Telegraph Avenue (45 page)

“No, Aviva,” Gwen said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I’m not sorry. Must be a black thing, huh, Paul?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Doctors, I look forward to hearing not only what you but also the EEOC have to say about all this. Now,” Gwen said with a wave to Moby, on a roll, talking mostly to herself, “if you’ll excuse me.”

Thus, feeling something very close to fly, and doing what she had to do, Gwen went to see about taking back her house.

“M
r. Stallings,” wrote A. O. Scott in his
New York
Times
review of
Strutter Kicks It Old-School
, “has not only redeemed himself, he has also redeemed the genre of American cinema known so crudely as blaxploitation, and let us hope that this marvelous new film lays in its grave that ignoble moniker for all time.”

That was only one of the clippings. There were positive reviews from
Time
,
Ebony
, and
Entertainment Weekly
. Cover stories in
People
and
Esquire
. Quotations from these articles and reviews had been excerpted to run in print ads and on the packaging of the DVD, useful exclamations like
BOLD!
and
TERRIFIC!
and
A NONSTOP ACTION-PACKED THRILL RIDE!
Across the film’s poster, above a full-length image of Candygirl Clark and Cleon Strutter leaning together, each of them three quarters turned to the camera, her left shoulder against his right shoulder, giant letters proclaimed
TWO THUMBS UP!!! EBERT & ROEPER.

“It looks so real,” Titus said.

That was not true at all, but he sounded like he meant it. Everything had been collaged using text, drawings, graphics cut from the pages of real newspapers and magazines, and computer-printed text that attempted with moderate success to match the fonts of the original publications. Leafing through this homemade archive, Julie felt an ache in his chest, though he wasn’t sure whether it was for the crude sincerity of the archive’s fakeness or for the faked and heartfelt sincerity of Titus, saying it all looked real.

“Totally,” Julie agreed.

The bin also contained seven drafts, six of them handwritten in slanting longhand on prison stationery, of the film’s script; a thin sheaf of old head shots of Luther Stallings when he was Luther Stallings, poker face but with that Strutter twinkle in the eye, beautiful and young. Synopses and diagrams done mostly by hand. A red folder tabbed
BUDGET
that held official-looking spreadsheets, and a blue one tabbed
LOCATIONS
that bulged with dozens of four-by-six photographs of Chinatown, East Oakland, the museum, and the interior of a restaurant that Julie recognized as the Merritt bakery.

A leather-grained pasteboard portfolio divulged a stack of storyboards for the film, strips of cartooned panels, executed in a style perhaps half a step above stick figure, that had been Scotch-taped to panels cut from pizza boxes. The greatest treasure and the pitiable heart of the whole archive was undoubtedly the poster, so large that it had to be folded in half to fit into the portfolio. It had been executed in colored pencil, no doubt over a long period of time, the colors laid down faint but smooth and even, as if rubbed with a tissue, giving everything the appropriate mistiness of a dream. The posed figures of Strutter and Candygirl were awkward, leggy even for Valletta Moore, and you could tell by the dead eyes and smiles that the faces had been copied, pretty accurately, from photos.

“Jailhouse artist,” said Archy’s dad, sounding apologetic and regarding the poster with a critical expression. He smiled; there was the twinkle from the ancient head shot. It reminded Julie of Archy, and then he thought of Titus, standing on the sidewalk outside the Bruce Lee Institute, scheming this whole adventure. “But I got to say, I think it looks pretty good.”

“Where you going to get the money to make it?” Titus said. “To make it for real, I mean.”

“Here and there.” Luther tried to come off as playful, having a secret, then seemed to worry that he might sound like he was full of shit. “You heard of Gibson Goode?”

Naturally, they had, Titus talking about rushing records, Grammy Awards, Julie basically grasping that the ex-quarterback had bent his wealth, legend, and magic on the destruction of Nat Jaffe and Brokeland Records.

