Griffith Review 50 - Cargoes
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SIR SAMUEL GRIFFITH was one of Australia’s great early achievers. Twice the premier of Queensland, that state’s chief justice and the author of its criminal code, he was best known for his pivotal role in drafting agreements that led to Federation, and as the new nation’s first chief justice. He was also an important reformer and legislator, a practical and cautious man of words.
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GriffithReview50 2015
GriffithReview is published four times a year by Griffith University in conjunction with Text Publishing. issn 1448-2924 ISBN 978-1-922212-30-6
PublisherMartin Betts
EditorJulianne Schultz AM FAHA
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FICTION
Cargoes
Nick Earls
THE FIRST TIME we were here it was just the two of us, Lindsey and me. We stayed at the Chelsea and I got my hair cut there by a hairdresser who had done Dee Dee Ramone’s that morning. Nothing unusual in that. She’d cut his hair for years, she told me. I never discovered if it was true or not. I wanted it to be true. Dee Dee Ramone.
Dee Dee’s hair was no fixed thing though. Johnny’s was the iconic Ramones hair, so that’s the cut I got. No one at home had that. And Johnny threw his hair forward when he stabbed at his guitar, as if hair could be another weapon. I could recognise it as a signature move, even the first time I saw it. I must have been about ten then.
I made Lindsey take my photo – me and my new hair, close-up by the Hotel Chelsea sign near the door. I had a denim jacket on, thumbs in my jean pockets. I turned away from the camera, putting on a look of purpose, pouting at the traffic on 23rd Street, as if searching for a cab that might not be coming, or might arrive with a starlet or David Byrne or a drag queen once painted by Andy Warhol. It was an album cover, that pose – one foot on the wall, knee bent, deep stare fixed on the middle of nothing – but the picture ended up looking mostly like me. Me with a Johnny Ramone haircut that didn’t take and that I didn’t keep. I looked too much like my aunt with that hair. It turned out some people at home had gone for that cut after all.
The closest I got to Bloomingdale’s that visit was a stand outside, on Third Avenue, selling pretzels as big as twisted limbs. They were golden and doughy, and I’d only ever had the other kind. I was waiting for Lindsey to come out of the store. If I looked south, I could count the sets of traffic lights to 53rd and Third, six blocks away. It was a Ramone’s song title, that intersection – ‘53rd & 3rd’, with an ampersand – a song written by Dee Dee about hustlers and violence. It was a two-minute blast of punk, but there was subtext in there about how to be a man, or be lost on the way there.
The song was twenty years old when I stood on Third Avenue waiting for Lindsey, but the Ramones were still alive and might have been anywhere nearby, walking those streets. They’re all gone now, at least the four originals on the T-shirt. Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny, Tommy. Tommy just months ago. Today I have plenty of questions to ask Na$ti Boi – the artist formerly known as Lydell Luttrell Junior – but I don’t have that one on the list. What does it mean to you that the last of the Ramones is dead?
Na$ti Boi is nineteen and ascendant, and coming to Australia for the festivals. He is not, from what I have seen and read, an easy interviewee, though it doesn’
t do to arrive with too many preconceptions. Some things are certain in interviews, but not many. Chris Isaak will always charm a female interviewer over forty. Chris Martin will charm anyone and make you want to like Coldplay more than you do. Bob Dylan will always treat at least one of your questions as if it’s been delivered in an alien tongue, or act as if you’re there for the very moment when he’s determined that he’s suffered his last fool.
Beyond that, where there are no certainties, there are at least patterns. Some interviewees come in too prepared and you have to chip your way through pre-prepared anecdotes in the hope that something real takes shape. Some have been burned before and hold back everything but name, rank and serial number.
Sometimes you have no choice but to wait and watch as the show takes place in front of you. Sometimes you lurk for hours, like a twitcher in a hide, gazing ahead for a flash of something, a true moment yet to have a witness.
