Telegraph Avenue

by Michael Chabon

  “You need a permit, anything like that, lay a body out in a record store?”

  “I don’t know. If you do, I guess Chan Flowers took care of it. Man took care of everything.”

  “No doubt,” Singletary said. “No doubt. Now, seriously, watch out, ain’t no light, the upstairs switch is broken.”

  You might have tunneled, given time enough and shovels, from the basement of Flowers & Sons, where the body of Cochise Jones lay in zinfandel darkness, to the basement of his house on Forty-second Street, but you probably would have run into problems trying to get in. It was a basement of the 1890s, resolute and dry. The house had been built by a retired riverboat captain from Sacramento who married a Portuguese girl of whom there were still living memories among a few of the very oldest neighbors, like Mrs. Wiggins. The smell of thousands of record albums submitting themselves to the depredations of bacteria and mold could not entirely erase the lingering smell of the cardoon cheeses that the old woman had manufactured for decades, along with hams and pickled tomatoes, in her basement.

  “I hope he ain’t mad about the Cadillac,” Singletary said.

  “If it’s the same Olds they had at Ardis Robinson’s funeral,” Nat said, citing the funeral two years back of a mainstay of the Bay Area funk circuit during the seventies and eighties, “it’ll work.”

  Nat and Archy groped after Singletary down the basement stairs of Cochise’s house. The wall of the stairwell was smooth, cold Oakland sandstone.

  “And you got the Chinese, right? I like that Green Street band. All military and proper. Ain’t one of those motherfuckers really Chinese, though.”

  “No, they were booked. I had to go in a different direction. Hired this outfit, Bomp and Circumstance, you know them?”

  “The lesbians?”

  “They got the set list together, they know how the Chinese do it, the hymns and whatnot. Kai, Kai Fierro, works for Gwen? Plays the sax. She promised me they would send Mr. Jones home right.”

  “But still,” Singletary observed, “lesbians ain’t quite what he asked for, either.”

  “True, true.”

  “That must nag at you.”

  “At times it does.”

  The downstairs light switch snapped. Ceiling fixtures gapped by dead tubes flirted with darkness. Then, with a click, they shone steady. Something on the order of, at Archy’s eyeball guesstimate, seven, eight thousand records, lovingly and helplessly amassed.

  “I had no idea,” Nat said. His suit was an Italian number from the sixties, narrow lapels, no trouser cuffs, textured black silk flecked with gray. Skinny tie. Pointy little black loafers. He looked like Peter Sellers trying to recover from a very long night in 1964 and needing a haircut. “I mean, I knew, but I didn’t comprehend.”

  “Man’s habit was out of control,” Archy said admiringly. His own suit was his least interesting, just a plain old Armani bought on sale at Men’s Wearhouse, two-button jacket, center vent. He wore it only to funerals and once, a long time ago, when he and Nat had gone to a Halloween party as the Men in Black. “God love him.”

  “Fuck God,” Nat said. “Bastard killed our best customer.”

  “You have fifteen minutes. Ten if you keep on blaspheming.” Singletary took out his phone and frowned at its display. “You ain’t interested, I’m calling Amoeba.”

  The only son of the captain from Sacramento and the Portuguese lady had a son who died in Korea and a daughter, Fernanda, who passed the house on to Cochise Jones when she left him a widower. The Joneses never had any children, and Mr. Jones’s heir, his late sister’s daughter, lived somewhere down toward San Diego and wanted everything sold. So Garnet Singletary had gotten the house cleaned, painted, and patched and, in his capacity as executor, had hired himself to sell it. Archy got the strong impression that Garnet Singletary was also arranging to have one of his many shiftless relatives and hangers-on, whom he kept in a state of cash dependency on him for such eventualities, front a company that would buy the house from the estate, Garnet Singletary preferring, if possible, as a rule, to negotiate with himself. It seemed like a pretty good system to Archy. The King of Bling knew how to get over.

  “We aren’t here to conduct business?” Archy looked at Nat. “Not today, right?”

