Telegraph Avenue

piece of poor judgment, some dud of a snack cake, that Monument Liquor and News was now stuck for to the tune of ten cases, some no-account relative of Opal’s to whom Nat’s father had, against her emphatic instructions, loaned three hundred and fifty dollars they could ill afford, while in the lower sash of the casement window behind the stove, a pair of tiny electric fans executed a broad parody of Nat’s father (and for that matter, prefiguratively, of Nat himself) going around and around and around, with unimpeachable intentions, to no effect at all. At last with her chicken pieces neatly mounded and her biscuits tumbled into a basket lined with a clean dish towel, Opal would knock on down the back hall in those high heels to the crazed wooden stairway, barrel staves and bent nails, something out of a Popeye cartoon, bolted to the back of their row house, throw open the door, and stand there on the landing, fanning up a hopeful breeze with her manicured brown hands, unimprisoning her soft dark dove-winged hair from its head scarf, saying in that wild negro Yiddish of hers, “That is sure enough a mechiah.” Thirty, almost thirty-five years ago that would have been, Nat’s professional expertise wanting to sweeten the memory with maybe some fresh-minted Isaac Hayes filtering in from the stereo in the living room, or the first Minnie Riperton album, Come to My Garden. Opal had been into poor sweet Minnie in a big way.

Aviva, as in so many other respects, held to Opalish principles when it came to approaching a mess in the kitchen, and she was going to fucking freak when she saw what he had done, Time machine my ass, Nat, Jesus! She herself had knocked out some kind of semi- elaborate breakfast this morning for the boys, pancakes, bacon, and yet when Nat arose from bed pregnant with his scheme to win the heart of Garnet Singletary, and came into the silent and gleaming kitchen, he found only a corky trace of bacon in the air to betray her. Aviva, first white woman Nat had ever taken a romantic interest in, and the only one of his girlfriends who ever met the standard or received the approval of his stepmother. The latter being expressed, shortly before Opal’s death, in a brief speech to Nat that could have been delivered by Aviva herself: “Don’t fuck it up.”

Forty minutes after the first batch of chicken went into the fat—without his having restored a modicum of order to the kitchen—Nat was still busy with the tongs and the drumsticks, mindful of Opal’s absolute prohibition on crowding the pan. By the time all those hard-ass little red beans, rushed into their fatback bathwater, had managed to relax enough to jump on over into a casserole with the rice, it was nearly 10:40. Time to get moving. The King, more often one of his entourage, could usually be seen passing the windows of Brokeland with a bag of McDonald’s, maybe a fish sandwich from Your Black Muslim bakery, sometime around noon, twelve-thirty at the latest. Nat needed to get in there just as the man’s hunger was calling to him.

Like a dog in a cartoon, forepaws a turbine blur as he hunted up a buried bone in a churn of dirt, Nat excavated the cabinets and ransacked the drawers looking for usable serving containers and suitable platters. Piling up behind him mountains of mateless lids and lidless bottoms, rattling cake pans and pie plates. Souvenirs of ancient Tupperware parties, ice cube trays, Thermos cups with no Thermoses, Popsicle molds with no sticks, roasting racks, bamboo skewers, a kitchen scale! Nat figured on serving up to five or six Singletary satellites, hangers-on, maybe even K of B shoppers. He hoped that at least a few of them would find his arguments rendered sound and his blandishments persuasive by the invincible rhetoric of Opal Starrett’s cuisine. To begin with, he needed only to reach the King.

And Garnet could be reached. Oakland-born and -raised, his roots snaked back deep into Texas and Oklahoma. By laying out the meal that he now carefully packed in tubs, wrapped in foil, stacked into a plastic milk crate (whose freight of unsorted and mostly unsellable vinyl recordings, among them several offerings by Jim Nabors, Nat freely added to the disorder of the kitchen), and schlepped downstairs to load into the back of his aging Saab 900, Nat would be speaking to Singletary in a deeper language. Like a wizard to a dragon in a novel on his son’s nightstand, speaking in the Old Speech.

