(The Amendment)
PART IV
In Between Then and Now
TWENTY-TWO
It’s funny that when I think back on the five years I was with Nicky, I always feel shame for being so very passive and for not ever really standing up for myself. I think of myself as keeping my head down all the way until Nicky proved that he wasn’t worth all that submission.
But that’s not entirely true. I had my moments. To be specific, three aggressive moments, the first of which happened in January 2001 and involved Mike Barker, the actor who broke Chloe’s heart.
According to his E! True Hollywood Story, Mike Barker had grown up in the roughest part of Pittsburgh, in the East Liberty projects, a place where white people only went to collect the rent. The child of a single mother with two jobs, an escalating crack habit, and little time to monitor him, Mike got caught up in the drug game early on. He started as a runner at age eight and worked his way up through the ranks, until at age sixteen, he was, by his own estimation, the number one high school dealer in all of Pittsburgh, with a client list that ranged from early onset crack users to suburban weedheads and the rural OxyContin kids.
He maintained good grades throughout high school in order to stay close to his client base. Then he surprised the higher-ups in his gang by not only graduating at the top of his class, but disappearing the day after he gave the valedictorian speech. He had secretly applied for and gotten a full scholarship to attend Amherst, a prestigious private college in western Massachusetts that was so far away in nature from the projects of East Liberty, the school might as well have been on the opposite side of the globe.
His former colleagues had no idea what had happened to him. Many assumed that he had been killed and his body disposed of by a rival gang.
That is, until Mike started appearing on movie screens, first in charming black romantic comedies, where his rock-hard abs, engaging dimples, and solid acting skills carried him through a lot of bad writing. His first reviews were often “everything buts.” As in, “everything but Mike Barker was awful in this movie.”
Then he graduated up to being the cocky black sidekick in a bunch of action films, in which he consistently stole all the scenes from his overpaid white headliners, until the powers-that-be finally took a chance and put him at the helm of a thirteen-million-dollar action throwaway, which was expected to be a Memorial Day weekend trifle, called Dark Matter. But thanks to Mike’s ad-libbing and an otherwise lackluster box office season, Dark Matter ended up being the sleeper hit of the summer.
Better scripts flooded his agent’s desk. And Mike kept on doing bigger and better movies, bringing in the box office every Memorial Day. And by the time he was twenty-nine, Celeb Weekly had taken to calling him the Memorial Day Rainmaker.
But here’s the thing that the E! True Hollywood Story didn’t cover, much to Nicky’s irritation. The first and only legitimate non-acting job that Mike ever held down was as a waiter at Nicky’s, which is where he had met and dated Chloe for several months.
Like I said before, I could see he would go far the first time I laid eyes on him—not just because of his good looks, his acting talent, or his full-on possession of “it,” but also because, simply put, Mike had a real talent for bullshit.
After meeting Mike once, people often came away feeling that he was just like them. And that’s what impressed me most about him. He basically did the same thing that I did with Stage Davie, but he did it better. He was a true chameleon, and it was extremely hard to see through the seams of his act unless you watched him very closely.
Luckily, I have always been good at watching people very closely.