Telegraph Avenue (40 page)

“Sure,” Julie said presently. “Totally.”

“Faggot.”

“Hate speech.”

As if in reply—a reply uttered in the silent and intricate language they used to transact the secret business that underwrote their friendship—Titus took hold of Julie’s hand and pressed it against the fly of his jeans. They were at the back of a spiffy new Van Hool, segmented and capacious, and there was no one in the seats behind or around them, but the bus was far from empty, and you would not have said that Titus’s move was quite covert. Julie pressed his palm against that straining arc of denim, rocked it back and forth, fingers spread. Titus kept his eyes on Valletta, imagining, Julie understood, that he was
up in that
. In the rape scene that opened
Mayflower Black
, Valletta Moore bared breasts that had the graceful architecture of eggplants, paler than the rest of her, nipples fleshy, aureoles far-flung. When she stabbed her white rapist in the throat, improvising a shiv with a shard of broken vinyl LP, rolling off him, you could see, in freeze-frame,
there!
and
there!
the tangled shadow of her bush. No doubt Titus was making use of some of that material now. He was not, Julie knew, picturing Julie naked. He was probably not even thinking that it was Julie reaching to unbutton his fly.

Julie’s fingers staged a brief bit of comedy with the buttons and the waistband of Titus’s boxer briefs, in which Titus’s dick played the role of clown bursting from a pint-sized car, snake liberated from the fake can of nuts. Smooth and cool against the hand as gargoyle stone. As he played with Titus, Julie tried to look at Valletta Moore the way he imagined that Titus was looking at her, but all he could manage was the idea that his lips were Valletta’s, a vivid O painted red around Titus’s penis. That his head was bobbing up and down and mechanically in Titus’s lap the way Valletta’s had done during her love scene with Luther Stallings in
Strutter at Large
. The idea that Julie could ever resemble Valletta Moore, in this or any way, struck him as only slightly more likely than his being able to get up in her, and he smiled at his poor little gargoyle self. Things went as far as they could between Titus and Julie’s fingers without causing cleanup issues. Titus brushed Julie’s hand aside and, still looking at Valletta, buttoned himself up. He gave Julie’s fingers a gentle squeeze.

Julie said, “Seriously, dude, you shouldn’t say ‘faggot.’ ”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“I’m serious. It’s—”

Titus said, “You go right ahead, call me ‘n—’ ”

“Oh, yeah, right.”

“I really don’t care.”

“Yes, you do.”

Titus frowned, half-closed his eyes, rehearsing the scene in his mind. Slouched low next to Julie, legs sprawled out into the handicap area, Nikes slanted like a couple of Easter Island heads. Taking up about a third of Julie’s seat, too. “Probably true,” he conceded.

“Anyway, I never
would
call you something like that.”

“Yeah, whatever, Wavy Gravy. Peace and love.”

“Want some tempeh?”

Titus’s eyes behind his Run-DMCs bore in on the back of Valletta’s head as she stared at the bus window opposite or, less likely, at whatever there was to see on the far side of the glass. As though to offer evidence of the terminal crunchiness, the megadoses of rainbow radiation, to which Titus felt Julie had been overexposed in his sheltered Berkeley youth, they rolled past the ruin of the Bit o’ Honey bar. The Bit o’ Honey, owned by some Black Panthers, was mentioned twice in a book on Panther history that Peter van Eder had loaned them. The Minister of Defense, Huey Newton, had been jumped and beaten in the parking lot, and a few nights later, perhaps in retaliation, someone named Everett “Popcorn” Hughes had been shot inside the bar. Now, affixed to one of the Baghdad-quality blast shutters that blinded the Bit o’ Honey’s face, a bold if oddly worded sign announced, in lean sans-serif letters, that the site would soon be home to the MindBridge Center for the Study of Human Consumption.

“I think I know where tempeh comes from,” Julie said.

“Okay,” Titus said to the back of Valletta Moore’s head. “Where we going?”

“The Number One goes to East Oakland. Out, um, International, kinda like, Fruitvale, I think.”

