Telegraph Avenue

  “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.

  He followed Forty-first as it bent around to run into Forty-second, then turned right and found himself, speaking of sole survivors and the fatal path of the tsunami, in front of Neldam’s bakery. A lint-bearded geezer of the type known in Archy’s childhood as a wino sat on an overturned milk crate just beyond the entrance, making his way with evident contentment through a sack of Swedish rolls.

  “Pretty good rolls,” Archy remembered.

  The wino stopped chewing and looked at Archy, his expression bleary but somehow astute, most likely trying to decide whether Archy was trying to menace or cadge a roll off him.

  “This here my lunch,” he said apologetically. “Breakfas’, too.”

  “I have no intention to molest your lunch, brother,” Archy said. “I was always a Dream of Cream man myself.”

  When he was a boy, a Dream of Cream from Neldam’s—crumbly chocolate cake interglaciating floes and tundras of whipped cream, the outside armored in a jagged tectonics of wide chocolate shavings—was a prodigy, a work of wonder, five dollars no one could spare spent annually by stingy but cake-loving ladies to celebrate the coming into the world of a fatherless and motherless fatboy.

  “Well, then, go on in and get yourself one,” the wino said. “Look like you might could need it.”

  “Maybe I could,” Archy allowed.

  He entered the bakery, with its curvy display cases and its pallid eighties palette of gray and pink. He breathed very deep, and the smell of the place, the olfactory ghosts of Pine-Sol and caramel and long-vanished dreams of cream, filled him with a sense of loss so powerful that it almost knocked him down. The cakes and cookies at Neldam’s were not first-rate, but they had an old-fashioned sincerity, a humble brand of fabulousness, that touched Archy in this time when everything good in life was either synthesized in transgenic cyborg vats or shade-grown in small batches by a Buddhist collective of blind

  ex-Carmelite Wiccans. And now word was that Neldam’s, too, was slated to close its doors.

  “I need a Dream of Cream,” he told the woman working the counter.

  She was a hard-eyed little Filipina lady with no time or patience for his sorrow. “Big one or small?” she said.

  Archy said, “Are those my only choices?”

  He ate half the enormous cake in the car, using a spork from Vik’s Chaat, stained yellow with turmeric, that he exhumed from the deepest stratum of his glove compartment. He shoveled freely, emitting bearish sighs and exclamations, and found that the Dream of Cream was, like so few things in this world, almost as good as he remembered. This discovery, along with the anticipated charms of sugar, fat, and chocolate, buoyed his spirits and steeled him sufficiently to confront with customary heedlessness his melancholy retail fate. He left the half a cake not yet required in its pink cardboard containment unit, under a stack of newspapers on the passenger seat, and wiped his mouth on the back of a parking ticket that had, like the fate of Brokeland Records, fallen victim to the Stallings moral code of studied negligence.

  “Whatever,” he told himself.

  The open-closed sign hanging from the door of Brokeland was spun for the third time that day. Archy went back behind the counter and prepared to resume his lonely inventory of the musical remains of the late Benezra. He was aware, as he did so, of a poignant air of tragic dedication in all his actions, the dutiful routines of a doomed picket manning his lonely watch as, beyond the next range of hills, the barbarian horde mounted its conquering ponies. Then the shop door banged open, and those toucan-bill Adidas came walking right into Brokeland, their occupant lagging, as always, a fraction of a second behind and listing three degrees to the right.

  “Damn, Turtle,” said the cantilevered man with a show of bitterness. “You hurt my feelings.”

  Archy had been present, throughout the late 1970s, as that gait was first propounded and then painstakingly crafted to serve as a pedestrian variation on the Gangster Lean as specified by William DeVaughn, in his song “Be Thankful for What You Got” (Roxbury, 1974), as a necessary precondition for Digging the Scene. “Rubbing that Velcro you got stuck onto your chin. Acting all ‘Heavens, what a interesting example of commercial urban vernacular, I must consult my notes.’ Like you didn’t even see me there.”

  “Kung Fu!” Archy said, coming around the counter to exchange a fist bump and a hug with Walter Bankwell, his best friend from kindergarten all the way through senior year at Oakland Tech, ten pounds heavier and four square inches balder than the last time Archy had seen him. Walter Bankwell was a nephew of Chan Flowers, had put in his time among the cadavers back in the day. Bombing around in the hearses, carrying a pager in case of a corpse, with that smell coming off of him like the water in a vase of old flowers. Somehow the boy managed to slip free of his uncle. Got into the music business, repping for a string of indie hip-hop labels that all folded. Managed a string of modestly gifted rappers, one of whom had almost blown up, sort of, in the greater L.A. area. Meanwhile, constantly in and out of trouble with the police, the IRS, lawyers, record executives, mothers of the young girls his clients liked to fuck. Walter always, lifelong, working that 51/49 smart-to-stupid ratio. A few years back, he had fucked up in a way that invited a severe beatdown from some Long Beach kingpin, put him in the hospital, rehab, physical therapy, Walter’s 49 percent ultimately costing him the sight in one eye. “What’s up, boy?”

