Slick

by Daniel Price

  Enjoying our surprise, he rummaged through his desk drawer.

  “Since you were nice enough to let me in on your joke,” he announced, “I’ll let you in on mine.”

  He dropped a fat stack of papers on the desk. Doug and I leaned forward to examine the top sheet. In the center of the page were three short lines of text.

  GODSEND

  a novel

  by Alonso Lever

  “It’s no secret that my heart has left my practice,” he told us. “This is where it went. For three years, I’ve nurtured and developed this manuscript. Writing it has been the greatest pleasure of my life. No, finishing it was the greatest pleasure. Selling it, however, has been a stygian nightmare. Through an agent, I’ve submitted a draft to virtually every publishing house, both large and small. Each time I was damned with excessive praise. Each time I was shunned with extreme encouragement. So unless I’m suffering from an acute delusion of quality, I can only assume the book is failing to sell for reasons of marketability.”

  “What kind of novel is it?” asked Doug, failing to hide his fear of a long answer.

  “It’s a futuristic love story, with a spiritual bent.” Alonso turned to me. “Please take this copy, Scott. I think you of all people would appreciate the premise.”

  Politely, I took the bundle. I hadn’t read a novel in years, but I was curious enough to put his book on my skim list. I peeked at the top right corner of the last page. Christ, the thing was 444 pages. No wonder he couldn’t sell it.

  He stood up. “Anyway, let me share my vision of a more immediate future. I pretend to be Harmony’s lawyer. I follow your every cue to the letter. Once she confesses, I close my firm in disgust. I then negotiate a deal to write a tell-all account of my experiences as an unwitting accomplice in the mass deceit of the decade. I’ll hold out, of course, until a publisher gets hungry enough to offer me a two-book deal. After that, I sit back and enjoy my long-awaited career transition. I’ve been thinking about this future all evening, gentlemen. It makes me smile. The real question: does it make you smile?”

  It made me beam. Doug was a little less tickled but Alonso assured him that the tell-all would tell nothing. Of course it wouldn’t. What did Alonso care as long as Godsend got published? He had everything to gain by cooperating with us.

  At long last, our business was concluded. This was the second night in a row I had toiled into the wee hours. I was on the verge of cognitive collapse. Doug was already flatline.

  But Alonso showed no signs of slowing down as he walked us to the elevator bank.

  “Well, my friends, I must say I’m excited to be part of the show.”

  After pressing the call button for us, he leaned against the wall and gazed down at his expensive Italian shoes.

  “I’m not proud,” he added. “But I am excited.”

  ________________

  Until the 1920s, the Bennett Rancho was little more than a bazillion acres of wheat and barley. Then Charles Lindbergh started using it as a landing strip on his pioneering journeys. The owners thought that was kind of neat. In 1927 they leased out a big chunk of their field to the city of Los Angeles, which turned it into a municipal airport. They named it Mines Field, after William Mines, the real estate agent who brokered the deal. Lord knows how that happened, but it wasn’t fated to last. Eventually it became known as Los Angeles International Airport, or LAX.

  There are millions of people whose experience of L.A. is limited solely to the airport, and yet many of them use their layover to not just support the claim that they’ve been to Los Angeles but to personally confirm some or all of the negative stereotypes associated with the city. Well, if you’re one of those people, I’ve got news for you. You’ve been to Inglewood. Congrats. And all the gang violence, road rage, mudslides, earthquakes, smog congestion, and phony attitudes you witnessed from your plastic seat in United Terminal 7 were most likely a product of your jet-lagged mind. Except maybe the phony attitudes. For that, we’re very sorry. They’re always so fake down there in Inglewood.

  Harmony was a notable exception. Not only was she a refreshingly genuine person, but she truly did spy with her very own eye most of the above-listed enormities. She had every reason to complain about Los Angeles. She had every reason to complain, period. One of the many things I liked about Harmony was the fact that she didn’t.

  “So what do you think?” I asked.

  She laughed. “I think it’s just like the LAX I seen on TV. I wasn’t expecting much more.”

  We dined at an overpriced wood-paneled franchise restaurant/bar in Terminal 2. By now I was way behind on the coaching I wanted to do, but screw it. I could finish the job by phone. There were only a few hours left for me to see her live, uncut, and unscripted.

  “There’s this girl who works for me now,” I told her. “Whenever she wants to get away from her mother, she finds her way here.”

  “You got an employee?”

  “I’ve got an intern.”

  “I didn’t even know you had an office.”

  “I don’t. She works out of my apartment.”

  Harmony raised her eyebrows suggestively. “I see...”

  “You know, that’s the second time I’ve mentioned her to someone, and the second time I’ve gotten that joke. I’m not Bill Clinton, okay? This girl is thirteen.”

  “Thirteen?”

  “Yes, but I’m not Roman Polanski either. There’s absolutely nothing sordid going on. See, this is the problem with living in a tabloid culture. We see everything as a scandal in the making.”

  “That’s funny, coming from you.”

  “You think that,” I said, lowering my voice, “but what I’m creating here is an anti-scandal. This is a bomb that’s going to defuse itself. If anything, it should teach the cynics and moral mouths of this country not to be so quick to judge.”

