart is eighty-five percent of everything in life.”
Tears ran burning along the gutters of Archy’s eyes. Generally, he tried, following the example of Marcus Aurelius, to avoid self-pity, but Archy had not experienced a great deal of appreciation in his life for his good qualities, for his potential as a man. His mother had died when he was young, his father had bounced early on. The aunts who raised him died with their ignorance of his good qualities perfectly preserved. His wife, though no doubt she loved him, was the latest in a long line of experts and connoisseurs, reaching back through the army and high school to his aunties, to underrate the rarity and condition of Archy’s soul. Only Mr. Jones had always stopped to drop a needle in the long inward spiraling groove that encoded Archy, and listen to the vibrations. Even in the days when Mr. Jones’s wife was alive and he was sought after in the clubs and recording studios, halfway famous, he always seemed to have time for Turtle Stallings.
“Thanks, Mr. Jones,” Archy said.
“What is the other fifteen percent?” Nat said. “Just out of curiosity?”
“Politeness,” Mr. Jones said without hesitation. “And keeping a level head.”
Nat blushed and failed to meet Mr. Jones’s watery gaze.
“We got that gig tomorrow,” Mr. Jones said. “I’m a need my Leslie, boy.”
“And you will have it,” Archy said.
“Said it would be ready Sunday.”
“It will be.”
After the parrot had piloted Mr. Jones out of the store, Nat shut the door behind them. He bolted it, turned the sign so that it read CLOSED. “The ‘community,’” he muttered. He stood with his hand on the bolt, humming. Then he slid it back, pulled the door open, and ran out onto the sidewalk, shouting in the direction that Councilman Flowers had taken: “The community hasn’t made a decent record since 1989!”
Nat came back in—stomped, really—and repeated the business with the deadbolt. He went back around the counter and stood, breathing in and out, making an effort to calm himself, the pounding of his heart visible in his temples. He stopped in front of Archy and fixed him with a level stare.
“See, Archy, this is why I hate everyone and the world,” he said, as if there were some connection between these words and what had just happened, some sequence of events like a theory of Ornette Coleman and the lost horn men of Storyville. “This is why I hate my sad-ass little life.”
He snatched his hat from the hook, pulled it down tight over his head, and went out. Archy tried and failed to decide whether to take seriously any, some portion, or none of the things that Nat had said. He reached for the Penguin Meditations stashed at the ready in his hip pocket, but he knew without consulting it what Marcus was unlikely to suggest: the kind of solace a man could find in the heat and spice of Ethiopia, a rank sweet sauce on the fingertips.
Gwen Shanks was headed north on Telegraph Avenue, on her way to work a home birth in the Berkeley hills, when she found herself blown off course by an unbearable craving into the cumin-scented gloom of the Queen of Sheba. Steeled by a lifetime of training in the arts of repression, like Spock battling the septenary mating madness of the pon farr, Gwen had resisted the urges and surges of estrogen and progesterone for each of the first thirty-four weeks of her pregnancy, denying all cravings, battened down tight against hormonal gusts. In her patients, Gwen uniformly and with tenderness indulged the rages, transports, and panics, the crying jags and cupcake benders, but she was not in the habit of indulging herself. Though she was a midwife by profession, her life’s work was self-control. Two weeks earlier, however, without explanation, her husband had dropped by the offices of Berkeley Birth Partners bearing, satanically, a fateful Styrofoam cup filled with something called suff. Since that day Gwen had been plagued by an almost daily hankering for this chilled infusion of sesame seeds, its flavor bittersweet as regret. A black belt in Wing Chun–style kung fu, Gwen had spent the morning in the dojo of the Bruce Lee Institute, working out for over two hours with her master, Irene Jew. Making a conscious effort not only to sharpen her practical edge against the loss of focus, strength, and quickness that pregnancy had brought but, more important, to regain some measure of discipline over herself. Wasted time. Parking in a yellow zone, risking lateness, Gwen abandoned herself to her thirst.
She was standing by the cash register, waiting for her change, and had taken her first painful and blessed sip when she noticed her darling husband sitting in a booth halfway back along the south wall, behind a tan-and-brown curtain of beaded strands that managed, in its sparsity, to leave nothing and everything to the imagination. Archy Stallings, dog of dogs, his thick Mingus fingers all up in a sticky compound of injera and the business of a long-headed rust-brown young bitch with the wondrous huge eyes of some nocturnal mammal. Elsabet Getachew, the Queen of Sheba, coiled on her side of the table like a soft and sinister intention. Across from her, Archy took off his horn-rims, polished their lenses with a soft cloth. That was all she saw; though it did not quite qualify as innocent, it was, in all fairness, not much. Afterward she could not be sure how or why she conceived the idea of marching back to the curtained booth and dumping a nice cold Styrofoam cupful of frothy regret onto her darling husband’s head. “Idea” was not even the right word; she seemed at that instant to define herself as the woman who was going to do that thing, to be the sea in which that action was the one and only fish.
Throughout her pregnancy, attacks of fatigue had alternated with bouts of bodily exaltation, but as she marched, rolling with the weight of the baby well distributed along the engineering of her bones, over to the fifth booth from the back, Gwen felt positively indomitable. She flung aside the beaded strands with a left hand that could splinter pine planks and reduce cinder block to gray dust. Strings snapped. Hundreds of brown and tan beads rattled down, darting and pinging and scattering in whorls, mapping, like particles in a cloud chamber, the flow of qigong from her black-belt hand.
In fact, Gwen disbelieved in qi and in 97 percent of the claims that people in the kung fu world made about it, those stories of people who could lift Acuras and avert bullets and bust the heads of mighty armies by virtue of their ability to control the magic flow. Ninety-seven percent was more or less the degree to which Gwen disbelieved in everything that people represented, attested to, or tried to put over on you. And despite midwives’ latter-day reputation as a bunch of New Age witches, with their crystals and their alpha-state gong CDs and their tinctures of black and blue cohosh root, most midwives were skeptical by training, Gwen more skeptical than most. Nonetheless, she felt something coursing through her and around her, mapped by the flying beads. She glowered down at the bastard who had somehow managed to conceal his bulk behind her 3 percent blind spot and sneak into her life.
As soon as Gwen appeared alongside the booth, Archy seemed to cotton all at once on to the whole scenario—wife, discovery, beads, size-large suff—with the instantaneous understanding common to unfaithful men. In the space of that instant, his eyes widened, apologizing, protesting, as wooden beads rained around him and eighteen ounces of ice-cold Ethiopian beverage were upended onto his head.
“Damn,” he said as the milk-white stuff streamed down his glasses and alongside his nose into his collar. He did not lose his temper, raise his voice, jump out of the way, or even shake himself like the dog he was. He just sat there dripping, suffering the punishment, as if doing so were a form of uxorious indulgence, the price that must be paid for having a wife who was not merely pregnant but, apparently, out of her mind. “I was only talking to the girl.”
“Excuse me,” said Elsabet Getachew with her husky accent, attempting with head lowered to slide out of the booth. Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands. She smelled violently of the kitchen, of nuts and oils and crushed handfuls of orange spice. Gwen interposed herself between the woman and freedom, glad to be huge and impassable. She waited until the young woman looked up, daring her to meet the wifely gaze: a wall, a dam, the arm of a government. The girl looked up. In those ibex eyes, Gwen saw guilt and mockery; but above all: contempt.
All at once the lights came on inside of Gwen. She looked down at her belly, at her pilled and distended stretch top, at the saggy knees of her CP Shades pants, at the ragged black espadrilles into which she stuffed her feet. And under all that! the preposterous bra, the geriatric panties!
“No excuse for you,” Gwen said feebly, and stepped aside.
Elsabet Getachew slipped past her and disappeared through another fringe of beads into the kitchen. Apart from the happy couple, there were now nine other human beings in the dining room, and all of them appeared to be enjoying the ongoing spectacle of Gwen.
“So, what?” Archy wanted to know. “Now I’m not allowed to interact with my fellow neighborhood merchants? Maintain the dialogue? How we supposed to keep a lid on crime, we don’t exchange tips and information, tell me that?”
“‘Tips and information,’” she quoted. “Uh-huh. I see.”
“Always have to assume the worst-case scenario.” He grabbed up some napkins and tenderly patted his pate, dabbed at his streaming cheeks. He shook his head.
“I just go with the odds, Archy,” Gwen said. “I’m looking at the numbers.”
Yes, she conceded as he followed her out the front door of the restaurant and down Telegraph to her black 1999 BMW convertible, Archy and Elsabet had appeared to be just talking, and if they were just talking, then it was completely and without question unreasonable for her to have bugged out on him the way she had. Given the innocence of the observed encounter, it was wrong to have gone and drenched his beautiful pumpkin sweater and tweeds in a soft drink from the Horn of Africa. Yes, she knew perfectly well that Archy ate lunch at Queen of Sheba all the time. She knew that Elsabet Getachew worked at the restaurant and that she was the niece of the owner, who was a nice guy. And no, she did not expect him to be rude to a friend and fellow member of the Temescal Merchants Association.
“It’s the indignity of it,” she heard herself telling him, invoking a key concept of her mother’s code of morality with such stone likeness that it chilled her, spiders walked on the back of her neck, you might as well swing the camera around and show Rod Serling standing there behind a potted banana tree in an eerie cloud of cigarette smoke.
She got right up in his face so she could make her speech without raising her voice.“I have been doing this for thirty-six weeks,” she began. “I am tired, I am large, I am hormonal. And I am hot. I am so hot and so large, I have to wear a culotte slip to keep my thighs from rubbing together when I walk. So, I admit, yes, I lost it. Maybe I ought not have poured my drink on your head. But I don’t know”—was this the prompting of estrogen or logic? could she tell the difference anymore?—“maybe I ought. Because even if you are ‘just talking’ to some astonishingly beautiful girl, Archy, it’s humiliating. I’m sick of it. I have to walk around my city, the place where I live, and wonder if next time I stop in, wherever, I don’t know, the drugstore to pick up a jar of Tucks medicated pads, I’m going to see my husband macking on the pharmacist.” This was not a hypothetical example. “It’s embarrassing. I have more pride than that.” She placed a hand against her sternum then, feeling the next words coming like a mighty belch. She lowered her voice to a whisper, as if being obliged to invoke the memory of her immensely dignified mother, only the second female African-American graduate of Harvard Medical School, were the greatest humiliation of all. “I have too much self-respect.”
“Way too much,” Archy agreed.
“Swear to me, Archy,” she said. “Raise your right hand and swear to me, on the soul of your mother, you aren’t getting up to anything with that girl, Chewbacca or whatever her name is.”
“I swear,” Archy said, but there was appended no oath that might require the damnation of his late mother. No raised hand.
“Raise it up,” Gwen said.
Archy lifted his right hand, a flag of surrender.
“Swear. On the soul of your mother, who raised you to be a better man than that.”
Before forming the words required, Archy hesitated, and in that half-second he was lost. All Gwen’s protestations of dignity and invocations of self-respect were scattered like deck chairs on the promenade of a heaving ship. She glanced up and down the street, casing it for witnesses, then plunged her hand down into the front of his pants. The upper serif of his belt buckle, a gold Ferragamo F, scraped her wrist. Her fingers found the heavy coil of hose cupped in the bag of his boxers. Her fingertips were briefly snagged by a film of bodily adhesive as weak as the glue on a Post-it. She tugged her sticky fingers loose, brought them to her nose, and took a quick but practiced sniff. Market stalls, smoking braziers, panniers of lentils. All the spice and stink of Ethiopia: turmeric, scorched butter, the salt of the Red Sea.
“Motherfucker,” Gwen said, turning on itself, like a cell going cancerous, the oath that Archy would not swear. It was only the third time in her life that she had used the word, and the first time without quotation marks demurely implied, and after it there was nothing more to say. Gwen went around to the driver’s side of the car, ignoring a parking citation in an acid-green envelope that had been poked, during her absence, under her left wiper. She guided herself into the space between seat and steering wheel. Then she and her battered dignity drove off, with the parking ticket flapping against the windshield and with the want of a cup of suff—for one more caramel sip of which she just then would have endured any affront to her self-esteem or stain upon her pride—doomed to burn on inside her, unassuaged, for many days.
The house on Stonewall Road was one of those California canyon houses put up in the late sixties with a Jet Propulsion Laboratory arrogance toward gravity, a set of angles on skinny poles engineered out into the green void. From the street, all you could see of it was its mailbox and carport, with the house concealed downslope as if it planned to spring an ambush on a passerby. In the middle of the driveway, over an eternal attendant puddle of leaking motor oil, sat Aviva Roth-Jaffe’s car, a Volvo station wagon whose age could be reckoned in decades. It had gold-on-blue vanity plates that read HEK8. At some point it had been condemned by a hundred-dollar Earl Scheib paint job to approximate the color of a squirt of fluoride Crest.
Gwen leaned against the trunk of her car, took a long slow breath. Shook off as much of the memory of the past half hour as would shake loose, and tamped down everything else. She had work to do, and when this job was over, her husband would still be there, and he would still be a dog, and the smell of another woman’s pussy would still be on him. She hoisted her black gym bag over her shoulder—the bag held clean bed linens, gloves, meds and syringes, forceps, a portable Doppler—and hefted it and herself down the twisting stairway from the street to the front door. The slope behind her was overgrown with morning glory. Tendrils of jasmine fingered the wooden stairs. A huge trumpet vine with its disappointed yellow mouths threatened to engulf the wooden house clear to the peak of the steep shed roof. The air on Stonewall Road smelled of cedar bark, eucalyptus, fir logs burning in a woodstove. From the lowest limb of a Meyer lemon, a wind chime searched without urgency for a melody to play. An adhesive sticker pasted to the sidelight beside the front door told prospective firefighters how many cats (three) to risk their lives in rescuing. From inside the house came the forlorn and piteous bellowing of an animal in pain.
“Hello?” Gwen called, letting herself in the front door. A small black Buddha greeted her from a low table by the front door, where it kept company with a photograph of Lydia Frankenthaler, the producer of an Oscar-winning documentary film about the neglected plight of lesbians in Nazi Germany; Lydia’s partner, Garth; and Lydia’s daughter from her first marriage, a child whose father was black and whose name Gwen had forgotten. It was a Chinese Buddha, the kind that was supposed to pull in money and luck, jolly, baby-faced, and potbellied, reminding Gwen of her darling husband apart from the signal difference that you could rub the continental expanse of Archy Stallings’s abdomen for a very long time without attracting any flow of money in your direction. “Somebody having a baby around here?”
“In here, Gwen,” Aviva said.
Lydia and Garth, a lawyer for the poor, were having their baby in their living room. It was a large room with a vaulted ceiling and nothing between it and the canyon but a wall of solid glass. The girl—Arabia, Alabama, she had a geographical name—sat marveling blankly at the spectacle of her naked mother reposed like an abstract chunk of marble sculpture in the center of the room. Against her legs the girl held a rectangle of cardstock to which she had pasted the three pages of her mother’s birth plan, decorating the borders in four colors of marker with flowers and vines and a happy-looking fetus labeled BELLA. Two low sofas had been pushed to the sides of the room to make space for a wide flat sandwich crafted from a tatami mat, a slab of egg-carton foam rubber, and a shower curtain decorated with a giant self-portrait of Frida Kahlo. Garth, a small-boned, thin-shanked man with a red beard and red stubble on his head, lay sleeping on the improvised bed.
“I’m at nine!” said Lydia by way of greeting, adding whatever comment was provided by her spread, furry-ish butt cheeks and the backs of her legs as she bent over in the downward-facing-dog position to grab two handfuls of floor. “A hundred percent effaced.”
“I’ve been trying to persuade her to try a little push,” said Aviva. She tilted back on her haunches, down on the floor beside Lydia, studying the looming pale elderly secundigravida. Disapproving of the woman, but only Gwen would have caught it, the lips pursed to the left as if withholding a kiss. Barefoot in a loose cotton shift over black ripstop pedal pushers, the roiling surf of her black hair, with its silver eddies, pulled back and tied in a sloppy bun. Stubble showing blue against her luminous shins. Toenails painted a deep cocoa red like the skin of Archy’s Queen of Sheba. “But all Mom wants to do is goof around like that.”
“I don’t want to push,” Lydia said. A string of pain drew and cinched her voice, a yogic voice, inverted and tied carefully to the rhythm of her breathing. “Is it okay, Gwen? Can’t I just stay this way for a little while longer? It feels a lot better.”
If Aviva said it was time to try a little push, then it was, in Gwen’s view, time to try a little push. You did not get to be the Alice Waters of Midwives by leaving your gratins in the oven too long.
“Well, you’ve got gravity working for you,” Gwen tried, less inclined than her partner to patience or politeness but good for at least one go-round with an upside-down naked lady in labor. “But if anybody ever pushed out a baby in that jackknife thing you’ve got working right there, Lydia, then I never heard about it.”
“It could be interesting,” Aviva said. “Now that you mention it. Maybe you should give it a try.” The words were humorous, but her tone continued to be critical, at least to Gwen’s ear.
“Let me just wash my hands and whatnot, and then I’ll fire up my Doppler and see what’s happening in there,” Gwen said, dropping her bag on a black leather armchair. “Hi, honey.” Arcadia. “What do you think of all this, Miss Arcadia?”
The girl shrugged, eyes wide and teary but not despairing. Without cant or reference to the threefold moon goddess or other such nonsense, it was a deep and solemn business that they were about in this room, and nobody was going to feel that, in all its fathomlessness, like a kid. Certainly not old Garth over there, sacked out with one toe poking out of his left sock and sleep working the bellows of his skinny frame.
“Kind of gross,” the girl said, hoisting the birth plan higher as if to shield herself from the grossness of it. Article Seven requested that the umbilical cord not be cut until the placenta had ceased to pump. Article Twelve was some kind of nonsense about the use of artificial light. Gwen was not one to disrespect a well-made birth plan, but there were always wishful thinking and juju involved, and when things went the way they were going to go, as they must, many plans took on a retrospective air of foolishness. “No offense, Mom.”
“You don’t.” The string cinching tighter. “Have to. Watch it, baby. I told you—”
“I want to stay.”
“Gross can be interesting,” Gwen said. “Huh?”
Arcadia nodded.
Lydia lowered her hips and sank to her knees, giving way like a sand castle, and on all fours she rested, head hung, eyes closed, as if about to pantomime some animal behavior. “I’m going to push now,” she announced. In the same stewardessy voice, she added, “Everyone please shut up.”
Her tone was wrong and startling, like a struck wineglass with a secret flaw, and at once Garth sat up and gaped at Gwen, blinking, wiping his lips with his sleeve. “What’s wrong?” he said. His eyes came unstuck from Gwen’s, and he looked around, kicking up from the deep-sea trench of a dream, looking for his new baby, finding his wife, who was seeing nothing at all.
“Everything’s fine, sweetie,” Aviva said. “Only we’re going to need Frida Kahlo.”
Gwen went into the kitchen to drink a glass of water and, in the name of asepsis if not pride, eradicate every last whiff of Elsabet Getachew from her hands. No excuse for you—that was sterling dialogue. She strangled the renascent memory of her shame with a pair of latex-free gloves. When she came back into the living room, she saw that Frida Kahlo had been veiled with an orange bath towel. Lydia lay on her back, propped up on an old plaid bolster, pale abdomen shot like an eyeball with capillaries, making a new kind of low growling sound that built slowly to an energetic whoop and flowered in a burst of foul language that made everybody laugh.
“Good one,” Aviva said. “Good one.”
Though Aviva had caught a thousand babies with hands that were steady and adept, now that it was time, she deferred to her partner, to the virtuoso hands of Gwen Shanks, freaky-big, fluid as a couple of tide-pool dwellers, cabled like the Golden Gate Bridge.
As Aviva gave way to Gwen, she tried by means of her powerfully signifying eyebrows to communicate that she felt something in this situation to be amiss, something not provided for in the birth plan, which lay sagging and looped onto itself under the little girl’s chair. Aviva’s apparent psychic ability to know in advance when something might go wrong, especially in the context of a birth, was not merely the statistical fruit of an abiding pessimism. Skeptic that she was, Gwen had seen Aviva make unlikely but correct predictions of disaster too many times to discount. Gwen frowned, trying to see or feel what Aviva had detected, coming up short. By the time she turned to Lydia, every trace of the frown had been blown away.
“Okay,” she said, “let’s see what little old Miss Bella is up to.”
Gwen lowered herself by inches and prayers to the floor and, when she arrived, saw that the inner labia of Lydia Frankenthaler had conformed themselves into a fiery circle. A smear of fluid and hair presented its credentials at this checkpoint, advance man for the imminently arriving ambassadress from afar.
“You’re working fast now,” Gwen said. “You’re crowning. Here we go. Oh my goodness.”
“Lydia, honey, remember how you said you really didn’t want to push,” Aviva said, climbing in alongside Gwen, “well, now I would actually like you to stop. Stop pushing. Just let her—”
“Coming fast,” Gwen said. “Look out.”
There was a ripple of liquid and skin, then with a vaginal sigh, the little girl squirted faceup into Gwen’s wide hands. The small eyes were open, nebular, and dull, but in the instant before she cried out, they ignited, and the child seemed to regard Gwen Shanks. The air was filled with a hot smell between sex and butchery. The father said “oh” and pressed in beside Gwen to take the sticky baby as she passed it to him. Arcadia hung back, aghast and thrilling to the redness of the birth and the life kindling in her father’s hands. They wrapped the baby loosely in a candy-striped blanket, and as Aviva stroked Lydia’s hair and helped to raise her head, Garth and Arcadia made the necessary introductions of mother and baby and breast. That left Gwen, crouched at the other end of the silvery umbilicus, to observe the heavy flow of blood that seeped from Lydia’s vagina in a slow pulsation, like water from a saturated sponge.
It required all of Gwen’s training and innate gift for minimization of disaster not to pronounce the fatal syllables “Ho, shit.” But Aviva caught something in her face or shoulders, and when Gwen looked up from the pulsing blood that had begun to pool in a red half-dollar on the shower curtain, her partner was already on her way around to have a look. Aviva hunched down behind Gwen, an umpire leaning in on a catcher’s shoulder to get a better look at the ball as it came down the pike. She smelled of lemon peel and armpit in a way that barely registered with Gwen by now except as a steadying presence. They settled in to wait for the placenta. The soft click-click of the baby’s nursing marked the passing of several minutes. Aviva reached down and gave a gentle tug on the umbilical cord. She frowned. She made a humming sound deep in her throat and then said, “Hmm.”
Her tone pierced the bubble of family happiness up by Lydia’s head. Garth looked up sharply. “Is it all right?”
“It’s fine.”
Gwen ripped back the Velcro straps of her hypodermic kit, unrolled it, and felt around with her left hand for the vial of Pitocin.
“Right now,” Aviva said, “the placenta is feeling a little shy, so we just all want to really encourage the uterus to do some contracting for us. Lydia, you just keep right on nursing her, that’s the very best thing you can do. How’s that coming?”
“She went right on!” Lydia cried. Everything was wonderful in the world where she had taken up residence. “Great latch. Sucking away.”
“Good,” Gwen said, practicing the business of syringe and vial in a mindful series of ritual taps, sinking the vial onto the shaft of the needle, reading the tale of liquid and graduation. “Keep it up. And just to make sure it all gets nice and tight and contracted in there, we’re going to give you a little Pitocin.”
“What’s the deal?” said Garth. He craned forward to see what was happening between his wife’s legs. There was not, say, an ocean of blood, but there was more than enough to shock an innocent new father awash in a postpartum hormonal bath of trust in the world’s goodness. “Oh, goddammit. Did you guys fuck something up?”
He swore stiffly but with a sincere fury that took Gwen by surprise. She had pegged him as the gently feckless type of Berkeley white guy, drawstring pants and Teva sandals worn over hiking socks, sworn to a life of uxorial supportiveness the way some monks were sworn to the work of silence. Gwen didn’t know that Garth and Lydia had quarreled repeatedly over the idea of home birth, that Garth had viewed Lydia’s insistence on having their baby at home as the latest in a string of reckless and unnecessarily showy acts of counterconventionality that included refusing, to date, three separate proposals of marriage from Garth. Garth believed in hospitals and vaccines and government-sanctioned monogamy and had absorbed from his poor black and Latino clients powerful notions of the sovereignty of bad luck and death. He had suffered no ill fortune throughout the length of a tranquil, comfortable, and fulfilling life and so at any moment anticipated—even felt that he deserved—the swift equalizing backhand of universal misfortune.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Gwen said. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah.” She laid it on, but only because she could do so in good conscience. This kind of hemorrhaging was not unusual; the Pitocin would kick in momentarily, the uterus would contract, the mysterious bundle of the placenta, that doomed and transient organ, would complete its brief sojourn, and that would be that.
“I mean, well,” Garth said. He appeared to consider and decide against speaking the words that had entered his mind, so as not to cause alarm, then said them anyway: “It’s just that it looks kind of bad.”
Gwen’s eyes snapped onto the little girl, but Arcadia seemed to have decided not to know anything except the baby sucking at her mother’s left breast and the feel of her mother’s hand in hers.
“That’s mostly just lochia,” Gwen said. “Lining, mucus, all that good stuff. It’s normal.”
“Mostly,” Garth repeated, his tone both flat and accusatory.
“How about you run get us some towels, Dad,” Aviva suggested. “And lots of them.”
“Towels,” Garth repeated, clinging to the rope of his desire to be useful.
“Definitely,” Gwen said. “Go on, honey. Go on and get us like every damn towel you got. Also, yeah, some sanitary pads.”
Gwen had a more than adequate supply of pads in her bag, but she wanted to give him a concrete mystery to grow entangled in, hoping that might keep him busy for a few minutes. Whenever she asked Archy to bring her a Tampax, he always got this look on his face, somewhere between intimidation, as by an advanced concept of cosmic theory, and dread, as if mere contact with a tampon might cause him spontaneously to grow a vagina.
Garth went away muttering, “Towels and sanitary pads.”
Aviva called Aryeh Bernstein. “Sorry to bother you,” she said. She gave him the essentials, then listened to what their backup OB had to say about Lydia Frankenthaler’s placenta. “We did. Yep. Okay. All right, thanks, Aryeh. I hope I won’t have to.”
“What did he say?”
“He said more Pitocin and massage.”
“On it,” Gwen said.
As Aviva prepped another push, Gwen laid her hands on Lydia’s belly and felt, blindly and surely, for the hard shuddering uterus. She sank her fingers into the crepey flesh of Lydia’s abdomen and kneaded with dispassion and no more tenderness than a baker. She disbelieved in the mystical power of visualization according to strictures of her 97 percent rule, but that did not prevent her from imagining with every flexion of her fingers that Lydia’s womb was clenching, sealing itself up, condensing like a lump of coal in Superman’s fist to a hard bright healthy diamond.
They heard cabinets slamming in a bathroom somewhere with a panicked air of comedy, and then a glass broke, and the girl jumped. It was not impossible that Gwen jumped, too. Aviva held steady, guiding the second needle into Lydia’s vein.
“Hey, there, Arcadia,” Gwen said. “How you doing?”
“Good.”
“You got a nice strong grip on your mom’s hand, there?” The girl nodded, slow and watchful. Gwen winced at the false tone of cheeriness she could hear creeping into her voice. “Know what I’m doing? I’m massaging your mom’s uterus. Now, I know you know what a uterus is.”
“Yes.”
“Duh. Of course you do, smart as you are.”
“Oh, uh, Gwen, um,” Lydia said, and she sank back deeper against the plaid bolster, her head lolling like a flower on a broken stem. Her left arm with the baby curled in its crook subsided, and there was a loud smack as the small mouth popped loose. “Oh, man, you guys, I don’t know.”
“Any change?” Aviva said.
“Some.”
Gwen tried not to look at her partner as Aviva went over to her flight bag, a gaudy pleather thing blazoned with the obscurely ironic legend SULACO, and broke out the bags, barbs, and tubing of an IV kit. Gwen crouched, up to her elbows in the dough of the woman’s life, knowing that everything was going to be all right, that it was a matter of hormones and massage and a husband judiciously sent to find Kotex and bath towels. She also knew that she suffered from or had been blessed with a kind of reverse clairvoyance, the natural counterpart to her partner’s predictive pessimism. Gwen was resistant to if not proof against clear signs of danger or failure. Not because she was an optimist (not at all) but because she took failure, any failure, whether her own or the universe’s, so personally. If a bridge gave way outside of Bangalore, India, and a bus full of children plunged to their deaths, Gwen felt an atom-sized but detectable blip of culpability. She had been taught firmly that you could not take credit for success if you were unprepared to accept blame for failure, and one useful expedient she had evolved over the years for avoiding having to do the latter was to refuse—not consciously so much as through a reflexive stubbornness—to acknowledge even the possibility of failure. And that was what she would have to accept if she looked up from her wildly bread-making hands and saw Aviva, with that grim measuring gaze of hers, holding up the bag of intravenous saline to catch the sunshine, her mouth drawn into a thin defeated line.
“Don’t fall asleep, Mommy,” Arcadia said. “Here comes Daddy with the towels.”
Gwen hurried along the corridor, bleeding from a fresh cut on her left cheek, trussing her belly with one arm, trying to keep up with Aviva, who was trying to keep up with the single-masted gurney on which Lydia Frankenthaler was being sailed toward one of the emergency-room ORs by a crew of two nurses and the EMT who had accidentally slammed the ambulance door on Gwen’s face. The EMT hit the doors ass-first and banged on through, and the nurse who was not steering the IV pole turned and faced down the midwives as the doors swung shut behind her. She was about Gwen’s age, mid-thirties, a skinny ash-eyed blonde with her hair in a rubber-band ponytail, wearing scrubs patterned with the logo of the Oakland A’s. “I’m really sorry,” she said. She looked very faintly sorry. “You’ll have to wait out here.”
This was a sentence being passed on them, a condemnation and a banishment, but at first Aviva seemed not to catch on, or rather, she pretended not to catch on. As the Alice Waters of Midwives, she had been contending successfully and in frustration with hospitals for a long time, and though, by nature, she was one of the most candid and forthright people Gwen had ever known, if you sent her into battle with another nurse, an intake clerk, or most of all an OB, she revealed herself to be skilled in every manner of wheedlings and wiles. It was a skill that was called upon to one degree or another almost every time they went up against hospitals and insurance companies, and Gwen relied upon and was grateful to Aviva for shouldering the politics of the job so ably. She envied the way it seemed to cost Aviva nothing to eat shit, kiss up, make nice. Catching babies was the only thing Aviva cared about, and she would surrender anything except her spotless record for catching them safe and sound. She had, Gwen felt, that luxury.
“No, no, of course, we’ll wait,” Aviva said in a chipper voice. She made a great show of gazing down at herself, at her white shirt with its chart of blood islands, at the chipped polish on her big toenail. With the same partly feigned air of disapproval, she surveyed Gwen’s cheek, her played-out saggy-kneed CP Shades. Then Aviva nodded, granting with a smile the whole vibe of dirt and disorder that the partners were giving off. “But after we clean up and scrub in, right? then it’s no problem, right”—leaning in to read the nurse’s badge—“Kirsten? If you want to check with Dr. Bernstein, I’m sure . . .”
Gwen could see the nurse trying to determine whose responsibility it was in this situation to be the Asshole, which was of course the purpose of Aviva’s gambit. Sometimes that awful responsibility turned out to be endlessly deferrable, and other times you got lucky and ended up in the hands of someone too tired or busy to give a damn.
“Bernstein’s stuck in traffic,” Kirsten said. “The attending’s Dr. Lazar. I’ll check with him. In the meantime, why don’t you two ladies go ahead and have a seat.” She told Gwen, “You’re going to want to have a seat.”
You have a seat, bitch. That’s my patient maybe bleeding to death in there.
“No, thank you,” Gwen said. “I prefer to stand.”
Her relations toward authority, toward its wielders and tools, were—had to be—more complicated than her partner’s. She could not as blithely subordinate her pride and self-respect to the dictates of hospital politics, distill her practice of midwifery, the way Aviva did, to the fundamental business of the Catch. But Gwen knew, the way a violinist knew tonewood, how to work it. She had grown up in a family of doctors, lawyers, teachers, cops. For many years her father was an assistant district attorney for the city of Washington, D.C., and then a lawyer for the Justice Department. Both of her mother’s sisters were nurses. Her uncle Louis had been a D.C. patrolman and plainclothesman and was now the chief of security for Howard University, and her brother, Ernest, ran a lab at George Mason. To the extent that Gwen had been hassled in her life by representatives of the white establishment, she had been trained to get the better of the situation without compromising herself, sometimes by dropping a name, sometimes by showing a respect that she genuinely felt or could at least remember how to simulate. Mostly by letting the doc or the officer feel that she understood how it was to be on the job.
“But truly, thank you, Kirsten,” Gwen added, reaching for chipper like a note that was just beyond her range. “We really appreciate your taking the time. We know how busy you are.” She smiled. “And maybe I will sit down a minute, at that.”
As though doing Kirsten a favor, Gwen lowered herself into one of the plastic chairs bolted to a nearby wall.
“Definitely want to have somebody look at that cheek,” the nurse said, her brittle tone expressing solicitude for the cheek less, Gwen thought, than for her own worn-out, urban-population-serving self.
“Oh, thank you so much for your concern,” Gwen said. Struggling a little harder, knowing from the way Aviva was looking at her, that she was starting, in Aviva’s phrase, to leak. “Now, please, honey, go ask the doc when we can see our patient.”
It must have been the “honey.”
Kirsten said, “She’s not your patient anymore.”
This was not technically true. As a result of years of hard work, steady and sound practice, slowly evolving cultural attitudes in the medical profession, and long, unrelenting effort begun by its founder and senior practitioner, by the summer of 2004, Berkeley Birth Partners enjoyed full privileges at Chimes General Hospital, with every right to assist in and attend to the care of Lydia Frankenthaler, who would remain a patient until such time as Lydia herself decided otherwise. But Aviva and Gwen had come this evening in an ambulance, giving off a whiff of trouble, with an unnecessary police escort they had managed to acquire along the way. Like a pair of shit-caked work boots, they were being left outside on the porch.
“We’ll wait here.” Aviva stepped in with the perfect mixture of unctuous sweetness and professional concern, spiking it lightly, like a furtive elbow to the ribs, with a warning to Gwen to seal all leaks or else shut the hell up. “As soon as you talk to the attending, you come find us, okay, Kirsten?”
Gwen followed Aviva into the bathroom, fighting the urge to apologize, wanting to point out that if you were white, eating shit was a choice you could make if you wanted; for a black woman, the only valid choice was not to.
In silence at separate sinks, they washed their hands and faces and rued the ruination of their shirts. The reverberation of water against porcelain intensified the silence. In the mirror, Gwen saw her partner staring at the bloodstains with an emotion between horror and hollowness, looking every one of her forty-seven years. Then their eyes met in the reflection, and the defeated look was gone in an instant, smuggled off, hooded and manacled, to the internal detention facility where Aviva Roth-Jaffe sent such feelings to die.
“I know,” Gwen said. “I was leaking.”
“Literally,” Aviva said, coming in to get a look at the damage the ambulance door had done to Gwen’s cheek. It had stopped bleeding, but when Aviva touched it, a fresh droplet formed a bead on the cut’s lower lip. The cut was about the size of a grain of pomegranate, pink and ugly. It would leave a scar, and Gwen was prone to keloids, and so forever after, she thought, she would have something special to remind her of this wonderful day. In her mind, she replayed her stumble, the optic flash as her face struck the steel corner.
“You need a stitch,” Aviva said. She leaned in to look at Gwen’s cut. “Maybe two.”
They went out to the ER and, after a few minutes of further genial self-abasement by Aviva, found themselves shown into an examination room with needle, suturing thread, and a hemostat. When it came time for novocaine, Gwen sat on her hands and told Aviva to go ahead and sew it up. “One stitch I can handle straight,” she said.
“Better call it two.”
“Two, then.”
“Aren’t you fucking macho.”
“I’m liable to start crying anyways, might as well give me a reason.” Gwen gasped as the needle bit. “Ow, Aviva, ouch.”
Aviva tugged the thread with a severe gentleness, breath whistling in her nostrils. Gwen focused her attention on the pendant that hung from a leather thong around Aviva’s throat. It had been made by Julie Jaffe in a flame-work class at the Crucible, lovely and enigmatic, a small glass planet, a teardrop of blue alien seas and green continents and polar caps tinted ice blue. For as long as Gwen had known him, Julie had been a mapper of worlds, on newsprint and graph paper and in the phosphor of a computer screen. Gwen recalled having asked him where he found the inspiration for the tiny glass world he had presented her as a Christmas present last year, and she tried to take comfort or at least find shelter from the pain of the suture needle in the memory of his reply: By living there. Then Aviva sank the barb a second time, and that was when Gwen started to cry, no big show or anything, they were both a couple of cool customers, your Berkeley Birth Partners. No sobbing. No whoops of grief. Just tears welling up and spilling over, stinging in the fresh seam of the wound. To be honest, it felt pretty good.
She permitted the tears to flow only as long as it took Aviva to snip the thread from the second stitch, lay down the hemostat, peel off her gloves, and hand Gwen a tissue. Gwen dabbed her eyes and then used the tissue to blow her nose, a nice big honking blast.
“They aren’t going to let us in,” Gwen said bitterly.
“I guess not.”
“Where’s Bernstein?”
“He was in the city. He’s coming.”
“We need to be in there. They’re going to want to do a hysterectomy, I know it. When all they need to do is just wait a little. Lazar. Who’s Lazar?”
“Don’t know him.”
“Tell me she’s going to be all right.”
“She will be all right.”
“I should have noticed it sooner.”
“There was nothing to notice until you noticed it. You noticed it right away.”
Gwen nodded, ducking her head, balling the tissue in her fist. She stood up and paced the room, stopped, hugged herself, notching her arms into the groove over the swell of her abdomen. She sat down, stood up, blew her nose again, and paced the room some more. She knew perfectly well there was nothing anyone could have done, but somehow that only made it feel more imperative to blame herself. It implied no kind of self-exoneration if she felt compelled to blame some other people, too.
“I can’t believe they aren’t letting us in there!”
“Take it easy,” Aviva said in a hushed voice that was meant, Gwen knew, to communicate the fact that she was talking too loudly. But Gwen could tell that she was rattling Aviva, and for some reason, it pleased her to see it. For the second time that day, she had a sense of trespassing on some internal quarantine, crossing a forbidden zone into the pon farr; amok time. It would not be right for Aviva to make her go there alone.
“I’ve had enough of this,” Gwen said. “Aviva, no, seriously. Listen to me.”
“I can hear you loud and clear, Gwen.”
“Come on. You have worked too hard. We have both earned the right to be treated better than this.”
There was the squeak of a sneaker on tiled floor. The partners turned, startled, to the door of the examining room, where a young pink-faced doctor appeared, his head shaved almost to the scalp, leaving only a ghostly chevron of pattern baldness. Dead-eyed, already tired of listening to them before they ever opened their mouths.
“I’m Dr. Lazar,” he said. “I was able to do a manual removal of the placenta. Mrs. Frankenthaler is stable, uterine tonicity looks good. We stopped the bleeding. She’ll be fine.”
The partners stood, perfectly still, tasting the news like thirsty people trying to decide if they had just felt a drop of rain. Then they fell on each other and hung on tight, Gwen half stupid with relief, drunk on it, clinging to Aviva as if to keep the room from spinning.
