Elimination Night Read online

  Wayne—new delivery ideas?

  All these pauses are getting

  a bit old, no? Food for thought…

  I wondered how many people would know that most of this intro was bullshit. In particular the bit about the “business genius Sir Harold Killoch” having anything to do with Icon’s success. I mean, yes, Sir Harold owned both the Rabbit network, and its parent company, The Big Corporation—so in that sense he was responsible for putting the show on the air. But as everyone who’d ever read ShowBiz knew, it was the mogul’s younger brother George who’d seen the original Belgian format—while on a beer-tasting vacation in Antwerp—and suggested that Rabbit license it from its creator, Sven Svendsen, a reclusive Swedish talent agent.

  “Who the hell wants to listen to a bunch of piss-poor wannabes who can’t sing?” was Sir Harold’s response, according to his unofficial biography, Harold’s Killing. Nevertheless, he ordered Rabbit to buy the rights, and within a few weeks, a pilot had been commissioned. “Old Harry thinks it’s the dumbest TV pitch he’s ever heard,” as ShowBiz reported at the time. “But his baby brother George—like all Killoch family members—is a voting shareholder in Big Corp, and therefore needs to be indulged. We predict a swift cancellation.”

  Rabbit aired the first episode at midnight on a Friday: “The hospice slot,” as I’ve since learned it is known (due to the fact that ninety percent of viewers at such an hour reside in assisted living communities). That in itself might have been enough to kill Project Icon, if not for the fact that Sir Harold asked Sven Svendsen—a.k.a. “Two Svens”—to help run the show.

  Two Svens’ first move? Hiring his old friend Leonard Braithwaite as supervising producer.

  I had no idea who Len was back then. No one in the US did. It was only later I found out he’d starred as a cruel-to-be-kind mentor in From Arse End to the West End, an acclaimed British TV documentary about the creation of a theater production using actors cast entirely from soup kitchens. That’s how Len persuaded Two Svens to hire exactly the same kind of villain for the Rabbit version of Project Icon. He couldn’t cast himself, though—the network wouldn’t let him—so he found a doppelgänger, Nigel Crowther, and spent months coaching him on “sneer technique” and “insult metaphors.”

  Oh, America had no idea what was coming.

  Pretty much everyone remembers the first time they saw Crowther on TV. Me? I was at my friend Maggie’s house, pretending to study for a math exam. I’d actually wanted to watch a NOVA documentary about long-whiskered Peruvian owls (that’s how hard I partied as a thirteen-year-old), but Maggie insisted on loading up Icon from her early-model TiVo. And thanks to Crowther, I couldn’t stop watching: Here was this aging, pudding-bellied, apparently heterosexual Scotsman with a toilet-brush hairdo, who kept his shirt unbuttoned to several inches below the navel, and appeared to have doused himself repeatedly in some kind of fluorescent orange tanning solution. More extraordinary, however, was his willingness to insult contestants to their faces, even if they were deranged or sobbing with fear—or both, which was more often than not the case.

  “When you reach for the high notes, David, you look like a brain damaged orangutan with a genital itch who’s trying to lick poo off its nose,” he informed one visibly quaking teenager, who promptly fell to his knees weeping.

  Within a few days, “Mr. Horrible” was a national sensation. The Concerned Parents of Young Christian Patriots tried to sue to remove him from the airwaves. Several members of Congress petitioned. Even the president of the United States himself made a personal call to Sir Harold, which the mogul put on hold, then sent through to voicemail, before leaking the voicemail—out of habit—to the editor of one of his more prominent news websites.

  “PREZ BLASTS MR. HORRIBLE FOR POO-LICKING RETARD JIBE,” read the headline.

  Everyone wanted to know: Who the hell was this guy?

  It didn’t take long for ShowBiz to dig up an answer: Before Icon, Crowther had been a talent scout in Glasgow, best known for discovering a pop duo named the Dreami Boyz, whose gimmick was to appear on stage wearing only pajama bottoms. They’d been a spectacular hit with both the grandma and gay demographics—hence the two million sales of their abominable first album, Sweet Dreamz & Warm Cuddlez, which received the first ever negative-starred review from NME.

