Slick (4 page)

“All right. I’ll let you guys have that one. Here’s a question, Deb. Why now?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean if you’re really concerned about the monk seal, wouldn’t it have been smarter to stage the protest three years ago, before the construction crew got started?”

“Come on,” I griped.

“No, it’s okay,” Deb replied, trying hard not to get flummoxed. “Three years ago, I was just a freshman. I didn’t have the organizational muscle to do an operation like this. Now that I’m here, I’m hoping this demonstration will at least slap a scarlet ‘A’  on the whole franchise. I want these corporations to, you know, think twice before they infringe on the rights of indigenous species.”

“I see. So you’re punishing Fairmont by showing them your trim, naked bodies.”

“We’re just...we had to resort to this to get your attention. We just want the world to know what Fairmont did to those seals.”

“Aren’t you afraid you’re just giving them free publicity? I mean Fairmont, not the seals.”

“Well...no. I mean it’s bad publicity. Corporations are really vain. They—”

“Who paid for all your travel costs?”

“Uh, Scott. Through an anonymous donor.”

Denny looked to me. I waved him on. Keep filming. It’s not like this was live.

“And you have no guesses as to who the donor is.”

“I have no idea. And I wouldn’t want to speculate.”

“But you know Scott’s a publicist, right?”

“Miranda...”

“Yes,” said Deb. “Why? What are you getting at?”

“Nothing. I just think it’s odd that an anonymous donor would need a publicist. You don’t have any idea who’s behind this?”

“Objection. Asked and answered.”

That was me. With a devilish smirk, Miranda continued. “Okay, Deb. Hypothetically—”

“All right. Stop.” Me again. That was enough. It was obvious Miranda wouldn’t let the issue drop.

“Scott, would you butt out? I’m conducting an interview.”

“No, you’re digging for information you know you won’t be able to use. What’s the point? Just stick to the facts.”

She let out a flustered laugh. “Facts?! What facts? I don’t see any facts! Hey, what about the fact that you’re working for Fairmont? No. Shit. That’s only speculation. Sorry.”

Daunted, Deb turned to me. “What is she talking about?”

“Forget it. She’s just trying to get a rise out of you.”

And succeeding. “Is it true?”

“It’s not, Deb, I swear to you. I’m not working for Fairmont. They’re not paying me a dime.”

“Not directly, anyway,” Miranda added. “Scott usually works through the big PR agencies. He’s a freelance flack. A media mercenary. Ronin.”

“Hey, Miranda. How’s Jim?”

“Cheating on me.”

Thought so. In my book, the definition of “prick” is someone who’s both dumb enough and mean enough to screw around on an investigative reporter. Jim certainly fit the description. What do you expect? He’s a producer for
Dateline NBC
.

Of course, in Deb’s book, the definition of “prick” was now me. Shame, really. She had worked so hard to dodge the hints. Now she was painted into a corner. With wet eyes, she threw me an expletive and disappeared into the sea of flesh.

Denny filmed her telegenic backside, then shut off the camera. “Well, that was dramatic. What now?”

“Now we look for Amber LaPierre. She’ll give us some good quotes.” I turned to Miranda. “Care to meet the number two girl?”

She shook her head at me in wonder. “You’re not even mad at me.”

I shrugged. “You know my motto: don’t get even, get over it.”

“That always drove Gracie nuts, you know. That she could never get you mad.”

“Yeah, well, she found a way. Sorry about Jim, incidentally.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

That was okay. I wasn’t offering. Now, where the hell was Amber?

 

 

The rest of the job took longer than expected. I spent fifteen minutes looking for Amber only to discover that she wasn’t in the crowd anymore. The public nudity had gotten her so aroused that she made her boyfriend smuggle her back to the boat for a quickie. By the time she re turned, all rosy-cheeked, I had already gotten several good quotes from Lorna Noonan, a comely sophomore who would have just as gladly flown out here to protest world peace.

After the incident with Deb, Miranda decided to behave herself. The only person she harassed was fellow journalist David Green. She thanked him and his magazine for keeping millions of useless men in their homes, masturbating, instead of bothering real women. David simply apologized on behalf of
Maxim
for raising the standard of female attractiveness well above Miranda’s head.

