by Nick Earls
‘And they don’t call him that ’cos his last name’s Robinson,’ Na$ti Boi says, with a kid’s lopsided smile, eyes on his manager.
‘It used to be my preferred means of relaxation,’ Smokey says. ‘But that was years ago. I’m a family man now. I don’t do that shit.’ His eyes flick across to Na$ti 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 not long after he was born.
‘And this is the man of the hour,’ Smokey says, using both hands in a gesture to showcase his charge.
I take a step towards Na$ti Boi, who leans slightly forward and raises his hand towards mine.
‘You can call me Na$ti Boi or just Na$ti but not just Boi,’ he says. ‘’Cos 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 by a staff member across the back of a chair.
His mother is dead and, I’ve been told, off limits. He has described her in the past as ‘a dead crack whore’ and ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’, depending on his state of mind and substance load.
‘Do you mind if I record?’ I pull my digital recorder from my jacket pocket as I say it to him. As I always do, I find myself showing it at the same time, as if the 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 her hand across it, as if it’s a much-loved Persian cat. It’s a top in a muted green, with long sleeves and three small white buttons where it opens at the neck. ‘It also comes in chocolate.’
She’s 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. With their fitted black, knee-length uniform dresses and their statement red lipstick and pale expressionless faces, they are two Robert Palmer girls. It’s a reference close to thirty years old. Along with the Ramones and their passing – not a thought for today.
They are white, both of them. Behind them stand three male mannequins, grey and with features somehow managing to hint at both Nordic and African. 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 aviators, polo shirts, bright yachting spray jackets.
It’s a long way from the streets in which Lydell Luttrell Junior started life. Not so far on the map or by the subway, but some kind of journey. He has the place rearranged around him, clothes he may or may not glance at draped here and there, all at his whim, like a boy pharaoh.
‘So, what makes this your kind of place?’ It’s often best not to start with the music. Start with the music, and sometimes that’s all you’ll get.
Smokey’s thumbing a message on his phone, but he glances up in Na$ti’s direction.
Na$ti gives a hint of a smile but then toughens his look up. ‘Are you sayin’ I should be shopping some place else?’ He will challenge me all night, I know it. There will be no right questions. ‘That this ain’t the place for me? That I’m not suitable?’
‘Not at all.’ I have to meet him. Not fight him, not apologise, just meet him, without any doubt in my voice or hint of uncertainty, or hint that I’m acknowledging I’ve opened with a question about race. It is not about race, though at the same time this is not the tale of a grey mannequin. Race is there, undeniably. Obama being in the White House does not give every black rapper a middle-class start to life, lawyers for parents. ‘I just didn’t know you’d wear this kind of stuff. Tiebars…’
‘I’m not here for preppie shit.’ He laughs. We’re okay. ‘I got my Bathing Ape, my Billionaire Boys Club. My Black Scale.’ He picks the cap up from the armrest, spins it on his finger and flips it into his other hand. ‘I got street covered, man, but my thing is blending it with a little high-end. But don’t go taking my picture with no tiebars. They just incidental. That’s our yoghurt bar there, that is.’ Without turning, he indicates with his thumb the glass countertop behind him, the silver ice bucket. ‘That shit’s got chocolate-coated goji berries and honey. It’s, like, organic honey.’
‘Wildflower honey,’ Smokey says, to be helpful. This era, food is all about the adjectives, the boosters, the story. Or maybe it’s that privilege accords a person more adjectives with their food nouns. Honey is not just honey now, not for Na$ti or Smokey. ‘Bloomingdale’s frozen yoghurt is…an institution. You get frozen yoghurt any place now, but it was here first.’ He looks at the ice bucket, the melting yoghurt. ‘Should have got an extra bowl.’
The poster for the tour in support of The Snatcher, Na$ti’s major label debut, features a reclining white woman, photographed in black-and-white from the end of the platform or table that she’s lying on. It isn’t a bed or somewhere comfortable – there’s a glossy sheen to it, hard edges at the sides, and a curve at the end that lets the top turn ninety degrees and drop to the floor. Her face and upper body are out of view. All you can see of her are her thin bright legs. She’s wearing glossy dark shoes with towering heels, and perhaps nothing else. One knee is bent, with the shoe on the tabletop, while the other is almost straight and rotated a little outwards, with her foot and shoe hanging in space. Na$ti’s hand is a dark wedge over her crotch, flat with the fingers extended. It might be a barrier, a shield. It might not even be touching her. His arm is straight, his torso shirtless and crossed by metal chains, his face staring at the camera, utterly blank.
‘So tell me how the creator of The Snatcher gets to be an appreciator of institutions.’ It seems as good a way for me to put it as any.
He takes the shirt from Eloise, rubs the fabric between thumb and finger. ‘Soft,’ he says. ‘I like that.’ He holds it up against himself. There’s a full-length mirror next to me, tilted so that he can appraise himself. Just when my question seems to have drifted out of view, he adds, ‘Institutions. The record’s all about one of the oldest institutions. It’s about a thief of love and pussy.’
