by Daniel Price
He must have been a pathetic sight indeed. I couldn’t imagine anyone, even Harmony, being anything less than furious.
“So was he all apologies?”
“Yeah. He said he’s a different man now, that he’s been living in shame over what he did. He said he’s been trying to find me for a while. Then he saw me on the news.”
I resolved not to say anything. No misgivings. No theories. I was just going to follow Maxina’s cue and be supportive.
Unfortunately, Harmony read my silence far too well. “Okay, what?”
“Nothing. I’m just listening.”
“No, you ain’t. You thinking shit.”
“I’m always thinking shit. But right now I’m just here to listen and be your friend.”
“Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious.”
“Scott, just say what you wanna say.”
“Look, I don’t know this man. I can’t judge his motives.” Wincing, I rubbed my temple. “All I’ll say is that it took me one afternoon to find you.”
“Well, he ain’t as smart as you.”
“You didn’t change your name. You didn’t even leave the area.”
“So maybe he just ain’t smart, okay? He’s still my father.”
“I know that. I know. I can’t even pretend to relate to what you’re going through right now. But in case you haven’t noticed, I’m very protective of you. I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
She unleashed a jaded laugh that was unique for her. And worrisome to me.
“It’s not that I think he’s out to hurt you,” I stressed. “I just think he’s...” Damn it. Shut up. Shut up. “Can I ask you a question?”
She let out an acrid sigh. “What?”
“Did he ask you for money?”
Her lack of answer was answer enough. I threw my head back, mouthing a curse.
“Did you give him money?”
Still nothing.
“You gave him all the money I gave you.”
After another lull, her crying gasps started up again. Son of a bitch. He was better off staying out of her life. Franklin Prince was not a nice man, nor was he a subtle man. And Harmony wasn’t stupid. She could tell from the start that her father was looking at her through dollar-sign eyes. All I was doing was confronting her with her own worst suspicions.
“Look, sweetheart, I’m sorry I—”
“Stop calling me that.”
“What?”
Her voice was low and guttural now, full of teary rasp. “Stop calling me ‘sweetheart.’ Stop calling me ‘honey.’ Stop talking down to me like I’m your goddamn bitch.”
I leaned forward, stunned. “I’m sorry. Harmony. I didn’t know that bothered you. If I’d known—”
“Just stop talking! I am so sick of you talking! I’m sick of you talking, and playing me, and acting like you care about me and shit!”
“I do care about you.”
“You never cared about me! You only care about getting what you want!”
I stood up. “Harmony, I’m not the one you’re mad at right now.”
“Yes you are! I’m mad at you, Scott! I’m mad at you for always talking down to me! I’m mad at you for always telling me how I feel! I’m mad at you for not telling me about Lisa Glassman!”
“Wait. What?”
“And for promising me all this money and then not letting me take a dime!”
“Hold it!”
“And I’m mad at you for kissing me and promising me the world and then locking me up in this motherfucking room for the rest of my life!”
“Wait!”
“Fuck you!”
The line went dead. The phone fell out of my hand. I put it back on the coffee table, then lay down on the couch again. My eyes were wide open. I spent the next few hours staring up at the ceiling, connecting the stucco dots into images that were both grand and intricate.
________________
Although she didn’t tell me, Harmony had another visitor on Saturday.
At three o’clock a lovely young woman of Korean descent approached the bodyguards outside Harmony’s suite. From her small white bikini, she seemed to be a guest who’d stumbled off (way off) from the pool area. After greeting the men, she removed the towel from her waist and slowly spun around for them. Her goal, aside from causing erections, was to prove that she wasn’t hiding any recording equipment. She wasn’t with the press. She was simply a businesswoman who required a few moments of Harmony’s time.
Like most women who caused erections, and like most erections, she was indulged. The bodyguards let her deliver her pitch through a two inch crack in the door.