Julie knew that Titus had not been asking about the bus route and where it might lead them. The gist of his question had been: Where is
she
going? They had literally bumped into her, emerging with a dreamlike matter-of-factness from the front door of the Bruce Lee Institute. The body pillow serving to absorb, like an air bag, Julie’s impact with the woman. At that point, enveloped in the deep, cool cushion of her fragrance, Julie had sort of recognized her, thinking,
That woman looks like her and smells how I would imagine her smelling how funny since I have just seen all six of the nine films in which she appeared between 1974 and 1978 and which are available on DVD or VHS I wonder how old
she is if she was born in like 1954
, and then when they came back outside, having left the pillow and note for Gwen, and saw the woman waiting by the bus shelter across Telegraph, he had known her for certain: Valletta Moore, in the flesh. High, fine, feline, with that Candygirl Clark aloofness, but looking, to the eye of a rainbow-irradiated East Bay boy, maybe a touch on the tranny side.

Titus got very quiet when he recognized her, the way only Titus could get quiet, shutting down nonessential systems, patching all available impulse power to the sensors. There was Valletta Moore, waiting for AC Transit, tapping her cell phone against her hip, face unreadable behind her foreign-dictator shades but standing folded into herself, with impatience or the need to pee. Her head fixing like a radar dish on every car that passed her. Going somewhere. Looking out for someone.

The possibility that she was on her way to a rendezvous with Luther Stallings occurred to both boys simultaneously, since in the interval between the doorway collision and now, they had not only deposited the body pillow by the door behind which (a thought as fearsome to Julie as that of having sexual intercourse with Valletta Moore or Red Sonja) the naked expanse of Gwen Stallings was evidently being lathered and rinsed. They had also seen a framed photograph in the dusty trophy case: the picture of Luther Stallings in his prime, posed beside the crazy little Chinese
sifu
lady when she was only one hundred, and not one hundred and thirty-five, years old.

“Okay, check this out,” Titus had said, watching her in the bus shelter. Power restored to all systems. He’d patted at the side of his tidy natural with his dazzling palm. Then he had crossed the street in disregard of a don’t-walk signal and converging vehicles, with Julie bringing up the rear like an old worried grandpa. When the lady’s bus came, the boys got on it. They drew a line from the photograph, lost in the dust of kung fu oblivion, to Valletta Moore, and now they were riding the bus along that line as she took up the pencil and marked the course they might follow to find the magical man.

It would not be accurate to claim that Julie had no illusions as to whether Luther Stallings would turn out to be worthy of the admiration, regard, and even—in a way that was, at this point, almost pure fanboyishness—the love that Titus and, loving Titus, Julie felt toward the man. True, Julie Jaffe was one of those rare beings capable of adopting an optimistic view toward the past, and furthermore, he had experienced while watching the available filmography of Luther Stallings the kind of sexual arousal that must afflict Titus as he stared at Valletta Moore. Not because Stallings was beautiful—though he was, his litheness in fight scenes and action sequences like a base stealer’s, head down and ready to get some dirt on his pants. What got to Julie was the way Luther Stallings off-gassed something invisible that Julie wanted to call
equipoise
: unruffled, confident, prepared to improvise. Something so rare and fragile could not be entirely faked. Archy had the same quality, softened up, and so, in his turn, did Titus: There had to be some kind of genuine basis in the famous original.

A number of Julie’s illusions remained intact, therefore, at the end of the ride as he followed Titus, who was following Valletta Moore, east to Franklin Street, where she opened her phone, made a brief call, then went into a takeout whose sign argued, with a certain apathy that must have been the fruit of language heedlessly applied, that it was properly known as
EGG ROLL LOVING DONUT
. But even without having heard the disparaging words and tone his father and Archy had used about Luther Stallings, Julie had read enough books and seen enough movies to suspect that if Titus ever did meet his grandfather, he was in for a disappointment, perhaps a grave one. Julie was so conscious of this possibility that as great a part of him hoped Valletta Moore was only stopping for a donut on the way to pay her electric bill, say, and had not seen Luther Stallings in twenty years, as hoped that they were seriously on the man’s trail. Titus showed nothing but scorn for Archy and had never said anything remotely to the effect that he had a hole in his heart in the shape of a father, but like an astronomer with an exoplanet, Julie could infer that hole’s presence from distortions in the field around Titus. It was there in the ambition and the scorn. It was there in the daring that led Titus to cut past Valletta Moore, duck ahead of her into Loving Donut with its brushed steel and white tile like a police morgue, and get in line before she did. Julie recalled having read in a spy novel that the best way to tail somebody was to walk ahead, but there was an élan to Titus’s move that went beyond spycraft.

