Slick (2 page)

That was January 19th. On February 1st, shortly after dawn, custodial workers left the employee dorm on Kaikaina and took the twelve minute ferry ride to the main hotel on Kaikua’ana. The 250-person staff had settled in shortly after the new year and had the run of both islands. But that would end tomorrow, when over four hundred guests and three hundred corporate executives would be arriving to christen the resort. For the crew, morale was low. They had uprooted themselves from their mainland jobs just to be here, and now it seemed the Fairmont Keoki was already destined to go the way of EuroDisney.

So you can imagine their surprise when they arrived at the lagoon dock only to find a crowd of one hundred and twenty-eight naked young women gathered in front of the hotel. From inside a vast rope cordon, they yelled with excited energy as more than six dozen college boys cheered them on.

This was new. On first glance, one might think it was nothing more than a shameless promotional stunt. However, if one were inclined to look up from all the naughty bits, one would notice the many placards the women brandished with righteous pride. They spelled out their cause in marker-drawn letters:
save the monk seal!

 

 

Masking corporate propaganda as social activism is one of the trade’s earliest tricks. In February 1929 the American Tobacco Company hired legendary PR pioneer Edward Bernays to help break the taboo against female smoking. Back then it was considered unladylike, a habit of whores. Two months later, spectators at Macy’s New York Easter Day Parade gaped in succession as a battalion of beautiful debutantes proudly puffed their way down Fifth Avenue. They were heralded worldwide as the Torches of Liberty brigade. Another stigma bit the dust. After that, even the most demure femmes were free to wave their Lucky Strikes around. Ah, Edward Bernays. He was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and never let anyone forget it. To this day, the tobacco companies still target women by drawing a two-way arrow between smoking and independence. We’ve come a long way, baby.

For my purpose, I knew the
Monachus schauinslandi
—the monk seal—would be the Trojan horse. But it was currently a cause without a rebel. A quick scan through the Nexis news database pointed me to the University of Maine at Orono, where a formidable all-girl squad of student upstarts made headlines by picketing a local mink farm in raw-meat bikinis. That may sound like no big deal, but this was mid-Maine in mid-November. Wow. Now
that’s
activism. It’s also a good way to get freezer burn. I figured these young ladies could use a change of climate.

Two days later, I was sitting in an Orono campus dining hall with Deb Isham, the buxom Robespierre of the pro-mink protest. On behalf of a philanthropic party who wished to remain anonymous, I offered her and a hundred thirty of her sisters a thousand dollars each, plus airfare, to stage an eye-catching demonstration on the other side of the country. I told her my employer was most displeased with the Fairmont’s eviction of the endangered monk seal. The least we could do was send a loud and clear message on behalf of those persecuted pinnipeds.

Deb was easy to gauge. From her faded sweatshirt, which hid her Massachusetts money and California body, I could tell she wasn’t just a self-satisfied poser. She was a true and modest do-gooder, emphasis on “modest.” She was all for the cause but, despite her stint in a tenderloin two-piece, had some grave concerns about the nudity.
Do we really have to go, you know, the full monty?

Sadly, yes. This wasn’t just for my gratification. If you want to know what it’s like to be a journalist reading the newswires, try standing in a room with a thousand people yelling “Over here! Over here!” It’s maddening, especially since so much of it is blatant promotional crap from amateur agents. All the press has time to do is race through headlines. In this day and age,
Bikini-Clad
isn’t even a speed bump. Changing it to
Topless
would certainly get some hits, but not enough to justify the expense.
naked young women protest beach resort
: now that would stop the presses.

Fortunately, Deb’s cohorts were an easier sell. They were poor. Maine was cold. And their second semester didn’t start until February 7. That gave them almost a week to bum around Hawaii, with cash, all for one day’s rage against the corporate machine. Screw modesty. In one afternoon, Deb managed to fill every slot on the roster. Half the girls opted to bring along their highly supportive boyfriends, who I later enlisted to serve as crowd control. In record time, I had my army.

