Elimination Night

Elimination Night - By Anonymous



1

Becoming Bill



September

“LOOK AT ME, Bill,” said Len.

I looked.

“Now, tell me what you see.”

I had no idea where he was going with this. I didn’t really want to know, to be honest with you.

“I see… your face,” I said.

“And tell me, Bill,” Len went on, “is my face betraying any sign, any hint—any indication whatsoever—that I might actually care about the logistical difficulty of performing the task I delegated to you? Is my face telling you that, Bill? Is that what you see?”

“No,” I sighed.

“Good. Now, please give the judges the run-through. And chop-bloody-chop. We’re on in ten.”

With that, Leonard Braithwaite—Supervising Producer of the Most-Watched Television Show on Earth—twirled on his heels like the backup dancer he used to be, and took his ridiculous English accent and even more ridiculous suit over to the other side of the room. Clotted cream and baby blue, that was today’s color scheme—with pinstripes so wide they could have been rolled onto his pants by one of those lawn painting machines they have at Wimbledon.

Len is an a*shole, in case you haven’t figured that out already. I would go so far as to say that he’s an a*shole’s a*shole, such is his lifelong dedication to the craft of a*sholeness. Len also couldn’t exist anywhere outside of reality TV. Take that faux bronze wet-look man-perm: “The Merm,” as it’s known here backstage. In the non-TV universe, such a hairstyle would be nearing the outer limits of credibility if its owner were merely approaching middle age. As it is, Len can’t be a day under seventy-five. It’s the teeth that give it away: an unnatural shade of white, with the lumpy, thick-grained texture of medieval church cabinetry.

I stared at the clipboard in my hand, as if that might somehow make the next ten minutes of my life any easier. Attached was the run-through Len had just mentioned: a twelve-page script for the eleven o’clock press conference, which would take place in the auditorium downstairs and would be streamed live on the Internet to a worldwide audience of two hundred million people (or so the Rabbit network was optimistically claiming). If you believed ShowBiz magazine—the holy text of industry gossip that lands on every desk in Hollywood once a week—an entire billion-dollar-a-year franchise depended on our not screwing this up. As, therefore, did all our jobs. So it was strange that Len wanted to put me in charge of the run-through. It wasn’t unusual for him to over-delegate, of course: He did it all the time, usually so he could take one of his five-hour lunch breaks at Mr. Chang’s. But today was different.

Today mattered.

I tried to calm myself. What was it my old meditation tutor used to say? “Imagine yourself as a majestic mountain.” I closed my eyes and pictured Everest, but my inner mountain wasn’t cooperating. Besides, when I first moved to LA, I promised myself I’d never turn into the kind of person who would say “imagine yourself as a majestic mountain” unless in mockery. So instead I just stood there, watching as four crew guys carried a vast airbrushed banner—in colors that looked suspiciously like the branding of a certain global hamburger chain—through the pre-show lounge area. “PROJECT ICON: THE DREAM REAWAKENS! ” it read.

Len had told me to fire the sign writer weeks ago. I had yet to find the right moment.

“Nine minutes until we’re on!” a voice behind me yelled.

I had to do the run-through. If only I hadn’t left my jar of little green pills in the bathroom cabinet at home. How else was I going to find the courage to address a room full of celebrities? Unless… unless I did what I’d been fantasizing about since my very first day at Project Icon, and quit. It wasn’t like I owed anyone here anything. I could just walk out, right now. I’d be at the baggage carousel at Honolulu International before dinner. Then a fifteen-minute taxi ride to Waikiki Beach, and then—oh, yes!—one of my sweet, handsome Brock’s frontal lobotomy mai tais, served under the hundred-year-old kiawe tree in the bar of the Huakuwali Hotel to the romantic, albeit slightly cheesy rhythm of hula music.

Only that wasn’t the plan.

No, the plan was to keep working, keep saving, until I had enough in the bank to leave this place and never come back.

Only then could I get on that plane.

So my name isn’t actually Bill, just FYI. It’s Sasha. Bill was—sorry, is—the name of my immediate boss, Bill Redmond, whose duties as assistant producer of Project Icon are now mine, or at least until Bill gets out of the ER at Denver General Medical Center.

Long story.

Len calls me Bill because he didn’t want there to be any confusion during the “transition of responsibilities.” Which means to say: Len calls me Bill because he thinks of his employees as being basically interchangeable. “That’s just how things are, Bill, when you work in live television,” he once explained to me. But really that’s just how things are when you work for Len, whose Repulsive Personality Field seems to have doubled in strength since he returned to the show for its thirteenth—and almost certainly final—season.

And so: Back in June, on the morning of that unfortunate incident in Denver, I, Sasha King—the pale, red-curled, non-girliest girl ever to work in live entertainment—became Bill. Or “acting assistant producer,” to use my official title, which no one does. The “acting” bit means I get the double privilege of responsibilities—serious, one-hour-of-sleep, lifespan-shortening responsibilities—while still being relied on for menial tasks, such as procuring obscure fried meat products for homesick Southern contestants or collecting Len’s eighteen-month-old adopted Congolese orphan from his nightly Bikram yoga class.

