by Nick Earls
‘This is good,’ Na$ti says when he sips from the first glass she’s poured. ‘You know I like this shit.’
‘I do,’ she says, rather than yes. Na$ti Boi would say ‘I do’, as would Smokey, but it’s not mimicry. It’s the chess game that some of these celeb shopping sprees must become. She needs to be in their heads, even more so when we hit a snag and unanticipated prickliness. She needs to keep the peace and keep everyone’s dignity intact to make a sale, and a credit-card refusal rocks the boat.
When I reach for my glass, Na$ti’s credit card is next to it on the counter. Smokey’s set it down to keep his phone in one hand and now a glass in the other. It’s a simple card, blue rather than gold or platinum, the kind anyone might have.
‘So, your credit card’s still in L L Luttrell?’ My recorder’s still humming in my hand.
‘Yeah.’ There’s a tone to it that’s bordering on surly – I’ve cast my eyes on something that wasn’t my business; I’ve put into play a name that he’s outgrown. Then he changes his mind and smiles. It’s nothing after all. ‘I ain’t done the paperwork yet. I been busy. There’s forms and shit. Smokey can fill them in for me, or Aaron, but I got to sign.’ His free hand does a squiggle in the air. ‘That’s prolly the limit thing too. I could get a different card with a concierge and shit, but I got to slow down enough to sign the form one day.’ He nods. It’s a story that restores his honour, and it might even be true. ‘One of those black cards’d be nice. Amex Centurion, like the King of Monaco. They ain’t even shiny. That’d be cool.’
He is picturing a deluxe life, private jets, a card with powers as strong and mysterious as the Matrix. I read an article once on black credit cards and Prince Albert, and my guess is the card’s about half as good as Na$ti’s imagining. That’s still a deluxe life though.
‘Or you could do what Martin Sheen does. He works as Martin Sheen but he still lives as Ramón Estévez. Passport, credit cards, all that.’
‘Yeah?’ He takes another sip of his drink. The light green foam touches his thread of moustache and he licks his lip. ‘He could get his ass kicked back to Mexico with shit like that.’
Smokey lifts a finger from his glass to catch Na$ti’s attention. ‘I’ll show you something later, Lydell. Some of Martin Sheen’s work.’
‘I’ll take a look at his shit now if it’s in Bloomingdale’s,’ Na$ti says with an expansive gesture that forgets the credit card and says all this is his.
At the other counter Andie coughs, but it starts as a laugh that escapes before she can catch it. Na$ti glares at her. She reaches into one of his Big Brown Bags, intently rearranging the folded garments. She leans her mouth to her sleeve and gives another small cough – no hint of anything else to it this time.
‘Prolly shit anyway,’ Na$ti says. ‘Martin Sheen. There’s a lot of shit in here. Too many old Italian faggots gettin’ it all wrong this season. Not just them. Anita Clark. I was very disappointed there. I didn’t say that at the time.’ It’s a monologue. We’re not expected to buy in. Somewhere among the discard piles on the furniture around us is the work of Anita Clark, rejected before I arrived. ‘She sold too much shit to the Obamas. That’s what it is. I know where she was from, but she done lost it now, what she had. She all dried up inside. She all Hamptons now. Next year she’ll do goddamn boat shoes, just wait. She whiter than Ralph Lauren now.’
‘This drink is good, Lydell,’ Smokey says, tapping a fingernail against his glass. ‘We could sit and enjoy our drinks while we wait for Aaron.’
Na$ti brings the glare up again, but stays silent as he works it through.
‘I’m gonna sit when I want to sit,’ is what he decides to say. He drinks another mouthful. ‘But this is good, yeah. You did good with this…’ He takes a look – it’s not as sly as it’s supposed to be – at her name tag. ‘Eloise. Some people go to town with the kale.’
She almost says something, but sticks with smiling and nodding. It’s the first part of a silence that builds to awkwardness soon enough. Na$ti sips his drink again.
Smokey touches my sleeve with his phone hand. ‘You got kids, right?’
I have a wedding ring, I’m forty and look it – I don’t know if he’s guessing or if I’ve told him. He doesn’t wait for an answer. He has an ultrasound image on his phone and he’s angling it my way. It’s a foetus, the bright outlines of one in its dark uterine world, a finely etched nose and mouth and perfect tiny fingers stretching to the limits of their span.
