'Sorry,' I said.
Dad and Paul didn't say anything. Which was good in a way. They could have screamed at me and told me I'd nearly killed them.
'You nearly killed us,' Paul said, right on cue.
'It was a stupid idea goin' in there,' my dad said.
'I know,' I said. 'And then we gave them our freaking camera!'
'Forget the camera,' Dad said. 'That was the smartest thing we did.'
'You're banned from making decisions from now on,' Paul said.
'Hear, hear,' Dad agreed.
I knew I was wrong so I tried to bite my tongue and not snap at Paul.
'That half-pipe was brutal,' I said. 'I'd love to have a go.'
They both gave me filthy looks.
Dad got up. Paul followed. Then I went too. We walked up Grand Street, right past my doughnut shop.
'Hey, Doughnut Plant,' I said, busting out my NY book and flipping to the page. 'Says here they sell square doughnuts the size of my head. Who wants one?'
They turned.
'We haven't had a doughnut all day,' I said. 'We could die or something.'
We bought three and sat out front and ate them. I had blackberry jelly flavour and it was definitely the best thing I've tasted in my life. I filmed Paul eating his on my new phone, which only made me feel worse about giving up the camera. Then we sat there and watched girls walk by wearing boots and short skirts with scraggly bits of material hanging off them. One chick had angel wings on. A dude went by in a shirt that looked like it was made out of Paul's mum's curtains. Everyone seemed to wear thick black glasses like Paul's, too. I filmed it all.
'Who knew there was a place on earth where your glasses were cool?' I said to Paul. He got me in a headlock and knuckled me. The sugar hit had lifted the mood a little.
'Where do you pair want to drag me now?' Dad grunted, his face still red, his breathing wheezy.
'Get another doughnut?' I said.
'Go home,' said Paul, releasing me. 'To Kings.'
'Why?' I asked him.
'Because, ever since we left there our lives have been a disaster. Abandoned at the airport. Bags lost. Then the car crash.'
'We didn't crash,' I said.
'Nearly,' Paul snapped back. 'Then I had to shower in blood –'
'Rust,' I said.
'Whatever,' he said. 'We couldn't get into Imaginator, which is the one thing I came to New York to do. These other coolhunter idiots are total up-themselves snobs. And, I don't know if you noticed, but we were almost killed by a bunch of preschoolers and their wooden blocks about twenty minutes ago. This place is total bums.'
When he put it like that, I could kind of see how he might not have had the greatest two days of his life.
'But what about all the doughnuts?' I said, raising my brows. 'And the sausages and egg whites you had at that Mash joint.'
He didn't even look at me.
I pulled my book out.
'Put it away,' Paul said.
'What?'
'There's nothing cool in there.'
'What do you mean?'
'You cut those pictures out of tourist brochures, man. These guys want cutting-edge cool. Coolhunters is not for retired holidaymakers.'
I flicked the book open, determined to prove him wrong, and came to rest on a page with a girl skating down by the East river.
'What about Melody – with the handtop glove and the crazy skates?' I said to him.
Paul groaned and shook his head, but I could tell he liked the angle.
'What if we try to find her again?' I said.
'And what? Coolhunt her? With no video camera? What are we gonna do, paint a picture of her and write a poem about it? That sucks.'
Paul's new phone rang. Crazy Frog-style. It was his mum. He wandered away to talk to her. I listened to see if he told her all the bad stuff that had happened. He didn't. If he had, she'd have been on the next plane over and that would have been worse than getting mugged by a gang of toddlers. Mrs Porter hung on way too tight. She was, like, the opposite of my mum. If Paul didn't hang with me he'd never get into any trouble. He'd be a shell of a man.
When he got off the phone I checked the map in my book and we headed for the hotel. Dad called the airline. His and Paul's bags had spent two days in Taipei, but they'd finally arrived in NYC and the airline delivered them to us. Paul refused to leave the room for the rest of the day. He sat and watched re-runs of Saved By the Bell and a Spongebob Squarepants marathon. Dad slept for hours. I put the Doughnut Plant piece up on Coolhunters, then prowled around the room like a caged beast, trying to work out how I'd break it to Speed that I'd given a five-thousand-dollar HD camera to a bunch of really scary nine-year-olds in a vacant block somewhere in the Lower East Side.
