Telegraph Avenue

by Michael Chabon

  “Day after tomorrow,” Archy said, wiping his cheek with the overly blue sleeve of his suit jacket.

  Then Nat Jaffe beeped in on the other line.

  “I’m a block away,” Archy told Nat.

  It was forty-seven minutes past the hour of eleven, only about twelve minutes beyond the usual frontiers of Archy’s lateness, and he wished sincerely but without much hope that his partner was not planning on pitching him shit about it. Not this morning.

  “You have a visitor,” Nat informed him, sounding cool if not frosty.

  Dread took hold of Archy, mostly at the scalp, like the lining of a too-small hat. The number of available candidates for the role of Dreadful Visitor was more than sufficient to stock his premonition of doom, but at the core of the feeling sat the memory of a visit paid to his third- grade classroom by the school principal, during current events, on the Tuesday morning of his mother’s passing. After that day every visitor was, in prospect, Mr. Ashenbach, all news going to be bad. Enemies, lovers, hitherto unknown children, cops and federales, process servers, debtors and creditors, vengeful Ethiopian fathers or brothers or clan elders, any one of the nine thousand and nine fools he had been plagued or influenced by over the years, folks time-traveling forward from any one of a number of doubtful periods of his life. Bankwell, Feyd, Titus, or Gwen. In the end he settled on his father as the likeliest Mr. Ashenbach du jour.

  “Man by the name of Goode,” Nat said, the temperature of his tone dropping by another ten degrees Kelvin. “Says he’s a particular friend of yours. Came with his entourage.”

  Turned out to be only Walter, skulking around in a five-hundred-dollar tracksuit behind that small moon. That’s no moon, it’s Taku, an earbud in his left ear, another dangling like a locket down his chest. A heavy burden of loot at throat, ear, and wrist, black tee, blue jeans, blue Top-Siders without socks.

  “You fucking it up,” Walter confided to Archy in a murmur. Archy careful to have on his round tortoiseshell sunglasses, nobody going to catch Diz or Mingus crying over whatever stupid shit they might have done or left undone. “Don’t fuck it up.”

  “I’m not,” Archy said.

  “Don’t let your boy fuck it up, either.”

  “Nat?”

  “Man, what is his problem?”

  “He being touchy?”

  “Kind of like.”

  “Dude can be touchy,” Archy said.

  If upon first arriving at the store this morning, the affable Mr. Gibson “G Bad” Goode had, as might be imagined, attempted to exchange a few pleasantries with Mr. Nat “Royal Pain” Jaffe, by the time Archy walked into Brokeland, the two men no longer appeared to be on speaking terms. They had installed themselves at opposite ends of the store, Nat perched at the cash register, affecting to conduct a careful audit of some check stubs in a scarred black binder, Goode way at the back, fingering a strand of painted beads in the Miles Davis curtain while he flipped through the hip-hop bins. A sweet-sounding copy of Melting Pot by Booker T. & The MG’s (Stax, 1971) was playing over the store system, and by the turntablism of chance, the record that Goode was lifting from the bin as Archy came in was a twelve-inch single of Roxanne Shanté’s “Live On Stage” (Breakout, 1989), built on the bedrock of sampled Booker T.

  Goode spun around when Archy came through the door, but Nat just sat there, hunched on his stool like some high-collared miser out of Charles Dickens, crooked as a finger on a guitar string, humming like a struck length of wire.

  “Yo, yo, yo,” Archy said. The hat of dread still gripped his brow, but he played things light and innocent, stalling for time as he sampled the atmosphere in the store, checked the thermometer, scanned the length of tape in the seismograph. Needles jigged. Gauges and meters all ran into the red.

  “Mr. Stallings,” Gibson Goode said.

  He stuck Roxanne Shanté under his arm and rolled on the trucks of an invisible skateboard to the front of the store, wearing a thousand dollars’ worth of T-shirt and jeans. Archy considered a final burst of evasion, acting as if he had never met Gibson Goode, never flown in his zeppelin, could not imagine what might have brought the man into his little old Telegraph Avenue used-record store on this fine August afternoon. But no, the time had come. Archy needed to man up, take hold of himself. Confess that he had known a moment of weakness. That he was tempted by the offer to run the Beats Department, get a regular paycheck, boss some other folks around.

