Slick

by Daniel Price

  “You ain’t just saying that?”

  I lowered my fork. “Sweetheart, haven’t I convinced you by now that I’m the real deal?”

  Harmony laughed. “No.”

  “Well, then I’ll just have to keep trying. In the meantime...” I raised my water glass. “A toast.”

  With a soft smile, she lifted her own glass. “To what?”

  “To the sweet smell of success.”

  “I hear that.”

  We clinked glasses, drank our water, and got back to our food.

  I noticed a small flock of people gathering in the bar, all looking up at the hanging television set. Though I couldn’t hear it, I saw a press conference fill the screen, garnished by a big, bold breaking news overlay.

  Unless a plane had crashed, it was safe for me to assume that the dam finally broke with the Bitch Fiend sex tape. By late afternoon, the nation would be flooded with all-new speculation and implications. By dinner time, the parents and critics and pundits and cynics would finally unite in their most delicious conviction: that Annabelle Shane was a victim of rap.

  “Oh boy,” I said. “Here we go.”

  Harmony turned around. “Here we go with what?”

  I thought about Lisa Glassman. I never met the woman and she never met me, but we were now officially locked in a frantic race to get to the media first. God help us if she won.

  “Here we go with you,” I said, before taking a good long drink.

  12

  IT'S ON

  On Tuesday, the first shot was fired.

  At 8:30 a.m., a lanky young courier named Mick (not his real name) stepped into the antiseptic clerk’s office of the Los Angeles Superior Court Building, Central District, and joined one of the many lines. Once he advanced close enough to the service wall, he caught the knowing eye of Jimmie (not her real name), who waved him over to an empty window.

  After exchanging their innocuous friendly greetings, Mick presented Jimmie with a stack of papers for filing. Among those in the pile: Judicial Form CH-100, “Petition for Injunction Prohibiting Harassment”; Judicial Form CH-110, “Response to Petition for Injunction Prohibiting Harassment”; and Judicial Form 982(a)(5.1), “Notice of Entry of Dismissal and Proof of Service.”

  Now a normal clerk would question the completeness of this package. It would be like filing a birth certificate, marriage certificate, and death certificate all at once for the same person. Fortunately, Jimmie wasn’t a normal clerk. Once Mick presented a different stack of papers (the smaller, greener kind), Jimmie put her stamp on each and every form. It wasn’t a normal stamp either. Like Marty McFly’s famous DeLorean, it was meticulously calibrated to go back in time.

  Thus, officially, the first shot was fired on Thursday, January 4, a full four weeks ago. That was when Harmony Prince filed for a temporary restraining order against Jeremy Sharpe. So much for their retroactive friendship. It just hit a retroactive skid.

  ________________

  “Publicity is...”

  On Monday, while the news of the Bitch Fiend sex tape continued to break over the nation’s collective head, I stretched out on my couch and bounced a tennis ball off the ceiling. Like a therapist, Madison watched me from the easy chair, notepad in hand. Her long blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. She wore a man’s oxford, tucked into pressed black slacks. She was adorable. You’d think this was her first day at Charles Schwab.

  “Okay. Let me ask you this. How many planets are there in our solar system?”

  “Nine,” she said, humoring me.

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know for sure. It’s just what I’ve been taught.”

  “But you heard it from more than one source, right?”

  “Right.”

  “How do you know?”

  She tilted her head. “What do you mean?”

  “You got it from your teachers. Where did they get it from? Probably their textbooks. Where did the textbooks get it from? Probably other textbooks. This information has been passed on and on since...shit, maybe Galileo started it. I don’t know. I’m not accusing him of lying. All I’m saying is that there’s a big sky out there. When’s the last time anyone checked for themselves?”

  The ball bounced off the arm of the couch and rolled away. I looked to Madison. I wasn’t exactly blowing her mind.

  I sat up and grabbed the remote. “All right. Let’s bring this back to earth.”

  “What are we doing?”

