Daniel Price - Slick

Right after Deb dropped me off at the Portland airport, she rolled down the window of her beat-up Tercel and eyed me uncomfortably.

“Scott, do you know why I organized that rally against the mink farm?”

“Because they’re killing minks.”

“It’s not the killing itself that bothers me. I’m not a vegetarian. If minks tasted good, I might even try one. But we don’t kill minks for nourishment. We kill them for luxury. In the end, they’re being exploited for their skins by people who want more luxuries. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

It wasn’t exactly a rebus. “What would you like to know?”

“Just promise me this is the real thing,” she said. “That this isn’t all just some big smear campaign by Marriott or something.”

See, there’s a difference between being smart and being wise. Deb was smart. I swore to her from the bottom of my heart that I wasn’t working for any of Fairmont’s competitors. After she drove off, I sighed steamy air and quietly hoped she wouldn’t get wise.

________________

February 1 was a perfect day for mass nudity. Thursday was a big TV night in itself, but this was also the first day of sweeps. The reruns were gone. Survivor: Australia was premiering in its regular time slot, followed by surprise hit CSI in its new choice location. You had Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on ABC, WWF Smackdown! on UPN, and, of course, the eternal Must See lineup on the Peacock. The ten and eleven o’clock newscasts would have over ninety million viewers to tease.

It was also my thirty-fifth birthday. That only mattered to me, of course, especially since I didn’t tell anyone. But what a way to celebrate. My work wasn’t always this much fun, and vice versa. I had to play shepherd for a flock of two hundred coeds. They had all arrived in Honolulu in scattered shifts on January 30. The next day I loaded them all onto a chartered booze cruise, which certainly lived up to its name. By the third hour, every stretch of railing was occupied by a heaving undergrad. The rest of the trip, thankfully, was dead quiet. It was an eighteen-hour ride from Oahu to Keoki. We wouldn’t get there until dawn.

One of the few other noncollegiates on the boat was David Green, a staff writer at Maxim . I owed him a favor so I gave him a heads-up exclusive on the before-and-after of this noble endeavor.

For a man who wrote pieces like “How to Ogle Her Breasts and Get Away with It,” David was the furthest thing from a regressed frat boy. He was a soft-spoken, agreeable fellow with a cardiologist wife, two teenage daughters, and one serious midlife crisis. Every time I saw him, he had done something different to his head. First it was the long hair/mustache retro thing, which should have died with Sonny Bono. Then it was the shaved head /goatee combo, which has yet to work on a white man. Now it was a buzz cut and stubble beard, which made him look like an A-list screenwriter. This was progress.

No stranger to PR machinations, David was able to see straight through my seat-of-the-pants operation, all the way to my ulterior. That was fine. I knew he had no intention of tipping the hand that fed him. Honestly, it wouldn’t have bothered me if he hinted at the truth in his article. Just not here. Not in front of the girls. It wasn’t the boat ride that was making me queasy. If even half of these women backed out, this would be the Heaven’s Gate of promotional stunts. It would maim my career.

After the students passed out, David and I enjoyed the quiet night breeze from the bow. Even when standing on the first rung of the railing, he was still shorter than me. Men often did strange, unconscious things to try to match my height.

“So how much has this cost so far?” he asked me.

“About the same as two thirty-second spots on Law and Order ,” I bragged. “Or four on Special Victims Unit .”

He whistled. “That’s quite a bargain.”

“We’ll see.”

At 6 a.m., the boat reached the Kaikua’ana port. By then everyone was happy to be back on terra firma. One of the many ironies of the day was that the girls, who had traveled five thousand miles to protest the evils of upscale development, were all mesmerized by the sheer beauty of this place. So was I. It was heavenly. I had expected a Vegas-like artificiality, or at best San Jose, but it was more like airbrushed nature. We stood under a pink dawn sky in a majestic stone courtyard that would make Zeus jealous. And we had the whole damn place to ourselves. It occurred to me that the sisters might actually be happy with their new look. Who were we to say?

I joined Deb as she watched the men set up the rope cordon. Unlike her friends, she seemed nervous and bothered. I could already smell the issue, but I played it simple.

“You okay?”

She tied her hair back tight. “Yeah. I just…I’m just wondering if we’re doing the right thing. I mean, what if this just brings more people here?”

“It probably will.”

“It will?”

“Probably,” I said. “Look, I’m a realist. I never expected to shut this place down. What we’re doing is slapping a scarlet ‘A’ on the whole franchise. Corporations are really vain. They hate controversy, even if it doesn’t hurt their bottom line. My guess is that in three weeks, Fairmont will make some big announcement about a new seal-friendly initiative.”

“Like what?”

I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. But it was a good excuse to send out another video news release in three weeks.

“We’ll see,” I told her. “The important thing is that the next company to develop a luxury resort will go out of its way to do something decent for the animals, just to avoid the kind of noise you’re making here today.”

Admittedly, that was crap. This story had the shelf life of scrod. But Deb took it on faith. My words didn’t inspire her, but they at least gagged that quiet, nagging voice that was bothering both of us.

By then the cordon was all done. Symbolically, it was David, the Maxim guy, who spoke for all the men.

“So, you gals getting naked or what?”

________________

After returning from Maine, I had asked my friend Ira to estimate how many of the nascent nudists would chicken out at the last minute. Ira was my secret weapon. My Nostradamus. Calling him an expert market analyst was like calling Network a cute little flick. He was a mad genius, years ahead of his craft, and utterly impossible to be around for more than an hour at a time. But he wasn’t infallible. He said he’d be surprised if less than twelve of them deserted the cause. He’d be shocked, then, to learn that only three women fatally succumbed to their poor body image.

By 7 a.m., it was a done deal. The girls were naked and inside the cordon. With synchronized trepidation, they folded their strategically held clothes into neat little bundles and placed them by their feet. The boyfriends cheered, David snapped his pictures, and I had a momentary attack of humanity. I hate those. I swore a very long time ago not to judge myself by other people’s moral standards, because they’re virtually always the product of some faulty, outdated, shrink-wrapped bullshit value system. I’m not talking about religious dogma. That’s the devil we know. I’m referring to Hollywood ethics. No, Senator, it’s not an oxymoron. Everyone who was raised by their TV and cineplex has been stuffed like foie gras with an unending supply of predigested moral pap, a dizzying tableau of Tinseltown tenets. Corporations are evil. Cripples are nice. Ambitious executives always learn to loosen up and “seize the day.” And liars always come clean in the end, usually in front of a big crowd. Screw that. You want one to grow on? Repeat these words: free will. Free will. Free will.