Gotham

by Nick Earls

  ‘This drink is good, LyDell,’ Smokey says, tapping a fingernail against his glass. ‘We could sit and enjoy our drinks while we wait for Aaron.’

  Nati brings the glare up again, but stays silent as he works it through.

  ‘I’m gonna sit when I want to sit,’ is what he decides to say. He drinks another mouthful. ‘But this is good, yeah. You did good with this…’ He takes a look—it’s not as sly as it’s supposed to be—at her name tag. ‘Eloise. Some people go to town with the kale.’

  She almost says something, but sticks with smiling and nodding. It’s the first part of a silence that builds to awkwardness. Nati sips his drink again.

  Smokey touches my sleeve with his phone hand. ‘You got kids, right?’

  I have a wedding ring, I’m forty and look it. I don’t know if he’s guessing or if I’ve told him. He doesn’t wait for an answer. He has an ultrasound image on his phone and he’s angling it my way. It’s a foetus, the bright outlines of one in its dark uterine world, a finely etched nose and mouth and perfect tiny fingers stretching to the limits of their span.

  ‘My lady’s in labour,’ he says. ‘Just the early part, but I want to get over there.’

  The best minders are conjurers, guiding the eye to the other hand, away from tantrums, embarrassment, slander, hubris.

  ‘I think we might pick this up later.’ I turn off my recorder and put it in my pocket. ‘When it’s just the three of us.’

  ‘Yeah. Perfect.’ He flicks to another image, spreads his fingertips and enlarges his tiny child.

  ‘I have a four-year-old daughter,’ I tell him. ‘She’s asleep at the Beacon Hotel right now, on Broadway and 75th. At least, I hope she’s asleep.’

  ‘My son is four. How about that?’ He seems genuinely pleased to say it, to make this connection, but it might just be shrewd preparation for a protracted pout from Nati Boi.

  The transaction isn’t over and Nati is looking glumly down into his drink, coaching himself through this diversion from his Bloomingdale’s dream. Andie is standing mannequin-style at the counter, perhaps wondering how to turn grey. Somewhere in the distance, there’s a one-sided conversation I can just work out is in Spanish, a cleaner talking on his phone.

  ‘There’s some good shit in this city for kids,’ Smokey says, warming to the possibility of an entirely non-contentious topic. ‘People don’t always get that. You taken her to the granite slide they got in Central Park? Billy Johnson Playground, East 67th. My boy digs that. Polished by the asses of ten million kids.’

  ‘It’s on my list.’ It’s true. I have a list, and it’s on it. ‘I’m actually writing a separate article—a travel article—on New York with an under-five.’

  ‘No shit? Well, you gotta go.’ He looks towards Nati, as Nati finally relents and sits down again on the chaise lounge. ‘Take cardboard. You go faster with cardboard. If you got none you can prolly pick a piece up there. You tell Australia that. It’s a good tip.’

  Nati arranges himself with his elbows on his knees, his half-full glass held in both hands in front of him. His face has settled for a vague, less angry look. He could be a boy waiting for a bus he knows is still some time away.

  Smokey flicks to another image on his phone. It’s his son—a close-up of his face, all bright eyes and gleaming teeth.

  ‘That’s my boy,’ he says. ‘Any time I put this thing down, I come back and it’s got new selfies on it. It’s a game we play now. Apparently.’

  I get my phone from my pocket. Ariel’s my wallpaper. The picture’s a few months old, but it’s a good one. She’s a dragonfly, with face paint and glistening wings and an emerald body. She looks happy, in the complete way that children can be.

  ‘Delightful,’ he says. Not a word I expected, but a good one. ‘She could do with a little more meat on those bones.’

  ‘She could.’ It’s there in the picture, if you look for it, if you aren’t distracted by the gaudy, glittery dragonfly trickery, as you’re supposed to be. ‘We’re working on that.’

  For a second I feel far away from her, here on this job while she’s sleeping in the fold-out bed at the foot of ours at the Beacon, jammed in there with her best monkey, Claude, sheets already kicked aside. Lindsey may be in bed by now, too, or watching TV in the living room with the volume down.

  ‘Beautiful though,’ Smokey says. ‘Looks like a real sweet kid. Like a little baby angel in one of them renaissance paintings. What’s her name?’

