Gotham Page 4

  ‘Sometimes there’s a girl there,’ he says, still craning his neck. ‘A particular girl.’

  He finds another number on his phone. This time it’s the restaurant and he tells them we’re going to be late. He estimates twenty minutes. Every call he makes is a new promise about time, and he sits there in his designer suit with his polished shoes and buffed nails but no say over his next five minutes.

  ‘There’s a place,’ he says, leaning forward. ‘They do a beef Wellington. Best in New York. Best anywhere, maybe. So LyDell says, and he sees himself as an aficionado. He prefers it served as soon as he arrives, so…’

  ‘How do they get that right?’ Beef Wellington takes time. It’s a multi-step process.

  ‘They set one up to be ready on time and there’s another fifteen minutes behind it.’ He watches for my reaction.

  ‘They make two in case he’s late?’

  ‘They make three maybe. I don’t know.’

  The wind makes a shhhh sound as it skids across the open door. The driver is still standing in the exact same spot, his hands clasped behind his back, fingers clenching and unclenching. More isometrics.

  ‘And what happens to the others?’ I do what I can to pull all the judgment out of my voice. I’m picturing a production line, one plate after another of the world’s best beef Wellington dropping from the end of a conveyor belt and crashing onto the mess that’s already there.

  There’s a pause before Smokey says, ‘I don’t know.’ He clears his throat. ‘This is not for the article, right? You and me talking about beef Wellington? That’s just you and me talking, yeah?’

  A message comes through to his phone. He checks it and flinches. He shows me the text part of it, his hand over an image. There’s only one word. ‘Puy.’ He doesn’t have to tell me who it’s from.

  ‘At least I didn’t show you the photo.’ He puts the phone on the seat, face down.

  There’s another squall of wind, this time with rain scattering across the roof of the van. Smokey grabs for the Little Brown Bag as the rain comes in. The driver shuts the door, but the bag tips over. The plum-coloured purse slides onto the seat. Smokey picks it up—it’s small in his hands—clicks the flap shut, folds the strap with care and slips it back into the bag.

  ‘The clothes are for him, I guess, but…’ It’s my best chance. The purse isn’t for Nati’s candy store girl, but it’s for someone.

  ‘This?’ Smokey sets the bag next to his thigh and keeps his hand on it. ‘I can’t say for sure. It’s not my place, and I also…I tell you this. His mom always said, ‘I don’t want no son who’s in jail. I want a son who’ll buy me something nice at Bloomingdale’s.’’

  It’s a gift Nati, Lydell Junior, will never deliver. It’s five years too late, the best they had. Did he picture it on her arm, I wonder, back there in Bloomingdale’s? Did he picture her there on the red chaise lounge among the grey yachtsmen, carried unharmed all the way to this different, invented life and its unimaginable opportunities?

  ‘You know we don’t discuss her,’ Smokey says before I can speak, ‘but I think it was important. Going there tonight, doing that. I don’t know. More important than two more pairs of pants anyways.’

  He gets another text, and shows it to me. This one reads, ‘You have a daughter, asshole.’ No photos.

  He calls back, full of joy and regret, and gets shouted at. A baby wails in the background.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he says, battling to get to the news, to make certain all is well.

  The phone is handed to the nurse for that. His lady dismisses him. He takes it on the chin and listens intently to every detail.

  ‘You tell her I love her,’ he says to the nurse once he’s heard it all. ‘D’vonne and my new best girl, you tell them both, even if one of them don’t want to hear it right now.’

  I can hear the nurse’s voice. His baby’s quiet now. He’s getting acquiescence to his request but not much sympathy.

  She finishes the call and he looks over to me and says, ‘Fine set of lungs, my daughter. Can’t guess where she got that from. She’s good. It’s cool. I’ll see her soon. Soon as LyDell…’ He raises his eyebrows. ‘She’s healthy. Everybody’s healthy. That’s the main thing. I thought I had more time.’

  ‘It’s quicker with the second sometimes.’ I have only one, but I’ve heard. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He grins. ‘Yeah, it is that time. I’m in the doghouse but she’s in the world, man. Breathing and squalling and beautiful, too, the nurse tells me. Thank you.’ He swivels in his seat, so that he’s on his knees and facing forward. ‘Hey, Rakim,’ he says to the driver. ‘I got me a daughter.’

