Strawberry Tattoo (34 page)

“Hey,” Leo said, dropping into the other chair. He pulled it up to the table and stretched his legs out, letting his head fall to one side. “Man, I am sleepy. I am whacked out.”

He looked even more dirty and disreputable than he had yesterday. His clothes smelt rank and his beard was well beyond designer stubble territory, reminding me of one of Tom’s most heartfelt and biting poems from the facial hair sequence of his “My Miserable So-called Holiday In India” book. In England Leo would doubtless have had a blond, upper-class girlfriend called Camilla or Melissa who lived at the posh end of Ladbroke Grove and thought it was frightfully daring of her to be slumming it with a dirty dealer boyfriend. Though actually that type preferred black guys if possible; better to get all their shock value in one package. Then they could settle down happily with a Toby or Piers, content in the knowledge that they had had their brief moment of rebellion.

I said some of this to Leo. Though I hardly knew him, I had the instinct that this would amuse him, and it did.

“Shit, I’m in the wrong place,” he commented. “Here everyone’s ma-jorly into money. I mean, you wouldn’t get rich girls doing that kinda thing. They’ve already got their eyes fixed on their first marriage, the divorce, the next marriage—no time to piss around with lowlifes like me, you know?”

“This friend of mine who was in Los Angeles told me that if you chat up a girl there she asks you straight away what kind of car you drive.”

“Oh yeah. Here too. I mean, people don’t drive much, but yeah, the
status thing is very big. NY’s better than LA, though. Here people are more real. Either they like you or they tell you to fuck off. In LA everyone’s much falser. Like, they’ll try to be friendly to get information and they’ll stab you in the back at the same time. But they’re more relaxed. In this city people are way more stressed out.”

He grinned at me.

“You don’t look stressed,” I said.

“Yeah, well. I do that kundalini yoga, you know? Breath of fire.”

Long experience with guys like Leo had taught me that the best thing to do would be to let that comment go, in case he was bullshitting me. So I did.

“Hey, man, you got a cigarette for me?” said the guy at the next table, leaning over with friendly familiarity.

“Sure, man.” Leo reached in his pocket and tapped a cigarette out of a battered packet. The guy nodded his thanks and went back to his paper.

“They let you smoke in here?” I asked as Leo lit one up for himself.

“Hey, this is the East Village. The entire area’s one big smoking zone.” He shoved the packet back into his pocket. “Shall we go?”

In London, East 2nd Street would have been generously wide. After 2nd Avenue, it seemed as narrow as a SoHo alleyway, and lit with the same occasional glare of ugly light—yolk-yellow or flaring red—from filthy-looking corner shops which optimistically called themselves delicatessens. Clearly the same standards of cleanliness prevailed in corner shops the world over, right down to the fruit and vegetables displayed on the sidewalk, marinating in exhaust fumes.

“We got a little way to go,” Leo said. The chain swinging from his waist knocked against his legs with every step, clinking on the metal button that fastened the huge pocket at his knee. It was practically the only sound; the streets were very quiet, and Leo was one of those men who speak only when he has something to say. Occasionally someone passing us would greet him, and once he paused briefly on a street corner to give a gangsta-style handclasp to a boy propping up a fire hydrant.

We turned onto Avenue B, heading for the Lower East Side. Steam was
pouring up like smoke from the huge gratings in the centre of the road, dissolving into delicate wisps just after it reached the surface, as if it faded the further it went from the underworld. I found myself imagining that the tarmac was only a thin crust, like the earth’s, and below it was something alive, blowing great gusts of cigarette smoke up through the cracks to remind us of its existence. New York was a city built for giants; it made sense that they would be down there, drawing on their cigarettes, waiting for the day they would come up from the depths and take over. Finally there would be people walking down these streets who were in proportion to them.

“This way,” Leo said laconically, ducking into an alley running down the side of a large and dilapidated building. Unusually, its fire escape was at the back: I was used by now to seeing houses disfigured by the thick tracery of Zs criss-crossing their frontages, though occasionally the fire escapes had a strange beauty of their own, like heavy white lacework. It was easy to see one of the reasons this building had been squatted. The back fire escape gave discreet access to all areas.

