Monkeytown

by Chris Vola

  The front of the house is modeled after a Mediterranean villa – mango-colored stucco walls with a slightly sloping red-tile roof. Billy and I follow the indistinct thump of hip-hop bass to the backyard. A few young girls mill around the dark granite pool deck, fiendishly typing on BlackBerrys. Two pale, strung-out members of an up-and-coming neo-psychedelic art-rock band from somewhere in Queens – Jackson’s apparently screwing the rhythm guitarist – are sprawled out on metallic lawn chairs, talking on cell phones, munching Tums. The air reeks of lunchmeat. Smartphones chatter and buzz, the battle march of ten million hemorrhoidal crickets.

  I don’t see Jackson or Davis anywhere.

  Jefferson Prescott, McKinley Munroe-Klein, and Archer Hamilton lean against the railing of the cedar deck that wraps around the back of the house, sipping Magic Hats. Square-jawed high school buddies. Poster jerks of the Fairport Prep Class of 2003 home from the city for the weekend. Stupid fucks. Archer went to Columbia, the other two ended up at Vassar. Archer sees me, smiles.

  “I’m going to find Davis,” Billy says. “Wait here.” He turns and almost slams into Olga, a dead ringer for the actress-slash-model who played the rape victim in a recent episode of CSI: Miami. Shaken, she reaches into her bag for something. When she realizes it’s not there, she screams, runs towards the pool house, her heels stabbing up the turf. Billy shrugs, limps inside the house.

  Up the deck’s steps, shake hands with the fellas. Archer taps his nose, grins.

  “Where’s Jackson?” I ask.

  ARCHER POSITIONS HIMSELF in front of a circular coffee table, the top of which is a mirror partially covered by a Kindle, the screen showing a page from Jung’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. He lifts the tablet, reveals four big lines and his Goldman ID, dusty with coke residue.

  “At least these are good for something, right?” He picks up the ID, licks the edges. He inserts a McDonald’s straw into his right nostril, snorts, sour face. Hands me the straw. He takes a small glass pipe and a lighter out of his pocket, fiddles with a baggie.

  “Is that crack?” I ask. “Jesus.”

  “God no,” he laughs. “What do you think I am? This is salvia, some legal shit my little brother and his friends at NYU were doing all school year. It’s like a psychedelic plant, acid from the tropics. Shamans in Mexico or something. Take you out of your body, the whole crazy…I think it just makes me laugh.”

  “Sounds pretty hipster.”

  “We’re in a volatile market, Josh,” he murmurs, stuffing what look like rotten tea leaves into the bowl of his pipe. “And in a volatile market, when hope for a turn-around is miserable at best, it’s essential to get the fastest rate of return on one’s investments. My brother may be a Brooklyn lowlife shitting away his rent money at a farmer’s market in Prospect Park, but he’s a smart kid.”

  “Jesus,” I repeat, shake my head, thankful that I don’t have a job to lead me down a path toward plant addiction and tripping out in sweaty, sock-smelling 19-year-olds’ dorm rooms. I bend over, pick what looks like the thickest line. Immediate sinus burn, the old, painful cavity behind the cartilage. Archer flicks the lighter, inhales. Thin wisps of burnt rubber, synthetic dust. A euphoric slump, tremors, dilated gleam.

  “Maybe…” he mumbles after a few moments. He tries to compose himself. “Maybe I wouldn’t have to resort to drastic circumstances if your boy could get us better shit than this.” He motions at the coke, shuffles the collar of his three-button herringbone sports coat, glazed, slipping off somewhere else.

  “My boy?”

  “Davis,” he says. “He used to genuinely and sincerely hook us up.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I know it’s a recession,” he says, “but his shit was nothing like what these Dominicanos on the Upper Least Side…you practically have to sell your watch for two grams of filth that’s only been stepped on three or four times. I mean…Davis really used to hook it up.”

  Archer’s watch is a Maurice Lacroix Masterpiece Collection two-tone stainless steel and gold special edition, according to his Facebook post the afternoon he bought it. Worth several eight-balls, if I’m not mistaken.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” I say, snarfing up the third line, wondering if Billy’s found Davis yet.

