by Daniel Price
That was your dilemma as you quietly rode up the elevator, as he kissed your neck and whispered into your ear that he hasn’t stopped thinking about you since the day he met you (which was crap, of course, but such wonderful crap). As soon as the elevator opened, you wanted to run, but still you followed him, all the way to the door of Room 1215.
At last, you cracked. You can’t, you told him. You can’t do what he wants you to do. In broken, clumsy phrases, you explained the whole abstinence thing. He was more stunned than anything else.
“Hold up. Wait. You saying you a virgin?”
No. You never said that.
“So this a religious thing.”
You never said that either, but it was easier just to nod your head and go for the simple story. You looked away. You cried. You apologized for being so stupid. But then his hand clasped your shoulder, and he gently turned you around. Suddenly he was more sober than you’d ever seen him before.
“Hey, it’s all cool,” he assured you. “It ain’t about that.”
You wiped your eyes. Really?
“I swear,” he said. “I just wanted to, you know, be with you. There are lots of ways I can be with you. Shit, we could lie down and talk. I don’t care. Right now I just want to be with someone who ain’t using me or judging me. Look, just hide out with me. Just for a little while. Please?”
Once again he managed to extinguish all your fears. Right there in the hallway, he held you close and stroked your hair. As you nuzzled against his strong chest, you thought you’d found a true prince indeed. You teased yourself with a sudden crazy vision of the future, one in which he leaves that shrew wife of his, marries you, and takes you all around the world. You compiled a list of things you would do with him in that hotel room, being the sweet guy he is and looking the way he does. Jesus. You’re only human.
At 10:45, in Room 1215, you and Jeremy kissed. You kicked off your pointy elf shoes. You fell into the bed. You began to walk him through your list. It was a good list.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough for Jeremy. He was still drunk. Still stoned. Still strong. As soon as you felt what he was doing—
“Stop. Please.”
________________
On Tuesday, it became official: I wasn’t going to heaven.
At 11 a.m., I pulled the car over on Ocean Park Boulevard, in Santa Monica. I had taken Harmony on a long and winding trek from her apartment in Venice to the downtown L.A. skyline, through the wide and airy streets of Pasadena, and then all the way back to the shore. The real journey was happening inside the car, as I walked her through a dark and stormy narrative. For the most part, she listened well. It wasn’t until the last few details that she turned to face the window. She didn’t make a sound. I didn’t even realize she was crying until she asked me to stop.
“I didn’t mean stop the car,” she said. “I just meant stop talking.”
“You want me to keep driving?”
“Yeah.”
I put us back on the road. I didn’t want to coach her in public for this very reason. There was simply no way I could feed her her story with out opening up old wounds.
Still, this was a bold new low for me. At that moment I was able to float outside my body, through the fourth wall, and into the seated audience that was watching the movie version of this. I could look around and see the bitter expressions they leveled at the big-screen me. I was the asshole, the villain of the story. And no matter what I did or said, no matter how good my intentions were, the audience wouldn’t be happy until I got my comeuppance, hopefully at Harmony’s hands.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and left it at that.
Eventually, she swapped her Kleenex for a Pall Mall, then punched in my car’s cigarette lighter. By the time it popped back out, she had regained herself.
“He didn’t do none of that shit,” she said, lighting up.
“I know.”
“He didn’t even know who the hell I was. He walked right by me. A couple times. Went straight to the couch with some other woman.”
I knew that too.
“I can’t tell what’s crazier,” she added. “The fact that you’re doing this to him or the fact that he’s paying you to do this to him.”
At the moment, I was more concerned with what I was doing to her. As soon as the coast was clear, I made a sharp U-turn.
Harmony clutched her door handle. “Whoa. What you doing?”
Distracting you. “Taking you to the airport.”
“Why?”
“Because this is hard work. We need a vacation. You and I need to get out of this city.”
She laughed smoke at me. “Shut up.”
“I’m serious. I’ll pay for the whole thing. Where do you want to go? Paris? London? Rome?”
