Elimination Night

16

When They Were Young



BONNIE DIDN’T STAND a chance.

This wasn’t because of her voice—far worse singers had thrived in the competition—but because she represented a triumph for Joey Lovecraft. And a triumph for Joey Lovecraft was by definition a failure for Bibi Vasquez. You could see the look of horror cross Bibi’s face the very moment Joey got down on his knees in front of Staff Sergeant Mike Donovan in that San Diego hotel suite. Until then, Bibi had been convinced that she was the real star of the show. She was paid more than Joey—a lot more. She got better treatment (in spite of Mitch’s best efforts). She had quadruple the number of assistants and stylists. Sir Harold Killoch called her personally every other day to make sure she was doing okay. And the reporters and paparazzi who thronged outside every Icon audition venue were interested only in her, not some crusty old relic from… whatever the hell his loser band was called. As far as Bibi was concerned, Joey was a Blist (if that) sidekick, a provider of occasional moments of comic relief.

But when Bonnie and her husband walked into that room, everything changed.

For Bibi, the irony must have been excruciating. She was the one who was supposed to be revealing her humanity, tears, and compassion! Teddy had promised her this, over and over. Ridding herself of the shallow, bragging, pre-Recession Ice Diva legacy of “I Wanna Rock (Any Diamond Will Do)” was the whole point of her being on the show. And yet when confronted with Staff Sergeant Mike Donovan, she had reacted in precisely the way an Ice Diva would: She had frozen. And who could really blame her? Nothing in Bibi’s life until that moment had prepared her to interact with such a human tragedy, at such an uncomfortably close range—a man with limbs blown off and half of his face missing, who was rocking violently back and forth, making some god-awful gurgling noise, while producing a steady ooze of greenish-yellow fluid from his lower jaw.

But Joey hadn’t flinched! His first instinct as a Child of the Earth, brimful of Kangen water, channeling the teachings of the great High Lama Yutog Gonpo, was to embrace.

There’s more to it than that, of course. For all Joey’s many faults—his compulsive libido, his terminal addictions, his lecturing of others on their every perceived failure—the man has a preacher’s gift for connecting with strangers. And not just strangers who also happen to be teenage beauty queens. Grandmas. Toddlers. Truck drivers. Bankers. Anyone. Joey loves people, and people love him right back… which makes Joey love people even more, because Joey needs to be loved above everything else. This much was obvious from his behavior while on the road with Icon. Morning and night, he would greet fans outside each venue, signing autographs, nuzzling babies, posing for photographs, answering questions—the very things Bibi took immense care to avoid. And at lunch, Joey rarely made use of the judges’ table, instead making sure to sit with the lowliest members of the crew, even if he’d just been humiliating them over some insignificant grievance a few moments earlier. Bibi? She ate only in her two-story trailer—sometimes with Teddy, at other times with Edouard and the four kids.

Mostly, though, Bibi dined alone.

Now, I should state for the record that I have no proof there was any plot against Bonnie. Perhaps it was simply my encounter with Bibi in the bathroom of that Milwaukee hotel that made me immediately assume the worst. All I can say is this: It was obvious to everyone after Bonnie’s appearance that Joey had become the undisputed star of season thirteen. Nigel Crowther might have defined Icon once with his “Mr. Horrible” routine, but it was now possible to glimpse an alternative future for the show: A kinder, softer, tearier Icon—and all because of the actions of a sixty-two-year-old drug addict and serial philanderer who had once been declared “the enemy of America’s children” by the U.S. Congress.

Len couldn’t have been more delighted. Hence the impromptu announcement he made over the crew’s headsets while Joey was still down on his knees in front of the injured US Marine. “In case anyone’s still wondering,” he’d croaked, between sobs of triumph, “this is why we hired him. Now listen up, all of you—I want ten moments like this EVERY SINGLE EPISODE.”

Bibi of course had no choice but to fight back—to launch (as it were), a countercaring offensive. Either that, or she had to find a way to recover the Bonnie situation at a later date. Joey was already both the wit of the show and its resident musical genius. If he also became its heart and soul, then what was Bibi for? Clearly, she and Teddy had to come up with a plan—and quick, as there were only four more stops left on the audition tour before so-called Las Vegas Week, where the finalists from each city (about a hundred and twenty in total) would be whittled down yet again to the “Final Fifteen.” After that: Too late! The episodes would have started to air, the critics would have delivered their verdicts (“A triumph for Lovecraft!”), and Bibi would have started the live shows at an unrecoverable disadvantage. Assuming Sir Harold hadn’t switched off the lights by then.

By the second day of filming in San Diego, it was already clear we were playing by new rules. For a start, Edouard was gone. Bibi said he’d been called away urgently to visit a sick relative in France and had taken the kids with him, along with the family Gulfstream (actually, one of the family Gulfstreams). No one believed this for a second. The previous night, there’d been reports of screaming coming from Bibi’s suite. Guests had complained; a room service tray had been dropped from the balcony; maintenance staff had been seen carrying away broken furniture. I wondered if Teddy had been involved, or if it was Bibi who’d asked her husband to leave. (I could never quite tell how the power was distributed among the three of them.) Whatever the case: Edouard had vanished, and Teddy hadn’t taken his place, which meant no more cues from behind the scenes.

