Slick Read online

  SLICK

  a novel

  Daniel Price

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  A Quick Word From the Author

  One — Flack

  1. Save The Monk Seal

  2. Bitch Fiend

  3. Marvel Girl

  4. Jeremy Sharpe

  Two — Rap

  5. Subtext

  6. Mean World Christmas

  7. Makaveli, Madison

  8. Harmony

  9. Taxi Dancer

  10. Serenade

  Three — Noise

  11. Secret Name

  12. It's On

  13. Stories For Kids

  14. Sanctified Lady

  15. Are You Impressed Yet?

  16. Slick’s Woman

  17. High Technology

  18. “Harmony This and That”

  19. “No.”

  Four — Blame

  20. Disharmony

  21. Godsend

  22. The Twist

  Another Quick Word From the Author

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Terms and Conditions: The purchaser of this book is subject to the condition that he/she shall in no way resell it, nor any part of it, nor make copies of it to distribute freely.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Villard Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2004.

  Cover design and illustration by Daniel Price

  Text copyright © 2004, 2013 by Daniel Price

  http://www.danielprice.info

  A Quick Word From the Author

  Slick contains a small number of e-mails, texts and instant message exchanges that have been force-formatted into a sans-serif font (Arial or Helvetica for most devices). For better contrast and a better reading experience, I suggest you set the main text to a serif font: Palatino, Baskerville, Caecilia, or the default publisher typeface.

  For those of you with older e-ink devices (the coal-powered Kindles with two font options), these electronic communications will appear in a readable but not-entirely-pretty Courier font. My apologies. Slick was first published in 2004, in the carefree days before e-book considerations. Rest assured I won’t be pulling these formatting shenanigans in future novels.

  On the plus side, I’ve made hundreds of small improvements to the narrative since the book was first released, stuff that Younger Me got away with but Older Me couldn’t tolerate. The result: a slightly better novel. The story still takes place at the turn of the millennium, in that cozy little space between the Columbine shootings and 9/11. Expect many quaint references from that era.

  Enjoy the book.

  - Daniel Price

  — ONE —

  FLACK

  When people ask me what I do for a living, I have a few ways to answer without lying. The quick and easy response is that I’m a publicist, of sorts. I’ll only add “of sorts,” of course, if I feel like teasing the more elaborate answer. “Of sorts” is just a silly passive-aggressive trick I use to encourage extended interest in me, a verbal hyperlink to click on for more information. Almost everyone clicks. Ironically, the few who don’t are the ones I’m more interested in talking to. It takes a certain amount of social defiance to see a conversational green light and simply park the car. I’ve learned to cherish those people, especially in Los Angeles. Mostly I’m left talking to duds.

  “Of sorts?”

  All right. Here we go...

  I work in the field of perception management, although the less colorful term is “media manipulation.” We’re the CIA of PR, the sublime little gremlins who live just outside your senses, selling you products and concepts without you even knowing. Example: if I told you how great Palmolive was, and you knew I worked for Palmolive, you’d obviously take my praise with a healthy amount of skepticism. But if I paid a friend to hand you an article citing a third-party consumer report that deemed Palmolive-brand dishwashing liquid to have the least amount of harmful ammonium sulfate, that would sneak past your filters. Never mind that the study was funded by me, or that the lazy journalist was just parroting my press release, or that ammonium sulfate is only harmful to those who squirt it repeatedly into their mouth and eyes (see: Darwinism); you’d remember my little factoid the next time you pushed your cart past the cleaning products. You might even be subconsciously swayed toward Palmolive just because I mentioned it four times in the course of one paragraph. That’s called product placement. You’re soaking in it.

  There are thousands of people who do what I do, but over the course of my career I’ve earned a reputation for being something of a devious bastard; “devious” for my choice of methods and “bastard” for my choice of clients. Admittedly, I was never one to discriminate. I’ve conspired with the gun people, schemed with the liquor people, toiled for tobacco, and moiled for Monsanto. I’ve pushed polluters and promoted porn. I’ve shilled for Shell and lied for Tide. I’ve helped a major pharmaceutical company sell a drug that does nothing by promoting a disease that doesn’t exist. And that’s just the old stuff on my resume. That was before I went freelance, and got really creative.

  It’s usually at this point in the conversation that the duds I’m talking to slowly let the air out of their smiles and desperately cling to their sense of courtesy. Most of them force an interested grunt, adding my picture to their mental file of What’s Wrong With America Today. Others gaze back in subdued horror, as if they just figured out what happened to Rosemary’s Baby. I’ve even gotten the dark stare of judgment from entertainment lawyers. Imagine.

  In February 2001, a bright and peculiar woman asked me what my origin was. Most people would have found that question a little vague (geographic? ethnic? cosmic?), but I knew exactly what she meant. Like me, she had a longtime love for comic books. In the superhero world, the origin is the tale of the fateful circumstances that gave the hero (or villain) their extraordinary powers and set them on their never-ending path of good (or evil). It was a clever choice of words on her part, a simple way of asking how I got to be me. Amused, I simply told her I was bitten by a radioactive asshole.

