Elimination Night Read online

  “I’ve got a lock,” I whispered. “Repeat, I’ve got a…”

  “TELL ME WHAT SHE’S LOOKING AT.”

  Bibi cleared her throat to deliver her verdict. Then—as always—she paused.

  That blank stare again.

  Now I was seeing exactly what she was seeing: the contestant trembling on the podium; the vast, glossy billboard of the sponsors’ wall behind him; the dense, tangled thicket of cameras, lights, mic stands, and monitors that loomed to either side; the black-T-shirted crew members, crouched down like me or flattened against the walls. What the hell was she focused on? I adjusted my angle by a tenth of a degree. Another tenth. C’mon, Bill, look. Look harder. There! Was that…? Yes, in the blackness beyond the cameras. Just to the left of the sponsors’ wall. A glint from a pair of eyeglasses. A figure on tiptoe. A man. Standing there, motionless. No… not motionless. Holding something up. He was holding up a—

  “Oh my God,” I said, but I was drowned out by Bibi.

  “It’s a no from me, honey,” she blurted, at last. “I’m sorry. You’re just not ready.”

  “You’ll never believe this,” I hissed into the headset. “Teddy is holding up cue cards.”

  We broke for lunch in an adjoining room, where the hotel staff had set up a temporary canteen. I’d learned the previous day that these lunches were like the first day of high school all over again, with a rigid hierarchy of seating. The popular kids were the judges, who were allocated a table all of their own. Of secondary coolness was the table for Len and his “Lovelies,” which included two blonde Rabbit publicists, and some of the better-looking assistants. Then there were the groupings of assistant producers and the like—i.e., me and my fellow underlings—followed by hair and makeup, lighting and sound, and then the rest of the crew.

  Today, however, was different: Joey, Mitch, and Len were sitting together, and when I walked in the room, they called me over and invited me to join them.

  This can’t be good news, I thought.

  “Before you ask, yes, I’m hungry,” said Joey, by way of explaining the spread in front of him. It included a dozen oysters, half a cheeseburger, some fries, a bento box of sushi, and a whole grilled salmon. At Joey’s table, I soon discovered, there was no menu. You just asked for whatever came to mind when you sat down.

  “Where on earth do you put it all, Joey?” asked Len. “You’ve got a ten-inch waist.”

  “Overactive thyroid,” Joey mumbled, through a mouthful of bun. “Plus ADD. I can eat anything.”

  “Incredible,” Len marveled.

  “You should have seen him on cocaine,” offered Mitch, glumly.

  Joey stood up. “Don’t let them clear this,” he instructed, gesturing to his plate with one hand while using the other to push half a roll of sushi into his still bun-filled mouth. “I’m sooo fuckin’ hungry, man. But I gotta siphon the python. I’ll be right back.”

  With that, he rose from the table and stumbled off in the direction of the bathroom, his twelfth visit of the day. (I knew this because the crew was now keeping an official tally.)

  “That man has the smallest bladder of anyone I’ve ever met,” Len declared. “Can’t you get him a new one, Mitch? We have to stop every three fucking minutes for it.”

  “Ha-ha,” sneered Mitch. “I think you’ve got a more urgent problem to deal with, don’t you?”

  I looked at Len. He took a swig of water. “It’s okay,” he said, when he was done. “Mitch knows.”

  “So what are we going to do?” I asked.

  “We?” said Len, feigning shock. “Shouldn’t the question be ‘what are you going to do?’”

  “Me?”

  “Forgive me,” said Len, in his most condescending tone. “I must have mistaken you for Bibi’s newest little friend. You know, the one she sends for by dispatching the very lovely David in a white Rolls-Royce Phantom to her crappy little apartment in Little Russia. I could have sworn that was you, Bill. Clearly I was wrong.”

  “How did you—”

  “I know everything.”

  “But it wasn’t like that. We’re not fri—”

  “You need to talk to her,” said Len, pointing his fork at me. “I don’t care how you do it, just do it quick. And don’t fucking upset her, okay? But I want Teddy off the set, no excuses, and this bullshit with the cue cards has got to stop. I’ll be amazed if we can use a single contestant from Houston, based on what I saw today. It’s a joke. She’s your mate—have a quiet word. Oh, and this didn’t come from me. If you so much as mention my name, I’ll deny all knowledge. Understood?”

