Telegraph Avenue

JULIUS L. JAFFE

Ronin ·HIRED BLADE

The look of mockery was still on the kid’s face as he studied the card, but he studied it. Slipped it into a pocket of his jeans. Then went to the back of the room to scatter his limbs across an upholstered armchair tucked into a corner.

“I’m sorry, sir.” It was one of the other students, a man in a wheelchair, speaking through a robo-box. Julie had seen the guy racing around Temescal, in the neighborhood of Brokeland, his body a toy in the paws of some brutal ailment. His voice came sparking through its Hawking box. “Sir? I’m sorry, but I have a bird allergy.”

“A bird allergy,” Mr. Jones said, looking blank, failing to see how this assertion could pertain to him. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Maybe you could— Can he wait outside?” said Peter Van Eder.

“Or… ?”

Fifty-Eight browsed politely through the silvery down at its breast, appearing to find no offense in the turn things had taken, but Mr. Jones, either because he had been looking forward to this series, or maybe on Fifty- Eight’s account, appeared to be heartbroken.

“It’s quite severe,” said the man in the wheelchair, the torsion of his neck giving him, no doubt unfairly, a sidelong and mendacious look as he said it, like maybe he was really just afraid of parrots or had something against Fifty-Eight personally. “I’m so sorry.”

Mr. Jones sighed. Even if he and Fifty-Eight had not been inseparable, there was no way you could leave a rare and costly bird sitting out in a hallway somewhere. He turned to the kid at the back of the room and raised a sheepish eyebrow. The kid stared at the dude in the wheelchair with open and admiring horror.

“You can get a bus?” Mr. Jones said. The kid knit up his limbs and gave a fractional nod, about to be left alone in this roomful of cripples and old people.

“Bye, Fifty-Eight,” Julie said. “Bye, Mr. Jones.”

“I feel terrible,” said the man in the wheelchair, but in the tonelessness of his voice-o-tron, it was hard to be sure whether he was referring to his remorse at the ejection of Fifty-Eight or the onset of anaphylaxis.

“Come on, fool,” Mr. Jones said to the bird.

Van Eder passed a syllabus to Titus Joyner, who thanked him softly, with an automatic “sir.” Then the kid’s eyes locked on the syllabus, scanned it. He frowned. Something written on the page dismayed him, filled him with outrage and confusion. He squirmed with it, deep in the armchair, until he was obliged to speak up.

“The Band Wagon?” he said.

His disdainful drawl intoned the title of the seventh film on the syllabus with a contempt so all-encompassing that it led one of the fearsome-looking, old, ex-nun-style, Communist, lesbian retired piano teachers who principally made up the enrollment of “Sampling as Revenge” to get up and start passing out oxygen masks and air tanks, so that all the other old people and Julie could go on breathing and not have the air sucked out of their lungs by the whooshing vacuum that followed this sally from the back of the room.

Peter Van Eder blinked and looked mildly amused. “Do you have a problem with The Band Wagon?” he said.

“It’s a musical,” Titus said. “It has, like, Sid Caesar.”

“Cyd Charisse,” said Peter Van Eder harshly, flatly, the way Julie’s old fencing teacher Mr. DiBlasio had been wont to correct Julie’s form with an impatient flat of the blade on the buttocks.

The kid nodded as if satisfied with this correction. He picked up his copy of the syllabus and held it at arm’s length in a display of nearsightedness that Julie took for mocking. “Gordon Liu,” he said slowly with a skeptic squint, pronouncing the Chinese name to rhyme with “shoe.” “Stanley Kubrick. Cyd Charisse.”

The old ladies—there were seven of them, all white—and the three old gents (one of them an Asian- American in an Oakland A’s cap) and the wheelchair guy apparently saw nothing at all droll or absurd in the presence of a Fred Astaire–Cyd Charisse film on that inventory of mayhem and martial arts action. On the contrary, they appeared shocked, even mildly disgusted, by the kid’s show of disrespect, either because they were old or because they were white or both. Julie was certainly shocked.