  Then, when he opened his mouth, the usual tangle of lies and evasions came spooling out.

  “Oh my goodness,” he said. “Look who it is! Nat, you know who this is?”

  “I do, in fact.”

  G Bad and Archy pitched the tent of a handshake over themselves, struck it, folded it up, put it away. Archy glanced over at his partner. Nat wore the look he got when he was listening to something amazing that was new to him. A fleer of analysis, like he was startled to learn that he could have missed this before, given that he knew everything about anything worth knowing.

  “Check it out, Nat. Gibson Goode. In our store.”

  “Totally.”

  “I know you’re excited about that.”

  “Yep.”

  “Did you so express it to him?”

  “Oh, he did, he did,” said Goode.

  “You used to get your hair cut here, isn’t that right, now?” Archy put the question like an interviewer on 20/20, lobbing him a softball. “Back when it was Spencer’s?”

  Nat looked up from the three-tier checkbook, betraying the mildest curiosity toward Goode. “Lot of folks got cut here,” Nat said amiably.

  “Did you?” Goode said.

  They clocked each other, their gazes two sets of radar guns.

  “Before my time,” Nat said.

  “Get rid of all this vinyl, put a few barber chairs in here, place looks pretty much the same,” Goode said. He took out and opened a tin of Flow-brand breath mints, which he had long had a deal to endorse, and offered one to Nat, who shook his head. “Pretty much.”

  “Stick around,” Nat said. “You can come to the second COCHISE meeting, it’s at noon.”

  “Noon? What’s the holdup?” Goode said without missing a beat. “Sounds to me like y’all been having meetings every five motherfucking minutes around here.”

  “I might like to have a meeting right now,” Nat said. “Archy? Partners’ meeting? Open to the general public. Stick around for that, at least, G Bad.” He gestured to Walter and Taku outside the window. “They can come, too.”

  “Nat—”

  “You, what, you here to offer Archy a job?”

  Goode saw how it was, that Nat knew nothing, had heard nothing from Archy. “That’s between he and I.” He smiled. “I’m the competition. I don’t need to tell you what I plan to do.”

  “Plan to or already did?”

  “He offered me a job, Nat,” Archy said. “Manager of the music department.”

  “The Beats Department, I believe it’s to be called.”

  “That is correct,” Goode said.

  “Manager,” Nat said. “Hey, that’s great. Congratulations.”

  “I didn’t say yes.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Well, did you say no?”

  Goode taking it all in, scanners lit and feeding information to the option-running brain.

  “At one point,” Archy said. “Maybe not definitively.”

  Nat hooked a thumb in Archy’s direction. “Get used to that kind of thing,” he told Goode.

  Archy felt blood in his cheeks, the shame of the ponderer in a world that urged decision. A deliberator nipped at and harried by the hounds of haste. Professing in his heart like some despised creed the central truth of life: The only decision a man will never regret is the one he never made.

  “How about that old man of yours,” Goode said. “Mr. Strutter. He ever turn up again?”

  The question caught Archy off guard, Luther a pot he thought he had slapped a lid onto one time
already that morning. He began to understand, though not yet to accept, that sooner or later his father—out there scheming, rolling some kind of Julie Jaffe−style D&D dice—would have to be faced, dealt with.

  “Not that I know of,” he said, trying to figure where Goode was going with this line of questioning.

  “Your father?” Nat said. “How is he mixed up in all this?”

  “You know our mutual friend Brother Flowers going to find him,” Goode said. “With or without your help. Got all his people, got those nephews, out there looking everywhere. Lot of folks owing Brother Flowers something, could find themselves able to wipe out a lot of debt real fast. Come up with a house number. Name of a motel.”

  “So be it,” Archy said. “Whatever. I can’t go there, you know?”

  “No?

  “No, man, I can’t think about that now.”

  “You might want to start soon.”

