Little White Lies

by Brianna Baker

  More rooms, more weirdness, more creepy. Creepy white goth girl. Creepy white hairless cat in the clutches of a creepy old white goth lady. Creepy old white man with a face tattoo in a wheelchair. Shirtless tattooed young black men playing high-stakes poker and smoking cigars while a French maid serves them champagne.

  This room not so creepy, kinda hot (except for the cigars). Weirdos wearing feathers and gas masks. Creepy white goth twins in matching striped jumpsuits and matching mismatched shoes. Glam strippers leaning against more monitors with Bey’s singing face. Glam stripper straddling older businessman. Androgynous bubble bath. That creepy Caucasian mannequin family again. Sinewy black woman with short platinum hair, elaborate panties, and black stars over her nipples dancing with a big paintbrush and a bucket of black paint. Creepy black gangster dudes in white face.

  When we get to the room with 1920s lesbian Bey on the bed and four pale white dancers with matching bobs and long-sleeve lingerie, slouching and crouching, spinning and grinding on the floor, I see we are finally getting to some choreography.

  When I see that Bey has lost the pants from her pantsuit, and we begin cutting back to the other rooms to see all these creeps and assorted weirdos getting down and dirty with each other, I am reminded that Beyoncé isn’t always suitable for children. (To be fair, this is one of six songs/videos on the album that is labeled “explicit”.) Scenes ramp up to a freaky crescendo, TV screens are smashed, Beyoncé calmly exits, and the fire in the fireplace goes out.

  The takeaway: White people are creepy; the whiter, the creepier. But black people can be creepy, too!

  Drunk in Love (featuring Jay Z)

  Honestly, when I saw the title of this song, I was imagining the word “Drunk” was being used as a metaphor for Love’s intoxicating qualities. Boy, was I wrong. The song could have just as easily been called “Drunk and Horny.” Okay, sometimes Beyoncé is really not suitable for young children. I’m not even comfortable with the message of this song being directed at me. Well, at least I’m old enough to know better. But I’m not so sure the same is true for all the other 17-year-olds out there.

  I wish it were not the case, but I have a feeling that “Drunk in Love” is going to be one of the hits off this album. (Aren’t her songs with Jay Z always hits?)

  Here are my impressions. The ocean. Black-and-white beach scene. Bey meandering along the sand in sleepwear (or is it beachwear?), clutching one of her beauty trophies from the “Pretty Hurts” video. Dopey stares, improvised tai chi, and some sultry sand-grinding tell us she’s in the mood for some inebriated boinking. She even slurs and stumbles over her lyrics—“swerving, surfing, swerfing”—she’s really committing to this character!

  Sparse arrangement. Strings and intermittent drums. The musical mood is airy, and this “drunken love” feels more detached and distant than intimate.

  Uh-oh, here comes Jay Z rapping with a stagger in his swagger. Name checking his cognac (D’Ussé) and name-dropping his art collection (Warhol). It appears that even when drunk and alone on the beach with Beyoncé, this man has a difficult time ever making eye contact with his wife. Wait a second, what?! Was that an Ike Turner reference? Um, yep. “Eat the cake, Anna Mae!” refers to a scene from the movie What’s Love Got to Do with It?, where Tina Turner’s physically abusive husband forces her to eat a piece of cake in celebration of her solo success. I love you, Bey, but. This. Is. Not. Cool.

  The takeaway: Bey can get every bit as freaky as Rhianna, and she’s a blast to be with at the beach when she’s drunk. Oh, and Jay Z is a very sensitive lover.

  AFTERWORD

  The glacial pace of publishing, even in this so-called Digital Age, is mind-boggling. We are writing this so-called “Afterword” at the last moment possible for it to appear in the hardcover first edition of Little White Lies—a book that revels in the immediacy of communicating through blogs, emails, texts, and tweets—more than four months before it will hit the shelves. The earliest you’ll be reading it is February 2016, nearly two and a half years after we began the project. Blockbuster movies and their attending sequels have been conceived, written, produced, focus-grouped, and distributed to theaters in less time. Our first draft was due—er, we should say, submitted—on January 21, 2015: a full year before its release.

  The constraints of our publishing schedule factored into our concerns about the timeliness of our book. We also considered this notion of timeliness in designing the arc of the plot. We wanted our book to be timely—that is, of these times. But we imagined that a book set in the “modern day” (an expression that feels outdated before, during, and after typing it) might feel outdated before it was even published, based solely on the protagonists’ preferred social media platforms. Lacking Karl’s supremely confident holiday-party prediction swagger, we couldn’t be entirely sure if people would still be tweeting in February 2016.

  So we decided to put a very specific time-stamp on our novel. This would allow us to reflect the times during which it was written, if not the times when it would be read. Our time-stamp decision also allowed us to incorporate “real-life” events into our fictional narrative. Through the course of writing the book—a collaborative process between the two of us and our editor Dan Ehrenhaft that involved a series of incremental deadlines (each one missed and extended at least once) and its own real-life cycle of texts, emails, and phone calls—we periodically tweaked the time line to adhere to school holidays, real world events, allusions to Shakespeare, and Beyoncé release dates. The time frame of the book loosely matches up with the time frame of its composition. The story begins one day before we signed our contracts, and ends in “Summer 2014”—just after Coretta has graduated from high school, and probably right around the time our manuscript was initially due.

  Since then, however, we have witnessed (primarily through the lens of the Internet) a panoply of tragedies, outrages, head-scratchers, punch lines, absurdities—even the formation of a new political movement—that would have made perfect fodder for Little White Lies—both Coretta’s fictional blog (and TV show, if it ever got off the ground!) as well as the real book you hold in your hands.

