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
“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
“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
“Huh,” Archy said.
“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
