Slick Read online

  See, there’s a difference between being smart and being wise. Deb was smart. I swore to her from the bottom of my heart that I wasn’t working for any of Fairmont’s competitors. After she drove off, I sighed steamy air and quietly hoped she wouldn’t get wise.

  ________________

  February 1 was a perfect day for mass nudity. Thursday was a big TV night in itself, but this was also the first day of sweeps. The reruns were gone. Survivor: Australia was premiering in its regular time slot, followed by surprise hit CSI in its new choice location. You had Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on ABC, WWF Smackdown! on UPN, and, of course, the eternal Must See lineup on the Peacock. The ten and eleven o’clock newscasts would have over ninety million viewers to tease.

  It was also my thirty-fifth birthday. That only mattered to me, of course, especially since I didn’t tell anyone. But what a way to celebrate. My work wasn’t always this much fun, and vice versa. I had to play shepherd for a flock of two hundred coeds. They had all arrived in Honolulu in scattered shifts on January 30. The next day I loaded them all onto a chartered booze cruise, which certainly lived up to its name. By the third hour, every stretch of railing was occupied by a heaving undergrad. The rest of the trip, thankfully, was dead quiet. It was an eighteen-hour ride from Oahu to Keoki. We wouldn’t get there until dawn.

  One of the few other noncollegiates on the boat was David Green, a staff writer at Maxim. I owed him a favor so I gave him a heads-up exclusive on the before-and-after of this noble endeavor.

  For a man who wrote pieces like “How to Ogle Her Breasts and Get Away with It,” David was the furthest thing from a regressed frat boy. He was a soft-spoken, agreeable fellow with a cardiologist wife, two teenage daughters, and one serious midlife crisis. Every time I saw him, he had done something different to his head. First it was the long hair/mustache retro thing, which should have died with Sonny Bono. Then it was the shaved head /goatee combo, which has yet to work on a white man. Now it was a buzz cut and stubble beard, which made him look like an A-list screenwriter. This was progress.

  No stranger to PR machinations, David was able to see straight through my seat-of-the-pants operation, all the way to my ulterior. That was fine. I knew he had no intention of tipping the hand that fed him. Honestly, it wouldn’t have bothered me if he hinted at the truth in his article. Just not here. Not in front of the girls. It wasn’t the boat ride that was making me queasy. If even half of these women backed out, this would be the Heaven’s Gate of promotional stunts. It would maim my career.

  After the students passed out, David and I enjoyed the quiet night breeze from the bow. Even when standing on the first rung of the railing, he was still shorter than me. Men often did strange, unconscious things to try to match my height.

  “So how much has this cost so far?” he asked me.

  “About the same as two thirty-second spots on Law and Order,” I bragged. “Or four on Special Victims Unit.”

  He whistled. “That’s quite a bargain.”

  “We’ll see.”

  At 6 a.m., the boat reached the Kaikua’ana port. By then everyone was happy to be back on terra firma. One of the many ironies of the day was that the girls, who had traveled five thousand miles to protest the evils of upscale development, were all mesmerized by the sheer beauty of this place. So was I. It was heavenly. I had expected a Vegas-like artificiality, or at best San Jose, but it was more like airbrushed nature. We stood under a pink dawn sky in a majestic stone courtyard that would make Zeus jealous. And we had the whole damn place to ourselves. It occurred to me that the sisters might actually be happy with their new look. Who were we to say?

  I joined Deb as she watched the men set up the rope cordon. Unlike her friends, she seemed nervous and bothered. I could already smell the issue, but I played it simple.

  “You okay?”

  She tied her hair back tight. “Yeah. I just...I’m just wondering if we’re doing the right thing. I mean, what if this just brings more people here?”

  “It probably will.”

  “It will?”

  “Probably,” I said. “Look, I’m a realist. I never expected to shut this place down. What we’re doing is slapping a scarlet ‘A’ on the whole franchise. Corporations are really vain. They hate controversy, even if it doesn’t hurt their bottom line. My guess is that in three weeks, Fairmont will make some big announcement about a new seal-friendly initiative.”

  “Like what?”

