* * *
—
“I’M SORRY,” the shop owner said upon his return. “You said ‘Luis’ Goodman? L-u-i-s?”
“That’s right.”
“We don’t have anything by him. I’ll be honest, I’ve never heard of him.”
“Hot damn,” Barry sang to himself after he had left the bookstore. “Hot dammity-damn!” He found himself all but skipping down the hot asphalt toward downtown. None of Luis Goodman’s novels were to be found in just the kind of smelly alternative bookstore that should have stocked them! Not even The Sympathetic Butcher, that indigestible piece of shit. Here was a sign, if he still needed one, that his journey was the special one.
Barry decided to take note of things, just like a real writer would. Baltimore had a harbor thing going. He counted several dozen yachts, none of them terribly impressive. The skyline was topped by Transamerica, Bank of America, PNC, and those usual fraudsters SunTrust and BB&T. Even this small, embattled city was completely financialized. Barry wanted to get away from the familiar be-khaki’d figures, all those low-level, back-office types who ran around through the heated streets with cartons of Starbucks iced coffee, their mouths full of Bluetooth.
He made a hard left and headed west, amazed by how quickly the business sections of the city gave way to poverty. A young white guy in dirty blond dreads was begging for change right off of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The white guy had a cardboard sign next to him that just read HOMELESS. No greater story to tell. When Barry dropped a twenty-dollar bill, he mumbled “Thank you” but did not look up at his benefactor. Perhaps he also had the diagnosis, this bleached skinny white guy in his twenties. Barry had only learned to hate Trump after he had made fun of a disabled reporter at a press conference, fluttering his arms around in imitation of his affliction. Shiva did the same thing—“flapping,” it was called—whenever he tried to express some great unspoken pleasure. Anyone who could make fun of one of his son’s few private joys didn’t deserve to live.
The neighborhood continued its decline. The street he was walking on was full of single-family Federal houses, a few glowing with health, but more peeling, and some boarded up with cardboard upon which things were written in incomprehensible Baltimorese. When he was a kid, Barry’s father had given him a map of Queens with large chunks of it crossed off by red Magic Marker stripes—no-go zones where “those people” lived. The vast neighborhood of Jamaica was especially to be avoided, though Jamaica Estates, where Trump himself once resided, was not. Barry had finally made it to Jamaica proper. He was on the brink of something big.
By a curb next to some Park Slope–grade town houses fitted with iron bars around every window, he found an attractive woman in her forties in charge of her own microbusiness, a bunch of Purell hand-sanitizer bottles repurposed to serve what a handwritten sign called PIMP JUICE. Barry was intrigued. The woman had colorful braids, a playful if tired smile, and patches of pink psoriasis running down the lengths of her arms and glowing at the elbows. Her breasts were high and round. “You from the group?” the woman asked him.
“Group?” he said.
“Never mind.” She smiled brightly at him and leaned toward her wares.
“What are you selling there?” He felt a bump of need between his legs.
“Pimp juice,” the woman said.
“And what’s in that?”
“I guess mostly coconut flavor.”
She pronounced the word “mostly” with great care.
“I’ll take a large.”
An icy, greenish liquid was poured into a paper cup. Even her psoriasis was beautiful, a part of who she was, so imperfect and real. “Doing much business today?” Barry asked, relishing the fact that his appearance did not intrigue this woman at all, nor the fact that he still had two large scratches across his face.
“It slow,” the woman said. “Everyone inside ’cause the heat. Six dollars.”
The pimp juice was delicious. Perfectly cubed chunks of ice left the imprint of coconut flavor on his tongue. He reached down to his pocket to fish out his phone and call Seema and shock her with his news of the world, but, of course, the phone was gone. He had to stop the old urges to reach out to his best friend. He had to prepare himself for Layla. She had been his best friend as well, for over three years. His best friend and his most passionate lover. Sure, they were younger then, but they used to have sex twice a day.
He walked a few more decrepit blocks. A bald young man was seated on a stoop, following him with his eyes. He was wearing what could have been a real Audemars Piguet, a bigger, more golden version of the one Seema had bought him in Venice. “Afternoon,” Barry said.
Moments later, he heard the scrunch of loafers behind him. He was being followed. Barry increased his speed. What if the young man wanted to own two watches? He looked nervously at his Patek 570 as it swung back and forth over the inner-city blacktop. It was too understated to attract the attention of most people. It was a Veblen scarce good. You had to have a certain net worth to even understand what it was.
The man was now directly behind him. “Hey, ole head!” he said. “Wassup?”
Ole head? Barry was just lightly flecked with gray. He decided to turn around and see if he could make friends. He could picture the sequence of events like he was at a sales conference. Eye contact. Handshake. Unexpected connection over something trivial. “Hey, my man!” Barry said. “Wassup with you?”
“What you want?”
“Just enjoying my pimp juice,” Barry said, lifting up his Dixie cup and holding it awkwardly in front of him. “I can’t recommend it highly enough.”
“You with the group?”
“Nope. Just me. What’s this group?”
“You up?”
“Up for what?”
“You buying?”
“Oh, no thank you.”
