“Alchemy, despite you being what I call ‘a public domain celebrity’ for over twenty years, my guess is you got a few skeletons I’ll need to deal with. Music is a dirty and corrupt business, but it’s the minor leagues compared to politics.” A woman knocked on the door and entered. “My partner, Elizabeth Borden, the pretty face and charming personality of the organization. She is also the finder and keeper of the skeletons.”
Borden wore light red lipstick on her thin lips and a navy blue pantsuit that epitomized seriousness. She passed folders to the three of them and sat in the fourth chair. Winslow resumed. “Drugs? No problem. The Nightingale Foundation programs negate prior indulgences. Years of therapy? I can turn that into an asset if you don’t mind me referencing your mother’s past.”
“Fine, within limits.”
“We’ll need you to verify what’s in here and fill in what we’ve missed.” Borden spoke in a clipped tone.
“Candy Rappa?” Winslow looked up from the pages and whistled.
“She’ll help with the porn vote — it’s um, huge.” They all looked at him quizzically. “Bad joke.” Alchemy grinned.
“Tonguing and gunning?” Winslow asked, befuddled.
“Just a little harmless sex thing.”
“Hmm.” Winslow angled his head to the left and then to the right, as if he were working out the cricks in his neck or maybe his thoughts. “Sex is not harmless, but Clinton proved it need not be fatal. It’s the Tiger Woods — Derek Jeter duality. Tiger Woods presented himself as the faithful family man while diddling everything that moved. The public turned on him, and he never recovered. Derek Jeter never claimed to be anything but a playboy. He’s a hero to men, and women still love him.” Winslow purposefully paused. “Most Americans will accept you if you present yourself as who you are. They hate lying, hypocrisy, and bad judgment. An affair with a porn star raises questions of judgment. Still, I can handle that.” Winslow leaned forward in his chair, his voice almost mellow. “The affair with Absurda when she was with Mindswallow, and, I’m sorry to bring this up, but one other affair, with uh, how should I put this—”
“Jay,” Moses interrupted him. None too thrilled with hearing Jay mentioned in the same conversation as a porn star, he clenched his fists and uttered the necessary assurance. “It happened before Alchemy and I met and, although I hope it doesn’t come up, if it does, it won’t be a problem.”
Alchemy flashed Moses a thank-you smile before interjecting, “No matter what the rumors say, I did not have sex with Absurda before, during, or after Ambitious and Absurda’s relationship.”
Winslow inhaled, his cheeks expanding and then slowly contracting. “There’s a story, apocryphal or not, but apropos. Early in his career, Lyndon Johnson spread the rumor that his opponent slept with pigs. Johnson knew it was a lie, but he said, ‘I only need him to deny it.’ Denial gives a story credibility and forces me to do plenty of extra contextualizing. Look at all the time and resources wasted on the idiocy of the Obi birther bullshit. The Kerry people totally misplayed the Swift Boating assassination. I follow the axiom, ‘Do unto others before they do unto you.’ My job is to find the best narrative to give you credibility by contextualizing her extensive sexual history—”
“Find another way. I liked to fuck. Absurda liked to fuck. We fucked a lot — separately. End of story. Equality in fucking without judgment is one of the reasons I’m doing this. Real equality in all forms — legal, financial, and moral — for all.”
Alchemy turned his gaze slowly to each of the people in the room so they fully understood: He makes the rules.
Moses pulled a paper from his briefcase. “Religion worries me more than sex. I took this from Jefferson in a letter to Richard Rush: ‘… religion, a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his maker, in which no other, & far less the public, had a right to intermeddle.’ ”
“Moses, that’s good but too heady for the everyday sound bite. It’s my job to simplify.”
Borden had been sitting mum. She eyed Winslow, who gave her the go-ahead. “Speaking of religion, your biggest liability may be Laluna’s budding relationship with Godfrey Barker and his church. What exactly is the nature of the relationship?”
Alchemy answered perfunctorily, “Jack Crouse persuaded her to do the music for a Cosmological Church video.”
An unsatisfied Borden continued, “It’s poison. You have to end it. If you don’t, I have advised Dewey that we cannot sign on.”
Alchemy, visibly bristling, got up from his chair. “You mind?” He lit a cigarette, took two puffs, and then stubbed it out in an empty ashtray.
Moses never anticipated Winslow turning them down for this reason. “Dewey, it hasn’t hurt Crouse’s career.”
“He’s not running for political office. There are certain things you can’t sell to the public as a politician.” He veered his gaze from Moses to Alchemy. “You both need to consider the extreme challenges of this undertaking, from every conceivable angle.”
“Challenges?” Alchemy opened his arms and held out his hands. “No problem. The impossible is the least that one can demand. I don’t know any other way.”
The meeting ended. Alchemy walked Moses out to the front of the house. “Thoughts?”
“He seems good. You checked him out thoroughly?”
“Yes, and still checking …”
“The one thing they didn’t, you know. Maybe there are other things?”
“There are and I will tell them over dinner.”
Moses understood that with Alchemy, everything was on a need-to-know basis — and there were things he didn’t need to know and was better off not knowing.
Unsure of himself, Moses still pressed the point. “Persephone.”
“You tell anyone?”
“No.”
“Not even Jay?”
“No one.” He suspected Alchemy would be unhappy but okay with him telling Jay, but he knew he would not be okay with Moses’s breaking his word. And so, betraying everything life and history had taught him, Moses deluded himself into believing that telling this one lie was less destructive than the truth.
“Then it’s only you, me, and Laluna.”
“Right.”
“Mose, we’re crossing the Delaware. You know the passwords.”
Driving back to the Laguna hotel, Moses reflected on his brother’s role as pop icon gone political. In our culture, he thought, stars live a far different reality from the rest of us, a reality where rumors become truths and where what is seen by others is the truth. All else happens in a vacuum where there is no identity without others to give one definition. Alchemy understood that he, as Alchemy Savant star, thrived in a public reality consisting solely of the external and the immediate. He constantly needed to reassure the public that his future was essential to our future. In this age of multiple, uncertain realities, stars are the existential heroes of our time, and stardom allowed Alchemy, and even the skeptical Moses, to believe in the reality of the impossible dream.
73 MEMOIRS OF A USELESS GOOD-FOR-NUTHIN’
Spittin’ Image, 2016
After a year and a half of touring with Ferricide, I get back to L.A. I don’t see Alchemy except on TV, so I don’t expect it when he calls me up and says me, him, Lux, Silky, and Laluna need to meet. He wants each of us to pick two older Insatiables songs and do an intro and we’ll release them off our Web site as a free download.