  I stared back at Len numbly. I had no more appetite. I wanted to leave the room and never come back. Before I could mount any kind of protest, however, there was a commotion outside in the lobby. Loud male voices—possibly security guards. Sobbing. A walkie-talkie hissed and crackled. And then one of Len’s Lovelies—a publicist named Dana—entered the room in a state of obvious distress. Flushed from walking at top speed in heels, she made her way directly to our table. Sensing trouble, Len wiped his mouth and began to get to his feet.

  Now I could hear sirens. Distant, but unmistakable.

  Holy sh—

  “It’s Joey,” announced Dana, breathlessly. “We just found him in the bathroom… with, uh…”

  “SHIT!” yelled Mitch, jumping up with enough force to make his chair topple backward. “Did he have the crack pipe? That piece of—I told him, dammit, I told him!”

  “He didn’t have a crack pipe,” said Dana, firmly.

  The sirens were getting closer.

  “Huh?” Mitch looked bewildered.

  Pandemonium in the lobby.

  “It’s worse than that, Mitch,” said Dana.

  The sirens were right outside the hotel now. Car doors slamming. More walkie-talkies.

  “He didn’t have the crack pipe?” Mitch had turned gray. He didn’t understand.

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “He had…”

  “WHAT?”

  “He had Miss Idaho.”

  Mitch doubled over, winded—as though he’d just been punched in the gut—and then tried to make a run for the door. With considerable effort, Len held him back.

  “You mean… the contestant?” I asked. “The girl with the ‘I Da Hoe’ T-shirt?”

  “Well, it turns out she is,” Dana confirmed. “Unfortunately, her dad doesn’t quite see it that way. He says she’s his little angel. There’s… there’s a lot of blood.”

  13

  Coach Andy

  ONE WEEK LATER…

  “How’s he doing?” I asked.

  “Let me tell you something,” Mitch replied, his nose dotted with the foam of a triple-shot cappuccino. “Joey Lovecraft’s moods are like Martian weather. Little understood. Spectacular from afar. And basically unsurvivable by humankind.”

  “Ah.” I tilted my head to catch more of the early afternoon sun. “So not good, then?”

  “I’d say he was a nine today. Borderline ten.”

  I stared blankly across the table.

  “No one told you?” said Mitch, surprised. “We track Joey’s moods with a numbering system. Ten is the worst; one is the best. Mu sends out an e-mail to the staff every morning. Just a number in the subject line—that’s it. She’s never reported a one, as far as I’m aware. If you believe some of the older roadies, he came close during the summer of 1983, before that stupid fucking parachute jump. Typically, though, four is as good as it gets. Five means Mu and Sue go home in tears. Higher than a six, and Joey’s bodyguard has the okay to call his doctor for a medical-marijuana prescription. An eight usually means hospital or incarceration.”

  “And a ten?”

  “Imagine an asteroid the size of Manhattan landing on Manhattan.”

  We were back on The Lot in the San Fernando Valley. Only this time, we hadn’t gone anywhere near Ed Rossitto’s batcave in the sky. Instead we were seated in Rabbit’s garden commissary, which serves egglesse
gg scrambles and meatless-meat burritos to ageless movie executives with mortgaged dental work and two-rounds-of-golf-per-day tans. They seem so much slicker than the likes of Len and Ed, these movie people. But I guess when you strip away the gloss of their A-list casts and seven-figure budgets, they’re basically selling the same thing: stories of human conflict, with their highs and lows, tears and laughter, heroes and villains… only our stories cost a lot less to tell. Not that season thirteen of Project Icon was in any way cheap, of course. In fact, I’d seen our budget, and it had pretty much doubled since the previous season. That didn’t bode well, given everything that had gone down, both literally and figuratively, in Houston. ShowBiz was already printing vague rumors of “trouble in Texas.” Its latest story quoted David Gent as saying Rabbit was “ironing out issues with the new panel” but that the network still had “confidence in the show.”

  Not total confidence, I noted. Just confidence—quantity unspecified.

  “D’you think we’ll get cancelled before we even get to air?” I wondered aloud.

  “Jesus Christ, Bill, keep it down,” Mitch hissed. “Never—ever—mention the C-word on The Lot.”

