Gotham (11 page)

‘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 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 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 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,' 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. 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 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 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,' Na
ti says, ‘you a long way from home, yeah?'