Daniel Price - Slick

So! Got any kids of your own?

Absently, I shook my head.

Smart of you. The keyword is “karma.” All the crap we put our parents through as teenagers…it comes back. Trust me.

I smiled. I liked this woman. And I felt bad for her. But at the same time I desperately wanted to run inside and work out my new equations.

Perceptively, she wrapped it up.

Thanks for being so patient with me. You’re a good man, Scott.

“I…You’re welcome. Good luck finding her. If I see her, I’ll let you know.”

She squeezed my arm and bathed me in a moist look of gratitude usually reserved for living organ donors. It was inflated and mostly unjustified. But I certainly didn’t mind being mistaken as an angel for once. It made a nice counterweight to last night’s snit.

Jean went back to her SUV. As she drove off, she gave me a final wave and apology. In her mind, I probably rued the day we ever crossed paths. In reality, her unannounced visit was the best thing that could have happened for me, Hunta, and the entire music industry. It wasn’t hard to find the irony in that.

________________

At 5:45, I left for my second meeting at L’Ermitage. Maxina had instructed me to bring two ideas, or at least one really good one. I had a really good one.

But, “good” is a subjective term. The XFL, which was debuting right at that very moment, seemed like a good idea to many. After all, nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. At least until the XFL. Who knew? Spokespeople for the soon-to-be defunct football league would attribute the poor ratings to all the Melrose-fueled hypersensitivity. In other words, they’ll blame the blame.

Some ideas were just plain bad from the start. Earlier that day, in Lake Mary, Florida, a twelve-year-old named Thomas Hitz doused his hand in bug spray and lit it on fire. Seeing his error in judgment, he tried to put his hand out on his cotton T-shirt. Also a mistake. By the time he jumped into his swimming pool, his only smart move, he had second and third-degree burns on his hand and chest.

Thomas and his parents would go on to blame MTV’s Jackass for the incident. They weren’t the first. The week before, a Connecticut boy named Jason Lind poured gasoline on his legs and lit himself up, hoping to imitate the same televised stunt that had inspired Thomas. On behalf of the Linds, Senator Joe Lieberman was quick to further publicize Jackass by calling for its cancellation. In actuality, four times as many kids (eight) were injured by real-live jackasses each month, and much more directly. From strictly a numbers point of view, donkeys were the more prevalent threat to our nation’s youth. Either Senator Joe didn’t know, or he was afraid to go after his party’s totem animal. Politics.

Alas, it’s a strange world. A strange nation. In the end, though, everything balanced. For every overreaction, there was an equal and opposite action. Hunta was destined to bear the brunt of America’s latest outcry. There was no way to stop it or even slow it down. Same went for Lisa. I was so busy worrying about how to destroy her or discredit her when all I had to do was upstage her. If she wanted to cry rape, I’d simply have to find another woman to cry it louder. And sooner.

“Is this some kind of joke?”

That was Byron “Judge” Rampton: former car salesman, former VP of Columbia Records, founder and president of Mean World Records. If Buddha were black, impeccably dressed, and determined to show off his wealth through the bling-bling of expensive ornaments, he’d look just like the Judge. He eyed me from one of the many couches in the living room of L’Ermitage Suite 511. He insisted on being here for the meeting, even though I didn’t need him for what I had planned.

“You want to save Jeremy from one slanderous charge by hitting him with another.”

That was Doug, sitting next to the Judge. Once again he looked ready for the courtroom in his Fruit of Islam wear. Didn’t someone tell him it was Saturday?

“No,” I replied. “I want to save him from one slanderous charge by missing him with another. That’s the key difference.”

I paced around the room, high on caffeine and inspiration. The entourage was gone. My audience consisted of six people…six and a half if you included baby Latisha. Even she seemed incredulous.

“The name of the game is ‘full public exoneration,’” I told them. “Lisa herself isn’t the threat. Her impending civil suit isn’t the threat. It’s the media we need to worry about. This is sweeps month. They’ll cast Hunta in whatever light it takes to keep things interesting. On the upside, they won’t care where their story comes from. So I say we preempt Lisa’s drama with ours. At least that way we have control over how it develops and, more importantly, how it ends.”

“But why that ?” asked Simba Shange. “Why swap one fake rape for another?”

“Because if we go with any other story, there’s nothing to stop the press from placing Lisa’s allegation on top, like a cherry on a sundae. They don’t cancel each other out.”

“Neither do two rapes.”

That was Maxina, on the third couch. She was clearly in a motherly mood, judging from the way she rocked Latisha in her beefy arms.

I smiled. “You’re right. Two different accusations only serve to strengthen each other. But two of the same accusation? Uh-uh. Then you’ve got a problem.”

Behind Simba’s couch, a shirtless and sweaty Hunta hung from a portable chin-up bar. When the meeting began, he’d been in the middle of an impressively long set of lifts. Now he was too stunned to do any thing but dangle.

“There were a lot of other women at that Christmas party,” I continued. “If we get just one of them to beat Lisa to the press with the exact same charge and the exact same story, down to the minute, then Lisa will be jammed forever. What’s she going to say? ‘No, Hunta didn’t sexually abuse that woman that night. He was too busy sexually abusing me’? Nobody would take her seriously. She’d be a copycat. A shameless opportunist. She’d barely get a mention.”

Big Bank, the last person in on the conspiracy, stood next to Hunta. He chewed on my idea. “But if we use our own woman, what’s to stop Lisa from joining in and saying Jer messed her up some other night?”

“Nothing. She could do it. So could fifty other women. But as far as the press is concerned, it’s not who’s right, it’s who’s first. If we get there first, our woman will be the tentpole. She’ll be the one the reporters rally around. And once she goes down, everyone goes down with her. It’s like fruit from a poisonous tree. That’s why it’s really important that we work fast and get our decoy out there first.”

Big Bank nodded in amazement. I also caught the sun rising on Doug’s face. Two down.

Simba remained firmly rooted in skepticism. She looked damn good in clothes, even though there was more cotton to be found in aspirin bottles than in her white baby T.

“I don’t understand, “ she said. “You’re going to have one of these dancing skanks come forward, frame Jeremy, and then what? Admit it was all a lie?”

“Yes, but not hers. That’s the best part. She’ll tell the world she was offered a lot of money by some unnamed source, some shadow conspirator with an anti-rap objective. The press will eat it up. They’ll do a total 180 and go after all the people who were going after Hunta. How’s that for payback?”

I turned to Hunta, still hanging. “Not only will this silence Lisa, not only will this turn you from monster to martyr, but it’ll weatherproof you against all future accusations. For the rest of your life, you’ll have the benefit of the doubt. You’ll have precedent .”