Ken Bruen - Pimp

Max tried out the line on newbies — in the bathroom at bars and clubs he’d hand out PIMP samples and when a kid said, “Why’s it called PIMP?” Max, ready, hit with, “ ’Cause it knows how to take care of you.” This was perfect because that was what people wanted. Kids today, they didn’t want to do any work — they wanted apps to do the work for them. They’d had Generation X and Y, they should call this one Generation Z — for zippo. These kids today had no ambition, wanted everything handed to them. Well, PIMP was the perfect drug for Generation Zippo because all you had to do was pop a pill and chill . Pop a pill and chill , there was another one. The brilliance was overwhelming Max now. If he didn’t watch out his head would explode.

Then one night tragedy hit — or fortune, depending on how you look at it. Max was at Sage’s, picking up some product, when Sage OD’d on PIMP — or maybe he’d been doing coke or shooting up, whatever, but he went into convulsions and then passed out on the kitchen floor. Max considered reviving him, but reminded himself that this was the kid who’d threatened him with that fucking huge knife, and maybe someday would develop the cojones to blackmail him, find some way to rat him out to the cops in spite of the fact that “Nathan Schneermesser” was just a name he’d made up, tied to a P.O. Box he’d rented, meaning that Max had the formula for PIMP and Sage had bubkis. So he just kneeled next to him while he was dying, went grim in full brogue like Liam in The Grey , and whispered, “You’re going to die now, Sage, but it’s okay, ya just gotta let go, feel the peace come over you,” and then realized, Eh, who’m I kidding? and said, “ Adios, muchacho ,” and left the kitchen.

Max wiped the place down, filled Sage’s car with as much PIMP as would fit, and headed east. First he thought he’d stop in some town in the middle of nowhere and indulge in some local ho action, but the PIMP and the death had ignited something in The Max, and he couldn’t resist the urge to shake his little town blues and go back to New York, the big time, and get his whole life back.

Yeah, he knew he was taking a risk going back east. The beard and weight helped, but last time he checked he was number six on the FBI’s Most Wanted list — he couldn’t just waltz back into Manhattan.

So when he got into town he called in a favor from an old crew member from Attica. He got the plastic surgery — a botch job, but at least he didn’t look like himself, and that was the whole point, right?

Next, to get his business going, he needed to produce PIMP, a shitload of it, and for that he needed das capital.

Enter Precious. She claimed she had a contact in the leading Jamaican gang in East New York, Brooklyn. That was good — there were lots of projects there and the second-best place — after a college campus — to start a trend was in the hood. PIMP would be the new Air Jordan, the new hip-hop.

In his room at Precious’ Harlem tenement, Max was saying to her, “So who do I talk to?”

“His name’s DeMarcus, mon,” Precious said.

“DeMarcusmon?” Max asked.

Precious rolled her eyes. “Just DeMarcus,” she said. “Mon.”

He wanted to slap her. So he slapped her.

“Hey, what’s that for?”

“A reminder of who’s in charge,” Max said. Then, “What’s he look like?”

Massaging her face, Precious said, “Big, dumb, got dreads.”

Thinking, Kinda like you , Max said, “So what do I do, just walk in, ask for him?”

“How else you gonna meet the man?” Precious said, as if Max was stupid.

On his way to Brooklyn in a fuckin’ Zipcar, Max had a bad vibe and he felt like an idiot. He should’ve had Precious come along, make the introduction. Old Max wouldn’t’ve made that slip-up. It showed that, far as he’d come, he still had a long way to go.

He should’ve listened to his instincts because when he got to the place, some kind of warehouse off Utica Avenue, a thin white guy, curly brown hair, glasses — a fucking hipster — put a gun to his head the moment he arrived, took him to a room in the back.

“You DeMarcusmon?” Max asked.

“Do I look like my name’s DeMarcusmon?” the guy asked.

Wiseass. These days it seemed like Max was flypaper for wiseasses.

“So what do you want?” Max said, when they arrived in a dimly lit room in the back. The room had no furniture, but there were three big black guys in the room, all with Uzis.

“I want to know all about PIMP,” the white guy said. “I want to know where you got it, how it’s made, how we can make more.”

“Yeah? And what if I’m not in the mood to talk?”

Stuffing the barrel of the gun into Max’s mouth so deep Linda Lovelace would’ve been impressed, the guy went, “Then you die, right here, right now.”

Fucking Precious. Another big-busted babe had fucked the Max over.

He shoulda known.

Someone, somewhere is tired of fucking the hot girl.

Larry Reed was old-school Hollywood, i.e., fuck-all talent but lots of chutzpah. He knew the trick was to blackmail the living daylights out of the real players. He looked like Fatty Arbuckle and indeed had similar tastes. Nearing seventy now, he relied on the little ol’ blue pills to keep the L-Rod in gear.

His dick had been working fine of late, but his career was in a tailspin. His last hit had been a Janeane Garofalo rom-com. Yep, it had been that long.

Five years ago he thought he was set for his big comeback. He optioned a pitch for a dollar from some shmuck kid, Bill Moss, who was desperate for a way out of the telemarketing cubicle. Larry talked him into writing on spec, the way a porno producer tells his talent that the first time on the desk is for free and the next time you get paid. You need lots of chutzpah to pull off that line but Bill went for it — hook, line, and sucker. Guys like Bill were morons when it came to the business of Hollywood; they believed that they had talent and that it was only a matter of time until their talent was recognized. This was perfect for Larry because Larry only worked with morons; it was the only way to avoid agents and managers and get pictures made.

But Bill Moss, God bless him, knew how to write. The script was called Spaced Out and the tagline was “ Alien meets Forrest Gump .”

The idea was everything you needed for a big hit nowadays — sexy, high-concept, dumbed down — should’ve been a slam dunk.

Should’ve. But this was Hollywood, where there were as many should’ves as there were actresses who’d quit waiting tables to become reiki masters.

The Spaced Out pitch: In the not-so-distant future, an Average Joe with a mental disability is chosen by the space program to become the first man on Mars, but aliens invade his ship and terrorize him. It wasn’t a horror picture, though, it was drama, because it turns out that one alien is a good alien — “Think E.T. meets Judge Reinhold,” Larry would say in the meetings, not realizing that the Reinhold reference made him sound like even more of a dinosaur.

To Larry’s unending dismay and kvetching, he couldn’t get Spaced Out off the ground. It wasn’t like the old days in Holly-wood when you could go to the Foxes or Paramounts with a stable of projects and they set you up in a bungalow on the lot with a fat production deal. Nowadays they didn’t give a fuck about ideas in Hollywood. If you came to them without money and attachments you had bullshit.

For a couple of years he’d had John Travolta loosely attached. Okay, okay, so “loosely” meant that he’d discussed it with Travolta’s manager at one of Bryan Singer’s pool parties — yeah, Larry had been into dudes for a while, call it “a phase.” Larry hadn’t gotten an invite, had crashed the party. Hey, Woody Allen says ninety percent of success is showing up, right? When the bouncers were tossing Larry, he’d shouted at the manager, “I want John to be in my movie!” and he thought he’d heard, “Okay, run with it, Lar.”