Daniel Price - Slick

“I meant well.”

Yes, and what a fine comfort that was. Maybe I could yell that to Harmony as she plummeted into darkness. Maybe she’d forgive me on the long way down.

________________

I parked a block away from Doug’s house, just in case someone followed me. I rang the doorbell and was surprised to see Big Bank. I blinked at him in stupor.

“Oh. Hey. What are you doing here?”

He looked around. “Just get in.”

I entered the house quickly. He closed the door behind me. “It was stupid of you to come here.”

“I was asked to come.”

“Yeah, well, it was stupid for them to ask.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not radioactive yet.”

“Yeah? What happens when the TV starts throwing your name around?”

“Then I start glowing.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “That’s why I came here.”

He studied me, expressionless. “You have a hickey on your neck.”

“What?”

I examined myself in the foyer mirror. Jesus. He wasn’t kidding. There was a blemish the size of a quarter at the base of my throat, a silly mishap from last night’s affections. It pulled me out of the future so fast, I laughed with dizzy inertia.

Big Bank eyed me cynically. “The deaf woman?”

“Yeah. You want to hear all about it?”

“No.”

“Good,” I said, while adjusting my shirt collar. “So is Jeremy here? Or did they just bring you over to kill me?”

I knew Hunta had a new secret hideout. I just didn’t expect it to be Doug’s place. The move was pure fiscal pessimism on the Judge’s part. On some level, he figured this was a lost battle, which meant he’d have to drop Jeremy from the roster, which meant there was no future revenue to deduct all those hotel expenses from. It was record-label dharma: if you can’t bill the artist, it’s probably not worth paying for.

Since I last saw him nine days before, Hunta had lost a little weight, a lot of sleep, his wife, his daughter, his faith in humanity, and any fondness he may have had for me. I could see it all on his face as I entered the living room. He stretched out on the long couch, decked out in nothing but an open robe and a pair of red silk boxer shorts. For once his opiates were legal. He tapped a cigarette into an ashtray on the floor, right next to a half-empty bottle of sloe gin.

“Slick,” he muttered. “Get the fuck over here.”

I sat down on the wooden coffee table, between him and the big-screen TV. The bold text overlay stretched all the way across the Fox News banner: harmony prince claim a hoax?

Before I could say anything, Hunta grabbed my sleeve. His eyes were cracked with deep red veins.

“Just tell me it’s over, man. Tell me this fucking nightmare is over and I’ll forgive you for everything.”

I caught Doug and the Judge in the corner of my eye. The two of them were pacing the porch — flailing, fretting. Like me, they were waiting for more data. They were waiting for Maxina.

“It looks like the nightmare’s over,” I told Hunta. “At least for you.”

“I didn’t ask what it looks like! I asked what it is!”

“I don’t know what else to tell you. We’re just going to have to wait and see.”

He sat up and hunched forward, his ring-laden hands pressing deep into his cornrows.

“They all saying she might be lying. She might be full of shit. But no one’s saying I might be innocent.”

“That’s not how they work. They only have two modes: attack and ignore. If you want vindication, you’re going to have to fight for it. You’re going to have to get in everyone’s faces, with middle fingers blazing, and say, ‘Fuck you. You got me all wrong.’”

I thought that might pick him up some, but he continued to brood. I plopped down next to him, slouching into the cushions.

“Or you can just attack the evil white men who framed you,” I said.

“Yeah? Can I mention you by name?”

“I don’t think you’ll have to.”

Hunta vented a smoky sigh, then matched my languid pose. We looked like a couple of wasted stoners.

“Forget it,” he said. “What I been through, I wouldn’t wish on anybody. And it don’t matter anyway. Even if I got the whole world kissing my ass, it won’t mean a damn thing. Not anymore.”

“I’m sorry about Simba.”

“Yeah. So am I.”

He took a long swig of gin, then offered me the bottle. I waved it away. I didn’t need his depressant, and he certainly didn’t need my flu germs.

“I fucked up,” he said. “And you know what the sad part is? Even if she came back right now, even if I apologized all day and all night, I’d only fuck it up all over again.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t.”

“Yeah, soon enough I would.” He took another swig of liquor. “Soon enough I’d have to.”

I studied the bottle in his hand. It idly occurred to me that the words “gin” and “Jean” would look very much the same to a deaf lipreader. So would “medicine” and “Madison.” The bizarre revelations nearly triggered an ill-timed chortle. All I needed was gin and medicine. I could survive all this with just a little gin and medicine.

“See, we ain’t like them, Slick. There’s a kind of love in women, most women, that we ain’t got in us. A kind of love we can’t handle. That’s why so many marriages end up falling apart.”

“That simple, huh?”

“Some things are just that simple, man. It’s people like you who make shit more complex.”

“Well, you ever rap about it?”

He gave me a jaded look. “Fuck you. I bet you think I haven’t.”

“Have you?”

“Second album, motherfucker. First track. ‘Love Is Real.’”

“Tell me about it.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

He extinguished his cigarette and stared at its last wisps of smoke.

“It’s a sequel,” he told me. “It’s all about that guy from ‘Bitch Fiend,’ except here he finally deals with his problem. He finally sees that if he keeps spreading himself out over all these different women, there’ll be nothing left of him to spread. And he finally finds a woman he can put all of himself into. Not just that one part of him. You understand what I’m saying?”

I nodded wistfully. “I do. It sounds really good.”

“It’s better than good, man. Best song I ever wrote.”

“Simba must have loved it.”

He bloomed a wistful sneer. “Nah. I wrote it for her, but I didn’t write it with her. That was the problem. I had help on that one. And then I fucked the help.”

Ah, yes. Lisa Glassman. How quickly she’d dropped off my radar screen. It felt like months since I’d thought about her. Months since I’d even wondered what the truth was.

“Jeremy, can I ask you something?”

He snorted a laugh. “You asking now?”

“Might as well.”

“What the fuck does it matter now?”

“Because I’d like to know what really happened that night.”

Hunta lit another cigarette. “It’s funny. She called me last Thursday. Right as that bitch of yours was getting her face put everywhere. I never expected to hear from her again, but there she was on the phone, wondering what the hell happened. How this one lie started this other lie and everything got so out of hand.”