  “You are going to watch the news,” I said, “and I am going to ruin it for you.”

  ________________

  On Tuesday, the first hint was dropped.

  Andy Cronin returned from lunch to find a thin white envelope on his office chair. It had been delivered via messenger from an unidentified source. He sat down and examined the contents.

  Nestled between two pieces of card stock was a single sheet of inkjet paper. Printed on the paper was a slightly pixelated photo of a handsome young black man who by now was easy to recognize. From an ornate living room, he innocuously smiled with some pretty little cupcake. Her head had been circled in red marker.

  It wasn’t until Andy shook the envelope that a slip of paper the size of a bookmark fluttered down to his desk. The typeface was big and bold.

  Andy. This woman’s name is Harmony Prince. She’s about to become very important. If you hurry, maybe you’ll get to her first. Good luck.

  It was the opinion of more than one person that Andy and I were cloned from the same German DNA. We were both six and a half feet tall, quietly brainy, emotionally distant, and annoyingly pragmatic. Unlike me, Andy was a journalist with the Associated Press. Unlike Miranda, Andy had no pretense of a higher purpose. He knew he was being fed by someone with an agenda, most likely nefarious. He didn’t care. If it had to do with Hunta, it was worth looking into.

  On the back of the slip were two phone numbers: one for Jay McMahon, the other for Sheila Yorn. I figured at least one of them would be willing to tell Andy all about this mystery woman. Of course, neither would admit to sending the envelope, since they hadn’t. Nor would they explain why Harmony Prince was about to become very important, since they couldn’t. Like everyone else, they’d have to read about it in the paper. Even Andy. In truth, he wasn’t meant to get to Harmony first. But if he played his cards right, he’d have her whole dramatic backstory ready, right when the Bitch demanded it.

  ________________

  “My main function,” I told Madison, “is to influence the news. Their main function is to catch the collective eye of a demographically desirable audience and hold it there long enough to show them the advertisements. The only way to support my function is to support their function. And the only way to do that is to understand how they operate.”

  She sat next to me on the couch, taking copious notes. I grabbed her notebook and chucked it.

  “Hey.”

  “Don’t write,” I said. “Just watch. What do you see on TV?”

  “The local news.”

  “What are they covering?”

  “I don’t know. You keep talking over them.”

  I muted the television. “Don’t listen. Just watch. What do you see?”

  “A photo of that guy from Melrose. What’s his name? The Bitch Fiend.”

  “Bryan Edison,” I said.

  “Right. Him.”

  “And who are they showing now?” I asked.

  “Annabelle Shane. I’m so sick of hearing about her. Did you know at my school—”

  “Whoa, whoa. Wait. Shut up. Did you notice any difference between the way they were just shown?”

  Madison gently grimaced. “Uh, I guess not.”

  “When they flashed that picture of Bryan, it was an extreme close up. Enough to see the pores on his nose. He wasn’t smiling. And there was some weird darkness around the edges, making him look even more sinister. With Annabelle, it was just the opposite. The shot they used of her was bright and smiley and a little bit blurry, giv
ing her this distant and angelic quality. And if you think that’s a fluke, wait and watch.”

  I flipped to another local newscast. Within seconds, images of Bryan and Annabelle were presented again. Different photos. Same motif.

  “You see?”

  She saw. “Jesus.”

  “Yup. It used to be old-school journalists who produced and edited the news. Now they’ve all been replaced by these Gen-X vid kids. They work cheap, they work fast, and they know all the great film-school techniques to spice up the drama.”

  Madison took the remote out of my hand and did her own surfing. “Damn. I can’t believe I never noticed this before.”

  “It’s almost impossible to catch on your own, especially with the sound on.”

  “Huh. That’s probably why my mom never watches TV.”

  I thought about it. “Oh yeah. That’s right. I guess she would see stuff like this all the time. That’s kind of cool.”

  “My mother’s the polar opposite of cool. Wait! There it is again! Holy shit! Does everyone do this?”

  “Everyone who wants to stay in business.”

