Telegraph Avenue

by Michael Chabon

  “That was the real underground railroad, a railroad underneath, inside another railroad. And this here was the terminus. This building you in, it was a train barn. You see that line there in the cement, crack like a big circle going all the way around? That’s where the turntable is. Big old concrete turntable, spinning the music of dreams.”

  The old man seemed to have concluded his remarks. He sat up, winded, shining from his hairline to his shins.

  “Only it don’t turn no more,” Eddie said.

  Luther Stallings looked from Titus to Julie and back, wanting to know what they thought, how they were handling it, what they were going to do with their little minds now that they had been blown.

  Julie glanced at Eddie. “Is that from the real Batmobile?” he said.

  Valletta Moore said, “Huh.” She shook her head. “Luther, they are not listening to you.” She was tucking little foam spacers between the fingers of her left hand. “Nobody is listening to you.”

  “Man should have got a Oscar,” Eddie said. “Always playing the silent type.”

  He and Valletta Moore fell out laughing.

  “I’m listening,” Titus said, trying not to sound contradictory, since contradicting Valletta Moore was painful to him and, in the movies of hers that he had seen, occasionally dangerous.

  “All right,” Luther said, firing off a scowl at his old lady, then giving Eddie the other barrel, mopping his face with a ragged but clean square of polishing cloth. “There you go. Now,” he told Titus, “boy, what you got to do, if you want to absorb knowledge, you have to ask questions. So go on. Go ahead.”

  Titus understood that he was meant to build off the lecture just completed, but that understanding was unable to outrun the natural impulse of his true curiosity. He knew he should ask a question about Egyptian funeral traditions and Prince Hall Freemasons, but to his dismay, he heard himself saying, “Why you have to live in a garage?”

  Another laugh arose irresistibly from the neighborhood of Eddie Cantor, a repressed, apologetic series of semi-coughs. This time Valletta Moore contented herself with studying her own reflection in the clear-coat shimmer of her left index fingernail and muttering a few words to herself in a parody of a stage whisper, hard to make out, something along the lines of Oh, now, I want to hear this.

  The old man sat, long arms hugging knees to chest. He pursed his lips and gave his head a slight shake, leading with his jaw. Closed his eyes, opened them again. For what felt like a long time, he said nothing. Titus began to regret the question, particularly when he saw a brief upwelling in the old man’s eyes, though it passed without a tear having been permitted to fall. Titus was on the verge of withdrawing the question and shifting about for a replacement when his grandfather said, “I did some stupid shit in my life. That is the truth.”

  Titus glanced at Julie, whose face grew solemn and knowing, a touch pious. “Drugs,” Julie said.

  “Even stupider shit than drugs,” the old man said. “And that’s saying a lot, y’all can take my word. But I’m clean and sober, thirteen months, one week, and two days. I have my shit together. I officially have a movie in the active stages of preproduction—”

  Valletta Moore pronounced another observation whose syllables hovered just that side of audible. She was like the magic harp from that Disney movie The Black Cauldron, popping a string every time the harp-playing dude, the bard, came up with some new exaggeration of his exploits or abilities.

  “Strutter 3?” Titus said.

  “You guessed it. But uh, something of that nature, independent type of venture, operating on the kind of small nonstudio level that Stallings Productions operating at, you have to, look here, sometimes you need to get a little creative in your financing. That’s why, to try to answer your question, wasn’t exactly the question I was expecting, but uh, I came up with a way to, uh, make one of those stupid things I did a long time ago, way to turn it around a little bit. Hook up to a major player in the industry.”

  “Or so you thought,” said Valletta Moore.

  “Goddammit, Valletta—”

  “Thinking you could shake down that—”

  The old man was up and on his feet like an umbrella opening. In the passage of another half second, he had organized his arms and legs according to a logic more direct than whatever had guided his verbal teaching. There was an impression of wind and gyration contained within a modest ambit, like the procedures of the Tasmanian Devil in cartoons, and then, as with the push given to the back of the Toronado by the tip of his walking stick, it all came down to the point of his left foot, one square inch of contact. The steel drum pitched over, resounding against the cement floor with a Chinese-gong finality. All of Valletta’s little bottles and implements went flying. Over in the bay, the hydraulic pump cut off with a gasp.

