Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“Seriously,” Archy said.

“Seriously.” Goode was ready for it, had a line. “She’s black. She is beautiful. And she goes really high.”

The five-octave F-above-high-C singing voice of Minnie Riperton, who died of cancer in 1977 at the age of thirty-one, was an avatar of Archy’s mother in his memory; always a vanishing quality to it, an ethereal warmth. The two women, Minnie and Mauve, even looked alike, Cherokee noses, eyes large, deep brown, and pain-haunted. At the unexpected invocation of the name, Archy’s heart leaped and he grew confused, assuming for a dreamlike instant that Goode had named the zeppelin in his mother’s honor.

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s so nice of you.”

Goode looked at Walter or, at any rate, appeared to be regarding Archy’s old friend from behind the blast shield of his D&Gs.

Walter shrugged. “I told you,” he said. “You got to feed the man.”

“Skip breakfast?” Goode said.

Archy said, “Never.”

Goode hung halfway out of the hatch, gripping the frame, and called to the chef to ask him how long it would be until lunch. Chef held up three thick fingers, then commenced plating lunch with DJ aplomb. Two minutes and forty-eight seconds later, Archy found himself sitting at a posse-sized plastic table topped with speckled laminate, called upon to conduct deep research into a plate piled with some kind of Thai-Samoan South-Central barbecued shrimp thing served, with plentiful Sriracha, over coconut rice. Black-eyed peas in a hoisin garlic sauce. A scatter of okra tempura doused in sweet and peppery vinegar.

“Kind of a soul-Asian fusion-type deal,” Archy said.

“Hey,” Goode said. “That’s your thing, right? Soul-jazz. Soul-funk. Walter tells me you like to work the hyphens. Walter— Ah, shit.”

Walter had his eyes closed, holding himself like a plateful of water, as, with an eager kick at its traces, the airship bucked gravity and took to the sky. Goode smiled, slowly shaking his head. “Boy spent his life cutting up dead folks, telling a bunch of homicidal rapping gangbangers they got dropped by their label, but he’s afraid to go up in a damn balloon .”

“Uhh,” said Walter.

Swiftly, Oakland fell away beneath them. The Bay Area shook out its rumpled coverlet, gray and green and crazy salt pans, rent and slashed and stitched by feats of engineering. Twin Peaks, Tamalpais, then Mount Diablo rising up beyond the hills. Archy had flown in and out of his hometown a dozen times or more but never in such breathless silence, never with such a sense of liberation, of having come unhooked. An airplane used force and fuel and tricks of physics to fight its way aloft, but the Minnie Riperton was returning to its rightful home. It belonged in the sky.

When they reached one thousand feet, Walter swallowed and opened his eyes. “Oh, the humanity,” he said.

Archy got up to tour the windows, meet the captains, squint through the shipboard telescope at a far-off disturbance in the haze that he was told to call Lassen Peak. He checked out a bunch of snaps and candids pinned to a corkboard beside the jump seat where T., the bodyguard, sat behind his gold-rimmed sunglasses, containing, as a fist might contain a bauble, his unimaginable thoughts. Pictures of G Bad, the man posed against varied nocturnal backgrounds of city lights or flashbulb darkness with famous singers and actors, black and white, holding the Golden Globes they had won for directing or starring in Dogpile films or their Grammys for Dogpile records. Or caught up in the thick of various posses, or maybe it was the same posse, an ontogeny shaped by time and fashion and the whims of Gibson Goode. Brothers in caps and game jerseys, smiling or blank-faced, throwing up gang signs, holding glasses and bottles. Women of the planet dressed in candy colors, necklines taking daring chances, eyelids done up lustrous as one of Sixto Cantor’s custom paint jobs. Gibson Goode looking exactly the same in every picture, sunglasses, enigmatic half-smile, Super Bowl ring, might as well be a blown-up life-size picture of himself mounted on a sheet of foam core.

“My peeps,” Goode said, taking the pin from one of the photos on the corkboard. “Check out last week.”

He passed the picture to Archy. It showed a particularly unruly group of ladies, strewn as if by a passing hurricane along the laps of a number of gentlemen, among them Walter Bankwell, who peered out from behind the wall of horizontal sisters with an expression of evident panic.

“My boy Walter’s first flight.”

“I never knew him to be afraid of heights,” Archy said.

“I hear you and him go way back.”

“Heard from him or somebody else?”

“Might have heard it from a number of sources.”

You do that. And maybe, you never know, I’m the one ends up putting in a word for you with Mr. G Bad. Undertaking motherfucker worked fast. Wanted to get hold of Luther Stallings with considerable urgency, indeed. Archy telling him, I’ll think about it .

“So where’s the posse?” Archy said, nodding toward the bulletin board. “You leave them at home?”

“Yeah, they okay for a party cruise, but they don’t appreciate the, uh, stately pace of the journey up from Long Beach,” Goode said. “They just a waste of time anyway. Nobody but Tak around, I can get a lot of work done.”

Trying to let Archy know what a serious guy he was, snaps and candids to the contrary, sending himself like his own stand-in to attend such trifling matters while his real self went on tirelessly planning conquests, a hip-hop Master of the World in his Vincent Price airship.

When they reached the featureless blue-gray world beyond the Golden Gate, the pilot brought them back around and they bore down on Oakland again, watching from the port-side window as their hometown gathered its modest splendors.

“Highland Hospital,” Goode said, pointing. “I was born there.”

“Me, too,” Archy said.

“Moved down to L.A. when I was three, but I came back in the summertime, Christmastime. Whenever school got out. Lived with my grandmother in the Longfellow district. Her brother had a record store for a time. Was on Market and Forty-fifth, over by the Laundromat there.”

“House of Wax,” Archy said. It was almost a question. “Seriously? I used to go in there. Your grandfather, he was, uh, kind of a portly man?”

“My uncle. Great-uncle. Uncle Reggie was pretty much spherical.”

“I remember him,” Archy said. And then, as if the line that hooked it had been snagged all these years on some deep arm of coral, an afternoon bobbed to the surface of his memory. A boy, the offhand sketch of a boy, reading a comic book or a magazine, long feet hooked through the slats of a metal stool, a pair of brand-new Top Tens. “Maybe I even remember you.”

Goode lifted a hand to his cheek and patted it as if checking the closeness of his morning shave or monitoring a toothache.

“You used to read comic books?” Archy said.

“Most definitely.”

“You were reading a comic book.” Archy took hold of the line with both hands and hauled up the afternoon, streaming years like water. “I’m thinking it was a Marvel book, but—”

“It was Luke Cage ,” Goode said, picking off the memory from Archy like a bobbled pass. Too positive about it, stripping the ball.

“Was it?”

“Yeah, Luke Cage, Power Man . And we got into a discussion, a long discussion,” turning to Walter, who lifted his head from his hands and stared, the food on his plate sitting there untouched. “Got ourselves way down deep.”

With the sunglasses, the smile that twisted Goode’s mouth could not be read for levels of irony or nostalgia.