It was like making a whole new show. Bibi might not have been as confident as Joey in her decisions—who could be?—but she was at least now looking in the right direction when she made them. And while she was for the most part nauseatingly positive (“You have a beautiful instrument, sweetie, and your dedication moves me”), there were times when traces of the real Bibi Vasquez leaked through. Typically, this happened when she was asked to judge a younger, better-looking female (“Honey you’re cute… but y’know, cute is a dime a dozen these days”)—or, even more noticeably, when a male contestant was unwise enough to say something like, “Man, I was totally obsessed with you when I was a kid.”

Oh, this riled Bibi like nothing else.

“When you were a kid, huh?” she spat, on the second occasion it happened. “Was that when the world was still in black and white? You sure know how to make a girl feel good.”

He blushed. “I didn’t mean it like—”

“So how did you mean it?”

“I meant—”

“That I’m older than your mom?”

“No! It’s just that… y’know… when I was growing up—”

“You need to learn some manners, douche nozzle. Get outta here. You ain’t going to Vegas. The only place you’re going is home. And don’t expect to see this on TV. Hey Len—we’re cutting this guy, okay? Where’s makeup? I’m upset now. I don’t wanna look upset. Jesus—MAKEUP! My day is ruined. Disrespectful motherf*cker.”

As requested, the contestant was cut from the final edit. Nevertheless, I was fully expecting an order from Len for me to have another “quiet word” with Bibi, to make sure it never happened again. I should have known better, of course. Len had a far more evil plan. He told the staff in the waiting room to whisper in every male contestant’s ear that what Bibi really loved to hear, what really flattered her, was how much her fans used to lust after her when they were young. So, one by one, the men walked into the room, stood on the podium, and delivered this unwitting insult, causing Bibi to seethe and curse and single-handedly eliminate at least another two male singers, both of whom were actually pretty good. Eventually, however, she had little choice but to take the comments with a smile; or at least a curl of the lips that approximated a reaction of humble amusement.

I doubt she suspected for an instant that her torture was entirely manufactured, that she was just another performing animal in the Project Icon circus.

After San Diego, the remaining cities on our list were Newark, Chicago, and Los Angeles. It took us three weeks to get to them all, and with each new location, my mood improved. Some of this was no doubt relief at finally getting in touch with Brock. He hadn’t dumped me, it turned out. He’d just left his phone on the beach while surfing (as I’d first suspected) and forgotten about the tide. It was now either halfway to Papua New Guinea, or in the belly of a passing whale. And without the phone, of course, Brock didn’t have my numbers, and because he was smoking so much weed (this seriously had to stop when I got to Honolulu), it took him forty-eight hours to figure out that he could simply borrow Pete’s computer and get all the details from my Facebook page. That’s why it took him so long to call. Or at least that was his explanation, and I was happy to go along with it. It had once taken me a week to get back to him, after all.

Anyway: By the time we finally reconnected, my late-night plan to quit Project Icon and get on the next flight to Hawaii had long since been abandoned. Bonnie’s audition had changed all that. Besides, I’d come this far. Might as well get to the end of the season.

Another reason to stay at Icon: Finally, season thirteen seemed to be gaining momentum. Aside from the rising confidence of the judges (JD had actually started to use real words, in addition to variations on “booya-ka-ka,” including “Takin’ it to the Ka!”, “Yaka-yaka-yaka!”, and “Ka-booya-boom-ka!”), the contestants had gotten stronger with every city. This was no accident, of course: When we’d done our preaudition tour in August, we’d become better at our jobs with every city. More to the point, we’d started to cheat by using talent scouts, who found us promising young singers on the local club circuits and offered them VIP treatment if they came in for auditions. And by VIP treatment, I mean bribes. Phones, concert tickets, T-shirts. That kind of thing. Oh, yeah, and cash.

Thanks to all this, Bonnie wasn’t the only early standout who seemed guaranteed a place in the Final Fifteen. Another was Jimmy Nugget, an eighteen-year-old country yodeler, with the wide-legged stance and apple-cheeked complexion of a 1950s farm boy. “It’s like Roy Rogers made love to a Bee Gee!” as Len enthused. The only problem, as far as I could tell, was Jimmy’s promiscuity, which in terms of sheer turnover made Joey seem practically abstemious. Not that Jimmy was in any way competing with Joey. Oh, no. His emphatic preference wasn’t for Icon’s female contestants, but for members of his own sex: hotel waiters, judges’ assistants, his fellow contestants, even a couple of passing construction workers. You could tell when he’d just emerged from a particularly invigorating encounter by his lopsided belt buckle and the V-shaped flush of crimson under his open woodcutter shirt.