Dr. Lazar studied the celebration with his flounder eyes and a mean smile like a card cheat with a winning hand. “Do you think,” he said after an interval not quite long enough to pass for decent, “uh, I don’t know, do either of you ladies think maybe you could explain to me how you managed to screw up this birth quite so badly?”
“Excuse me?” Gwen said, letting go of Aviva as the dizziness abruptly passed.
“Ten more minutes of sage-burning or whatever voodoo you were working, and that mom—”
“Voodoo?” Gwen said.
Instead of wincing at this clear instance of having said something he was bound to regret, Dr. Lazar turned gelid, immobile. But he flushed to the tips of his ears. “You know what?” he said. “Whatever.”
He turned and walked out of the room, and Gwen noticed a purple Skittle adhering to the seat of his surgical scrub trousers. For some reason, the sight of the smashed piece of candy stuck on the doctor’s ass inspired a minute compassion for the fish-eyed and weary young man with his burden of alopecia, and this, in turn, sent her over the edge.
“Gwen!” Aviva said, but it was too late, and anyway, the hell with her.
An hour ago, when they had blown in on a gust of urgency from the ambulance bay, EMT yelling instructions, calling for a stretcher, Garth looking modestly wild-eyed, dancing like a man who had to pee, holding the baby who needed to be fed, Aviva breaking out a bottle of Enfamil from her backpack and cracking it with a sigh and that formula smell of vitamins and cheese, the wonderful avid baby needing every ounce of it—Gwen had failed to remark just how busy it was tonight at the emergency room of Chimes General Hospital.
Every room seemed to be occupied. Her pursuit of Dr. Lazar was haunted at its edges by glimpses of a pale hairy shin slashed with red. A forlorn teenager in a volleyball uniform clutching her arm at a surrealist angle. A young man with baby dreadlocks gripping either side of a sink as if about to vomit. The whole scene scored with a discordant soundtrack of televisions and woe, the nattering of SpongeBob, an old man’s ursine expectorations, a pretty Asian woman cursing like a sailor as something nasty was extracted from the meat of her hand, the horrific shrieking of a toddler being held down by its father while a phlebotomist probed its arm for a vein. Outside the last examination room before the waiting area, a young Hispanic man lolled in a chair, holding a bloody ice pack to his face, while from inside the room, a doctor yelled cheerfully in English at his bleeding companion as if the man were deaf and retarded.
“I am a nurse,” Gwen said, managing to sound calmer than she felt, catching up with Lazar. “Please tell me that I did not just hear you employ the term ‘voodoo’ in reference to my licensed and certified practice of midwifery.”
Lazar stopped at the threshold of the waiting area, where he planned, she assumed, to tell Garth and Arcadia that Lydia would be okay, business that was definitely more important, as Gwen knew perfectly well in some cool, quiet corner of her being, than whatever point she was attempting to make. The doctor turned to confront her with an air of resigned willingness to go along, an obedient soldier saddling up for the ride into the valley of death.
“I know you were burning something,” he said. “I could smell it on her.”
“It was ylang-ylang,” Aviva said, hurrying up behind them, taking a step toward Gwen as if to interpose her body between Gwen and the doctor. “Her husband was burning it during the first part of her labor. She likes the smell.”
“That woman,” Gwen said, “Lydia. The placenta was retained. There was stage zero hemorrhage, borderline stage one. Uterine atonicity. And she went into a hypovolemic shock.”
“Correct,” the doctor said, impatient.
“Even though we had her on a course of supplements and immediately began to administer oxytocin and do uterine massage. Exactly like you or any doctor would have done. Is that not correct?”
He blinked, not wanting to give up anything to her.
“So tell me this, Doctor, how many accretas, how many postpartum hemorrhages, have you guys had here this month? Like, what, I’m going to say six?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Ten?”
“I don’t know the answer to that, Ms. Shanks, but see, the thing is, when those things happen here, okay? When they happen here? When there’s some hemorrhaging? Which does occur, of course. Then the patient’s already in the damn hospital. Where she ought to be.”
Gwen looked over at the young man with the ice pack, his visible eye dull and maddened, his knuckles swollen like berries on the point of rot.
“You know what?” Aviva said, and out came the pointing finger so feared by all who loved her, Gwen among them, as the Berkeley faded and the Brooklyn broke through, and all at once Aviva’s proximity no longer buffered but menaced the doctor. “In fifteen years, my practice has never lost a single mother. And not one single baby. Can this place make that claim? No, I happen to know very well it can’t, and so do you.”
“Who would ever want to have a baby here?” Gwen observed, half to herself, a hand settling on her belly like an amulet or shield.
“It’s a birth,” the doctor said. “You know, call me crazy, but maybe in the end that’s one of those things you just don’t want to try at home. It’s not like conking your hair.”
Somebody gasped out in the waiting room. An arch, eager female voice went Awwwwww shit.
“You racist,” Gwen began, “misogynist—”
“Oh, come on, don’t start that crap.”
Lazar turned his back on her and went into the waiting room. Throwing up his hands, shaking his head: all the bad acting people tended to engage in when they were most sincere. Gwen stayed right with him. Everyone in the waiting room raised their head, face blank and attentive, prepared if not hoping for further entertainment.
“Don’t you bait me,” Gwen said, feeling an internal string, years in the winding, snap with a delicious and terrible twang. “Don’t you ever try to bait me, you baldheaded, Pee-wee Herman–looking, C-sectioning, PPO hatchet man.”
Ho! Uh-uh! Go, Mommy!
Gwen was right up against him, her body, her belly, the pert cupola of her protruding navel flirting through the fabric of her blouse with actual physical contact. He backed off, betraying the faintest hint of fear.
Garth stood up, holding the baby stiffly, forlornly, as if it were a rare musical instrument, some kind of obscure assemblage of reeds and bladders that he would now be called upon to play. His blue eyes looked frightened, bewildered, and when she saw him, Gwen felt ashamed. Arcadia, curled in on herself in a plastic armchair, woke up and started to cry.
“Mr. Frankenthaler?” the doctor said.
“Garth, she’s fine,” Aviva said. She hurried over to Garth, rubbed his shoulder. “She’s fine, she’s going to be fine.”
“Why don’t you come with me, Mr. Frankenthaler? I’ll take you to see your wife,” Lazar said.
“She isn’t my wife,” Garth said, dazed. “My last name is Newgrange.”
Lazar crouched down in front of Arcadia and spoke, in a tender voice, words that only she could hear. She nodded and sniffled, and he moved a thick coil of her dark hair, damp at the end with tears, out of her eyes, painting a shining trail across her cheek. Suddenly, the man was the kindest doctor in the universe. He stood up, and Arcadia took hold of the hem of her father’s windbreaker, and they followed Lazar back into the ER. Two seconds later, Lazar reappeared and pointed his finger at Gwen in a parody, perhaps unconscious, of Aviva’s recent performance.
“I’m writing this up,” he told Gwen, who stood there, shoulders heaving, all the righteousness emptied out of her, the last bright tankful burned off in that final heavenward blast. “Count on that.”
“Did you hear the way he spoke to me?” she said to Aviva, to the room, a note of uncertainty in the question as if seeking confirmation that she had not in fact imagined it. “‘Voodoo.’ ‘It’s not like having your hair conked.’ Did you hear? I know everybody in this room heard the man.”
Aviva was back to the hushed voice, gently taking hold of Gwen’s elbow. “I heard,” she said, “I know.”
“You know? I don’t think you do.”
“Oh, come on,” Aviva said with an unfortunate echo of Lazar in her tone. “For God’s sake, Gwen. I’m on your side.”
“No, Aviva, I’m on my side. I didn’t hear him say one damn word to you.”
Gwen pulled her arm free of Aviva’s grasp and trudged out of the waiting room, through the covered entranceway to the ER, and out to the driveway, where Hekate the Volvo still sat, her hazard lights faithfully blinking. The late-summer-afternoon breeze carried a smell of the ocean. Gwen shivered, a spasm that started in her arms and shoulders but soon convulsed everything. She had barely eaten all day, which was horrible, reprehensible, two months from delivery and already a Bad Mother. Now she felt like she was starving and at the same time like she might throw up. The stitches burned in her cheek. There was a reek of butts and ashes, out here beyond the doors, and a live thread of fresh smoke. She turned to see a pair of women whom she recognized from the waiting room, young and wide-eyed with matching taffy curls, cousins or possibly sisters, one of them even more hugely pregnant than Gwen, sharing a Kool with an air of exuberant impatience as if, when they finished it, something good was going to happen to one or both of them.
“Hello,” Gwen said, and they laughed as if she had said something stupid or as if she herself were stupid regardless of what she might say. They were among those who had cheered and taken great pleasure in Gwen’s public argument with Dr. Lazar. The pregnant one smoked, inhaling in that strange impatient way, and studied Gwen as if the sight of her confirmed some long-held theory.
“You a midwife?” the pregnant woman said.
Gwen nodded, trying to look proud and competent, a credit to her profession and her people. The pregnant woman dropped the burning cigarette and stepped on it, and then she and her companion turned to walk back to the emergency room, the pregnant woman’s flip-flops scraping and slapping against the soles of her feet.
“See, now,” she told her companion, “don’t want to be messing with that country shit.”
Around the time when Baby Frankenthaler was bundled from her mother’s belly red and headlong into the world, Archy came rolling out of his front door for the second time that day and stood on the topmost step of his porch, freshly showered, toweled, and eau-de-cologned, dressed in a crisp shirt of seafoam-green linen and a linen suit of dulce-de-leche brown. Only to his pride did there still cling, perhaps, the faintest whiff of sesame. He reached up and out with both arms to shoot his cuffs, and for an instant he might have served to illustrate the crucial step in a manual on the seizing of days. He had already seized this particular day once, but he was prepared, if need be, to go ahead and seize the motherfucker all over again.
It was a pretty day for seizing, that much was certain: the prettiest that Oakland, California, had to offer. The fog had burned off, leaving only a softness, as tender as a memory from childhood, to blur the sunlight that warmed the sprawl of rosemary and purple salvia along the fragrant sidewalk and fell in shifting shafts through the branches of the monkey-puzzle tree. This whimsical evergreen, mammoth and spiky, dominated the front yard of Archy and Gwen’s sagging 1918 bungalow, formerly the home of a mean old Portuguese man named Oliveira. Reputed, when Archy was a kid, to contain an extensive collection of shrunken heads gathered during Mr. Oliveira’s career as a merchant seaman, the house had been a reliable source of neighborhood legend, especially at Halloween, and the mythic memory of those leering heads gave Archy pause sometimes when he came home on an autumn evening, a ring-and-run thrill. He had to this day never forgotten the strange horror of glimpsing one of Mr. Oliveira’s many tattoos, like something out of Nathaniel Hawthorne, consisting of a ragged rectangle, a bar of black ink scrawled across the cordovan hide of the old sailor’s upper arm in order to blot out, like the pen of a censor, some underlying name or image whose memory, for mysterious reasons, was abhorrent.
Archy patted the hip pocket of his jacket, checking for The Meditations, coming down the front steps with his sense of resignation stiffened, in best Stoic fashion, to a kind of resolve. Knowing he had done wrong, prepared to make amends, settle his business. Determined to return to Brokeland, open the doors wide to the angel of retail death, and run the place into the ground all by himself, if that was what it took—but to fail calmly, to fail with style, to fail above all with that true dignity, unknown to his wife or his partner, which lay in never tripping out, never showing offense or hurt to those who had offended or hurt you.
He heard the grumbling of a vintage Detroit engine, inadequately muffled, and watched with dull foreboding as a 1970 Oldsmobile Toronado, recurrent as a bad dream, turned onto Sixty-first Street. The vehicle was in awful shape: formerly green and bleached to a glaucous white, rusted in long streaks and patches so that the side visible resembled a strip of rancid bacon.
Archy was a compulsive admirer of American muscle cars from the ten-year period following his birth in 1968, a period which, in his view—a view often and with countless instances, oral footnotes, and neologisms expounded at the counter of Brokeland Records—corresponded precisely with the most muscular moment in the history of black music in America. His own car, parked in the driveway, was a 1974 El Camino, butterscotch flake, maintained with love and connoisseurship by himself and Sixto “Eddie” Cantor, Stallings Professor of Elcaminology at Motor City Auto Repair and Custom Jobs. Archy was the author of the as yet unwritten Field Guide to Whips of the Funk Era, and thus, even if he had not grown up as the virtual older brother of this particular Toronado, he would have been able, by its GT hood badge and dual exhaust, to identify the model year of the low-fallen specimen rolling up to his house. Of the chrome trim only the white plastic underclips remained, and the hood was held shut by a frayed knot of nylon rope looped through the grille, several vanes of which had fallen out, leaving the unfortunate car with a gap-toothed and goofy Leon Spinks grin. In the backseat he thought he glimpsed the blue plastic Samsonite suitcase his grandmother used to take with her on the Fun Train up to Reno. From the right rear window protruded a deco-style halogen floor lamp of the type that caught Lionel Hampton on fire.
“Nuh-uh,” Archy said, seeing that this was to be one of those days when it was best to remember, following the cue of Marcus Aurelius or possibly Willie Hutch, that the things of the body are as a river, and the things of the soul as a dream and a vapor; and life is a warfare and a pilgrim’s sojourn, and fame after death is only forgetfulness. “Y’all can just continue on your way.”
He could see that it was not Luther at the wheel. Any one of a number of interstellar fuckups and freakazoids might be at the helm of this broke-down starship of the seventies, but Archy’s thoughts leaped with a bitter instinct to Valletta Moore.
Sure enough. A lamentable lamentation of the door hinges, sounding like the gate on a crypt filled with vengeful dead folks being thrown open, and Valletta Moore got out of the car. Big-boned, shapely, on the fatal side of fifty, high-waisted, high-breasted, face a feline triangle. Beer-bottle-brown eyes, skin luminous and butterscotch, as if she herself had come fresh from the spray gun of Sixto Cantor. Ten, eleven years since the last time Archy had seen her, at least.
“Uh-oh. Look out.”
“I know you remember me,” she said.
“I remember you didn’t used to be quite as fine as you are now.”
“‘Look out,’” Valletta quoted back at him, shaking her head, lowering over her amber eyes a pair of bulbous sunglasses with white plastic frames. “I guess I know where you learned that shit.”
Looking at her, already smelling her perfume, Archy’s memory dealt him a rapid hand of images, of which the ace was unquestionably the grand soft spectacle of Valletta Moore, 1978, shaving her legs at his father’s apartment in El Cerrito, glimpsed through the five-inch crack of the open bathroom door. Slender right foot planted on the floor, other foot arched on the shining lip of the bathtub, Valletta bent like a watchmaker over the work of painting a brown razor stripe up the white lathered inside of her long left leg, hair wrapped in a towel but her strong body naked and bold as a flag. The architecture of her ass was something deeper than a memory to Archy, something almost beyond remembrance, an archetype, the pattern of all asses forever after, wired into the structure of reality itself.
“Valletta,” he said, thinking she still looked good, then abandoning all wisdom and ignoring his Spidey sense long enough to let her take him in her arms, the skin of her bare shoulder in a halter top cool against his shoulder, the lady most definitely giving off that heavy 1978 Spencer’s smell of love candles and sandalwood incense but, laid over top of it, the stink of cigarette, the instant-potatoes smell you might find in the interior of a beat-to-shit Toronado. “Damn.”
It was only when she let go of Archy that he saw the tight line of her lips. She looked left, right. She was worried, hiding, running: running to Archy. In the pit of his sensitive belly, neurotransmitters registered with a flutter of dread whatever kind of trouble his father was currently getting himself into. Already thinking it might have something to do with Chandler Flowers, his father’s best friend, back in the day. How Flowers had come into the store today, asking, of all things, Your dad around? Luther reported to have been down in West Hollywood someplace, last Archy heard, not that he ever sought the least news or information of Luther’s who-, what-, where-, when- or whyabouts.
“Well, it sure has been a long time, Valletta,” he said cheerfully, deciding to pretend that he believed she had been driving Luther’s car down Sixty-first Street, happened to see him on his front porch, and decided to stop and say hello. As if she could have stared clean through 175 pounds and thirty years to recognize the teenager in whose dreams she briefly but intensely featured. “I do have to be running, because I got to, you know, get to the store, but, hey—”
“Archy, no, no, wait, hold up—”
“You have a good day, now. All right? No, really. I’m sorry. But you have a positive day.”
Back when he was a boy, there used to be a gentleman named Joseph Charles, man would stand out every day at the corner of Oregon and Grove wearing a pair of dazzling yellow gloves. Waving to every car that passed him, extending to its driver, regardless of race, creed, or receptivity, one (1) genuine, heartfelt greeting. Mr. Charles’s manner bold and cheerful but a touch formal, hinting, though not in any unkind way, at the impersonal. No intention of greeting you in particular; simply reminding you that, like all humans, you partook in the noble human capacity for being greeted. It was Mr. Charles’s manner that Archy tended to adopt around women when he sensed they might be about to pose him some kind of problem. He gave Valletta’s shoulder a fond squeeze, started away. In his heart, he already knew that he was not going to get anywhere; not yet. Like many abandoned sons, he was conscious of owing a mysterious, unrepayable debt toward the man of whom, in truth, he was the eternal creditor.
“Archy, it’s your dad,” she said, tendering that unpayable IOU, “it’s Luther.”
She raised the sunglasses at him and hit him straight on with twin blasts of yellow-brown fire, with the shock of the bitter work of time and corruption. Cakes of mascara cobwebbed her lashes.
“Yeah?”
Valletta checked out the shadows and rustlings up and down both ends of the street one more time, ran the broom of her paranoia up the quiet little pond of a street built around a pocket playground that some unknown amateur of children had tucked, like an Easter egg, onto an island of grass in the midst of Sixty-first Street. Archy wondered if Valletta might not be high, cashed out on something that was making her go all Pynchonesque. The last time he found himself unable to prevent hearing news of Luther, it was a tale, grand and heartwarming, of cleanness, sobriety, redemption. Luther had drawn a judge down south who remembered Strutter and, never having been the man’s son, was willing to take a chance on Luther Stallings, divert him to a drug court. Luther went around after that, supposedly, making amends to 17,512 people on two continents. That was at least a year ago, and the amends that Archy consented to allow his father to make to him at the time had consisted, in full, of a sober, clean telephone promise to leave Archy the fuck alone from now until the end of time.
“Can we go in?” she wanted to know, sighing, impatient, maybe, he thought desperately, only needing to pee. “Inside your house?”
“Huh-uh,” Archy said, not trying to charm or work her anymore, the deep 1978 El Cerrito–apartment sullenness starting to seep out of him as he remembered how Luther and Valletta used to leave him there all night by himself, nothing on the television but Wolfman Jack and some movie where a shark-toothed devil doll was biting Karen Black on the ankles. Only thing he wanted to know now: what kind of bullshit trouble Luther Stallings was trying to get Archy into this go-round and how much it was going to cost in blood and treasure. “Just say what you came to say. No joke, Valletta, I really do have to go.”
“Mm-hmm, yeah, you ain’t changed,” she said, lighting up icy diodes at the heart of those eyes that, in the summer of 1977, had stared not only into Archy’s soul but into the soul of young black America from the covers of Jet and Sepia and from the feathers-fur-and-leather kung fu splendors of her role as Candygirl Clark in one of the last blaxploitation films of that era, Strutter at Large, in which she costarred with a lean, wiry, and beautiful Luther Stallings in his most famous part. “Still walking around all pinch-up and pouty-face, giving everybody a fish-eye, most of all your father or his friend.”
“Y’all are still friends, then.”
“We took up with each other again. Third time, you know what they say.”
Archy had contrived to miss the second near-fatal intersection of Luther and Valletta by cleverly timing his service in the United States Army to coincide with the geopolitical hard-on of Saddam Hussein.
“He back in town, then?”
She stared him down, challenging him, not wanting to give up anything if he was going to make her stand out on the damn sidewalk to say it.
“And now you come around here. Saying Luther sent you, is that right? Come around here hoping to find out what, exactly?”
“Luther don’t know nothing about it. Man knew I was here . . .” She chewed on the earpiece of her sunglasses, seeming to rehearse Luther’s anger in her mind. “He knows how you feel, he wants to respect that.”
“So you don’t want money.”
“Truly,” she said, “I do. I’ll take whatever you can spare me. We need to get far away from here and stay there.”
It did not take a lot of effort for Archy to harden his heart against his father; that clay was well fired, long and slow. Anger, resentment, scorn, disgust, Luther’s son kept these handy in the pocket of his soul as surely as the copy of Meditations at his hip. So it must testify to something, some abiding foolishness peculiar to the sons of broken fathers, that it took any effort at all. Thirty-six years of this shit, and Archy was still willing to let the man disappoint him.
“I’m not going to ask why,” Archy said. “Because if you don’t tell me, then I won’t know.”
“Archy, I can’t get into it out here.”
“I am so fine with that, Valletta.”
“Your daddy . . . Luther . . .” She tried for a couple of seconds, pursing her lips, tapping them pensively with her right fist, to put it into words. Then she gave up. “He been clean and sober thirteen months now.”
“Uh-huh. Good for him.”
“And, like, now he got some irons in the fire.”
“I bet he does,” Archy said, thinking that was the perfect expression to describe the future as it stood in permanent relation to Luther Stallings: a big pile of irons glowing red-hot, to be snatched from the fire only at the cost of singed flesh. “Investment opportunities, that right?”
She fell back once more on her optic beams, but either this time Archy was ready or the effect had begun to dull. She lowered the sunglasses again.
“Let me guess,” Archy said. “Because I am experiencing premonitions.”
Chan and Luther unhooked a heavy chain between two pillars, left the Toronado tucked into a fold of midnight at the back of a gravel parking lot. Crunched up a hillside through fumes of eucalyptus, Chan carrying the shotgun, to a lookout they at one time favored for planning their conquests of the world. At their spot Chan turned and swung the gun, let it fly. It helicoptered out into the night and came whipping down with a clang of pipe somewhere in the woods behind them. Then they sat on their bench, perched side by side on the high shoulder of Oakland. Looked out at streets and bridges and highways embroidered, stitched out, in lights onto dark panels of water and sky.
In the interest of furthering his stone-cold pistolero legend, of which purity was to form a key component, the Undertaker never drank and rarely smoked. Luther passed him a package of Kools, and the Undertaker took one and lit it. Luther fished a fifth of Rumple Minze from his jacket pocket. The Undertaker surrendered the last fragment of his stillborn legend to the possibility of solace offered by the bottle of schnapps.
“He grabbed hold of his wrist, sat there looking at it,” Chan said, wiping his lips. “Meat and blood. A stump. All calm and collected, cuff of his jacket shot up to threads. Just a rag where his hand used to be, looking at it.”
“Popcorn Hughes,” Luther said admiringly.
“I need to hide myself, Luther.”
“Where at?” Dread inflated a taut balloon in Luther’s rib cage. He could barely muster breath to get out the next syllables: “L.A.?”
For that was the obvious solution: Swing by Luther’s mother’s house and pick up the canvas suitcase and the three Berkeley Farms crates, packed and ready to go. Hit L.A. by morning, Chan could buy what he needed when they got there. Track down some shitbox safe house where Chan could hole up. Wave goodbye then. Engage in the theater of turning their separate ways, meeting their respective fates, until the next of his friend’s schemes went wrong, the next time Chan found himself confronting the truth that his faith in himself was misplaced, his intelligence fated to go unrewarded because it was no substitute for luck, no proof against the world’s massive, even hostile, indifference to the productions of a black man’s intellect. Like the Party he had joined too late, too young, Chan was a lost claim check, a series of time-lapse photos of a promise as it broke. He was a king of finite space, bound in a nutshell. And Luther was sick of it. He rued all the time he had wasted since the call came from his agent, feeling guilty, feeling sorry for Chan.
“Or,” he said, trying to be helpful, “uh, lot of Panthers in Chicago, right?”
Chan didn’t say anything.
“Morocco, then. Or Spain.”
“Spain,” Chan said. Luther could hear the hard little smile creasing his face. “Good thinking. Go to Spain. Become a toronado.”
“Why not? All the revolutionary Negroes been skipping to Morocco, Spain. Paris. You were doing their business. They got to take care of you.”
“Who?”
“The Party.”
“Luther, if I had the kind of clout, get myself that far away from here? I wouldn’t have needed to impress anybody in the first place with the fool thing I just tried to do.”
Somewhere right around here, Luther remembered, if you went farther up the path behind the picnic tables, you would stumble across a pyramid of built-up stones left behind by some crazy old beard-faced poet back when Oakland was nothing but a slough and a stables and a cowboy hotel. In school they came here on field trips, checking out the poet’s little white farmhouse, a big lumpy statue of him riding on a Mongoloid-looking horse. A pyramid of stone and, farther back, a stone platform the man had built, intending it to be used for his funeral pyre. Out here in the hot sun, day after day, the man piling up rocks like lines in one of his boring poems. Dreaming, the whole time he was stacking those rocks, about how all those olden-time gangsters of Oakland, those whoring, robbing, land-grabbing Indian killers, opium addicts and loot seekers down there in the flatlands, how some fine night they were going to look up here at this green slope and marvel at the spectacle of a burning poet. Nothing ever came of that plan, far as Luther could recall. But then that was the general tendency of plans.
“If you’re a fool,” Luther said, “what’s that make me?”
This was a question that could never be answered, and Luther carried swiftly on to the next.
“Why’d I want to go and mess up my good thing driving your murder taxi around West Oakland?” he said. “Tell me that? So the Marxist gangsters can roll over the running-dog capitalist gangsters, take over their drugs and cash flow?”
“Leave, then,” Chan said. “You’re not in this. You go on and get.”
Before Luther could begin to feign that he was not entertaining this generous suggestion, there was a flicker of moonlight, like the bright quick of a fingernail, at the corner of his eye. Chan was pondering a handgun. Taken like the shotgun, no doubt, from the Party arsenal that it was Chan’s official duty to keep inventoried, secret, and in fighting shape. A .45, a handsome piece, probably brand-new. Luther’s heart misgave at the way Chan was balancing it on both palms, weighing it like a heavy book that held a heavy answer.
“What you going to do with that?” Luther said.
“Try again,” Chan said at last. “Find out what hospital they took Popcorn to.” He found a solid grip on the pistol. “Get it right the second time.”
“Maybe you ought to talk to somebody first. Maybe Huey be satisfied with what you already did to fuck Popcorn up for him.”
A fog began to blur the prospect of Oakland spread beneath them. Silence gathered around the friends until it felt like something profound. The coals of their cigarettes flared and crackled. The fog hissed like carbonation in a drink.
“You remember what your uncle Oogie used to do on your birthday, at Christmas?” Chan said finally. “All ‘Yeah, uh, listen, I was going to get you a air rifle.’” His imitation of Oogie’s mumbly drawl was flawless. “Expecting you to be as grateful as if he did give it to you. Now I’m supposed to say, ‘Uh, yeah, Huey, I was going to kill Popcorn Hughes for you, but, uh . . .’?”
“Why not?”
“‘Why not?’” Chan said, making it come out high and childish. “Easy for you to say. Tell me this. You get down there on that movie set, are you going to forget your lines? Tell the director, ‘Uh, yeah, I meant to memorize that shit, but, uh . . .’?”
“No.”
“Are you?”
“No!”
“Then why do you want me to do it?”
“Come on, then,” Luther said. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“Let’s, uh, let’s get out of here. You come with me. Down to L.A. Hide out down there. San Pedro. Long Beach.” Trying to summon or feign enthusiasm for his proposal. “Yeah, Ensenada.”
It was too dark for Chan to see what was not in Luther’s eyes and too dark for Luther to see him missing it.
Chan stood up and dropped the .45 into his hip pocket. It rattled against the extra shotgun rounds. “I woke up this morning,” he said, “had all kinds of beautiful intentions. Prove myself to the Supreme Servant of the People, take a major annoyance off his hands. Move in, move up, maybe in a year I’m running the Oakland chapter. Then I get my eye on the account books. See what kind of holes might be in them, waste and whatnot. Bring a little more structure, a little more discipline. Now, no. Nuh-uh. Now I just have to make it right. You go on, though. Go on, Luther, and get your good thing.”
His voice broke, and from the crack in it emerged the voice of the boy he recently was. Fiercely shy and bookish, absorbing without saturation, on behalf of his sisters and his baby brother, the endless seep of the elder Flowers’s venom. At the memory of that vanished boy, Luther regretted, without entirely renouncing, his earlier disloyal thoughts. He put his arm around the professorial shoulders of his friend. “It’s already too wrong, Chan,” he said. “No way you can make it right.”
“That is probably true.”
“You got to leave. Come on. Come to L.A., hole up. Ride it out.”
“I appreciate the gesture, Luther,” Chan said. “I already troubled you sufficiently.”
“Then go somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“Anywheres that a bus could take you.”
“Maybe I will,” Chan said, to end the conversation.
When the peppermint brandy was drunk, they got up and left behind them the spot where a forgotten dreamer of the California dream had planned to have his glory notarized by fire. Turned and hiked, sliding, back down to the car. After a silent drive to the bottom of the city, the blue dome of the Greyhound station loomed before them like a promise of adventure. There was an OPD cruiser parked at the curb when they pulled up, but before they could consider bailing on the bus station plan, a cop came strolling out of the station, got back into the car, and drove away.
Luther had three hundred dollars in his wallet, all that was left of his up-front money. He handed it over to Chan, “’Kay, then,” he said.
They stood facing each other at the back of the Toronado. Its taillights were slits as narrow as the eyes in the Batman mask, a skeptical squint regarding them. The friends exchanged a couple of palm slaps. Each clasped the other briefly to his chest. Chan offered up some parting bullshit about catching a northbound up to Alaska, or maybe head south, work those shrimp boats down in the Gulf of Mexico. It was all smoke. Chan had never been a boy to leave food on a plate, a math problem without a solution, an open pussy unfucked. He wasn’t going to go into the bus station, get on a bus for North Nowhere. Soon as Luther left, he would get busy finishing, for the sake of finishing, the trouble he had started.
“Seriously,” Luther said. “What you going to do?”
“You don’t need to know, Luther. Tell you this, though, whatever it is? When I’m done, I’m going to be able to hold my head up high.”
“I know that’s true.”
“See you do the same down there. Comport your ass with dignity. Do what you have to do.”
“Yeah.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah.”
Luther tried not to show his impatience, his eagerness to get quit of Chandler Bankwell Flowers III and his cup of clabbered ambition. To get quit of Oakland and Berkeley and all the local fools. The broken promises, the pyres that never got lit.
“You are having good luck right now,” Chan said. “Good luck is good. But that’s all it is, you dig? Not any kind of a substitute for doing what you have to do.”
Luther nodded, said, “No doubt, no doubt,” thinking about the ads you used to see in the pages of Ebony and Esquire selling the long, low, smiling crocodile of 1970, the slogan across the top of the page: WOULDN’T IT BE NICE TO HAVE AN ESCAPE MACHINE?
“I know what it means,” Luther said.
“Huh?” Chan said. “What—”
“I can define ‘toronado.’”
Chan frowned, remembered, frowned more deeply. “Do it, then,” he said.
Luther shook his head. “You don’t need to know,” he said.
Then he strapped himself into his escape machine, and headed for the Nimitz Freeway, San Jose, Los Angeles: the world and the fortune that awaited him.
Popcorn Hughes, Luther heard afterward, was shot to death early that morning in his bed at Summit Hospital. The only suspect was the unknown, unidentified black male who had been described, by witnesses to the first attack at the Bit o’ Honey Lounge, as wearing a mask that was meant, it was generally agreed, to resemble the one worn in Marvel comics by the Black Panther, the first black superhero.
The killer was never apprehended. The Toronado overheated in the Grapevine just north of Lebec and had to be towed across the L.A. County line.
“He’s looking for investors,” Archy guessed.
Valletta affected to study some scene or detail in the distance, beyond the playground, beyond Berkeley, beyond Mount Lassen, saying nothing, infinitesimally shaking her head, mouth down-twisted in a way that might have been disapproving of Archy, Luther, herself, or some combination thereof, arms crossed furiously under her breasts: unable to believe, finally, that she was party to this latest bullshit scheme of Luther’s, or that Archy declined to be party to it, or perhaps that the world did not and never would appreciate the genius of Luther Stallings.
“He still talking about that damn movie?”
“What d’you think?”
She rummaged around in her bag and took out what appeared to be a boxed set of three DVDs entitled The Strutter Trilogy. Its cover featured a handsome close-up shot of the long-jawed, Roman-nosed, Afro-haloed, 1973-vintage Luther Stallings as master thief Willie Strutter, and it promised restored or digital versions of three films: Strutter, Strutter at Large, and Strutter Kicks It Old-School. But it was an empty hunk of packaging with no disks inside, and on closer inspection, it proved to have been painstakingly crafted from the cardboard case to a Complete Back to the Future box set over whose panels had been pasted vivid but crudely executed cut-and-paste computer artwork, a minor but necessary bit of imposture, since, as far as Archy knew—and he knew far; too far—there was no such movie as Strutter Kicks It Old-School.
“Strutter 3. Is that right? Going to write and direct and star! Triple threat! Going to make it fast, cheap, and badass, like they used to do back in the day. Old-school. And you’re going to be his leading lady. That the story he sent you here to tell me, Valletta?”
Out of gentlemanly impulses and, worse, feeling sorry for this woman, one of a string he had auditioned during his childhood for the role of Archy’s New Mother, Archy struggled to keep a tone of derision from creeping into his voice as he offered this bit of informed speculation as to Luther’s line—phrases such as “triple threat” and “fast, cheap, and badass” having formed part of his father’s formulary of bullshit over the years. He did not entirely succeed. The only thing lamer than the piece-of-shit plan Luther had come up with for peeling money loose from Archy, for a film that he had not the least intention of making, was the idea that Luther thought his son would give him anything ever again.
“He’s going to put in a nice big part for you. That right, Valletta? Maybe somehow it turns out Candygirl wasn’t dead all along?”
He detected a ripple along the muscles of her cheek. She held on to her silence, watching as Tibetan flags strung from the front porch of the Sandersons’ house across the park bade their random prayers farewell.
“We’re in preproduction,” she said at last. Defiant, lying the lie.
“So you, what, you have a script?”
“Nah, but your dad, he has the story all figured out. Told me the whole thing, every character, every shot, every minute of screen time, told it ten different ways five hundred times. Archy, it’s gonna be good.”
“Kind of a, what, Strutter comes out of retirement, one last job, gets his revenge type of thing?”
“You want to hear how it goes?”
Archy closed his eyes, anticipating the tedious madness of the scenario that he was about to be pitched, some kind of incoherent mashup of Ocean’s Eleven, The Matrix, and Death Wish, his father’s favorite movie, interlarded with a thick ribbon drawn from the saga of whatever kind of bullshit landlord trouble or IRS trouble or dental trouble his father and the lady had gotten themselves into. But Valletta fell silent again, and he opened his eyes to find a lone tear lingering on her cheek, a tiny solitary pool of outrage or shame. He felt his heart sink and drew another draft on his endless reserve of misplaced guilt. He took out his billfold and conducted a sorry inventory therein.
“Nah,” she said, pushing away from her the bills that emerged, four crisp twenties, a faded five, and two soft, crumpled ones. “Nah, never mind. Keep your money. I didn’t come here to bother you for money. I know you don’t believe that—”
“Sure, I—”
“And I did not come here to bother you with that motherfucking movie you and I both know ain’t ever going to get made.”
“Okay.”
“I know if I told you your dad was in trouble because of the drugs, you wouldn’t feel inclined to help him in any way, shape, or form, and since I got with the program, fourteen months and nine days clean and sober, I respect that position, and so does he. What I want to ask you is, what if we was in some other kind of trouble, didn’t have nothing to do with using? Would you possibly be willing to help him out then?”
“What did he do?”
Again the careful study of the street, the neighboring trees and houses. “I don’t really know,” she said. “But hypothetical.”
“Hypothetical? Hypothetical, if that man’s hair was on fire, I would not piss on his head to put it out.”
She put her sunglasses back on.
“That’s just a theory, though,” Archy said. “We don’t need to test it.”
She nodded, chewing her lip, and he saw that under the lipstick, it was already ragged with chewing.
“Go on, Valletta,” he said, pressing the money on her. “If you promise not to tell me where he’s living at, or what he’s doing, or how bad he looks, or give me any information at all, that’s worth eighty-seven to me right there.”
She considered it. Her tongue emerged from her lips and ran around her mouth once hungrily. Then she knitted up the money in her long fingers and made it vanish so quickly and completely that she might have been alluding to the length of time it was likely to spend in her pocket. She would not take the empty DVD box.
“Nah, y’all keep that, anyway. He got five more just like it.”
“All right.”
He took the box, Jack with a handful of beans, already awash in eighty-seven dollars’ worth of regret over his own stupidity.
“Maybe I should come back next week,” Valletta said, and a smile lacking one lower bicuspid made a brave appearance along the lowermost regions of her face. “Come up with a few more things about him you don’t want to hear, see what that gets me.”
“Funny,” Archy said.
“Don’t worry, you won’t see me again.”
“Valletta—”
She’d started for the Toronado, but he called her back.
“Come on,” he told her. “You got to say it.”
During the summer of 1978, Valletta’s summer, the T-shirt shops of urban America had offered for sale an iron-on transfer that depicted Valletta Moore in a bell-bottom zebra-print pantsuit, surrounded by the glitter-balloon letters of the catchphrase with which she would forever be associated, first spoken in Strutter at Large. The iron-ons were produced by Roach, kings of the rubber transfer, who had divided all the profits, presumably considerable, with retailers and the movie’s distributors.
“You want me to say it?” she said, doubtful, pleased.
“I think eighty-seven dollars buys me that,” Archy said.
She sighed, pumped her fist once, like it was the head of a very heavy hammer, and said, “Do what you got to do.” The fist burst apart in slow motion, fingers blooming. “And stay fly.”
She wrestled with the steel of the car door, resuscitated the engine by patience and finesse, and rolled, shocks creaking, away.
“Stay fly, Valletta,” Archy said.
Julius Jaffe was rereading his memoir in progress, working-titled Confessions of a Secret Master of the Multiverse. He had begun to write it two months earlier in a six-inch Moleskine, in a fever of boredom, drug-sick on H. P. Lovecraft, intending to produce an epic monument to his loneliness and to the appalling tedium he induced in himself. That first night he had cranked out thirty-two unruled pages. Page one started thus:
This record of sorrow is being penned in human blood on parchment made from the hides of drowned sailors. Its unhappy author—O pity me, friend, wherever you lie at your ease!—perches by the high window of a lightning-blasted tower, on a beetling skull-rock beside the roaring madness of a polar sea. Chained at the ankle to an iron bedstead, gnawing on the drumstick of a roasted rat. Scribbling with tattered quill on an overturned tub, his sole illumination a greasy flame guttering in a blubber lamp. A prisoner of ill fortune, a toy of destiny, a wretched cat’s-paw for gods of malice who find sport in plucking the wings from the golden butterfly of human happiness! Thus shorn of liberty and burdened with the doubtful gift of time do I propose to ease the leaden hours in setting down this faithful record, the memoir of a king in ruins.
