Telegraph Avenue

He detected a ripple along the muscles of her cheek. She held on to her silence, watching as Tibetan flags strung from the front porch of the Sandersons’ house across the park bade their random prayers farewell.

“We’re in preproduction,” she said at last. Defiant, lying the lie.

“So you, what, you have a script?”

“Nah, but your dad, he has the story all figured out. Told me the whole thing, every character, every shot, every minute of screen time, told it ten different ways five hundred times. Archy, it’s gonna be good.”

“Kind of a, what, Strutter comes out of retirement, one last job, gets his revenge type of thing?”

“You want to hear how it goes?”

Archy closed his eyes, anticipating the tedious madness of the scenario that he was about to be pitched, some kind of incoherent mashup of Ocean’s Eleven, The Matrix, and Death Wish, his father’s favorite movie, interlarded with a thick ribbon drawn from the saga of whatever kind of bullshit landlord trouble or IRS trouble or dental trouble his father and the lady had gotten themselves into. But Valletta fell silent again, and he opened his eyes to find a lone tear lingering on her cheek, a tiny solitary pool of outrage or shame. He felt his heart sink and drew another draft on his endless reserve of misplaced guilt. He took out his billfold and conducted a sorry inventory therein.

“Nah,” she said, pushing away from her the bills that emerged, four crisp twenties, a faded five, and two soft, crumpled ones. “Nah, never mind. Keep your money. I didn’t come here to bother you for money. I know you don’t believe that—”

“Sure, I—”

“And I did not come here to bother you with that motherfucking movie you and I both know ain’t ever going to get made.”

“Okay.”

“I know if I told you your dad was in trouble because of the drugs, you wouldn’t feel inclined to help him in any way, shape, or form, and since I got with the program, fourteen months and nine days clean and sober, I respect that position, and so does he. What I want to ask you is, what if we was in some other kind of trouble, didn’t have nothing to do with using? Would you possibly be willing to help him out then?”

“What did he do?”

Again the careful study of the street, the neighboring trees and houses. “I don’t really know,” she said. “But hypothetical.”

“Hypothetical? Hypothetical, if that man’s hair was on fire, I would not piss on his head to put it out.”

She put her sunglasses back on.

“That’s just a theory, though,” Archy said. “We don’t need to test it.”

She nodded, chewing her lip, and he saw that under the lipstick, it was already ragged with chewing.

“Go on, Valletta,” he said, pressing the money on her. “If you promise not to tell me where he’s living at, or what he’s doing, or how bad he looks, or give me any information at all, that’s worth eighty-seven to me right there.”

She considered it. Her tongue emerged from her lips and ran around her mouth once hungrily. Then she knitted up the money in her long fingers and made it vanish so quickly and completely that she might have been alluding to the length of time it was likely to spend in her pocket. She would not take the empty DVD box.

“Nah, y’all keep that, anyway. He got five more just like it.”

“All right.”

He took the box, Jack with a handful of beans, already awash in eighty-seven dollars’ worth of regret over his own stupidity.

“Maybe I should come back next week,” Valletta said, and a smile lacking one lower bicuspid made a brave appearance along the lowermost regions of her face. “Come up with a few more things about him you don’t want to hear, see what that gets me.”

“Funny,” Archy said.

“Don’t worry, you won’t see me again.”

“Valletta—”

She’d started for the Toronado, but he called her back.

“Come on,” he told her. “You got to say it.”

During the summer of 1978, Valletta’s summer, the T-shirt shops of urban America had offered for sale an iron-on transfer that depicted Valletta Moore in a bell-bottom zebra-print pantsuit, surrounded by the glitter-balloon letters of the catchphrase with which she would forever be associated, first spoken in Strutter at Large. The iron-ons were produced by Roach, kings of the rubber transfer, who had divided all the profits, presumably considerable, with retailers and the movie’s distributors.

“You want me to say it?” she said, doubtful, pleased.

“I think eighty-seven dollars buys me that,” Archy said.

She sighed, pumped her fist once, like it was the head of a very heavy hammer, and said, “Do what you got to do.” The fist burst apart in slow motion, fingers blooming. “And stay fly.”

She wrestled with the steel of the car door, resuscitated the engine by patience and finesse, and rolled, shocks creaking, away.

“Stay fly, Valletta,” Archy said.

