Like We Care (36 page)

“He’ll make the scene with that hot piece of ass from R
²
Rev,” said Hutch. “He’ll bring all his friends. We’ll hook him up with Scroat after the show. Scroat’ll apologize for dissing him the time before, load the kid up with autographs and shit. Maybe share some weed, pass the peace pipe, if that’s his thing. It’ll be a beautiful moment.”

Hutch put his hand on Annie’s knee. “Bring me that moment.”

Joel already knew that Wad Wendell was going to be there, and Slopes, and pretty much the whole football team. As soon as word got out about what was being offered them, the chance they’d do the right thing turned to zero. They were just teenagers, neither wise like Todd, nor smooth like Joel. They were clowns; they did dumb shit. They were gonna do what they were gonna do.

Joel’s every instinct told him to stay away, to give his boys his reluctant blessing but leave them to this thing that they could not resist. He had his future to think about. If public sentiment turned against those who started this whole thing, if laws ended up broken, it could harm his career. But and—it hurt Joel to think this—for Wad and the othersthis could be the biggest thing that ever happens to them.
Ever
.

And yet here he was, driving to meet them. Annie had called. He knew she was back in town, down at the theatre gathering material for the network. In her sweetest voice, she told him that it was time for him to drop the act. That he should come on over, and she couldn’t wait to see him.

Maybe she could put him on camera one last time.

When Todd realized it was inevitable, he knew he would have to attend as well. As mastermind of all this, he felt duty bound to be there for the final blow, to pay his respects as something that had once loomed so large passed into nothingness. What was about to go down at that theatre was going to be sad, too painful to observe, but he knew he would regret it later if he weren’t there.

On a whim, he called Frank Kolak to see if he’d like to join him. The disgraced teacher had had a role in this thing—and had paid the biggest price of all—so maybe he should be there, for closure. Todd worried about Frank; no one had seen him much since he resigned. Word was going around that he might drive his mother home down South, and maybe stay. There was nothing keeping him in Berline anymore.

“I don’t know,” Frank said, typically skittish. “It’s really not appropriate that we
hang out
together.”

“You’re not my teacher anymore. You’re just my friend. I might even start calling you Frank, Frank.”

He smiled, but refused. “Look, you go on down, and let me know how it turns out. I’ll want to know if it’s as awful as you’re making it sound.”

“Please?” Todd begged. “Joel’s already over there. He’s got his whole thing going on with Annie.” His disappointment was unmistakable. “Who knows where he’s gonna be? I just don’t want to do this by myself.”

Frank sighed and knew that his mother would be okay alone for a couple hours. He wasn’t long for this town anyway. He’d do what he felt like doing.

He told Todd to swing by and get him.

I
f you stood to the far right corner of the window in the bridal suite of the Berline Ramada and strained an eyeball past some duct work on the roof, you could make out a few square feet of sidewalk in front of the Uptown Theatre. It wasn’t an ideal view—perhaps there was more going on than he could see—but from ScroatM’s vantage point, something appeared to have gone horribly wrong.

“We’re fucked, Artie,” he whined. “We are bare-assed fucked.”

He looked to the street below, where he had expected to see legions of his fans, howling at the moon, nipping off cigarettes and beers, maybe throwing a rock through a window to announce their evening agenda as they descended on the theatre. He had watched it happen before, pretty much every night on the
Nigga
tour, and it had been glorious to behold.

But now it was under an hour to show time, and kids were only showing up in stray handfuls. For a free concert. By a guy who thought he’d have the number one album in the country right now.

“Oh, Artie,” ScroatM sniffed, close to tears.

“Move!” the manager barked, shoving the singer away and wedging himself into the small corner from which he could see the theatre.

He spotted Hutch Posner. They were already linked by cell phone.

“I am not believing what I’m seeing,” Pistone said darkly.

Hutch looked to the hotel across the street and understood that he was being watched. He continued to pace anxiously. The entryway of the Uptown was empty, deathly quiet. Security guards were stationed at the front door with metal detectors and menacing scowls, but they hadn’t had any business for over ten minutes. Every so often, a small pack of kids would round the corner toward the theatre, one of them inevitably letting loose with the celebratory “
wooooo
” of the young male bonehead approximating debauchery. But when they were met by the library-like stillness, and by the harried glare of Hutch Posner, they lowered their eyes and skulked inside sheepishly.

Several kids, who knew a bum party when they saw one, simply turned and went off in search of something more happening. The R
²
Rev cameraman was ordered, at the threat of his life, not to shoot any of this.

Hutch’s head ached. “I don’t know. We’ve just got to wait.”

“It’s fifty minutes until the fucking show!” Pistone sneered. “How many have you let in?”

Hutch chewed the inside of his mouth. “Four hundred. Maybe.”

“Four hundred! In a twelve-hundred-seat house?!” Artie wheezed. “We’re gonna get fuckin’ tattooed on this, you piece a shit! You and your fucking boss—”

“Look,” Hutch said sternly, not willing to take this kind of abuse from a mere manager. “You saw the same numbers we did. There was a statistical certainty that we could pull this off. They
told
us they’d be here!”

Hutch turned hopefully as he heard several feet approaching. His spirits soared as he recognized Annie, Joel, Todd, and that black teacher, but they sank again when he saw no crowd trailing behind them. Something was wrong.

“Stay in the room till you hear from me!” he ordered Pistone, then he hung up and got in Joel’s face.

