Like We Care (11 page)

Oh, and by the way, ScroatM is a
character
portrayed by Ronald Gerber who, with a high degree of satire, blah blah blah. . .

Teen consumers could always surprise you, which is why R
²
Rev was prepared to give over hours of its programming to hyping the CD’s release. But Hutch Posner sensed that ScroatM was over.

He had seen it countless times before in the net’s young life, could almost offer up a formula designed to estimate the half-life of a pop star: divide the number in the entourage by the number of lawsuits filed by friends or family members, add in the number of times his breakthrough album had gone platinum, and multiply that by the number of times he or his posse had been arrested.

If you could do the math—any math, really—you were probably smart enough to see that you had been had. And you moved on.

Still, ScroatM had been a mainstay in R
²
Rev’s formative years. He and his handlers had nurtured a mutually beneficial relationship back when his career took off, using R
²
Rev as Scroat’s base of fan maintenance when he could’ve gone to one of the other nets.

Many of the acts who had been red hot when R
²
Rev debuted were already over or in their death throes. Hutch had begun to worry that there were no evergreens, no acts that could stand the test of time and remain a constant supplier of content for his empire. It seemed like every week R
²
Rev had to grease the skids for the
new
Biggest Act Ever, dealing with another set of freshly morphed egos, dead-eyed coteries of managers and label thugs, and a blandly embraced escalation in the debasement of “popular entertainment.”

As he sat across the sleekly polished conference table, Hutch found himself growing almost nostalgic for ScroatM, who had changed very little over the years: same backwards baseball hat, same underpants hanging out of his baggies. Better pimp jewelry, more tattoos. But the fact that ScroatM couldn’t even be bothered to change his look as he prepared to reengage the marketplace, maybe
that
was bad-ass.

Or maybe he just didn’t care.

“S’bout keepin’ it real.”

That was about the extent of Scroat’s contribution to the meeting, along with
“Yo”
(a dated, non-specific assertion of street credibility, often employed at random moments by white artists trying to pass), “
Knowuddumsayin?
” (a lazy-tongued slur heard whenever those encountering ScroatM found themselves staring at him blankly), and—of course—“
Whatever. . .,
” the rebel yell of a generation, delivered with a cocky shrug of surrender and the clear message of: “I’ll be damned. I
can
care even less.”

And thus it was agreed: ScroatM would flood the R
²
Rev airwaves starting in mid-February, world-premiering his first video from the new album at a heavily hyped release party, performing and presenting at the vitally important
VideoYear
Awards, contributing celebrity flatulence to
Bowel Cloud Theatre
, and showing up merely to chill with the R
²
Rev veejays, but only during Mimi SoWett’s shift.

Hutch had secured assurances that ScroatM’s videos, with guaranteed heavy rotation on the net, would engender the R
²
Rev gestalt of posed violence and hatred with, perhaps, a little less of the jaunty pedophilia of “Hey, Baldy.” ScroatM’s management team agreed that everyone was now on the same page, revealing that the video for the album’s first single— “Dingleberry”—would be a straight concert clip taken from a three-date shakedown tour ScroatM had gone on the month before.

Again, Hutch wondered what image ScroatM sought to project. A low-tech concert piece, in an age when music videos routinely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, frequently directed by slumming movie directors and awash with state-of-the-art digital imagery, felt like a step backward, particularly with the visual potential of a song called “Dingleberry.”

Maybe this was ScroatM’s statement, that he was disavowing the over-produced flash that had come to define hip-hop and was returning to the simpler, rougher stance of his roots.

Or, again, maybe he just didn’t care.

Technology simply did not exist to gauge the subtle shades of difference between feigned soullessness and the real deal.

W
ho knew a sixty-year-old could fight like this?

“Come on! Ow! Mister, OW! I’m sorry!! I’m sorry!! Shit!
OW!!
”

Casey Lattimer lay curled on the ground, manure-crusted boots kicking him in the ribs. He knew this experience from when he was a kid growing up in Hollywood, Florida, forced to play football in school and perpetually finding himself ground into the sod by big, mean kids who hated him for being so weird.

