Telegraph Avenue

Gibson Goode’s bodyguard glanced over his shoulder for half a second, like he was verifying that he hadn’t just stepped in dog shit. The goons in the blue blazers kept walking.

“Hey, yo!” Mr. Nostalgia said. “Come on! Hey, come on, you guys! That’s Luther Stallings.”

It was Stallings who came to a stop first, digging in, bucking his captors, turning to confront his redeemer. The familiar smile—its charm gapped and stained by drugs or prison dentistry or maybe only by the kind of poverty that would lead you to try to skirt an eight-dollar admission fee—put an ache behind Mr. Nostalgia’s breastbone.

“Thank you, my good man,” Stallings said. Ostentatious, showing up the goons. “My dear friend…”

Mr. Nostalgia supplied his actual last name, which was long, Jewish, and comical, a name for a type of cheese or sour bread. Stallings repeated it flawlessly and without the hint of mockery that it typically inspired.

“My friend here,” Stallings explained, shouldering free of the goons like an escape artist shrugging out of a straitjacket, “has kindly offered to float me the price of admission.”

A slight rise in intonation at the end, almost putting a question mark there. Making sure he had his facts right.

“Absolutely,” Mr. Nostalgia said. He remembered sinking deep into a greasy Herculon seat at the Carson Twin cinema, a Saturday afternoon thirty years ago, an elephant of joy sitting on his chest, watching a movie with a mostly black cast—it was a mostly black audience—called Night Man. In love with every single thing about that movie. The girl in her silver Afro. The hand-to-hand fighting. The funky soundtrack. A chase involving a green 1972 Saab Sonett driven at top speed through streets that were recognizably those of Carson, California. The gear, tackle, and explosives carried by the bank robbers. Above all, the movie’s star, loose-limbed, still, and taciturn like a McQueen hero and with the same willingness to look silly, which was another way of saying charm. And—indisputably, in 1973—a Master of Kung Fu. “It’s truly an honor.”

The goons zoomed in on Mr. Nostalgia, training their scopes, scanning the green two-day exhibitor’s pass hanging from a lanyard around his neck. Faces going dull, losing some of their bored swagger as they tried to remember if there was anything about this type of situation in the official goon manual.

“He was harassing Mr. Goode,” said Goode’s bodyguard, stepping in to shore up morale in the muscle department. “You buy him a ticket,” he told Mr. Nostalgia, “he just going to harass him some more.”

“Harassing?” Luther Stalling said, wild with incredulity. Innocent of every crime of which he ever had or ever would be accused for all time. “How I’m harassing that man? I just want to get with him, have my thirty seconds at his feet, standing on line like everybody else. Get my autograph off him, go about my way.”

“Straight autograph from Mr. Goode going to cost you forty-five dollars,” the bodyguard pointed out. For all his girth, height, and general monstrousness, his voice was gentle, patient, the man paid, basically, to suffer fools. Maintain a fool-free perimeter around G Bad without making his employer look like a dick. “How you going to pay that, you ain’t even have eight?”

“Buddy, hey, yo,” Stallings said, then got the name right again with another painful flash—painful to Mr. Nostalgia, at any rate—of that scrimshaw smile. Whatever the man had been doing, apart from simply getting old, to have so brutally pared himself down, hollowed himself out, since his glory days, it didn’t seem to affect his memory; or maybe he wasn’t doing it anymore. “I hope, I, uh, wonder,” going all in with the question mark this time, “if maybe I could persuade you to help me out?”

