by Daniel Price
“In answer to your question, yes,” said Doug. “Jeremy did an interview for BET last year where he defended the point of ‘Bitch Fiend.’ Maxina’s people are working to procure the footage.”
I guessed as much. The real stumper was what the hell they needed me for.
Maxina read my thought balloon and shot me a canny grin. “Scott, you need to know this stuff but you don’t have to worry about it. This is my part of the project. I’ve got a staff of thirty working around the clock. We brought you in for Problem B. It’s very important, very delicate, and it might get a little dirt on your hands. Are you okay with that?”
“Depends. I’m fine at digging dirt, but I’m not so good at throwing it. Especially at clean people.”
“This bitch ain’t clean,” Hunta muttered.
A crisp, tense air wafted into the bathroom. Most of it circulated around Simba, who could have frozen the whole tub.
“Okay,” said Maxina, getting up. “The dry folks can take it from here.”
Simba rolled her eyes. “It’s all right. I’m not made of glass.”
“No, but this toilet is. So unless you get a nice big couch in here, I’m moving this meeting to a more comfortable room. Besides, I’m getting tired of looking at your skinny body.”
Reluctantly, Simba nodded. “All right. Get out of here.”
Doug and I stood up. As I moved toward the door, Hunta grabbed my pants leg with his dripping right hand. “Yo. Hold up. What’s your name again?”
“Scott. Scott Singer.”
“Well, Scott, Scott Singer, let me tell you something. Ever since the movies / Ho’s try to do me / If they can’t screw me / They find a way to sue me.”
“Nice,” I lied, scanning my inner rap dictionary. “Was that a freestyle?”
He chuckled. “Naw, man. They ain’t even my words. They were Tupac’s. Just remember them, all right? I don’t want it happening to me what happened to him.”
“It won’t,” I promised. I’d assumed he was making a figurative reference to the drive-by shooting that had killed the infamous rapper in 1996. Turns out I was wrong. I really had a lot more research to do.
________________
L’Ermitage was just a hop away from San Vicente Boulevard. So was my apartment. However, the ride home wasn’t as simple as one would think. The Beverly Hills San Vicente had nothing to do with the San Vicente in Brentwood. They were connected only by name. Connecting them physically would require bisecting UCLA and a major golf course. Nobody wanted that.
Once again, I was forced to ride Wilshire Boulevard, the one street that linked both San Vicentes. I hated taking Wilshire through Beverly Hills. A dense array of traffic lights turned a two-mile stretch into a twelve-minute series of angry spurts. To make matters worse, I was now forever bound to equate Wilshire with the secret menace of deaf drivers. I still had to take my car in for an estimate, but that wouldn’t happen anytime in the next twenty-four hours. I had a lot of thinking to do. When Maxina said I might get a little dirt on my hands, she meant definitely. And when she said a little dirt, she meant just enough to bury someone.
________________
“There was an incident,” Doug told me, just moments after exiting the bathroom. He, Maxina, and I reconvened around the master bed. Simba’s icy turn had already clued me in to the nature of Problem B, and the nature of my problem-to-be.
“Her name is Lisa Glassman. She was a production assistant for Mean World who started with us last summer. We put her under Kevin Haggerty, the producer on Hunta’s second album.”
I nodded. Get to the damn incident already.
“Since September she’d been working closely with Jeremy and Kevin, doing really great work. She’s young. She’s pretty. And it was clear that she... Look, I won’t mince words. Jeremy enjoys women. And vice versa. His marriage with Simba is very...”
“Clintonesque,” Maxina said, with obvious derision.
“Sort of. Anyway, they managed to finish a rough master of the new album right before our label’s Christmas party, so they had double reason to celebrate. At the party...I don’t know. Things got out of hand. People were drinking, smoking, having a good time. All of a sudden, the following Monday, Lisa quits and tells us that she’s going to press rape charges against Jeremy.”
“So why hasn’t she yet?”
