Telegraph Avenue (13 page)

J
ULIUS
L. J
AFFE

curator

“I have to admit,” his father said, sounding like the admission was not a costly one, “I’m getting pretty fucking sick of these fucking cards.” He passed it back to Julie, who returned it to his wallet and put Johnny Depp back in the pocket of his shorts. “What’s with the enormous shoes?”

They were size-fifteen Air Jordans, white on white on white. They looked like a couple of scale-model Imperial destroyers docked neatly on a deck of the Death Star. Julie considered making this claim. He saw that he would have to collapse the Field of Silence, at least temporarily, and throw up a Snare of Deceit. “It’s that art project,” he said. “The one I told you about.” This strategy—Julie’s mother called it “gaslighting”—could be surprisingly effective on his father, who spent so much time lost in his own humming that he sometimes missed out on real-world events.

“Huh,” his father said.

There was no good reason to lie; on some level, Julie knew that. His parents had to figure-slash-understand that Julie was semi-bicurious, or maybe even gay, or what have you. Twenty-five minutes to gay o’clock. But the confession felt like too much work; Titus was too hard to explain. He was, for example, straight-up-noon straight, both hands on the twelve, though that had not prevented him from accepting every last note and coin of Julie’s virginity over the past two weeks. There was so much more to it than sex, gender, race, and all that piddly shit. Julie felt that his life had suddenly, like amino acids in the primordial soup, begun to knot and pattern and complicate itself. How to confess that he had sneaked out with his skateboard every night to hook up with Titus, in slang but also quite literally joining himself by the hand to Titus’s shoulder as they rolled through the nighttime summer streets of South Berkeley and West Oakland, through the wildly ramifying multiverse of their mutual imagination? Titus preferred the street to the roof and walls within which a hard fate and a ninety-year-old batshit auntie had obliged him to shelter, and Julie preferred nothing to the feeling of Titus’s shoulder bone and muscle against his hand, preferred nothing to the grind of his wheels, each tree, parked car, and lamppost a whisper as they passed.

“It’s that thing at Habitot,” Julie added for verisimilitude. “I have to decorate them.”

His father nodded knowledgeably. There was no other way that he knew how to nod. “So what
are
you doing?” he said. “Playing MTO?”

As a matter of fact, before Titus nodded off, they had been taking turns at Julie’s laptop, logged on to Marvel Team-Up Online. Leveling up their latest characters, Dezire and the Black Answer, running them in their capes and energy auroras through the teeming streets of Hammer Bay, on the island of Genosha.

Julie said, “Filing my teeth.”

“Uh-huh. Not smoking dope.”

“Just crack. And a little opium. Just, like, this much.” He pinched an imaginary pellet between his fingertips. “Fuck, Dad.”

“Because you know it would be all right if you did.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Not all right, but I mean, if you were getting high, I would want you to tell me about it, right?”

“Right.”

“Not feel like you have to hide it or anything.”

“I get it.”

“Because that’s when you start to drift into stupid.”

Julie said that he planned to continue his lifelong policy of avoiding stupid at every opportunity.

“So,” his father said. “Just sitting here, what, feeling sorry for yourself?”

“I don’t need anybody’s pity,” Julie replied, seeing the words scrawl themselves across the page of his imagination in the florid hand he had affected when writing in his Moleskine with his fountain pen. “Least of all my own.”

That raised a smile on his father’s face.

“Why are you even here in the middle of the day?” Julie said.

“I, uh, came home,” his father said. “I guess I should probably go back.”

The shorter his father’s stories got, the more unwise or embarrassing his behavior turned out to have been. His father’s eyes wandered unseeing for the one thousand and seventh time across the artwork that Julie had drawn and pinned to the lath ceiling, the portraits of cybernetic pimp assassins and blind albino half-Jotun swordsmen and one cherished sketch of Dr. Strange produced with Crayolas and a Flair pen when Julie was five or six. A
Nausicaä
poster, the Israeli one-sheet for
Pulp Fiction
. The gatefold inner sleeve of a record called
Close to the Edge
(Atlantic, 1972), with its world of cool, enigmatic waterfalls that endlessly poured their green-blueness into infinity. His father seeing nothing, understanding nothing, searching for the line, the signal, the telling bit of repartee. Recently and unexpectedly, the fiber-optic cable between the continents of Father and Son had been severed by the barb of some mysterious dragging anchor. His father stood there in the attic doorway with his hands in the jump-jive pockets of his suit jacket, loving Julie with a glancing half-sly caution that the boy could feel and yet be certain of the uselessness thereof, that love occupying as it did only one small unproductive zone of the Greater Uselessness that seemed to pervade his father’s life from pole to pole.

