Slick

by Daniel Price

  Before I could even fathom her words, she was back at the door. She turned around and threw me a grin that was alarmingly mature.

  “Don’t worry. That’s the last time I’ll ever get sappy with you. From now on I’m all business.”

  And with that, she dashed off, in the extra-springy way that only a kid could run.

  I studied the comic book again. The issue was a real heartbreaker. I actually cried when Phoenix first sacrificed her life on the blue area of the moon. I could feel the pain of Cyclops as the love of his life died screaming his name (and mine). This was how I got my drama fix, back when I was Madison’s age. I don’t know if it was a simpler time but Jesus Christ, I was a simpler kid.

  ________________

  As far as puzzling figures went, Madison was a one-piece jigsaw compared to her mother. At 9:30, I received this narrow oddity in my inbox:

  >PS-Thanks for the great gift. IT’S WAY

  >TOO MUCH! But thank you.

  I can tell you’re a reader, not a collector.

  Don’t worry. Despite its great significance,

  that issue’s only worth $40, mint condition.

  So I wouldn’t call it “way too much.” I also

  gave you a spare copy, so I wouldn’t call it

  a GREAT gift either. Hell, it might not even

  be a gift at all. It could be a subconscious

  scheme to bring you down a rung or two in my

  daughter’s high esteem. Can you blame me for

  being jealous? I mean I was never really her

  idol but damn it, we used to be so close. We

  talked every day. Now all I get from her are

  icy glares, secrecy, and a tsunami of drama.

  So if I did subconsciously sabotage you, all

  I can say is “oops” and “sorry.” Then again,

  maybe the cigar’s just a cigar. Who can say?

  In any case, please excuse my neurotic rant.

  Sometimes I get a’Freud for no clear reason.

  And yet this note seems strangely justified.

  Enjoy the comic,

  Jean

  ...who clearly has issues to spare.

  Normally, I’d say this was a woman with way too much free time, but it had taken her just seven minutes to read and respond to my message. Seven minutes to express a few crazy thoughts, drop a few clever puns, and—most amazing—frame it all at exactly forty-four characters per line. How the hell did she do that in seven minutes?

  By the time I finished admiring her handiwork, I noted the time. 9:43. All right, lady. Not only will I step up to the box, I’ll give it a little twist.

  O

  Jean,

  don’t let

  Madison’s new

  esteem for me get

  you down. By no means

  does it indicate that you

  somehow pale in comparison. I

  have several unfair advantages in

  that I’m not the one who tells her to

  brush her teeth, finish all her broccoli,

  write that thank-you note to Grandma for that

  horrible green sweater, and so on, and so

  forth. It’s all just part of the pain

  of raising a teenager (not that I

  would personally know). Look,

  you did one hell of a job

  with her. The kid is

  a real diamond in

  the rough. Oy!

  Squarely,

  Scott

  S

  ...who has a number of classic issues himself.

  I sent it off at 9:55. Twelve minutes. Damn. And I’d only worked in a fraction of the amount of text that she did. There was no denying it. Jean had kicked my ASCII.

  And yet instead of being squarely smug, she simply shined on my crazy diamond. By her account, she had been composing a normal e-mail (well, as normal as she would get) when she noticed that the first four lines happened to be even. From there, she merely made a game out of it. She was only challenging herself. She never expected me to join in with my own text sculpture. Jean confessed that as far as speed went, she had the unfair advantage of being prelingually deaf. She thought in letters. I thought in sounds. But given my natural limitations, I did arousingly well (her words).

  Of course she framed her entire response in the shape of a large “Z.” And she did it in five minutes.

  But I didn’t have time to respond to her letter. Hunta’s interview was about to hit the nation, which meant Harmony would be calling, which meant it was time to get back to doing what I did best.

  ________________

  “That’s so messed up!” Harmony cried, from the foot of her bed.

  I grinned into the red phone. “Welcome to the business, hon.”

  Those tuning in to watch an all-new Judging Amy were in for a disappointment, as CBS ran a special edition of 48 Hours in its place. The network had won the Maxina Howard sweepstakes, but victory came with a price. In order to keep her carefully crafted interview from devolving into one big episode of Judging Jeremy, Maxina had worn the producers down into a state of childlike submission. Yes ma’am, we will limit our footage of Mr. Sharpe to what you’ve provided on the videotape. Yes ma’am, we understand that means no raunchy bits from any of his videos, none of his randy appearances on MTV, and no out-of-context sound bites from any of his previous interviews. And yes ma’am, we promise to air each and every quote that you have earmarked as mandatory, including the part where your client stresses twice that he has no criminal record.

  Harmony and I watched the whole show together, in the only way we could. She was curled up in front of her ancient thirteen-inch bedroom TV. I sat in my living room, rolled out on my extra-long couch. Every time the reporter asked Hunta a question or nodded to one of his longer answers, Harmony freaked out. She just couldn’t get over the deception.

  “They making it look like that reporter guy was in the room asking all those questions. But he wasn’t even there!”