The night after he penned these words, Titus Joyner had appeared on the scarp of Julie’s solitude, swinging his grappling hook. Since then Julie had not added a word to his chronicle of boredom. He closed the Moleskine, fitted his memoirs with the little elastic strap, his own heart cinched with a tender compassion for their boy author in that distant age.
The front door slammed and the secret master of the multiverse said, “Shit.”
“Titus,” Julie said. “It’s my dad. Get up.”
Titus Joyner lay on his back with a pillow mashed down over his face, held in place by the hook of an arm. That was how he slept: shielded. Titus from Tyler, in Julie’s imagination a sunblasted and horizonless patch of infinite Texas, a necromantic Dia de los Muertos city of prisoners and roses, where Titus had been raised by a forbidding grandmother known as Shy. In Julie’s imagination, Shy was all in black, lit by lightning. Dead now, and Titus cast to his fate, claimed like a lost hat by an auntie from Oakland, a stranger from a house of strangers.
“Dude!” Julie said in a whisper. “T!”
Julie reached for the portable eight-track cassette player Archy had picked up for him at the Alameda swap meet. It was tank-corps green, styled like a field radio, and it had a webbed strap so that a Soldier of Funk, Julie supposed, could march his groove around. He popped out Innervisions (Motown, 1973), one of the few among the small stock of eight-track cassettes he had managed to scrounge that Titus would consent to listen to, and shoved in, with a meaty thunk, Point of Know Return (Kirshner, 1977), aware of how it would irritate his father.
“Julie? You up there?”
Enigmatic white midwesterners of the 1970s aired curious ideas about the role of the violin and the organ in a rock-and-roll context. Titus dragged the pillow from his head and sat up. Awake, looking right at Julie; then, before Julie was quite aware of it, scrambling up out of the bed. Buck-naked, as Titus called it. Titus crumpled his clothes into an armload, went to the window, spun around, and confronted an art deco chifforobe that had belonged to Julie’s great-grandmother. It opened with a great-grandmotherly creak, and Titus climbed inside.
Julie accepted this move without considering whether it was necessary or desirable.
He knew. He knew more than me or you. You can tell by the pictures he drew.
“Hide the hookah,” his father said. “I’m coming up.”
With a solemn intake of breath, Julie activated his secret master training. He would use his Field of Silence, he thought, in combination with his Scowl of Resounding Finality. The door swung open and his father looked in, eyes bright and sunken, cheek nicked by the razor, in one of his old-time hepcat suits. He had that shifty-eyed look he got whenever he had just done something he probably ought not to have done. This might not be a bad time, Julie saw, to confess or at least allude to his own most recent instance of bad behavior. Yet there was something he loved about the way Titus had entered into conspiracy with the chifforobe.
His father covered the fact that he was sniffing the air of the room for the molecular residue of burnt cannabis by making a show of sniffing the air of the room. “You just sitting around?” he said.
Julius Lovecraft Jaffe (though on his passport the middle name, by one of those metaphysical clerical errors forever being committed by reality on the true nature of his being, read Lawrence), gazed calmly back at his father. He sat on his bed, cross-legged in his tie-dyed long johns. Not the tie-dyed long johns with the infinite Escher stairway silk-screened across the chest but the ones with the space galleon setting sail for Tau Ceti across a sea of stars, which he had purchased last spring in the women’s section at Shark’s, where they had been labeled with a handwritten tag on which was printed, in an architect hand and in terms guaranteed to finger the deepest chords of his soul, COOL 70S SPACE KITSCH. The Field of Silence pulsed steady and thick as a stream of annihilating syrup. The Scowl burned shimmering hot pathways in the air between Julie and his father.
“What is that?”
His father’s face seized up around the eyes, and his cheeks went hollow. He looked like a man with inner ear problems, halfway between disoriented and about to vomit.
“My God,” he said. “Please tell me you aren’t listening to Kansas.”
There was a small prog bin at Brokeland, but it spurned the pinnacles and palisades in favor of the dense British thickets, swarms of German umlauts. Wander into Brokeland hoping to sell a copy of Point of Know Return or, say, Brain Salad Surgery (Manticore, 1973), they would need a Shop-Vac to hose up your ashes.
Julie took his wallet from the back pocket of his cutoff denim shorts. It was a yellow plastic wallet printed with a scratched image of Johnny Depp sporting hair of the eighties and the words 21 JUMP STREET in fake-wildstyle lettering. He unsnapped the wallet’s coin purse, in which he rotated a selection from the variety of business cards he had printed up for himself at Kinko’s at the beginning of the summer, just before he met Titus. A well-chosen card had served him well a number of times since then as a substitute for conversation, particularly with his parents. This time he chose one that read:
JULIUS L. JAFFE
curator
“I have to admit,” his father said, sounding like the admission was not a costly one, “I’m getting pretty fucking sick of these fucking cards.” He passed it back to Julie, who returned it to his wallet and put Johnny Depp back in the pocket of his shorts. “What’s with the enormous shoes?”
They were size-fifteen Air Jordans, white on white on white. They looked like a couple of scale-model Imperial destroyers docked neatly on a deck of the Death Star. Julie considered making this claim. He saw that he would have to collapse the Field of Silence, at least temporarily, and throw up a Snare of Deceit. “It’s that art project,” he said. “The one I told you about.” This strategy—Julie’s mother called it “gaslighting”—could be surprisingly effective on his father, who spent so much time lost in his own humming that he sometimes missed out on real-world events.
“Huh,” his father said.
There was no good reason to lie; on some level, Julie knew that. His parents had to figure-slash-understand that Julie was semi-bicurious, or maybe even gay, or what have you. Twenty-five minutes to gay o’clock. But the confession felt like too much work; Titus was too hard to explain. He was, for example, straight-up-noon straight, both hands on the twelve, though that had not prevented him from accepting every last note and coin of Julie’s virginity over the past two weeks. There was so much more to it than sex, gender, race, and all that piddly shit. Julie felt that his life had suddenly, like amino acids in the primordial soup, begun to knot and pattern and complicate itself. How to confess that he had sneaked out with his skateboard every night to hook up with Titus, in slang but also quite literally joining himself by the hand to Titus’s shoulder as they rolled through the nighttime summer streets of South Berkeley and West Oakland, through the wildly ramifying multiverse of their mutual imagination? Titus preferred the street to the roof and walls within which a hard fate and a ninety-year-old batshit auntie had obliged him to shelter, and Julie preferred nothing to the feeling of Titus’s shoulder bone and muscle against his hand, preferred nothing to the grind of his wheels, each tree, parked car, and lamppost a whisper as they passed.
“It’s that thing at Habitot,” Julie added for verisimilitude. “I have to decorate them.”
His father nodded knowledgeably. There was no other way that he knew how to nod. “So what are you doing?” he said. “Playing MTO?”
As a matter of fact, before Titus nodded off, they had been taking turns at Julie’s laptop, logged on to Marvel Team-Up Online. Leveling up their latest characters, Dezire and the Black Answer, running them in their capes and energy auroras through the teeming streets of Hammer Bay, on the island of Genosha.
Julie said, “Filing my teeth.”
“Uh-huh. Not smoking dope.”
“Just crack. And a little opium. Just, like, this much.” He pinched an imaginary pellet between his fingertips. “Fuck, Dad.”
“Because you know it would be all right if you did.”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Not all right, but I mean, if you were getting high, I would want you to tell me about it, right?”
“Right.”
“Not feel like you have to hide it or anything.”
“I get it.”
“Because that’s when you start to drift into stupid.”
Julie said that he planned to continue his lifelong policy of avoiding stupid at every opportunity.
“So,” his father said. “Just sitting here, what, feeling sorry for yourself?”
“I don’t need anybody’s pity,” Julie replied, seeing the words scrawl themselves across the page of his imagination in the florid hand he had affected when writing in his Moleskine with his fountain pen. “Least of all my own.”
That raised a smile on his father’s face.
“Why are you even here in the middle of the day?” Julie said.
“I, uh, came home,” his father said. “I guess I should probably go back.”
The shorter his father’s stories got, the more unwise or embarrassing his behavior turned out to have been. His father’s eyes wandered unseeing for the one thousand and seventh time across the artwork that Julie had drawn and pinned to the lath ceiling, the portraits of cybernetic pimp assassins and blind albino half-Jotun swordsmen and one cherished sketch of Dr. Strange produced with Crayolas and a Flair pen when Julie was five or six. A Nausicaä poster, the Israeli one-sheet for Pulp Fiction. The gatefold inner sleeve of a record called Close to the Edge (Atlantic, 1972), with its world of cool, enigmatic waterfalls that endlessly poured their green-blueness into infinity. His father seeing nothing, understanding nothing, searching for the line, the signal, the telling bit of repartee. Recently and unexpectedly, the fiber-optic cable between the continents of Father and Son had been severed by the barb of some mysterious dragging anchor. His father stood there in the attic doorway with his hands in the jump-jive pockets of his suit jacket, loving Julie with a glancing half-sly caution that the boy could feel and yet be certain of the uselessness thereof, that love occupying as it did only one small unproductive zone of the Greater Uselessness that seemed to pervade his father’s life from pole to pole.
“Did something happen with Archy?” Julie said.
“With Archy?”
“Something at the store.”
“At the store?”
“Question with a question.”
“Sorry.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing, I didn’t, I just kind of blew my stack.”
“Oh, Dad.”
“At Chan Flowers. Councilman Flowers.”
“Whoa.”
“Yep.”
“Is that guy kind of, like, scary?”
“I have always thought so, yes.”
“Kind of a creeper?”
“At times he gives off that vibe.”
“But he buys a lot of records.”
“An all too common conjunction of behaviors.”
“And you yelled at him?”
“Threw him out, actually,” Nat said. “Then I threw out every other shmegegge in the joint.”
“Oh, fuck, Dad—”
“Then I closed the store for good. How do you like that?”
“You what? For good?”
“As in out of business.”
“You closed the store?”
“I really felt I had no choice.”
“For good?”
“Question with a question,” his father said. “Look, I’m fine. I got over myself. Now I’m going to go back, say I’m sorry to Arch. I’ll apologize to Flowers, Moby, everybody else who needs it. Apologies are cheap, Julie, and effective all out of proportion to their cost. My father used to say, ‘Carry ’em like a roll of bills in your hip pocket, pass ’em out freely.’ Remember that.”
“Cool, okay.”
“Used to say, ‘They are good for business, and they make the world a better place.’”
Clearly, his dad was cycling high today, getting that Groucho Marx quality to his delivery. For years he had been on and off various medications whose names sounded like the code names of sorceresses or ninja assassins. Disastrous from the first dose or disappointing in the long run, each wore out its welcome in his father’s bloodstream without ever managing to lay an insulating glove on the glowing wire inside him. His moods had little in the way of pattern or regular rotation apart from a possible intensification in Septembers and Februarys, but if Julie had over time learned to live unshaken by his father’s unpredictable temblors of mania, he had grown inured as well to their completely predictable aftermaths, however heartfelt, of apology and remorse.
“Say sorry,” Nat said. “Then open the store back up like I was, you know, on a little mental lunch break. False alarm. Everybody go about your business.”
“Except Gibson Goode, right?”
“Whatever,” his father said. “Man has a right to sell what he wants, where he wants. Bring him on. Meanwhile, you. Cheer up. You got two more weeks of summer to get through.”
With a wan crackle, the Field of Silence fluttered back to life between them.
And he tried. But before he could tell us he died.
His father closed the door. Julie listened for the creak of his passage down the twisting stair.
The narrow, mirrored door of the old art deco chifforobe swung open, betraying the folded articulate span, half dressed in pressed blue jeans, of Titus Joyner.
“Yo yo yo,” Titus said. Bit by careful bit, he took himself out of the chifforobe and reassembled himself on the floor of Julie’s bedroom, a hit man snapping together the pieces of his rifle. He looked tired. He smelled like the locker room at the Y. “Five more minutes,” he said.
He unrolled himself along the floor of Julie’s room, on the coiled braids of a rag rug, and stretched out. He closed his eyes; his breathing turned solemn and slowed the rise and fall of his chest. He was a prodigy of furtive and impromptu sleep. The nightly bed that fate had furnished him was a zone of danger and dark insomnia. If you closed your eyes in that unsafe house, they would rifle your nightmares and violate your dreams.
“Titus,” Julie said. “Yo, T.”
Nothing; gone. Julie pulled the quilt from his bed and laid it over Titus. It was an antique of the ’80s, Michael Jackson in a tacky spacesuit with a motley crew of robots and aliens. Julie stared at the boy on his floor, a mystery boy fallen from the sky like the Wold Newton meteorite, apparently inert and yet invisibly seething with the mutagenic information of distant galaxies and exploding stars.
Julie was in love.
The title of the course, offered through the summer evening enrichment program of the city of Berkeley’s Southside Senior Center, was “Sampling as Revenge: Source and Allusion in Kill Bill.” It was scheduled to meet every Monday for ten weeks through August, amid the folding furniture of a beige multipurpose room where, in the past, Julie had taken classes in puppet making, clay sculpture, and ikebana. Always the youngest in the room by decades, half centuries, and happier there among the elderly than ever seemed possible in the company of his so-called peers.
That first Monday in June, a week after his graduation from Willard, Julie had taken his seat in the front row of five chairs at the exact center of the room, midway between the video projector and Peter Van Eder, whom Julie had always imagined, from his irritated tone in the Berkeley Daily Bugle, to be this one pudgy bald gentleman with aviator glasses and a square-tipped knit tie whom he would see from time to time at the California, glumly suffering the opening night of Planet of the Apes (perhaps the greatest disappointment in the movie life of Julie Jaffe, a mad Tim Burton fan) or Steamboy (another tragic dud). But Van Eder turned out to be a bony young guy not far past college age. Big Adam’s apple, big wrist bones, one shirttail untucked, his hair long and stringy and flecked with dandruff or ash from his cigarettes or both. On his chin, a hasty pencil sketch of a goatee.
Julie took a glue stick and a bright orange notebook, quadrille-ruled, out of a Pan Am flight bag. Neatly, he folded and glued to the inside front cover the syllabus of films that Peter Van Eder proposed to screen and discuss:
Lady Snowblood (1973) d Toshiya Fujita
The Doll Squad (1973) d Ted V. Mikels
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) d Sergio Leone
Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972) d Shunya Ito
Ghetto Hitman (1974) d Larry Cohen
The Tale of Zatoichi (1962) Kenji Misumi
The Band Wagon (1953) d Vincente Minnelli
A Clockwork Orange (1971) d Stanley Kubrick
36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978) d Gordon Liu
Coffy (1973) d Jack Hill
Julie studied the syllabus as Van Eder waited for the last two names on his roster, one of them, Julie was interested to learn, being Randall Jones. Mr. Jones had both given and attended classes at the Southside Senior Center, and it was through him, a few years ago, that Julie had learned of the puppet-making class. Mr. Jones, whose taste in film ran strongly to violent western and crime, was a regular attendee of Peter Van Eder’s film series at the Southside.
Julie found himself dizzied by his ignorance of Van Eder’s choices, only two of which, the Sergio Leone and The Band Wagon, he had seen. Unless, as seemed likely, there was another movie called The Band Wagon, because The Band Wagon that Julie had watched with his maternal grandparents one Christmas in Coconut Creek, Florida, was a delicious musical with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, whose thighs stirred ancient and somewhat distressing longings in Grandpa Roth. A couple of the other titles and directors were familiar. Zatoichi. Kubrick, duh.
Somebody said, “Look at the bird!”
Cochise Jones, wearing a leisure suit with a faded houndstooth check, stepped into the multipurpose room with Fifty-Eight manning the poop deck of his left shoulder, trailing a kid, perhaps a grandson, about Julie’s age, light-skinned, light-eyed, broad at the shoulder, and slender at the hips. Though as far as Julie knew, Mr. Jones didn’t have any family apart from the bird. When he noticed Julie, he frowned, looking thoughtful, hesitating, as if trying to make up his mind about bringing over the kid to meet Julie.
“He a friend of Fifty-Eight,” Mr. Jones explained straight-faced, apparently deciding that no harm could come of the introduction. “Also a fan of Mr. Tarantino.” Only he pronounced the name as if it rhymed with “Tipitina.”
“Hey,” said Julie, twisting a finger in the tattered selvage of his denim cutoffs until the blood ceased to circulate in his fingertip. His index finger in its noose of cotton thread swelled and pulsed and throbbed and in general served as symbol or synecdoche for its owner and his fourteen-year-old heart, for that all-encompassing, all-expanding disturbance in his skinny little chest that was the love of Tarantino, the world, or all mankind. “I like him, too.”
Titus Joyner nodded, mildly amused (if that) by the spectacle of Julie in his cutoffs and sleeveless T, his portable eight-track on the floor by his feet in their clear white jellies, with his bright blue flight bag like one of the moon stewardesses in 2001. He didn’t say anything. A slender, loose- and long-limbed kid, skin the color of a Peet’s soy latte. Hair worn in a neat, modest Afro with an air of studied retroism. Eyes wary, derisive, cold apart from that ghost of amusement, or maybe it was a flicker of recognition, as if he thought he knew how best to label Julie. Cleft chin. Clothes neat and spotless: dark jeans, short-sleeved, button-down oxford-cloth shirt. Nothing fancy, but somehow the crisp white shirt and the sharp creases ironed into the front of his trouser legs gave him an air of formality. On his feet he wore those imperial star-destroyer kicks.
“What’s up?” he said.
Julie took a card, newly printed, from his wallet, and passed it to the kid, one that read:
JULIUS L. JAFFE
Ronin ·HIRED BLADE
The look of mockery was still on the kid’s face as he studied the card, but he studied it. Slipped it into a pocket of his jeans. Then went to the back of the room to scatter his limbs across an upholstered armchair tucked into a corner.
“I’m sorry, sir.” It was one of the other students, a man in a wheelchair, speaking through a robo-box. Julie had seen the guy racing around Temescal, in the neighborhood of Brokeland, his body a toy in the paws of some brutal ailment. His voice came sparking through its Hawking box. “Sir? I’m sorry, but I have a bird allergy.”
“A bird allergy,” Mr. Jones said, looking blank, failing to see how this assertion could pertain to him. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Maybe you could— Can he wait outside?” said Peter Van Eder.
“Or . . . ?”
Fifty-Eight browsed politely through the silvery down at its breast, appearing to find no offense in the turn things had taken, but Mr. Jones, either because he had been looking forward to this series, or maybe on Fifty-Eight’s account, appeared to be heartbroken.
“It’s quite severe,” said the man in the wheelchair, the torsion of his neck giving him, no doubt unfairly, a sidelong and mendacious look as he said it, like maybe he was really just afraid of parrots or had something against Fifty-Eight personally. “I’m so sorry.”
Mr. Jones sighed. Even if he and Fifty-Eight had not been inseparable, there was no way you could leave a rare and costly bird sitting out in a hallway somewhere. He turned to the kid at the back of the room and raised a sheepish eyebrow. The kid stared at the dude in the wheelchair with open and admiring horror.
“You can get a bus?” Mr. Jones said. The kid knit up his limbs and gave a fractional nod, about to be left alone in this roomful of cripples and old people.
“Bye, Fifty-Eight,” Julie said. “Bye, Mr. Jones.”
“I feel terrible,” said the man in the wheelchair, but in the tonelessness of his voice-o-tron, it was hard to be sure whether he was referring to his remorse at the ejection of Fifty-Eight or the onset of anaphylaxis.
“Come on, fool,” Mr. Jones said to the bird.
Van Eder passed a syllabus to Titus Joyner, who thanked him softly, with an automatic “sir.” Then the kid’s eyes locked on the syllabus, scanned it. He frowned. Something written on the page dismayed him, filled him with outrage and confusion. He squirmed with it, deep in the armchair, until he was obliged to speak up.
“The Band Wagon?” he said.
His disdainful drawl intoned the title of the seventh film on the syllabus with a contempt so all-encompassing that it led one of the fearsome-looking, old, ex-nun-style, Communist, lesbian retired piano teachers who principally made up the enrollment of “Sampling as Revenge” to get up and start passing out oxygen masks and air tanks, so that all the other old people and Julie could go on breathing and not have the air sucked out of their lungs by the whooshing vacuum that followed this sally from the back of the room.
Peter Van Eder blinked and looked mildly amused. “Do you have a problem with The Band Wagon?” he said.
“It’s a musical,” Titus said. “It has, like, Sid Caesar.”
“Cyd Charisse,” said Peter Van Eder harshly, flatly, the way Julie’s old fencing teacher Mr. DiBlasio had been wont to correct Julie’s form with an impatient flat of the blade on the buttocks.
The kid nodded as if satisfied with this correction. He picked up his copy of the syllabus and held it at arm’s length in a display of nearsightedness that Julie took for mocking. “Gordon Liu,” he said slowly with a skeptic squint, pronouncing the Chinese name to rhyme with “shoe.” “Stanley Kubrick. Cyd Charisse.”
The old ladies—there were seven of them, all white—and the three old gents (one of them an Asian-American in an Oakland A’s cap) and the wheelchair guy apparently saw nothing at all droll or absurd in the presence of a Fred Astaire–Cyd Charisse film on that inventory of mayhem and martial arts action. On the contrary, they appeared shocked, even mildly disgusted, by the kid’s show of disrespect, either because they were old or because they were white or both. Julie was certainly shocked.
“Tarantino himself has often argued that his movies should be situated in the context of the big-screen musical, with the outbursts of violence serving the same structural narrative function as the musical numbers,” Peter Van Eder said. “Like a lot of Minnelli, The Band Wagon exhibits a strong female character of the kind that has come to be foregrounded in Tarantino’s work. More important—I’m getting ahead of myself, but whatever—the self-enclosed, self-reflexive world of actors and dancers it portrays prefigures exactly the hermetic, empty universe of physical artistry that we find in Kill Bill. It also showcases the technical virtuosity of Minnelli that is an acknowledged influence not only on Tarantino but on Martin Scorsese as well. In other words . . .”
Van Eder smiled, a stiff, genuine smile made more horrible somehow by its genuineness, in which were intermingled an ingratiating familiarity and a desire to put this kid in his place.
“. . . gots to be hip to Minnelli, my man.”
Julie wanted to die of his own whiteness, to be drowned in the tide of his embarrassment on behalf of all uncool white people everywhere when they tried to be cool. Titus Joyner glowered at Van Eder. He pursed his lips, easing them pensively back and forth, wavering perhaps between giving Van Eder his due for wisdom imparted and taking offense at that horrible “my man.”
“Lady Snowblood,” Van Eder went on.
He addressed the class for ten minutes, reading from a set of four-by-six index cards in a soft, stupefied, increasingly breathless tone like an astronaut pleading with a mad supercomputer to open an airlock, the voice that, for unknown reasons, Van Eder relied on for the imparting of information. He touched on the ambivalent place of women in the postwar Japanese economy, feudal history and Western values, the popularity in Japan of comic books like the original Snowbird, the Japanese literature of revenge, the tension between the needs of the individual and the norms of the community, et cetera. Then Van Eder switched on the video projector, pulled down the screen, and put out the lights.
Taking advantage of the sudden darkness, Julie turned to look back at Titus Joyner. The kid reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a set of massive spectacles, at once square and rounded, a style somewhere between early Spike Lee and Miles Davis on the cover of Get Up with It. In the flickering light from the projector lens, the kid saw Julie looking at him, and a smirk drew a fishhook at the corner of his mouth. Then he turned to the screen, and the disc spun inside the Panasonic projector, and the fan whirred, and the soundtrack scratched, and the cymbals clanged, and Julie dreamed for two hours with his eyes open.
It was a dream Kill Bill, angelic and ghastly, more beautiful, more simplistic, bleaker. More, he tried, existential. At least the Bride, Beatrix Kiddo, had known love and happiness, companionship, hope for the future. Even at her lowest, even comatose and raped by crackers, she carried the memory inside her, in the place vacated by the baby she had lost. Her revenge was haunted by the ghost of happiness. From birth, Yuki Kashima—Meiko Kaji, so delicate, so badass!—had never known anything but the curse of her bloody and useless use. And the swordplay! Criminals and rogues, masters and pupils, slashing and hacking, fatal parasols. And the blood! Severed limbs flying, blood on fresh fallen snow, curtains and cataracts of blood!
When the lights came up at the end, Julie’s reptile brain was dimly aware of Van Eder apologizing for having exceeded the time allotted for class, the rustle of papers, and the scrape of chair legs. The biomass designated as Julie Jaffe stood up, and its autonomic systems took over and propelled it toward a beige corridor, along beige linoleum tiles, through a beige world, while in another universe, his traveler soul honed its katana and ate rice with chopsticks by a fire and tied a thick topknot in its wild black mane. Julie was halfway to the snowy courtyard where the existentially absurd and beautiful combat between Yuki and her final enemy was appointed—halfway to the glass doors of the Southside Senior Center, which opened onto a cement plaza with a sculpture fountain—when he heard a strange howl behind him, canine and low at first, then rising to articulate a screech of mock Japanese challenge.
Julie whirled just in time to see the kid, Titus, coming at him, glasses returned to his shirt pocket, eyes twisted up with homicidal glee, kick-flying through the air while whirling an imaginary blade over his head.
“Hi-yah!” he cried, alighting only inches away and bringing his sword down as if to cleave Julie from cranium to coccyx. Julie drew and parried in a single swift motion, then stepped back in a shower of sparks and let the other kid’s crazy momentum carry him forward with an ungainly lurch. As the kid went past, Julie jabbed downward with his left elbow (stopping just short of striking the small of his back).
“Yah!”
The other kid regained his feet and swung around, and they exchanged a quick series of attacks and parries, simulating with their mouths the clash and clang of steel on steel as Titus backed out of the glass doors of the Southside Senior Center and into the summer night.
Yah!
Hah!
Hah-YAH!
As the ladies and the geezers in their ball caps shuffled past, Julie and his opponent hacked and ducked, slashed, feinted, thrust. They dashed around the wide floodlit plaza with its random scattering of concrete oblongs, hopping up and off, circling the fountain at the center. Julie, with two disappointing years of fencing lessons in his recent past, had the advantage of knowing what you could do with a sword if you actually held one, while Titus had the advantage that he always would have: The whole thing was his idea. He was the one causing things to happen, driving them, taking them seriously long enough and intensely enough—and in public—to make them somehow be. Julie chased him, and Titus ran, laughing. He leaped up onto the broad lip of the fountain and took a deep breath. Three concrete-jacketed light fixtures led like stepping-stones across the water to the sculpture, a big mutant hand of steel entitled Dancing Group II that grasped at the night sky from the center of the fountain. With the tip of his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth, Titus island-hopped the lights along to the sculpture. He scrambled up onto the steel palm of the open hand and stood there, beaming at Julie. Way down along Fourth Street, the train for Sacramento mourned its own passage. The air smelled of chlorine from the fountain, of cut grass from the soccer field on the other side of the Southside Senior Center.
“Dude, what’s your name again?” Julie called, though he knew it was breaking the spell. “Are you— Is Mr. Jones your, like, grandpa or something?”
For answer, Titus leaped from the sculpture into the air, out over the turbid pool water and the scattered wishes of pennies and dimes, helicoptering his blade over his head, legs outstretched fore and aft like a hurdler’s, clearing a gap of six horizontal and four vertical feet to land with a dainty stutter step on the lip of the fountain. Julie stopped breathing.
“Titus Joyner from Tyler, Texas,” he said. “And I am here to dismember your pink bicycle−riding, plastic shoe−wearing, Jethro Tull−singing, faggoty Mr. Spock ass.”
Julie’s heart seized, and then a strange fizz of wonder seemed to engulf him, as if he had been dropped like an ice cube into a glass of sparkling water. The previous evening, he and his parents had gone to Archy and Gwen’s for fish tacos, a specialty of the house. After a while, Julie had grown restless with the trend of conversation at the table and had wandered outside with his eight-track player to kill some time. On the little grass island where the neighborhood children were wont to abandon their toys, Julie had come upon a girl’s bicycle, pink with white handlebar grips and white rubber tires. Wearing a blue science-section Star Trek T-shirt with a black collar and the little flying “A” over the left breast, from which he had cut away the sleeves, Julie rode the pink bike around and around the cul-de-sac, singing along with the eight-track at the top of his lungs about how a bungle in the jungle was all right with him. He had not been aware that even then he was being observed by a cold intelligence from another world. Now he gaped up at Titus Joyner as the other boy brought down his weapon hard, and Julie, deeply interested and intensely embarrassed, allowed himself to be killed. He died.
“I can stay here?”
Julie jumped. Titus lay motionless under the shelter of the comforter, eyes closed, somniloquent.
“Uh, okay, yeah,” Julie said. “My dad went back down to the store, he probably won’t be home for a while. I think my mom’s at a birth, so she’s probably gone all day. You can shower. And I could, I have to do some laundry. I could wash your clothes.”
Julie, under the guise of a sudden blossoming of self-reliance and a desire to help around the house, had been washing Titus’s clothes secretly along with his own for the past two weeks. Titus had only three pairs of pants, three shirts, and five pairs apiece of socks and briefs, but he was obsessive about keeping himself neat and clean. He had a horror of bad breath that approached the pathological, and he spent an aggregate hour a day, at least, in the maintenance of his modest little ’fro.
“Nah, nah,” Titus said. “I mean can I stay here.”
“You mean— What? You mean, like, can you move in?”
From the time of his arrival in June on a flight out of Dallas, Titus had been cribbing, as he put it, in West Oakland, in an undisclosed location; at any rate, he would not disclose its location to Julie. Mr. Jones and Fifty-Eight were neighbors, that was all Julie knew. The house held nine people in three bedrooms, cousins and unrelated relations, all living under the furious, disregarded administration of Titus’s ancient auntie, who was actually a great- or maybe even a great-great-aunt. No one in that house, which—in Julie’s imagination—teemed at every window like a cartoon asylum with madmen and psychotics, knew or cared if Titus came or went, if he dressed and fed and cleaned himself, if he lived or died, smoked crack, or built himself a suitcase bomb in the basement. And yet every day, more or less, he appeared before Julie in crisp jeans and a bright white T-shirt, with the white oxford or one of two plaid short-sleeve button-downs, a blue-black and a green-black, worn unbuttoned over the tee. And the starship shoes, scrupulously tended. Julie was obscurely moved by this scrupulousness, so helping Titus maintain it felt not like a chore but an honor. An offering of love.
The eight-track cassette punched to the next program with a loud clunk, and Titus sat up, wild-eyed and startled. He reached into his pocket for his glasses, and Julie noticed for the first time the coiled plug of black electrician’s tape holding together, at the nosepiece, the right and left halves of his big Spike Lees. Titus had seemed weird last night when they first rendezvoused in Frog Park, but it was too dark then for Julie to spot the evidence of trouble.
“What happened?” Julie said. “Did you get in a fight? Did somebody— Did they say you had to leave?”
Titus appeared to be awake, blinking, swallowing, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, but it took a long time for a reply to emerge.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he finally managed, his voice little more than a whisper. Then he shook it off. “Shake it off,” he told himself.
He got up and came over to Julie’s bed, staring down through his lenses, and his expression was mocking, of himself, of Julie for his solicitude.
“I’ve seen things,” he said, looming over Julie, close enough for Julie to smell the orange and cloves of his own brand of underarm deodorant, smeared somehow across Titus as they had grappled that morning in the dark. “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.”
“C-beams in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. You can’t stay here.”
“Just tell them I’m your imaginary friend,” Titus said. “A only child, come on, you got to have a imaginary friend.”
“I did when I was little.”
“Yeah? What was his name?”
“His name was Cherokee.”
“Cherokee. He still live here?”
Before he could quite dismiss the question as the joke it was intended to be, Julie had a quick look around the attic. When he was four or five years old and sleeping in the room next to his parents’, he used to come up here to hide and conspire with his imaginary playmate. Now there was nothing left of Cherokee but the dry cool pulse of Indian fingers against his palm.
“Second, okay, that’s first, but second, you promised me, T.”
“What I say?” Titus gave the question an offhand spin and turned to examine, in a dish on the dresser, the orrery of small glass planets that Julie had made over the years at the Crucible. Trying to play it off, to persuade Julie that whatever rash thing he might have said was a joke, insincere, forgotten. “Only thing I promised you,” he continued, “is that when I’m a A-list Hollywood auteur, you get to help me out on the screenplays. I remember promising you that. Isn’t any other promise I remember.”
“You said you would . . . you know.” Julie felt his voice get very quiet. “If I came with you.”
Like Galactus, like some giant, timeless celestial older than the stars, Titus scooped up a handful of planets, tumbled them between his fingers, let them splash chiming back into the dish. “True,” he said. “But check it out, man.” He laughed, bitter laughter, contemptuous. “I’m afraid of her. I heard her one time kind of like whispering to him from the porch when he dropped a garbage bag all over the sidewalk. Reminded me of this principal I had back in Texas, had that same quiet way of getting angry, talking all soft and reasonable, then suspend your ass for three days ’cause you threw a pencil.”
“Yeah,” Julie agreed. “She gets all Eastwood.” Then, “How often do you go by there?”
“I followed him home a couple times.”
“Just, what, stalking him or something?”
“Just looking.”
Julie envisioned Titus pedaling past Archy and Gwen’s house at twilight, the sagging porch with its freight of bougainvillea, the life in which Titus was not permitted or could not bring himself to share passing back and forth like a movie to be memorized shot for shot across the screen of the big bay window. Then Titus turned around, and Julie was shocked to see that he had tears in his eyes.
“I am not going back to my auntie’s, tell you that,” Titus said, and a flat, genuine twang of Texas crept into his voice. He took off his glasses to wipe away the tears with the back of his arm, and the two halves fell apart, the wad of black tape giving way, the sections of broken frame rattling against the plywood subfloor of the attic. “No way I’m ever going back to that house.”
They stood there with six inches and an adamantine membrane of the multiverse between them. Julie longed to put his arms around Titus, to console him, but he could not be sure that Titus would welcome such a touch. Indeed, he suspected Titus would reject it. Julie could only guess, the intuition guided if not shaped entirely by the dubious and histrionic hand of ghetto melodramas, cop shows, and the brutal lyrics of rap songs, at the latest trauma that Titus had undergone.
Julie knelt and picked up the pieces, then carried them over to the bare pine table, its surface an action painting of Testors paint, scorched black in patches by the glue guns and the glowing elements of soldering irons, inscribed with an illegible cuneiform of X-ACTO-blade scars, where he had been wont, in the limitless trances of his loneliness, to assemble his scale models of AT-ATs and Gundam Wing fighters, and to ornament his little metal armies of orcs and paladins, and to invest the unspent and endlessly compounding principle of his inner and only life. There were three neat plastic racks of screw and nail drawers, and he rummaged among them until he came up with a tube of superglue, the crusted tip of its nozzle forever pierced, like some allegorical wound in a story of King Arthur, by its tiny red-capped pin. He squeezed out two drops and then eased the acrylonitrile halves of Titus’s glasses together with the practiced touch of a modeler until they held and there was not even a fissure visible. Then he handed them back to Titus, who gingerly tested the join. Without his frames, his face looked vulnerable, raw.
“Anyway, they just glass,” he said.
“Seriously?”
“I got like twenty-ten. I just wear them to, uh, make me look smart.” He put them on again, and something armored, sealed off, unassailable resumed its dominion over the features of his face.
“You could stay here tonight,” Julie told him, and as he said the words, he felt a pang of regret for them, intuiting the valediction they contained. If Titus accepted the terms with which Julie was about to present him, the period of their secret friendship would come to an end. After today, the world would know about Titus Joyner, and knowing that, would begin to know, or believe that it knew, Julius Jaffe, too. Yet he felt so far from being ready to know himself or contend with the world and its definitions. “After that, I don’t know, we’ll see.”
“Cool,” Titus said. “Damn, thank you.”
“Okay, it’s on one condition.”
“I’m not eating any more of that tempeh. Shit is nasty.”
“We don’t actually eat that much tempeh,” Julie said, feeling himself blushing at the thought of the hopeless Berkeletude of himself and his family. “I don’t know why it was even in our fridge. And no, that’s not it.”
“What, then?”
“You know.”
“No,” Titus said. “No way. I’m not—”
“You have to. I mean, even if my parents let you stay, and I don’t even want to think how I’m going to explain it all to them, I just have to, like, rely on the fact that they are going to get off on the idea that I have a troubled young African-American friend they can, like, help out or whatever. But you can’t just keep riding your bike past his house all the time. That is just sad.”
Julie went down to the bathroom to brush his teeth and, strangely modest, change into his clothes. When he came out of the bathroom, he found Titus sitting on the bottom attic step, fully dressed, upright, hands on his knees, as if awaiting a court date.
“What if he doesn’t like me?” he said.
Julie thought about squeezing in next to Titus, between him and the wall of the stairwell. Put his arm around the boy, lay his head against his shoulder, hold his hand. If he were Titus’s girlfriend, it would be the easiest thing in the world.
“I wish I were your girlfriend,” he said.
“Shut up, faggot,” Titus said gently.
“Hate speech,” said Julie. He sat down on the other side of Titus, where there was room for them to share the stair without touching. “Just do what I tell you. It’s going to be fine.”
Titus wiped his cheek with the back of one hand and snuffled once. Julie offered him a Kleenex. Titus waved it off.
“Tears in the motherfuckin’ rain,” he said.
On his way back to throw open the doors of Brokeland to the winds of doom, Archy decided to take a detour, drive past the site of the former Golden State market, corner of Forty-first and Telegraph, from whose shelves, as a pup, he had shoplifted all kinds of tasty and desirable items. The Golden State chain, small and local to the Bay Area, had suffered some kind of implosion while Archy was over in the Gulf. The site at Forty-first was sown with the salt of failure, and since then no enterprise had taken root at the cursed spot. Not the plastic-plant nursery. Not the store that sold novelty floor coverings, the kind you usually saw for sale draped over hurricane fences along vacant corner lots, shag-rug portraits of Malcolm X and shag-rug Aztec warriors cradling dead Aztec ladies in the deep nylon pile of their arms.
Archy parked and got out of the El Camino. In the same spirit of research that made him borrow Rolando (he hadn’t gotten the chance to tell Gwen about that, to show her he was capable, willing, and at this point, telling her would be like dropping a penny in a parking meter), Archy applied himself to the study of this slab of failure hewn from the greater zone of vicissitude that was his hometown. He tried to see it the way a successful businessman and top-ranked rich person like Gibson Goode was seeing it: as something that, unlike a plastic houseplant, could be made to grow. He studied the boarded-up plate windows, the rusting iron barrier around the empty cart corral. The mysteriously virginal circle of white concrete where, at the nexus of all earthly desire, there had stood a coin-operated peewee carousel with fiberglass horses, grinding around their tiny orbit in a way that only a kid could have found magical. As he ambled toward the back of the building to the shuttered and chained loading dock, he saw a pudgy man wearing a turquoise tracksuit and sneakers like a pair of tropical birds, murmuring into a cell phone. Big sunglasses made of turquoise plastic concealed the upper part of the man’s face, but the lower part gathered itself into a troubled pout. The man said softly, “Hey.”
