Telegraph Avenue (3 page)

“Maybe I can do better than that,” Mr. Nostalgia said.

He reached into the back pocket of his denim shorts and took out a folded, sweat-dampened manila envelope. Inside it were the other two green badges on lanyards to which, at his level of participation, he was entitled. He fished out one badge and pushed his way through the screen of goons. Luther Stallings bowed his head, revealing an incipient Nelson Mandela bald spot, and Mr. Nostalgia bestowed the badge on him, Oz emboldening the Lion.

“Mr. Stallings is working for me today,” he said.

“That’s right,” Stallings said at once, sounding not just sincere but impatient, like he had been looking forward for days to helping out in Mr. Nostalgia’s booth. His eyes had flicked, barely, across the badge as Mr. Nostalgia hung it on him; he said, not missing a trick, “In Mr. Nostalgia’s Neighborhood.”

“Working how?” said the older of the two goons.

“He’s doing a signing at my booth,” Mr. Nostalgia said. “I got a complete and a partial set, no Bruce Lee, of the
Masters of Kung Fu
series, I got a few other things Mr. Stallings has kindly consented to sign. A lobby card from
Black Eye
, I’m pretty sure.”

“ ‘
Masters of Kung Fu
,’ ” Stallings repeated, barely managing to avoid sounding like he had absolutely no idea what Mr. Nostalgia was talking about.

“Donruss, 1976, it’s a tough set.”

Four clueless looks sought enlightenment at the hands of Mr. Nostalgia.

“Uh, guys?” Mr. Nostalgia said with a circular sweep of his hands, taking in the echoing space all around them. “Trading cards? Little rectangles of cardboard? Stained with bubble gum? Pop one in the spokes of your bicycle, make it sound like a Harley-Davidson?”

“Damn, seriously?” Stallings could not keep it back. “
Masters of Kung Fu.
They got a Luther Stallings in there?”

“Naturally,” Mr. Nostalgia said.

“Luther Stallings.” The older of the two blue blazers, lank dark hair, the flowerpot skull and triangle chin of a Russian or a Pole, about Mr. Nostalgia’s age, tried out the name. Scrunching up one side of his face like he was screwing a loupe into his eye socket. “Okay, yeah. What’s it?
Strutter.
Seriously, that’s you?”

“My first part,” Stallings said, seizing upon this unexpected opportunity to preen. Loving it. Putting one of those massive antler hands on Mr. Nostalgia to let him know he was loving it: doing what he must do best. Restoring the goon squad to their proper roles as members of the Luther Stalling Irregulars. “Year after I won the title.”

“Title in what? Kung fu?”

“Wasn’t one at that time. Was in karate. In Manila. World champion.”

“World champion, bullshit,” said Goode’s bodyguard. “I give you that.”

Stallings flat ignored the big man. Mr. Nostalgia, feeling fairly balls-out pleased with himself, tried to do the same.

“We all done here, gentlemen?” Stallings asked the blue blazers.

The security guys in the blue blazers checked in with the bodyguard, who shook his head, disgusted.

“I tell you what, Luther,” the bodyguard said. “You even flick a boogie in Mr. Goode’s general
vicinity
, I will come down on you, motherfucker. And I will show no mercy.”

The man turned and, with a forbearing hitch in his walk, rolled back to the signing table where his boss, head shaved to stubble, wearing a black polo shirt with a red paw print where the alligator would have gone, armed with nothing but a liquid-silver marker and a high-priced smile, sat fighting his way through an impressively long line of autograph seekers. Game-worn jerseys, game-used footballs, cards, ball caps, he was going to clear nine, ten thousand today.

“Yeah, whatever,” Stallings said, as if he could not care less about Gibson Goode.

Working up a surprising amount of swagger, he followed Mr. Nostalgia to the booth. You would have thought the man had just saved himself from being tossed out of the building by the goon squad. Mr. Nostalgia recognized objectively that he ought to be annoyed, but somehow it made him feel sorrier for Stallings.

“Wow, check this shit out.”

Stallings worked his gaze along the table, taking in the sealed wax packs of
Garbage Pail Kids
and
Saturday Night Fever
, the unopened box of Fleer
Dune
cards, the
Daktari
and
Gentle Ben
and
Mork & Mindy
board games, the talking Batman alarm clock, the Aurora model kits of the
Spindrift
and
Seaview
in their original shrink-wrap.

“They even got cards for that
ALF
, huh?” he said.

His voice as he made this observation, like his expression as he took it all in, sounded unhappy to Mr. Nostalgia, even forlorn. Not the disdain that Mr. Nostalgia’s wife always showed for his stock-in-trade but something more like disappointment.