He offers it as though it’s the smartest thing said in the world all week, the most insightful. He’s said it dozens of times, I bet – ‘a thief of love and pussy’ – with no thought beforehand as to whether or not the recipient might already have given the record’s title a second’s thought and be wise to the sledgehammer subtext. He bundles the shirt into a ball and tosses it back to Eloise.
His eyes are still on the mirror when he says, ‘That record got me more pussy than a bucketful of fish marinated in catnip.’ Then he glances Smokey’s way. ‘That’s a new one, new right now. You can have that one for Australia.’
He sets up for a fist bump, and Smokey obliges.
‘He’s a poet, my boy,’ Smokey says, shuffling his cuffs again and giving Na$ti a smile I can’t read.
I have, it turns out, missed most of the trying-on of clothes. I’m to bear witness to the boy pharoah’s taste for Bloomingdale’s – to his penchant for mashing up high-end and street – but I’ve been spared much of the detail. Andie has been folding and piling the chosen garments on the next countertop along from the frozen yoghurt. The throw to Eloise has signified that the Pensacola Henley is a no.
They have a system.
I take out my camera and snap some pictures of him on the chaise longue, picking up the plush red, the gilt trim, the silver of the ice bucket over his shoulder. He knows I’m doing it and looks as disengaged as possible. He’s been watching models.
‘Would you like to see the purses now?’ Eloise says. The question’s directed at Na$ti, but her eyes shift for a moment to Smokey. She’s following orders. Sometime during the planning he has put purses on the list. Smokey seems not to notice her. He’s checking his phone again. ‘I have a selection from our premium designers.’ She indicates a trolley that’s mostly obscured by the three grey yachtsmen.
‘I would.’ Na$ti Boi sits back on the chaise longue and runs his hands down his thighs, as though smoothing invisible wrinkles in his shiny synthetic track pants.
‘I have a McQ clutch…’ She reaches for the trolley.
‘All of them.’ He leans forward again and glances towards Smokey, who has the same smile as before still in place. ‘I want to see all of them.’
‘It has a razor-edge laser hologram.’ Eloise is still with the McQ clutch, her spiel spooling another sentence before she can pull it to a halt. Her hand is on the way to the clutch, but she lets it land on the brass handle of the trolley instead. ‘But all of them, sure, no problem. We have quite a range, all new season. I’m sure there’ll be something that will…’ She doesn’t know who it’s supposed to be right for. She looks around as if the recipient of the purse might now appear among us, and the moment make its way to a soft landing. ‘Be just right.’
It’s specificity that she’s searching for. She sells purses to men all the time, probably, but the woman is present – it’s part of the gesture, the trip together to Bloomingdale’s to buy the purse – or she’s named straight up. Before confessing a complete ignorance of purses and putting himself at her expert mercy, the one thing any man tells her is who he’s buying for.
On the surface, there is nothing in this for an article, but I’m still recording. Too much is unexplained. We are in male personal shopping. These purses were gathered up floors away and brought here.
Eloise eases the trolley across the tiles and into full view.
‘Which one’s the most expensive?’ Na$ti Boi says, having not clarified since he tossed the Henley that he’s the boy pharaoh here.
‘Sure.’ It comes out clipped, his bare crassness a gust of cold air that has her buttoning down her response.
She starts searching through the purses – they’re filed like books on a library trolley – checking tags only occasionally and mostly making her price assessment based on the purse itself. She slides one out and sets it on top. It’s plum coloured, shaped quite like the round-cornered square of a Scrabble letter and with a long black strap. The second purse she pulls out is gloss black with a black suede flap and silver clasp and a shorter black strap. They are for different occasions, different people.
‘These two both come in at nineteen ninety,’ she says. ‘One thousand, nine hundred ninety.’ She turns the tag on the second over again and nods. ‘Both CoSTUME NATIONAL. This one’s the Colorblock Piccola Messenger and this…’ she shifts her fingertips to the flap of the black bag ‘…is the Tema Morbido in suede.’
‘Let me see the…’ He points lazily in the direction of both of them. ‘Purple one.’
‘The Piccola Messenger? Sure.’
He takes it in both hands and feels the weight of it. He opens the flap and then clicks it shut again. It’s a good, solid click, almost a clunk. He tests the gold buckles that join the strap to the bag and then holds it up by the strap and rotates it to view it from all angles. He is picturing it being carried, being worn.
‘Yeah.’ He turns to Smokey, the bag still suspended from two of his fingers. ‘You know who this is for.’
‘I do, Lydell.’
It is a moment between them that is not to be broken by me asking the obvious question. Sometimes, in this job, a question can be the worst way to go. Rapport is not about questions and will not come easily with Na$ti Boi as it is. The truth – the interesting part of it, at least – is not often arrived at through asking for it directly.
‘He’s my cousin, you know,’ Na$ti Boi says to me. ‘This man.’ He sets the bag in his lap, folds the strap over it and keeps both his hands there. The gesture looks protective, like the stance of a grandmother on a train that’s rattling through a bad part of town, her eye out for miscreants. ‘Second cousin or some shit. Maybe second and a half. With me all the way.’
