Telegraph Avenue

version of a song you would hear on an oldies station, but it’s too late, baby, now, it’s too late, the parrot sounding like a funky church organ and making its musical selection, given the circumstances, with what seemed to be a disturbing sense of the apropos, the endless organ solo after a couple of hours kind of sort of starting to work on Aisha’s last nerve, the latter a strand of bodily tissue notorious among her friends and family for its thinness and stretched as well by her ADD-ass little son lying there on the rug kicking his ADD-ass little feet, and also by an eerie dead-old-man vibration troubling the air in the house, a smell of decrepitude and neglected houseplants, water drops hitting the bathtub from a leaky tap like a ticking clock, year after year of debts and depositions, old record albums, the elegiac smell of leisure suit, all of it starting to creep Aisha the fuck out, but at last she got everything tagged and bagged and boxed and, having buckled Rolando back into his car seat for safekeeping, made five trips to the street, arms loaded with exiled shit to put out for curbside pickup, trying, as she climbed and descended the front steps, to reckon once and for all in her mind what was the right thing to do about the parrot, her analysis determining that it could be 1) sold for money, 2) put down, or 3) set at liberty to forge its own fate in the wild, but when she returned for the last time to Cochise Jones’s house, having decided to turn the question over to the executor, who was also her father, Garnet Singletary, in spite of the certainty that in consulting him, she would incur the risk of his electing to choose option 4) keeping the gray parrot for himself, a fate that she placed somewhere between 1) and 2) from the parrot’s point of view, and worse, from her own, since she had a serious case of birdophobia and, what was more, believed firmly that her father’s house already smelled bad enough, thank you very much, she came back into the living room to find her baby just sitting there in his car seat, sucking on his bottle, no longer kicking, studying the bird while the bird, fallen silent, contemplated the baby, and Aisha understood how the part of Rolando that was like a wild animal, all eyes and reflexes, was a part already fading and soon to vanish from the world, understood how fragile was her child and how contingent that world, to her, on Rolando, understood the price in heartache that her child would extract from her in exchange for the ever passing joy of him, and then the parrot aimed a quick eye at her, and there was something about its expression, an air of sympathetic reserve, of pity kept politely to itself, which unnerved her further, so that though it was time to call her father and hand the bird over, time to tell the baby, “Okay, mister, we got to bounce,” Aisha looked at the two little animals caught up in some kind of moment, and felt something long- stymied inside her pop loose, and now, at last, the parrot spoke, saying plainly, in the voice of Cochise Jones, “Quarter to three in the gotdamn morning!” and that was when, short story long, Aisha went over to the bedroom window and threw it open to a fine August afternoon, blue sky and green trees and any old thing a parrot might want, some dim memory chiming in her brain of rumored colonies of parrots, or was it parakeets, flying wild over San Francisco and, picturing Fifty-Eight making some local East Bay scene down in Trestle Glen, or up in Tilden Park, and holding fixed in her mind that happy image of sociable birds running loose in the trees, Aisha screwed up her courage and got in close to the bird, scary close, close enough to grab the pole of the perch, to smell the hot-newspaper funk on its feathers, then carried perch and parrot over to the open window, brusquely exhorting the bird to go free, an invitation of which the parrot did not hesitate to avail itself; a rousing of neck feathers, a sidestep, then flap, flap out into the day with no word of valediction, a bird of wide experience and rare talent set free over Telegraph Avenue, catching a scent of eucalyptus in its olfactory organs, banking left and heading north across Forty-third Street, up two blocks, passing over the Bruce Lee Institute of Martial Arts, in whose secret room, at the back of the stairs leading up to the roof, where exiles and religious fugitives and, for nine nights, a Living Buddha from the mountains of Sichuan, had all known bitterness and safety, Luther Stallings and Valletta Moore prepared to flee, neither of them quite clean but both of them dreadfully sober, zipping what all they had into suitcases and gym bags, Luther sending Valletta down to the tiny parking lot out back to load up the car, then at her honk—she was not supposed to honk—coming down himself, careful as a cat, bringing out what he called “the crown jewels,” though Valletta was uncertain whether the term referred to himself or to the contents of the bulging portfolio and plastic storage bin that he carried: the conceptual artwork, promotional designs, notes, treatments, screenplay drafts, and other creative materials that, in the event he predeceased the start of production, might someday be packaged and assembled, as it pleased him to imagine, into a special slipcovered edition entitled, with becoming modesty, Strutter Kicks It Old-School: The Second Greatest Film That Never Was, the number one greatest film that never was being, of course, Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon, curating the bin and portfolio down the stairs with a tenderness rarely shown, in her opinion, to Valletta, out onto a back porch of painted two-by-fours which the director of the Bruce Lee Institute, Irene Jew, was sweeping with a crazy-looking Chinese broom, just a bunch of long twigs witch-knotted together on a bamboo pole with a piece of straw, a tool for sweeping away demons, sifu Irene a woman schooled in the art of being haunted, so that two young black men in ill-fitting suits, trying to appear as if they had parked randomly outside the Institute earlier that day, in their hearse, had posed zero challenge to her skills at the kung fu of ghosts, the apparition sending her straight upstairs to tell Luther that his cover was blown, Mrs. Jew leaving off her sweeping long enough to say “Don’t worry” to Luther as he passed, because, he understood, she was worried, so that all he could reply was “Should have left yesterday,” then let her get back to her sweeping while he loaded the storyboards of his dream into the trunk of the Toronado, like some kind of deposed tin pot from Haiti or the Philippines about to get into a Sikorsky and fly to a tax haven, only without the title, the helicopter, or the income to be taxed, a king in ruins, still the most brilliant product of the Bruce Lee Institute and the most talented student Mrs. Jew had ever taught, shoving Valletta’s wig box into the trunk alongside his practice bokken, nowhere to really go, no one to help him, Archy never going to drop his permanent eternal state of beef with Luther, though Luther had tried to make amends, take responsibility, tried all twelve steps, some of them two or three times apiece, got the degree in regret and done the postgraduate work in sorry, but Archy wanted nothing to do with Luther, would not listen, would not even listen to people, the man’s own wife, telling him to listen, meanwhile Luther living, in spite of sobriety and its promised advantages, so broke and destitute that he was forced to seek refuge in the bosom of crazy old Irene Jew, God love the little Chinese lady, desperate enough to reach out to Gibson Goode, to undertake the long-contemplated shakedown of Chan Flowers, which he had always been too fucked up before this to attempt, a Hail Mary from the bottom of a deep dogpile indeed, at the far-distant end of whose majestic arc lay enough money—Goode had promised—to finance Luther’s dream too long deferred, every shot of the film worked out in his mind from the classic slow strut through the streets of Oakland Chinatown on a busy Saturday morning, under the opening credits, Cleon Strutter come out of retirement to pull one last funky heist job, a blast from the past in a three-piece suit and Borsalino, a whup-ass Rip Van Winkle, to the final freeze frame, Luther always having found a strangely fraught pleasure in movies that ended like that, Butch Cassidy, Fists of Fury, a shot of Luther and Valletta jumping out of an airplane into an ocean full of sharks with a suitcase full of gold, every detail thought through over the course of long years, from the ad campaign to the casting, so that when the film came out, Luther would star not only on screen but at the center of his own comeback story, saved by no one, unlike Pam Grier or John Travolta, but himself, and by nothing but his own genius, and fuck that little whiteboy Tarantino anyway, passing Luther up for the part of Winston in Jackie Brown only because he believed the (perfectly true at the time) rumors about Luther Stallings’s uncontrollable drug use, Luther imagining in like detail every shot of his comeback story as well, which would end with himself tossing down, in front of Valletta, a pile of job offers from agents and producers, clearing the way for Luther to take on his dream after next, which was to work with Clint Eastwood, whom he considered, as known at this point by half of West Oakland living and dead, to be the single greatest leading man in Hollywood history, and on whose eloquent taciturnity he had modeled his own reticent style, a style in stark contrast, as much of West Oakland dead and living would also readily attest, to his voluble off-camera self, or hey, maybe at the other end of this Hail Mary pass, he would take all the money he squeezed loose from Gibson Goode, for services rendered in helping change Chan Flowers’s mind about the Dogpile Thang, and snort it right on up his nose, an option that, as he helped Valletta load her barbells into the car, struck him as possibly preferable to the comeback story, which was going to be difficult, so much more motherfucking hard than he ever allowed himself to consider; and just before they rolled out of the back alley, Luther saw against the afternoon sky the foreign profile of the fugitive parrot making its escape, taking its bearings generally along the hypotenuse of Telegraph Avenue while parsing light and scent and angles for their information, reckoning a course toward the eucalyptus hills, thrown eastward by a sensation of horror as it skirted the death cloud hovering above the Smokehouse hamburger stand, the sudden detour sending it over the street of forgotten toys, over the tan bungalow lost in flowers, where Fifty-Eight went unobserved by either of the house’s present occupants, a man and a boy, side by side on a yellow Swedish sofa from the 1950s that the man had bought because it somehow reminded him of a zoot suit, watching the A’s play Baltimore, Rich Harden on the