  “Here’s a helpful hint for the future,” I said. “Any time you see a one-on-one interview and they never show you both people in the same frame, chances are it’s a cut-and-paste job like this one. They probably never even met.”

  “But how did they get the room to look the same and all that?”

  “I don’t know. Either they set up a background façade at the studio, or they just filmed that reporter in another room at the same hotel.”

  “That’s so dirty!”

  “Well, in this case Maxina didn’t give them a choice. But just wait. In a decade or so, I’m sure they’ll be faking the side-by-side shot, too. You know, like when an actor plays twins.”

  “Goddamn, Scott. You scare me sometimes.”

  “I didn’t say I’d be doing that stuff.”

  “You know, Alonso’s kind of scared of you too,” she teased. “He said he likes you but you make him glad he’s getting out of the game.”

  “Oh, and why is that? “

  “He told me you were like... damn, how did he put it? Oh yeah, you were an East Coast shark in a West Coast fishbowl. He said that with a brain like yours, you should be making and breaking presidents instead of dealing in celebrity shit.”

  “That’s nice,” I replied, only mildly flattered. “Did you tell him I got out of politics years ago?”

  “Yeah. I told him you left Washington behind and all that. He said no you didn’t. You just brought it with you.”

  “Ooh. He’s so profound.”

  She giggled along. “I know. He talks like Jesse Jackson. But he’s nice, though. You know, he wants to put me up in a hotel for the next week or so.”

  “I know. It was my idea.”

  “Yeah, but who’s paying for all that?”

  “It won’t be you. That’s for damn sure.”

  “Wow. So are we talking a big-money Hunta-style hotel or, like, Motel 6?”

  I smiled. “Somewhere in between, closer to Hunta-style.”

  Spea
king of Hunta style, he continued to defend himself with intelligence and poise. Maxina had done a great job coaching him. Too bad he had to ride the interview couch alone. In the end, Maxina relegated both Simba and Latisha to the B-roll. From what Doug had told me, Simba remained in highly uncooperative spirits, enough to trigger some closed-door emergency sessions between the Judge and Maxina. I assumed it was simply a matter of time before she’d become my problem too.

  “Speaking of big money,” I added, giving Harmony her cue to thank me.

  “What about money?”

  “Uh, did you happen to check the rest of the package I gave you?”

  “What? You mean the box with the phone in it?”

  “Yes. That box.”

  “Wait. You saying there was money in it?!”

  I paused. “Yes. Fifteen hundred dollars. Do you still have it?”

  “No, Scott! I threw it out! Why the hell didn’t you tell me?!”

  I kept silent as I analyzed the data. Just from the slight bump in her voice, I wagered a good eighty percent chance that she was just messing with me.

  Soon enough, she cracked up. “No, I’m just messing with you. I got the money. Thank you.”

  I played the dupe anyway. “Don’t do that to me.”

  She laughed triumphantly. “I got him! I tricked the tricksta! I slicked the slicksta!”

  “You know, I’m starting to think I’m a bad influence on you.”

  “You a terrible influence on me.”

  Hunta slowly grew within the confines of the TV screen. The close-up meant he was about to say something important.

  “Whoa. Quick. Turn up your TV,” I told her.

  “Why? What’s he gonna say?”

  “Just trust me.”

  “I know I got a responsibility,” Hunta declared with dyed-in-the-wool candor. “I mean as an artist. And I take it very seriously, you know what I’m saying? I never hurt a woman in my life. I never forced a woman into sex. And I never, ever told anyone they should do that stuff. Never said it. Never wrote it. Never rapped it.”

  “There it is,” I said.

  “There what is?”

  “The dinner bell,” I replied, shamefully excited. “He just put himself on a plate and rang the dinner bell.”

  ________________

  When Hunta assured the nation that he had never forced a woman into sex, the publicists of America collectively winced. Goddamn, you just don’t say that, even if it’s true. And to understand why, one would only have to look to the journalists of America, who collectively drooled. See, if you’re a reporter and you’re looking to bite into a piping-hot celebrity, it’s a far better thing to yell “au contraire” than “j’accuse.” In the media world, catching someone in a seeming contradiction is just as good as catching them in the act.

  So on Wednesday, February 7, the gold rush began. The news brigades stepped all over each other, swinging their pickaxes high and low in the search for even the tiniest nugget of evidence that Hunta had indeed protested too much. I, of course, knew the location of two rich deposits. My urgent goal was to steer the press toward one and away from the other. I knew that today would be the last leg of the race between Harmony and Lisa Glassman. By midnight at the very latest, one of them would be discovered.

  I woke up at nine to the ringing of the red phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Scott! I got a reporter woman on the phone! What do I tell her?”

  “Harmony?”

  “She’s waiting on the other phone! She wants to talk to me! What do I say?”

  “Get her number,” I said. “Call her back.”

  “Okay...”

  Finally, I came back to reality. What the hell was I talking about? “Wait. Harmony? Is that Gail Steiner from the L.A. Times?”

  “Yeah. She’s waiting!”

