Features

Slim Shady and the Quest for the Fire Album, Part 1

“Slim.” Darkness surrounded. “Slim.” Darkness surrounded. “Slim…”
“DUGADUUDUUUDUUU,” the voice yells.
Slim Shady stood up out of his bed with sweat running down his forehead. The dream had finally come, after so many years of disgrace and relative obscurity. Eminem reached for his diamond-studded Sony Xperia and pushed several digits. The phone began to ring.
“Don’t go to voicemail. C’mon Cube, pick up. C’mon!”
“Yow. What’s good Slim?”
Ice Cube stood in the rubble of Death Row Records on Wilshire Boulevard, the site he strategically won from Suge Knight after the Death Row Wars of 1996. The entire square block, once the shimmering monolith of West Coast bumpin’, was completely rendered into glass fragments and crumbled concrete. There was a tiny blue tarp tent in the middle of it all where O’Shea Jackson had spent the past two decades sleeping, eating, loving, and contemplating his next moves. Clutching his phone to his ear, Cube brushed off the shattered platinum record shards that stuck into his black and white Hawaiian shirt.
“He came to me in a dream. I saw him, and he told me that I gotta find wherever his body is buried and bring him back. Then, he will ghostwrite my next album.”
“You sure about that? I heard you’ve been desperate lately, doin’ verses for Rihanna and smilin’ through Prep H. commercials.”
Slim felt his face turn red and wanted to hang up on Cube, but reminded himself that anything color-face but blackface was nothing to get all hyped up about.
“I swear. This is the real deal. Look, you’re the only one that I can trust. Not Dre, not Jay, not even Busta. You, Cube. If you swing by my house right now and help me find him, I’ll put you on the album. Three features and a production credit.”
Cube closed his eyes and imagined it all: being on tour again, having sixteen-year-old white kids wanting his autograph, the stay-at-home dads nodding their heads as they take their first hit since their bachelor party in 2009. The films that can be done! Barbershop 4: Young Chop.
“Aight, I’ll be there in thirty. You still hidin’ out in Detroit?”
“Yeah man. You in town?”
“Nah. 30 minutes.”
Cube hung up and smirked. He brushed through the Death Row debris until he found the Sony VAIO laptop, loads up “HARTONATOR.zip” and pressed the enter key. Not too far away, in a Spanish-style mansion in Beverly Hills, Kevin Hart was lying out by his pool. He tried not to think because his therapist says he over thinks too much. He stared at the water, reminding himself desperately not to think of anything. All of the sudden, Kevin Hart biotransformed into a rocket and shot up high in the sky. Way past the stratosphere and toward the ionosphere, the silent Hart Rocket reached an apex and began to fall back down to Earth. Flames surrounded the comedian and burned off his metal exterior. As he plummeted down, engulfed in fire, Kevin Hart shrunk down to a pebble-size, just like a meteorite. Ice Cube targeted the trajectory on his VAIO and made sure to aim it just right. The NanoHart whooshed by jumbo jets, nightingales, cypress trees, to land perfectly into Cube’s shirt pocket, directly onto the microswitch hidden in its stitching. With the switch triggered, Cube’s supersonic roller blades were activated around his feet, and onward Cube went to Detroit.

To be continued…