  One of the biggest dilemmas we faced as we were completing the last chapters of the book was how, for example, to account for the tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri—wherein Michael Brown, an unarmed young black man, was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer—and all the tumult that followed in its wake. Michael Brown was killed on August 9, 2014—months after our novel’s action had ended, yet months before we completed our manuscript. How could we write a book addressing contemporary racial tensions and identity, we wondered, without acknowledging something we sensed at the time to be a potential catalyst for a shift in our nation’s racial consciousness?

  Many events since have begged the question, “What would Coretta have to say about this?”

  What would she have to say about the Black Lives Matter movement? About the death of Freddie Gray and the ensuing protests in Baltimore? About Rachel Dolezal? About the massacre of nine black churchgoers in Charleston at the hands of a young white supremacist?

  But this book, of course, was never intended to dwell in such unfathomable horror. At its heart, it is meant to be fun, humorous, provocative. On the other hand, comedy has its own dark side. In October 2014 (months after the final chapter of Little White Lies was closed, yet months before Karl’s epilogue would be written), comedian Hannibal Buress called Bill Cosby a rapist during his stand-up act; the clip went viral; over the next several months more than 50 women came forward to accuse Cosby of drugging and raping them, with the alleged attacks dating back some 50 years; public support for Cosby steadily waned until July 2015, when a Philadelphia judge unsealed decade-old court transcripts in which Cosby admitted to having administered Quaaludes to young women as a means to take advantage of them sexually. Here was one of the most famous and successful black men in America—beloved for his comedy career and television masterpieces, revered and resented for hi
s outspoken critiques of perceived failings within the black community—exposed as a hypocrite of the creepiest kind.

  Coretta would no doubt have a lot to say about both Cosby and Buress, as would her parents. As would Karl.

  They would have plenty to say, too, about the recent gravity-affirming freefall of Australian model-turned-rapper Iggy Azalea—after a series of her racist and homophobic tweets were dredged up from the not too distant past. On black twitter the schadenfreude was palpable.

  And what about Terry Bollea aka Hulk Hogan, arguably the most famous professional wrestler of all time? As of late July 2015 he was entirely scrubbed from the official history of pro wrestling (have a look at the WWE web site and see if you can find him), after audio recordings surfaced where Bollea/Hogan privately declared, “I am a racist, to a point. F***ing n***ers.”*

  Way to go, Hulkster!

  Inevitably there will be an untold number of LWL-worthy happenings, flare-ups, faux pas, showdowns, spectacles, controversies, and catastrophes over the days, months, years between now and the time you’re reading these words—which, presumably, means you’ve read to The End. Well done.

  We, the authors, have come to peace with the understanding that the fictional blog we created, written by a fictional character about real events, will not necessarily persevere beyond these pages. We can only hope that real-life people, young and old alike, will pick up where Coretta left off, and take to their own tumblrs, Facebook pages, YouTubes, Instagrams, or whatever the kids are using these days to communicate, to do what Coretta prescribed in her final words on television, and which Karl reiterated at the end of his epilogue: seek and empower truth and justice; recognize and oppose injustice and deception.

  Thank you for reading.

  —Brianna Baker and F. Bowman Hastie III

  * Whereas our protagonists would likely eschew the use of asterisks to bowdlerize such words, Karl and Coretta lacked our good fortune of having a professional editor.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The authors would like to thank: Dan, Bronwen, Rachel, Meredith, and the entire Soho Teen team; Kaya and Amaechi; Dave; each other; and you the reader.

  Thanks also to Rita Williams-Garcia and Michael Render aka Killer Mike, and Dorian Warren for their early support.

  Brianna Baker would like thank: Dad, Lauren, Evan, Alek, Kelly, Nic, Jmiah, Walt, Jean, Blair, Punam, Gladyse, Steven, Joan, my manager Brian Stern at AGI Entertainment Media and Management, and Kristyn Keene at ICM.

  F. Bowman Hastie III would like to thank: Mom, Dad, Matt, Amelie, John, Katie & Georgia, Tillie & Doc, Jay, Gordon, Shaina, Sasha, Stephen, Ricardo, AK & Family, smarcus, Darien, Fred, Kristen, Tyler, Chris & Anne, Sean, Dirk, Andy & Jack, Diane, Pollack, Jaishri, Reema, Courtney & Martin, Mira, Ramsey & Eric, Knuckles, and my agent Don Fehr at Trident Media Group. Special gratitude goes to IBC, Willard Moan, low-fi, Whizzy, Dreamkillers, Bottom Feeders, Nappy G, The 9-Inch Whales, Dred Scott Trio, T-n-T, Zelly Rock, Run-DMC, LL Cool J, The Beastie Boys, N.W.A., Public Enemy, Too $hort, The Jungle Brothers, Schoolly D, Eric B. & Rakim, Geto Boys, Kool G Rap, Big Daddy Kane, Slick Rick, BDP, De La Soul, EPMD, A Tribe Called Quest, Brand Nubian, X Clan, Sir Fresh & DJ Critical, M.C. Nikke and DJ Rap N Scratch, Audio Two, MC Lyte, Positive K, Redman, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Kill Dog E, Domino, Nas, Outkast, Cypress Hill, Wu-Tang, Killah Priest, Biggie, Lil’ Kim, The Click, DMX, Del, Kool Keith, The Pharcyde, Freestyle Fellowship, Organized Konfusion, Smoothe Da Hustler and Trigga tha Gambler, Eminem, Missy Elliot, Blackalicious, Jay-Z, Kanye, Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj, Drake, Three Loco, Kendrick Lamar, Lil Dicky, Run The Jewels, Mr. Magic & Marley Marl, DJ Chuck Chillout, Kool DJ Red Alert, Teddy Tedd & Special K (Audio 2), DNA & Hank Love, Stretch & Bobbito.