Telegraph Avenue

“Come on,” she said.

“Come on, where?”

“Miss Wiggins. Look for your friend. Mr. Occult Investigator, scared of ghost house. That’s why you come here first. Talking about some lamebrain idea, a fourteen-year-old boy could sneak into the Bruce Lee Institute and I don’t know about it. You came here because you are afraid to go there. Right or wrong?”

“Right,” Julie said. “Basically. But seriously, Titus does have skills.”

“Insult me one more time,” she said, “I don’t go with you.”

He got on his skateboard and they set off, the lady tearing down the sidewalk with such impossible energy, such abandon, that Julie could not keep up. She stopped and waited for him, gesturing toward her shoulder with her chin. He took hold of it. It was rope and bone.

She towed him down to Forty-second Street and turned the corner. They rode past Mr. Jones’s, the house looking empty and forlorn. On the porch stood the perch where Fifty-Eight used to sit, empty, abandoned. She pedaled on, rolling toward the door of the house where Titus’s auntie moldered like some ancient monarch whose kingdom had gone to lawlessness and ruin. The lady—she’d said to call her Mrs. Jew—hoisted the bike and rolled it up the crumbling front steps of the porch. She pounded on the door, bang! bang!

“Titus,” she told the young man who opened the door, eighteen, nineteen, pop-eyed and heavy-jawed, with a frowsy tangle of chin beard. Shirtless, lean-bellied, his skin blotted with unreadable, uninterpretable tattoos. The elastic of his boxer shorts and an inch of dark blue lozenges on light blue background emerged from the waistband of his knee-length denim shorts.

“Titus,” Mrs. Jew said again.

The young man gardened at his chin beard with two fingers. Julie lingered on the bottom step, feeling exposed and dangerously faggoty in his short shorts and his sleeveless T-shirt. From the open mouth of the house came a steady exhalation of marijuana and a low rumble of television, maybe a football game. There were voices, too. Not angry or hostile. Just voices. People talking, laughing.

“I teach kung fu,” Mrs. Jew said.

“Kung fu?”

“Bruce Lee Institute. Around the corner.”

Julie remembered his father telling him once about how when Julie was little and he would go around the neighborhood wearing his little Batman or Spider-Man costume year-round, people used to think he was cute and all. But when he went around the block dressed up like Superman, people would light up. Over and above the cuteness of some little dude masquerading around all solemn-face in the gaudy S-suit, there was something about the idea of Superman that made people happy. It was probably like that when you mentioned Bruce Lee.

“Bruce Lee,” the young man said. “He really was a student there?”

“I was his teacher.”

“For real? You?”

“I kick his ass,” said Mrs. Jew. “On a daily basis. ”

“Yo,” the young man called, glancing over his shoulder into the house. “Where Titus at?”

Somebody said something, and the man stepped aside. It was easily accomplished, without violence, subterfuge, or even use of the word “please.” Julie felt ashamed of his trepidation and anxiety, but he did not renounce them as he followed Mrs. Jew into the house. It was old and cramped, maybe kind of charming once upon a time. The fireplace mantel had that medieval feel you saw in a lot of little bungalows. Handsome columns of painted wood held up the ceiling here and there. The living room was all about the television, an old rear-projection number whose sun-dimmed display struggled to contend with the color palette of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Three teenage boys and two girls on a sectional tartan-plaid sofa repaired with accumulated yards of silver duct tape. On the floor a girl about Julie’s age, in a Catholic-school skirt, and four or five little kids. The girl looked more Latina than black to Julie, and one of the little kids was almost white, with drifts of reddish- brown curls. Across from the plaid sofa, a young man in a wheelchair breathed air from a green steel tank. He laughed into the plastic breathing mask. An empty bag of spicy Cheetos lay on the floor. On the coffee table stood two large bottles of Coke. A pizza box. A plastic tub that once held Trader Joe’s animal crackers. It was messy, dirty, crowded, and there was a miasma of Cheetos, but mostly, it was a bunch of kids sitting around watching a show that Julie also enjoyed. He had been expecting strobe lights, peeling wallpaper, people passed out on the floor, the flash of crack pipes. Twenty-four-hour pounding of woofers. Baleful people, he thought, lurking in the corners of shadowy rooms.

He was such a racist.

The young man who had greeted them at the door led them all the way to the back of the house, down some ill-sorted steps to an addition. In one of the bunks, a boy not much younger than Julie lay cuddling a Game Boy.

“Titus?” Julie called.

It was a kind of bunkhouse, furnished with a variety of bunk beds of different periods and styles, some made of steel tubing, some of scuffed and gouged wood. Not much light. In the rear corner, on the bottom bunk, under a Blue’s Clues sleeping bag, Julie found Titus. “Hey,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” Titus said from under the comforter, voice muffled but sounding, to Julie’s ear, roughened by weeping. “Man, get the fuck out.”

“Okay,” Julie said, and tears came to his own eyes. He started to turn away but then wiped his face with his arm. The little kid with the Game Boy was staring at him. “I just came to, uh, tell you that I thought you might want to know that Gwen is having the baby. About to. Right now. I mean, she’s in labor. If you come now, you, you know, you could kind of like, be there, or whatever. When your brother’s born.”

Titus didn’t move or speak.

“He got a brother?” said the boy, doubtful.

“Almost,” said Julie. “Titus, come on. We got your bike. Let’s go, don’t miss this. It’s really awesome. Brothers are cool. I wish I had one.” He looked at the boy. “Right, brothers are cool?”

“Not really,” the boy said.

“Could you, maybe, like, could we get a little privacy?”

“Why, so you can suck his dick?”

“Yes, totally,” Julie said without missing a beat, exhilarated by his own daring. “Here.” He took five dollars out of his wallet. “Go buy some candy or something.”

The kid left. Julie sat down on the corner of the bed.

“I know, I mean, I get that you…” He took a breath, let it out. “I just wanted to say, if you came back here, you must have been feeling pretty lonely right then. Like, okay, Archy was being an ass and all. But, I mean, this is your brother, it’s a, here’s your chance, you know? To have somebody that loves you and looks up to you. Besides me, I mean, because I know that’s, like, not really such a big deal.”

“Get up,” Mrs. Jew said. “Go to the hospital. Now. Or I will kick your butt. Do you believe me?”

Titus sat up, looked at Julie, then back at Mrs. Jew. Nodded yes.

Over. A rest between measures scored for kettledrums. A patch of blue sky between two rolling thunderheads.

Gwen in the birthing bed, between contractions, hating the only friend she had in the world. Hating his aftershave: a compound of unlit cherry cigar and the cardboard pine tree dangling from the rearview of a taxicab. Underneath that smell a deeper rancor, raw bacon gone soft in the heat. Hating the shine of his scalp through crosshatched hair. The whitehead at the wing of his right nostril. The fur on the backs of his fingers. Hating him for not being Archy.

Nat sat upright in a leatherette chair, chin raised, stiff-backed, looking like he was waiting for something freaky to happen, something that would demand more from him than he was prepared to deliver, like maybe any minute Nurse Sally was going to roll some weird Filipino piano into the room, made from sharks’ teeth and tortoiseshells and coir, which he would be expected to play. The expression on his face saying, Please, Lord, do not let this spectacle become any more revolting than it already is. Eyelids half-lowered, widening, narrowing again, the poor man trying to find that sweet spot between shut-tight-in-horror and wide-