Elimination Night Read online

  “So, uh, hi everyone,” I began, excruciatingly. “How was breakfast?”

  “We all held hands and sang Kumbaya,” replied Wayne, nastily. “Now can you give us the run-through—or is there something else you’d like to know? We had eggs, if that helps.”

  Suddenly, heat in my face. “Okay, yes, right,” I said, between shallow breaths.

  “She’s sorry,” Wayne snorted. “My God, where do they get ’em? Producer school?”

  Titters.

  Joey wasn’t laughing, though. He lifted his bare feet onto the table and said, “Take your time, Bungalow Bill. Ain’t no hurry. Don’t listen to HAL fuckin’ 9000 over there.”

  That’s the big joke about Wayne Shoreline, of course: That he’s not actually human. It’s a compliment, of sorts—an acknowledgment that his ability to host a live one-hour broadcast with such ruthless calm is beyond the realm of mere flesh and blood. But there’s another reason for Wayne’s heart-of-silicon reputation: The fact he’s never had any kind of public relationship—male or female—during his entire twenty-year show business career. Indeed, when he’s photographed at dinner, it’s usually with his mother. “The press thinks he’s gay,” as Mitch once told me. “But I doubt it. I don’t think he’s anything. If you pulled down the guy’s pants, the only thing swinging between his legs would be a USB stick.”

  Everyone was now waiting for me to continue. So I cleared my throat and started again.

  “Okay, so Wayne’s up first,” I said, consulting the script on my clipboard. “He’s going to do the intro, recap Project Icon’s backstory, et cetera, et cetera… then we’ll introduce JD. Lights will go down, there’ll be a two-minute video package—a kind of ‘best of’ thing, lots of booya-ka-kas—and then Wayne will invite JD on stage, there’ll be cheering, flashbulbs, a bit of music, Wayne and JD will do a very short Q&A, thirty seconds maximum, lights will go back down, JD will leave the stage, and we’ll move on to Joey. Everyone good with that?”

  “You mean Joey’s not last?” replied Mitch, as if this were some kind of huge, deal-breaking surprise.

  Clearly, Bibi would be last. Mitch surely knew this already.

  “We’re not thinking of it in terms of ‘first’ and ‘last,’ Mitch,” I said, surprised at my ability to bullshit without hesitation or shame when the occasion called for it.

  “Don’t fucking bullshit me, Bill. You’re no good at it.”

  “Look, the running order is JD, Joey, then Bibi,” I said. “It’s in the script. Sorry, Mitch.”

  “Why can’t Joey and Bibi come out on stage at the same time?”

  Mitch wasn’t letting this one go.

  “Mitch, we’re running a video package and a separate Q&A for each panel member. We can’t do them all at the same time. It’s a ‘reveal.’ It’s supposed to be dramatic.”

  “Okay, so why not do Bibi second? Ladies before gentlemen.”

  “THAT’S AN OUTRAGE!” yelled Joey, so loud it almost made me lose my balance. Then, with a shriek of hilarity: “Don’t ever accuse me of being a gentleman!”

  Everyone laughed—anything to relieve the horrible tension in the room—but not Mitch. He crossed his arms and stared at me, eyes gleaming. Behind him, Teddy grinned.

  I flipped through the pages of the script, noticing that Len had replaced the final section—this much was obvious from the spelling errors and formatting. He’d typed it himself, it seemed, and at speed. I wondered why he hadn’t mentioned that.

  “So anyway,” I went on, shakily. “Next up: Joey. Same deal as JD, basically. First the video package, then Wayne will invite Joey on stage, there’ll be a Q&A, cheering, flashbulbs, bit of music—et cetera, et cetera—lights down again, then on to Bibi.”

  “Ooh, me?” Bibi squealed.

  Teddy’s smile grew wider.

  I turned the page.

  “Okay: so the lights will go down once more,” I read. “The darkness will last for ninety seconds. We’ll hear distant thunder. Then the thunder will get louder. Smoke will gather…”

  “OH, FOR FUCK’S SAKE!” Mitch screamed.

  “… and then, in a blinding flash, lightning will strike the stage…”

  I had to take a breath. Len hadn’t warned me about any of this. This was exactly what Mitch had feared. They’d fucked him. There was simply no other way of putting it. Joey had been reduced to a sideshow, a supporting act—no more important than JD. Len and Teddy must have cut a deal, without telling anyone. And now I was the one having to deliver the news. No wonder Len hadn’t told me about the script changes. No wonder he’d been so insistent that I do the run-through, even though he was supposed to be in charge.