  I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. But it was a good excuse to send out another video news release in three weeks.

  “We’ll see,” I told her. “The important thing is that the next company to develop a luxury resort will go out of its way to do something decent for the animals, just to avoid the kind of noise you’re making here today.”

  Admittedly, that was crap. This story had the shelf life of scrod. But Deb took it on faith. My words didn’t inspire her, but they at least gagged that quiet, nagging voice that was bothering both of us.

  By then the cordon was all done. Symbolically, it was David, the Maxim guy, who spoke for all the men.

  “So, you gals getting naked or what?”

  ________________

  After returning from Maine, I had asked my friend Ira to estimate how many of the nascent nudists would chicken out at the last minute. Ira was my secret weapon. My Nostradamus. Calling him an expert market analyst was like calling Network a cute little flick. He was a mad genius, years ahead of his craft, and utterly impossible to be around for more than an hour at a time. But he wasn’t infallible. He said he’d be surprised if less than twelve of them deserted the cause. He’d be shocked, then, to learn that only three women fatally succumbed to their poor body image.

  By 7 a.m., it was a done deal. The girls were naked and inside the cordon. With synchronized trepidation, they folded their strategically held clothes into neat little bundles and placed them by their feet. The boyfriends cheered, David snapped his pictures, and I had a momentary attack of humanity. I hate those. I swore a very long time ago not to judge myself by other people’s moral standards, because they’re virtually always the product of some faulty, outdated, shrink-wrapped bullshit value system. I’m not talking about religious dogma. That’s the devil we know. I’m referring to Hollywood ethics. No, Senator, it’s not an oxymoron. Everyone who was raised by their TV and cineplex has been stuffed like foie gras with an unending supply of predigested moral pap, a dizzying tableau of Tinseltown tenets. Corporations are evil. Cripples are nice. Ambitious executives always learn to loosen up and “seize the day.” And liars always come clean in the end, usually in front of a big crowd. Screw that. You want one to grow on? Repeat these words: free will. Free will. Free will.

  And I’ll tell you something else for free: the whole nude experience was more rewarding for the women than it was for the men. Trust me. I was there. It wasn’t that sexy. And I’m saying this as a securely heterosexual man who, until that night, hadn’t been laid in three years. There was just too much skin. It desensitized me pretty fast.

  I wasn’t alone. It took five minutes for the boyfriends’ raucous cheering to die down to obligatory applause. Once the hotel staff arrived, the guys were completely faking it. By then the whole thing was about as sexy as macrame.

  “It’ll be better once we start obscuring the nipples and stuff,” David told me while snapping pictures. “Strange, isn’t it? Maxim’s selling like hotcakes while Penthouse keeps losing half its subscribers. Gee, you think maybe men are starting to use their imaginations again?”

  I smiled. “That’s crazy talk.”

  “I’m serious. Look around. It doesn’t get any more naked than this. Where the hell else can we possibly go from here but back?”

  Where indeed? If there’s one thing I learned from Jurassic Park, it’s that life finds a way. But David did convince me of one thing: he wouldn’t be around at Maxim much longer. Midlife crises aside, burnout was extremely common in the magazine trade. I
mean how many times can you write the same “Please Your Man in Bed” piece for Cosmo before developing a facial tic?

  Meanwhile, the Orono women were off on their own journey. At first they struggled to hide. The most exposed girls fought their way deeper into the crowd, causing the new outer layer to fight their way in. From above it must have looked like a kaleidoscope. Or Busby Berkeley’s dry dream. I’m not sure what psychological force took over, but it spread like current. In eerie synchronization, they simply stopped hiding and started cheering.

  Makes sense, I suppose. The weather was gorgeous. They were out in large numbers. And they were defiantly breaking convention, like the Torches of Liberty brigade. By the time the men stopped hooting and hollering, the women euphorically took over. Some of the guys even asked me if they could join in on the nude thing and, you know, help the cause. Uh-uh. I was all for equal rights, really, but if we made this thing coed it would seem more like an orgy than a social protest. People would smell the marketing.