  “I’m not blaming anyone, no blame involved…I’m not,” he says. He’s sweating, licking his bottom lip. “So how are you? You look like shit!” He laughs, then straightens up like something just stung his lower back. “Sorry, wow, I’m…sorry. But seriously, I’ve been meaning to make sure you aren’t disappearing, disintegrating on us up here in the homeland. Jefferson and I have been worried.”

  He licks his ID, stuffs it into his wallet, throws that across the room.

  “Thanks for your concern,” I say. “I think I’ll be all right. Dandy.”

  “And so, we were thinking,” he says, “why don’t you come down to the city, get a job, live with us? I know gigs are hard to land, especially now…but they’re always looking for a few good bodies from Columbia, and I mean, Christ. You’ve got…people skills. Come on, we have an extra room. Charlie’s still in Thailand.”

  “How long has that been, 12 weeks?”

  “We haven’t gotten an email from him since March. Disconnected his Facebook in June. Safe to say he’s probably a ladyboy by now.”

  “That’s great,” I say. “Even though I’d have to start smoking hippie speed, I’m sold on the idea. Where do I sign?”

  “Really? Great.” Archer’s right foot – tapping furiously against the carpet. In between breaths, he clenches his jaw, snaps it together hard, opens it again like a possessed nutcracker. Losing control. “All I’m saying is think about it.” He takes his iPhone out of his pocket, stares at the blank screen, caresses the camera lens gingerly.

  “Before I do anything,” I say to myself, feeling my BlackBerry vibrate, “I need to figure out things with Lauren…”

  The interjection is pointless. Nothing filters through the dopamine of this dope’s internal monologue. His intellect is invincible. His banker’s brain has already analyzed the risk, maximized his verbal profitability. Or he’s riding dragons with shamans in an alternate universe. Either way. I put my nose to the straw, do the last line. The painful cavity widens.

  Droplets of sweat and hair product collect in growing numbers on Archer’s temples. His eyes roll back into his head.

  I’M LEANING AGAINST a black granite island countertop in the kitchen, talking to Susannah van der Boer. Or, more accurately, she’s talking to me while I run my tongue across the back of my teeth trying to decide whether the coke was cut with gasoline or baking soda. Susannah graduated from Barnard the year after me, lives in her parents’ co-op in TriBeCa. We drunkenly screwed a couple of times my junior year and decided not to be awkward about it, so we make a point of talking about nothing at parties. She’s one of Lauren’s closest friends.

  “…and I told her, I was like oh my god, are you serious,” Susannah is saying, “a claims lawyer from fucking New Haven?” She looks at me like I should respond.

  “Hmmm,” I say. She keeps looking at me for a while with these big green cat eyes that seem detached but for the one or two moments they seem to convey a sense of undeniable warmth and genuine concern. That’s probably just the coke.

  “You look skinny,” she says. She flicks her cigarette, looks at her BlackBerry. “You know you can talk to me about anything,” she says, “if something’s wrong.”

  I love how every girl you ejaculate into thinks she’s your qualified therapist.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Really good.”

  “So, has Lauren introduced you to John yet?” She presses her cigarette against the sink, crushes it like an accordion against the stainless steel.

  “No, who is he?”

  “Oh, I thought she told me you guys still talked a lot,” she says, “like, you were really good friends.” She sucks a citrus Altoid. Her thin, waspy lips pucker.

 
; Good friends?

  “Well, she hasn’t ever –” Billy pushes through the saloon-style door at the far end of the kitchen, red-faced, out of breath.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” he sputters. He limps over to the countertop, picks up a half-empty beer can someone forgot, swishes it around with his wrist, smells it, drinks the remaining backwash.

  Susannah acts like she’s puked a little, makes a show of trying to cover it up.

  “Davis isn’t here,” Billy says, ignoring her. “Probably went back to Fairport.” He walks over to the refrigerator, reaches in for a beer. “Give me your phone, Josh,” he says, “mine died.”

  I toss Billy my BlackBerry, knowing full well that his shitty service plan ran out of minutes months ago. Susannah gives him one more disgusted grimace, hoists her bag over her left shoulder. “It was nice seeing you, Josh,” she says, “give me a call sometime.”

  “OK.” She walks out. Billy, my phone pressed against his ear, trails her.

  John, John, John, put a face with the name, or at least a profile picture.

  A minute later, Billy barges back in. “He’s at Kenyon’s basement,” he grunts. “They’re shooting a video. Let’s go.”

