Telegraph Avenue

“You are planning to stay here,” Julie said. “In, like, a garage.”

“Hello, Archy.”

“Hey, Valletta. What’s up?”

“Oh, you know. Just another motherfucking day in the ancient Egyptian Land of Rebirth.”

“Say again?”

Valletta only shook her head in an infinitesimal arc, almost a tremor, as if saying it again would cost her too much dignity.

“So, you up for the stepmom gig this time? Step-grandmom. Seems like you’re about to have another mouth to feed.”

“I had not heard that.”

“That the deal, Luther? Titus gonna stay here with you?” Archy took a slow, theatrical, but keen look around the premises of Motor City Auto Body. “Doesn’t look too comfortable. You and Valletta really sleeping here?”

Julie had been wondering that, too. He dreaded to consider the possibility that the two gray sofas, their original coloration lost to time, might be converted into places where human beings passed the night.

“It’s all right,” Luther said.

“Glad to hear it. Y’all got room for one more?”

Luther didn’t answer, just stood there with his arms folded and an offended expression, moving his lips as if trying to formulate an argument for why Archy ought to show more respect. At last he shrugged and turned to Titus. “Go on, now,” he said.

Titus crumpled. Everything bright, all the fierceness, drained out of his face. He didn’t move, didn’t say a word. It hurt Julie to see it, not because his friend was disappointed so much as because he ever could have thought Luther was going to let him stay.

“Go on!” Luther repeated. “I know Eddie Cantor don’t plan to start running no group home anytime soon.”

Over in the service bay, Eddie nodded, slow and firm, looking like he might be considering whether to point out to Luther that he was not running a hotel, either, or a halfway house, or a B&B.

Titus made a wild experiment. “Grampa,” he tried. The word sounded exotic on his lips, unlikely, as though it referred to something mythical or long extinct.

“One step at a time,” Luther said.

“If that,” said Archy, and Valletta said, “That’s right.”

“Go on,” Luther said. “We’ll see you again.”

In one final, loose-limbed access of emotion, Titus went slack as a child and groaned. Then he stood up straight and rolled, walking like Strutter, past Archy and toward the open doorway of the middle bay. “Man, how can you let your father live that way?” he said.

Julie, feeling unexpectedly that Archy, historically his favorite person in the world, was being a total douche toward Luther, who had straightened himself out and was really sorry about everything and simply needed a little help, could not bring himself to say so, but he went over to the bin on the workbench and pointed. “Do you think I could maybe have one of those head shots?” he said. “I really like your movies.”

“What?” Luther said, watching his grandson strut angrily out into the giant blank where at one time the trains and ships of a mighty nation had come to exchange cargoes, and Oakland had fattened on war and on the flesh of San Francisco. Walking out into the ghost footsteps of his great-grandfather, who worked the docks here and got blown up one day during World War II when Vallejo, or maybe it was Martinez, exploded. “Sure, go ahead. Help yourself.”

Julie went over to the plastic bin. He was about to pick up the photo when he noticed, lying in a corner of the bin, the faded and wrinkled husk, like a vacated chrysalis, purply blue, of what could only be a Batman glove. It was stained dark along the fingers and fraying at the seams. It had the little old-school fins, and Julie guessed it was the same vintage as the door that hung from Sixto Cantor’s wall, with its red bat logo. In his imagination—patrolling the streets of Genosha or Wakanda or the corridors of Blue Area of the Moon in MTO—Dezire wore long purple gloves. It had never occurred to Julie that they ought to have fins. He snatched up the stray glove and shoved it down into the pocket of his cutoffs.

“Do you have a pen?” Julie asked Archy when he had chosen the picture he wanted and turned away from the bin.

Archy put a warning in his voice. “Julie.”

“I want to get an autograph. Come on. Don’t be a dick.”

“‘Don’t be a dick.’ That’s how you’re going to talk to me.”

“I want. An autograph.”

Archy fished a pen out of his pocket and click-clicked it. Then he handed it to Julie.

“You tell him it’s just a matter of time,” Luther said in a low voice as he scratched the pen across the bottom right corner of the photo. “Soon as my associates come through. After that, him and me can talk it over, see what’s possible.”

That was when Julie knew the Strutter 3 venture was doomed, if not imaginary. He determined on the spot to see that it came true, that it happened, that Strutter was resurrected one last time to kick it old-school, for the sake of Titus, for the sake of Luther, and for the sake of the world of cinema, too.

DON’T LOSE THAT DREAM, Luther wrote. BEST WISHES, LUTHER STALLINGS.

The late Randall “Cochise” Jones, his mortal remains. Washed, powdered, painted. Conduits and chambers flooded with aldehydes. Broken ribs set. Eyelids sealed, jawbone wired shut, fingernails trimmed close as in life, fingers woven into a trellis on the belly. Vestigial smile of forgiveness. Hallucinogenic Ron Postal leisure suit that cost three hundred dollars in 1975. Stacy Adams Spectators, two-tone blue and white. Thick ginger-gray flag of hair flown stubbornly to the left, as in life. Stashed like some fine tool or instrument in the velour darkness of a casket prepaid since 1997. The velour a specified shade of purple called zinfandel. Satin pillow propping up the ten-pound head. Exterior of the casket done up in a rich oak finish like the cabinet of a Leslie speaker, then trimmed out like the lost ark with finials and gargoyles of gold plate. Loaded onto a mortuary cot, ready to ride up the freight elevator to the garage at the back of Flowers & Sons Funeral Home, where a pristine 1969 Oldsmobile 98 Cotner Bevington, borrowed for the occasion from a funeral home up in Richmond, waited to ferry it over to Brokeland Records. Here the body would be laid out for a combination wake and funeral scheduled to begin at eleven A.M. and to last until three P.M. or the refreshments ran out. When the living had concluded their business of farewell, the casket would be rolled back to the capacious rear section of the hearse. Half an hour later, at Mountain View Cemetery, it would be put into the ground alongside what remained of the dead man’s second wife, Fernanda. And that would be the end of that. Mr. Jones’s funeral plan had called for the use of Flowers and Sons’ vintage 1958 Cadillac, but the Caddy had come down with a pain in the alternator. Even if Mr. Jones had known of the substitution, he hardly could have faulted the magnificent Olds 98, batlike and swooping, ready to haul ass through even the shadowiest valley.

“You need a permit, anything like that, lay a body out in a record store?”

“I don’t know. If you do, I guess Chan Flowers took care of it. Man took care of everything.”

“No doubt,” Singletary said. “No doubt. Now, seriously, watch out, ain’t no light, the upstairs switch is broken.”

You might have tunneled, given time enough and shovels, from the basement of Flowers & Sons, where the body of Cochise Jones lay in zinfandel darkness, to the basement of his house on Forty-second Street, but you probably would have run into problems trying to get in. It was a basement of the 1890s, resolute and dry. The house had been built by a retired riverboat captain from Sacramento who married a Portuguese girl of whom there were still living memories among a few of the very oldest neighbors, like Mrs. Wiggins. The smell of thousands of record albums submitting themselves to the depredations of bacteria and mold could not entirely erase the lingering smell of the cardoon cheeses that the old woman had manufactured for decades, along with hams and pickled tomatoes, in her basement.

“I hope he ain’t mad about the Cadillac,” Singletary said.

“If it’s the same Olds they had at Ardis Robinson’s funeral,” Nat said, citing the funeral two years back of a mainstay of the Bay Area funk circuit during the seventies and eighties, “it’ll work.”