by Daniel Price
Doug Modine was no stranger to the fine art of ass-covering. Right after Lisa had tendered her angry resignation, he solicited written statements from nearly two dozen people who had attended the party. These weren’t sworn depositions. Doug just wanted to get the story down while the facts were still fresh. He put it all in the file.
For the gala, Mean World had rented out one of the grand ballrooms at Le Meridien, a posh hotel on the eastern end of Beverly Hills. Between the staff, the talent, and all their friends and families, there were more than two hundred people present for the buffet.
After dinner Byron “Judge” Rampton spoiled all the kids with gifts, mostly of the PlayStation 2 variety. The employees got generous checks. The artists got car keys. Despite the fact that music sales were stagnant for the first time in two decades, 2000 had been damn good to Mean World. Things were festive. So festive, in fact, that by 9:30 all the mothers in the room got the heads-up from Doug. Soon this party would not be suitable for children.
Although the alcohol consumption had started with dinner, nighttime was the right time for all the homeys in the house to break out the bud. You know what I’m talking about. The bammer, the brown, the buddha, the cheeba, the chronic, the dank, the doobage, the hash, the herb, the homegrown, the ill, the indo, the method, the sess, the sake, the shit, the skunk, the stress, the tabacci, the wacky. Marijuana. What can I say? California knows how to party. For the boys at the label, it wasn’t enough to crack another 40 and smoke some kill. They were also determined to put the “ho” in “ho ho ho.”
So in came the ladies. Dashers and dancers, prancers and vixens. What started out as an evening of reindeer games devolved into one big stag party. You won’t hear me casting judgment. After Keoki Atoll, that’d be the pot calling the kettle bitch.
At the same time, I can spare some empathy for Lisa. Born and raised in Oakland. Accepted, full scholarship, into the San Francisco High School for the Performing Arts. Graduated magna cum laude. Accepted, full scholarship, into UC Santa Barbara. Graduated summa cum laude, with a BA in African American studies and a BFA in Music Theory. Card-carrying member of the ACLU, DNC, Black Women’s Caucus, and (for God’s sake) Mensa. Has published poetry in numerous anthologies and has written a bunch of articles for LA Weekly, covering the hip-hop scene. She’ll be twenty-six in July.
This was no bitch.
As a smart and skillful young woman, Lisa must have had a hard time breathing in all that secondhand smut. Lord only knew what rationale she used to fuel her polite smile. Boys will be boys? All’s fair in rap and war? Ain’t nothing but a gangsta party?
I didn’t know. I didn’t pretend to know. All I had was the testimony of others. The witnesses all seemed to agree that Lisa was having a bad time to begin with. All throughout the night she threw loaded glances at Hunta, enough to trigger a loud spat between him and Simba. No one was particularly alarmed by the squabble. It wasn’t a big deal, one source quipped. They only fight when they’re married.
At 9:50, Simba took Latisha and left. Hunta didn’t go after them. Instead he smoked some blunts (pot-filled cigars, for the uninitiated) and got obnoxious. He felt up Felisha, the label’s very own platinum-selling R&B sex kitten, which ignited a heated argument between Hunta and Felisha’s husband, fellow rapper X/S. The fight was broken up by the Judge.
Hunta eventually settled down…with Lisa. They retreated to a remote couch and had, as witnesses describe it, a quiet but serious looking conversation, complete with lots of touching. At 10:30, the pair set off for quieter pastures. Everybody saw them leave together.
An hour later, Lisa came back. Alone.
Everyone agreed in no uncertain terms that she seemed perfectly fine. Her hair. Her clothes. Her demeanor. All was jake. She spent another ten minutes talking to her immediate boss, producer Kevin Haggerty. All work-related stuff, according to him, although he admitted in his statement that he was too stoned to do anything but nod. At a quarter to midnight, she gave Kevin a kiss on the cheek, wished him a great holiday, and left. Ipso facto.
Wrongo. It occurred to me during my aimless drive that these accounts were a little too consistent and time-accurate, especially for a bunch of people baked out of their muffins. I had gone through my own marijuana phase in college. After two joints I became chronologically challenged. Every time I opened my mouth to say something, I got the nervous sense that I’d been droning on forever. “You know, the other day I—JESUS! How long have I been talking? I’m so sorry! I don’t usually ramble like—JESUS! I’m doing it again!”