  “… at this point we’ll hear the first few bars of Bibi’s new single, ‘Gotta Disco,’ and as the music gets louder, images of Bibi Beautiful cosmetics products will be projected on to the auditorium walls…”—I found myself speaking faster, trying to get it over with—“… then fade out as we cut to Bibi’s fifteen-minute video package. When the package is over, Wayne will move to the wings. All lights out. More thunder. More lightning. Then a trapdoor in the stage floor will open, and Bibi will rise on a mechanical arm over the audience, as Wayne says, ‘Ladies and gentlemen: The legend, the movie star, the multiplatinumselling, Grammy-winning artist, also known to the residents of Planet Earth as a mother, thinker, philanthropist, businesswoman, dancer, style icon, and best-selling author… BIBI VASQUEZ. Then lights up, ‘Gotta Disco’ will resume, Bibi’s dancing troupe will run up the center aisle, and Bibi will perform a three-song set. Then cut to the prerecorded Rabbit News Special with Bibi featuring Sir Paul McCartney, the Dalai Lama, and the First Lady of the United States.”

  Finally. It was over.

  The only sound in the room now was Teddy giving his own heartfelt personal round of applause.

  Mitch was under the table, making a noise I’d never heard anyone make before.

  Then it began. Joey stood up, loosened his belt, and began to adjust his leather chaps.

  “Get the pee cup, Mitch,” he ordered.

  A few seconds earlier, I wouldn’t have believed it possible for Mitch to sound any unhappier.

  He was now proving me wrong.

  “The pee cup,” Joey repeated. “It’s in the contract, right? These guys want me to take a pee test every week, to make sure I ain’t gonna do any crazy shit on prime-time TV?”

  A muffled voice from under the table: “Joey… please… this isn’t the time or the—”

  “Mitch: SHUT UP. I need the pee cup, and I need it now, ’cause trust me, I’m gonna take so many pills and drink so much booze, my pee ain’t gonna be clean again for a thousand fuckin’ years. You promised me equal treatment, you motherfuckers. And now Little Miss Perfect over there is getting a royal coronation? Mitch, you suck. Teddy, you suck cock. That’s cool, but you fuckin’ ain’t.”

  He turned to me. “And you, girl-called-Bill,” he said. “I thought you were okay, man. What happened? You’re all the same, you people. You’ve all got the same poison in your soul. Fuckin’ TV producers. And to think I fell for it. Well, I hope you’re happy now, ’cause I ain’t doing this bullshit anymore. Show over. Go fuck yourselves.”

  “Joey,” I said. “This is isn’t how it—”

  Too late. He was out of the door. “Th- Th- Th- That’s all, folks!” he yelled, as it jerked shut behind him.

  8

  Six Things

  I AWOKE IN MY clothes—again—to the sound of knocking. With great effort, I opened my eyes. It was almost noon, judging by the patterns of sunlight on the ceiling.

  God, my head hurt.

  Surveying the floor by my bed, I glimpsed the silver foil of a half-eaten chicken shawarma, three tubes of lip balm, my college-era laptop, and a pair of white earbuds (of the please-go-right-ahead-and-mug-me variety), still vibrating to the tinny frequencies of a Nick Cave album that had seemed a lot more profound at three o’clock in the morning. What had I done last night? Whatever it was, I suspec
ted it had involved breaking my promise to never smoke another cigarette for as long as I lived. Every time I swallowed, I could taste the ash. Disgusting.

  There it was again—that awful noise. And a voice. “Meesash,” it seemed to be saying.

  More knocking.

  Ah, now I could make out the words: “Meess Sasha? Meess Sasha?”

  I buried my head in the pillow. Then my cell phone began to ring. Well, not ring exactly—before Brock left for Hawaii, he’d set it to play the opening riff of “Hell on Wheels” whenever it received a call. This had seemed pretty funny at the time. It didn’t now.

  Dn.

  Dn-nn-nah.

  Dn-nn-nah-nh! Bleeeowww-neow-newo…

  “Meess Sasha? Hello? Meess Sasha?”

  “Please… make it stop,” I moaned, yanking the comforter up and over my head.