  Garnet and Nat said nothing, though neither appeared to see any cause for alarm in the prospect of dealing for the old man’s vinyl on the day of his interment.

  “I thought we had just came to, like, admire,” Archy said.

  “You go right ahead and admire,” Garnet said. “It’s your fifteen minutes, you spend it however you want to. Then I’m calling Amoeba records.”

  The albums were in poly sleeves, for the most part, and for the most part had been kept edge-on in crates, but here and there in tottering piles, discs lay ruined by the horizontal, and some of cheaper stuff was not in plastic or was missing its paper inner sleeve. The crates were stacked into alleys and bends that lacked only a Minotaur.

  After a ten-minute walkabout, Archy was prepared to pronounce the collection first-rate. He guessed that not quite half of the records had flowed through Brokeland on their way to this subterranean catchment. Another 20 percent, call it, bore price tags indicating provenance in the bins of other used-record dealers here in the Bay Area and all around the country. Ten percent was flotsam and jetsam, the random shit—fifties gospel, old Slappy White and Moms Mabley records, a surprising amount of Conway Twitty, George Jones, Merle Haggard. The rest—about 25 percent—was in the nature of Mr. Jones’s personal collection, as it were: recordings of sessions and dates he had played, the work of friends, colleagues, and rivals, maybe a hundred rare stride and boogie-woogie 78s, and a couple of complete sets of ten-inch LPs from the forties of classical works for organ, Bach, Buxtehude, Widor. These had belonged to Mr. Jones’s father, for many years house organist of Flowers Funeral Home as well as a number of local churches. There was no way to be sure after such a cursory sniff, but Archy figured the collection be low five figures, at least. Likely more.

  “What do you think?” Nat said, turning out to be the Minotaur trapping Archy at the heart of the labyrinth. “Call it, what, fifteen? Offer twelve-five?”

  He spoke in a low voice, not quite a whisper, but Singletary was busy grilling somebody on the phone, possibly Airbus.

  “Who did?” Singletary was saying. “Well, where’d they see it? Uh-huh. Did it say anything? What did it say? Goddammit, Airbus, what did it say?”

  “Twelve-five,” Archy said. “Nat, look here. Maybe this isn’t the right time to be . . . You are talking about putting more money into the business.”

  “That’s right.”

  Archy studied Nat’s face, trying to see if his partner was fucking with him. Nat believed that he owned a top-notch poker face, but in this belief he was sadly mistaken. His eyebrows in particular were unruly and signifying. The man thought he could conceal the contempt he felt toward his benighted fellow creatures, but the best he could arrange was to immobilize every part of his face, apart from the eyebrows, into a leaden mask through whose eye slits leaked an incandescent scorn. Right now, though, all that Archy could see on Nat’s face was enthusiasm, a certain smug pursiness to his lips that Nat got whenever he believed himself (again mistakenly, most of the time) to be about to get the upper hand in a negotiation. Nat had descended like Orpheus to this basement full of forgotten music, dressed in a funeral suit, hoping to bring Brokeland Records back to the upper world, the land of the living, with a vibrant infusion of collectible stock, stock that they would catch the scent of as far away as Japan.

  “But, uh, I don’t—I’m not sure, even if I had that kind of cash—”

  “I have it. Or I can get it. If you—Oh.” The truth that Archy was not ready, not today, to confess, had begun to seep in through those eye slits. The mask gave way, Nat’s jaw softening. “Archy, there is some shit here, in Japan, France, we could sell it for easily—”

  “Did it know German?” Singletary called out t
o them from the stairs. “Mr. Jones’s parrot, could it speak German?”

  Archy looked at Nat, who shrugged impatiently.

  “Not to our knowledge,” Archy said.

  “That ain’t him,” Singletary said to Airbus. “I never heard that bird do anything but sound like a Hammond B-3.”

  “Can’t rule it out, though,” Archy called. “Bird knew all kinds of unlikely shit.”

  “Maybe I should have gone into business with him,” Nat said.

  “Oh, okay, now you’re all mad at me.”

