by Daniel Price
Of course it wasn’t without problems. For starters, there was an extraordinary amount of data entry involved, not to mention educational guesswork. In the hands of Ira, it was a precise instrument. In the hands of a sloppy marketing intern, it would be no better than tea leaves. It would require at least two weeks for Ira to train the MGM staff to properly use his Ouija. That part worried me the most. The software, like Ira, was user-hostile.
Still, the numbers were hard to ignore. Keith was so impressed that he was willing to pay seventy-five hundred dollars for a trial run. Our meeting was officially a success, and my part in the project was over for now.
We threw in fifteen more minutes of obligatory shop talk, then I paid for lunch. As the three of us left the restaurant, Keith took my arm.
“Listen, Scott, do you have time to take a ride with me?”
“Sure. You want to drop me off in Marina del Rey?”
“No problem.”
I gave Ira the keys to my car and told him I’d meet him at the Ishtar. Although I didn’t show it, I was excited. Keith wouldn’t have taken me aside like this if he didn’t have PR work for me. And since his wife, Hayley, was a vice president at my old firm, Tate & Associates, that meant the work was too covert for them. I loved covert projects. They always paid big, always under the table. And as ominous as they sounded, most of them were actually nice and simple. Drama-free.
________________
“This goddamn school shooting,” he muttered, tapping his cigarette out the window of his BMW Z8. “I thank my lucky stars that it’s more rap-related than film-related. But it’s still gonna hurt Hannibal when it opens next Friday. The movie’s not exactly an after-school special. If you read the book, you know.”
“I know.” I hadn’t read the book. Just the reviews.
“Man, that little girl picked a hell of a time to go postal.”
“No kidding.” I looked beyond Keith to the sprawling CBS Television City complex. Late one night Gracie and I had bribed a guard to let us sneak onto the set of The Price Is Right. I just wanted to look around. The sex was her idea. She climbed up onstage, got undressed, and told me to come on down.
“The whole entertainment industry’s gonna catch hell for this,” said Keith. “Soon it’ll be easier to market tobacco products than R-rated films.”
“People still smoke, though.”
He laughed and held up his cigarette. “This I’m addicted to. I don’t know anybody who had a fit to see The Mod Squad.”
I smiled. Keith turned left on Fairfax. The infamous Melrose High was just a few blocks north of us. I could feel it. A big black hole, sucking all the conversational air. For over a year it had been the same way with O.J. Simpson’s house, a mere stone’s throw from my apartment.
Keith took a deep drag off his cigarette. “Scott, you know that everything I’m about to say is in complete confidence.”
“Of course.”
“Good. There’s an interesting opportunity for you. An urgent one. That was sort of the real reason I wanted to meet with you. No disrespect to your Cheese thing.”
That only made me tingle. “No. That’s fine. Sounds like quite a jam.”
“It’s not my jam, thank God. It’s a job my wife came across. She would have called you herself but she doesn’t want this coming within a mile of Tate. This is a complete mercenary effort. You get caught, you’re on your own.”
I loved movie people. “What kind of job?”
“It’s a de-publicity effort. The story’s already written and it needs to be unwritten. The problem is that you’ve got to work fast, because it’s coming out soon. Probably sooner than Hannibal.”
“Care to give me details?”
“You ever heard of a guy named Jeremy Sharpe?”
“No.”
“Neither did I. Listen, all you need to know is that he’s a very important man who needs a hero right now. You save his ass, and you’re in the catbird seat. We’re talking an easy six figures and a lot of gratitude from a lot of big names. You interested?”
Jesus. Yes. “Depends. I assume this is short-term, right?”
“The shortest of terms. This’ll keep you busy while you have it, though. So clear your schedule.”
No problem. I had already cleared it for the Fairmont Keoki project. If this hadn’t come along, I would have had to start making cold calls again.
“I’m interested so far. What’s the next step?”
He handed me a hotel business card. L’Ermitage. A swank luxury pad on the outskirts of Beverly Hills. A room number was scribbled on the back.
“Be there at eight tonight. They’ll fill you in on the rest.”
“You don’t have any more information? I usually like to prepare.”
“Don’t worry. My wife already sold you to them. All you need to do is show up and say yes.”
Hayley Jane Trudeau was the last of the old guard at Tate & Associates. In 1998, a London ad agency acquired the firm and put it through a huge turnover, kind of like The Poseidon Adventure. Many jobs were lost. A small band of survivors, including myself and Hayley, made it to safety. Under the incompetent new regime, the job quickly began to suck, kind of like Beyond the Poseidon Adventure. I quit and went freelance. Hayley threw me some crisis work now and then.
“So, Scott, can I tell them you’re coming?”
Fun fact about me: the less bait you put on the hook, the greater the chance Ill bite. I tried not to be predictable, but damn it. I fell for it every time. Hayley knew that, of course.
“I’ll be there.”
Keith threw his cigarette out the window before getting on the 10 West. “Good. I just finished my household chore for the day. Can I ask you a question now?”
“Sure.”
“Why the hell is it called Move My Cheese?”
