Like We Care (33 page)

“Joel. . .?” Frank asked gingerly.

The kid turned, completely without words.

“Fuck, dude,” he blubbered. “Just. . . Fuck.”

He trudged over to them and they fell into an embrace, a three-man huddle. When they broke, they’d be returning to separate games.

Annie watched, tears in her eyes and a wistful smile on her face.

Her cameraman taped it all. He was just doing his job.

S
ince he withdrew so late, there hadn’t been time to take Frank’s name off the ballot, so the chance had still been there to cast a symbolic vote for him.

When the final tally came in, he ran a strong second. If the adults hadn’t been enticed to the polls to put down this degenerate who had been teaching their children, if some of the young and the black hadn’t ended up staying home, disillusioned by the brutally cynical turn their first taste of politics had taken. . .

One would never know.

Annie had stayed in town, hoping for just such a dispiriting, what-might-have-been finale. Todd found her at a local video house, where R
²
Rev had rented space for her to put together a rough edit.

“Hey,” he said weakly, peering into her editing bay.

“Hey.” She smiled. The wound was still fresh, the aftermath still unfolding. She had not spent enough time with Todd and Joel, so busy was she documenting the final days of the campaign.

“How are you doing?” she asked sincerely.

He shrugged cavalierly, like he was already past it. “Seen the final numbers?”

“You would’ve won,” she stated flatly. “If they had just left him alone, your guy would’ve won. That’s going to come through.”

Todd studied the frozen images on the various monitors.

There were Frank’s earnest young supporters, canvassing neighbor-hoods.

There was the public access video of Frank before the City Council.

There was Todd, at the park, hanging from a tree.

It didn’t feel right, seeing it all there. Almost like autopsy photos. Annie sensed his unease.

“That lesbian in Denver? She won. Easily,” Annie said with enthusiasm. “Four or five other local campaigns around the country that can be attributed directly to what you guys started? All winners.

“And you know what? Who cares? Winning is boring.”

Todd recoiled slightly.

“
This
is the story,” she insisted, pointing to the monitors. “This is what’s going to get our viewers’ blood boiling. You guys proved that you can make a difference. You challenged the system. You put up a perfectly qualified candidate. You had victory wrapped up, and then the adults slapped you down. Over a cigarette in a parking lot,” she sneered. “Kids will get that, and they’ll understand why it’s bullshit.”

She pointed to the image of Frank before the Council. “Frank getting forced out created an opening for this whole race angle, how he had stirred up animosity by busting the city over how they were handling the Happy Snack, how he was already on thin ice with his school. They were gunning for this guy, because of his race.

“Frank lost, and that stinks,” she concluded. “But I think the
way
he lost sends your message clearer than if he had won. My bosses think so, too.”

He stared at her for a long while, replaying how they got here. It felt like they had finally reached a full stop.

“You know what? I think you should just let it go.”

“W-what?”

“Mr. Kolak just wants this behind him. He wouldn’t be comfortable with any of this,” he said calmly, recalling how traumatic Frank’s stand before the City Council had been. He thought back on how garish Annie’s first show had turned out, and imagined how luridly the story would be played up here. He pictured that frozen, indicting image of Joel and Mr. Kolak passing a cigarette from mouth to mouth. A black man, a trusting white boy. The
gay
thing.

Ugh. . .

“I’m not comfortable with it either,” he said, adding simply: “This is just something that happened to us. It’s not for everybody else to look at.”

“Todd,” she said in astonishment. “This is
all
for everybody else to look at. I mean, what have I been doing here?”

“People got hurt by this,” Todd said softly. “They could still get hurt. This isn’t some game anymore.”

She wasn’t without compassion. None of this would have happened if she hadn’t understood completely the frequency this kid ran on. She respected him, she really did.

And yet this was not acceptable.

“Money has been spent on this, Todd,” she said bluntly, without rancor. “People are expecting it. My boss is ready to put this on the air as soon as I deliver it to him. It’s going forward, there’s nothing that can be done about that now.”