  Nat didn’t answer. He ran a furry finger along the printed spines of the records in a nearby crate. Archy saw that it was all Mr. Jones’s label-mates from his time on CTI. Hank Crawford, Grover Washington, Jr., Johnny Hammond. A number of them would be records that Mr. Jones had played on. Archy had probably owned most of the Creed Taylor catalog at one time or another, but it made an impression, seeing the records all together in that crate and those immediately above and below it, all those discs produced by Taylor or Don Sebesky back when Archy was a youngster, recorded by Rudy Van Gelder, pressed at some plant in New Jersey, then shipped by the scattered millions to the vanished mom-and-pop record shops of America, to the local chain stores of the seventies that had long since folded or been absorbed into national chains that had in turn folded, all those tasty beats and (mostly) tasteful string arrangements marbled together in a final attempt to reclaim jazz as popular music to be danced to and not just an art form to be curated, all those beautiful records with their stark jacket photography and their casually integrated personnel, reunited through the efforts of Mr. Jones. Archy had been breaking up estates for years and selling them off in pieces, but until now he had never felt the vandalism inherent in that act, his barbarity amid the crates of so many ruined empires.

  “Nice,” Archy admitted, running his own finger along the spines of the records.

  “Beautiful,” Nat said, giving the word the full benefit of his residual Tidewater accent.

  “Nat,” Archy said, “nothing would make me happier than to let you take twelve thousand five hundred dollars you don’t have and buy these records for us, then you and me sit on top of them for two, three years like a couple of dad penguins. Listening to Idris Muhammad all day long, all that crazy old Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith he had, that Versatile side he did with Grant motherfucking Green that never got released, I mean—”

  “I know, you saw that?” Nat hung on, fanning the little spark of it.

  “But I have been fucking off, fucking up, and fucking around for too long. I need to get real, else I’m going to end up living in an auto body shop. I need insurance, a paycheck, all that straight-life bullshit. Gwen goes out on maternity, she doesn’t work, I’m going to need to take care of her, the baby. I got to settle some shit with Titus, Nat, that boy—”

  “You guys back together?”

  “Huh?”

  “You and Gwen. She moved back in?”

  “Last night.”

  “Hey, all right.”

  “Uh-huh, she moved in, then she threw my ass out. Said it was her house, too, and so on. She came home, I don’t— Something got into her. Had the gain on the flamethrower turned all the way up.”

  “Yeah, I heard she was in fine form yesterday. I heard she did the full mau-mau routine on those assholes at Chimes.”

  “Is that the term Aviva used to describe it, ‘mau-mau’?”

  “That was just my interpretation.”

  “Black midwife standing up for herself to a bunch of white doctors, that makes it a mau-mau?”

  “I don’t have a problem with mau-mauing,” Nat said. “It’s a valid technique.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Archy said. “Black folks been holding off on the mau-mauing lately, till we got a ruling from you.”

  “Where are we?” Garnet Singletary said, sounding prepared to be disappointed by the answer. He filled the space at the end of the narrow alley in which Archy and Nat seemed to have lodged.

  “Where we are is, Archy is ‘getting real,’ ” Nat said.

  “That doesn’t sound like an offer,” Singletary said.

  “Nat, man, please. We can get into all of this tomorrow. We don’t need to get into it now. Mr. S., respect, I know you’re in a hurry, but today I am about trying to do this one thing of sending off Cochise Jones how he expected and how he deserved. I can’t be about anything else.”

  “Are you going with Gibson Goode?” Nat laughed, a single incredulous bark. “Ho! Wait! Is that what you’re doing right now? You already took the job! Jesus Christ, Arch, is that why you’re here? Did he, did your friend Kung Fu give you his checkbook, tell you, go ahead, get in there, start stocking your Beats Department?”

  “Hold up, Nat. Now you’re getting toward paranoid.”

  “A short journey,” Garnet Singletary observed.

  “I seriously doubt if the offer is even out there anymore,” Archy said. “Maybe I put the man off too long.”