  “Uh?” Julie said to Valletta Moore. “You okay?”

  They were the first words he had directed toward her since the minute they walked into the garage.

  “Oh, I’m fine, honey,” Valletta said, all cheerful. She crept around on her hands and knees, trying to put things right, checking bottles for cracks and spills. “Thank you.”

  “Well, I better go check on those yo-yos,” Eddie said.

  The fighting fish flitted back and forth behind the panes of their aquarium as Eddie surveyed the mess he had permitted in his otherwise spotless body shop, looking like his reasons for having permitted it were no longer apparent to him. Figure his eyes must be trained by now to gauge possibilities for recovery, salvation, hidden in the ruin of a once fine machine. Titus tried to read those eyes for signs of hope, but Eddie was looking at him; Julie; him.

  “You boys need a ride anywheres?”

  “Uh, well—”

  Julie got to his feet, hugging himself, used to hanging with the kind of people who talked it out, shared their feelings, everybody circling up like Care Bears for a big hug when it was through, nobody kicking shit over, spattering the walls and floor with bloody nail polish.

  Luther Stallings reached for his walking stick and leaned on it with both hands, watching his grandson but not giving any indication of what he wanted Titus to do or to say.

  “We’re fine,” Titus said.

  Eddie nodded and, yelling in a contemptuous dialect of Spanglish, went over to critique the efforts of his crew. Luther’s stick banged against the concrete floor as he padded in his Bruce Lee slippers across the stained seas and continents that mapped it, toward the Toronado in the nearest bay. He reached in through the driver’s window to take the keys from the ignition, then went around to the back and popped the trunk. He took a plastic bin with two lids that interfolded out of the trunk, huffed it over to one of the workbenches. He looked at Titus.

  “Thought your ass wanted to see my movie,” he said.

  She would do what she had to do; staying fly, alas, might not be an option. It implied the sustainment of a metaphysical state from which Gwen, a house on a rain-swollen hillside, had long since slid. But she gave it her best shot, determined to quit sneaking around, put an end to the hiding, all the craven marital and professional ninjutsu. To come on as straight and strong and brazen as Candygirl Clark, unreachable as that aspiration might remain to a woman in her thirty-seventh week who had spent the past three days with a suitcase for a wardrobe and a foam pad for a bed.

  With three hours to go before the showdown at Chimes, Gwen drove through the tunnel to the Land of the White People. Her BMW faded incrementally into the local autosphere as the freeway stretched and flexed for its run toward the Sierra foothills. Shadows sharpened, and the afternoon took on a desert shimmer. Sprinklers chittered. Titleists traced white rainbows against the blue Contra Costa sky. Along the forearms of hard-shopping women in tennis skirts, sunshine lit the golden down.

  At A Pea in the Pod, Gwen consigned her cubiformity to a simple A-line dress of stretchy gray jersey with a matching gray blazer. The jacket came with shoulder pads that lent her an uncomfortable resemblance to the flight de
ck of an aircraft carrier. Because it rode up so high on her belly, the dress appeared to hang down at the back a good three or four inches in a kind of impromptu train. She would spend the rest of the day tugging her dress down at the front like a half-bold teenage girl in a micromini.

  Up at the cash register, she asked for a pair of scissors to cut out the shoulder pads, which, given the shock on the face of the downy golden salesgirl as Gwen vandalized a dress on which she had dropped $175, felt like kind of a kick-ass thing to do. Then it was on to the Easy Spirit store, where, employing a pair of vanadium tongs and a portable blast shield, she consigned her depleted espadrilles to a trained hazmat team and walked out in a stolid gray pair of modified Mary Janes. They had the charm of cement and the elegance of cinderblocks, but they held her feet without pain or structural failure, and it seemed to her that the librarian-nun vibe they exuded was also not incompatible with the kicking of ass.