“Then why you up in my shit?”
“I’m sorry?”
“If you ain’t buying rock, get the fuck off my block.”
Or at least that’s how it sounded to Barry. Still, rock? Crack cocaine? On the HBO show they were slinging what they called heron.
“Hate to break the news to you,” Barry said, “but it’s a free country.”
The young man walked up to him in three brisk steps. Their faces were now inches apart, and Barry could smell the heat off his face, as well as an underlying layer of baby powder. The man was breathing into him aggressively. He had prominent ears set behind his bald head, and a strong vein running across his forehead. His nose sloped to form the shape of an anchor; a narrow gap had wedged itself between his two front teeth. “You think you the one with the high card,” the man said, “but you not.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I’m saying you best tip on out, faggot.”
“Okay,” Barry said, his voice now unwillingly experimenting with a different register. “I’ll just keep walking. No harm, no foul.”
“Nah,” the man said, his thumbs hooking the front of his belt. “This my block. You ain’t walking my block. You turn around same way you came.”
“Wait a minute,” Barry started to say, but the kid reached out and slapped the pimp juice out of his hand. It sounded like a weapon being discharged. The broken street filled with green liquid and ice.
And now they were in a different space. Now the kid was asserting himself over Barry. Humiliating him. He could feel it rising up inside him, the anger, the 2.4 billion under management, all the work he had done to become Barry Cohen, the way he had stood up once to his own moderately violent father and punched him clear in the lip maybe a week after his Bar Mitzvah. What would Hemingway do? He’d come out of this with some real scars, not just some tiny, fading Filipina-nanny scars. But what if Barry lost? What if the young man was armed? A gun tucked into the back of his belt? Did people still use knives on one a
nother? He could feel his breath, its sweetness, some hint of cherry like those old bricks of Bazooka gum his father used to buy him when he was “good.”
Barry looked down at his feet, which were now quickly taking him away from the young man, back in the direction from which he came.
“Yeah, you best hop to,” the kid shouted behind him.
The asphalt crunched beneath Barry’s feet. So this was America. A cruel place where a man could be thrown off the street because of the color of his skin, the cut of his watch. It was disgraceful. He didn’t want any part of it. Maybe it wasn’t too late to turn back. He could picture it all. His office, Seema’s fine body, an endless stream of macchiatos and uni rolls. A Manhattan life for a Manhattan man. He could rejoin the winners’ circle.
He thought of the young man’s eyes. Their hue was the same as Shiva’s. He didn’t know what it meant, but he was somehow scared of the drug dealer in the same way he was scared of Shiva’s meltdowns. Both promised violence. Both were a world run amok, lawless, chaotic, not fit for someone of Barry’s stature and hard-won grace.
A large van with a sign reading THE WIRE/DER ANFANG scotch-taped to the side had pulled up to the pimp-juice lady’s stand and she was now surrounded by tall, mostly blond tourists with wide-angle cameras, all of them wearing black T-shirts that read, “YOU COME AT THE KING, YOU BEST NOT MISS”—OMAR LITTLE.
So this was “the group” everyone was talking about. Some of the men looked at Barry’s pale countenance with unconcealed anger, as if he was disturbing their inner-city safari. An older black gentleman in sunglasses was leaning against the van, thoughtfully cleaning his mouth with a toothpick, while listening to a game on an ancient pocket radio. GROUP LEADER, his T-shirt read.
The juice lady was both making her product and putting on a show. “Pimp juice! Pimp juice! Come and git it. I bet this the shit Omar drink when he not robbin’ dealers.”
Eventually the Germans started wandering down the street with their green drinks, taking well-composed shots of urban decay, from a bleached tuft of grass to a crumpled cigarette pack littering the street. The juice lady wound down her act.
“Hey,” Barry said to her, “I just had a run-in with this guy. He told me if I wasn’t buying rock, I should get the fuck off his block.”
The woman laughed. “Oh, that’s just Javon,” she said, carefully sorting her bills by denomination. The fact that she was laughing made Barry feel worse. Was the kid not dangerous?
“Javon?”
“Yeah, he’s from round the block. He sell rock, but everybody they want one and one.”
“What’s one and one?”
“Heron and coke. He selling rock like it the nineties. Nobody know where that boy get his package. That’s why he angry.”
“So it’s not me, it’s him.”
“Uh-huh. You pay him no mind. He just a kid. Hey, you drink that pimp juice real fast! You want another?”
Barry found himself walking back in Javon’s direction, so lost in thought he nearly knocked down a German woman in denim shorts documenting a pothole. He had to solve this. If he got his ass kicked or worse, he was fine with it. If he got killed on the streets of West Baltimore, at least his obituary in the Journal wouldn’t end with Valupro or GastroLux or the fucking SEC. He was Barry Cohen, a leader of men.
When Barry was a kid, he had been super smart. He could program his Commodore 64 to make a graphic of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek gliding from one side of the screen to the other. But he knew that if he wanted to get out of Little Neck, out of his father’s tropical basement, he had to make friends. So each day, he’d stand in front of the mirror and practice ten opening lines that he could say to the other boys in homeroom, the boys who didn’t know he existed or would make fun of the chlorine smell that seemed to attach itself to the Pool Man’s Son.
