Gotham (3 page)

‘Smokey.' The tang of his aftershave reaches me as he says it. There's a glint of gold from his mouth, light catching on something in there, but his thick lips close over it quickly, making his mouth look like a boxer's.

He moves with the ease of a boxer, too, but his hand is soft, his handshake measured. He has nothing to prove to me. It's Smokey I've been dealing with to make this meeting happen, Smokey who said his charge had an interest in fashion and that this would be the place and time.

‘And they don't call him that 'cause his last name's Robinson,' Na
ti Boi says, with a kid's lopsided smile, eyes on his manager. Years ago it
would have been a marijuana reference, but this century it's probably crack.

‘It used to be my preferred means of relaxation,' Smokey says. ‘But 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 around the time he started school. I might tell Deborah Conway though. I have her number.

‘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. ‘'Cause 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 across the back of a chair by a staff member.

His mother is dead and, I've been told, off limits. He has described her in past interviews, depending on his state of mind and substance load, as ‘a dead crack whore' and ‘the most beautiful woman in the world'.

‘Do you mind if I record?' I pull my digital recorder from my jacket pocket. As I always do, I find myself demonstrating it at the same time, clicking the button on and off, as if my 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 it, as if it's a much-loved Persian cat. It's a muted green, with long sleeves and three small white buttons where it opens at the neck. ‘It also comes in chocolate.'

Eloise is 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. They are Robert Palmer girls, with their uniform fitted black knee-length dresses and their statement red lipstick and pale expressionless faces. It's a
reference close to thirty years old. Along with the Ramones and their passing, not a thought for today.

Eloise and Andie are white, both of them. Behind them stand three male mannequins, grey and with features somehow managing to hint at both Nordic and African origins. 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 polo shirts and bright yachting spray jackets.

We are 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, 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 any 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. Tie bars…'

‘I'm not here for preppy shit.' He laughs. ‘I got my Bathing Ape, my Billionaire Boys Club. My Black Scale.' He picks the cap up from the arm of the chaise lounge, 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 tie bars. They just incidental. That's our yoghurt bar there, that is.' Without turning, he points with his thumb at 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 privilege that accords a person more adjectives with their food nouns. Honey is no longer just honey, 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.' Smokey looks at the ice bucket, the melting yoghurt. ‘Should've 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 table or platform 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 is utterly blank.