Telegraph Avenue

“You know.”

“No,” Titus said. “No way. I’m not—”

“You have to. I mean, even if my parents let you stay, and I don’t even want to think how I’m going to explain it all to them, I just have to, like, rely on the fact that they are going to get off on the idea that I have a troubled young African-American friend they can, like, help out or whatever. But you can’t just keep riding your bike past his house all the time. That is just sad.”

Julie went down to the bathroom to brush his teeth and, strangely modest, change into his clothes. When he came out of the bathroom, he found Titus sitting on the bottom attic step, fully dressed, upright, hands on his knees, as if awaiting a court date.

“What if he doesn’t like me?” he said.

Julie thought about squeezing in next to Titus, between him and the wall of the stairwell. Put his arm around the boy, lay his head against his shoulder, hold his hand. If he were Titus’s girlfriend, it would be the easiest thing in the world.

“I wish I were your girlfriend,” he said.

“Shut up, faggot,” Titus said gently.

“Hate speech,” said Julie. He sat down on the other side of Titus, where there was room for them to share the stair without touching. “Just do what I tell you. It’s going to be fine.”

Titus wiped his cheek with the back of one hand and snuffled once. Julie offered him a Kleenex. Titus waved it off.

“Tears in the motherfuckin’ rain,” he said.

On his way back to throw open the doors of Brokeland to the winds of doom, Archy decided to take a detour, drive past the site of the former Golden State market, corner of Forty-first and Telegraph, from whose shelves, as a pup, he had shoplifted all kinds of tasty and desirable items. The Golden State chain, small and local to the Bay Area, had suffered some kind of implosion while Archy was over in the Gulf. The site at Forty-first was sown with the salt of failure, and since then no enterprise had taken root at the cursed spot. Not the plastic-plant nursery. Not the store that sold novelty floor coverings, the kind you usually saw for sale draped over hurricane fences along vacant corner lots, shag-rug portraits of Malcolm X and shag-rug Aztec warriors cradling dead Aztec ladies in the deep nylon pile of their arms.

Archy parked and got out of the El Camino. In the same spirit of research that made him borrow Rolando (he hadn’t gotten the chance to tell Gwen about that, to show her he was capable, willing, and at this point, telling her would be like dropping a penny in a parking meter), Archy applied himself to the study of this slab of failure hewn from the greater zone of vicissitude that was his hometown. He tried to see it the way a successful businessman and top-ranked rich person like Gibson Goode was seeing it: as something that, unlike a plastic houseplant, could be made to grow. He studied the boarded-up plate windows, the rusting iron barrier around the empty cart corral. The mysteriously virginal circle of white concrete where, at the nexus of all earthly desire, there had stood a coin-operated peewee carousel with fiberglass horses, grinding around their tiny orbit in a way that only a kid could have found magical. As he ambled toward the back of the building to the shuttered and chained loading dock, he saw a pudgy man wearing a turquoise tracksuit and sneakers like a pair of tropical birds, murmuring into a cell phone. Big sunglasses made of turquoise plastic concealed the upper part of the man’s face, but the lower part gathered itself into a troubled pout. The man said softly, “Hey.”

“Tsup,” Archy said, fixating his connoisseurial attention on the completely featureless and uninteresting cinder-block backside of the building. He stroked his chin and nodded as if confirming some rumor about the building’s construction, as if noting that the ratio between the width and height of the cinder blocks echoed information that had been hidden by God in the works of Pythagoras, in the radio pulsing of the stars. Slowly, he walked on without giving the man in the bright kicks a second glance, heading down Forty-first Street toward Highway 24 like he had some proper business to attend to.

Forty-first was all sky and wires and broken rooflines and, like a lot of streets that had been cut in two by the construction of the Grove-Shafter Freeway, after all these years it still had a dazed feel, a man who had taken a blow to the head staggering hatless down from Telegraph, face-planting at the overpass. Archy felt a balloon of failure inflating in his rib cage. Between the days of peewee carousels and hectic stolen packages of Ding Dongs and this afternoon in the wasteland of the Golden State parking lot, there seemed to lie an unbridgeable gulf. As if his history were not his own but the history of someone more worthy of it, someone who had not betrayed it. He felt, not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989, when he had accepted an impromptu one-night invitation to play a Funkadelic show at the Warfield (Archy was, at the time, a member of a P-Funk tribute band called Bop Gun) after Boogie Mosson was laid up with a case of food poisoning. That was no decision at all, since a request from George Clinton was an incontrovertible voice from the top of a very high mountain. Archy was tired of Nat, and he was tired of Gwen and of her pregnancy with all the unsuspected depths of his insufficiency that it threatened to reveal. He was tired of Brokeland, and of black people, and of white people, and of all their schemes and grudges, their frontings, hustles, and corruptions. Most of all, he was tired of being a holdout, a sole survivor, the last coconut hanging on the last palm tree on the last little atoll in the path of the great wave of late-modern capitalism, waiting to be hammered flat.

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