Telegraph Avenue

Jones, man preferred to listen, witness, I bet most of you had no idea until this very afternoon, all due respect to Dr. Hanselius from the library, oh my goodness, Cochise Jones, look at you, dressing like that all the time, riding around town in your big old van with your gold toothpick, and all the time you secretly a Communist! Mr. Jones was like, almost like a father to me, used to pass me a little cash every now and then, kept an eye on me. Talked to me, and like I’m saying, that was, you know, it took an effort for him.

“Anyway, if you could drag it out of him, you found out sooner or later that Mr. Jones came here to Oakland from somewhere down in Louisiana, outside of New Orleans, was it Slidell? Yes, when he was fourteen, fifteen. His dad got a job working at the cannery, the one where the DMV is now? The Lusk Cannery, yes. That is all long before my time. But Mr. Jones used to tell me things, you know, every so often the parrot would lay off talking, Nat there just about finished up with the daily rant, ha, ha, something used to bubble up out of Mr. Jones. About the neighborhood. Things he remembered. Coming up a little boy in Louisiana, hearing things from the old folks, some of those people went way on back, back up almost to slavery times.

“I don’t know how many black folks came up to Oakland from Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, you know, back at the time when Mr. Jones and his family came here. Many, many thousands, tens of thousands. Yeah, so, they left most of what little they had down south, but they brought the music they liked, going back to like Congo Square or whatever. Jazz and boogie, church music. And then getting off the train in Oakland, everything’s booming. That’s when, if you came inside here, you most likely would be hearing that rocking postwar blues, that jump music, coming out of the radio Eddie Spencer used to keep on this shelf behind me.

“You listen to that music now, like Joe Houston, it’s rock and roll, right? Same music. Joe Turner. And that’s the kind of music Mr. Jones started out playing in public. That and church music, and church music, that’s like, that’s the original rock and roll. I can tell, looking at his face, my partner has certain bones to pick with my theorizing on this subject, but hey, we did that roshambo and I drew the eulogy, so hang with me, all right? I think you are going to like where this is going.

“Yeah, so, when he was in high school, Mr. Jones had a band, they were all black kids, played rhythm and blues, Drifters covers. But he also used to play sometimes with a bunch of white boys, I think they were called the Pearl Tones, was that it? Based out of Skyline High. Even when he first got known, in like ’64, ’65, playing straight- ahead jazz, kind of following on the organ a little bit what Ahmad Jamal was doing on the piano, even then he never totally lost that rocking touch. I know it always used to, not bother him, but make him a little sad the way people sat around listening to jazz. To those Eric Dolphy joints he played on, people nodding a little bit, tapping their feet, but not, you know, not up jumping around, getting wild, the way black folks generally, historically speaking, have tended to do.

“Meanwhile, on the radio, Mr. Jones is hearing Jimi Hendrix, hearing Sly Stone. Not just white boys playing black music, like always, or even black dudes playing in a white style, but really, like, this moment, this one moment, lasted four, five years, when the styles and the players were mixing it all up. The Temptations, some of that late stuff is heavy in the true rock-and-roll vernacular. And Mr. Jones, he knew Sly Stone, they was even related by marriage somehow, he started working some of that same idea into the jazz that he started to play.

“And even though he never lost that smooth approach, that soft touch on the right hand, his left hand, ’67, ’68, it started to get extremely funky. But Mr. Jones didn’t call his style ‘funky,’ I don’t believe I ever heard him use that term at all. Church music, jump music, rock and roll, hard bop, soul-jazz, none of that. We get into a lot of, like, genre arguments around here, like, is Donald Byrd’s Street Lady soul-jazz, or is it more to the side of jazz-funk? Is ‘hard bop’ redundant? Mr. Jones never took part in those discussions. But one time, I do remember, he called what he played ‘Brokeland Creole.’