“Oh ho ho,” said the King of Bling as Nat backed, carrying the milk crate, through the steel mesh door of the eponymous establishment. Singletary reigned from his stool behind the glass counter in his cave of gold, atop his pile of rope and finger rings. Apart from the treasure in the cases, there was nothing else to look at in the shop: plain white tile floor, bare walls paneled in Masonite. Singletary himself devoid in his person, as always, of the least gleam or half-ounce of bling, filling out a guayabera shirt, looking sweaty-hot in his Jheri curl, toward which he took a studiously historicist stance. Strapped like Bullitt over the arm with a licensed .44 that, as he never tired of assuring the curious, had more than once, in the service of the King, been called upon to do what its manufacturers had intended. “I had a feeling. Soon as I saw that little flyer you was passing around.”

“Did you, now,” Nat said, doubting it.

As his trade demanded, Garnet Singletary was a keen assayer of human alloy, though he would say what he needed to say, Nat knew, to induce among the general public, whether buying or pawning, that he was even sharper than that. But it wasn’t like Nat was attempting some subtle bit of statecraft, or considered himself inscrutable, a master of neighborhood diplomacy. This was a fairly straight-ahead play.

“Read me like a book,” he said.

He winked at Ervis Watson, more often known as Airbus, who quite amply served as muscle for the King of Bling, a six-five, three-hundred-pound first line of defense in a velour tracksuit, weaponless apart from his ordnance arms and his howitzer legs, beyond whose bulk, events rarely penetrated to the point that the services of Singletary’s sidearm were required. King of Bling was half the size of Brokeland, dividing with the United Federation of Donuts the former premises of an Italian butcher, and between Singletary, Airbus, and the stock in trade, arranged in two long and two short table showcases on the floor and a tall cabinet that ran the length of the north wall, there was not a lot of room to turn around.

Airbus did not acknowledge the wink or indeed move the slightest feature of his face. Nat understood that the attempt to elicit a superficial comradeship by winking was a standard gambit of the environmentally nervous white man. He was not the least bit nervous, having grown up in the black part of Richmond with a black stepmother, black friends, black enemies, black lovers, black teachers, and culture heroes who, barring a few Jewish exceptions, were almost exclusively black. But he had so profound a horror of black-acting white men, such as Moby, that he drove himself with a near-pathological rigor to avoid any appearance, in manner or speech, of trying to pass. He would let his chicken do the talking.

“I brought you guys some lunch,” he said. He set the milk crate on the counter behind which Singletary sat on his stool. “Thought you might be getting a little tired of the Big Macs.”

Singletary squinted at the crate, then looked at Nat, running through possible negative scenarios that might arise once Nat opened the containers stacked in the crate: hustles, robbery schemes, some kind of nasty hummus or shit you were supposed to eat off a leaf. Then the smell coming from the food, a breeze off the coast of the past, worked its way into his nostrils, well defended as they were by his Billy Dee Williams mustache, and a wild surmise lit up the chilly precincts of his face. Nat lifted the platter of chicken and paused, milking the moment, fingers ready to peel back the blanket of aluminum foil at any time. All that was required was a sign from the King of Bling.

Singletary stared at Nat with a curious mixture of hopefulness and misgiving. He glanced at Airbus as if uncertain whether to split or double down on a soft eleven. Then he nodded once: Hit me. Nat ripped away the sheet of foil.

“Ho, shit,” said Airbus.

“I was expecting maybe you might have a few more people around,” Nat said as he set out the containers of beans, rice, and greens and tore open the foil packet of biscuits. Forks, knives, paper plates. A small ottoman of foofy Marin County butter. “Maybe feed a couple of your customers, too.”

“Aisha was here, but she getting the baby’s picture taken up at Hilltop Mall,” Singletary said. He smiled. “I might have scared away some of the other people like to waste my time and theirs sitting around here all the damn day. Medication I been taking for my blood pressure have a tendency to make me a little irritable, from what I hear.”

Airbus looked prepared but declined to comment on this rumor.

“Customers,” Singletary continued. “That I don’t know. Business been a little slow this morning.”

“Fuck the customers,” Airbus said. “More for me.” He skyhooked a plate piled high with some of everything.

“Hope I brought enough,” Nat said.

Singletary contemplated the well-encumbered plate that Nat had made up for him, but held off from tasting the food. He reached around behind him, shuffled through some papers, pulled out one of the flyers printed on blue paper. Nat had typed it up on the store computer, got it copied at Krishna. Singletary lifted to his face the plain