Elimination Night

13

Coach Andy



ONE WEEK LATER…

“How’s he doing?” I asked.

“Let me tell you something,” Mitch replied, his nose dotted with the foam of a triple-shot cappuccino. “Joey Lovecraft’s moods are like Martian weather. Little understood. Spectacular from afar. And basically unsurvivable by humankind.”

“Ah.” I tilted my head to catch more of the early afternoon sun. “So not good, then?”

“I’d say he was a nine today. Borderline ten.”

I stared blankly across the table.

“No one told you?” said Mitch, surprised. “We track Joey’s moods with a numbering system. Ten is the worst; one is the best. Mu sends out an e-mail to the staff every morning. Just a number in the subject line—that’s it. She’s never reported a one, as far as I’m aware. If you believe some of the older roadies, he came close during the summer of 1983, before that stupid f*cking parachute jump. Typically, though, four is as good as it gets. Five means Mu and Sue go home in tears. Higher than a six, and Joey’s bodyguard has the okay to call his doctor for a medical-marijuana prescription. An eight usually means hospital or incarceration.”

“And a ten?”

“Imagine an asteroid the size of Manhattan landing on Manhattan.”

We were back on The Lot in the San Fernando Valley. Only this time, we hadn’t gone anywhere near Ed Rossitto’s batcave in the sky. Instead we were seated in Rabbit’s garden commissary, which serves egglessegg scrambles and meatless-meat burritos to ageless movie executives with mortgaged dental work and two-rounds-of-golf-per-day tans. They seem so much slicker than the likes of Len and Ed, these movie people. But I guess when you strip away the gloss of their A-list casts and seven-figure budgets, they’re basically selling the same thing: stories of human conflict, with their highs and lows, tears and laughter, heroes and villains… only our stories cost a lot less to tell. Not that season thirteen of Project Icon was in any way cheap, of course. In fact, I’d seen our budget, and it had pretty much doubled since the previous season. That didn’t bode well, given everything that had gone down, both literally and figuratively, in Houston. ShowBiz was already printing vague rumors of “trouble in Texas.” Its latest story quoted David Gent as saying Rabbit was “ironing out issues with the new panel” but that the network still had “confidence in the show.”

Not total confidence, I noted. Just confidence—quantity unspecified.

“D’you think we’ll get cancelled before we even get to air?” I wondered aloud.

“Jesus Christ, Bill, keep it down,” Mitch hissed. “Never—ever—mention the C-word on The Lot.”

With that, his phone began to squirm its way across the metal table in a fit of groans and yelps, as if there were a small animal inside trying to break loose. He glanced at its screen and said, “Right, he’s here.” We both stood up. Mitch wiped his nose—at last—but only half-caught the foam, and there didn’t seem like a good moment to bring up the subject as we made our way to the narrow pathway outside. A longwheelbase golf cart—green canvas sunshade pitched over the three rows of seats—was waiting. The driver, who looked barely old enough for sixth grade, proceeded to transport us at the maximum velocity allowed by the vehicle’s tiny electric motor through fake Brooklyn backstreets, a miniature Sahara desert, and the scene of a crashed Boeing 747 filled with half-melted alien corpses.

“Imagine coming to work here every day,” mused Mitch. “No wonder these people are so twisted.”

Eventually, we jerked to a halt outside a beige conference hall at the other end of the property. Beyond the jungle-landscaped entrance: a beige lobby with beige walls, beige carpet, and an air-conditioning system so powerful, the place felt like an industrial meat locker. It couldn’t have been more than forty degrees in there. Ahead of us was a set of double doors, upon which someone had taped a sheet of laserprinted paper. “Project Icon: Fraternization Seminar,” it read. “Attendance COMPULSORY for all cast/producers. Starts: 3:30 p.m.”

The clock on the wall read 3:29 p.m.

Mitch and I looked at each other with here-goes-nothing faces, then pushed our way inside.

We emerged into a small yet plush auditorium with a low stage at the far end of the room and a dozen or so rows of fold-up seats, arranged in tiers. Suspended from the ceiling was a digital projector, and embedded in the walls were the yellow Kevlar cones of audiophilequality Bowers & Wilkins loudspeakers (blame Dad for my knowledge of such things). Behind us, meanwhile, was a generously stocked drinks and snack counter, the kind you might find in a business-class airline lounge. Knowing what was to come, I was tempted to pour myself a Maker’s Mark on ice. No one else was drinking, though, so I resisted.