“We’ve been negotiating with her all through January,” he said. “Trying to come to some sort of compromise. Look, this is nothing more than extortion, Scott, plain and simple. I know Jeremy. He’s a good man. He goes to church every week. He reveres his father, spoils his daughter. He may not be the most faithful husband, but he’s never forced himself on a woman in his life. He’s never had to.”
Maxina rolled her eyes.
“Well, if she’s extorting him,” I asked, “why were you willing to negotiate with her? What else does she have on him besides an accusation?”
“She’s a woman and he’s a rapper. What else does she need?”
“Legally? Quite a bit.”
“If this were just a legal issue, Scott, I wouldn’t be worried. You’re a publicist. You know the stakes involved. Jeremy has his whole career ahead of him. He’s got the looks and the talent to become a huge crossover hit, maybe even the next Will Smith. The problem is that the studios won’t touch him if he has all this dark smoke around him, even if he’s proven innocent. We all agreed that it would be cheaper and safer to keep Lisa quiet.”
“But now…,” Maxina segued.
“But now all this Melrose shit has happened. She’s got us over a barrel. Her lawyer could file as early as next week. Once that happens, Jeremy’s screwed and we’re screwed. We’ll be like a cash machine to every woman who ever brushed hands with him.”
Maxina seemed less than verklempt over Mean World’s financial plight. Although she had understated it earlier, artistic free expression was a fierce crusade with her. When President Reagan insinuated that “obscene” music didn’t deserve constitutional protection, she went postal. When the state of Oregon made it illegal for retail stores to display ads or even photos containing rapper Ice Cube, she went ballistic. And there’s no word violent enough to describe her reaction when they started arresting record-store executives for selling 2 Live Crew’s explicit albums.
Once again, it seemed, the recording industry needed her rage. Within the last decade, sanctimonious lawmakers had gotten smarter in their attempts to suppress the material they found objectionable. The way around those First Amendment whiners, they knew, was to implement severe marketing and trade restrictions on all naughty stuff. It’s not censorship, they say. Just keeping it out of the hands of kids (and everyone else). The password was “financial disincentive.” Sure, you have the right to release an NC-17 film. We just won’t let you advertise it or show it in ninety-five percent of the nation’s venues. Sure, you have the freedom to put out a stickered album. We’ll just pressure the major music retailers like Wal-Mart to stop carrying it. For the media giants of the world, it all came down to a simple decision: the Wite-Out or the red ink. Not much of a f****** choice now, is it?
And there was more correction fluid coming. Riding the wave of fear and blame that came about from Columbine, senators such as Joe Lieberman and John McCain had been able to open the door to even tighter reform. Now the Melrose situation could very well blow it off its hinges.
“The bottom line,” said Maxina, “is that we’ve got to get Hunta and his music out of this whole equation. We’ve got to lift him up above it. But we won’t have a shot in hell of doing that if Lisa Glassman gets to tell her story.”
“Her fictional story,” Doug stressed.
“That’s the key, Scott. We can’t afford her a moment of credibility. We have to stack the deck before she even plays her first card. Now Doug is doing everything he can to stall her lawsuit, but you’re still on a seriously tight schedule. You’ve got to strike hard and fast. Are we painting a clear picture here?”
“Like El
Greco.” I did not like this.
They both smiled. Doug opened his briefcase and retrieved a thin manila folder. “We hired a private investigator to look into Lisa’s background. This is all we have on her. I won’t lie. She’s pretty clean. You’re going to have to get crafty.”
As soon as the file touched my hands, I was officially sucked into the maelstrom that Annabelle started. The one Hayley wouldn’t come within a mile of. It was easy to see why. After all the Sturm und Drang, it turned out Hunta was right. All they needed was an assassin.
Personal smear campaigns were not to be taken lightly. Drea taught me that. She had the skill and the power to drop mountains on people. With a few phone calls she could make someone, anyone, so radioactive that even their pets wouldn’t come near them. It was one of the worst things you could do to a fellow human being. Just ask Richard Jewell, the poor Atlanta security guard who became the chief suspect in the 1996 Olympic Park bombing. Knowing damn well he was innocent, the FBI flacks used him as media chum to lure the hungry press away from their real investigation. A necessary evil? Perhaps. But believe it or not, most publicists have souls. Most of us find it difficult to justify those means, even for noble ends. Amazingly, I was no exception.
