Shopping with the wow niece.(Story)(Short Story)

The day began as a Mexican standoff between two stray cats, a turf war of the feline homeless that erupted in the street just as I was picking up the morning paper. I always figured you had to be tough to make it on the street as a cat, but these guys displayed an intensity of nastiness and rancour I had thought unique to human beings.

Then, as I studied Bascom Lamar Lunsford recordings from 1935, trying to come up with a rift on fatalism in mountain balladry, the direction of my day was decided by the women in the house, Karley and her niece, Nadege, who is visiting from Paris. I was taking Nadege on a hiphop shopping spree.

This was nowhere near as bad as it sounds. Nadege's shopping destination was Fulton Mall, which is far from an indoors, antiseptic, commercial morgue. It's a funky strip in downtown Brooklyn peopled with street vendors and ranting black supremacists. It was one of my old haunts when I was a frequent visitor to New York, working on a novel with underlife scenes on the streets of Brooklyn. In need of a guide to the underworld of drugs and hookers, I had latched onto the friendship of a homeless incense vendor who set up his table on one of the side streets that feed into Fulton Mall. While Nadege shopped, I figured, I would look around for Hakim, see if he was still at the old place.

Alas, it had been years, and Bond Street, where Hakim once hawked incense (and himself) in the shadow of Shabazz's much more elaborate empire of odds and ends, had been emptied. Not a soul. Not a stick of incense, either. At some point, someone must have decided that street vendors were a blight. None remained. So, feeling like a ghost, or a friend to ghosts, I trailed behind Nadege as she strolled through all of the places Hakim had once identified as "hoochie mama shops". Nadege is no hoochie--she is a proud, perfectly formed Parisian single mother with a taste for hiphop and its culture--but many of her fellow shoppers sure seemed to be. Visually, they were terrific company, and by joining Nadege in the stores I got out of earshot of the ranting black supremacists, who unfortunately had survived the street ...