“Creole, that’s, to me, it sums it up. That means you stop drawing those lines. It means Africa and Europe cooked up in the same skillet. Chopin, hymns, Irish music, polyrhythms, talking drums. And people. Cochise Jones, his mother was mostly, uh, Choctaw, I think it was. Me, my father’s half Mexican, which is already half something else. Brokeland Creole. Around here used to be Mexico, before that, Spain, before that, Ohlone. And then white people, Chinese, Japanese, black folks bringing that bayou, that Seminole, that Houston vibe. Filipinos. Toss ’em on the grill, go ’head. Brokeland Creole. And some more Mexicans, Guatemalans. Thai, Vietnamese. Hmong. Uh, Persian. Punjab, Mr. Mirchandani. Mr. Mirchandani, here’s an example right here. All them good samosas back there, piled up next to the fried chicken? I— Yeah. I know I had a point I was going to make. Ha, seriously. Yeah, no, okay.

“Only that Cochise Jones— Oh. Excuse me. Whoa. No, I’m good. Mr. Jones was like a father to me, which I seriously needed. That’s one point. And the other point is, since I’m here doing this eulogy, I have a responsibility to have us, you know, take a look at the life the man led and, like, extract some kind of wisdom out of it. Right? So here goes.

“Seems like, I don’t know. When people start looking at other people, people not like them, one thing they often end up liking about those people is their music.

“There’s sort of a, what, an ideal that I know Nat and me always had in mind for this store. Not, like, anything we ever planned out or talked about. But it’s something like this: on the old Silk Road, you know, between Europe and China. It’s all tribes and deserts, and then you’ve got this long, hard journey, take you a couple of years to get there if you go quick. It’s a hard road, it has bandits, sandstorms. You carrying the light of all the civilizations back and forth, but all around you, the tribes just want to keep up their warring, and killing, and keeping track of what makes them better than everybody else. Like you know how every tribe’s name, when you translate it, turns out to mean ‘the people,’ like nobody else but them is really human? But you keep on because you are trying to earn a little cheese, right, and you spreading the collective wisdom back and forth. Forging that Creole style. And every so often, every few hundred miles, maybe, you got these oases, right, these caravansaries, where they all get together and chill, hang out, listen to good music, swap wild tales of exaggeration. Nat, man, you know what I’m saying, right? That was kind of our dream. The Brokeland Creole dream.

“Mr. Jones was a mainstay of this caravansary. He was, like, our idol in the corner, the household god. Now he is gone, and we, me and Nat— Whoa. Okay, yes, could I get that tissue, Aviva? Thank you.”

“You can ride with us,” a voice was saying, sounded like the undertaker. “Funeral can’t start without the deceased.”

In reply, only a silence, partial, intensified by the sounds of departure from the front of the store, chairs scraping, people offering rides, vouching for their own or somebody else’s sobriety. Burial-suit thugs from the funeral home handing out maps to the grave: Miss, a map?

Titus zipped his pants. The way to play it, saunter out of the bathroom into the workroom, alone. Kid coming out of the toilet zipping up his Levi’s, so what? He communicated his intentions to Julie by means of Special Ops hand signs: I, turn out light. You, stay. I, go, create diversion. You, count thirty, exit bathroom, slip out the back. Julie nodded: Understood. That turned out not to be the case, because the minute Titus switched off the light, Julie just went and opened the bathroom door. Eased it open, at least a show of stealth, half an inch, an inch.

Then the answer: “I’ll give you five minutes.”

His father. Archy. Tightness in his voice. Fronting. Bored with the undertaker, bored with using boredom as a front. Angry, tired.

Titus and Julie exchanged a look in the darkness: change of plan. The lonely science of eavesdropping, another mad love they shared. Two of Julie’s fingers keeping the door open that one little inch.

“All I need is five seconds,” the undertaker said. “To say you are the stupidest, most self-defeating negro I have ever seen. And my experience in that category is long and bitter.”

Archy said, “Let me save you the five seconds, then, ’cause I already know that.”

“How about this, then? You have played yourself now.”

“No surprise there, either.”

Archy was leaning against one of the rolling bin tables they had humped into the workroom that morning, his wide ass in those ugly black suit pants pinned against a corner of the Disco section. On the tab of the white section divider behind him were written, intriguingly, the words YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA. Titus briefly imagined the warm, candy-flavored music that might go by that name.