Telegraph Avenue

black half-rims he wore around his neck on a thin rubber thong—another spurned opportunity to model his wares. He studied, or affected to study, the text Nat had composed last night in a fever of righteous defiance.

“‘COCHISE,’” he said. “That’s for Mr. Jones.”

“Another little tribute.”

“Funeral’s Saturday?”

“At the store, two P.M.”

“‘Conserve Oakland’s Character against Homogenization, Impact, and Stress on the Environment.’”

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“That works.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Homogenization?”

“In the corporate sense. Chain stores, franchises.”

“I see. Yeah, that’s real clever.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Singletary put down the sheet of paper as though it weighed ten pounds, as though, contrary to his stated opinion, its text left him, on the whole, unimpressed. He returned the half-glasses to struggle for purchase, belayed by the rubber thong, atop the Half Dome of his belly. His eyes were the steel pans of a precision scale.

“Let me see if I understand,” he said. “In your opinion, the opening of a Dogpile shopping center on the site of the old Golden State market at Forty-first and Telegraph, which has the support of some highly respected figures in the community, such as Chan the Man, coming out of a company that works hard to lift the economic status and neighborhood pride of black people, is actually something that would have a negative impact.”

“It’s called a Thang,” Airbus said through a mouthful of beans and rice. “It’s really more like a mall.”

“Sixty thousand square feet,” Nat said. “Two levels of parking. The equivalent of five stories tall. Built right out to the sidewalk all the way around. It’s going to dwarf everything around it.”

“A lot of things in this neighborhood, I hope you don’t mind my saying, could get dwarfed by a midget. Ain’t like we got a lot of mansions and terrazzos and whatnot. Historical landmarks.”

“True,” Nat said. “We also don’t have a traffic or a parking problem, but we will if that Thang gets built. As far as economic uplift of the community? Gibson Goode is looking out for himself. I mean, come on, King. I came in here for two reasons, and one of them is that of all the people up and down this avenue for two miles in either direction, white, black, Asian, or from Tajikistan, you’re the only one more willing than I am to come out and say you hate that community-uplift bullshit.”

Singletary weighed the intended compliment in those proving steel pans. “The enemy of bullshit,” he said at last. “That’s you, huh? And this whole thing”—he flicked the sheet of paper—“don’t have nothing to do with the fact that a Dogpile Thang moving in two blocks from here, it’s liable to put you and Archy Stallings out of business so fast you going to have to declare bankruptcy last Christmas to catch up?”

“Of course it does,” Nat said. “I should have led off with that. You’re right. I guess I just got a little tired of walking around all day saying, ‘We’re fucked.’” He rubbed at his chin. “I’m going to come all the way out with it, Garnet. I talked to a guy at Councilman Abreu’s office.” Abreu was the at-large member of the Oakland City Council. He had no particular interest in Brokeland or music generally, as far as Nat knew. Based on his past record, Abreu would have no particular philosophical, environmental, or other beef with a project like Dogpile. But Abreu was rumored to dislike Chan Flowers, and their clashes in session were a matter of record. “He said that Abreu might be willing to show up, talk to COCHISE, hear what we had to say. But not if—”

“Not if at”—checking the flyer—“twelve-thirty or so, you got a store full of sniffy old white people.”

“I could use some influential people of color there,” Nat said. “For sure. Prominent local merchants.”

The King of Bling considered his next words. “Chan and me, we don’t see eye to eye on too many subjects,” he said. “And he has said things, both to my face and in a way that it got repeated back to me, about my line of business, comparing the sale of gold rope, et cetera, to a cancer, a plague, and so forth. But if this neighborhood have a heart and soul, Chan the Man got to be a candidate for that position. And you ought to know better than anybody, because you a smart, intelligent man with a lot of experience and credibility, that just because it’s all right for a cold-eye, skeptic motherfucker like me to go around saying all that community-uplift jive is a bunch of bullshit, don’t make it all right for you.”

“Right again,” Nat said. “Point taken.”

“What’s the second reason?”

“Oh. Well, I know how much you like collard greens.”

