Like We Care (19 page)

A great, silly, 17-year-old god.

The crowd, already pumped by the presence of R
²
Rev, hooted at his theatrics. It was early November. The cold sting of the air against his skin just accentuated the statement.

“We. Are not. Buying. This.
Shit,
” Joel proclaimed, winningly guileless in his half-naked state. Tossing the shreds of his shirt to the mob, he was just a really cool character in a TV show they were watching.

“Deal with it,” he pronounced into the camera.

The crowd cheered. One kid ripped his shirt off in tribute. Another kicked off his $120 Nikes and threw them up in the air.

For the tenth time, Annie made sure Carlos was capturing all this. Then she found Todd in the crowd.

He had delivered, just as he promised. His heart was racing, because Joel had hit it out of the park—and because Annie McCullough, from R
²
Rev in New York, was looking at him, with admiration and gratitude.

There, in the Happy Snack parking lot, agendas were fused.

They had something here.

T
he suggested infinity of the stark white backdrop enhanced the dark, dark chocolate of his skin to an absolute matte black. He sat on a throne, draped in Italian leather and thirty thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry, with a floppy Santa hat on his head.

A nine-month-old baby girl named Shanté cooed lovingly on his knee, and a three-year-old boy named Bryce darted in and out from under the throne. Their mothers—his girlfriends (one ex, one on the bubble)—and a posse of eleven juggled the administration of ass kisses as R
²
Rev crew members cooled their heels and waited.

He was Sweetie-P, hip-hop mogul, empire builder, one-time crack dealer, and—for today’s purpose anyway—doting father.

R
²
Rev had persuaded the industry titan to cut some promotional spots for a
Year In Review
special (Sweetie had a greatest hits package—
Da Hitz!
— coming out for Christmas and could use the added exposure), and part of the sell had been giving him free rein to script the ads.

Sweetie and the Sweetie machine had spent the past year trying to transition into the mainstream, playing down his gangsta affiliations and emphasizing his more legitimate pursuits, like his new clothing line and his motion picture company. It had occurred to the artist—via a memo from an image consultant to whom it occurred first—that showing off his gentler, domestic side would “be the shit.”

A Christmas theme was arrived upon—“so long as I ain’t lookin’ like a faggot,” Sweetie had warned. For weeks, the Santa hat was the source of tense negotiations, until one of his handlers convinced Sweetie that white people might find him less scary if he wore it.

Showing his kids off would work wonders, too. To that, Sweetie chuckled, “Oh, yeah. White folks always like to know we’re makin’ more of us.”

So they had gathered here at R
²
Rev’s Manhattan soundstage, Sweetie-P to be seen coddling his offspring in his Santa hat, set against a limitless white backdrop. Sweetie didn’t want candy canes and Christmas trees and reindeer (“Fuck the reindeers!”). He had already agreed to the hat.

He was keepin’ it real. Or whatever.

The problem was that his
other
child—two-year-old D’Monte—was stuck in traffic. Or, to be more precise, his mother—another ex—was trapped in a limo somewhere up on the Brooklyn Bridge, trying to make her way out of Bed-Stuy. She had been more than an hour late just making it to the car, and now she had kept everyone on the soundstage waiting pretty much all morning.

Sweetie had initially welcomed the opportunity to snuggle up with the two kids who
had
shown up, but the burden of fatherhood was beginning to make him cranky as the wait dragged on under the hot studio lights.

Meanwhile, the respective mothers of his progeny stood tensely just feet apart, shooting daggers at each other and silently counting the minutes that Sweetie showered affection on one child over the other. Kept in high style by the Sweetie gravy train, each mother had her own mini-posse, members of which spent the time flirting with Sweetie’s posse proper, which was franticly working cell phones and personal organizers to reconfigure the rest of their boss’ day now that the R
²
Rev shoot was running long. A swing past Versace was threatening to fall out of the day altogether.

And all the while, the network was paying a New York union crew to stand around drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. In less than 90 minutes, this stage was going to be needed to construct the set for
The Ripple Room
, the net’s weekly rap/dance party, commonly known as
The Nipple Room
for the preferred dress of the kids brought in to rub up against each other for the cameras. They couldn’t wait much longer.

