Telegraph Avenue

Joyner.

“Y’all go on, do what you have to do,” Archy told the clipboard girl, who was glancing toward the ever darkening cloud of blue air over El Boom Ellerbe as if trying to decide whether it presented a security threat. “I need help with this, I’ll be sure to call you.” His eyes went to her name tag so he could give proper emphasis to the dismissal and there read, with a smile, LESLIE.

El Boom left off questioning the maternal purity of his drum kit and stood up to greet the amplifier, venerable and pedigreed, a Model 122 known to have been owned at one time by Rudy Van Gelder, in whose Englewood Cliffs studio it was employed by Johnny “Hammond” Smith and Charles Earland before passing into the possession of Mr. Jones, on whose Redbonin’ it could be heard to everlasting glorious effect. Cleaned, oiled, restored, and rewired. Archy had been grateful for the chance to climb inside of history like that, walnut-paneled, belt-driven, analog history with all its parts spinning, however many hours of his spare time the job had required. What kind of insensitive, disrespectful, superficial person with the necessary skill set would ever turn his back on an opportunity like that? Not to mention the chance to help out a lonely old gentleman living off his Social Security, nothing but that and a small royalty on the co-credit (with a white record producer whose label kept the rights to every other song Cochise Jones ever wrote) for “Cold Cold Sunday,” a minor 1969 hit on the soul charts for Wilson Pickett that had been used in the late eighties in an ad campaign for Dreyer’s ice cream? Thus arguing on with the Gwen who lived inside his head, Archy eased the Leslie—the wooden one—down onto the flagstones and rumbled it, stately as a hearse, across the patio.

“Deep purple!” said El Boom, taking stock of Archy in his Funky Suit. Across the beeswax-buffed surface of the Leslie, the drummer ran the varnished walnut of his big-hitting right hand.

“Yeah, Boom, what up. How you doing?” Palm slap, finger tangle, shake, the older man’s hand dry and cool. “I got some tools in the car, you need pliers, a socket wrench, anything like that.” Archy fought down somewhere around 92 percent of the smile that tried to break loose on his face. “Blowtorch.”

“She-it,” said El Boom, reduced by helpless despair to this monosyllable, though he sustained it. “Thing’s a brand-new secondhand Ludwig.”

Archy shook his head in sham sympathy and turned to Nat, letting fly the smile. Nat played a lick on his unplugged guitar, a comic snippet of Carl Stalling’s cartoon jazz. With Mr. Jones sitting in at the organ, and with the original contractor for this evening’s musical entertainment laid up at home with some chronic alphabet letter of hepatitis, being a (soporific, in Archy’s opinion) guitarist, Nat had come armed with his Jazzmaster and a finicky old Epiphone to which he was attached for sentimental reasons, guitar being his second best instrument after piano. Guitar, organ, drums, they would be fine without Archy. He tried to work some of that reassurance into his eyes, then drew back a step and inclined his head in a way meant to signify the need for confidential communication with his partner. Nat fitted the Fender into its stand and picked his way among the cables to join Archy beside a man- high cactus in a Talavera pot, where only the goldfish would be able to overhear. Ugly things, technically koi, Archy supposed, freaky mutant motherfuckers all dappled and pop-eyed and tangled up in the shimmery scarves of themselves.

“Mr. Jones running late?”

Everything would be fine, Archy thought, at least until Nat looked up at the sky, got an eyeful of that big black visual pun on centuries of white male anatomical anxiety.

“Generally speaking,” Nat said. “Did you call him?”

“I saw him this morning. He was on it, giving me shit about being on time.”

“I find you have to tell him to come half an hour before you actually need him to be there. Now, not unlike you, he’s”—checking his watch, a Swiss-railroad number Nat kept set, out of habit from long-ago days tending bar, seven minutes ahead—“twenty-three minutes late.”

