Telegraph Avenue (31 page)

Then Archy saw, and realized, the surprise. It swung with a slow majesty from its tether at the end of a high steel mast that was in turn mounted on the bed of a tractor-trailer, at the farthest reaches of the Oakland airport, along a bleak, half-wild stretch of marshland.

“The blimp,” Archy said. It filled the windshield of the GLH, shiny and black, emblazoned on its flank with a red paw print and bold red slab-serif type. “The Dogpile blimp.”

“Ain’t a blimp, it’s a zeppelin.” That raspy Q-Tip voice of Walter’s turned soft, choked. Betraying, Archy might have said, possibly the slightest hint of fear. “Got the rigid structure.”

“Oh, right.”

“Blimp’s just a bag.”

They rolled up to a checkpoint manned by a pock-faced rent-a-cop where Walter exchanged his driver’s license for a long hard fish-eye, which, upon return of his license, he steadily countered. Walter rolled the car right up into the shadow of the airship, and they got out, slammed doors. The zeppelin appeared to be as long as a block of Telegraph Avenue, as tall as Kaiser Hospital.

Standing there, righting his beret, verifying the tuck of his shirttails, smoothing the wrinkles from the front of his butterscotch suit, Archy regarded the big black visual pun on centuries of white male anatomical anxiety and felt it trying, like Kubrick’s melismatic monolith, to twist the wiring of his brain. The late-August sun goaded him, the way Walter had always goaded him, urging him to give the slip to the thunderbolt-throwing aunties who dwelled in his soul, to emerge from the doomed cavern of Brokeland Records and the gloomy professional prospect of endless Dumpster dives and crate digs, every day dropping like a spindled platter on top of the next, Z out the cash register with its feeble tally, get home at the end of the day humping your box of scratched and moldering treasure to have your wife harangue you in instructive tones with quotes from some self-help book on the moral imperative to strip all that was not essential from one’s life. To throw over all ballast and soar. Starting with, say, your record collection, just shed the whole off-gassing pile in a scatter of 180-gram Frisbees and rise up. The high blue curtain of sky overhead, the tender wetlands reek of Alameda on the breeze that took hold of Archy’s necktie, seemed to hold a promise to redeem the unredeemed promise that he had always carried around, creased and tattered, in the billfold of his life.

“Lunch, motherfucker,” Walter explained.

L
ike a hoard of family diamonds sewn into the hems and hidden pockets of an exile’s cloak, Oakland was salted secretly with wonders, even here, at its fetid, half-rotten raggedy-ass end.

The zeppelin’s gondola was a streamlined dining car formed from some black polymer glossy as a vinyl record. It hovered just above the ground, a cushion for the reclining god. Through its front viewports, a pair of typecast pilots in captain’s hats saluted the arriving passengers, then resumed their preparations for ascent, fiddling with knobs, dialing in shit on their big old zeppelin mixing board. Between the new arrivals and the gondola, a laterally oriented brown man in a toque and white smock stood at a pushcart grill, practicing relentless artistry on two dozen big prawns with a pair of brass tongs and a brush. Wild-style lettering sprayed onto the front of the grill read
THE HUNGRY SAMOAN
.

“Don’t tell me,” Archy began, then stopped, for he was not yet prepared to understand or to accept what he knew to be the situation vis-à-vis lunch: that it was to be eaten in the sky. He eyed the smoke as it knit and unknit in dense skeins trailing from the grill top, catching along the flank of the airship.

“Filled with helium,” Walter said, following the worried course of Archy’s gaze, looking worried himself despite the cool expository tone. Self-reassuring. “Shit’s inert. Can’t burn. Can’t interact with nothing.”

Then a hatch in the side of the gondola sighed and swung open, divulging the airship’s secret cargo: a basalt monolith, the very thing to set half-apes dreaming of the stars. Black knit polo shirt, skull polished like the knob on an Oscar. Gold-rimmed sunglasses, gold finger rings, black Levi’s, Timberland loafers. Pausing at the top of a fold-down stair for a display of freestyle looming, brother looked like a celebrity golfer or as if perhaps he had recently eaten a celebrity golfer. Shoulders thrown back, chest out, he moved with a herky-jerk stop-motion fluidity, a Harryhausen Negro, mythic and huge. Behind him, tall and broad-shouldered yet dwarfed by the dude from
The
Golden Voyage of Sinbad
, came a tea-brown handsome man, lithe, slender. He stood considering his guests on the top step, then hopped down and made slowly for Archy and Walter, past the bodyguard, breaking out from behind his blocker, some kind of joint pain or old injury a slight hitch in his gait.