By eleven o’clock, the whole nude thing had gotten stale. Most of the staff had gone inside to work. The protesters complained about hunger and sunburn. The boyfriends were just bored. At 11:15, I called it a wrap but told Amber, Lorna, and a dozen others to stick around in case we needed pickup shots.

While Miranda wrote up and sent her wire release, and David shot four rolls of the reverse stripdown, I worked with Metropia to cut the final VNR. I annoyed all three of them with my artistic perfectionism. I’ll admit it, I’ve done one too many of these things. I was getting creative just to alleviate my own boredom. Eventually, Gray snapped. “Jesus, man! Who are you, Kubrick? Step back!” I casually relented, then pointed out that Kubrick would have certainly enjoyed a scene like this.

At high noon, the piece was done. I was happy with it. We launched it into the heavens and announced it through MediaFAX. It was out of my hands. Boy did that feel good. It felt even better to read Miranda’s eight hundred-word submitted draft, which ended up supporting my facts and figures. I knew she’d come around.

I saluted the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, that is a wrap.”

Students and staff alike rejoiced at a job well done. Giddy at the thought of all the press calls he’d soon be fielding, James Dmitriov—executive director of the Fairmont Keoki—offered the demonstrators free lunch, plus full use of the pool and water slide. Within seconds of announcing his offer, poor James was almost trampled by the stampede into the hotel.

Miranda shook her head. “That was the most pathetic social protest in human history.”

“You outdid yourself, man,” said David, clapping my back.

“Thanks, but I’m not going to celebrate until I see how many stations pick us up.”

I wouldn’t get a sense of that until much later that night. The true count wouldn’t start until Friday, when the first Nielsen SIGMA results came in. It’s an impressive process. Metropia lojacks the VNR with a digitally encoded tag, then Nielsen tracks it all over the broadcast spectrum. They even calculate the comparative ad value of all that free airtime. Anything over two million dollars would officially be a job well done. Over three million would be a gold star on my forehead. If my story got picked up in all top one hundred markets, on multiple affiliates, the ad value could hit six million. That would make me Jesus.

But I tried not to get too starry-eyed. It was all up to the news directors now. I had to tell myself to loosen up. Out of the many things that could have gone wrong with the production, only one or two did. Silly, insignificant things.

Mostly.

Rare is the day that I have more than one moral relapse. For no reason other than self-justification, I felt the need to achieve some kind of closure with Deb. I knew she wouldn’t be dining with her friends, so I looked for her on the boat.

She leaned against the railing of the bow, staring somberly out at the cool blue waters of the lagoon. She was now dressed in a simple white tank top and khaki shorts, an ensemble that made her look very...damn, and here I thought her best color was clear. Maybe David was right. Maybe the visualization was better than the visual. Or maybe three years of circumstantial celibacy were finally taking their toll on me.

No, that was too easy an answer. I was pretty sure these feelings, though not altogether deep, were quite specific to Deb. I suppose I should also mention in my own defense that the sexiest woman I’d ever known (you know, the A-cup) was fourteen years older than me, not younger. Is this what happens to us as we inch toward middle age? Was I headed toward an obligatory crisis, where I’d suddenly get the urge to change my hair, grow a beard, buy a fancier car, or have meaningless carnal relations with a well-endowed collegian? This may not have been the best day to turn thirty-five.

Deb didn’t acknowledge me, even as I stood next to her, following her gaze across the water. From her vantage, stretching out to sea, it was all nature. No signs or logos. No wheelchair ramps or drinking fountains. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was intentional on her part or unconsciously symbolic.

I took a deep breath. “Deb—”

“Fuck you.”

Okay. New approach. I let a few seconds pass. “Look, I wanted everyone to come away from this happy. You guys got an all-expense paid trip to Hawaii. Fairmont got cheap advertising. The press got good filler. And millions of men and women will get a nice little story to distract them from their mundane lives. And if you want more honesty, yes, this will be a nice shot in the arm for my career. The bottom line is that everybody benefits from this.”

“Except the monk seal.”

