Daniel Price - Slick

“She’s a woman and he’s a rapper. What else does she need?”

“Legally? Quite a bit.”

“If this were just a legal issue, Scott, I wouldn’t be worried. You’re a publicist. You know the stakes involved. Jeremy has his whole career ahead of him. He’s got the looks and the talent to become a huge crossover hit, maybe even the next Will Smith. The problem is that the studios won’t touch him if he has all this dark smoke around him, even if he’s proven innocent. We all agreed that it would be cheaper and safer to keep Lisa quiet.”

“But now…,” Maxina segued.

“But now all this Melrose shit has happened. She’s got us over a barrel. Her lawyer could file as early as next week. Once that happens, Jeremy’s screwed and we’re screwed. We’ll be like a cash machine to every woman who ever brushed hands with him.”

Maxina seemed less than verklempt over Mean World’s financial plight. Although she had understated it earlier, artistic free expression was a fierce crusade with her. When President Reagan insinuated that “obscene” music didn’t deserve constitutional protection, she went postal. When the state of Oregon made it illegal for retail stores to display ads or even photos containing rapper Ice Cube, she went ballistic. And there’s no word violent enough to describe her reaction when they started arresting record-store executives for selling 2 Live Crew’s explicit albums.

Once again, it seemed, the recording industry needed her rage. Within the last decade, sanctimonious lawmakers had gotten smarter in their attempts to suppress the material they found objectionable. The way around those First Amendment whiners, they knew, was to implement severe marketing and trade restrictions on all naughty stuff. It’s not censorship, they say. Just keeping it out of the hands of kids (and everyone else). The password was “financial disincentive.” Sure, you have the right to release an NC-17 film. We just won’t let you advertise it or show it in ninety-five percent of the nation’s venues. Sure, you have the freedom to put out a stickered album. We’ll just pressure the major music retailers like Wal-Mart to stop carrying it. For the media giants of the world, it all came down to a simple decision: the Wite-Out or the red ink. Not much of a f****** choice now, is it?

And there was more correction fluid coming. Riding the wave of fear and blame that came about from Columbine, senators such as Joe Lieberman and John McCain had been able to open the door to even tighter reform. Now the Melrose situation could very well blow it off its hinges.

“The bottom line,” said Maxina, “is that we’ve got to get Hunta and his music out of this whole equation. We’ve got to lift him up above it. But we won’t have a shot in hell of doing that if Lisa Glassman gets to tell her story.”

“Her fictional story,” Doug stressed.

“That’s the key, Scott. We can’t afford her a moment of credibility. We have to stack the deck before she even plays her first card. Now Doug is doing everything he can to stall her lawsuit, but you’re still on a seriously tight schedule. You’ve got to strike hard and fast. Are we painting a clear picture here?”

“Like El Greco.” I did not like this.

They both smiled. Doug opened his briefcase and retrieved a thin manila folder. “We hired a private investigator to look into Lisa’s background. This is all we have on her. I won’t lie. She’s pretty clean. You’re going to have to get crafty.”

As soon as the file touched my hands, I was officially sucked into the maelstrom that Annabelle started. The one Hayley wouldn’t come within a mile of. It was easy to see why. After all the Sturm und Drang , it turned out Hunta was right. All they needed was an assassin.

Personal smear campaigns were not to be taken lightly. Drea taught me that. She had the skill and the power to drop mountains on people. With a few phone calls she could make someone, anyone, so radioactive that even their pets wouldn’t come near them. It was one of the worst things you could do to a fellow human being. Just ask Richard Jewell, the poor Atlanta security guard who became the chief suspect in the 1996 Olympic Park bombing. Knowing damn well he was innocent, the FBI flacks used him as media chum to lure the hungry press away from their real investigation. A necessary evil? Perhaps. But believe it or not, most publicists have souls. Most of us find it difficult to justify those means, even for noble ends. Amazingly, I was no exception.

Neither was Maxina. She had all the resources to handle Lisa in house. She just didn’t have the stomach for it. As a “self-respecting woman who grew up on love and Motown,” she would clearly eat her young before raining knives on a fellow sister, especially one who may have indeed been wronged, no matter what Doug said. For Maxina, there was only one course of action: close her eyes, summon a demon, and convince herself that it was all for the greater good.

Apparently I was the first name she found in the Yellow Pages, under “Demons.”

________________

The day I truly became a free man was the day I stopped caring about the world’s impression of me. Like everyone else, I was raised to seek affirmation and avoid contempt. Unfortunately, the quest to be liked by everyone triggered an undue amount of stress, anger, and acquiescence in my life. By the time I left college, I realized I’d never be happy unless I undid a lifetime of conformist conditioning.

Thus, I reversed my directives. I shunned affirmation and craved contempt. I sought arguments from argumentative people. I encouraged judgment from judgmental people. I went out of my way to trigger all kinds of scorn from anyone who was willing to give it, and there was never a shortage of volunteers. It wasn’t the easiest phase of my life. But like the most determined bodybuilders, I stuck to my regimen and eventually began to see results. Eventually I became a human fortress, impervious to even the most subtle and penetrating forms of disdain. Life got easier from there.

But my defenses occasionally sputtered, especially when I was tired. That night, in the master bedroom of Suite 511, I suffered a hull breach. I couldn’t help but reconstruct the conversation between Maxina and Hayley, at least the encapsulated version:

Maxina: Hey, girlfriend. I’m in a big fix, and I need someone evil. I don’t just mean right-wing evil. I mean head-spinning, fork-tongued, baby-eating evil. Know anyone?

Hayley: Do I ever!

It wasn’t Maxina who bothered me. She only had my client list to judge me from. Glock. Philip Morris. Monsanto. Shell. Of course she knew about Shell. Who was I kidding? For a social crusader like her, my resume might as well come with a pentagram. She knew my work but she didn’t know me.

Hayley, however, was the plastic knife in my back. We’d fought side by side fifty hours a week for four years. Many a time we dozed next to each other on her office couch following a twenty-hour phone blitz. True, she was more of the East Coast, old-school style of publicist, but never once did she complain to me about my gangsta methods.

Fine. Whatever. I let it all out through a wide yawn. I may have been feeling a little sore, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to show it.

“All right,” I sighed. “No doubt you’ll want to know what my game plan is. And soon.”

“Smart man,” said Maxina. “Come back here tomorrow. Six o’clock. Bring two game plans. Or at least one good one.”

“Tomorrow at six,” I said, heading for the door.

Doug was confused. “Uh, Scott? Don’t you want to talk about money?”

“That’s okay,” I quipped. “You can pay me in goat’s blood.”