“You’re crazy.”
“Why am I crazy?”
“For starters, what makes you think I want to go anywhere with you?”
“All right,” I said with feigned umbrage. “If that’s the way you feel about it, we’ll take separate trips. I’m going to Madrid. What’s your pleasure?”
“Forget it.”
“Come on. If you could go anywhere, where would it be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Fine,” I declared. “I’ll just give you my American Express card. You can go wherever you want. Just make sure to come back by the twelfth.”
Harmony crossed her arms and eyed me. I caught her gaze. “What?”
“You ain’t serious about this.”
“No.”
She rolled her eyes. “I figured you was just teasing me.”
“Hey, the only thing I’m teasing you with is your future.”
“My future,” she parroted skeptically.
“Your near future. When this is all over and you get your advance money from the book deal, the movie rights, and all that, you’re going to go to LAX. You’re going to buy a whole book of plane tickets, and then you’re going to hit every corner of the world. How does that sound?”
I was sure it sounded great, but judging from her dour expression, Harmony wasn’t in the mood for the soft sell. I toned down my zeal.
“Look, I don’t expect you to believe me, hon, but there’ll be a point when this whole crazy whirlwind comes and goes and you’ll see that you’re still standing. You’ll see all these great opportunities you’ve never had before, just lying at your feet. And that’s when you’ll realize that all this hard work, all this drama, all this time with me, was actually worth it. I promise.
“Until then,” I added with a shrug, “I don’t know. If it helps, just try to picture the world. Because I’m going to put you all over it. Even if I have to drive you myself.”
If I affected her, she didn’t show it. She continued to stare out the window between wisps of her smoke. After a few miles of silence, I brought us onto the 405 South.
“We still going to the airport?” she asked.
“If you want to, sure.”
“Actually, I wouldn’t mind. I never been there. I lived in Inglewood almost my whole life and I ain’t never been to the airport.”
“Your wish is my command.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her loosen up. I shouldn’t baby her so much. She was strong. Much stronger than me. If I had suffered even a fraction of her ordeals, I’d be broken china. Useless. No wonder the audience liked her better. I liked her better.
She threw out her cigarette, grabbed a new one, then punched in my lighter. By the time it popped back out, she was ready to work.
“So after the Christmas party, what did I do?”
________________
“Obviously, she wouldn’t go to the police,” I’d said, sixteen hours earlier. “Not after what they put her through.”
From the driver’s seat, Doug concurred. “That’s good. People will buy that.”
If they ever handed out awards for national media hoaxes (call them the Shammys), and I won for the Harmony Prince story, the very firs
t person I’d thank at the podium would be Doug Modine. He picked up the slack everywhere I dropped it. I’d spent so much energy casting, courting, and grooming Harmony that I had barely spent an ounce of thought on who we’d get to play her lawyer.
Once again Doug came through. On Monday evening he picked me up and drove us to our 7:30 meeting at 3345 Wilshire, in the heart of the Koreatown district. There on the eleventh floor, nestled between an Asian banking firm and a nonprofit housing organization, was the law office of A. Richard Lever.
“You’ll like this guy,” Doug assured me. “He’s a real pistol.”
“As long as he fires on our command.”
When it came to celebrity lawsuits, Alonso Lever was the rare kind of attack dog who was all bite and no bark. Over the past six years, he’d shepherded over one hundred civil actions against the rich and infamous. Palimony. Paternity. Assault. Abuse. Harassment. You name the claim, he had the claimant. And he chose his plaintiffs well. They were virtually all pretty young black and Hispanic women from the wrong side of the tracks and the right side of the law. They were unimpeachable, especially compared to those scurrilous rappers and athletes who threw their id around like wrecking balls.
Alonso only played with stacked decks, and it served him well. Out of those hundred or so cases, he only had to step into the courtroom twice. His motif was to go for the quick money. His clients loved the nearly instant cash results. His opponents loved the all-encompassing gag orders that came with each settlement. No wonder I’d never heard of him. He rarely left a mess to clean up.