“Some of it’s derivating from him, payment for services rendered. Some of it, I’m going to be relying on cash flow from another source of funds, a local businessman. A, uh, a former associate, you know, an old homey of mine, always been reliable. Between what he’s willing to part with and what Goode already committed to, all told . . .” Luther tapped the red folder with a finger. “I figure I can make this movie for, like, call it a hundred K. And that’s about what I’m hoping to raise.”

Luther’s fingers, his hands, amazed Julie. The backs of them were red-brown, fading to gold at the meridians where they met the palms. The fingers were slender, long and fluid, but you did not question their storied lethality. They looked like they had been shaped with fine tools from a regal pair of antlers.

“You have an old friend,” Titus said, “man has that kind of money, but you sleeping in a garage.”

Valletta laughed a low, unhappy laugh and got up from the table where she had progressed from her fingernails to painting her toes. “Boy has sense,” she said. She tucked her feet into a pair of blue Dr. Scholl’s sandals and then went tocking across the cement floor to the bathroom door, on which some airbrush master had rendered a photoreal image of a Conan the Barbarian–type character in the style of Frank Frazetta, sitting on a toilet with his ax and his sword on the floor in front of him, squeezing out a shit with a look on his face of barbaric joy. “Must come from his momma’s side of things.” She slammed the bathroom door behind her.

“Boy, we are comfortable as hell here,” his grandfather said. “Truly. Not that I don’t hope to improve our situation. But I would prefer if you didn’t keep harping on it like that.”

The compressor clanged the entire building like a single great fire alarm reverberating in the rebar, the air itself ringing as though struck. The noise of it was starting to get on Julie’s nerves. Somebody had started to brew up a batch of a noxious substance needed for bodywork, and it smelled to Julie like burning bananas.

“I’m sorry,” Titus said. It was the first time Julie had ever heard him employ those words in that configuration.

“Man ain’t exactly a friend, is the answer to your question. Let’s just say, he and I, we have some history.
Long
time ago, back in the Jurassic Age.” He gestured toward the ruin of the Toronado. “Motherfucking dinosaurs roamed the earth.” He interrupted himself to chuckle at his self-mockery, then seemed to lose the thread, maybe recollecting those dinosaurian days. “Dude and me, we had our misunderstandings, know what I’m saying? Water has for sure flowed under the motherfucking bridge. But he’ll come through. Basically, he wants to keep up the prosperity as a local businessman, he
has
to come through, is the type of situation we’re talking about.”

It sounded sketchy to Julie, and he guessed, given what he knew about recent decades in the history of Luther Stallings, that it might have something to do with drugs. Maybe the reason that Luther had “taken a rap” and “done a bid” was so the mysterious old friend from the Jurassic Age could stay free, and now, by prior arrangement, it was time for him to repay Luther for “carrying the weight.” Or maybe, Julie thought, wildly quoting from his cinematic syllabus over the past week and forgetting that Luther was not a master thief and had only played a master thief in one semi-bad and one wretched movie, maybe it was like in
The Getaway
and the mystery “running buddy” had
arranged
to get Luther released from prison because he needed him for a job. The shadowy benefactor in Julie’s imagination took on a distinct resemblance to the actor Ben Johnson, so he was bewildered to hear Titus’s grandfather say, “Your pops knows him. Chan, Chandler Flowers, the undertaker.”

“
I
know him!” Julie said, startling himself along with Luther Stallings, who seemed inclined to forget that Julie was there. “He’s on the Oakland City Council. He’s a customer at Brokeland. He likes King Curtis.”

“King Curtis, Earl Bostic, Illinois Jacquet,” Luther Stallings agreed. “He loves all them honkers.”

“Chan the Man,” Julie said.

“So-called, so-called,” Luther said. “Old Chan, I tell you what, old Chan never was the flexible type. A stubborn, stiff-necked man. Eventually, I feel confident, he is going to come around.”

“You best hope he
don’t
, you old fool.”