I have sold and re-sold tonight’s interview: everything from a three-minute video for a festival website to a feature across five glossy pages of a newspaper’s Saturday magazine. At these extremes, the markets are mutually exclusive. The festival-goers have never put their young hands to newsprint, while the magazine readers – their parents, perhaps – will never go near the festivals. The music would be wrong and the UV exposure unthinkable; the toilets too. But they will want to know how Na$ti Boi works and why he works, because they have heard about rap and the culture around it, and he will serve as a new proxy for his perplexing generation. That’s the promise we will make them when we flag it on the cover.
Through the glass doors at the less conspicuous 59th Street entrance to Bloomingdale’s, there’s something golden about the light falling on the black-and-white tiled floor. From the street, I can’t tell if it’s a tint in the door glass or something they do inside with the light itself. I’ve never been in there, not once in the five, perhaps six, visits I’ve made to New York since that first one. Above the double door, there’s an awning with the look of brushed steel and ‘Bloomingdale’s’ on it in a sans-serif font, rounded lower-case letters, Os crossed like a Venn diagram waiting for content to be dropped in.
There’s a security guard inside, standing side-on to the door and rocking on his heels, hands clasped in front of him. He’s gazing straight ahead, neither out nor in. It’s 9.30, an hour after closing and exactly when I’m supposed to arrive.
I tap on the glass with a knuckle, and he turns my way. He’s big and broad and his name tag says Lopez. He presses a button on the wall, and the door lock disengages with a clunk. He eases the door open, but no wider than his hand.
‘Yes, sir?’ This is another featureless night in a thousand to him, my face another featureless shape in it.
‘Jeff Foster,’ I tell him, a hint of American slipping into my accent, so that I only have to say my name once. It’s a habit, not an intention. ‘I’m here for an interview.’ I can’t say my interviewee’s name. I can’t say Na$ti Boi, even though it’s a safe bet that an S with a slash through it sounds precisely the same as one without.
‘Yes, sir.’ This time it’s not a question. He draws back on the long brass handle and the door swings fully open. ‘Please follow me. They’re in our At His Service section – men’s personal shopping.’
Mr Lopez keeps his hand on the door as it glides back into place behind me and locks. He walks me through the silent store to the lift. The call button is set in a big square of brass. Inside the store, the light is not as golden as it appeared from the street, though there is still a lustre to it. Somewhere, far away across the shop floor, I can hear the hum and slap of a polisher buffing the black-and-white tiles. Behind the counter nearest us is a trolley, ready to restock it with Little, Medium and Big Brown Bags.
Lindsey bought a brooch on that first visit to Bloomingdale’s. That was not part of the plan. The dollar was low then – our dollar against the American – and even the half-price theatre tickets we’d been lining up for weren’t cheap. We’d seen Matthew Broderick in a comedy, and a Ben Jonson play that didn’t survive the creative shift to a late nineteenth-century schtetl and a whole lot of kvetching. She came out with her purchase in a small brown bag with ‘Little Brown Bag’ written on the side, and told me she’d made the purchase mainly for the bag.
My mouth was dry with salt and stale pretzel. The guy at the stand picked up another pretzel in a square of white paper and took a handful of coins from his next customer. I wondered if that pretzel was stale too, or if the others were all fresh, even warm. I had a ball of dry bread in my mouth – I felt like I’d been suckered somehow.
‘They’re iconic,’ Lindsey told me, holding the bag up and letting it swivel on its string handles. ‘These bags. Bloomingdale’s bags. A New York icon.’
We had an argument about that, there on Third Avenue, this purchase made in the name of packaging at a time when all our money was being measured out. It was another big deal made out of nothing. I should have taken it in my stride. What was twenty bucks, really? We had talked about seeing the Yankees play at Yankee Stadium, and still hadn’t got tickets. I thought about money too much that trip. It was our chance to treat New York lightly, to be young there and care about little, but I was picturing money as a limit to everything rather than seeing it as our only limit.
In the middle of the argument, she glanced at my hair. I hadn’t needed a haircut, not really, but it was the Chelsea and I’d taken the opportunity. I surrendered the argument about the bag then and there, without another word spoken on it.
‘You should wear the brooch,’ I told her. ‘It looks good.’ She had it in her hand, still set in its tissue paper. ‘You should wear it now.’
