Elimination Night

6

Sanity Check: The Sequel



I STOOD OUTSIDE JOEY’S dressing room in a hot panic. The run-through was so far behind schedule now, there was no conceivable way that the press conference could start on time.

This was ridiculous.

How the hell could I… lose the judges? They had to be around here somewhere. “Think, Sash, think!” I said to myself. But I could think of only one thing: Len’s face when he realized the biggest news event in Project Icon’s history would have to be delayed because his assistant producer couldn’t find the panel.

With no better ideas, I checked the catering area, the conference facility, the public bathrooms, the hallway that led to the parking lot, and then—in rising desperation—the janitor’s storage closet. (You never know with Joey Lovecraft.) All empty. Shit. So I returned to the backstage lounge area, where a couple of crew members in black T-shirts were standing around, looking confused.

“Hey—shouldn’t this thing have started by now?” asked one of them, in an accusatory tone.

I offered him my very best shut-the-f*ck-up face.

He was right, of course: The judges should have been on stage two minutes ago. A few more minutes’ delay wouldn’t be so bad, I kept telling myself. Even ten minutes—well, we could just about pull that off. Any longer, however, and we’d be charged an extra half-day for the venue and crew—not to mention all that wasted bandwidth for the live streaming—which would put us into overtime rates. It could add up to a few hundred thousand dollars, easy. Len had already been hospitalized twice since returning to Icon, due to a peptic ulcer and a burst appendix. A bill of that size could send him right back to the ER again.

Come to think of it, though… why hadn’t Len called me already? It wasn’t like him. Under normal circumstances, he would have threatened me with some kind of medieval torture at least three times by now. Unless… oh God, please no… unless he was already front of house with Sir Harold, waiting—and waiting—for “The Reveal” to begin. I could just picture him now: cheeks ablaze, nostrils flaring, the Merm quivering with fury. And in his eyes, two words, written in flames:

KILL BILL.

Sir Harold had blown twenty million dollars on the new Project Icon panel—and it all came down to this moment. Indeed, Big Corp’s newlyissued “earnings guidance” for the next year depended heavily on Joey and Bibi (even JD Coolz, I suppose) keeping the show viable for one last season. Sir Harold had granted an interview to the Monster Cash Financial Network that very morning on the subject—I’d watched it with Mitch and a few others in the Roundhouse’s canteen. Jesus, what a disaster. The anchor had started out with a long, ass-kissy intro about Sir Harold’s upbringing in South Africa—all that stuff about his English merchant-banker father and Nguni housemaid mother, the national scandal of their marriage, and how the young Harry had literally inherited a gold mine at age seventeen, fought the apartheidera government to hold on to it, then used the profits to build the world’s largest media empire. Standard life story, basically. And then, just as Sir Harold was beginning to relax—or grow bored (hard to tell the difference)—out came the Gotcha Question: “Wouldn’t you agree, Sir Harold: Project Icon without Nigel Crowther is a zombie franchise, with only three ways to go—down, down, and down.”

The anchor’s smug attempt at humor was a bad idea. The mogul’s great face trembled. His sun-spotted lips gathered into a sneer. Then he slapped down his hand with such force on the coffee table in front of him, it made the TV camera shake. For a few seconds, the studio looked like the deck of the Starship Enterprise under Klingon attack.

“Let me tell you something, boy,” Sir Harold rumbled, adjusting his steel-rimmed glasses. “We could lose HALF our audience, and we’d still be number one. And who do you think owns The Talent Machine, eh? WE DO. So when it goes live next fall, we’ll have ANOTHER number one show. Big Corp is always number one!”

The interview was over at that point. The anchor tried to ask a follow-up question about the German televised bingo market—apparently there’d been some major development over there recently—but Sir Harold stood up, unhooked the microphone from his ten thousand dollar suit, and peered directly into the camera, until the Big Corp CEO’s unmistakable turret of white-silver hair filled the frame.

“Number one!” he reiterated, poking a bony finger into the lens. And with that, he shuffled off the set.

Sir Harold’s confidence in Project Icon should have been reassuring, I suppose. But from what I’d seen over the last few months, it was practically a miracle that season thirteen had even gotten this far. And no matter how much money Sir Harold still hoped to wring out of the franchise, no one doubted for a second that he would pull us off the air if the ratings didn’t hold up. One f*ck-up, that’s pretty much all it would take. One f*ck-up, and the world’s most popular TV show—a format that ShowBiz magazine once said had “revolutionized prime time, creating an entirely new genre of programming in its wake”—would be gone, never to return. Hence, it was of such vital importance that this morning’s press conference go flawlessly, with no delays, budget overruns, or—God forbid—missing judges.

