Pimp (3 page)

“Come another inch toward me, I’ll waste you.” Nerdy white guy trying to be all
Menace 2 Society
.

Half wishing he’d taken out this asshole on that bathroom floor when he’d had the chance—but not really, ’cause then where would he get more PIMP?—Max said, “Okay, let’s say I am who you say I am, though I’m not saying that. But if you really think I’m Max Fisher why aren’t you turning me in? I mean, I’m on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. You get a reward, what, hundred grand if you turn me in? You gonna tell me you’re allergic to the green and white?”

Sage didn’t say anything, but it clicked for Max.

“It’s the PIMP, isn’t it? If you rat on me, then I rat on you.” Max smiled. “Well, looks like we have a situation here now, doesn’t it?”

The ol’ businessman Max Fisher was back in play, and he did what he did best—negotiated a deal. A seventy-thirty split in his favor. Sage would produce the shit and Max would market it. Powder form or pill, user’s choice. And as far as ratting on each other went—well, they’d make that risk work for them. Like the U.S. and Russia in the Cold War, they’d each hold something over the other’s head. Sage would write down the formula for PIMP and the history of how he’d invented it and sold it to barflies and businessmen all summer, and put this in a sealed envelope; Max would do the same with a confession detailing his crimes; and they’d send the two envelopes to a neutral lawyer, Nathan Schneermesser, Esq., Counselor-at-Law. For a fee, Mr. Schneermesser, Esq., would sit on the envelopes, with instructions to release one or the other in the event something happened—Max’s confession if something happened to Sage, Sage’s if something happened to Max. A perfect stalemate. Business relationships had been based on less.

With that out of the way, it was time for marketing.

Max had seen
The Social Network
, and knew if you wanted to start a trend, you had to get college kids hooked first. If it worked for Facebook, it would work for PIMP.

He distributed freebies at dorms, bars, off-campus parties, clubs. The kids called Max “Red” ’cause of his beard. The name helped hugely—not Max’s, the drug’s. Walking past the juice bars of Portland, Max heard, “Gotta get me with some PIMP, yo.” Kids were fucking Facebooking and Tweeting about it; PIMP was going viral!

Max, at his core, was a marketing guru, and he knew it didn’t matter what you sold, it mattered how you sold it—fuck, look at Amazon. Bezos started with books, cockamamie books, and now people were buying toilet paper from him in bulk—there was a lesson in there somewhere, and your last name had to be Bezos, Trump or Fisher to understand what that lesson was. It was that it all came down to the sell. Max had been watching lots of
Mad Men
and he saw himself as the Don Draper of the new millennium. He knew if PIMP was going to take off, if it was going to rock the nation as the new super drug, he needed a pitch, a tagline, and Max, like Donny D, had one ready to roll.

PIMP: It knows how to take care of you.

Boom, gotchya, slam dunk. Can you say homerun? Winnah winnah, chicken dinnah! He could see the jumbotron flashing, the crowd going wild. In the boardroom inside Max’s head, his employees were congratulating him for coming up with that little gem. Then he was on stage, bowing, enjoying the standing O.

Max tried out the line on newbies—in the bathroom at bars and clubs he’d hand out PIMP samples and when a kid said, “Why’s it called PIMP?” Max, ready, hit with, “ ’Cause it knows how to take care of you.” This was perfect because that was what people wanted. Kids today, they didn’t want to do any work—they wanted apps to do the work for them. They’d had Generation X and Y, they should call this one Generation Z—for zippo. These kids today had no ambition, wanted everything handed to them. Well, PIMP was the perfect drug for Generation Zippo because all you had to do was pop a pill and chill
. Pop a pill and chill
, there was another one. The brilliance was overwhelming Max now. If he didn’t watch out his head would explode.

Then one night tragedy hit—or fortune, depending on how you look at it. Max was at Sage’s, picking up some product, when Sage OD’d on PIMP—or maybe he’d been doing coke or shooting up, whatever, but he went into convulsions and then passed out on the kitchen floor. Max considered reviving him, but reminded himself that this was the kid who’d threatened him with that fucking huge knife, and maybe someday would develop the
cojones
to blackmail him, find some way to rat him out to the cops in spite of the fact that “Nathan Schneermesser” was just a name he’d made up, tied to a P.O. Box he’d rented, meaning that Max had the formula for PIMP and Sage had bubkis. So he just kneeled next to him while he was dying, went grim in full brogue like Liam in
The Grey
, and whispered, “You’re going to die now, Sage, but it’s okay, ya just gotta let go, feel the peace come over you,” and then realized,
Eh, who’m I kidding?
and said, “
Adios, muchacho
,” and left the kitchen.

