Griffith Review 50 - Cargoes

by Nick Earls

  ‘You take a still and let me check this?’ He points at the camera.

  After minor alterations and another still, we’re ready.

  I frame him as well as I can with the van stopping and starting in avenue traffic, and I ask him to start by telling us where we are.

  ‘Hi, Australia,’ he says, and waves, like a witless tourist. Fine by me if that’s how he wants it. ‘This is my wheels, aka Club Na$ti, coming to you from the streets of New York City.’

  ‘Great.’ As in, great if the benchmarks are boxing commentators from the ’70s and tuxedoed pageant hosts. But my next question – the festival’s next question – is set to be worse. ‘So, what are you looking forward to in Australia?’

  ‘I’m gonna bring it, Australia, like I know you want me to.’ He’s looking right down the barrel, pointing for emphasis. ‘I’m gonna rhyme like the best of all time, rhymes that turn on a dime. I know you know how to party, and I’m bringin’ the beats.’ His phone is in his other hand, and he glances down at the screen and flicks quickly between images. ‘Now tell me, Australia, you got some of this for me?’ He holds the phone up, squarely in the middle of the shot. It’s bright with white flesh. ‘How beautiful is this? You got anything this motherfuckin’ beautiful?’

  It’s Miss New Haven, naked. Her knees are bent and the phone must be somewhere between her ankles. Immediately above her porn-star-bare vagina, though careful not to obscure a millimetre of it, the straight index finger of her right hand slides back and forth through the inverted V made by the index and ring fingers of her left, like a pool cue in a jigger, sizing up a shot. In the distance, framed by the larger V of her thighs, there’s a blur of blonde hair, the smudged red lipstick line of a smile on her pale face, dark featureless eyes.

  Na$ti lurches back laughing, and his left hand goes out to balance him and tips the Little Brown Bag onto the floor. The plum-coloured purse spills out, its folded strap unravelling. He puts his hand over his phone screen. That’s his first move. His mother is in his head. He sets the phone on the seat and scoops up the purse, holding it close to a strip of white door lights and examining each part of it to make certain it’s come to no harm.

  He finds a scuff mark and says, ‘Fuck, man. Fuck.’ There’s a sharp intake of breath and he blinks and rubs his eyes. ‘Goddamn it.’

  The camera is pointing at the floor and I stop it filming. Na$ti stares at the mark. A tear rolls down his cheek and drops from his chin.

  ‘It’s cool, Lydell.’ It’s a line Smokey must say in his sleep. He reaches across to take the purse, licks his thumb and wipes the smudge away. ‘Good as new.’ He shows him the spot.

  There’s another lurch of breath, and Na$ti steadies himself and nods. He is not in this second remotely nasty. He is a lost boy.

  ‘Let’s put it in one them big bags,’ he says, ‘with clothes all around.’ He clears his throat, focuses on something in the air between us and then looks at me. His eyes are still shiny, but he puts on a smile. ‘You showin’ Australia all that?’

  ‘It’ll cut out before the bag’s involved.’

  ‘Cool. You showin’ the rest?’ The smile reshapes itself. It’s cockier, dirtier.

  ‘We might drop a little pixellation here and there, I suspect.’

  It won’t need much. Crotch and gesture amount to no more than a few square millimetres in the middle of a phone screen that’s only part of the shot. And there are no identity issues. Even with the complete photo, only her gynaecologist might have a chance of recognising her. Perhaps fans too, in this case, but she’s already selling it to them.

  I restart the camera, and he settles himself again in his seat and gives me a nod.

  ‘Your branding’s all very vaginal.’

  He laughs. ‘Catch the salmon while it’s running.’

  He looks to Smokey for affirmation or a high five, but Smokey has one hand deep in the Big Brown Bag, with the other holding the purse clear until he’s made a nest for it.

  Na$ti frowns. ‘I’m all about family now.’

  It comes out sounding like a line he’s read somewhere, one of those things famous people say, the lie of a broken politician or CEO who has lost the confidence of the board. In this second though, I think he means it. In the interview, it’s a car-crash non sequitur, but for him it was the next direct unfiltered thought. I don’t know what family he has, other than his second-and-a-half cousin, who can probably thank Na$ti for the great suit and the gold on his teeth, but who tends to the bags and takes what he’s given.

