The Clout Pot

Cold Open

BOILWATCH ALERT

HUMIDITY: 71%

RISK LEVEL: MANAGEABLE

RECOMMENDATION: TRUST THE NUMBERS

Under the tarp roof of the loading bay behind Trattoria al Dente, where the kitchen’s extractor fan breathed fryer over the dock all night, the alert came up on Louie Lasagna’s phone and sat there on its tripod of three stacked boxes, glowing at nobody. It was just before ten on Sunday night. The phone faced a ring light that had cost too much for how cheap it looked, and on the far side of the ring light stood Louie, twenty-four, in a navy pinstripe three-piece with room in it for a second Louie, in front of a shower curtain with PROTECTION PLUS written across it in marker.

The alert said MANAGEABLE. The bay disagreed. The tarp had kept the day’s heat all evening and was not giving any of it back, and under the ring light Louie’s top layer had begun to bead along its curled front edge while his collar went dark, slowly, under the pinstripe. TRUST THE NUMBERS. Louie felt personally endorsed. He trusted numbers more than he trusted anything, including the people who produced them, and in about four minutes he was going to buy some.

“How do I look?” he said.

At the launch, twelve days ago, the answer had been “Like leadership,” and Louie had lived on it for a week. Tonight the answer took longer. Ralphie Ravioli, twenty-seven, looked at him over the reading glasses he wore because they looked professional, and gave the question real thought. Ralphie gave everything real thought, including the mints.

Ralphie said, “Authoritative.”

Louie said, “I want to look like someone you can trust with your safety.”

“You look like someone who would definitely not rob you.”

Louie turned this over and looked at the bottom of it. “…Is that good?”

“I think so?”

Ralphie wrote something on his clipboard and squared the phone on its boxes. Louie cleared his throat twice, once for himself and once for the air, and checked the front of his top sheet in the selfie camera. It curled up like a pompadour, and he kept it that way with a comb and a belief. He pressed GO LIVE.

His broadcast voice came up from somewhere below the lapels.

“What’s UP Machattan, it’s your boy Louie Lasagna coming at you LIVE and UNFILTERED with Protection Plus Premium—”

He checked the viewer count. Zero.

He waited. The extractor fan went round. Still zero.

“—where YOUR safety is OUR priority—”

Zero. It had a way of looking back at you.

He leaned toward Ralphie and dropped his voice. “Get the bots.”

“Which package?”

“The big one. The impressive one.”

Ralphie took the other phone out of his vest. The menu on it came from the shop Louie did not name, and it listed its goods cheapest first, like every menu in the city:

- 50 viewers — $4.99
- 150 viewers, the impressive one — $14.99
- 500 viewers — contact us
- Pay later — always

Louie had been on pay later for twelve days, since the launch. In all that time pay later had not said a word, which Louie took for faith, and which was interest.

Ralphie tapped twice. The count went from nothing to 153, which was three more than they had paid for. Louie took it as a sign. In his experience the city did not tip, so when it did, you noticed. On Ladle Live a viewer was a spoon and a bought viewer was a plastic spoon, and the counter never said which was which, because that was the product.

“WOW look at you beautiful people joining us!”

“Look at that retention,” he told Ralphie, still smiling at the lens.

“They arrived eleven seconds ago,” Ralphie said.

“Eleven seconds of retention.”

It was the biggest crowd that had ever looked at him at once, and he had paid for it, which in his family was the usual way to get one.

The chat began to scroll up the side of the screen:

bot_4729: mid
user_fake_38: who is this
pasta_fan_bot: ratio + L + fell off

Louie beamed at the word mid as if it were a review that had spelled his name right. Behind the boxes, Ralphie gave him a thumbs-up with one hand and wrote down the time with the other.

definitely_real: is this a scam
bot_account_77: I’m a bot and even I’m bored

A hundred and fifty-three. Louie let the number warm him the way the ring light did, from the front, all at once. Somewhere behind the sweat a voice he did not listen to was doing arithmetic about $14.99, and twelve days, and tomorrow, which he had named Billing Monday himself and capitalized in his head ever since. He leaned in until the light made a halo of him and spoke straight down the lens to the people who were not there.