  Perhaps inevitably, Two Svens—three hundred pounds, ice-skating enthusiast, face like an exploded dumpling—couldn’t stand Crowther. He swung a punch at him a couple of times, in fact. Even Len fell out with his protégé within a few days. But it didn’t matter. By the end of Project Icon’s first season, “Mr. Horrible” had become one of the most famous men on earth. And by the second season, more votes were being cast by the show’s viewers every week than it takes to win the keys to the White House. As a result, Crowther was able to negotiate a contract that made him the best-paid performer in TV history.

  And now?

  Well, as the script said—there wasn’t any hiding it—Crowther had left. What the script didn’t say was that Two Svens had turned almost homicidal with rage upon learning this news, especially given that he’d offered Crowther a “Triple Oprah”—i.e., three times the salary of the Queen of Daytime TV during her final season on network TV—to stay on for another year. Crowther’s counteroffer? No salary. But one hundred percent ownership of everything.

  Two Svens thought he was joking.

  Another fact omitted from Wayne’s script: Crowther had now started to work on his own rival TV franchise, The Talent Machine, which the Rabbit network had paid for and promised to air. Thankfully, The Talent Machine wouldn’t be ready for another year. But when the show did finally make it onto Rabbit’s prime-time schedule, it seemed obvious that only one singing competition could survive.

  As Chaz Chipford, the newly-assigned Project Icon correspondent for ShowBiz, summed it up:

  Season thirteen is a live or die moment for Project Icon—a last chance for the Rabbit tentpole warblefest to prove that it’s still viable without superstar Crowther. Odds don’t look good, even with dancepants-wearing showrunner Leonard Braithwaite back in the supervising producer’s seat (robo-host Wayne Shoreline also inked a new contract last week). After all, The Talent Machine is revving up like an eighteen-wheeler for its debut next year, and Madison Avenue expects it to spatter Icon like a bug on its windshield. Sure, Icon and T-Machine won’t air at the same time, but Rabbit insiders say Crowther will likely soak up all the audience for warblefests in the fall, leaving Icon to pick over the scraps come January. Besides, as Sir Harold already knows: Icon’s format is as stale as a week-old Pink’s hot dog, and ratings have been tanking by TEN PERCENT a year for the last five seasons. Word is even going around The Lot of a top-secret plan at Big Corp to ax Icon THIS season if it loses its number-one position. Old Harry—who celebrates his eighty-second birthday next week at Skullhead, his private island in the South Pacific—wants to spare it (or perhaps himself) any future humiliation. What few hopes remain now rest on a cast of untested new judges, after Sir Harold ordered Braithwaite to “nuke the panel.” JD Coolz remains—he’s cheap—but dud celebrity chef Helen DeMendes has been ankled, as has sourpuss tunesmith Kat Patrigliano. Rumor has it, only two “stars” will be hired to fill the three empty seats. Trouble is, no matter who comes on board, there’ll still be a gaping, Crowther-shaped hole.

  Those two stars were now supposed to be in their dressing rooms, waiting for me to give them the run-through of the press conference, where in five minutes we’d reveal their names. But I’d knocked six or seven times now, and no one had answered.

  Where the hell were they?

  “Ahem. Hello?” I said, rapping on the first door again, hurting my knuckles. “Anybody there?”

  Silence.

  Another try, this time on the second door.

  “This is Bill,” I called out. “For the run-through. We’re starting in two minutes.”

  Nothing.

  Out of options, I turned the handle in front of
me and pushed. The door swung open to reveal an untouched room. The red sofas I’d bought on the Project Icon credit card for five thousand dollars apiece showed no creases. Neither did the five hundred dollar red silk pillows. Likewise, the red candles were unlit, the red iPad on its red docking station next to the red roses was still playing The Best of Enya, and the seal on the room temperature Pellegrino (placed on the red table, next to the red vase) was unbroken. In spite of the eight days it had taken me to furnish this room to such precise specifications, no one appeared to have set foot in it.

  Same deal: leather bean bags fluffed and perfect. Mongolian dream catcher untroubled by a breeze from the switched-off wind machine. Giant vat of drinking water (marked “Kangen” in black Sharpie) still full to the brim and gurgling quietly to itself. And under the Broadway-style vanity mirror, a foot-long roast beef sub, placed strategically next to a square-jawed Action Man figure, who for reasons not worth getting into right now was dressed in nothing but a frilly pink Barbie doll bra. Attached to the latter was a note from Len, which read, “Best we could manage, I’m afraid!”

  Uh-oh—something’s up, I thought.

  And this was a problem. Because we were out of time.

  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. Zg
lagovvcini.”

  “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.