Harmony, my name is Kathy Oh. I’m a publicist. A very good one. Now you can listen to me or not, but I’m telling you right now that whoever’s handling you is wasting you. You’ve got a spotlight on you that few people ever get. You should use it before it goes away. Make a difference. Make some money. I can get you enough offers in the next seven days to set you up for the rest of your life.
To give Harmony a taste of her own potential, Kathy brought a ready-made deal. On behalf of the Coca-Cola Company, she was authorized to offer Harmony fifty thousand dollars, all up front, in exchange for being seen with a can of Coke in her hand. Left or right. Diet or regular. The variables didn’t matter as long as the can was caught on the news. The arrangement was completely confidential, and it was valid whether or not Harmony signed with Kathy. She would return, with cash and paperwork, at 6 p.m. Think it over. Have a nice afternoon.
Naturally, the offer provoked much discussion among Harmony, her bodyguards, and her visiting roommates. Even her friends, who had each turned down tabloid money on principle, couldn’t find a problem with the Coke proposal. Neither could Harmony. The one thing standing between her and free money was the stern specter of me.
Circumventing me altogether, she called Alonso, the lenient parent, in the hope that he would bless the deal. No such luck. He simply told her everything I would have. Despite Kathy’s grand fancy, word of the arrangement would inevitably reach the press, and the press took a harsh eye to secret shills. Harmony was better off sticking to open endorsements, and not until after the twist.
But, sensing Harmony’s resentment, Alonso adjusted his spiel. Look, that’s just how Scott explained it. If it were up to me, I’d be having a Coke and a smile right alongside you. But this is his show. And we both know his take on this.
I didn’t learn about this until Sunday morning, when Maxina gave me the secondhand story. I had to laugh, not just at Alonso’s cheap evasion but at Kathy Oh’s resourcefulness. Like me, she was a freelance operative. Unlike me, she was renowned for her effective lack of subtlety.
Yet we were both minnows compared to Maxina. She was never one for the bikini trick, thank God, but she had her own way of getting things done. By the time she showed up at my doorstep, bearing news and gifts, she knew who was in the superior position. I couldn’t blame her for being smug. I couldn’t even blame her for being superior. I lost Harmony on my own, with only a little help from others.
________________
“She’ll come around,” Maxina assured me from the bottom of my front steps. “That thing with her father really threw her for a loop. You just got caught in it.”
She stood. I sat. She was clean and well rested. I still wore my clothes from last night, plus a new dark circle under each eye. I was miserable. She was not. But her joy had little to do with me. On Friday night, while in the lowest of low moods, she returned to her hotel room only to find her husband and sons waiting there, fresh from Atlanta. They’d conspired with her staff to surprise her, and it worked. Maxina told me she screamed so loud, she probably set off every car alarm in the area.
Currently, her three men—-all big and burly fellows—waited patiently outside her rented Lexus. They were all about to take a nice, relaxing jaunt up the Pacific Coast Highway. Maxina only came by to deliver her latest coup, which I now held in my hands. It was a c
ardboard box the size of a toaster oven. There wasn’t a news director alive who wouldn’t club me for its contents.
“Well,” I admitted, “you certainly put me in my place.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You told her about Lisa Glassman.”
Expressionless, Maxina unwrapped a peppermint candy. “Yes. That I did.”
“Kind of like the scorpion stinging the frog, don’t you think?”
“It was a calculated risk.”
“It was your first bad move.”
She popped the candy in her mouth, then slipped the wrapper into her shirt pocket. “You had way too much power over her. Every time I talked to her, every other sentence out of her mouth was ‘Scott says this’ or ‘Scott says that,’ ‘Scott thinks this’ or ‘Scott thinks that.’” She laughed. “I mean you really won her over. I was trying to ride my way in on the surrogate-mother train, but you, you seduced her.”
Maxina brushed a ladybug off her shoulder. “Not literally, of course.”
I had the urge to become loud and nasty, but her family was just ten yards away.
