Gotham

by Nick Earls

  ‘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 instinctively move the camera 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. He’d look as mad as a snake on a hot road with all those scatty ideas one after another—salmon, family, pants, credit cards. I could run it as is with a clock in the corner and no one would believe it.

  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, bring in another rapper to benchmark yourself. It’s the start of some bullshit, but the correct kind of bullshit for the territory. 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.’

  ‘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 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 Nati’s left nostril. It’s catching the light like quartz.

  Nati wipes his face and blood smears across the back of his hand.

  ‘Motherfucker.’ He wipes again, streaking the blood across his cheek. He gives a big wet sniff and presses both hands on his face, finger-tips 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 Nati’s face, then pulling it back. Rakim passes a box of tissues from the front without turning around. Smokey pulls out a handful, prises Nati’s tented fingers away from 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 Nati decides to take that and give me the older one. The place is empty, the kitchen closed but for Nati’s production line. There is no suggestion that I be given a menu. A great beef Wellington that has spent a few 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 meal time 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 his is being plated up, I ask Nati what makes this his favourite meal and he says, ‘It’s just the best. The pastry’s flaky, the duxelle…it tastes real good.’ He lifts his chin a little and sets his hands on the table. I notice a tiny pilled ball of tissue lodged in his moustache, where Smokey 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 look as if I’m doing just that, but it’s Brooklyn I want to take us to—the past, always the reluctant past and the light it might throw on the conflicted present.

  ‘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 is what I think he means. By my reckoning, Lydell Luttrell Junior turned two that year.

  ‘I met his mom, though,’ he says. ‘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 imagining 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.

  It’s another in a series of probing moves that could lead him to his parents, but not one does. 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 should be a pivotal moment, with Biggie Smalls—Christopher Wallace—the Icarus of the tale, a parable from LyDell’s own neighbourhood. I’m picturing Nati’s mother with the plum-coloured shoulder bag that she’ll never see.

  But Nati gives me none of that. 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, who granted him his rapper name by accident, 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 diverting me to the present, always the present.

  He tells me 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. If he stares too closely at any of this big life, it might disappear.

  He wants the present to write over the past, firmly and grandly. I am to judge him for his now, yet it’s 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.

  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, s
kimming the kerb. Crates of fruit are being delivered to the supermarket on the other side of Broadway. The van smells of bodies now, of Nati 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 allnighters, 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, and he could not mean it more kindly.

  It’s not long after five, 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, then turns back to the screen. I hear a bowl clunk on a countertop. Lindsey is warming the morning feed.

  She’s in the kitchenette, with her forehead against the cupboard above the sink. Her hair is over 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 twoto-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, Nati is hooking up, getting high, dialing 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 looks 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 her 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 Ariel’s face while she 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.’

  The editors 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 wouldn’t say this. 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 help herself and touches the bag to check. 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 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. She gives me two thumbs up.

  ‘Excellent,’ she says. ‘Not a great night here, but I figured there was no point in calling.’

  ‘We’ll have breakfast and I’ll take her to the park.’

  I can tell she’s about to bring up the risk of infection, but she stops herself. Ariel’s white cell count is good enough now, if we take precautions. That was yesterday’s news.

  ‘You didn’t sleep either,’ she says instead, because it’s decent to note it.

  ‘I’ll sleep after the treatment.’

  She puts her hand out, touches my arm, then drifts into the dark bedroom without a word.

  As I’m setting up next to Ariel, I can hear Lindsey flop onto the bed and roll over. For the first time in hours she is not responsible, and has instantly thrown all switches to sleep. It’s an ability I wish I had.

  ‘Are you ready?’ I try to keep my voice down, and it accidentally comes out in a whisper.

  ‘Yeah,’ Ariel whispers back. She has her Frozen figurines in front of her on the glass top of the coffee table, and she sets Olaf down with a clunk. ‘You’ll sit next to me?’

  ‘All the way.’

  I would pay fifty bucks, if I had it spare, not to see Frozen one more time. Once we’re through this, all of us, long through it, a single frame of that movie will bring me right back here to this room. It could be forty years, and Frozen will smell like feeding formula and feel like Beacon carpet.

