Uncooked and Unbothered

Cold Open

BOILWATCH STATUS

HUMIDITY: 58%

RISK LEVEL: LOW

RECOMMENDATION: STAY FIRM

On the stoop of the walk-up at No. 3, halfway down, the phone in Tony Tortellini’s front pocket gave one soft buzz, which was how BoilWatch knocked on a good day. It was eight thirty-one on a Thursday. Tony stopped on the third step and read the screen with his whole body.

He was twenty-one. Nothing on the block was bigger except the buildings, and he was on his way to the only paid job of his week. A mixing desk, six steps down, into a basement studio in Harlem, at ten. The dispatcher in Hell’s Pantry had sent the address at eleven the night before, with the client’s one request forwarded underneath it: Send the big one. They had sent Tony. They always sent Tony. He had texted the client himself afterward, as he always did: This is Tony from the movers. Ten o’clock. I’ll be EARLY. The client had written back Good. Six steps. The outfit paid by the stair. He had been counting the six since he woke up.

Behind him, on the top step, his father lifted his coffee at the sky. “Look at that cloud,” Mr. Tortellini Sr. told the street. “It’s been sitting over the Bridge since SIX.”

Tony looked up at it to be polite. “It’s a nice cloud, Pop.”

“It’s too SLOW for this neighborhood.” Mr. Tortellini Sr. was sixty-one and in his undershirt, as he was every morning from June to September, because rain ruined a move, and a man who had carried furniture most of his life did not trust the sky in a good shirt. “Somebody should say something to it.”

“You want anything from uptown?”

His father did not answer. He was watching the cloud for movement, and finding none, and taking it personally.

It was, by every measure the block kept, a beautiful morning. The humidity was low. The light came down off the colander water tower gold instead of yellow, through holes that usually dripped, and lay on the cobbles without sweating on them. The launderette breathed out warm cotton instead of steam. In Nonna’s window the basil stood up straight. It was the one cool morning of June, and the street was treating it like anything else that came free: suspiciously, and all at once.

Three weeks ago the same voice had told this street it was EMOTIONALLY UNSAFE, and Tony had stood in front of Ricky’s board and cried at it, because it was true and nobody had ever put it to him so plainly. Now it said STAY FIRM. He took that personally too. He firmed. He drew his folds in tight and checked his crimp with one hand, and he came down the last three steps feeling like a man with written instructions.

He crossed the lane where the painted line ran over the grate, white paint on iron bars, and stepped over it with his eyes on the paint and his boots clear of it, like everybody on the block. On the south sidewalk he turned west, toward the colander dome on its four iron legs over the station stairs. He liked to be early. Early was a thing you could carry.

At eight-forty, ten steps short of the dome, every phone on the street went off at once.

It was not BoilWatch. BoilWatch knocked. This was a chime, bright and climbing, the sound of a prize nobody had entered for, and it had no sender. It came like BoilWatch came, to every phone on the block in the same second and in the same capitals, and up and down the street everyone stopped walking and looked down. On Tony’s screen, under the morning’s STAY FIRM, it said:

TRENDING NOW
UNCOOKED IS THE NEW COOKED
Be dry. Be superior. Be raw.
12.4K posts in the last hour

Somewhere behind him a voice read the hashtag aloud, already flat: “Hashtag Unbothered and Uncooked.”

Tony went through it line by line. Dry he could do. The air was cool, and he had a towel in his bag. Superior nobody had ever called him, not once, not even the outfit, which called him reliable, which was also what it called the van. Raw he would look up later.

Tony said it out loud, to nobody: “I don’t know what this means.”

Across the lane, his father told the cloud it was a disgrace. Tony looked at the screen a while longer. “But I’m gonna commit fully.”

He straightened. He stiffened. He locked his arms at his sides, strapped for a long stair, so that nothing could shift on the turn, and he lifted his chin and arranged his face into uncooked. On Tony, who had never in his life tried to look like anything except available, it came out as an enormous patience: the face of a man holding a door for something that was never going to arrive.

