Daniel Price - Slick

“I know.” I hadn’t read the book. Just the reviews.

“Man, that little girl picked a hell of a time to go postal.”

“No kidding.” I looked beyond Keith to the sprawling CBS Television City complex. Late one night Gracie and I had bribed a guard to let us sneak onto the set of The Price Is Right . I just wanted to look around. The sex was her idea. She climbed up onstage, got undressed, and told me to come on down.

“The whole entertainment industry’s gonna catch hell for this,” said Keith. “Soon it’ll be easier to market tobacco products than R-rated films.”

“People still smoke, though.”

He laughed and held up his cigarette. “This I’m addicted to. I don’t know anybody who had a fit to see The Mod Squad. ”

I smiled. Keith turned left on Fairfax. The infamous Melrose High was just a few blocks north of us. I could feel it. A big black hole, sucking all the conversational air. For over a year it had been the same way with O.J. Simpson’s house, a mere stone’s throw from my apartment.

Keith took a deep drag off his cigarette. “Scott, you know that everything I’m about to say is in complete confidence.”

“Of course.”

“Good. There’s an interesting opportunity for you. An urgent one. That was sort of the real reason I wanted to meet with you. No disrespect to your Cheese thing.”

That only made me tingle. “No. That’s fine. Sounds like quite a jam.”

“It’s not my jam, thank God. It’s a job my wife came across. She would have called you herself but she doesn’t want this coming within a mile of Tate. This is a complete mercenary effort. You get caught, you’re on your own.”

I loved movie people. “What kind of job?”

“It’s a de-publicity effort. The story’s already written and it needs to be unwritten. The problem is that you’ve got to work fast, because it’s coming out soon. Probably sooner than Hannibal .”

“Care to give me details?”

“You ever heard of a guy named Jeremy Sharpe?”

“No.”

“Neither did I. Listen, all you need to know is that he’s a very important man who needs a hero right now. You save his ass, and you’re in the catbird seat. We’re talking an easy six figures and a lot of gratitude from a lot of big names. You interested?”

Jesus. Yes. “Depends. I assume this is short-term, right?”

“The shortest of terms. This’ll keep you busy while you have it, though. So clear your schedule.”

No problem. I had already cleared it for the Fairmont Keoki project. If this hadn’t come along, I would have had to start making cold calls again.

“I’m interested so far. What’s the next step?”

He handed me a hotel business card. L’Ermitage. A swank luxury pad on the outskirts of Beverly Hills. A room number was scribbled on the back.

“Be there at eight tonight. They’ll fill you in on the rest.”

“You don’t have any more information? I usually like to prepare.”

“Don’t worry. My wife already sold you to them. All you need to do is show up and say yes.”

Hayley Jane Trudeau was the last of the old guard at Tate & Associates. In 1998, a London ad agency acquired the firm and put it through a huge turnover, kind of like The Poseidon Adventure . Many jobs were lost. A small band of survivors, including myself and Hayley, made it to safety. Under the incompetent new regime, the job quickly began to suck, kind of like Beyond the Poseidon Adventure . I quit and went freelance. Hayley threw me some crisis work now and then.

“So, Scott, can I tell them you’re coming?”

Fun fact about me: the less bait you put on the hook, the greater the chance Ill bite. I tried not to be predictable, but damn it. I fell for it every time. Hayley knew that, of course.

“I’ll be there.”

Keith threw his cigarette out the window before getting on the 10 West. “Good. I just finished my household chore for the day. Can I ask you a question now?”

“Sure.”

“Why the hell is it called Move My Cheese?”

If you don’t already know, it’s not worth explaining. Trust me. I wanted to call it What If…? That was the name of a comic book series that Marvel Comics ran in the eighties and nineties. It was a great concept. Each month they took a different superhero and threw in a speculative twist. What if Spider-Man’s uncle had lived? What if Captain America had never been unfrozen? What if Magneto had formed the X-Men? It allowed writers to experiment with classic characters without messing up decades of continuity. Unfortunately, Ira didn’t appreciate the connection. Like I said, it was his baby.

Keith dropped me off at the Marina at 3:15. I went aboard the Ishtar . A yacht wasn’t the best place for a home office. Ira’s workstation took up half the galley. His printer sat on top of his microwave. Wires ran everywhere, and Ira worked in the middle of it all, a fat techno-spider. He loved it, but it wasn’t very friendly for all his visitors, namely me.

“So that went well,” he said, in lieu of hello. “What did he want with you?”

“PR stuff.”

“Specifically?”

“I don’t know yet. You ever heard of Jeremy Sharpe?”

“No.”

“Well, look him up.”

I could always share proprietary knowledge with Ira. He’d never given me a compliment in his life but he would saw off his own legs before double-crossing me. He spun his chair and launched Internet Explorer on his souped-up Dell.

“So you just accepted a job without knowing what it entails,” he blurted.

“I didn’t accept anything yet.” I looked over his shoulder. “I think it’s Sharpe with an E.”

“Doesn’t matter.” He punched it into Google. The list came up. There were only ten items on the page, but they were merely the first of 8,912 hits. You may be wondering how a media-savvy fellow like myself had never heard of this man, who merited so many mentions plus a score of dedicated fan sites. The answer was right there in the titles of those digital shrines. Jeremy Sharpe was just an alter ego. A not-so-secret identity. To his legions of acolytes, he was simply the rapper known as Hunta.

“Shit.”

“Shit indeed,” said Ira. “It was nice knowing you.”

Ira did know me. He knew there was no way in hell I’d turn down a challenge like this. But that didn’t mean I had to be happy about it. If my life were a computer adventure game, this would be the part where I saved. That way if I screwed up or died, I could just come back to this very place and time and try a different approach, like walking away.

Convenient, right? Too bad my game didn’t have that feature. All I had — all I have now — is hindsight and a whole lot of regret. I can’t go back. But sometimes, just to piss myself off, I play a few rounds of What If…?

It had burst forth from the chest of disco. The New York City dance clubs, the quintessential social scene of the seventies, phased out cheesy cover bands in favor of the vinyl-spinning disc jockey. Thanks to the invention of the mixer, club DJs were free to creatively fade, scratch and shift to their heart’s content. The reggae “dub” style of Jamaican mix masters gradually introduced a signature prominence of beat over melody. Then came the art of the toast, in which eurhythmic DJs worked up the crowd by shouting to their own groove. Finally, they delegated the microphone duties to an accomplice called the MC.

And thus the rapper was born.

Of course that’s just an oversimplified breakdown from a white guy with Web access. I had to look this stuff up, even though I was only a hop, skip, and bridge away from the cultural genesis while it was happening. What can I say? The street revolution never made its way to my cul-de-sac. In fact, my cracker white ass didn’t get its first peep of the hip or the hop until a fine-looking Deborah Harry (you know, Blondie) got the fabulous Fab 5 Freddy to put the rap in her famous “Rapture.”