  “So that’s your message with this thing?”

  “No. My message is ‘stop kicking my client.’”

  For some reason, that tickled her funny bone. She just couldn’t stop chuckling. Once the waiter came by with our food, she looked down and giggled into her fist.

  I grinned at her. “It’s not that funny.”

  “I know. I know...”

  Once the waiter left, Harmony sobered up and ate her meal. She had decided to “keep it light” with a Cobb salad. I didn’t want to tell her but she’d probably have to eat a ham steak the size of a Michelin in order to get the same number of calories as that thing.

  Even as she ate, she had aftershocks of chuckles. I marveled at her.

  “Harmony, I’ve got to tell you. You’re not the person I expected to find when I looked up your background.”

  She lost her humor. “What do you mean by that?”

  “It’s not an insult. I’m giving you praise.”

  “I believe you. I just don’t know what you mean by it.”

  “What I’m saying is that for someone with your life story, you’re a hell of a lot sunnier than I expected. I mean if I went through all the awful things you went through, I’d have a chip on my shoulder the size of a Lexus. I’d be an angry, bitter, hateful nutjob. And I don’t mean a standard, mutter-to-myself-on-the-street kind of nut. I mean I’d be building a death ray.”

  Harmony stared at me with dark perplexity. “Okay...”

  “Let me ask you a question I know the interviewers will ask. How have you managed to cope so well?”

  After a moment of quiet reflection, she gulped a forkful of blue cheese. “Shit. I guess I’ll have to come up with something.”

  “You must have some idea.”

  “I think I know. I just don’t think it’s gonna play well.”

  “Then try it on me. What do you think I’m here for?”

  She took a deep, halting breath. “Okay. When I got hit by that police car, it was a bad thing. But in some ways it was also a good thing. Getting my head knocked in like that. I know that sounds messed up but ever since the accident, because of my brai
n damage...I mean I still got all my memories and shit. But ever since the accident, they seem like they all outside me. It’s like none of that stuff ever happened to me personally, you understand what I’m saying? To me, it was all just like some movie I watched from the front row.”

  “Wow.”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes I wish I had a stronger memory, especially of my mother. And then sometimes, when it comes to the bad stuff, just remembering the movie is enough to set me off. Like this morning. That’s rare though. At the end of the day...I don’t know. I don’t know how I’d be if I didn’t have that distance. Maybe I’d be just as messed up as you expected me to be. I can’t say. I just know that the police car hitting me turned out to be a good thing. Except for all the headaches.”

  I sat in silence, parsing her circuitous new data. Ever since she flashed me her first loaded look, I’d known how perfect she was for the role I was casting. But now I felt a strange sense of artistic possessiveness. Suddenly I was afraid to share her with the world, for fear they wouldn’t get her right. I certainly had qualms about sharing her with the media, with their quick cuts and dynamic framing techniques. Damn those lazy fucks. Those lowbrows and philistines. They’d flatten her many layers. They’d take this lovely swan and cram her into a duck-shaped hole. Worse, they’d force me to help.

  “So what do you think?” she asked. “Is that gonna play well on TV?”

  “I think you’re going to play well on TV. But we’ll definitely have to work on trimming your answers.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “I’m not the boss,” I stressed. “If anything, you and I are partners on this.”

  Harmony shrugged before getting back to her fatty salad. “Boss. Partner. Whatever. You the one with the freaky super-brain.”

  ________________

  On Tuesday, my freaky super-brain wondered if Lisa Glassman was abstinent.

  ________________

  Excluding our lunch break at the airport, I had driven Harmony around for six hours and 149 miles. At 3:20 we made our final stop in Koreatown, just around the corner from Alonso’s building. I turned off the ignition and looked at my passenger.

  “Well, good luck. Hope it all goes okay.”

  She laughed. “Thanks.”

  “Actually, if you reach under your seat, you’ll find a small cardboard box.”

  She did, and she did. “What’s this? A parting gift?”

  “Just something you’ll need.”

  Inside the box, snuggled in its plastic tray, was a brick-red wireless phone, plus accessories. I had hidden a pressed stack of seventy-five twenties beneath the tray. That was the parting gift. She wouldn’t find it until she got home.

  “This for me?”

  “That’s for you. That thing cost me five C-notes, so treat it well.”

  “Five hundred dollars?”

  “It’s worth it. It’s got a special chip in it that...I don’t know how it works. All I know is that nobody will be able to pick up our conversations. But listen, it’s only going to work with me, because I’ve got the exact same kind of phone. The call has to be secure on both ends.”

  She kept flipping it over in her hands. “I never had one of these before.”

  “This is how we’re going to communicate from now on. So don’t lose it. Don’t lend it out. And always remember to keep the battery charged. That’s very important.”

  She put the phone back in the box. “Shit, man. This is starting to feel real.”

  “Hey. Look at me.”

  She turned to me. She was back to being the quiet and awkward Harmony I had chatted up at the Flower Club. We’d come such a long way in just forty hours. And yet all I’d really done was bring her from one game of dirty pool to another.

