————hey don’t be greedy dude, don’t get sacrilege. You know the true one to aspire to, that’s your real shot, more than anybody, & that’s still Fish (he needed to aspire to be his own version of Fish, because he had to keep his individuality) — Antwone Fisher, stalwart unflashy boy of ambition (just like me), boy who broke free, boy become a man, a manchild who wrote & directed, wrote books too, dignified man & boychild who could do it all.
He never told Tom-Tom about any of that, never told anyone, because a person didn’t have to share everything.
. .
She put him in the shower, dressed him in levi’s & a t-shirt that said YSL, they did more coke, swallowed some roxys & were good to go. Tom-Tom stood behind the camera, she’d moved the whole operation to the bathroom which had a tiny skylight & told Rikki to begin by giving his name, age, what school he went to, how he was in a few school plays/productions like Rent & House of Blue Leaves. (All bullshit) She thought it was a good idea to prompt him by asking questions O.C. She got to the meat of it right away because she knew he had to get their attention, about 10,000 other vids were probably being uploaded right now so his audition needed to stand out from the gate.
She made Rikki introduce himself, the key factoid being that in real life he actually was a foster child (just like Antwone F & the boy pretending to be the child soldier in the movie), but who differs from that character because of his very loving relationship with his fosterparents & their imminent plans to legally adopt him, a ceremony that was mere months away. Tom-Tom had concerns that whoever was watching the tape might think he was making this part up, so she took pains to have Rikki dwell on it, to inform directly to the camera that he would be doing some improvising but the shit he said about his upcoming adoption was not a part of it. That shit was true. Occasionally, when he froze up or got self-conscious, Tom-Tom turned off the camera to loosen him up, maybe give him more blow, tiny bit of H, once she even brained him which for some reason made him laugh inside while she was doing it, tripping on how she could really suck a dick straight up, deepthroating till his balls disappeared in her mouth, that’s why they call him gutsy. When Tom-Tom turned the camera back on, she did some off-cam freestylin herself, like reading some of the dialog of a socialite in the movie who gets duped into believing the runaway’s story of ex-childsoldierdom, the Miami Beach toryburch of her being titillated to the core whilst in the presence of this very attractive negro monster/killing machine who laid claim to being redeemed viz the help of loving dad Fishburne & intrepid U.N. worker-turned-NGO founder Douglas, parts of the script reminding Tom-Tom of that movie where Will Smith pretends to be Sidney Poitier’s son. She’d have shown it to Rikki but they didn’t have time.
He soon found his own cadence. He talked about being a student at John Crowe Ransom Middleschool, ordinary kid who did ordinary stuff, even mentioned his g.f. Reeyonna, Tom-Tom thought that was tight. In one part of the charming (she hoped) “novelty interview,” she even had him lay out the strange co-inky-dink of Ishmael Beah coming to speak at his school assembly last year, it was too karmic not to mention, plus how A Long Way Gone had been on Rikki’s iPod for like, a year already. Co-inky-dink? I think not. She was beguiled/captivated just filming/watching Rikki glide from middleschool plainspeak to cagey hustler to ruminatively remorseful, childsoldier-Beahspeak, patois-riffing freestylin monologues off the e-purloined script. She hoped the producers wouldn’t take offense, because the screenplay wasn’t supposed to be out there, tho Tom-Tom was 100 % certain the prod co had already just shrugged its shoulders, everyone knew you couldn’t keep anything off the internet, the world as we know it was now pure LeakiLeaks, all leaks all the time, & no one expected the genie to ever get back in the bottle. Tom-Tom was certain too that Rikki wouldn’t be the only auditioner openly using it as source.
Then Tom-Tom said (prearranged), “I understand you & Ishmael were friends,” so as to trigger/cue Rikki to rev up his patois freestylin & Rikki said
Yes… tiss is true. We trahvill’d to-get-hur in duh teek [thick] forest, duh moon was hangin like a bloody banahna in duh black saffire pool of duh sky. Dat day I saw duh rebels snatch duh imam from deh mosk & tie heem to a pole & set heem on fie-uhr… we covered r ears from duh screemin. Duh rebels made me & Ishmael do many terrible tings, you know, like chop off duh arms & legs of duh moms & dads and duh cats & dogs [Tom-Tom almost lost it right there]. Dere were many daze when we hodd to go wid-out duh use of anti-perspirant. Sum times, before day sent me & Ishmael out to rape and to pillage duh village, duh nasty-ass rebels day feed us speedy dope & to make us angry, day force us to watch duh Justin Beeber cone-surt feelm———
Tom-Tom laughed, wondering if Rikki went too far. She decided it was perfect. I mean hey! it’s a frickin comedy, right?
Around noon of the 2nd day, she started to edit together an hour or so of footage. But when she replayed Rikki’s hilarious monolog with the chopping of duh arms & legs of duh cats&dogs and duh Justin Beeber cone-surt feelm, she said fuck it, fuck the montage, and told Rikki that’s what she was going to give em. Rikki started to protest, not even too much, but Tom-Tom told him it was now in the hands of the lord. With a wild eye she said
“TOO LATE! Already pusht SEND! It is now in the hands of the Lord, & the Lord’s Resistance Army too. Nigger yo sweet black ass is officially uploaded! You gunna be a moviestar. Now come & get your reward, I’m gunna suck that beautiful black dick til your eyes roll up in your fuckin head. What are you smiling at, whats the matter, you don’t want me to? What, you don’t like the way I suck it? Cause nigger I know you do. Now how’s Reeyonna gunna find out about that shit? Who’s gunna tell her, you? Cuz I sure as hell don’t plan to… don’t you like the way I do you? Cause I know you aint never been done like the way I do. Well aw-ite, that’s better now, nigger show me that you mean it, cause otherwise you gunna hurt my feelings. Ooh ooh that’s better. Look at that muthafucker. Just look. And take a long look, cause you aint gunna see it for a while. That’s right. Say ‘Bye-Bye!’ Say, ‘Bye-Bye, Black Beauty!’ Cause that muther is goin in.”
EXPLICIT [Jerzy]
To Kill A Hummingbird
Jerzy’s
intel, his twittinformers, twatsnitches, GPS-holes, whatever, had furnished him plate numbers & car descriptions, so he could still make the I.D. & give chase, even if they did a vehicle switcheroo, even if the windows were blacked out he could still follow them to Melrose Place or Giorgio Baldi or In-N-Out (the one by LAX had been good to him) or the plastic surgeon’s or wherever. This late afternoon, he had cellpics of plates, dents, & scuffs on Rihanna’s SUV, Reese’s Audi wagon, V Beckham’s Rolls, Colin Farrell’s Fiat, Lindsay’s Lex hybrid plus 100 more, all +/- the last 48 hrs at most, because anything later than that was untrustworthy intel.