“Archy Stallings,” said Gibson Goode, like he was repeating the sly punch line to a joke that had made him laugh recently. “Thanks for coming.”

“Yeah, thanks for, uh, having me,” Archy said, his voice petering out at the pronoun and the unworthiness it designated. Walter put his fingers to his lips, corking a laugh as Archy fell all over himself trying not to fall all over himself. “Gibson Goode! I mean!” Archy laughing at himself now. “Goddamn.”

Print it on the back of the man’s Topps card, six-six, 230 pounds, Emperor of the Universe in 1999 when he led the NFC in touchdowns, completions, passer rating, and threw three four-hundred-yard games. Still long and wiry, built more like a center fielder than a QB, mostly leg with that loose equine sense of motion, Gibson Goode, aka G Bad. Head cropped to leave a faint, even scatter of coal dust. Wearing a pair of heavy tortoiseshell sunglasses with dark green lenses that left his eyes to go about the cold business of empire unobserved.

“What can I pour you?” he said.

“I don’t drink . . .” Archy said, and stopped. He hated how this sounded whenever he found himself obliged to say it. Lord knew he would not relish the prospective company of some mope-ass motherfucker who flew that grim motto from his flagpole. “. . . alcohol,” he added. Only making it worse, the stickler for detail, ready to come out with a complete list of beverages he was willing to consume. Next came the weak effort to redeem himself by offering a suggestion of past indulgence: “Anymore.” Finally, the slide into unwanted medical disclosure: “Bad belly.”

“Yeah,” Goode said looking appropriately sober, “I quit drinking, too. Coke, then? San Pellegrino? Sweet tea?”

“You going to like my sweet tea,” said the Hungry Samoan gravely. It appeared to be in the nature of a command.

“Yo, T.,” Goode said to the giant in the Timberlands, his bodyguard, majordomo. Wordless and obedient as a golem, the giant returned to the gondola. When Archy stepped up behind Goode into the cabin of the misnomered Dogpile blimp, the giant had a tall tumbler apiece of passionflower tea for Archy and Goode, and a can of Tecate for Walter, with a lime-wedge eyebrow.

The interior of the gondola was cool and snug, the whole thing molded continuously into a glossy surface of black plastic trimmed with brushed aluminum and covered, wherever it was likely to encounter a pair of human buttocks, in spotted pony skin. On the spectrum of secret lairs, it fell somewhere between mad genius bent on world domination and the disco-loving scion of a minor emirate. The decor made references, of which Archy approved, to
Diabolik
and the David Lynch
Dune
.

Goode dropped back to let Archy admire freely. “Welcome aboard the
Minnie Riperton
,” he said.

Walter stole a look toward Archy, who rocked back, caught off guard.

“Seriously,” Archy said.

“Seriously.” Goode was ready for it, had a line. “She’s black. She is beautiful. And she goes really high.”

The five-octave F-above-high-C singing voice of Minnie Riperton, who died of cancer in 1977 at the age of thirty-one, was an avatar of Archy’s mother in his memory; always a vanishing quality to it, an ethereal warmth. The two women, Minnie and Mauve, even looked alike, Cherokee noses, eyes large, deep brown, and pain-haunted. At the unexpected invocation of the name, Archy’s heart leaped and he grew confused, assuming for a dreamlike instant that Goode had named the zeppelin in his mother’s honor.

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s so nice of you.”

Goode looked at Walter or, at any rate, appeared to be regarding Archy’s old friend from behind the blast shield of his D&Gs.

Walter shrugged. “I told you,” he said. “You got to feed the man.”

“Skip breakfast?” Goode said.

Archy said, “Never.”

Goode hung halfway out of the hatch, gripping the frame, and called to the chef to ask him how long it would be until lunch. Chef held up three thick fingers, then commenced plating lunch with DJ aplomb. Two minutes and forty-eight seconds later, Archy found himself sitting at a posse-sized plastic table topped with speckled laminate, called upon to conduct deep research into a plate piled with some kind of Thai-Samoan South-Central barbecued shrimp thing served, with plentiful Sriracha, over coconut rice. Black-eyed peas in a hoisin garlic sauce. A scatter of okra tempura doused in sweet and peppery vinegar.

“Kind of a soul-Asian fusion-type deal,” Archy said.

“Hey,” Goode said. “That’s your thing, right? Soul-jazz. Soul-funk. Walter tells me you like to work the hyphens. Walter— Ah, shit.”

