When Somebody Needs Hypnotized
4.
The dorm party is over, busted up by the campus police. Three 6 Mafia, the party’s entertainment, are sleeping in the dorm’s multipurpose room. Steinbeck adds his hotel blanket and pillow to their circle of sleeping bags.
But Three 6 Mafia are not sleeping. After years in obscurity, they have just won an Oscar. The adrenaline has yet to wear off. They are ordering pizza, getting high on cough syrup. Juicy J hands Steinbeck his iPod and the group crowds around him to watch the video footage of their big moment. “Did you see the way we ran out there on the stage?”
“It felt good,” DJ Paul remembers. “I was trying to keep from looking in the crowd, because I was nervous.”
Paul and Juicy take the iPod back from Steinbeck, and huddle together on a Three 6 Mafia sleeping bag, reliving the Oscars.
Steinbeck remembers feeling this excited about writing, once.
Project Pat, Juicy’s older brother and tonight’s opening act, shakes his head at their recent success.
He hands Steinbeck a bottle of cough syrup and tells him, “I was locked up. And when they got signed and went gold, I was just getting out.” Juicy and Paul high-five and play their Oscar footage again. “You know,” Pat continues, “Ninety percent of Memphis is black. It’s like crabs in a bucket and that’s for real. Nobody wants nobody to have nothing.”
Steinbeck chugs his syrup and grimaces. “The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.”
“I’m gonna be honest with you,” Pat says. “I just want to get this money. I want to sell me some millions. I’m my own man. I’m just gonna do this myself. Like Pac. He came out of jail and he sold five million. Man, that’s love. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to get a piece of this money out here because once you do that, you’ve done did it.”
Steinbeck does not react well to the cough syrup. Project Pat throws him over his shoulder, carrying him down the concrete hallway to the restroom. Steinbeck traces his fingers across the cold drab walls. “Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion.”
On the floor, after throwing up, Steinbeck cups his head in his hands. He is thinking of the woman in his hotel room, the way she fell asleep so quickly, how his words sedated her instead of inspired her to action. “In my heart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel award.”
Pat leans back against the sink and puts a hand on Steinbeck’s shoulder. “Sometimes you’ve got to come out of an environment and sit yourself down and think about what you really want to do.
Because life is real and you can die out here. White, black … you can die.” He pauses. “I’m an entertainer and I’m for the people. So if the people like it, I love it.”
“The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.”
Project Pat nods. “That’s the main thing. You’ve got to have a good marketing thing going. And I just feel that the first album wasn’t promoted right. I was a first-time artist coming out. It did well, but then, you know, I was looking at it like I could have sold more.”
Steinbeck describes the beautiful housekeeper he left sleeping in his hotel room. The hope she showed him for the perfectibility of man. The glimmer in her sad eyes. How she smelled like chemical lemons. He sighs, “In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.”
Project Pat shakes his head, suggests that this woman is probably robbing him right now, stealing his iPod, his laptop, and his extra socks. Steinbeck refuses to listen, but Pat is speaking from experience.
“Man, we didn’t have nothing. You’re talking about sleeping on the floor with coats, windows busted out, no heat working. It wasn’t a big apartment. You did what you could. We might break in a friend’s house, eat they food, take a couple of they CDs. You might take a couple yams, just maintain and get by.”
* This story incorporates elements from John Steinbeck’s 1962 Nobel Banquet Speech, Studs Terkel’s Working, Murder Dog’s interview with Project Pat, and MTV Movie News’ interview with Three 6 Mafia.