Yeah, it was all working out just perfectly.

There was nothing left for me to do. I had to call Len.

Oh, wow, this was going to be ugly. “Oh, er, hi there, Len. No biggie—but you know how we were due to start fifteen minutes ago? And how the future of an entire billion dollar TV franchise depends on all this whole press conference thing going smoothly? Well, about that… Oh, Sir Harold’s sitting next to you? Cool. Anyway, uh, just wanted to let you know: I’ve been running up and down hallways for, oh, at least twenty minutes now, and I can’t seem to find the people we paid twenty million dollars to be here today.”

At least it wouldn’t the first time the new judges had caused us any problems, I reassured myself. I mean, the entire hiring process had been one bang-your-skull-against-a-rock moment after another, each more outrageous—and exhausting—than the last.

And to think how straightforward everything had seemed when Rabbit first made the decision—after an eight-hour board meeting on The Lot—that Joey and Bibi were the only candidates famous and qualified enough to make up for the loss of Nigel Crowther. Ed made Bibi an offer that very same day, in fact. (By then, she’d reconciled with Teddy, who’d issued a statement to the press, saying, “It is a measure of Bibi’s extraordinary humanity that she has offered me a second chance—I pledge to work tirelessly to help my client achieve her career goals of a billion record sales and the eradication of hate.”) As for Joey: although Ed had found him to be “functionally stable” after his emotional monologue under the piano, Rabbit wanted to bring him in once more, just to make absolutely sure. So a week later, back to the batcave we went, for Sanity Check: The Sequel, as Joey himself described it. This time, there were two other executives in the room: Ed’s boss, David Gent—another Brit, and so close to Killoch, he doesn’t need a title—plus the gargoylesque, three-pack-a-day smoker Maria Herman-Bloch, CEO of Invasion Media, the production company that handles studio rental, crew logistics, and other tedious backstage aspects of the show.

“Make no mistake,” Len warned everyone beforehand. “Gent can take a shit on Sir Harold’s behalf. And chances are, that shit will land on one of our heads.”

We all knew from reading ShowBiz that Gent’s real job was to find a replacement for Icon—and that he’d personally signed off on Crowther’s deal for The Talent Machine. So it was hard to know what to expect. If Gent loved Joey, would he steal him for Crowther? And what if he thought he was a liability? Would he let us hire him anyway, so the show could go out in a bonfire of its own negative PR?

No one knew.

The meeting began calmly enough. Joey turned up on time—in lederhosen and moon boots—and leaned down to greet Ed like one of his oldest friends. As for Gent, he seemed like an okay guy. I knew from his bio that he was ex-military (wing commander, Royal Air Force), but he was making an effort to disguise it, what with his herringbone shirt, navy blazer, and wispy brown college-professor hair. In fact, it was hard to believe this was a man who had penetrated the very highest levels of Big Corp and had a policy of automatically demoting employees if they asked for business cards—titles being a sign of complacency and (a far more serious offence at Big Corp) “box-inward thinking.”

“So, Joey, tell me: Why do you think you can do this job?” was his opening question, after a round of handshakes. “You’ve never even watched our show, have you?”

In an instant, the temperature of the room seemed to drop ten degrees. I swear Mitch groaned.

“It’s true… I’ve never seen it,” Joey answered. “But, y’know, I’ve heard about it plenty.”

A seriousness had descended over Joey’s face that I’d never seen before. There was also a tone in his voice I didn’t recognize. Not so much anger. More like petulance.

“I’ve heard that your ratings have been falling by ten percent a year,” he went on. “And I’ve heard that you made a giant f*ck-up with your panel last season, ’cause you hired a chick who can tell you how to bake a cake”—he was almost yelling now—“but can’t tell the Rolling Stones from her FAT TALK SHOW HOST ASS.”

“Easy, Joey,” urged Mitch.

Joey ignored him.

“I mean, if it were me,” he continued, “and I had a show about MUSIC that made a billion bucks a year, I think I’d be looking to hire someone who knew a little about MUSIC. Maybe someone whose mom was trained at the Royal f*ckin’ Academy, maybe someone who grew up under a grand piano, who plays five instruments, who taught his band everything they know, who can f*ckin’ sing, man. And I mean SING—not blow into a goddamn computer. But what do I know, huh? I’m just a rock star! I’m just someone who’s sold one and a half billion records during my career! But if it were up to me—li’l old me, who doesn’t know shit and belongs in the crazy house—I’d want to give the job to someone who actually KNOWS WHAT THE HELL HE’S TALKING ABOUT.”