Julius Jaffe was rereading his memoir in progress, working-titled Confessions of a Secret Master of the Multiverse. He had begun to write it two months earlier in a six-inch Moleskine, in a fever of boredom, drug-sick on H. P. Lovecraft, intending to produce an epic monument to his loneliness and to the appalling tedium he induced in himself. That first night he had cranked out thirty-two unruled pages. Page one started thus:

This record of sorrow is being penned in human blood on parchment made from the hides of drowned sailors. Its unhappy author—O pity me, friend, wherever you lie at your ease!—perches by the high window of a lightning-blasted tower, on a beetling skull-rock beside the roaring madness of a polar sea. Chained at the ankle to an iron bedstead, gnawing on the drumstick of a roasted rat. Scribbling with tattered quill on an overturned tub, his sole illumination a greasy flame guttering in a blubber lamp. A prisoner of ill fortune, a toy of destiny, a wretched cat’s-paw for gods of malice who find sport in plucking the wings from the golden butterfly of human happiness! Thus shorn of liberty and burdened with the doubtful gift of time do I propose to ease the leaden hours in setting down this faithful record, the memoir of a king in ruins.

The night after he penned these words, Titus Joyner had appeared on the scarp of Julie’s solitude, swinging his grappling hook. Since then Julie had not added a word to his chronicle of boredom. He closed the Moleskine, fitted his memoirs with the little elastic strap, his own heart cinched with a tender compassion for their boy author in that distant age.

The front door slammed and the secret master of the multiverse said, “Shit.”

“Titus,” Julie said. “It’s my dad. Get up.”

Titus Joyner lay on his back with a pillow mashed down over his face, held in place by the hook of an arm. That was how he slept: shielded. Titus from Tyler, in Julie’s imagination a sunblasted and horizonless patch of infinite Texas, a necromantic Dia de los Muertos city of prisoners and roses, where Titus had been raised by a forbidding grandmother known as Shy. In Julie’s imagination, Shy was all in black, lit by lightning. Dead now, and Titus cast to his fate, claimed like a lost hat by an auntie from Oakland, a stranger from a house of strangers.

“Dude!” Julie said in a whisper. “T!”

Julie reached for the portable eight-track cassette player Archy had picked up for him at the Alameda swap meet. It was tank-corps green, styled like a field radio, and it had a webbed strap so that a Soldier of Funk, Julie supposed, could march his groove around. He popped out Innervisions (Motown, 1973), one of the few among the small stock of eight-track cassettes he had managed to scrounge that Titus would consent to listen to, and shoved in, with a meaty thunk, Point of Know Return (Kirshner, 1977), aware of how it would irritate his father.

“Julie? You up there?”

Enigmatic white midwesterners of the 1970s aired curious ideas about the role of the violin and the organ in a rock-and-roll context. Titus dragged the pillow from his head and sat up. Awake, looking right at Julie; then, before Julie was quite aware of it, scrambling up out of the bed. Buck-naked, as Titus called it. Titus crumpled his clothes into an armload, went to the window, spun around, and confronted an art deco chifforobe that had belonged to Julie’s great-grandmother. It opened with a great-grandmotherly creak, and Titus climbed inside.

Julie accepted this move without considering whether it was necessary or desirable.

He knew. He knew more than me or you. You can tell by the pictures he drew.

“Hide the hookah,” his father said. “I’m coming up.”

With a solemn intake of breath, Julie activated his secret master training. He would use his Field of Silence, he thought, in combination with his Scowl of Resounding Finality. The door swung open and his father looked in, eyes bright and sunken, cheek nicked by the razor, in one of his old-time hepcat suits. He had that shifty-eyed look he got whenever he had just done something he probably ought not to have done. This might not be a bad time, Julie saw, to confess or at least allude to his own most recent instance of bad behavior. Yet there was something he loved about the way Titus had entered into conspiracy with the chifforobe.

His father covered the fact that he was sniffing the air of the room for the molecular residue of burnt cannabis by making a show of sniffing the air of the room. “You just sitting around?” he said.

