Telegraph Avenue (56 page)

On the dilapidated sign of Steele’s Scuba, a ghostly diver confronted the lost submarine mysteries of Telegraph Avenue. Gwen slowed as the bus in front of them knelt like a cow before the newborn Jesus to take on, was it, yes, the Stephen Hawking guy. Nat watched the poor bastard increment himself and his chair, patient and stubborn, onto the bus’s power lift. Talk about alone. But look at him, dude was unstoppable, ubiquitous. Basically, a head on a meat stalk, strapped into a go-kart, motherfucker would take a bus to Triton if AC Transit ever put it on a route. Nat might have felt ashamed of the self-pity in which he currently wallowed, if self-pity knew any shame. He looked away, left, right, and then, tasting his hangover at the back of his mouth like a flavor of dread, up at the sky. Afraid he might see above him, at any moment, the evidence of last night’s stupid shit, looming and vengeful as Spiny Norman in the old Monty Python sketch.

“Whatever,” Nat said. “I’m going to tell this or not?”

“Let me guess. You started drinking.”

“I found a six-pack of warm Corona. Some miracle it didn’t get drunk.”

Nat had opened the first beer, found a slice of lemon, poked it through the mouth of the beer can. Knocked the photograph of Mr. Jones from its ceremonious stool with a satisfying sense of desecration. Got up into the old man’s chosen spot, maybe trying to dispel the emptiness that had gathered there. Figuring he would wait for Archy, who lived in his own personal CP time zone, his own little Guam of lateness. In the meantime have a beer, try to think his existential drama-queen way out of—or anyway, around—the situation. Then, for sure, do a little cleaning up.

By the fourth Corona, Archy had not showed or called, the store was no nearer to being clean, and Nat no longer bothered with the lemon. The goal was still to think his way out of or around the situation, but by this point, admittedly, his grasp of the complexity of the situation was pretty diminished. The improvidence, carelessness, and lack of acumen that he and Archy had shown in operating their business; their tendency to view the taking on of responsibility for every task, errand, or chore that Brokeland Records required—to conduct their lives, mutual and individual—as a prolonged if not infinite game of chicken, each waiting for the other to blink, to give in; the rise of electronic file sharing of digital music; the low revenue generated by the bargain-hunting and transient crew of dormitory DJs and homeboy mix-tapers who made up the greater share of their customer base, far outnumbering the high-roller collectors; the collapse of the Japanese and overseas markets generally; not to mention Archy’s evident dissatisfaction with the nature of their partnership and the algae bloom of financial panic, of provider anxiety, in the normally tranquil pond water of Archy’s soul: All these proximate and precipitating causes of the imminent failure of Brokeland Records seemed by the fourth Corona to have been rinsed from Nat’s mind, leaving only a mildew-black residue of rage against Gibson Goode. Alcohol as helpful to the making of scapegoats as mud to the shaping of golems.

When the beer was gone, Nat poked around amid the dead soldiers stacked on and under the folding tables until he came up with a bottle of Hungarian slivovitz, God knew who had brought it. It was a quarter full. Nat sloshed a little into a red hot-and-cold cup, then quickly knocked back two or possibly three shots. Slivovitz was the cordial of grief, the mourner’s brandy. Nat could remember his newly widowed father, the first Julius, lost in a helpless scrum of uncles in somebody’s kitchen after his first wife’s funeral, gasping at the fire in his chest as the slivovitz went down.

Nat climbed back onto Mr. Jones’s stool with his glass of burning wine, put on
A Love Supreme.
Reliably, it destroyed him. Yes, it had passages of lyric majesty, passages that embodied the modernist union of difficulty and primitivism, and some kind of groove beyond groove, funk beyond funk; and yes, it had been intended as a kaddish of sorts, an expression of praise in the face of all sorrow for the Creator of John Coltrane, with thanks from His magnificent creation; but to Nat, it had always come off as music that was—like Nat himself— secretly powered by currents of rage. Probably that was a projection of Nat’s own feelings toward his own fucked-up Creator, some lesser cousin twice removed of the Perfect Being that had made John William Coltrane. But as he listened to the A-side, with its furious repetitions, the saxophone bashing itself over and over against some invisible barrier, a bee at a windowpane seeking ingress or escape, Nat felt his low-frequency rage with motherfucking Gibson Goode and his motherfucking Dogpile Thang begin to spike. The stylus dragged itself to the locked groove, and he needed to take a piss, and it was at this point, as far as he could remember, that he decided it would be a good idea to forgo the routine pleasure of pissing in his own toilet, in the bathroom behind the curtain with its bug-eyed portrait of Miles Davis. He decided that he would walk down to the future site of the Dogpile Thang and piss on that instead.

