Rikki
couldn’t fucking believe what he found online — Antwone Fisher was directing a movie starring, of all people, Larry Fishburne. (Too bad it didn’t say anything about porndaughter co-
ing.) It got weirder: there was a role for a black his age. www.castingcallLA.com said Antwone already saw 100s of boys but hadn’t yet found “the one.” “We’ll know it when he walks through the door,” said Fish (not Fishburne; “Fish” was Antwone’s nickname) in an interview with www.shootingstarz.com.
WTF. Shit was crazy.
The timing was crazy cosmic too, but Rikki was stymied about how to proceed. He talked to ReeRee (somewhat reluctantly hipping her to his general plan; not too many people had ever known about his closely-concealed somewhat embarrassing ((to him)) ambitions to act, maybe just Dawn & Engineer Jim) and Ree tripped on it & loved him for it, because it was so unexpected, & a way of being proactive re them getting a house together, getting a life, getting on with their lives to come. Reeyonna then spoke to her bro who then spoke to his parttime g.f. Tom-Tom, who was truly hip to gaming the Hollywood system. The Treasure of Sierra Leone had a Facebook page & casting link where you could upload your reel from tmblr or wherever. Tom-Tom even found verboten chunks of the script in the shady thickets of the webswamp (www.scriptileaks.com).
She ran down the synopsis for him: Treasure was about a failed character actor (Fishburne) whose estranged teenage daughter gets a virus that severely damages her heart. In order to raise the 300K required for meds & a transplant, Fishburne becomes a grifter. He hooks up with an old guy (Michael Douglas) recently fired from his job of 35 years — a daytime soap — whose livelihood now pretty much exclusively consists of seducing widows. Douglas never really has the heart to royally fleece the old ladies, settling instead for room, board & pocket $$$ in exchange for platonic companionship. Enter Fishburne, who wants to change all that muy pronto. The duo stage a bingo scam & are nearly out-hustled by a brilliant 15-year-old, an agro Afro-American runaway from some foster home hellhole. Impressed by his mad skills, they take the kid under their wing.
That night, Fishburne watches Oprah interview a former child soldier from Freetown. He’s riveted by the charismatic young boy’s articulate saga of being abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army and brainwashed to be a killer. Inspired, he calls his friend Douglas & proposes they set out on a scam tour of America — with the runaway impersonating a reformed child soldier, Fishburne playing his impoverished, dignified African father, & Douglas trodding the boards as the founder of the NGO responsible for the boy’s rehab & redemption. At first Douglas is skeptical, but when Fishburne bares his soul & says that his daughter will die without the surgery, Douglas needs no further coaxing.
So they set out & the kid’s a natural. Born for the part. As a warm-up, he practices on the widows, who practically hand over their pocketbooks. Fishburne & Douglas begin booking lectures in small auditoriums & concert halls, and pretty soon they’ve got a cash cow phenom on their hands. They’re making local appearances, doing call-in radio shows, county fairs, all that. The fake warrior becomes a burgeoning rockstar on the indomitable-human-spirit circuit, the darling of liberal socialites’ soirées, everybody hungering to hear the lurid horrors of manchild in the unpromised land. The biggest problem becomes how to keep the whole floating crapgame below the radar — Fishburne & Douglas want attention, just not the wrong kind. Because the minute someone starts trying to verify details, the jig, as they say, is up.
Tom-Tom read Rikki an online press release from a few weeks back. It said that Ishmael Beah, the famous grownup child soldier whom the script’s impostor was based upon, signed on as a consultant on the film. The name rang a bell. Weirdly enough, Rikki recalled that some months ago, Beah visited John Crowe Ransom to give a talk about his memoir, A Long Way Gone. The dude didn’t seem too much older than himself. During a special assembly, Beah shared his story of the atrocities he was forced to commit as a young boy. He remembered Beah talking about how the rebels hooked him & his homies on some kind of speed mixed with gunpowder.
Killin & cokin’! Fuckin bitchin…
The web was awash with h8trs whining that Beah “went Hollywood”—not only was he cheapening his own story, but the stories of all traumatized child soldiers & “lost boys.” Blahdee-blahdee-blah. The usual devils were busily obsessed with debunking the truthfulness of Ishmael’s journey (http://oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/ishmael-beahs-a-long-way-gone-is-a-long-way-from-the-truth-magazine-says-in-report-raising-serious-doubts-about-memoir/) — but what Rikki really liked was, Beah kept above the fray, rebutting, “sad to say, my story is all true.” In response to his lotusland-sellout critics (http://whatisthewhat.org.african-stories/lost-in-america/ishmael-beah-chronicles-his-role/), he said “sometimes painful truths must be ‘wrapped’ in comedy in order to open people’s eyes so they may learn & understand.”
Tom-Tom thought Rikki’s encounter with Beah, plus the fact he’d already read (listened to, actually) the memoir, was some kind of sign from God. (She was way off into omens & numerology.) But Tom-Tom also knew they were seriously running out of time. Any day now she could get a Google Alert that Antwone Fisher found his boy. She gave them a firm 48-hr deadline, periodically setting out bumps to help Rikki get the job done. Bumpin bumpin bumpin.
Tom-Tom said the most important thing was for Rikki to listen to Beah’s book on the iPod, like over and over, building a baseline of memory in his head of how the dude spoke, his rhythm & intonation, with particular emphasis on the content of stories & anecdotes, cause that was gonna be the source of his freestylin material. The rich, poetic details of Sierra Leone, its fauna&flora, Beah’s friends, family & aborted childhood… that’s where the gold was. She really wanted him to master the Beah voice, the glib, syrupy, transatlantic inflection that counterpoised so well with clipped, deadpan tales of random rape, torture & murder. Tom-Tom reminded Rikki that in the movie, Douglas and Fishburne put the (adopted!) boy through a similar crash course, accent & all.
Rikki didn’t go home for 2 straight days. (He slept with Reeyonna at night but during the day Tom-Tom banned Ree from the working area, banned everyone, cause the shit they were up to was too serious to be distracted by people walking in & generally getting in their business.) The dro was dank, the blow was crank & the shit was crackin. They read aloud scenes from the script, a couple times she even jacked him off for real. Rikki wanted to keep it going but she said nope, back to work, maybe they’d fuck when they finished. Tom-Tom was a good improvver, she used to have a boyfriend in 2nd City, & Rikki turned out to have some flamboyant freestyle flair. V. good at voices & impressions. Tom-Tom got way into it… she pushed & pushed, and at the end of their mini-marathon told Rikki he was effing awesome, which he was thrilled to hear, he felt good, & came to believe she was telling the truth, too. Tom-Tom encouraged him to get cocky (just don’t let it show), in this situation she said it was totally okay to get his cock on & be stuck-up/superconfident of his gifts. If he really wanted to get the part.