Julius Lovecraft Jaffe (though on his passport the middle name, by one of those metaphysical clerical errors forever being committed by reality on the true nature of his being, read Lawrence), gazed calmly back at his father. He sat on his bed, cross-legged in his tie-dyed long johns. Not the tie-dyed long johns with the infinite Escher stairway silk-screened across the chest but the ones with the space galleon setting sail for Tau Ceti across a sea of stars, which he had purchased last spring in the women’s section at Shark’s, where they had been labeled with a handwritten tag on which was printed, in an architect hand and in terms guaranteed to finger the deepest chords of his soul, COOL 70S SPACE KITSCH. The Field of Silence pulsed steady and thick as a stream of annihilating syrup. The Scowl burned shimmering hot pathways in the air between Julie and his father.

“What is that?”

His father’s face seized up around the eyes, and his cheeks went hollow. He looked like a man with inner ear problems, halfway between disoriented and about to vomit.

“My God,” he said. “Please tell me you aren’t listening to Kansas.”

There was a small prog bin at Brokeland, but it spurned the pinnacles and palisades in favor of the dense British thickets, swarms of German umlauts. Wander into Brokeland hoping to sell a copy of Point of Know Return or, say, Brain Salad Surgery (Manticore, 1973), they would need a Shop-Vac to hose up your ashes.

Julie took his wallet from the back pocket of his cutoff denim shorts. It was a yellow plastic wallet printed with a scratched image of Johnny Depp sporting hair of the eighties and the words 21 JUMP STREET in fake-wildstyle lettering. He unsnapped the wallet’s coin purse, in which he rotated a selection from the variety of business cards he had printed up for himself at Kinko’s at the beginning of the summer, just before he met Titus. A well-chosen card had served him well a number of times since then as a substitute for conversation, particularly with his parents. This time he chose one that read:

JULIUS L. JAFFE

curator

“I have to admit,” his father said, sounding like the admission was not a costly one, “I’m getting pretty fucking sick of these fucking cards.” He passed it back to Julie, who returned it to his wallet and put Johnny Depp back in the pocket of his shorts. “What’s with the enormous shoes?”

They were size-fifteen Air Jordans, white on white on white. They looked like a couple of scale-model Imperial destroyers docked neatly on a deck of the Death Star. Julie considered making this claim. He saw that he would have to collapse the Field of Silence, at least temporarily, and throw up a Snare of Deceit. “It’s that art project,” he said. “The one I told you about.” This strategy—Julie’s mother called it “gaslighting”—could be surprisingly effective on his father, who spent so much time lost in his own humming that he sometimes missed out on real-world events.

“Huh,” his father said.

There was no good reason to lie; on some level, Julie knew that. His parents had to figure-slash-understand that Julie was semi-bicurious, or maybe even gay, or what have you. Twenty-five minutes to gay o’clock. But the confession felt like too much work; Titus was too hard to explain. He was, for example, straight-up-noon straight, both hands on the twelve, though that had not prevented him from accepting every last note and coin of Julie’s virginity over the past two weeks. There was so much more to it than sex, gender, race, and all that piddly shit. Julie felt that his life had suddenly, like amino acids in the primordial soup, begun to knot and pattern and complicate itself. How to confess that he had sneaked out with his skateboard every night to hook up with Titus, in slang but also quite literally joining himself by the hand to Titus’s shoulder as they rolled through the nighttime summer streets of South Berkeley and West Oakland, through the wildly ramifying multiverse of their mutual imagination? Titus preferred the street to the roof and walls within which a hard fate and a ninety-year-old batshit auntie had obliged him to shelter, and Julie preferred nothing to the feeling of Titus’s shoulder bone and muscle against his hand, preferred nothing to the grind of his wheels, each tree, parked car, and lamppost a whisper as they passed.

“It’s that thing at Habitot,” Julie added for verisimilitude. “I have to decorate them.”

His father nodded knowledgeably. There was no other way that he knew how to nod. “So what are you doing?” he said. “Playing MTO?”

As a matter of fact, before Titus nodded off, they had been taking turns at Julie’s laptop, logged on to Marvel Team-Up Online. Leveling up their latest characters, Dezire and the Black Answer, running them in their capes and energy auroras through the teeming streets of Hammer Bay, on the island of Genosha.

Julie said, “Filing my teeth.”

“Uh-huh. Not smoking dope.”

“Just crack. And a little opium. Just, like, this much.” He pinched an imaginary pellet between his fingertips. “Fuck, Dad.”

