Slick (12 page)

And there was more correction fluid coming. Riding the wave of fear and blame that came about from Columbine, senators such as Joe Lieberman and John McCain had been able to open the door to even tighter reform. Now the Melrose situation could very well blow it off its hinges.

“The bottom line,” said Maxina, “is that we’ve got to get Hunta and his music out of this whole equation. We’ve got to lift him up above it. But we won’t have a shot in hell of doing that if Lisa Glassman gets to tell her story.”

“Her
fictional
story,” Doug stressed.

“That’s the key, Scott. We can’t afford her a moment of credibility. We have to stack the deck before she even plays her first card. Now Doug is doing everything he can to stall her lawsuit, but you’re still on a seriously tight schedule. You’ve got to strike hard and fast. Are we painting a clear picture here?”

“Like El Greco.” I did not like this.

They both smiled. Doug opened his briefcase and retrieved a thin manila folder. “We hired a private investigator to look into Lisa’s background. This is all we have on her. I won’t lie. She’s pretty clean. You’re going to have to get crafty.”

As soon as the file touched my hands, I was officially sucked into the maelstrom that Annabelle started. The one Hayley wouldn’t come within a mile of. It was easy to see why. After all the
Sturm und Drang
, it turned out Hunta was right. All they needed was an assassin.

Personal smear campaigns were not to be taken lightly. Drea taught me that. She had the skill and the power to drop mountains on people. With a few phone calls she could make someone, anyone, so radioactive that even their pets wouldn’t come near them. It was one of the worst things you could do to a fellow human being. Just ask Richard Jewell, the poor Atlanta security guard who became the chief suspect in the 1996 Olympic Park bombing. Knowing damn well he was innocent, the FBI flacks used him as media chum to lure the hungry press away from their real investigation. A necessary evil? Perhaps. But believe it or not, most publicists have souls. Most of us find it difficult to justify those means, even for noble ends. Amazingly, I was no exception.

Neither was Maxina. She had all the resources to handle Lisa in house. She just didn’t have the stomach for it. As a “self-respecting woman who grew up on love and Motown,” she would clearly eat her young before raining knives on a fellow sister, especially one who may have indeed been wronged, no matter what Doug said. For Maxina, there was only one course of action: close her eyes, summon a demon, and convince herself that it was all for the greater good.

Apparently I was the first name she found in the Yellow Pages, under “Demons.”

 

 

The day I truly became a free man was the day I stopped caring about the world’s impression of me. Like everyone else, I was raised to seek affirmation and avoid contempt. Unfortunately, the quest to be liked by everyone triggered an undue amount of stress, anger, and acquiescence in my life. By the time I left college, I realized I’d never be happy unless I undid a lifetime of conformist conditioning.

Thus, I reversed my directives. I shunned affirmation and craved contempt. I sought arguments from argumentative people. I encouraged judgment from judgmental people. I went out of my way to trigger all kinds of scorn from anyone who was willing to give it, and there was never a shortage of volunteers. It wasn’t the easiest phase of my life. But like the most determined bodybuilders, I stuck to my regimen and eventually began to see results. Eventually I became a human fortress, impervious to even the most subtle and penetrating forms of disdain. Life got easier from there.

But my defenses occasionally sputtered, especially when I was tired. That night, in the master bedroom of Suite 511, I suffered a hull breach. I couldn’t help but reconstruct the conversation between Maxina and Hayley, at least the encapsulated version:

 

It wasn’t Maxina who bothered me. She only had my client list to judge me from. Glock. Philip Morris. Monsanto. Shell. Of course she knew about Shell. Who was I kidding? For a social crusader like her, my resume might as well come with a pentagram. She knew my work but she didn’t know me.

Hayley, however, was the plastic knife in my back. We’d fought side by side fifty hours a week for four years. Many a time we dozed next to each other on her office couch following a twenty-hour phone blitz. True, she was more of the East Coast, old-school style of publicist, but never once did she complain to me about my gangsta methods.

