by Nick Earls
The two of them sit in front of me like a split-screen image, different stories, different motivations spliced next to each other for effect.
‘I’m sure we’d be able to handle the interview, just the two of us, if Smokey had to go.’ I don’t need my boy pharaohs to be selfish to help me get the point about who’s in charge.
‘Really?’ Na$ti says, the grin now more of a smirk. ‘You’re sure of that?’
Smokey’s mouth opens as if he’s about to speak, but then he closes it again. His chunky ring taps his window as the van hits a bump.
The mood is not right for an interview. Na$ti’s head is already in his candy store, and Smokey will not jolly him back to me. Na$ti turns his phone over and over in his hand and stretches out in his seat, an action that requires me to move my feet for his. He sets his phone on the flat plane of his abdomen – he is whippet-lean beneath his rapper’s clothes, I’m betting – and he keeps one hand over it.
The driver makes several more turns. He has a GPS but doesn’t seem to use it. We pull up outside a rundown building. The driver steps out and checks the street in an overt way, like someone in a video checking a street, about to be surprised by gunfire or a flash mob of dancers. I can see no one out there, nothing moving. He opens the door.
Na$ti climbs out, connecting up the zip on his jacket, looking high up at the brickwork, beyond the graffiti tags, for Rapunzel or a party that’s waiting just for him, piles of coke or ice, like perfect ground glass. A breeze swirls in, a chill on it.
He steps lightly across the kerb, still fiddling with the zip and saying something like, ‘Back in five’, without turning his head.
The driver releases the door handle and decides he should stand next to the open door until directed otherwise. He clasps his hands behind his back and takes his own look at the higher windows, thinking of the party up there that is never for him, or thinking of home or blankly gazing, stretching his neck.
‘Five,’ Smokey says, with a distinct lack of conviction. ‘He’s…’ He shrugs and peers out the open door. ‘Excuse me.’
He finds a number on his phone and taps the green button to make the call. A woman answers, not with hello but with a sentence, in a forceful tone.
‘Yeah, honey,’ he tells her. ‘It’s Lydell. You know how he–’ Her voice cuts back in, berating him. ‘Yeah… Hmmm… I know, honey, I’d be…’ He puts his hand on his forehead, waiting for the tide to turn, the storm to abate. She tears another piece or two off him. ‘Soon. When Lydell’s eating. But how you doin’? That’s what I want to know.’
I can hear her telling him about the pain, pulling out some big metaphors. He makes listening, soothing noises. She has plenty more to tell. He is kerbside, elsewhere, useless, but making the best sounds he can of unequivocal support and deep engagement. We are all – fathers, husbands, partners – always precisely where we should be in spirit, even when the facts of our days and nights take us down stupid side streets like this one. Even when we should own our choices a little more than we do.
When the call’s over, he looks my way despondently and says, ‘She’s okay.’
‘Sure. It’s quite a time.’ I have been in a labour ward once, and seen the female body defy logic and deliver something as bulky, wriggling and life-changing as a baby.
‘It is.’ He smiles, for the first time in a while.
My Krug is now warm in the bottle. A car drives past us, slowly, beats thumping behind its closed windows.
Smokey takes another look at the building, perhaps hoping it will reveal something new.
‘Sometimes there’s a girl there,’ he says, while 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 and no say over his next five minutes.
‘There’s a place,’ he tells me, 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 with each other. More isometrics.
‘And what happens to the others?’ I do what I can to pull all the judgment out of my voice. I could put plenty in there if I chose to. 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 leans back in his seat to check it. He flinches. He shows me the text part of it, his hand over an image. There’s only one word. Pu$$y. He doesn’t have to tell me who it’s from.
‘At least I didn’t show you the photo.’ He sets the phone on the seat, facedown.
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 out 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 Na$ti’s candy-store girl.
‘This?’ Smokey sets the bag down 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 Na$ti, 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 longue among the grey yachtsmen, carried unharmed all the way to this different, invented life of his 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, word that 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, no words necessary. ‘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 squawling 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, who allows himself to turn, ‘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, Na$ti’s voice just audible through the thick glass saying, ‘What the fuck?’ His other arm is over his head, as though the light rain might strike with enough force to cause actual pain.