He nodded to his image on the monitor. He had her.

“I’m a minor. You can’t use my likeness without my parents’ okay, and they won’t give it. Mr. Kolak sure as hell isn’t going to sign anything. Joel won’t. You can’t use any of this if we don’t want you to.”

Who
was
this kid? “There are ways around all that,” she said. “They’ll find a way. They always do.”

Todd wasn’t impressed. “I really think you need to let it go.”

He turned and walked out. She was beautiful and connected and, if he played along, most likely a gateway to something else, but he turned and walked out.

He’d file this away, under cool things he did once.

She processed this in disbelief for a second or two, then followed him outside. She’d been holed up in the editing room all morning. The sun was bright. She squinted painfully as she touched his shoulder.

“Wait a minute!” she begged. “You’d really do this? You’d really just walk away after all the time you’ve put into this?”

He shrugged his shoulders dismissively. “Sure. I don’t do what’s expected of me,” he said with a small grin. “As seen on TV.”

She studied him intently, all the more intrigued and impressed.

Or maybe she
was
out to use him. That was the thing—even she couldn’t tell.

She bit her lip pensively. “Okay, look. You’ve still got something they want, the ‘We’re Not Buying This Shit’ thing,” she said, drawing closer. “Under the circumstances, if you were to not work against us on this other thing, I really think you could make a lot of money. I would see to it that—”

“
No!
” he laughed in disgust as he pulled away. “It’s not for sale! This is our
life
, what you’re trying to get your hands on. You can’t have it.”

“Todd,” she pleaded, for him, and for her career. “You’re only hurting yourself. R
²
Rev runs this story, or they don’t. It doesn’t matter to them.
You
don’t matter to them. The only way you come out a winner in this thing is if you take some money away from them, instead of the other way around. That’s just the way it works.”

He listened, because he knew she was right.

“You don’t beat companies this big. You guys tried. You saw through their shit. You put the word out, and you put a dent in a few balance sheets for a few weeks, and that was marvelous. And when I said you didn’t matter to them, I was full of shit, because you can bet that a lot of people—a lot of powerful people—have been watching closely to see how far you guys could take this thing.

“But kids are still smoking,” she said sadly. “Kids are still buying shitty music and one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar basketball shoes and whatever else they’ve tricked you into thinking you can’t live without. With you guys swinging at everything, there was no way you were going to stop any of it.”

She rubbed his shoulder and gave him a sympathetic smile. “There are just too many things to not buy.”

Todd remained silent, as a notion struck him.

He turned inward, the way he did whenever a bold vision introduced itself. If Frank Kolak were here, he’d be rocketing for the horizon like a cartoon rabbit right about now.

Todd Noland had a new idea.

“Look, your show—it’s not gonna happen,” he said a little urgently, the new plot still unfurling in his mind. “You have to go home. You can’t be here for this next thing.”

Annie didn’t like the sound of this. “What next thing?”

He was already seeing it play out. “It’s gonna be. . .” He looked at her. He foresaw something bad befalling her.

“You have to go home.”

She laughed nervously. “Todd?
What
next thing?”

“People can get hurt in these things, Annie,” he said soberly. “Put some distance between us. If you do, you might be okay.”

T
he machine was primed.

The
Freakal Matter
marketing assault that had been planned and incrementally rolled out over the past six months had tripped and triggered itself through a series of carefully orchestrated press availabilities and media stunts, bringing the CD-buying public to lubricated readiness for the album’s April 27 release.