If you don’t already know, it’s not worth explaining. Trust me. I wanted to call it What If... ? That was the name of a comic book series that Marvel Comics ran in the eighties and nineties. It was a great concept. Each month they took a different superhero and threw in a speculative twist. What if Spider-Man’s uncle had lived? What if Captain America had never been unfrozen? What if Magneto had formed the X-Men? It allowed writers to experiment with classic characters without messing up decades of continuity. Unfortunately, Ira didn’t appreciate the connection. Like I said, it was his baby.
Keith dropped me off at the Marina at 3:15. I went aboard the Ishtar. A yacht wasn’t the best place for a home office. Ira’s workstation took up half the galley. His printer sat on top of his microwave. Wires ran everywhere, and Ira worked in the middle of it all, a fat techno-spider. He loved it, but it wasn’t very friendly for all his visitors, namely me.
“So that went well,” he said, in lieu of hello. “What did he want with you?”
“PR stuff.”
“Specifically?”
“I don’t know yet. You ever heard of Jeremy Sharpe?”
“No.”
“Well, look him up.”
I could always share proprietary knowledge with Ira. He’d never given me a compliment in his life but he would saw off his own legs before double-crossing me. He spun his chair and launched Internet Explorer on his souped-up Dell.
“So you just accepted a job without knowing what it entails,” he blurted.
“I didn’t accept anything yet.” I looked over his shoulder. “I think it’s Sharpe with an E.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He punched it into Google. The list came up. There were only ten items on the page, but they were merely the first of 8,912 hits. You may be wondering how a media-savvy fellow like myself had never heard of this man, who merited so many mentions plus a score of dedicated fan sites. The answer was right there in the titles of those digital shrines. Jeremy Sharpe was just an alter ego. A not-so-secret identity. To his legions of acolytes, he was simply the rapper known as Hunta.
“Shit.”
“Shit indeed,” said Ira. “It was nice knowing you.”
Convenient, right? Too bad my game didn’t have that feature. All I had—all I have now—is hindsight and a whole lot of regret. I can’t go back. But sometimes, just to piss myself off, I play a few rounds of What If...?
— TWO —
RAP
It had burst forth from the chest of disco. The New York City dance clubs, the quintessential social scene of the seventies, phased out cheesy cover bands in favor of the vinyl-spinning disc jockey. Thanks to the invention of the mixer, club DJs were free to creatively fade, scratch and shift to their heart’s content. The reggae “dub” style of Jamaican mix masters gradually introduced a signature prominence of beat over melody. Then came the art of the toast, in which eurhythmic DJs worked up the crowd by shouting to their own groove. Finally, they delegated the microphone duties to an accomplice called the MC.
And thus the rapper was born.
Of course that’s just an oversimplified breakdown from a white guy with Web access. I had to look this stuff up, even though I was only a hop, skip, and bridge away from the cultural genesis while it was happening. What can I say? The street revolution never made its way to my cul-de-sac. In fact, my cracker white ass didn’t get its first peep of the hip or the hop until a fine-looking Deborah Harry (you know, Blondie) got the fabulous Fab 5 Freddy to put the rap in her famous “Rapture.”
Sad? Perhaps. But I at least caught the tail end of hip-hop’s commercial fertilization. It was in 1984 that a young MTV served me my first full platter of rap, the music video for Run DMC’s “Rock Box.” Suddenly the business that began with a seven-inch single from the Sugar Hill Gang became a chart-topping, Adidas-plugging, Aerosmith-reviving crossover bonanza. It was Run’s brother, Russell Simmons, who cofounded Def Jam Records, rap’s first commercial empire. And in 1986 Yo! MTV Raps—hosted by the same Fab 5 Freddy—began channeling a steady infusion of urban groove into the homes and hearts of those who could afford basic cable.
Mostly what we got was the sanitized, glamorized version of the genre. Call it hip-pop. Nobody considered MC Hammer a particularly dangerous influence on our nation’s youth, unless one had a fear of parachute pants. Vanilla Ice was only bad in a musical sense. And Will Smith, the Fresh Prince himself, was a media darling even to parents who just didn’t understand him. Those were the salad days, when a rapper could throw his hands in the air and wave them like he just didn’t care.
But things done changed. Once heavy metal music went the way of the Go-Go’s, the middle- and upper-class youth of America lost their chief means of alarming their elders. Meanwhile, old-school purists be came increasingly dismayed by the vacuous Top 40 “crap rap” that turned an artistic revolution into a corporate cash cow. By the early 1990s, MC Hammer had become a cartoon version of himself, a glittery Stepin Fetchit who danced his way through Kentucky Fried Chicken ads while drugs, crime, and police brutality continued to decimate the boys in the ‘hood. Just as the economic downturn of the seventies and the heroin invasion brought about the hip-hop movement, it was the Reagan era and crack that created a mass demand and supply of hard-core gangsta rap.
So much has been written and said about this genre, from so many ignorant sources, that I’m reluctant to add myself to the mix. The word “gangsta” itself is a flimsy label, as overused and misapplied as “feminist” or “politically correct.” Unlike those, however, gangsta rap is one of those rare scapegoats enjoyed by all. Dan Quayle said it had no place in our society. Newt Gingrich openly encouraged advertisers to pull their spots from radio stations that played it. Even waffling übercentrist Bill Clinton got props from the soccer moms when he condemned Sister Souljah for her seemingly anti-whitey comments in The Washington Post.
