There were over three dozen fine-looking women at that party who would have fucked Jeremy for the price if a smile.
There was an idea stuck in the back of my mind, like a caraway seed. It was maddening because I could feel the shape of it, enough to know that it was something good. There was a solution. There was a way to thwart Lisa’s attack without even having to draw blood. I just couldn’t shake it loose.
I bought my comics, stopped for a California Roll, and then continued to amble about town. The clock was down to five and a half hours, and my teasingly brilliant idea was only getting more elusive.
There was something in Tupac’s rape case, something I needed to know. I drove straight home and got back on the laptop. Thanks to Nexis and a scandal-hungry media, I had access to a ton of articles that detailed Ayanna Jackson’s accusations against the great but controversial artist known as Tupac Amaru Shakur.
She’d met him at Nell’s, a downtown New York nightclub. They dirty-danced. They kissed. She fellated him right there on the dance floor, according to Tupac and his character witnesses. Frankly, that part smelled a little like spin to me, the kind of discrediting tactic a desperate and uncreative lawyer would use. Then again, I wasn’t part of that world. I didn’t personally know any women that friendly, but it wasn’t hard to believe that a man who looked and rapped like Tupac did.
What was established is that they had sex later that night in his hotel room. That ended fine. The trouble happened four days later, when she returned to pick up some of her belongings. Still mutually fond of each other, they went back in the bedroom. She gave him a massage. They started kissing. And then three of Tupac’s crew entered and turned it into a party.
“Don’t worry,” Tupac reportedly said to her. “These are my brothers and they ain’t gonna hurt you. We do everything together.”
Proving his point, they fondled her, tore off her underwear, and sodomized her. At some point during all this, Tupac left to chill on the couch in the other room. His version was that she didn’t say a word in protest. Her version was that she said plenty, including the golden word “no.” She certainly had some choice phrases afterward, when she cried and screamed at Tupac: “How could you do this to me? I came here to see you! I can’t believe you did this to me!”
Tupac’s response, per Ayanna: “I don’t got time for this shit! Get this bitch out of here!”
Whether he said it or not, she was clearly looking for vengeance.
Within hours, the police, the press, and Tupac’s publicist were in the hotel lobby, along with Ayanna. She incriminated Tupac and his manager, Charles “Man Man” Fuller. Both were cuffed and led away to police cars.
En route, Tupac held his head up high to the paparazzi crowd. “I’m young, black… I’m making money and they can’t stop me,” he declared. “They can’t find a way to make me dirty, and I’m clean.”
Not according to the jury, who saw Tupac as the serpent in this tale. Although he and Fuller beat the rape and sodomy charges, they were convicted on three counts each of first-degree sexual abuse. The third accomplice pleaded down to a misdemeanor, and the fourth was never charged.
Tupac was sentenced to four and a half years at Rikers Island. He ended up serving eleven and a half months, until he was sprung on a $1.4 million bond posted by Suge Knight. Thus began Tupac’s infamous stint with Death Row Records, not to mention the last year of his life.
All along he proclaimed his own innocence, maintaining — like Hunta — that this was a setup. Shortly before the verdict, he was interviewed by Vibe journalist Kevin Powell. “It was all right with that police thing [in Atlanta],” he said. “But this rape shit… it kills me. ‘Cuz that ain’t me.”
“I love black women,” he told Powell. “It has made me love them more because there are black women who ain’t trippin’ off this. But it’s made me feel real about what I said in the beginning. There are sisters and there’s bitches.”
It’s obvious which category he put Ayanna in. After that interview was published, she defended herself in a letter to Vibe. Her closing: “Tupac knows exactly what he did to me. I admit I did not make the wisest decisions, but I did not deserve to be gang-raped.”
Fade out. Credits. Seven and a half years later, there I was, deeply rooted in her side of the tale. With just a tiny sliver of the truth, simplified and amplified for my reading enjoyment, I had no trouble believing her. It would have taken a mountain of direct conflicting evidence to tip my scales in Tupac’s favor. Was it biased on my part? Sure. Was it fair? Nope. But it was a natural reaction. Like everyone else, I’d been conditioned to assume the worst of people, particularly those who had the nerve to obtain more money, power, and sex than me.
Hunta was screwed.
Even though I bought Doug’s version of the story, or at least rented it, there was no mountain or molehill I could build to get all the journalists, obstructionists, and water cooler cynics to side with Hunta. I realized this at 2 p.m., four hours before my scheduled meeting. My brilliant but elusive idea managed to flee the country and change its name.
I was screwed. In lieu of wowing Maxina and the others with a magic-bullet solution, I would have to settle for presenting multiple catastrophe plans, the PR equivalent of assuming crash position. Anyone can hire a bastard. They’d specifically ordered a devious bastard. This would not help my career.
The sound of the apartment buzzer pulled me back into the present. I pressed the intercom button by the door. “Yeah?”
No answer. All I could hear was the crackle and hum of the speaker, the tinny sounds of traffic.
“Hello?”
Nothing. Whatever. Right as I sat back down at the coffee table… BZZZT.
“Jesus.” Once again, I rose and pressed the talk button. “Who is it?”
Once again, no answer.
“Look, if you’re hoping to get buzzed in, you’ll have to give me a little more to go on, okay?”
After a few more seconds of nothing, I went back to the laptop. I got so desperate I started to consider the ramifications of using the truth. So Hunta’s a philanderer. An adulterer. So what? So are half the politicians who have spoken out against rap. Maybe I should propose a “glass houses” attack against every senator who burns Hunta in effigy.
No. Who was I kidding? Clinton’s affair, at least with Monica, was beyond consensual. And still they roasted him in the public rotisserie. Even chief griller Henry Hyde was able to admit to his own past infidelities and keep on basting.
BZZZT.
“Goddamn it!” I didn’t have time for this. I hustled straight past the intercom, out of my apartment, and all the way down the hall. A petite woman watched me through the glass of the front door. From a distance, I thought it was Miranda, until I saw her short hair and hoop earrings.
Jean Spelling. The web designer/deaf driver whose SUV rode up my poor Saturn’s tailpipe. She looked much different in broad daylight. A little older, a lot cuter, and much WASPier. Maybe it was her sky-blue eyes. Her button nose. Or her respectful but ass-end-of-fashion Target blouse that seemed to scream “church.”