  With that, his phone began to squirm its way across the metal table in a fit of groans and yelps, as if there were a small animal inside trying to break loose. He glanced at its screen and said, “Right, he’s here.” We both stood up. Mitch wiped his nose—at last—but only half-caught the foam, and there didn’t seem like a good moment to bring up the subject as we made our way to the narrow pathway outside. A longwheelbase golf cart—green canvas sunshade pitched over the three rows of seats—was waiting. The driver, who looked barely old enough for sixth grade, proceeded to transport us at the maximum velocity allowed by the vehicle’s tiny electric motor through fake Brooklyn backstreets, a miniature Sahara desert, and the scene of a crashed Boeing 747 filled with half-melted alien corpses.

  “Imagine coming to work here every day,” mused Mitch. “No wonder these people are so twisted.”

  Eventually, we jerked to a halt outside a beige conference hall at the other end of the property. Beyond the jungle-landscaped entrance: a beige lobby with beige walls, beige carpet, and an air-conditioning system so powerful, the place felt like an industrial meat locker. It couldn’t have been more than forty degrees in there. Ahead of us was a set of double doors, upon which someone had taped a sheet of laserprinted paper. “Project Icon: Fraternization Seminar,” it read. “Attendance COMPULSORY for all cast/producers. Starts: 3:30 p.m.”

  The clock on the wall read 3:29 p.m.

  Mitch and I looked at each other with here-goes-nothing faces, then pushed our way inside.

  We emerged into a small yet plush auditorium with a low stage at the far end of the room and a dozen or so rows of fold-up seats, arranged in tiers. Suspended from the ceiling was a digital projector, and embedded in the walls were the yellow Kevlar cones of audiophilequality Bowers & Wilkins loudspeakers (blame Dad for my knowledge of such things). Behind us, meanwhile, was a generously stocked drinks and snack counter, the kind you might find in a business-class airline lounge. Knowing what was to come, I was tempted to pour myself a Maker’s Mark on ice. No one else was drinking, though, so I resisted.

  Joey was already in a front-row aisle seat, next to Mu and Sue, both of whom had dressed for the occasion like soft-porn librarians. He was wearing high-top sneakers and a tweed suit with one pant leg cut off at the knee, all the better to display an actual-size tattoo of a tartan sock on his right calf. (He did this one himself while in London’s Pentonville prison for urinating on Buckingham Palace, because it made him smile every morning in his cell.) The novelty sock tattoo wasn’t the first thing to catch my attention about Joey, however. Instead my eyes were drawn to his fly-goggle sunglasses, the kind that Manhattan Project scientists might have worn during atomic bomb testing in the New Mexico desert. They served to only partially disguise a black eye of such severity, its purple-yellow tendrils crept all the way out to his middle cheek. This had been a gift from Miss “I Da Hoe”’s father, an ex-U.S. Marine and, as it turned out, committed member of the Coeur D’Alene chapter of the Aryan Nations. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for Icon’s security detail, Joey’s record company might have already been enjoying the spoils of a posthumous album release.

  By inflicting such a dramatic injury on Joey, however, the Idaho Klansman had actually done Icon a huge favor. Without the assault, the show would have been looking at a shut-up-and-go-away settlement on the scale of Bibi’s salary. But now they had leverage: the attempted murder of a celebrity judge. Plus, Miss “I Da Ho” herself—she had in fact only ever won a minor village pageant—apparently didn’t share her father’s politics, and had no interest in punishing Joey.

  The matter was resolved privately, in a matter of days.

  That wasn’t the end of Joey’s issues with young female contestants, however.

  Oh, no.

  It quickly emerged that Joey’s indiscretions hadn’t been limited to Miss “I Da Ho.” He had also been exchanging direct messages on Twitter with several other female contestants (had he searched for their accounts, or had they followed him first?), providing them with both his cell phone number and Twitpics of his bulging underwear, taken from under the judges’ desk. All had responded in kind, so Joey had scheduled each of them to visit his room, at fifteen-minute intervals, that very same night. It was hard not to be impressed by the man’s ambition. It was also hard not to wonder how he could manage such a back-to-back operation at the age of sixty-two, without either surgical or chemical assistance. This question was never answered, however, because someone in Rabbit’s human resources department (a.k.a. Team Joeysitter) noticed what was going on—they were already in crisis mode after the whole beauty queen affair—and dispatched an emergency task force to the scene. Joey’s phone was confiscated, his Twitter account deleted, and he was ordered by Sir Harold Killoch to attend today’s “fraternization seminar” at The Lot. For good measure, the other judges and key members of Icon’s staff were ordered to go, too.

