Slick Read Free

Topless would certainly get some hits, but not enough to justify the expense. naked young women protest beach resort : now that would stop the presses.
    Fortunately, Deb’s cohorts were an easier sell. They were poor. Maine was cold. And their second semester didn’t start until February 7. That gave them almost a week to bum around Hawaii, with cash, all for one day’s rage against the corporate machine. Screw modesty. In one afternoon, Deb managed to fill every slot on the roster. Half the girls opted to bring along their highly supportive boyfriends, who I later enlisted to serve as crowd control. In record time, I had my army.
    Right after Deb dropped me off at the Portland airport, she rolled down the window of her beat-up Tercel and eyed me uncomfortably.
    “Scott, do you know why I organized that rally against the mink farm?”
    “Because they’re killing minks.”
    “It’s not the killing itself that bothers me. I’m not a vegetarian. If minks tasted good, I might even try one. But we don’t kill minks for nourishment. We kill them for luxury. In the end, they’re being exploited for their skins by people who want more luxuries. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
    It wasn’t exactly a rebus. “What would you like to know?”
    “Just promise me this is the real thing,” she said. “That this isn’t all just some big smear campaign by Marriott or something.”
    See, there’s a difference between being smart and being wise. Deb was smart. I swore to her from the bottom of my heart that I wasn’t working for any of Fairmont’s competitors. After she drove off, I sighed steamy air and quietly hoped she wouldn’t get wise.
     
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    February 1 was a perfect day for mass nudity. Thursday was a big TV night in itself, but this was also the first day of sweeps. The reruns were gone. Survivor: Australia was premiering in its regular time slot, followed by surprise hit CSI in its new choice location. You had Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on ABC, WWF Smackdown! on UPN, and, of course, the eternal Must See lineup on the Peacock. The ten and eleven o’clock newscasts would have over ninety million viewers to tease.
    It was also my thirty-fifth birthday. That only mattered to me, of course, especially since I didn’t tell anyone. But what a way to celebrate. My work wasn’t always this much fun, and vice versa. I had to play shepherd for a flock of two hundred coeds. They had all arrived in Honolulu in scattered shifts on January 30. The next day I loaded them all onto a chartered booze cruise, which certainly lived up to its name. By the third hour, every stretch of railing was occupied by a heaving undergrad. The rest of the trip, thankfully, was dead quiet. It was an eighteen-hour ride from Oahu to Keoki. We wouldn’t get there until dawn.
    One of the few other noncollegiates on the boat was David Green, a staff writer at Maxim . I owed him a favor so I gave him a heads-up exclusive on the before-and-after of this noble endeavor.
    For a man who wrote pieces like “How to Ogle Her Breasts and Get Away with It,” David was the furthest thing from a regressed frat boy. He was a soft-spoken, agreeable fellow with a cardiologist wife, two teenage daughters, and one serious midlife crisis. Every time I saw him, he had done something different to his head. First it was the long hair/mustache retro thing, which should have died with Sonny Bono. Then it was the shaved head /goatee combo, which has yet to work on a white man. Now it was a buzz cut and stubble beard, which made him look like an A-list screenwriter. This was progress.
    No stranger to PR machinations, David was able to see straight through my seat-of-the-pants operation, all the way to my ulterior. That was fine. I knew he had no intention of tipping the hand that fed him. Honestly, it wouldn’t have bothered me if he hinted at the truth in his article. Just not here. Not in front of the girls. It wasn’t the boat ride that