Elimination Night

26

Room 709



JOEY PRACTICALLY KEPT an open suite at Mount Cypress Medical Center, ready to take him at a moment’s notice. It was one of those running jokes. “Call Cypress!” he’d yell to Mitch whenever something trivial was upsetting him. “Tell ’em to prepare my room. I’m comin’ in!” Everyone would laugh. But it didn’t seem so funny now.

He’d overdosed, according to Mitch’s second text, which had arrived when I was in the air.

It was bad.

After that, no more updates: Mitch had gone offline, wouldn’t pick up his phone. So I did as he’d instructed, and made my way to the hospital as quickly as possible. I hardly dared think what might have prompted Mitch’s silence: Was Joey even still alive? I kept checking the ShowBiz website, just in case. There were no dead rock star stories, thank God: Just another page one feature about Sir Harold’s German problems, which appeared to be getting worse. “Big Corp implosion buys resurgent Icon more time,” it read. “Could lucky break save unlucky season thirteen?”

Resurgent? Even ShowBiz must have expected last night’s ratings to be good.

What a moment for Joey to fall off the wagon.

Three hundred dollars, the lousy cab driver charged me. For a fifteen-minute journey. I guess it was my own fault for calling him in advance, which meant he got to see me arrive at Santa Monica airport in a presidential-grade helicopter. I didn’t even argue with his crooked meter, which had raced upward like the jackpot on a one-armed bandit. I just signed the receipt and threw it at him through the hatch. “No wonder everyone buys their own damn car in this city,” I said, climbing out.

Security was tight at the hospital: Black-and-whites on the street, armed guards in the lobby. And of course no one wanted to tell me Joey Lovecraft’s room number: “Joey who? I’m afraid there’s no Joey-whatever-his-name-is here. You must be mistaken.”

This was precisely why Joey always went to Mount Cypress: The place was built for celebrities in distress, what with the two-thousand-square-foot “recovery suites” and counterpaparazzi squads at every entry and exit point. Not that I’d noticed any telltale blacked-out SUVs on the way in, which suggested no one knew about this yet—or at least no one other than Nigel Crowther…

Holy crap, tonight had been weird.

I couldn’t even begin to think about who Crowther’s “source” might be—or anything else regarding my time aboard The Talent and the Glory, for that matter. With Joey in the hospital, in God knows what condition, it made me feel almost traitorous.

At the reception desk, I tried desperately to remember the fake name Joey had used when booking himself into hotels on the Project Icon auditions tour. It was a cartoon character, I knew that much. But which one? Think, Sash, think. “I’m here to see Mr. Scooby-Doo,” I announced, eventually, to the exhausted-looking and bespectacled African American man behind the counter. “He’s in one of the private recovery suites.”

“No ‘Scooby-Doo’ here,” he said, without looking up from his paperback.

“Please,” I begged, “I can’t get through to his manager on the phone. I need to be up there. It’s urgent.”

The receptionist sighed, put down his book, and shifted uncomfortably on his chair. “Why don’t you try again,” he said, tapping a key on his computer. “Along the same lines.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you.”

“Don’t thank me, Miss. Just get it right.”

I was sure it was Scooby-Doo. But there was some kind of twist to it: Something ridiculous.

“Mr. Scooby-Dooby-Doo?” I attempted.

He shook his head.

“Mr. Scooby-Dooby… Doo-Wop-Dooby-Doo?”

Handing me a laminated guest pass, he said: “Take the elevator to the fourth floor. Ward three, room 709. Oh… and Miss?”

“Yes?”

“Can you please ask Mr. Scooby-Dooby-Doo-Wop-Dooby-Doo to come up with a better name. I’ve been through this a dozen times already this evening.”

“I will. Thank you again. Thank you so much.”

I ran.

Mitch was standing outside room 709 with a heavy blanket in his arms. The door was half-open, enough to reveal the shape of Joey’s body under starched white bed covers. Next to him was a giant rack of monitoring equipment. It bleeped and pulsed. “They pumped him out pretty good,” said Mitch. “It was touch and go a few minutes ago—I had to switch off my phone, sorry—but it looks like he’s pulling through. The docs say he should be in okay shape by the morning.”

