Telegraph Avenue

“Highland Hospital,” Goode said, pointing. “I was born there.”

“Me, too,” Archy said.

“Moved down to L.A. when I was three, but I came back in the summertime, Christmastime. Whenever school got out. Lived with my grandmother in the Longfellow district. Her brother had a record store for a time. Was on Market and Forty-fifth, over by the Laundromat there.”

“House of Wax,” Archy said. It was almost a question. “Seriously? I used to go in there. Your grandfather, he was, uh, kind of a portly man?”

“My uncle. Great-uncle. Uncle Reggie was pretty much spherical.”

“I remember him,” Archy said. And then, as if the line that hooked it had been snagged all these years on some deep arm of coral, an afternoon bobbed to the surface of his memory. A boy, the offhand sketch of a boy, reading a comic book or a magazine, long feet hooked through the slats of a metal stool, a pair of brand-new Top Tens. “Maybe I even remember you.”

Goode lifted a hand to his cheek and patted it as if checking the closeness of his morning shave or monitoring a toothache.

“You used to read comic books?” Archy said.

“Most definitely.”

“You were reading a comic book.” Archy took hold of the line with both hands and hauled up the afternoon, streaming years like water. “I’m thinking it was a Marvel book, but—”

“It was Luke Cage,” Goode said, picking off the memory from Archy like a bobbled pass. Too positive about it, stripping the ball.

“Was it?”

“Yeah, Luke Cage, Power Man. And we got into a discussion, a long discussion,” turning to Walter, who lifted his head from his hands and stared, the food on his plate sitting there untouched. “Got ourselves way down deep.”

With the sunglasses, the smile that twisted Goode’s mouth could not be read for levels of irony or nostalgia.

“Well,” Archy began.

“This motherfucker was peeling off all these sophisticated interpretations. Inner meanings. In Luke Cage. Talking about the American penal system as portrayed in Marvel Comics. Referencing all kinds of heavy reading materials. Eleven, twelve years old, telling me what, like, Frantz Fanon has to say about the possibility of black superheroes in a white superpower structure and whatnot.”

“Huh,” Walter said, looking doubtful, life returning to him in the form of irritation. This claim was almost certainly 90 to 97 percent false. The shimmer of what Archy remembered from that afternoon at House of Wax was only an awkward mutual series of passwords exchanged, the chance encounter with a random nerd brother in an unexpected location. Right up to this very instant Archy possessed no theory of black superheroics, only a vague idea of who Frantz Fanon was, and apart from the redoubtable Black Panther, particularly during the operatic run of McGregor-Graham on the book, Archy had never taken particular interest in the skin color of the comic book superheroes he loved, most of whom, now that he thought about it, had been white. The world in which those characters lived and operated was plainly not the world in which Archy lived, and on the whole that was the way he preferred it. On that long-distant afternoon at House of Wax, there had been no theory spun, no deep knowledge displayed. Goode was flattering him, either because he was a flatterer or because he wanted to see if Archy was a hound for flattery. Archy had to admit that there was something gratifying about the flicker of envy he saw in Walter’s eyes as Goode falsely lionized his critical acumen at eleven.

“You have a better memory than I do,” Archy suggested, guarded, leery, unable to shake a feeling not just that he was stepping out on Nat Jaffe, up here dining on shrimp and flattery and all kinds of piquant sauces, but that he was in over his head, that he was going to be edged into doing something or agreeing to something that he did not want to do or agree to, into something at least that he did not understand, some kind of business being transacted by Goode and Flowers that would prove costly to Luther Stallings, maybe other people, too. To judge from things Archy had read about G Bad, as well as from memories of watching him on television as he conducted instantaneous Einstein-deep analyses in the pocket under a heavy rush (not to mention the simple fact that he was visiting the man in the cabin of his personal zeppelin that flew on the gas of burning dollars), Gibson Goode was smarter than Archy on many levels. “But I remember you, and I remember your uncle.”

Goode got up and went over to a beautiful Thorens semi-automatic, perched atop a low plastic cabinet that formed part of the plastic wall of the cabin. On a shelf along the bottom of the cabinet, beneath the turntable, a row of LPs lounged like boys at lazy angles. Beside the albums, a steel mesh box held a couple of dozen 45s. Goode flipped through them, chose one, and did what he needed to do to the turntable to switch it over to forty-five revolutions per minute.

“Name that tune,” he said.

He lowered the tonearm, and from a pair of speaker grilles, a drum pattern emerged and repeated itself, b-boom boom CHICK! in 4/4 time, the kick muffled, mixed very dry and miked with the attention to detail that marked 1970s recording of drums but partaking, through having been sampled so many times by subsequent hip-hop acts, of a timelessness beyond period or style.

“Manzel,” Archy said, knowing that he was being tested, thinking it was kind of a bullshit move and yet incapable of resisting the challenge, which was hardly a challenge at all. “‘Midnight Theme.’ That was on the, uh, Fraternity label. 1975.”

The single played on, adding textures, stacking up layers. A moody wash of piano, a stab of ARP strings. The swirl and growl of a Hammond B-3 played through the whirling orrery of a Leslie cabinet. Scritch-scratch guitar, coming in on the 2, along with paired lines of space-funk Minimoog that sidled in, late arrivals, to carry the melody and bass line, that Minimoog sound popping the bubble of timelessness and returning the track, comfortably, to its home in the mid-1970s.

“Sounds good,” Archy said. “Nice pressing.”

“Know where I bought it?” Goode said.

“Was on Saturday afternoon,” Goode said. “Walter here had told me about you, your store. Thought I should check it out. I had to be up here anyway. So I came in the store, your boy was there. Nat, right? Said you was home, gone for the day, some shit.”

“Yeah, I had to meet somebody.” Archy kept his thoughts off that last encounter with Mr. Jones, ran back the tape on every conversation he’d had with Nat since Saturday that had contained the words “Gibson Goode,” looking for hints of guilty knowledge, a secret suppressed. “Damn. MVP quarterback media mogul comes in our store, cagey motherfucker never says a word to me.”

It did not strike Archy as the kind of thing Nat was likely to keep quiet about, let alone forget.

“He didn’t know me,” Goode said. “I was just a customer. Between you and me, dude didn’t seem too keen on making conversation. Up there at the cash register all mumbling to himself, making these fucked-up Keith Jarrett noises, like hnnh. Only wasn’t any piano around.”

“He has days like that,” Archy said.

“To be honest,” Goode said, “I mean, look here, y’all have a nice store and everything. Really nice. Lot of charm, inventory goes deep, goes wide. But it wasn’t just your partner that seemed kinda out of it. Business seemed pretty fucking slow.”

“We’re doing all right.”

“Oh, really? I stayed twenty-two minutes, I was the only one in the place the whole time. That place was desolate. On a Saturday afternoon.”

“But I mean, Saturday was a beautiful day,” remembering the scent of honeysuckle in sunshine, the knock- knock of Mr. Jones’s pipe against the sidewalk, “lot of folks were probably—”

“Your partner up by the cash register, all groaning and moaning. Felt like I was in the motherfucking Omega Man in there. Last man alive, trapped with a zombie.”

For the first time since they came in sight of the Minnie Riperton, Walter smiled and burped up something that sounded like a laugh. Archy turned away, watching the approach of Berkeley as they turned to the north. Anger and shame braided themselves like wires through his interior cabinetry, with shame carrying the greater flow. He did not like to stand there while G Bad or anyone tore off woof tickets about