Walter had his eyes closed, holding himself like a plateful of water, as, with an eager kick at its traces, the airship bucked gravity and took to the sky. Goode smiled, slowly shaking his head. “Boy spent his life cutting up dead folks, telling a bunch of homicidal rapping gangbangers they got dropped by their label, but he’s afraid to go up in a damn
balloon
.”

“Uhh,” said Walter.

Swiftly, Oakland fell away beneath them. The Bay Area shook out its rumpled coverlet, gray and green and crazy salt pans, rent and slashed and stitched by feats of engineering. Twin Peaks, Tamalpais, then Mount Diablo rising up beyond the hills. Archy had flown in and out of his hometown a dozen times or more but never in such breathless silence, never with such a sense of liberation, of having come unhooked. An airplane used force and fuel and tricks of physics to fight its way aloft, but the
Minnie Riperton
was returning to its rightful home. It belonged in the sky.

When they reached one thousand feet, Walter swallowed and opened his eyes. “Oh, the humanity,” he said.

Archy got up to tour the windows, meet the captains, squint through the shipboard telescope at a far-off disturbance in the haze that he was told to call Lassen Peak. He checked out a bunch of snaps and candids pinned to a corkboard beside the jump seat where T., the bodyguard, sat behind his gold-rimmed sunglasses, containing, as a fist might contain a bauble, his unimaginable thoughts. Pictures of G Bad, the man posed against varied nocturnal backgrounds of city lights or flashbulb darkness with famous singers and actors, black and white, holding the Golden Globes they had won for directing or starring in Dogpile films or their Grammys for Dogpile records. Or caught up in the thick of various posses, or maybe it was the same posse, an ontogeny shaped by time and fashion and the whims of Gibson Goode. Brothers in caps and game jerseys, smiling or blank-faced, throwing up gang signs, holding glasses and bottles. Women of the planet dressed in candy colors, necklines taking daring chances, eyelids done up lustrous as one of Sixto Cantor’s custom paint jobs. Gibson Goode looking exactly the same in every picture, sunglasses, enigmatic half-smile, Super Bowl ring, might as well be a blown-up life-size picture of himself mounted on a sheet of foam core.

“My peeps,” Goode said, taking the pin from one of the photos on the corkboard. “Check out last week.”

He passed the picture to Archy. It showed a particularly unruly group of ladies, strewn as if by a passing hurricane along the laps of a number of gentlemen, among them Walter Bankwell, who peered out from behind the wall of horizontal sisters with an expression of evident panic.

“My boy Walter’s first flight.”

“I never knew him to be afraid of heights,” Archy said.

“I hear you and him go way back.”

“Heard from him or somebody else?”

“Might have heard it from a number of sources.”

You do that. And maybe, you never know, I’m the one ends up putting in a word for you with Mr. G Bad.
Undertaking motherfucker worked fast. Wanted to get hold of Luther Stallings with considerable urgency, indeed. Archy telling him,
I’ll think about it
.

“So where’s the posse?” Archy said, nodding toward the bulletin board. “You leave them at home?”

“Yeah, they okay for a party cruise, but they don’t appreciate the, uh, stately pace of the journey up from Long Beach,” Goode said. “They just a waste of time anyway. Nobody but Tak around, I can get a lot of work done.”

Trying to let Archy know what a serious guy he was, snaps and candids to the contrary, sending himself like his own stand-in to attend such trifling matters while his real self went on tirelessly planning conquests, a hip-hop Master of the World in his Vincent Price airship.

When they reached the featureless blue-gray world beyond the Golden Gate, the pilot brought them back around and they bore down on Oakland again, watching from the port-side window as their hometown gathered its modest splendors.

“Highland Hospital,” Goode said, pointing. “I was born there.”

“Me, too,” Archy said.

“Moved down to L.A. when I was three, but I came back in the summertime, Christmastime. Whenever school got out. Lived with my grandmother in the Longfellow district. Her brother had a record store for a time. Was on Market and Forty-fifth, over by the Laundromat there.”

“House of Wax,” Archy said. It was almost a question. “Seriously? I used to go in there. Your grandfather, he was, uh, kind of a portly man?”

“My uncle. Great-uncle. Uncle Reggie was pretty much spherical.”

“I remember him,” Archy said. And then, as if the line that hooked it had been snagged all these years on some deep arm of coral, an afternoon bobbed to the surface of his memory. A boy, the offhand sketch of a boy, reading a comic book or a magazine, long feet hooked through the slats of a metal stool, a pair of brand-new Top Tens. “Maybe I even remember you.”