  “Aw, you know.”

  “Working?”

  Walter stepped back from Archy, his tracksuit dazzling and sickly green as a glow stick, a long, slow, mocking smile inching up his face at either side.

  “What?” Archy said.

  “Just like old times, Turtle Stallings, sneaking round the Golden State market. Expect you to have a sixty-four-ounce Orange Crush stuffed down your pants, and two packs of Now and Laters.”

  Saying it “ ’nihilators,” the way they used to.

  “Huh,” Archy said.
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  “Checking out the competition, I suppose. Got that Thang moving in, going to have a used-vinyl department twice the size of what y’all got going on here.”

  “Nobody knows that. Anyway, it’s apples and oranges.”

  “Then when you see me coming out the door, it’s like, ‘Ho, shit.’ Run, Turtle.”

  “Fuck you, Walter. Last time I ran from something was in 1991, in Kuwait, and it was a bat with rabies.”

  “I’m just playing with you. Check it out.”

  Walter’s hand crept into one of the zip pockets of his warm-up jacket and emerged palming a case for business cards, a nice vintage-looking brass one mounted with a big white stone that wanted you to think it was a diamond. Walter took out a card and handed it to Archy. It was printed in black and red ink, with a familiar logo of a paw print in halftone behind the text.

  “ ‘Community Relations,’ ” Archy read. “ ‘Dogpile Entertainment Group.’ Since when?”

  Walter shrugged.

  “Since before your uncle changed his mind . . . ?” Even before he saw the smirk pushing out Walter’s lower lip, Archy knew it was a stupid question. “Oh, okay,” he said. “It’s like that.”

  “Quit pro crow,” Walter said. “As they say. One hand scratching the other.”

  “Chan’s little Walter,” Archy said. “I begin to understand.”

  A pudgy boy, soft-faced, asthmatic, given to fevers, often hospitalized, supposedly a dead ringer for Chan Flowers’s only brother who had died, Walter was always Chan’s favorite, could always worm his way out of whatever trouble the other nephews got into. All due respect to cynicism itself and to Mr. Mirchandani its prophet, it was hard for Archy to believe that Flowers would sell out Brokeland for a simple payoff. The councilman didn’t give off the smell of that particular kind of corruption. But to reach out a hand to his nephew, the boy not a boy anymore, scuffling around for the past ten years, had only one eye. Maybe that was something Archy could begin to understand.

  “ ‘Community relations,’ ” Archy said. “Mr. Gibson Goode.”

  “Working for G Bad.”

  “G Bad know you have a congenital condition in which you were sadly born full of shit?”

  “Paid vacation. Corporate retreats in Hawaii. Health benefits.”

  Walter trying to sound like it was all due and proper, Archy knowing him too well to miss the almost desperate wonder lighting up his face. Something like that coming along, a hook on a helicopter, snatching him out of the churn and froth and icy water. A paycheck, benefits. Archy imagined coming home with such things in his backpack, how it would be if he could meet Gwen’s reproachful look with news like that, the 50 percent gain in domestic peace that would result if he could move from being shiftless and cheating to merely the latter. A stack of quarters to feed the meter, move the needle out of the red, way over to the right.

  “Yeah, that sounds real nice, Walter,” Archy said. “And I wish you the best. Now get the fuck out of here.”

  “Turtle—”

  “Are you serious? This is my house, you come in here, working for that corporate expansionist retail bullshit—”

  “All right, chill, Turtle, damn. I get it. I know how much love you got for this old ex-barbershop, have so many spiderwebs, dust in here, all Roger Corman and shit.” Walter took in the faded sleeves tacked in Plexiglas frames, the old NyQuil-colored clamshell iBook they used for inventory, the bins that Archy and Nat had built themselves, mounting them on rollers so they could be pushed aside to make room for the famous Brokeland rent parties they rarely put on anymore. The arcologies of spiders. “But I tell you what. Dogpile is a one-hundred-percent black-owned enterprise. A hundred percent.”

  As if summoned like a genie by this allusion, Nat walked into the store. He was carrying a box of donuts from the Federation next door, and he wore a soul patch of powdered sugar. He took in the spectacle of Walter’s tracksuit and shoes, then seemed to recognize Archy’s old friend with a vague nod.

  “Oh, yeah, uh, Nat, this here, you remember Walter Bankwell? Old running buddy of mine? Walter, this is my partner, Nat Jaffe. Walter was, he’s in town on business, and, uh—”

  “How you doing?” Nat said. He reached out to shake hands, but Walter raised his arms like a pair of crazy aerials at weird angles to his body. He flattened his hands into a pair of shovel blades and crouched low, sweeping the floor behind him in an arc with the toe of one foot. Some kind of Crane-style move, Archy thought.

