Telegraph Avenue

Abreu, in his ongoing struggle with Chan the Man for control of the Oakland City Council, might plausibly clothe his presence and his intentions.

“Let me start by telling you folks,” Abreu said, “why, I think, we are not here.”

Rod Abreu was a weary-shouldered, pudding-cheeked lawyer, at one time the attorney for the electrical workers’ union, younger and sharper than he looked, better educated than he sounded, scented with bay rum and endowed advantageously with large, moist mournful eyes the color of watery coffee that were set into his face in a pair of bruised hollows, prints inked by the malefactor thumbs of life. Yet in spite of his hangdog stoop and sorrowful countenance, his manner leaned aggressively toward an irrepressible and uniform pep, pep sprayed in snaky jets all over everything he said like concrete onto rebar.

“We probably should not be here today at this time,” he put it to them, “thinking we’re going to try to stop or turn back the clock on the Dogpile proposal. All right?”

Awaiting objection in a way that seemed to promise a swift overruling, courtroom-tested, Abreu held up his chin. No objection was forthcoming, though the lady with the Skye terrier looked disappointed. Nat was disappointed himself but, supposing this might be some kind of Brutus-is-an-honorable-man rhetorical gambit, settled in to hear what came next. The chin was duly lowered.

“To say anything like that, all right, would not only be premature, it would also be unfair. Maybe even a mistake.” Talking to a jury, a labor board, people who believed themselves, no matter how scant the supporting evidence, not to be simpletons. “Yes, I have seen the initial proposal, my staff and I have had a chance to look it over, and I would say that the best word for it is ‘ambitious.’ It is an ambitious proposal, and Mr. Gibson Goode, a terrific athlete, a human highlight reel—I mean, seriously—is an ambitious dude, okay, who has made amazing use of his gifts and his competitive edge, those leadership skills. If you ever saw him play, you know he has the goods. He can do it all. Guy you want in the huddle, third and long, take the ball and run with it, I mean, pick your favorite football cliche, to be honest, I’m more of a baseball fan. Go A’s?”

This tentative sentiment was seconded with scattershot but genuine fervor, the Oaklands a game and half out of first that August and seriously contending, and then the hinges of the front door let out a contrarian jeer. Everyone turned to see, hesitating at the threshold, a large man dressed in a stained Captain EO sweatshirt, sleeves cropped and curling at the shoulder seams to expose two high-reaching power forward arms. A pair of official Team USA basketball shorts as worn by that summer’s inglorious Olympic squad. White-on-white Adidas kicks, scarred as warhorses and wrinkled as elephants. The man looked flummoxed, lost, and, to his business partner, crestfallen, as if a grim fate that he had always feared might befall their establishment—say, a massive influx of strange white people—was now come to pass. He was carrying a square black frame from Blick art supplies, the kind they used to display album covers. He didn’t say anything, just stood there sweaty and breathing carefully through his nose.

“My partner, folks, Archy Stallings,” Nat announced, aware of a change of pitch, a downshift, in the music he was hearing in his head. For the first time since he had begun to craft the flyer that summoned COCHISE into being, it occurred to him, maybe a bit late, that he might have wanted to drop some hint of his intentions on his partner, folks, Archy Stallings. If for no other reason—again a bit late, he saw that there might be plenty of other reasons— than to prevent the calamitous breach of personal-style code that his oversight had obliged Archy to commit. Every so often, maybe, if he was running way behind, Archy might stop by the store on his way from the courts at Mosswood Park, before he went home to shower and change. He never did so except with reluctance, discomfort, and apologies to whoever was at the counter to see him looking so raggedy-ass.

“Sorry,” he told the room before settling on his partner as the likely source of his underdressed confusion with a frown and a furrowing of eyebrows. “I—uh. Whoa. Nat—”

“Archy, this is Councilman Abreu,” Nat said, trying for the sake of appearances to make it sound like he was reminding rather than informing. “He graciously found some time to stop by today and talk to us, give us his views on the Dogpile thing. And,” he added, seized by a happy if disingenuous inspiration, “to hear what we have to say. Our neighbor and good friend Mr. Singletary—”

Garnet Singletary pressed his fingers against his sternum as though feeling for the bullethole.