  ‘So, what do you want from this? From the life you’re leading now? Apart from more photos like the one on your phone.’

  ‘I wanted them cargoes.’ It’s another piece of a thought. He is full of drugs and sex, and sad notions are surfacing out of the black water.

  ‘You wanted some other things more,’ Smokey says, in a tone that’s almost gentle. ‘And you got them. Anyways, Alexander Wang gonna be making pants a while.’

  ‘That was shitty, maxing out the card in Bloomingdale’s.’ He’s talking to Smokey, but I’m still shooting. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be like that, not there.’ He looks at the camera and holds up his hand so that his palm fills the screen. ‘You cut that. You cut that, okay?’ I move the camera inadvertently and his hand follows. ‘I’m gonna answer that question again. You ask it again and I’ll answer.’

  ‘Sure. We’ll keep rolling and I’ll cut it later.’ I will. There’s no reason not to. He’ll look as mad as a snake on a hot road with all those scatty ideas one after another – salmon, family, pants, credit cards – and anyone viewing it is likely to put it down to bad editing. I could run it as is with a clock in the corner and no one would believe me. Take two. ‘So, what do you want from this?’

  ‘What do I want from this? Drake’s got a waterfall.’ It’s a rapper’s answer. It’s the start of some bullshit, but the correct kind of rapper bullshit. His eyes flick towards the camera and then back to me. ‘And stables. He’s got a waterfall with two bitches on their knees. Statues. And a grotto. I want that shit.’

  ‘What about inner peace?’ It’s the real unanswered question, though the chance won’t arise to give it its due, not even over the final mouthfuls of the world’s greatest beef Wellington, candlelight glinting from my recorder. Statues and a grotto. Inner peace might as well be tossed in now, sounding like a joke, to see what he makes of it.

  He smiles a smile that he never intended, not a rapper’s smile at all, no condescension in it. He gives a hur-hur-hur laugh, deeper than I thought it’d be. ‘Yeah, that too. Maybe not this week. Inner peace ain’t so good for the rhymes.’ It’s all I’m getting for now.

  ‘So, stables. Have you got any horses?’

  ‘Do I got horses?’ He looks straight at the camera. ‘Do I got horses, Australia? No. Drake got no horses neither. But he got stables, see. I want enough stables that I got me a mews.’

  His head rocks on screen as he laughs, and light flashes on his teeth. He holds up a fist and Smokey bumps it. It’s perfect for the festival website, exactly the kind of soulless bragging and wordplay we look to rappers for.

  ‘Lydell, you got a little…’ Smokey indicates the crusting around Na$ti’s left nostril. With his head turned, it’s catching the light like quartz.

  Na$ti wipes his face, and blood smears across the back of his hand.

  ‘Motherfucker.’ In panic, he wipes again, streaking the blood across his cheek. He gives a big wet sniff and presses both hands on his face, fingertips meeting over his nose. He blinks, mouth-breathes. ‘How about a Kleenex, bitches?’

  ‘Pinch it,’ I tell him, demonstrating on myself. ‘Just pinch it.’

  Smokey fidgets in his seat, lifting his hand towards Na$ti’s face, then pulling it back. From the front, Rakim passes a box of tissues without turning around. Smokey pulls out a handful, prises Na$ti’s tented fingers away fro
m his nose and clamps the tissues in place.

  ‘Now pinch it,’ he says. ‘You heard the man.’ He takes another tissue from the box and wipes his hand before looking up at me. ‘We get final cut, yeah?’

  A BEEF WELLINGTON is waiting when we arrive at the restaurant, but the next is two minutes away, so Na$ti decides to take that and give me the older one. The place is otherwise empty, the kitchen otherwise closed. There is no suggestion that I be given a menu. A great beef Wellington that has spent ten minutes under a hot lamp is still, by my reckoning, likely to be a great beef Wellington. And it’s deep into the night, not near a mealtime for me anyway.

  Smokey is on his way to his new daughter, finally.

  The table, set for two, has a bud vase crammed with small red plastic flowers and a tea-light candle in a bowl.

