The Brand (10 page)

‘What about Ryze Entertainment?’

‘I’m thinking that we don’t do the sort of
music you wanna do…’

‘Oh.’ Disappointed.

‘But we can work out a contract,’ he
concluded.

‘Oh.’ Relieved.

‘I got connections in the music industry. We
leak a song here and there over the next few weeks and get you
recognition. We get people interested in Jo S and nobody but Jo S,
so—.’

Unannounced, his secretary and PA both burst
into the studio, paused and realized that no recording was in
session, then scolded him for switching both his phones off.

He ignored them and said to Joelyn, ‘We start
tonight. Somebody’ll pick you up at 7pm. In the meantime, get some
rest and sleep if necessary. I want you fresh and nice when you get
here.’

After the success of the Woodyard film,
Joelyn Smith became hot property in Hollywood. She was offered
leading roles in two separate films but turned both of them down,
citing other work commitments, when in fact she didn’t want to be
in a Christmas movie, the first, or a tasteless comedy, the second.
She accepted three other offers; a period drama based on a
best-selling novel, a spy thriller set in the 1980s, and a
modern-day romantic comedy that she would also co-produce. Men were
another nuisance of life to contend with. Now that she was publicly
single, both rich and famous men were calling her agent trying to
get a date with the beautiful Joelyn Smith, among them the playboy
son of a UAE emir.

She turned them all down, but did accept the
invitation from Raizer T to go with him to watch an evening NBA
game between the New York Knicks and the Brooklyn Nets at Madison
Square Garden. They watched the game from a suite-box, with some of
his friends and, of course, his bodyguards. Cristal flowed in
copious amounts, and the men smoked cigars while their lady friends
tried not to look bored. After the game, Joelyn and Raizer T were
taken to his apartment in an all-white Rolls Royce. When they took
the elevator upstairs and reached his door, Raizer T said to the
bodyguards, ‘Guys, beat it. Go. I don’t want anybody here
tonight.’

The two burly men obeyed his orders and went
away. Raizer T entered into the condominium and yelled, ‘Everybody,
get out! I want some privacy in this fucking place, and I don’t
need nobody near me. You hear?’

He was clearly drunk, and the people did not
want to upset the hand that fed them, so they filed out of the
apartment, all except one, a beautiful White girl with dark, tanned
skin and eyes that had been inherited from a Vietnamese
grandmother. She walked up to Raizer T. ‘Raize, you said you wanted
me tonight, remember?’ she asked, almost pleading, near
desperation.

‘Bitch, get out,’ Raizer T pointed at the
door.

‘Please, Raizer, no. I need you.
Tonight—.’

‘I said get out!’

The girl hurried out of the door and Raizer T
slammed it shut. ‘Bitch-ass whore!’ he cursed, but when he turned
around to face Joelyn, his eyes held only affection. ‘Jo S,’ he
smiled at her. ‘Beautiful Jo S.’

To a degree, Joelyn was also drunk, but not
so much as to lose her mind. ‘Who’s she?’ she asked with concern
after the girl.

‘Forget her,’ said Raizer T, wrapping his
arms around her waist.

‘Who’s she?’ Joelyn insisted.

‘She’s a porn star,’ Raizer T sighed in
exasperation. ‘She wants to sing, but the bitch ain’t got no
talent. An’ there ain’t no shit I can do ’bout that coz I ain’t no
muthafuckin’ magician.’

Joelyn broke off his hold and walked to the
living room. He followed behind her.

‘How old’s she?’ Joelyn asked, pouring
herself some Cristal from a bottle into a glass she found lying
idle in the room. She sat down on a canary yellow leather
couch.

‘Don’t know,’ replied Raizer T, shrugging. He
sat down next to her. ‘20…21…22…somewhere there. What do you
care?’

Joelyn gulped down the champagne. ‘She’s so
beautiful. It just seems so unfair for her to be wasting her life
doing porn.’