Surely he'd understand.
11
Dog Bender
The doughnut piece was weak. Subscribers hate it.
You have to deliver better than this.
Look at what the others uploaded.
Speed
I logged out of my Coolhunters messages and googled 'dog bender 17464' on my phone. A message popped up: 'No results found for "dog bender 17464".'
I was down in the lounge area of our hotel room. It was 5 a.m. and I'd been up for two hours already. The jetlag was killing me. I paced around on the thick, red shagpile rug. It felt good between my toes. My dad was sleeping on the floor under the stairs in his swag. The sky was starting to grow orange over Manhattan.
I punched in 'hog bender 17464'. I'd never actually owned a mobile before (one of the downsides of having lo-fi, enviro-warrior parents) so I was pretty slow and useless with my thumbs. Then I tried 'dogbender street new york' and about seven hundred other combos but I got nothing.
After yesterday's disaster, and now with Speed on my case, I figured I had to work fast if I was going to turn this trip around. Melody, the chick outside Imaginator with her rollerballs and computer-glove, were the most coolhuntable thing we'd discovered, apart from the three-storey halfpipe. If I could just work out the cryptic clue the Rollerball chick had left, we'd at least get an interview and have something decent to put on the site.
But it was useless. For all I knew she might have said 'bog blender' or 'hot dog vendor' or 'My middle name is Glenda.' (Although she didn't really seem like a Glenda.) Trying to find one girl in a city of nearly nine million people was loco.
I grabbed my NY book off the coffee table and flopped onto the couch. What was Paul saying, 'retired holidaymakers'? I flicked through. The bottom corner of every page was grubby from me thumbing it so often in the lead-up to the trip. There was a pic of the Statue of Liberty and a note I'd jotted saying 'free tickets 2 see statue on Staten Island ferry'. There was a picture of Economy Candy (a cool lolly shop downtown) and one of the Empire State Building. There was a shot of a hidden tunnel under Chinatown and an image of FAO Schwarz, a massive toy store. I turned the page and there was a snap from the Imaginator site opposite a clipping on the world's biggest secondhand bookstore. There was a pic of a New York Police Department cap. I chucked the book onto the coffee table. Paul was right. None of this stuff was breaking news.
I logged back in to Coolhunters and re-read the message from Speed, then I checked out what Van, Michiko, Luca and Rash had put up ... Van had discovered an unknown indie band's latest release, available only on ancient audio cassettes. No download. So you had to track down a tape player just to listen to their album ... Freaks. Rash had interviewed an independent game creator. Michiko was a fan of hot sauces and she reckoned she'd found the hottest in the world somewhere in Tribeca. Luca had covered a company doing rappelling and abseiling off skyscrapers. (This, I had to admit, was cool.)
Speed's message had come in at 4:33 a.m., half an hour earlier. I figured he must've been jetlagged, too. I hadn't broken the news about the camera. He was still online so I sat there trying to work out what to say to him. Eventually I pinged him a message.
Hey S. I got 2 tell u something. If not sit
ting down maybe u should. We haven't got a cam. M.
I waited. Then, a few seconds later:
Speed: What?! You lost another 1?
The camera Speed had given us for our trial back in Kings Bay had been stolen from our workshop.
Mac: Yeah yesterday. We kind of got mugged.
Speed: And they took camera?
Mac: We gave it 2 them. So they wouldnt kill us.
Speed: So its gone?
Mac: Yep.
Speed didn't respond. I sat there, quietly stressing. After a couple of minutes I couldn't take it any more.
Mac: Really sry Speed.
No response.
Mac: Do u think there might be another cam 4 us to use?
Speed: No. Sort yrself out or you're gone.
Speed went offline.
I hit the lift button and the door sprang open. Van was inside.
'Hey,' I said, feeling pretty miserable.
She raised her brows at me, the minimum she could do to acknowledge I was alive.
I pressed the button to close the doors and we began moving. It was a glass lift and you could see twenty-four floors down into the lobby where the guests looked like mice. My stomach flipped as we fell.