  Thus equipped, she returned through the Caldecott Transdimensional Portal to Oakland, to submit her hair to the subtle if not silent artistry of Tyneece Fuqua at Glama. To meet Gwen’s hair emergency, Tyneece had been obliged—she explained in irritable detail—to reschedule a telephone consultation with a psychic in Makawao, Hawaii, a woman who, during their prior phone session, had come close to locating the two bars of looted Reich gold that Tyneece’s great-grandfather had brought home from the war and buried, it was said, in one of three backyards belonging to three different Oakland women who were the mothers of his nineteen children. While she lectured Gwen on the intricacies of Nazi gold registration numbers and of her abundant and goldless cousinage, Tyneece serviced Gwen’s worn-out locks, picking out slackers, stragglers, and lost souls, then twisting them tight, as if winding the very mainsprings of Gwen’s resolve. She massaged Gwen’s scalp, neck, and shoulders and put the new girl on Gwen’s sore feet. Finally, having done what she could, she called in Mr. Robert, whom she had sent for as soon as she learned what Gwen was up against today.

  Mr. Robert came in wheeling a scuffed pink plastic art box on an airline-stewardess luggage trolley. He was a dapper little gentleman in green plaid pants, a short-sleeve lime turtleneck, and zip-up white ankle boots, with Sammy Davis hair. Nowadays he mostly worked weddings, proms, and the odd quinceañera, but at one time he had been the go-to Hollywood black makeup man, relied upon by an entire vanished generation of television actresses, from Diahann Carroll to Roxie Roker, to combat the visual and technical biases of white cameramen and lighting directors. After a few seconds of intense scrutiny, Mr. Robert shrugged and looked confused.

  “I heard this was supposed to be an emergency,” he said. “But honey, you’re so hot, I’m afraid you going to set fire to my cotton balls.”

  “Now, don’t lie to me, Mr. Robert.”

  “I’m serious! You’re radiant! I need a Geiger counter! I need to get me one of those lead suits like Homer Simpson wears.”

  Mr. Robert was a scabrous if outdated gossip with a brusque, pointillist touch and a habit of asking questions without waiting for answers. When he had finished, he took hold of her chin in his slim, dry fingers and turned her head this way, that. One eyebrow lifted in a skeptical arch. Then he let Gwen get a gander at herself in the mirrored wall of the salon.

  “I almost look beautiful,” she told his reflection.

  “Almost?” his reflection said, looking hurt. “Honey, fuck that, Mr. Robert doesn’t leave no one looking almost.”

  “No, you’re right, thank you, Mr. Robert,” she said quickly, as he began with an angry clatter to return his brushes and bottles to the pink tackle box. “I look fly.”

  He didn’t say anything, but she caught the shrug of the left wing of his mustache, a half-satisfied half-smile. He packed up his gear, slow and deliberate, from time to time rubbing the ache of age out of his fine brown long-fingered hands. Tyneece had already collected Gwen’s money for this emergency session, but when Mr. Robert looked up from his kit, Gwen was holding out a twenty-dollar tip. Mr. Robert shook his head and pushed away her proffering hand.

  “Hit me next time,” he said.

  “No, Mr. Robert—”

  “I was born in my momma’s kitchen,” he said. “In Rosedale, Mississippi. Was a midwife like you brought me into this wonderful world.”

  “Yeah, well,” Gwen said, touched, embarrassed, regretting, in spite of the progress it seemed to imply, the loss of the world of black midwives catching black children, grappling the future into the light one slick pair of little shoulders at a time. “After today I might not be a midwife too much longer.”

  As appeared to be his habit—maybe Mr. Robert was a bit deaf—he ignored her. “Before she called my daddy in to see me for the first time,” he continued, “this lady, the midwife, she took a lipstick out her purse? And made up my momma’s mouth. She combed my momma’s hair. Fixed her up, you know? Got her ready. That was how my momma always told it, anyway. Sometimes I wonder, you know, hmm, was that, did that give me the idea,” hand on a hip, pointing with the other hand, the genie of himself addressing himself in far-off Rosedale long ago, “ ‘Mr. Robert, when you grow up, you going to be a makeup artist!’ ”

  He hoisted his tackle box onto the wheeled trolley and bound it carelessly with loops of green bungee cord. “Do you think something like that,” he said, “something that happened in the room when you were born, you could notice it, and it would stay with you the rest of your life?”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past a baby,” Gwen said.