But this wasn’t playing. This man, old enough to be his grandpa, had veins bulging out of his neck, had gone purple in the face, and had begun to try to beat Casey to death. Only Annie and her three-man video crew kept him from succeeding.

“That’s it! That’s it! That’s
it!
Please!” Annie shouted into the chest of Carl Jubel, the old man straining to get past her and get another shot in.

“What the hell’s the matter with him?” Mr. Jubel yelled, pointing down at the long-haired boy who was shrieking and weeping on the ground.

“He’s on TV,” Annie offered as explanation. Provoked by what he took to be her wise-ass response, Mr. Jubel shoved past Annie and drove another kick into Casey’s ass.

“
Please!!!
” Casey cried.

John, the buff and handsome camera guy, took Annie by the elbow and flung her from the center of the fray. This was turning really ugly, and somebody had to assert some control. Carl Jubel was merely the man who had been
specifically
offended by Casey. Dozens of others—muscled, leather-skinned, and supremely pissed off—were coiled to get in their licks.

Something elemental had been inflamed here.

“We were just trying to have some fun,” John said.

“This isn’t funny!” strafed Mrs. Ruth Bender, stocky and hag-like.

“Your cow is constipated. That’s kinda funny.”

“This is our life! If these animals get sick, if they
die
, we could lose everything!”

There was a rustle among the knot of angry farmers as Annie pushed her way through and reasserted herself at the heart of the storm. She did not at all appreciate being pushed aside by John. They would talk later.

“And all we were trying to do was educate our viewers about how you deal with these situations,” she insisted soberly. “This could be a learning tool.”

“That little faggot wanted to stick his hand up my cow’s ass!” Carl Jubel spit. Casey, still on the ground and intending never to stand again, whimpered at being mentioned.

“
You
were going to!” Annie argued.

“It is a medical procedure. If something’s impacted up there, it has to come out somehow. But it’s serious business. It’s not some goddamned game!”

The time felt right to stand down.

“I’m sorry. We misunderstood,” soothed the VP of Special Projects. “We’ll go.”

“You’d better go!” sneered Ruth Bender. “Get offa this farm, and get outta this town! We ain’t gonna be part of your tee-vee show!”

Annie stood in the middle of this boggy field somewhere in Indiana and absorbed the woman’s fury. Annie grew up around women like this in Michigan: big-boned, formless, scary-ass ugly. Proud, but at the end of the day really just peasant stock with pickup trucks.

If they had cable out here, she told herself, they’d know that this was a big deal. Instead, the farmers snarled one last snarl and headed back to work, Carl Jubel pulling on a thick rubber glove that stretched clear past his elbow. He had a job to do.

Annie watched them recede into the farmland, then turned to her crew, her heart still racing. It was all John, Kenny, and Carlos could do to not bust out laughing.

“Look at that glove! He’s really going up a cow’s ass!” Carlos marveled. The others stifled laughs as another farmer looked over his shoulder to make sure they weren’t being mocked.

Kenny goofed through ventriloquist lips. “Man, I wasted my time in film school. I want
that
job.”

“Shut up!” Annie hissed. She bore down on John. “Don’t you ever show me up on a location! You do that again and you’ll—”

“What? Never work in this town again?” John cracked, gesturing to the small burg they had just vandalized and would soon flee.

Annie was set to explode when her phone blurbled.

“What?!”

Hutch had just been brought a cup of Starbucks mocha grandé. The heat radiated a fine white haze across the top of his spare and flawless desk.

He jumped at the harshness of Annie’s voice. “Annie? Jesus, it’s Hutch. What’s going on?”

Everything Annie wanted—not just Hutch’s hiply restrained office with the icy-fine view of Manhattan, but all that was shiny and exhilarating and
clean
about this new media age—congealed in the cosmos and hurled itself at her through her state-of-the-art phone. It took everything she had to not grind it into the slime beneath her feet.

“Nothing. Casey just got roughed up by some locals.”

Hutch instinctively sat upright and looked to a framed one-sheet, part of a collection of posters Marketing had put together for the very first NATPE show where R
²
Rev had had a presence. It featured Casey in rubber gloves and surgical scrubs drenched in blood. Hutch couldn’t remember the piece exactly, but it was some kind of skit that had Casey traveling back in time and aborting Ricky Martin. Ricky Martin’s mother had put up a real fight, and Casey had to sic the INS on her. Hutch remembered it was funny as hell.

