Slick

by Daniel Price

  Oh, and you may want to anticipate her occasional absence due to grounding.

  That’s about it. I have the urge to add some mushy sentiment about what an uncommonly kind person you are, but you strike me as a man with a low-mush threshold. So just accept thanks #1,000,002 and let me know when you’d like Madison to start.

  Best regards,

  Jean

  PS — Kudos on not being a registered sex offender.

  The only time I laughed was at the very end. The rest of her message was the clear reflection of a woman who got off on being cute. But I admired her for having the smarts to run a check on me, plus the honesty to admit it.

  Now I just had to decide whether or not I was really going through with this.

  “It’s not a matter of if you’re going to work for me,” I assured Madison. “It’s a matter of when.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I’ve got a lot on my plate right now.”

  “Oh,” she dryly replied. “I can see why you wouldn’t want help then.”

  “Sarcastic little thing, aren’t you?”

  “Let me help!”

  “I will. I promise. I just need to get organized. As soon as I’m ready—”

  “How soon?”

  “Very soon.”

  “I’m available tomorrow.”

  “I might not be.”

  Madison heaved a loud sigh. “Are you sure this isn’t some extended blowoff?”

  That was quite possible. “It’s not. I promise.”

  “Because if it is—”

  “It’s not. I’ll let you know when I’m ready. I mean it.”

  That seemed to sate her. “Okay. Sorry I got pushy.”

  “Don’t be. In my line of work, that’s the only way to get things done.”

  “Good,” she said with a charm well beyond her years. “In that case I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  ________________

  The twenty-five minutes I waited for Harmony were hands down the most stressful part of the job yet. What if she’s not coming? Did I put enough bait on the hook? Too much? Would I have to start from scratch with one of the two inferior backup candidates? What if I couldn’t get them?

  I parked across the street from the building and then turned off the ignition. Working under the lampposts, I loaded a new seventy minute sound chip into my Palm Pilot audio recorder and tested it out. It was in fine working order. One less thing to worry about.

  After doing some fidgety cleanup work inside the car, I discovered Jean’s business card, the one she handed me right after the accident. Just for a diversion, I embarked upon the quest to send her a text message from my cell phone. It was easy enough to locate the function under all the sub-menus. The challenge was typing with a numeric keypad. With all the gaffes and misstrokes, it took me fifteen minutes to key in the following:

  Received your e-mail. Your provisions are fine. Tell Madison she can start tomorrow if she wants.

  And off it went. I wasn’t going to question my decision. For now and the foreseeable future, I’d reserve all my jitters for Harmony.

  Soon after midnight, she exited the building. She had changed out of her little black dress and into a casual denim jacket and jeans. Her short hair, which had been moussed into a large and unwieldy construct, was now clean and slicked back. She looked totally different. With her makeup gone, I could see the kindness in her pretty young features. She had the type of face that TV producers craved, especially when they were looking to add a little nonthreatening color to an otherwise homogenous show. How the hell could someone go through everything she’d been through and still manage to look so wholesome?

  She spotted me and started across the street. As I unlocked the door, I activated the Palm Pilot recorder and placed it atop the loose pens and nickels in the center storage well. I may have been floating on excitement and good-natured optimism, Harmony-wise, but I was still a realist. I knew how crucial it was to capture her voice. It was the only insurance we’d have if she ever went rogue on us.

  Harmony entered and, after a brief hesitation, closed the door.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said.

  “No problem,” she replied in a timid half-whisper.

  “Look, before I start the car, I just want to reiterate that I’m taking you straight home. And all we’re doing between now and then is having a conversation. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Good.” I turned the key. “But just to prepare you, you should know that the whole thing will end with a job offer.”

  That raised her interest, but didn’t lower her guard. She still couldn’t get her suspicions out of the gutter.

  “What kind of job?”

  “Acting.”

  “What kind of acting?”

  “Don’t worry. It’s for a network show.”

  “Which network?”

  I smiled at her. “All of them. Buckle up.”

  And off we went.

  ________________

  “Okay, let me give you the big picture for a moment. It’s no secret that all the media in this country are controlled by corporations. Big corporations. In fact it’s six giant multinationals that pretty much run the show. They don’t advertise that because they don’t want us making a big deal out of it. You know how we get when big business starts to look a little too big, like Microsoft. Who needs that kind of hassle? Still, you have your typical reactionaries who freak out and say that by controlling the airwaves, these few conglomerates are controlling us, the little people.

  “I, for one, can tell you that’s bullshit. All of these companies News Corp, Viacom, Disney—they lose money on ninety percent of the things they push on us. For every hit there are nine misses. And why? Because we do have free will. Not only that, but we’re pretty goddamn fickle about where we put our valuable attention. So what you have in each of these six companies are thousands of executives and specialists and analysts scrambling to get a better understanding of the mass American psyche. I give them credit for trying but let’s face it. It’s like washing cars on the freeway.”