“What? What’s going on? Where is everybody?!”

Joel hunched his shoulders casually, in a fashion sure to inflame the tightly-wound New Yorker. “Dunno.”

“Where are all your fucking friends?”

“They’re here,” Joel insisted. “Didn’t you see the guys from the football team go in?”

“But. . .” Hutch gestured helplessly, as if waving his arms would fill the foyer of the theatre with teenagers and deliver him from this mess. Annie stifled a grin as she watched him twitch. She knew he had never been responsible for a field shoot. He had never seen how easily these things could unravel.

“You had hundreds,
thousands
doing what you said!”

“Hey, look, they’re their own people. They make up their own minds. Turns out I can’t influence them any easier than you can.”

A fully dressed-out hip-hop caricature emerged from the shadowy sidewalk and swaggered dourly toward the theatre all alone.

“Thanks for coming out!” Joel said, waving brightly.

“Fuck you,” the kid sneered as he went inside.

Joel dismissed it with a shake of his head. “Kids. They outgrow you so fast.”

Hutch slapped his palm into the dossier he had been clinging to. “But they
said
they’d be here.” He tore through the pages of data. “These kinds of numbers don’t lie.”

“Well, yeah,” Todd said, rubbing his nose idly, having earned the right to bring his point home. “But teenagers do. It’s one of their best things.

“Somebody polls you, you’re not under oath. Make stuff up. Lie,” he said. “Could cause problems.”

Hutch’s fingers dug into the glossy cover of the polling report. “All of them? How could they
all
have known to. . .?”

Annie, Todd, and Joel girded themselves for an assault as Hutch stopped to piece it together. Frank Kolak, just now figuring it out along with Hutch Posner, shook his head with awed bemusement—yet again.

“We e-mailed alerts to everyone in the area who ever visited our site. Except you guys,” Todd explained. “We knew you and the record company were giving us hits, because Ira had already hacked into your systems to compile a list of all your internal screen names. Whenever there was a match, it went into the filter. Everybody but
you
was told how to respond when the call from the polling place came. The rest was just word of mouth.”

Hutch turned darkly to Annie, because he now knew her role in this. She bit her lower lip fetchingly as she eased her way behind Todd and Joel for cover.

“You knew we were going to poll?” Hutch asked Todd through gritted teeth, his eyes never leaving Annie. “You
told
everyone not to show?”

“She played you, dude,” Joel drawled. “Totally.”

Hutch lashed out to get at her. Todd and Joel stepped protectively in front of her, and Frank stepped in front of them. Pricked by a burst of adrenaline, he shoved the R
²
Rev honcho in the chest and threw him backward.

“You want trouble?” the teacher asked with a kind of strut. Joel and Todd went wide-eyed—Mr. Kolak would get his ass kicked if there was an actual fight.

Instead, Frank gestured to the curb. Patrol cars had been circling all night, on high alert because of the concert. A pair of cops were standing outside their cruiser, watching the strained exchange with bored interest.

Hutch backed down with a furious glare. He turned his back on his tormentors, thought for a second, then bitterly jabbed at his phone.

“
What?
” Pistone asked on the first ring.

“We’ve been fucked,” Hutch said, breaking off each word brittlely as he faced the Ramada window. “Four hundred is all we’re getting.”

Artie was already throwing things into his valise. “All right. We’re outta here.”

ScroatM was standing gratefully at the door. He had hoped this would be the answer.

“Wait a minute!” Hutch shouted into the phone. Artie kept packing as he cradled the cell.

“We do not go on for four hundred fucking yokels in the middle of Buttfuck, Illinois!!”

“If he bails on this, with everything else going on, his career is fucking over, you fat son of a bitch!” Hutch shouted. Todd and Joel snorted and made mocking scared faces as they listened to such high-level music business. “This could be the last four hundred kids in the whole country who give a fuck about your boy, and now he’s gonna shit on them, too?”

Artie stopped packing. He cursed the logic he was hearing.

“You put him out there for a half-hour,” Hutch suggested, trying to picture the eventual media coverage. “‘The turnout wasn’t what he expected, but ScroatM sucked it up and put on the show of his life, because he knew he had to do right by the kids who turned out.’”

Then he addded, “It might not work, but it might be all you get.”

Hutch waited out a long pause.

“All right, we’re comin’ down,” Pistone grumbled as ScroatM sank into despair yet again. “But the car’s gonna be runnin’. We’re in and we’re out. They might get a half-hour if they count the part where he says, ‘So long, suckers!’”

Hutch shut down the phone, composed himself, then turned to Annie with pure heat.

“You’re done in this industry,” he spit, jabbing a finger toward her. “You’re finished!”

“Promise?”

T
he houselights cut out abruptly. The sad little crowd did its best to fill the hall with hoots and cheers, their sincere anticipation echoing through the empty back of the house and the roped-off balconies.

Jungle drums, hellacious beats, exploded through the theatre’s primitive P.A. system. Dust from the rafters began to rain down. Damage was being done.

The assault continued for minutes, scratches, samples, and riffs now blending in with the thundering drum machine bed. The fans pressed forward hungrily, pinning themselves to the lip of the stage.

And then there he was: ScroatM, right there before them, in the tattooed flesh. Forget about the flat
VideoYear
performance. Forget about all the sniping in the music press about the laziness heard on the new album. This was ScroatM as raw and as intense as in his early, legendary days.