“Ordinarily, that wouldn’t concern me too much,” she added. “Except that you yourself were getting a little too ‘Harmony this and that’ for my comfort.”
I lowered my head and laughed. Maxina didn’t share the humor.
“I’ve been in this game a long, long time, Scott. One of the reasons I’ve endured, I think, is because I’ve always kept an inch of space between me and my causes. It doesn’t stop me from fighting passionately. It doesn’t stop me from working eighty-hour weeks. It just stops me from losing myself in the mission. I’ve seen some bright and talented people burn up that way.”
She tossed me a meaningful glance. “So have you.”
I twirled the box in my hands. It didn’t make a sound. Whoever packed the tapes sure packed them tight.
Maxina sighed. “Okay, I have better things to do than stand here and annoy you. I just wanted to drop off the present. To be honest, I was hoping I could convince you to convince Harmony to end this sham tomorrow, but obviously—”
“She’s not even talking to me.’”
“She will. For God’s sake, it’s just a snit. If you weren’t so wrapped up in her, you’d see that.”
Try as I might, I couldn’t disagree. With Harmony, I didn’t have a shred of detachment left. Funny how just twelve hours before, another highly perceptive woman called me feeling-impaired.
“I am not here to meddle in your life,” Maxina declared. “Frankly, I couldn’t care less about whatever personal issues you’re dealing with. All I know is that this whole mess revolves around Harmony, and she, for reasons I can’t even begin to fathom, still revolves around you. That makes you crucial to me, to Jeremy, to Mean World, and to the entire music industry.”
She glanced back at her family, waving for more patience. “I need you for this. You’re the one who started it. You’re the one who has to end it. And if you just took a step back and just got some distance, you’d see that Larry King Live is a perfect place to end it.”
“It’s too soon.”
Maxina pointed to the box. “We’ve got the documentary now. We’ve got hours of sympathetic footage to help break her fall.”
“It’s still too soon.”
“You saying that out of spite?”
“I’m saying it out of reason. I’m talking about a few more days. Jeremy, Mean World, and the entire music industry can survive a few more days of Harmony, much more than Harmony can survive a confession tomorrow. She’s barely said a word to the public yet.”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Mine. Obviously. If I was overcautious, I was overcautious. But I’m not going to be reckless to compensate.” I flashed her a facetious grin. “Not with my dear, beloved Harmony at stake.”
That was said out of spite. Maxina pressed her hands together, resting the tips of her fingers against her lips.
“I’m going up the coast,” she proclaimed in a demonstrably chirpy tone. “I’m going to spend the day with the men I love. At the moment, you are not a man I love.”
“That’s okay. I wouldn’t have fit in the car anyway.”
She dissected me one last time.
“Scott, do me a favor. Don’t watch those tapes right away. Take a day for yourself. Run some errands. Spend some time with your lady friend. Just take a break from the mission. Please.”
I tried that yesterday. It didn’t quite work. There was no escaping Harmony. But I appreciated the concern.
________________
When the nation’s hottest new victim asked the nation to leave her alone, the cynics didn’t buy it. This was the age of Jerry Springer. And Harmony Prince, like it or not, was firmly entrenched in a demographic that lined up to exploit itself on trashy vessels like his. She was a hostess dancer. A hip-hop hoochie. A low-rent ass-shaker who’d presumably bite the head off a chicken if it gave her the chance to get bleeped on somebody’s talk show.
And yet the media—the legitimate media—had been standing outside her hotel for three days, waiting for her to spill her guts. Even Jesus popped up after three days. Who the hell was this woman?
She certainly wasn’t Jesus, but through her silence, her restraint, she was rising above the pathetically low expectations of her demographic, the caricature of the lower-class black woman. How very strange that this was all engineered by the whitest of white men, an apolitical flack who gagged at every form of mass-market idealism. I wasn’t doing this for black women. I was doing it for Harmony. I wanted the world to appreciate her for more than her entertainment value. How very sad that she, of all people, resented my efforts.