It didn’t reach the ground. Leo had already jumped up to grasp the overhead strut of metal, and was chinning it, grabbing a foothold as he went. I followed suit, saying a silent prayer of thanks, as so often, to the person who invented Lycra miniskirts. Apart from being easy to execute gymnastics in, they were so versatile; how many outfits would take you so effortlessly from brunch to shopping to swinging around on the fire escapes of squatted buildings?

“Thought I’d need to pull you up,” Leo said, eyeing me assessingly. “Not many girls can do that on their own. You work out?”

“Not as much as I should.”

“Good upper body strength,” he said approvingly. Everyone here was obsessed with fitness, even the druggies.

We went up four flights of rickety iron steps, along a narrow walkway, and paused while Leo undid three padlocks attached to a large and well-fitting iron door. At this height there was a breeze, dirty and polluted but nonetheless welcome, which wrapped itself round my neck and, percolating
down to street level for a moment, rattled the dustbin lids in the yard behind the building, moving on immediately, restless and curious, looking for something better from the night.

The clank of chains and padlocks dropping behind me sent an involuntary shiver down my spine. The decay of these half-ruined buildings, each door as bolted and barred as a prison cell, the shapes of people flitting in and out, sleeping by day, on the move at night, was pure Edgar Allan Poe remade for the 1990s. It was easy to imagine someone walled up in one of these rooms and left to die.

Leo was opening the door, and I shook myself hard. The twisted romance of the moment was all New York, the unfamiliar sirens in the distance, the skyscrapers on the horizon. I couldn’t see my imagination running equally riot about an identical squat in Hackney.

“Welcome to the jungle,” Leo said, gesturing that I should enter. “Let’s see if the electricity’s working today—yeah.” He flicked a switch and a gentle light flooded the room.

There were canvases in various stages of composition hung on the walls and propped all around the room. But the walls had been painted, too, with a series of unfamiliar symbols, and they were the first thing I saw. I stared at them, assessing their power, and my hackles stayed down as I saw that the symbols remained where they were, neither reaching out to draw me in nor projecting malevolence. They weren’t benign; but nor were they black magic.

Now I could look round the rest of the room. A big futon in the corner made me immediately nostalgic for my own. Nancy’s mattress was like a feather bed by comparison, and every morning, half-drowned in it, I had to drag myself out of the trough dug by my own body. The far corner held a large and battered music system, stained with paint like a plasterer’s radio. Behind a screen was a sink with a bucket underneath, and a toilet, both so chipped and battered that they had probably been rescued from a skip. A long trestle table against the right-hand wall was stacked with a weird assortment of paint and brushes. The room smelt, familiarly, of turps and paint and the faint cat-pee smell of dirty water.

“You must paint pretty much full-time,” I said, propping myself on the arm of the ancient sofa which faced the equally broken-down TV. Leo had rigged up a series of small lights on a dimmer strung round the walls, and the light was diffused and cosy. I felt at home here; it reminded me not only of my own studio, but all the rooms friends of mine had occupied over the years, squats or co-op houses or sub-let council flats.

He shrugged, looking almost embarrassed, as he closed the door and started relocking the padlocks, now on the inside. “Yeah. As much as I can afford. Though I get free paint from the hardware store down the street, when they’ve mixed the colours wrong, or got the wrong order—and you can pick up frames on the street often, you’d be amazed what people junk in this city. I don’t really have much space to store stuff, though, mostly I’ll just cut up the old ones, or paint over them, or give them away. …”

His tone had changed. I recognised all too well his defensiveness and insecurity, coupled with the necessarily exaggerated self-belief a struggling artist needs to keep going in the long lonely wilderness years alone with the work.

“I like these,” I said, looking closely at the one leaning against the table, almost in front of me. It was enormous but strangely delicate, thickly crusted with tiny pieces of glass, the shatterproof kind that breaks into miniature crystals. The effect reminded me of the fire escapes I had been thinking of earlier, the way some of them managed to combine a fragile beauty with a sense of their sheer heaviness. I was surprised when Leo jumped up and turned the painting away from me.

“I was looking at that!” I protested.

