A Man Inspired

by Derek Jackson

  But the message Candace’s publicist had for her was to confirm the airline and hotel for the trip to Los Angeles. Carl had no way of knowing Tasha was not to be in the loop on this—she was supposed to be the last one to know about the interview. The reason that Candace had been holding off telling her was, of course, because she knew, she just knew, that Tasha would be—

  “Going off, Candi! I’m going off on you—how could you not tell me that you were the one to do this interview? I’m your best friend!” With a glare, she forcefully pushed her way past Candace and stormed toward the sunroom. “Or maybe you’re one of those so-called friends who enjoys keeping secrets from the people who care about you the most.”

  “Tasha . . .” Candace rolled her eyes as she closed the door, knowing that uncontrollable emotional outbursts like this were exactly why she had planned to wait until the last minute to tell Tasha. Following her friend into the sunroom, she found Tasha seated at the bar, uncorking a bottle of sparkling cider.

  “Tasha, you know I love you and everything, but I’m just going to be honest. I can’t deal with how you carry on whenever the subject is Jermaine Hill.”

  “So you weren’t going to tell me that you were the one conducting the interview? For weeks I get excited about this interview, and my very own best friend is the one who gets chosen to do it? And she doesn’t think enough of me to even tell me?” Her eyes began bulging and Candace could make out that telltale vein popping out just below her jaw. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen Tasha so angry.

  Candace fidgeted a little with her earring. “I was going to tell you . . .”

  “When? When the story came out in print?”

  “Well, probably a little bit just before that,” she hesitantly began, “but that was my plan, yes.”

  “Why, Candi? I’m the president of his fan club!”

  Oh Tasha, grow up . . . “The unofficial president of an unofficial fan club. And this is why I was going to wait to tell you, girlfriend. Because I knew you would give me no rest.”

  “You got that right I’d give you no rest! Candi, you know I’d give anything to be with that man! Jermaine Hill is like the . . . like the finest, most eligible bachelor around. He could be the one for me. Sometimes I don’t understand you, you know? I mean, that you would keep something like this from me . . .” Her now-trembling voice trailed off, and Candace knew it was a matter of seconds before her friend would burst out with the tears.

  Candace took the bottle from Tasha and filled a tumbler for herself. “Trust me, Tasha—I was just looking out for your own good. A guy like that is not the one for you.”

  Tasha’s mouth dropped open. “How can you say something like that?”

  Candace immediately regretted how she had phrased her last words. “Tasha, I . . . I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant . . . well, I was just saying—”

  “I know what you were saying. You don’t think I could get a man like Jermaine. I’m not good enough, is that it?” The tears now began rolling down Tasha’s cheeks.

  “No, that’s not what I meant. Tasha, you’re my girl—you know that. I just don’t want to see you hurt again.” Keeping up with Tasha’s constant man problems was like running a never-ending marathon in the heat of an African desert without drinking water. “It’s not a good idea to start a relationship with a guy you practically keep on a pedestal. I mean, you worship the man like he’s a god or something. So when Prince Charming turns out to be less than perfect, you’re staring at a serious wake-up call.”

  “Is that so? Well, I guess you would know about wake-up calls where Prince Charming is concerned, now wouldn’t you?”

  Candace set her tumbler down firmly on the bar’s countertop. “Let’s not go there,” she whispered.

  An awkward silence ensued. Candace rubbed the end of her fingernail around the rim of the glass, wondering yet again why Tasha had to compartmentalize everything on either one end of the emotional extreme or the other. It had always been like that. From the first time they met while taking English Lit. at Rice ten years ago until now, Candace could have penned hundreds of soap opera pilots starring Tasha Briggs as the female lead.

  Tasha dabbed at her wet, tear-streaked cheeks. “I’m sorry, Candi. I didn’t mean to bring up Ton—”

  “I know,” she bluntly cut in, not wanting to even hear the name of that creep who had hurt her in what seemed like a lifetime ago. “No harm done.”

  “It’s just that you’re going to be living with Jermaine Hill for two weeks!”

  “I’m not going to be living with him, exactly,” she corrected. “Let’s keep the facts straight here.”

  “You know what I mean. And you also know that I’d give anything to meet him. You could arrange for that to happen, right? Oh, c’mon, Caann-deee! If I were in your shoes I wouldn’t even have to think twice about it. Not for my best friend, I wouldn’t.”

  If you were in my shoes, knowing you, you wouldn’t be thinking at all . . . “I’ll see what I can do, Tasha, but I’m not promising anything.”

  The beaming smile on Tasha’s face, however, said otherwise.

  “Oh well . . . at least she’s not crying anymore . . .” Candace thought. A major accomplishment in its own right.

  “WE GOT THE STORY!” Myra jubilantly exclaimed, dancing a little jig in her kitchen as she celebrated with Xavier over the phone. Her funky rendition of the chicken would have been hilarious to anyone watching her dance, but she was thankfully alone in her house.

  “Didn’t I tell you that Candace was known for accepting proposals from lesser-known magazines?”

  Myra paused, trying to return her breathing and heart rate to normal. She couldn’t remember the last time she had boogied with such fervor and meaning.

