Emergency Contact(70)

“And if you get rich and famous, you’re paying for this kid’s college,” she said.

“Can it be RISD?” asked Bastian. Luz responded in Spanish for a while. Bastian said something back and laughed.

Sam knew they were talking about him.

“Do you want a juice?” she asked.

“Sure. I’m sure I could use one,” Sam said.

“You need milk shakes more than you need juice, flaco,” she said. She made him something with beets. It was thick and the color of rubies. As he drank he imagined his withered cells revitalizing.

“Not bad,” he said, taking another slug. It was disjointing. A juice that tasted of beets.

“Yeah, your people love it.”

“My people?”

“She means the whites,” said Bastian.

“What do I owe you?” said Sam. He hoped he had cash.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, and waved them out of the store.

They got back into the car.

Bastian pulled on his seat belt. “She likes you,” he said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. She charges everyone.”

“What were you guys saying about me?” he asked. “That made you laugh. Something about college.”

“Oh,” said Bastian, laughing. “She said I could maybe go to art school as long as I don’t do anything stupid,” he said. “Say, get a bunch of tattoos so I can’t ever get a real job like you.”

Sam laughed.

“I told you she was cold.”

Sam wondered if Bastian knew how lucky he was to have Luz. To have a mother who actually seemed to like you. Sam hung a right from the Taco Cabana and across the train tracks to a section of town so dicey it didn’t even have a bar.

“Park here,” said Bastian. They were on a nondescript street near a chain-link fence. Bastian hopped out, leaving his skateboard in the car and slinging his backpack over his shoulder.

He crawled through a clipped hole in the fence. Sam followed. Bastian scanned his surroundings quickly, pulled out a key, and unlocked a thick padlock on the metal door of a brown building that had graffiti on the front in white. NSB was scrawled in menacingly giant letters, and Sam wondered if they were going to get killed execution style for trespassing. “Don’t worry,” said Bastian about the North Side Bloods tag. “I put that there so the bums don’t jack my shit.” To Sam it sounded like exactly the kind of genius plan that got you killed.

The kid had made a huge deal out of whatever it was that he was going to show him. Sam wondered if it was a skate ramp or a meth lab. Sam followed him into the cool hallway, which smelled of wet concrete.

“Come on, man,” griped Bastian. “Get your camera out. You need to be getting all of this.”

The cavernous room was flooded with natural light. You couldn’t tell from the street, but there were panes of glass high on the wall and the vaulted ceilings that served as skylights. It was a miracle that some hipster developer hadn’t already bought the place out to turn into a design studio or a vegan co-working space.

“This is incredible,” Sam said, panning the room.

“Roof leaks,” complained Bastian. As if he were making mortgage payments on the place.

In the middle of the space there was a lone folding chair and paintings of varying size.

The still air hung thick with chemicals. Nail polish. Or primer.

“So, this is what I’m working on,” said Bastian, gesturing at the canvases standing sentry. “Other than becoming the Mexican Nyjah Huston and getting that Nike SB money.”

The kid painted the same way he skated. The brushwork was confident, clear. The streaks and dabs made sense where they were and held your attention. There was a series of heads, misshapen, with haphazard rows of teeth. Another with angry marker cross-hatchings over brown faces. One said FOR MOM on it with the words crossed out, a mountain of angrily drawn tiny stick figures piled high with a series of interlocking rainbow hearts repeated over the image. What Bastian brought into the world commanded the space they occupied.

“Where do you get this stuff?” Some paintings were the size of shoe boxes, others taller than Bastian at six feet.

“I make the canvases,” Bastian said, shrugging. He stared square into Sam’s camera. “They’re such a rip-off at the art stores. Plus, those snobby assholes hate when I come through. They follow you around like you’re brown or something.” He laughed.

“I rack most of my shit from hardware stores anyway,” he said. “And you can steal wood from any of those big dumpsters when they’re building new subdivisions but you gotta go early.”

“This is my prized possession, though,” he said. Sam followed him to the far wall. It was a silver and yellow circular saw.

“It’s a miter saw,” he said, pronouncing it “meter” saw. Sam didn’t correct him. “For the frames.” He pulled out a box of acrylic paints and showed it to the camera.

“Shout out to Ms. Mascari at Burnet Middle School!” he said. “She gives me these because she’s in love with me.” He smiled devilishly into Sam’s phone.

“Why painting?” asked Sam, zooming in.

“The god Basquiat obviously,” said Bastian. “He’s legendary. Devin Troy Strother is the truth too. And Warhol. Man, that creepy old dude was the G.O.A.T. He wasn’t even making his own work anymore and still got paid.”