Telegraph Avenue

“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.”