Little White Lies

by Brianna Baker

  Coretta White had far more than seven thousand followers by the time she crossed my radar, of course. When Alex’s call came, she had over 700,000.

  She was also realer than anyone I’d ghosted for in a long time.

  After accepting the job and placing R$$P back on my communications table, I leaned back on the Big Silver Ball into a gentle back-bend, then closed my eyes and lingered on thoughts of my ex-girlfriend-turned-employer. I was careful not to fall on my head. In the six months I’d been sitting on the BSB, I had fallen on my head exactly twice. Still, I could really feel the difference in my core strength.

  Unfortunately my six-pack was still obscured by the countless other six-packs that had passed through over the decades. Ice Cream and Beer: the Two Pillars of My Visible Prosperity, the foundation of my formidable paunch.

  Reflecting on my twenty-year relationship with Alex was akin to visiting an absurd carnival fun house populated with the rich and powerful. Strobe-lit pockets revealed glimpses of autistic Nobel Prize winners, plastic-smile politicians, menopausal titans of industry. From unseen passageways sprang gum-popping teenybopper stars, lascivious celebrity chefs, and rappers who ranged from the monosyllabic coma-toast to wide-eyed megalomaniacs.

  I shared the price of admission with a secret cadre of misfit friends and occasional subcontractors when the workload got too heavy.

  Alex was aware of all of them and was always there along with us—but somehow removed, above it all, herself.

  Now the prospect of fostering a single identity—the truly amazing Coretta White—had an unsettling result. It made me question my own identity. I tried to rewind, so I could make some sense of the endless stream of someone elses I had inhabited. Half of my life, it occurred to me, had been devoted to pretend time, to imagining myself as someone other than Karl Ristoff.

  For the first time ever, for the first time since Alex had brought me into this ghost-racket, I actually found myself wondering about my “true self.”

  Who was I? What was I?

  I saw no point in apprising Alex of my plunge into uncertainty.

  Back in college I’d based my identity around being in a band, the Peter O’Toole Society*. We were a campus sensation, drawing crowds in small Cambridge clubs, getting paid to play parties and school-sanctioned trip-fests at colleges throughout the Northeast.

  Possessing no discernable musical ability but plenty of unrestrained personality, I was the front man. An early ’90s white rapper convinced that I was the heir apparent to the Beastie Boys*. The rest of the group was essentially a prototypical four-piece Ivy League jam band—drums, guitar, bass, and keys—and they were frighteningly good. Too good for me, it turned out, although I’m not sure why it took them three years to realize it.

  Exactly one week after we landed ourselves in Rolling Stone magazine as one of the “Best College Bands in the USA,” I was fired. Our guitarist broke the news. He and the other three members of the Peter O’Toole Society wanted to break up so they could embark on “a new project.” This new project would consist of the original band minus me. Apparently they were being held back creatively by having to play “behind a white rapper.”

  I didn’t see the point of arguing my case. If they wanted to swap showmanship and charisma for the creative freedom to take mushrooms and play extended interpolations of The Meters’* greatest hits, well, that was their pickle, and they could suck it.

  On the other hand, Alex first met me at a POTS show. She made it abundantly clear that she was interested in me in spite of my stage persona, M.C. Expensive Meal aka Dick Johnson.

  “Please stop rapping,” she pleaded, about two months into our relationship. “Just … don’t rap. Okay?”

  “But rap is in my blood, baby.”

  In retrospect I find it hard to believe that I made such a pronouncement without irony. “Rap is in my blood, baby”? I must have been saying that as a joke, right? But my memory is of a perfectly straight-faced (and much thinner) younger self articulating those exact words, and Alex staring back with a look of abject pity. There was enough pity for both of us.

  “No. It’s not. It’s not in your blood, Karl. It’s in your penis.” She affectionately mussed my curly high-top fade. “And in some other tiny, very stupid portion of your brain.”

  She was right. I was twenty-two years old. I had a diploma from Harvard. It was time to give up my dreams of rap stardom.