  ‘Ariel.’

  ‘Sounds like you got that right. Sweet name for a sweet kid.’ He holds his phone next to mine. ‘My boy’s Eugene.’

  Eugene has cheeks like apricots when he grins, balls of bunched tissue with dimples under them, and perfect teeth. I’m working on something to say about him when a message alert lands on the screen. It’s Aaron.

  ‘Okay…’ Smokey moves away from me, reads it, processes it.

  Nati looks up.

  ‘How ’bout we just buy some shit another day,’ Smokey says, meeting Nati’s gaze with a look crafted to resemble nonchalance. ‘You can’t wear it all at once, LyDell.’

  Nati’s jaw muscles tighten. So does his grip on his glass. His head is full of ugly thoughts warring with better ones, and there is no room left for the guile that would let him hide it.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, with a sigh at the end of it, a valve releasing some pressure. He pushes himself into a position intended to look more relaxed, casual. ‘I’ll sign that form some day, come back and buy the whole place. But let’s get it under ten for now. Ladies?’

  ‘No problem, sir,’ Andie says. She already has a printout of the items in her hand. ‘The purse would get you there right away or…’ She runs her glossy fingernail down the list. ‘You got four pairs of Alexander Wang cargo pants. Two of those would do it.’

  ‘Well,’ he says, in a softer, smaller voice, ‘I’m keeping the purse.’

  Smokey steps across to the counter, and maybe it’s his momentum that brings Nati to his feet. As he rises, he puts his glass next to the ice bucket with the frozen yoghurt in it and wipes his damp hands on his pants. He watches Smokey, as if his manager’s next act will reveal the perfect answer we’ve been waiting for. Smokey notices none of that, none of the anticipation.

  ‘Look at all those pants,’ he says, taking the list from Andie. ‘Not just the Alexander Wang neither. How many legs you got, LyDell? You some kind of centipede, you need all those pants?’

  It’s enough. Nati laughs. ‘That’d be one fine pair of pants. Centipede pants. Prolly a set of pants, not a pair, all those legs. Let me see ’em, ladies. Let me see the four and I’ll decide which two.’

  Eloise and Andie start unpacking one bag, lifting folded items out and setting them in neat piles. They hit the cargoes near the bottom and step out from behind the counter with two pairs each in their arms.

  Smokey gets another message and checks his phone as Eloise and Andie spread the cargoes out across the chaise lounge.

  ‘She’s eight centimetres,’ he says, in Nati’s direction. ‘I got to get there.’

  ‘My dick is eight centimetres,’ Nati says, but towards the splayed cargoes and without turning. ‘How big is a centimetre?’ He glances over his shoulder. ‘Be cool. We’ll get there.’

  I can’t tell the pants apart. Two pairs might be charcoal and two black, but it might just be the way the light’s working on them. As Nati slowly walks the line, weighing up his choices, Smokey steps past the huddle of mannequins with his phone to his ear.

  His voice is soft and, from the start, he’s beating a retreat. ‘I know, honey, I know…’

  The van is waiting directly outside the 59th Street entrance, taking up a space and a half. It’s black, with deeply tinted windows, and clearly announces itself as the conveyance of a pimp or gangster or young rapper with his head spinning too fast to settle on anything tasteful.

  Smokey mentions the hospital again as the Big Brown Bags are lifted from a trolley, and Nati says, ‘Sure,’ b
ut means nothing like it. He’s watching his Robert Palmer girls lugging the purchases and his driver standing with his hand on the van door, directing them. The driver is wearing a black collared shirt, a charcoal suit—he’s picking up the colours of the Alexander Wang cargoes without knowing it—and round, cool sunglasses, though it’s close to eleven. The lights of Bloomingdale’s gleam on his fabulously polished shoes.

  ‘Which way you want to look?’ Smokey says to me. ‘Front or back?’

  ‘Front, if that works for everyone else.’ I’m not always asked about my seating preference in a vehicle like this, not that I find myself in them often. Facing backwards gives me motion sickness, but the journalist has to fit in around the edges. Everyone else already knows where they sit.

  ‘It works, man.’ Nati claps his hand on my shoulder.