  “But why does it work?”

  I shrugged. “If I knew that, I’d be in advertising.”

  “Come on.”

  “It’s human nature. We like a good distraction. The more extreme, the better. Not only that, but most of us are so overwhelmed by the complexities of modern life that we’re secretly relieved when the newscasts squeeze reality into a familiar storytelling construct. Don’t just give us information. Tell us a tale. Who’s the victim? Who’s the villain? How does it end? What’s the moral? Of course if it’s presented too dramatically, we can’t accept it as reality anymore and we turn away. That’s why they have to be subtle. It’s really not easy to please us.”

  From her end of the couch, Madison beamed me a goofy smile. “What?”

  “Will you be my daddy?”

  “Shut up.”

  She went back to the TV, which now gave us a five-second music video clip of a do-ragged Hunta at his most sexually menacing. Even I got scared of him.

  “Wow,” she said. “I caught that one. You know, it’s kind of funny that the news is the only place you can see or hear ‘Bitch Fiend’ now. It’s like contraband everywhere else.”

  “I’ve never heard the song.”

  “It’s lame. It’s just Hunta strutting around, bragging about his big dick and all the different women he’s bagged. It only got popular because it has a good beat and the video shows lots of skin. I can’t believe it would corrupt or inspire anybody.”

  “That’s the debate,” I said.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think the press is going to screw Hunta into the ground.”

  “So if you were his publicist, what would you do?”

  “If I were his publicist,” I replied, “I’d start screwing back.”

  ________________

  On Tuesday, we made some noise.

  As the sun set over the Pacific, Gail Steiner speed-walked the perimeter of the Griffith Park Observatory. She had returned to her beat at the Los Angeles Times last week, after eight months of maternity leave. Nobody could picture this rocket of a woman doing the domestic thing. She’d probably spent the whole time buzzing furiously around the house, scorching the walls with her afterburn. Well, now it was her husband’s turn to be the latchkey parent. She was back out in the open, doing what she loved.

  Eventually, she pegged her new contact. It was hard to miss him. Rocket-of-a-Woman, meet Tank-of-a-Man.

  “Calvin?” she asked.

  He paused before answering. “Yup.”

  “Hi. I’m Gail. It’s great to meet you. How you holding up?”

  “Could be better.”

  “I know. Listen, like I said on the phone, you have nothing to worry about. I’ll go to jail before I give up your name. You’re totally safe with me. Okay?”

  That was essentially what I had told him, but Big Bank was more afraid of the rumors. If any of his comrades caught him leaking to the press, his reputation would be ruined. I had assured him the odds of that happening were as slim as he wasn’t.

  “And by the way,” she lied, “you’re doing a good thing by talking to me.”

  “Doesn’t feel that way.”

  “I know. It’s never easy. But if Hunta’s doing something wrong—”

  “Not something,” he corrected. “Someone.”

  Surely, Gail was beginning to realize the jackpot she had won. Too bad I couldn’t take credit for it. I would have had a chit with her the size of Ohio.

  “Calvin,” she said, slowly reaching into her purse or jacket, “I just want you to know before we even begin that I’m going to be recording this. Nobody’s going to hear this tape but me. I promise. Is that okay?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  Of course Big Bank had been recording from the moment she arrived. His tape would be heard by several of us, including Hunta. Big Bank had insisted on it. There was already a big cloud of mistrust inside this operation, most of it centered over me. Wisely, he wanted to keep his own skies clear.

  “All right,” said Gail. “It’s on. You ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what’s the story?”

  “You want a story? I’ll tell you a story. It’s all about a woman.”

  On tape, I could practically hear Gail smile. “What’s her name?”

  ________________

  Your name is Harmony Prince, and these are the facts as you recall them. On Saturday, March 11, 2000, you attended an open dance audition sponsored by Mean World Records. You succeeded in landing a small role in one of their videos (“Chocolate Ho-Ho”).