Singletary nodded and picked up his fork. He got himself a nice mouthful of the collards and chewed, reflectively at first and, it seemed, with a hint of doubt. Abruptly, he closed his eyes and took a deep, slow breath as though surrendering the burden of many long years. When he opened his eyes, they were brimming with emotion in a way that would have astonished the hangers-on recently banished from the premises by his ill temper.

“What time you need me?” he said.

Solemn, smiling, mildly puzzled, or with a beneficent swish of Glinda the Good, each Concerned Person put down his or her alphanumerics, then passed along the clipboard and the souvenir pen from Children’s Fairyland that was tricked out with pink and purple tinsel as a magic wand: Shoshana Zucker, who used to be the director of Julie’s nursery school, a chemotherapy shmatte on her head; Claude Rapf the urban planner, who lived on a hill above the Caldecott Tunnel in a house shaped like a flying saucer, where he once threw a party to mark the unwrapping of a pristine original pressing of In a Silent Way (Columbia, 1969), which he then catalyzed on a fifty-thousand-dollar analog system; a skinny, lank-haired, Fu Manchued dude later revealed with a flourish to be Professor Presto Digitation, the magician from Julie’s fifth birthday party; two of the aging Juddhists who had recently opened a meditation center called Neshama, a block down from the old Golden State, the male Juddhist slurping with a vehement mindfulness from the rubber teat of a water bottle while the female rummaged with melancholy chopsticks through the strips of flesh-gray tofu skin interleaved in her bento box as if ruing the slaughter of innocent soy plants that her appetite had ordained; Moby; that freaky Emmet Kelly–as Gloria Swanson–impersonator lady from the apartment over the Self-Laundry, holding her Skye terrier; Amre White, godson of Jim Jones, now the pastor of a rescue mission adjacent to the Golden State site, his ears, nostrils, and the ridges of his eyebrows cratered with the ghosts of renounced piercings; a city of Berkeley arborist named Marge whom Aviva once shepherded through a grievously late-term abortion; that Stephen Hawking guy who was not Stephen Hawking; the lady who owned the new-wave knitting store, teasing into life from the primal chaos of her yarn bag what appeared to be a doll-sized pair of cock-socked Eldridge Cleaver pants but also might have been a pullover sweater for her pet wyvern; weirdly, the accountant who got caught embezzling minor sums from a number of her clients, among them Brokeland Records, and was obliged (as a result of a bee that flew into a previous bonnet of Nat’s) to settle in small claims court; a noted UC Berkeley scholar of Altaic languages who specialized in collecting independent-label seven-inch soul releases of the mid-to-late sixties, carrying on his right shoulder without acknowledgment and for unspoken reasons a ripe banana, onto the nub end of which he (or someone) had drawn in black felt pen a smiling cartoon face; one of the eleven shrinks Nat had seen over the past ten years, a Dr. Milne, who spent the whole time casting a restless diagnostic eye across the framed album covers on the walls, the inoperative iron fuchsia of the fan whose downrod receded into the time-furred webs and shadows of the high tin ceiling, Julie’s painted bead curtain looking more like Sammy than Miles Davis, the battalion of miniature plastic Shriners in their miniature tuxes and fezzes massed along the plate rail of the wainscot at the back of the store, architectural relic of some pre-Spencerian establishment rumored but not confirmed to have been for a time the Oakland headquarters of the Black Hand; Sandy the dog trainer, who had been lobbying the city for nearly a decade to convert the Golden State site to a dog park and who had taught the Jaffes’ beagle-schnauzer mix, Jasper, later slain by cancer, to play dead; and S. S. Mirchandani, there only because he was always around that time of day, the wandering star of his mysterious system of motels, nephews, and liquor stores. Last to sign his name, grunting and shifting and looking like he would have preferred to consult beforehand with his attorney, the King of Bling on his usual stool, minimally fulfilling the racial requirement imposed on Nat by an anonymous aide to Councilman Rod P. Abreu; though Airbus, unrecorded by wand, was also present, way at the back, to sew a second patch of verisimilitude onto the motley cloak of diverse community support behind which