  There’s a flash from across the street, someone taking a photo with a phone.

  ‘Oh, look, it’s…’ a man nearer the intersection calls out. His phone snaps, too, three flashes, even though the sentence trails off into nothing.

  Nati gestures for me to board. It’s a bigger, clearer sweep of the arm than it needs to be. He’s the host, under the Bloomingdale’s marquee. His staff, Bloomingdale’s staff, me, we’re all taking his direction. It’s an image of himself he seems glad to compose—high-end but magnanimous, entitled as a pharaoh or a Monégasque prince, but full of largesse.

  I can’t tell whether he has made this moment for me or for himself, but it is already implausible that his credit card could be declined. One Bloomingdale’s security guard covers the front of the van, another takes the back. The driver reaches his arm out to beckon Nati. Smokey scans the streetscape, clutching his phone, as if he’s guarding a Kennedy. His mouth is slightly open, streetlights sparking from his grills.

  ‘Paps,’ Nati says to me, though they were just people, bewildered passers-by glimpsing star activity and not wanting to miss a New York moment.

  Shoot first and ask questions later. Maybe they’ll recognise him when they open the images, maybe they won’t. I have my own collection of moments, stars of various wattages making entrances and exits. I have a photo of Dame Edna on her way into the Tonys, gladioli, glasses and bouffant do bobbing along above the heads of the crowd.

  The van has fat leather seats, a faint smell of dope, a stronger smell of sanitiser and a compact fridge loaded with piccolos of Krug. Nati passes me one right away.

  ‘Some people drink it with a straw,’ he says. ‘They require a straw. Assholes.’

  Smokey climbs in next to him, picking up the Little Brown Bag that’s on the seat and placing it in his lap. The two big bags are next to me. The door clunks shut.

  ‘So, why do you like facing backwards?’ I want to get us talking.

  ‘Is this the interview?’ He tears the foil from the top from his bottle and twists at the wire cork cover.

  He’s in a good mood. He is famous on 59th Street and he has Krug to share.

  The engine starts. It’s less powerful, less military in tone than I was expecting. It’s a car engine, with this beast of a pimp van built on.

  ‘It can be. Or it can be just a question.’

  ‘Sure.’ He drinks a mouthful. ‘Any asshole can face forward. In a cab, you face forward. In a car, you face forward. You got wheels big enough to have a room, you get to face backward.’

  It’s a point he can’t seem to stop himself making. He needs it in my notes, in every article. He wants proof in writing that he has escaped the hard streets of his recent childhood and arrived somewhere else, in some Oz of his invention, where life is about something altogether more luxurious than survival.

  ‘And you get to look back and see all the people pointing, going, ‘Who the fuck?’ He imitates star-shock, going wide-eyed and waving his hand around, snapping away with an imaginary phone.

  Beside him, Smokey stares at his screen, punching out a text message, no doubt to his labouring lady, placating, promising, telling her she matters more than this ride. He has another life, as do I, but I have yet to see Nati’s properly. My hand goes to my pocket without me thinking about it, but there’s no buzz of a message from Lindsey, nothing telling me there are problems back at the Beacon.

  Smokey hits send and says, ‘I might step out while you two eat.’

  It’s the first I’ve heard of food being part of the plan. The nine-thirty meeting time meant I ate in the real world before heading for Bloomingdale’s. But I’ll take it. The biggest piece I’m writing is Rolling Stone-style, where you buddy up with the artist and log time across different terrains—in transit, in their favourite dive bar where they don’t merit a glance, over Darjeeling tea one morning while they’re in trackpants and coming down from something, finding room for remorse and even doubt. For this interview I get to compress that into one night, and it must go as long as it must go. A meal works well as the middle part of it. It’ll read like days. Themes will be revisited. Truths will find their shape and show themselves.

  ‘You leavin’ me at this man’s mercy?’ Nati laughs. ‘Who knows what shit I might say without you running interference?’ He pokes Smokey in the sleeve, hoping for a laugh back. Smokey obliges, but half-heartedly. ‘Yeah, man. I can let you off the clock a while.’

  Nati pulls his own phone from his pocket and flicks between screens. I didn’t hear a message. He smiles to himself. The van turns out of 59th Street into an avenue, heading north. He glances through some photos—blurred selfies, a girl with blonde hair—and starts tapping a message.