‘I’ve always maintained that there is a thin
line between being rich and being poor. For many poor folk out
there, it’s just a push in the right direction that’s needed in
order to be big in life. But life’s about opportunities and a great
deal of luck. Have you ever wondered if A hadn’t happened then you
wouldn’t be in B? Just like me, if I hadn’t had a break I could’ve
stayed dealing drugs on the streets and right now I could either be
dead or rotting in jail. It’s just the mathematics o’ life.
Sometimes shit works, and sometimes it don’t. There’s lots of
talented people out there who will never reach their dreams because
they will never get the opportunity and the luck, just as there’s
many people without talent making a lot of dough only because
they’re in a good place in life, and I don’t mean no offence to
you.’

Joelyn said nothing.

‘Many people died for this rap shit, Jo. And
now that it’s gone mainstream people should stop the violence and
just make money from the music. I have become major, so much that
I’ve got companies like Reebok making sneakers in my name. They’re
makin’ money off of me and I’m makin’ off them, cuz it’s business.
I ain’t bragging, but I’m just showing you that I ain’t no typical
air-brained rapper. I got a fashion line, I got my own whisky
distillery, I got investments in real estate, and I’ve stocks in
some tech companies. I could leave the rap game any day now and
still be rich. But I don’t, because this music made me what I am.
And I stay loyal to the game.’

Joelyn remained silent.

Raizer T got up, disappeared for a while and
returned to the living room smoking a joint of marijuana. The
pungent smell hit Joelyn’s nostrils instantly. He sat down beside
her, dragged hard on the cigarette and handed it to her. She shook
her head. ‘Take it,’ he urged. ‘It’s good weed.’

Reluctantly, she took it, placed it between
her lips and pulled in the smoke. It hit her lungs like a fireball
and she coughed uncontrollably.

‘Slowly,’ said Raizer T. He took the joint
from her and placed it between his lips. ‘Like this.’

He handed it back to her and she dragged
slowly at it. The smoke coursed through her insides and seeped into
her bloodstream. An instant euphoria engulfed her. She dragged
harder at the joint and closed her eyes as a tingling sensation
began at her loins. Raizer T took off his jacket and shirt. He had
two names written in cursive on each side of his chest. She stared
at his naked torso. ‘You have a clean body,’ she said with a
naughty smile.

He pulled the joint from her fingers and
pulled on it hungrily. He trapped the smoke inside his mouth and
then swallowed it after a moment. ‘My mother hated tattoos. Still
does. Would kill me if she ever saw me with one. So I only have
these.’ He turned, and she noticed that he had two more names in
cursive on each of his shoulder blades, and another one at the top
of his left shoulder in Japanese or Chinese – she was not sure –
characters. ‘They’re the names of my children. And this one on the
shoulder is Shawn, the last born, in Japanese.’

‘Cute.’

Raizer T made one last long pull at the
almost burnt-out cigarette and then killed it on an ashtray on the
coffee-table. He leaned towards her and they kissed. He shoved a
hand between her thighs and groped…‘Wait,’ she cried. ‘I have to go
to the bathroom.’

The alcohol had done its chemistry inside her
body and rapidly filled her bladder after being adjudged useless by
the kidneys. When she came out of the bathroom he was standing at
the door, completely naked, with a powerful erection. She cast a
glance downwards and noticed that her fears had been unfounded. He
did not have an abnormally big penis as the myth about Black men
had led her to believe. It was just an ugly dark tube of muscle,
darker than any other visible parts of his body, with a small head
that tapered towards its end. He scooped her up suddenly in his
arms and carried her to the bedroom. They fell on the bed and
locked each other in a passionate kiss.

‘I wanted you from the first moment I laid my
eyes on you,’ he panted. ‘I love you, and I want to make you my
wife.’

He tore off her clothes and descended
hungrily on her breasts. He sucked on them until she yelped
helplessly. He rolled her to her back and pulled her pants off her
legs. He slid her green thong off her body too. Then he pushed her
legs far apart and began to lick her vagina with his mouth. He
stroked her clitoris with the tip of his tongue and she moaned in
appreciation. He pushed her legs against her chest, exposing the
dark starfish that was her anus. He licked it and wet it with
saliva.

He let go of her and reached for a small
transparent plastic bag with a white powder inside it. With a
worried look in her eyes, Joelyn began to protest. ‘No, I
don’t—.’

‘Ssh,’ commanded Raizer T. ‘Relax.’