Max wiped the place down, filled Sage’s car with as much PIMP as would fit, and headed east. First he thought he’d stop in some town in the middle of nowhere and indulge in some local ho action, but the PIMP and the death had ignited something in The Max, and he couldn’t resist the urge to shake his little town blues and go back to New York, the big time, and get his whole life back.

Yeah, he knew he was taking a risk going back east. The beard and weight helped, but last time he checked he was number six on the FBI’s Most Wanted list—he couldn’t just waltz back into Manhattan.

So when he got into town he called in a favor from an old crew member from Attica. He got the plastic surgery—a botch job, but at least he didn’t look like himself, and that was the whole point, right?

Next, to get his business going, he needed to produce PIMP, a shitload of it, and for that he needed
das capital.

Enter Precious. She claimed she had a contact in the leading Jamaican gang in East New York, Brooklyn. That was good—there were lots of projects there and the second-best place—after a college campus—to start a trend was in the hood. PIMP would be the new Air Jordan, the new hip-hop.

In his room at Precious’ Harlem tenement, Max was saying to her, “So who do I talk to?”

“His name’s DeMarcus, mon,” Precious said.

“DeMarcusmon?” Max asked.

Precious rolled her eyes. “Just DeMarcus,” she said. “Mon.”

He wanted to slap her. So he slapped her.

“Hey, what’s that for?”

“A reminder of who’s in charge,” Max said. Then, “What’s he look like?”

Massaging her face, Precious said, “Big, dumb, got dreads.”

Thinking,
Kinda like you
, Max said, “So what do I do, just walk in, ask for him?”

“How else you gonna meet the man?” Precious said, as if Max was stupid.

On his way to Brooklyn in a fuckin’ Zipcar, Max had a bad vibe and he felt like an idiot. He should’ve had Precious come along, make the introduction. Old Max wouldn’t’ve made that slip-up. It showed that, far as he’d come, he still had a long way to go.

He should’ve listened to his instincts because when he got to the place, some kind of warehouse off Utica Avenue, a thin white guy, curly brown hair, glasses—a fucking hipster—put a gun to his head the moment he arrived, took him to a room in the back.

“You DeMarcusmon?” Max asked.

“Do I look like my name’s DeMarcusmon?” the guy asked.

Wiseass. These days it seemed like Max was flypaper for wiseasses.

“So what do you want?” Max said, when they arrived in a dimly lit room in the back. The room had no furniture, but there were three big black guys in the room, all with Uzis.

“I want to know all about PIMP,” the white guy said. “I want to know where you got it, how it’s made, how we can make more.”

“Yeah? And what if I’m not in the mood to talk?”

Stuffing the barrel of the gun into Max’s mouth so deep Linda Lovelace would’ve been impressed, the guy went, “Then you die, right here, right now.”

Fucking Precious. Another big-busted babe had fucked the Max over.

He shoulda known.

Someone, somewhere is tired of fucking the hot girl.
C
LINT
E
ASTWOOD

Larry Reed was old-school Hollywood, i.e., fuck-all talent but lots of chutzpah. He knew the trick was to blackmail the living daylights out of the real players. He looked like Fatty Arbuckle and indeed had similar tastes. Nearing seventy now, he relied on the little ol’ blue pills to keep the L-Rod in gear.

His dick had been working fine of late, but his career was in a tailspin. His last hit had been a Janeane Garofalo rom-com. Yep, it had been that long.

Five years ago he thought he was set for his big comeback. He optioned a pitch for a dollar from some shmuck kid, Bill Moss, who was desperate for a way out of the telemarketing cubicle. Larry talked him into writing on spec, the way a porno producer tells his talent that the first time on the desk is for free and the
next time
you get paid. You need lots of chutzpah to pull off that line but Bill went for it—hook, line, and sucker. Guys like Bill were morons when it came to the business of Hollywood; they believed that they had talent and that it was only a matter of time until their talent was recognized. This was perfect for Larry because Larry only worked with morons; it was the only way to avoid agents and managers and get pictures made.