  Goode’s tone was cool, matter-of-fact, unconcerned with the fate or the whereabouts of Luther Stallings, and Archy saw, catching up at last, that the warning was directed at him. Goode was trying to remind him that the job offer with Dogpile had been, and remained, conditional on his helping Flowers track Luther down.

  “I surely will,” Archy said. “I will start thinking about it, sure enough. The day after tomorrow.”

  A beautiful phrase to the ponderer, the day after tomorrow. The address of utopia itself.

  “Okay, let me try for one second to pretend like I understand,” Nat said. “Not only do you, Archy, not plan to help me get out in front of this thing, reach out to the neighborhood, start pressing the city, the Planning Commission, on the DEIR, so forth? But you are actively considering going to work for this guy at Dogpile. Do I have that right?”

  “You might,” Archy said. “Or perhaps you might not.”

  “Archy, what the fuck?”

  “Nat,” Archy said, “for a good many years, I have been trying as hard as I can, and in good faith, to answer your rhetorical questions. Today, just this one time, I’m afraid this particular rhetorical question is going to have to comport itself in the traditional manner, which I believe is to not need an answer from me or from anyone.”

  “Arch,” Nat said, and for the first time his eyes, his voice, betrayed a certain desperation, a wince of genuine pain. “I need you. You can’t just sit this out. We have to actively oppose this asshole.”

  “Seriously?” Goode said, showing pain himself, though it was the broader, more universal pain of reckoning with fools. “You going to do that, Stallings? Cost this neighborhood where you grew up, like, two-fifty, three hundred good-paying jobs? I don’t know how much in revenue, tax base? Neighborhood revitalization? Sense of pride?”

  “Maybe,” Archy said, soothing himself with the feel of the words, two cool sides of a smooth round stone between his fingers. “Maybe not. For the time being, I have a neutral stance.”

  “Oh, uh-huh,” Goode said. “Okay.”

  “Fuck that,” Nat said. At last he abandoned the pretense of bookkeeping, closed the cover on the three-level checkbook, slapped his pencil down. Pouring himself off the high stool like Snoopy going from vulture to snake. “No, you don’t. I mean it, Archy. Either you are fucking me over here, or you are helping me out. Which is it?”

  Archy and his brown shoes made their way around the counter, and he brushed up close against Nat, taking some kind of ugly satisfaction in the way his partner stepped back. Even though he knew that Nat was far from a physical coward, had gotten his hothead self into more fights and public dustups than Archy over the years by a factor of ten. Archy activated all the force fields of coolth, calm, and collectedness built in to the circuitry of his Iron Man armor. Nothing to fight about, no need for alarm. He took down the framed copy of Redbonin’ that he had hung on the wall the day of the first COCHISE meeting. He propped the frame on its bottom edge along the counter, opened the triangular foot cut into the cardboard backing, angled it so that the photograph of Mr. Jones’s freckled face, looking young and fierce, could stare down Gibson Goode. The disc itself stood among the hold items on the shelf behind the register in its paper sleeve. Archy slid it out, held it up to the window, watching the daylight flow like water across the shimmer of the grooves. A Very Fine example of a scarce release, believed to be among the smallest runs of all CTI pressings. He laid the record on the turntable’s platter and cued the first track, a cover of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar.