“Tsup,” Archy said, fixating his connoisseurial attention on the completely featureless and uninteresting cinder-block backside of the building. He stroked his chin and nodded as if confirming some rumor about the building’s construction, as if noting that the ratio between the width and height of the cinder blocks echoed information that had been hidden by God in the works of Pythagoras, in the radio pulsing of the stars. Slowly, he walked on without giving the man in the bright kicks a second glance, heading down Forty-first Street toward Highway 24 like he had some proper business to attend to.
Forty-first was all sky and wires and broken rooflines and, like a lot of streets that had been cut in two by the construction of the Grove-Shafter Freeway, after all these years it still had a dazed feel, a man who had taken a blow to the head staggering hatless down from Telegraph, face-planting at the overpass. Archy felt a balloon of failure inflating in his rib cage. Between the days of peewee carousels and hectic stolen packages of Ding Dongs and this afternoon in the wasteland of the Golden State parking lot, there seemed to lie an unbridgeable gulf. As if his history were not his own but the history of someone more worthy of it, someone who had not betrayed it. He felt, not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989, when he had accepted an impromptu one-night invitation to play a Funkadelic show at the Warfield (Archy was, at the time, a member of a P-Funk tribute band called Bop Gun) after Boogie Mosson was laid up with a case of food poisoning. That was no decision at all, since a request from George Clinton was an incontrovertible voice from the top of a very high mountain. Archy was tired of Nat, and he was tired of Gwen and of her pregnancy with all the unsuspected depths of his insufficiency that it threatened to reveal. He was tired of Brokeland, and of black people, and of white people, and of all their schemes and grudges, their frontings, hustles, and corruptions. Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.
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Michael Chabon
From Michael Chabon, the bestselling author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; his first novel in 5 years is a lovingly painted pop-culture epic.
One street in Oakland, California. As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are hanging in there, co-regents of Brokeland Records. Their wives, Gwen and Aviva, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary midwives.
When former star quarterback Gibson Goode announces plans to dump his latest Dogpile megastore on Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear the worst for their vulnerable little enterprise. As behind Goode's proposal a nefarious story lurks.
While their husbands struggle to mount a defence, Aviva and Gwen find themselves caught up in a professional battle that tests the limits of their friendship. And into their already tangled lives comes Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged.
An intimate epic set to the laidback beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all of its own, Telegraph Avenue is Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet, and a must-read for fans of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity’.
Telegraph Avenue
A Novel
Michael Chabon
Dedication
To Ayelet, from the drop of the needle to the innermost groove
Epigraph
Call me Ishmael.
—Ishmael Reed, probably.
Contents
Dedication (#uc05a89b1-054a-5a3e-a194-a9bd341b4610)
Epigraph (#ue3e23c70-7620-5583-a26e-6d43980ad6c0)
I (#ue146fd8b-db12-51b8-9bb6-919dfb122ad2)
Dream of Cream (#ue146fd8b-db12-51b8-9bb6-919dfb122ad2)
II (#litres_trial_promo)
The Church of Vinyl (#litres_trial_promo)
III (#litres_trial_promo)
A Bird of Wide Experience (#litres_trial_promo)
IV (#litres_trial_promo)
Return to Forever (#litres_trial_promo)
V (#litres_trial_promo)
Brokeland (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Michael Chabon (#litres_trial_promo)
Credits (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
I
Dream of Cream
A white boy rode flatfoot on a skateboard, towed along, hand to shoulder, by a black boy pedaling a brakeless fixed-gear bike. Dark August morning, deep in the Flatlands. Hiss of tires. Granular unraveling of skateboard wheels against asphalt. Summertime Berkeley giving off her old-lady smell, nine different styles of jasmine and a squirt of he-cat.
The black boy raised up, let go of the handlebars. The white boy uncoupled the cars of their little train. Crossing his arms, the black boy gripped his T-shirt at the hem and scissored it over his head. He lingered inside the shirt, in no kind of hurry, as they rolled toward the next pool of ebbing streetlight. In a moment, maybe, the black boy would tug the T-shirt the rest of the way off and fly it like a banner from his back pocket. The white boy would kick, push, and reach out, feeling for the spark of bare brown skin against his palm. But for now the kid on the skateboard just coasted along behind the blind daredevil, drafting.
Moonfaced, mountainous, moderately stoned, Archy Stallings manned the front counter of Brokeland Records, holding a random baby, wearing a tan corduroy suit over a pumpkin-bright turtleneck that reinforced his noted yet not disadvantageous resemblance to Gamera, the giant mutant flying tortoise of Japanese cinema. He had the kid tucked up under his left arm as, with his free right hand, he worked through the eighth of fifteen crates from the Benezra estate, the records in crate number 8 favoring, like Archy, the belly meat of jazz, salty and well marbled with funk. Electric Byrd (Blue Note, 1970). Johnny Hammond. Melvin Sparks’s first two solo albums. Charles Kynard, Wa-Tu-Wa-Zui (Prestige, 1971). As he inventoried the lot, Archy listened, at times screwing up his eyes, to the dead man’s minty quadrophonic pressing of Airto’s Fingers (CTI, 1972) played through the store’s trusty Quadaptor, a sweet gizmo that had been hand-dived from a Dumpster by Nat Jaffe and refurbished by Archy, a former army helicopter electrician holding 37.5 percent—last time he’d bothered to check—of a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from SF State.
The science of cataloging one-handed: Pluck a record from the crate, tease the paper sleeve out of the jacket. Sneak your fingers into the sleeve. Waiter the platter out with your fingertips touching nothing but label. Angle the disc to the morning light pouring through the plate window. That all-revealing, even-toned East Bay light, keen and forgiving, always ready to tell you the truth about a record’s condition. (Though Nat Jaffe claimed it was not the light but the window, a big solid plate of Pittsburgh glass vaccinated against all forms of bullshit during the period of sixty-odd years when the space currently housing Brokeland Records had been known as Spencer’s Barbershop.)
Archy swayed, eyes closed, grooving on the heft of the baby, on the smell of grease coming off of Ringo Thielmann’s bass line, on the memory of the upraised eyes of Elsabet Getachew as she gave him head yesterday in the private dining room of the Queen of Sheba Ethiopian restaurant. Recollecting the catenary arch of her upper lip, the tip of her tongue going addis ababa along the E string of his dick. Swaying, grooving, feeling on that Saturday morning, just before the boots of the neighborhood tracked bad news through his front door, like he could carry on that way all day, forever.
“Poor Bob Benezra,” Archy said to the random baby. “I did not know him, but I feel sorry for him, leaving all these beautiful records. That’s how come I have to be an atheist, right there, Rolando, seeing all this fine vinyl the poor man had to leave behind.” The baby not too young to start knowing the ledge, the cold truth, the life-and-death facts of it all. “What kind of heaven is that, you can’t have your records?”
The baby, understanding perhaps that it was purely rhetorical, made no attempt to answer this question.
Nat Jaffe showed up for work under a cloud, like he did maybe five times out of eleven or, be generous, call it four out of every nine. His bad mood a space helmet lowered over his head, poor Nat trapped inside with no way to know whether the atmosphere was breathable, no gauge to tell him when his air supply would run out. He rolled back the deadbolt, keys banging against door, working one-handed himself, because of a crate of records he had crooked up under his left arm. Nat bulled in with his head down, humming low to himself; humming the interesting chord changes to an otherwise lame-ass contemporary pop song; humming an angry letter to the slovenly landlord of the nail salon two blocks up, or to the editor of the Oakland Tribune whose letters page his anger often adorned; humming the first fragments of a new theory of the interrelationship between the bossa nova and the nouvelle vague; humming even when he wasn’t making a sound, even when he was asleep, some wire deep in the bones of Nathaniel Jaffe always resounding.
He closed the door, locked it from the inside, set the crate on the counter, and hung his gray-on-charcoal pin-striped fedora from one of nine double-branched steel hooks that also dated from the days of Spencer’s Barbershop. He ran a finger through his dark hair, kinked tighter than Archy’s, thinning at the hairline. He turned, straightening his necktie—hepcat-wide, black with silver flecks—taking note of the state of box 8. Working his head around on the neck joints a few times as if in that creak of bones and tension lay hope of release from whatever was causing him to hum.
He walked to the back of the store and disappeared through the beaded curtain, laboriously painted by Nat’s son, Julie, with the image of Miles Davis done up as a Mexican saint, St. Miles’s suffering heart exposed, tangled with a razor wire of thorns. Not a perfect likeness, to be sure, looking to Archy more like Mookie Wilson, but it could not be easy to paint a portrait of somebody across a thousand half-inch beads, and few besides Julius Jaffe would ever contemplate doing it, let alone give it a try. A minute later Archy heard the toilet flush, followed by a spasm of angry coughing, and then Julie’s father came back out to the front of the store, ready to burn another day.
“Whose baby is that?” he said.
“What baby?” said Archy.
Nat unbolted the front door and spun the sign to inform the world that Brokeland was open for business. He gave his skull another tour of the top of his spinal column, hummed some more, coughed again. Turned to his partner, looking almost radiant with malice. “We’re totally fucked,” he said.
“Statistically, that’s indeed likely,” Archy said. “In this case, how so?”
“I just came from Singletary.”
Their landlord, Mr. Garnet Singletary, the King of Bling, sold grilles and gold finger rings, rope by the yard, three doors up from Brokeland. He owned the whole block, plus a dozen or more other properties spread across West Oakland. Retail, commercial. Singletary was an information whale, plying his migratory route through the neighborhood, taking in all the gossip, straining it for nutrients through his tireless baleen. He had never once turned loose a dollar to frolic among the record bins at Brokeland, but he was a regular customer nonetheless, stopping by every couple of days just to audit. To monitor the balance of truth and bullshit in the local flow.
“Yeah?” Archy said. “What’d Singletary have to say?”
“He said we’re fucked. Seriously, why are you holding a baby?”
Archy looked down at Rolando English, a rusty young man with a sweet mouth and soft brown ringlety curls all sweaty and stuck to the side of his head, stuffed into a blue onesie, then wrapped in a yellow cotton blanket. Archy hefted Rolando English and heard a satisfying slosh from inside. Rolando English’s mother, Aisha, was a daughter of the King of Bling. Archy had offered to take Rolando off Aisha’s hands for the morning, maybe pick up a few items the baby required, and so forth. Archy’s wife was expecting their first child, and it was Archy’s notion that, given the imminence of paternity, he might get in some practice before the first of October, their due date, maybe ease the shock of finding himself, at the age of thirty-six, a practicing father. So he and Rolando had made an excursion up to Walgreens, Archy not at all minding the walk on such a fine August morning. Archy dropped thirty dollars of Aisha’s money on diapers, wipes, formula, bottles, and a package of Nuk nipples—Aisha gave him a list—then sat down right there on the bus bench in front of the Walgreens, where he and Rolando English changed themselves some foul-smelling diaper, had a little snack, Archy working his way through a bag of glazed holes from the United Federation of Donuts, Rolando English obliged to content himself with a pony of Gerber Good Start.
“This here’s Rolando,” Archy said. “I borrowed him from Aisha English. So far he doesn’t do too much, but he’s cute. Now, Nat, I gather from one or two of your previous statements that we are fucked in some manner.”
“I ran into Singletary.”
“And he gave you some insight.”
Nat spun the crate of records he had carried in with him, maybe thirty-five, forty discs in a Chiquita crate, started idly flipping through them. At first Archy assumed Nat was bringing them in from home, items from his own collection he wanted to sell, or records he had taken home for closer study, the boundaries among the owners’ respective private stocks and the store’s inventory being maintained with a careless exactitude. Archy saw that it was all just volunteers. A Juice Newton record, a bad, late Commodores record, a Care Bears Christmas record. Trash, curb fruit, the bitter residue of a yard sale. Orphaned record libraries called out constantly to the partners from wherever fate had abandoned them, emitting a distress signal only Nat and Archy could hear. “The man could go to Antarctica,” Aviva Roth-Jaffe once said of her husband, “and come back with a box of wax 78s.” Now, hopeless and hopeful, Nat sifted through this latest find, each disc potentially something great, though the chances of that outcome diminished by a factor of ten with each decrease in the randomness of the bad taste of whoever had tossed them out.
“‘Andy Gibb,’” Nat said, not even bothering to freight the words with contempt, just slipping ghosts of quotation marks around the name as if it were a known alias. He pulled out a copy of After Dark (RSO, 1980) and held it up for Rolando English’s inspection. “You like Andy Gibb, Rolando?”
Rolando English seemed to regard the last album released by the youngest Gibb brother with greater open-mindedness than his interlocutor.
“I’ll go along with you on the cuteness,” Nat said, his tone implying that he would go no further than that, like he and Archy had been having an argument, which, as far as Archy could remember, they had not. “Give him.”
Archy passed the baby to Nat, feeling the cramp in his shoulder only after he had let go. Nat encircled the baby under the arms with both hands and lifted him, going face-to-face, Rolando English doing a fine job of keeping his head up, meeting Nat’s gaze with that same air of willingness to cut people a break, Andy Gibb, Nat Jaffe, whomever. Nat’s humming turned soft and lullaby-like as the two considered each other. Baby Rolando had a nice, solid feel to him, a bunch of rolled socks stuffed inside one big sock, dense and sleepy, not one of those scrawny flapping-chicken babies one ran across from time to time.
“I used to have a baby,” Nat recalled, sounding elegiac.
“I remember.” That was back around the time he first met Nat, playing a wedding at that Naturfreunde club up on Joaquin Miller. Archy, just back from the Gulf, came in at the last minute, filling in for Nat’s regular bassist at the time. Now the former Baby Julius was fifteen and, to Archy at least, more or less the same sweet freakazoid as always. Hearing secret harmonies, writing poetry in Klingon, painting his fingernails with Jack Skellington faces. Used to go off to nursery school in a leotard and a tutu, come home, watch Color Me Barbra. Even at three, four years old, prone like his father to holding forth. Telling you how french fries didn’t come from France or German chocolate from Germany. Same tendency to get caught up in the niceties of a question. Lately, though, he seemed to spend a lot of time transmitting in some secret teenager code, decipherable only by parents, designed to drive them out of their minds.
“Babies are cool,” Nat said. “They can do Eskimo kisses.” Nat and Rolando went at it, nose to nose, the baby hanging there, putting up with it. “Yeah, Rolando’s all right.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Got good head control.”
“Doesn’t he, though?” Archy said.
“That’s why they call him Head-Control Harry. Right? Sure it is. Head-Control Harry. You want to eat him.”
“I guess. I don’t really eat babies all that much.”
Nat studied Archy the way Archy had studied the A-side of the late Bob Benezra’s copy of Kulu Sé Mama (Impulse!, 1967), looking for reasons to grade it down.
“So, what, you practicing? That the idea?”
“That was the idea.”
“And how’s it working out?”
Archy shrugged, giving it that air of modest heroism, the way you might shrug after you had been asked how in God’s name you managed to save a hundred orphans trapped in a flaming cargo plane from collision with an asteroid. As he played it off to Nat, Archy knew—felt, like the baby-shaped ache in his left arm—that neither his ability nor his willingness to care for Rolando English for an hour, a day, a week, had anything whatsoever to do with his willingness or ability to be a father to the forthcoming child now putting the finishing touches on its respiratory and endocrine systems in the dark laboratory of his wife’s womb.
Wiping a butt, squeezing some Carnation through a nipple, mopping up the milk puke with a dishrag, all that was mere tasks and procedures, a series of steps, the same as the rest of life. Duties to pull, slow parts to get through, shifts to endure. Put your thought processes to work on teasing out a tricky time signature from On the Corner (Columbia, 1972) or one of the more obscure passages from The Meditations (Archy was currently reading Marcus Aurelius for the ninety-third time), sort your way one-handed through a box of interesting records, and before you knew it, nap time had arrived, Mommy had come home, and you were free to go about your business again. It was like the army: Be careful, find a cool dry place to stash your mind, and hang on until it was over. Except, of course (he realized, experiencing the full-court press of a panic that had been flirting with him for months, mostly at three o’clock in the morning when his wife’s restless pregnant tossing disturbed his sleep, a panic that the practice session with Rolando English had been intended, vainly, he saw, to alleviate), it never would be over. You never would get through to the end of being a father, no matter where you stored your mind or how many steps in the series you followed. Not even if you died. Alive or dead or a thousand miles distant, you were always going to be on the hook for work that was neither a procedure nor a series of steps but, rather, something that demanded your full, constant attention without necessarily calling on you to do, perform, or say anything at all. Archy’s own father had walked out on him and his mother when Archy was not much older than Rolando English, and even though, for a few years afterward, as his star briefly ascended, Luther Stallings still came around, paid his child support on time, took Archy to A’s games, to Marriott’s Great America and whatnot, there was something further required of old Luther that never materialized, some part of him that never showed up, even when he was standing right beside Archy. Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.
“Yeah,” Nat said. For a second the wire in him went slack. “Babies are cute. Then they grow up, stop taking showers, and beat off into their socks.”
There was a shadow in the door glass, and in walked S. S. Mirchandani, looking mournful. And the man had a face that was built for mourning, sag-eyed, sag-jowled, lamentation pooling in the spilt-ink splash of his beard.
“You gentlemen,” he said, always something elegiac and proper in his way of speaking the Queen’s English, some remembrance of a better, more civilized time, “are fucked.”
“I keep hearing that,” Archy said. “What happened?”
“Dogpile,” Mr. Mirchandani said.
“Fucking Dogpile,” Nat agreed, humming again.
“They are breaking ground in one month’s time.”
“One month?” Archy said.
“Next month! This is what I am hearing. Our friend Mr. Singletary was speaking to the grandmother of Mr. Gibson Goode.”
Nat said, “Fucking Gibson Goode.”
Six months prior to this morning, at a press conference with the mayor at his side, Gibson “G Bad” Goode, former All-Pro quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, president and chairman of Dogpile Recordings, Dogpile Films, head of the Goode Foundation, and the fifth richest black man in America, had flown up to Oakland in a customized black-and-red airship, brimming over with plans to open a second Dogpile “Thang” on the long-abandoned Telegraph Avenue site of the old Golden State market, two blocks south of Brokeland Records. Even larger than its giant predecessor near Culver City, the Oakland Thang would comprise a ten-screen cineplex, a food court, a gaming arcade, and a twenty-unit retail galleria anchored by a three-story Dogpile media store, one floor each for music, video, and other (books, mostly). Like the Fox Hills Dogpile store, the Oakland flagship would carry a solid general-interest selection of media but specialize in African-American culture, “in all,” as Goode put it at the press conference, “its many riches.” Goode’s pockets were deep, and his imperial longings were married to a sense of social purpose; the main idea of a Thang was not to make money but to restore, at a stroke, the commercial heart of a black neighborhood cut out during the glory days of freeway construction in California. Unstated during the press conference, though inferable from the way things worked at the L.A. Thang, were the intentions of the media store not only to sell CDs at a deep discount but also to carry a full selection of used and rare merchandise, such as vintage vinyl recordings of jazz, funk, blues, and soul.
“He doesn’t have the permits and whatnot,” Archy pointed out. “My boy Chan Flowers has him all tangled up in environmental impacts, traffic studies, all that shit.”
The owner and director of Flowers & Sons funeral home, directly across Telegraph from the proposed Dogpile site, was also their Oakland city councilman. Unlike Singletary, Councilman Chandler B. Flowers was a record collector, a free-spending fiend, and without fully comprehending the reasons for his stated opposition to the Dogpile plan, the partners had been counting on it, clinging to the ongoing promise of it.
“Evidently something has changed the Councilman’s mind,” said S. S. Mirchandani, using his best James Mason tone: arch and weary, hold the vermouth.
“Huh,” Archy said.
There was nobody in West Oakland more hard-ass or better juiced than Chandler Flowers, and the something that evidently had changed his mind was not likely to have been intimidation.
“I don’t know, Mr. Mirchandani. Brother has an election coming,” Archy said. “Barely came through the primary. Maybe he’s trying to stir up the base, get them a little pumped. Energize the community. Catch some star power off Gibson Goode.”
“Certainly,” said Mr. Mirchandani, his eyes saying no way. “I am sure there is an innocent explanation.”
Kickbacks, he was implying. A payoff. Anybody who managed, as Mr. Mirchandani did, to keep a steady stream of cousins and nieces flowing in from the Punjab to make beds in his motels and wash cars at his gas stations without running afoul of the authorities at either end, was likely to find his thoughts running along those lines. It was almost as hard for Archy to imagine Flowers—that stiff-necked, soft-spoken, and everlastingly correct man, a hero in the neighborhood since Lionel Wilson days—taking kickbacks from some showboating ex-QB, but then Archy tended to make up for his hypercritical attitude toward the condition of vinyl records by going too easy on human beings.
“Anyways, it’s too late, right?” Archy said. “Deal already fell through. The bank got cold feet. Goode lost his financing, something like that?”
“I don’t really understand American football,” said S. S. Mirchandani. “But I am told that when he was a player, Gibson Goode was quite famous for something called ‘having a scramble.’”
“The option play,” Nat said. “For a while there, he was pretty much impossible to sack.”
Archy took the baby back from Nat Jaffe. “G Bad was a slippery motherfucker,” he agreed.
Mr. Nostalgia, forty-four, walrus mustache, granny glasses, double-extra-large Reyn Spooner (palm trees, saw grass, woodies wearing surfboards), stood behind the Day-Glo patchwork of his five-hundred-dollar exhibitor’s table, across a polished concrete aisle and three tables down from the signing area, under an eight-foot vinyl banner that read MR. NOSTALGIA’S NEIGHBORHOOD, chewing on a Swedish fish, unable to believe his fucking eyes.
“Yo!” he called out as the goon squad neared his table: two beefy white security guys in blue poly blazers and a behemoth of a black dude, Gibson Goode’s private muscle, whose arms in their circumference were a sore trial to the sleeves of his black T-shirt. “A little respect, please!”
“Damn right,” said the man they were escorting from the hall, and as they came nearer, Mr. Nostalgia saw that it really was him. Thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, forty watts too dim, maybe: but him. Red tracksuit a size too small, baring his ankles and wrists. Jacket waistband riding up in back under a screened logo in yellow, a pair of upraised fists circled by the words BRUCE LEE INSTITUTE, OAKLAND, CA. Long and broad-shouldered, with that spring in his gait, coiling and uncoiling. Making a show of dignity that struck Mr. Nostalgia as poignant if not successful. Everybody staring at the guy, all the men with potbellies and back hair and doughy white faces, heads balding, autumn leaves falling in their hearts. Looking up from the bins full of back issues of Inside Sports, the framed Terrible Towels with their bronze plaques identifying the nubbly signature in black Sharpie on yellow terry cloth as that of Rocky Bleier or Lynn Swann. Lifting their heads from the tables ranged with rookie cards of their youthful idols (Pete Maravich, Robin Yount, Bobby Orr), with canceled checks drawn on long-vanished bank accounts of Ted Williams or Joe Namath; unopened cello packs of ’71 Topps baseball cards, their fragile black borders pristine as memory, and of ’86 Fleer basketball cards, every one holding a potential rookie Jordan. Watching this big gray-haired black man they half-remembered, a face out of their youth, get the bum’s rush. That’s the dude from the signing line. Was talking to Gibson Goode, got kind of loud. Hey, yeah, that’s what’s-his-face. Give him credit, the poor bastard managed to keep his chin up. The chin—him, all right—with the Kirk Douglas dimple. The light eyes. The hands, Jesus, like two uprooted trees.
“Consider yourselves fortunate, gentlemen,” Mr. Nostalgia called as they swept past his table. “That man could kill you with one finger if he wanted to.”
“Awesome,” said the younger of the goons, head shaved clean as a porn star’s testicle. “Long as he buys a ticket first.”
Mr. Nostalgia was not a troublemaker. He liked to smoke prescription indica, watch television programs about World War II, eat Swedish fish, and listen to the Grateful Dead, in any combination or grouping thereof. Undoubtedly, sure, he had issues with authority, his father a survivor of two camps, his mother a marcher on Washington, Mr. Nostalgia unfit to hold down any job requiring him to answer to a boss. Great as he might be in circumference, however, Mr. Nostalgia was only five-six, almost, in his huaraches, and not quite in fighting trim. His one reliable move, if you hoped to base a style of kung fu on it, you would probably have to go with Pill Bug. Mr. Nostalgia avoided beefs, quarrels, bar fights, and showdowns foreign and domestic. He deplored violence, except in 1944, in black and white, on television. He was a merchant of good reputation and long standing who had forked over a hefty fee to the organizers of the East Bay Sports and Card Show, some of which money had gone to pay for the protection, the peace of mind, that these goons in their blue blazers would, at least in theory, provide. And peace of mind, face it, was not merely a beautiful phrase; it was a worthy ambition, the aim of religions, the promise of underwriters. But Mr. Nostalgia, as he would afterward explain to his wife (who would sooner eat a bowl of mashed Ebola than attend another card show), was deeply outraged by the rough treatment to which a hero of his youth was being subjected, for no reason other than his having managed to ninja himself onto the floor of the Convention Center without a ticket. And so, on that Saturday morning in the Kaiser Center, Mr. Nostalgia surprised himself.
He came out from behind the ramparts of his neighborhood—replete as a Vegas buffet with choice offerings in the nonsports line that he had made his specialty and métier, among them a complete set of the 1971 Bobby Sherman Getting Together cards, including the very tough number 54. Mr. Nostalgia moved with a stately glide that had led at least one uncharitable observer over the years to remark, seeing him go by in one of his floral numbers, that the Pasadena Rose Parade appeared to be missing a float.
“Wait up, let me get the man a ticket,” he called after the retreating security escort.
Gibson Goode’s bodyguard glanced over his shoulder for half a second, like he was verifying that he hadn’t just stepped in dog shit. The goons in the blue blazers kept walking.
“Hey, yo!” Mr. Nostalgia said. “Come on! Hey, come on, you guys! That’s Luther Stallings.”
It was Stallings who came to a stop first, digging in, bucking his captors, turning to confront his redeemer. The familiar smile—its charm gapped and stained by drugs or prison dentistry or maybe only by the kind of poverty that would lead you to try to skirt an eight-dollar admission fee—put an ache behind Mr. Nostalgia’s breastbone.
“Thank you, my good man,” Stallings said. Ostentatious, showing up the goons. “My dear friend . . .”
Mr. Nostalgia supplied his actual last name, which was long, Jewish, and comical, a name for a type of cheese or sour bread. Stallings repeated it flawlessly and without the hint of mockery that it typically inspired.
“My friend here,” Stallings explained, shouldering free of the goons like an escape artist shrugging out of a straitjacket, “has kindly offered to float me the price of admission.”
A slight rise in intonation at the end, almost putting a question mark there. Making sure he had his facts right.
“Absolutely,” Mr. Nostalgia said. He remembered sinking deep into a greasy Herculon seat at the Carson Twin cinema, a Saturday afternoon thirty years ago, an elephant of joy sitting on his chest, watching a movie with a mostly black cast—it was a mostly black audience—called Night Man. In love with every single thing about that movie. The girl in her silver Afro. The hand-to-hand fighting. The funky soundtrack. A chase involving a green 1972 Saab Sonett driven at top speed through streets that were recognizably those of Carson, California. The gear, tackle, and explosives carried by the bank robbers. Above all, the movie’s star, loose-limbed, still, and taciturn like a McQueen hero and with the same willingness to look silly, which was another way of saying charm. And—indisputably, in 1973—a Master of Kung Fu. “It’s truly an honor.”
The goons zoomed in on Mr. Nostalgia, training their scopes, scanning the green two-day exhibitor’s pass hanging from a lanyard around his neck. Faces going dull, losing some of their bored swagger as they tried to remember if there was anything about this type of situation in the official goon manual.
“He was harassing Mr. Goode,” said Goode’s bodyguard, stepping in to shore up morale in the muscle department. “You buy him a ticket,” he told Mr. Nostalgia, “he just going to harass him some more.”
“Harassing?” Luther Stalling said, wild with incredulity. Innocent of every crime of which he ever had or ever would be accused for all time. “How I’m harassing that man? I just want to get with him, have my thirty seconds at his feet, standing on line like everybody else. Get my autograph off him, go about my way.”
“Straight autograph from Mr. Goode going to cost you forty-five dollars,” the bodyguard pointed out. For all his girth, height, and general monstrousness, his voice was gentle, patient, the man paid, basically, to suffer fools. Maintain a fool-free perimeter around G Bad without making his employer look like a dick. “How you going to pay that, you ain’t even have eight?”
“Buddy, hey, yo,” Stallings said, then got the name right again with another painful flash—painful to Mr. Nostalgia, at any rate—of that scrimshaw smile. Whatever the man had been doing, apart from simply getting old, to have so brutally pared himself down, hollowed himself out, since his glory days, it didn’t seem to affect his memory; or maybe he wasn’t doing it anymore. “I hope, I, uh, wonder,” going all in with the question mark this time, “if maybe I could persuade you to help me out?”
Mr. Nostalgia stepped back, an involuntary move ingrained by years of tangling with the hustlers, operators, schnorrers, and short-change artists who flecked the world of card shows like weevils in flour. Thinking there was a difference of more than thirty-seven dollars between offering to pick up the price of admission, a gesture of respect, and springing for the man to buy himself, of all things, a Gibson Goode autograph. Mr. Nostalgia tried to remember if he had ever seen or even heard of a celebrity (however well forgotten) who was prepared to stand in line to pay cash for another celebrity’s signature. Why did Stallings want it? Where was he going to have G Bad put it? He did not appear to be carrying any obvious signables, book, photograph, jersey, not even a program, a napkin, a Post-it. I just want to get with him. To what end? Mr. Nostalgia never could have flourished in his trade without maintaining a keen ear for the slick lines of grifters and bullshit artists, and Luther Stallings was definitely setting off Klaxons, up to something, working some angle. Had already blown his play, in fact, until Mr. Nostalgia for some reason had felt it necessary to leave the safety of his neighborhood and stick his nose where it didn’t belong. Mr. Nostalgia could hear his wife passing the sole necessary judgment on the matter, another in the string of endless variations on her single theme, What in God’s name were you thinking? But Mr. Nostalgia’s title was not a mere honorific; his d/b/a was his DNA. Remembering the weight of that elephant of happiness upon him, on that Saturday afternoon at the Carson Twin in 1974, he chose to believe in the truth of Luther Stallings. A man could want things far stranger and less likely than a quarterback’s signature on a scrap of cash register tape or a torn paper bag.
“Maybe I can do better than that,” Mr. Nostalgia said.
He reached into the back pocket of his denim shorts and took out a folded, sweat-dampened manila envelope. Inside it were the other two green badges on lanyards to which, at his level of participation, he was entitled. He fished out one badge and pushed his way through the screen of goons. Luther Stallings bowed his head, revealing an incipient Nelson Mandela bald spot, and Mr. Nostalgia bestowed the badge on him, Oz emboldening the Lion.
“Mr. Stallings is working for me today,” he said.
“That’s right,” Stallings said at once, sounding not just sincere but impatient, like he had been looking forward for days to helping out in Mr. Nostalgia’s booth. His eyes had flicked, barely, across the badge as Mr. Nostalgia hung it on him; he said, not missing a trick, “In Mr. Nostalgia’s Neighborhood.”
“Working how?” said the older of the two goons.
“He’s doing a signing at my booth,” Mr. Nostalgia said. “I got a complete and a partial set, no Bruce Lee, of the Masters of Kung Fu series, I got a few other things Mr. Stallings has kindly consented to sign. A lobby card from Black Eye, I’m pretty sure.”
“‘Masters of Kung Fu,’” Stallings repeated, barely managing to avoid sounding like he had absolutely no idea what Mr. Nostalgia was talking about.
“Donruss, 1976, it’s a tough set.”
Four clueless looks sought enlightenment at the hands of Mr. Nostalgia.
“Uh, guys?” Mr. Nostalgia said with a circular sweep of his hands, taking in the echoing space all around them. “Trading cards? Little rectangles of cardboard? Stained with bubble gum? Pop one in the spokes of your bicycle, make it sound like a Harley-Davidson?”
“Damn, seriously?” Stallings could not keep it back. “Masters of Kung Fu. They got a Luther Stallings in there?”
“Naturally,” Mr. Nostalgia said.
“Luther Stallings.” The older of the two blue blazers, lank dark hair, the flowerpot skull and triangle chin of a Russian or a Pole, about Mr. Nostalgia’s age, tried out the name. Scrunching up one side of his face like he was screwing a loupe into his eye socket. “Okay, yeah. What’s it? Strutter. Seriously, that’s you?”
“My first part,” Stallings said, seizing upon this unexpected opportunity to preen. Loving it. Putting one of those massive antler hands on Mr. Nostalgia to let him know he was loving it: doing what he must do best. Restoring the goon squad to their proper roles as members of the Luther Stalling Irregulars. “Year after I won the title.”
“Title in what? Kung fu?”
“Wasn’t one at that time. Was in karate. In Manila. World champion.”
“World champion, bullshit,” said Goode’s bodyguard. “I give you that.”
Stallings flat ignored the big man. Mr. Nostalgia, feeling fairly balls-out pleased with himself, tried to do the same.
“We all done here, gentlemen?” Stallings asked the blue blazers.
The security guys in the blue blazers checked in with the bodyguard, who shook his head, disgusted.
“I tell you what, Luther,” the bodyguard said. “You even flick a boogie in Mr. Goode’s general vicinity, I will come down on you, motherfucker. And I will show no mercy.”
The man turned and, with a forbearing hitch in his walk, rolled back to the signing table where his boss, head shaved to stubble, wearing a black polo shirt with a red paw print where the alligator would have gone, armed with nothing but a liquid-silver marker and a high-priced smile, sat fighting his way through an impressively long line of autograph seekers. Game-worn jerseys, game-used footballs, cards, ball caps, he was going to clear nine, ten thousand today.
“Yeah, whatever,” Stallings said, as if he could not care less about Gibson Goode.
Working up a surprising amount of swagger, he followed Mr. Nostalgia to the booth. You would have thought the man had just saved himself from being tossed out of the building by the goon squad. Mr. Nostalgia recognized objectively that he ought to be annoyed, but somehow it made him feel sorrier for Stallings.
“Wow, check this shit out.”
Stallings worked his gaze along the table, taking in the sealed wax packs of Garbage Pail Kids and Saturday Night Fever, the unopened box of Fleer Dune cards, the Daktari and Gentle Ben and Mork & Mindy board games, the talking Batman alarm clock, the Aurora model kits of the Spindrift and Seaview in their original shrink-wrap.
“They even got cards for that ALF, huh?” he said.
His voice as he made this observation, like his expression as he took it all in, sounded unhappy to Mr. Nostalgia, even forlorn. Not the disdain that Mr. Nostalgia’s wife always showed for his stock-in-trade but something more like disappointment.
“Used to be pretty standard for a hit show,” Mr. Nostalgia said, wondering when Stallings would get around to hitting him up for the forty-five dollars. “Nothing much of interest in that set.”
Though Mr. Nostalgia loved the things he sold, he had no illusion that they held any intrinsic value. They were worth only what you would pay for them; what small piece of everything you had ever lost that, you might come to believe, they would restore to you. Their value was indexed only to the sense of personal completeness, perfection of the soul, that would flood you when, at last, you filled the last gap on your checklist. But Mr. Nostalgia had never seen his nonsports cards so sharply disappoint a man.
“ALF, yeah, I remember that one,” Stallings said. “That’s real nice. Growing Pains, Mork & Mindy, uh-huh. Where the Masters of Kung Fu at?”
Mr. Nostalgia went around to a bin he had tucked under the table that morning after setting up and dug around inside of it. After a minute of moving things around in the bin, he came out with the partial set, the one that was missing the Lee and the Norris cards. “Fifty-two cards in the set,” he said. “You’re number, I don’t know, twelve, I think it is.”
Stallings shuffled through the cards, whose imagery depicted, bordered by cartoon bamboo, labeled with takeout-menu-style fake Chinese lettering, a fairly indiscriminate mixture of real and fictitious practitioners (Takayuki Kubota, Shang-Chi) of a dozen forms of martial arts in addition to the eponymous one, including bartitsu (Sherlock Holmes) and savate (Count Baruzy). At last Stallings came up with his card. Stared at the picture, made a sound like a snort through his nose. The card featured a color still from one of his movies, poorly reproduced. A young Luther Stallings, in red kung fu pajamas, flew across the frame toward a line of Chinese swordsmen, feet first, almost horizontal.
“Damn,” Stallings said. “I don’t even remember what that’s from.”
“Take it,” Mr. Nostalgia said. “Take the whole set. It’s a present, from me to you, for all the pleasure your work has given me over the years.”
“How much you get for it?”
“Well, the set, like I said, it’s pretty tough. I’m asking five, but I’d probably take three. Might go for seven-fifty with the Bruce Lee, the Chuck Norris.”
“Chuck Norris? Yeah, I went up against the motherfucker. Three times.”
“No joke.”
“Kicked his ass all over Taipei.”
Mr. Nostalgia figured he could look it up later if he wanted to break some small, previously unbroken place in his own leaf-buried heart. “Go on,” he said. “It’s yours.”
“Yeah, hey, thanks. That’s really nice. But, uh, no offense, I’m already so, like, overburdened, you know what I’m saying, with stuff out of the past I’m carrying around.”
“Oh, no, sure—”
“I just hate to add to the pile.”
“I totally understand.”
“Got to keep mobile.”
“Of course.”
“Travel light.”
“Right-o.”
“How much,” Luther Stallings said, lowering his voice to a near-whisper. Swallowing, starting over, louder the second time. “How much you get for my card by itself.”
“Oh, uh,” Mr. Nostalgia said, understanding a microsecond or two too late to pull off the lie that he was going to have to tell it. “A hundred. Ninety, a hundred bucks.”
“No shit.”
“Like around ninety.”
“Uh-huh. Tell you what. You give me this one card, Luther Stallings in . . . I’m going to make a wild guess and say it was Enter the Panther.”
“Has to be.” Mr. Nostalgia felt the play begin again, the game that Luther Stallings was trying to run on him and, somehow, on Gibson Goode.
“And I’m a sign it, okay?” Here it came. “Then I’m a trade it back to you for forty-five bucks.”
“Okay,” Mr. Nostalgia said, feeling unaccountably saddened, crushed, by the pachyderm weight of a grief that encompassed him and Stallings and every man plying his lonely way in this hall through the molder and dust of the bins. The world of card shows had always felt like a kind of true fellowship to Mr. Nostalgia, a league of solitary men united in their pursuit of the lost glories of a vanished world. Now that vision struck him as pie in the sky at best and as falsehood at the very worst. The past was irretrievable, the league of lonely men a fiction, the pursuit of the past a doomed attempt to run a hustle on mortality.
“If that’s how you want it,” Mr. Nostalgia said. He was not averse, in principle, to raising the five-dollar value of the Stallings card by a factor of three or four. But as he handed Stallings the gold-filled Cross pen, a bar mitzvah gift from his grandparents that he liked to use when he was getting something signed for his own collection, he wished that he had never come out from behind the table, had let the security guards sweep Luther Stallings past Mr. Nostalgia’s Neighborhood and clear on out of the Kaiser Center.