Wow, what a rainy morning!
Did you go to the Lake Success mall over the weekend?
I fished off Kings Point with my dad, but we didn’t catch anything.
And then Barry would try to think of at least ten responses the boys could give him. And then ten more responses for each of their responses. It was a bit like programming his Commodore. He could store about ten thousand combinations in his head.
Javon was back on his stoop. He was wearing a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt buttoned up at the neck just like the Guatemalan writer had worn his Brooks Brothers the other night, giving him a formal, almost clerical look. He was wearing it nonironically in the blasted heat of the afternoon. Barry’s mind was buzzing with overtures. He stuck out his hand with a twenty-dollar bill.
“Oh, hell, no,” Javon said.
“I want to buy some rock,” Barry said. “But I want you to subtract the cost of the pimp juice you spilled. So you give me twenty-six dollars’ worth of rock, and we’re even.”
Javon laughed. His laugh was actually bright and unexpected. Childish. He’s just a boy, Barry thought. The realization made him ache inside. The street was empty, devoid of life, iron bars covered in flecking paint, and this kid with nothing to do, no customers, no friends, not even a home computer.
“I like your watch,” Barry said. “Can I look at it?”
“No, you cannot, faggot,” the young man said. But his eyes were still smiling. He looked away down the street, shy suddenly.
The atmosphere was cooling around them. Barry pocketed his twenty. “Just that I know a lot about watches,” he said. “They call people like me Watch Idiot Savants. ‘WIS’ for short.”
Javon sighed. “Idiot be right,” he said. He snorted, then locked eyes with Barry. Barry smiled, then shrugged in return. He held the kid’s gaze until it became painful.
The kid took off his watch and gave it to Barry, the metal hot in his hand. “My best cuz got dropped. This his watch.”
“Dropped?” Barry said.
“Dude from the Perkins Homes served him up one in the face. Some East Side shit.”
Barry examined the watch. It was gold-plated, not gold, and already flaking at the lugs. Half of the blue tapisserie dial had turned radioactive orange. The last u in “Audemars Piguet” was missing, rendering the watchmaker’s name as “Piget.”
“Looks real to me,” Barry said.
“Serious?” The young man’s eyes were robust with hope and grief.
“It’s a forty K watch,” Barry said. “Congratulations.”
“You a po-lice?”
“I’m a hedge fund.”
“Say again?”
“I make bets.”
“Roll bones up by Fayette?”
“Huh?”
“Dice game.”
“Sort of,” Barry said. He could never successfully explain what a hedge fund was, other than the betting part. “I’m sorry about your cousin. May I ask, was it drug related?”
“Drug related.” Javon laughed. “Yeah. Might could be.”
This is where Barry’s friend moves dictated that he insert a few beats, establish a little quiet time between them. Men needed to know from one another that they could stop talking for a while and it would not prove awkward. Barry visored his eyes against the sun with his hand and looked east, trying to figure out how far they were from downtown and the harbor full of yachts. His guess was not that far.
“Hey,” he said, “speaking of drug related, I heard people are more interested in one and one, not rock. I’m a businessman. I could help talk strategy. I run a multistrategy shop. My advice: You’re young, you can take on more risk, go really big in your trades. Do rock and a little one and one. Now your competition’s off-balance.”
“No offense, but it don’t look like you in the game.”
“You’d be surprised,” Barry said. “The government’s always looking for ways to shut me down.”
“You got heat on you?”
“I guess
you could say that.”
“Where you jail down?”
Barry thought it over. He pictured being in prison with Javon. They would have to hang out with their own race, like in that prison show Seema liked to watch, but they could be secret friends. Barry would send him signals across the prison yard. “Nowhere yet,” he said.
“Then shut the fuck up.” The kid chortled and Barry followed suit. A cloud passed and now the sun was bearing down hard on them, the flaked façades of the row houses aglow. Barry felt like he was in a painting. “Why the cops buggin’ on you?” Javon asked.
“Business I’m in, I’m always looking for edge, same as you. Like what do I know that others don’t.” Barry sighed. “Sometimes you have to get close to the fire.”
“I hear that.”
“That’s why I want to help you.”
“You mean we start doin’ for each other?”
“I guess?”
“I don’t need no partners.”
“You work alone?”
“Yeah,” Javon said, “I don’t need nobody on my shit all day. Like, ‘What’s the count? What’s the count? What’s the count?’ I don’t got a crew. No lookouts. Things slow now, but one day my name gonna ring out.”
“You’re an independent contractor.”
“Uh-huh. Everything I make go into my pocket. You feel me?”
“I feel you,” Barry said. He let that term course through him. Feel. In this usage, it meant to “understand,” and despite the language barrier he understood Javon. Unlike the impenetrable Shiva, Javon was an undervalued stock. He was all upside at this point, a vibrant young man who wanted to be in business. And unlike Barry he didn’t give a shit about his investors. He was running a family office. “Do you mind if I sit down next to you?” Barry asked.
Lake Success Page 8