  “I’m going to be with you every step of the journey. I’ll be all around you, like a guardian angel, keeping you out of harm’s way. You won’t be able to see me, but you’ll hear me. You and I will talk a million times a day. You think you have brain damage now, just wait until you’re done with that thing. We’ll be lucky to have four neurons left between us.”

  She wasn’t as amused by that as I was. “You gonna call me or can I also call you?”

  “You better. If you have any concerns, I want to be the first and only person you talk to. You have any problems, you stub your toe, I want you to call me. Any time of the day or night, as often as you like. I’ll always be reachable.”

  “What’s your number?”

  “I already programmed it into memory. It’s under ‘Slick.’”

  Now she laughed. “You’re too much.”

  “Actually, I’m not enough. That’s why we’ll both appreciate Alonso. He’s a nice guy. And he’ll take care of everything I can’t.”

  “If you say so.”

  He better. “He will. And he’s waiting for you, so...”

  “Yeah.”

  Despite that, she didn’t budge. I wasn’t sure if she was scared to move forward or sad to leave me behind. I assumed it was both. I hoped it was just the latter. I think it’s time to admit that with Harmony, my foothold was weak. She could move me to good or bad places. But somehow I’d managed to tell myself that given the weight of this assignment, anyone in Harmony’s role would have the same emotional leverage over me. I reminded myself that for all the good things about her, she was still just a nineteen-year-old kid with a cracked skull.

  “You know what I noticed about you, Scott?”

  “What did you notice about me?”

  “You never really touch anyone. I mean most people when they talk, they like hold an arm or pat a back. Hell, even Hunta did that shit with me yesterday and he knows what I’m about to do to him. And when I was crying today...I don’t know. I ain’t criticizing you. I think that’s just a part of being you. All I’m saying is I noticed. That’s all.”

  I didn’t take it as criticism at all. I held my left hand up to her, as if I were making a pledge. Catching my drift, she pressed her right palm to mine and then closed her grip. Her hand was tiny, like a child’s. And dark. Never in my life had I seen such dark fingers contrasted against the back of my hand. It was fascinating to look at, like a complex variation of the yin-yang.

  I tightened my grip. “This is your last day of being anonymous. Tomorrow there are going to be a lot of people whispering your name. By Thursday you’ll hear it from every direction. By Friday you’ll need a hat and glasses to go to the store. And by Monday you won’t be able to go to the store.”

  Demurely, she looked down at her knees but squeezed my hand harder.

  “You and I are going to conquer the world,” I said. “You better be ready.”

  “You better be with me.”

  “I won’t let you down.”

  “You better not.”

  It would be all too easy for the audience to make a big deal about the brief and feather-light kiss that Harmony and I shared. It would be all too convenient to pan the camera, add a soundtrack, and frame our exchange in some broad romantic context. It would also be a mistake. This wasn’t romance, despite the appearance. This wasn’t even attraction, in a physical sense. This was all energy. We were two ends of the same battery, positive and negative, bound together in a symbiotic quest for power and glory. When our hands clasped tight, we were simply sealing the casing. When our lips touched, we were only sharing the spark of ambition. It was electric, dynamic, and utterly fantastic. We might as well have been kissing the Bitch.

  The whole transaction, three seconds at best, was neither hot or cold. It was merely sweet. It was one of the sweetest moments of my adult life. How it looked to others, how it played in the theater, was not my concern.

  Still blushing, Harmony undid her seat belt and opened the door.

  “I’m gonna miss this car,” she joked.

  “I’m going to miss the smell of smoke in here,” I teased back. “Someday.”

  With a mischievous sneer, she pulled a cigarette from her shirt pocket and stashed it
behind my right ear. She stepped outside.

  “He’s on the eleventh floor,” I reminded her. “Alonso Lever.”

  She closed the door and peeked in through the window. “I know.”

  As she turned around, I called after her. “Hey!”

  With a roll of her neck, Harmony indulged me with a final glance.

  “You holla?”

  She smirked. “I holla.”

  With that, she walked away for good. I tossed the cigarette, raised the window, and then called Alonso from my new cellular.

  “She’s on her way up.”

  “Excellent,” he declared. “I can’t wait. And have no fear. My staff and I will treat her like royalty.”

  “Just be up front with her, okay? She’s going to hear enough bullshit. She won’t need more.”

  “I’ll be her oasis of honesty.”

  “Okay. Good. But at the same time, don’t refer to her final move as a confession. It’ll only freak her out. Just call it a retraction. Or better yet, it’s ‘clearing Hunta’s name.’ I know I’m splitting hairs—”

  “I’m a lawyer, my friend. I’ve split finer hairs than that.”

  “I’m sure. Now tonight or tomorrow, you should be getting a call from Gail Steiner from the Times. And probably Andy Cronin from the Associated—”

  “We went over this already. It’s all under control.”

  I pressed my temple. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m just being anal.”

  “Scott, you’ve done a man’s job. You designed and built this machine in record time. But a body can only work so hard. Go home. Take a hot bath. You deserve it.”