  Cochise Jones always liked to play against your expectations of a song, to light the gloomy heart of a ballad with a Latin tempo and a sheen of vibrato, root out the hidden mournfulness, the ache of longing, in an up-tempo pop tune. Cochise’s six-minute outing on the opening track of Redbonin’ was a classic exercise in B-3 revisionism, turning a song inside out. It opened with big Gary King playing a fat, choogling bass line, sounding like the funky intro to some ghetto-themed sitcom of the seventies, and then Cochise Jones came in, the first four drawbars pulled all the way out, giving the Lloyd Webber melody a treatment that was not cheery so much as jittery, playing up the anxiety inherent in the song’s title, there being so many thousand possible ways to Love Him, so little time to choose among them. Cochise’s fingers skipped and darted as if the keys of the organ were the wicks of candles and he was trying to light all of them with a single match. Then, as Idris Muhammad settled into a rolling burlesque-hall bump and grind, and King fell into step beside him, Cochise began his vandalism in earnest, snapping off bright bunches of the melody and scattering it in handfuls, packing it with extra notes in giddy runs. He was ruining the song, rifling it, mocking it with an antic edge of joy. You might have thought, some critics felt, that the meaning or spirit of the original song meant no more to Cochise Jones than a poem means to a shark that is eating the poet. But somewhere around the three-minute mark, Cochise began to build, in ragged layers, out of a few repeated notes on top of a left-hand walking blues, a solo at once dense and rudimentary, hammering at it, the organ taking on a raw, vox humana hoarseness, the tune getting bluer and harder and nastier. Inside the perfectly miked Leslie amplifier, the treble horn whirled, and the drivers fired, and you heard the song as the admission of failure it truly was, a confession of ignorance and helplessness. And then in the last measures of the song, without warning, the patented Creed Taylor strings came in, mannered and restrained but not quite tasteful. A hint of syrup, a throb of the pathetic, in the face of which the drums and bass fell silent, so that in the end it was Cochise Jones and some rented violins, half a dozen mournful studio Jews, and then the strings fell silent, too, and it was just Mr. Jones, fading away, ending the track with the startling revelation that the song was an apology, an expression, such as only the blues could ever tender, of limitless regret.

  Archy pressed the button that raised the tonearm of the Marantz 6300 he had restored to its veneer and steel glory after Nat rescued it from a curbside trash heap in Montclair. In the silence that followed, he returned disc to sleeve, sleeve to album.

  “Nat,” Archy said, “I’m sorry. I know I am the most unhelpful, indecisive, useless partner you could have. And Mr. Goode, I apologize for how rude and how ungrateful I probably seem to you regarding your generous offer. But right now, and for the next forty-eight hours, until I see that man safe and resting peaceful in the ground?” With both hands, like a ring-card girl, he raised the record high, flashing the face of Mr. Jones now at Nat, now at G Bad. “Fuck both of y’all.”

  He nodded to himself as much as to both his interlocutors and then, tucking the record up under his arm, set out, feeling mysteriously free, for the first time in days, of regret, ready for whatever might come, and bound, as ever, for the day after tomorrow.

  A last morning flag of summer, blue banded with gold and peach, unfurled slowly over the streets as the two wanderers, denizens of the hidden world known to rogues, gamblers, and swordsmen as “the Water Margin,” made their way along the Street of Blake toward the ance
stral stronghold of the Jew-Tang Clan, its gables armored in cedar shakes faded to the color of dry August hills. Armed merely with subtle weapons of loneliness, they left behind them, like a trail of dead, the disappointment of their tenure at the School of the Turtle. They were little more than boys, and yet while they differed in race, in temperament, and in their understanding of love, they were united in this: The remnant of their boyhood was a ballast they wished to cut away. And still boyhood operated on their minds, retaining all its former power to confound wishes with plans.

  “I ain’t staying. Just so you know. Not hanging around.”

  “Just a couple of days.”

  “Not even.”

  “Well, just till we get some money.”

  “I can get some money today. How much you got?”

  “A hundred and seven dollars.”

  “Huh.”

  “A hundred and eight. I mean, it’s probably enough for the bus, but—”

  “Bus will be like maybe a hundred.”

  Their wish, wearing its mask of planning, was to seek out a legendary master in his hidden sanctuary among the deserts of the south and offer their blades to his service. The journey would be long and fraught with peril and was soberly considered impossible, but one of the boys had mastered the kung fu of desperation and the other the kung fu of love, and armed with these ancient techniques, they passed untouchable, protected from knowledge of the certainty of failure. At any rate, it was the end of summer, a season when the wishes of fourteen-year-old boys are wont to turn heedless of the facts. So they had returned to the house where one of the young men had been raised, in the time before he embraced the bitterness and romance of the Water Margin, hoping to find, by theft or pilferage, provision for their journey to the south.

  “I would have had more than a hundred and eight dollars, only, like a fuckhead, I bought that stupid Viking helmet at the Solano Stroll back in April.”

  “How much that thing cost?”