Right after Deb dropped me off at the Portland airport, she rolled down the window of her beat-up Tercel and eyed me uncomfortably.

“Scott, do you know why I organized that rally against the mink farm?”

“Because they’re killing minks.”

“It’s not the killing itself that bothers me. I’m not a vegetarian. If minks tasted good, I might even try one. But we don’t kill minks for nourishment. We kill them for luxury. In the end, they’re being exploited for their skins by people who want more luxuries. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

It wasn’t exactly a rebus. “What would you like to know?”

“Just promise me this is the real thing,” she said. “That this isn’t all just some big smear campaign by Marriott or something.”

See, there’s a difference between being smart and being wise. Deb was smart. I swore to her from the bottom of my heart that I wasn’t working for any of Fairmont’s competitors. After she drove off, I sighed steamy air and quietly hoped she wouldn’t get wise.

 

 

February 1 was a perfect day for mass nudity. Thursday was a big TV night in itself, but this was also the first day of sweeps. The reruns were gone.
Survivor: Australia
was premiering in its regular time slot, followed by surprise hit
CSI
in its new choice location. You had
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
on ABC,
WWF Smackdown!
on UPN, and, of course, the eternal Must See lineup on the Peacock. The ten and eleven o’clock newscasts would have over ninety million viewers to tease.

It was also my thirty-fifth birthday. That only mattered to me, of course, especially since I didn’t tell anyone. But what a way to celebrate. My work wasn’t always this much fun, and vice versa. I had to play shepherd for a flock of two hundred coeds. They had all arrived in Honolulu in scattered shifts on January 30. The next day I loaded them all onto a chartered booze cruise, which certainly lived up to its name. By the third hour, every stretch of railing was occupied by a heaving undergrad. The rest of the trip, thankfully, was dead quiet. It was an eighteen-hour ride from Oahu to Keoki. We wouldn’t get there until dawn.

One of the few other noncollegiates on the boat was David Green, a staff writer at
Maxim
. I owed him a favor so I gave him a heads-up exclusive on the before-and-after of this noble endeavor.

For a man who wrote pieces like “How to Ogle Her Breasts and Get Away with It,” David was the furthest thing from a regressed frat boy. He was a soft-spoken, agreeable fellow with a cardiologist wife, two teenage daughters, and one serious midlife crisis. Every time I saw him, he had done something different to his head. First it was the long hair/mustache retro thing, which should have died with Sonny Bono. Then it was the shaved head /goatee combo, which has yet to work on a white man. Now it was a buzz cut and stubble beard, which made him look like an A-list screenwriter. This was progress.

No stranger to PR machinations, David was able to see straight through my seat-of-the-pants operation, all the way to my ulterior. That was fine. I knew he had no intention of tipping the hand that fed him. Honestly, it wouldn’t have bothered me if he hinted at the truth in his article. Just not here. Not in front of the girls. It wasn’t the boat ride that was making me queasy. If even half of these women backed out, this would be the
Heaven’s Gate
of promotional stunts. It would maim my career.

After the students passed out, David and I enjoyed the quiet night breeze from the bow. Even when standing on the first rung of the railing, he was still shorter than me. Men often did strange, unconscious things to try to match my height.

“So how much has this cost so far?” he asked me.

“About the same as two thirty-second spots on
Law and Order
,” I bragged. “Or four on
Special Victims Unit
.”

He whistled. “That’s quite a bargain.”

“We’ll see.”

At 6
a.m.
, the boat reached the Kaikua’ana port. By then everyone was happy to be back on terra firma. One of the many ironies of the day was that the girls, who had traveled five thousand miles to protest the evils of upscale development, were all mesmerized by the sheer beauty of this place. So was I. It was heavenly. I had expected a Vegas-like artificiality, or at best San Jose, but it was more like airbrushed nature. We stood under a pink dawn sky in a majestic stone courtyard that would make Zeus jealous. And we had the whole damn place to ourselves. It occurred to me that the sisters might actually be happy with their new look. Who were we to say?