A reluctant Hutch Posner had been called down from his office. He was going to have to do something.

“Sweetie-P!” Hutch drawled, trying to pimp it up the best he could. Bryce, the three-year-old, was yipping and squawking obnoxiously as he squeezed himself between Hutch and the throne.

“’Sup,” Sweetie said with the dead-eyed indifference of an autistic child, offering his hand to receive a retro soul shake. This lazy-wristed how-do-you-do, which around the late ’70s had all but vanished as a Huggy Bear-ed affectation of the worst kind, was now de rigueur for a generation and an industry steeped in hollow, caricatured gestures.

“Hutch Posner. We met at that AIDS thing in June.”

Whatever. . . “Yeahallright.”

Bryce was tugging at his father’s leather-covered arm. Sweetie was starting to bristle.

“Raised a lot of money that night,” Hutch said. “You really came through.”

“Yeah. My first deejay, from back in the day—he died from the AIDS,” Sweetie said solemnly before breaking into a leering laugh. “That nigger stuck his dick up some
skanky
holes!”

He crowed and reflexively swung downward with an open palm, expecting to lay skin on one of his crew. Someone, at all times, had to be nearby to offer affirmation to Sweetie’s trenchant remarks by receiving his boneless low-five with an adulatory cry of “Nigga be sayin’!” or simply “Dat’s it!” (roughly translated: “Aptly put, old bean”).

But the system had broken down, and Sweetie brought his hand down into nothing but air. His posse was elsewhere, working the phones and chatting up the hos, and he was not being serviced.

He was about to explode when he noticed that young Bryce was beside him with his palm outstretched.

“Skanky holes!” the three-year-old said brightly.

His doting father burst into a smile and laid skin on the boy. The posse, suddenly aware of and horrified by its malfeasance, laughed with relief.

Hutch laughed, too. He rubbed Bryce’s head affectionately, then quickly withdrew his hand. He recalled vaguely that there was something politically incorrect about rubbing a black boy’s head.

He couldn’t stall any longer. “So, bro—”

“
Boo!
” Bryce had leapt up between Hutch and Sweetie. Sweetie erupted.

“Donna!”

“
That
one’s not mine!” Donna snapped back.

Sweetie cursed bitterly at his mistake. He’d had a 50-50 shot.

The other mother—Charlayne—recognized the vicious bite in Sweetie’s voice and leapt into action, pulling Bryce away quickly. Donna flew in behind her to grab the baby. Sweetie-P was done fathering for now.

He glowered at them all as they withdrew, the Santa hat drooping off his head. Charged menace hung in the air.

Hutch cleared his throat awkwardly. “Cute kids.”

“Safe sex, dog,” Sweetie moaned wearily. “Only way to go.”

“So, Sweetie,” Hutch drew in closer, burrowing on. “Bro, it’s the shit, having you cut these spots for us. But you’re a busy man, I want to get you on your way. Thought maybe we could reconceptualize and lay this thing down.”

Sweetie dismissed him with a wave of the hand. He dug down deep and summoned up the will to endure.

“Nah, man. S’all right,” he sighed. “Car’s just a few blocks off. We’ll be kickin’ it any minute now.”

Hutch coughed. “Our driver just called and said she pulled over to do some shopping. Said your son needs better clothes for the shoot.”

“
Bitch!
” Sweetie seethed through clenched teeth. It was a sharp, violent curse, one that could be pictured being uttered along with a shot to the face.

He laid out his hand and instantly a phone was dropped into it. He jabbed at a button and prepared to unload.

“Hold on,” Hutch said quickly, delicately. He could still pull this off. “Man, it’s killing me, seeing you mess with all this drama on account of us. Tell me how I can make this work for you, right now.”

“It’s Christmas, bitch!” Sweetie snapped at Hutch, his voice going up an octave. “It’s a Christmas-fucking-card, that’s the plan. It’s me and my fucking babies and Merry-fucking-Christmas! If I ain’t got my babies, the fuck’s the point?!?”

Hutch hung on. “I hear ya, man. I’m down with that. But, hey, look: We got
two
of your babies! Cute as hell and ready to go. Let’s just go with them, get you outta here.”