“Yeah, well. Whatever. I mean, you didn’t come here to look at fucking paintings, did you?” he said with an unpleasant tinge creeping into his voice, already fetching a big sheet of mirror from where it was leaning behind the TV. “Let’s get down to business, OK?” he continued in the same vein. “I’ll give you a sample of the merchandise. I hate all that crap when people feel they’ve got to be friends with their dealer. Make nice about his paintings and shit like that.”

“God, you’re defensive,” I said crossly. “I can look at your fucking paintings if I want to.”

He was shaking a packet of coke onto a small electronic scale, but he looked up at me, his face twisted into a grimace. It was an unpleasant stare, meant to intimidate me, but it didn’t. For some reason I was not at all afraid of Leo. I looked back at him coolly and after a while said:

“Are we going to do some drugs or are we just going to stare each other down all evening?”

It broke the tension, though it didn’t help his mood. He muttered something and went back to weighing me out a couple of grams.

“Here,” he said, drawing out a couple of lines onto the mirror with the skill of long practice. I bent down and hoovered one up, swallowing as I felt the chemical hit dripping down the back of my throat.

“So you’re an old friend of Kim’s?” Leo said as he bent to do his.

“Yeah, we go back at least ten years.”

“You English chicks all that fit?” Leo said. “Kim can chin herself up my fire escape too.”

“She’s been hitting the gym a lot since she came here,” I said, feeling the sharp bright rush of cocaine swirling through my bloodstream.

“Shit, you’re telling me. You should have seen her a couple of weeks ago. Swinging on that bar like she was an Olympic gymnast. Pretty damn impressive.”

“I thought you guys hadn’t seen each other for a while,” I said, surprised.

Leo was tapping off the contents of the scale into a wrap, but he shot me a glance. It was sly and knowing and sexy too, if you liked that bad-boy thing.

“That what she told you? Nah, Kim drops in every once in a while, when she gets off her shift at the bar. Four in the morning, whatever. I stay up all night.”

Surveying the room again, I noticed something that hadn’t struck me before. There was no door other than the one to the fire escape. I had assumed that this was a shared house, and its occupants used the fire escape
to keep any ground-floor doors and windows permanently fortified against a possible raid by the police. I hadn’t realised that Leo had no contact with the rest of the building.

I asked him, and he smiled, a deliberately cynical smile.

“Hey,” he said, “that’s how we like it. None of this house-sharing shit. I have my space, they’ve got theirs, and that’s it. Guy who lives on the top floor runs the place, collects the rent and the utilities charge. It’s just like your apartment, only we don’t got no doorman or elevator.”

Weirdly enough, I liked the idea of having a room like this, clinging to the side of a half-abandoned building, with a reinforced steel door padlocked against the world, high up in the air with just a steel staircase outside for access. My studio was the first permanent place of my own, and before that I had lived on the move and come to like it. That sense of rootlessness, of waking up every day unsure of where you were and where you would sleep that evening, rolled over me like a cloud of nostalgia.

Leo was staring at me curiously.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“I like your room,” I said.

“Hey,” he said, less aggressively, “so do I.”

“How do you manage to get enough light to work with?”

“I do most of my painting up on the roof,” he said. “When the weather’s good. It’s a blast.”

“I bet it is.”

“You’re a sculptor, right?” he said, sounding almost friendly.

I nodded. “Big metal mobiles. You should come to the show and see them. Lex is showing too.”

He pulled a face. “No disrespect, but I had a look at what’s on at the moment, right? The wicked stepmother. Didn’t exactly ring my bell.”

“The wicked stepmother?”

“That’s what Kim calls her. Boy, has she got her knife into that woman. Makes her sound like Eva Braun and Cruella de Vil rolled into one.” He dropped a wrap in front of me. “Two Gs. Like you asked for. You want to do a bit more now?” Without waiting for my answer he pulled the mirror
onto his lap again. “Yeah,” he continued. “I tell you, if it was that Bilder woman that got whacked, I would have suspected Kim even if she was here sitting in front of me at the critical moment. You know what I’m saying? Even if I was her goddamn alibi.” He tipped out some more cocaine onto the mirror. “So. You’re the old friend who knows her from way back.” He shot me another of the Leo looks, wily, mocking and loaded with sexual innuendo.