  On April 5 and 6, you participated in the video shoot at a production studio in Glendale. This was when you first met Jeremy Sharpe, aka Hunta. He didn’t seem to take any special interest in you until he noticed the scar on your right thigh. When he asked you how you got it, you told him of your fateful “run-in” with the Los Angeles Police. From that point he seemed very interested in you. He conversed with you as much as his schedule allowed. At the end of the second day, you and he exchanged phone numbers. He promised he would use you for his upcoming video (“Bitch Fiend”), but the shoot came and went without you even knowing.

  But at least you made it into Mean World’s database of fine young things. At least once a month you received a mailed invitation for some sort of bash. You ended up attending two of them: a Fourth of July barbecue and a November tenth gala to celebrate Huntaway going platinum. Both shindigs were held at the swank estate of Byron “Judge” Rampton. Both times you spent at least an hour talking to Jeremy. You were never completely alone with him; nor did he ever try to get you alone. At the November tenth event, you noticed he spent a lot of time touching you, but you didn’t take it as an overt sexual gesture, especially since he was stoned out of his mind and touching everyone.

  Then came the Christmas party.

  This time you weren’t invited, you were hired. On December 11, Marjorie Bunce, the Mean World publicist/event planner, offered you four hundred dollars to grace the label with your presence. The terms were simple. Put on sexy hip-hop elf-wear. Dance from ten to midnight. Mingle from midnight to two. Then stay or leave as you see fit. At a hundred dollars an hour, the job was a holiday miracle. You would have done it for the buffet.

  On Friday, December 15, your roommate Daryl “B-Naste” Lynch dropped you off at Le Meridien Hotel at 9:20 P.M. Upon checking in with Ms. Bunce, you joined your fellow dancers in the designated changing room. By 9:50 you and the rest of the elves were assembled in two-by-two formation by the main door to the ballroom. Five minutes later, you got your entrance cue.

  Already things seemed off with this party. You’ve seen inebriated people, of course. You’ve even seen inebriated Mean World people. But tonight the revelers seemed really out of control. Chairs were being thrown. Bottles broken. Women groped.

  Jeremy was hardly above the fray. Fr
om your dancing spot, you watched him cup the breast of R&B sensation Felisha, immediately triggering a brawl with her husband. By the time you looked back, he was arguing with the Judge. You’d never seen him so crazy before. You figured it had something to do with his wife.

  At 10:20, he approached you with a wide neon grin. You even smiled as he held you by the hips and danced with you for a minute or two. Once the song ended, he asked you to come sit with him on a nearby couch.

  You can’t, you told him. You’re supposed to dance until midnight.

  He waved it off. “Naw, fuck that shit. Nobody care. Come on.”

  You can’t....

  “Come on, Harmony. I ain’t seen you in months. Come talk to me.”

  Actually, it had only been a month. But you were flattered that even in his zonked-out state, he remembered your name. You joined him on the couch, well in view of at least a dozen others.

  For Jeremy, catching up was a one-way street. Over the next fifteen minutes, he buried you under a mountain of personal angst. His father still didn’t respect him, despite his success. His wife resented him because of his success. His friends kept using him for his money. The Judge kept confusing him out of his money. And his critics kept bashing him, either for trying too hard to sound like Tupac or for not trying hard enough. He was being hit from all sides and nobody understood him.

  All along, you listened and nodded like the well-trained hostess you were, increasingly aware of the strong hands moving up and down your arms, then your legs. Admittedly, you didn’t mind. For five nights a week, you were hit up, talked up, felt up by toads. By every comparative standard, Jeremy was a prince. He was all sweet and sad and funny, and damn, the way he looked at you. The way he looked! By the time he said “Let’s get out of here,” at 10:30, you were under his spell.

  It wasn’t until he returned from the concierge desk, hotel key in hand, that you came to your senses. You knew what he wanted. How the hell were you going to tell him? How the hell could you—a fawning, near-naked, cheap-flesh party elf—explain to him that you were saving yourself for marriage?