Elimination Night

3

Sanity Check



THINGS WERE PRETTY desperate at Project Icon after Nigel Crowther left. I mean, by most accounts, season twelve had been our worst ever. This was of course thanks largely to Crowther, who—in a blatant act of sabotage—had repeatedly told the audience to vote for Ernie Bucket, a cross-eyed Wisconsin tractor salesman with horrific facial warts and a single octave range (his debut album, Ain’t Pretty, But Sure Can Sing, would go on to sell a hundred and twenty copies, mostly in the greater Milwaukee area). Predictions of our cancellation were all over the Internet, and the crew’s morale was so low, I saw people—okay, one person—weeping at their desks.

As for me: Every morning, I woke up with a new plan to get on a plane to Honolulu.

That wasn’t an option, of course. Not if I wanted enough money in the bank to take a year off and finish my Novel of Immense Profundity. In fact, I was starting to wonder if a year would be enough, given the lack of recent progress.

So far, this was all I had written:

The old man’s knobbled, weary arms pulled at the oars, as a lashing rain drenched his robes. With each hellish clap of thunder, he thought of what his grandfather had told him when he was a boy: “Let ye be warned, my child! Never go out on the Black Lake of Sorrow when the shutters of the Old House are closed!”

It was epic, for sure. And it spanned generations. (I was quite proud of the grandfather character.) But as you’d expect at such a preliminary stage of the creative process, a number of plot issues remained. Such as: Who the hell was this knobbled, weary old man? Why was he wearing a robe? What was he doing on a boat, on a lake? Where was the lake? Why hadn’t he used a more convenient mode of transportation? Was the name “Black Lake of Sorrow” a little overwrought? (I’d already toned it down from the “Black Lake of Doom.”) And how could the shutters of the Old House possibly have any effect on the local sailing conditions?

Still, I was confident the answers to all these questions would come—along with the rest of the chapter and the remaining twenty-nine other chapters I planned to write—just as soon as I got to Honolulu. All I had to do was keep my job at Project Icon for a few more months, so I could afford the ticket to get there.

It was tough in LA without Brock, though. I missed his stupid jokes, his refusal to think about anything too deeply. “He lightens you up,” as Mom once said. “You need that, dear. Especially after what you’ve been through with your father.”

In fact, Brock and I wouldn’t have started dating if it hadn’t been for Dad’s funeral: He just happened to be working behind the bar at Billy McQuiffy’s when we all piled in there after the service. (It’s a King family traditional to get drunk after—or during—most significant occasions.) I already knew Brock Spencer Daniels from Babylon High, of course. He’d practically been a celebrity when I was there: too slight for football, but a huge track and field star. Oh, and his girlfriend was Jenny Baker—who kept having to take days off for modeling shoots in Manhattan. Brock and Jenny were a couple of such impossible glamour, kids had posters of them pinned up on their bedroom walls.

Brock lost his way after senior year, though. He got into college—an athletic scholarship—but dropped out for some vague reason after a few months. Then Jenny dumped him for a police officer: a female police officer. He’d been in limbo ever since. Working for his dad during the week. Chasing waves in Montauk at the weekend. His plan, he told me, was to make surfing a career. He’d already won a few championships, and his next goal was to get an endorsement deal. That’s why he wanted to go to Hawaii, where most of the board makers were based.

When I saw Brock that afternoon in Billy McQuiffy’s, he was just as absurdly handsome as I remembered. Same shaggy dark hair. Same outdoorsy tan. Same blue-gray eyes. I wasn’t exactly in the mood for romance after the funeral, of course. And maybe Brock wasn’t interested, either. But he did make the first move.

“Hey, wanna go skydiving tomorrow?” he asked, pouring my fourth refill. (By then we’d already been through the don’t-I-know-you-from-somewhere conversation, which basically established that no, he didn’t remember me at all.)

“Skydiving?”

“I’m going with Pete Mitchell,” Brock elaborated. “You remember Pete, doncha?”

“Crazy Pete who got a pencil sharpener stuck up his nose in seventh grade?”

“Yeah, Crazy Pete. A buddy of his has got a jump school down near the Keys. He’s offered us some free rides, as long as we gas up the plane ourselves.”

“Wow, Florida,” I said, now even more surprised by the invitation. “How are you getting there?”

“My mom’s SUV.”