Jimmy achieved these feats in spite of the near-constant presence of his father, a gigantic Nebraskan cattle rancher who insisted on being addressed as “Big Nugg.” From what I could tell, Big Nugg wasn’t so much in a state of denial regarding his son’s sexual orientation as living in an entirely different universe. At every opportunity he spoke about Little Nugg’s love of “our Lord and savior,” his devotion to the Holy Temple Faith and Deliverance Center in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and his high-school courtship of “sweet li’l Annie, my beautiful future daughter-in-law.” Whether or not sweet li’l Annie actually existed was anyone’s guess, but Big Nugg’s commitment to the fiction was unwavering, almost as unwavering as his commitment to the advancement of his son in Project Icon. With respect to the latter, Big Nugg had brought with him a yodel coach, who took Little Nugg away for “private sessions” at every opportunity.

As for the other front-runners: Near the top of list was Mia Pelosi, former member of the children’s chorus at the Metropolitan Opera, speaker of six languages, wearer of sweeping ball gowns and diamond neckwear, and in pretty much every other respect a foul-mouthed tramp from the mean streets of Newark. Mia’s vocabulary made Bibi Vasquez sound like a mother superior at Mass on a Sunday morning—an effect heightened by her thirty-a-day cigarette habit, strict diet of fast-food cheeseburgers, and frequently deployed party trick of belching and talking at the same time. And yet by some unfathomable accident of genetics, Mia had been appointed custodian of a larynx that produced a noise as rich and nuanced as any eighteenth-century Stradivarius—a fact noted early on by her public-school music teacher. He was the one who’d sent her to the Met, causing the visiting Czech conductor Milos Dzbirichzijec to literally sob with ecstasy from the orchestra pit. A scholarship at Juilliard followed, interrupted briefly by a stint in a juvenile-detention facility for drunken brawling in public. Mia graduated with distinction in spite of this, and soon became a professional mezzo-soprano, earning tens of thousands of dollars per month, most of which she invested in a burgeoning methamphetamine habit. Fortunately, Mia was eventually able to clean herself up, largely thanks to a year-long recuperation at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in upstate New York. And when she emerged at the age of twenty-three, with renewed focus, a supportive parole officer, and a battle scene from the Book of Revelations tattooed across her buttocks, she returned to the audition circuit, only this time for Icon. Her rendition of “The Prayer” caused a studio-wide outbreak of goose bumps, and the panel’s verdict was an instant and unanimous yes.

Which left one other contestant who seemed destined to become a season thirteen finalist: Cassie Turner, the defiantly unwashed Pennsylvanian folkstress who performed her audition while sitting cross-legged on the podium, strumming on a beat-up guitar. Cassie was older than the others by at least five years, she was a single mother of three kids, and she resided in one of Pittsburgh’s less desirable trailer parks. But her voice… oh, my Lord, her voice: a harrowing, broken sound, at times a roar of almost beast-like rage, at others a falsetto of such sweetness and vulnerability, you wanted to pick her up and cradle her like a child. More than that, she meant every word.

Like the others, however, Cassie had her issues. Chief among them: As a purveyor of songs about the struggle and dignity of the working class, it didn’t help that her father was the owner of a Boston private equity firm. Yes, Cassie’s noble life of poverty was entirely a matter of choice—and not just because of the generously endowed trust fund that had been established in her name when she was two years old. At the insistence of her parents, she had also graduated summa cum laude from Harvard Law School. If Cassie’s musical career didn’t work out, there was a job already lined up for her in the litigation department of Dammock, Hurt & Richardson (Karl Hurt being one of her father’s oldest friends).

None of this would matter during Las Vegas Week, of course: The press didn’t usually develop an interest in Icon contestants until much later in the season—and even then, it didn’t necessarily mean the details of their personal lives would become public. Two Svens was unusually protective (or just old-fashioned) in this regard. “I want my finalists alive at the end of the season, dammit!” I once overheard him screaming at Nigel Crowther through a closed office door. “How can they sell any records for us if they keep hanging themselves from your balcony?”

Crowther had laughed for a long time at this. “C’mon, Sven, old boy,” he crooned. “How many of them”—he had to cough and blow his nose—“sell any records?”

Two Svens named two ex-contestants whose albums had been certified platinum. This only made Crowther even laugh harder. “Two people!” he squealed. “Two people in the history of this show! What about the other others, eh? There are fifteen finalists every season, you daft old Swede, and we’ve been doing this for twelve years.”

“Some are very successful.”

“Yeah—in the cruise ship and wedding industries.”

“No, you fat-nippled arsehole, on Broadway.”

“They make us more money in the tabloids than on Broadway! Think, man. Reality deals. Advertweets. Doctor-sponsored cosmetic implants. Those kids could be out there getting photographed without their underwear, or spending time in celebrity rehab. They could be productive. Instead, what? Forty-second Street? Oh, please.”

That was when the office door had opened, prompting me to dive for cover as Two Svens emerged, still in a fury. Crowther was gone from the show a few weeks later—he’d signed his deal for The Talent Machine. I remember wondering if he’d actually tell any of his future contestants what he had planned for them.

Maybe they wouldn’t care.