  Harmony watched me the whole time, nodding, listening, and most likely wondering when the hell I’d get to the part that involved her. My fault for trying to impress her.

  “So once in a while,” I continued, “a public drama comes along that causes everyone to stop and look. It fixates us, for whatever reasons. O.J. Simpson. Jon Benet Ramsey. Elián González. Columbine. The networks didn’t engineer these events. They just happened. And when they do, holy shit, are they lucrative. I mean for everyone. Viewer and subscription ratings go up, which means ad sales go up. Experts and pundits get to speak their minds and plug their books. Even the nonprofits profit. Every time a relevant activist group puts their two cents in, they get thousands back in donations. It’s all part of the fun and games of a modern free market. Are you still with me?”

  She nodded.

  “All right. So here we are again with Melrose. It’s a lot like Columbine, except this time the shooter was cuter.”

  “And white,” Harmony groused.

  “Actually, the Columbine shooters were white. And Annabelle Shane wasn’t. But the important thing is that the Melrose tragedy is a gold mine of human interest. Mostly because it’s rap-related.”

  “They haven’t proved that for sure.”

  “They will. Very soon. Trust me. This one is going to progress to a full-fledged indictment of the music and entertainment industry. As far as the media folks are concerned, it’s the perfect storm. Black versus white. Parents versus kids. Washington versus Hollywood. Nobody’s going to let this one go. And everyone with an agenda, noble or otherwise, is going to throw their hat in the ring. In fact, there’s only one guy who doesn’t want be a part of this mess, and he’s trapped right in the middle of it.”

  “Hunta.”

  “That’s right. That’s why they hired me. My job is to get him out of that ring alive. Now I can’t kill this story. Nobody can. But wh
at I can try to do is steer it in a different direction, toward a much more favorable outcome. It’s kind of like one of those old Looney Tunes, where the Road Runner paints a fake curve in the road and leads the Coyote into a brick wall.”

  At last I got her to chuckle. Too bad she wouldn’t be doing much of that for the cameras. She had a gorgeous laugh.

  “There’s only one way for me to accomplish my goal,” I said. “I have to give the people something even more exotic than what’s been going on already. If they’ve got a horse, I’ve got to give them a zebra. If they’ve got a twelve-car pileup, I’ve got to give them a plane crash. Now I think I’ve got the story to top all stories, but what I don’t have is a compelling lead.”

  Finally I connected the big picture to her. She stopped smiling.

  “Wait. Me?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, you’re perfect for the part.”

  “That’s crazy. I ain’t...I don’t do that acting stuff.”

  “That’ll only help your credibility.”

  “But I don’t get it. What am I supposed to do?”

  All at once, a series of glaring doubts caught up to me with a vengeance. This was too much to spring on her, too soon. I’d assumed my enthusiasm for the plan would be infectious. I’d assumed Harmony would jump at any opportunity to escape her current hapless existence. Even worse, I’d assumed she’d take my crash course in media literacy as a sign of good faith instead of the mark of a soulless prick. But what if I was wrong on all counts? Suddenly I felt like a student who crammed for the wrong test.

  “Do me a favor,” I said, with considerably less aplomb. “Open the glove compartment.”

  She did, and immediately gawked at the standout item: a fat stack of bills.

  “That’s your thousand,” I told her. “Your listening fee.”

  “Why you giving it to me now?”

  I took an extended breath. “Because this is the part where you earn it.”

  ________________

  Sometime during the next twenty minutes, the sound chip in my recorder became a dangerous and valuable item. It was both a weapon and a shield. There were a good two minutes of dialogue that, when properly isolated, would provide us with one hell of a net should Harmony ever betray us.

  Getting that was the easy part. Getting Harmony in tune with my grand design was the more difficult and pressing concern.

  She rested against the passenger side of my car, smoking a cigarette under the pitch black sky. The car itself rested in a parking lot off Lincoln Boulevard, right in front of a sleeping strip mall. Hunta’s brother, Ray, had died somewhere in this vicinity. For all I knew, it was right where we were standing.

  It was my idea to pull over. I wanted to give Harmony time to regroup and weigh the issues. She pulled a generic pill bottle from her purse and poured herself three chalky-white tablets. This was the second time I watched her dry-gulp a trio of painkillers.

  I leaned against the car, inches away from her. We gazed at the dark Thai eatery in front of us.

  “Look on the bright side,” I offered. “At least now you know I’m not just some guy trying to fuck you.”

  She coughed out a quick laugh, then covered her mouth. At the very least, my bombshell had cracked away her timid exterior. I was starting to get a nice glimpse of Inner Harmony.

  “This the craziest shit I ever heard in my life.”

  “Tell me which part worries you and I’ll see if I can clarify.”

  “Which part? All of it! You want me to yell ‘rape’ against a man who never even touched me...”

  “We don’t really want to call it rape.”

  “With no evidence...”

  “You won’t need evidence.”

  “And then fry his ass for no good reason...”