I wasn’t the first high-minded artist to get caught up in his subject. I wasn’t even the first one to get caught up in Harmony. Four years ago, a progressive filmmaking duo followed her around with a camera, studying her in her natural habitat like she was an exquisite gazelle. They amassed a hundred and two hours of raw video, all of which fell into a deep legal crack once the couple split hard.
By Thursday every network was pounding at their respective doors, looking for some way, any way, to untie the Gordian knot that was keeping all that beautiful footage from being released. Then Maxina cut right through it, not only freeing the product but getting an exclusive hold on it. When I asked her how, she said, “Who cares?”
The moment I reentered my apartment, I opened the box, closed the shades, and popped in the first of the eighteen videotapes. In my state, I must have looked like a moping ex-boyfriend, losing himself in old, happy images of the woman who dumped him. There was a little of that, but mostly I was working. I held a notepad in my lap, marking the most poignant segments. I wanted to explain to the masses, in a compelling nutshell, why Harmony lied. Why she stopped lying. Why everyone should forgive her and ultimately admire her for the person she is. I had my work cut out for me, especially since I was building my case off the person she was.
Outwardly, Harmony at fifteen was little different from Harmony at nineteen. Her hair was longer. Her teeth were crooked. She had some mild acne. All to be expected. What jarred me was the vastly different way she carried herself. There was a sharp edge to her that didn’t exist anymore. This Harmony was still two years away from being mowed down in a crosswalk by a wayward police cruiser. She talked quicker. She moved quicker. I could even see her think quicker.
She also had clearer access to some very bad memories, and it showed. The more I watched her interact with people, the more I noticed a jagged edge. She was polite to her teachers, funny to her friends, even a little sexy to the boys who paid her attention (and there were more than a few), but a lot of it seemed artificially generated for the cameras. Behind the act was a thin layer of contempt that never seemed to reach the surface.
Clearly the filmmakers adored her. Since this was all rough copy, I could hear Jay and Shiela’s off-screen chatter. They’d fallen for Harmony just as hard as I did, although I
wouldn’t have been as easily roped in by this version. This one was a little less than genuine. This one put her best foot forward.
Twenty hours into the footage (and eight hours into my viewing), Harmony dropped the mask. She sat on a couch in her shabby group home, drawing into a sketchpad. It was yet another maddeningly dull segment to fast-forward through, but there was something about her increasing discomfort that made me slow down and watch. She kept peeking at the camera through the corner of her eye, increasingly vexed.
“I don’t know what y’all find so interesting about this.”
“We think it says a lot about you,” replied Sheila, invisible as always.
“Yeah, well, I don’t know what you find so interesting about me.”
Now Jay chimed in. “Don’t sell yourself short. You’re pretty remarkable.”
I rolled my eyes. So did Harmony. “Why? Because I’m less fucked up than I should be?”
“You’re a girl who grew up in a culture of violence and abuse—”
“I’m a black girl who grew up in Inglewood,” she countered. “And you only calling me ‘remarkable’ because I don’t got a pimp, two kids and a crack habit.”
I laughed. The filmmakers didn’t.
“Harmony, we admire you for the things you do have. You’re intelligent. You’re talented. You’re affable.”
“We look up to you.”
“Yeah, but you looking down to look up,” Harmony told them. “You admiring me like I’m the nicest dog in the pound.”
The next few seconds were pure nerve-racking silence. I sat forward, mesmerized.
Vindicated by the filmmakers’ silence, Harmony got back to her drawing.
“Don’t worry. I’ll play along for the show. I’ll even roll over and beg if it’ll get me out of this place.”
The scene would never have made it into Jay and Sheila’s final cut, had there been one. I couldn’t even work it into my own product. For the media, it would only be a tool to simplify her, a way to squeeze her into one of their preexisting molds. The world would never get Harmony right. But I was finally starting to.