Elimination Night

27

Love What You Do



WHEN I AWOKE, there was sunlight on my face. I was still on the sofa, but BLT had gone. Outside: car horns, jackhammers, trucks reversing. “Twelve hours,” I murmured. A groggy fumble for my phone. The backlit screen told me it was almost ten o’clock. I’d slept all night… Jesus, and then some. Now I was late for work. More to the point: I had less than forty minutes to dial the number on the back of the business card in my pocket, and give Nigel Crowther my answer.

An Aston Martin.

A penthouse apartment.

Two hundred thousand dollars a year.

The services of Rick Ponderosa, literary agent.

Yes or no, Sasha. Yes or no?

Surely, this wasn’t going to take a great deal of thought. And yet… everything about Crowther was so wrong. His ego terrified me, for a start. I mean, that was clearly what the whole performance with the helicopter and the yacht had been about—pure male ego. Crowther’s hubris also explained why he was trying so hard to destroy Project Icon, even after it had rewarded him with global celebrity and a bank account so large he could afford The Talent and the Glory. Leaving the panel was understandable. But gloating over Icon’s failure, and calling for its cancellation every day in the press? Pure malice. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t shake the feeling that Crowther had somehow been involved in my pills turning up in Joey’s trailer. As an act of sabotage, it was just so… perfect. He would have surely known that Joey would be unable to resist; that a relapse of that scale would send him into a spiral of catastrophe… turning a bad situation for the show into something even worse.

He couldn’t have done it himself, of course. Maybe Teddy was acting on his behalf. It made sense. Maybe the two of them had set up some kind of communications back channel, months ago, so The Talent Machine could hire Bibi if—or when—Project Icon was taken off the air. Maybe Teddy was Crowther’s “source.” Maybe Bibi was in on it, too. Would that really be so strange, so impossible to imagine, after everything that had happened this season? Bibi herself had once threatened to frame me for selling pills to Joey. If she was capable of that, then she was also surely capable of an even grander, even more diabolical conspiracy.

A final reservation about Crowther: If the exploitation of Mia Pelosi had made me so uncomfortable, how would I handle The Talent Machine? Crowther had recently admitted to hiring an in-house “psychological counselor” for the first season’s contestants, for example. Two Svens had done the same at Project Icon, of course—only his shrink was brought in to actually help the contestants, to stop them going out of their minds from the fame and the weekly threat of elimination. Crowther’s shrink, on the other hand, had been given a very different brief. A former psych-ops specialist from Guantánamo Bay, his job was to break the contestants, to accelerate and heighten their emotional distress—so the results could be captured on hidden cameras throughout the studio. That was the point of The Talent Machine: drama of the lowest, cruelest kind.

Still… two hundred thousand dollars was two hundred thousand dollars. A year on that salary, and I’d have enough in the bank to write three novels, nevermind one.

“Have you forgiven me yet, Bungalow Bill?”

Joey’s voice—an octave lower than usual—startled me.

I’d almost forgotten he was in the room.

“You’ve alive,” I said, hauling myself upright.

Joey was more than just alive. He was propped up on pillows, a morning feast laid out on a silver tray in front of him. The tubes were out of his nose. Fresh flowers had been placed around the room in tall vases. And in the far corner by the door—which was closed, with the red “privacy please” light switched on—BLT was nosing around in what appeared to be some kind of custom-built piggy playpen.

“You had every right to be mad with me, y’know,” he croaked. “It’s okay. I get it.”

“No, Joey,” I sighed. “If I’d have known about your mom… that she was sick… what she did to you… I wouldn’t have given you such a hard time about the pills. Or, y’know, the other stuff. I’m so sorry this happened. My dad died from cancer, too.”

Joey nodded slowly.

“So what’s new?” he said, changing the subject. “Apart from me takin’ enough aspirin to cure every goddamn headache in China. Shit, man—Joey Dumbass strikes again.”

“You were upset.”

“My mom… she wasn’t real emotional, y’know? Some f*cked-up Danish thing. Or maybe it was just her, I dunno. Me and my bro, we had a rough time dealin’ with it. That ain’t an excuse for doin’ what I did, ’course. There’s no excuse for that.”