Maybe the folks at Mean World held their ganja better than I did. Maybe Lisa wore a huge clock on her back. Or maybe Doug had embellished the stories, which meant there were facts worth hiding.
At 10 a.m., I parked the car in front of a mattress store on Santa Monica Boulevard and called Doug. In L.A. the pay phones were merely decorative nostalgia. Nobody actually used them. From the way passing drivers looked at me, I might as well have been wearing a porkpie hat and riding a penny-farthing bicycle. Like everyone else, of course, I owned a cell phone. I just didn’t want to show up on any of Mean World’s phone logs, should the very worst happen.
Doug sounded half asleep. “Hello?”
“Doug, it’s Scott. I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“A little. Are you using a pay phone?”
“Yeah. Listen, I’ve been reading these statements. I’ve got a bit of a problem.”
“What’s up?”
“Well, I don’t mean to sound like a TV lawyer, but I can’t help you if you’re going to lie to me.”
That woke him up. “Whoa. Wait. What do you mean?”
“I read the reports. You overdid it. Now what are you not telling me?”
“Everything you need to know is in that file.”
“I need to know the whole story. You gave me the airplane version.”
“Look, unless you’re writing her biography, that’s more than enough to—”
“Doug, we don’t have time to wrestle. What are you not telling me?”
Short pause, then a sigh. “You know, I really wish you’d signed those nondisclosure agreements.”
Lawyers. “I understand your concern, but I’ve never screwed over a client in my life. If you don’t want to believe that, fine. At least believe Maxina when she said she could cut the legs off my career. And believe that I believe it. Okay?”
“I believe it.” He laughed, then followed it with a yawn. “Look, you know the expression: if you repeat a lie enough, it becomes the truth. I just made people write it out because I wanted them to get familiar with the slightly altered version. Just in case.”
“It’s a smart plan. So what changed from the original?”
“There’s only one significant difference.” Pause. Sigh. “She left upset. Really upset. But it’s not what you think.”
“Then tell me.”
He carefully measured his words. “She was into Jer. Heavily. It started out as a good working relationship. Not to belittle Kevin but Lisa was the real force behind the album. She’s got serious talent as a producer. Creatively, she and Jer fed off each other. The tracks they cut together are incredible. Really deep, innovative stuff. Nothing like his first album, forgive me for saying. The problem is that, look, when you spend that much time together, when you connect on such a creative level... it affects you. It affected her. Even if she wouldn’t admit it, it was clear to everyone else that she wanted to be the next Mrs. Sharpe.”
“Did she notice the first one was still around?”
“Yes. It was hard to miss her. But Jer and Simba have the kind of relationship that always seems like it’s circling the drain, you know what I mean? They fight all the time. He threatens divorce. She threatens child custody. Then after they’ve screamed themselves blue, they cry, hug, and have sex in the nearest bed. It’s a never-ending drama with them. They’ll never leave each other.”
“I guess Lisa didn’t see it that way.”
“No. A
nd Jer didn’t help. That’s his other problem. He’s a sweet talker. When he’s high and when he’s mad at Simba, he becomes Barry White to whoever smiles at him first. That night at the party, Lisa made her move at just the right time. Whatever words of romance she threw at him, he gave right back with interest. It’s just the way he operates. Now do you see where this is going?”
“Upstairs,” I said.
“Right. Room 1215. They got it on. When it was over, he thanked her for the sex and then called Simba for his nightly apology. Naturally, Lisa didn’t take it well.”
“I’d imagine.”
“Hey, I felt bad for her. We all did. It was cruel for him to use her like that. But everything that happened was entirely consensual. This doesn’t come anywhere near the realm of sexual abuse. You agree?”
“Wholeheartedly.”
“Okay then. The problem is that it’s her word against his. You know, the irony is that if Jeremy really was a Bitch Fiend, he would’ve filmed the whole thing and we’d have hard evidence against her.”