'You staying here?' I asked her.
She did the brow-raise again.
'I thought, maybe, with you being a New Yorker you might not be.'
No reaction. Not even a look. The lift stopped on the fourteenth floor. By then I was starting to despise her. A guy stepped in and hit 'Ground'.
'Hey, did I tell you I know someone just like you in the town where I live?'
Van did a slow look towards me.
'Tell me you don't mean Cat,' she said.
Cat DeVrees had trialled against me back in Kings Bay for the coolhunting job. She was a spoilt but incredibly hot chick with anger running through her veins. I'd forgotten the other 'hunters would have seen her vlogs on the site.
'Um,' I said.
'She was a total cow in that trial,' Van said. 'You don't even know me.'
'You've snubbed me twice,' I said.
'What are you talking about? Have you even tried to talk to me till now?'
I thought about it for a second. I hadn't.
'Don't pin your insecurities on me,' she said and started typing a message into her phone.
The door opened. She stepped out into the lobby, still texting. I followed.
'Hey, you're a local, can you tell me something?' I said, catching up to her.
'Yeah, it's not like I'm busy or anything. What?'
'I met this girl ...'
'Congratulations.'
'No, that's not it,' I said. 'I met this girl and I asked how I could get in touch with her and she said to me "Hogbender" or "Dogbender 17464". What does that mean?'
'Dogbender?' She started laughing.
'Something like that.'
'Try "Dawg Finder",' she said, going back to her phone.
'What's that?'
'Have you got GPS on your cell?'
'My what?'
'Your phone,' she said like she was explaining something to a two-year-old.
'I don't know,' I said. 'It's the same as yours, so ...'
'It's an app that lets you find your friends, your dawgs, on a map. The number would've been her Finder code. Look ...'
Van stopped at the entrance to the hotel restaurant and showed me her phone. There was a map of Manhattan with four or five little red dots flashing. She hit a button and zoomed in on one of the dots and you could see the street names.
'My friend, Roxy, is only half a block from here so I could go see her right now if I wanted,' Van said. 'If you want to go undercover you hit "phantom" and they can't see you anymore.'
'That's cool,' I said. 'Thanks. And sorry about the Cat thing.'
'Forget about it,' she said. 'You remind me of my brother. And he's a total loser.'
A guy showed us our seats. He thought we were together but Van sat two tables away.
I found Dawg Finder, joined, and punched in Melody's code. Then I messaged her and asked her to be my dawg. I called out to Van and asked if she wanted to be my dawg, too. She said, 'No way.'
'Thanks,' I said. 'Appreciate it.'
I headed for the buffet. I hadn't eaten cooked food at home in a year. My ma reckoned cooking disturbed the spiritual essence of the food or something but I'd had just about all the raw cabbage and zucchini I could hack. I piled plate after plate with bacon, eggs, mushrooms, hash browns, pastries, muffins, omelette and Turkish toast.
Around plate number six Dad and Paul arrived. By plate nine I could feel this freaky food concoction swilling around in my belly. That's when Melody messaged me and her icon flipped up on my Dawg Finder map.
Paul and I got ready to roll.
'You boys have fun,' Dad said, his face hidden behind The New York Times.
'You're not coming?' I asked, my stomach groaning under the weight of nine full breakfasts.
'Nah, you'll be right.'
Paul and I looked at each other. After yesterday, was he kidding?
'Are there any rules or anything?' Paul whispered to me.
'Are there any rules?' I asked Dad.
He folded his paper down, a little annoyed at being disturbed. 'I don't know. Do you want rules?'
Paul and I thought about it. I hadn't lived with my dad in years. He wasn't used to making stuff up to pretend he was in control. I shrugged.
'Just don't stray too far from the hotel,' he said, satisfied he'd fulfilled his parental responsibilities. 'You'll be right. Go and have fun. I'm taking the detector up to Central Park.'
Dad had brought his metal detector from home. On a Sunday afternoon in Kings, he could find a few hundred in cash and jewellery on the beach. Kids at school gave me a hard time about it, said he was a scavenger. I looked to Van, hoping she hadn't heard him.