Joey sunk back in his chair. He looked spent. The rant had clearly been forming for some time.

Gent was smiling.

“I share your sentiment entirely, Mr. Lovecraft,” he said. “Just so you know: We’re also talking with Ms. Bibi Vasquez. How would you feel about working with her?”

For a moment, Joey looked bewildered—as though he were halfway through a gig and had just realized he was at the wrong venue, in the wrong city, playing with the wrong band. Then he showed the room his magnificent teeth.

“Man,” he said, pointing at Gent and drumming his feet. “You had me there! You had me, man!”

“So what about Bibi?” asked Gent again.

“Bibi?” Joey replied. “Just saw her in a movie. Mitch, what was that thing we saw on the plane?”

“Nannyfornia,” answered Mitch.

“There you have it,” Joey confirmed. “Nannyfornia.”

“And how did you like it?”

“Can I be honest?”

Gent looked surprised. “Of course,” he said.

“As long as I have a face,” said Joey. “Bibi Vasquez will always—always—have a place to sit.”

I thought we might have to call an ambulance for Len, he choked so hard. Mitch studied the carpet. Gent said nothing—he just stood up and offered Joey his hand. Sanity Check: The Sequel was over, and Joey had surely passed. Ignoring Gent’s outstretched arm, he moved in for a hug, only to pull back in frustration: The Brit had tensed instinctively, unused to such man-on-man contact.

“Hey, don’t f*ckin’ hug me like that, man!” Joey scolded, loudly. “Hug me like you hug your wife.”

They tried again.

I couldn’t watch.

So that was that: Bibi and Joey were hired, terms to be agreed on. Which left only JD Coolz, who no one ever doubted would accept whatever scraps were thrown in his direction to stay on the show. “Coolz is well aware that he is the luckiest man alive—or at least the luckiest man to have ever been paid more than a million dollars a year to appear on TV,” as Len once put it, after a record-breaking lunch at Mr. Chang’s that lasted from 10:45 a.m. until early evening. “His talents, such as they are, amount to saying ‘booya-ka-ka!’ a thousand different ways.”

Ed Rossitto hadn’t been much more diplomatic.

“I like to think of Joey as the devil on this new panel,” he told JD, during one of those early batcave sessions. “And Bibi—well, she’s the angel, of course. And you? You’re the American everyman, JD. Fat and ordinary. And I mean that as a compliment.”

Poor old JD. Raised out in Bakersfield, California—a.k.a. The Most Boring City on Earth. White kid, black neighborhood. Subject of ridicule from an early age due to his fondness for the deep-fat fryer. By his twelfth birthday, losing weight meant getting back down to two hundred pounds. But with JD’s size came a certain presence. He moved slow, wore a lot of jewelry, communicated only in fist bumps and monosyllabic slang. On the whole, people found him… reassuring. There was a calmness to JD. A Great Dane–like lovability. And so, when he turned eighteen and moved to LA—after teaching himself how to play bass guitar—he soon became a fixture in the weed-smoking rooms of all the major recording studios. “Oh, that’s JD: He’s cool, man,” went the standard introduction. Which is how Jason Dee, son of a Bakersfield agricultural inspector, became JD Coolz, multiplatinum session player.

If I’d been JD, I would have picked up Rossitto by his tiny legs and dangled him out of the window until he apologized for the “fat and ordinary” comment. But JD is Mr. Nice. He just kept mumbling “yo” and “I get it” before asking plaintively if there was anything he could do to help with the recruitment of Joey. (JD had once toured with Honeyload, in the days before Icon’s success made earning a living from music unnecessary.) The meeting ended with Rabbit offering JD what it described as “a generous offer,” which turned out to mean a fifty percent salary cut. He accepted right there in the room, no complaints.

If only Bibi and Joey’s negotiations had been so easy.

With Bibi, the problem was Teddy. It was simply impossible to communicate with Bibi unless you did so via Teddy, and even then, you could never quite be sure if you were getting through. “It’s like being at a f*cking séance!” I once heard Rossitto yell into his speaker phone. And in spite of Teddy’s claim to have changed his ways since the whole ShowBiz leak debacle, his original sixty million dollar demand for Bibi remained the same—minus the “dressing compound” that had been ridiculed so mercilessly on the late night talk show circuit.

So when Rabbit made its first offer to Bibi—a mere ten million—Teddy’s response was… no response. He just ignored it. It was such a derisory sum, in Teddy’s eyes, that it qualified as no sum at all.