“Look, Joey” I said. “I know this is a bad time, so don’t answer this if don’t feel like it. But I need to know. When you took my pills, did you really find them in my trailer?”

Joey laughed, which seemed to cause him some pain. “You’re still busting my ass about that?”

“I don’t care if you stole them, Joey. I just need to know.”

“They were right there in my trailer, man,” he said, leaning forward. “I f*ckin’ swear! Look at me: I’m done. Game over. Why would I lie to you about that now? They were in the bathroom, on the countertop. When I saw ’em, I was all alone, with the door f*ckin’ closed. I spent thirty goddamn years on those pills, and another ten getting off ’em. I thought I was hallucinating. I thought the devil himself had come along to tempt me. And I failed, Bill, I failed the test. But I swear to you, they were in my trailer. So either you left ’em, or some a*shole put ’em there.”

I believed him. As much as I felt like a sucker—never trust an addict—I really believed him.

“Now let me ask you something, Bungalow Bill,” said Joey, his voice strengthening. “Why are you even doing this job? I mean, you asked me if I cared about Project Icon the other night. But what about you, huh? You act like you’re too cool for school half the time, like none of this means a goddamn thing.”

No one had ever asked me this before. Not directly, anyway. I’d certainly never had to explain it out loud. “Before my dad died,” I began, aware how deluded I was going to sound, “he told me to do what I love. And what I love is… I love to write, Joey. But the problem is, no one’s going to pay me to write a novel when I’ve never been published before. So I need to save up some money, take some time off, and…”—I gave him the spiel about Brock, Hawaii, the whole master plan—“… and that’s why I took this job. I never even wanted to work in TV. It just came up. Len called me and it seemed like a good idea—”

“What did your old man do?”

“He played the trumpet.”

“He made a living doing that?”

“Barely. He played in a wedding band.”

“So he did what he loved, and he made a paycheck.”

“Yeah.”

“Listen to me, Bungalow Bill. Your daddy was right: You should do what you love. But here’s what he didn’t tell ya: You’ve also gotta find a way to love what you do. I bet you any money you like, your old man never dreamed of working his ass off—playing two gigs a night, probably—in a f*ckin’ wedding band. I know trumpet players, man: They all wanna be the next Miles f*ckin’ Davis. That’s why most of ’em end up drunks or junkies. Either that, or they give up altogether and go kill their souls in an office somewhere. But not your daddy. No, he found a way to love what he HAD to do to pay the rent. Life ain’t perfect, Bill. It’s easy to complain about the job you’ve got, how it ain’t exactly what you want, and this, that, and the other. I used to hear that bullshit from Blade all the time. ‘Why are we playin’ this shitty little club, now that we’re a stadium band? Why are we doin’ this stoopid MTV video, when it should be about the music? Why are we doing that commercial, this book deal, that reality TV show?’ Well, hey, guess what? No one owes you a living. In the entertainment business, you snap your fingers, your audience has moved on, you’ve spent your money, and you’re back home, livin’ with your mom. So you wanna be a writer? Why the F*ck do you need a year on a beach with Mr. Hawaii to do that, man? You’re already a writer: You ghostwrite for the contestants, dontcha? It ain’t War and Peace—I’ll grant you that—but everyone’s gotta start somewhere.”

I’d never thought about my job that way before. But it was true—I did ghostwrite for the contestants. I wrote those cheesy backstories to the songs they chose every week.

I remembered now what Dad had told me about his old band, Baja Babylonia: Stevie on bass, Jimbo on keys, Fitz on drums. They’d recorded this jazz album—three tracks, each lasting twenty minutes or so—and it had been reviewed by one of the underground listings magazines. A huge deal, in those days. All of a sudden, celebrities were turning up to their gigs. Within a month, they’d been picked up by the same label the Mahavishnu Orchestra were on. And a month after that, they’d been dumped. The album sold a few dozen copies. Stevie, Jimbo, and Fitz couldn’t take it. For them, it was a record deal or nothing. For Dad… well, he loved the trumpet too much to give up. That’s when he joined the wedding band, and gave music lessons at Babylon High when he wasn’t touring. He’d always hoped for another break. But he still got to do what he loved for a living.

