Telegraph Avenue

“Nice,” Archy admitted, running his own finger along the spines of the records.

“Beautiful,” Nat said, giving the word the full benefit of his residual Tidewater accent.

“Nat,” Archy said, “nothing would make me happier than to let you take twelve thousand five hundred dollars you don’t have and buy these records for us, then you and me sit on top of them for two, three years like a couple of dad penguins. Listening to Idris Muhammad all day long, all that crazy old Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith he had, that Versatile side he did with Grant motherfucking Green that never got released, I mean—”

“I know, you saw that?” Nat hung on, fanning the little spark of it.

“But I have been fucking off, fucking up, and fucking around for too long. I need to get real, else I’m going to end up living in an auto body shop. I need insurance, a paycheck, all that straight-life bullshit. Gwen goes out on maternity, she doesn’t work, I’m going to need to take care of her, the baby. I got to settle some shit with Titus, Nat, that boy—”

“You guys back together?”

“Huh?”

“You and Gwen. She moved back in?”

“Last night.”

“Hey, all right.”

“Uh-huh, she moved in, then she threw my ass out. Said it was her house, too, and so on. She came home, I don’t— Something got into her. Had the gain on the flamethrower turned all the way up.”

“Yeah, I heard she was in fine form yesterday. I heard she did the full mau-mau routine on those assholes at Chimes.”

“Is that the term Aviva used to describe it, ‘mau-mau’?”

“That was just my interpretation.”

“Black midwife standing up for herself to a bunch of white doctors, that makes it a mau-mau?”

“I don’t have a problem with mau-mauing,” Nat said. “It’s a valid technique.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Archy said. “Black folks been holding off on the mau-mauing lately, till we got a ruling from you.”

“Where are we?” Garnet Singletary said, sounding prepared to be disappointed by the answer. He filled the space at the end of the narrow alley in which Archy and Nat seemed to have lodged.

“Where we are is, Archy is ‘getting real,’” Nat said.

“That doesn’t sound like an offer,” Singletary said.

“Nat, man, please. We can get into all of this tomorrow. We don’t need to get into it now. Mr. S., respect, I know you’re in a hurry, but today I am about trying to do this one thing of sending off Cochise Jones how he expected and how he deserved. I can’t be about anything else.”

“Are you going with Gibson Goode?” Nat laughed, a single incredulous bark. “Ho! Wait! Is that what you’re doing right now? You already took the job! Jesus Christ, Arch, is that why you’re here? Did he, did your friend Kung Fu give you his checkbook, tell you, go ahead, get in there, start stocking your Beats Department?”

“Hold up, Nat. Now you’re getting toward paranoid.”

“A short journey,” Garnet Singletary observed.

“I seriously doubt if the offer is even out there anymore,” Archy said. “Maybe I put the man off too long.”

“I can’t believe I told you what my number would be.”

“Why don’t you tell me your number?” Singletary suggested. “I’m the one selling the damn records. No, I tell you what. Do it this way, I give you a number. Seventeen thousand dollars.”

“I am supposed to give you seventeen grand to buy back a bunch of records I already bought and sold once before,” Nat said. “Some of these records are like children to me, you’re going to make me pay for them twice.”

“Give me a offer, then,” Singletary said, declining to acknowledge that Nat was starting to get bothered. “Then you get to sell them twice, too.”

“Fuck it,” Nat said. “We’re already having one funeral. Let’s bury everything. Right here and now. Have done with it.” He brushed past Singletary, in his pointy little loafers went banging back upstairs.

“Seem like maybe you been putting a lot of people off a little too long,” said Singletary.

“I know it,” Archy said. “I wish I knew what was wrong with me.”

“I got a theory.”

“Which is?”

“Maybe you are sick to death of mold-smelling, dust-covered, scratched-up, skipping, wobbly old vinyl records.”

“You said ‘no blaspheming.’”

“Maybe you sick of Nat Jaffe. Man started to get on my nerves five minutes before I met him.”

Archy experienced a certain temptation to assent to this theory, but it felt disloyal, so he only said without enthusiasm, “Huh? Nah, man, Nat’s my nigger.”

Singletary seemed to weigh this claim. “Was just a question of knowing how to fry a chicken leg,” he said, “I might almost be prepared to agree to that description.”

“So, yeah. I guess you better call Amoeba or whoever. Call Rick Ballard down at Groove Yard.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Singletary said. “Okay, now, hold on. Let me just ask you. What was his number going to be?”

“He said something about eleven. Fifty-five apiece, but I don’t have it, and as far as I know, neither does he.”

“And if he did, if he came up with the money, and you all acquired Mr. Jones’s collection here for something south of fifteen but north of eleven, would you be able to make money on that?”

“Hard to say.”

“Oh, no doubt.”

“A little, maybe. Maybe a little more than a little. Nat was saying about France and Japan, but that’s no sure thing. It would improve our inventory, I mean, damn, there is some tough stuff here. Maybe if we expanded our website, did more of the shows. Put a little more push into the business side of the business, spent a little less time shooting the shit around that counter.”

“Aw, no, don’t say that,” Singletary said. “I might back off from the fool offer I am about to propose. Because you know, truth is, I don’t give a shit about some scratched-up vinyl Rahsaan Kirk, Ornette Coleman sound-like-a- goose-trying-to-fuck-a-bicycle bootleg pressing from the rare Paris concert of 1967. I spend five minutes listening to that, I’m like to want to slap somebody. I don’t really like any jazz, to be honest. The kind of style Mr. Jones played, mostly have a steady groove to it, that was all right, but when I get home at the end of a working day, Miller time, put some music on, you know what I like? I like Peabo Bryson.”

“Peabo had his due share of jams.”

“Here’s my concern in this matter. I know you think I am messing around in all that protest shit your partner’s stirring up to annoy Chan Flowers. Just because I maintain historically cool relations with the councilman. And true, that is part of the reason. But the real reason is something that’s not that. The reason, I remember when that record store used to be Eddie Spencer’s. And before that, when I first got out of the army, right after the war, it was called Angelo’s Barbershop, and those old Sicilian dudes used to go in, get their mustaches looked to or whatnot. I have known Sicilians, and so I feel confident saying, your store been full of time-wasting, senseless, lying, boastful male conversation for going on sixty years, at least. What that Abreu said the other day at that meeting, he was right. It’s an institution. You all go out of business, I don’t know. I might have to let in some kind of new age ladies, sell yoga mats. Everybody having ‘silence days,’ walking around with little signs hanging from their neck saying ‘I Am Silent Today.’ I would take that as a loss.”

“Garnet Singletary,” Archy letting amazement show on his face. “One-man historical preservation society. Turning soft on me.”

“Lot of bad things happen once you start to get old.”