“Great questions! Great engagement! Let me tell you about our TIERS—”

Chapter One — Layer Three Is Leaving the Chat

Five minutes in, Louie Lasagna was deep in the pitch, and the bots had settled into the steady rhythm of a crowd that had been paid to boo.

“—BASIC tier gets you a monthly check-in. PREMIUM gets you twenty-four seven text access. And PLATINUM ELITE—”

He paused. It was a dramatic pause. He had rehearsed it on the dock that afternoon, and it had worked on the rats.

The pause was where it went wrong. The ring light sat at arm’s length giving off the heat of a small, dishonest sun, the air in the bay was wetter than any app was prepared to say, and between the two of them the underside of Louie’s top sheet, which held on to the rest of him with cooked starch and confidence, let go. He felt it start to travel, all in one piece, quietly, in the direction of the floor.

Louie did not stop. Stopping was for people with a backup plan. He put one hand flat on top of his head to hold the layer where it was, pointed the other at the PLATINUM ELITE badge pinned to the shower curtain, and finished the sentence straight down the lens as if nothing on him were in motion.

“—gets you ME. Personally. Showing up when you need me.”

bot_3310: layer 3 is leaving the chat

Behind the boxes Ralphie raised both palms and pressed them slowly down through the air, the motion of a man shutting an overfull suitcase on someone else’s behalf. Louie pressed. The layer stopped somewhere above his left ear.

“Oh, bleep,” Louie told Machattan. “That’s a bleep. Stay with me.”

The count went up by four. Louie saw it, because it was a number, and numbers were the only part of the screen he ever really saw.

“You know what? Tour,” he said, and lifted the phone off its boxes before Ralphie could log an objection. “Tour of the territory, chat. Let me show you what we protect.”

He walked the phone down the alley with one hand still on his head, and Ralphie walked behind him with both hands on Louie’s top layer, nudging it back into register a little at every step. The alley ran south from the bay, past the big trash bin Louie called his office, to a mouth where the block’s one streetlamp, an iron stalk with a garlic-bulb globe, poured a single amber pool onto the cobbles. Louie stepped into the pool and turned the phone on Salt Street.

“The block,” he said. “Our community. Our MARKET.”

It was one lane of wet cobbles under a sky like the underside of a pot lid. Nonna’s Pasta Shop sat dark on the corner to the west, its OPEN neon off since nine, as it had been at nine every night for fifty years. Directly across the lane Lao Lao’s sign burned red through the fog, as it had for longer than that, and Lao Lao would want that noted. Down the exact middle of the street ran a white painted line that nobody admitted to painting, straight across the bars of the subway grate.

“Fully painted, chat,” Louie said. “Even the grate. That’s attention to detail.”

He panned up. On the roof of the walk-up next door stood the block’s water tower, which was clearly a colander and dripped on the hydrant all summer. “Our community water feature.” Down at the corner, the rigatoni’s kindness board was still bolted to Nonna’s brick under Nonna’s own advertisement, and the signs from the sauce war were still in both shop windows, answering each other in capitals across the street. On the south sidewalk the colander dome over the station stairs glowed green from below.

“And that’s transit,” Louie said, and moved on quickly, because transit was not on brand.

Back in the bay Ralphie set the phone on its boxes, re-squared it, and re-squared Louie. Louie took his hand off his head. The layer held, out of what looked like politeness. The chat had been busy while he was gone:

spoon_12: platinum elite means he comes over??
bot_6610: sir this is a hookup
user_204: how much for the layers

Hearts climbed the side of the screen. The count went to 168, and those fifteen had not been bought. Louie felt it in his collar.

“Look at this TRACTION,” he said. “You love Platinum Elite. I KNEW Platinum Elite would land. When you need me, I come to you, I am there, in person, any hour—”

The hearts doubled. Ralphie leaned into the edge of the light, close to Louie’s ear, with the face he used for reading out policy. “They believe Platinum Elite includes intercourse.”

Louie kept his smile exactly where it was.