“Wouldn’t that have been nice?” I flipped through the file. “I also notice she has no history of crying wolf.”
“At the moment, no.”
I chuckled darkly. “Sorry. That old trick doesn’t work anymore, my friend. It’ll only backfire.”
He didn’t chuckle back. “Then I can only hope, my friend, that you come up with something better. Any more questions?”
“One. Where’s Hunta’s statement?”
“You just heard it.”
“Okay. But I have to ask. What you just gave me, is it the original version or a slightly altered one?”
Doug frosted over. “Scott, if you don’t want to believe me, that’s fine. But you seem like a smart man, so just follow your logic. There were over three dozen fine-looking women at that party who would have fucked Jeremy for the price of a smile. If Lisa had said no, he would have gone straight to one of them. Or two of them. Or three of them. It’s just that easy. That’s the world he lives in. The downside is that he doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt, even from the people on his own team.”
“Doug, I’m not forming any opinions. I just need to know what’s going on in Lisa’s head.”
Now he chuckled. “Thoughts of revenge and a whole lot of dollar signs. That’s all that matters. I’ll see you at six.”
He hung up. I couldn’t blame him for getting testy. He was right. As far as presumed guilt went, young black rappers had it worse than anyone. They were like flypaper to even the most frivolous charges. As the label’s head lawyer, Doug had to deal with that crap eight days a week.
At the same time, he wasn’t giving Lisa enough credit. If this had just been about greed, she would have simply raised her asking price instead of stopping the negotiations. And if this was just revenge, well, I think Annabelle Shane conveniently took care of that for her.
This was something more. This was a woman who lived, loved, and breathed a style of music that wasn’t exactly known for loving women back. She spent her life forgiving it. Defending it. Even improving it. And in the end it dissed her and dismissed her like she was just another bitch.
Lisa Glassman wanted respect.
Now I knew. And now I had less than eight hours to figure out how to keep her from getting it.
________________
The thinking wasn’t going well, so I made stops for errands. I went back to my favorite West L.A. spy shop and bought an untraceable mobile phone. The device itself was nothing fancy. The seller, however, was quite unique in that he took cash and asked for no ID. I now had four thousand minutes of anonymous call time. For a few hundred dollars more, I could have gotten the Drug Dealer Special. It had a microchip inside that made it virtually impossible for the feds to monitor or track by location. I politely declined. Nothing like a little perspective to make me feel better about my own line of work.
I kept driving, but I wasn’t getting any ideas. Stacking the deck against Lisa was impossible if she was holding all the cards. Even the dreaded smear campaign wasn’t a viable option. You couldn’t just pull dirt out of thin air. You had to take an actual smudge from the person’s past and turn it into an oil spill. Lisa was spotless, and there was nothing the news loved more than a spotless victim.
That was the other problem. As far as the press was concerned, it was always more interesting to favor the accuser over the accused, especially when the accused is a celebrity, and especially when he’s a celebrity in the middle of another hot controversy. The slightest allegation from an other woman, any woman, would make Lisa’s case ten times stronger. There would be no shortage of former bedroom buddies willing to hang Hunta out to dry in exchange for a few minutes in the spotlight.
Shit.
I made my next errand a comic-book run. Since I was near Culver City, I stopped at Comics Ink, a small but friendly store that was short on back issues but always well stocked in recent releases. I was a sucker for the Marvel mutant titles. When I started collecting back in the early 1980s, there was only one monthly X-Men comic: The Uncanny X-Men. In 1985 it spun off into The New Mutants, a team of junior X-Men, and then X- Factor, a team of senior X-Men. Seeing substantial profits thanks to fools like me, Marvel Comics exploded the franchise to a ridiculous extent. Currently gracing the stands were Uncanny X-Men, Ultimate X-Men, X-Men Forever, X-Men Unlimited, X-Men: The Hidden Years, X-Force, X-Man, Mutant X, Generation X, and plain old adjectiveless X-Men, which would soon be rechristened as New X- Men and then joined by X-Treme X-Men. The fact that I could keep track of this made me wonder how I ever got laid at all.
There were over three dozen fine-looking women at that party who would have fucked Jeremy for the price if a smile.