There was real panic in his voice. “Is he all right?”

Annie looked to the ground, where R
²
Rev’s prime asset was finally sitting up, snot running down his face as he picked hay and cow shit out of his long, greasy hair. She regretted finding this sight so satisfying.

“He’s fine. Old MacDonald just took offense at him trying to sodomize his cow.”

Hutch tittered like an 11-year-old. “Oooo. Sounds wild.”

“Yeah, well. I’ll throw the tape in tonight’s pouch for you. No one else is ever going to see it.”

A red flag went up. “What? Why?”

“Because we’re not going to get releases from any of these people. We’re lucky we weren’t lynched.”

“So we’ll face-smear. It’ll be funny, all these farmers with their faces electronically scrambled, like they’re felons or something.”

“Forget it,” Annie said. “This one’s a wash. It wasn’t funny. It was just. . . really bad.”

John, Kenny, and Carlos stood in a semi-circle around Casey, nursing bottled water and moving not an inch to tend to their bedraggled star. Casey had his hand down his pants, soothing his ass.

Hutch bore down on the phone. He shouldn’t have to lecture Annie at this point. “Annie, we’re not sponsoring a tour of America for you. We’re spending thousands of dollars a day to keep you out there. Your job is to come back with video we can use.

“Casey pushes buttons. That’s what he does. If you’re telling me somebody finally went off on him, and you got it on tape, Jesus, that’s gold. Geraldo got his nose busted on-air by a skinhead a hundred years ago and that dickwad is
still
milking it.”

“Hutch. . .”

He grew firm. “You gotta get releases. Face smear won’t cut it. These farmers, they’re like really ugly, right?” Hutch laughed again just thinking about it. “Oh, man. . .”

Annie ground her teeth. “There’s no way they’re—”

“Have Carlos do it. Those rubes will see that big Puerto Rican coming at them and they’ll sign anything he’s got. Tell him I’ll double today’s per diem if he can pull it off.”

Annie, surprisingly, unforgivably, found herself wanting to cry. But maybe it was this hardscrabble Midwestern backdrop—the simple, determined Middle American ethos bred into her whether she cared to admit it or not—that inspired her instead to dig in.

“Hutch, I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“Do what?”

“The Casey thing, the tweak-a-hick thing. You have to find something else for me.”

Hutch squirmed a bit. But he made sure he sounded offended.

“I made you a VP. I didn’t have to do that, Annie.”

“Hutch,” she began. Right on the spot, right in the middle of a mucky cow pasture twelve light years away from where she belonged, she summoned up the silky coo of a beautiful young woman who would ordinarily get her way simply based on that, but who—is it right that one should be so blessed?— also possessed blackmail material. “You know I deserve more than this.”

He thought she might, or at least that’s what the lawyer had said. Back when she started to make noises, right after she said she wouldn’t sleep with him anymore, Hutch had consulted one of the company attorneys, just to determine what his exposure was.

The lawyer had concerns. All it would take is one person from that meeting who recalled Annie leaning in to help her boss after his
arrr-arrr-arrrrrr
manifesto went down in flames to suddenly call into question Hutch’s authorship of the celebrated R
²
Rev logo. That initial sketch had been framed and put on display in the lobby of the net’s suite of offices. It wouldn’t take an expert to determine that Hutch hadn’t drawn it.

The inevitable protests by feminist groups over the net’s scabrous content had been picking up potency since R
²
Rev first went on the air. Wait until they heard that a man had stolen its ubiquitous logo from a subordinate young woman he was sleeping with.

“Don’t offer her the world,” the lawyer had said. “Determine the lowest possible threshold for her happiness—and give her a little less. When she becomes dissatisfied with
that,
upgrade her to ‘happy.’ By the time she’s dissatisfied with that, a cushion of deniability will have been established. Her contract will be up and she won’t be your problem anymore.”

“I just want you to be happy, Annie,” Hutch spun into the phone. It made him feel good, saying nice words.