“They believe you provide it personally, at any hour,” Ralphie said.

The smile stayed. It took everything he had.

“…Is that bad for the brand?” he asked, out of the side of his mouth, live.

Ralphie whispered, “Tell them about the badges.”

“We have BADGES. Ralphie, show them the badges.”

Ralphie held them up to the lens one at a time, the way a lawyer held up exhibits in a case he expected to win. They were the launch badges, laminated since. BASIC was a shield whose outline wobbled all the way round and arrived back where it had started, slightly surprised. PREMIUM was a lopsided crown, and above it, crossed out with one firm line, was a first attempt at the word in which PREMIUM had come out with only one M and a great deal of confidence. PLATINUM ELITE had glitter on it well past the point where glitter became a decision. They had been made by hand, which was the point, and in a hurry, which was not, and Ralphie held each one level and still until it had been seen.

Louie said, “Hand-crafted. Artisanal. Limited edition.”

bot_2847: those look terrible
fake_user_11: my kid could make better
real_person_lol: is this a bit

Louie pressed on into the part that sold.

“The streets are getting WEIRD, Machattan. You’ve seen the BoilWatch alerts. You’ve felt the humidity in your BONES. Something’s coming.”

bot_8812: bro we dont have bones

“Exhibit A,” Louie said, and Ralphie held the other phone up to the lens with the clip already playing.

It was forty seconds of the food fight on this very street ten days ago, the sound cut: the painted line, flour flying off one curb and steam rolling off the other, and in the middle of it all a rigatoni with his arms up, being breaded alive in good faith. It had been on the boil all week, posted on Roil from an account with no name and no other posts. Louie had watched it eleven times. Each time it got better and he got angrier that it wasn’t his. He had tried twice to find out whose it was, and the account had no name, and the account was winning.

“Ten days ago,” Louie said. “Right THERE. Look at this guy. Where was HIS protection? Nobody should have to be breaded, chat. Nobody.”

He let that sit. Then he leaned into the lens until his face filled it, intense, sweating, a man standing in his own spotlight.

“You need STRUCTURE. You need LEADERSHIP. You need someone who’s not afraid to STEP UP.”

He held it.

“You need ME.”

From behind the boxes Ralphie’s voice came, low, at exactly the right moment. “The signup link.”

“LINK IN BIO. Payment plans available. Sliding scale for the elderly but not too sliding because this is a business.”

---

At ten to eleven Louie ended the stream, and the loading bay went back to being a loading bay. He sat on a milk crate with his jacket open. Ralphie sat on the other milk crate with the clipboard on his knees and read out the evening.

Sign-ups tonight: none. Subscribers in total: four, all of them signed in person at Ralphie’s table last week, none of them billed yet. Tomorrow was Billing Monday. Louie had announced it on Wednesday, live, to the $4.99 package, and the package had taken it well.

“Four’s a pilot program,” Louie said.

“Pilot program,” Ralphie said, and wrote it down, and underlined it.

Louie’s top layer chose that moment to begin sliding again, off the back this time, in no hurry. Ralphie reached into the inside pocket of his reflective vest, produced a large black binder clip, and clipped the layer to the one beneath it with a small authoritative snap.

“For structural integrity,” Ralphie said.

Louie touched it. It held. He did not ask why Ralphie carried a binder clip that size, because he knew the answer, which was that Ralphie carried everything.

The bulb buzzed. Out on the street a train went by underneath, felt rather than heard, and the dock hummed with it for a second like a struck pan. Louie looked at the dead screen of his phone, at his own face in it.

“Do you think he watches?”

He did not say who. He never had to. On this block there was the weather, and there was his uncle, and only one of them came with an app.

“Everyone watches, Louie,” Ralphie said.

They sat with that. Behind the kitchen door somebody scraped a pan. Ralphie consulted the clipboard.

“Engagement was up nine hundred percent,” he said.

“Because of the badges?”

“Because of the misunderstanding.”

Louie thought about it for a while, his clipped layer cooling against the back of his head.

“Can we misunderstand on purpose?”

Ralphie said, “Noted.”