Telegraph Avenue. Michael Chabon
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and palisades in favor of the dense British thickets, swarms of German umlauts. Wander into Brokeland hoping to sell a copy of Point of Know Return or, say, Brain Salad Surgery (Manticore, 1973), they would need a Shop-Vac to hose up your ashes.
Julie took his wallet from the back pocket of his cutoff denim shorts. It was a yellow plastic wallet printed with a scratched image of Johnny Depp sporting hair of the eighties and the words 21 JUMP STREET in fake-wildstyle lettering. He unsnapped the wallet’s coin purse, in which he rotated a selection from the variety of business cards he had printed up for himself at Kinko’s at the beginning of the summer, just before he met Titus. A well-chosen card had served him well a number of times since then as a substitute for conversation, particularly with his parents. This time he chose one that read:
JULIUS L. JAFFE
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