  “You’ll have a very good reason.”

  “...just so I can save him.”

  “Right.”

  She blew smoke at the pavement. “Right. Meanwhile I spend the rest of my life in jail.”

  “You won’t go to jail. You won’t even be arrested.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know your background. I know you’ve been put through the wringer more times than anyone deserves. Run over by cops. Screwed over by bureaucrats. And all that family trauma. Jesus, honey, life owes you. You know it. I know it. And once everyone knows it, it’ll be political suicide for anyone to do anything short of hugging you.”

  That didn’t help her state of mind. “Who... who told you all that stuff about me?”

  “It’s all on record. It’s all out there for anyone willing to dig. Harmony, look, I am truly sorry for all the crap you’ve been through. But if you go along with my plan, that crap is exactly what’s going to save you. When you retract your story, everyone will understand what motivated you to lie. They’ll forgive you for it. And most important, they’ll admire you for eventually coming clean and undoing it. This is the stuff TV was made for.”

  “This is my life!”

  “Right. And?”

  “And I don’t want it out there like that! I don’t want people talking about me, feeling sorry for me and shit.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Jay McMahon and Sheila Yorn. Remember them?”

  From her stunned gape, you’d think I was levitating. “Goddamn. Do you know everything about me?”

  “I know you spent over a hundred hours in front of the camera for them, sharing your life. Not to be cynical but I don’t think you did it just to advance their careers. You did it in the hopes that it would get you on the air, make you a cause célèbre, and open up some bright new doors. It was a solid plan. Really. It’s a shame it didn’t work out.”

  She aimed a sour glare at her feet. “Yeah, well, what makes you think you’ll do any better?”

  “Because I have better skills, better resources, and better circumstances to work with. I’m not just going for PBS here. I’m putting you everywhere. I can’t guarantee complete happiness. Everyone knows that fame is a mixed bag. But I’ll get you there. And I promise you this: you’ll never have to spend an other day as background booty in some rap video or hostess club.”

  Inevitably, I had to hit her where she worked. I had to rely on the hunch that she wanted to get out of that awful place as much as I did. And worse, I had to prey on that one sliver of hope left inside of her: that God would balance her uncommonly dark past with an uncommonly bright future.

  She took a long, shaky drag off the cigarette. “How do I know if you for real or not?”

  “Are you questioning my existence or my credibility?”

  “I’m questioning you.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “All I know is that I’ve got a plan. Yeah, it carries risk. For you, me, and a lot of people. But I did manage to talk Hunta into it, if that says anything.”

  “See, how do I even know that? For all I know, you never even met the man.”

  “I met him twice. He likes me. He even calls me Slick.”

  “Prove it.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What’s tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s the day I take you to see him. If you’re up for it.”

  That didn’t help her state of mind, either. She was clearly looking for an out, some irrefutable sign that this was all bullshit. Then she could go on her way without ever having to wonder if she missed her one true shot at something better.

  “Listen, Harmony, you’re scared to trust me and I don’t blame you. You want my advice? Don’t.”

  “Don’t trust you.”

  “Not until you’re ready. I don’t need your absolute confidence yet. All I need to know is whether or not you’ll meet me again tomorrow. And you don’t even have to decide that until I get you home. So just take a deep breath. Think about it. Do you want to keep going, or do you want to stay here a little while longer?”

  Whether she knew it or not, she was beginning to believe in me. An
d whether she wanted to or not, she was beginning to like me. As for me, I was way beyond sold. I was ready to shout her name from the rooftops.

  She took one last smoky breath and then stomped her cigarette. “Let’s keep going.”

  ________________

  The rest of the ride was dead silent. At 1:15, I reached her apartment complex, a seedy-looking building that made me think of the pool table at the Flower Club.

  I stopped the car, but she didn’t get out. She looked like she was about to ask me something, then let out a nervous laugh.

  “What?”

  “I forgot your name,” she admitted. “I know you told it to me, back at the club. But I don’t remember it.”

  “It’s Scott.”

  “Okay. Scott. Can I ask you something?”

  “Anything.”

  “Why’d you pick me? Out of all the women out there you could’ve used for this thing, why me? Is it ‘cause I’m easy to feel bad for?”

  “No. I picked your photo before I knew a single thing about you.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. There was just something about your face. It sang to me.”

  After a long pause, she tittered again. “You sure you ain’t some guy trying to fuck me?”

  I smiled along. “If I am, I really need to work on my foreplay.”

  She covered her grin with her hand, then turned somber again.

  “I never asked anyone to feel sorry for me, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean I’m not the kind of person who asks for stuff just because, you know, I been through shit.”

  “I get that sense,” I told her.

  “But that doesn’t mean I want more bad things happening to me, you understand what I’m sayin’?”

  “This will only lead to good things. That’s what I’m saying.”

  She glanced at her front door. “Yeah, that’s just what Jay and Sheila said, too. And that didn’t lead to anything.”