“Used to be pretty standard for a hit show,” Mr. Nostalgia said, wondering when Stallings would get around to hitting him up for the forty-five dollars. “Nothing much of interest in that set.”

Though Mr. Nostalgia loved the things he sold, he had no illusion that they held any intrinsic value. They were worth only what you would pay for them; what small piece of everything you had ever lost that, you might come to believe, they would restore to you. Their value was indexed only to the sense of personal completeness, perfection of the soul, that would flood you when, at last, you filled the last gap on your checklist. But Mr. Nostalgia had never seen his nonsports cards so sharply disappoint a man.

“
ALF
, yeah, I remember that one,” Stallings said. “That’s real nice.
Growing Pains
,
Mork & Mindy
, uh-huh. Where the
Masters of Kung Fu
at?”

Mr. Nostalgia went around to a bin he had tucked under the table that morning after setting up and dug around inside of it. After a minute of moving things around in the bin, he came out with the partial set, the one that was missing the Lee and the Norris cards. “Fifty-two cards in the set,” he said. “You’re number, I don’t know, twelve, I think it is.”

Stallings shuffled through the cards, whose imagery depicted, bordered by cartoon bamboo, labeled with takeout-menu-style fake Chinese lettering, a fairly indiscriminate mixture of real and fictitious practitioners (Takayuki Kubota, Shang-Chi) of a dozen forms of martial arts in addition to the eponymous one, including bartitsu (Sherlock Holmes) and savate (Count Baruzy). At last Stallings came up with his card. Stared at the picture, made a sound like a snort through his nose. The card featured a color still from one of his movies, poorly reproduced. A young Luther Stallings, in red kung fu pajamas, flew across the frame toward a line of Chinese swordsmen, feet first, almost horizontal.

“Damn,” Stallings said. “I don’t even remember what that’s from.”

“Take it,” Mr. Nostalgia said. “Take the whole set. It’s a present, from me to you, for all the pleasure your work has given me over the years.”

“How much you get for it?”

“Well, the set, like I said, it’s pretty tough. I’m asking five, but I’d probably take three. Might go for seven-fifty with the Bruce Lee, the Chuck Norris.”

“Chuck Norris? Yeah, I went up against the motherfucker. Three times.”

“No joke.”

“Kicked his ass all over Taipei.”

Mr. Nostalgia figured he could look it up later if he wanted to break some small, previously unbroken place in his own leaf-buried heart. “Go on,” he said. “It’s yours.”

“Yeah, hey, thanks. That’s really nice. But, uh, no offense, I’m already so, like,
overburdened
, you know what I’m saying, with stuff out of the past I’m carrying around.”

“Oh, no, sure—”

“I just hate to add to the pile.”

“I totally understand.”

“Got to keep mobile.”

“Of course.”

“Travel light.”

“Right-o.”

“How much,” Luther Stallings said, lowering his voice to a near-whisper. Swallowing, starting over, louder the second time. “How much you get for my card by itself.”

“Oh, uh,” Mr. Nostalgia said, understanding a microsecond or two too late to pull off the lie that he was going to have to tell it. “A hundred. Ninety, a hundred bucks.”

“No shit.”

“Like around ninety.”

“Uh-huh. Tell you what. You give me this one card, Luther Stallings in . . . I’m going to make a wild guess and say it was
Enter the Panther.
”

“Has to be.” Mr. Nostalgia felt the play begin again, the game that Luther Stallings was trying to run on him and, somehow, on Gibson Goode.

“And I’m a sign it, okay?” Here it came. “Then I’m a trade it back to you for forty-five bucks.”

“Okay,” Mr. Nostalgia said, feeling unaccountably saddened, crushed, by the pachyderm weight of a grief that encompassed him and Stallings and every man plying his lonely way in this hall through the molder and dust of the bins. The world of card shows had always felt like a kind of true fellowship to Mr. Nostalgia, a league of solitary men united in their pursuit of the lost glories of a vanished world. Now that vision struck him as pie in the sky at best and as falsehood at the very worst. The past was irretrievable, the league of lonely men a fiction, the pursuit of the past a doomed attempt to run a hustle on mortality.

“If that’s how you want it,” Mr. Nostalgia said. He was not averse, in principle, to raising the five-dollar value of the Stallings card by a factor of three or four. But as he handed Stallings the gold-filled Cross pen, a bar mitzvah gift from his grandparents that he liked to use when he was getting something signed for his own collection, he wished that he had never come out from behind the table, had let the security guards sweep Luther Stallings past Mr. Nostalgia’s Neighborhood and clear on out of the Kaiser Center.