Over the course of the next half hour, he checked on Stallings a couple of times as the man made his way to the end of the signing line for Gibson Goode, then inched his way to the front one lonely man at a time. In the middle of selling a 1936 Wolverine gum card, “The Fight with the Shark,” for $550 to a dentist from Danville, Mr. Nostalgia happened to glance over and see that Luther Stallings had regained his place at the front. The bodyguard got to his feet looking ready, as promised, to suspend mercy, but after a brownout of his smile, Gibson Goode reached for the bodyguard and gently stiff-armed him, palm to the big man’s chest, and the big man, with a mighty headshake, stepped off. Words passed between Goode and Stallings—quietly, without agitation. To Mr. Nostalgia, reading lips and gestures, sometimes able to pick up a word, a phrase, the conversation seemed to boil down to Gibson Goode saying no repeatedly, with blank politesse, while Luther Stallings tried to come up with new ways of getting Goode to say yes.
There was only so much of this that the people in line behind Luther Stallings were willing to put up with. A rumor of Stallings’s earlier outburst, his near-ejection, began to circulate among them. There was a certain amount of moaning and kvetching. Somebody gave voice to the collective desire for Stallings to Come on!
Stallings ignored it all. “You asked him?” he said, raising his voice as he had done an hour ago, when the blue blazers came to see how he might like to try getting himself tossed. “You asked him about Popcorn?” Talking loudly enough for Mr. Nostalgia and everybody in the neighborhood to hear. “Then I got the man for you. Hooked him. You know I did.”
The expressions of impatience, general down the line, rose to outright jeering. Stallings turned on the crowd, trying to scowl them into silence, snapping at a man in a Hawaiian shirt standing two guys behind him. The man said, “No, fuck you!”
Wading into the signing area, arms windmilling to reach for Stallings in a kind of freestyle of aggression, came the two blue blazers, Shaved Ball and the Soviet. They took brusque hold of Stallings’s arms, faces compressed as if to resist a stink, and jerked his arms back and toward his spine.
Two seconds later, no more, Shaved Ball and the Soviet were lying flat on their backs on the painted cement floor of the hall. Mr. Nostalgia could not have said for certain which of them had taken the kick to the head, which the punch to the abdomen, or if Luther Stallings had even moved very much at all. As they’d gone tumbling backward, the line of autograph seekers had shuddered, rippled. Human turbulence troubled all the surrounding lines, people waiting for Chris Mullin, Shawn Green.
“Bitch,” Stallings said, turning back to Gibson Goode, in his polo shirt, with his sockless loafers. “I want my twenty-five grand!”
Gibson Goode, being Gibson Goode, Mr. Nostalgia supposed, might have had no choice in the matter: He kept, as his legend said he must, his cool. The same quiet, restraining hand against his bodyguard’s chest. Unintimidated. Still smiling. He took out his wallet, opened it, and counted out ten bills, rapid-fire. Slid them across the signing table. Luther Stallings studied them, head down, chest rising and falling. The money lay there, exciting comment in the line, ten duplicate cards from the highly collectable Dead Presidents series. Luther shook his head once. Then he reached down and took the money. Resigned—long since resigned, Mr. Nostalgia thought—to doing things he knew he was going to regret. When he went past Mr. Nostalgia’s table, without so much as a thank-you, he had not managed to get his chin up again.
It was only later, as a voice on the PA was chasing stragglers from the hall and the lights went out over the signing area, that Mr. Nostalgia noticed Luther Stallings had walked off with his gold pen.
On a Saturday night in August 1973, outside the Bit o’ Honey Lounge, a crocodile-green ’70 Toronado sat purring its crocodile purr. Its chrome grin stretched beguiling and wide as the western horizon.
“Define ‘toronado,’” said the man riding shotgun.
Behind his heavy-rimmed glasses, he had sleepy eyes, but he scorned sleep and frowned upon the somnolence of others. In defiance of political fashion, he greased his long hair, and its undulant luster was clear-coat deep. His name was Chandler Bankwell Flowers III. His grandfather, father, and uncles were all morticians, men of sobriety and pomp, and he inhabited a floating yet permanent zone of rebellion against them. Nineteen months aboard the Bon Homme Richard had left Chan Flowers with an amphetamine habit and a tattoo of Tuffy the Ghost on the inside of his left forearm. The shotgun, holstered in a plastic trash bag alongside his right leg, was a pump-action Mossberg 500.
“‘Define’ it?” said the driver, Luther Stallings, not giving the matter his full attention. His eyes, green flecked with gold, kept finding excuses to visit the rearview mirror. “It’s the name of a car.”
“But what does it mean? What is the definition of the word ‘toronado.’ Tell me that.”
“You tell me,” Luther said, more wary now.
“It’s a question.”
“Yeah, but what are you really asking?”
“Toro-nah-do.” Chan strumming the “R” like a string of Ricky Ricardo’s guitar. “You’re driving it. Talking about it. In love with it. Don’t even know what it means.”
Luther massaged the leather cover on the steering wheel as if feeling for a cyst. He took another glance in the mirror, then leaned forward to look past Chan at the Bit o’ Honey’s front door. Where Chan ran to dark and stocky, Luther Stallings was long and light-skinned, with an astronaut chin. He had served one tour in the U.S. Army, most of it spent splintering planks with his feet for a hand-to-hand combat demonstration team. He was dressed as for dancing, tight plaid bell-bottom slacks, a short-sleeved terry pullover. His hair rose freshly stoked into a momentous Afro.
“I believe it is Spanish,” Luther said. “A common expression, can be loosely translated to ‘suck my dick.’”
“Vulgar language,” Chan said, drawing on his rich patrimony of improving maxims. That stiff mortuary grammar, hand-beaten into him by his old man, had always embarrassed him when they were youngsters. In this hoodlum revolutionary phase he was going through, Chan flaunted the properness of his speech, a lily in the lapel of a black leather car coat. “Always the first and last refuge of the man with nothing to say.”
Luther broke free of the mirror to look at Chan. “Toronado,” he said, employing the imperative.
“You don’t know, do you?” Chan said. “Just admit. You are driving around, you paid three thousand dollars for this vehicle, cash, for all you know, a toronado’s, what, might be some kind of brush you use for cleaning a Mexican toilet bowl.”
“I don’t care what it—”
“Juanita, quick, get the toronado, I have diarrhea—”
“It means a bullfighter!” Luther said, rising to the bait despite long experience, despite needing to keep one eye on the rearview and one on the diamond-tufted vinyl door of the lounge, in spite of wanting to be a hundred years and a thousand miles away from this place and this night. “A fighter of bulls.”
“In Spanish,” Chan suggested in a mock-helpful tone.
Luther shrugged. When Chan was nervous, he got bored, and when he got bored, he would start trouble, any kind of trouble, just to break the tedium. But there was more to this line of questioning. Chan was mad at Luther and trying to hide it. Had been trying for days to hold his anger close, like the Spartan boy with the fox in his shirt, let it feast on his intestines rather than cop to hiding it.
“‘Bullfighter,’” Chan said with bitter precision, “is torero.”
He bent down to scoop a handful of twelve-gauge cartridges from a box between his feet and pocketed them at the hip of his tweed blazer. His hair, heavy with pomade, gave off a dismaying odor of flowers left too long in a vase, putrid as envy itself.
“Then uh, ‘tornado,’” Luther tried.
This was such a contemptible suggestion that Chan, who generally never lacked for verbal expressions of contempt, could dignify it only with a smirking shake of his head. Luther was about to point out that it was he, the ignorant one, who’d just laid down thirty-two hundred-dollar bills for the beautiful car with the mysterious name, while Professor Flowers remained a frequent denizen of the buses.
“Chan, you captious motherfucker—” he began, but then stopped.
From another pocket of his tweed blazer, patches on the elbows, Chan drew a pair of sateen gloves, dark purplish blue. Shoddy things, busted at the seams, tricked out with pointy fish fins. Last Halloween, Chan’s little brother, Marcel, out trick-or-treating in a Batman suit, had been hit by a car and killed. Drunken negroes in a Rambler American, boy stepping off the curb with his face too small to really fit the eyeholes of the mask. Chan had some tiny hands, but even so, the gloves were a tight fit, and as he pulled them on, they split some more.
When Luther saw Chan wearing Marcel’s purple crime-fighting gloves, he didn’t know what to say. He threw another glance at the rearview: Telegraph Avenue nocturne, a submarine wobble of light and shadow. Chan reached into the garbage bag, came out with a bat-eared mask stamped from flimsy plastic. He slipped the elastic string over the back of his head, parked the borrowed face at the top of his forehead.
“Okay,” Luther said at last, the second smartest boy in the room every day of his life from 1955 to the day in 1971 that had Chan shipped out, “tell me what it means.”
A girl, at key points also constructed like the car along a beguiling x axis, came out of the Bit o’ Honey Lounge. She wore tight white jeans whose flared legs bellied like sails. Her hair was tied back shiny against her head to emerge aft in a big puffball. Her feet rode the howdahs of swaying platform sandals. As she sauntered past the car, she pulled the tails of her short-sleeved madras shirt from the waist of her jeans, knotting them together under her breasts.
“That’s it,” Luther said. He pressed down on the clutch and readied his hand on the gearshift. “Go if you’re going.”
Chan lowered the mask over his face, and Luther saw that it had been painted top to bottom, matte black paint effacing the line that marked the bottom edge of Batman’s cowl, paint sprayed over the heroic molded chin dimple, the affable molded smile. Behind the mask, Chan’s eyes glistened like organs exposed by two incisions.
“Jungle action,” Chan said behind the baffle of the mask. “Oh, and by the way.” He shouldered open the passenger door and sprang out of the car. The shotgun in the garbage bag hung by his side like a workaday implement. “‘Toronado’ doesn’t mean shit.”
Chan’s right arm snaked into the mouth of the garbage bag as, with his left hand, he grabbed hold of the brass handle of the upholstered front door of the club. He yanked the door open, flinging his right arm out to the side. The garbage bag flew off, revealing the riot gun that Chan had checked out that afternoon from the basement arsenal of a Panther safe house in East Oakland. There was a gust of horns, palaver, and thump, and then the door breathed shut behind Chan. The garbage bag caught on a thermal hook and spun in the air, teased and tugged by unseen hands.
Luther lowered the volume on the in-dash eight-track. City silence, the sigh of a distant bus, the tide of the interstate, Grover Washington, Jr., setting faint, intricate fires up and down the length of “Trouble Man.” Beyond that, nothing. Luther felt his attention beginning not so much to wander as to migrate, seeking opportunity elsewhere. Far down the coast highway, at the wheel of his beautiful green muscle car, he made his way to Los Angeles, capital of the rest of his life. In a helicopter shot, he watched himself rolling across an arcaded bridge with the ocean and the dawn and the last of the night spread out all around him.
He heard the stuttering crack of a number of firearms discharging at once. The door of the Bit o’ Honey banged open again, spraying horns and shouts. Chan came out at a running walk. He got into the car and slammed the door. Blood streaked his left shoe like a bright feather. The shotgun gave off its sweet, hellish smell, electricity and sizzling fatback.
Luther shifted into first gear, standing on the gas pedal, balanced on it, and on the moment like the trumpeter angel you saw from the Warren Freeway, perched at the tip of the Mormon temple, riding the wild spin of the world itself. Everything Detroit could muster in the way of snarling poured from the 450 engine. They parlayed a dizzying string of green lights all the way to Claremont Avenue. It had been a case of love at first sight for Luther and the Toronado two days before, at a used-car lot down on Broadway. Now, as they tore up Telegraph, something slid coiling through his belly, more like a qualm of lust. Chan tossed his brother’s Halloween mask out of the open window, slid the gun under the seat. He peeled away the gloves and started to throw them out, too, but in the end seemed to want to hold on to them, the right one bloody and powder-burned, a while longer. He sat there clutching them in one fist like a duelist looking for someone to slap.
At the Claremont intersection, with no one after them and no sign of the law, Luther eased the car into a red light. Just an ordinary motorist, window down, elbow hooked over the door, grooving on the passage of another summer evening. Somewhere in the vicinity, he had once been told, covered over by time and concrete, lay the founding patch of human business in this corner of the world. Miwok Indians dreaming the dream, living fat as bears, piling up their oyster shells, oblivious to history with its oncoming parade of motherfuckers.
“What happened?” Luther said to Chan, affecting lightness. Only then, in the wake of posing this awful question, did he begin to feel something like dread. Chan just turned up the volume on the music. “Chan, you did it?”
Luther could see Chan struggling to frame the story of what had transpired inside the Bit o’ Honey Lounge in some way that did not infuriate him. One thing Chandler Flowers hated more than being underestimated for his intelligence was giving evidence of any lack thereof. The light turned green. Luther steered, for mysterious reasons and in the absence of counterinstruction from his companion, toward the image in his mind of that westernmost angel blowing that apocalyptic horn. A minute went by which Joe Beck and his guitar organized according to their own notions of time and its fuzztone passage. At last Flowers emitted, as through a tight aperture, four words.
“Shot off his hand.”
“Left or right?”
“The right hand.”
“He a righty or a lefty?”
“Why?”
“Is Popcorn a righty or a lefty?”
“You are suggesting, if Popcorn Hughes turns out to be right-handed, maybe I messed this job up a little less. Because at least now Popcorn only has the hand he doesn’t use.”
Luther reflected as they rumbled up Tunnel Road toward the spot where, invisibly as a decision turning bad, it became the Warren Freeway. “No,” he conceded at last.
After this, they did not speak at all. Luther went on reflecting. At seven in the morning, Monday, he was expected to report to a rented soundstage down in Studio City to film his first scenes for Strutter, a low-budget action movie in whose lead he had recently been cast. He was driving around tonight in the up-front money from that job. There was ten grand yet to come, and after that, anything: sequels, endorsements, television work, the parts that Jim Brown was too busy to take, a costarring role with Burt Reynolds. Now, through some damned interlocking of bravado, loyalty, and the existential heedlessness that had helped him to become the 1972 middleweight karate champion of the world, Luther had knotted his pleasantly indistinct future like a sackful of kittens to the plunging stone of Chan Flowers.
Tonight had gone wrong, but even if Popcorn, as planned, had caught a fatal chestful of lead shot and pumped out his life in a puddle under a table by the stage, the situation would have been no better. True, the seed of Panther legend that Chan Flowers hoped to cultivate as Chan “the Undertaker” Flowers, killer of men—a real one, not some make-believe hard-ass in a low-budget grind-house feature—would have been planted. True, the ongoing mental distress caused to Huey Newton by the continued existence of Popcorn Hughes might have been assuaged. But there still would have been no benefit whatsoever to Luther Stallings. Success of the mission would have been another kind of failure, even deeper shit than Luther was in now.
Luther had no politics, no particular feelings toward drug dealers like Popcorn or toward the Black Panthers who had targeted them. He did not care who controlled the city of Oakland or its ghetto streets. He had seen Huey Newton once in his life, black leather jacket, easy smile, talking some shit about disalienation at a house party in the Berkeley flatlands, and had marked him right away as just another stylist of gangster self-love. Luther Stallings, future star of blaxploitation and beyond, had no call to be here, no interest in the outcome either way. Chan asked him to drive, so Luther drove. Now, instead of a murder in his rearview mirror, there was the bloody trail of a fuckup. Meanwhile, the image of the golden angel of the Mormons soloing atop his spire worked its strange allure on Luther’s imagination.
“Take a left,” Chan said as they rolled off the freeway at the Lincoln Avenue exit.
Luther was about to protest that a left turn would lead them away from the temple when he realized that he had no real reason to want to go to that place. The vague longing to bear some kind of witness to the glory of the angel Moroni winked out inside him, crumbled like ash. Luther aimed the Toronado up Joaquin Miller Road.
“Where we going?” he said.
“I need to think,” said the smartest boy in the room. He stared out at the night that streamed like a downpour across the windshield. Then, “Shut up.”
“I didn’t say nothing,” Luther said, though he most definitely had been tossing around some combination of words along the lines of Ain’t it a little late for that now?
“Yeah, I was in that Dogpile one time,” Moby was saying. “Down in L.A.?”
Moby was one of the noontime regulars. He was a lawyer, none too unusual a career path for a three-hundred-dollar-a-month abuser of polyvinyl chloride, except that Moby’s clients were all cetaceans. His real name was Mike Oberstein. He was notably—given the moniker—white and size 2XL. Wore his longish hair parted down the center and slicked back over his ears in twin flukes. Moby worked for a foundation out of an office in the same building as Archy’s wife, bringing action against SeaWorld on behalf of Shamu’s brother-in-law, suing the navy for making humpbacks go deaf. He was a passionate and free-spending accruer of fifties and sixties jazz sides.
“It was pretty tight,” Moby added.
“Was it?” Nat said. Giving a bottle to Rolando English, who sat fastened safely into an infant carrier, propped up on the counter by the cash register. Nat kept his gaze fixed on the baby so that, Archy understood, he would not have to kill Mike Oberstein with gamma rays shot out of his eyeballs. “Was it bangin?”
Archy knew—could not help knowing all the man’s rants and treatises on the subject—how it bothered Nat that Moby tried so hard (to be honest, probably wasn’t even trying anymore) to sound like he was from the ’hood, from round the way, as Moby would have put it, even though he was a sweet-natured white guy from Indiana, someplace.
“It was straight-up bangin,” Moby said, so well armored in his sweetness and his imaginary Super Fly fur coat that he was impervious if not oblivious to the eyeball lightning Nat was always forking in his direction. “No joke. Found me this crazy side called, Nat, get this, Jimmy Smith Live in Israel. Thought it was a myth. I been looking for that for, like, years.”
Nat nodded, watching the formula steadily disappear from the bottle, while in his imagination, as Archy could infer by the knot of Nat’s shoulders, he took a pristine pressing of Jimmy Smith Live in Israel (Isradisc, 1973) out of its sleeve and snapped it over his knee. Twice, into quarters. Then handed it back to Moby without a word, not even needing to say, Man, fuck Dogpile. And the motherfucking Dogpile blimp.
“Part I don’t understand, all due respect, is why y’all act like it some kind of invasion,” said the King of Bling. “Dogpile coming into this neighborhood.”
Garnet Singletary, Baby Rolando’s grandfather, was sitting beside Moby at the glass display counter that ran nearly half the length of the south wall of the store, at the end farthest from the window, in order to preserve a certain distance between himself and the parrot. Fifty-Eight, the African grey, sat perched on the shoulder of Cochise Jones, who occupied his usual stool tucked into the corner by the window, Mr. Jones with that inveterate hunch to his spine from fifty years conducting experiments at the keyboard of a Hammond B-3. Decades of avian companionship had raised a fuzz of claw marks at the shoulders of Mr. Jones’s green leisure suit, tussocks on the padded polyester lawn. Restless as a radio telescope, the parrot’s head with its staring eye plowed the universe for invisible signs and messages. Every so often Fifty-Eight, whose public utterances tended to be musical, would counterfeit the steely vibrato of his owner’s B-3, break out into a riff, a stray middle eight, the bird programming its musical selections with an apparent randomness in which Singletary, who feared and admired the bird, claimed to find evidence of calculation and ironical intent.
“Gibson Goode was born here,” Singletary continued when no explanation was forthcoming from either partner.
Singletary was in his mid-fifties but looked thirty. Hair sprang carefully from his head in micro-dreads no thicker than his grandson’s fingers. His smile easy and warm, his eyes as cold as pennies at the bottom of a well. Like Fifty-Eight’s, those eyes missed nothing, cloaking in a universal fog of conversation the ceaseless void of his surveillance. Archy wondered if the man’s unease around the bird arose from recognition of a rival or a peer.
Singletary said, “Man grew up down in L.A., but his granny still living over in Rumford Plaza. Y’all was operating in Atlanta, New York, and this dude showed up in his great big black blimp, I might understand how you could feel some resentfulness. But Gibson Goode is a semi-local product. Like”—the eyes teaming up with the smile to give notice that he was about to mess with Nat—“if you was to put you and Archy together. Half local, half out of town.”
“Half and half,” Nat said, humming to himself, pouring the formula into Rolando English. The boy definitely had an appetite; they had run through the bottles of Good Start by eleven this morning and were working on a can of Enfamil powder mixed with water at Brokeland’s bathroom sink, the Enfamil provided by S. S. Mirchandani from a deep, remote, and spidery shelf over at Temescal Liquor, which he owned. The infant carrier came courtesy of the King of Bling.
“Look at him go.” Cochise Jones watched the baby formula work its way like mercury in a falling thermometer down the graduations. Intent, pleased, doubtful, as if he had money riding on the outcome. He winked at Archy. Mr. and the late Mrs. Jones never had children of their own. “Boy making me thirsty.”
“Yes, I am feeling quite thirsty myself,” said Mr. Mirchandani, and Archy felt a flutter of anticipatory dread. “You know, Nat, you really should put in an espresso machine or other form of beverage service.”
Archy plunged himself deeper into the mysteries of crate number 8. The theoretical espresso machine was a sore subject, the most recent of many arguments between the co-owners of Brokeland having begun over the question of whether, as Archy had been hinting with increasing heavy-handedness for a couple of years, the time had come to offer more at the counter than unlimited supplies of music and bullshit on tap. Because the truth was, they were already fucked, with or without Gibson Goode and his Dogpile empire. They were behind on the rent to Singletary. Their inventory was dwindling as their ability to purchase the better collections ran afoul of cash flow problems. Probably if you looked at the matter coolly and rationally, an activity in which neither partner could be said to excel, they were on their last legs. So many of the other used-record kings of the East Bay had already gone under, hung it up, or turned themselves into Internet-only operations, closing their doors, letting the taps of bullshit go dry. Brokeland Records was nearly the last of its kind, Ishi, Chingachgook, Martha the passenger pigeon.
Every time Archy broached the subject of trying some new angle, branching out, beefing up their website, even, yes, selling coffee drinks and pastries and chai, he ran into heavy resistance from Nat. Not just resistance; the man would shut down the conversation, shut himself down, with that infuriating, self-righteous Abraham the Patriarch way he had sometimes, acting as if he and Archy were not a couple of secondary-market retailers trying to stay afloat but guardians of some ancient greatness that must never be tainted or altered. When really (like any religion, Archy supposed), it was a compound of OCD and existential panic, a displaced fear of change. Reroutings of familiar traffic patterns, new watermarks and doodads on the national currency, revised rules for the bundling of recyclables, such things were anathema to Nat Jaffe. Fresh starts, clean slates, reboots: anathema. He stood against them like an island in the flow, a snag of branches.
“You want a fucking macchiato?” he had said a couple of days earlier, throwing a record album at Archy, nothing too valuable, just a copy of Stan Getz and J. J. Johnson at the Opera House (Verve, 1957), Getz sitting in with Johnson, Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, and Connie Kay. “Here’s your fucking macchiato!”
Meaning, sweet light froth of a white guy on top of a dense dark bottom of black. The shot had gone wide, but damn, a flying record, the thing could have sliced Archy’s head off. Archy found himself annoyed just thinking about it now. It annoyed him as well that Mr. Mirchandani had mentioned the espresso machine, even though he knew that Mr. Mirchandani was only trying to help out, take up the cause, join the chorus of those who did not want to see Brokeland die. There was no mistaking the fact that Nat was on high simmer today, perhaps two bubbles away from a full-on roll.
“Gentlemen.”
It was a mild voice, the voice of a man trained to extol the highest in men and women while seeing them at their lowest. Trained to seemliness, to keeping itself soft and low under the pall of remembrance and grief that forever hung over Flowers & Sons. At the sound of that funereal voice, its head cocked in Singletary’s direction, the African grey parrot began to give out, note-perfect, Cochise Jones’s reading of the old Mahalia Jackson spiritual “Trouble of the World,” found on Mr. Jones’s only album as a bandleader, Redbonin’ (CTI, 1973).
“Look out,” Mr. Jones said, but as usual, Fifty-Eight was way ahead of him.
In the shade of a wide-brimmed black hat whose vibe wavered between crime boss and Henry Fonda in Once upon a Time in the West, pin-striped gray-on-charcoal three-piece, black wing tips shined till they shed a perceptible halo, Chan Flowers came into the store. Slid himself through the front door, ineluctable as a final notice from the county. Straight-backed, barrel-chested, bowlegged. A model of probity, a steady hand to reassure the grieving, a sober man—a grave man—solid as the pillar of a tomb. A good dose of gangster to the hat to let you know the councilman played his politics old-school, with a shovel in the dark of the moon. Plus that touch of Tombstone, of Gothic western undertaker, like maybe sometimes when the moon was full and Flowers & Sons stood empty and dark but for the vigil lights, Chan Flowers might up and straddle a coffin, ride it like a bronco.
“Looks like we have ourselves the hard core here today,” he said, quickly tallying the faces at the counter before settling on Archy, a question in his eyes, something he wanted to know. “Wait out here,” he told his nephews.
The two Flowers nephews stayed out on the sidewalk. Like all of Mr. Flowers’s younger crop of nephews, they seemed not to be wearing their ill-fitting black suits so much as to be squatting inside them until some less embarrassing habitation came along. They had the solemn faces of practical jokers waiting to spring a gag. One of them took out a book of Japanese math puzzles and started working them with a stub of pencil.
“Mr. Jones!” Flowers said, starting in, with that politician resolve, to fill the boxes of this human sudoku.
“Your Honor,” said Cochise Jones.
Flowers reached for Mr. Jones’s octave-and-a-half hand, its nails like chips of piano ivory.
“The honor is indeed mine,” Flowers said, “as always, to bask in the reflected luster of the legacy you represent. Inventor of the musical styling known as Brokeland Creole.” Mr. Jones was also, as far as Archy knew, the first person to use the term Brokeland to describe this neighborhood, the ragged fault where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted. “Hello, Fifty-Eight.”
There was a silence. The bird regarded Flowers.
“Say hello,” Mr. Jones said.
“Say hello, you little jive-ass motherfucker,” Fifty-Eight said.
The voice was that of Cochise Jones, the unmistakable smoker’s croak, but way more irritable than Archy had ever heard Mr. Jones become. Everybody laughed except Chan Flowers. His eyes kept aloof from the smile on his lips.
“Keep it up,” Flowers told Fifty-Eight. “You know I have a deluxe cherrywood pet casket sitting on my stockroom shelf right now, waiting to house your remains.”
This was true; Cochise Jones had made funeral arrangements of Egyptian exactitude for himself and his partner in solitude.
“Brother Singletary.” Flowers pointed a slender finger. “The King of Bling, how are you, sir?”
“Councilman,” Singletary said, looking at Flowers the same way he looked at Fifty-Eight, with a mix of curiosity and distaste, as if touching his tongue to something bitter at the corner of his mouth.
The two of them, Singletary and Flowers, had beefed often and openly over the years, always in a civilized way. Lawsuits, real estate, a long cold war fought against a backdrop of redevelopment money using proxies and attorneys. West Oakland rumor traced the source of beef to the late 1970s, tendering the story that Singletary had married his wife out from under a preexisting condition of Chan Flowers. Rumor further added the dubious yet somehow creditable information that her reason for choosing Singletary over Flowers came down to an ineradicable odor of putrefaction on the undertaker’s hands. “I’m all right, ’less you here to tell me otherwise.”
“Now, you know,” Flowers said, half addressing the room, the voice modulated, genial, but not, in spite of the rhetoric, orotund. Cool and dispassionate, as ready to express disappointment as flattery. “Back in the Bible, only a king could even wear the bling. They did not call it that, of course, did they, Mr. Oberstein? King Solomon, in his book of Ecclesiastes, do you know the vernacular he employed to allude to that which we now style ‘bling’?”
Moby guessed, “Frankincense and myrrh?”
“He called it vanity,” said the King of Bling. “And I got no argument against that.”
“Well, that’s fine, because I did not come in here looking for an argument,” Flowers said. “Mr. S. S. Mirchandani, a latecomer to these shores, but wasting no time.”
“Councilman Flowers.”
“Good for you, sir. And Mr. Oberstein . . .”
Flowers frowned at the whale attorney, plainly searching for the kind of fitting summary he liked to bestow on people, an epitaph for every headstone.
“‘Keepin it real,’” Nat suggested.
“No doubt,” said Moby, beaming. “True dat.”
“Mr. Jaffe,” Flowers concluded. He pressed his lips very thin.
“Councilman.”
A silence followed, deeper and more awkward than it might have been because Archy had forgotten to turn over the record on the turntable. It was rare, very rare, to see Flowers at a loss for words. Was there guilt on his conscience over changing his mind about the Dogpile deal? Had he come in, this lunchtime, manned up to break the bad news himself? Or was he so caught up in running his own big-time playbook, in setting up his line to defend against the scramble, that he’d forgotten he might run into some resistance at the front counter of Brokeland?
“Archy Stallings,” Flowers said, and Archy, confused, knowing he probably should play it cold and hostile with Chan Flowers but in the lifelong habit of looking up to the man, gave himself up to a dap and a bro hug with the councilman.
“Your dad around?” Flowers said, not quite whispering but nearly so.
Archy drew back, but before he could do anything more than squint and look puzzled, Flowers had his answer and was moving on.
“I seem to remember,” he said, letting go of Archy, “somebody telling me you had left a message for me, Mr. Jaffe. At my office, not very long ago. Thought I would stop in and inquire as to what it might have been regarding.”
“Probably did,” Nat said, still without looking up. At times his protean hum took the form of an earful poured into the councilman’s office answering machine or, when possible, directly into the ear of one of his nephews, assistants, office managers, press secretaries, Nat complaining about this, that, or the other thing, trash pickup, panhandlers, somebody going around doing stickups in broad daylight. “Huh.” He feigned an effort to remember the reason for his most recent call, feigned giving up. “Can’t help you.”
“Huh,” the councilman repeated, and there was another silence. Awkward turtle, Julie Jaffe would have declared if he had been present, making a turtle out of his stacked hands, paddling with his thumbs.
“Now, hold on! Look here!” Flowers noted the baby, who had fallen asleep on the bottle. His eyes went to Archy with unfeigned warmth but flawed mathematics. “Is that the little Stallings?”
Flowers reached out his hand for a standard shake, and Archy took it with a sense of dread, as if this really were his baby and all his impotencies and unfitnesses would stand revealed.
“I know it might seem impossible,” said Flowers, holding on to Archy’s hand, still working the room, “but I remember when you were that size.” Everybody laughed dutifully but sincerely at the idea of Archy’s ever having been so small. “Child looks just like you, too.”
“Oh, no,” Archy said. “No, that is Aisha English’s baby. Rolando. Mr. Singletary’s grandson. My wife and I got like a month to go. Nah, I’m just babysitting.”
“Archy is practicing,” Mr. Mirchandani said.
“It is never too early to start,” Flowers said. Though well provided with nephews and nieces, little shorties all the way up to grown men who had played football with Archy in high school, Flowers was a bachelor and, like Mr. Jones, had no children of his own. “It can definitely sneak up on a man.”
“Maybe I should start practicing being dead,” Nat said too loudly, though whether the excess volume was deliberate or involuntary, Archy could not have said. Before any of them had the chance to fully ponder the import of this remark, Nat added, “Oh, yeah. I do remember why I called, Councilman. It was to ask you to come on by and slit my throat.”
Flowers turned, taken mildly aback. Smiled, shook his head. “Brother Nat, I will never tire of your sparkling repartee,” he said. “What a treat it is.”
“Also, I have that Sun Ra you were looking for,” Nat said, banking the anger, using his smile like a valve to feed it nourishing jets of air. “I don’t know, maybe you want to wait and pick it up at that new Dogpile store of yours. I hear their used-wax department is going to be straight-up bangin.”
“Nat,” Archy said.
“Duly noted,” Nat replied without missing a beat. “Warn me again in twenty seconds, okay?”
“I can certainly understand your distress at the possibility of the level of competition you are going to be facing, Brother Nat,” Flowers said with perfect sympathy. “But come on, man. Show some faith in your partner and yourself! What’s with the defeatist attitude? Maybe you want to consider the possibility your anxiety might be premature.”
“I have never actually experienced anxiety that turned out to be premature,” Nat said, always happy to keep punching in the clinch. “It usually shows up right on time, in my experience.”
“Just this once, then,” Flowers suggested. Itching to get out, tugging at the lapels of his jacket. “Premature.”
“Are you saying that Gibson Goode, the fifth richest— What is it?” Nat turned with an audible creak of his neck bones to Garnet Singletary, who drew back, tight smile noncommittal; in no way, shape, or form interested, not being a fool, in openly taking up against his favorite enemy from way back in the day. “Fifth—?”
“I believe I read in Black Enterprise that he is currently the fifth most richest African-American,” Singletary said carefully. “I didn’t see my own name anywheres on the list.”
Again all the men in the store laughed, happy to let Singletary break up the tension, all the same feeling sympathy for Nat, Archy was certain. The place was part of their lives, including the life of Chan Flowers, who had for years come every week to get his hair cut by Eddie Spencer and afterward never lost the habit of stopping by.
“Are you saying, Councilman, that Gibson Goode does not have an open field ahead of him, thanks to you, to start putting in this Thang two blocks down from here, thus effectively cutting not only my throat but the throat of this great big ex-baby of whom you are so very fond? Because what we heard, and I believe we even heard it from your lips, was that Mr. Goode was having serious trouble with some of your friends on the zoning commission, and that because of that, in this climate, was the term I believe you employed, the banks were giving him a hard time.”
“If I told you that,” Flowers said, “I was only reporting what I knew to be the case.”
“So what changed? Or let me rephrase that, how much change did it take?”
“Nat, here’s that warning,” Archy said.
“How much cheese. Right, Moby?”
“I— What am I agreeing to?” Moby said.
“Jesus, Nat,” Archy said.
“You had better watch what you say, Mr. Jaffe,” Flowers suggested. He was looking at Archy when he said it. Not quite in appeal, not quite making some kind of threat. Inquiry widening his eyes when he looked at Archy, something that he would have liked to know. Archy wondered if this question Flowers did not feel comfortable asking in front of a crowd, and not Nat’s call about a Sun Ra record, lay behind today’s visit from the councilman.
“I checked out Dogpile,” Nat said. He smiled at Moby. “Last summer Archy and I went down to play that wedding in Fox Hills. It was, truly, extremely bangin. They had a sweet Nubian Lady, Roy Meriwether. The pricing was more than competitive. What’s more, I got into a very interesting discussion, forty, forty-five minutes, with the manager of the used-vinyl department. Young guy, college guy, black, good-looking, very passionate about Ornette Coleman. Making a case that Coleman basically rediscovered the original tone of the New Orleans cornet players, basically thought his way back to it like Einstein thinking about passing trains. And that closed the circuit. The story ended. That was the end of jazz as we know it. Kind of an ouroboros thing, the snake swallowing its own tail. I don’t know if I completely agree, but it was an interesting argument. Oh, I also picked up a really decent Out There.”
“I don’t go in for the hyperbole the way my partner does, Councilman,” Archy said. “You know that. And I apologize on his behalf for the disrespect, which you won’t hear any more of, or I’m going to kick his ass from here to the Carquinez Bridge. Right, Nat? But look here, if you come through for Gibson Goode, after all this time you been such a good customer to us, not to mention, you know, blessing us with the example of your coming in here and meeting some of your music needs from time to time, then with respect, excuse me, but you really did turn your back on us. Seems like.”
Flowers’s gaze slid over to the sleeping baby. He seemed to be seeing little Archy himself lying there, hearing some wah-wah echo of 1968.
“I sincerely hope that is not true,” he said, returning to the present. “I would miss this place, I truly, truly would. But a Dogpile Thang is going to be a real boon to the community.”
“The community.”
Ho, shit, Archy thought.
“The community!” Nat repeated.
“Be cool, Nat,” Archy said.
“Oh, sure, I’ll be cool. I’ll be really fucking cool when I’m down the street selling my blood plasma!”
“Nat . . .”
Having to sell his blood plasma was always Nat’s worst-case scenario, the example he gave to his son, his wife, his partner, anyone he needed to persuade of the dire expedients and financial ruin that loomed before him.
“You know, Councilman, I don’t know why, but I was under the impression that this place right . . . here”—and Nat pounded the counter, Right! Here!—“was a community! But I guess I was wrong.”
Nat reached under the counter and pulled out a copy of The Soul Vibrations of Man (Saturn Research, 1976) and hurled it across the room. You could hear it crack, a snapping like wood in a fire. Along with fretting about having recourse to selling his blood plasma, Nat liked to throw record albums, usually the slag. Alas, this one was rare and valuable.
“You can ask Gibson Goode and the community to find you a sealed original mono copy of The Soul Vibrations of Man. Because we’re closing. Right now. As of this moment. Why delay it? Why draw out the suffering? We are closing this store today. You can all leave, thank you very much for your support all these years. Goodbye, gentlemen.”
Flowers started to say something, to remonstrate with Nat, reproach him for the destruction of that beautiful disk. Thought better of it. Fixed those searching peepers on Archy one last time, seeming to see some kind of answer in Archy’s blankness.
“Well, then.” Flowers touched his fingers to the brim of his hat, bowed to the men at the counter. He walked out of the store, and the nephews took up their places on either side of him. “Enjoy your day. Mr. Jones, Mr. Singletary.”
“Gentlemen, goodbye,” Nat said.
The customers turned, looking dazed, Mr. Mirchandani and Moby appealing to Archy. Archy shrugged. “Sorry, fellas,” he said.
Archy picked up Rolando, snoozing in his caddy, and made a formal transfer of custody to the grandfather, England turning over Hong Kong, mournful trumpets of farewell, a weird ache in Archy’s heart like the forerunner or possibly the distant memory of tears. The men slipped from their stools and trooped out.
Mr. Jones stopped in the doorway, unhunched himself from the perpetual ghostly keyboard, and turned back. He shot a look at Nat in which sympathy and scorn contended. Fished his pipe and tobacco out of his hip pocket. Then, gesturing with the stem of the pipe toward Rolando as the King carried out the baby, Mr. Jones nodded to Archy. “You keep on practicing, Turtle,” he said. “You going to get it.”
“I hope I do, Mr. Jones.”
“You got the good heart. Underneath all the other stuff. Good heart is eighty-five percent of everything in life.”
Tears ran burning along the gutters of Archy’s eyes. Generally, he tried, following the example of Marcus Aurelius, to avoid self-pity, but Archy had not experienced a great deal of appreciation in his life for his good qualities, for his potential as a man. His mother had died when he was young, his father had bounced early on. The aunts who raised him died with their ignorance of his good qualities perfectly preserved. His wife, though no doubt she loved him, was the latest in a long line of experts and connoisseurs, reaching back through the army and high school to his aunties, to underrate the rarity and condition of Archy’s soul. Only Mr. Jones had always stopped to drop a needle in the long inward spiraling groove that encoded Archy, and listen to the vibrations. Even in the days when Mr. Jones’s wife was alive and he was sought after in the clubs and recording studios, halfway famous, he always seemed to have time for Turtle Stallings.
“Thanks, Mr. Jones,” Archy said.
“What is the other fifteen percent?” Nat said. “Just out of curiosity?”
“Politeness,” Mr. Jones said without hesitation. “And keeping a level head.”
Nat blushed and failed to meet Mr. Jones’s watery gaze.
“We got that gig tomorrow,” Mr. Jones said. “I’m a need my Leslie, boy.”
“And you will have it,” Archy said.
“Said it would be ready Sunday.”
“It will be.”
After the parrot had piloted Mr. Jones out of the store, Nat shut the door behind them. He bolted it, turned the sign so that it read CLOSED. “The ‘community,’” he muttered. He stood with his hand on the bolt, humming. Then he slid it back, pulled the door open, and ran out onto the sidewalk, shouting in the direction that Councilman Flowers had taken: “The community hasn’t made a decent record since 1989!”