“Where are you staying?”

“My mom’s SUV.”

I laughed. “Thanks for the offer, Brock. I’d really love to. But I’m not going to be much fun. I’m going to be the opposite of fun, actually. Now isn’t a good time.”

“You kidding me?” said Brock. “The day after your dad’s funeral is the best time.”

Brock was right: I needed a distraction. And as I found out when we got to Florida, it was impossible to think about Dad—anything, really—while falling from a plane at 115 mph. Especially given that I was strapped to a man named Crazy Pete.

Nothing happened between Brock and me on that trip, I should add. Nothing physical, anyway. But when we went back to the Keys a few weeks later—this time, no Pete—we got through two bottles of wine on the first night and woke up in an embrace so close, it took a day for the circulation to return to my left arm.

All that was two years ago—and we barely spent a day apart until I left for LA.

Being separated from Brock wasn’t the only difficult thing about living out West, of course: I was also broke—a result of trying to put at least half of every paycheck into my Hawaii fund. Hence my crappy Little Russia basement apartment, which received precisely three minutes of sunlight a day through its single half-pane window, and the fact that I commuted to work on a sit-up-and-beg bicycle, which had somehow become stuck permanently in seventh gear.

“I don’t get it, Meess Sasha,” as my Siberian super kept telling me. “You say you work with all these superstar people, but you live here. This place is total sheethole. I give you job cleaning toilets, and you afford nicer place. It crazy situation, Meess Sasha. You beautiful redheaded woman, even though you’re pale as a ghost and dress like old man. Why not you find some rich celebrity boytoy, so you can have sweeming pool?”

“Actually, I’ve got a boyfriend,” I protested.

“He invisible?”

“No, he lives in Hawaii. I’m moving out there to be with him next summer.”

“Like I said: Invisible. Why not you try eCupidMatch.com? I help you write profile.”

“I’ve gotta go, Mr. Zglagovvcini.”

“On rusty bicycle? You madwoman! Why not you buy a car?”

“Because I’m saving money.”

“Life too short to be so tight in the ass, Meess Sasha. You young. You should leeve a little.”

Mr. Zglagovvcini went on like this pretty much every day—or at least until things got so crazy at work, I was getting home at one in the morning, only to leave again at dawn, when he was safely in bed and snoring with enough force to make the pipes in my bathroom vibrate.

I suppose it should have come as a relief to avoid his nagging.

And yet… I kind of missed it.

So: the first of the potential Crowther replacements to come in for an interview was none other than Joey Lovecraft. Yeah, that Joey Lovecraft. Not that Len allowed us to use the word “interview,” of course. God, no. Officially, it was a “strategy session.” In reality… it was neither of those things. It was a sanity check. Joey Lovecraft had a reputation, after all. And Sir Harold had already made it clear he didn’t think Joey was mentally fit for the job—any job, not least as a celebrity judge on the world’s most-watched TV show. (Given the recent YouTube clip of his “accident” in Houston—for God’s sake don’t Google on a full stomach—there wasn’t much point in arguing.)

Nevertheless, the executives at Rabbit were convinced Joey could be managed. It was just going to take a little patience. That, and a fulltime squad of Joey-minders.

Actually, the fact that Joey had been given any kind of meeting at all was pretty incredible. After all, when news first broke about Nigel Crowther leaving Icon, Len’s cell phone turned so hot—1,438 missed calls in ten minutes—it literally began to melt. Every agent in Hollywood wanted to set up a meet and greet for their client. And it wasn’t just the reality TV crowd who wanted in: It was some of the most famous people alive—people whose names come above Coca-Cola in global brand surveys. Did any of them give a crap about “finding the next Elvis” or whatever bullshit their reps came up with to explain their sudden interest in a singing competition? No. What they cared about—what they really cared about—was the Triple Oprah.

Joey was different, though. He didn’t need the money. Maybe that’s why Rabbit wanted him so bad, regardless of Sir Harold’s very public misgivings.