Neither was Maxina. She had all the resources to handle Lisa in house. She just didn’t have the stomach for it. As a “self-respecting woman who grew up on love and Motown,” she would clearly eat her young before raining knives on a fellow sister, especially one who may have indeed been wronged, no matter what Doug said. For Maxina, there was only one course of action: close her eyes, summon a demon, and convince herself that it was all for the greater good.
Apparently I was the first name she found in the Yellow Pages, under “Demons.”
________________
The day I truly became a free man was the day I stopped caring about the world’s impression of me. Like everyone else, I was raised to seek affirmation and avoid contempt. Unfortunately, the quest to be liked by everyone triggered an undue amount of stress, anger, and acquiescence in my life. By the time I left college, I realized I’d never be happy unless I undid a lifetime of conformist conditioning.
Thus, I reversed my directives. I shunned affirmation and craved contempt. I sought arguments from argumentative people. I encouraged judgment from judgmental people. I went out of my way to trigger all kinds of scorn from anyone who was willing to give it, and there was never a shortage of volunteers. It wasn’t the easiest phase of my life. But like the most determined bodybuilders, I stuck to my regimen and eventually began to see results. Eventually I became a human fortress, impervious to even the most subtle and penetrating forms of disdain. Life got easier from there.
But my defenses occasionally sputtered, especially when I was tired. That night, in the master bedroom of Suite 511, I suffered a hull breach. I couldn’t help but reconstruct the conversation between Maxina and Hayley, at least the encapsulated version:
Maxina: Hey, girlfriend. I’m in a big fix, and I need someone evil. I don’t just mean right-wing evil. I mean head-spinning, fork-tongued, baby-eating evil. Know anyone?
Hayley: Do I ever!
It wasn’t Maxina who bothered me. She only had my client list to judge me from. Glock. Philip Morris. Monsanto. Shell. Of course she knew about Shell. Who was I kidding? For a social crusader like her, my resume might as well come with a pentagram. She knew my work but she didn’t know me.
Hayley, however, was the plastic knife in my back. We’d fought side by side fifty hours a week for four years. Many a time we dozed next to each other on her office couch following a twenty-hour phone blitz. True, she was more of the East Coast, old-school style of publicist, but never once did she complain to me about my gangsta methods.
Fine. Whatever. I let it all out through a wide yawn. I may have been feeling a little sore, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to show it.
“All right,” I sighed. “No doubt you’ll want to know what my game plan is. And soon.”
“Smart man,” said Maxina. “Come back here tomorrow. Six o’clock. Bring two game plans. Or at least one good one.”
“Tomorrow at six,” I said, heading for the door.
Doug was confused. “Uh, Scott? Don’t you want to talk about money?”
“That’s okay,” I quipped. “You can pay me in goat’s blood.”
For the first time, I heard Maxina laugh. Heartily. It was to her credit that she took it so well. In no uncertain terms, I’d just given her the finger.
________________
I was ready to fall asleep at the wheel. After two nights of travel and one night of adultery, my circadian rhythm had hit its fermata. With each infuriating red light, it only got worse.
So did my mood. You would have seen it on my face if you had driven past me on Wilshire. With my guard down, all the fears and insecurities I kept buried in the back of my mind came creeping forward. I could see them, oozing around the edges of my vision. I could hear them buzzing in my ears. They were so happy to be noticed again. It’s been ages, Scott! We have so much to catch up on!
I drove faster. This was what happened when I pushed myself too hard. I probably shouldn’t have taken this job.
Probably?
Oh, don’t start, you. I spent most of my life as a slave to doubt, looking at myself through other people’s eyes. Why? Why should I care?
Because, my boy, those opinions you claim to be so impervious to are looking more the same each day. A motif, if you will.