Titus put in an order for six egg rolls and two glazed raised donuts; Julie paid the bill. Valletta Moore, taking no notice of either boy, ordered a chicken chow mein and a dozen egg rolls to go.

She paid for her food using coins of small denomination, slowly, seeming to get angrier with each one that she snapped down on the counter, as though the Asian lady at the cash register were rushing her or fouling up her math. The Asian lady said nothing at all, and her face gave away little, but in her very silence and patience, there was something that might have passed for contempt. Settling the tab took every nickel that Valletta Moore could raise in the clatter of her handbag. When the Asian lady offered to make up the four cents’ change, Valletta stared at the proffered pennies with distaste, as though they were something the Asian lady ought to take care of with a Handi Wipe. Then she carried her white paper bag out to the sidewalk, where the boys, cleverly, were already hot in advance on her trail. Their cover: two boys patronizing Loving Donut. Easy to remember, diabolic in its simplicity.

Julie declined to touch the paper bag that Titus held out to him, let alone its contents, whose reek of cabbage and burnt sugar caused his stomach, already twisted by the dread and bus-borne hand job and the thrill of pursuit, to seethe. “Did you see the oil they had those things cooking in?” he said.

“Biodiesel,” Titus said. “Run a Jetta.”

If you recorded Titus eating the six egg rolls and two donuts on film, Julie thought, and then ran the film in reverse, it would look as though he were firing them out of his mouth, pop, pop, like cannonballs from the mouth of a cannon. Thirty seconds after commencing his meal, he went inside to wash it down with a half pint of milk, also on Julie.

When Titus came back out of Loving Donut, he was just in time to witness the arrival of a very unfortunate Toronado. It juddered, and heaved, and disputed with unseen antagonists like some kind of Telegraph Avenue hobo. Rust had left bloody tooth marks along its underbelly and wheel beds. It might once have been gray or green, but since that remote era, the most irresolute painter in the history of automotives appeared to have tested out every known make and formulation of primer on all of its surfaces. Its driver slowed without stopping and leaned over to unhook a loop of yellow nylon that connected the right-side grab handle to the lock button of the passenger door. The door groaned open. Valletta effected a kind of flying hurdle into the passenger seat. She slammed the door shut and relooped the nylon cord over the lock button. Without missing a beat, she and the driver seemed immediately to resume some earlier argument, the report of which contended, as the car pulled away from the curb, with the hawking and rattling of the car’s emphysema, arthritis, TB.

At the wheel, indisputably, unmistakably: Luther Stallings.

“Damn,” said Titus, not without an air of truest wonder.

The hunt would have ended there, with the boys left to find their way back from Franklin Street, if Julie had not happened to spot a man in a turban coming out of the one-story office building next door to Loving Donut. He was holding a package of Rolaids and a small spray bottle of Febreze.

“This is going to be incredibly racist,” Julie warned Titus, or himself, or the censorious gods of his hometown.

The pathetic Toronado hit a red light at the corner of Twelfth and Broadway. Julie approached the gentleman in the turban and asked if he was, by any chance, a taxi driver, and if so, did he happen to have his taxicab handy?

Julie was to be spared having the racist underpinnings of the structure of his consciousness exposed to the world, at least for now, because it turned out that the door from which the man in the turban had emerged belonged to the dispatch center and main office of Berkeley-Oakland Yellow Cab of Oakland, Inc. Thus Julie’s rude and bigoted inquiry was transformed by chance proximity into a reasonable if not logical inference.

The man in the turban looked them up and down, holding the bottle of deodorant spray with a hint of admonishment, as though to suggest that he might be obliged, if they were planning to fuck with him, to Febreze them. “Who is wanting to know?” he said.

They found Mr. Singh’s Crown Victoria parked around the corner, bearing across the bottom of its doors, under the stenciled logo of Berkeley-Oakland Yellow Cab of Oakland, Inc., in slanted capital letters, the surprisingly furious legend
GOD DAMN INDIA IMPERIALIST DESTROYER OF PURISTAN!
The boys got into the back. Julie had twenty-one dollars left in his wallet. He hoped it would be enough to get them wherever they were going.