Something—pre-gig jitters, the last-minute-sub nature of the booking, the high caliber of the venue and clientele, for all Archy knew the politics behind the event itself, the candidate for president whose campaign the event would benefit not doing as well as might be hoped at this juncture—was bringing an edge to Nat’s voice. He had on a black sharkskin suit, by design too short at the cuffs of trousers and jacket and too snug across the chest. Black cowboy shirt snapped all the way up to its collar button. A bolo tie whose cinch was adorned with a miniature black-and-white portrait of Richard Nixon. Any one of these items of apparel might contribute to the increase of Nat’s native tight-assedness. Archy elected to forestall for another second or two having to tell Nat that, Leslie delivered, he would be blowing off the chance to expose the Wakanda Philharmonic to a mansionful of deep-pocket East Bay tastemakers any number of whom could be counted on in the near future to get married, turn fifty, or bar mitzvah their children, in order to go sit around, instead, on a rubber mat in a foot-stanky church rec room, learning a set of procedures and techniques without which, for fifty, sixty thousand years, fathers had managed to do all right. Even though it was becoming more difficult to imagine that Gwen would in any way welcome his feckless presence at the birth. Archy all stumbling and dropping shit around the castle like Eyegore in Young Frankenstein while Gwen plunged two-handed and full-tilt into the thunder and the lightning (life! life!) of the business, the job that she knew better than anyone with the possible exception of Aviva Roth-Jaffe, who for that matter was going to be there, too, rendering Archy more useless than he already felt.

“Is that how you do?” he said. “Tell people to come half an hour early just because you anticipate they going to be half an hour late?”

“Black people, yeah,” Nat said. “Thirty-seven minutes.”

“So, including me, you routinely—”

“You I cheat at least forty-five. And somehow, go figure, you’re still twenty minutes late.” He gave the back of his head a puzzled scratch. “I don’t claim to understand the math of it.”

“Yeah, look here,” Archy said, running a confidential finger alongside his nose. “I got Gwen in the car, and uh…”

“She okay?”

“Yeah, no, she’s fine. She uh, she just, I forgot—”

“I heard she’s been, I don’t know”—Nat pretended to search for the right word, though Archy could see it unboxed, unwrapped, plugged in, sitting there in the man’s mind all ready to go—“a little irrational past couple days. Stuff with the birth and the… incident. With the doctor. Guy sounds like a royal turd, but the way things work around that place—”

“Yeah, I don’t know, she—”

“You tell her about Titus yet?”

It was like dropping into a manhole, hearing that name. Every motherfucking time. Walking down the street, sun on your sunglasses, beats in your earbuds, rolling with your own particular roll along the pavement, and then fwoop! Not even the puff of smoke or patch of ashes that a thunderbolt might leave behind. Gwen was always accusing Archy of not thinking or caring about, not preparing for, the baby who was on its way. Which only showed how little she knew him or, to be fair, how parsimonious he could be in sharing with a woman, with anyone, the almost constant state of anxiety in which he was living. Anxiety that, for example, had led him to volunteer to keep an eye on little Rolando yesterday, to see how he could manage the whole diapers-and- formula routine. But this boy. Titus. His son, half grown and staring him down from the far side of all that resentfulness and abandonment. If Gwen knew about Titus Joyner—and sooner or later, she was going to find out—then there would be justice in her charge of obliviousness, lack of consideration. Because since yesterday Archy had been trying to resume his former state of happy ignorance and think as little as possible about the child he already had.

“That revelation is still, uh, forthcoming,” he said.

“Maybe you should try it out on her now,” Nat suggested. “Holistic approach. Cure it with poison. Fire with fire. Drive her insane from a totally different direction, she comes out at zero.”

“Yeah,” Archy said without enthusiasm. “Right now we’re at week thirty-six, I don’t think I have too much influence over the situation inside her head anymore.” Nat inclined his head, pursed his lips, nodding, having nothing to offer in the way of argument. “How’s he comporting himself round your house? Titus.”

“Oh, uh, fine. I don’t know. He’s okay. Funny kid.”

“Funny.”

“Solemn little motherfucker.”

“Solemn as in?”