“Tarantino himself has often argued that his movies should be situated in the context of the big-screen musical, with the outbursts of violence serving the same structural narrative function as the musical numbers,” Peter Van Eder said. “Like a lot of Minnelli, The Band Wagon exhibits a strong female character of the kind that has come to be foregrounded in Tarantino’s work. More important—I’m getting ahead of myself, but whatever—the self-enclosed, self-reflexive world of actors and dancers it portrays prefigures exactly the hermetic, empty universe of physical artistry that we find in Kill Bill. It also showcases the technical virtuosity of Minnelli that is an acknowledged influence not only on Tarantino but on Martin Scorsese as well. In other words…”

Van Eder smiled, a stiff, genuine smile made more horrible somehow by its genuineness, in which were intermingled an ingratiating familiarity and a desire to put this kid in his place.

“…gots to be hip to Minnelli, my man.”

Julie wanted to die of his own whiteness, to be drowned in the tide of his embarrassment on behalf of all uncool white people everywhere when they tried to be cool. Titus Joyner glowered at Van Eder. He pursed his lips, easing them pensively back and forth, wavering perhaps between giving Van Eder his due for wisdom imparted and taking offense at that horrible “my man.”

“Lady Snowblood,” Van Eder went on.

He addressed the class for ten minutes, reading from a set of four-by-six index cards in a soft, stupefied, increasingly breathless tone like an astronaut pleading with a mad supercomputer to open an airlock, the voice that, for unknown reasons, Van Eder relied on for the imparting of information. He touched on the ambivalent place of women in the postwar Japanese economy, feudal history and Western values, the popularity in Japan of comic books like the original Snowbird, the Japanese literature of revenge, the tension between the needs of the individual and the norms of the community, et cetera. Then Van Eder switched on the video projector, pulled down the screen, and put out the lights.

Taking advantage of the sudden darkness, Julie turned to look back at Titus Joyner. The kid reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a set of massive spectacles, at once square and rounded, a style somewhere between early Spike Lee and Miles Davis on the cover of Get Up with It. In the flickering light from the projector lens, the kid saw Julie looking at him, and a smirk drew a fishhook at the corner of his mouth. Then he turned to the screen, and the disc spun inside the Panasonic projector, and the fan whirred, and the soundtrack scratched, and the cymbals clanged, and Julie dreamed for two hours with his eyes open.

It was a dream Kill Bill, angelic and ghastly, more beautiful, more simplistic, bleaker. More, he tried, existential. At least the Bride, Beatrix Kiddo, had known love and happiness, companionship, hope for the future. Even at her lowest, even comatose and raped by crackers, she carried the memory inside her, in the place vacated by the baby she had lost. Her revenge was haunted by the ghost of happiness. From birth, Yuki Kashima—Meiko Kaji, so delicate, so badass!—had never known anything but the curse of her bloody and useless use. And the swordplay! Criminals and rogues, masters and pupils, slashing and hacking, fatal parasols. And the blood! Severed limbs flying, blood on fresh fallen snow, curtains and cataracts of blood!

When the lights came up at the end, Julie’s reptile brain was dimly aware of Van Eder apologizing for having exceeded the time allotted for class, the rustle of papers, and the scrape of chair legs. The biomass designated as Julie Jaffe stood up, and its autonomic systems took over and propelled it toward a beige corridor, along beige linoleum tiles, through a beige world, while in another universe, his traveler soul honed its katana and ate rice with chopsticks by a fire and tied a thick topknot in its wild black mane. Julie was halfway to the snowy courtyard where the existentially absurd and beautiful combat between Yuki and her final enemy was appointed—halfway to the glass doors of the Southside Senior Center, which opened onto a cement plaza with a sculpture fountain—when he heard a strange howl behind him, canine and low at first, then rising to articulate a screech of mock Japanese challenge.

Julie whirled just in time to see the kid, Titus, coming at him, glasses returned to his shirt pocket, eyes