  Alex drew me close. “Karl, there are so many other ways you can make a living—and a real life for yourself—using your mind and your gift with words. You are a wordsmith. But if you do decide to keep rapping, well, I don’t want to hear about it.”

  We broke up three weeks later. Not because Alex told me I’d never make it as a rapper.

  On second thought, that’s probably exactly why we broke up. Thankfully, Alex coerced me into our lifetime-guaranteed friendship pact.

  Three weeks after that, she called to offer me my first gig working for her new company.

  AllYou™ is a rare example of genius. In an age where “genius” is tossed around like glitter and bestowed upon the likes of Lady Gaga, the word has lost the weight it deserves. But at the age of twenty-two, Alex Melrose conceived of a comprehensive concierge service to provide “that one perfect person” to fulfill the individual needs of the super rich. She did this in the middle of a recession. And she started the company with nothing more than a Rolodex (if you don’t know what a Rolodex is, Google it, kids), at her desk in the humongous Chelsea loft her art-dealer parents bought her as soon as she received her MBA.

  Believe it or not, the western edge of Chelsea was a sketchy neighborhood back then. To me, it felt like a risky place to open a boutique business geared toward the top point-one percent (that’s point-one percent).

  Now the property is worth ten times what they paid for it.

  Alex, like her parents, has always operated ahead of the curve. Even then, she had that uncanny art-dealer talent for bringing the right people together at the right time. She explained to me that when it came to the promise of luxury goods and services, the extremely wealthy were immune to redundancy and hyperbole.

  That’s where I came in. I was her first “highly specialized specialist.”

  Based on a PowerPoint presentation I’d helped her create for one of her cutthroat business school classes, Alex decided I was the one perfect person to assist the Deputy US Commerce Secretary.

  Madame Deputy happened to be the wife of one of Alex’s pointedly powerful professors. She was computer illiterate but too embarrassed to admit as much to her employed assistants. As she made clear to AllYou™ (Alex and her Rolodex), she desperately needed help presenting her report on money laundering and transnational crime at the twentieth G7 summit in Italy.

  My highly specialized specialty: I knew how to use PowerPoint.

  Remember, this was 1994, a time when very few people realized how easy (or lame) it was to use Office Suite for Microsoft Word in general. The best part about the gig was that I got to travel to Naples and spend an afternoon in the same room as three prime ministers, four presidents, and a chancellor. Oh, and I got paid five thousand dollars. Not bad for my first week of honest work as a college graduate. Alex was thrilled.

  Other high-profile PowerPoint gigs followed. I developed a knack for distilling big ideas into digestible bits of content, easily consumed by a broad range of participants in a group setting. In some ways Twitter is a lot like PowerPoint—a natural vehicle for disseminating self-promotional bullshit—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  As the twentieth century wound down, I created PowerPoint presentations for some of the greatest minds in economics, public policy, and reinsurance*. Their brainpower was best spent elsewhere, at least according to their own worshipful views of themselves. Meanwhile, I was traveling the world, staying in five-star hotels, always as an anonymous “assistant.”

  I knew it couldn’t last forever, but why hit the brakes? I didn’t even mind the Brooks Brother
s suits and black wingtips, the “respectable work clothes” Alex insisted on buying for me.

  A few of the smarter CEOs and politicians tried to woo me away from Alex, but she would never let such a thing happen. Not that she wanted to hold onto me specifically, but Alex understood that if any of her “specialists” were to be poached by one of her clients, her healthy commissions would disappear. From day one, all of her contracts—with clients as well as specialists—contained ironclad non-compete and nondisclosure clauses. And all payments, naturally, went through AllYou™. I’d go to jail before I’d get another job.

  My PowerPoint career peaked when Alex agreed to loan my exclusive services for a three-month period—during which a certain high-powered, right-wing female CEO plotted a run for US Congress. This woman was so impressed with my PowerPoint acumen that she wanted to hire me as her head speechwriter.

  She lost the election (through no fault of my own; no speech can undo the damage of a husband’s indictment for insider trading), but she loved my speeches so much that she negotiated an extended deal with Alex for me to ghostwrite her memoir.

  It turned out to be a New York Times bestseller.

