Telegraph Avenue. Michael Chabon

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СКАЧАТЬ a fool-free perimeter around G Bad without making his employer look like a dick. “How you going to pay that, you ain’t even have eight?”

      “Buddy, hey, yo,” Stallings said, then got the name right again with another painful flash—painful to Mr. Nostalgia, at any rate—of that scrimshaw smile. Whatever the man had been doing, apart from simply getting old, to have so brutally pared himself down, hollowed himself out, since his glory days, it didn’t seem to affect his memory; or maybe he wasn’t doing it anymore. “I hope, I, uh, wonder,” going all in with the question mark this time, “if maybe I could persuade you to help me out?”

      Mr. Nostalgia stepped back, an involuntary move ingrained by years of tangling with the hustlers, operators, schnorrers, and short-change artists who flecked the world of card shows like weevils in flour. Thinking there was a difference of more than thirty-seven dollars between offering to pick up the price of admission, a gesture of respect, and springing for the man to buy himself, of all things, a Gibson Goode autograph. Mr. Nostalgia tried to remember if he had ever seen or even heard of a celebrity (however well forgotten) who was prepared to stand in line to pay cash for another celebrity’s signature. Why did Stallings want it? Where was he going to have G Bad put it? He did not appear to be carrying any obvious signables, book, photograph, jersey, not even a program, a napkin, a Post-it. I just want to get with him. To what end? Mr. Nostalgia never could have flourished in his trade without maintaining a keen ear for the slick lines of grifters and bullshit artists, and Luther Stallings was definitely setting off Klaxons, up to something, working some angle. Had already blown his play, in fact, until Mr. Nostalgia for some reason had felt it necessary to leave the safety of his neighborhood and stick his nose where it didn’t belong. Mr. Nostalgia could hear his wife passing the sole necessary judgment on the matter, another in the string of endless variations on her single theme, What in God’s name were you thinking? But Mr. Nostalgia’s title was not a mere honorific; his d/b/a was his DNA. Remembering the weight of that elephant of happiness upon him, on that Saturday afternoon at the Carson Twin in 1974, he chose to believe in the truth of Luther Stallings. A man could want things far stranger and less likely than a quarterback’s signature on a scrap of cash register tape or a torn paper bag.

      “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 СКАЧАТЬ