  “Yes, but to sign with us for the biggest story of the year? Xavier, that’s a miracle! It’s nothing short of God answering our prayers. Oh, goodness,” she added as her hand flew to her forehead. The full weight of what was now going to happen, business-wise, began to sink in. “We’ve got to dramatically increase our printing numbers. And our advertising rates have just skyrocketed, because I guarantee you we’ll have no problem finding people who’ll pay now. And we’ve got to double the distribution, and—”

  “Whoa, Myra. You sound like my three-year-old daughter when you babble on like that,” he said, chuckling. “Listen, this is not the time to get stressed out. If God dropped this in our lap then He’ll grace us to handle the extra responsibilities.”

  “Yes. Yes, you’re right.” Myra started pacing her kitchen floor in circles. “But the demand for copies hot off the press is going to be like nothing we’ve seen, and there’s no way we can let the early demand exceed our initial supply.” We’ve got to let people know that we’re for real . . . “I’m going to meet with our printer and core distributors this afternoon and then we’ll have a conference call with the staff tonight. We’ve got to prep everyone on exactly what we’re going to do.”

  “Myra?”

  “Yes?”

  “That brain of yours is shifting into editing overdrive, my friend. You know, it might be a good idea to have your pastor and prayer partners covering you even more in prayer. This is a huge, unprecedented venture we’re undertaking, and we need to be sure that we’re being led and guided in the right way.”

  Xavier, you’re always pointing me back to prayer . . . “Thank you, Xavier. You’re a spiritual beacon for this magazine. You always have been.”

  “I just do what I know how to do. And the rest I leave to God.”

  “Amen to that!” She thanked him once again and clicked off the phone. As she opened her laptop to begin penning the editor’s note to the upcoming edition, she recalled her days at Spelman, when she had viewed the world through the eyes of hopeful idealism. She believed she was going to change the world. Most people at that impressionable, young period in life usually had such feelings, but she actually began to formulate a plan to do such an extraordinary thing.
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  That plan was going to be realized through the vehicle of mass media. For years, she strategized, brainstormed, plotted out proposals, and . . . dreamed. Oh, how she had dreamed. She envisioned a magazine that would not only inform her targeted audience about events and people in society, but would also cause the readers to reflect and ponder on the splendor and worth of a loving God. A modern day Ebony meets Gospel Today magazine.

  Now, twenty years after the idea had been birthed in her heart, she was discovering that dreams could indeed come true. The most anticipated celebrity interview in recent history had fallen to none other than Song of Solomon!

  Myra’s God was certainly an awesome God.

  Chapter seven

  AS SHE SIPPED the cool and refreshing ginger ale, Candace tilted her head back against the comfortable leather headrest of the first-class seat and allowed herself a small smile. But this smile by no means adequately conveyed the silly, almost hysterical laughter bubbling inside her.

  You’ve come a long way, sistah girl.

  Hadn’t she, though! She recalled how, as a child, she had been deathly afraid of airplanes. Big flying monsters, she had called them. And the notion that she would ever board one? Puh-leeze! At times, the mere thought of attempting such madness would have been enough reason to send her into a mild anxiety attack. But a nerve-racking episode with her mother before a vacation trip to New York City had, strangely enough, turned out to be just the remedy for her fears of flying.

  Candace had been just twelve years old at the time, and she had somehow lost track of her mother while they were waiting for their flight to depart. She had become engrossed, naturally, in some novel in one of the magazine shops and when the story had finally ended she looked around and saw that Analee was nowhere to be found. As it had turned out, her mother had gone to check on travel arrangements and had gotten understandably lost inside the colossally spread out Dallas/Fort Worth airport. What a terrible, gut-wrenching nightmare that had been . . . for both of them.

  When mother and daughter finally reunited almost two hours later, Candace could genuinely admit that the fear of becoming separated from her mother was much, much greater than the fear of flying on an airplane. Thus the first steps toward conquering her phobia were taken. Over the years, she had grown accustomed to and at better ease with flying—to the point where she now used this method of transportation more frequently than some people drive automobiles.

  Now, with her eyes closed and a contented expression adorning her face, she appeared to be just moments from drifting off to sleep. But in reality, her mind was engaged in a multitude of various thoughts—how to strengthen her relationship with her father, her present feelings concerning Tasha’s emotional state, and of course—the interview with the man she currently was on her way to meet. The whole nation was talking about this man and already heralding him as one of the great motivational speakers of all time.

  More than simply an interview with Jermaine Hill, this was to be a feature story as well. And, as Candace was well aware, all features possessed a hook of some sort—an angle from which the central theme of the story hung. She had been mulling over several angles to employ, but she generally found herself coming back to the same question—who or what motivated the greatest inspirational speaker in the nation? What was his source of inspiration?

  Her primary goal was to obtain as much personal information as she could (at least, as much as he was willing to share) and then assimilate those juicy tidbits into a literary tour de force that would give his fans exactly what they craved. Jermaine Hill—the story behind the glory.

  No, that sounds too cliché . . .