No, Mom really couldn’t believe it when I took this job.

“Since when have you wanted anything to do with show business?” she asked, spitting vodka everywhere. “You’ve never cared about glam or glitz in your life! You don’t even wear makeup, dear. I thought you wanted to be a writer, like that man—y’know, the one who wrote that depressing book you’re always carrying around with you, Never-ending Misery.”

“It’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mom,” I sighed. “And it’s not depressing. It’s the greatest novel ever written. Dad gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday.”

“This is just very… unlike you, dear. What about Brock? Is he going to LA, too?”

“No, Mom. Brock’s not coming with me. He’s moving to… look, it doesn’t matter. This is a short-term thing. If I’m ever going to finish my novel, I need to take some time off. And for that, I need some money. The student loans are gone, Mom.”

“What about your inheritance?”

“Jesus, Mom. Dad left me four dollars and half a pack of Camel Lights.”

“I thought he left you his moose socks, too?”

“And the moose socks, yes.”

Mom did have a point about all of this, of course: Growing up in the fishing hamlet of Babylon, Long Island—with its peeling paintwork, Babylicious Crab Cakes, and twice-weekly hurricanes—I mocked anyone with an interest in celebrities. Even as an infant (or so I’ve been told) I considered most forms of popular entertainment beneath me. Rattles? Meh. Stuffed animals? Please. Life was a serious business, as far as Baby Me was concerned, requiring deep thought and a frown at all times. Even a giggle was asking too much: If you tickled my belly, I would grunt and try my best to punch you in the face. (Dad found infinite amusement in this, judging by the camcorder footage.) Things didn’t change much as I got older. I preferred the Discovery Channel to the Mickey Mouse Club, the spelling bee to the cheerleading squad, The Times’ op-ed page to the sex quiz in Seventeen. Full-blown nerdism, in other words.

Nevertheless, by the time I got to high school—where I hung with the cooler of the uncool kids—my knowledge of early seventies Tom Waits albums and appreciation for Lou Reed’s experimental period gave me a certain kind of credibility with a certain kind of boy… and of course it did no harm that by then I’d learned how to manage my inextinguishable wildfire of orange curls, or that I’d inherited Dad’s nerves, which kept me on the bonier side of slim despite a lifelong pastry habit. (Unfortunately, this effect is no longer quite as reliable as it once was.)

As for college: Well, I was an okay student… but a little cocky. “Jesus, Sash, even your irony is ironic,” as Dad used to say. A classic teenage self-defense mechanism, of course. But this was lost on the admissions officers of the prestigious schools to which I applied. They took it as detachment or over-confidence, maybe both. Hence my place at the J-School you won’t have heard of, half the tuition paid for with loans, the other half by Mom, who had worked double-time shoveling meds as a Walgreens pharmacist for the best part of a decade to make sure her only child went to college. (Shockingly, Dad’s “career” as a wedding trumpeter didn’t contribute much in the higher education department, unless you count the time he sent me a plastic-wrapped tray of hallucinogenic cookies.)

Suffice it to say, I was turned down for internships at all our nation’s great metropolitan newspapers, and quite a few of the not-so-great ones, too. Same story with the big magazines. And the TV news networks. Then Dad’s Irish peasant genes went and gave him cancer, and shortly after that god-awful funeral in the church he’d been to only once before, I embarked on my Novel of Immense Profundity. Or rather, I spent a year living at home, staring tearfully at an empty Word document. I wanted my book to be epic. A generation-spanning masterpiece. Something Gabriel García Márquez himself might have written. The problem was, I couldn’t decide where to set it. Long Island seemed too obvious. Aside from college, however, I’d never really been anywhere else before…

I was saved from this indecision by Brock—calm, funny, excitingly toned Brock Spencer Daniels—whose frat buddy worked at Rabbit News and was looking for a talent booker’s assistant. Before I knew it, I’d been offered the job—if the word “job” can be used to describe a position whose salary consisted of a MetroCard and a daily canteen allowance. My first assignment: help organize a panel interview with the cast and crew of Project Icon, led by none other than Leonard Braithwaite.

A couple of months later, Len called my cell (I hadn’t given him the number) to offer me a “dazzling opportunity in Hollywood, California.”

“I bet they’ve got you working for free over there at Rabbit, haven’t they?” he chuckled.

“Yes,” I admitted (stupidly).

“Well, then—I think we can offer you a raise,” he replied. “How does more than nothing sound?”

The line went fuzzy with laughter. To Len, the world’s funniest joke is the one he’s just told.

The money he offered wasn’t good, but it was good enough for Brock and me to hatch a plan: He’d move to Honolulu to focus on his “surfing career” (while making cocktails on the weekends and finding us a place to live), and I’d take the job at Icon until my savings account was refilled. Then I’d join him beachside to finish my novel. He’d win the MegaWave Super Crown. I’d win the Most Immensely Profound Novel of Our Generation Award.

We had it all worked out.

So off I went to LA.

“Another one of Len’s Lovelies, huh?” sneered the vinegar-faced woman in Icon’s accounts department on my very first morning. “Funny—they’re usually blondes, not redheads. His standards must be slipping.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just met Len’s wife.