  DAVIS RIDGEWAY IS lucky enough to be the heir to one of East Fairport’s oldest, most prominent families, and half black, on his mother’s side.

  His father is the CEO and president of the insurance company where my father worked for twenty-four years. His mother runs the cardiology department at Fairport Hospital. A natural born hustler, he started with Magic Cards and Pogs in elementary school. Trade you a Twinkie? How much for three Handi-Snacks? Learn the system, jack up the prices. Own the game. He had his own school store in front of his locker, sold bootleg concert tees, thousands of illegal candy bags – the Lord of Laffy Taffy, the Prince of Reese’s Pieces.

  At Fairport Prep, his ambiguous ethnicity made him the perfect cultural chameleon. Video games and hide-and-seek had been replaced by that golden mentality – school-drink-smoke-fuck – the pimply preoccupation of the Cracker With Cash. Tone-wise, he already looked like the people in inner-city Fairport, he just had to act like them. Be out on a date with a day-trader’s blonde daughter, wear a pastel polo and leather flip-flops. Get a call from one of the tormented teenage souls that fill your contact list, hop in your leased 7-series (a 17th birthday present), throw on a pair of custom Air Force Ones and a white tee, drive into the city, chill with your connect, drive back to the ’burbs, rip off the white boy.

  During his junior year at Amherst, a girl had a seizure at a party where he’d supplied most of the coke, weed, a few rolls of ecstasy. Some frat boys snitched and Davis dropped out. His parents were pissed, but that didn’t mean anything. After all, his trust fund had already matured when he’d turned twenty-one. Nothing they could do, right?

  THE VIDEO SET – Kenyon’s mother’s basement on a dilapidated street of duplexes in Fairport’s North End – is dark, smoke-charred. Unpainted concrete, swashes of graffiti. A bed sheet hangs vertically from the ceiling, a makeshift greenscreen. A Yamaha keyboard and a small desk, on top of which is a Macbook and two huge speakers – Kenyon’s studio.

  Davis’s obsession, his latest hustle, is music. Keyon is his latest project, by far his most successful. He’s been promoting him heavily for the last few months, financing his gigs at clubs in Fairport and the videos he puts on MySpace, YouTube. And his apparently non-ironic bling, too.

  “I was starting to think you forgot about me,” Davis says when we’re downstairs, after Billy limps across the room to talk to Chizzy, Kenyon’s cousin. Chizzy's weed isn’t as good as Davis’s, but I know Billy would rather buy in bulk. Davis could care less who Billy buys from. In these hard economic times…

  “Hey now,” I reply, shrugging, “you know me.” I suddenly remember that Davis had invited me to this video shoot a couple days ago.

  “Yes I do,” he says, “and I also know that you’re going to love what you see tonight. Kenyon’s good, Josh, really good. Blogs and tumblrs going crazy. I’ve got like half a dozen A&R guys sweating him hard. This could be it, can’t-lose situation, for real. Hold on,” he rummages through the pockets of his gray William Fiovaranti suit, doing the businessman shuffle. “Ah-ha!” he pulls out orange bottles. “Ten Vicodins, twenty Xanny bars. My little cousin got his wisdom teeth out last Tuesday and was panicked as shit about the operation.”

  I hand him a few crumpled bills, automatic reflex.

  “Have you thought about coming with us tomorrow?” Davis asks.

  I forgot about the trip. “I don’t know,” I say, “things are going pretty good around here right now.”

  Davis rolls his eyes, smiles. “So typical.”

  Last week he called me to see if I wanted to tag along with him on a “working vacation” to Virginia. Something about meeting a group of savvy iGeek investors to try to raise more funds for his mostly floundering musical projects, including Keyon. I have no idea why he’d been so adamant on recruiting me. Company for the road, maybe an extra piece of plastic for gas money. He even tried to play the nostalgia card, saying we’d be stopping a few miles from University of Richmond, my old college stomping grounds before I transferred, that we could swing by the campus for old time’s sake. Probably the last thing I’d envisioned myself doing in the next…well, ever. His snake-oil salesman routine already has Billy fooled and gung-ho for the road trip. All it probably took to convince him was a few free joints.

  “Nevermind,” Davis says, “we’ll talk about it later.”

