Gotham Read online

  Inkerman & Blunt Publishers Pty Ltd

  P.O. Box 310, Carlton South

  Victoria 3053, Australia

  www.inkermanandblunt.com

  First Published as Cargoes in Griffith Review 50 Tall Tales Short—The Novella Project III

  Published by Inkerman & Blunt in paperback and ebook form in 2016

  Copyright © Nick Earls 2015

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted. This book is copyright. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, and apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publisher

  Editing by Irma Gold

  Book design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

  Cover and internal images by Virginia Kraljevic, virginiakraljevic.com

  Typeset in 13/16 pt. Granjon by Mike Kuszla, J & M Typesetting

  Printed in Australia through Book Production Solutions

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: Earls, Nick, 1963– author

  Title: Wisdom Tree: five novellas / by Nick Earls

  ISBN: 9780992498573 (paperback)

  Series: Earls, Nick, 1963– Wisdom Tree

  Notes: Gotham—Venice—Vancouver—Juneau—NoHo

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  Creator: Earls, Nick, 1963– author

  Title: Gotham / Nick Earls

  ISBN: 9780992498580 (paperback)

  Series: Earls, Nick, 1963– Wisdom Tree: 1

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  1

  GOTHAM

  2

  VENICE

  3

  VANCOUVER

  4

  JUNEAU

  5

  NOHO

  1

  GOTHAM

  The first time we were here it was just 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 told me she’d cut his hair for years. I never discovered if it was true. I wanted it to be true. Dee Dee Ramone.

  Dee Dee’s hair was no fixed thing. Johnny’s was the iconic Ramones’ hair, so that’s the cut I got. No one at home had that. Johnny threw his hair forward when he stabbed at his guitar, as if hair could be another weapon. The first time I saw it, I knew it was a signature move. I was about ten back then.

  I made Lindsey take a photo of me and my new hair, a 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 and put 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 photo ended up looking mostly like me. Me with a Johnny Ramone haircut that didn’t take and which I didn’t keep. I looked too much like my aunt with that hair. It turned out some people in Australia had gone for that cut after all.

  The closest I got to Bloomingdale’s that visit was a vendor 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 Ramones’ song title, that intersection, ‘53rd & 3rd’, 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 get lost on the way there.

  The song was almost 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 Nati 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?

  Nati 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 treat at least one of your questions as if it’s been delivered in an alien tongue, or as if he’s just that moment determined he’s suffered his last fool.

  Beyond that, where there are not certainties, there are patterns. Some interviewees come too prepared and you have to chip your way through pre-built 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 the show that takes place in front of you. Sometimes you lurk for hours, like a twitcher in a hide, for a flash of something, a true moment yet to have a witness.

  I have sold and resold 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 the extremes, the markets are mutually exclusive. Festival-goers have never put their young hands to newsprint, while the magazine readers, their parents, probably, will never go near festivals. The music would be wrong and the UV exposure unthinkable, the toilets, too. But the magazine readers will want to know how Nati Boi works and why he works. 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 the interview on the cover.

  Through the glass doors at the less conspicuous 59th Street entrance, there’s something golden about the light falling on the black-and-white tiled floor. I can’t tell if it’s a tint in the door glass or something they do with the light itself. I’ve never been inside, not once in five visits to New York since that first time. Above the double door there’s an awning with a brushed-steel look and ‘Bloomingdale’s’ on it, 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 nine-thirty, an hour after closing and exactly when I’m supposed to arrive.

  I tap on the glass 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 let a hint of American slip into my accent, so 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 Nati Boi, even though it’s a safe bet that an S with a slash or two 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 swings the door fully open. ‘Please follow me. They’re in our ‘At His Service’ section. Men’s personal shopping.’

  He keeps his hand on the door as it glides into place and locks behind me. He walks me through the silent store to the lift. Inside the store, the light is not as golden as it appeared from the street, though it
still has a lustre to it. Somewhere, far 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, with fresh supplies of the store’s distinctive 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, 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 Johnson play that didn’t survive the creative shift to a late nineteenth-century schtetl and a whole lot of kvetching. She came out with the brooch in a little brown bag with ‘Little Brown Bag’ written on the side, and told me the bag was the main reason for the purchase.

  My mouth was dry from 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 said, 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 it right 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 seeing money as a limit to everything rather than as our only limit.