“I just wish I didn’t feel like we were taking advantage of the contestants so much,” I said. “I mean, that whole thing with Mia’s dress. And have you ever seen the contracts that Two Svens makes them sign? They don’t even get paid.”

“Oh, honey,” said Joey, as though my ignorance were endearing. “You ever heard of Brian Epstein?”

“Of course. The Beatles’ manager.”

“That’s right. And d’you know what Epstein told Ed Sullivan when he offered the Fab Four a mountain of f*ckin’ cash to come on his show in sixty-four?”

“It wasn’t enough?”

“Try again.”

“I’ve no idea.”

“He didn’t want the money.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Swear to God, look it up on Googlepedia. Ed Sullivan was offerin’ a one-shot deal: one night, three songs, big f*ckin’ payday. Same thing he’d given Elvis a few years earlier. But Epstein didn’t give a shit about the money. He didn’t want a one-shot deal—he wanted The Beatles on the show three times in a row, top billing each time And for that, he was happy to take almost nothin’ at all. The Ed Sullivan Show was a national ad campaign, as far as Brian Epstein was concerned.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“You’re ten years old, how could you? The point being: Brian Epstein was a smart motherf*cker. The Beatles were lucky to have him. Just like those contestants are lucky to have Two Svens. If the greatest band in history was happy to give up a payday to get on prime-time TV, then why can’t those kids do the same? Trust me—for the ones with the talent, who can work hard and take the pressure—it’s the best deal they’ll ever make. And before you tell me The Ed Sullivan Show was cooler beans than Project Icon, think again, man. Ed Sullivan was a Grade A f*ckin’ cheeseball. He had ventriloquists’ dummies and tapdancing farm animals and shit on his show. He damn near ruined the Beatles, too. Go watch the tape. He had ’em do a cover of a show tune—and when John Lennon opened his mouth to sing, he put a caption up that said, ‘Sorry, girls, he’s married.’ Project Icon is like Shakespeare compared with that goddamn corny bullshit.”

Joey slumped back on his pillows. The speech had left him exhausted. Then he leaned forward again. “Tell you what, Bill,” he said. “If you wanna write so bad—why don’t you write some lines for me in your spare time? I’m sick of that f*ckhead Tad Dunkel putting words in Ghetto Barbie’s mouth. I’ll pay you. Whatever Len has got you on right now, I’ll give you the same. Double your salary.”

I thought I must have misheard. “You mean—”

“A payin’ gig. Ain’t that what all writers want?”

For the first time in what felt like months, I smiled—a real smile, the kind that just arrives on your face, without thought or planning, requiring the use of unfamiliar muscles and sinew. When Joey saw it, he couldn’t help but do the same.

“If you suck, though, your ass is fired,” he added quickly.

“Okay,” I agreed, still unable to stop myself grinning. “It’s a deal. Thank you, Joey. Thank you.”

So that was it: my future decided.

As long as Project Icon remained on the air, which now seemed more likely than not thanks to Sir Harold’s bingo problem, I had finally done it; I had become a writer.

Okay, so it wasn’t precisely the way I had expected my career to turn out. But it was a start. And in terms of subject matter, what could possibly beat The King of Sing, the Devil of Treble, the Holy Cow of Big Wow? Not much. Not much at all. I was delighted—and I guess relieved. Not just because of the extra money (which would solve a number of increasingly pressing financial issues), but also because it gave me a legitimate excuse to turn down Nigel Crowther’s two hundred thousand dollars a year. It also meant that I could see Project Icon through until at least the end of season thirteen, and as horrifically dysfunctional as my colleagues at Greenlit Studios might have been, I’d become fond of many of them: Mitch and Joey, Mu and Sue, the crew guys I went drinking with every so often (all right, a lot). Even Nico DeLuca, the strange-voiced barista, who’d started to leave freshly brewed americanos inside my cubicle at Greenlit Studios every morning, thus sparing me from the green room’s 1998-vintage jar of instant coffee. And Len? Sure, he was an a*shole, and yet… no, actually, he was just an a*shole. But that didn’t stop me from feeling a certain loyalty to him.