  ‘Happy for you, Mr Carmichael.’ Rakim reaches a hand up to shake. ‘So happy for you.’

  There’s a tapping sound at the front window, Nati’s voice just audible through the thick glass saying, ‘What the fuck?’ His arm is over his head, as though the light rain might strike with enough force to cause actual pain.

  ‘Sorry, sir.’ Rakim moves quickly.

  Nati steps back as Rakim simultaneously opens his door and pops a black umbrella. He launches himself from his seat and shelters Nati while pulling the rear door open.

  ‘I’m cool that you get out of the rain,’ Nati says as he climbs in, ‘but you could keep your eyes open.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I was distracted by the news.’

  Nati runs his hand down each sleeve, flicking water onto the floor. He smells of sweat and sex. He eases back in his seat and sits knees apart, proud of himself.

  He runs a finger under his nose, taking a long theatrical sniff at it.

  ‘Sweet,’ he says. ‘This been in some happy places.’

  The finger leaves a few white crystals behind, or moves them around in a way that makes them visible.

  I’m waiting for Smokey to break his news, but instead he says, ‘How ’bout we do some more of the interview now. Seems like the perfect time.’

  I pat my jacket down to find my recorder. It’s another chance for Smokey to mention his baby, another for Nati to ask. But Smokey is back looking out the window as we pull away from the kerb and Nati is grinning like a fool, jazzed on whatever’s gone up his nose and the sex he’s just had.

  ‘Okay, so…’ I try to remember what I’ve covered. I have notes in a pocket, but it wouldn’t be right to pull them out. ‘There’s word you’ve been recording something new. Is there any news on that?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s under wraps but, for you, yeah.’

  He nudges Smokey. He’s waiting for Smokey to stop him. Smokey pulls out his phone and gets to work on a new text. To D’vonne is my guess, more joy, more apologies and promises.

  ‘All right then,’ Nati says. ‘It’s your story, if I’m good to go. It’s done, the record. The beats are super nasty, just wait. It’s called…I say it’s called Pussy Hound, but we still talking that one through. With two dollar signs, so you get it right. P, U, dollar sign, dollar sign, Y, yeah? Puy Hound.’ He nods, appreciating the artistry of it. ‘It’s like a dog reference and a cat reference in the one title, see? It’s got layers.’

  I ask him who he collaborated with—always the story with a rap album—and Smokey stirs and says, ‘LyDell, we got to leave some gas in the tank. No offence, Jeff. In the article that can be when I walk back in the room shouting, ‘Embargo,’ and demanding you talk about something else.’ He waves his hand around like a man in a slow-motion panic. ‘But you can break the title news if you want. And now for the something else…’

  I ask Nati about the girl he’s just visited and it turns out she’s an emerging porn star who has recently had her vagina, mouth and anus moulded for a doll.

  ‘She’s in college,’ he tells me, big dopey grin over most of his face at the thought of her parts latexed and on the open market. ‘Nice college, too. That shit don’t go down too good at New Haven.’

  He means Yale. He’s telling me he’s dating an Ivy League porn star. And he’s referring to Yale the wa
y F. Scott Fitzgerald did two pages into The Great Gatsby. Nati is a boy from near Fitzgerald’s city of ashes—the awful demoralised pit between the Long Island Eggs and the city—and I wonder if he knows that. The reference is chance, surely. There is no well-thumbed Gatsby in his back pocket. He could have learned something from Jay Gatsby about the transience and dangers of gaudiness, of relying on surfaces to bear weight.

  Not that I’m an expert on the book, but I have a friend, Paul, who has written three novels, all of them The Great Gatsby in one way or another. That’s his admission, not mine, and it made me give Fitzgerald’s book a more focused read than I otherwise might have. Any time I’m in this city, I cross paths with Paul’s dream to make it in New York, even in the close boxy world inside this van. His career high point was a meeting in a cockpit office right at the narrow end of the Flatiron Building, selling the first of his three Gatsbyish novels to a publisher. They bought the second, too, I think, as part of the same deal, but they didn’t take the third.