After the millennium, however, his reputation as a celebrity juicer began to slide. Word got out among his opponents that he was settling way too quickly, taking whatever number you threw at him and then calling it a day. Doug had found this out for himself early last year, when one of Alonso’s disenfranchised clients sued Mean World rapper Hitchy (then known as Hit-G) for defaming her in one of his songs.
“I knew he would never let it go to trial,” Doug told me. “So already I had the upper hand. But when I offered sixty thousand, he made the most perfunctory attempt to raise it and then caved. I thought he was kidding at first. I mean, I could have handed him a check right then and there for two hundred grand.”
“Didn’t he consult his client first?”
“Of course,” he said. “But like most of his plaintiffs, she had a ninth grade education and a home in the projects. She didn’t know any better. He should have.”
“Sounds like he’s all burnt out. How old is he?”
“Thirty-five. Just like us.”
“Wow,” I said, chuckling. “I like this guy already.”
________________
Alonso had a soft spot for me as well.
“In my days,” he declared with the eloquence of a man at the pulpit, “I have met some mad geniuses, and I have met some reckless fools. But I must say that you, Mr. Singer, are the very first person I would characterize as a reckless genius, and I mean that in the strictest complimentary sense.”
“Call me whatever you want,” I responded. “Call me a mad fool. Just don’t call me Mr. Singer. I have an intern, and even she doesn’t call me that.”
With droll humor, he raised his palms. “Hey, whatever your intern calls you in private is not my business.”
He was a tall, thin reed of a man, with narrow shoulders, small eyes, and thick-rimmed glasses. He had a majestic presence, to be sure, but there was an underlying goofiness to him. He was Malcolm X by way of Urkel. Strangely, the dichotomy worked on him. He came off as strong but personable. Media-wise, he’d go together with Harmony like chicken and waffles.
Alonso’s staff was gone for the evening. It was just the three of us in his expansive office, which seemed to have been assembled straight from the official Law Firm Starter Kit: black leather couches, polished marble floors, copperplate text engravings. He even had a token brass scale of justice on his desk. I fidgeted with it during the first half hour of the meeting, which was all legal finery and foofaraw. Doug had dropped Alonso in a sea of nondisclosure agreements, and Alonso took his own sweet time getting back to shore. Maxina would have rolled her eyes with me. We both knew that in a dirty game like this, a secrecy clause was about as reliable as a fishnet condom. But if it made the lawyers feel better, fine.
Then it was my turn to play. It took twenty minutes to walk Alonso through my elaborate maze. He was enthralled at every turn. Soon after he praised my reckless ingenuity (and joked that I was having inappropriate relations with Madison), he sat on the edge of his desk and let out a ponderous exhale.
“For the moment, gentlemen, let us attack the scenario as if this woman had approached me on her own. Now when, exactly, would this be?”
“The third week of December,” I answered. “Say the twentieth.”
Alonso nodded and scribbled into last year’s calendar. “All right. Obviously I would take her case on contingency, without hesitation, but I wouldn’t make my move until after the holidays. The first thing I’d do in January is submit a CH-100 for a temporary civil restraining order. Just as an icebreaker. I prefer to file on a Thursday so the defendant gets served on a Friday and worries about it all weekend.”
“Okay,” Doug replied. “That’s good. I would have to submit a CH-110 response, with declaration, and then move to postpone the hearing.”
“Relax,” said Alonso. “There wouldn’t be any hearing. My next step would be to call you after the weekend and offer to withdraw the TRO in exchange for a quick, quiet face-to-face.”
Now things were getting fun. I sat back and watched as the lawyers continued their volley.
“Naturally, I’d accept that,” said Doug, a little wary. “But I’d try to push that meeting back, too.”
“I would only give you until the Friday the twelfth. I assume you’d meet me then.”
Doug nodded. “Of course. But I wouldn’t exactly bring the checkbook.”