  ‘Okay,’ Smokey says, more to bring Nati back to us than anything. Nati’s focus stays on his screen. ‘Okay, that’s good, LyDell.’

  ‘I have a visit in mind first,’ Nati says, still texting. ‘A little happy appetiser before the meal.’ He sends the message and twists around in his seat, ducking Smokey’s gaze. He puts his hand on the driver’s shoulder. ‘Candy store, my man.’

  Smokey turns to look out the window at the lights, at nothing at all, his lips pulled shut over his gold grills. The van makes a right at the next intersection, then another, sending us south, back where we’ve come from.

  Nati’s directly opposite me. He catches my eye and grins. ‘Candy store.’

  It’s cryptic, and its mystery is meant for me. I’m not on the inside. He’s welcome to remind me of that as much as he likes. It would not occur to him that I don’t want to be him. It would shock him to learn that I am in his van, writing this piece, solely for the money. It would not shock Smokey, I think. His life is in a hospital somewhere else on this crowded island, eight centimetres, nine centimetres, ten centimetres, action.

  ‘I’m sure we can handle the interview, just the two of us, if Smokey has to go.’

  ‘Really?’ Nati says, his grin now more of a smirk. ‘You’re sure of that?’

  Smokey’s mouth opens as if he’s about to speak, but then he closes it again. His chunky ring taps his window as the van hits a bump.

  Nati’s head is already in his candy store, and Smokey will not jolly him back to me. Nati turns his phone over and over in his hand and stretches out in his seat, an action that requires me to move my feet for his. He sets his phone on the flat plane of his abdomen—he is whippet-lean beneath his rapper’s clothes, I’m betting—and he keeps one hand over it.

  The driver makes several more turns. He has a GPS but doesn’t seem to use it. We pull up outside a rundown building. The driver steps out and checks the street in an overt way, like someone in a video checking a street, about to be surprised by gunfire or a flash mob of dancers. I can see no one, nothing. He opens the door.

  Nati climbs out, connects the zip on his jacket and looks up high at the brickwork, beyond the graffiti tags, for Rapunzel or a party that’s waiting just for him, piles of coke or ice, like perfect ground glass. A breeze swirls in, a chill on it.

  He steps lightly across the kerb, still fiddling with the zip and saying something like, ‘Back in five,’ without turning his head.

 
The driver releases the door handle and decides he should stand next to the open door until directed otherwise. He clasps his hands behind his back and takes his own look at the high windows, perhaps thinking of the party up there that is never for him, or thinking of home, or blankly gazing, just stretching his neck.

  ‘Five,’ Smokey says, with a distinct lack of conviction. ‘He’s…’ He shrugs and peers out the open door. ‘Excuse me.’

  He finds a number on his phone and taps the green button to make the call. A woman answers, not with hello but with a sentence, in a forceful tone.

  ‘Yeah, honey,’ he says. ‘It’s LyDell. You know how he—’ Her voice cuts back in, berating him. ‘Yeah…Hmmm…I know, honey, I’d be…’ He puts his hand on his forehead, waiting for the tide to turn, the storm to abate. She tears another piece or two off him. ‘Soon. When LyDell’s eating. But how you doin’? That’s what I want to know.’

  I can hear her telling him about the pain, pulling out some big metaphors. He makes listening, soothing noises. She has plenty more to tell. He is kerbside elsewhere, useless, but making the best sounds of unequivocal support and deep engagement that he can. We are all—fathers, husbands, partners—always precisely where we should be in spirit, even when the facts of our days and nights take us down stupid side streets like this one. Even when we should own our choices a little more than we do.

  When the call’s over, he looks my way half-heartedly and says, ‘She’s okay.’

  ‘Sure. It’s quite a time.’ I have been in a labour ward once, and seen the female body defy logic and deliver something as bulky, wriggling and life-changing as a baby.

  ‘It is.’ He smiles, for the first time in a while.

  A wrapper blows along the sidewalk, skittering end over end. My Krug is warm in the bottle. A car drives past us slowly, beats thumping behind its closed windows.

  Smokey takes another look at the building, perhaps hoping it will reveal something new.