  While my dinner spends its final minute under the light and Na$ti’s is being plated up, I ask him what makes this his favourite meal and he says, ‘It’s just the best. The pastry’s flaky, the duxelles…it tastes real good.’ He tilts his chin up a little and sets his hands on the table. I notice a tiny, pilled ball of tissue lodged in his moustache, where Smokey has dabbed a Kleenex dipped in Perrier to clean away the blood. ‘It tastes refined. I believe they add cream, which many people don’t. And the mushrooms are straight from Italy.’

  There are no deep truths to be mined in his dinner choice, no heartfelt connections to bring to the surface. He’s more concerned with sounding like an aristocrat, someone who has lived and Wellingtoned anywhere a person should.

  As our meals are served, I ask him what music meant to him when he was younger and he tells me, ‘I liked the sound first, the way cool guys had it coming out of cars.’ He picks up his fork. ‘Then I see that Jay Z come from Brooklyn and he the richest dude.’

  ‘Mos Def, Notorious B.I.G. – they were from Brooklyn too, weren’t they?’ I can talk music endlessly. I want to see what it brings up here.

  ‘Them too, but I only knew about Mos Def from when he worked with Kanye in ’bout 2010. Anyway, he got a different name now.’ He cuts into his beef Wellington and a rush of steam comes out. ‘And Biggie, well, I was young then.’

  Young when Biggie was shot dead in LA – that’s what I think he means. By my reckoning, Lydell Luttrell Junior turned two that year.

  ‘I met his mom, though, Ms Wallace. She call him Christopher, but…’

  ‘So you talked about him with her?’

  ‘No. It’s what I hear.’ He sticks his fork into the pink beef. ‘You don’t want this to get cold.’

  ‘How did you know her?’ I’m picturing a young Lydell, hand in his mother’s, Voletta Wallace bending down to talk to him. She was a preschool teacher, maybe still is.

  ‘Just in the neighbourhood.’ He lifts the fork to his mouth and sits back to chew, appreciate. Whatever story there is, he’s scrubbed it bare of detail and it’s plain I’ve got all I’m going to.

  It should mean everything, this picture I have of them in my mind – two mothers meeting on the street, one of a dead rapper, the other on her own downward path, her boy soon working his own rhymes. It could be a pivotal moment, with Biggie Smalls – Christopher Wallace – the Icarus of the tale, a parable from Lydell’s own neighbourhood. I’m picturing Na$ti’s mother with the plum-coloured shoulder bag that she’ll never see.

  It’s another in a series of probing moves that could take him to his parents, but not one does. He keeps me at bay the whole meal.

  His connection to Smokey is on his mother’s side: ‘Some kind of cousin.’ No more detail than at the start of the night. Ms Willard is recently dead and thought him nasty to the last. He has some friends from the neighbourhood, though he doesn’t see them much and won’t give me names. As is his way, he leaves that recollection whirring in his head a while before trying to divert me to the present, always the present.

  He has a story about the Grammys, which he’s told in several other interviews, and one about a ski trip with Jay Z, when he hoped the technique for snowboarding would be identical to skateboarding but it turned out it wasn’t. He mentions a record-label party on a yacht where Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs had a red drink spilt on his white suit and left by helicopter from a pad on the rear deck.

  Each anecdote is brief and unexamined, but Na$ti is not yet a great examiner of his life. I suspect he doesn’t dare to be. If he stares too closely at any of this, it might disappear.

  He wants the present to write over the past, firmly and grandly. I am to judge him for his ‘now’, even though it’s only the journey to now that’s of interest to me. A nineteen-year-old loose in the city, having sex, taking drugs and eating late is no story in itself. Sometime, long into the future, he’ll know that too.

  But it will add up to enough for my purposes, even if it’s served to me as a mixture of rapper’s answers, dead ends and jagged edges. A story is a cohesive thing once it’s written, but the path to it is not.

  IT’S DAWN WHEN I arrive back at the Beacon. A street-sweeping truck is passing, skimming the kerb. Crates of fruit are being delivered to the supermarket on the other side of Broadway. The air is cool and fresh as I step out. The van smells of bodies now, of Na$ti and his girl, of men kept in a small place. The last molecules of sanitiser have been defeated.