Clearly, the job of vetting judges couldn’t be done at Greenlit Studios: It was June, so the set was being dismantled, and we were getting ready to move out until the following year, when the live shows of season thirteen would begin. The meetings also couldn’t be held at the offices of Two Svens’ company, Zero Management, because the enormous Swede was still crippled with rage over the whole Talent Machine situation—that, and the hour-long “farewell ceremony” Nigel Crowther had bullied Rabbit into staging for him during Icon’s season twelve finale. In terms of pomp, the latter had been pitched somewhere between a papal death and the Beijing Olympics—and Crowther’s fellow judges had to sit there for the duration, grinning and clapping, in the full knowledge that he was single-handedly responsible for getting them all fired. (Apart from JD Coolz, that is—but he didn’t know it at the time.)

Hence Joey was told to go to The Lot, the walled minitropolis out in the San Fernando Valley where Rabbit Studios makes its movies and respectable, scripted TV shows. More specifically, he was booked to sit down with Ed “Big Guy” Rossitto, president of Rabbit’s Mainstream Entertainment division, whose office is located about a half-mile north of the twin golden bunnies that sit atop The Lot’s entrance on Sir Harold Killoch Drive. Len was also asked to come along—or maybe he invited himself, hard to tell—which meant I also needed to be there for moral support. Or to “look smart and f*ckable” as Len put it helpfully, with a disapproving nod at my comfort-focused getup of jeans, hiking sneakers, and a pizza-stained halter top. (Note to self, I thought: wear pants.)

In truth, I was glad to at least be a part of the hiring process—even though my stomach had second thoughts when the morning of the interview finally came around. It took three green pills to halt the resulting panic attack before I climbed into the back of Len’s dark green chauffeured Jaguar.

Then off we went. No turning back.

Rossitto’s office turned out to be on the top floor of a tinted-glass tower overlooking an immaculate bunny-shaped lake.

At least the view would be good from up there, I told myself.

Boy, was I wrong.

We stepped out of the private, leather-upholstered elevator into darkness. Rugs and sheets hung over the windows. Incense sticks burned. Beyond the long, oak table for Rossitto’s assistants was an inner lair, in which a grand piano stood next to a suit of armor, under an oil painting of some beardy guy from the Revolutionary War. We were shown to an ancient chesterfield in the far corner and invited to sit. Rossitto would be here in a minute, we were told, after he’d finished doing something else (something more important, being the hint). I’d been to enough Hollywood meetings to know the drill: He’d “arrive” seconds after Joey walked in the door—“Perfect timing!”—all man hugs and buddy slams.

“So, what d’you know about Joey Lovecraft?” Len semiwhispered, as we sat there in Rossitto’s penthouse batcave, our eyes aching as they adjusted to the half-light.

“Oh, y’know… the headlines.”

In fact, I had a binder of research in front of me. I’d spent most of the previous night reading it—even though it wasn’t exactly necessary. I mean, this was Joey Lovecraft we were talking about. His life story had been turned into five movies. His leather pants had been sent into orbit aboard Apollo 16. He’d even been mentioned in a Rose Garden speech. (“Joey Dumbass,” President Reagan had called him.)

“Coffee?” interrupted an assistant.

“Water,” countered Len. “Not tap.”

“Black, four sugars, please,” I said.

Len looked at me with disgust. Then, when the assistant had left the room, he said, “Go on then.”

“Huh?”

“Jesus Christ, Bill. Give me the bloody headlines.”

For a moment I thought this must be some kind of test. But then I realized: Len was too old for Joey’s music. He must have been born in the late thirties, before the Second World War. Meaning he would have spent his later teenage years listening to Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, not the Rolling Stones and Honeyload. Or maybe Len was even older than that: a Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra guy. Looking at him in that unflattering gloom, it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that Leonard Braithwaite predated the twentieth century altogether.

“Okay, the headlines,” I said, glancing around to make sure no one was listening.

Then I recited from memory: “Joey Lovecraft, the world’s least boring Canadian, and lead singer of hard rock band Honeyload, until their latest break-up, anyway… one half of the so-called Devil’s Duo with his childhood best friend and Honeyload lead guitarist Blade Morgan… survivor of drunken parachute jump from a small aircraft over Manhattan without a parachute… longest-ever resident of the Betty Ford Center… he was there for every single day of the nineties, apart from the forty-eight hours when he attempted to murder the president of BeeBop Records… seven-times divorced, his last wife being the eighteen-year-old Pacific Island Princess Aleeya Khootna-Nmubbi… honorary doctor of chemistry at the University of Toronto… creator of his own strain of LSD… unbearable perfectionist… author of My Fifty-Year Hangover: Worth Every Shot… and of course defendant in that lawsuit a few years back about touring contracts, in particular a rider stipulating that after every show, a naked transsexual must prepare roast beef sandwiches for the band and its groupies, with the beef never to exceed a thickness of one-eighth of an inch. It’s said Joey carries a ruler with him at all times to enforce this.”