‘My lady’s in labour,’ he says. ‘Just the early part, but I want to get over there.’ The best minders are conjurers, guiding the eye to the other hand, away from tantrums, embarrassment, slander, hubris.
I turn off my recorder and put it in my pocket.
‘I think we might pick this up later,’ I tell him. ‘When it’s just the three of us.’
‘Yeah. Perfect.’ He flicks to another image, spreads his fingertips and enlarges his tiny child.
‘I have a four-year-old daughter,’ I tell him. ‘She’s asleep at the Beacon Hotel right now, on Broadway and 75th. At least, I hope she’s asleep.’
‘My son is four. How about that?’ He seems genuinely pleased to say it, to make this connection, but it might just be shrewd preparation for a protracted pout from Na$ti Boi.
The transaction isn’t over yet, and Na$ti is looking glumly down into his drink, coaching himself through this diversion from his Bloomingdale’s dream. Andie is standing mannequin-style at the counter and perhaps wondering how to turn grey. Somewhere in the distance, there’s a one-sided conversation that I can just work out is in Spanish, a cleaner talking on his phone.
‘There’s some good shit in this city for kids,’ Smokey tells me, warming to the possibility of an entirely non-contentious topic. ‘People don’t always get that. You taken her to the granite slide they got in Central Park? Billy Johnson Playground, East 67th. My boy digs that. Polished by the asses of ten million kids.’
‘It’s on my list.’ It’s true. I have a list, and it’s on it. ‘I’m actually writing a separate article – a travel article – on New York with an under-five.’
‘No shit? Well, you gotta go.’ He glances towards Na$ti, as Na$ti finally relents and sits down again on the chaise longue. ‘Take cardboard. You go faster with cardboard. If you got none you can prolly pick a piece up there. You tell Australia that. It’s a good tip.’
Na$ti arranges himself with his elbows on his knees, his half-full glass held in both hands in front of him. His face has settled for a vague look, less angry. He could be a boy waiting for a bus that he knows is still some time away.
Smokey flips to another image on his phone. It’s his son – a close-up of his face, all bright eyes and gleaming teeth. ‘That’s my boy. Any time I put this thing down, I come back and it’s got new selfies on it. It’s a game we play now. Apparently.’
I find my phone in my pocket. Ariel’s my wallpaper. The picture’s a few months old, but it’s a good one. She’s a dragonfly, with face paint and glistening wings and an emerald body. She looks happy, in the complete way that children can be.
‘Delightful,’ he says. Not a word I’d expected, but a good one. ‘She could do with a little more meat on those bones.’
‘She could.’ It’s there in the picture, if you look for it, if you aren’t distracted by the gaudy, glittery dragonfly trickery, as you’re supposed to be. ‘We’re working on that.’
For a second I feel far away from her. I’m picturing her sleeping in the foldout bed at the foot of ours at the Beacon, jammed in there with her best monkey, Claude, sheets probably already kicked aside. Lindsey may be in bed too by now, or watching TV in the living room with the volume down.
‘Beautiful though,’ Smokey says. ‘Looks like a real sweet kid. Like a little baby angel in one of them Renaissance paintings. What’s her name?’
‘Ariel.’
‘Sounds l
ike you got that right. Sweet name for a sweet kid.’ He holds his phone next to mine. ‘My boy’s Eugene.’
Eugene has cheeks like apricots when he grins, balls of bunched tissue with dimples under them, and perfect teeth. I’m working on something to say about him when a message alert lands on the screen. It’s Aaron.
‘Okay…’ Smokey leans away from me, reads it, processes it.
Na$ti looks up.
‘How ’bout we just buy some shit another day,’ Smokey says, meeting his gaze with a look crafted to resemble nonchalance. ‘You can’t wear it all at once, Lydell.’
Na$ti’s jaw muscles tighten. So does his grip on his glass. His head is full of ugly thoughts warring with better ones, or at least full of basic anger-management tactics, and there is no room left for the guile that would let him hide it.
‘Yeah,’ he says, with a sigh at the end of it, a valve releasing some pressure. He pushes himself into a position intended to look more relaxed, casual. ‘I’ll sign that form some day, come back and buy the whole place. But let’s get it under ten for now. Ladies?’
