Slick (24 page)

I leaned against the car, inches away from her. We gazed at the dark Thai eatery in front of us.

“Look on the bright side,” I offered. “At least now you know I’m not just some guy trying to fuck you.”

She coughed out a quick laugh, then covered her mouth. At the very least, my bombshell had cracked away her timid exterior. I was starting to get a nice glimpse of Inner Harmony.

“This the craziest shit I ever heard in my life.”

“Tell me which part worries you and I’ll see if I can clarify.”

“Which part? All of it! You want me to yell ‘rape’ against a man who never even touched me...”

“We don’t really want to call it rape.”

“With no evidence...”

“You won’t need evidence.”

“And then fry his ass for no good reason...”

“You’ll have a very good reason.”

“...just so I can save him.”

“Right.”

She blew smoke at the pavement. “Right. Meanwhile I spend the rest of my life in jail.”

“You won’t go to jail. You won’t even be arrested.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know your background. I know you’ve been put through the wringer more times than anyone deserves. Run over by cops. Screwed over by bureaucrats. And all that family trauma. Jesus, honey, life owes you. You know it. I know it. And once everyone knows it, it’ll be political suicide for anyone to do anything short of hugging you.”

That didn’t help her state of mind. “Who... who told you all that stuff about me?”

“It’s all on record. It’s all out there for anyone willing to dig. Harmony, look, I am truly sorry for all the crap you’ve been through. But if you go along with my plan, that crap is exactly what’s going to save you. When you retract your story, everyone will understand what motivated you to lie. They’ll forgive you for it. And most important, they’ll admire you for eventually coming clean and undoing it. This is the stuff TV was made for.”

“This is my life!”

“Right. And?”

“And I don’t want it out there like that! I don’t want people talking about me, feeling sorry for me and shit.”

“Sure you do.”

“Excuse me?”

“Jay McMahon and Sheila Yorn. Remember them?”

From her stunned gape, you’d think I was levitating. “Goddamn. Do you know everything about me?”

“I know you spent over a hundred hours in front of the camera for them, sharing your life. Not to be cynical but I don’t think you did it just to advance their careers. You did it in the hopes that it would get you on the air, make you a cause célèbre, and open up some bright new doors. It was a solid plan. Really. It’s a shame it didn’t work out.”

She aimed a sour glare at her feet. “Yeah, well, what makes you think you’ll do any better?”

“Because I have better skills, better resources, and better circumstances to work with. I’m not just going for PBS here. I’m putting you everywhere. I can’t guarantee complete happiness. Everyone knows that fame is a mixed bag. But I’ll get you there. And I promise you this: you’ll never have to spend an other day as background booty in some rap video or hostess club.”

Inevitably, I had to hit her where she worked. I had to rely on the hunch that she wanted to get out of that awful place as much as I did. And worse, I had to prey on that one sliver of hope left inside of her: that God would balance her uncommonly dark past with an uncommonly bright future.

She took a long, shaky drag off the cigarette. “How do I know if you for real or not?”

“Are you questioning my existence or my credibility?”

“I’m questioning you.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “All I know is that I’ve got a plan. Yeah, it carries risk. For you, me, and a lot of people. But I did manage to talk Hunta into it, if that says anything.”

“See, how do I even know that? For all I know, you never even met the man.”

“I met him twice. He likes me. He even calls me Slick.”

“Prove it.”

“Tomorrow.”

“What’s tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow’s the day I take you to see him. If you’re up for it.”

That didn’t help her state of mind, either. She was clearly looking for an out, some irrefutable sign that this was all bullshit. Then she could go on her way without ever having to wonder if she missed her one true shot at something better.

“Listen, Harmony, you’re scared to trust me and I don’t blame you. You want my advice? Don’t.”

“Don’t trust you.”

“Not until you’re ready. I don’t need your absolute confidence yet. All I need to know is whether or not you’ll meet me again tomorrow. And you don’t even have to decide that until I get you home. So just take a deep breath. Think about it. Do you want to keep going, or do you want to stay here a little while longer?”

