Gotham Read Free

mind and substance load, as ‘a dead crack whore’ and ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’.
    â€˜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 questionneeds illustrating. ‘Just while you’re shopping and we’re talking about…whatever. Maybe some pictures, too? Candid ones. Nothing too stagey.’
    â€˜Sure.’ He turns to one of the personal shoppers. ‘What you got for me there?’
    â€˜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 areference 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 glanceat draped here and there, all at his whim, like a boy pharaoh.
    â€˜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 Nati’s direction.
    Nati 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.
    â€˜That this ain’t the place for me? That I’m not suitable?’
    â€˜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 isnot 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…’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Wildflower honey,’ Smokey says, to be helpful.
    This era, food is all about the adjectives,