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.”
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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:
Maxina: Hey, girlfriend. I’m in a big fix, and I need someone evil. I don’t just mean right-wing evil. I mean head-spinning, fork-tongued, baby-eating evil. Know anyone?
Hayley: Do I ever!
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.
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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.
Probably?
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?
Because, my boy, those opinions you claim to be so impervious to are looking more the same each day. A motif, if you will.
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?
No point. just curious why everyone tends to see you as a soulless prick. That’s all.
“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.
6. MEAN WORLD CHRISTMAS
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 11p.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.