Joey was already in a front-row aisle seat, next to Mu and Sue, both of whom had dressed for the occasion like soft-porn librarians. He was wearing high-top sneakers and a tweed suit with one pant leg cut off at the knee, all the better to display an actual-size tattoo of a tartan sock on his right calf. (He did this one himself while in London’s Pentonville prison for urinating on Buckingham Palace, because it made him smile every morning in his cell.) The novelty sock tattoo wasn’t the first thing to catch my attention about Joey, however. Instead my eyes were drawn to his fly-goggle sunglasses, the kind that Manhattan Project scientists might have worn during atomic bomb testing in the New Mexico desert. They served to only partially disguise a black eye of such severity, its purple-yellow tendrils crept all the way out to his middle cheek. This had been a gift from Miss “I Da Hoe”’s father, an ex-U.S. Marine and, as it turned out, committed member of the Coeur D’Alene chapter of the Aryan Nations. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for Icon’s security detail, Joey’s record company might have already been enjoying the spoils of a posthumous album release.

By inflicting such a dramatic injury on Joey, however, the Idaho Klansman had actually done Icon a huge favor. Without the assault, the show would have been looking at a shut-up-and-go-away settlement on the scale of Bibi’s salary. But now they had leverage: the attempted murder of a celebrity judge. Plus, Miss “I Da Ho” herself—she had in fact only ever won a minor village pageant—apparently didn’t share her father’s politics, and had no interest in punishing Joey.

The matter was resolved privately, in a matter of days.

That wasn’t the end of Joey’s issues with young female contestants, however.

Oh, no.

It quickly emerged that Joey’s indiscretions hadn’t been limited to Miss “I Da Ho.” He had also been exchanging direct messages on Twitter with several other female contestants (had he searched for their accounts, or had they followed him first?), providing them with both his cell phone number and Twitpics of his bulging underwear, taken from under the judges’ desk. All had responded in kind, so Joey had scheduled each of them to visit his room, at fifteen-minute intervals, that very same night. It was hard not to be impressed by the man’s ambition. It was also hard not to wonder how he could manage such a back-to-back operation at the age of sixty-two, without either surgical or chemical assistance. This question was never answered, however, because someone in Rabbit’s human resources department (a.k.a. Team Joeysitter) noticed what was going on—they were already in crisis mode after the whole beauty queen affair—and dispatched an emergency task force to the scene. Joey’s phone was confiscated, his Twitter account deleted, and he was ordered by Sir Harold Killoch to attend today’s “fraternization seminar” at The Lot. For good measure, the other judges and key members of Icon’s staff were ordered to go, too.

And now… well, here we were.

Being the last to arrive, Mitch and I took seats at the rear. Bibi was to our left, a few rows forward, obscured partially by Teddy, and engrossed in her phone. Looking closely, I noticed that she had the Face-Time app running, and was actually examining herself in the screen. Len was visible only via his Merm, which was wobbling around somewhere near the front, next to Maria and Ed (or that’s what I assumed, as Ed’s head didn’t reach the top of his chair).

We waited.

And waited.

And—

At last, the house lights dimmed, the stage lights brightened, and in an unmistakable glow of smugness, our “fraternization coach” appeared. “My name’s Andy,” he announced unnecessarily (it was written in blue marker on his circular name tag). “And I know what y’all are thinking: I’m here to judge. Well, bad news, folks”—cheesy smile—“the only judges in this room are sitting right in front of me here. I’m here to inform. To guide. Think of me as a resource.”

Andy was unbearable, this much was already clear.

He went on: “Now, what I’m going to talk about today is what we at Rabbit call fraternization.”

“You mean screwin’?” interrupted Joey.

Oh, God. I closed my eyes.

“Ha-ha,” said Andy, nervously running a fleshy hand through his overly product-enhanced hair.

“Call it what it f*ckin’ is, man,” said Joey, disgust in his voice. “I f*ckin’ hate—”

“We call it fraternization,” Andy reiterated, a little testily. “Now, what does fraternization mean, exactly?”

Joey snorted with contempt and began to shuffle boisterously in his seat.