Over the course of the next half hour, he checked on Stallings a couple of times as the man made his way to the end of the signing line for Gibson Goode, then inched his way to the front one lonely man at a time. In the middle of selling a 1936 Wolverine gum card, “The Fight with the Shark,” for $550 to a dentist from Danville, Mr. Nostalgia happened to glance over and see that Luther Stallings had regained his place at the front. The bodyguard got to his feet looking ready, as promised, to suspend mercy, but after a brownout of his smile, Gibson Goode reached for the bodyguard and gently stiff-armed him, palm to the big man’s chest, and the big man, with a mighty headshake, stepped off. Words passed between Goode and Stallings—quietly, without agitation. To Mr. Nostalgia, reading lips and gestures, sometimes able to pick up a word, a phrase, the conversation seemed to boil down to Gibson Goode saying no repeatedly, with blank politesse, while Luther Stallings tried to come up with new ways of getting Goode to say yes.

There was only so much of this that the people in line behind Luther Stallings were willing to put up with. A rumor of Stallings’s earlier outburst, his near-ejection, began to circulate among them. There was a certain amount of moaning and kvetching. Somebody gave voice to the collective desire for Stallings to
Come on!

Stallings ignored it all. “You asked him?” he said, raising his voice as he had done an hour ago, when the blue blazers came to see how he might like to try getting himself tossed. “You asked him about
Popcorn
?” Talking loudly enough for Mr. Nostalgia and everybody in the neighborhood to hear. “Then I got the man for you. Hooked him. You know I did.”

The expressions of impatience, general down the line, rose to outright jeering. Stallings turned on the crowd, trying to scowl them into silence, snapping at a man in a Hawaiian shirt standing two guys behind him. The man said, “No, fuck
you
!”

Wading into the signing area, arms windmilling to reach for Stallings in a kind of freestyle of aggression, came the two blue blazers, Shaved Ball and the Soviet. They took brusque hold of Stallings’s arms, faces compressed as if to resist a stink, and jerked his arms back and toward his spine.

Two seconds later, no more, Shaved Ball and the Soviet were lying flat on their backs on the painted cement floor of the hall. Mr. Nostalgia could not have said for certain which of them had taken the kick to the head, which the punch to the abdomen, or if Luther Stallings had even moved very much at all. As they’d gone tumbling backward, the line of autograph seekers had shuddered, rippled. Human turbulence troubled all the surrounding lines, people waiting for Chris Mullin, Shawn Green.

“Bitch,” Stallings said, turning back to Gibson Goode, in his polo shirt, with his sockless loafers. “I want my twenty-five grand!”

Gibson Goode, being Gibson Goode, Mr. Nostalgia supposed, might have had no choice in the matter: He kept, as his legend said he must, his cool. The same quiet, restraining hand against his bodyguard’s chest. Unintimidated. Still smiling. He took out his wallet, opened it, and counted out ten bills, rapid-fire. Slid them across the signing table. Luther Stallings studied them, head down, chest rising and falling. The money lay there, exciting comment in the line, ten duplicate cards from the highly collectable Dead Presidents series. Luther shook his head once. Then he reached down and took the money. Resigned—long since resigned, Mr. Nostalgia thought—to doing things he knew he was going to regret. When he went past Mr. Nostalgia’s table, without so much as a thank-you, he had not managed to get his chin up again.

It was only later, as a voice on the PA was chasing stragglers from the hall and the lights went out over the signing area, that Mr. Nostalgia noticed Luther Stallings had walked off with his gold pen.

O
n a Saturday night in August 1973, outside the Bit o’ Honey Lounge, a crocodile-green ’70 Toronado sat purring its crocodile purr. Its chrome grin stretched beguiling and wide as the western horizon.

“Define ‘toronado,’ ” said the man riding shotgun.

Behind his heavy-rimmed glasses, he had sleepy eyes, but he scorned sleep and frowned upon the somnolence of others. In defiance of political fashion, he greased his long hair, and its undulant luster was clear-coat deep. His name was Chandler Bankwell Flowers III. His grandfather, father, and uncles were all morticians, men of sobriety and pomp, and he inhabited a floating yet permanent zone of rebellion against them. Nineteen months aboard the
Bon Homme Richard
had left Chan Flowers with an amphetamine habit and a tattoo of Tuffy the Ghost on the inside of his left forearm. The shotgun, holstered in a plastic trash bag alongside his right leg, was a pump-action Mossberg 500.