I joined Deb as she watched the men set up the rope cordon. Unlike her friends, she seemed nervous and bothered. I could already smell the issue, but I played it simple.

“You okay?”

She tied her hair back tight. “Yeah. I just...I’m just wondering if we’re doing the right thing. I mean, what if this just brings more people here?”

“It probably will.”

“It will?”

“Probably,” I said. “Look, I’m a realist. I never expected to shut this place down. What we’re doing is slapping a scarlet ‘A’ on the whole franchise. Corporations are really vain. They hate controversy, even if it doesn’t hurt their bottom line. My guess is that in three weeks, Fairmont will make some big announcement about a new seal-friendly initiative.”

“Like what?”

I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. But it was a good excuse to send out another video news release in three weeks.

“We’ll see,” I told her. “The important thing is that the next company to develop a luxury resort will go out of its way to do something decent for the animals, just to avoid the kind of noise you’re making here today.”

Admittedly, that was crap. This story had the shelf life of scrod. But Deb took it on faith. My words didn’t inspire her, but they at least gagged that quiet, nagging voice that was bothering both of us.

By then the cordon was all done. Symbolically, it was David, the
Maxim
guy, who spoke for all the men.

“So, you gals getting naked or what?”

 

 

After returning from Maine, I had asked my friend Ira to estimate how many of the nascent nudists would chicken out at the last minute. Ira was my secret weapon. My Nostradamus. Calling him an expert market analyst was like calling
Network
a cute little flick. He was a mad genius, years ahead of his craft, and utterly impossible to be around for more than an hour at a time. But he wasn’t infallible. He said he’d be surprised if less than twelve of them deserted the cause. He’d be shocked, then, to learn that only three women fatally succumbed to their poor body image.

By 7
a.m.
, it was a done deal. The girls were naked and inside the cordon. With synchronized trepidation, they folded their strategically held clothes into neat little bundles and placed them by their feet. The boyfriends cheered, David snapped his pictures, and I had a momentary attack of humanity. I hate those. I swore a very long time ago not to judge myself by other people’s moral standards, because they’re virtually always the product of some faulty, outdated, shrink-wrapped bullshit value system. I’m not talking about religious dogma. That’s the devil we know. I’m referring to Hollywood ethics. No, Senator, it’s not an oxymoron. Everyone who was raised by their TV and cineplex has been stuffed like foie gras with an unending supply of predigested moral pap, a dizzying tableau of Tinseltown tenets. Corporations are evil. Cripples are nice. Ambitious executives always learn to loosen up and “seize the day.” And liars always come clean in the end, usually in front of a big crowd. Screw that. You want one to grow on? Repeat these words: free will. Free will. Free will.

And I’ll tell you something else for free: the whole nude experience was more rewarding for the women than it was for the men. Trust me. I was there. It wasn’t that sexy. And I’m saying this as a securely heterosexual man who, until that night, hadn’t been laid in three years. There was just too much skin. It desensitized me pretty fast.

I wasn’t alone. It took five minutes for the boyfriends’ raucous cheering to die down to obligatory applause. Once the hotel staff arrived, the guys were completely faking it. By then the whole thing was about as sexy as macrame.

“It’ll be better once we start obscuring the nipples and stuff,” David told me while snapping pictures. “Strange, isn’t it?
Maxim
’s selling like hotcakes while
Penthouse
keeps losing half its subscribers. Gee, you think maybe men are starting to use their imaginations again?”

I smiled. “That’s crazy talk.”

“I’m serious. Look around. It doesn’t get any more naked than this. Where the hell else can we possibly go from here but back?”

Where indeed? If there’s one thing I learned from
Jurassic Park
, it’s that life finds a way. But David did convince me of one thing: he wouldn’t be around at
Maxim
much longer. Midlife crises aside, burnout was extremely common in the magazine trade. I mean how many times can you write the same “Please Your Man in Bed” piece for
Cosmo
before developing a facial tic?