  And I was thinking of Natalie, the girl I had broken up with to be with Lindsey and who had suggested the New York trip in the first place. She had a wish list that included the Museum of Modern Art, meeting particular graphic novelists and New Yorker cover artists, and buying something that came in a Bloomingdale’s bag. She had used the word ‘iconic’, too. And there was Lindsey, swinging one on her finger in front of me. It had been Natalie’s plan to go to MoMA late on a Friday, when it was pay-what-you-wish, and that’s what Lindsey and I had done. I made it seem like my idea. Natalie would never know about that. But the Little Brown Bag would be packed carefully, taken home, witnessed. It seemed cruel for a moment. Lindsey didn’t like Natalie and hadn’t tried to hide it.

  But I kept that complicated thought to myself and kept the argument about money, the waste of twenty precious dollars on a paper bag. Lindsey wasn’t stealing Natalie’s dream. The Bloomingdale’s experience was her own. Then she saw 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 then and there.

  ‘You should wear the brooch,’ I told her. ‘It looks good.’ She had it in her hand, still partly wrapped 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 nineteen 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, then 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’ 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.

  Nati Boi is sitting on a plush red Louis XIV chaise lounge, his rapper’s jacket slung over the gilt-turned 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, ending in coloured beads. He looks younger than nineteen, younger than his photos, as if he’s still growing into the trackpants that balloon around his invisible legs. He looks like a kid who has borrowed from his big brother’s wardrobe and been told to sit there, 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 tie bars set in trays. 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 lounge, 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.

  Nati Boi was discovered by Jay Z after he posted some rapping videos shot on his phone and people started to talk. Jay Z found him producers like AAP Rocky and Joey Fat Beats. Nati Boi does the usual braggy stuff about bitches and brand names, but his rhymes are smart and sometimes unexpected. It’s rumoured 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 and gives a small nod.

  He takes a step in retreat, still facing Nati 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 Nati Boi.

  ‘Hey, man,’ Nati 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, 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 thick lips close over it 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. He has 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.

  ‘And they don’t call him that ’cause his last name’s Robinson,’ Nati Boi says, with a kid’s lopsided smile, eyes on his manager. Years ago it would have been a marijuana reference, but this century it’s probably crack.

  ‘It used to be my preferred means of relaxation,’ Smokey says. ‘But I’m a family man now. I don’t do that shit.’ His eyes flick across to Nati Boi before settling on me again. ‘Or any kind of shit.’

  He is a family man with gold grills in his mouth that I can now see read ‘BITCH’ and ‘EPIC’. It’s not the time to tell him that together they make up the title of an album released by a now-fifty-five-year-old Australian woman around the time he started school. I might tell Deborah Conway though. I have her number.

  ‘And this is the man of the hour,’ Smokey says, using both hands in a gesture to showcase his charge.

&nbs
p; I take a step towards Nati Boi, who leans slightly forward and raises his hand towards mine.

  ‘You can call me Nati Boi or just Nati but not just Boi,’ he says. ‘’Cause I ain’t nobody’s boy.’ He smiles. ‘’Cept my momma’s, right? We all that.’

  His handshake is quick, done almost before it’s started. It’s a straightforward handshake, no rapper tricks to it, but to him I’m an old white guy from across the planet and likely to be proficient at only one way to shake a hand. He’s looking past me, to a shirt being spread across the back of a chair by a staff member.

  His mother is dead and, I’ve been told, off limits. He has described her in past interviews, depending on his state of mind and substance load, as ‘a dead crack whore’ and ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’.

  ‘Do you mind if I record?’ I pull my digital recorder from my jacket pocket. As I always do, I find myself demonstrating it at the same time, clicking the button on and off, as if my question needs illustrating. ‘Just while you’re shopping and we’re talking about…whatever. Maybe some pictures, too? Candid ones. Nothing too stagey.’

  ‘Sure.’ He turns to one of the personal shoppers. ‘What you got for me there?’

  ‘It’s Billy Reid,’ she tells him. Her name tag says Eloise. ‘From his new range of polos and henleys. This one’s the Pensacola.’ She strokes it, as if it’s a much-loved Persian cat. It’s a muted green, with long sleeves and three small white buttons where it opens at the neck. ‘It also comes in chocolate.’

  Eloise is blonde and the other personal shopper, Andie, has jet black hair. In neither case is it their natural colour, but each has her hair styled into a tight gleaming French roll. They are Robert Palmer girls, with their uniform fitted black knee-length dresses and their statement red lipstick and pale expressionless faces. It’s a reference close to thirty years old. Along with the Ramones and their passing, not a thought for today.

  Eloise and Andie are white, both of them. Behind them stand three male mannequins, grey and with features somehow managing to hint at both Nordic and African origins. It has been a work of some precision to make them raceless. They have serious, down-tilted expressions, as though they’ve collectively noticed something not to their liking on the carpet, and each is waiting for one of the others to speak first. They’re wearing polo shirts and bright yachting spray jackets.