Fine. Whatever. I let it all out through a wide yawn. I may have been feeling a little sore, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to show it.

“All right,” I sighed. “No doubt you’ll want to know what my game plan is. And soon.”

“Smart man,” said Maxina. “Come back here tomorrow. Six o’clock. Bring two game plans. Or at least one good one.”

“Tomorrow at six,” I said, heading for the door.

Doug was confused. “Uh, Scott? Don’t you want to talk about money?”

“That’s okay,” I quipped. “You can pay me in goat’s blood.”

For the first time, I heard Maxina laugh. Heartily. It was to her credit that she took it so well. In no uncertain terms, I’d just given her the finger.

 

 

I was ready to fall asleep at the wheel. After two nights of travel and one night of adultery, my circadian rhythm had hit its fermata. With each infuriating red light, it only got worse.

So did my mood. You would have seen it on my face if you had driven past me on Wilshire. With my guard down, all the fears and insecurities I kept buried in the back of my mind came creeping forward. I could see them, oozing around the edges of my vision. I could hear them buzzing in my ears. They were so happy to be noticed again.
It’s been ages, Scott! We have so much to catch up on!

I drove faster. This was what happened when I pushed myself too hard. I probably shouldn’t have taken this job.

Oh, don’t start, you. I spent most of my life as a slave to doubt, looking at myself through other people’s eyes. Why? Why should I care?

Right. Right. I’m a heartless bastard. A supervillain. A card-carrying member of the Brotherhood of Evil Flacks. News flash, buddy. Even if a million people see me as Pol Pot, it doesn’t mean they’re right. A million people believe that everything they see on the news is real. A million people believe that the divorce rate is fifty percent. A million women believe that all rappers are rapists, and a million rappers believe that all women are bitches. So tell me, O tar of the soul, O former master, what the hell is your point?

“I don’t know,” I blurted. “I guess nobody loves a publicist.”

And then that was it. The discussion was over. If those dark little voices wanted to chat among themselves, they had my blessing. But I was out of the loop. Out of earshot. As far as my deepest, darkest thoughts were concerned, I was a deaf driver, stuck on Wilshire, inching his goddamn way home.

I didn’t know it at the time, but on the night I met Hunta, he was celebrating his eighth anniversary of being an only child.

Well, maybe “celebrating” isn’t the right word. At 11
p.m.
on February 2, 1993, Ray Sharpe was driving his Pontiac Bonneville down Lincoln Boulevard in Venice when he saw the flashing lights of the police cruiser in his rearview mirror. He pulled over. The two confronting officers told him they could hear his goddamn music from a mile away. They would have let the issue drop then and there, but Hunta’s brother became irrational and belligerent. After failing two sobriety tests, he made the unwise decision to flee to his car. One of the officers fired a shot into his leg. It wasn’t meant to kill him, but it was Ray’s bad luck that he tripped and smashed his head against the passenger window. The glass merely cracked. His neck shattered instantly.

The music he’d been blasting that night was from Tupac Shakur’s second solo album,
Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.
, which had come out in stores the day before. Similarly, just eight months prior to Ray’s death, a nineteen-year-old Texan named Ronald Ray Howard had been playing Tupac’s first album,
2Pacalypse Now
, from his tape deck when he was pulled over by a state trooper. Only this time the officer was the one killed. At the trial, the defense attorney placed the blame squarely on Tupac, whose anti-cop lyrics
clearly
incited Ronald Ray to violence. The jury didn’t buy it. Neither did the civil court when the officer’s widow sued Tupac for the exact same reason.