Nat came back in—stomped, really—and repeated the business with the deadbolt. He went back around the counter and stood, breathing in and out, making an effort to calm himself, the pounding of his heart visible in his temples. He stopped in front of Archy and fixed him with a level stare.
“See, Archy, this is why I hate everyone and the world,” he said, as if there were some connection between these words and what had just happened, some sequence of events like a theory of Ornette Coleman and the lost horn men of Storyville. “This is why I hate my sad-ass little life.”
He snatched his hat from the hook, pulled it down tight over his head, and went out. Archy tried and failed to decide whether to take seriously any, some portion, or none of the things that Nat had said. He reached for the Penguin Meditations stashed at the ready in his hip pocket, but he knew without consulting it what Marcus was unlikely to suggest: the kind of solace a man could find in the heat and spice of Ethiopia, a rank sweet sauce on the fingertips.
Gwen Shanks was headed north on Telegraph Avenue, on her way to work a home birth in the Berkeley hills, when she found herself blown off course by an unbearable craving into the cumin-scented gloom of the Queen of Sheba. Steeled by a lifetime of training in the arts of repression, like Spock battling the septenary mating madness of the pon farr, Gwen had resisted the urges and surges of estrogen and progesterone for each of the first thirty-four weeks of her pregnancy, denying all cravings, battened down tight against hormonal gusts. In her patients, Gwen uniformly and with tenderness indulged the rages, transports, and panics, the crying jags and cupcake benders, but she was not in the habit of indulging herself. Though she was a midwife by profession, her life’s work was self-control. Two weeks earlier, however, without explanation, her husband had dropped by the offices of Berkeley Birth Partners bearing, satanically, a fateful Styrofoam cup filled with something called suff. Since that day Gwen had been plagued by an almost daily hankering for this chilled infusion of sesame seeds, its flavor bittersweet as regret. A black belt in Wing Chun–style kung fu, Gwen had spent the morning in the dojo of the Bruce Lee Institute, working out for over two hours with her master, Irene Jew. Making a conscious effort not only to sharpen her practical edge against the loss of focus, strength, and quickness that pregnancy had brought but, more important, to regain some measure of discipline over herself. Wasted time. Parking in a yellow zone, risking lateness, Gwen abandoned herself to her thirst.
She was standing by the cash register, waiting for her change, and had taken her first painful and blessed sip when she noticed her darling husband sitting in a booth halfway back along the south wall, behind a tan-and-brown curtain of beaded strands that managed, in its sparsity, to leave nothing and everything to the imagination. Archy Stallings, dog of dogs, his thick Mingus fingers all up in a sticky compound of injera and the business of a long-headed rust-brown young bitch with the wondrous huge eyes of some nocturnal mammal. Elsabet Getachew, the Queen of Sheba, coiled on her side of the table like a soft and sinister intention. Across from her, Archy took off his horn-rims, polished their lenses with a soft cloth. That was all she saw; though it did not quite qualify as innocent, it was, in all fairness, not much. Afterward she could not be sure how or why she conceived the idea of marching back to the curtained booth and dumping a nice cold Styrofoam cupful of frothy regret onto her darling husband’s head. “Idea” was not even the right word; she seemed at that instant to define herself as the woman who was going to do that thing, to be the sea in which that action was the one and only fish.
Throughout her pregnancy, attacks of fatigue had alternated with bouts of bodily exaltation, but as she marched, rolling with the weight of the baby well distributed along the engineering of her bones, over to the fifth booth from the back, Gwen felt positively indomitable. She flung aside the beaded strands with a left hand that could splinter pine planks and reduce cinder block to gray dust. Strings snapped. Hundreds of brown and tan beads rattled down, darting and pinging and scattering in whorls, mapping, like particles in a cloud chamber, the flow of qigong from her black-belt hand.
In fact, Gwen disbelieved in qi and in 97 percent of the claims that people in the kung fu world made about it, those stories of people who could lift Acuras and avert bullets and bust the heads of mighty armies by virtue of their ability to control the magic flow. Ninety-seven percent was more or less the degree to which Gwen disbelieved in everything that people represented, attested to, or tried to put over on you. And despite midwives’ latter-day reputation as a bunch of New Age witches, with their crystals and their alpha-state gong CDs and their tinctures of black and blue cohosh root, most midwives were skeptical by training, Gwen more skeptical than most. Nonetheless, she felt something coursing through her and around her, mapped by the flying beads. She glowered down at the bastard who had somehow managed to conceal his bulk behind her 3 percent blind spot and sneak into her life.
As soon as Gwen appeared alongside the booth, Archy seemed to cotton all at once on to the whole scenario—wife, discovery, beads, size-large suff—with the instantaneous understanding common to unfaithful men. In the space of that instant, his eyes widened, apologizing, protesting, as wooden beads rained around him and eighteen ounces of ice-cold Ethiopian beverage were upended onto his head.
“Damn,” he said as the milk-white stuff streamed down his glasses and alongside his nose into his collar. He did not lose his temper, raise his voice, jump out of the way, or even shake himself like the dog he was. He just sat there dripping, suffering the punishment, as if doing so were a form of uxorious indulgence, the price that must be paid for having a wife who was not merely pregnant but, apparently, out of her mind. “I was only talking to the girl.”
“Excuse me,” said Elsabet Getachew with her husky accent, attempting with head lowered to slide out of the booth. Her hair was a glory of tendrils for the snaring of husbands. She smelled violently of the kitchen, of nuts and oils and crushed handfuls of orange spice. Gwen interposed herself between the woman and freedom, glad to be huge and impassable. She waited until the young woman looked up, daring her to meet the wifely gaze: a wall, a dam, the arm of a government. The girl looked up. In those ibex eyes, Gwen saw guilt and mockery; but above all: contempt.
All at once the lights came on inside of Gwen. She looked down at her belly, at her pilled and distended stretch top, at the saggy knees of her CP Shades pants, at the ragged black espadrilles into which she stuffed her feet. And under all that! the preposterous bra, the geriatric panties!
“No excuse for you,” Gwen said feebly, and stepped aside.
Elsabet Getachew slipped past her and disappeared through another fringe of beads into the kitchen. Apart from the happy couple, there were now nine other human beings in the dining room, and all of them appeared to be enjoying the ongoing spectacle of Gwen.
“So, what?” Archy wanted to know. “Now I’m not allowed to interact with my fellow neighborhood merchants? Maintain the dialogue? How we supposed to keep a lid on crime, we don’t exchange tips and information, tell me that?”
“‘Tips and information,’” she quoted. “Uh-huh. I see.”
“Always have to assume the worst-case scenario.” He grabbed up some napkins and tenderly patted his pate, dabbed at his streaming cheeks. He shook his head.
“I just go with the odds, Archy,” Gwen said. “I’m looking at the numbers.”
Yes, she conceded as he followed her out the front door of the restaurant and down Telegraph to her black 1999 BMW convertible, Archy and Elsabet had appeared to be just talking, and if they were just talking, then it was completely and without question unreasonable for her to have bugged out on him the way she had. Given the innocence of the observed encounter, it was wrong to have gone and drenched his beautiful pumpkin sweater and tweeds in a soft drink from the Horn of Africa. Yes, she knew perfectly well that Archy ate lunch at Queen of Sheba all the time. She knew that Elsabet Getachew worked at the restaurant and that she was the niece of the owner, who was a nice guy. And no, she did not expect him to be rude to a friend and fellow member of the Temescal Merchants Association.
“It’s the indignity of it,” she heard herself telling him, invoking a key concept of her mother’s code of morality with such stone likeness that it chilled her, spiders walked on the back of her neck, you might as well swing the camera around and show Rod Serling standing there behind a potted banana tree in an eerie cloud of cigarette smoke.
She got right up in his face so she could make her speech without raising her voice.“I have been doing this for thirty-six weeks,” she began. “I am tired, I am large, I am hormonal. And I am hot. I am so hot and so large, I have to wear a culotte slip to keep my thighs from rubbing together when I walk. So, I admit, yes, I lost it. Maybe I ought not have poured my drink on your head. But I don’t know”—was this the prompting of estrogen or logic? could she tell the difference anymore?—“maybe I ought. Because even if you are ‘just talking’ to some astonishingly beautiful girl, Archy, it’s humiliating. I’m sick of it. I have to walk around my city, the place where I live, and wonder if next time I stop in, wherever, I don’t know, the drugstore to pick up a jar of Tucks medicated pads, I’m going to see my husband macking on the pharmacist.” This was not a hypothetical example. “It’s embarrassing. I have more pride than that.” She placed a hand against her sternum then, feeling the next words coming like a mighty belch. She lowered her voice to a whisper, as if being obliged to invoke the memory of her immensely dignified mother, only the second female African-American graduate of Harvard Medical School, were the greatest humiliation of all. “I have too much self-respect.”
“Way too much,” Archy agreed.
“Swear to me, Archy,” she said. “Raise your right hand and swear to me, on the soul of your mother, you aren’t getting up to anything with that girl, Chewbacca or whatever her name is.”
“I swear,” Archy said, but there was appended no oath that might require the damnation of his late mother. No raised hand.
“Raise it up,” Gwen said.
Archy lifted his right hand, a flag of surrender.
“Swear. On the soul of your mother, who raised you to be a better man than that.”
Before forming the words required, Archy hesitated, and in that half-second he was lost. All Gwen’s protestations of dignity and invocations of self-respect were scattered like deck chairs on the promenade of a heaving ship. She glanced up and down the street, casing it for witnesses, then plunged her hand down into the front of his pants. The upper serif of his belt buckle, a gold Ferragamo F, scraped her wrist. Her fingers found the heavy coil of hose cupped in the bag of his boxers. Her fingertips were briefly snagged by a film of bodily adhesive as weak as the glue on a Post-it. She tugged her sticky fingers loose, brought them to her nose, and took a quick but practiced sniff. Market stalls, smoking braziers, panniers of lentils. All the spice and stink of Ethiopia: turmeric, scorched butter, the salt of the Red Sea.
“Motherfucker,” Gwen said, turning on itself, like a cell going cancerous, the oath that Archy would not swear. It was only the third time in her life that she had used the word, and the first time without quotation marks demurely implied, and after it there was nothing more to say. Gwen went around to the driver’s side of the car, ignoring a parking citation in an acid-green envelope that had been poked, during her absence, under her left wiper. She guided herself into the space between seat and steering wheel. Then she and her battered dignity drove off, with the parking ticket flapping against the windshield and with the want of a cup of suff—for one more caramel sip of which she just then would have endured any affront to her self-esteem or stain upon her pride—doomed to burn on inside her, unassuaged, for many days.
The house on Stonewall Road was one of those California canyon houses put up in the late sixties with a Jet Propulsion Laboratory arrogance toward gravity, a set of angles on skinny poles engineered out into the green void. From the street, all you could see of it was its mailbox and carport, with the house concealed downslope as if it planned to spring an ambush on a passerby. In the middle of the driveway, over an eternal attendant puddle of leaking motor oil, sat Aviva Roth-Jaffe’s car, a Volvo station wagon whose age could be reckoned in decades. It had gold-on-blue vanity plates that read HEK8. At some point it had been condemned by a hundred-dollar Earl Scheib paint job to approximate the color of a squirt of fluoride Crest.
Gwen leaned against the trunk of her car, took a long slow breath. Shook off as much of the memory of the past half hour as would shake loose, and tamped down everything else. She had work to do, and when this job was over, her husband would still be there, and he would still be a dog, and the smell of another woman’s pussy would still be on him. She hoisted her black gym bag over her shoulder—the bag held clean bed linens, gloves, meds and syringes, forceps, a portable Doppler—and hefted it and herself down the twisting stairway from the street to the front door. The slope behind her was overgrown with morning glory. Tendrils of jasmine fingered the wooden stairs. A huge trumpet vine with its disappointed yellow mouths threatened to engulf the wooden house clear to the peak of the steep shed roof. The air on Stonewall Road smelled of cedar bark, eucalyptus, fir logs burning in a woodstove. From the lowest limb of a Meyer lemon, a wind chime searched without urgency for a melody to play. An adhesive sticker pasted to the sidelight beside the front door told prospective firefighters how many cats (three) to risk their lives in rescuing. From inside the house came the forlorn and piteous bellowing of an animal in pain.
“Hello?” Gwen called, letting herself in the front door. A small black Buddha greeted her from a low table by the front door, where it kept company with a photograph of Lydia Frankenthaler, the producer of an Oscar-winning documentary film about the neglected plight of lesbians in Nazi Germany; Lydia’s partner, Garth; and Lydia’s daughter from her first marriage, a child whose father was black and whose name Gwen had forgotten. It was a Chinese Buddha, the kind that was supposed to pull in money and luck, jolly, baby-faced, and potbellied, reminding Gwen of her darling husband apart from the signal difference that you could rub the continental expanse of Archy Stallings’s abdomen for a very long time without attracting any flow of money in your direction. “Somebody having a baby around here?”
“In here, Gwen,” Aviva said.
Lydia and Garth, a lawyer for the poor, were having their baby in their living room. It was a large room with a vaulted ceiling and nothing between it and the canyon but a wall of solid glass. The girl—Arabia, Alabama, she had a geographical name—sat marveling blankly at the spectacle of her naked mother reposed like an abstract chunk of marble sculpture in the center of the room. Against her legs the girl held a rectangle of cardstock to which she had pasted the three pages of her mother’s birth plan, decorating the borders in four colors of marker with flowers and vines and a happy-looking fetus labeled BELLA. Two low sofas had been pushed to the sides of the room to make space for a wide flat sandwich crafted from a tatami mat, a slab of egg-carton foam rubber, and a shower curtain decorated with a giant self-portrait of Frida Kahlo. Garth, a small-boned, thin-shanked man with a red beard and red stubble on his head, lay sleeping on the improvised bed.
“I’m at nine!” said Lydia by way of greeting, adding whatever comment was provided by her spread, furry-ish butt cheeks and the backs of her legs as she bent over in the downward-facing-dog position to grab two handfuls of floor. “A hundred percent effaced.”
“I’ve been trying to persuade her to try a little push,” said Aviva. She tilted back on her haunches, down on the floor beside Lydia, studying the looming pale elderly secundigravida. Disapproving of the woman, but only Gwen would have caught it, the lips pursed to the left as if withholding a kiss. Barefoot in a loose cotton shift over black ripstop pedal pushers, the roiling surf of her black hair, with its silver eddies, pulled back and tied in a sloppy bun. Stubble showing blue against her luminous shins. Toenails painted a deep cocoa red like the skin of Archy’s Queen of Sheba. “But all Mom wants to do is goof around like that.”
“I don’t want to push,” Lydia said. A string of pain drew and cinched her voice, a yogic voice, inverted and tied carefully to the rhythm of her breathing. “Is it okay, Gwen? Can’t I just stay this way for a little while longer? It feels a lot better.”
If Aviva said it was time to try a little push, then it was, in Gwen’s view, time to try a little push. You did not get to be the Alice Waters of Midwives by leaving your gratins in the oven too long.
“Well, you’ve got gravity working for you,” Gwen tried, less inclined than her partner to patience or politeness but good for at least one go-round with an upside-down naked lady in labor. “But if anybody ever pushed out a baby in that jackknife thing you’ve got working right there, Lydia, then I never heard about it.”
“It could be interesting,” Aviva said. “Now that you mention it. Maybe you should give it a try.” The words were humorous, but her tone continued to be critical, at least to Gwen’s ear.
“Let me just wash my hands and whatnot, and then I’ll fire up my Doppler and see what’s happening in there,” Gwen said, dropping her bag on a black leather armchair. “Hi, honey.” Arcadia. “What do you think of all this, Miss Arcadia?”
The girl shrugged, eyes wide and teary but not despairing. Without cant or reference to the threefold moon goddess or other such nonsense, it was a deep and solemn business that they were about in this room, and nobody was going to feel that, in all its fathomlessness, like a kid. Certainly not old Garth over there, sacked out with one toe poking out of his left sock and sleep working the bellows of his skinny frame.
“Kind of gross,” the girl said, hoisting the birth plan higher as if to shield herself from the grossness of it. Article Seven requested that the umbilical cord not be cut until the placenta had ceased to pump. Article Twelve was some kind of nonsense about the use of artificial light. Gwen was not one to disrespect a well-made birth plan, but there were always wishful thinking and juju involved, and when things went the way they were going to go, as they must, many plans took on a retrospective air of foolishness. “No offense, Mom.”
“You don’t.” The string cinching tighter. “Have to. Watch it, baby. I told you—”
“I want to stay.”
“Gross can be interesting,” Gwen said. “Huh?”
Arcadia nodded.
Lydia lowered her hips and sank to her knees, giving way like a sand castle, and on all fours she rested, head hung, eyes closed, as if about to pantomime some animal behavior. “I’m going to push now,” she announced. In the same stewardessy voice, she added, “Everyone please shut up.”
Her tone was wrong and startling, like a struck wineglass with a secret flaw, and at once Garth sat up and gaped at Gwen, blinking, wiping his lips with his sleeve. “What’s wrong?” he said. His eyes came unstuck from Gwen’s, and he looked around, kicking up from the deep-sea trench of a dream, looking for his new baby, finding his wife, who was seeing nothing at all.
“Everything’s fine, sweetie,” Aviva said. “Only we’re going to need Frida Kahlo.”
Gwen went into the kitchen to drink a glass of water and, in the name of asepsis if not pride, eradicate every last whiff of Elsabet Getachew from her hands. No excuse for you—that was sterling dialogue. She strangled the renascent memory of her shame with a pair of latex-free gloves. When she came back into the living room, she saw that Frida Kahlo had been veiled with an orange bath towel. Lydia lay on her back, propped up on an old plaid bolster, pale abdomen shot like an eyeball with capillaries, making a new kind of low growling sound that built slowly to an energetic whoop and flowered in a burst of foul language that made everybody laugh.
“Good one,” Aviva said. “Good one.”
Though Aviva had caught a thousand babies with hands that were steady and adept, now that it was time, she deferred to her partner, to the virtuoso hands of Gwen Shanks, freaky-big, fluid as a couple of tide-pool dwellers, cabled like the Golden Gate Bridge.
As Aviva gave way to Gwen, she tried by means of her powerfully signifying eyebrows to communicate that she felt something in this situation to be amiss, something not provided for in the birth plan, which lay sagging and looped onto itself under the little girl’s chair. Aviva’s apparent psychic ability to know in advance when something might go wrong, especially in the context of a birth, was not merely the statistical fruit of an abiding pessimism. Skeptic that she was, Gwen had seen Aviva make unlikely but correct predictions of disaster too many times to discount. Gwen frowned, trying to see or feel what Aviva had detected, coming up short. By the time she turned to Lydia, every trace of the frown had been blown away.
“Okay,” she said, “let’s see what little old Miss Bella is up to.”
Gwen lowered herself by inches and prayers to the floor and, when she arrived, saw that the inner labia of Lydia Frankenthaler had conformed themselves into a fiery circle. A smear of fluid and hair presented its credentials at this checkpoint, advance man for the imminently arriving ambassadress from afar.
“You’re working fast now,” Gwen said. “You’re crowning. Here we go. Oh my goodness.”
“Lydia, honey, remember how you said you really didn’t want to push,” Aviva said, climbing in alongside Gwen, “well, now I would actually like you to stop. Stop pushing. Just let her—”
“Coming fast,” Gwen said. “Look out.”
There was a ripple of liquid and skin, then with a vaginal sigh, the little girl squirted faceup into Gwen’s wide hands. The small eyes were open, nebular, and dull, but in the instant before she cried out, they ignited, and the child seemed to regard Gwen Shanks. The air was filled with a hot smell between sex and butchery. The father said “oh” and pressed in beside Gwen to take the sticky baby as she passed it to him. Arcadia hung back, aghast and thrilling to the redness of the birth and the life kindling in her father’s hands. They wrapped the baby loosely in a candy-striped blanket, and as Aviva stroked Lydia’s hair and helped to raise her head, Garth and Arcadia made the necessary introductions of mother and baby and breast. That left Gwen, crouched at the other end of the silvery umbilicus, to observe the heavy flow of blood that seeped from Lydia’s vagina in a slow pulsation, like water from a saturated sponge.
It required all of Gwen’s training and innate gift for minimization of disaster not to pronounce the fatal syllables “Ho, shit.” But Aviva caught something in her face or shoulders, and when Gwen looked up from the pulsing blood that had begun to pool in a red half-dollar on the shower curtain, her partner was already on her way around to have a look. Aviva hunched down behind Gwen, an umpire leaning in on a catcher’s shoulder to get a better look at the ball as it came down the pike. She smelled of lemon peel and armpit in a way that barely registered with Gwen by now except as a steadying presence. They settled in to wait for the placenta. The soft click-click of the baby’s nursing marked the passing of several minutes. Aviva reached down and gave a gentle tug on the umbilical cord. She frowned. She made a humming sound deep in her throat and then said, “Hmm.”
Her tone pierced the bubble of family happiness up by Lydia’s head. Garth looked up sharply. “Is it all right?”
“It’s fine.”
Gwen ripped back the Velcro straps of her hypodermic kit, unrolled it, and felt around with her left hand for the vial of Pitocin.
“Right now,” Aviva said, “the placenta is feeling a little shy, so we just all want to really encourage the uterus to do some contracting for us. Lydia, you just keep right on nursing her, that’s the very best thing you can do. How’s that coming?”
“She went right on!” Lydia cried. Everything was wonderful in the world where she had taken up residence. “Great latch. Sucking away.”
“Good,” Gwen said, practicing the business of syringe and vial in a mindful series of ritual taps, sinking the vial onto the shaft of the needle, reading the tale of liquid and graduation. “Keep it up. And just to make sure it all gets nice and tight and contracted in there, we’re going to give you a little Pitocin.”
“What’s the deal?” said Garth. He craned forward to see what was happening between his wife’s legs. There was not, say, an ocean of blood, but there was more than enough to shock an innocent new father awash in a postpartum hormonal bath of trust in the world’s goodness. “Oh, goddammit. Did you guys fuck something up?”
He swore stiffly but with a sincere fury that took Gwen by surprise. She had pegged him as the gently feckless type of Berkeley white guy, drawstring pants and Teva sandals worn over hiking socks, sworn to a life of uxorial supportiveness the way some monks were sworn to the work of silence. Gwen didn’t know that Garth and Lydia had quarreled repeatedly over the idea of home birth, that Garth had viewed Lydia’s insistence on having their baby at home as the latest in a string of reckless and unnecessarily showy acts of counterconventionality that included refusing, to date, three separate proposals of marriage from Garth. Garth believed in hospitals and vaccines and government-sanctioned monogamy and had absorbed from his poor black and Latino clients powerful notions of the sovereignty of bad luck and death. He had suffered no ill fortune throughout the length of a tranquil, comfortable, and fulfilling life and so at any moment anticipated—even felt that he deserved—the swift equalizing backhand of universal misfortune.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Gwen said. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah.” She laid it on, but only because she could do so in good conscience. This kind of hemorrhaging was not unusual; the Pitocin would kick in momentarily, the uterus would contract, the mysterious bundle of the placenta, that doomed and transient organ, would complete its brief sojourn, and that would be that.
“I mean, well,” Garth said. He appeared to consider and decide against speaking the words that had entered his mind, so as not to cause alarm, then said them anyway: “It’s just that it looks kind of bad.”
Gwen’s eyes snapped onto the little girl, but Arcadia seemed to have decided not to know anything except the baby sucking at her mother’s left breast and the feel of her mother’s hand in hers.
“That’s mostly just lochia,” Gwen said. “Lining, mucus, all that good stuff. It’s normal.”
“Mostly,” Garth repeated, his tone both flat and accusatory.
“How about you run get us some towels, Dad,” Aviva suggested. “And lots of them.”
“Towels,” Garth repeated, clinging to the rope of his desire to be useful.
“Definitely,” Gwen said. “Go on, honey. Go on and get us like every damn towel you got. Also, yeah, some sanitary pads.”
Gwen had a more than adequate supply of pads in her bag, but she wanted to give him a concrete mystery to grow entangled in, hoping that might keep him busy for a few minutes. Whenever she asked Archy to bring her a Tampax, he always got this look on his face, somewhere between intimidation, as by an advanced concept of cosmic theory, and dread, as if mere contact with a tampon might cause him spontaneously to grow a vagina.
Garth went away muttering, “Towels and sanitary pads.”
Aviva called Aryeh Bernstein. “Sorry to bother you,” she said. She gave him the essentials, then listened to what their backup OB had to say about Lydia Frankenthaler’s placenta. “We did. Yep. Okay. All right, thanks, Aryeh. I hope I won’t have to.”
“What did he say?”
“He said more Pitocin and massage.”
“On it,” Gwen said.
As Aviva prepped another push, Gwen laid her hands on Lydia’s belly and felt, blindly and surely, for the hard shuddering uterus. She sank her fingers into the crepey flesh of Lydia’s abdomen and kneaded with dispassion and no more tenderness than a baker. She disbelieved in the mystical power of visualization according to strictures of her 97 percent rule, but that did not prevent her from imagining with every flexion of her fingers that Lydia’s womb was clenching, sealing itself up, condensing like a lump of coal in Superman’s fist to a hard bright healthy diamond.
They heard cabinets slamming in a bathroom somewhere with a panicked air of comedy, and then a glass broke, and the girl jumped. It was not impossible that Gwen jumped, too. Aviva held steady, guiding the second needle into Lydia’s vein.
“Hey, there, Arcadia,” Gwen said. “How you doing?”
“Good.”
“You got a nice strong grip on your mom’s hand, there?” The girl nodded, slow and watchful. Gwen winced at the false tone of cheeriness she could hear creeping into her voice. “Know what I’m doing? I’m massaging your mom’s uterus. Now, I know you know what a uterus is.”
“Yes.”
“Duh. Of course you do, smart as you are.”
“Oh, uh, Gwen, um,” Lydia said, and she sank back deeper against the plaid bolster, her head lolling like a flower on a broken stem. Her left arm with the baby curled in its crook subsided, and there was a loud smack as the small mouth popped loose. “Oh, man, you guys, I don’t know.”
“Any change?” Aviva said.
“Some.”
Gwen tried not to look at her partner as Aviva went over to her flight bag, a gaudy pleather thing blazoned with the obscurely ironic legend SULACO, and broke out the bags, barbs, and tubing of an IV kit. Gwen crouched, up to her elbows in the dough of the woman’s life, knowing that everything was going to be all right, that it was a matter of hormones and massage and a husband judiciously sent to find Kotex and bath towels. She also knew that she suffered from or had been blessed with a kind of reverse clairvoyance, the natural counterpart to her partner’s predictive pessimism. Gwen was resistant to if not proof against clear signs of danger or failure. Not because she was an optimist (not at all) but because she took failure, any failure, whether her own or the universe’s, so personally. If a bridge gave way outside of Bangalore, India, and a bus full of children plunged to their deaths, Gwen felt an atom-sized but detectable blip of culpability. She had been taught firmly that you could not take credit for success if you were unprepared to accept blame for failure, and one useful expedient she had evolved over the years for avoiding having to do the latter was to refuse—not consciously so much as through a reflexive stubbornness—to acknowledge even the possibility of failure. And that was what she would have to accept if she looked up from her wildly bread-making hands and saw Aviva, with that grim measuring gaze of hers, holding up the bag of intravenous saline to catch the sunshine, her mouth drawn into a thin defeated line.
“Don’t fall asleep, Mommy,” Arcadia said. “Here comes Daddy with the towels.”
Gwen hurried along the corridor, bleeding from a fresh cut on her left cheek, trussing her belly with one arm, trying to keep up with Aviva, who was trying to keep up with the single-masted gurney on which Lydia Frankenthaler was being sailed toward one of the emergency-room ORs by a crew of two nurses and the EMT who had accidentally slammed the ambulance door on Gwen’s face. The EMT hit the doors ass-first and banged on through, and the nurse who was not steering the IV pole turned and faced down the midwives as the doors swung shut behind her. She was about Gwen’s age, mid-thirties, a skinny ash-eyed blonde with her hair in a rubber-band ponytail, wearing scrubs patterned with the logo of the Oakland A’s. “I’m really sorry,” she said. She looked very faintly sorry. “You’ll have to wait out here.”
This was a sentence being passed on them, a condemnation and a banishment, but at first Aviva seemed not to catch on, or rather, she pretended not to catch on. As the Alice Waters of Midwives, she had been contending successfully and in frustration with hospitals for a long time, and though, by nature, she was one of the most candid and forthright people Gwen had ever known, if you sent her into battle with another nurse, an intake clerk, or most of all an OB, she revealed herself to be skilled in every manner of wheedlings and wiles. It was a skill that was called upon to one degree or another almost every time they went up against hospitals and insurance companies, and Gwen relied upon and was grateful to Aviva for shouldering the politics of the job so ably. She envied the way it seemed to cost Aviva nothing to eat shit, kiss up, make nice. Catching babies was the only thing Aviva cared about, and she would surrender anything except her spotless record for catching them safe and sound. She had, Gwen felt, that luxury.
“No, no, of course, we’ll wait,” Aviva said in a chipper voice. She made a great show of gazing down at herself, at her white shirt with its chart of blood islands, at the chipped polish on her big toenail. With the same partly feigned air of disapproval, she surveyed Gwen’s cheek, her played-out saggy-kneed CP Shades. Then Aviva nodded, granting with a smile the whole vibe of dirt and disorder that the partners were giving off. “But after we clean up and scrub in, right? then it’s no problem, right”—leaning in to read the nurse’s badge—“Kirsten? If you want to check with Dr. Bernstein, I’m sure . . .”
Gwen could see the nurse trying to determine whose responsibility it was in this situation to be the Asshole, which was of course the purpose of Aviva’s gambit. Sometimes that awful responsibility turned out to be endlessly deferrable, and other times you got lucky and ended up in the hands of someone too tired or busy to give a damn.
“Bernstein’s stuck in traffic,” Kirsten said. “The attending’s Dr. Lazar. I’ll check with him. In the meantime, why don’t you two ladies go ahead and have a seat.” She told Gwen, “You’re going to want to have a seat.”
You have a seat, bitch. That’s my patient maybe bleeding to death in there.
“No, thank you,” Gwen said. “I prefer to stand.”
Her relations toward authority, toward its wielders and tools, were—had to be—more complicated than her partner’s. She could not as blithely subordinate her pride and self-respect to the dictates of hospital politics, distill her practice of midwifery, the way Aviva did, to the fundamental business of the Catch. But Gwen knew, the way a violinist knew tonewood, how to work it. She had grown up in a family of doctors, lawyers, teachers, cops. For many years her father was an assistant district attorney for the city of Washington, D.C., and then a lawyer for the Justice Department. Both of her mother’s sisters were nurses. Her uncle Louis had been a D.C. patrolman and plainclothesman and was now the chief of security for Howard University, and her brother, Ernest, ran a lab at George Mason. To the extent that Gwen had been hassled in her life by representatives of the white establishment, she had been trained to get the better of the situation without compromising herself, sometimes by dropping a name, sometimes by showing a respect that she genuinely felt or could at least remember how to simulate. Mostly by letting the doc or the officer feel that she understood how it was to be on the job.
“But truly, thank you, Kirsten,” Gwen added, reaching for chipper like a note that was just beyond her range. “We really appreciate your taking the time. We know how busy you are.” She smiled. “And maybe I will sit down a minute, at that.”
As though doing Kirsten a favor, Gwen lowered herself into one of the plastic chairs bolted to a nearby wall.
“Definitely want to have somebody look at that cheek,” the nurse said, her brittle tone expressing solicitude for the cheek less, Gwen thought, than for her own worn-out, urban-population-serving self.
“Oh, thank you so much for your concern,” Gwen said. Struggling a little harder, knowing from the way Aviva was looking at her, that she was starting, in Aviva’s phrase, to leak. “Now, please, honey, go ask the doc when we can see our patient.”
It must have been the “honey.”
Kirsten said, “She’s not your patient anymore.”
This was not technically true. As a result of years of hard work, steady and sound practice, slowly evolving cultural attitudes in the medical profession, and long, unrelenting effort begun by its founder and senior practitioner, by the summer of 2004, Berkeley Birth Partners enjoyed full privileges at Chimes General Hospital, with every right to assist in and attend to the care of Lydia Frankenthaler, who would remain a patient until such time as Lydia herself decided otherwise. But Aviva and Gwen had come this evening in an ambulance, giving off a whiff of trouble, with an unnecessary police escort they had managed to acquire along the way. Like a pair of shit-caked work boots, they were being left outside on the porch.
“We’ll wait here.” Aviva stepped in with the perfect mixture of unctuous sweetness and professional concern, spiking it lightly, like a furtive elbow to the ribs, with a warning to Gwen to seal all leaks or else shut the hell up. “As soon as you talk to the attending, you come find us, okay, Kirsten?”
Gwen followed Aviva into the bathroom, fighting the urge to apologize, wanting to point out that if you were white, eating shit was a choice you could make if you wanted; for a black woman, the only valid choice was not to.
In silence at separate sinks, they washed their hands and faces and rued the ruination of their shirts. The reverberation of water against porcelain intensified the silence. In the mirror, Gwen saw her partner staring at the bloodstains with an emotion between horror and hollowness, looking every one of her forty-seven years. Then their eyes met in the reflection, and the defeated look was gone in an instant, smuggled off, hooded and manacled, to the internal detention facility where Aviva Roth-Jaffe sent such feelings to die.
“I know,” Gwen said. “I was leaking.”
“Literally,” Aviva said, coming in to get a look at the damage the ambulance door had done to Gwen’s cheek. It had stopped bleeding, but when Aviva touched it, a fresh droplet formed a bead on the cut’s lower lip. The cut was about the size of a grain of pomegranate, pink and ugly. It would leave a scar, and Gwen was prone to keloids, and so forever after, she thought, she would have something special to remind her of this wonderful day. In her mind, she replayed her stumble, the optic flash as her face struck the steel corner.
“You need a stitch,” Aviva said. She leaned in to look at Gwen’s cut. “Maybe two.”
They went out to the ER and, after a few minutes of further genial self-abasement by Aviva, found themselves shown into an examination room with needle, suturing thread, and a hemostat. When it came time for novocaine, Gwen sat on her hands and told Aviva to go ahead and sew it up. “One stitch I can handle straight,” she said.
“Better call it two.”
“Two, then.”
“Aren’t you fucking macho.”
“I’m liable to start crying anyways, might as well give me a reason.” Gwen gasped as the needle bit. “Ow, Aviva, ouch.”
Aviva tugged the thread with a severe gentleness, breath whistling in her nostrils. Gwen focused her attention on the pendant that hung from a leather thong around Aviva’s throat. It had been made by Julie Jaffe in a flame-work class at the Crucible, lovely and enigmatic, a small glass planet, a teardrop of blue alien seas and green continents and polar caps tinted ice blue. For as long as Gwen had known him, Julie had been a mapper of worlds, on newsprint and graph paper and in the phosphor of a computer screen. Gwen recalled having asked him where he found the inspiration for the tiny glass world he had presented her as a Christmas present last year, and she tried to take comfort or at least find shelter from the pain of the suture needle in the memory of his reply: By living there. Then Aviva sank the barb a second time, and that was when Gwen started to cry, no big show or anything, they were both a couple of cool customers, your Berkeley Birth Partners. No sobbing. No whoops of grief. Just tears welling up and spilling over, stinging in the fresh seam of the wound. To be honest, it felt pretty good.
She permitted the tears to flow only as long as it took Aviva to snip the thread from the second stitch, lay down the hemostat, peel off her gloves, and hand Gwen a tissue. Gwen dabbed her eyes and then used the tissue to blow her nose, a nice big honking blast.
“They aren’t going to let us in,” Gwen said bitterly.
“I guess not.”
“Where’s Bernstein?”
“He was in the city. He’s coming.”
“We need to be in there. They’re going to want to do a hysterectomy, I know it. When all they need to do is just wait a little. Lazar. Who’s Lazar?”
“Don’t know him.”
“Tell me she’s going to be all right.”
“She will be all right.”
“I should have noticed it sooner.”
“There was nothing to notice until you noticed it. You noticed it right away.”
Gwen nodded, ducking her head, balling the tissue in her fist. She stood up and paced the room, stopped, hugged herself, notching her arms into the groove over the swell of her abdomen. She sat down, stood up, blew her nose again, and paced the room some more. She knew perfectly well there was nothing anyone could have done, but somehow that only made it feel more imperative to blame herself. It implied no kind of self-exoneration if she felt compelled to blame some other people, too.
“I can’t believe they aren’t letting us in there!”
“Take it easy,” Aviva said in a hushed voice that was meant, Gwen knew, to communicate the fact that she was talking too loudly. But Gwen could tell that she was rattling Aviva, and for some reason, it pleased her to see it. For the second time that day, she had a sense of trespassing on some internal quarantine, crossing a forbidden zone into the pon farr; amok time. It would not be right for Aviva to make her go there alone.
“I’ve had enough of this,” Gwen said. “Aviva, no, seriously. Listen to me.”
“I can hear you loud and clear, Gwen.”
“Come on. You have worked too hard. We have both earned the right to be treated better than this.”
There was the squeak of a sneaker on tiled floor. The partners turned, startled, to the door of the examining room, where a young pink-faced doctor appeared, his head shaved almost to the scalp, leaving only a ghostly chevron of pattern baldness. Dead-eyed, already tired of listening to them before they ever opened their mouths.
“I’m Dr. Lazar,” he said. “I was able to do a manual removal of the placenta. Mrs. Frankenthaler is stable, uterine tonicity looks good. We stopped the bleeding. She’ll be fine.”
The partners stood, perfectly still, tasting the news like thirsty people trying to decide if they had just felt a drop of rain. Then they fell on each other and hung on tight, Gwen half stupid with relief, drunk on it, clinging to Aviva as if to keep the room from spinning.
Dr. Lazar studied the celebration with his flounder eyes and a mean smile like a card cheat with a winning hand. “Do you think,” he said after an interval not quite long enough to pass for decent, “uh, I don’t know, do either of you ladies think maybe you could explain to me how you managed to screw up this birth quite so badly?”
“Excuse me?” Gwen said, letting go of Aviva as the dizziness abruptly passed.
“Ten more minutes of sage-burning or whatever voodoo you were working, and that mom—”
“Voodoo?” Gwen said.
Instead of wincing at this clear instance of having said something he was bound to regret, Dr. Lazar turned gelid, immobile. But he flushed to the tips of his ears. “You know what?” he said. “Whatever.”
He turned and walked out of the room, and Gwen noticed a purple Skittle adhering to the seat of his surgical scrub trousers. For some reason, the sight of the smashed piece of candy stuck on the doctor’s ass inspired a minute compassion for the fish-eyed and weary young man with his burden of alopecia, and this, in turn, sent her over the edge.
“Gwen!” Aviva said, but it was too late, and anyway, the hell with her.
An hour ago, when they had blown in on a gust of urgency from the ambulance bay, EMT yelling instructions, calling for a stretcher, Garth looking modestly wild-eyed, dancing like a man who had to pee, holding the baby who needed to be fed, Aviva breaking out a bottle of Enfamil from her backpack and cracking it with a sigh and that formula smell of vitamins and cheese, the wonderful avid baby needing every ounce of it—Gwen had failed to remark just how busy it was tonight at the emergency room of Chimes General Hospital.