  I attach the syringe to the tube, release the clamp and draw up yellow gastric fluid. I swing it around to the front for Ariel to check.

  ‘Good to go,’ she says. It’s an expression she’s picked up at the clinic.

  I push the fluid back down and clamp again, set up the extension tubing, connect the syringe and draw the plunger out with a pop.

  Ariel says, ‘Pop,’ as she usually does.

  I run the feed in and attach the apparatus to Ariel’s feeding tube.

  ‘Ready to roll.’

  I wait until she nods before releasing the clamp. She needs to know that breakfast is about to start. No brain is wired to receive gastric filling signals when the mouth isn’t engaged, but she has trained herself to imagine food at exactly the right time. I check the flow. Ariel moves in close to me and I put my arm around her, keeping the syringe barrel close to mouth height and letting gravity do its job.

  ‘So, we’ll go to the park today,’ I tell her.

  ‘Really?’ She turns away from the screen and looks at me. She has seen Central Park in our old photos, and through a car window.

  ‘Yeah. And I got a tip last night about a particularly good playground.’

  ‘Yay,’ she says in a small voice, acknowledging something positive but not more engaged than that. She’s already back watching the TV.

  And we are back in the world, with a park visit. Today is that day, a milestone by my reckoning, even if she’s not one for marking such things. I hug a little closer to her as the level in the syringe slowly falls. I can convince myself she is less obviously bony than she once was.

  From all the clothes we’ve brought—the sun-dresses, the princess costumes, the shades of pink everything—Ariel elects to go to the park as Batman. She wears the hood up with the clamp tucked back inside it, tube sneaking forward to her nose. With the clamp out of sight, the rest is barely visible, or at least I can tell myself that. She has not had a public life since she’s been a kid with a tube—just the Beacon and the clinic. I’m glad she chose Batman.

&nb
sp; The hotel lends us a stroller, and the concierge hurries to help when I pull out a pack of antiseptic wipes and start rubbing it down. I can’t yet face the maths of the tip we’ll be giving the staff when we leave.

  Ariel and I hit the street smelling more like a hospital than we should, but the breeze soon deals with that. She’s a bit long for the stroller, but I could fold her up and she still wouldn’t fill it. It has a simple frame, and wheels with none of the shock absorbency of the Bugaboo at home. Lindsey would not approve, but it will take us where we want to go.

  Ariel looks up through the filtered light at the tree canopy and tall buildings. She is searching for superheroes, she tells me, or supervillains. She confirms with me that she is now on the streets of Gotham City. From the hotel room she has looked out to the water towers, watching for Spider-Man. Superheroes work a decent kind of magic as far as she’s concerned, and she is glad to be in their world.

  On Central Park West a subway train thunders below us, and I stop the stroller on a grate to let her feel the rush of warm wind.

  ‘There’s a famous scene in a movie like this,’ I tell her. ‘A lady standing on one of these grates gets her skirt blown right up.’

  ‘Is it on YouTube?’ She grips the struts of the stroller and peers down into the darkness, her bat ears pointing up and forward. She is the caped crusader in his eyrie, vigilant for evil deeds on the grimy streets below. ‘I want to see it.’

  ‘I bet it’s there. We’ll find it.’

  We enter the park near Strawberry Fields and I’m about to tell her we’ll add John Lennon to our YouTube list but she seems more taken with the glum man sitting on a bench selling dollar jokes to no one. He has a handwritten sign: ‘I tell jokes—1 a piece—laffs guaranteed.’ The spelling tells me all I need to know.

  Ariel makes me read it aloud, as if he’s a waxwork or not really there, and, as I wheel her away, she says, ‘But how do you sell jokes? Jokes just are. And what if they’re not funny?’

  Maps never help me in Central Park, so I take my bearings from the buildings I can see and we edge our way across. Every so often I check behind us for the two towers of the San Remo to see they’re where they should be, northwest of us, with the Beacon out of view beyond them, three blocks down 74th Street.