‘No problem, sir,’ Andie says. She already has a printout of the items in her hand. ‘The purse would get you there right away or…’ She runs her glossy fingernail down the list. ‘You got four pairs of Alexander Wang cargo pants. Two of those would do it.’
‘Well,’ Na$ti says, in a softer, smaller voice, ‘I’m keeping the purse.’
Smokey steps across to the counter, and maybe it’s his momentum that brings Na$ti to his feet. As he rises, he sets his glass next to the ice bucket with the frozen yoghurt in it and wipes his damp hands on his pants. He watches Smokey, as if his manager’s next act will reveal the perfect answer we’ve been waiting for. Smokey notices none of that, none of the anticipation.
‘Look at all those pants,’ he says when he takes the list from Andie. ‘Not just the Alexander Wang neither. How may legs you got, Lydell? You some kind of centipede, you need all those pants?’
It’s enough. Na$ti laughs. ‘That’d be one fine pair of pants. Centipede pants. Prolly a set of pants, not a pair, all those legs. Let me see ’em, ladies. Let me see the four and I’ll decide which two.’
Eloise and Andie start unpacking one bag, lifting folded items out in turn and setting them in neat piles. They hit the cargoes near the bottom and step out from behind the counter with two pairs each in their arms.
Smokey gets another message and checks his phone as Eloise and Andie spread the cargoes out across the chaise longue.
‘She’s eight centimetres,’ he says, in Na$ti’s direction. ‘I got to get there.’
‘My dick is eight centimetres,’ Na$ti says, but down towards the splayed cargoes and without turning. ‘How big is a centimetre?’ He glances over his shoulder. ‘Be cool. We’ll get there.’
I can’t tell the pants apart. Two pairs might be charcoal and two black, but it might just be the way the light’s working on them. As Na$ti slowly walks the line, weighing up his choice, Smokey steps past the huddle of mannequins with his phone to his ear.
His voice is soft and, from the start, beating a retreat. ‘I know, honey, I know…’
THE VAN IS waiting directly outside the 59th Street entrance when a security guard opens the door for us. It’s taking up a space and a half. It’s black with deeply tinted windows, and clearly announces itself as the conveyance of a pimp or gangster or young rapper with his head spinning too fast to settle on anything tasteful.
Smokey again mentions the hospital as the Big Brown Bags are being loaded from a trolley, and Na$ti says, ‘Sure’, but means nothing like it. He’s watching his Robert Palmer girls lugging the purchases and his driver standing with his hand on the van door, directing them. The driver is wearing the colours of the Alexander Wang cargoes, a black collared shirt and a not-quite-black suit. He has sunglasses on – round, cool sunglasses – though it’s close to 11 pm. The lights of Bloomingdale’s gleam on his fabulously polished shoes.
‘Which way you want to look?’ Smokey says to me. ‘Front or back?’
‘Front, if that works for everyone else.’ I’m not always asked about my seating preference in a vehicle like this, not that I find myself in them often. Facing backwards gives me motion sickness, but the journalist fits in around the edges. Everyone else already knows where they sit.
‘It works, man.’ Na$ti claps his hand on my shoulder. It’s the first time he’s been close to me.
There’s a flash from across the street, someone taking a photo with a phone.
‘Oh, look, it’s–’ a man nearer the intersection calls out and, even though the sentence trails off into nothing, his phone snaps too, three flashes.
Na$ti gestures for me to board. It’s a bigger, clearer sweep of the arm than it needs to be. He’s the host, under the Bloomingdale’s marquee. His staff, Bloomingdale’s staff, me, we’re all taking his direction. It’s a picture he is glad to compose. This is the life he sees himself leading, high-end but magnanimous. Entitled as a pharaoh or a Monégasque prince, but full of largesse.
I can’t tell whether he has made this moment for me or for himself, but it is already implausible that his credit card could be declined. One Bloomingdale’s security guard covers the front of the van and another takes the back. The driver reaches his arm out to beckon Na$ti in. Smokey scans the streetscape, phone clutched in his hand, as if he’s guarding a Kennedy. His mouth is slightly open, streetlights sparking from his grills.
‘Paps,’ Na$ti says to me, though they were just people, bewildered passers-by glimpsing star activity and not wanting to miss a New York moment. Shoot first and ask questions later. Maybe they’ll recognise him when they open the images, maybe they won’t. I have my own collection of moments like it, stars of various wattages making entrances and exits. I have a photo of Dame Edna on her way into the Tonys: gladioli, glasses and bouffant do bobbing along above the heads of the crowd.