Every room seemed to be occupied. Her pursuit of Dr. Lazar was haunted at its edges by glimpses of a pale hairy shin slashed with red. A forlorn teenager in a volleyball uniform clutching her arm at a surrealist angle. A young man with baby dreadlocks gripping either side of a sink as if about to vomit. The whole scene scored with a discordant soundtrack of televisions and woe, the nattering of SpongeBob, an old man’s ursine expectorations, a pretty Asian woman cursing like a sailor as something nasty was extracted from the meat of her hand, the horrific shrieking of a toddler being held down by its father while a phlebotomist probed its arm for a vein. Outside the last examination room before the waiting area, a young Hispanic man lolled in a chair, holding a bloody ice pack to his face, while from inside the room, a doctor yelled cheerfully in English at his bleeding companion as if the man were deaf and retarded.
“I am a nurse,” Gwen said, managing to sound calmer than she felt, catching up with Lazar. “Please tell me that I did not just hear you employ the term ‘voodoo’ in reference to my licensed and certified practice of midwifery.”
Lazar stopped at the threshold of the waiting area, where he planned, she assumed, to tell Garth and Arcadia that Lydia would be okay, business that was definitely more important, as Gwen knew perfectly well in some cool, quiet corner of her being, than whatever point she was attempting to make. The doctor turned to confront her with an air of resigned willingness to go along, an obedient soldier saddling up for the ride into the valley of death.
“I know you were burning something,” he said. “I could smell it on her.”
“It was ylang-ylang,” Aviva said, hurrying up behind them, taking a step toward Gwen as if to interpose her body between Gwen and the doctor. “Her husband was burning it during the first part of her labor. She likes the smell.”
“That woman,” Gwen said, “Lydia. The placenta was retained. There was stage zero hemorrhage, borderline stage one. Uterine atonicity. And she went into a hypovolemic shock.”
“Correct,” the doctor said, impatient.
“Even though we had her on a course of supplements and immediately began to administer oxytocin and do uterine massage. Exactly like you or any doctor would have done. Is that not correct?”
He blinked, not wanting to give up anything to her.
“So tell me this, Doctor, how many accretas, how many postpartum hemorrhages, have you guys had here this month? Like, what, I’m going to say six?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Ten?”
“I don’t know the answer to that, Ms. Shanks, but see, the thing is, when those things happen here, okay? When they happen here? When there’s some hemorrhaging? Which does occur, of course. Then the patient’s already in the damn hospital. Where she ought to be.”
Gwen looked over at the young man with the ice pack, his visible eye dull and maddened, his knuckles swollen like berries on the point of rot.
“You know what?” Aviva said, and out came the pointing finger so feared by all who loved her, Gwen among them, as the Berkeley faded and the Brooklyn broke through, and all at once Aviva’s proximity no longer buffered but menaced the doctor. “In fifteen years, my practice has never lost a single mother. And not one single baby. Can this place make that claim? No, I happen to know very well it can’t, and so do you.”
“Who would ever want to have a baby here?” Gwen observed, half to herself, a hand settling on her belly like an amulet or shield.
“It’s a birth,” the doctor said. “You know, call me crazy, but maybe in the end that’s one of those things you just don’t want to try at home. It’s not like conking your hair.”
Somebody gasped out in the waiting room. An arch, eager female voice went Awwwwww shit.
“You racist,” Gwen began, “misogynist—”
“Oh, come on, don’t start that crap.”
Lazar turned his back on her and went into the waiting room. Throwing up his hands, shaking his head: all the bad acting people tended to engage in when they were most sincere. Gwen stayed right with him. Everyone in the waiting room raised their head, face blank and attentive, prepared if not hoping for further entertainment.
“Don’t you bait me,” Gwen said, feeling an internal string, years in the winding, snap with a delicious and terrible twang. “Don’t you ever try to bait me, you baldheaded, Pee-wee Herman–looking, C-sectioning, PPO hatchet man.”
Ho! Uh-uh! Go, Mommy!
Gwen was right up against him, her body, her belly, the pert cupola of her protruding navel flirting through the fabric of her blouse with actual physical contact. He backed off, betraying the faintest hint of fear.
Garth stood up, holding the baby stiffly, forlornly, as if it were a rare musical instrument, some kind of obscure assemblage of reeds and bladders that he would now be called upon to play. His blue eyes looked frightened, bewildered, and when she saw him, Gwen felt ashamed. Arcadia, curled in on herself in a plastic armchair, woke up and started to cry.
“Mr. Frankenthaler?” the doctor said.
“Garth, she’s fine,” Aviva said. She hurried over to Garth, rubbed his shoulder. “She’s fine, she’s going to be fine.”
“Why don’t you come with me, Mr. Frankenthaler? I’ll take you to see your wife,” Lazar said.
“She isn’t my wife,” Garth said, dazed. “My last name is Newgrange.”
Lazar crouched down in front of Arcadia and spoke, in a tender voice, words that only she could hear. She nodded and sniffled, and he moved a thick coil of her dark hair, damp at the end with tears, out of her eyes, painting a shining trail across her cheek. Suddenly, the man was the kindest doctor in the universe. He stood up, and Arcadia took hold of the hem of her father’s windbreaker, and they followed Lazar back into the ER. Two seconds later, Lazar reappeared and pointed his finger at Gwen in a parody, perhaps unconscious, of Aviva’s recent performance.
“I’m writing this up,” he told Gwen, who stood there, shoulders heaving, all the righteousness emptied out of her, the last bright tankful burned off in that final heavenward blast. “Count on that.”
“Did you hear the way he spoke to me?” she said to Aviva, to the room, a note of uncertainty in the question as if seeking confirmation that she had not in fact imagined it. “‘Voodoo.’ ‘It’s not like having your hair conked.’ Did you hear? I know everybody in this room heard the man.”
Aviva was back to the hushed voice, gently taking hold of Gwen’s elbow. “I heard,” she said, “I know.”
“You know? I don’t think you do.”
“Oh, come on,” Aviva said with an unfortunate echo of Lazar in her tone. “For God’s sake, Gwen. I’m on your side.”
“No, Aviva, I’m on my side. I didn’t hear him say one damn word to you.”
Gwen pulled her arm free of Aviva’s grasp and trudged out of the waiting room, through the covered entranceway to the ER, and out to the driveway, where Hekate the Volvo still sat, her hazard lights faithfully blinking. The late-summer-afternoon breeze carried a smell of the ocean. Gwen shivered, a spasm that started in her arms and shoulders but soon convulsed everything. She had barely eaten all day, which was horrible, reprehensible, two months from delivery and already a Bad Mother. Now she felt like she was starving and at the same time like she might throw up. The stitches burned in her cheek. There was a reek of butts and ashes, out here beyond the doors, and a live thread of fresh smoke. She turned to see a pair of women whom she recognized from the waiting room, young and wide-eyed with matching taffy curls, cousins or possibly sisters, one of them even more hugely pregnant than Gwen, sharing a Kool with an air of exuberant impatience as if, when they finished it, something good was going to happen to one or both of them.
“Hello,” Gwen said, and they laughed as if she had said something stupid or as if she herself were stupid regardless of what she might say. They were among those who had cheered and taken great pleasure in Gwen’s public argument with Dr. Lazar. The pregnant one smoked, inhaling in that strange impatient way, and studied Gwen as if the sight of her confirmed some long-held theory.
“You a midwife?” the pregnant woman said.
Gwen nodded, trying to look proud and competent, a credit to her profession and her people. The pregnant woman dropped the burning cigarette and stepped on it, and then she and her companion turned to walk back to the emergency room, the pregnant woman’s flip-flops scraping and slapping against the soles of her feet.
“See, now,” she told her companion, “don’t want to be messing with that country shit.”
Around the time when Baby Frankenthaler was bundled from her mother’s belly red and headlong into the world, Archy came rolling out of his front door for the second time that day and stood on the topmost step of his porch, freshly showered, toweled, and eau-de-cologned, dressed in a crisp shirt of seafoam-green linen and a linen suit of dulce-de-leche brown. Only to his pride did there still cling, perhaps, the faintest whiff of sesame. He reached up and out with both arms to shoot his cuffs, and for an instant he might have served to illustrate the crucial step in a manual on the seizing of days. He had already seized this particular day once, but he was prepared, if need be, to go ahead and seize the motherfucker all over again.
It was a pretty day for seizing, that much was certain: the prettiest that Oakland, California, had to offer. The fog had burned off, leaving only a softness, as tender as a memory from childhood, to blur the sunlight that warmed the sprawl of rosemary and purple salvia along the fragrant sidewalk and fell in shifting shafts through the branches of the monkey-puzzle tree. This whimsical evergreen, mammoth and spiky, dominated the front yard of Archy and Gwen’s sagging 1918 bungalow, formerly the home of a mean old Portuguese man named Oliveira. Reputed, when Archy was a kid, to contain an extensive collection of shrunken heads gathered during Mr. Oliveira’s career as a merchant seaman, the house had been a reliable source of neighborhood legend, especially at Halloween, and the mythic memory of those leering heads gave Archy pause sometimes when he came home on an autumn evening, a ring-and-run thrill. He had to this day never forgotten the strange horror of glimpsing one of Mr. Oliveira’s many tattoos, like something out of Nathaniel Hawthorne, consisting of a ragged rectangle, a bar of black ink scrawled across the cordovan hide of the old sailor’s upper arm in order to blot out, like the pen of a censor, some underlying name or image whose memory, for mysterious reasons, was abhorrent.
Archy patted the hip pocket of his jacket, checking for The Meditations, coming down the front steps with his sense of resignation stiffened, in best Stoic fashion, to a kind of resolve. Knowing he had done wrong, prepared to make amends, settle his business. Determined to return to Brokeland, open the doors wide to the angel of retail death, and run the place into the ground all by himself, if that was what it took—but to fail calmly, to fail with style, to fail above all with that true dignity, unknown to his wife or his partner, which lay in never tripping out, never showing offense or hurt to those who had offended or hurt you.
He heard the grumbling of a vintage Detroit engine, inadequately muffled, and watched with dull foreboding as a 1970 Oldsmobile Toronado, recurrent as a bad dream, turned onto Sixty-first Street. The vehicle was in awful shape: formerly green and bleached to a glaucous white, rusted in long streaks and patches so that the side visible resembled a strip of rancid bacon.
Archy was a compulsive admirer of American muscle cars from the ten-year period following his birth in 1968, a period which, in his view—a view often and with countless instances, oral footnotes, and neologisms expounded at the counter of Brokeland Records—corresponded precisely with the most muscular moment in the history of black music in America. His own car, parked in the driveway, was a 1974 El Camino, butterscotch flake, maintained with love and connoisseurship by himself and Sixto “Eddie” Cantor, Stallings Professor of Elcaminology at Motor City Auto Repair and Custom Jobs. Archy was the author of the as yet unwritten Field Guide to Whips of the Funk Era, and thus, even if he had not grown up as the virtual older brother of this particular Toronado, he would have been able, by its GT hood badge and dual exhaust, to identify the model year of the low-fallen specimen rolling up to his house. Of the chrome trim only the white plastic underclips remained, and the hood was held shut by a frayed knot of nylon rope looped through the grille, several vanes of which had fallen out, leaving the unfortunate car with a gap-toothed and goofy Leon Spinks grin. In the backseat he thought he glimpsed the blue plastic Samsonite suitcase his grandmother used to take with her on the Fun Train up to Reno. From the right rear window protruded a deco-style halogen floor lamp of the type that caught Lionel Hampton on fire.
“Nuh-uh,” Archy said, seeing that this was to be one of those days when it was best to remember, following the cue of Marcus Aurelius or possibly Willie Hutch, that the things of the body are as a river, and the things of the soul as a dream and a vapor; and life is a warfare and a pilgrim’s sojourn, and fame after death is only forgetfulness. “Y’all can just continue on your way.”
He could see that it was not Luther at the wheel. Any one of a number of interstellar fuckups and freakazoids might be at the helm of this broke-down starship of the seventies, but Archy’s thoughts leaped with a bitter instinct to Valletta Moore.
Sure enough. A lamentable lamentation of the door hinges, sounding like the gate on a crypt filled with vengeful dead folks being thrown open, and Valletta Moore got out of the car. Big-boned, shapely, on the fatal side of fifty, high-waisted, high-breasted, face a feline triangle. Beer-bottle-brown eyes, skin luminous and butterscotch, as if she herself had come fresh from the spray gun of Sixto Cantor. Ten, eleven years since the last time Archy had seen her, at least.
“Uh-oh. Look out.”
“I know you remember me,” she said.
“I remember you didn’t used to be quite as fine as you are now.”
“‘Look out,’” Valletta quoted back at him, shaking her head, lowering over her amber eyes a pair of bulbous sunglasses with white plastic frames. “I guess I know where you learned that shit.”
Looking at her, already smelling her perfume, Archy’s memory dealt him a rapid hand of images, of which the ace was unquestionably the grand soft spectacle of Valletta Moore, 1978, shaving her legs at his father’s apartment in El Cerrito, glimpsed through the five-inch crack of the open bathroom door. Slender right foot planted on the floor, other foot arched on the shining lip of the bathtub, Valletta bent like a watchmaker over the work of painting a brown razor stripe up the white lathered inside of her long left leg, hair wrapped in a towel but her strong body naked and bold as a flag. The architecture of her ass was something deeper than a memory to Archy, something almost beyond remembrance, an archetype, the pattern of all asses forever after, wired into the structure of reality itself.
“Valletta,” he said, thinking she still looked good, then abandoning all wisdom and ignoring his Spidey sense long enough to let her take him in her arms, the skin of her bare shoulder in a halter top cool against his shoulder, the lady most definitely giving off that heavy 1978 Spencer’s smell of love candles and sandalwood incense but, laid over top of it, the stink of cigarette, the instant-potatoes smell you might find in the interior of a beat-to-shit Toronado. “Damn.”
It was only when she let go of Archy that he saw the tight line of her lips. She looked left, right. She was worried, hiding, running: running to Archy. In the pit of his sensitive belly, neurotransmitters registered with a flutter of dread whatever kind of trouble his father was currently getting himself into. Already thinking it might have something to do with Chandler Flowers, his father’s best friend, back in the day. How Flowers had come into the store today, asking, of all things, Your dad around? Luther reported to have been down in West Hollywood someplace, last Archy heard, not that he ever sought the least news or information of Luther’s who-, what-, where-, when- or whyabouts.
“Well, it sure has been a long time, Valletta,” he said cheerfully, deciding to pretend that he believed she had been driving Luther’s car down Sixty-first Street, happened to see him on his front porch, and decided to stop and say hello. As if she could have stared clean through 175 pounds and thirty years to recognize the teenager in whose dreams she briefly but intensely featured. “I do have to be running, because I got to, you know, get to the store, but, hey—”
“Archy, no, no, wait, hold up—”
“You have a good day, now. All right? No, really. I’m sorry. But you have a positive day.”
Back when he was a boy, there used to be a gentleman named Joseph Charles, man would stand out every day at the corner of Oregon and Grove wearing a pair of dazzling yellow gloves. Waving to every car that passed him, extending to its driver, regardless of race, creed, or receptivity, one (1) genuine, heartfelt greeting. Mr. Charles’s manner bold and cheerful but a touch formal, hinting, though not in any unkind way, at the impersonal. No intention of greeting you in particular; simply reminding you that, like all humans, you partook in the noble human capacity for being greeted. It was Mr. Charles’s manner that Archy tended to adopt around women when he sensed they might be about to pose him some kind of problem. He gave Valletta’s shoulder a fond squeeze, started away. In his heart, he already knew that he was not going to get anywhere; not yet. Like many abandoned sons, he was conscious of owing a mysterious, unrepayable debt toward the man of whom, in truth, he was the eternal creditor.
“Archy, it’s your dad,” she said, tendering that unpayable IOU, “it’s Luther.”
She raised the sunglasses at him and hit him straight on with twin blasts of yellow-brown fire, with the shock of the bitter work of time and corruption. Cakes of mascara cobwebbed her lashes.
“Yeah?”
Valletta checked out the shadows and rustlings up and down both ends of the street one more time, ran the broom of her paranoia up the quiet little pond of a street built around a pocket playground that some unknown amateur of children had tucked, like an Easter egg, onto an island of grass in the midst of Sixty-first Street. Archy wondered if Valletta might not be high, cashed out on something that was making her go all Pynchonesque. The last time he found himself unable to prevent hearing news of Luther, it was a tale, grand and heartwarming, of cleanness, sobriety, redemption. Luther had drawn a judge down south who remembered Strutter and, never having been the man’s son, was willing to take a chance on Luther Stallings, divert him to a drug court. Luther went around after that, supposedly, making amends to 17,512 people on two continents. That was at least a year ago, and the amends that Archy consented to allow his father to make to him at the time had consisted, in full, of a sober, clean telephone promise to leave Archy the fuck alone from now until the end of time.
“Can we go in?” she wanted to know, sighing, impatient, maybe, he thought desperately, only needing to pee. “Inside your house?”
“Huh-uh,” Archy said, not trying to charm or work her anymore, the deep 1978 El Cerrito–apartment sullenness starting to seep out of him as he remembered how Luther and Valletta used to leave him there all night by himself, nothing on the television but Wolfman Jack and some movie where a shark-toothed devil doll was biting Karen Black on the ankles. Only thing he wanted to know now: what kind of bullshit trouble Luther Stallings was trying to get Archy into this go-round and how much it was going to cost in blood and treasure. “Just say what you came to say. No joke, Valletta, I really do have to go.”
“Mm-hmm, yeah, you ain’t changed,” she said, lighting up icy diodes at the heart of those eyes that, in the summer of 1977, had stared not only into Archy’s soul but into the soul of young black America from the covers of Jet and Sepia and from the feathers-fur-and-leather kung fu splendors of her role as Candygirl Clark in one of the last blaxploitation films of that era, Strutter at Large, in which she costarred with a lean, wiry, and beautiful Luther Stallings in his most famous part. “Still walking around all pinch-up and pouty-face, giving everybody a fish-eye, most of all your father or his friend.”
“Y’all are still friends, then.”
“We took up with each other again. Third time, you know what they say.”
Archy had contrived to miss the second near-fatal intersection of Luther and Valletta by cleverly timing his service in the United States Army to coincide with the geopolitical hard-on of Saddam Hussein.
“He back in town, then?”
She stared him down, challenging him, not wanting to give up anything if he was going to make her stand out on the damn sidewalk to say it.
“And now you come around here. Saying Luther sent you, is that right? Come around here hoping to find out what, exactly?”
“Luther don’t know nothing about it. Man knew I was here . . .” She chewed on the earpiece of her sunglasses, seeming to rehearse Luther’s anger in her mind. “He knows how you feel, he wants to respect that.”
“So you don’t want money.”
“Truly,” she said, “I do. I’ll take whatever you can spare me. We need to get far away from here and stay there.”
It did not take a lot of effort for Archy to harden his heart against his father; that clay was well fired, long and slow. Anger, resentment, scorn, disgust, Luther’s son kept these handy in the pocket of his soul as surely as the copy of Meditations at his hip. So it must testify to something, some abiding foolishness peculiar to the sons of broken fathers, that it took any effort at all. Thirty-six years of this shit, and Archy was still willing to let the man disappoint him.
“I’m not going to ask why,” Archy said. “Because if you don’t tell me, then I won’t know.”
“Archy, I can’t get into it out here.”
“I am so fine with that, Valletta.”
“Your daddy . . . Luther . . .” She tried for a couple of seconds, pursing her lips, tapping them pensively with her right fist, to put it into words. Then she gave up. “He been clean and sober thirteen months now.”
“Uh-huh. Good for him.”
“And, like, now he got some irons in the fire.”
“I bet he does,” Archy said, thinking that was the perfect expression to describe the future as it stood in permanent relation to Luther Stallings: a big pile of irons glowing red-hot, to be snatched from the fire only at the cost of singed flesh. “Investment opportunities, that right?”
She fell back once more on her optic beams, but either this time Archy was ready or the effect had begun to dull. She lowered the sunglasses again.
“Let me guess,” Archy said. “Because I am experiencing premonitions.”
Chan and Luther unhooked a heavy chain between two pillars, left the Toronado tucked into a fold of midnight at the back of a gravel parking lot. Crunched up a hillside through fumes of eucalyptus, Chan carrying the shotgun, to a lookout they at one time favored for planning their conquests of the world. At their spot Chan turned and swung the gun, let it fly. It helicoptered out into the night and came whipping down with a clang of pipe somewhere in the woods behind them. Then they sat on their bench, perched side by side on the high shoulder of Oakland. Looked out at streets and bridges and highways embroidered, stitched out, in lights onto dark panels of water and sky.
In the interest of furthering his stone-cold pistolero legend, of which purity was to form a key component, the Undertaker never drank and rarely smoked. Luther passed him a package of Kools, and the Undertaker took one and lit it. Luther fished a fifth of Rumple Minze from his jacket pocket. The Undertaker surrendered the last fragment of his stillborn legend to the possibility of solace offered by the bottle of schnapps.
“He grabbed hold of his wrist, sat there looking at it,” Chan said, wiping his lips. “Meat and blood. A stump. All calm and collected, cuff of his jacket shot up to threads. Just a rag where his hand used to be, looking at it.”
“Popcorn Hughes,” Luther said admiringly.
“I need to hide myself, Luther.”
“Where at?” Dread inflated a taut balloon in Luther’s rib cage. He could barely muster breath to get out the next syllables: “L.A.?”
For that was the obvious solution: Swing by Luther’s mother’s house and pick up the canvas suitcase and the three Berkeley Farms crates, packed and ready to go. Hit L.A. by morning, Chan could buy what he needed when they got there. Track down some shitbox safe house where Chan could hole up. Wave goodbye then. Engage in the theater of turning their separate ways, meeting their respective fates, until the next of his friend’s schemes went wrong, the next time Chan found himself confronting the truth that his faith in himself was misplaced, his intelligence fated to go unrewarded because it was no substitute for luck, no proof against the world’s massive, even hostile, indifference to the productions of a black man’s intellect. Like the Party he had joined too late, too young, Chan was a lost claim check, a series of time-lapse photos of a promise as it broke. He was a king of finite space, bound in a nutshell. And Luther was sick of it. He rued all the time he had wasted since the call came from his agent, feeling guilty, feeling sorry for Chan.
“Or,” he said, trying to be helpful, “uh, lot of Panthers in Chicago, right?”
Chan didn’t say anything.
“Morocco, then. Or Spain.”
“Spain,” Chan said. Luther could hear the hard little smile creasing his face. “Good thinking. Go to Spain. Become a toronado.”
“Why not? All the revolutionary Negroes been skipping to Morocco, Spain. Paris. You were doing their business. They got to take care of you.”
“Who?”
“The Party.”
“Luther, if I had the kind of clout, get myself that far away from here? I wouldn’t have needed to impress anybody in the first place with the fool thing I just tried to do.”
Somewhere right around here, Luther remembered, if you went farther up the path behind the picnic tables, you would stumble across a pyramid of built-up stones left behind by some crazy old beard-faced poet back when Oakland was nothing but a slough and a stables and a cowboy hotel. In school they came here on field trips, checking out the poet’s little white farmhouse, a big lumpy statue of him riding on a Mongoloid-looking horse. A pyramid of stone and, farther back, a stone platform the man had built, intending it to be used for his funeral pyre. Out here in the hot sun, day after day, the man piling up rocks like lines in one of his boring poems. Dreaming, the whole time he was stacking those rocks, about how all those olden-time gangsters of Oakland, those whoring, robbing, land-grabbing Indian killers, opium addicts and loot seekers down there in the flatlands, how some fine night they were going to look up here at this green slope and marvel at the spectacle of a burning poet. Nothing ever came of that plan, far as Luther could recall. But then that was the general tendency of plans.
“If you’re a fool,” Luther said, “what’s that make me?”
This was a question that could never be answered, and Luther carried swiftly on to the next.
“Why’d I want to go and mess up my good thing driving your murder taxi around West Oakland?” he said. “Tell me that? So the Marxist gangsters can roll over the running-dog capitalist gangsters, take over their drugs and cash flow?”
“Leave, then,” Chan said. “You’re not in this. You go on and get.”
Before Luther could begin to feign that he was not entertaining this generous suggestion, there was a flicker of moonlight, like the bright quick of a fingernail, at the corner of his eye. Chan was pondering a handgun. Taken like the shotgun, no doubt, from the Party arsenal that it was Chan’s official duty to keep inventoried, secret, and in fighting shape. A .45, a handsome piece, probably brand-new. Luther’s heart misgave at the way Chan was balancing it on both palms, weighing it like a heavy book that held a heavy answer.
“What you going to do with that?” Luther said.
“Try again,” Chan said at last. “Find out what hospital they took Popcorn to.” He found a solid grip on the pistol. “Get it right the second time.”
“Maybe you ought to talk to somebody first. Maybe Huey be satisfied with what you already did to fuck Popcorn up for him.”
A fog began to blur the prospect of Oakland spread beneath them. Silence gathered around the friends until it felt like something profound. The coals of their cigarettes flared and crackled. The fog hissed like carbonation in a drink.
“You remember what your uncle Oogie used to do on your birthday, at Christmas?” Chan said finally. “All ‘Yeah, uh, listen, I was going to get you a air rifle.’” His imitation of Oogie’s mumbly drawl was flawless. “Expecting you to be as grateful as if he did give it to you. Now I’m supposed to say, ‘Uh, yeah, Huey, I was going to kill Popcorn Hughes for you, but, uh . . .’?”
“Why not?”
“‘Why not?’” Chan said, making it come out high and childish. “Easy for you to say. Tell me this. You get down there on that movie set, are you going to forget your lines? Tell the director, ‘Uh, yeah, I meant to memorize that shit, but, uh . . .’?”
“No.”
“Are you?”
“No!”
“Then why do you want me to do it?”
“Come on, then,” Luther said. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“Let’s, uh, let’s get out of here. You come with me. Down to L.A. Hide out down there. San Pedro. Long Beach.” Trying to summon or feign enthusiasm for his proposal. “Yeah, Ensenada.”
It was too dark for Chan to see what was not in Luther’s eyes and too dark for Luther to see him missing it.
Chan stood up and dropped the .45 into his hip pocket. It rattled against the extra shotgun rounds. “I woke up this morning,” he said, “had all kinds of beautiful intentions. Prove myself to the Supreme Servant of the People, take a major annoyance off his hands. Move in, move up, maybe in a year I’m running the Oakland chapter. Then I get my eye on the account books. See what kind of holes might be in them, waste and whatnot. Bring a little more structure, a little more discipline. Now, no. Nuh-uh. Now I just have to make it right. You go on, though. Go on, Luther, and get your good thing.”
His voice broke, and from the crack in it emerged the voice of the boy he recently was. Fiercely shy and bookish, absorbing without saturation, on behalf of his sisters and his baby brother, the endless seep of the elder Flowers’s venom. At the memory of that vanished boy, Luther regretted, without entirely renouncing, his earlier disloyal thoughts. He put his arm around the professorial shoulders of his friend. “It’s already too wrong, Chan,” he said. “No way you can make it right.”
“That is probably true.”
“You got to leave. Come on. Come to L.A., hole up. Ride it out.”
“I appreciate the gesture, Luther,” Chan said. “I already troubled you sufficiently.”
“Then go somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“Anywheres that a bus could take you.”
“Maybe I will,” Chan said, to end the conversation.
When the peppermint brandy was drunk, they got up and left behind them the spot where a forgotten dreamer of the California dream had planned to have his glory notarized by fire. Turned and hiked, sliding, back down to the car. After a silent drive to the bottom of the city, the blue dome of the Greyhound station loomed before them like a promise of adventure. There was an OPD cruiser parked at the curb when they pulled up, but before they could consider bailing on the bus station plan, a cop came strolling out of the station, got back into the car, and drove away.
Luther had three hundred dollars in his wallet, all that was left of his up-front money. He handed it over to Chan, “’Kay, then,” he said.
They stood facing each other at the back of the Toronado. Its taillights were slits as narrow as the eyes in the Batman mask, a skeptical squint regarding them. The friends exchanged a couple of palm slaps. Each clasped the other briefly to his chest. Chan offered up some parting bullshit about catching a northbound up to Alaska, or maybe head south, work those shrimp boats down in the Gulf of Mexico. It was all smoke. Chan had never been a boy to leave food on a plate, a math problem without a solution, an open pussy unfucked. He wasn’t going to go into the bus station, get on a bus for North Nowhere. Soon as Luther left, he would get busy finishing, for the sake of finishing, the trouble he had started.
“Seriously,” Luther said. “What you going to do?”
“You don’t need to know, Luther. Tell you this, though, whatever it is? When I’m done, I’m going to be able to hold my head up high.”
“I know that’s true.”
“See you do the same down there. Comport your ass with dignity. Do what you have to do.”
“Yeah.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah.”
Luther tried not to show his impatience, his eagerness to get quit of Chandler Bankwell Flowers III and his cup of clabbered ambition. To get quit of Oakland and Berkeley and all the local fools. The broken promises, the pyres that never got lit.
“You are having good luck right now,” Chan said. “Good luck is good. But that’s all it is, you dig? Not any kind of a substitute for doing what you have to do.”
Luther nodded, said, “No doubt, no doubt,” thinking about the ads you used to see in the pages of Ebony and Esquire selling the long, low, smiling crocodile of 1970, the slogan across the top of the page: WOULDN’T IT BE NICE TO HAVE AN ESCAPE MACHINE?
“I know what it means,” Luther said.
“Huh?” Chan said. “What—”
“I can define ‘toronado.’”
Chan frowned, remembered, frowned more deeply. “Do it, then,” he said.
Luther shook his head. “You don’t need to know,” he said.
Then he strapped himself into his escape machine, and headed for the Nimitz Freeway, San Jose, Los Angeles: the world and the fortune that awaited him.
Popcorn Hughes, Luther heard afterward, was shot to death early that morning in his bed at Summit Hospital. The only suspect was the unknown, unidentified black male who had been described, by witnesses to the first attack at the Bit o’ Honey Lounge, as wearing a mask that was meant, it was generally agreed, to resemble the one worn in Marvel comics by the Black Panther, the first black superhero.
The killer was never apprehended. The Toronado overheated in the Grapevine just north of Lebec and had to be towed across the L.A. County line.
“He’s looking for investors,” Archy guessed.
Valletta affected to study some scene or detail in the distance, beyond the playground, beyond Berkeley, beyond Mount Lassen, saying nothing, infinitesimally shaking her head, mouth down-twisted in a way that might have been disapproving of Archy, Luther, herself, or some combination thereof, arms crossed furiously under her breasts: unable to believe, finally, that she was party to this latest bullshit scheme of Luther’s, or that Archy declined to be party to it, or perhaps that the world did not and never would appreciate the genius of Luther Stallings.
“He still talking about that damn movie?”
“What d’you think?”
She rummaged around in her bag and took out what appeared to be a boxed set of three DVDs entitled The Strutter Trilogy. Its cover featured a handsome close-up shot of the long-jawed, Roman-nosed, Afro-haloed, 1973-vintage Luther Stallings as master thief Willie Strutter, and it promised restored or digital versions of three films: Strutter, Strutter at Large, and Strutter Kicks It Old-School. But it was an empty hunk of packaging with no disks inside, and on closer inspection, it proved to have been painstakingly crafted from the cardboard case to a Complete Back to the Future box set over whose panels had been pasted vivid but crudely executed cut-and-paste computer artwork, a minor but necessary bit of imposture, since, as far as Archy knew—and he knew far; too far—there was no such movie as Strutter Kicks It Old-School.
“Strutter 3. Is that right? Going to write and direct and star! Triple threat! Going to make it fast, cheap, and badass, like they used to do back in the day. Old-school. And you’re going to be his leading lady. That the story he sent you here to tell me, Valletta?”
Out of gentlemanly impulses and, worse, feeling sorry for this woman, one of a string he had auditioned during his childhood for the role of Archy’s New Mother, Archy struggled to keep a tone of derision from creeping into his voice as he offered this bit of informed speculation as to Luther’s line—phrases such as “triple threat” and “fast, cheap, and badass” having formed part of his father’s formulary of bullshit over the years. He did not entirely succeed. The only thing lamer than the piece-of-shit plan Luther had come up with for peeling money loose from Archy, for a film that he had not the least intention of making, was the idea that Luther thought his son would give him anything ever again.
“He’s going to put in a nice big part for you. That right, Valletta? Maybe somehow it turns out Candygirl wasn’t dead all along?”
He detected a ripple along the muscles of her cheek. She held on to her silence, watching as Tibetan flags strung from the front porch of the Sandersons’ house across the park bade their random prayers farewell.
“We’re in preproduction,” she said at last. Defiant, lying the lie.
“So you, what, you have a script?”
“Nah, but your dad, he has the story all figured out. Told me the whole thing, every character, every shot, every minute of screen time, told it ten different ways five hundred times. Archy, it’s gonna be good.”
“Kind of a, what, Strutter comes out of retirement, one last job, gets his revenge type of thing?”
“You want to hear how it goes?”
Archy closed his eyes, anticipating the tedious madness of the scenario that he was about to be pitched, some kind of incoherent mashup of Ocean’s Eleven, The Matrix, and Death Wish, his father’s favorite movie, interlarded with a thick ribbon drawn from the saga of whatever kind of bullshit landlord trouble or IRS trouble or dental trouble his father and the lady had gotten themselves into. But Valletta fell silent again, and he opened his eyes to find a lone tear lingering on her cheek, a tiny solitary pool of outrage or shame. He felt his heart sink and drew another draft on his endless reserve of misplaced guilt. He took out his billfold and conducted a sorry inventory therein.
“Nah,” she said, pushing away from her the bills that emerged, four crisp twenties, a faded five, and two soft, crumpled ones. “Nah, never mind. Keep your money. I didn’t come here to bother you for money. I know you don’t believe that—”
“Sure, I—”
“And I did not come here to bother you with that motherfucking movie you and I both know ain’t ever going to get made.”
“Okay.”
“I know if I told you your dad was in trouble because of the drugs, you wouldn’t feel inclined to help him in any way, shape, or form, and since I got with the program, fourteen months and nine days clean and sober, I respect that position, and so does he. What I want to ask you is, what if we was in some other kind of trouble, didn’t have nothing to do with using? Would you possibly be willing to help him out then?”
“What did he do?”
Again the careful study of the street, the neighboring trees and houses. “I don’t really know,” she said. “But hypothetical.”
“Hypothetical? Hypothetical, if that man’s hair was on fire, I would not piss on his head to put it out.”
She put her sunglasses back on.
“That’s just a theory, though,” Archy said. “We don’t need to test it.”
She nodded, chewing her lip, and he saw that under the lipstick, it was already ragged with chewing.
“Go on, Valletta,” he said, pressing the money on her. “If you promise not to tell me where he’s living at, or what he’s doing, or how bad he looks, or give me any information at all, that’s worth eighty-seven to me right there.”
She considered it. Her tongue emerged from her lips and ran around her mouth once hungrily. Then she knitted up the money in her long fingers and made it vanish so quickly and completely that she might have been alluding to the length of time it was likely to spend in her pocket. She would not take the empty DVD box.
“Nah, y’all keep that, anyway. He got five more just like it.”
“All right.”
He took the box, Jack with a handful of beans, already awash in eighty-seven dollars’ worth of regret over his own stupidity.
“Maybe I should come back next week,” Valletta said, and a smile lacking one lower bicuspid made a brave appearance along the lowermost regions of her face. “Come up with a few more things about him you don’t want to hear, see what that gets me.”
“Funny,” Archy said.
“Don’t worry, you won’t see me again.”
“Valletta—”
She’d started for the Toronado, but he called her back.
“Come on,” he told her. “You got to say it.”
During the summer of 1978, Valletta’s summer, the T-shirt shops of urban America had offered for sale an iron-on transfer that depicted Valletta Moore in a bell-bottom zebra-print pantsuit, surrounded by the glitter-balloon letters of the catchphrase with which she would forever be associated, first spoken in Strutter at Large. The iron-ons were produced by Roach, kings of the rubber transfer, who had divided all the profits, presumably considerable, with retailers and the movie’s distributors.
“You want me to say it?” she said, doubtful, pleased.
“I think eighty-seven dollars buys me that,” Archy said.
She sighed, pumped her fist once, like it was the head of a very heavy hammer, and said, “Do what you got to do.” The fist burst apart in slow motion, fingers blooming. “And stay fly.”
She wrestled with the steel of the car door, resuscitated the engine by patience and finesse, and rolled, shocks creaking, away.
“Stay fly, Valletta,” Archy said.
Julius Jaffe was rereading his memoir in progress, working-titled Confessions of a Secret Master of the Multiverse. He had begun to write it two months earlier in a six-inch Moleskine, in a fever of boredom, drug-sick on H. P. Lovecraft, intending to produce an epic monument to his loneliness and to the appalling tedium he induced in himself. That first night he had cranked out thirty-two unruled pages. Page one started thus:
This record of sorrow is being penned in human blood on parchment made from the hides of drowned sailors. Its unhappy author—O pity me, friend, wherever you lie at your ease!—perches by the high window of a lightning-blasted tower, on a beetling skull-rock beside the roaring madness of a polar sea. Chained at the ankle to an iron bedstead, gnawing on the drumstick of a roasted rat. Scribbling with tattered quill on an overturned tub, his sole illumination a greasy flame guttering in a blubber lamp. A prisoner of ill fortune, a toy of destiny, a wretched cat’s-paw for gods of malice who find sport in plucking the wings from the golden butterfly of human happiness! Thus shorn of liberty and burdened with the doubtful gift of time do I propose to ease the leaden hours in setting down this faithful record, the memoir of a king in ruins.
The night after he penned these words, Titus Joyner had appeared on the scarp of Julie’s solitude, swinging his grappling hook. Since then Julie had not added a word to his chronicle of boredom. He closed the Moleskine, fitted his memoirs with the little elastic strap, his own heart cinched with a tender compassion for their boy author in that distant age.
The front door slammed and the secret master of the multiverse said, “Shit.”
“Titus,” Julie said. “It’s my dad. Get up.”
Titus Joyner lay on his back with a pillow mashed down over his face, held in place by the hook of an arm. That was how he slept: shielded. Titus from Tyler, in Julie’s imagination a sunblasted and horizonless patch of infinite Texas, a necromantic Dia de los Muertos city of prisoners and roses, where Titus had been raised by a forbidding grandmother known as Shy. In Julie’s imagination, Shy was all in black, lit by lightning. Dead now, and Titus cast to his fate, claimed like a lost hat by an auntie from Oakland, a stranger from a house of strangers.
“Dude!” Julie said in a whisper. “T!”
Julie reached for the portable eight-track cassette player Archy had picked up for him at the Alameda swap meet. It was tank-corps green, styled like a field radio, and it had a webbed strap so that a Soldier of Funk, Julie supposed, could march his groove around. He popped out Innervisions (Motown, 1973), one of the few among the small stock of eight-track cassettes he had managed to scrounge that Titus would consent to listen to, and shoved in, with a meaty thunk, Point of Know Return (Kirshner, 1977), aware of how it would irritate his father.
“Julie? You up there?”