“They put that sign up,” he said to Gwen. “You’ve seen it? Big black and red sign. With the paw print, future home of.”

“You peed on the sign.”

“I thought it might feel good.”

“Did it?”

“Well, I mean, it always feels pretty good. But, like, in terms of my
morale
. . . ?”

“And what, somebody saw you peeing on it?”

“Oh,” Nat said, grabbing at this possibility, “do you think it’s that?”

“Do I think what’s that?”

“What the police want to talk to me about.”

“Why, did you do something
else
?”

“The whole,” deciding to adopt Gwen’s word, which sounded so much more innocent and harmless than “pissing,” “peeing thing, I don’t know. I was kind of drunk. But I wasn’t drunk enough to kid myself that it wasn’t kind of a lame thing to do.”

“ ‘Kind of.’ ”

“It pretty much made me feel
more
useless. So that’s when I decided to head out to the airport.”

“You drove drunk.”

“If you want to get technical.”

“What’s with everyone making travel plans all of a sudden?” Gwen wanted to know. “Where did you think you were going? Belize?”

“ ‘Travel plans’? How well do you know me?”

“No, of course, right.”

“I just wanted to get a look at that motherfucking zeppelin.”

“Why? So you could pee on it?”

“Pissing on a zeppelin,” Nat said, regretting bitterly the loss of this opportunity. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

H
e kept the radio off, making the argument to himself that if music divided his impaired attention, then logically, silence would augment it. It was a timeless, placeless transit through a strobe-lit hyperspace of beer and slivovitz, scored only by the quarter-note rumble of I-880 under his tires. Vaguely, he remembered someone reporting a sighting of the airship early that morning, moored somewhere off Hegenberger Road. If it had not already returned to its home base in Southern California, he might find it there, shiny and gigantesque as the ego of Gibson Goode. Let it be huge, shiny, and awesome, then. Nat was prepared—maybe even hoping—to be awed. At least let a failure of his, just this once, partake to some measure, however indirect, of grandeur.

He traced and retraced the barren cipher written in the darkness by airport roads whose names commemorated heroes of aviation. The silence in the Saab was replaced by humming as Nat’s original curiosity about the zeppelin, half larkish, half irritated, mounted in the darkness, until it became a full-blown longing and, as with Ahab’s fish, the airship came to bear the blame, in Nat’s imagination, for all the ways in which the world was broken. And then, right around the time Nat began to understand that he was drunk and lost and would never find the motherfucker, and furthermore had probably already attracted the notice of Homeland Security’s flying robot thermal cameras—around the time he realized that for some reason he was humming the chord changes to “Loving You”—it startled him: a zeppelin-shaped hole cut into the orangey skyline of San Francisco.

What happened then: He must have swerved. Someone threw a big luminous net at the car. After that—all within the span of the three or four seconds it took him to crash through the chain-link fence—came a lot of really interesting sounds. A ringing of bells. A raking of tines. A boing, a thump, a scrape, a crunch. Finally, a gunshot bang, as the same clown who had thrown the giant steel net at the car decided it would be funny to give Nat a face full of airbag.

After that there was a gap in the archive. The next things Nat remembered were a taste of salt in his nostrils, the blacktop sending the day’s heat up through the soles of his socks, the dwindling hiss of the Saab’s radiator, and the consciousness—alas, not yet sober—of having benefited from a miracle. He was fine, whole. And the God of Ahab at last had delivered him from his lonely quest. He stood a hundred feet from his beast in its nighttime pasture. He was not sure what had happened to his shoes.

As he started across the sweep of pavement toward the zeppelin, he tripped some kind of sensor. Stanchions studded with floods lit up all around the airship, snapping it on like a neon sign. Nat fell back into shadow and waited to see what happened. Expecting to find himself confronted by a Bronco full of security guards, an android sentry equipped with lasers, a lonely old night watchman named Pete or Whitey who would leap up from his chair, already halfway to cardiac arrest, as the latest
Field & Stream
tumbled from his lap.