Scroat’s undeniably flaccid performance at the
VideoYears
had been tempered somewhat by the brief scandal caused by his toilet paper prank. A hastily arranged series of live dates, in which he headlined a roster of Tok$ic’s fresher hip-hop acts, shored up any concerns about the rapper’s touring popularity, although more than one critic noted that the set list for these dates leaned heavily on tracks from
Right White Nigga
. After a rapid shot to the top of R
²
Rev’s request list, “Dingleberry” had faded quickly, and there was a subdued panic among ScroatM’s handlers over what to rush out as the next single. Despite fifteen available tracks on the new album, their choices were really limited to only six or seven. The harsher songs—the fag stuff, the bitch stuff, the gonna-chop-up-my-mama-and-feed-her-to-the-dog stuff—were clearly too profane to spin off as separate revenue-generating entities from the album, even with the crude censorship jobs that artists routinely allowed in order to make their work more radio-friendly. These more repellent (more satiric?) tracks would ship silently, tucked away inside the disk, and assault the 13-year-olds seduced by the sophomoric charms of “Dingleberry.”

R
²
Rev, burned both by Scroat’s performance and his pre-show meltdown at the
VideoYears
, and well aware of the subdued pre-release tracking for the new album, nevertheless honored the promotional commitments Hutch had made. Even if his musical time had passed, there was still the speculation that ScroatM could be retooled as an actor in youth-oriented thug fare, with R
²
Rev
⁴
Films having any number of scripts in development into which he could be inserted as a marketing component. Relationships, therefore, had to be preserved.

So Scroat did his scheduled walk-ons on various R
²
Rev shows, and dutifully showed up to record celebrity gas for
Bowel Cloud Theatre
, although when it turned out that the artist could not deliver, the flatulence of others was credited to him.

All Tok$ic was hoping for with the new disk was a strong street date pop, one great rush of sales that might not translate into a hit down the line but would earn them a few positive headlines in the trades and the props of the industry. The gaudy influx of cash from
Right White Nigga
had allowed the label to sign and develop a wide roster of promising young acts, and the sense shared in only the most private of meetings was that their lives would be much easier (and their cut much richer) if future fortunes were tied to artists they had groomed to serve at their command, rather than the increasingly demanding and unmanageable ScroatM.

Freakal Matter
, then, might best serve as a bridge of sorts to a re-dedicated Tok$ic Records. A diversified Tok$ic, their financial team had stressed, was the best hedge against the vagaries of the market and the inevitable volatility of artist-label relations.

So there was a lot riding on
Freakal Matter
.

T
he “next thing” Todd had promised came for Annie just a few days after she got back to New York. She was still smarting over the heat she had taken for returning home without the election piece, and for the lack of professionalism she had shown by not locking up releases before they became an issue. She insisted that there were ways to finesse their way around the legalities, but she could tell that Viceroy’s enthusiasm was waning yet again and that a fight was unlikely.

All for the best, Annie thought. If this thing could just fade away due to apathy, the stink of her own failures might not follow her to whatever her next job was going to be. Wherever that job was going to be.

But then she was called into Viceroy’s office, where Hutch and some MediaTrust lawyers were waiting grim-faced with a couple of Guidos whom Annie quickly learned were the proprietors of Tok$ic Records. The mood in the room was black with menace-laden male fury. And they all looked to Annie as if they intended to extract something that would restore their sunshine.

A chair had been held for her in front of Viceroy’s desk. She sat down, a kind of terror rising in her chest.

“Do you have any explanation for this?” Viceroy asked darkly, swiveling his computer screen towards her. She leaned in to watch some concert footage. It was ScroatM in rehearsal at the
VideoYears
. And the dingleberries. Startled when the moment came, Annie stifled a woefully ill-timed giggle as she watched the skulking rapper get blown backwards by the cannon shot. She had been elsewhere when the accident happened at Radio City, but word of the mishap had spread throughout R
²
Rev. It turned out to be as funny as it had sounded.

Annie composed herself and watched with professional regret as ScroatM went spastic and started getting beat up by his own men. The video was shaky, obviously amateur, but it was all there.

Viceroy shut down the image as everyone studied her.

“Where did you get that?” she asked nervously, still not knowing what this had to do with her.

“It’s on the internet,” Viceroy glowered.