‘All the way from diapers,’ Smokey says, smiling at him, rubbing a cufflink with his thumb and finger under his jacket sleeve. ‘All the way from when you was only Lydell Junior.’ Smokey’s hand slips from his sleeve as he looks my way. ‘He got Na$ti Boi from what old Ms Willard round the corner used to call him. And she used to call him that ’cos he was one nasty boy. Full of nasty tricks, you was.’ Na$ti Boi laughs, treating it as a compliment. ‘That’s why I’m here, playing the dual roles of Mr Straight and Mr Narrow.’
Lydell Senior was gone early. ‘He got messed up in some shit,’ is all that’s been said about that by his son, spraying it like smoke over the question as a means of escape. I read it in a print interview. The body language was all recorded, and as expected. Drawbridge up. When his son was four, Lydell Senior’s body was found in a dumpster with two bullets in it and his hands cable-tied. No one says that’s a robbery, or someone ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
‘Is it good, working with family?’ It’s a way into the subject, maybe, but made to sound like conversation rather than a question.
‘Always,’ Na$ti says. He smiles. And that’s it. I open a small door and he shuts it without drama. He stands and hands the bag to Eloise. ‘I’ll take it.’
‘No problem, sir.’
She folds the strap over carefully and carries the bag to the counter, where Andie has started scanning the clothes. She sets the bag down with its tag barcode up and starts folding the items Andie’s already processed and placing them in one of two open Big Brown Bags.
The bill comes to $11,700 for not much. Na$ti reaches into one of the pockets in his pants and brings his hand out like a poker player covering an ace. His credit card clicks against the glass when he sets it down on the counter.
Andie swipes it and watches the small screen on the machine. She presses a button and swipes again. She takes a look at the magnetic strip on the card, and rubs it before trying for a third time.
‘There seems to be a problem with this card,’ she says tentatively. ‘It’s reading okay, but I’m not getting authorisation.’
‘The card is good,’ Na$ti tells her. He shuts his mouth firmly, and I see his jaw muscles working.
‘I’m sure it is, sir.’ She swipes again and then taps the card on the counter while she waits, her eyes fixed on the screen. She is wishing she could be anywhere else – home, on the subway.
Smokey steps across and places his hand over hers, extracting the card.
‘I’ll just put in a call,’ he says quietly. ‘Or we could try splitting it and use one of my cards for some.’
‘We’re not using your cards, man,’ Na$ti says. He swaps weight from one foot to the other and gives an exasperated sigh. His body’s still wired for all the young people’s gestures. ‘We’re not doing that shit. This is my spree. This is Bloomingdale’s.’
‘I know it.’ Smokey turns the card over in his hands and seems to run his eye over its details. ‘I’ll put in a call.’ He takes his phone from an inside jacket pocket, scrolls and finds the number he wants. ‘Voicemail,’ he tells us once it’s connected. I’m close enough to make out the beep at the end of the outgoing message. ‘Hey, Aaron. We got a minor credit card thing going down here; Lydell’s card. We’re at Bloomingdale’s and it’s declining eleven seven. Be good to get it fixed ASAP.’
He finis
hes the call, flicks to another screen. Na$ti watches him, focuses on him, pushing Bloomingdale’s to his peripheral vision, blocking it, blocking this brass-and-gold and black-and-white-tiled institution that has given him exquisite attention and frozen yoghurt but rejected his card. Smokey’s still working on his phone. His thumb moves a couple more times.
Eloise has gone, I realise. She’s silently ducked out behind the grey yachtsmen, like an actor stealing an exit from the stage the instant the focus is elsewhere. Andie is motionless at the counter, the lack of expression on her face more deeply embedded than ever.
Na$ti raises and then drops his arms in a half-question half-shrug, a mime to get Smokey’s attention.
‘He’s workin’ on it,’ Smokey tells him. ‘Chill Lydell. It’ll be cool.’ A text message pings through. His thumb slides up and down. ‘Okay, so there’s a certain limit, like ten K… Probably a security thing.’ Na$ti goes to talk, but Smokey keeps going. ‘Not about you. He’s going to see what he can do. Now, I got my cards…’
Na$ti’s right hand clenches into a fist and he leans forward and then rocks back and taps the fist against his thigh. He has a glare fixed on Smokey, which Smokey is matching with a smile that’s as close to beatific as he can make it.
‘Gentlemen,’ Eloise says as she crab-walks past the purse trolley and the yachtsmen and into view. ‘Drinks?’ She’s holding a tray carrying a shapely crystal jug of green turbid liquid and three highball glasses, each containing an inch of crushed ice and a long silver spoon. ‘Some refreshments while we get everything finalised. Kale, ginger, celery and green apple.’
Na$ti Boi is a juicer. He’s talked about that. She’s done her homework.
She sets the tray on the counter next to the yoghurt and starts pouring. The three of us follow dumbly: Na$ti working his way down from punchiness; Smokey going for the safety of silence; me processing and so far coming up short. There are agendas here, and I don’t know them yet.