  Even though my name appeared nowhere in the pages of the book or any related materials, Alex made sure word got around about AllYou™’s prowess for finding that “one perfect ghostwriter.” For some reason, most of Alex’s politician clients ended up falling on the right side of the political spectrum. I soon found myself working on speeches for people I reviled. But I never let my personal worldview get in the way of making a buck.

  In 1999 I helped write autobiographies for three of the five female Fortune 500 CEOs, and for two of the ten women who served in the US Senate—all at the same time.

  If you think ghostwriting five books in one year is a lot, you’re right. It is. On the other hand, five female CEOs out of five hundred? That’s a poor statistic. But as of 2013, there are twenty-one female Fortune 500 CEOs and twenty women serving in the US Senate. That’s progress!

  Maybe I should be thanked? If so, you’re welcome.

  But ghostwriting isn’t really writing. It’s more like translating. The ghostwriter does not make things up. A ghostwriter must convince the reader that his words have emanated from an attributed author’s brain. But more importantly, he must compose the author’s story in a way that is compelling to the reader.

  Then there is the delicate relationship between ghostwriter and “author.” A skilled ghostwriter will never allow the author to feel that his or her own stories are being rewritten because they are otherwise un-fucking-readable. Rather, the ghostwriter is merely “helping bring the author’s own words to life on the page.”

  Okay, five books in one year was too much. I shouldn’t complain, since I made a shit-ton of money. But when the last inspirational tale of bootstraps-to-Burberry was in the can, I was completely fed up with skirt-suits, skinny lattes, and private drivers. I was also convinced that the “book” as we knew it was an endangered species, but that it might very well outlive the magazine. That made me anxious. If I wasn’t a rapper, at least I was a writer, a wordsmith. Wasn’t I?

  When I was in college, my weed dealer Clarence gave me some important advice. (Full Disclosure: I have not smoked weed with any regularity for more than fifteen years, and since the year 2000 I have been virtually drug free, except for alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, and Adderall.) He took a huge bong hit and began speaking in that tight-lipped, constricted voice that precedes the exhalation. “My biggest regret about getting into the business”—here he enveloped me in a cloud of pungent smoke—“is not giving myself a pseudonym. I should have told all my custies my name was Jay, like every other Tom, Dick, and Larry who sells weed. And now look at me. I’m Clarence the Weed Guy. Not Clarence the DJ. Not Clarence with the Amazing Record Collection. Not Clarence Who Makes the Killer Gazpacho. Just Clarence the Weed Guy.”

  I was too stoned to follow. “Custies?” I asked. “What’s that?”

  “Customers.”

  “Is that what I am, a custie?”

  “Yeah, kid, you’re a custie.” He loaded the bong and passed it to me with a sad smile. “Listen, if you ever find yourself doing something that you don’t want to be known for doing—especially if it’s something you’re doing purely for money, or if it’s illegal or unethical in any way—I strongly advise you to adopt a pseudonym. An alias. An aka. In life, we are never required to tell the truth.”

  AM I BORING YOU, DEAR READER?

  Please forgive this prolonged section of overwrought personal business history! I’m just trying to get to the part where I became an Internet soothsayer.

  Years before I happened upon Coretta White and Little White Lies, I proved to Alex Melrose that I, too, could be ahead of the curve. Which helps elucidate why my friend and employer believed that I was the Magical White Man qualified to help this Rich Little Black Girl write a blog—specifically a blog that did not require a ghostwriter.

  It’s hard to fathom that from 2002 to 2005, blogs ruled. And I ruled the blogs. Some of them, at any rate. During that time, I must have blown through hundreds of thousands of dollars made on blogs alone. Some content I wrote myself, or rather rewrote for the so-called “blogger.” On some blogs I was more of an editor, farming out writing assignments to a tiny, trusted army of minions.

  I didn’t bother Alex with putting my subcontractors on the books, or frankly mentioning them to her at all. My fees from AllYou™ were direct-deposited to my bank account, and I paid all my workers in cash, under the table. Cash goes fast in New York City, after all. With all the fine restaurants, overpriced cocktails, and cab fares, it’s hard to keep money in the bank.