Whether she knew it or not, she was beginning to believe in me. And whether she wanted to or not, she was beginning to like me. As for me, I was way beyond sold. I was ready to shout her name from the rooftops.

She took one last smoky breath and then stomped her cigarette. “Let’s keep going.”

 

 

The rest of the ride was dead silent. At 1:15, I reached her apartment complex, a seedy-looking building that made me think of the pool table at the Flower Club.

I stopped the car, but she didn’t get out. She looked like she was about to ask me something, then let out a nervous laugh.

“What?”

“I forgot your name,” she admitted. “I know you told it to me, back at the club. But I don’t remember it.”

“It’s Scott.”

“Okay. Scott. Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“Why’d you pick me? Out of all the women out there you could’ve used for this thing, why me? Is it ‘cause I’m easy to feel bad for?”

“No. I picked your photo before I knew a single thing about you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. There was just something about your face. It sang to me.”

After a long pause, she tittered again. “You sure you ain’t some guy trying to fuck me?”

I smiled along. “If I am, I really need to work on my foreplay.”

She covered her grin with her hand, then turned somber again.

“I never asked anyone to feel sorry for me, you know.”

“I know.”

“I mean I’m not the kind of person who asks for stuff just because, you know, I been through shit.”

“I get that sense,” I told her.

“But that doesn’t mean I want more bad things happening to me, you understand what I’m sayin’?”

“This will only lead to good things. That’s what
I’m
saying.”

She glanced at her front door. “Yeah, that’s just what Jay and Sheila said, too. And that didn’t lead to anything.”

I sighed. “Harmony, I wish I could say just the right thing to put your mind at ease. I really do. But it’s late. You’re tired. And I’m officially out of new things to tell you.”

“Just promise me.”

I waited for a rider to that, but it didn’t seem like one was coming.

“Promise you what?”

She was still working out the verbiage, as if I were one of those cruel genies who always granted wishes in the most literal, ironic sense.

“Promise me that when this is all over, that when everything’s said and done, I won’t hate you.”

Although awkwardly phrased, her request was almost brilliant in its wide-ranging simplicity. It pretty much covered all bases.

“Harmony, I can’t control whether or not you hate me. All I can promise is that I’ll never give you a reason. You’re going to have to accept that, plus my heartfelt conviction that when this is all over, when everything’s said and done, you’ll be glad you met me.”

That was it. There was nothing left to add. Her hard disk was full. She spent her last few watts on a skeptical smirk.

“I see why they call you Slick.”

She grabbed her purse, opened the door, and then stared ahead for several seconds. “I got to get my braces tightened tomorrow. At ten.”

“Okay.”

“After that, I’m free.”

I smiled. “Okay.”

 

 

I kept smiling all the way home. I couldn’t stop. A wide, shit-eating grin usually reserved for lovelorn schoolboys. This wasn’t love, despite what “Dave” may have thought. This wasn’t even infatuation, despite my urge to sing Harmony’s name. Although I’d meant every word of what I said, and would fight to the end to protect her, the ugly truth was that she was still just a vehicle to me. She was just a potent way for me to get to
her
. The Bitch. That fickle and elusive model/goddess who stretched and writhed atop an entire nation and beyond, endlessly bored with our petty little offerings. Annabelle had managed to get her to look this way, and then conveniently left the scene. Now it was my turn. No cheesy love notes this time. This was a full-blown serenade. I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t wait.

Upon returning home, my phone emitted a series of beeps. The LED informed me that I had one new text message. It seemed the curious Jean Spelling was something of a night owl. I scrolled through her words.

 

Yeah. Weren’t we all?

I’m a shameless man living in shameless times, but the blood of my vocational ancestors runs through me. The seeds of my profession were planted centuries ago by men with the ingenuity and nerve to manipulate thousands. In fact, it was Benjamin Franklin, the father of electricity, who secretly discovered a different source of power: the media hoax.