In the launderette doorway behind him, somebody said something to the street. Across the lane, Mena Orecchiette, seventy-one, whose window over the stoop had not been shut in thirty years, leaned out to pass it on.

“Mr. Tortellini,” she called down, “they’re saying your son’s having a medical emergency.”

His father did not look down. “He’s FINE. Look at that CLOUD.”

Chapter One — Please Rate Your Dispatcher

At ten to nine Tony had been uncooked for ten minutes, and he was counting. In for four. Out for six. He did it under his breath without moving his mouth, which turned out to be a skill he had always had and never had a use for.

He could not turn his head, so the block came to him in the order his eyes allowed. Far left, across the lane on the corner, Nonna’s Pasta Shop, with Ricky’s kindness board bolted to its brick under Nonna’s ad; in her window, going yellow at the corners, the ORIGINAL RECIPE sign, still answering a sign behind him that he could not see and knew by heart. Then the walk-up: his own stoop, his father on it, Mena’s window over it, the hydrant out front. Then the alley mouth and its one garlic-bulb streetlamp, unlit; the Trattoria with its extractor fan already going; the padlocked Lot. In the lane between, the painted line ran straight over the grate, and along it lay the thin gray ridge of dust the grandmothers swept toward it every morning at seven, from both sides, which made one ridge, which nobody mentioned. Behind him Lao Lao’s heavy door opened and closed with a thud you could hear across the street, which was what the door was for.

That was everything. It was the most of his own street he had looked at in years. Usually he was carrying something in front of it.

He checked the load. Arms: strapped, at his sides, good. Shoulders: back. Knees: locked, fine for now, and the part that would shift first, because knees always did. Crimp: up. The wrap on his left wrist was working loose. He could feel the tail of it lifting in the breeze off the Row, and he could not fix it without bending, and he could not bend. A loose wrap was how you lost a fridge on the third floor. He let it hang.

Under the street the eight fifty-five went by, felt in his soles. That was all right. The nine-twenty was the last one that got him uptown by ten, and the nine-twenty was a long way off, and a man could be uncooked for one more train.

A stranger in a visor stopped on the far sidewalk at nine, filmed him for eleven seconds and walked on without a word. Tony held all eleven of them as still as he had ever held anything.

---

Mahmoud Macarona, twenty-one, who called himself Mac-Muud on all three of his business cards and believed in every one of them, set up a folding table under the streetlamp at the alley mouth at a quarter past nine and unrolled a printed banner that said PREMIUM PASTA POLISH — FOR THE SHINE.

“Good morning, Salt Street,” he said to it. “Premium Pasta Polish. For that healthy, glossy, just-out-of-the-pot—”

He looked up. The north sidewalk was full of pasta walking as no pasta walked, every one of them at the same speed.

“—Premium Pasta Polish,” Mac-Muud said, without a gap, “now in Matte.”

He uncapped a marker and wrote MATTE over the word SHINE on his own banner, in letters that leaned forward. He set out the cans. He set out a card reader that had never once worked and turned it so its little screen faced the street, which was the part that mattered.

“The uncooked look, in a can,” he told the sidewalk. “Matte. Bold. Unbothered. One coat and you’re raw till dinner. Use code UNBOTHERED. That’s Willie’s code. Willie gets a cut.” Then, very fast and a little lower, like the end of a pharmacy ad: “Not tested above ninety percent.”

Two pennes in matching sunglasses stopped at the table and each bought a can without bending to look at it.

Under Tony’s feet the nine-twenty came in, waited, and left without him. He felt every car of it go. He knew it by the absence, like the last step of a staircase in the dark. He kept his chin up.

Mac-Muud came across the lane with a can in each hand, sideways around the grate, and stopped in front of the most committed body on the street like a founder whose shareholder had actually come to the meeting.

“My investor,” he said.

Tony had invested twenty dollars in Premium Pasta Polish the month before. It was the only investment he had ever made, and he took it as seriously as a sofa on a spiral stair.

“Quarterly update,” Tony said, without moving his mouth.

“Great question.” Mac-Muud held up one finger, then a second. The update came in tiers. “The shine line pivoted at nine-sixteen this morning. We are now a matte company. Margins are strong. The customer base is growing.”