Mr. Nostalgia stepped back, an involuntary move ingrained by years of tangling with the hustlers, operators, schnorrers, and short-change artists who flecked the world of card shows like weevils in flour. Thinking there was a difference of more than thirty-seven dollars between offering to pick up the price of admission, a gesture of respect, and springing for the man to buy himself, of all things, a Gibson Goode autograph. Mr. Nostalgia tried to remember if he had ever seen or even heard of a celebrity (however well forgotten) who was prepared to stand in line to pay cash for another celebrity’s signature. Why did Stallings want it? Where was he going to have G Bad put it? He did not appear to be carrying any obvious signables, book, photograph, jersey, not even a program, a napkin, a Post-it. I just want to get with him. To what end? Mr. Nostalgia never could have flourished in his trade without maintaining a keen ear for the slick lines of grifters and bullshit artists, and Luther Stallings was definitely setting off Klaxons, up to something, working some angle. Had already blown his play, in fact, until Mr. Nostalgia for some reason had felt it necessary to leave the safety of his neighborhood and stick his nose where it didn’t belong. Mr. Nostalgia could hear his wife passing the sole necessary judgment on the matter, another in the string of endless variations on her single theme, What in God’s name were you thinking? But Mr. Nostalgia’s title was not a mere honorific; his d/b/a was his DNA. Remembering the weight of that elephant of happiness upon him, on that Saturday afternoon at the Carson Twin in 1974, he chose to believe in the truth of Luther Stallings. A man could want things far stranger and less likely than a quarterback’s signature on a scrap of cash register tape or a torn paper bag.

“Maybe I can do better than that,” Mr. Nostalgia said.

He reached into the back pocket of his denim shorts and took out a folded, sweat-dampened manila envelope. Inside it were the other two green badges on lanyards to which, at his level of participation, he was entitled. He fished out one badge and pushed his way through the screen of goons. Luther Stallings bowed his head, revealing an incipient Nelson Mandela bald spot, and Mr. Nostalgia bestowed the badge on him, Oz emboldening the Lion.

“Mr. Stallings is working for me today,” he said.

“That’s right,” Stallings said at once, sounding not just sincere but impatient, like he had been looking forward for days to helping out in Mr. Nostalgia’s booth. His eyes had flicked, barely, across the badge as Mr. Nostalgia hung it on him; he said, not missing a trick, “In Mr. Nostalgia’s Neighborhood.”

“Working how?” said the older of the two goons.

“He’s doing a signing at my booth,” Mr. Nostalgia said. “I got a complete and a partial set, no Bruce Lee, of the Masters of Kung Fu series, I got a few other things Mr. Stallings has kindly consented to sign. A lobby card from Black Eye, I’m pretty sure.”

“‘Masters of Kung Fu,’” Stallings repeated, barely managing to avoid sounding like he had absolutely no idea what Mr. Nostalgia was talking about.

“Donruss, 1976, it’s a tough set.”

Four clueless looks sought enlightenment at the hands of Mr. Nostalgia.

“Uh, guys?” Mr. Nostalgia said with a circular sweep of his hands, taking in the echoing space all around them. “Trading cards? Little rectangles of cardboard? Stained with bubble gum? Pop one in the spokes of your bicycle, make it sound like a Harley-Davidson?”

“Damn, seriously?” Stallings could not keep it back. “Masters of Kung Fu. They got a Luther Stallings in there?”

“Naturally,” Mr. Nostalgia said.

“Luther Stallings.” The older of the two blue blazers, lank dark hair, the flowerpot skull and triangle chin of a Russian or a Pole, about Mr. Nostalgia’s age, tried out the name. Scrunching up one side of his face like he was screwing a loupe into his eye socket. “Okay, yeah. What’s it? Strutter. Seriously, that’s you?”

“My first part,” Stallings said, seizing upon this unexpected opportunity to preen. Loving it. Putting one of those massive antler hands on Mr. Nostalgia to let him know he was loving it: doing what he must do best. Restoring the goon squad to their proper roles as members of the Luther Stalling Irregulars. “Year after I won the title.”

“Title in what? Kung fu?”

“Wasn’t one at that time. Was in karate. In Manila. World champion.”

“World champion, bullshit,” said Goode’s bodyguard. “I give you that.”

Stallings flat ignored the big man. Mr. Nostalgia, feeling fairly balls-out pleased with himself, tried to do the same.

“We all done here, gentlemen?” Stallings asked the blue blazers.

The security guys in the blue blazers checked in with the bodyguard, who shook his head, disgusted.

“I tell you what, Luther,” the bodyguard said. “You even flick a boogie in Mr. Goode’s general vicinity, I will come down on you, motherfucker. And I will show no mercy.”