Daniel Price - Slick

For the first time, I heard Maxina laugh. Heartily. It was to her credit that she took it so well. In no uncertain terms, I’d just given her the finger.

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I was ready to fall asleep at the wheel. After two nights of travel and one night of adultery, my circadian rhythm had hit its fermata. With each infuriating red light, it only got worse.

So did my mood. You would have seen it on my face if you had driven past me on Wilshire. With my guard down, all the fears and insecurities I kept buried in the back of my mind came creeping forward. I could see them, oozing around the edges of my vision. I could hear them buzzing in my ears. They were so happy to be noticed again. It’s been ages, Scott! We have so much to catch up on!

I drove faster. This was what happened when I pushed myself too hard. I probably shouldn’t have taken this job.

Probably?

Oh, don’t start, you. I spent most of my life as a slave to doubt, looking at myself through other people’s eyes. Why? Why should I care?

Because, my boy, those opinions you claim to be so impervious to are looking more the same each day. A motif, if you will.

Right. Right. I’m a heartless bastard. A supervillain. A card-carrying member of the Brotherhood of Evil Flacks. News flash, buddy. Even if a million people see me as Pol Pot, it doesn’t mean they’re right. A million people believe that everything they see on the news is real. A million people believe that the divorce rate is fifty percent. A million women believe that all rappers are rapists, and a million rappers believe that all women are bitches. So tell me, O tar of the soul, O former master, what the hell is your point?

No point. just curious why everyone tends to see you as a soulless prick. That’s all.

“I don’t know,” I blurted. “I guess nobody loves a publicist.”

And then that was it. The discussion was over. If those dark little voices wanted to chat among themselves, they had my blessing. But I was out of the loop. Out of earshot. As far as my deepest, darkest thoughts were concerned, I was a deaf driver, stuck on Wilshire, inching his goddamn way home.

I didn’t know it at the time, but on the night I met Hunta, he was celebrating his eighth anniversary of being an only child.

Well, maybe “celebrating” isn’t the right word. At 11p.m. on February 2, 1993, Ray Sharpe was driving his Pontiac Bonneville down Lincoln Boulevard in Venice when he saw the flashing lights of the police cruiser in his rearview mirror. He pulled over. The two confronting officers told him they could hear his goddamn music from a mile away. They would have let the issue drop then and there, but Hunta’s brother became irrational and belligerent. After failing two sobriety tests, he made the unwise decision to flee to his car. One of the officers fired a shot into his leg. It wasn’t meant to kill him, but it was Ray’s bad luck that he tripped and smashed his head against the passenger window. The glass merely cracked. His neck shattered instantly.

The music he’d been blasting that night was from Tupac Shakur’s second solo album, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. , which had come out in stores the day before. Similarly, just eight months prior to Ray’s death, a nineteen-year-old Texan named Ronald Ray Howard had been playing Tupac’s first album, 2Pacalypse Now , from his tape deck when he was pulled over by a state trooper. Only this time the officer was the one killed. At the trial, the defense attorney placed the blame squarely on Tupac, whose anti-cop lyrics clearly incited Ronald Ray to violence. The jury didn’t buy it. Neither did the civil court when the officer’s widow sued Tupac for the exact same reason.

But that wasn’t the end of Tupac’s troubles. Seven months later, he was hit with another wrongful-death suit, this one from the parents of a six-year-old boy who was killed in the crossfire between Tupac’s crew and some old Marin City gang rivals. Tupac’s label, Interscope Records, settled out of court for a little under half a million. Nine months after that, he was arrested for trying to club a fellow MC who had upstaged him at a Michigan State concert. He pleaded down to a misdemeanor and served ten days in jail. Five months after that , he was charged in the nonfatal shooting of two off-duty Atlanta police officers. He claimed that he and his posse were simply coming to the aid of a black motorist the officers had been harassing. His defense — and his lyrics — were later substantiated by mounting evidence of racism on the part of the two cops, one of whom wrote in his report that the “niggers came by and did a drive-by shooting.” The charges against Tupac were dropped.

And then came his Waterloo, three weeks later, in the form of a nineteen-year-old woman named Ayanna Jackson. In November 1993 she cried rape. Everyone listened, so much so that when Tupac’s third album, Me Against the World , premiered at the top of the Billboard charts in 1995, he became the first recording artist in history to enjoy a number one debut from inside a prison cell.

Well, maybe “enjoy” isn’t the right word.

I don’t want it happening to me what happened to him, said Hunta.

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For my own well-being, I should have caught up on sleep, but I was simply too keyed up. By 9 a.m. on Saturday, I was back in my car, driving aimlessly around Los Angeles, hoping to jump-start my sputtering brain. I needed to understand the woman I was suddenly up against. And to understand Lisa Glassman, I needed to understand what really happened to her the night of Friday, December 15, when she celebrated a very Mean World Christmas.

Doug Modine was no stranger to the fine art of ass-covering. Right after Lisa had tendered her angry resignation, he solicited written statements from nearly two dozen people who had attended the party. These weren’t sworn depositions. Doug just wanted to get the story down while the facts were still fresh. He put it all in the file.

For the gala, Mean World had rented out one of the grand ballrooms at Le Meridien, a posh hotel on the eastern end of Beverly Hills. Between the staff, the talent, and all their friends and families, there were more than two hundred people present for the buffet.

After dinner Byron “Judge” Rampton spoiled all the kids with gifts, mostly of the PlayStation 2 variety. The employees got generous checks. The artists got car keys. Despite the fact that music sales were stagnant for the first time in two decades, 2000 had been damn good to Mean World. Things were festive. So festive, in fact, that by 9:30 all the mothers in the room got the heads-up from Doug. Soon this party would not be suitable for children.

Although the alcohol consumption had started with dinner, nighttime was the right time for all the homeys in the house to break out the bud. You know what I’m talking about. The bammer, the brown, the buddha, the cheeba, the chronic, the dank, the doobage, the hash, the herb, the homegrown, the ill, the indo, the method, the sess, the sake, the shit, the skunk, the stress, the tabacci, the wacky. Marijuana. What can I say? California knows how to party. For the boys at the label, it wasn’t enough to crack another 40 and smoke some kill. They were also determined to put the “ho” in “ho ho ho.”

So in came the ladies. Dashers and dancers, prancers and vixens. What started out as an evening of reindeer games devolved into one big stag party. You won’t hear me casting judgment. After Keoki Atoll, that’d be the pot calling the kettle bitch.

At the same time, I can spare some empathy for Lisa. Born and raised in Oakland. Accepted, full scholarship, into the San Francisco High School for the Performing Arts. Graduated magna cum laude. Accepted, full scholarship, into UC Santa Barbara. Graduated summa cum laude, with a BA in African American studies and a BFA in Music Theory. Card-carrying member of the ACLU, DNC, Black Women’s Caucus, and (for God’s sake) Mensa. Has published poetry in numerous anthologies and has written a bunch of articles for LA Weekly , covering the hip-hop scene. She’ll be twenty-six in July.