He sank to his knees before the bed and
pulled her to him. He dipped his middle finger in the cocaine and
rubbed it onto her clitoris. Then he licked it off her and sucked
the miniscule organ until her moans increased in volume and
frequency. He spat at her anus, dipped his middle finger inside her
vagina and then into the cocaine. Slowly, he inserted the finger
into her anus and drove it deep. He worked his finger back and
forth, while he used his mouth to stimulate her vagina. Then he
rose to his feet and fed his rock-solid erection into her moist
vagina. She let out a scream of ecstasy. He grabbed her knees and
slapped her legs together. For a while they panted and heaved in
unison, lost in a world of pleasure so exciting it belonged only to
them.

He released her and turned her body around to
get on her knees and flatten her chest on the bed. She backed her
buttocks up to him. He sank to his knees and buried his face
between her luscious buttocks. He licked at her vagina and prodded
inside it with his tongue. He grabbed a bottle of lubricating oil
from the top of the nightstand and applied it to her anus. Then he
grabbed her buttocks and held them wide apart as he gently inserted
his penis into her tight hole. Tears stung Joelyn’s eyes as the big
tube tore her apart. She gritted her teeth as the pain seared
through her.

‘Oh God! Fuck you!’ she exploded.

And then all of a sudden he was wedged inside
her rectum and she felt like ejecting him out of her body. He began
to thrust back and forth. It was so painful, yet so delicious she
did not want him to stop….so punitive…so torturous…so exquisitely
tender…she collapsed onto the bed, and he crashed onto her back,
still inside her. He rolled her with him and they lay on their
sides as he continued digging for glory inside her buttocks. He
opened up her thighs and rubbed her vagina with his hand. He slid a
finger inside the warm organ, wetting it with her fluids, and then
dipped the finger into the plastic with cocaine. He fed his finger
into her mouth and she sucked on it hungrily, anything to divert
her mind from the exquisite pain at her buttocks…

Afterwards, she sat up on the bed with her
back against the head-rest, sharing a cannabis cigarette with him.
He kissed her lips and stroked her vagina with one hand. ‘I can’t
get enough of you,’ he said, brushing his lips against hers.

She grabbed his flaccid penis and curled her
fingers around it. It awakened, and in an instant it was as hard as
a rock. ‘You’re a maniac,’ she said with half-closed, drunken
eyes.

He just smiled, laid her on her back and
dipped himself into her, not telling her that he had ingested
performance-enhancement drugs.

If an ordinary woman sleeps around with
various men in order to get her way in the world, she is called a
self-serving whore, but if it’s a celebrated individual, she rises
to cult status as a sex symbol of note. How many times in the near
future will we have to endure tales of Joelyn Smith’s love life,
and why should the American public be so interested in Joelyn Smith
anyway? Barely four months ago she was a nobody, at least in as far
as celebrity stakes go, then she slept with Hollywood film director
Chris Woodyard and subsequently got a job in his blockbuster summer
release, starring opposite a man she also had a sexual relationship
with, Byron Taylor. And the world was introduced to Joelyn Smith.
That fling lasted all of two months.

Now Ms. Smith, 27, has decided to develop a
career in music, and she has gone to star rapper Raizer T, known to
his mother by his given name of Anthony Ryzor, for help with this
effort. We are all hoping Ms. Smith can sing better than she can
act – because, really, her performance in the Woodyard-directed
film was mediocre – but perhaps that’s too much to ask. You see,
people who give sexual favors in order to get ahead in life are
never good in any other thing to start with. This time the output
from Ms. Smith is guaranteed to be worse than any of her other
projects so far, because she has decided to marry Anthony Ryzor, a
talented musician in his own right. Given her talents to corrupt
talented men into submission, we just pray and hope that she won’t
be a bad influence on his genius…

This is an unedited excerpt from the
lifestyle section of a widely distributed New York daily newspaper,
written by a columnist who was well-known for her caustic criticism
of celebrated public figures. It is an example of the kind of
reaction with which the public announcement that Raizer T and
Joelyn Smith would get married was met. While certain sections of
society found this piece by a popular newspaper columnist witty and
funny, it raised Joelyn’s ire. She was so infuriated by the article
that she had a good mind to sue both the columnist and the
newspaper for libel and defamation of character.