The van has fat leather seats, a faint smell of dope, a stronger smell of sanitiser and a compact fridge loaded with piccolos of Krug. Na$ti passes me one right away.
‘Some people drink it with a straw,’ he says. ‘They require a straw. Assholes.’
Smokey climbs in next to him, lifting the Little Brown Bag on the seat and placing it in his lap. The two large bags are next to me. The door clunks shut.
‘So, why do you like facing backwards?’ I want to start a conversation, get us talking.
‘Is this the interview?’ He tears the foil from the top from his bottle and twists at the wire cork cover. He’s in a good mood. He is famous enough on 59th Street and he has Krug to share.
The engine starts. It’s less powerful, less military in tone than I was expecting. It’s a car engine, with this beast of a pimp van built on.
‘It can be. Or it can just be a question.’
‘Sure.’ He drinks a mouthful. ‘Any asshole can face forward. In a cab, you face forward. In a car, you face forward. You got wheels big enough to have a room, you get to face backward.’ It’s a sign, another sign, another assertion that he’s escaped the hard streets of his recent childhood and arrived somewhere else, in some Oz of his invention, where life is about something altogether more luxurious than survival. ‘And you get to look back and see all the people pointing, going, “Who the fuck?”’ He imitates star-shock, going wide-eyed and waving his hand around, snapping away with an imaginary phone.
Beside him, Smokey stares down at his screen, punching out a text message, no doubt to his labouring lady, placating, promising, telling her she matters more than this ride. He has another life, as do I, with mine across town at the Beacon, but I have yet to see Na$ti’s properly. My hand goes to my pocket without me thinking about it. Whenever my mind turns to Lindsey and Ariel, I imagine the buzz of a message, something not right.
Smokey hits send and says, ‘I might step out while you two eat.’
&
nbsp; It’s the first I’ve heard of food being part of the plan. With a 9.30 meeting time, I ate in the real world before heading for Bloomingdale’s. But I’ll take it. The biggest piece I’m writing is Rolling Stone-style, where you buddy up with the artist and log time across different terrains: in transit; in their favourite dive bar where they don’t merit a glance; over tea one morning while they’re in track pants and coming down from something, finding room for remorse and even doubt. With this interview I get to compress that into one night, and it must go as long as it must go. A meal works well as the middle part of it. It’ll read like days. Themes will be revisited. Truths will find their shape and show themselves.
‘You leavin’ me at this man’s mercy?’ Na$ti laughs. ‘Who knows what shit I might say without you running interference?’ He pokes Smokey in the sleeve with a finger, hoping for a laugh back. Smokey obliges, but half-heartedly. ‘Yeah, man. I can let you off the clock a while.’
Na$ti pulls his own phone from his pocket and flicks between screens. I didn’t hear a message. He smiles to himself. The van turns out of 59th Street into an avenue, heading north. He glances through some photos – blurred selfies, a girl with blonde hair – and starts tapping a message.
‘Okay,’ Smokey says, more to bring Na$ti back to us than anything. Na$ti’s focus stays on his screen. ‘Okay, that’s good, Lydell.’
‘I have a visit in mind first,’ Na$ti says, still texting. ‘A little happy appetiser before the meal.’ He sends the message and twists around in his seat, ducking Smokey’s gaze. He puts his hand on the driver’s shoulder. ‘Candy store, my man.’
Smokey sets his arm along the base of the window and looks out – at the lights, at nothing at all – his lips pulled shut over his gold grills. In his other hand, his phone taps against his thigh. The van turns at the next intersection, then turns again, sending us south, back where we’ve come from.
Na$ti’s directly opposite me. He catches my eye and grins. ‘Candy store.’
It’s cryptic, and its mystery is meant for me. I’m not on the inside. He’s welcome to remind me of that as much as he likes. It would be implausible to him that I don’t want to be him, that I am living a life I could want more than this. A life in a suburb across the world, a remortgaged house, responsibilities, routines. Routines and the people in them are what makes up a life, and are not the grim sentence he might think. It would shock him to learn that I am in his van, writing this piece, solely for the money. It would not shock Smokey, I think. Not at all. His life is in a hospital somewhere else on this crowded island, eight centimetres, nine centimetres, ten centimetres, action.