Telegraph Avenue

Brokeland, which, along with some of the sounds that had issued at times from his Fender Jazz Bass, Archy had always considered the only truly beautiful thing he had ever made. He knew that he and Nat were financially circling the spindle in an ever narrowing gyre. Now here came this man who could afford, even in these times of failing record chains and of infinite free downloadable libraries that fit in your hip pocket, to open a bangin used vinyl store, five times as big as Brokeland and tenfold deep and, just for the glory and goodness of it, let it fail, forever, inexhaustibly bankrolled by his media empire, his licensed image, his alchemical touch with ghetto real estate. Breezing into Brokeland on a Saturday afternoon, a king in mufti, come to lay his sandal upon the necks of the conquered.

Archy felt ashamed, too, remembering the longing that had stirred in him, not half an hour before, to throw over, once and for all, the burden of the store. Remembering the first time he had met Nat Jaffe, after that last- minute wedding gig up in the Oakland hills, Archy fresh from the Saudi desert, dragging his honorably discharged ass through the streets of Bush I America, disoriented, lonely, unable to connect to anyone, black or white. How he and Nat had sat on the floor of the Jaffes’ living room till five o’clock in the morning, little Julie asleep, Aviva out wrestling some other new human into the world. Nat rolled fat numbers packed with the Afghan butthair, threaded and hoary, that he routinely scored at that time, and stoned and cross-legged, they fell through the circular portals of Nat’s record collection, one after another, flat-out tumbled awestruck arm in arm like that team of chrononaut dwarfs in Time Bandits, through those magic wormholes in the fabric of reality. Archy was so impressed by the scope and detail but most of all by the passion—relentless, nettlesome, ecstatic, inspiring—of Nat’s knowledge when it came to music, “in all its many riches,” from Storyville whorehouse rags to South Bronx block-party sound-system battles. It had been a long time since Archy had seen a man so willing to betray himself by exuberance, by enthusiasm for things that could not be killed, fucked, or fed upon. Nat already dreaming of opening his own store, lacking only half the cash, half the records, and half the foolishness necessary for the undertaking.

“My partner is a cantankerous pain in the motherfucking ass,” Archy said, recalling the eagerness with which he had leaped at the chance to make up that holy trinity of shortfalls. “Also my best friend.”

He gazed down at Golden Gate Fields as it slid under them, the grandstand half full of losers, the horses blowing like confetti along the futile oval. They passed over the giant oil tanks of Richmond, ranked along the slopes like secondhand turntables on a pawnshop shelf. “Midnight” came to an end. The tonearm worked itself loose of the label’s edge and sought its well-deserved rest.

“Now,” Goode said. “I know you already know what it is we are planning to do in Temescal, and I gather the councilman already made a suggestion of what I might like to obtain from you in that direction.”

“You’re offering me a job,” Archy said.

“You could look at it that way. Or you could look at it, I am offering you a mission.”

“That’s right,” Walter said.

“I am building a monastery, if you like,” Goode said, warming up, “for the practice of vinyl kung fu. And I am asking you to come be my abbot. And, yeah,” with the enigmatic half-smile, “that does make me the Buddha, but don’t go too far down that analogy, ’cause, check it out, now I’m a bend it a little. What I am asking you to do, to be— Look here, did you ever read this book, Taku over there turned me on to it, A Canticle for Leibowitz?”

“Good book.”

“You know it. All right, then, look at it this way. The world of black music has undergone in many ways a kind of apocalypse, you follow me? You look at the landscape of the black idiom in music now, it is post- apocalyptic. Jumbled-up mess of broken pieces. Shards and samples. Gangsters running in tribes. That is no disrespect to the music of the past two decades. Taken on its own terms. I love it. I love it. Life without Nas, without the first Slum Village album, without, shit, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill? Can’t imagine it. Can’t even imagine. And I’m not saying, just because we got sampling, we got no innovation happening. Black music is innovation. At the same time, we got a continuity to the traditions, even in the latest hip-hop joint. Signifying, playing the dozens. Church music, the blues, if you wanna look hard. But face it, I mean, a lot has been lost. A whole lot. Ellington, Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, we got nobody of that caliber even hinted at in black music nowadays, I’m talking about genius, composers, know what I’m saying? Quincy Jones. Charles Stepney. Weldon Irvine. Shit, knowing how to play the fuck out of your instrument. Guitar, saxophone, bass, drums, we used to own those motherfuckers. Trumpet! We were the landlords, white players had to rent that shit from us. Now, black kid halfway to a genius comes along? Like RZA? Can’t even play a motherfucking kazoo. Can’t do nothing but ‘quote.’ Like those Indians down in Mexico nowadays, skinny-ass, bean-eating motherfucker sleeping with his goat on top of a rock used to be a temple that could predict what time a solar eclipse was going to happen.

“I’m not going to blame nobody, and I don’t know what the reason is, because I haven’t studied it, and like with everything misfortunate in life, I bet there’s ten, twelve reasons for musical civilization getting wiped out by this here particular firestorm, what’s he call it in the book—?”

Goode glanced over at the bodyguard, Taku, who sat immersed in a copy of Shonen Jump magazine. “‘The Deluge of Flame,’” Taku said, not looking up.

“Record companies. MTV. Corporate radio. Crack cocaine. Budget cuts to music programs, high school bands. All that, none of that. Doesn’t make no difference. I’m saying we are living in the aftermath. All’s we got is a lot of broken pieces. And you been picking those pieces up, and dusting them off, and keeping them all nice and clean, and that’s commendable. Truly. What I’m offering you is a chance not just to hang them up on the wall of your museum, there, maybe sell one every now and then for some white dentist or tax attorney to take home and hang on his wall. I’m offering you, I’m saying, come on, let’s really put them out there where the kids are, where the future’s spending its money. Teach them. Explain what all those broken-up old pieces mean, why it’s all important. Then maybe one of those kids, maybe he’s going to come along, learn what you have to teach, and start to put things back together. If you feel me.”

“Huh,” said Archy. “So you want me to be Saint Leibowitz of the Funk.”

“More like, T., who was it? In that, what’s it? Foundation.”

“Hari Seldon,” Taku said.

“You can be Hari Seldon,” Goode said. “Preserving all the science till civilization gets reborn, man had a whole planet—”

“Terminus,” said Archy, right before the bodyguard could come out with it. Taku nodded once, solemn.

“Planet of the Negroes,” Walter said. “That’s what you should call your band. Y’all still play, right? You and your boy Nat?”

“When we can get the gigs.”

“What instrument he play, piano?”

“Some guitar. Mostly piano.”

“Like Bill Evans.”

“A touch.”

“Elton John. Barry Manilow.”

“Lennie Tristano,” Goode suggested.

“Actually,” Archy said, “Nat digs Tristano. Tristano sang at his birthday party, bar mitzvah, some kind of shit like that. And we already got a name, Walter, the Wakanda Philharmonic.” He looked at Goode, calling him out on the boyhood reminiscences, the secret comics-nerd lore. “I know, given our history, you can dig the reference.”

“I like it,” Goode said. “And speaking of names. How do you like this: the Cochise Jones Memorial Beats Department?”

“That’s nice. That’s a nice tribute. You ought to do that.”

“Come over, then. I will. I know you don’t believe me. But I’m not in it for the money. Record stores, brick and mortar, they’re dying. Large and small. Any fool can see that.”