But Bill Moss, God bless him, knew how to write. The script was called
Spaced Out
and the tagline was “
Alien
meets
Forrest Gump
.”

The idea was everything you needed for a big hit nowadays —sexy, high-concept, dumbed down—should’ve been a slam dunk.

Should’ve. But this was Hollywood, where there were as many should’ves as there were actresses who’d quit waiting tables to become reiki masters.

The
Spaced Out
pitch: In the not-so-distant future, an Average Joe with a mental disability is chosen by the space program to become the first man on Mars, but aliens invade his ship and terrorize him. It wasn’t a horror picture, though, it was drama, because it turns out that one alien is a good alien—“Think E.T. meets Judge Reinhold,” Larry would say in the meetings, not realizing that the Reinhold reference made him sound like even more of a dinosaur.

To Larry’s unending dismay and kvetching, he couldn’t get
Spaced Out
off the ground. It wasn’t like the old days in Holly-wood when you could go to the Foxes or Paramounts with a stable of projects and they set you up in a bungalow on the lot with a fat production deal. Nowadays they didn’t give a fuck about ideas in Hollywood. If you came to them without money and attachments you had bullshit.

For a couple of years he’d had John Travolta loosely attached. Okay, okay, so “loosely” meant that he’d discussed it with Travolta’s manager at one of Bryan Singer’s pool parties—yeah, Larry had been into dudes for a while, call it “a phase.” Larry hadn’t gotten an invite, had crashed the party. Hey, Woody Allen says ninety percent of success is showing up, right? When the bouncers were tossing Larry, he’d shouted at the manager, “I want John to be in my movie!” and he thought he’d heard, “Okay, run with it, Lar.”

So Larry went around town, telling people “Travolta’s on board,” but it didn’t open the doors he’d expected. Travolta had had more comebacks than Brett Favre, couldn’t he go to the well once more, paint on some more hair, do the combover like that kid in
American Hustle
? He went from meeting to meeting and rejection to rejection and it was getting to be a chicken-and-egg type situation. You can’t score when you’re desperate—every guy who’s ever been to a hotel bar knows this—and desperation oozed from Larry Reed. His marriage to his third wife Bev had been shitty for years, but now it was on life support. One night in the kitchen she screamed at him, “I can’t take you anymore, just looking at your old, ugly face depresses me!” Larry had let a comment fly about how she wasn’t exactly a pleasant sight either, and that after all the sun damage she’d gotten they should cast her as the next Leatherface, but he got her point. He was a big downer, was even bumming himself out. What had happened to that ol’ Larry Reed pizazz? Life just didn’t have the spark that it used to have.

But Larry didn’t give up, kept pitching
Spaced Out
around town. He thought his big break was on the horizon when Tom Selleck’s people had interest. It was about time for a Selleck comeback. So he set up meetings around town. But the plans for world domination hit a snag when he advertised that he had Tom attached. People assumed he meant Cruise or Hanks, and Larry would say, “No, the
other
Tom. Selleck’s been on the sidelines for a while, but he’s ready to finally blow up in his old age. He’s going to be the male Betty White, he’s going to bring back the mustache.”

Larry’s pitch went nowhere. He got the Moss kid to do a bunch of free rewrites—God bless non-Guild writers—trying for a tone change. In one draft, it
was
a horror picture. In another draft it was a bromance. Larry hadn’t seen any of those bromances himself—didn’t know Jason Segal from Seth Rogen—but fuckit, they were selling.

Well, all but his, apparently. He finally dropped the
Spaced Out
project, deciding that the problem wasn’t him or the project, it was that movies were dead. He needed an in to TV, every schmuck knew the big bucks were headed that way. But how did you get into TV if you didn’t kiss ass and bullshit your way in? His motto was based on a line he stole from Bob Redford in
Spy Game
, “If it’s between you and him, send flowers.” Lar had one way or another sent a shitload of flowers.

Now in his West Hollywood office, he stared at the blonde on her knees, doing her best to get him off. The blue wonders were not weaving their magic and he pushed her aside, went, “Eh, fuckit, I’m too creative today to come.”

The woman, definitely the wrong side of thirty-five, was relieved, got to her feet and delicately wiped her mouth in a way she hoped came off as sensual. She said, “You are nearly too much man for me, baby.”