Things didn’t go much better with Joey—but only because he’d already read what Bibi was asking for. “You ever heard the phrase, ‘mostfavored nation’?” he asked Ed during a conference call. (I remember this largely because Joey insisted on the call starting at three a.m., West Coast time, as he’d just flown to Paris to buy shoes.) “International law, guys. United Nations: Look it up in your f*ckin’ dictionaries. Means whatever one cat gets, the other has to get. Not a cent more, not a cent less. I want that in my contract.”

This was in fact impossible, because what Bibi wanted in addition to cash—breast insurance, for example, or the discounted advertising rate for Bibi Beautiful—Joey simply wasn’t equipped to receive. The closest thing he had to a cosmetics company, any company, was a twenty percent share of a Colorado brewery, which had repeatedly offered to buy him out because of “urination issues” during shareholder meetings. While putting together Joey’s offer, Rabbit had also been under the impression that Joey wasn’t interested in the money. “I AIN’T F*ckIN’ INTERESTED IN THE F*ckIN’ MONEY!” as he’d screamed on many occasions. What Joey really wanted, Rabbit thought, was leverage against Honeyload. But things had changed during the week or so between the first sanity check and Rabbit’s offer: Namely, Honeyload had reformed. They still weren’t speaking. They had simply agreed to perform together. None of them had any choice in fact because when Joey had taken out his injunction against the band for allegedly considering Billy Ray Cyrus as his replacement, they countersued, arguing that if Joey was going to prevent their hiring a new singer, then he had to go back on tour immediately to allow them to continue earning a living. That’s what Joey had wanted at the very beginning, of course, but everyone had forgotten about that by then—including Joey.

Fortunately, Mitch was able to remind him before yet another court date was set.

Meanwhile, Honeyload knew nothing about Joey’s interviews for Project Icon (he’d denied all rumors)—and if they had, they would have almost certainly done everything possible to kill the deal. After all, Joey couldn’t exactly appear on a twice-weekly TV show and play a gig with Honeyload in a different city every night. Being a judge on Project Icon would render all his promises about touring meaningless.

The day Rabbit finally approved Joey’s appointment, Honeyload was booked to play a gig at the Freaky-Cola Amphitheater in San Bernardino. I was in the room when Len and Ed tried to make the call to Joey personally, but he was already on the road and wasn’t answering. So instead they called Mitch, who was still in LA. He knew exactly what was coming, of course—thanks to the story that had gone up a few moments earlier on the ShowBiz website:

HOUSTON, WE HAVE AN OFFER!

(A CHAZ CHIPFORD EXCLUSIVE)

BUNNY NET DANGLES FIVE-MILLION-DOLLAR CARROT IN FRONT OF YOUTUBE POOPER’S NOSE —

SEEN AS LEVERAGE, REHABILITATION FOR TROUBLED HONEYLOAD FRONTMAN

“I’m going down to meet Joey at the show tonight—if the rest of the band haven’t killed him before then,” said Mitch. “I’ll see what he thinks of the terms.”

“Great,” Len replied. “Bill will go with you.”

Actually, I was supposed to be having a video chat with Brock at seven o’clock.

Not anymore.

Mitch didn’t put up a fight—which was just as well, otherwise the three-hour Town Car ride that followed might have been a bit awkward. Maybe he wanted the company, I thought. Or a witness, in case things got nasty backstage.

When we finally got to the amphitheater, Blade Morgan was waiting just beyond the crew entrance, looking about as unhappy as it is possible for a human being to look. Holding up his BlackBerry—on which the headline from the ShowBiz website was displayed—he said, “Tell Joey to go f*ck himself up the ass with a razor blade. Actually, don’t: He’d probably enjoy that. Tell him I hope he drops dead, so I can skullf*ck his eye sockets.”

“One word, Blade,” Mitch replied, pushing the screen away from his face. “Franjoopta.”

“That was different,” Blade steamed. “That was f*ckin’ different, you a*shole!”

Mitch just raised his eyebrows and walked away. Franjoopta was of course the worst contestant in Project Icon’s history. Indeed, when he was voted into the season eight finale as a result of an ironic “Save Franjoopta” campaign, the nation was so outraged, questions were raised in Congress. The point being: Franjoopta’s final song on the show (before Sir Harold ordered his elimination “by any means necessary”) was a spectacularly misguided light reggae affair, supposedly based upon The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” And Len, in a desperate effort to add credibility to the proceedings, had invited a “rock ’n’ roll icon” to play George Harrison’s riff as a special guest. Unfortunately for Blade, that icon was him. He’d never heard of Franjoopta. This changed soon enough. The ridicule from Honeyload’s fan base was so overwhelming, he couldn’t go out in public again for a year.