But that wasn’t the end of Tupac’s troubles. Seven months later, he was hit with another wrongful-death suit, this one from the parents of a six-year-old boy who was killed in the crossfire between Tupac’s crew and some old Marin City gang rivals. Tupac’s label, Interscope Records, settled out of court for a little under half a million. Nine months after that, he was arrested for trying to club a fellow MC who had upstaged him at a Michigan State concert. He pleaded down to a misdemeanor and served ten days in jail. Five months after
that
, he was charged in the nonfatal shooting of two off-duty Atlanta police officers. He claimed that he and his posse were simply coming to the aid of a black motorist the officers had been harassing. His defense—and his lyrics—were later substantiated by mounting evidence of racism on the part of the two cops, one of whom wrote in his report that the “niggers came by and did a drive-by shooting.” The charges against Tupac were dropped.

And then came his Waterloo, three weeks later, in the form of a nineteen-year-old woman named Ayanna Jackson. In November 1993 she cried rape. Everyone listened, so much so that when Tupac’s third album,
Me Against the World
, premiered at the top of the Billboard charts in 1995, he became the first recording artist in history to enjoy a number one debut from inside a prison cell.

Well, maybe “enjoy” isn’t the right word.

I don’t want it happening to me
what happened to him,
said Hunta.

 

 

For my own well-being, I should have caught up on sleep, but I was simply too keyed up. By 9
a.m.
on Saturday, I was back in my car, driving aimlessly around Los Angeles, hoping to jump-start my sputtering brain. I needed to understand the woman I was suddenly up against. And to understand Lisa Glassman, I needed to understand what really happened to her the night of Friday, December 15, when she celebrated a very Mean World Christmas.

Doug Modine was no stranger to the fine art of ass-covering. Right after Lisa had tendered her angry resignation, he solicited written statements from nearly two dozen people who had attended the party. These weren’t sworn depositions. Doug just wanted to get the story down while the facts were still fresh. He put it all in the file.

For the gala, Mean World had rented out one of the grand ballrooms at Le Meridien, a posh hotel on the eastern end of Beverly Hills. Between the staff, the talent, and all their friends and families, there were more than two hundred people present for the buffet.

After dinner Byron “Judge” Rampton spoiled all the kids with gifts, mostly of the PlayStation 2 variety. The employees got generous checks. The artists got car keys. Despite the fact that music sales were stagnant for the first time in two decades, 2000 had been damn good to Mean World. Things were festive. So festive, in fact, that by 9:30 all the mothers in the room got the heads-up from Doug. Soon this party would not be suitable for children.

Although the alcohol consumption had started with dinner, nighttime was the right time for all the homeys in the house to break out the bud. You know what I’m talking about. The bammer, the brown, the buddha, the cheeba, the chronic, the dank, the doobage, the hash, the herb, the homegrown, the ill, the indo, the method, the sess, the sake, the shit, the skunk, the stress, the tabacci, the wacky. Marijuana. What can I say? California knows how to party. For the boys at the label, it wasn’t enough to crack another 40 and smoke some kill. They were also determined to put the “ho” in “ho ho ho.”

So in came the ladies. Dashers and dancers, prancers and vixens. What started out as an evening of reindeer games devolved into one big stag party. You won’t hear me casting judgment. After Keoki Atoll, that’d be the pot calling the kettle bitch.

At the same time, I can spare some empathy for Lisa. Born and raised in Oakland. Accepted, full scholarship, into the San Francisco High School for the Performing Arts. Graduated magna cum laude. Accepted, full scholarship, into UC Santa Barbara. Graduated summa cum laude, with a BA in African American studies and a BFA in Music Theory. Card-carrying member of the ACLU, DNC, Black Women’s Caucus, and (for God’s sake) Mensa. Has published poetry in numerous anthologies and has written a bunch of articles for
LA Weekly
, covering the hip-hop scene. She’ll be twenty-six in July.

This was no bitch.

As a smart and skillful young woman, Lisa must have had a hard time breathing in all that secondhand smut. Lord only knew what rationale she used to fuel her polite smile. Boys will be boys? All’s fair in rap and war? Ain’t nothing but a gangsta party?