“Oh, uh, yep.” Jesus Christ, I was about to die. This whole place was a front. The guy behind the counter turned to the other two in the back, shouting so loud you could have heard it halfway down the L train line.
“Hey! Guys! Kingmaker’s client’s here!”
“Well, aw, shit,” the other man in the back said, a tall and vaguely greasy white guy who looked like he always smelled like oregano, leaning over the counter to get a good look at me, grinning with two teeth missing. “You’re in good hands, miss.”
The first guy, a Black man with a beer belly that could have sustained a month-long Oktoberfest, pointed a chubby finger towards the corner of the parlor. “Kingmaker’s back there. Your pizza’s already waiting.”
“It’s Kingmaker’s client?” The last person behind the counter, a Black girl with hoop earrings and tall curls, crowded in to look at me. I was starting to feel like a circus attraction. Was that what this was? Not organ harvesting, but something far more sinister, selling me to the circus? The girl lit up. “Aw, you look like shit, babe. Kingmaker’s got his work cut out.”
“Hey—I didn’t ask.”
“Do you want a drink, babe?”
I was pretty sure they’d poison it. “I’m all good. Just here for the… consultation.”
If I had a friend, I’d have told them what I was doing, so they knew to come look for me if I disappeared. But if I told someone what I was doing, they’d probably barrel in and haulme out under one arm and give me a lesson on stranger danger. And I wasn’t my own friend, so I let myself go to the corner, where there was only one seat taken at a booth, a man who I could only assume was the illustrious… uh, Kingmaker.
I wouldn’t have trusted this man to housesit for an empty lot. Everything about him oozedsleazy,and I got a sour feeling in my gut just looking at him. He was a white guy who might have been thirty years old, probably five nine, with a tacky gold tracksuit, a durag and ratty little braids, and he had a big lion tattoo on one arm with the wordKINGMAKERwoven through the design, and on the other arm, a traditional Japanese watercolor tattoo of a dragon. It was so absurd a juxtaposition I almost laughed, the way he’d talked himself up and then this spot, with cracked vinyl booth seating, a slice of generic cheese pizza on a paper plate, and a Coke in a Pizza-Hut-style plastic cup. Kingmaker of the middle school, maybe.
Who was I to judge someone for being a pathetic loser, though? Maybe it took one to knew one.
He gave me a once-over when I came up to the table, and he nodded like he knew all there was to know from one look. “Julie?” he said, and I nodded, hovering next to the other seat. I felt like cockroaches would crawl into my pants if I sat down.
“You must be, uh, Kingmaker.”
He gestured to the other seat. Ugh. I didn’t see any cockroaches. I’d just have to pray. I wiped the seat a few times before I sat down, the plush vinyl more comfortable than it looked. Kingmaker pushed the second slice of pizza towards me, plain cheese.
“Enjoy the pizza. This is how real deals happen in this city—over a slice of proper pizza.” He paused. “Only three bucks.”
“What—you’re charging me?” I bristled. “I thought this was a hospitality thing!”
He shook his head, grinning. “Naw, you see? This is the first problem. You’re about to be a rich woman, Julie. You gotta get into the rich mindset. A king don’t worry about a three-dollar slice of pizza.”
Well, talk about a fucking relief. If he was trying to trick me into a human trafficking scheme, he wouldn’t cheap out on a fucking slice of pizza. Whatever. Three bucks was good for a slice, and I hadn’t had dinner. “Rah—fine, whatever. Also, I’m still pretty sure I’d be a queen, not a king.”
“Nah. The king and the queen are two different mindsets.” He gestured with his hands while he talked in a weird way that, it took me a second to place, was him trying and almost succeeding at mimicking classic boom-bap rappers. “The queen mindset, that’s grace. The queen holds court. The king mindset, that’s power. The king takes what’s his. Asserts his place. Anyone can be a king or a queen. But we’re here to make a king out of you.”
Was this manosphere bullshit made gender-neutral? I wasn’t following. “Uh, okay, Kingmaker.”
“So, you wanna be a king, don’t you, Julie? You wanna make something of yourself. That’s why you called me.”
“Look, this is fucked up,” I said. “I called you because I’m at rock bottom and I’m leaving New York in a couple months. I came here like any idiot who thinks they can walk into the city and make it work, reading a bunch of stupid self-help books, bought into the stupid hustle culture bullshit for a while. Did the wholewake and grindthing, and here I am, with fucking nothing. Two years and nothing to show for it. This fucking city. Everyone’s just looking to cheat someone else out of a couple bucks, everyget rich quickshortcut is someone else’s rug-pull, and if you don’t already have money and status and influence, then you’re just someone else’s mark. I did all I could, but there’s no use. And thislife coachthing is bullshit, too. You’re just another huckster selling fake promises and trying to cona couple bucks out of someone’s desperation, and I called you because what else am I going to do while I’m here? I don’t have a job, I live in an illegal sublet in a closet, my girlfriend dumped me, and this city fucking hates me. And I fucking hate it too,” I said, my voice thick now, and I took a greedy, angry bite of the pizza.
Shit. It was good pizza. I’d forgotten the cardinal rule: the more the guy at the counter looks like he hates you, the better the pizza’s going to be. Itwasa tasty slice. Also, I was crying like a fucking loser. I wiped my eyes.
“Sorry, Kingmaker,” I said, laughing at the absurdity of it all. “I just wanted to get that off my chest for a while now.”
He pointed at me. “See, Julie, you’re not crying over your life right now,” he said. “You’re crying because, deep down, you know you’re about to leave your old life behind. The human mind is afraid of change. You’re overwhelmed at the greatness you’re about to find.”
“Fuck you, Kingmaker,” I laughed through tears, taking another bite of pizza. If it weren’t so good, I’d have slapped it in his face.
“So when you planning to leave?”
“Ugh… end of June. Going back to stay with my mom in Missouri while I figure things out.”
He snorted. “A king don’t turn and run. You don’t really want to go, do you?”
“Who the hell wants to go to Missouri? And my mom is going to be so fucking insufferable. Going to tell me I was stupid for ever going, going to tell me what a disappointment I am, going to keep forgetting that I’m gay like she keeps doing all the time. I did the best Icould.There’s no fuckingwinningin this fucking city, in this fucking life, in this fucking capitalist hellscape.”