I sighed. “Deb, the world isn’t that simple. Trust me. There are—”

“Don’t give me that paternalistic bullshit! You—”

“There are twelve sides to every story. And a million layers to every side. So tell me, how much truth do you want? How much are you prepared to deal with? Some of it, or all of it?”

“All of it! But I doubt you’re capable of—”

“You don’t know what I’m capable of. And you’d be surprised at some of the things I know. In my job you have to learn the facts in order to distort them. I’ll start with the easy one. You know what happened to the monk seals when the big construction barges showed up three years ago? They left. That’s it. They swam off to Kure Atoll, a bunch of uninhabited, Navy-owned islands a hundred miles to the northwest. They have just as much privacy and protection as they ever did. The U.S. government made sure of that before they leased Keoki. But that’s old news. That’s the happy layer. Do you want to go deeper?”

She kept her hot glare forward.

“The deeper truth is that the Hawaiian monk seal is going to be extinct within thirty years, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. Okay, no. If we got rid of the tuna nets that sometimes snag them, they’d probably die off in forty years. We might be able to buy an other five if we killed off all the tiger sharks in the area, but that creates its own issues. And it’s still futile. You know why? Because the monk seal’s number one enemy is the monk seal. Surprise! They may look cute, but they’re one of the most sexually malevolent species on the face of the planet.”

That earned me a quick, distrustful glower.

“During sex,” I explained, “the males bite. I’m not talking about love nibbles, I mean they chomp their honeys hard. Often fatally. This has led to a serious skew in the guy/girl ratio, worse than any technical college. But instead of being wooed, the few females left can look forward to a short life of perpetual gang bangs. Oh yes. These monks do that. It’s called mobbing. And when there aren’t enough women around for the old screw-and-chew, the men move on to the girls. Then the boys. Then each other. This isn’t Sammy the Seal you’re crying over. These are rapists with flippers. Their entire society is like a bad prison drama. And by 2030 their show is going to be canceled. Because of Fairmont? No. Because there are no more women. They’ve been on this crash course for fifteen million years. They haven’t learned. Now Darwin says it’s their time to go. But that’s not even the worst part. Do you want go deeper?”

“Shut up.”

“The truth is that all of the information I gave you is out there. It took me ten minutes to get it off the Internet. It would have taken you the same—”

“Shut up!”

“—time to find it. But you didn’t look. And I know it’s not because you’re dumb or lazy. Quite the opposite. You’re an extraordinary woman. You just didn’t want to know. You were offered a free trip to Hawaii to do something you believed in. How often does a chance like that come along? I’m sorry it got ruined for you, that’s all. That’s what too much truth can do. That’s why people like me exist.”

Deb pressed her fist against her lips. I wasn’t sure if she was going to cry or deck me. Either way, I figured the greatest gift I could give her now was my lifelong absence.

“You’re going to go far, Deb. You’re going to do wonderful things. But my well-meaning advice is to get over it, join your friends, and have one hell of a vacation. You deserve it, okay? Take it easy.”

She resumed her westward gaze. I took a short breath, nodded, and started on my merry way.

“Scott...”

I stopped and turned around. She tensely chewed on her words.

“I appreciate what you no doubt saw as an attempt to cheer me up. And I also appreciate the wisdom you shared. You’re right. There are twelve sides to every story. Here’s mine. You’re a bastard. You’re a bastard who took advantage of my good nature in order to get my clothes off, in order to make more money for your corporate overlords, in order to make more money for yourself. The fact that you think a free vacation could possibly make up for how disgusting I feel shows how little you understand women. Or anyone, for that matter. You may excuse yourself for being such a moral cripple because that’s the way you think the world works, but there’s another layer to that. Do you want to go deeper?”

“Deb—”

“The deeper truth is that you are going to live a long, destructive life. You’re going to keep doing terrible things. And when you’re in your deathbed at a hundred and three, you’re going to realize that it didn’t mean a damn thing. None of it. You know why? Because it’ll finally occur to you that nobody’s going to miss you. You could die today and nobody would miss you. In fact, most of us will be happy to forget you even existed. Why don’t we get that process started, okay? Get the fuck out of my sight. Get the fuck out of my life. And Scott? For the sake of the world, please don’t live to be a hundred and three.”