Telegraph Avenue

hey, I’m a homeboy, too? Born in East Oakland, right at Highland Hospital? It’s this: I have seen a lot of impressive people come through this city over the years with a lot of awesome ideas that looked good on paper. Hey, when you look like I do, on paper’s your only hope.”

That got a laugh, Shoshana in her chemo scarf nodding, other people nodding. Abreu worked those doleful eyes, those Marrano eyes, abreu meaning “Hebrew,” as Nat would have liked to inform Archy, in Portuguese, or maybe it was Catalan.

“Whenever you have a proposal as ambitious as this one, and folks, no doubt about it, this is a very ambitious proposal, you have to be careful. People tend, when you have a charismatic guy like Gibson Goode, a genuine superstar, hey, somebody like that generates a lot of excitement, people get kind of caught up, right? And when people get excited, they get carried away, then they rush into things. And that’s why we are here today. Because somebody has to kind of hang back a little, say, okay, let’s slow down. Let’s take our time with this. That’s the message I’m bringing you today.”

Slow down, admittedly not quite the message that Nat had envisioned when he first began to lay his fevered plans, but his nose detected subterfuge in Abreu’s words, and he did not believe that a mere retarding action was all the councilman had in mind.

“And it’s the message that I’d like to take back from you and share with my colleagues on the city council.”

S. S. Mirchandani leaned in close to Archy. “I have been reliably informed,” he said in a portentous and inadequate whisper, nodding toward Abreu, “that he was the one getting Chan the Man’s sister fired from the port of Oakland.”

Like Archy, making his joyless way through a biscuit that might have brought joy to Eeyore, Nat affected not to have heard Mr. Mirchandani, but he glanced over at the likely source of the information. Singletary arched an eyebrow, then, after taking a look around the room, smiled a dubious but encouraging smile, the way you might smile at someone about to depress the ignition button of a homemade jet pack. He did not look too impressed by the putative founding membership of COCHISE, their ranks drawn largely, as Nat would have been obliged to concede, from the recipients of an e-mail sent in bee-meets-bonnet haste to those addresses in his personal contacts file who shared a zip code with Brokeland, a relatively modest number (Nat at best a fitful electronic correspondent) amassed over a period of several years from a disparate set of social contexts.

“Now, I want to thank our hosts today, you two are really pillars of this neighborhood, for organizing this get-together.”

“Huh,” said Archy.

Abreu turned at the sound and caught Nat in the midst of offering his landlord an elaborate shrug, lips down- twisted asymmetrically into an expression meant to convey 1) that his willingness to concede both the unlikeliness of COCHISE’s success and the regrettable preponderance, thus far, of white faces among its membership was accompanied by 2) a respectful suggestion that Singletary reserve judgment, because hey, you never knew what might happen, and a second, still more respectful suggestion that 3) Singletary go fuck himself; such elaborate, densely layered shrugs being a particular specialty of the Jaffes going back to their days of never knowing what might happen along the banks of the Vistula.

“No, really,” Abreu said, misinterpreting Nat’s shrug as modesty. “Brokeland Records, right, I mean, this place is so much more than a store. It’s a neighborhood institution. I know a lot of you folks have spent a lot of your time and money in this place over the years.”

“Lot more time than money,” Archy said, and Moby, who had dropped thousands over the years, loyally laughed.

“It’s the kind of independent, quirky, welcoming place…” Abreu went on, voice wavering as though he were picking up on the crackle of politics that troubled the air between the partners. The Spinozan sadness in his eyes seemed to balloon, and the thumbprints beneath them to deepen: “…that gives a special character to this part of the city. And it’s that special character we’re going to have to really consider as we look at the Dogpile plan going forward. There are also possibly some environmental-impact issues to look at. Now, I understand, from talking to, uh, Ms.—”

“Sandy,” said the former light in the eye and wag in the tail of poor Jasper. “That’s why I was told we couldn’t put a dog park there. The back end of the property used to be a factory or something. I heard there was mercury. You can’t dig it up without doing some kind of big cleanup.”

A number of people nodded and murmured that they had heard reports of some kind of problem with the site, but many more seemed to be hearing the information for the first time, and Nat was gratified by the concern that it appeared to engender, news of the danger forking outward, in his imagination, along a network of gossip and bloggery until it reached a crescendo of outrage that would doom the Dogpile proposal now and for all time, bring it with a creak and a crumble and a great cloud of dust to the ground. He wanted to turn to Archy, standing irritated next to him, turn to Aviva as in his imagination she ran screaming from the devastated kitchen of the home that was, after all, also threatened by the advent of the Thang, turn to the ghost of Opal Starrett, who always used to say, not without affection, that Nat was incapable of organizing an empty drawer, throw out his arms, and cry, Da-deeda-la-dee-dop!

Just as Nat was congratulating himself and mentally boasting to the living and the dead for his remarkable aim with the ancestral Davidic sling, he saw Singletary sit up electric-shock straight, then nod cool and wary at someone beyond the frame of the front window, out of Nat’s line of sight.

“So the Dogpile folks are probably going to run into some questions right there. And of course, and here’s the end of what I have to say, the city council and the planning commission are going to be looking for a lot of input and comment from you—”

And then in walked Chan the Man, in his Sergio Leone hat and funereal suit, steps precise, eye bright and quick as a rooster’s. He stopped in the doorway with two of his nephews paired behind him. “Oh my goodness,” he said. “I am sorry. I did not realize.”

He raised a hand to his mouth and looked embarrassed. Dumbfounded to discover his favorite record store almost if not quite packed with people in the middle of the day. Far more people, perhaps, than had ever been almost but not quite packed into this space at any time in its history, even back when it was Spencer’s Barbershop. For a kinescoped instant Nat cut away in his imagination from the scene at Brokeland to an afternoon forty years earlier, men and boys, maybe Chan Flowers and Luther Stallings among them, jostling around a portable black- and-white to watch Cassius Clay take down the Big Bear. Nat wished intensely that this gathering could be that gathering, these people could be those, with all the years of ferment and innovation in the music and the life of black America ahead of them. Hope unfulfilled, not yet betrayed.

The crafty old fucker, acting surprised. It was barely possible that he felt surprised by the decent turnout Nat had managed, but Nat did not buy for a second that the guy was embarrassed, that he just happened to walk in on the organizational meeting of COCHISE, oh my goodness, so sorry to interrupt, I see I will have to come back later. Flowers made a more rapid but careful survey of the human contents of the room. When he reached the King of Bling, he paused.

“Mr. Singletary,” he said with cold affection. “Well, well. An august presence.”

Singletary said, “Mm-hmm.” Savoring it, all at once content to be there in the room, the King of Bling kicked back on the stool. He smiled slowly. Chan the Man smiled right back.

“So many faces I don’t know,” he said as if fault for the ignorance were entirely his. “Oh, now, Elisheva, isn’t it?”

“Yes, hello,” said the lady rabbi from Neshama, wagging three fingers Girl Scout–style.

“Making your preparations for the High Holidays?”

“They’re getting close,” Elisheva said.

“That’s right! Rosh Hashanah!” On Flowers’s lips, the name of the holiday sounded like something much grander to Nat’s ear, roarsh ha-shanah!, a Klingon affair involving ritual combat and lunar howling. “And who else? Oh, excuse me, there, brother.”

The Steven Hawking guy joysticked his chair around to make room, causing Abreu to take a step back and thus come into Chan Flowers’s line of sight for the first time. He had been concealed by the certificate, mounted on a piece of foam core, advising all comers that in 2003 readers of the Express had declared Brokeland records to be the Best Used Record Store in the East Bay, a conclusion they had reached in