  By 7:30, the next wave of staff arrived on the scene. Then the next. And the next. Within the hour, the courtyard was overflowing with spectators. As I’d hoped, the employees showed no ill will toward the protesters. It was kind of hard to take this seriously when being confronted with signs like fairmont unfair to monk seals!, hey fairmont! ‘aloha’ also means goodbye!, and my personal favorite: don’t you know you’re gonna shock the monk seal?

  At 9:15, a DC-10 touched down on the airstrip. The press had finally arrived. The demonstrators were quite surprised to learn that the fourth estate, in this case, was simply a petite reporter and a three-man production crew. The reporter, Miranda Cameron-Donnell, worked for the Associated Press. The production crew worked for me.

  “That’s it?” yelled one of the boyfriends. “You said the media would be all over this.”

  And now they were. Yesterday, while most of the students were booting into the Pacific, I called the producers at each of Hawaii’s four major TV news markets. Since the Fairmont Keoki was a four-hour flight from Honolulu, I figured I’d give them ample lead time, just as a courtesy.

  Naturally, they all went nuts for my premise. “Wow! Really? Cool!”

  “Way cool,” I replied. “Swing on by.”

  As I expected, they sighed and stalled: “Yeah, well, I don’t know. Keoki Atoll’s kind of far, dude. Tell you what, just send the VNR and the B-roll, and we’ll definitely use it. Just make sure to send it early enough so we can tease it.”

  Ninety-nine percent of the world couldn’t translate that request for the life of them. That makes the other one percent of us very happy.

  As you know, the news has changed dramatically over the last few decades. The media outlets have merged and merged and merged into what are (as of now) six multinational überconglomerates that control virtually everything you see and hear. This has led to an unprecedented streamlining of the news industry. It’s still going on. Just one month before, the newly consummated AOL Time Warner cut four hundred jobs at CNN. Why? The quick and easy answer would be profitability, but it’s also because of people like me. Publicists and journalists used to be flip sides of the same coin. Now we’re sharing space on a one-sided nickel. This isn’t a bad thing at all. It’s made both our jobs a hell of a lot easier. With the exception of AP and Maxim, I’m all the media I need for this event.

  The video news release (VNR) is the dirty little secret that all flacks and hacks share. It’s do-it-yourself coverage. Using my own crew, my own script, even my own voice, I serve as the on-the-scene (but never seen) reporter. When all is said and done, I’ve got a professional-looking two-minute news piece, the kind you see every night at eleven. From there we use a portable uplink to shoot the whole thing into space. The final step is faxing notice to all the newsrooms. Hi. I’ve got a sweet piece on a mob of angry naked chicks. Interested? Here are the satellite coordinates. Go nuts.

  For the budget-conscious news director, this is manna from heaven. It takes just minutes for Graphics to add their custom network overlays and Sound to dub a local reporter’s voice over mine. Presto. The station runs the piece as their own. There’s no legal requirement to cite the source, and that’s just the way we like it. The producers often mix it up a little to cover their tracks. That’s what the B-roll is for. It’s a no-frills collection of relevant interviews and visual clips, a media LEGO set they can put together any way they want. It’s a great system. On a slow news day, a thirty-minute show can squeeze in a good four to five minutes of VNRs, as compared to five or six minutes of real news. It’s pretty easy to tell the two apart. That fire in Century City? News. That new laser technique to remove wrinkles? VNR. If it promotes a product or company, it’s probably a VNR. If the reporter never appears in any of the on-scene footage, that’s because it’s not his story. It came from outer space.

  I was glad the cavalry finally arrived. Keoki Atoll was six hours be hind the East Coast. I wanted to get this out by 11 a.m. so the eastern affiliates could tease the story all through prime time.

  The video crew was from an L.A. production house called Metropia. Its three principals—Denny, Gray, and Vivek—were your standard ponytailed AV geeks. But they were masters of their craft. I flew them out here at great expense because I didn’t want to take a chance with an untested local outfit. If the final piece looked like crap, the stations wouldn’t run it.

  I wished I had filmed their faces as soon as they broke through the outer shell of the brouhaha and got a look at the chewy, creamy center. Even Vivek, the gay one of the bunch, was stunned by the unprecedented display of natural breasts.