  Unfortunately, “Hell on Wheels” reminded me why my brain felt as though it had been removed from my skull, beaten repeatedly with a nine iron, then reinserted upside down: Joey Lovecraft. The very thought of his name was enough to make me curl up and cover my ears, as if that might shut out the memory of the previous day.

  Bursting into tears after Joey’s little speech in conference room five certainly hadn’t been a good idea. I mean, sure, I’d made it into the ladies’ room before the snot storm began—thus saving myself from abject humiliation—but it’s not exactly hard to tell when a redhead has just given a box of Kleenex the workout of its life. When I finally emerged from the bathroom with a face like a thousand bee stings, Len had already returned from wherever the hell it was he’d been, and was trying to save The Reveal from a disaster of show-destroying proportions. To that end, he’d located Joey (who’d mercifully been unable to find an open bar anywhere in the building), sat him down with Mitch in the judges’ lounge—Mu and Sue providing additional comfort—and was busy explaining that there’d been a horrible misunderstanding. Or rather, that I had failed to give him the “full context” of the last-minute changes to the run-through, thus creating the absurd impression that he had been relegated to Bibi Vasquez’s supporting act.

  “What Bill should have told you, Joey—and I don’t for the life of me know why she didn’t—is that Bibi’s entrance, with the mechanical arm and the dancers and so on, is designed to, well… poke fun at her,” he said. “She’s a diva, Joey. You know that. We were just trying to make some mischief, without crossing a line. To be honest with you, Joey—and this goes no further, I hope—we were worried about Bibi’s reaction. I mean, Teddy’s been trying very hard to position her as ‘recession-sensitive’ lately, what with the ad for the Chevy Frugal and everything.”

  The Frugal ad, by the way, was another disaster—largely due to Bibi’s refusal to visit downtown Detroit for the filming. A body double was therefore hired in her place, this fact being leaked to the press by a furious Madison Avenue executive a few hours before the commercial aired. Things only got worse when a viewer noticed that the greenscreened interior shots of Bibi in the Frugal featured a suede-upholstered steering wheel that clearly didn’t fit in a seven-thousand-dollar car. After some cursory Internet research, it was discovered that the wheel in fact belonged to Bibi’s Bentley Mulsanne. Not only had Bibi refused to go to Detroit for the filming, she’d also declined to sit in the car.

  “It’s all about dramatic narrative, Joey,” Len pressed on. “And we get that with contrast. I mean, look: there’s JD, everyone’s friendly uncle; Bibi, the stuck-up, out-of-control ego; and you, the musical genius… the, uh… the icon of a generation.”

  Joey nodded seriously. “Makes sense,” he said, sniffing.

  “It does, Joey,” agreed Len, gripping Joey’s arm. (What an unbelievable toad.) “It really, really does.”

  That was when I emerged, only half recomposed, from my sob session. Joey’s comment had really gotten to me. I mean, maybe I was “poison,” as he’d suggested. Maybe all this—Len, Sir Harold Killoch, the whole Two Svens-versus-Crowther thing going on between Project Icon and The Talent Machine—had already damaged my soul in some profound yet intangible way. Maybe I’d become one of those “Hollywood people” you hear about. After all, I was only there for the money, wasn’t I? Okay, not a lot of money—barely more than I could have made serving eggs at Mel’s Diner on the Sunset Strip—but my job was still a means to an end. Which made me a phony: a fact that Joey had recognized so clearly.

  I could barely look at him. Not that I had much choice. As I approached, he stood up and walked straight at me. “Come here, babe, let’s cuddle through this muddle,” he rapped, with a concerned frown. “Let’s face the embrace, let’s seize the squeeze, honey.”

  And then his arms formed a wall of crazy around me. I tried not to choke on his cologne.

  “We’ll be better next time, okay?” Joey whispered, as my eyes began to water.

  His eyes were watering, too.

  Not from the smell, though.

  “Okay,” I nodded, too busy withholding a cough of lung-exploding force to be irritated by Joey’s use of the word “we” and its implicit suggestion that I was somehow jointly to blame for Len changing the format of the script, prompting a grown man to act like a toddler who’d just discovered the unfairness of gravity.

  Joey clapped his hands as he pulled away from me.

  “Showtime!” he announced, with another sniff. “Let’s get this baby on the air.” Then he ambled off, jewelry clanking, in the direction of his Kangen machine.