  “I can’t believe I told you what my number would be.”

  “Why don’t you tell me your number?” Singletary suggested. “I’m the one selling the damn records. No, I tell you what. Do it this way, I give you a number. Seventeen thousand dollars.”

  “I am supposed to give you seventeen grand to buy back a bunch of records I already bought and sold once before,” Nat said. “Some of these records are like children to me, you’re going to make me pay for them twice.”

  “Give me a offer, then,” Singletary said, declining to acknowledge that Nat was starting to get bothered. “Then you get to sell them twice, too.”

  “Fuck it,” Nat said. “We’re already having one funeral. Let’s bury everything. Right here and now. Have done with it.” He brushed past Singletary, in his pointy little loafers went banging back upstairs.

  “Seem like maybe you been putting a lot of people off a little too long,” said Singletary.

  “I know it,” Archy said. “I wish I knew what was wrong with me.”

  “I got a theory.”

  “Which is?”

  “Maybe you are sick to death of mold-smelling, dust-covered, scratched-up, skipping, wobbly old vinyl records.”

  “You said ‘no blaspheming.’ ”

  “Maybe you sick of Nat Jaffe. Man started to get on my nerves five minutes before I met him.”

  Archy experienced a certain temptation to assent to this theory, but it felt disloyal, so he only said without enthusiasm, “Huh? Nah, man, Nat’s my nigger.”

  Singletary seemed to weigh this claim. “Was just a question of knowing how to fry a chicken leg,” he said, “I might almost be prepared to agree to that description.”

  “So, yeah. I guess you better call Amoeba or whoever. Call Rick Ballard down at Groove Yard.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Singletary said. “Okay, now, hold on. Let me just ask you. What was his number going to be?”

  “He said something about eleven. Fifty-five apiece, but I don’t have it, and as far as I know, neither does he.”

  “And if he did, if he came up with the money, and you all acquired Mr. Jones’s collection here for something south of fifteen but north of eleven, would you be able to make money on that?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Oh, no doubt.”

  “A little, maybe. Maybe a little more than a little. Nat was saying about France and Japan, but that’s no sure thing. It would improve our inventory, I mean, damn, there is some tough stuff here. Maybe if we expanded our website, did more of the shows. Put a little more push into the business side of the business, spent a little less time shooting the shit around that counter.”

  “Aw, no, don’t say that,” Singletary said. “I might back off from the fool offer I am about to propose. Because you know, truth is, I don’t give a shit about some scratched-up vinyl Rahsaan Kirk, Ornette Coleman sound-like-a-goose-trying-to-fuck-a-bicycle bootleg pressing from the rare Paris concert of 1967. I spend five minutes listening to that, I’m lik
e to want to slap somebody. I don’t really like any jazz, to be honest. The kind of style Mr. Jones played, mostly have a steady groove to it, that was all right, but when I get home at the end of a working day, Miller time, put some music on, you know what I like? I like Peabo Bryson.”

  “Peabo had his due share of jams.”

  “Here’s my concern in this matter. I know you think I am messing around in all that protest shit your partner’s stirring up to annoy Chan Flowers. Just because I maintain historically cool relations with the councilman. And true, that is part of the reason. But the real reason is something that’s not that. The reason, I remember when that record store used to be Eddie Spencer’s. And before that, when I first got out of the army, right after the war, it was called Angelo’s Barbershop, and those old Sicilian dudes used to go in, get their mustaches looked to or whatnot. I have known Sicilians, and so I feel confident saying, your store been full of time-wasting, senseless, lying, boastful male conversation for going on sixty years, at least. What that Abreu said the other day at that meeting, he was right. It’s an institution. You all go out of business, I don’t know. I might have to let in some kind of new age ladies, sell yoga mats. Everybody having ‘silence days,’ walking around with little signs hanging from their neck saying ‘I Am Silent Today.’ I would take that as a loss.”

  “Garnet Singletary,” Archy letting amazement show on his face. “One-man historical preservation society. Turning soft on me.”

  “Lot of bad things happen once you start to get old.”