  But somehow Alex knew about my minions. Alex always knew everything.

  Fortunately, AllYou™ also deducted my taxes before direct-depositing. My tax returns were generously prepared by Alex’s in-house accountant. Most years I signed the returns without even reading the dollar amounts. There was nothing left in my bank account, so why bother knowing how much I had made in the first place? I was king of the ghost-blogs. That was all that mattered.

  At least until the 2005 AllYou™ holiday party. Then everything changed.

  Since 1996 Alex had hosted this annual AllYou™ holiday bacchanal (she called it a Christmas party until 2000) at that same Chelsea loft where she’d started. She lavished gifts upon all those who benefited from her genius—her tiny and trusted army of minions, of which I was Minion Number One. All of us were sworn to the same rigid code of anonymity and secrecy, which of course led to lots of drinking.

  It was here, less than three months after Facebook launched, that I made the audacious prediction it would take over the World Wide Web.

  Back then Facebook was still intended for high school and college kids. I swore that it would make Friendster and Myspace and maybe even Google obsolete.

  God, I love eggnog.

  One year later, having been proved at least partly right, I learned Alex decided I should (anonymously and secretly) head up the new social networking division of AllYou™. The money was good, and the work was easy. The problem was that I no longer met interesting and powerful people. Facebook was all about corporations. I got stuck coaching a bunch of clueless marketing directors. Herders of sheeple. And I was their schlepherd.

  My hate for all things corporate was starting to give me back pain. And I missed writing. Maybe even more than I missed rapping.

  Then came Twitter.

  At the 2007 holiday party, I found myself preaching to Alex about the amazing potential of “a new microblogging and social networking site.” (God, I do love eggnog.) I hypocritically quoted Twitter’s corporate words because in this instance, I believed them. I could see the cash written all over the cow.

  And per my prediction, when Twitter emerged as the preferred medium for fame seekers, it was like God’s gift to me. I became its secret weapon. I was indeed #KingTwit, Dark Lord of the Twitterverse.

  I became increa
singly convinced of my own genius as well.

  So four years later, I was eggnog-fueled enough to announce that I would not be accepting any more corporations as clients. I got in this business to help Alex’s people. Like that first poor client who didn’t know how to create a PowerPoint presentation. And I did not believe corporations were people.

  “Well, neither do I,” Alex offered in rebuttal, helping herself to another sloppy ladleful. “But their money is quite green. As green as a person’s, and often comes in larger sums.”

  Now here I was on the BSB wondering if it would ever occur to Alex that I might not be motivated by money.

  Maybe she would never realize that my motivation stemmed from unwavering loyalty to her. (Maybe that was best.) Loyalty, and the love of a challenge, and a fierce pride in my ability to write convincingly and on demand. On some level, it stemmed from a belief in my own genius.

  On the other hand, Alex knew me better than anyone else. She’d offered me the Coretta White gig for a reason. She knew I was ready for a break. Twitter may have been my bitch once, but I was now a prisoner of the Twittersphere. I was Twitter’s bitch. I was twizzered. Tweeked. Tweezled.

  “You know I love the color green, Alex,” I’d told her at the end of today’s fateful phone call. “But in my heart, I’m a wordsmith.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Coretta (September 25–November 18, 2013)

  tumblr.

  LITTLE WHITE LIES

  September 25, 2013

  Little White Lie of the Day: “Free your ass, and your mind will follow.” Translation: “Young women, you need to keep up with the Kardashians (or the Joneses) to stay relevant, current, and/or accepted.” Also: this lie wasn’t one my parents told me, but rather one that I told myself.

  Anyone born from the early 1980s until the early 2000s is part of Gen Y or a “millennial.” I’ll accept the “millennial” label for the purpose of this post. As a millennial, I feel fortunate for all of the access I have been granted to information. I will never know the annoyance my parents idiotically suffer when sitting around with friends and trying to think of an actor’s name from … wait, what’s that film again? My friends and I know how to find Charlize Theron’s shoe size. Instantly. That’s progress.