Nothing. Most of the light from the stanchions was squandered on the gasbag, or whatever it would be called on a zeppelin—the word “envelope” slid in through a slot in his memory—but Nat thought he could make out a few small buildings over on the far side of the asphalt field. Maybe Gibson Goode and his entourage were asleep inside that glossy plastic gondola. It was not hard to imagine somebody in that crew feeling obliged to bust out with a gun and take a few shots at the intruder. Nat wondered if he ought to be afraid. But no light came on in the windows of the gondola.

The zeppelin floated three or four feet off the ground, lashed at the nose to a steel mast that rose in turn from the wide bed of a parked truck that looked small next to the airship but must in fact be massive. The airship lay perfectly still, as if listening for Nat. The breeze off the bay did not appear to trouble it. Yet at the same time it thrummed, verging on some kind of outburst of motion. It reminded Nat less of a whale now than a Great Dane or a thoroughbred horse. An animal strung with nerve and muscle but, for all that, lovable.

“Poor thing,” he said to the zeppelin.

He came out of shadow and went over to the truck, across whose grille in chrome letters ran the weighty inscription
M • A • N
. The mooring mast was a business of telescoping poles, like the arm of a cherry picker without the elbow. As Nat drew closer, the mast chimed deep inside itself, and the breeze sang along the length of guy wire that held the zeppelin fast. The truck was meant, from the ground up, to be climbed. At the back, three steel steps led up the bed, and then you scooted around the base of the mast to the bottommost of a column of metal spikes or cleats, like the steps on the side of a telephone pole, which led up the lower segment of the mast to a narrow steel ladder, which in turn carried Nat all the way to the top.

Here his lingering intoxication, and maybe a touch of loopiness from the collision, contended against his desire to set the noble zeppelin free. He spent awhile clinging to a cold rung at the top of the mast. He reached a hand, palm outward, fingers spread, like a man feeling for the kick of a child in a woman’s belly. In the instant before contact, he recalled having heard that a static discharge had ignited the
Hindenburg
. But there was no spark, only the cool taut bellying of the airship against his palm. He wished wildly for an ax, a pair of shears, a torch to cut the cable. Then he noticed a heavy lever on the shaft of the mast, alongside the spinneret from which the cable emerged, helpfully labeled
EMERGENCY RELEASE
. He opened the clasp that held it in place, snaked his shoeless feet around the poles of the ladder, and dragged down on the release, wrestling its rubber grip with both hands. The lever shunted out and down, and with a whistle of steel against steel, the guy wire whiplashed loose of the mast and swung from the big carabiner that clipped it to the airship’s nose.

“Go ahead, Arch,” he said, perhaps uncovering the source of the sudden flood of tenderness he felt toward the zeppelin. “Fly and be free.”

The zeppelin disdained his gesture of liberation. It continued to hang, drifting minutely, almost invisibly, three or four feet off the ground.

“Ballast,” Nat inferred. “Right.”

He climbed down the mooring mast, dropped to the ground, and took a slow walk around the gondola, looking for something to release, a system of weights, bags of sand like in
The Wizard of Oz.
There was nothing. He sat down on the ground, abruptly tired, and looked up at the gondola’s underside. There were two round hydrants, sealed with caps. Modest red capital letters identified them as ballast tanks. Nat reached up, went on the tips of his toes, and got hold of one of the caps. He got just enough purchase on tiptoe to pop it loose. The cap tore loose of his fingers. He felt himself hammered by something cold and implacable that turned out to be a hundred gallons of water. The shock of the water sobered him at once, enough to drench him in an equal or greater quantity of cool, clear regret for what he had done, as the zeppelin, with appalling grace and lightness, took to the luminous night sky.

“H
ow did you get home?”

“Walked. Found a cab.”

“You just left the car there?”

“I now realize the folly of that.”

“That’s how the cops found you. From your registration.”

“No doubt.”

“Oh, Nat.”

“I know, I know.”

“You
stole
the damn Dogpile blimp.”

“Liberated,” he suggested, but he knew that in all its long history, the word had never sounded more lame.