Dad flipped his paper up in front of his face again and that was that.
Paul and I hit the street. We were on a mission to find Melody, get Speed back onside and keep our coolhunting careers alive.
12
Alphabet City
Paul and I whipped around a corner off Houston Street and hurried down a laneway. We were in a part of town known as Alphabet City. It was Saturday morning, people were everywhere. Sitting around, drinking coffee, eating bagels, talking loudly. The thin lane was lined with dozens of cafes and small clothes stores. (The stores were small. Not the clothes.) Fire-escapes jutted out from buildings above us.
I looked at the icon flashing on my phone.
'She's just here somewhere,' I said to Paul.
There was a queue of about thirty people winding out of a store up ahead. Paul and I cruised past the people in line, scanning for Melody. I only had a hazy memory of what she looked like. Short, cute and Italian-looking.
We came to the shopfront but no Melody. Howls of laughter echoed out into the alley. A crackly painted sign above the tiny hole-in-the-wall store read 'Tickle Shop – Tickling New Yorkers since 1983'. Paul and I pressed our faces up against the dirty glass. Inside there were two seats, like dentist's chairs, and two Asian women tickling people. One customer, who looked about twenty, was having her arms tickled with a long pink feather. She was giggling uncontrollably. The kid next to her was only about our age and the woman was really digging him in the ribs with her fingers. He was screaming with laughter. I started laughing just watching it.
A sheet of paper was stuck to the window with crusty, yellow sticky tape. The word 'Menu' was handwritten at the top, then it listed the different tickle sessions you could choose. There was an 'Afternoon Breeze', a 'Japanese Fighting Fish' and 'The Howler'. I figured the ribsy guy must be getting that. It was seven bucks for ten minutes.
There was a man at the front of the line wearing a New York Fire Department shirt.
'Popular place,' I said. 'Always this busy?'
'Are you kidding me? This is quiet,' he said.
'Next!' screamed a voice
from inside as pink feather girl went by, wiping tears from her eyes. Fire guy went inside.
'It's weird and dirty,' Paul said.
'What's dirty?' I asked him.
'People going in there with warts and scabies and stuff and getting tickled.'
'Do you even know what scabies is?' I asked.
He looked at me. 'No. But it's bad. And those ticklers are so old. And look how small that filthy little room is.'
I peered back in at the tickle room. Suddenly what had seemed pretty innocent – and maybe even fun – was stained with Paul's fear of all things involving dirt, confined spaces and old people.
'I bet they eat porridge and casseroles,' Paul said, looking at the tickling women.
Paul saw this direct connection between old people and sloppy food. He reckoned anyone over thirty must eat casseroles and he couldn't deal with it.
'I'm shooting it,' I said.
'Are you kidding?' Paul asked. 'This is not cool. This is scabs. It's worse than the doughnut shop.'
I switched my phone to camera. Last night I'd worked out that, once you'd crunched and compressed it for the web, the vid quality on the phone was nearly as good as the HD camera anyway.
'What about Melody?' he asked, desperate to divert me.
'Just gimme a second.'
I shot the ticklees and the ticklers, the queue down the laneway and the store sign. Then I got Paul to film a quick piece to camera with me talking.
'Hey, I'm Mac Slater. This is The Tickle Shop, established 1983, Alphabet City, New York, New York. I don't care if this is a city secret or if it's way-old news, I reckon this place is cool and don't be surprised if Tickle Shops start cropping up all over the planet. Remember where you heard it first.'
'That's ridiculous,' Paul said, hitting the stop button. 'It's sick, man. In the bad way. We're fighting for our coolhunting lives here and you want to deliver this? Tickle shops are so not the future.'
Like you'd know, I thought. 'Let's find Melody,' I said, checking my phone. Her icon was flashing now over on Avenue B, a couple of blocks away. She was on the move. Paul and I broke into a jog.
13
Avenue B
We dodged down Avenue A, across East 5th Street. Paul told me I had the phone map upside down so we went back across East 5th, then suddenly we were lost. We argued for twenty minutes, then asked this dude where Avenue B was.
Mac Slater Coolhunter 2 Page 4