  Mu and Sue followed.

  There were more complications to come, naturally. As it turned out, someone on Team Bibi had been listening in to Len’s conversation with Joey (could it have been Teddy? Had he been hiding under the sofa?) and had informed Bibi that her Messiah-like entrance during the press conference was in fact a form of mockery, not celebration. Within minutes, the Beverly Hills attorney Karl Hurt—managing partner at Dammock, Hurt & Richardson (known in the industry as Damage, Hurt, and Retaliation)—had called Len, threatening a lawsuit for breach of contract. There was a “ridicule clause” in Bibi’s agreement with Project Icon, apparently. While Len dealt with the atomictempered lawyer, he shooed me back to the front line of conference room five to calm Bibi.

  “Don’t fuck it up this time,” he mouthed.

  Bibi was actually in the hallway, encircled by Teddy, Teddy’s four assistants, and five stylists.

  I straightened my back (I’m five eight, so taller than Bibi by five inches) and exhaled.

  “Ahem. Miss Vasquez?” I attempted.

  “Miss Vasquez is busy,” said Teddy, appearing center frame. “Very busy.”

  This was quite obviously untrue. Bibi wasn’t busy at all. The people around her were busy. One stylist was using a miniature spray bottle to apply toning liquid to her calves, giving them a warm, buttery texture. Another was using some kind of air gun to apply perfect distress to individual strands of hair. Meanwhile, an assistant held out an iPad upon which Bibi’s horoscope from a supermarket tabloid was displayed on the maximum zoom setting. Bibi was reading it with great interest. She’d clearly noted my arrival, yet nevertheless had enough plausible deniability to ignore me without risking any awkwardness.

  “Look, Teddy,” I began, emotionally. “I just need you to know… we all love Bibi.”

  “Everyone loves Bibi,” snipped Teddy, now distracted by an e-mail on his phone. As with Bibi, an assistant was holding it out for him. Couldn’t these people do anything for themselves?

  “Of course!” I fawned. “But we think she’s, y’know, really, really amazing. And, er, I just want to, er—”

  “Hasn’t Len fucked you enough for one day, Bill?” Teddy interrupted, without looking up (the e-mail he was reading had come from Bibi, I could see, with Karl Hurt copied). “You really wanna get fucked again? Why not let the grown-ups handle this.”

  Grown-ups? Oh, that was rich.

  “I mean, Len sent you over here, right?” Teddy continued, now offering me a full twenty-five percent of his a
ttention. “And he thought you could talk to my client?” He laughed. “Len thought YOU could talk to one of the most famous, successful women alive today? You? With your… boyfriend jeans and hiking shoes? Oh, hilarious.”

  That was it: screw these assholes. I was all set to give up and walk away when suddenly, the stylists around Bibi parted, giving me a direct view of the star herself.

  Eye contact.

  Holy crap: Bibi Vasquez was looking at me.

  “Honey,” she said, in a tone that suggested an attempt at warmth. “What is it you wanna talk to me about?”

  Silence.

  A crippling panic. Then irritation. What is wrong with wearing hiking shoes when you spend sixteen hours a day running around a set under hot studio lighting, especially if you have an abnormal big toe, like I do? Then I made a decision. If Len could bullshit Joey, then I could bullshit Bibi. When in hell, do as the devil does, as they say. Okay, so no one actually says that. But you know what I mean.

  “Look, Bibi,” I began. “I just want to say, as both a producer and a fan”—yes, I was going all the way on this—“you’re the biggest thing that has ever happened to this show. Everyone at Icon feels that way, Bibi. And I know for a fact that Joey does, too. But he also feels… well, threatened. You’ve got to remember, he’s an alpha male, Bibi. A rock star. And that makes him want to compete with everyone—even when he’s not even in the same game. He just doesn’t know how to respond to your level of fame and success, Bibi. Or the fact that you’re a woman, a mother… an icon. That’s why we sometimes have to talk him down from the ledge. I mean, you saw what happened today, right? But he’s okay now. He’s ready to go. And all I want to say is—if you’re ready, so are we. We’re ready to go out there and own prime time, Bibi. This is so… amazingly… awesome.”

  My bullshit generator had reached maximum capacity. If I didn’t stop talking immediately, it was gonna blow. So I wrapped up my speech with a fake little shudder of excitement, then looked over at Teddy, hoping for some support.