“Ah yes,” said Len, wistfully. “I remember the beef. Anything else I should know?”

“That’s about it, really.”

Actually, I could have gone on for another hour or so, but I didn’t want to come across as a fan. It’s not cool, being a fan, when you work with celebrities. I mean, yes, you say, “I’m a fan,” to every one of them you meet. But you don’t actually mean it, because if you did, no one would trust you. Fans are civilians. And as such they are a liability.

In Joey’s case, however, I am indeed a genuine fan. Somewhere in my old bedroom closet at Mom’s house, I even have a collection of Honeyload T-shirts, each featuring the band’s logo of a gleaming silver tool: wrench head at one end, penis head at the other—the latter glowing red and orange, as if reentering Earth’s atmosphere at a great speed (while firing sperm-shaped bullets). In fact, I can still remember the very first time I ever heard Joey’s voice on a warped cassette that I’d liberated from Mom’s old boom box in the attic. I was seven years old. The song was from some bootlegged gig that Honeyload had played in Wichita Falls, back during the last days of legal acid and curable STDs. It was his tone, more than anything, that I fell in love with: like three singers in one, each slightly above or below the key, combining to form this aching, ragged noise that could jump between five or six octaves without ever losing power—a voice so clear, it sounded as though it had been recorded and mixed inside the singer’s lungs.

Lucky for me, Honeyload had its first big comeback a few years after I discovered them. In fact, Joey was as big a star when I graduated from Babylon High as he’d been when Mom had done the same thing twenty years earlier. I remember him pouting down from my bedroom wall: shirt open, legs astride, flower protruding from between those enormous, never-quite-settled lips. To me, Joey was—will always be—The King of Sing, The Devil of Treble, The Holy Cow of Big Wow, and yes, The Wizz o’ Jizz, as he’d so infamously christened himself during that 1998 Hellraiser magazine interview. (During the fifteen-page Q&A—no longer available online for legal reasons—Joey declared that he had never counted his conquests: “I only count the number of times they scream, man.” He went on to claim responsibility for 1,028,981 female orgasms since Honeyload’s first record deal.)

“So tell me something, Bill,” asked Len. “If everything you say is true, why in God’s name does a man like Joey Lovecraft need a show like Project Icon?”

I thought about this for a moment.

“He doesn’t,” I concluded.

Len gave a condescending snort. “Oh, c’mon,” he said. “Even you know better than that.”

“I mean, he doesn’t need the money,” I clarified. “Honeyload sells ten million albums a year from its back catalog. And Joey does a lot of stuff on the side. His venture capital group just invented a marijuana-infused soft drink that’s legal in twenty-three states. It’s going to IPO next month.”

“Nevertheless,” said Len, impatiently. “There’s a reason he’s coming here today.”

Before I could answer, I felt a vibration near my waist. Instinctively, I reached for my phone.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” declared Len, with as much sarcasm as he could manage. “I didn’t realize I was disturbing you. Would you like me to leave the room while you take that? Would you like me to tell Joey to come back another day?”

“I thought it was off,” I protested, glancing at the screen while reaching for the power switch. A flurry of text messages had just arrived—all from a number I wouldn’t have recognized, had I not programmed it into my address book a few hours earlier when the faucet in my apartment began delivering raw sewage instead of hot water. “Mr. Z,” was how it came up.

I couldn’t resist reading:

QUESTION FOR YOU, MEESS SASHA

WEBSITE NEED TO KNOW

ARE SUPER-LOGICAL GUYS ARE A TURN-ON?

OR YOU PREFER EXCITEMENT?

PLS ANSWER

PS: I FIX THE SHIT IN YOUR BATHTUB

I closed my eyes and shook my head. Mr. Zglagovvcini and I needed to have a very long talk.

“Is somebody dying?” asked Len.

“No,” I replied, finally shutting down the phone. “It’s nothing. Spam. Won’t happen again.”

“Good. Now tell me what Joey Lovecraft wants out of this deal. And hurry. He’ll be here any minute, swinging that giant dick of his everywhere.”