The guy with the bolt through his nose lightly holds up a warning palm to Mateo.
“Oh, hey,” Mateo continues, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to trigger folks. What I meant was it’s not just the, unh, the using, it’s—” He pauses. “It’s the people. It’s all the fucking loose strings. I have not tied up my loose strings and made some key amends and stuff like that.”
Half the room nods with him. He feels a bit back in their good graces after his slight gaffe. “But hey,” he says, “I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m here, and I’m sober. I mean, I am in fucking New York City and I am sober, and that’s truly a miracle. And I am here on a fucking amazing project with amazing people and I’m psyched about that. And, hey, I just hope I can get here most nights, ’cause it’s gonna be a crazy few months here.”
After the meeting, after everyone’s said the Serenity Prayer together and unjoined hands, Sophie turns to him. “You’re here to work on the UnderPark, right?” she asks. “You and Charlie Gauthier?”
Mateo nods. He’s a little taken aback but not really surprised; the news has been all over art verticals the past six months. “That’s why we’re here,” he says.
“That’s so cool,” she says. “I actually used to be Ruby Levin’s assistant.”
“Oh, yeah?” he asks. Ruby Levin is the head of Creative Production Fund, a nonprofit that usually has a hand in the biggest public-art projects in the city; in twenty years, she’s kind of become the town’s fairy godmother of popular art, and, no surprise, she’s playing a big role in the art for the UnderPark. “What are you doing now?” Mateo asks her.
“Well,” says Sophie, pulling back her lank blond hair, “not much. Going to meetings and looking for a job. Ruby fired me for being an alcoholic fuckup.” She laughs, but her face flushes with shame as she says it.
“And knowing Ruby, she probably gave you about five chances first, right?”
“Yeah.” Sophie laughs again. “She told me to go to AA about five times before firing me.”
They laugh together, and Mateo feels that spark. This, he realizes, has become a recurring minor problem. The fucked-up pretty girl, the art groupie, the AA new arrival, and the sudden confusing stabs of empathy and desire he feels for her; the pretty girl who reflects him back to himself and who is so unlike Dani and Char in their stolid, competent, crisp non-fucked-up-ness. He’s learned it’s simply better to let other folks exchange pings with such girls; he can always provide real-time support when he sees them at meetings, but he doesn’t need to have their data. He did that once, a long time ago, and where that led. .
So Mateo says, “I guess she finally did what she had to do to get you here, right?”
Sophie shrugs, sheepish. “I guess she did.”
He offers her a fist bump, and she accepts. “You’re gonna be okay,” he says. “I remember the crummy loser feeling. It goes away.”
“Does it really?”
Oh God, he thinks, she’s breaking my heart with those eyes. “It seriously diminishes,” he says. “If you keep coming here.”
He walks out of the building and down the treacherous narrow staircase, exchanging hellos and fist bumps with a few familiar faces he knows from when they drop in on meetings in L.A. His gut instinct tells him to hop on a bike and hightail it home to Dani. But God, those quiet, dark post-midnight streets below Houston call him back. Can he do it? Can he walk those streets and face down memories? Hating himself for being the weak addict he is, he buys a nineteen-dollar pack of cigarettes at a bodega, lights one, ducks a block below Houston and swings left on Prince. Scarcely a soul passes him. Eventually, Prince gives out onto the Bowery and he’s standing in front of the Chinatown YMCA, where they took him Saturday mornings for swim lessons. She would take her coffee and a magazine into the little glassed-in room overlooking the pool while he would take Mateo into the men’s locker room and help him get into his bathing suit and goggles. He’d put Mateo under the shower and point him toward the instructor and the other kids with their inflatable doughnuts on their arms. And from time to time, Mateo would look up and see them behind the glass, watching him, giving him a thumbs-up, and Mateo would wave back at them, feeling the good feeling of being watched over.
The next morning, Mateo’s at the site at nine A.M. in a ratty old T-shirt and jeans, ready to make things happen. Char’s already there, a dozen scruffy assistants swarming around him. This is the first time Mateo’s been at the site since a brief initial visit six months ago, and he marvels at the progress. Here’s a huge, dank underground space, a former hideaway for subway cars, that a massive infusion of new-style private New York mega-money is transforming into a subterranean park with a high-tech lighting system that collects sunlight up on the street and then funnels and diffuses it below. The interior envelope is nearly complete; the ceiling is countless square feet of undulating silvery reflective material.
His and Char’s project, the biggest public project they’ve ever been commissioned for, is to paint the entryway corner ceiling in a twinkling profusion of greens, blues, and yellows so that, once trees are planted, their leafy tops will disappear into the work. For the past two days, Char’s been supervising assistants to paint the ceiling in a kind of high-tech primer that will hold their paints; they’ve long since abandoned working with spray cans, precluding anyone from ever again putting the word graffiti anywhere in a description of their art. Besides, the whole point of Mateo and Char, the whole reason for their explosion of highbrow success the past seven years, is that the two of them “revolutionized” street art, transformed it from something that, however artful, always looked like graffiti into something that took an existing wall or surface and made people feel their eyes were playing tricks on them — that, say, an old brick wall was oozing black tar from the center outward, or that the concrete parabolas of a skate park were breaking open with a lacy neon moss.
The original idea, street art that looked like something in a dream, was, of course, Char’s — that much is certain, from that very first piece Mateo saw him (well, then, her) doing on the wall in West Adams, back almost ten years ago at Mateo’s lowest point. But Mateo feels confident he’s brought something to the collaboration, to the style they both take the credit for today.
“Let’s make it less,” he would always say to Char once the two of them started working together in earnest. That was 2013, 2014, those years after Mateo left the halfway house and bunked in that shithole in downtown L.A. and actually learned, for once, how to live a life and not blow it up with needles every few months.
“Like,” he’d say to Char, “less form, less form, less like we were even there. Let’s make it like you just look at the surface and the first thing you think is something’s wrong, what the fuck is happening to that wall, it’s, like, melting or frying or transforming itself or something.” He loved this kind of stealth approach, it felt so sneaky, and Char, after a moment’s pause, liked it too, and that’s how the two of them bonded. Even as they got more and more attention, they felt like two sneaks, ever so delicately fucking with the existing surface and making people do a double take.