  She didn’t think I was an asshole at all. Then again, she didn’t know what I was working on at the time. In February 2001, I was hired to save the public character of a certain man by destroying the character of a certain woman. Despite my nefarious accomplishments, I’d never used my talents to ruin another human being before, and I didn’t want to start. So instead of getting nasty, I got clever. I came up with an ambitious alternative, a grand and epic hoax that would have saved all and destroyed none. It would have been my greatest achievement to date, had it worked.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t. Somewhere along the way, it took a bad turn and just kept going. Once that happened, a lot of people thought I was an asshole. At the lowest point of the operation, a dark and famous woman told me that she didn’t care what had happened in my life to make me this way. There was no excuse. There was no excuse for a man like me.

  The thing is, I never offered any excuses. I never justified myself through heartbreaking tales of trauma and adversity. I never even claimed to have an origin. I simply was the man I was. What I didn’t tell the woman—what I should have told her on that awful day—was that despite the buzz, despite my foiled plans, and d
espite all my nefarious accomplishments, I was actually a man who meant well.

  That’s all right. Even if I had told her, she wouldn’t have believed me. She’s certainly entitled to her mistrust. After all, this is a cynical age we live in. This is a media-driven world. And in the media business, they teach you that every good story has two things: a victim and a villain. My story has more than one victim. I guess that makes me the villain. Of sorts.

  1

  SAVE THE MONK SEAL

  For millions of years, the Keoki Atoll sisters had struggled with a shared inferiority complex. It’s not that they weren’t pretty. They were gorgeous. God just put them in a bad place. In the Hawaiian chain, they were two of the farthest-outlying landmasses, separated from the main islands by more than twelve hundred miles of ocean. They weren’t even touched by human feet until 1827, when Captain Stanikowitch of the Russian freighter Moller took a leg-stretch pit stop on Kaikaina, the little sister. For reasons beyond me, he named both islands George. From 1876 to 1932, both George and George (aka Kaikua’ana, the big sister) were courted by the Australian Guano Company, which was just using them for their mineral-rich animal shit.

  World War II was a particularly busy time for the sisters. The U.S. Navy commandeered the islands, renamed them Keoki Atoll (Keoki is Hawaiian for “George”), and set up quite an elaborate outpost. After the war ended, the Keoki base was maintained by a skeleton crew for forty-three more years, until the navy shut the place down.

  In May 1988, Keoki Atoll was reborn as a national wildlife refuge, housing such endemic but dwindling species as the blue hornbill turtle, the green hornbill turtle, and the Hawaiian monk seal. The sisters were now well protected from human meddlers, who needed a special permit just to come near them. But for all the government’s best intentions, the hornbill turtle—both blue and green—left the islands without explanation.

  In November 1997 the U.S. gave up on Keoki and leased the islands to Nomura, a Japanese holding company. Animal activists raised a loud stink in Washington, but that lasted about as long as Divx. Luckily for Nomura, the good people at Fairmont Hotels & Resorts were hot to add a Hawaiian dig to the franchise. The sisters were in for a serious makeover.

  They had one last year of peace and quiet before an army of developers swarmed all over them in a swirling frenzy of hammering and sawing. By October 2000 the Fairmont Keoki had risen: a 29-acre resort with 450 one-bedroom suites, 55 private beachfront villas, 40,000 square feet of function space, two full-service spas and fitness centers, six restaurants, twelve boutiques, a year-round children’s program, and a 140-foot waterslide. It was like a giant luxury cruise ship that wouldn’t sink or go anywhere. The one remnant from the sisters’ past lives was the navy airport on Kaikua’ana, fully expanded and upgraded to accommodate daily shuttles to and from Honolulu.

  The grand opening was set for Friday, February 2, 2001. To ensure that the resort got off to a running start, Fairmont had offered major incentive packages to their Platinum Club members and favored travel agents. Unfortunately, due to internal mismanagement, their promotion coincided with a massive PR blitz for the illustrious Fairmont Plaza in New York. As if stealing their own thunder wasn’t bad enough, media operatives for the Landmark Hotels Group—still bitter that Fairmont didn’t acquire their own Kea Lani Hotel in Maui—launched a covert, preemptive strike against the sisters. On January 12, The New York Times Sunday magazine ran a spoon-fed article on the “troubled” history of Keoki Atoll, focusing on the recent invasion of rats and deadly ants.

  As usual, this was painted air. The inexplicable rat epidemic occurred briefly in 1987, while Keoki was still a wildlife refuge. As for the ants, they came with the lumber. But the article failed to mention that they’re only deadly to people who happen to be beetle-size or smaller.