Luther Stallings was caught as helplessly off guard as Julie and Titus. If it had been some hood or, like, Ben Johnson standing there with a .45, Luther would have been toast. So much for instincts honed by years of arcane martial arts training or by the harsh realities of prison life. Presently, Luther remembered to brandish his walking stick, but it was too late, and he knew it. Phantom slugs starred his head and torso with phantom squibs. He lowered the stick, looking disgusted. “Goddammit, Eddie!” he said. “What the hell kind of hidden refuge you running here?”

Eddie called back to him, offhand, bored, “Oh, yeah. You have a visitor.”

“Yo, what up, Ed?”

“Hey, Archy. How’s the whip?”

“Running well, looking good.”

“Baby?”

“No, nuh-uh, not yet. Julie, Titus. Go get in the motherfucking car.”

Julie had known Archy Stallings since he was four years old. He tried to remember if he had ever, in all that time, seen him angry twice in one day. Luther was smiling, or showing his teeth, anyway, a weird smile, as if he had lost money betting against some outcome that would be worse than losing. “Look at this,” he said. “Big shorty.”

A little white mint appeared for an instant in Archy’s mouth, surfing the curl of his tongue. “Boys,” he said. “Car.”

“Man,
fuck
you,” Titus said.

For the past little while, the hour, hour and a half they had spent at Motor City, rattled by the air compressor like bones in a blender, watching Eddie Cantor’s blowtorch pirates butcher the Citation so it could be rebuilt, that magic slaughter like something out of
Norse Gods and Giants
, hot rod dwarves intent on replacing its headlights with diamonds and its tires with wild boars and its engine with the heart of a dragon, Valletta Moore moving on from fingernails to toes, crooking one long leg against the steel drum, craning forward so the boys were granted a fitful vision of the shadowland between her legs, which forever afterward would remain confused in Julie’s retroimagination with the vision of his homeland articulated by Luther Stallings as he snapped off stomach crunches by the abs-rippling dozen, that whole ancient Egyptian take on Oakland being a land of rebirth for the Black Man because of Pullman porters—all that while, sitting there on that skanky old sofa, Titus had seemed for the first time to relax. His angles softened, and his cords went slack. The things he said sounded sincere, unbracketed with an ironic formulation, a celebrity impression, or a parody of a gang-banging TV hood rat. His string had been jerked taut again, and Julie could not tell if it was Titus or some imaginary street Negro who said, “Man,
fuck
you.”

“We having ourselves a visit,” Luther said. “My grandson and me. And my man Julius. Ain’t that right, boys?”

“Yes, sir.”

My man.
Julie reveled in the designation. “Yes,
sir
,” he said.

“Something wrong with that?” Luther wanted to know. “You got an objection?”

“Oh, huh, suddenly he’s your grandson.”

“Not sudden. Been, what, how old are you, boy?”

“Fourteen.”

“Been fourteen years.”

“Fourteen years of you not knowing or giving a shit.”

“You should talk.”

“Ho, snap,” Titus said, as if he had enjoyed the retort, even though Julie could not imagine what there was to enjoy in the idea that for the fourteen years of your life, your father had cared as little about you as your grandfather. But Julie had observed that, like other black kids he knew, Titus seemed able to find humor in things that only would have made Julie feel sad.

“How’d you find us?” Julie asked Archy.

“A customer, owns the cab company. Mr. Mirchandani. You gave the driver your card?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Mr. M. recognized your name, he called my cell.”

“Mr. M. is nice,” Julie said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Archy said. “Okay, come on, you been rescued, now we got to go.”

Julie started to walk toward Archy, more than ready to go home, but when he turned to look back at Titus, he saw that they were going to be standing around having generational difficulties for a while longer.

“Come
on
! I got to go to Costco, meet up with my marching band. You boys get your asses in the damn car.”

“Go on,” Titus said. Then, softening it, “Yo, Julie, you go on home.”

“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-
grand
mom. 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.