Daniel Price - Slick

On Tuesday, it became official: I wasn’t going to heaven.

At 11 a.m., I pulled the car over on Ocean Park Boulevard, in Santa Monica. I had taken Harmony on a long and winding trek from her apartment in Venice to the downtown L.A. skyline, through the wide and airy streets of Pasadena, and then all the way back to the shore. The real journey was happening inside the car, as I walked her through a dark and stormy narrative. For the most part, she listened well. It wasn’t until the last few details that she turned to face the window. She didn’t make a sound. I didn’t even realize she was crying until she asked me to stop.

“I didn’t mean stop the car,” she said. “I just meant stop talking.”

“You want me to keep driving?”

“Yeah.”

I put us back on the road. I didn’t want to coach her in public for this very reason. There was simply no way I could feed her her story with out opening up old wounds.

Still, this was a bold new low for me. At that moment I was able to float outside my body, through the fourth wall, and into the seated audience that was watching the movie version of this. I could look around and see the bitter expressions they leveled at the big-screen me. I was the asshole, the villain of the story. And no matter what I did or said, no matter how good my intentions were, the audience wouldn’t be happy until I got my comeuppance, hopefully at Harmony’s hands.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and left it at that.

Eventually, she swapped her Kleenex for a Pall Mall, then punched in my car’s cigarette lighter. By the time it popped back out, she had regained herself.

“He didn’t do none of that shit,” she said, lighting up.

“I know.”

“He didn’t even know who the hell I was. He walked right by me. A couple times. Went straight to the couch with some other woman.”

I knew that too.

“I can’t tell what’s crazier,” she added. “The fact that you’re doing this to him or the fact that he’s paying you to do this to him.”

At the moment, I was more concerned with what I was doing to her. As soon as the coast was clear, I made a sharp U-turn.

Harmony clutched her door handle. “Whoa. What you doing?”

Distracting you. “Taking you to the airport.”

“Why?”

“Because this is hard work. We need a vacation. You and I need to get out of this city.”

She laughed smoke at me. “Shut up.”

“I’m serious. I’ll pay for the whole thing. Where do you want to go? Paris? London? Rome?”

“You’re crazy.”

“Why am I crazy?”

“For starters, what makes you think I want to go anywhere with you?”

“All right,” I said with feigned umbrage. “If that’s the way you feel about it, we’ll take separate trips. I’m going to Madrid. What’s your pleasure?”

“Forget it.”

“Come on. If you could go anywhere, where would it be?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fine,” I declared. “I’ll just give you my American Express card. You can go wherever you want. Just make sure to come back by the twelfth.”

Harmony crossed her arms and eyed me. I caught her gaze. “What?”

“You ain’t serious about this.”

“No.”

She rolled her eyes. “I figured you was just teasing me.”

“Hey, the only thing I’m teasing you with is your future.”

“My future,” she parroted skeptically.

“Your near future. When this is all over and you get your advance money from the book deal, the movie rights, and all that, you’re going to go to LAX. You’re going to buy a whole book of plane tickets, and then you’re going to hit every corner of the world. How does that sound?”

I was sure it sounded great, but judging from her dour expression, Harmony wasn’t in the mood for the soft sell. I toned down my zeal.

“Look, I don’t expect you to believe me, hon, but there’ll be a point when this whole crazy whirlwind comes and goes and you’ll see that you’re still standing. You’ll see all these great opportunities you’ve never had before, just lying at your feet. And that’s when you’ll realize that all this hard work, all this drama, all this time with me, was actually worth it. I promise.

“Until then,” I added with a shrug, “I don’t know. If it helps, just try to picture the world. Because I’m going to put you all over it. Even if I have to drive you myself.”

If I affected her, she didn’t show it. She continued to stare out the window between wisps of her smoke. After a few miles of silence, I brought us onto the 405 South.

“We still going to the airport?” she asked.

“If you want to, sure.”

“Actually, I wouldn’t mind. I never been there. I lived in Inglewood almost my whole life and I ain’t never been to the airport.”

“Your wish is my command.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her loosen up. I shouldn’t baby her so much. She was strong. Much stronger than me. If I had suffered even a fraction of her ordeals, I’d be broken china. Useless. No wonder the audience liked her better. I liked her better.

She threw out her cigarette, grabbed a new one, then punched in my lighter. By the time it popped back out, she was ready to work.

“So after the Christmas party, what did I do?”

________________

“Obviously, she wouldn’t go to the police,” I’d said, sixteen hours earlier. “Not after what they put her through.”

From the driver’s seat, Doug concurred. “That’s good. People will buy that.”

If they ever handed out awards for national media hoaxes (call them the Shammys), and I won for the Harmony Prince story, the very first person I’d thank at the podium would be Doug Modine. He picked up the slack everywhere I dropped it. I’d spent so much energy casting, courting, and grooming Harmony that I had barely spent an ounce of thought on who we’d get to play her lawyer.

Once again Doug came through. On Monday evening he picked me up and drove us to our 7:30 meeting at 3345 Wilshire, in the heart of the Koreatown district. There on the eleventh floor, nestled between an Asian banking firm and a nonprofit housing organization, was the law office of A. Richard Lever.

“You’ll like this guy,” Doug assured me. “He’s a real pistol.”

“As long as he fires on our command.”

When it came to celebrity lawsuits, Alonso Lever was the rare kind of attack dog who was all bite and no bark. Over the past six years, he’d shepherded over one hundred civil actions against the rich and infamous. Palimony. Paternity. Assault. Abuse. Harassment. You name the claim, he had the claimant. And he chose his plaintiffs well. They were virtually all pretty young black and Hispanic women from the wrong side of the tracks and the right side of the law. They were unimpeachable, especially compared to those scurrilous rappers and athletes who threw their id around like wrecking balls.

Alonso only played with stacked decks, and it served him well. Out of those hundred or so cases, he only had to step into the courtroom twice. His motif was to go for the quick money. His clients loved the nearly instant cash results. His opponents loved the all-encompassing gag orders that came with each settlement. No wonder I’d never heard of him. He rarely left a mess to clean up.

After the millennium, however, his reputation as a celebrity juicer began to slide. Word got out among his opponents that he was settling way too quickly, taking whatever number you threw at him and then calling it a day. Doug had found this out for himself early last year, when one of Alonso’s disenfranchised clients sued Mean World rapper Hitchy (then known as Hit-G) for defaming her in one of his songs.

“I knew he would never let it go to trial,” Doug told me. “So already I had the upper hand. But when I offered sixty thousand, he made the most perfunctory attempt to raise it and then caved. I thought he was kidding at first. I mean, I could have handed him a check right then and there for two hundred grand.”