  On a scale from one to ten, she supposed her preparation for this story had been a five. A six, maybe. Those projections were unusually low for her since she normally studied her feature subjects with the exacting thoroughness of an operating surgeon. But because this assignment was not an academic or socially instructive article, she hadn’t given her lack of research much thought. Simply put, this was a celebrity piece—“a lot of fluff and cream puff,” as her mentor, Dr. West, was known to term such works. And though it would provide her with the largest single readership she had ever written for, she still would rather write more serious-minded features. She was content to leave the cheesy fanfare and glitz to the writers who based their merit on style rather than substance.

  “Our estimated time of arrival into Los Angeles International Airport is three hours, twenty-eight minutes,” the pilot’s voice announced. “We are expecting no weather-related interruptions; the temperature in southern California is a pleasant eighty-four degrees.”

  Eighty-four degrees without the humidity . . . that’ll be nice . . . She opened her carry-on case situated at her feet and extracted a leather-bound portfolio notebook. Although her laptop was stowed in the above compartment, her first preference was always the old-fashioned standbys of a pen and loose-leaf sheets of paper. She liked to think it was the intimate, almost sensual, smooth stroke of the pen onto the paper that over the years had become a therapeutic act for her.

  “Child, you are forever writing something,” Analee had always lightly reprimanded Candace, because her daughter was never without a pen in her hand. But those admonishing words simply had become reverse psychology to the ambitions of her daughter, serving to motivate her even more. Consequently, anything had been fair game for Candace to doodle on at any given time, from napkins and church bulletins to newspapers and blank spaces in her mother’s fashion magazines.

  Analee had viewed her daughter’s writing infatuation as a hobby that she hoped Candace would outgrow. And the sooner, the better. Her maternal reasoning was that there was no career to be had or lifestyle to be lavishly lived as a . . . writer. But after Candace landed a position as a contributing youth columnist for the Dallas Morning News in her junior year of high school and then steadily gained acclaim in certain literary circles, Analee was forced to concede that perhaps her daughter’s writing was more than a passing hobby.

  “Alright, Jermaine Hill,” she began, whispering to herself. “What’s your real story?” She outlined several introductory questions on her paper by methodically filling in the blank spaces and lines, oblivious to the passing of time as the minutes ticked by. And as the once-blank outline took shape and changed into a more complete synopsis, little by little she began to see how she would conduct the interview. When the plane’s wheels touched down on the LAX runway three and a half hours later, her rating on the projection scale was now up to an eight or nine. Whoever this celebrity mystery man was and whatever his source of inspiration, Candace felt newly confident that she would find out all about him.

  STANDING MERE INCHES from the rocky terrain of dirt and vegetation descending from the cliff’s edge to the ocean did not seem to be a safe thing to do. But Jermaine had no intention of jumping. At least not yet, anyway. Roughly ten feet behind him was the metal guardrail that fenced in the narrow shoulder of Pacific Coast highway from this very cliff. After another lonely drive to Laguna Beach done for the sole purpose of squandering time between endless photo sessions and talk-show tapings, he had parked along the shoulder and climbed over the guardrail. Now he stood, staring with a morbid sense of admiration at the calm, blue-green body of water almost directly beneath him. The glassy surface of the ocean, casting pools of glimmering pearl-like reflections of sunlight, beckoned ever so seductively to him.

  And where would you take me?

  Did it matter where the ocean would take him? If nothing else, it would take him away from here, far away from a hypocritical life he was tired of leading. The fans, the shows, the contracts, the pressure . . .

  The pressure. When Jermaine reduced everything in his life down to a foundation, he swore time and time again that he found this pressure. It ate at him, the pressure from the comparisons to other orators and speakers; from the larger and more ostentatious contracts Mario brokered for him, demanding that the one and only Jermaine Hill be paid top dollar;
pressure from the millions of people who placed him on a pedestal, looking to their idol for words of inspiration that might give meaning to their humdrum, dreary lives. Additionally, pressure came from the fickle media, whose coverage was quick to laud him for his positive contributions but quicker still to crucify him alive at the slightest scent of something scandalous.

  When he had visualized a career that would afford him success and fame, he had magnified only the glamour of it. He was either naïve enough or ignorant enough to somehow not realize there were negative aspects to such a life. He needn’t be reminded of the positives, for he knew those all too well. He knew such a flamboyant lifestyle held power—power that his very pores exuded like a rich cologne the second he entered a room. Power that would cause women to literally throw themselves at him, wanting desperately to have him, if only for one night.

  And of course, he knew there was money—ridiculous amounts of money that would continually flow in as a result of his upcoming book deal that was going to shatter every financial record for motivational speakers. And since his show was heard in the top media markets nationwide, he was an advertising magnet for sponsors looking to link their products with the man “guaranteed to get you excited and inspired about life!”

  He had known all of this, then had the business sense to link up with the shrewdest, craftiest agent in the business in order to be successful to the point of becoming peerless. One writer for the Los Angeles Times had even gone so far as to write a few months earlier that “Jermaine Hill is giving the motivational speaking world the same jolt that Tiger Woods gave the golf world in 1996 upon turning pro.”