  The last one into the fray was the AP’s own Miranda Cameron-Donnell. Established in 1848, the Associated Press was a nonprofit collective owned by more than fifteen hundred newspapers. In effect, they did what I did: ship their stories off to others. Unlike me, they got credit for their work. Also unlike me, their reach extended to over one billion people. That was why I called Miranda. Once she put her piece on the wire, it would get picked up by newspaper, radio, and Web outlets all over the world. There was quite a lot of power packed into that small frame.

  Miranda was an old friend of mine. Actually, she was an old friend of an old flame, but we remained chummy. Since I was the one who got cheated on and dumped, Miranda didn’t have to play the allegiance card and freeze me out. To her, I was only an asshole by profession.

  Inviting her to Keoki Atoll had been a cruel pleasure on my part. It was always fun to crack her carefully maintained appearance. Miranda was a power dresser. Even in tropical weather, she looked ready for the catwalk in her sleeveless white Donna Karan blouse and three-hundred dollar Gucci slacks.

  Predictably, her jaw dropped at the spectacle of skin. “Oh my fucking God. I can’t believe you really did this.”

  “Miranda. Hey!” I went to hug her.

  “Don’t. Don’t even touch me. You are the scum of the earth. I’ve stepped in better things than you.”

  That was just how New Yorkers said hello. “How are you, hon?”

  “Jet-lagged. And thoroughly repulsed. What did you do, hire strippers?”

  “Nope. These are genuine New England student activists.”

  “Pathetic, Scott. Am I the only real journalist here?”

  “You and David Green from Maxim.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Here.”

  She handed me a DVD-ROM. The AP GraphicsBank was one of the world’s most extensive video image libraries. You try finding stock footage of a monk seal.

  “Oh, perfect,” I said. “I really needed this. Thank you.”

  “I don’t even know why I’m helping you. Jesus.”

  “Hey, where’s your photo guy?”

  “That would be me.” Proving her point, she extracted a two-thousand dollar digital camera from her leather bag, holding it as if it were somebody else’s baby. “There weren’t any photographers available from the Honolulu pool. And my goddamn bosses wouldn’t pay to fly Armand out here.”

&
nbsp; Typical. “All right. Hope you know how to use that thing.”

  “I hope I don’t.”

  It was finally time to get started. I gave Denny and Vivek a list of required shots, and they immediately sicced their cameras on the pool of nudes. No doubt there would be an unedited C-roll added to their personal collection. I made a note to get a copy for Ira.

  Meanwhile, Gray set up his editing station: a titanium G4 Power Book, complete with satellite uplink terminal. As I handed him the monk-seal disc, Miranda yanked my script out of my pocket. She paced the pavement, reading aloud.

  “‘You know the old expression: it’s not what you say but how you say it. This morning on the beautiful Hawaiian islands of Keoki Atoll, over two hundred young female activists staged a “cheeky” demonstration against the brand-new Fairmont Keoki, a ninety-million-dollar, twenty nine-acre luxury’—God, Scott!”

  “Keep reading.”

  “‘—luxury beach resort scheduled to open tomorrow. Their gripe? Fairmont’s treatment of Keoki’s oldest occupant, the endangered monk seal. Now in order to save the critters’ hides, these lovely young women...are baring theirs.’”

  She handed the script back. “You’re going to burn in hell.”

  “Only if they use my tit-for-tat pun.”

  “So how much did you spend on this whole sham?”

  “Who says I spent anything?”

  “Right. I’m sure these kids just cashed in their beer bottles. Do they know you’re using them?”

  “Who says I’m using them? God, Miranda. Relax. You’re in Hawaii.”

  Over the years, I’ve taught myself to observe people’s subtle nuances, to read between their lines. Now I can’t turn those powers off. I suffer from Terminator Vision, a red-screen overlay with constant streaming data on the side. At the moment that data was telling me Miranda had issues. Not with me or the gratuitous T&A. She was having problems at home. Of course that wasn’t a blind guess. I’d met her husband many times. Quite the prick.