I was so relieved, I threw my arms around Mitch and hugged him, causing the blanket he was holding to twitch and squeal. I jumped back in surprise, almost knocking over a passing nurse. Then I watched in disbelief as two small, pink nostrils emerged from between the folds. They sniffed the air. Then an oink and a grunt.

“Mitch,” I said, calmly. “Why do you have a pig in that blanket?”

“Oh, uh—Joey got him last week on the advice of his psychiatrist. He’s a ‘comfort animal.’ Helps reduce depression and anxiety, or so they say. Joey takes him everywhere now.”

“Does he have a name?”

“Benjamin Lovecraft the Third, after Joey’s great-grandfather.”

“Quite a title.”

“We call him BLT.”

“… so what happened, Mitch?”

“We just went to the pet store on Melrose. You’d be amazed what you can get for—”

“No, the overdose, Mitch. The overdose.”

Mitch rubbed his eyes. He looked ragged, spent. “Joey’s mom died,” he sighed. “Stage-four cancer. He hadn’t told anyone about it. That’s what caused his relapse, I think. I’m also pretty sure that’s why he’s been so… unlike himself recently. He took it really bad. He worshipped her, y’know—probably ’cause his dad was never around. But she was a piece of work, if you ask me. Remember that story he told Ed Rossitto about sitting under the piano while she played? Well, she never let him under the piano, it turns out. She’d lock Joey and his brother in their room when she practiced. The only time Joey got under that thing was when he broke out and she wasn’t looking. He fell asleep, apparently. Convinced himself she was playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21 in C major as a way of expressing her love. Tragic. He woke up screaming when he felt the boiling water on his legs. Poor kid. He still has the scars to this day. I think that’s why he can be so critical of people, y’know. He just does to them what she did to him.”

I honestly thought I might cry. The way Joey had told the piano story to Ed… he must have so badly wanted it to be true. “How could a mother do that?” I said.

“I’ve no idea—I think I’d be shoving pills down my neck, too, if I’d had that kind of upbringing.”

“But where did he get the drugs? Did he call a dealer?”

“God, no. When Joey’s using, he improvises. I caught him smoking the oregano off a frozen pizza once. So when he got the news about his mom, he just downed whatever was closest to hand, which happened to be a jar of maximum-strength aspirin. Thank God for Mu. She came home a few minutes later. Somehow got him into the Range Rover and drove him here. Then they gave him the pump and the gastric decontamination. Now he’s on charcoal tablets.”

“Charcoal?”

“Soaks up the drugs. No one knows about this, by the way, and I’m hoping to keep it that way. It might not matter, of course: The pee-test results come back from the lab tomorrow morning. It’ll be a miracle if he passes. Here, take this.”

Mitch handed me the blanket with BLT still inside. I tried to give it back, but not quickly enough.

“I’m going to get something to eat,” said Mitch, who by now was already halfway down the hallway. “It’s been a long night. Plus, the canteen in this place has a Michelin star. Oh—there’s some milk for BLT in Joey’s room. Bottle-feed him when he gets hungry. And call me if he shits himself. That’s a two-man emergency.”

“Did you switch your phone back on?” I shouted after him.

But he was gone.

With nothing better to do, I walked into Joey’s room. It was the size of a large Manhattan apartment, with polished wooden floors, and a north-facing wall made entirely from glass, which supplied a letterbox view over the Hollywood hills and the great terrestrial constellation of the LA grid system below. Facing Joey’s bed was a hundredinch flatscreen mounted on a steel frame, along with what appeared to be every type of gaming console ever invented. Elsewhere I saw basketball hoops, a Ping-Pong table, massage chairs, and an espresso bar.

Groaning from the stress of the day, I fell backward into a deep velvet sofa by the window. BLT nibbled at my cheek. It hurt, but I was too tired to push him away. His breath smelled of… whiskey and chocolate. What the hell had Mitch been feeding him?

I looked over at Joey. His face was a mass of gurgling plastic tubes. It was doubtful he’d be waking up any time soon. To the left of him, I noticed, was a filing cabinet on wheels—at least ten drawers tall. Written on the side, in black marker: “Lovecraft, Joseph T.—patient history.” And then, below that: “Cabinet 14 of 28.”

I wanted to laugh but didn’t have the energy. Instead, I let my head fall back onto the cushion and closed my eyes—and by the time I realized I was falling asleep, it was too late, or I just didn’t care. I was done. For once, everything could wait.