“Of course not. Not yet, anyway. But if I found my client to be a truly compelling presence—”
“She is,” I added.
“—I’d bring her to this meeting and have her tell you her story herself. Just to give you a sense of how she’d look on Dateline.”
Now it was Doug’s turn to act smarmy. “That wouldn’t faze me. I’d just bring in Jeremy’s wife to impeach the testimony. Just to give you a sense of how she’d look in court.”
Ooh, good move. Alonso chewed on that one.
“Hmm. You didn’t tell me the defendant was married. I assume then that his wife is quite...”
“She is,” I added.
Doug agreed. “She looks better, speaks better, plays better. If she painted Harmony as a gold-digging stalker, any jury would buy it.”
“That’s debatable. And also moot. You’d never let it go to trial.”
“I would before you would. No offense, Alonso, but you do have a reputation.”
Alonso didn’t seem offended at all, but he was stymied.
“What we have here, Scott, is a small conundrum. At this point my next move would be to leak the hints of the story to a reporter.”
I shook my head. “Can’t do that.”
He sighed. “I figured. Backdating paperwork is easy. Backdating a press leak is not. It would seem then that my hands are somewhat tied.”
I stood up. “Look, we have some flexibility here. Is it unrealistic to say that the two of you continued playing chicken for the next couple of weeks, all the way to February?”
The lawyers traded glances. Alonso shrugged. “I suppose not. If he puts up a decent stonewall.”
Doug nodded. “Right. Let’s assume I did.”
“But why the delay?” Alonso asked me. “Why February?”
“Check the news lately?”
Now he got it. “Ahhh. The Melrose tragedy. Of course.” He simpered at Doug. “No offense, but I would have your fat ass in a sling, wouldn’t I?”
The counsel prepared their back-and-forth paperwork, an eas
y but time-consuming process. I passed away the hours on Alonso’s jurassic PC, typing up the first draft of our official new continuity. Naturally it was an unpleasant task to dream up the details of the incident in Room 1215. Believe me, if I could truly rewrite history, I’d erase all the terrible traumas from Harmony’s life instead of keying in a new one. The story was a slap in the face to Hunta as well. But in the end, it was just a story. It never happened. And as sure as the main characters knew it, both villain and victim, the world would know too. Eventually.
By the stroke of midnight, the whole legal mini-drama had been collected into one big messenger envelope. Poor Doug was tired and sweat-stained. The jacket and bow tie had come off hours ago, and his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. Alonso, by contrast, never once compromised his crisp three-piece ensemble. He looked unnaturally fresh and spry for a man who’d pulled a double workday.
“Well,” he said, kicking back in his chair, “I certainly look forward to meeting this young lady.”
“Tomorrow afternoon,” I told him, “I’m handing her off to you.”
He chuckled. “That must make you as nervous as a new mother.”
It did, and then some. But unlike the Judge, I issued my threats with diplomacy.
“Ordinarily it would, Alonso, but the nice thing about this operation is that we’ve established a system of checks and balances. I’ve got Maxina Howard looking over my shoulder, keeping me honest—”
“And I’ve got you,” he surmised.
“You’ve got me and Maxina,” I corrected.
Bemused, he fingered his scale of justice. “Well, that’s certainly a check. I don’t know if I’d call it a balance. Especially with one of her weight. Figuratively speaking.”
“Yes,” I said, “but look at the flip side. You know her reputation. You know she takes care of her own. When this is all over, she’ll put that considerable weight behind you. And so will I.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Scott, I appreciate the consideration you’ve shown me so far. You could have just as easily played me for a sucker, sending Harmony to my office like a poison pill. But you were straight with me. So let’s not kid each other now. You know as well as I do that when our ingénue confesses, my reputation will go from a slow decline to a mad plummet. To the teeming masses, I’ll either be a foolish patsy or a race-traitor servant of the ‘vast white conspiracy.’ Considering the demographics of my client base, I might as well shut the doors when this is over. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I plan to do.”