  Black kids in hoodies sit on folding chairs next to a pile of electronic equipment, passing a blunt. Their female counterparts lounge a few feet away in booty-hugging jeans, absorbed in cell phone and lollipop-sucking boredom. A skinny hipster white kid studies a laptop screen. Another fiddles with a sleek camcorder on a tripod. Three older men, mid-thirties with hair yuppie-slick and cliché aviator sunglasses down, stand against the far wall, whispering. One of them stares at me absentmindedly, flicking a lighter.

  “Extras?” I ask, only half kidding.

  “Industry people – Ghetto Gold Records, Redline Productions – came from New York for the shoot,” Davis says, brusquely, thoughts elsewhere. “Listen,” he says, noticing something next to the screen, “I have to take care of this. If these A/V club mongoloids I hired didn’t have all the equipment I needed, I would have just shot this myself.” He hustles over, berates a member of the nerd squad for, as I far as I can tell, an improper lighting adjustment.

  While we’ve been talking, Billy’s followed Chizzy up the basement hatch to make a transaction in Chizzy’s Acura.

  A door to a side room opens and Keyon Shuttlesworth – a.k.a. Killa Key – appears, a presence to be felt. Jamaican coal skin, boulder-sized gut, noticeable man-tits stretching the confines of XXXL fabric, black crushed-velvet. At nineteen, the fleshy command of youth. A stomach stapler’s wet dream.

  He fist-bumps nearly everyone, hugs Davis, finishes his Red Stripe. The white kids are ready. Davis and the men in suits all have taken seats in folding chairs opposite from where I’m standing, out of range of the lights. Keyon scowls at the camera, gets in character. Someone presses RECORD. The cool blast of stereo, Kenyon’s voice out of the speakers, the chorus of his newest, ah, track: I’ll be jonesin’ ’til the day that I drop (drop), On my grind, climbin’ all the way to the top (top), And niggas still hate, whether you made it or not – stop! I’ll never be faded like shots…

  Keyon springs to life. Lip-synching, his entire face curls into a snarl. His eyes blaze. Davis is right. The charisma, the on-camera whatever-tude, all of it is there, glaring. My one criticism is with the beat. Aside from the processor that manipulates Kenyon’s voice into that of a robot with perfect pitch, the production is archaic, laughable. Sparsely layered amateur bass riffs, a high-pitch whistle effect that peaked in popularity just before I hit puberty. From what I’ve already heard of his music, it’s always been Davis’s fatal flaw as a producer –
his preoccupation with image over sound. A weird hollowness that seeps into all his work. He’d rather make crappy videos than actually help Keyon out by buying him time at a real studio.

  I reach into my pocket, finger the pleasantly heavy bottles.

  MY BLACKBERRY VIBRATES in my pocket. Lauren. Is this the tenth or eleventh call today? No need to break the record. Out of this basement and talk to my girlfriend. Girlfriend surrounds itself with quotation marks. No one notices as I slip out the hatch. The sky is a black nest of invisible stars above the orange city-glow.

  “Hello?”

  “You know who it is.”

  “Nice to talk to you, too,” I say. “What’s up, babe?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Out with Billy. Is something wrong?”

  “I’m standing in your driveway, locked out,” she snaps. “Where did you put the spare key?”

  “It’s not underneath the mat on the front steps?” Then I remember. “Shit. Left it in the kitchen,” I say. “Sorry.” I feel her eyes roll.

  “And what about yesterday? This afternoon?”

  “What about them?”

  “Why didn’t you pick-up-your-phone?”

  “I was drunk.” Take the familiar road…

  “All day?”

  “I went on a real bender, babe,” I chortle, “re-living the days when we were young, wild, and free-ee!”

  “Just come back here,” she sighs. “We need to talk, tonight. And I’m not leaving.”

  “Ooh, sexy,” I croon. “And what will you be wearing when I make my late, but always fashionable entrance, darling?”

  “Asshole,” she says. “Drop off your burnout prick friend and come back now, or I’m breaking the handle off your fucking front door.”

  CLICK.

  Lauren’s breaking-and-entering-abilities – she’s maybe five-three with heels, barely cracks 100 pounds – don’t scare me but something behind her voice does. I walk to my car, unlock it, remember Billy, probably blazing down Chizzy with the weed he just bought from him. He can get a ride home from Davis. He’ll be fine.