For the next three hours, I sat on a giraffe-skin couch in Joey’s trailer, listening to Mitch being subjected to a meandering, tearful lecture outlining the many, many ways in which he was a failure as a representative, and how, if Joey Lovecraft were a manager—“li’l old me, who doesn’t know shit and belongs in the crazy house”—he would never, ever have allowed his client to be humiliated with such a pathetic, insulting sum as five million dollars. For a moment I wondered if all this were for my benefit: a negotiating tactic. But no. I doubted Joey could remember my name, never mind who I worked for.

“Did you even do any research on these Rabbit clowns?” he asked Mitch, loading up a DVD of an old episode of Cannon Jump. It was a TV show from the eighties about a nine-year-old kid who takes a job as a human cannonball, only to find that every time he gets shot up in the air, he goes back in time. “I mean, hello?” he yelled, waving at the image paused on his giant flatscreen. “The kid. Ring any bells?”

“Not really,” shrugged Mitch.

“Look again.”

Mitch studied the child. There was, in fact, something oddly familiar about the shape of his—

“Holy shit!”

“Yeah,” nodded Joey. “Ed f*ckin’ Rossitto! Guess how old he was when he got this part?”

“Eleven?” guessed Mitch.

“Thirty f*ckin’ three!”

“Wow.”

“You shoulda WARNED me about this guy, man. He’s freakier than a cow who goes ‘quack’! And have you seen the… the shit he put on TV before Icon?” He passed Mitch an entry from Wikipedia that Mu or Sue must have printed out for him earlier.

“When Sharks Eat Babies,” Mitch read.

“Yeah. Dude belongs at a f*ckin’ circus.”

Awkwardly, Mitch then had to reveal that JD Coolz and Maria Herman-Bloch were on their way to that night’s show (Ed couldn’t make it, thank God) to help convince him to sign the contract that Ed had just e-mailed over. “Ain’t nothin’ to discuss,” Joey huffed. After another hour of complaining, he agreed to at least give them both backstage passes, so they could watch from the wings.

It wasn’t until Blade dropped to his knees for the guitar solo in “Hell on Wheels”—while staying within the contractually mandated No Lead Singer Zone drawn around him in chalk—that Joey even acknowledged their presence. He did this by running over to Maria, grabbing her hand, dragging her out on to the stage, and forcing her to dance. When the music stopped, he bent her over backward until she was about to fall. “More, s’il-vous plaît,” he whispered.

It was the last thing he said to anyone all night.

Eventually, revised offers were made to both Bibi and Joey: Twenty million dollars combined. To keep Joey happy, the basic salaries were exactly the same, but Rabbit came up with all kinds of other tricks to guarantee millions of dollars’ worth of publicity for Bibi’s various enterprises. Everything was ready to go.

And then came the weeks and weeks and weeks of arguing over every subclause and footnote, right down to the number of Balance Bars in the minibar of Bibi’s trailer, versus the number of Ghirardelli chocolate squares in Joey’s. Finally, when all this had been agreed in writing—it took July, August, and some of September—Mitch and Teddy were loaned private jets from Big Corp and told to go find Bibi and Joey, wherever they happened to be in the world, and get their signatures within twenty-four hours. But Teddy couldn’t help himself: He leaked a story to ShowBiz bragging of how Bibi had gotten the better deal. Example: She’d been given a dressing room for The Reveal, when Joey had been told to show up “camera ready” with nowhere to sit but the backstage lounge area.

Mitch was so mad, he had to be strapped to a gurney and shot up with Xanax. By the time he’d calmed down, it looked like the whole thing was off. But then Ed got on the phone and convinced Mitch that Teddy had been bullshitting.

All the judges had to turn up camera ready.

“If it makes you feel any better, I’ll give both of ’em both dressing rooms,” he said. “How about that? We’ve got an assistant producer down at The Roundhouse—Len will get you her name—who can sort it out. Tell her exactly what you need.”

Grudgingly, Mitch agreed. It didn’t change the fact that Bibi and Joey wouldn’t actually need the dressing rooms. But it was enough of a symbolic gesture to finally get some ink on the contracts. That’s why I had to spend eight days and fifty thousand dollars making sure every last detail was taken care of, right down to Bibi’s red iPads, which had to be custom-ordered from a store in Hong Kong. It never occurred to me the judges would never even see the result of all this work.

Clearly, when it came to celebrities, I still had a lot to learn.