  At 2:55, her Chimes General parking ticket tucked carefully into a zip pocket inside her handbag, Gwen trundled through the high, wide sliding doors she had come through so many times before, having so much more at stake, those other late nights, long afternoons, and early mornings, than her own small, personal fate. The feeders and freshets of East Bay humanity flowed through the filter of the hospital lobby, all the wild variety of life in the local pond. A gang banger rolling toward the elevator with a bouquet of lilies and Gerber daisies stuffed under his arm, a sunburned old buzzard with a physicist shock of white hair and camp shorts, a one-legged, three-fingered bearded biker dude she figured for a lax diabetic being eaten by neuropathy, two new moms—one Asian, one veiled and tented in the laws of Islam—waiting in festive wheelchairs with their babies for their husbands to bring the cars around. Scrubs, coveralls, nightgowns, baller jerseys, and patterned hippie-chick skirts, a pair of Buddhist monks flying the saffron, probably Thais from over at the Russell Street Temple. At the sight of them, Gwen was rapt by a need for the little coconut-and-chive pancakes they served there Sunday mornings, but it was a Thursday, and anyway, Candygirl Clark never would have permitted

  a craving, even for Thai temple pancakes, to divert her from a mission.

  “Wow,” Aviva said, taking in the fruit of Gwen’s resolve. Shoes, dress, jacket, the exuberant coils of her restored coiffure. “Don’t you clean up nice.”

  Gwen gave a tug on the front hem of the dress.

  Aviva was at her gravest, slim and efficacious in a taupe suit with a skirt that fell to just above her knees. Her hair, regularly—you might even have said carefully—threaded with gray, was pulled into a wide barrette of chased Mexican silver. No makeup at all apart from a touch of color on her lips, a shade or two more vivid than her own natural rose-pink. Rested and collected and projecting, Gwen thought, the slightest touch of resignation to her fate. Having given Gwen’s appearance a good going-over, she lingered on Gwen’s eyes, as if trying to discern in them some clue to her partner’s thinking or state of mind.

  “You ready for this?” Aviva said.

  “I am so ready for this,” Gwen said.

  “Yeah?” Alerted, curious. “Know something I don’t?”

  “Not so far,” Gwen said, sweet as pie. “But it’s only been ten years.”

  “Huh,” Aviva said, bullshit sniffer set as ever to a brutally low ppm.

  Gwen tried to go wide-eyed and innocent, feeling, of all things, strong and positi
ve and—but for the lack of six little coconut milk pancakes, steaming and flecked with green onion, nestled in their paper cradle—surprisingly ready.

  “I’m just going to try to, you know, maintain my dignity in this matter,” she said. “I don’t intend to embarrass myself ever again.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Aviva said. “ ’Kay, then. I guess we should probably head on up.”

  Gwen checked her watch. “Let’s give him a minute.”

  “Give who a minute?”

  “Moby,” Gwen said, and then she saw the big man stutter-stepping leftward to avoid collision with an elderly black couple helping each other out the front door, a human lean-to, temporary shelter against the day.

  She had called Moby right after the fateful shower, her last ever at the Bruce Lee Institute, during the course of which, caught in the brainstorm breeze of all those negatively charged ions, Gwen had found herself imbued with the spirit of Candygirl Clark.

  “All your little self-deprecating pregnant-lady fat jokes to the side,” Moby had told her over the phone, “I really only represent whales.”

  “Yeah, I know that,” Gwen had said. “But Chimes General doesn’t.”

  “Did they suggest y’all bring a lawyer along?”

  “No, on the contrary, technically, it’s just an informational thing. But that’s what makes it such a good idea. Look, Moby, you don’t even have to say anything. Just sit there with, like, your necktie, your briefcase, all big and intimidating like you are.”

  “No shit. You think I look intimidating?”

  “You definitely have the potential.”

  “To be badass?”

  “Like, a form of badass.”

  “The intimidation fac-tah!”

  “Sure.”

  Admittedly, she felt a doubt then, hearing the eagerness kindle in Moby’s voice along with that horrible Electric Boogaloo accent, but today was not about doubt, second-guessing, hesitation. Today was about doing what one had to do while approximating, to the best of one’s own and Mr. Robert’s abilities, the condition of flyness.