“Because you know it would be all right if you did.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Not all right, but I mean, if you were getting high, I would want you to tell me about it, right?”

“Right.”

“Not feel like you have to hide it or anything.”

“I get it.”

“Because that’s when you start to drift into stupid.”

Julie said that he planned to continue his lifelong policy of avoiding stupid at every opportunity.

“So,” his father said. “Just sitting here, what, feeling sorry for yourself?”

“I don’t need anybody’s pity,” Julie replied, seeing the words scrawl themselves across the page of his imagination in the florid hand he had affected when writing in his Moleskine with his fountain pen. “Least of all my own.”

That raised a smile on his father’s face.

“Why are you even here in the middle of the day?” Julie said.

“I, uh, came home,” his father said. “I guess I should probably go back.”

The shorter his father’s stories got, the more unwise or embarrassing his behavior turned out to have been. His father’s eyes wandered unseeing for the one thousand and seventh time across the artwork that Julie had drawn and pinned to the lath ceiling, the portraits of cybernetic pimp assassins and blind albino half-Jotun swordsmen and one cherished sketch of Dr. Strange produced with Crayolas and a Flair pen when Julie was five or six. A Nausicaä poster, the Israeli one-sheet for Pulp Fiction. The gatefold inner sleeve of a record called Close to the Edge (Atlantic, 1972), with its world of cool, enigmatic waterfalls that endlessly poured their green-blueness into infinity. His father seeing nothing, understanding nothing, searching for the line, the signal, the telling bit of repartee. Recently and unexpectedly, the fiber-optic cable between the continents of Father and Son had been severed by the barb of some mysterious dragging anchor. His father stood there in the attic doorway with his hands in the jump-jive pockets of his suit jacket, loving Julie with a glancing half-sly caution that the boy could feel and yet be certain of the uselessness thereof, that love occupying as it did only one small unproductive zone of the Greater Uselessness that seemed to pervade his father’s life from pole to pole.

“Did something happen with Archy?” Julie said.

“With Archy?”

“Something at the store.”

“At the store?”

“Question with a question.”

“Sorry.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing, I didn’t, I just kind of blew my stack.”

“Oh, Dad.”

“At Chan Flowers. Councilman Flowers.”

“Whoa.”

“Yep.”

“Is that guy kind of, like, scary?”

“I have always thought so, yes.”

“Kind of a creeper?”

“At times he gives off that vibe.”

“But he buys a lot of records.”

“An all too common conjunction of behaviors.”

“And you yelled at him?”

“Threw him out, actually,” Nat said. “Then I threw out every other shmegegge in the joint.”

“Oh, fuck, Dad—”

“Then I closed the store for good. How do you like that?”

“You what? For good?”

“As in out of business.”

“You closed the store?”

“I really felt I had no choice.”

“For good?”

“Question with a question,” his father said. “Look, I’m fine. I got over myself. Now I’m going to go back, say I’m sorry to Arch. I’ll apologize to Flowers, Moby, everybody else who needs it. Apologies are cheap, Julie, and effective all out of proportion to their cost. My father used to say, ‘Carry ’em like a roll of bills in your hip pocket, pass ’em out freely.’ Remember that.”

“Cool, okay.”

“Used to say, ‘They are good for business, and they make the world a better place.’”

Clearly, his dad was cycling high today, getting that Groucho Marx quality to his delivery. For years he had been on and off various medications whose names sounded like the code names of sorceresses or ninja assassins. Disastrous from the first dose or disappointing in the long run, each wore out its welcome in his father’s bloodstream without ever managing to lay an insulating glove on the glowing wire inside him. His moods had little in the way of pattern or regular rotation apart from a possible intensification in Septembers and Februarys, but if Julie had over time learned to live unshaken by his father’s unpredictable temblors of mania, he had grown inured as well to their completely predictable aftermaths, however heartfelt, of apology and remorse.

“Say sorry,” Nat said. “Then open the store back up like I was, you know, on a little mental lunch break. False alarm. Everybody go about your business.”

“Except Gibson Goode, right?”

“Whatever,” his father said. “Man has a right to sell what he wants, where he wants. Bring him on. Meanwhile, you. Cheer up. You got two more weeks of summer to get through.”

With a wan crackle, the Field of Silence fluttered back to life between them.