“Revenue?”

Mac-Muud pointed a can at him. “You. Total revenue to date is you, partner. And two pennes.” He saw something in Tony’s stillness and put a hand up. “This is NOT a scheme. It’s an OPPORTUNITY.”

“I didn’t say scheme.”

“Nobody ever says it. You can feel them not saying it.” Mac-Muud looked at the cans in his hands, and for a second the pitch went out of his elbow, and what was left was a plain sentence, in numbers. “My father drives a cab sixteen hours a day. Same fare whatever the distance, banker or grandmother. My mother feeds the Financial District off a cart under BOIL-RITE Plaza, and she charges me full price so I learn what a business is. I’m not going to waste that.”

Then the pitch came back into him like a fan after a brownout. “You want a coat? Investor discount. You’d be the face of the brand.”

“No,” Tony said. “I’m NATURAL.”

“Okay, but what if we pivoted—” Mac-Muud stopped himself with one finger. “No. You’re right. Natural is the brand. So you support the brand. Three cans, investor price, ten a can.”

An investor supported the product. That was what investing was. Tony had seen it on Roil. “Okay.”

“Wallet?”

Tony’s wallet was in his back pocket. His arms were at his sides, strapped, and his knees were locked, and there was no route from one to the other that did not go through bending. Mac-Muud cleared his throat. “Permission to enter your back pocket, partner.”

“GRANTED.” It came out of Tony at moving-day volume, and across the lane two pairs of sunglasses turned round.

Mac-Muud went in respectfully, two fingers only, took out three tens, put the wallet back exactly where he had found it, and tucked the three cans of Premium Pasta Polish, now in Matte, under Tony’s rigid left arm, where they fit, because everything fit under Tony’s arm. They were cold from the morning. Tony clamped them. He was holding something again, and it felt correct.

“Pleasure doing business,” Mac-Muud said, and went back across the lane to tell a ziti in a tracksuit about the matte revolution.

---

Willie came down the far sidewalk from the Row at ten to ten.

He was walking stiff, like the whole north side now. He stopped at the hydrant, where Ricky was talking to Frankie with both hands and Frankie was filming the sidewalk. Tony could see all three of them. He could not hear any of it. Ricky’s hands went up. Willie’s chin went up. Frankie’s phone went from the sidewalk to Ricky and stayed there.

Once, Ricky stepped off the curb toward the south side, toward Tony, and Frankie said something without lowering the phone, and Ricky stepped back up.

Tony looked at the hydrant and thought about Harlem.

At ten o’clock exactly his phone buzzed against his hip. Then again. Then again. It was in his front pocket, by his strapped right arm, and his right arm was part of the load.

Mac-Muud came back across, because Mac-Muud went toward any sound a customer made. “You’re vibrating, partner.”

“I know.”

“Standing permission?”

Tony did not nod, because nodding was bending, but he made his eyes say yes, and Mac-Muud, who read people for a living and was wrong about most of them, read that one right. He slid the phone out, held it up to Tony’s face until it recognized him, and read it aloud to its owner in his investor-relations voice.

Dispatch: Where are you.
Dispatch: Tony.
Dispatch: Client says nobody at the door either.
Dispatch: Job reassigned. No-show logged.

“Oh, starch,” Tony said.

His head did the sum before he could stop it. The day rate. The six stairs, paid by the stair, which were now somebody else’s stairs. His father’s back, which needed a mat they did not have. The rent on 2B, which went up every June for what BOIL-RITE called humidity adjustment. And then, underneath the sum, the other thing, which felt exactly like integrity: if he bent now, the morning was nothing. He would have lost the job and the hour and twenty minutes he had spent being superior, and he would have nothing to show for either but three cans.

Mac-Muud lowered the phone. His voice went gentle, a different product entirely. “You want me to call them back?”

“I am COMMITTED.”

The phone buzzed once more in Mac-Muud’s hand. He read it to Tony anyway, because it was Tony’s phone, and a man had a right to know.

Please rate your dispatcher.