We bought salads from Zabar’s and picnicked in the park, watching kids hitting baseballs, practising, practising. We made it to Yankee Stadium too, later that week, and sat way up in the bleachers, facing the sun the whole game, but it was the Yankees and eighteen years later we still have the photo in a frame.
‘Must be coming from the top,’ Mr Lopez says, his eyes on the lift doors, our buckled gold reflections.
With that, there’s a muted electronic tone, and a hum as the doors part.
At His Service is on lower ground, one floor down. A cleaner is polishing the glass countertop at Salvatore Ferragamo. There are designer boutiques on either side of the aisle – Zegna, Armani, Michael Kors, Hugo Boss. The rubber soles of Mr Lopez’s boots squeak softly on the tiles in a rhythm built long ago into his stride and no more audible to him, I’m sure, than his own heartbeat.
At His Service is set discreetly away from the aisle, though nothing could be more discreet than being the only customer in a department store that’s already closed. It’s the voices that let me know we’re getting close: a young male ‘I don’t think so’, and a softer deferential murmur in reply.
Na$ti Boi is sitting on a plush red Louis XIV chaise longue, his rapper’s jacket slung over the nearby turned-gilt arm with a baseball cap set on top of it. Below his right eye, he has a scar that’s wider than it should be, like a small pale pink pair of lips or a kiss, with the dots of failed sutures along its edges. There’s a line of whiskery boy’s moustache running along his upper lip. His hair is gathered in tight cornrows, each ending in coloured beads. He looks younger than nineteen and younger than his photos, still growing into the track pants that balloon around his invisible legs. He looks like a kid who has borrowed from his big brother’s wardrobe and has been asked to sit here – and sit still – while a parent attends to some business nearby. He never had that life though; I know that much.
Behind him is a cabinet with cufflinks and tiebars set in trays or on little cushions in manly colours like bronze and burgundy. On the countertop, there’s a steel bucket with two glass bowls of frozen yoghurt sitting in ice. Each bowl has a long-handled silver spoon resting in it. At the foot of the chaise longue, in an armchair that’s part of the same set, a
man in a charcoal suit sits leaning forward, elbows on his thighs, phone in his hands. He has just been shown something, or has just whispered advice – that’s the pose he’s in. He looks late twenties, maybe thirty. Two Bloomingdale’s staff members, both women, are on the move, silently arranging clothes for viewing.
Na$ti Boi was discovered by Jay Z after he posted some rapping videos shot on his phone and people started to talk. He was seventeen then, and probably sees that as a lifetime ago. Jay Z found him producers such as A$AP Rocky and Joey Fat Beats. Na$ti Boi does the usual braggy stuff about bitches and brand names, but his rhymes are smart and sometimes unexpected. It’s rumoured that he was booked to open for Beyoncé until she listened closely.
‘Gentlemen,’ Mr Lopez says, ‘this is Mr Foster.’ He indicates me with his hand, at the same time giving a small nod. He takes a step in retreat, still facing Na$ti Boi and his attendants. It’s the way you’re supposed to leave the Queen. She never sees people’s backs, and maybe that’s now true for Na$ti Boi.
‘Hey, man,’ Na$ti Boi says, in a way that’s downplayed, but not unfriendly. ‘Australia, right?’
‘Yeah. Jeff Foster.’ He nods when I say it, but it’s a reflex, not a sign that I’m getting his full attention. ‘Good to meet you.’
The man in the suit stands. He slips his phone into a pocket and offers me his hand. He has a gold ring as chunky as a nugget on his ring finger. As his white shirt cuff slides from his jacket sleeve, he reaches across with his other hand and tweaks it back into place.
‘Smokey.’
The tang of his aftershave reaches me as he says it. There’s a glint of gold from his mouth, light catching on something in there, but his lips close over it again quickly, making his mouth look like a boxer’s. He moves with the ease of a boxer too, but his hand is soft, his handshake measured, nothing to prove to me. It’s Smokey I’ve been dealing with to make this meeting happen, Smokey who said his charge had an interest in fashion and that this would be the place and time.