  My eyelids feel as stiff as wallpaper. There’s a sheen of grease on my skin. I’m not one for all-nighters, even when my sleep reserves are okay.

  The concierge calls out, ‘Good morning, sir’, altogether too heartily. ‘How’s that beautiful daughter of yours?’ Our circumstances make us everyone’s business here, but he could not mean it more kindly.

  It’s not long after 5 am, but Lindsey and Ariel are already up when I open the door. Ariel is in pyjamas, sitting with toys, watching Frozen again on DVD. She looks at me as if I’ve been gone no more than a minute and then turns back to the screen. I can hear a bowl clunk on a countertop. Lindsey is warming the morning feed.

  When I step into the kitchenette, she is leaning forward, with her forehead against the cupboard above. Her hair is in front of her face, so I can’t see if her eyes are open. She is squishing the packet of liquid around in the warm water, attempting to heat it evenly.

  ‘Here, let me do that.’

  She jerks into a more vertical position when I speak, and she bumps the bowl. There’s a red patch on her forehead from the cupboard door.

  ‘Didn’t hear you come in,’ she says, and steps back. She folds her arms and watches me press the liquid around in the packet. ‘All night. Did you know it’d take all night?’

  ‘Sorry. You know what they can be like, some of them.’ I hadn’t the heart to tell her it was a two-to-three-day job, compressed into whatever hours last night would give me. No time in the planning of this trip or its execution was the right time for that. But the interview will end up delivering four pay packets, one of them a good one.

  In a simpler life I would have spread it out, with time for sightseeing, maybe a baseball game. I can still remember the chickpea salad from Zabar’s. We had no commitments that first visit, other than to squeeze as much New York out of it as we could.

  ‘Yeah.’ She stretches her arms up and yawns. ‘My parents have transferred the last five thousand.’

  This is what we have become, ledger-keepers and scroungers trying to pay for medical treatment. Across town, Na$ti is hooking up, getting high, dialling the present up as far as it’ll go, and here at the Beacon we have to be about the future. You cannot live in the moment when the moment is a diabolical time.

  ‘Dad still thinks we should crowdfund,’ Lindsey says. Her parents have given us twenty thousand. ‘You’ve got the contacts.’ She glances past me, checking Ariel, who is still deep in Frozen, clutching her second- or third-best monkey. ‘She’s not… I don’t want her to perform for it.’

  Ariel scratches her cheek where the tape itches. The clamp on h
er tube sways up and down.

  ‘Neither do I.’ I find the thought of the crowdfunding video hard to bear. We can’t let a sick four-year-old plead. I can’t write that script, or frame her face while Ariel says it back to me a line at a time. She would do it, without a second thought. ‘I’ll get people to push my payments. We’ll make it, with that and the credit cards.’

  These are not black credit cards, not cards with the matt sheen of Prince Albert’s and endless concierging, but any credit card with breathing space is good enough. And the people I’m writing for will pay early, on delivery, if I ask them. We have a good history and they know Ariel or know of her. Right now they are buying stories from me because I am offering them, simple as that. I’m crowdfunding in my own way, without Ariel doing a piece to camera.

  If I told her I’d help her crowdfund for anything she wanted, she might say stables. It’s a real possibility. Stables with at least one good chestnut pony. Stables, a grotto, a waterfall – she’d love all of those. We should be crowdfunding to buy Drake’s place, not for exotic treatments.

  But the signs are good. The fear is still there for Lindsey and me, but we have stepped back from its sharpest edge. Ariel’s blood work is strong, her weight has stopped falling and, so far, every child in the program with her stats has made it. These are good odds.

  The feed is ready. Lindsey can’t stop herself checking and puts a hand on the bag. The feed needs to be warm but not too warm.

  ‘I’ll take this one,’ I tell her. The pouch of liquid is body temperature in the palm of my hand, like a living thing. ‘You get some sleep.’

  ‘Really?’ She looks past me at the day now blasting in through the window, the water towers and scrappy rooftops below us, New Jersey across the water. She yawns again, a big jaw-dislocating python yawn. Her eyes sparkle, and she blinks. She gives me two thumbs up. ‘Excellent. Not a great night here, but I figured there was no point in calling.’