Sweetie-P stared at him. “The fuck’s the matter with you? I got three babies. Whole fuckin’ world knows I got
three
babies. Barbara Walters interviewed me, she was rollin’ around on the floor with all my little pickaninnies like we’s her favorite darkies on the whole plantation.

“The fuck can I show up now with just two babies? Black man in this country turn up with a baby missing, he gets social services crawling up his ass. Nigger, please.”

“Well,” Hutch began hopefully, when in fact he should’ve braked. Hard. “Supposing we could find—”

Sweetie nearly leapt off the throne. “
Find what?
Some other black baby? Stick him in the family photo and just figger nobody’s gonna know, seein’ as how we all look alike and all?”

“No!”

“Dat’s it, we’re through.” The posse was already halfway to the door, forming a line of security that would stretch to the limo idling outside.

Sweetie stood and prepared to make good on his threat, but made the mistake of looking to his manager first. The manager knew that the pre-release tracking on the greatest hits package was disturbingly low and that Sweetie could not afford any bad blood with R
²
Rev right now.

The manager pursed his lips and shook his head with an almost complete stillness. Sweetie had seen the numbers, had heard the warnings that his move toward softer fare had caused his base to start questioning his legitimacy. Fact was, if he carried through on his plan to abandon the guns, pimps & hos entirely in favor of the mainstream, R
²
Rev would have no use for him at all.

He impotently flopped back down onto the throne, hissing with anger.

“Fuck y’all!” he shouted. “
No
babies. It’s just me and my ass and let’s do it!”

The Santa hat flopped across his face. “
And get this the fuck offa me!!
”

Without the children and the hat, the scene didn’t say Christmas at all. It was just one very angry black man on a throne, staring hatefully into the camera. Anyone stumbling upon this spot might’ve thought the Revolution had finally come.

When little Bryce figured out he wasn’t going to be on TV with his daddy, he started to bawl. The baby, fussy and hot under the lights, set to shrieking as well. The two mothers, who had gone to the trouble of getting here on time with the hope of scoring a little glory for their bastard children, fumed furiously.

Hutch felt the forceps squeezing at the base of his brain as Sweetie-P waited for the TelePrompTer to heat up, his teeth grinding.

Finally:

“Yo, you kids dreaming of a white Christmas? I know I am. . .”

A
nd then, there she was. Waiting for him.

She had already commandeered his VCR, had already fired up that ridiculous tape she had returned with. Even more audacious, she had collared staffers from across the floor and pulled them into his office to view it.

He could hear that kid—that irredeemably common kid—from all the way down the hall.

“It’s almost like we’re being born just to take money off us,” Joel protested on the tape. “Fuck that!”

Fresh from his run-in with Sweetie-P, this was the last thing Hutch needed. He had to pull people away from his doorway and aim them back toward their work stations just to get into his office.

“All right, thank you,” he said dryly, hating the nagging, school-teacherish tone in his voice. Every month as the head of this media giant took him farther and farther away from the happening young man he once thought he was.

“Back to work. We’ve got a culture to bring down.” He pushed more staffers out of the room.

Last to leave—in fact, as yet oblivious to Hutch’s hectoring—were the interns, standing nearest to the monitor. They were young college students, much closer to high school age than the paid staffers. And, as eager-to-be-unpaid drones in the R
²
Rev universe, much less possessed of the cynicism and attitude that marked the staffers.

To have the best view of the TV, they must’ve come running when Annie first put out the call.

Or maybe she went to them first.

“Annie—” he fussed.

“Look,” she said quietly. “They’re paying attention. What more do you want?”

He grabbed the remote from her hand and shut Joel Kasten off. The interns turned and went pale at finding themselves busted in the boss’ office.

“I’m about to hire the bunch of you just so I can fire you.”

They scuttled out, averting their eyes as they squeezed past Hutch. This was the closest he’d ever come to encountering much of the intern staff.

Christ, did they all look this young?

Annie took the remote back from Hutch and started the tape again, muting it. Images of Joel, of the Happy Snack, of a persecuted Daljit Singh spilled into Hutch’s office.

“What do you think?” she asked confidently.