In 1732, at age twenty-seven, Franklin published his maiden edition of
Poor Richard’s Almanac
. In order to generate buzz for his new endeavor, he used astrological hooey to predict the exact date and time that Mr. Titan Leeds—Franklin’s number one competitor in the almanac market—would die of natural causes. Naturally Mr. Leeds was quite smug, ten months later, when his prescribed expiration date came and went without so much as a headache. Like Franklin cared. The next edition of
Poor Richard’s
included a heartfelt obituary for the dear Titan Leeds, plus a warning to readers that any future written statements from the deceased, re: his not being deceased, were purely the work of profit-seeking forgers. Franklin’s head game was unprecedented for its time, and quite successful. Despite Leeds’s repeated and furious insistence that he was still alive, sales of his almanac dropped consistently each year, all the way to his actual death in 1739. Once the final edition of Leeds’s work was published, Franklin openly thanked the forgers for giving up the ghost.

In 1835, Richard Adams Locke, a cheeky young reporter for the
New York Sun
, used astronomy instead of astrology to trick the masses. Trading in on the name of Sir John Herschel, a renowned British stargazer, Locke invented the tale of a giant new telescope that revealed the existence of unicorns and bat-winged people on the moon. His continuing chronicle of Herschel’s “discoveries” was so successful that competing papers ran sensational confirmations of the story, just to get a contact sales high. Eventually Locke’s own big mouth did him in, but nobody seemed to mind being duped. Even Herschel himself took it with good humor, months later, when the story finally caught up to him at his observatory in South Africa. The only one left grumbling in his absinthe was Edgar Allan Poe, whose own attempt at a moon-related hoax was eclipsed by the
Sun
.

Not all fabrications were driven by greed. In 1874, Joseph Clarke, a writer for the
New York Herald
, was so incensed by the cruel treatment of zoo animals that he vented his rage through a five-column fib. The animals have staged a mass escape! he declared. Two hundred beasts are running amok through the streets! People are being eaten by lions! Gored by rhinos! Trampled by hippos!

Word spread fast. All over town, screaming citizens boarded up their windows and huddled with their guns. Some even jumped into the river in hopes that the crisis was limited to land creatures. The most amazing part is that Clarke admitted in the last paragraph of the article that the whole thing was a gag. Apparently, no one read that far.

But when it comes to mass deception, nobody—and I mean nobody—holds a candle to William Randolph Hearst.

The son of an obscenely wealthy California senator, Hearst used his family fortune to become a newspaper magnate. His endless lust for sensationalism, plus his obsessive competition with rival Joseph Pulitzer (no angel himself), caused him to sink his numerous papers into new depths of putrescence. But I’ll give the man credit. Like no one before him, Hearst understood the winning elements of a good public drama. Moreover, he knew how to slip his personal agendas inside each tasty little distraction.

In 1897 one such agenda was the liberation of Cuba from Spain. It infuriated Hearst that the United States wasn’t intervening on our neighbor’s behalf. He tried for months to drum up public outrage through blood-curdling tales—mostly exaggerations and fabrications—of Spanish cruelty. This time his readers weren’t biting. They knew that outrage would lead to pressure, pressure would lead to war, and nobody wanted war. Nobody but Hearst.

That was when he learned of Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros, the lovely nineteen-year-old daughter of an elite Cuban family who was arrested on suspicion of aiding revolutionaries and sentenced to twenty years in a Moroccan prison. Bad news for her. Good news for Hearst. If anyone knew the marketing power of a tragic young hottie, it was him.

Quicker than you could say “Rosebud,” he turned her into a national crusade. He devoted over four hundred columns of text to his “Cuban girl martyr” and dispatched two hundred reporters to gather fifteen thousand signatures in a petition to free her. True to form, the public became engrossed in the plight of poor Evangelina, who had only fought to defend her virtue from a lecherous Spanish colonel and was now due to be sent to a North African penal colony filled with murderers, thieves, and ravishers, all of whom would compromise her virtue on a daily basis.