  Walter straightened up. “Later,” he told Archy without another glance at Nat. His shoes walked out of the store, followed shortly thereafter by Walter, gangster-leaning now a little to the left.

  “We used to call him Kung Fu,” Archy explained.

  “Just stopping by?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Old times’ sake.”

  “We for sure used to get into some crazy shit, me and him. Right about when I was Julie’s age.”

  “You still aren’t Julie’s age,” Nat said. “Julius Jaffe was born older than you are now.”

  “I don’t know about that, boss,” Archy said.

  Standing across the avenue, right in front of the funeral home, was Speak of the Devil, stepping his skateboard up into his hand, fidgeting alongside a solemn-faced youngster on a bicycle, nobody Archy knew. Casing the joint—Archy felt it deep in the mischief center of his brain—for some kind of metaphysical stickup.

  Nat turned to see what Archy was seeing. “You know that other kid?” he asked.

  He looked perturbed; recently, Archy gathered, Julie had begun to wobble on his axle. Until now it had been hard for Archy to imagine the boy getting into any kind of trouble that could not be ameliorated by rolling a handful of twenty-sided dice.

  “Huh-uh,” he said. “From here, he looks like my little cousin Trevor, but no. That ain’t Trevor.”

  “From here, you know who he looks like?”

  “What are they doing, just standing there?”

  “Maybe they’re planning to hold us up.”

  “Huh,” Archy said, feeling, at this echo of his own offhand first reaction, a vague anxiety at the sight of Salt and Pepper over there, waiting to get spilled. “That why you came back?”

  “No, Archy,” Nat said. “That’s not why I came back.”

  Useless, by James Joyce. That was Nat’s father’s joke, passing sentence on himself when he spaced on the dry cleaning, when the phone bill went past due and service got cut, when he could not start a fire or turn over an engine, when he ran another candy store or newsstand into the ground. A man with a talent for nothing but tipping weary waitresses, slipping lollipops to babies when their mothers’ backs were turned. Saddled with the especial uselessness of the third-generation socialist, one of the lonely grandsons of Eugene V. Debs, stood up by Utopia, stranded with a payroll to make. Fatherhood among the Jaffes afforded a history of uselessness, with Nat only the latest chapter: luftmenschen, ineptitudes, and bankrupts going all the way back to Minsk Guberniya. Standing there like an ass in the doorway to Julie’s room—fucking useless!—serving up the traditional blend of banter and bluster, an old family recipe. Seeing misadventure, doubt, confusion in his son’s eyes and having not a clue what to do about it. Knowing that as the boy got older, every such moment might turn out to be the last of its kind. Something to be seized upon and savored, not allowed to slip away in hints and smart remarks.

  Carpe diem. Was there ever a more useless piece of advice?

  Nat remembered how, when he went back for his father’s funeral, a few weeks after he and Aviva started sleeping together, he found the old man’s copy of Ulysses in a box of ten-inch records, mainly classical, mostly Shostakovich. That chunky softcover from the late fifties or early sixties, fat “U,” slender “L,” swaybacked, edges sueded, pages yellow as the filter of a smoked cigarette. Tucked into his father’s favorite passage—the hungry cat giving its morning oration—Nat had found a clipping from the Times-Dispatch. NEWSSTAND OWNER FOIL
S ROBBERY. A Sunday morning in 1968 in Shockoe Bottom. Suspect, a Negro male in his early twenties, asked for a copy of Bird Fancier on a shelf behind the counter, then rifled the cash register when the owner’s back was turned. Pistol-whipped a customer who tried to intervene. Store owner Julius Jaffe, forty, then struck the assailant with a (Times-Dispatch) newspaper weight. Alertly flagged a passing police car. Almost certainly averted further violence, the suspect having served time at Powhatan for attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon. Julius the First was not the type to save clippings, never one to stand back and admire himself—the fifteen-year-old story came as news to Nat, who could only conclude that, though his father never spoke of it, the incident had meant a great deal to him. A high point in a life lived at sea level, prone to flooding.

  At the time, when he was in the midst of mourning his father, the discovery of the clipping had made Nat smile. Three weeks earlier, walking home from the Telegraph Repertory where he worked as an usher, Nat had interrupted a mugger in the act of taking a wallet, a watch, and a silver Tibetan barrette off a young woman whom Nat recognized as a regular patron of the theater, particularly fond, it seemed, of the work of Elliott Gould, to whom Nat had always fancied he bore a resemblance. Nat acted without reflection, plan, or reservation and was rewarded for his courage with a blow to the stomach and a night in the arms of the young woman, whose name was Aviva Roth. As he read the old clipping—teary at the thought that the incident had meant so much to Julius that he kept a record of it between the favorite pages of his favorite book—it did not occur to Nat, not for an instant, that the day would come when he, too, would look back on a moment’s thoughtless heroism, almost twenty years before, as the only useful thing he had ever done.