  We can’t be more than a few blocks from that office with its dark curved window fixed, like an unblinking eye, on Broadway. We might even pass it on our way to the beef Wellington, casting our own small lights into the coursing traffic below.

  Paul still has a photo of the building on his office wall at home, and no doubt still keeps a candle burning for the dream. It should have been the start of something, that meeting, not the best of it.

  But I’d put in time in bands that never made it. It’s all right that not all dreams end up being lived. We are both getting by. And it’s still a dream, this job, in its own way, even if not every interview is with a lifelong hero and some are simply for the purpose of getting paid.

  ‘Hey, man,’ Nati says, ‘you a long way from home, yeah?’

  He rummages around in his jacket, searching for an inside pocket, grinning, laughing. There’s a big joke going on, but so far only he is in on it. He pulls out something pale and flexible, a kind of tube. He tosses it to me. I catch it instinctively and clutch it and the recorder together in my hands. The tube ends in a neat oval cap with a puckered centre leading to its hollow core.

  ‘You want a piece of ass on the road?’ He laughs squawkily, struggling to pull it in so that he can finish. ‘Now you got one. This is one prototype asshole from Little Miss New Haven. Don’t tell me no rock star never gave you his girl’s ass before…’

  It wobbles in my hand. I fumble it, and grab it between my knees as it falls. It’s a rubber anus, sphincter and reservoir, but it feels as though I’d somehow be disrespecting its model if I let it drop to the floor. The anus wobbles and topples to one side.

  ‘It’s made for getting real dirty, see,’ he says matter-of-factly as I lift it by its stem, like a lily, and place it on the seat beside me. ‘It comes out and cleans up real good. The guy who made it, I had him blinded afterwards, obviously, blinded or killed.’

  It was the prerogative of kings, medieval and ancient, to be so brutal and so self-absorbed. It’s a jokey reminder about status, in case I’m still not getting the message.

  ‘Did you want to shoot some video?’ Smokey says. ‘We might do that now.’

  ‘Embargo!’ Nati calls out, waving his hands dramatically. ‘Embargo the rubber asshole! That’s what that means. You gone too far, Nati.’

  I had the video pencilled in for later, but the trick is to roll with it. To bring up my plans would betray a structure, and a structure would betray a purpose and I would be back to being the interrogator, to being viewed with suspicion. I am to be a talkative shadow in this van, this night, and shadows don’t initiate the moves. A guy with a notepad and a pen and ten questions gets some facts, but that’s not the same. No one, once they’re used to the shape of it, guards against their shadow.

  ‘This is for a website,’ I tell Nati. ‘For the festivals.’

  In another pocket, I have a camera that can shoot web-quality video. With that pointed at his face, there will be no room to pretend that we are four guys in a van and I am doing anything subtle. It will look like—and will be—an interview, but then it will be done and I can go back to lurking around his evening, casting lines into the dark in the hope of catching something new and unusual and telling.

  ‘So, it’ll be a few straightforward questions,’ I tell him. ‘Straight Q&A thing. We’ll edit me out, so if you could start the answer by reframing the question in your own words…’

  ‘No problem.’

  He reaches to his left and pushes on a panel set between the backs of his seat and Smokey’s. It clicks open, revealing a grid of controls. He presses a button and strings of lights blink on. They’re threaded around the doors and seats and shaped to make swirls on the ceiling. He brings music up, too, but keeps it low, all bass and beat. The lights pulse in synch.

  ‘The audio might be on three, LyDell,’ Smokey says, ‘but you just cranked the pimp dial up to eleven.’

  ‘You tell me when it hits fifteen and I’ll bring it back a little.’ He pulls his cap on and then says, ‘No, that’s wrong for the lighting. You’ll lose my face.’ He pulls it off again. ‘I want the beanie, the SSUR.’ He clicks his fingers and waggles one in the direction of the bags. Smokey already has one hand on a bag, but he holds it there and waits until Nati says, ‘Please.’

  Smokey lowers the bag onto the floor between his feet and starts parting garments. ‘Damn pimp lighting never meant to find no beanie.’

  Eventually he extracts it and Nati puts it on. It’s fawn in colour and knitted, and he pulls at it so that it sits in layers and looks not unlike a bandage.