Enigmatic white midwesterners of the 1970s aired curious ideas about the role of the violin and the organ in a rock-and-roll context. Titus dragged the pillow from his head and sat up. Awake, looking right at Julie; then, before Julie was quite aware of it, scrambling up out of the bed. Buck-naked, as Titus called it. Titus crumpled his clothes into an armload, went to the window, spun around, and confronted an art deco chifforobe that had belonged to Julie’s great-grandmother. It opened with a great-grandmotherly creak, and Titus climbed inside.
Julie accepted this move without considering whether it was necessary or desirable.
He knew. He knew more than me or you. You can tell by the pictures he drew.
“Hide the hookah,” his father said. “I’m coming up.”
With a solemn intake of breath, Julie activated his secret master training. He would use his Field of Silence, he thought, in combination with his Scowl of Resounding Finality. The door swung open and his father looked in, eyes bright and sunken, cheek nicked by the razor, in one of his old-time hepcat suits. He had that shifty-eyed look he got whenever he had just done something he probably ought not to have done. This might not be a bad time, Julie saw, to confess or at least allude to his own most recent instance of bad behavior. Yet there was something he loved about the way Titus had entered into conspiracy with the chifforobe.
His father covered the fact that he was sniffing the air of the room for the molecular residue of burnt cannabis by making a show of sniffing the air of the room. “You just sitting around?” he said.
Julius Lovecraft Jaffe (though on his passport the middle name, by one of those metaphysical clerical errors forever being committed by reality on the true nature of his being, read Lawrence), gazed calmly back at his father. He sat on his bed, cross-legged in his tie-dyed long johns. Not the tie-dyed long johns with the infinite Escher stairway silk-screened across the chest but the ones with the space galleon setting sail for Tau Ceti across a sea of stars, which he had purchased last spring in the women’s section at Shark’s, where they had been labeled with a handwritten tag on which was printed, in an architect hand and in terms guaranteed to finger the deepest chords of his soul, COOL 70S SPACE KITSCH. The Field of Silence pulsed steady and thick as a stream of annihilating syrup. The Scowl burned shimmering hot pathways in the air between Julie and his father.
“What is that?”
His father’s face seized up around the eyes, and his cheeks went hollow. He looked like a man with inner ear problems, halfway between disoriented and about to vomit.
“My God,” he said. “Please tell me you aren’t listening to Kansas.”
There was a small prog bin at Brokeland, but it spurned the pinnacles and palisades in favor of the dense British thickets, swarms of German umlauts. Wander into Brokeland hoping to sell a copy of Point of Know Return or, say, Brain Salad Surgery (Manticore, 1973), they would need a Shop-Vac to hose up your ashes.
Julie took his wallet from the back pocket of his cutoff denim shorts. It was a yellow plastic wallet printed with a scratched image of Johnny Depp sporting hair of the eighties and the words 21 JUMP STREET in fake-wildstyle lettering. He unsnapped the wallet’s coin purse, in which he rotated a selection from the variety of business cards he had printed up for himself at Kinko’s at the beginning of the summer, just before he met Titus. A well-chosen card had served him well a number of times since then as a substitute for conversation, particularly with his parents. This time he chose one that read:
JULIUS L. JAFFE
curator
“I have to admit,” his father said, sounding like the admission was not a costly one, “I’m getting pretty fucking sick of these fucking cards.” He passed it back to Julie, who returned it to his wallet and put Johnny Depp back in the pocket of his shorts. “What’s with the enormous shoes?”
They were size-fifteen Air Jordans, white on white on white. They looked like a couple of scale-model Imperial destroyers docked neatly on a deck of the Death Star. Julie considered making this claim. He saw that he would have to collapse the Field of Silence, at least temporarily, and throw up a Snare of Deceit. “It’s that art project,” he said. “The one I told you about.” This strategy—Julie’s mother called it “gaslighting”—could be surprisingly effective on his father, who spent so much time lost in his own humming that he sometimes missed out on real-world events.
“Huh,” his father said.
There was no good reason to lie; on some level, Julie knew that. His parents had to figure-slash-understand that Julie was semi-bicurious, or maybe even gay, or what have you. Twenty-five minutes to gay o’clock. But the confession felt like too much work; Titus was too hard to explain. He was, for example, straight-up-noon straight, both hands on the twelve, though that had not prevented him from accepting every last note and coin of Julie’s virginity over the past two weeks. There was so much more to it than sex, gender, race, and all that piddly shit. Julie felt that his life had suddenly, like amino acids in the primordial soup, begun to knot and pattern and complicate itself. How to confess that he had sneaked out with his skateboard every night to hook up with Titus, in slang but also quite literally joining himself by the hand to Titus’s shoulder as they rolled through the nighttime summer streets of South Berkeley and West Oakland, through the wildly ramifying multiverse of their mutual imagination? Titus preferred the street to the roof and walls within which a hard fate and a ninety-year-old batshit auntie had obliged him to shelter, and Julie preferred nothing to the feeling of Titus’s shoulder bone and muscle against his hand, preferred nothing to the grind of his wheels, each tree, parked car, and lamppost a whisper as they passed.
“It’s that thing at Habitot,” Julie added for verisimilitude. “I have to decorate them.”
His father nodded knowledgeably. There was no other way that he knew how to nod. “So what are you doing?” he said. “Playing MTO?”
As a matter of fact, before Titus nodded off, they had been taking turns at Julie’s laptop, logged on to Marvel Team-Up Online. Leveling up their latest characters, Dezire and the Black Answer, running them in their capes and energy auroras through the teeming streets of Hammer Bay, on the island of Genosha.
Julie said, “Filing my teeth.”
“Uh-huh. Not smoking dope.”
“Just crack. And a little opium. Just, like, this much.” He pinched an imaginary pellet between his fingertips. “Fuck, Dad.”
“Because you know it would be all right if you did.”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Not all right, but I mean, if you were getting high, I would want you to tell me about it, right?”
“Right.”
“Not feel like you have to hide it or anything.”
“I get it.”
“Because that’s when you start to drift into stupid.”
Julie said that he planned to continue his lifelong policy of avoiding stupid at every opportunity.
“So,” his father said. “Just sitting here, what, feeling sorry for yourself?”
“I don’t need anybody’s pity,” Julie replied, seeing the words scrawl themselves across the page of his imagination in the florid hand he had affected when writing in his Moleskine with his fountain pen. “Least of all my own.”
That raised a smile on his father’s face.
“Why are you even here in the middle of the day?” Julie said.
“I, uh, came home,” his father said. “I guess I should probably go back.”
The shorter his father’s stories got, the more unwise or embarrassing his behavior turned out to have been. His father’s eyes wandered unseeing for the one thousand and seventh time across the artwork that Julie had drawn and pinned to the lath ceiling, the portraits of cybernetic pimp assassins and blind albino half-Jotun swordsmen and one cherished sketch of Dr. Strange produced with Crayolas and a Flair pen when Julie was five or six. A Nausicaä poster, the Israeli one-sheet for Pulp Fiction. The gatefold inner sleeve of a record called Close to the Edge (Atlantic, 1972), with its world of cool, enigmatic waterfalls that endlessly poured their green-blueness into infinity. His father seeing nothing, understanding nothing, searching for the line, the signal, the telling bit of repartee. Recently and unexpectedly, the fiber-optic cable between the continents of Father and Son had been severed by the barb of some mysterious dragging anchor. His father stood there in the attic doorway with his hands in the jump-jive pockets of his suit jacket, loving Julie with a glancing half-sly caution that the boy could feel and yet be certain of the uselessness thereof, that love occupying as it did only one small unproductive zone of the Greater Uselessness that seemed to pervade his father’s life from pole to pole.
“Did something happen with Archy?” Julie said.
“With Archy?”
“Something at the store.”
“At the store?”
“Question with a question.”
“Sorry.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing, I didn’t, I just kind of blew my stack.”
“Oh, Dad.”
“At Chan Flowers. Councilman Flowers.”
“Whoa.”
“Yep.”
“Is that guy kind of, like, scary?”
“I have always thought so, yes.”
“Kind of a creeper?”
“At times he gives off that vibe.”
“But he buys a lot of records.”
“An all too common conjunction of behaviors.”
“And you yelled at him?”
“Threw him out, actually,” Nat said. “Then I threw out every other shmegegge in the joint.”
“Oh, fuck, Dad—”
“Then I closed the store for good. How do you like that?”
“You what? For good?”
“As in out of business.”
“You closed the store?”
“I really felt I had no choice.”
“For good?”
“Question with a question,” his father said. “Look, I’m fine. I got over myself. Now I’m going to go back, say I’m sorry to Arch. I’ll apologize to Flowers, Moby, everybody else who needs it. Apologies are cheap, Julie, and effective all out of proportion to their cost. My father used to say, ‘Carry ’em like a roll of bills in your hip pocket, pass ’em out freely.’ Remember that.”
“Cool, okay.”
“Used to say, ‘They are good for business, and they make the world a better place.’”
Clearly, his dad was cycling high today, getting that Groucho Marx quality to his delivery. For years he had been on and off various medications whose names sounded like the code names of sorceresses or ninja assassins. Disastrous from the first dose or disappointing in the long run, each wore out its welcome in his father’s bloodstream without ever managing to lay an insulating glove on the glowing wire inside him. His moods had little in the way of pattern or regular rotation apart from a possible intensification in Septembers and Februarys, but if Julie had over time learned to live unshaken by his father’s unpredictable temblors of mania, he had grown inured as well to their completely predictable aftermaths, however heartfelt, of apology and remorse.
“Say sorry,” Nat said. “Then open the store back up like I was, you know, on a little mental lunch break. False alarm. Everybody go about your business.”
“Except Gibson Goode, right?”
“Whatever,” his father said. “Man has a right to sell what he wants, where he wants. Bring him on. Meanwhile, you. Cheer up. You got two more weeks of summer to get through.”
With a wan crackle, the Field of Silence fluttered back to life between them.
And he tried. But before he could tell us he died.
His father closed the door. Julie listened for the creak of his passage down the twisting stair.
The narrow, mirrored door of the old art deco chifforobe swung open, betraying the folded articulate span, half dressed in pressed blue jeans, of Titus Joyner.
“Yo yo yo,” Titus said. Bit by careful bit, he took himself out of the chifforobe and reassembled himself on the floor of Julie’s bedroom, a hit man snapping together the pieces of his rifle. He looked tired. He smelled like the locker room at the Y. “Five more minutes,” he said.
He unrolled himself along the floor of Julie’s room, on the coiled braids of a rag rug, and stretched out. He closed his eyes; his breathing turned solemn and slowed the rise and fall of his chest. He was a prodigy of furtive and impromptu sleep. The nightly bed that fate had furnished him was a zone of danger and dark insomnia. If you closed your eyes in that unsafe house, they would rifle your nightmares and violate your dreams.
“Titus,” Julie said. “Yo, T.”
Nothing; gone. Julie pulled the quilt from his bed and laid it over Titus. It was an antique of the ’80s, Michael Jackson in a tacky spacesuit with a motley crew of robots and aliens. Julie stared at the boy on his floor, a mystery boy fallen from the sky like the Wold Newton meteorite, apparently inert and yet invisibly seething with the mutagenic information of distant galaxies and exploding stars.
Julie was in love.
The title of the course, offered through the summer evening enrichment program of the city of Berkeley’s Southside Senior Center, was “Sampling as Revenge: Source and Allusion in Kill Bill.” It was scheduled to meet every Monday for ten weeks through August, amid the folding furniture of a beige multipurpose room where, in the past, Julie had taken classes in puppet making, clay sculpture, and ikebana. Always the youngest in the room by decades, half centuries, and happier there among the elderly than ever seemed possible in the company of his so-called peers.
That first Monday in June, a week after his graduation from Willard, Julie had taken his seat in the front row of five chairs at the exact center of the room, midway between the video projector and Peter Van Eder, whom Julie had always imagined, from his irritated tone in the Berkeley Daily Bugle, to be this one pudgy bald gentleman with aviator glasses and a square-tipped knit tie whom he would see from time to time at the California, glumly suffering the opening night of Planet of the Apes (perhaps the greatest disappointment in the movie life of Julie Jaffe, a mad Tim Burton fan) or Steamboy (another tragic dud). But Van Eder turned out to be a bony young guy not far past college age. Big Adam’s apple, big wrist bones, one shirttail untucked, his hair long and stringy and flecked with dandruff or ash from his cigarettes or both. On his chin, a hasty pencil sketch of a goatee.
Julie took a glue stick and a bright orange notebook, quadrille-ruled, out of a Pan Am flight bag. Neatly, he folded and glued to the inside front cover the syllabus of films that Peter Van Eder proposed to screen and discuss:
Lady Snowblood (1973) d Toshiya Fujita
The Doll Squad (1973) d Ted V. Mikels
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) d Sergio Leone
Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972) d Shunya Ito
Ghetto Hitman (1974) d Larry Cohen
The Tale of Zatoichi (1962) Kenji Misumi
The Band Wagon (1953) d Vincente Minnelli
A Clockwork Orange (1971) d Stanley Kubrick
36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978) d Gordon Liu
Coffy (1973) d Jack Hill
Julie studied the syllabus as Van Eder waited for the last two names on his roster, one of them, Julie was interested to learn, being Randall Jones. Mr. Jones had both given and attended classes at the Southside Senior Center, and it was through him, a few years ago, that Julie had learned of the puppet-making class. Mr. Jones, whose taste in film ran strongly to violent western and crime, was a regular attendee of Peter Van Eder’s film series at the Southside.
Julie found himself dizzied by his ignorance of Van Eder’s choices, only two of which, the Sergio Leone and The Band Wagon, he had seen. Unless, as seemed likely, there was another movie called The Band Wagon, because The Band Wagon that Julie had watched with his maternal grandparents one Christmas in Coconut Creek, Florida, was a delicious musical with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, whose thighs stirred ancient and somewhat distressing longings in Grandpa Roth. A couple of the other titles and directors were familiar. Zatoichi. Kubrick, duh.
Somebody said, “Look at the bird!”
Cochise Jones, wearing a leisure suit with a faded houndstooth check, stepped into the multipurpose room with Fifty-Eight manning the poop deck of his left shoulder, trailing a kid, perhaps a grandson, about Julie’s age, light-skinned, light-eyed, broad at the shoulder, and slender at the hips. Though as far as Julie knew, Mr. Jones didn’t have any family apart from the bird. When he noticed Julie, he frowned, looking thoughtful, hesitating, as if trying to make up his mind about bringing over the kid to meet Julie.
“He a friend of Fifty-Eight,” Mr. Jones explained straight-faced, apparently deciding that no harm could come of the introduction. “Also a fan of Mr. Tarantino.” Only he pronounced the name as if it rhymed with “Tipitina.”
“Hey,” said Julie, twisting a finger in the tattered selvage of his denim cutoffs until the blood ceased to circulate in his fingertip. His index finger in its noose of cotton thread swelled and pulsed and throbbed and in general served as symbol or synecdoche for its owner and his fourteen-year-old heart, for that all-encompassing, all-expanding disturbance in his skinny little chest that was the love of Tarantino, the world, or all mankind. “I like him, too.”
Titus Joyner nodded, mildly amused (if that) by the spectacle of Julie in his cutoffs and sleeveless T, his portable eight-track on the floor by his feet in their clear white jellies, with his bright blue flight bag like one of the moon stewardesses in 2001. He didn’t say anything. A slender, loose- and long-limbed kid, skin the color of a Peet’s soy latte. Hair worn in a neat, modest Afro with an air of studied retroism. Eyes wary, derisive, cold apart from that ghost of amusement, or maybe it was a flicker of recognition, as if he thought he knew how best to label Julie. Cleft chin. Clothes neat and spotless: dark jeans, short-sleeved, button-down oxford-cloth shirt. Nothing fancy, but somehow the crisp white shirt and the sharp creases ironed into the front of his trouser legs gave him an air of formality. On his feet he wore those imperial star-destroyer kicks.
“What’s up?” he said.
Julie took a card, newly printed, from his wallet, and passed it to the kid, one that read:
JULIUS L. JAFFE
Ronin ·HIRED BLADE
The look of mockery was still on the kid’s face as he studied the card, but he studied it. Slipped it into a pocket of his jeans. Then went to the back of the room to scatter his limbs across an upholstered armchair tucked into a corner.
“I’m sorry, sir.” It was one of the other students, a man in a wheelchair, speaking through a robo-box. Julie had seen the guy racing around Temescal, in the neighborhood of Brokeland, his body a toy in the paws of some brutal ailment. His voice came sparking through its Hawking box. “Sir? I’m sorry, but I have a bird allergy.”
“A bird allergy,” Mr. Jones said, looking blank, failing to see how this assertion could pertain to him. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Maybe you could— Can he wait outside?” said Peter Van Eder.
“Or . . . ?”
Fifty-Eight browsed politely through the silvery down at its breast, appearing to find no offense in the turn things had taken, but Mr. Jones, either because he had been looking forward to this series, or maybe on Fifty-Eight’s account, appeared to be heartbroken.
“It’s quite severe,” said the man in the wheelchair, the torsion of his neck giving him, no doubt unfairly, a sidelong and mendacious look as he said it, like maybe he was really just afraid of parrots or had something against Fifty-Eight personally. “I’m so sorry.”
Mr. Jones sighed. Even if he and Fifty-Eight had not been inseparable, there was no way you could leave a rare and costly bird sitting out in a hallway somewhere. He turned to the kid at the back of the room and raised a sheepish eyebrow. The kid stared at the dude in the wheelchair with open and admiring horror.
“You can get a bus?” Mr. Jones said. The kid knit up his limbs and gave a fractional nod, about to be left alone in this roomful of cripples and old people.
“Bye, Fifty-Eight,” Julie said. “Bye, Mr. Jones.”
“I feel terrible,” said the man in the wheelchair, but in the tonelessness of his voice-o-tron, it was hard to be sure whether he was referring to his remorse at the ejection of Fifty-Eight or the onset of anaphylaxis.
“Come on, fool,” Mr. Jones said to the bird.
Van Eder passed a syllabus to Titus Joyner, who thanked him softly, with an automatic “sir.” Then the kid’s eyes locked on the syllabus, scanned it. He frowned. Something written on the page dismayed him, filled him with outrage and confusion. He squirmed with it, deep in the armchair, until he was obliged to speak up.
“The Band Wagon?” he said.
His disdainful drawl intoned the title of the seventh film on the syllabus with a contempt so all-encompassing that it led one of the fearsome-looking, old, ex-nun-style, Communist, lesbian retired piano teachers who principally made up the enrollment of “Sampling as Revenge” to get up and start passing out oxygen masks and air tanks, so that all the other old people and Julie could go on breathing and not have the air sucked out of their lungs by the whooshing vacuum that followed this sally from the back of the room.
Peter Van Eder blinked and looked mildly amused. “Do you have a problem with The Band Wagon?” he said.
“It’s a musical,” Titus said. “It has, like, Sid Caesar.”
“Cyd Charisse,” said Peter Van Eder harshly, flatly, the way Julie’s old fencing teacher Mr. DiBlasio had been wont to correct Julie’s form with an impatient flat of the blade on the buttocks.
The kid nodded as if satisfied with this correction. He picked up his copy of the syllabus and held it at arm’s length in a display of nearsightedness that Julie took for mocking. “Gordon Liu,” he said slowly with a skeptic squint, pronouncing the Chinese name to rhyme with “shoe.” “Stanley Kubrick. Cyd Charisse.”
The old ladies—there were seven of them, all white—and the three old gents (one of them an Asian-American in an Oakland A’s cap) and the wheelchair guy apparently saw nothing at all droll or absurd in the presence of a Fred Astaire–Cyd Charisse film on that inventory of mayhem and martial arts action. On the contrary, they appeared shocked, even mildly disgusted, by the kid’s show of disrespect, either because they were old or because they were white or both. Julie was certainly shocked.
“Tarantino himself has often argued that his movies should be situated in the context of the big-screen musical, with the outbursts of violence serving the same structural narrative function as the musical numbers,” Peter Van Eder said. “Like a lot of Minnelli, The Band Wagon exhibits a strong female character of the kind that has come to be foregrounded in Tarantino’s work. More important—I’m getting ahead of myself, but whatever—the self-enclosed, self-reflexive world of actors and dancers it portrays prefigures exactly the hermetic, empty universe of physical artistry that we find in Kill Bill. It also showcases the technical virtuosity of Minnelli that is an acknowledged influence not only on Tarantino but on Martin Scorsese as well. In other words . . .”
Van Eder smiled, a stiff, genuine smile made more horrible somehow by its genuineness, in which were intermingled an ingratiating familiarity and a desire to put this kid in his place.
“. . . gots to be hip to Minnelli, my man.”
Julie wanted to die of his own whiteness, to be drowned in the tide of his embarrassment on behalf of all uncool white people everywhere when they tried to be cool. Titus Joyner glowered at Van Eder. He pursed his lips, easing them pensively back and forth, wavering perhaps between giving Van Eder his due for wisdom imparted and taking offense at that horrible “my man.”
“Lady Snowblood,” Van Eder went on.
He addressed the class for ten minutes, reading from a set of four-by-six index cards in a soft, stupefied, increasingly breathless tone like an astronaut pleading with a mad supercomputer to open an airlock, the voice that, for unknown reasons, Van Eder relied on for the imparting of information. He touched on the ambivalent place of women in the postwar Japanese economy, feudal history and Western values, the popularity in Japan of comic books like the original Snowbird, the Japanese literature of revenge, the tension between the needs of the individual and the norms of the community, et cetera. Then Van Eder switched on the video projector, pulled down the screen, and put out the lights.
Taking advantage of the sudden darkness, Julie turned to look back at Titus Joyner. The kid reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a set of massive spectacles, at once square and rounded, a style somewhere between early Spike Lee and Miles Davis on the cover of Get Up with It. In the flickering light from the projector lens, the kid saw Julie looking at him, and a smirk drew a fishhook at the corner of his mouth. Then he turned to the screen, and the disc spun inside the Panasonic projector, and the fan whirred, and the soundtrack scratched, and the cymbals clanged, and Julie dreamed for two hours with his eyes open.
It was a dream Kill Bill, angelic and ghastly, more beautiful, more simplistic, bleaker. More, he tried, existential. At least the Bride, Beatrix Kiddo, had known love and happiness, companionship, hope for the future. Even at her lowest, even comatose and raped by crackers, she carried the memory inside her, in the place vacated by the baby she had lost. Her revenge was haunted by the ghost of happiness. From birth, Yuki Kashima—Meiko Kaji, so delicate, so badass!—had never known anything but the curse of her bloody and useless use. And the swordplay! Criminals and rogues, masters and pupils, slashing and hacking, fatal parasols. And the blood! Severed limbs flying, blood on fresh fallen snow, curtains and cataracts of blood!
When the lights came up at the end, Julie’s reptile brain was dimly aware of Van Eder apologizing for having exceeded the time allotted for class, the rustle of papers, and the scrape of chair legs. The biomass designated as Julie Jaffe stood up, and its autonomic systems took over and propelled it toward a beige corridor, along beige linoleum tiles, through a beige world, while in another universe, his traveler soul honed its katana and ate rice with chopsticks by a fire and tied a thick topknot in its wild black mane. Julie was halfway to the snowy courtyard where the existentially absurd and beautiful combat between Yuki and her final enemy was appointed—halfway to the glass doors of the Southside Senior Center, which opened onto a cement plaza with a sculpture fountain—when he heard a strange howl behind him, canine and low at first, then rising to articulate a screech of mock Japanese challenge.
Julie whirled just in time to see the kid, Titus, coming at him, glasses returned to his shirt pocket, eyes twisted up with homicidal glee, kick-flying through the air while whirling an imaginary blade over his head.
“Hi-yah!” he cried, alighting only inches away and bringing his sword down as if to cleave Julie from cranium to coccyx. Julie drew and parried in a single swift motion, then stepped back in a shower of sparks and let the other kid’s crazy momentum carry him forward with an ungainly lurch. As the kid went past, Julie jabbed downward with his left elbow (stopping just short of striking the small of his back).
“Yah!”
The other kid regained his feet and swung around, and they exchanged a quick series of attacks and parries, simulating with their mouths the clash and clang of steel on steel as Titus backed out of the glass doors of the Southside Senior Center and into the summer night.
Yah!
Hah!
Hah-YAH!
As the ladies and the geezers in their ball caps shuffled past, Julie and his opponent hacked and ducked, slashed, feinted, thrust. They dashed around the wide floodlit plaza with its random scattering of concrete oblongs, hopping up and off, circling the fountain at the center. Julie, with two disappointing years of fencing lessons in his recent past, had the advantage of knowing what you could do with a sword if you actually held one, while Titus had the advantage that he always would have: The whole thing was his idea. He was the one causing things to happen, driving them, taking them seriously long enough and intensely enough—and in public—to make them somehow be. Julie chased him, and Titus ran, laughing. He leaped up onto the broad lip of the fountain and took a deep breath. Three concrete-jacketed light fixtures led like stepping-stones across the water to the sculpture, a big mutant hand of steel entitled Dancing Group II that grasped at the night sky from the center of the fountain. With the tip of his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth, Titus island-hopped the lights along to the sculpture. He scrambled up onto the steel palm of the open hand and stood there, beaming at Julie. Way down along Fourth Street, the train for Sacramento mourned its own passage. The air smelled of chlorine from the fountain, of cut grass from the soccer field on the other side of the Southside Senior Center.
“Dude, what’s your name again?” Julie called, though he knew it was breaking the spell. “Are you— Is Mr. Jones your, like, grandpa or something?”
For answer, Titus leaped from the sculpture into the air, out over the turbid pool water and the scattered wishes of pennies and dimes, helicoptering his blade over his head, legs outstretched fore and aft like a hurdler’s, clearing a gap of six horizontal and four vertical feet to land with a dainty stutter step on the lip of the fountain. Julie stopped breathing.
“Titus Joyner from Tyler, Texas,” he said. “And I am here to dismember your pink bicycle−riding, plastic shoe−wearing, Jethro Tull−singing, faggoty Mr. Spock ass.”
Julie’s heart seized, and then a strange fizz of wonder seemed to engulf him, as if he had been dropped like an ice cube into a glass of sparkling water. The previous evening, he and his parents had gone to Archy and Gwen’s for fish tacos, a specialty of the house. After a while, Julie had grown restless with the trend of conversation at the table and had wandered outside with his eight-track player to kill some time. On the little grass island where the neighborhood children were wont to abandon their toys, Julie had come upon a girl’s bicycle, pink with white handlebar grips and white rubber tires. Wearing a blue science-section Star Trek T-shirt with a black collar and the little flying “A” over the left breast, from which he had cut away the sleeves, Julie rode the pink bike around and around the cul-de-sac, singing along with the eight-track at the top of his lungs about how a bungle in the jungle was all right with him. He had not been aware that even then he was being observed by a cold intelligence from another world. Now he gaped up at Titus Joyner as the other boy brought down his weapon hard, and Julie, deeply interested and intensely embarrassed, allowed himself to be killed. He died.
“I can stay here?”
Julie jumped. Titus lay motionless under the shelter of the comforter, eyes closed, somniloquent.
“Uh, okay, yeah,” Julie said. “My dad went back down to the store, he probably won’t be home for a while. I think my mom’s at a birth, so she’s probably gone all day. You can shower. And I could, I have to do some laundry. I could wash your clothes.”
Julie, under the guise of a sudden blossoming of self-reliance and a desire to help around the house, had been washing Titus’s clothes secretly along with his own for the past two weeks. Titus had only three pairs of pants, three shirts, and five pairs apiece of socks and briefs, but he was obsessive about keeping himself neat and clean. He had a horror of bad breath that approached the pathological, and he spent an aggregate hour a day, at least, in the maintenance of his modest little ’fro.
“Nah, nah,” Titus said. “I mean can I stay here.”
“You mean— What? You mean, like, can you move in?”
From the time of his arrival in June on a flight out of Dallas, Titus had been cribbing, as he put it, in West Oakland, in an undisclosed location; at any rate, he would not disclose its location to Julie. Mr. Jones and Fifty-Eight were neighbors, that was all Julie knew. The house held nine people in three bedrooms, cousins and unrelated relations, all living under the furious, disregarded administration of Titus’s ancient auntie, who was actually a great- or maybe even a great-great-aunt. No one in that house, which—in Julie’s imagination—teemed at every window like a cartoon asylum with madmen and psychotics, knew or cared if Titus came or went, if he dressed and fed and cleaned himself, if he lived or died, smoked crack, or built himself a suitcase bomb in the basement. And yet every day, more or less, he appeared before Julie in crisp jeans and a bright white T-shirt, with the white oxford or one of two plaid short-sleeve button-downs, a blue-black and a green-black, worn unbuttoned over the tee. And the starship shoes, scrupulously tended. Julie was obscurely moved by this scrupulousness, so helping Titus maintain it felt not like a chore but an honor. An offering of love.
The eight-track cassette punched to the next program with a loud clunk, and Titus sat up, wild-eyed and startled. He reached into his pocket for his glasses, and Julie noticed for the first time the coiled plug of black electrician’s tape holding together, at the nosepiece, the right and left halves of his big Spike Lees. Titus had seemed weird last night when they first rendezvoused in Frog Park, but it was too dark then for Julie to spot the evidence of trouble.
“What happened?” Julie said. “Did you get in a fight? Did somebody— Did they say you had to leave?”
Titus appeared to be awake, blinking, swallowing, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, but it took a long time for a reply to emerge.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he finally managed, his voice little more than a whisper. Then he shook it off. “Shake it off,” he told himself.
He got up and came over to Julie’s bed, staring down through his lenses, and his expression was mocking, of himself, of Julie for his solicitude.
“I’ve seen things,” he said, looming over Julie, close enough for Julie to smell the orange and cloves of his own brand of underarm deodorant, smeared somehow across Titus as they had grappled that morning in the dark. “Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.”
“C-beams in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. You can’t stay here.”
“Just tell them I’m your imaginary friend,” Titus said. “A only child, come on, you got to have a imaginary friend.”
“I did when I was little.”
“Yeah? What was his name?”
“His name was Cherokee.”
“Cherokee. He still live here?”
Before he could quite dismiss the question as the joke it was intended to be, Julie had a quick look around the attic. When he was four or five years old and sleeping in the room next to his parents’, he used to come up here to hide and conspire with his imaginary playmate. Now there was nothing left of Cherokee but the dry cool pulse of Indian fingers against his palm.
“Second, okay, that’s first, but second, you promised me, T.”
“What I say?” Titus gave the question an offhand spin and turned to examine, in a dish on the dresser, the orrery of small glass planets that Julie had made over the years at the Crucible. Trying to play it off, to persuade Julie that whatever rash thing he might have said was a joke, insincere, forgotten. “Only thing I promised you,” he continued, “is that when I’m a A-list Hollywood auteur, you get to help me out on the screenplays. I remember promising you that. Isn’t any other promise I remember.”
“You said you would . . . you know.” Julie felt his voice get very quiet. “If I came with you.”
Like Galactus, like some giant, timeless celestial older than the stars, Titus scooped up a handful of planets, tumbled them between his fingers, let them splash chiming back into the dish. “True,” he said. “But check it out, man.” He laughed, bitter laughter, contemptuous. “I’m afraid of her. I heard her one time kind of like whispering to him from the porch when he dropped a garbage bag all over the sidewalk. Reminded me of this principal I had back in Texas, had that same quiet way of getting angry, talking all soft and reasonable, then suspend your ass for three days ’cause you threw a pencil.”
“Yeah,” Julie agreed. “She gets all Eastwood.” Then, “How often do you go by there?”
“I followed him home a couple times.”
“Just, what, stalking him or something?”
“Just looking.”
Julie envisioned Titus pedaling past Archy and Gwen’s house at twilight, the sagging porch with its freight of bougainvillea, the life in which Titus was not permitted or could not bring himself to share passing back and forth like a movie to be memorized shot for shot across the screen of the big bay window. Then Titus turned around, and Julie was shocked to see that he had tears in his eyes.
“I am not going back to my auntie’s, tell you that,” Titus said, and a flat, genuine twang of Texas crept into his voice. He took off his glasses to wipe away the tears with the back of his arm, and the two halves fell apart, the wad of black tape giving way, the sections of broken frame rattling against the plywood subfloor of the attic. “No way I’m ever going back to that house.”
They stood there with six inches and an adamantine membrane of the multiverse between them. Julie longed to put his arms around Titus, to console him, but he could not be sure that Titus would welcome such a touch. Indeed, he suspected Titus would reject it. Julie could only guess, the intuition guided if not shaped entirely by the dubious and histrionic hand of ghetto melodramas, cop shows, and the brutal lyrics of rap songs, at the latest trauma that Titus had undergone.
Julie knelt and picked up the pieces, then carried them over to the bare pine table, its surface an action painting of Testors paint, scorched black in patches by the glue guns and the glowing elements of soldering irons, inscribed with an illegible cuneiform of X-ACTO-blade scars, where he had been wont, in the limitless trances of his loneliness, to assemble his scale models of AT-ATs and Gundam Wing fighters, and to ornament his little metal armies of orcs and paladins, and to invest the unspent and endlessly compounding principle of his inner and only life. There were three neat plastic racks of screw and nail drawers, and he rummaged among them until he came up with a tube of superglue, the crusted tip of its nozzle forever pierced, like some allegorical wound in a story of King Arthur, by its tiny red-capped pin. He squeezed out two drops and then eased the acrylonitrile halves of Titus’s glasses together with the practiced touch of a modeler until they held and there was not even a fissure visible. Then he handed them back to Titus, who gingerly tested the join. Without his frames, his face looked vulnerable, raw.
“Anyway, they just glass,” he said.
“Seriously?”
“I got like twenty-ten. I just wear them to, uh, make me look smart.” He put them on again, and something armored, sealed off, unassailable resumed its dominion over the features of his face.
“You could stay here tonight,” Julie told him, and as he said the words, he felt a pang of regret for them, intuiting the valediction they contained. If Titus accepted the terms with which Julie was about to present him, the period of their secret friendship would come to an end. After today, the world would know about Titus Joyner, and knowing that, would begin to know, or believe that it knew, Julius Jaffe, too. Yet he felt so far from being ready to know himself or contend with the world and its definitions. “After that, I don’t know, we’ll see.”
“Cool,” Titus said. “Damn, thank you.”
“Okay, it’s on one condition.”
“I’m not eating any more of that tempeh. Shit is nasty.”
“We don’t actually eat that much tempeh,” Julie said, feeling himself blushing at the thought of the hopeless Berkeletude of himself and his family. “I don’t know why it was even in our fridge. And no, that’s not it.”
“What, then?”
“You know.”
“No,” Titus said. “No way. I’m not—”
“You have to. I mean, even if my parents let you stay, and I don’t even want to think how I’m going to explain it all to them, I just have to, like, rely on the fact that they are going to get off on the idea that I have a troubled young African-American friend they can, like, help out or whatever. But you can’t just keep riding your bike past his house all the time. That is just sad.”
Julie went down to the bathroom to brush his teeth and, strangely modest, change into his clothes. When he came out of the bathroom, he found Titus sitting on the bottom attic step, fully dressed, upright, hands on his knees, as if awaiting a court date.
“What if he doesn’t like me?” he said.
Julie thought about squeezing in next to Titus, between him and the wall of the stairwell. Put his arm around the boy, lay his head against his shoulder, hold his hand. If he were Titus’s girlfriend, it would be the easiest thing in the world.
“I wish I were your girlfriend,” he said.
“Shut up, faggot,” Titus said gently.
“Hate speech,” said Julie. He sat down on the other side of Titus, where there was room for them to share the stair without touching. “Just do what I tell you. It’s going to be fine.”
Titus wiped his cheek with the back of one hand and snuffled once. Julie offered him a Kleenex. Titus waved it off.
“Tears in the motherfuckin’ rain,” he said.
On his way back to throw open the doors of Brokeland to the winds of doom, Archy decided to take a detour, drive past the site of the former Golden State market, corner of Forty-first and Telegraph, from whose shelves, as a pup, he had shoplifted all kinds of tasty and desirable items. The Golden State chain, small and local to the Bay Area, had suffered some kind of implosion while Archy was over in the Gulf. The site at Forty-first was sown with the salt of failure, and since then no enterprise had taken root at the cursed spot. Not the plastic-plant nursery. Not the store that sold novelty floor coverings, the kind you usually saw for sale draped over hurricane fences along vacant corner lots, shag-rug portraits of Malcolm X and shag-rug Aztec warriors cradling dead Aztec ladies in the deep nylon pile of their arms.
Archy parked and got out of the El Camino. In the same spirit of research that made him borrow Rolando (he hadn’t gotten the chance to tell Gwen about that, to show her he was capable, willing, and at this point, telling her would be like dropping a penny in a parking meter), Archy applied himself to the study of this slab of failure hewn from the greater zone of vicissitude that was his hometown. He tried to see it the way a successful businessman and top-ranked rich person like Gibson Goode was seeing it: as something that, unlike a plastic houseplant, could be made to grow. He studied the boarded-up plate windows, the rusting iron barrier around the empty cart corral. The mysteriously virginal circle of white concrete where, at the nexus of all earthly desire, there had stood a coin-operated peewee carousel with fiberglass horses, grinding around their tiny orbit in a way that only a kid could have found magical. As he ambled toward the back of the building to the shuttered and chained loading dock, he saw a pudgy man wearing a turquoise tracksuit and sneakers like a pair of tropical birds, murmuring into a cell phone. Big sunglasses made of turquoise plastic concealed the upper part of the man’s face, but the lower part gathered itself into a troubled pout. The man said softly, “Hey.”
“Tsup,” Archy said, fixating his connoisseurial attention on the completely featureless and uninteresting cinder-block backside of the building. He stroked his chin and nodded as if confirming some rumor about the building’s construction, as if noting that the ratio between the width and height of the cinder blocks echoed information that had been hidden by God in the works of Pythagoras, in the radio pulsing of the stars. Slowly, he walked on without giving the man in the bright kicks a second glance, heading down Forty-first Street toward Highway 24 like he had some proper business to attend to.
Forty-first was all sky and wires and broken rooflines and, like a lot of streets that had been cut in two by the construction of the Grove-Shafter Freeway, after all these years it still had a dazed feel, a man who had taken a blow to the head staggering hatless down from Telegraph, face-planting at the overpass. Archy felt a balloon of failure inflating in his rib cage. Between the days of peewee carousels and hectic stolen packages of Ding Dongs and this afternoon in the wasteland of the Golden State parking lot, there seemed to lie an unbridgeable gulf. As if his history were not his own but the history of someone more worthy of it, someone who had not betrayed it. He felt, not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989, when he had accepted an impromptu one-night invitation to play a Funkadelic show at the Warfield (Archy was, at the time, a member of a P-Funk tribute band called Bop Gun) after Boogie Mosson was laid up with a case of food poisoning. That was no decision at all, since a request from George Clinton was an incontrovertible voice from the top of a very high mountain. Archy was tired of Nat, and he was tired of Gwen and of her pregnancy with all the unsuspected depths of his insufficiency that it threatened to reveal. He was tired of Brokeland, and of black people, and of white people, and of all their schemes and grudges, their frontings, hustles, and corruptions. Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.
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Michael Chabon
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: From Michael Chabon, the bestselling author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; his first novel in 5 years is a lovingly painted pop-culture epic.