“Did something happen with Archy?” Julie said.

“With Archy?”

“Something at the store.”

“At the store?”

“Question with a question.”

“Sorry.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing, I didn’t, I just kind of blew my stack.”

“Oh, Dad.”

“At Chan Flowers. Councilman Flowers.”

“Whoa.”

“Yep.”

“Is that guy kind of, like, scary?”

“I have always thought so, yes.”

“Kind of a creeper?”

“At times he gives off that vibe.”

“But he buys a lot of records.”

“An all too common conjunction of behaviors.”

“And you
yelled
at him?”

“Threw him out, actually,” Nat said. “Then I threw out every other shmegegge in the joint.”

“Oh, fuck, Dad—”

“Then I closed the store for good. How do you like that?”

“You what? For good?”

“As in out of business.”

“You closed the store?”

“I really felt I had no choice.”

“For good?”

“Question with a question,” his father said. “Look, I’m fine. I got over myself. Now I’m going to go back, say I’m sorry to Arch. I’ll apologize to Flowers, Moby, everybody else who needs it. Apologies are cheap, Julie, and effective all out of proportion to their cost. My father used to say, ‘Carry ’em like a roll of bills in your hip pocket, pass ’em out freely.’ Remember that.”

“Cool, okay.”

“Used to say, ‘They are good for business, and they make the world a better place.’ ”

Clearly, his dad was cycling high today, getting that Groucho Marx quality to his delivery. For years he had been on and off various medications whose names sounded like the code names of sorceresses or ninja assassins. Disastrous from the first dose or disappointing in the long run, each wore out its welcome in his father’s bloodstream without ever managing to lay an insulating glove on the glowing wire inside him. His moods had little in the way of pattern or regular rotation apart from a possible intensification in Septembers and Februarys, but if Julie had over time learned to live unshaken by his father’s unpredictable temblors of mania, he had grown inured as well to their completely predictable aftermaths, however heartfelt, of apology and remorse.

“Say sorry,” Nat said. “Then open the store back up like I was, you know, on a little mental lunch break. False alarm. Everybody go about your business.”

“Except Gibson Goode, right?”

“Whatever,” his father said. “Man has a right to sell what he wants, where he wants. Bring him on. Meanwhile, you. Cheer up. You got two more weeks of summer to get through.”

With a wan crackle, the Field of Silence fluttered back to life between them.

And he tried. But before he could tell us he died.

His father closed the door. Julie listened for the creak of his passage down the twisting stair.

The narrow, mirrored door of the old art deco chifforobe swung open, betraying the folded articulate span, half dressed in pressed blue jeans, of Titus Joyner.

“Yo yo yo,” Titus said. Bit by careful bit, he took himself out of the chifforobe and reassembled himself on the floor of Julie’s bedroom, a hit man snapping together the pieces of his rifle. He looked tired. He smelled like the locker room at the Y. “Five more minutes,” he said.

He unrolled himself along the floor of Julie’s room, on the coiled braids of a rag rug, and stretched out. He closed his eyes; his breathing turned solemn and slowed the rise and fall of his chest. He was a prodigy of furtive and impromptu sleep. The nightly bed that fate had furnished him was a zone of danger and dark insomnia. If you closed your eyes in that unsafe house, they would rifle your nightmares and violate your dreams.

“Titus,” Julie said. “Yo, T.”

Nothing; gone. Julie pulled the quilt from his bed and laid it over Titus. It was an antique of the ’80s, Michael Jackson in a tacky spacesuit with a motley crew of robots and aliens. Julie stared at the boy on his floor, a mystery boy fallen from the sky like the Wold Newton meteorite, apparently inert and yet invisibly seething with the mutagenic information of distant galaxies and exploding stars.

