Telegraph Avenue

Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.

Only Mr. Jones had always stopped to drop a needle in the long inward spiraling groove that encoded Archy, and listen to the vibrations.

“Say hello, you little jive-ass motherfucker,” Fifty-Eight said.

Apologies are cheap, Julie, and effective all out of proportion to their cost. My father used to say, ‘Carry ’em like a roll of bills in your hip pocket, pass ’em out freely.’ Remember that.”

Titus from Tyler, in Julie’s imagination a sunblasted and horizonless patch of infinite Texas, a necromantic Dia de los Muertos city of prisoners and roses, where Titus had been raised by a forbidding grandmother known as Shy.

to be the sea in which that action was the one and only fish.

“fast, cheap, and badass”