And he tried. But before he could tell us he died.

His father closed the door. Julie listened for the creak of his passage down the twisting stair.

The narrow, mirrored door of the old art deco chifforobe swung open, betraying the folded articulate span, half dressed in pressed blue jeans, of Titus Joyner.

“Yo yo yo,” Titus said. Bit by careful bit, he took himself out of the chifforobe and reassembled himself on the floor of Julie’s bedroom, a hit man snapping together the pieces of his rifle. He looked tired. He smelled like the locker room at the Y. “Five more minutes,” he said.

He unrolled himself along the floor of Julie’s room, on the coiled braids of a rag rug, and stretched out. He closed his eyes; his breathing turned solemn and slowed the rise and fall of his chest. He was a prodigy of furtive and impromptu sleep. The nightly bed that fate had furnished him was a zone of danger and dark insomnia. If you closed your eyes in that unsafe house, they would rifle your nightmares and violate your dreams.

“Titus,” Julie said. “Yo, T.”

Nothing; gone. Julie pulled the quilt from his bed and laid it over Titus. It was an antique of the ’80s, Michael Jackson in a tacky spacesuit with a motley crew of robots and aliens. Julie stared at the boy on his floor, a mystery boy fallen from the sky like the Wold Newton meteorite, apparently inert and yet invisibly seething with the mutagenic information of distant galaxies and exploding stars.

Julie was in love.

The title of the course, offered through the summer evening enrichment program of the city of Berkeley’s Southside Senior Center, was “Sampling as Revenge: Source and Allusion in Kill Bill.” It was scheduled to meet every Monday for ten weeks through August, amid the folding furniture of a beige multipurpose room where, in the past, Julie had taken classes in puppet making, clay sculpture, and ikebana. Always the youngest in the room by decades, half centuries, and happier there among the elderly than ever seemed possible in the company of his so-called peers.

That first Monday in June, a week after his graduation from Willard, Julie had taken his seat in the front row of five chairs at the exact center of the room, midway between the video projector and Peter Van Eder, whom Julie had always imagined, from his irritated tone in the Berkeley Daily Bugle, to be this one pudgy bald gentleman with aviator glasses and a square-tipped knit tie whom he would see from time to time at the California, glumly suffering the opening night of Planet of the Apes (perhaps the greatest disappointment in the movie life of Julie Jaffe, a mad Tim Burton fan) or Steamboy (another tragic dud). But Van Eder turned out to be a bony young guy not far past college age. Big Adam’s apple, big wrist bones, one shirttail untucked, his hair long and stringy and flecked with dandruff or ash from his cigarettes or both. On his chin, a hasty pencil sketch of a goatee.

Julie took a glue stick and a bright orange notebook, quadrille-ruled, out of a Pan Am flight bag. Neatly, he folded and glued to the inside front cover the syllabus of films that Peter Van Eder proposed to screen and discuss:

Lady Snowblood (1973) d Toshiya Fujita

The Doll Squad (1973) d Ted V. Mikels

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) d Sergio Leone

Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972) d Shunya Ito

Ghetto Hitman (1974) d Larry Cohen

The Tale of Zatoichi (1962) Kenji Misumi

The Band Wagon (1953) d Vincente Minnelli

A Clockwork Orange (1971) d Stanley Kubrick

36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978) d Gordon Liu

Coffy (1973) d Jack Hill

Julie studied the syllabus as Van Eder waited for the last two names on his roster, one of them, Julie was interested to learn, being Randall Jones. Mr. Jones had both given and attended classes at the Southside Senior Center, and it was through him, a few years ago, that Julie had learned of the puppet-making class. Mr. Jones, whose taste in film ran strongly to violent western and crime, was a regular attendee of Peter Van Eder’s film series at the Southside.

Julie found himself dizzied by his ignorance of Van Eder’s choices, only two of which, the Sergio Leone and The Band Wagon, he had seen. Unless, as seemed likely, there was another movie called The Band Wagon, because The Band Wagon that Julie had watched with his maternal grandparents one Christmas in Coconut Creek, Florida, was a delicious musical with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, whose thighs stirred ancient and somewhat distressing longings in Grandpa Roth. A couple of the other titles and directors were familiar. Zatoichi. Kubrick, duh.

Somebody said, “Look at the bird!”