Julie was in love.

T
he title of the course, offered through the summer evening enrichment program of the city of Berkeley’s Southside Senior Center, was “Sampling as Revenge: Source and Allusion in
Kill Bill
.” It was scheduled to meet every Monday for ten weeks through August, amid the folding furniture of a beige multipurpose room where, in the past, Julie had taken classes in puppet making, clay sculpture, and ikebana. Always the youngest in the room by decades, half centuries, and happier there among the elderly than ever seemed possible in the company of his so-called peers.

That first Monday in June, a week after his graduation from Willard, Julie had taken his seat in the front row of five chairs at the exact center of the room, midway between the video projector and Peter Van Eder, whom Julie had always imagined, from his irritated tone in the
Berkeley Daily Bugle
, to be this one pudgy bald gentleman with aviator glasses and a square-tipped knit tie whom he would see from time to time at the California, glumly suffering the opening night of
Planet of the Apes
(perhaps the greatest disappointment in the movie life of Julie Jaffe, a mad Tim Burton fan) or
Steamboy
(another tragic dud). But Van Eder turned out to be a bony young guy not far past college age. Big Adam’s apple, big wrist bones, one shirttail untucked, his hair long and stringy and flecked with dandruff or ash from his cigarettes or both. On his chin, a hasty pencil sketch of a goatee.

Julie took a glue stick and a bright orange notebook, quadrille-ruled, out of a Pan Am flight bag. Neatly, he folded and glued to the inside front cover the syllabus of films that Peter Van Eder proposed to screen and discuss:

Lady Snowblood
(1973) d Toshiya Fujita

The Doll Squad
(1973) d Ted V. Mikels

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
(1966) d Sergio Leone

Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41
(1972) d Shunya Ito

Ghetto Hitman
(1974) d Larry Cohen

The Tale of Zatoichi
(1962) Kenji Misumi

The Band Wagon
(1953) d Vincente Minnelli

A Clockwork Orange
(1971) d Stanley Kubrick

36th Chamber of Shaolin
(1978) d Gordon Liu

Coffy
(1973) d Jack Hill

Julie studied the syllabus as Van Eder waited for the last two names on his roster, one of them, Julie was interested to learn, being Randall Jones. Mr. Jones had both given and attended classes at the Southside Senior Center, and it was through him, a few years ago, that Julie had learned of the puppet-making class. Mr. Jones, whose taste in film ran strongly to violent western and crime, was a regular attendee of Peter Van Eder’s film series at the Southside.

Julie found himself dizzied by his ignorance of Van Eder’s choices, only two of which, the Sergio Leone and
The Band Wagon
, he had seen. Unless, as seemed likely, there was another movie called
The Band Wagon
, because
The Band Wagon
that Julie had watched with his maternal grandparents one Christmas in Coconut Creek, Florida, was a delicious musical with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, whose thighs stirred ancient and somewhat distressing longings in Grandpa Roth. A couple of the other titles and directors were familiar.
Zatoichi.
Kubrick, duh.

Somebody said, “Look at the
bird
!”

Cochise Jones, wearing a leisure suit with a faded houndstooth check, stepped into the multipurpose room with Fifty-Eight manning the poop deck of his left shoulder, trailing a kid, perhaps a grandson, about Julie’s age, light-skinned, light-eyed, broad at the shoulder, and slender at the hips. Though as far as Julie knew, Mr. Jones didn’t have any family apart from the bird. When he noticed Julie, he frowned, looking thoughtful, hesitating, as if trying to make up his mind about bringing over the kid to meet Julie.

“He a friend of Fifty-Eight,” Mr. Jones explained straight-faced, apparently deciding that no harm could come of the introduction. “Also a fan of Mr. Tarantino.” Only he pronounced the name as if it rhymed with “Tipitina.”

“Hey,” said Julie, twisting a finger in the tattered selvage of his denim cutoffs until the blood ceased to circulate in his fingertip. His index finger in its noose of cotton thread swelled and pulsed and throbbed and in general served as symbol or synecdoche for its owner and his fourteen-year-old heart, for that all-encompassing, all-expanding disturbance in his skinny little chest that was the love of Tarantino, the world, or all mankind. “I like him, too.”