“We need to fight!” said the lady who lived over the Self-Laundry, goosing her dog on the word “fight” as though encouraging it to second the motion. The dog abstained.

“HELL, YES,” intoned the Stephen Hawking guy through his vocoder, rolling his Mars rover out of Archy’s way.

“Huh,” said Archy quietly. “Is that right? Fight, okay.”

Nat noted the passage across his friend’s wide, mild features of what appeared to be genuine distress. Eager to ascribe that painful sight to anything other than the fact that, in an access of hypomania, he had convened— without consulting anyone, in the middle of a “transitional” neighborhood in a city that was largely black and poor and hungry for the kind of pride-instilling economic gesture that the construction of a Dogpile Thang represented, however gestural and beneficial only to Our Beloved Corporate Overlords it might turn out to be—this motley gathering of freaky Caucasians united, to hazard a guess, only by a reflexive willingness if not a compulsion to oppose pretty much anything new that came along, especially if it promised to be big and bright and bangin; in the process, creating and abandoning an unholy mess in his own kitchen, a mess that, his rapidly cycling brain chemistry began to whisper to him, was probably a metaphor, a prophecy of how this whole thing was going to turn out; hoping to forestall this realization, Nat sought explanation for Archy’s evident dismay in the picture frame. Archy had used it to mount the sleeve of his cherished copy of Redbonin’, with its starkly lit, extreme close-up Pete Turner photograph of Cochise Jones looking lean and hale but far more menacing than he ever had in life, cheeks printed with a calamitous history of freckles.

“I just came by to hang this picture up,” Archy said.

“Aw, man, condolences,” said Moby, letting loose some kind of absurd dap congeries which, remarkably, Archy returned slap for slap, flutter for flutter, pound for pound. Then, like sparring bears, they fell into a woozy clinch. “So fuckin sorry to hear about that, bro. Mr. Jones was a legend and a hella nice guy.”

“True, true,” Archy said, wading toward the front counter with everybody goggling silently at him in a way that reminded Nat of Jesus among the moneylenders. Archy took note of the remaining fried chicken, beans and rice, collards, and biscuits laid out on the counter. He pressed his lips together as if in token of a Juddhist detachment from such worldly (not to say unclean) productions. Exchanged with the King of Bling a curl-fingered clasp of Zen simplicity. Went to a shelf on the wall behind the counter, moved aside an old Seth Thomas digital clock, a James Brown bobblehead, and a stack of AT&T bills one or the other of the partners was long since supposed to have gone through with a highlighter pen. He unfolded the cardboard foot at the back of the frame and propped up the album sleeve with its matte-finished border of funereal black. He stepped back to contemplate it and heaved a big old big-man sigh. Then he turned to face the inexplicable room and reached for a chicken leg. He bit and chewed and swallowed without apparent pleasure, by which token Nat saw that his partner was truly angry.

“Arch—”

“I’m here to listen,” Archy said to Nat. “You listen, too.” Chomp. “Excuse me, Councilman. Please continue.”

“Okay,” Rod Abreu said. “Well, like I explained, Mr. Stallings, just a minute ago, at this point in the game, I actually don’t think we should be thinking of fighting anything. I was just saying…” He looked sheepish. “What was I saying?”

“Go A’s,” said Dr. Milne.

“Right. Football. Yes. Folks, there is no question, if you don’t know, take it from me, Gibson Goode has done great things for the community down in L.A., a community where not a whole lot of great things were happening before. I commend and admire him for that, and I commend the people, some of my colleagues on the city council, who look at what Mr. Goode has done in L.A. and say, hey, wouldn’t it be great if we could make something like that happen here in Oakland. And hey, he’s a hometown boy, right? A homeboy. Wouldn’t something like that be awesome? A shot in the arm. Well, yes, maybe it would be awesome. It sounds awesome. It looks awesome on paper. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, and