Right. Right. I’m a heartless bastard. A supervillain. A card-carrying member of the Brotherhood of Evil Flacks. News flash, buddy. Even if a million people see me as Pol Pot, it doesn’t mean they’re right. A million people believe that everything they see on the news is real. A million people believe that the divorce rate is fifty percent. A million women believe that all rappers are rapists, and a million rappers believe that all women are bitches. So tell me, O tar of the soul, O former master, what the hell is your point?
No point. just curious why everyone tends to see you as a soulless prick. That’s all.
“I don’t know,” I blurted. “I guess nobody loves a publicist.”
And then that was it. The discussion was over. If those dark little voices wanted to chat among themselves, they had my blessing. But I was out of the loop. Out of earshot. As far as my deepest, darkest thoughts were concerned, I was a deaf driver, stuck on Wilshire, inching his goddamn way home.
6
MEAN WORLD CHRISTMAS
I didn’t know it at the time, but on the night I met Hunta, he was celebrating his eighth anniversary of being an only child.
Well, maybe “celebrating” isn’t the right word. At 11p.m. on February 2, 1993, Ray Sharpe was driving his Pontiac Bonneville down Lincoln Boulevard in Venice when he saw the flashing lights of the police cruiser in his rearview mirror. He pulled over. The two confronting officers told him they could hear his goddamn music from a mile away. They would have let the issue drop then and there, but Hunta’s brother became irrational and belligerent. After failing two sobriety tests, he made the unwise decision to flee to his car. One of the officers fired a shot into his leg. It wasn’t meant to kill him, but it was Ray’s bad luck that he tripped and smashed his head against the passenger window. The glass merely cracked. His neck shattered instantly.
The music he’d been blasting that night was from Tupac Shakur’s second solo album, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., which had come out in stores the day before. Similarly, just eight months prior to Ray’s death, a nineteen-year-old Texan named Ronald Ray Howard had been playing Tupac’s first album, 2Pacalypse Now, from his tape deck when he was pulled over by a state trooper. Only this time the officer was the one killed. At the trial, the defense attorney placed the blame squarely on Tupac, whose anti-cop lyrics clearly incited Ronald Ray to violence. The jury didn’t buy it. Neither did the civil court when the officer’s widow sued Tupac for the exact same reason.
But that wasn’t the end of Tupac�
��s troubles. Seven months later, he was hit with another wrongful-death suit, this one from the parents of a six-year-old boy who was killed in the crossfire between Tupac’s crew and some old Marin City gang rivals. Tupac’s label, Interscope Records, settled out of court for a little under half a million. Nine months after that, he was arrested for trying to club a fellow MC who had upstaged him at a Michigan State concert. He pleaded down to a misdemeanor and served ten days in jail. Five months after that, he was charged in the nonfatal shooting of two off-duty Atlanta police officers. He claimed that he and his posse were simply coming to the aid of a black motorist the officers had been harassing. His defense—and his lyrics—were later substantiated by mounting evidence of racism on the part of the two cops, one of whom wrote in his report that the “niggers came by and did a drive-by shooting.” The charges against Tupac were dropped.
And then came his Waterloo, three weeks later, in the form of a nineteen-year-old woman named Ayanna Jackson. In November 1993 she cried rape. Everyone listened, so much so that when Tupac’s third album, Me Against the World, premiered at the top of the Billboard charts in 1995, he became the first recording artist in history to enjoy a number one debut from inside a prison cell.
Well, maybe “enjoy” isn’t the right word.
I don’t want it happening to me what happened to him, said Hunta.
________________
For my own well-being, I should have caught up on sleep, but I was simply too keyed up. By 9 a.m. on Saturday, I was back in my car, driving aimlessly around Los Angeles, hoping to jump-start my sputtering brain. I needed to understand the woman I was suddenly up against. And to understand Lisa Glassman, I needed to understand what really happened to her the night of Friday, December 15, when she celebrated a very Mean World Christmas.