  For Fairmont, this was all bad mojo. Based on advance reservations, the Keoki would open at a paltry thirty percent guest occupancy. That’s the kind of lame start that can haunt a hotel’s reputation, a self-fulfilling omen of doom. Panicked, Fairmont ran to Mertens & Fay, a Los Angeles PR firm that specialized in crisis management. Never too busy to take on a six-figure job, the nice folks at M&F decided to outsource the whole Fairmont mess. To me. My mission, should I choose to accept it, was to bury the bad buzz under a wave of counterhype. They didn’t care how I did it as long as I turned Keoki Atoll into a shiny new star on the map. I had two weeks. Mahalo.

  That was January 19th. On February 1st, shortly after dawn, custodial workers left the employee dorm on Kaikaina and took the twelve minute ferry ride to the main hotel on Kaikua’ana. The 250-person staff had settled in shortly after the new year and had the run of both islands. But that would end tomorrow, when over four hundred guests and three hundred corporate executives would be arriving to christen the resort. For the crew, morale was low. They had uprooted themselves from their mainland jobs just to be here, and now it seemed the Fairmont Keoki was already destined to go the way of EuroDisney.

  So you can imagine their surprise when they arrived at the lagoon dock only to find a crowd of one hundred and twenty-eight naked young women gathered in front of the hotel. From inside a vast rope cordon, they yelled with excited energy as more than six dozen college boys cheered them on.

  This was new. On first glance, one might think it was nothing more than a shameless promotional stunt. However, if one were inclined to look up from all the naughty bits, one would notice the many placards the women brandished with righteous pride. They spelled out their cause in marker-drawn letters: save the monk seal!

  ________________

  Masking corporate propaganda as social activism is one of the trade’s earliest tricks. In February 1929 the American Tobacco Company hired legendary PR pioneer Edward Bernays to help break the taboo against female smoking. Back then it was considered unladylike, a habit of whores. Two months later, spectators at Macy’s New York Easter Day Parade gaped in succession as a battalion of beautiful debutantes proudly puffed their way down Fifth Avenue. They were heralded worldwide as the Torches of Liberty brigade. Another stigma bit the dust. After that, even the most demure femmes were free to wave their Lucky Strikes around. Ah, Edward Bernays. He was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and never let anyone forget it. To this day, the tobacco companies still target women by drawing a two-way arrow between smoking and independence. We’ve come a long way, baby.

  For my purpose, I knew the Monachus schauinslandi—the monk seal—would be the Trojan horse. But it was currently a cause without a rebel. A quick scan through the Nexis news database pointed me to the University of Maine at Orono, where a formidable all-girl squad of student upstarts made headlines by picketing a local mink farm in raw-meat bikinis. That may sound like no big deal, but this was mid-Maine in mid-November. Wow. Now that’s activism. It’s also a good way to get freezer burn. I figured these young ladies could use a change of climate.

  Two days later, I was sitting in an Orono campus dining hall with Deb Isham, the buxom Robespierre of the pro-mink protest. On behalf of a philanthropic party who wished to remain anonymous, I offered her and a hundred thirty of her sisters a thousand dollars each, plus airfare, to stage an eye-catching demonstration on the other side of the country. I told her my employer was most displeased with the Fairmont’s eviction of the endangered monk seal. The least we could do was send a loud and clear message on behalf of those persecuted pinnipeds.

  Deb was easy to gauge. From her faded sweatshirt, which hid her Massachusetts money and California body, I could tell she wasn’t just a self-satisfied poser. She was a true and modest do-gooder, emphasis on “modest.” She was all for the cause but, despite her stint in a tenderloin two-piece, had some grave concerns about the nudity. Do we really have to go, you know, the full monty?

  Sadly, yes. This wasn’t just for my gratification. If you want to know what it’s like to be a journalist reading the newswires, try standing in a room with a thousand people yelling “Over here! Over here!” It’s maddening, especially s
ince so much of it is blatant promotional crap from amateur agents. All the press has time to do is race through headlines. In this day and age, Bikini-Clad isn’t even a speed bump. Changing it to Topless would certainly get some hits, but not enough to justify the expense. naked young women protest beach resort: now that would stop the presses.

  Fortunately, Deb’s cohorts were an easier sell. They were poor. Maine was cold. And their second semester didn’t start until February 7. That gave them almost a week to bum around Hawaii, with cash, all for one day’s rage against the corporate machine. Screw modesty. In one afternoon, Deb managed to fill every slot on the roster. Half the girls opted to bring along their highly supportive boyfriends, who I later enlisted to serve as crowd control. In record time, I had my army.

  Right after Deb dropped me off at the Portland airport, she rolled down the window of her beat-up Tercel and eyed me uncomfortably.

  “Scott, do you know why I organized that rally against the mink farm?”

  “Because they’re killing minks.”

  “It’s not the killing itself that bothers me. I’m not a vegetarian. If minks tasted good, I might even try one. But we don’t kill minks for nourishment. We kill them for luxury. In the end, they’re being exploited for their skins by people who want more luxuries. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  It wasn’t exactly a rebus. “What would you like to know?”

  “Just promise me this is the real thing,” she said. “That this isn’t all just some big smear campaign by Marriott or something.”