‘Sorry, sir.’ Rakim moves quickly.
Na$ti steps back as Rakim simultaneously opens his door and pops a black umbrella. He launches himself from his seat and shelters Na$ti while pulling the rear door open with his other hand.
‘I’m cool that you get out of the rain,’ Na$ti says as he climbs in, ‘but you could keep your eyes open.’
‘Yes, sir. I was distracted by the news.’
Na$ti runs his hand down each sleeve, flicking water onto the floor. He smells of sweat and sex. He eases himself 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. 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 Na$ti to ask. But Smokey is back looking out the window as we pull away from the kerb, and Na$ti is grinning like a fool, jazzed on whatever’s gone up his nose and the sex he’s just been having.
‘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,’ Na$ti 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? Pu$$y 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. That can be when I walked back into the room shouting, “Embargo”, and demanding you talk about something else.’ He waves his non-phone 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 Na$ti about the girl he’s just visited, and it turns out she’s an emerging porn star who has recently had her vagina, mouth and anus moulded for a doll.
‘She’s in college,’ he tells me, big dopey grin over most of his face at the thought of her parts latexed and on the open market. ‘Nice college too. That shit don’t go down too good at New Haven.’
He means Yale. He’s telling me he’s dating an Ivy League porn star. And he’s referring to Yale the way F. Scott Fitzgerald did two pages into The Great Gatsby. Na$ti 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 from Jay Gatsby, at least something 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 who has written three novels, all of them The Great Gatsby in one way or another. That’s his admission, not mine, and it saw me giving 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 attempts to make it in New York publishing, even in the close boxy world inside this van. His career high point – he knew it was that, and feared it too, in the moment it was happening – 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 where that dark curved window keeps its unblinking eye fixed 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 wanted to be in a band once. It’s all right that not all dreams end up being lived. We are both getting by, each putting our words to our own honest kind of work. 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,’ Na$ti says, ‘you a long way from home, yeah?’
He rummages around in his jacket, searching for an inside pocket, grinning, laughing. There’s a big joke going on that so far only he is in on. He pulls out something pale and flexible, a kind of tube. He tosses it to me, and I catch it instinctively, holding it and the recorder together between my hands. The tube ends in a neat oval cap with a puckered centre leading to its hollow core.
‘You want a piece of ass on the road?’ He laughs squawkily, struggling to pull it in so that he can finish. ‘Now you got one. This is one prototype asshole from Little Miss New Haven. Don’t tell me no rock star never gave you his girl’s ass before.’
It wobbles in my hand. I fumble it and catch it between my knees. It’s a rubber anus, sphincter and reservoir, but it feels as though I’d somehow be disrespecting its model if I let it drop to the floor. The anus wobbles and topples to one side.
‘It’s made for getting real dirty, see,’ he tells me matter-of-factly as I lift it by its stem, like a lily, and place it on the seat beside me. ‘It comes out and cleans up real good. The guy who made it, I had him blinded of course afterwards, blinded or killed.’
It was the prerogative of kings, medieval and ancient, to be so brutal and so self-absorbed. It’s a jokey reminder about who is the boss around here.
Smokey leans towards me. ‘Did you want to shoot some video? We might do that now.’
‘Embargo!’ Na$ti calls out, waving his hands dramatically. ‘Embargo the rubber asshole! That’s what that means. You gone too far, Na$ti.’
I had the video pencilled in for later, but the trick is to roll with it. To bring up my plans would betray a structure, and a structure would betray a purpose and I would be back to being the interrogator, to be viewed with suspicion. I am to be a talkative shadow in this van, this night, and shadows don’t initiate the moves. A guy with a notepad and a pen and ten questions gets some facts, but that’s not the same. No one, once they’re used to the shape of it, guards against their shadow.
‘This is for a website,’ I tell Na$ti. ‘For the festivals.’
In another pocket, I have a camera that can shoot web-quality video. With that in my hand and 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 might aim to 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 stops it there and stares at the fingers instead until Na$ti says, ‘Please’.
Smokey lowers the bag onto the floor between his feet and starts parting garments. ‘Damn pimp lighting never meant to find no beanie.’
Eventually he extracts it and Na$ti 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.