“Well, folks, if you look it up in the ol’ dictionary,” Andy continued, reaching behind him to pick up a heavy black volume from the table behind him. “It says, ‘To associate or mingle as brothers with a hostile group, especially when directly against military orders.’”

Andy made a hokey face to illustrate confusion.

“Now, we’re not all brothers here, are we?” he continued, in the tone of a preschool teacher breaking up a fight over a jigsaw puzzle. “And we sure as heck ain’t running an ‘army’! Also, I wouldn’t suggest for one second that the wonderful, talented contestants on Project Icon are your enemy. No, sir! Nevertheless, you have to understand, if ANYTHING that could be deemed ‘inappropriate’ goes on between any of YOU and any of your subordinates—i.e., the contestants—then you’re putting both yourself and the Rabbit network in DIRE JEOPARDY.”

Andy went on like this for three hours. He passed around leaflets featuring stock photographs of men and women in “uncomfortable” workplace situations. He used the digital protector to a show a graph of recent legal settlements in key sexual harassment cases. He even distributed Rabbit-branded key rings and notebooks featuring the slogan “Professionalism, Respect, Boundaries.”

Bibi didn’t look up once from her phone. Joey, on the other hand, seemed transfixed.

“Any questions?” asked Andy, when he was finally done.

At last, it was over.

Only it wasn’t.

“Yeah, actually,” declared Joey, to groans from the row behind him. “Let’s pretend for a moment, Andy, that you’re a winner. Let’s pretend that you don’t spend your life giving pious lectures to other people about their own private goddamn business. Let’s pretend that the no-fun-sized miniwiener in your sad-assed, beige f*ckin’ kill-me-now slacks has ever seen half a second of action—which, by the way, I personally guarantee it f*ckin’ hasn’t. But let’s pretend all that, anyway…”

Mitch’s head was now in his hands.

“… so you’re a hot dude,” Joey went on. “Rockin’ your shit as a judge on Project Icon. And you’ve gotta drain the dragon. Snake break. So off you go to the bathroom, and on your way—BLAM!—you run straight into Little Miss Over Easy, Sunny-Side-Up Beauty Queen. Now, this chick ain’t no nun. She’s more into the Holy Molys than the Hail Marys, if you get my vibe. She’s wearing a f*ckin’ T-shirt that says ‘I Da Ho’ for the love of sweet Jesus Christ! So this little smokin’ firecracker of a pageant princess says to you, ‘Hey, my best friend says you’d never let me blow you in the Icon bathroom. Wanna help me win a hundred bucks?’”

Joey was now standing, leaning over the edge of the stage, inches from Andy, who was gripped with either panic or anger, it was hard to tell which. “What was I supposed to DO, huh?” Joey yelled, before turning incredulously to his audience. “Send the girl home, emptymouthed and a hundred bucks poorer?”

He grinned to prove his point. So many teeth. Such ludicrously proportioned lips.

Silence.

Beside me, Mitch looked as though he were in physical pain.

“HUH??” repeated Joey.

Then Andy spoke.

“Yes,” he began, quietly. “That’s what you were supposed to do, Joey. Send her home, without putting your sixty-two-year-old dick in her goddamn eighteen-year-old mouth, okay? Now is that too much to ask, to save yourself and your employer from years of depositions, a public trial, jail, and/or possible financial ruin? Is it really?”

Andy’s face now had the hot, lumpy texture of rage.

“Jesus,” said Joey, throwing up his hands. “Shoot me. Just f*ckin’ shoot me, okay? I had some fun. This is America. You guys should go work for Tali-Qaeda.”

“You mean the Taliban,” Andy corrected.

“Whatever, man.”

“Or al-Qaeda.”

“Jesus, okay, Mr. Dictionary.”

“Not Tali-Qaeda.”

“Suck on it, fat boy.”

Ignoring this, Andy leaned down and got closer to Joey, until their faces were almost touching. “Now answer my question, Mr. Lovecraft,” he snarled. “Will you restrain yourself? Or do you want to lose this lucrative day job of yours?”

Joey crossed his arms and tried to outstare his adversary. But Andy wasn’t intimidated. He’d clearly been given orders by Sir Harold to deliver an unambiguous message.

“Well?” demanded Andy.

“Okay—you f*ckin’ win!” Joey huffed, sitting back down heavily. “Now why don’t you give me your goddamn address, so I can FedEx my f*ckin’ balls to you overnight.”