There was an idea stuck in the back of my mind, like a caraway seed. It was maddening because I could feel the shape of it, enough to know that it was something good. There was a solution. There was a way to thwart Lisa’s attack without even having to draw blood. I just couldn’t shake it loose.
I bought my comics, stopped for a California Roll, and then continued to amble about town. The clock was down to five and a half hours, and my teasingly brilliant idea was only getting more elusive.
There was something in Tupac’s rape case, something I needed to know. I drove straight home and got back on the laptop. Thanks to Nexis and a scandal-hungry media, I had access to a ton of articles that detailed Ayanna Jackson’s accusations against the great but controversial artist known as Tupac Amaru Shakur.
She’d met him at Nell’s, a downtown New York nightclub. They dirty-danced. They kissed. She fellated him right there on the dance floor, according to Tupac and his character witnesses. Frankly, that part smelled a little like spin to me, the kind of discrediting tactic a desperate and uncreative lawyer would use. Then again, I wasn’t part of that world. I didn’t personally know any women that friendly, but it wasn’t hard to believe that a man who looked and rapped like Tupac did.
What was established is that they had sex later that night in his hotel room. That ended fine. The trouble happened four days later, when she returned to pick up some of her belongings. Still mutually fond of each other, they went back in the bedroom. She gave him a massage. They started kissing. And then three of Tupac’s crew entered and turned it into a party.
“Don’t worry,” Tupac reportedly said to her. “These are my brothers and they ain’t gonna hurt you. We do everything together.”
Proving his point, they fondled her, tore off her underwear, and sodomized her. At some point during all this, Tupac left to chill on the couch in the other room. His version was that she didn’t say a word in protest. Her version was that she said plenty, including the golden word “no.” She certainly had some choice phrases afterward, when she cried and screamed at Tupac: “How could you do this to me? I came here to see you! I can’t believe you did this to me!”
Tupac’s response, per Ayanna: “I don’t got time for this shit! Get this bitch out of here!”
; Whether he said it or not, she was clearly looking for vengeance.
Within hours, the police, the press, and Tupac’s publicist were in the hotel lobby, along with Ayanna. She incriminated Tupac and his manager, Charles “Man Man” Fuller. Both were cuffed and led away to police cars.
En route, Tupac held his head up high to the paparazzi crowd. “I’m young, black... I’m making money and they can’t stop me,” he declared. “They can’t find a way to make me dirty, and I’m clean.”
Not according to the jury, who saw Tupac as the serpent in this tale. Although he and Fuller beat the rape and sodomy charges, they were convicted on three counts each of first-degree sexual abuse. The third accomplice pleaded down to a misdemeanor, and the fourth was never charged.
Tupac was sentenced to four and a half years at Rikers Island. He ended up serving eleven and a half months, until he was sprung on a $1.4 million bond posted by Suge Knight. Thus began Tupac’s infamous stint with Death Row Records, not to mention the last year of his life.
All along he proclaimed his own innocence, maintaining—like Hunta—that this was a setup. Shortly before the verdict, he was interviewed by Vibe journalist Kevin Powell. “It was all right with that police thing [in Atlanta],” he said. “But this rape shit... it kills me. ‘Cuz that ain’t me.”
“I love black women,” he told Powell. “It has made me love them more because there are black women who ain’t trippin’ off this. But it’s made me feel real about what I said in the beginning. There are sisters and there’s bitches.”
It’s obvious which category he put Ayanna in. After that interview was published, she defended herself in a letter to Vibe. Her closing: “Tupac knows exactly what he did to me. I admit I did not make the wisest decisions, but I did not deserve to be gang-raped.”
Fade out. Credits. Seven and a half years later, there I was, deeply rooted in her side of the tale. With just a tiny sliver of the truth, simplified and amplified for my reading enjoyment, I had no trouble believing her. It would have taken a mountain of direct conflicting evidence to tip my scales in Tupac’s favor. Was it biased on my part? Sure. Was it fair? Nope. But it was a natural reaction. Like everyone else, I’d been conditioned to assume the worst of people, particularly those who had the nerve to obtain more money, power, and sex than me.