Then I remembered something.

Oh, crap, how could I have forgotten? I looked at the time on my phone. Nigel Crowther’s deadline had passed, but another was approaching. “Joey,” I said, urgently. “Your pee test.”

“Huh?” he replied, sounding bored.

“Your pee test. It’s due back from the lab this morning.”

“Oh.”

“Joey, you took my pills. You took the whole bottle. That stuff doesn’t leave your system for months. You’re going to fail. What are you gonna tell Len? He doesn’t even know you’re here, does he? And what if ShowBiz—”

“Will you relax already?” said Joey. “First of all, Len will never know. Doc says I can leave here after lunch, before rehearsal. And the pee test? Seriously, man, not a problem. All you’ve got to worry about is getting on the phone to Brick or Brack, or whatever the f*ck your invisible boyfriend is called, and tell him your plans have changed, and that he needs to get his ass over to LAX. And don’t be surprised if he pulls some bullshit excuse. In fact, if he ain’t already boning some hula-skirted surf princess with a snatch as tight as a bee’s f*ckin’ a*shole, I’ll eat my own underwear. No offence. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna watch some TV here and play a game of five-knuckle shuffle under the covers. You’re welcome to stay for the main event—but if I were you, I’d go make that call.”

With that, Joey waved a remote at the TV, and the screen lit up like the scoreboard at the Super Bowl. It was tuned to one of the local Rabbit channels; the kind that employ young and invariably blonde female anchors to wear lipstick and strapless dresses while reading the news at ten a.m. Just what Joey needed.

I grabbed my jacket and got up to leave.

“See you later, Joey,” I said. “Enjoy the ‘news.’”

I was halfway to the door when I heard the smash and clatter. Joey’s breakfast tray had slid off the bed, creating a slick of coffee and orange juice under my feet. A muffin rolled in the direction of BLT, who seemed baffled and yet duly grateful for this unrequested gift from above. When I looked over at Joey, he had the remains of an omelet in his lap and was half out of bed, pointing dementedly.

It was the TV.

The local Rabbit channel was showing live news footage from a helicopter. The camera was pointed at the side of a high-rise building somewhere—but the image wasn’t quite in focus. Then it zoomed slightly, and the clarity improved. Through the window—which must have spanned thirty or forty feet—it was now possible to make out the interior of some kind of upscale condominium. In the center of the main room was a huge bed, surrounded by wheeled cabinets of some kind, and a figure sitting up on the mattress, arms outretched. Behind him was another figure, near the door. She had… red hair and looked…

Oh, Jesus, we were on TV.

Joey was now stabbing furiously at the remote, trying to raise the volume.

“… infamously described as ‘Joey Dumbass’ by President Reagan for his parachute-less jump over Manhattan…”

Every phone in the room began to ring. I didn’t know which one to answer first, so I just stood there, uselessly, watching myself stand there, uselessly, on the giant screen.

“… troubled history of extreme behavior, resulting in a decade-long visit to the Betty Ford…”

Joey was out of bed now, heading for the window. His robe had fallen away, leaving him completely naked—a vision of ruined human anatomy, like one of those cautionary photographs they put on cigarette packs in Europe and South America. Someone had started to bang on the door while at the same time holding down the buzzer. The phones were still ringing.

So much noise.

But I couldn’t move.

“… and comes just as Project Icon has finally seen the first sign of a turnaround in its ratings, after seeming for months to face certain cancellation. A spokesman for Mr. Lovecraft could not be reached for comment at this hour, although Honeyload bandmate Blade Morgan has taken to Twitter this morning, saying this doesn’t come as a…”

The news had now cut to a three-way shot. On the left: the anchor, all tight leather and gold jewelry, still talking. Below her, a scrolling caption: “SHOWBIZ WEBSITE CLAIMS ICON JUDGE HOSPITALIZED—FANS AND COLLEAGUES FEAR DEADLY OVERDOSE. STATEMENT IMMINENT.” And to the right, the feed from the helicopter—which, if you looked carefully enough, displayed the outline of a sixty-two-year-old man, unclothed and in an unambiguous state of sexual arousal, screaming from behind tinted glass.