Truth be told, I was more than happy to keep my distance, to remain quietly uninformed and nonjudgmental. But with a simple two-word inscription on a mini-videocassette, Annabelle Shane threw the issue onto the nation’s front burner, right along with Jeremy Sharpe, aka Hunta. I had four hours to learn everything I could about the original Bitch Fiend. So much for that comfortable space I’d put between myself and America’s war with the hip-hop nation. I guess I just picked my side, yo.
5
SUBTEXT
The story was out of Annabelle’s hands. Now that the media had a full day to dress up the event, it was purely a network affair.
The CBS Evening News ran a glossy four-minute eulogy of Annabelle Shane: honor student, beloved daughter, tragic symbol of a generation gone out of control. Over at ABC, Peter Jennings took a more macroscopic look at the carnage. What’s happening in our nation’s schools? How did they become so violent? More important, how can you tell if your child is on the edge? NBC picked the fruit off its own tree when it focused on the post-Melrose panic that’s infected the country. Over six hundred high schools sent their kids home early today. Another three hundred were closed entirely. Attendance rates in all remaining classes, kindergarten and up, were at their lowest since Columbine, the Titanic of school shootings. Once again, parents were afraid to drop their kids off at school. As well they should be. According to Ira, the chances of their offspring dying in an auto accident on the way to school were over nine hundred times greater than the odds of being shot by a classmate. The chances of their dying at home were only two hundred times greater. Despite all that, the L.A. Times ran a poignant piece on the rise in home schooling: it might just save your child’s life.
The one calm voice in the storm was Miranda, who spent eight hundred words highlighting the brief lives of the four students murdered by Annabelle. Yes, murdered. Once you read between her lines, it was obvious that Miranda was sick of all the double-standard knee-jerk empathy we adopted for our underage killers. Hey, assholes! This girl took innocent lives!
Yes, but were they all innocent? As usual, it was CNN that had the time to bite into the underripe portion of the story, namely Bryan Edison and his merry band of Bitch Fiends. For today the network was content to simply get the questions out there. The L.A. County sheriff’s office refused to comment on that part of the investigation but at least confirmed that there was an investigation. You had to hand it to the folks at AOL-Time Warner-Turner. They sure knew how to foreshadow. They even threw in a few dozen mentions of Hunta, marking him up as next week’s grillhouse special.
________________
It took considerable effort to make myself late for the meeting. I ended up circling the Beverly Center for twenty minutes before making the final turn into L’Ermitage. There weren’t any quote-hungry reporters waiting outside the hotel, which meant someone had done a good job misleading the press. No doubt a gaggle of newsfolk were holding a camera-light vigil outside the gates of Casa de Hunta, in Silverlake. I pitied his mailman.
I took a deep breath in the elevator, gathering my wits and senses. Confronted by the clear scope of the project, not to mention my inexperience with the rap world, I couldn’t shake that “first day of school” feeling. That was fine as long as I didn’t show it. Being a celebrity’s crisis manager is like being the emperor’s new tailor. You have to earn his absolute confidence if you want him to wear the air you crafted. Still, I wished I had come into the situation knowing more. I’d spent the whole afternoon researching Hunta. Most of what I’d read was spoon-fed crap created by people like me: puff pieces full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I knocked on the door to Suite 511, which opened to a square-headed, bear-size bodyguard. I could have used his stretched black T-shirt as a hammock.
“You Scott Singer?”
“Only if you’re happy to see him.”
He smirked politely, as if he’d never heard that joke before. “ID?”
&nb
sp; I showed him my driver’s license.
“Lift your arms, please.”
He patted me down, just in case I was a pistol-packing publicist.
“Since we’re getting to know each other better,” I said, “what’s your name?”
“Just call me Big Bank.”
Too many bon mots entered my caffeinated mind, all of them in danger of being poorly received. I felt the primal need to prove to this excessively large man that he didn’t scare me, which pretty much proved that he did.
“What’s that in your shirt pocket?”
“Just my Palm Pilot, “ I said, showing him. “Can’t leave home without it.”
The best bodyguards made upward of five hundred dollars a day. Those were the ones who knew how to protect their clients from extortion as well as physical threats. For all Big Bank knew, I was carrying a digital recording device disguised as a Palm Pilot. I turned it on for him.
He nodded. “All right. You’re cool. Come in.”
Another satisfied customer. There was a neat little spy shop on Olympic Boulevard that an associate of mine turned me on to. Some of their gadgets were so fancy that you’d half expect Q to come out of the back room and demonstrate them. My handy toy—$850 after tax—was a digital recording device disguised as a Palm Pilot. It captured seventy minutes of audio on a removable chip the size of an airmail stamp ($92 each). Even better, it had a “Boss” button that displayed a snapshot of a Palm OS desktop, allowing me to trick the sharper tools in the shed, like Big Bank. As soon as I demonstrated it for him, it began recording.