  ‘You take a still and let me check this?’ He points at the camera.

  After minor alterations and another still, we’re ready.

  I frame him as well as I can with the van stopping and starting in avenue traffic, and I ask him to start by telling us where we are.

  ‘Hi Australia,’ he says, and waves, like a witless tourist. Fine by me if that’s how he wants it. ‘This is my wheels, aka Club Nati, coming to you from the streets of New York city.’

  ‘Great.’ As in, great if the benchmarks are boxing commentators from the seventies and tuxedoed pageant hosts. But my next question—the festival’s next question—is worse. ‘So, what are you looking forward to in Australia?’

  ‘I’m gonna bring it, Australia, like I know you want me to.’ He’s looking right down the barrel, pointing for emphasis. ‘I’m gonna rhyme like the best of all time, rhymes that turn on a dime. I know you know how to party, and I’m bringin’ the beats.’ He glances down at his phone and flicks between images. ‘Now tell me, Australia, you got some of this for me?’ He holds the phone up, squarely in the middle of the shot. It’s bright with white flesh. ‘How beautiful is this? You got anything this mother-fuckin’ beautiful?’

  It’s Miss New Haven, naked, lying on a bed. Her knees are bent and the phone must be somewhere between her ankles. Immediately above her porn-star-bare vagina, though careful not to obscure a millimetre of it, the straight index finger of her right hand is placed in the inverted V of the index and ring fingers of her left, like a pool cue in a jigger, sizing up a shot. In the distance, framed by the larger V of her thighs, I can make out a blur of blonde hair, the smudged red lipstick line of a smile on her pale face, her dark featureless eyes.

  Nati lurches back laughing and, as he reaches out to balance himself, he tips the Little Brown Bag onto the floor. The plum-coloured purse spills out, its folded strap unravelling. He puts his hand over his phone screen. That’s his first move. He drops the phone to the seat and scoops up the purse. He holds it close to a strip of white door lights and examines each part of it to make certain it’s come to no harm.

  He finds a scuff mark.

  ‘Fuck, man. Fuck.’ There’s a sharp intake of breath. He blinks and rubs his eyes. ‘God dammit.’

  I stop filming. Nati stares at the mark. A tear rolls down his cheek and drops from his chin.

  ‘It’s cool, LyDell.’ It’s a line S
mokey must say in his sleep. He reaches across to take the purse, licks his thumb and wipes the smudge away. ‘Good as new.’ He shows him the spot.

  Nati’s breath lurches. He steadies himself and nods. In this second he is not remotely nasty. He is a lost boy.

  ‘Let’s put it in one them big bags,’ he says, ‘with clothes all around.’ He clears his throat, focuses on something in the air between us, then looks at me. His eyes are still shiny but he puts on a smile. ‘You showin’ Australia all that?’

  ‘It’ll cut out before the bag’s involved.’

  ‘Cool. You showin’ the rest?’ The smile reshapes itself. It’s cockier, dirtier.

  ‘We might drop a little pixilation here and there, I suspect.’

  I restart the camera and he settles himself in his seat and nods.

  ‘Your branding’s all very vaginal.’

  He laughs. ‘Catch the salmon while it’s running.’

  He looks to Smokey for affirmation or a high-five, but Smokey has one hand deep in the Big Brown Bag, with the other holding the purse clear until he’s made a nest for it.

  Nati frowns. ‘I’m all about family now.’

  It comes out sounding like a line he’s read somewhere, one of those things famous people say, the lie of a broken politician or CEO who has lost the confidence of the board. In this second though, I think he means it. In the interview, it’s a car-crash non sequitur, but for him it was the next direct unfiltered thought. I don’t know what family he has other than his second-and-a-half cousin, who can probably thank Nati for the great suit and the gold on his teeth, but who tends to the bags and takes what he’s given.

  ‘So, what do you want from this? From the life you’re leading now? Apart from more photos like the one on your phone.’

  ‘I wanted them cargoes.’

  It’s another piece of a thought. He is full of drugs and sex, and sad notions are surfacing out of the black water.

  ‘You wanted some other things more,’ Smokey says, in a tone that’s almost gentle. ‘And you got them. Anyways, Alexander Wang gonna be making pants a while.’