  I sat up. “Okay. Tell her you’re not supposed to talk to anyone. If she has any questions, she can call your lawyer.”

  “That’s all I’m supposed to say?”

  “Just that,” I urged. “She’ll try to ask you questions anyway. Don’t answer a single one. Don’t give her anything even close to an answer. Just keep telling her to call Alonso Lever. Repeat it like a mantra if you have to. And if she asks for the number, tell her to look it up.”

  “But... I’m confused. I thought you wanted—”

  “Trust me. Send her off and call me back.”

  “Okay.”

  I had only gotten six hours of sleep. It wasn’t fair. I needed at least seven hours to be functional. Eight to be clever. Of course it was being clever that got me into this mess in the first place. Jean made cleverness a contact sport. I wound up playing until 3 a.m. That wasn’t clever at all.

  ________________

  Gail Steiner was lagging way too much for my comfort. I had expected her to call Harmony sometime last night, soon after talking to Big Bank. Didn’t happen. Maybe it was the demands of motherhood, or maybe she had simply lost her edge after eight months away from the beat. Whatever it was, I may have backed the wrong horse.

  After a shower and coffee, I initiated Plan B. Cradling the phone on my shoulder, I logged on to the Hotmail website and created a pseudonymous account.

  “All right,” I told Harmony. “Let me explain where you’re coming from. Officially, you don’t like or trust the media.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No. You believe this is between you and Hunta. It’s nobody else’s business. All you want, besides some compensation, is for Hunta to acknowledge what he did to you and to apologize for it. Not to the world. Just you. In fact—and I want you to say this often—you wish your lawyer had settled the case back in January, before the whole Bitch Fiend mess. Oh, by the way, you don’t think Hunta’s responsible for that.”

  “I don’t?”

  “Do you?”

  “Wouldn’t I?”

  I flipped through a thin stack of legal papers until I found a copy of the CH-100 judicial form. This was the pre-notarized version, but I had scribbled down the official court docket number in the upper right-hand corner.

  “A lesser person would,” I explained, while composing a message through Hotmail. “But you are going to ride the moral high ground all the way to the twist ending. That’s why you’re never going to look like you enjoy the publicity. That’s why you’re never going to take pleasure in Hunta’s public crucifixion. And most important, that’s why you’re never going to take a dime from anybody but Alonso.”

  Oof. That didn’t come out right at all. Her silence was piercing.

  “I mean just until you recant,” I stressed.

  “You said I’d be getting all sorts of money.”

  “And you will. Once you clear Hunta’s name, you can go crazy. Sell your autobiography. Endorse Revlon. Pose nude for Penthouse. Believe me, they’ll offer. It’s all up to you. But until that happens, you can’t do anything that’s even remotely self-serving. The name of the game...”

  I clicked and sent the e-mail.

  “... is credibility.”

  Harmony was still frosty. Shit. Things were so much easier when I was handling her from the driver’s seat of my car.

  “I’ll be honest, Scott. I’m lost again. You just lost me.”

  With Plan B now in motion, I pushed away the laptop and stretched out on the couch.

  “Well, then let’s go over it again,” I said. “We’ve got nothing but time.”

  ________________

  I didn’t want the story to begin on the Internet. Planting a seed on the World Wide Web was like conceiving a child on Three Mile Island. Who knew what kind of mutated freak I’d end up with?

  But at least the Net worked fast, and on Wednesday I needed speed. My backup leak was The Smoking Gun, an online rag that regularly served up telling documents and court records, all legally obtained through freedom-of-information statutes. The site was a celebrity publicist’s nightmare, filled to the brim with big-name divorce petitions, arrest reports, civil
claims, and ludicrous contract riders. One such proviso revealed that Britney Spears, a well-paid Pepsi endorser, secretly demanded a six-pack of Coke in her dressing room at every stop on her 2000 world tour. Oh, the scandal!

  So, in electronic disguise, I pointed the way to the L.A. County superior court clerk’s office, where a nice fat CH-100 was waiting to be discovered. Obviously, the good folks at The Smoking Gun were just as hot to nab Hunta as everyone else. So you could imagine their delight in learning that Mr. Never-Hurt-a-Woman had come this close to getting slapped with a temporary restraining order. And just last month, too.

  Over the next six hours, the seed became a sprout, the sprout became a plant, the plant bore fruit, and the fruit tasted funny. That’s what I got for using the Internet.

  ________________

  “Goddamn it!”

  Madison looked up from her work. “What?”

  It was four o’clock. While I surfed the Web from the couch, Madison sat lotus-style on the living room floor, surrounded by a sea of online printouts. To my relief, she had finally deep-sixed the junior-executive wear and simply came to work as a junior.

  “The Smoking Gun,” I told her. “They just posted a restraining order request that some woman filed against Hunta.”

  “Oh shit. Who is she?”

  “I don’t know. They grayed out her name. Everywhere it’s mentioned.” I scrolled through the digital pages. “They even grayed out her lawyer’s name. I don’t get it! They almost never gray out names! Why this one? Why now?”