Michael Chabon: Telegraph Avenue

“Maybe I can do better than that,” Mr. Nostalgia said.

He reached into the back pocket of his denim shorts and took out a folded, sweat-dampened manila envelope. Inside it were the other two green badges on lanyards to which, at his level of participation, he was entitled. He fished out one badge and pushed his way through the screen of goons. Luther Stallings bowed his head, revealing an incipient Nelson Mandela bald spot, and Mr. Nostalgia bestowed the badge on him, Oz emboldening the Lion.

“Mr. Stallings is working for me today,” he said.

“That’s right,” Stallings said at once, sounding not just sincere but impatient, like he had been looking forward for days to helping out in Mr. Nostalgia’s booth. His eyes had flicked, barely, across the badge as Mr. Nostalgia hung it on him; he said, not missing a trick, “In Mr. Nostalgia’s Neighborhood.”

“Working how?” said the older of the two goons.

“He’s doing a signing at my booth,” Mr. Nostalgia said. “I got a complete and a partial set, no Bruce Lee, of the Masters of Kung Fu series, I got a few other things Mr. Stallings has kindly consented to sign. A lobby card from Black Eye , I’m pretty sure.”

“‘ Masters of Kung Fu ,’” Stallings repeated, barely managing to avoid sounding like he had absolutely no idea what Mr. Nostalgia was talking about.

“Donruss, 1976, it’s a tough set.”

Four clueless looks sought enlightenment at the hands of Mr. Nostalgia.

“Uh, guys?” Mr. Nostalgia said with a circular sweep of his hands, taking in the echoing space all around them. “Trading cards? Little rectangles of cardboard? Stained with bubble gum? Pop one in the spokes of your bicycle, make it sound like a Harley-Davidson?”

“Damn, seriously?” Stallings could not keep it back. “ Masters of Kung Fu. They got a Luther Stallings in there?”

“Naturally,” Mr. Nostalgia said.

“Luther Stallings.” The older of the two blue blazers, lank dark hair, the flowerpot skull and triangle chin of a Russian or a Pole, about Mr. Nostalgia’s age, tried out the name. Scrunching up one side of his face like he was screwing a loupe into his eye socket. “Okay, yeah. What’s it? Strutter. Seriously, that’s you?”

“My first part,” Stallings said, seizing upon this unexpected opportunity to preen. Loving it. Putting one of those massive antler hands on Mr. Nostalgia to let him know he was loving it: doing what he must do best. Restoring the goon squad to their proper roles as members of the Luther Stalling Irregulars. “Year after I won the title.”

“Title in what? Kung fu?”

“Wasn’t one at that time. Was in karate. In Manila. World champion.”

“World champion, bullshit,” said Goode’s bodyguard. “I give you that.”

Stallings flat ignored the big man. Mr. Nostalgia, feeling fairly balls-out pleased with himself, tried to do the same.

“We all done here, gentlemen?” Stallings asked the blue blazers.

The security guys in the blue blazers checked in with the bodyguard, who shook his head, disgusted.

“I tell you what, Luther,” the bodyguard said. “You even flick a boogie in Mr. Goode’s general vicinity , I will come down on you, motherfucker. And I will show no mercy.”

The man turned and, with a forbearing hitch in his walk, rolled back to the signing table where his boss, head shaved to stubble, wearing a black polo shirt with a red paw print where the alligator would have gone, armed with nothing but a liquid-silver marker and a high-priced smile, sat fighting his way through an impressively long line of autograph seekers. Game-worn jerseys, game-used footballs, cards, ball caps, he was going to clear nine, ten thousand today.

“Yeah, whatever,” Stallings said, as if he could not care less about Gibson Goode.

Working up a surprising amount of swagger, he followed Mr. Nostalgia to the booth. You would have thought the man had just saved himself from being tossed out of the building by the goon squad. Mr. Nostalgia recognized objectively that he ought to be annoyed, but somehow it made him feel sorrier for Stallings.

“Wow, check this shit out.”

Stallings worked his gaze along the table, taking in the sealed wax packs of Garbage Pail Kids and Saturday Night Fever , the unopened box of Fleer Dune cards, the Daktari and Gentle Ben and Mork & Mindy board games, the talking Batman alarm clock, the Aurora model kits of the Spindrift and Seaview in their original shrink-wrap.

“They even got cards for that ALF , huh?” he said.

His voice as he made this observation, like his expression as he took it all in, sounded unhappy to Mr. Nostalgia, even forlorn. Not the disdain that Mr. Nostalgia’s wife always showed for his stock-in-trade but something more like disappointment.

“Used to be pretty standard for a hit show,” Mr. Nostalgia said, wondering when Stallings would get around to hitting him up for the forty-five dollars. “Nothing much of interest in that set.”

Though Mr. Nostalgia loved the things he sold, he had no illusion that they held any intrinsic value. They were worth only what you would pay for them; what small piece of everything you had ever lost that, you might come to believe, they would restore to you. Their value was indexed only to the sense of personal completeness, perfection of the soul, that would flood you when, at last, you filled the last gap on your checklist. But Mr. Nostalgia had never seen his nonsports cards so sharply disappoint a man.

“ ALF , yeah, I remember that one,” Stallings said. “That’s real nice. Growing Pains , Mork & Mindy , uh-huh. Where the Masters of Kung Fu at?”

Mr. Nostalgia went around to a bin he had tucked under the table that morning after setting up and dug around inside of it. After a minute of moving things around in the bin, he came out with the partial set, the one that was missing the Lee and the Norris cards. “Fifty-two cards in the set,” he said. “You’re number, I don’t know, twelve, I think it is.”

Stallings shuffled through the cards, whose imagery depicted, bordered by cartoon bamboo, labeled with takeout-menu-style fake Chinese lettering, a fairly indiscriminate mixture of real and fictitious practitioners (Takayuki Kubota, Shang-Chi) of a dozen forms of martial arts in addition to the eponymous one, including bartitsu (Sherlock Holmes) and savate (Count Baruzy). At last Stallings came up with his card. Stared at the picture, made a sound like a snort through his nose. The card featured a color still from one of his movies, poorly reproduced. A young Luther Stallings, in red kung fu pajamas, flew across the frame toward a line of Chinese swordsmen, feet first, almost horizontal.

“Damn,” Stallings said. “I don’t even remember what that’s from.”

“Take it,” Mr. Nostalgia said. “Take the whole set. It’s a present, from me to you, for all the pleasure your work has given me over the years.”

“How much you get for it?”

“Well, the set, like I said, it’s pretty tough. I’m asking five, but I’d probably take three. Might go for seven-fifty with the Bruce Lee, the Chuck Norris.”

“Chuck Norris? Yeah, I went up against the motherfucker. Three times.”

“No joke.”

“Kicked his ass all over Taipei.”

Mr. Nostalgia figured he could look it up later if he wanted to break some small, previously unbroken place in his own leaf-buried heart. “Go on,” he said. “It’s yours.”

“Yeah, hey, thanks. That’s really nice. But, uh, no offense, I’m already so, like, overburdened , you know what I’m saying, with stuff out of the past I’m carrying around.”