But, yeah, Max’s drug dealing business was a huge hit. He started small, with addicts he knew. Like one of his oldest steadies, Jack Haywood. Jack was the VP of Information Technology at a major midtown investment banking firm. He was a closet cokehead and Max had been taking advantage of this for years, plying the asshole with coke and table dances in exchange for inking six- and seven-figure IT deals.
So when Max had received his first shipment of rock, he’d called Jack at work and gone, “Don’t hang up on me. I’ve got something good for you-”
“I can’t do business with you any more,” Jack said nervously.
“It’s not about business,” Max said. “It’s-”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “It’s not you. I think you’re a decent guy, but my bosses-they don’t want me, well, associating with you anymore.”
Max had expected this attitude from Jack. When NetWorld had gone under, Max had gotten into a little trouble with the police. Something about a bunch of murders he didn’t commit. None if it had been any fault of his-blame it on booze and that ditzy bitch, Angela. Call it “the dark period” in his life. But that was all in the past. He was a new Max Fisher now, a Max Fisher who had discovered the wonderful world of crack cocaine.
“It’s not what you think,” Max said. “I just want to get together, for old time’s sake.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t-”
“I have some new candy for you,” Max said.
Candy was the old code word that Max and Jack used to have for coke.
There was silence on the line, then Jack said, “I don’t like candy any more,” but Max could tell the idea was very appealing to him.
“This is really sweet, really delicious candy,” Max said. “I tried some myself the other day.”
A longer silence, then Jack asked, “How sweet and how delicious?”
Max punched the air, thinking, Gotcha, sucker. What was that line from House of Games, and two to take ’em? No, that wasn’t it. What-the-fuck-ever.
Max took Jack out, got him hooked. Before long, Jack was spending a thou a week on Max’s shit, and that was only one customer. Soon Max had twelve other Jack Haywoods and his profits started to explode. Hell, Jack had even hooked his wife on crack. That was the beauty of the business-you could gain new customers so effortlessly. It was all word of mouth. You didn’t need to advertise, you didn’t need to invest a lot of money in having a pretty office. There was no one to impress. All you had to do was get people addicted and you were golden. They would get others hooked, and so on and so on. This was better than TiVo and the George Foreman Grill.
Max had been smoking crack himself-but he was taking it easy, kept it to two pipes a day. Well, maybe more than that sometimes, but he didn’t go crazy or anything. He found that crack actually kept him balanced. If he was having too much booze, he would smoke a crack pipe to pull himself back up, and vice versa. It kept him levelheaded, in control. And, just like he was avoiding mixing alcohol, he stuck to crack and crack only. The stupid fuckers who got addicted to the rock-like Jack Haywood and his wife-were the ones who cut it with brown. Yeah, that was right, Max called heroin brown. He was up on all the current, hip drug lingo all right. He listened to Naz, Ja Rule, Busta Rhymes, and 5 °Cent. He even knew how many times 50 had been shot-nine. See how hip he was?
To keep the hip vibes flowing, he had gangsta movies playing on his massive Sony 64-inch LCD TV, twenty-four-seven. Classics like Boyz n the Hood, Menace II Society, Gang Related, and, of course, the granddaddy of ’em all, Scarface. One of Max’s favorite ways to pass the time was to smoke some good rock while watching Scarface and trying to keep track of how many putas Pacino blows away. When he got into the twenties he always lost count.
Max learned lots of hip lingo, but chill-ah, chill was by far his favorite new word. Man, he loved saying chill. And it was such a useful word; it had so many meanings. Chill could mean to relax, as in, “Chill out, my man” or “I’m just sitting in here in FisherLand, chillin’ with my bee-atch.” But it also meant to be cool, like, “I’m chill, baby, I’m chill.” And it meant, “Hang out,” like when you say to somebody, “Wanna chill?” But the best way to use chill was in place of fuck. Like sometimes Max would go to Felicia, “Yo wassup, my bee-atch? You wanna get in bed and chill, baby?” Or sometimes, while she was going down on him, Max, high on crack, would go, “Yeah, chill on my rod for a while, baby. Yeah, like that, my bee-atch.”
Was hiring Felicia as his round-the-clock ho the best move he’d ever made or what?
When the money started rolling in, one of the first things Max had done was go to Legz Diamond in midtown, where he used to entertain his networking clients back in the day. He bought a lap dance from Felicia, and as she was squatting over him, those great fake tits-had to be quadruple Ds-inches away from his face, he whispered to her, “Can I ask you a personal question?”
“They ain’t real,” she said.
“I know that,” Max said. “I was curious about something else. How much’re you making?”
She thought about it, went, “You mean dancin’?”
“No, I mean the whole enchilada. Dancing plus whatever else you do on weekends. How much you make in a week?”
After a long pause, she went, “On a good week? Two thousand.”
Max went, “Say hello to your new boss-I’m paying you four.”
And that was it, done deal. Talk about closing a sale.
Felicia moved into the penthouse with him and Max only had one rule: she had to walk around topless at all times. He didn’t care what she wore on the bottom, but he needed to see those tits constantly. Her knockers were like his goddamn inspiration. He could be feeling down about something, self-doubt creeping in, and he’d go, “Yo, Felicia, come here bee-atch and chill on my lap,” and life would have meaning again.
The most chill thing about Felicia was how she knew her place in the world, and how she accepted it. She knew she was a ho, a bee-atch, and she didn’t give Max “no talkin’ back to.” Most of the other women in his life had been a lot more sensitive. Angela, forget about it. If he called her a bee-atch, she’d would’ve bashed his face in. And his ex-wife Deirdre, God rest her soul, hadn’t exactly rolled with the punches either. If Max had let one slip, called her a cunt or something, she would’ve had a big fit, going on about how he was “verbally abusive” and “a misogynist” and a “womanizer.” Yadda, yadda, yadda. Thank God he was through with all of that shit, right?
But, yeah, Max was in heaven with Felicia. If there was such a thing as an ideal woman she was it. At home, it was like she was his beck-and-call girl, his Pretty Black Woman, but nothing had ever made him feel more like a player than the times he took her out on the town. He’d be in one of his new mustard-colored suits, and she’d be wearing something really skimpy, showing as much of her boobs as was legally allowed, and just to see the looks on people’s faces was priceless. Everybody was so fucking jealous, especially the guys. They’d look at him, their mouths sagging open, and he could read their minds. All the jealous fucks were wishing that they could be Max Fisher, just for one day, just to see what it was like.