  And now… well, here we were.

  Being the last to arrive, Mitch and I took seats at the rear. Bibi was to our left, a few rows forward, obscured partially by Teddy, and engrossed in her phone. Looking closely, I noticed that she had the Face-Time app running, and was actually examining herself in the screen. Len was visible only via his Merm, which was wobbling around somewhere near the front, next to Maria and Ed (or that’s what I assumed, as Ed’s head didn’t reach the top of his chair).

  We waited.

  And waited.

  And—

  At last, the house lights dimmed, the stage lights brightened, and in an unmistakable glow of smugness, our “fraternization coach” appeared. “My name’s Andy,” he announced unnecessarily (it was written in blue marker on his circular name tag). “And I know what y’all are thinking: I’m here to judge. Well, bad news, folks”—cheesy smile—“the only judges in this room are sitting right in front of me here. I’m here to inform. To guide. Think of me as a resource.”

  Andy was unbearable, this much was already clear.

  He went on: “Now, what I’m going to talk about today is what we at Rabbit call fraternization.”

  “You mean screwin’?” interrupted Joey.

  Oh, God. I closed my eyes.

  “Ha-ha,” said Andy, nervously running a fleshy hand through his overly product-enhanced hair.

  “Call it what it fuckin’ is, man,” said Joey, disgust in his voice. “I fuckin’ hate—”

  “We call it fraternization,” Andy reiterated, a little testily. “Now, what does fraternization mean, exactly?”

  Joey snorted with contempt and began to shuffle boisterously in his seat.

  “Well, folks, if you look it up in the ol’ dictionary,” Andy continued, reaching behind him to pick up a heavy black volume from the table behind him. “It says, ‘To associate or mingle as brothers with a hostile group, especially when directly against
military orders.’”

  Andy made a hokey face to illustrate confusion.

  “Now, we’re not all brothers here, are we?” he continued, in the tone of a preschool teacher breaking up a fight over a jigsaw puzzle. “And we sure as heck ain’t running an ‘army’! Also, I wouldn’t suggest for one second that the wonderful, talented contestants on Project Icon are your enemy. No, sir! Nevertheless, you have to understand, if ANYTHING that could be deemed ‘inappropriate’ goes on between any of YOU and any of your subordinates—i.e., the contestants—then you’re putting both yourself and the Rabbit network in DIRE JEOPARDY.”

  Andy went on like this for three hours. He passed around leaflets featuring stock photographs of men and women in “uncomfortable” workplace situations. He used the digital protector to a show a graph of recent legal settlements in key sexual harassment cases. He even distributed Rabbit-branded key rings and notebooks featuring the slogan “Professionalism, Respect, Boundaries.”

  Bibi didn’t look up once from her phone. Joey, on the other hand, seemed transfixed.

  “Any questions?” asked Andy, when he was finally done.

  At last, it was over.

  Only it wasn’t.

  “Yeah, actually,” declared Joey, to groans from the row behind him. “Let’s pretend for a moment, Andy, that you’re a winner. Let’s pretend that you don’t spend your life giving pious lectures to other people about their own private goddamn business. Let’s pretend that the no-fun-sized miniwiener in your sad-assed, beige fuckin’ kill-me-now slacks has ever seen half a second of action—which, by the way, I personally guarantee it fuckin’ hasn’t. But let’s pretend all that, anyway…”

  Mitch’s head was now in his hands.

  “… so you’re a hot dude,” Joey went on. “Rockin’ your shit as a judge on Project Icon. And you’ve gotta drain the dragon. Snake break. So off you go to the bathroom, and on your way—BLAM!—you run straight into Little Miss Over Easy, Sunny-Side-Up Beauty Queen. Now, this chick ain’t no nun. She’s more into the Holy Molys than the Hail Marys, if you get my vibe. She’s wearing a fuckin’ T-shirt that says ‘I Da Ho’ for the love of sweet Jesus Christ! So this little smokin’ firecracker of a pageant princess says to you, ‘Hey, my best friend says you’d never let me blow you in the Icon bathroom. Wanna help me win a hundred bucks?’”