Elimination Night

by AnonYMous

  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 fuckable” 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 bedr
oom 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.”

  4

  The M-Word

  THE ANSWER TO LEN’S question was simple: Joey wanted to get Honeyload back together. Or more accurately, he wanted Blade Morgan to beg him to return as lead singer.

  Without Project Icon, however, this wasn’t likely to happen. After all, Joey hadn’t spoken to Blade for three years. No phone calls. No emails. Not even a single text message. And the reason why Blade and Joey hadn’t spoken was because Joey had gone back on the pills and the cognac during their last tour. Hardly a big deal in itself, of course: Joey had been high during every tour in the band’s history. The big deal was this: On the night they played Houston, Joey walked on stage, dropped his pants, and proceeded to evacuate his bowels in front of Blade’s amp stack, as punishment for Blade’s refusal to turn down his reverb setting—which was allegedly interfering with Joey’s ability to hear himself sing.

  Now, again: Not such a biggie. Joey had been known to do worse. Much worse—especially when he was going through a pills-and-cognac period. But the evacuation had led to another issue—namely, that when Joey stood up after this toxic protest, he slipped and fell headfirst into the orchestra pit, breaking a leg and his collarbone in the process, which of course meant that the rest of the tour, all twenty-six dates of it, had to be cancelled. At first, the band wasn’t particularly upset: This was precisely why they had bought a very expensive gig-cancellation insurance policy. But when they tried to make a claim, the underwriter—who’d watched “the Houston incident” unfold in graphic detail on YouTube—pointed out a clause in the policy that invalidated coverage in the event of “self-destruction.” He argued, not unreasonably, that this included “broken limbs caused by slippage after a voluntary act of onstage defecation.”

  Joey was devastated. Unlike him, Blade and the other members of the band hadn’t invested in the marijuana-soft drink industry. They needed the five million dollars they were due for those remaining gigs. And they didn’t take it well, either. In fact, they cut Joey off completely, aside from a “Fuck You” card they sent to the hospital. Meanwhile, still tortured by guilt over what he’d done—and now on crutches—Joey headed to the only place he still felt welcome: the Betty Ford Center. But on the way there, he disappeared. It took a four-county manhunt and a worldwide vigil by fans before he was finally located, three days later, naked in a Kmart near La Quinta, California, singing “Psycho Sluts from Paradise” over the PA system. And when he finally cleaned himself up and tried to make good with the band, he discovered that in his absence, they’d been auditioning a new singer. As if that weren’t humiliating enough, the singer was Billy Ray Cyrus.

  He hated Billy Ray Cyrus.

  Joey spent four days up a tree in his backyard, howling.

  Then he took out an injunction against Honeyload to stop them touring without him and hired the nastiest managers he could find, Stanley Wojak and Mitch McDonald. “I need a fuckin’ day job, man,” he told them. “Go get me Project Icon.”

  Like most of the other celebrities who’d applied for Nigel Crowther’s position, Joey had never watched the show. Not a single episode. Neither had he shown any interest in watching it. He didn’t even own a TV—it contradicted the teachings of his muse, the Tibetan high lama Yutog Gonpo. For Joey, Icon meant only one thing: leverage. He wanted to be able to say to Blade Morgan and his other ex-bandmates: You can’t fire me, I’m employable! I’m so hot, I’m worth a Triple Oprah! And what better leverage could you possibly get than a twice-weekly gig in front of twenty million TV viewers? That was four times as many people than had bought Deathray Juggernaut in 1972, giving Honeyload their very first triple-diamond LP.

  I’d just finished explaining all this to Len when a figure appeared in the doorway to Rossitto’s office.

  “Mitch!” said Len, getting up.

  An uncomfortable half-handshake, half-hug followed.

  “Bill, this is Mitch McDonald,” Len announced. “Joey’s manager. One of them, anyway, ha-ha.”

  “Only one that matters,” declared Mitch. He didn’t seem to be joking.

  Mitch was short, pumped, entirely hairless—a human pool ball. Closing in on fifty, I guessed, and dressed as though for a funeral at an Apple Store: black jeans, black polo shirt, black sneakers. His face, meanwhile, was set into a frown that suggested the long-term expectation of disappointment.

  “So who is this guy Ed Rossitto?” he growled, looking around the room skeptically.

  “Oh, he’s huge,” said Len. “I mean, well… not literally huge. But a very big deal at Rabbit. A top decision maker. If Joey and Ed vibe”—in my entire time at Project Icon, I had never heard Len use this word before—“my guess is, this will be a go.”

  Mitch took a seat opposite us, crossed his legs, and said, “Save the bullshit for the teenagers, Len.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This isn’t about Joey and Ed vibing,” sighed Mitch. “This is a sanity check. You want to make sure he’s not crazy. You wanna look the guy in the eye, and not see cuckoos. Right?”

  Len’s face reddened slightly. Chuckling nervously, he said, “C’mon, Mitch.”

  Mitch just shrugged.

  “There are concerns, yes,” Len confirmed, delicately. “But it’s not—”

  “Truth is,” Mitch interrupted, “we don’t blame you. Jo
ey’s been in a bad place. But he’s roaring back. Roaring.”

  “Look, Mitch,” said Len, leaning forward with a leathery squeak. “Given Joey’s, y’know… history, and everything, there’s something you should probably know. Just so it doesn’t put anyone off balance. It’s about Ed Rossitto. He’s, uh…”

  I wondered what the hell Len was about to say. Mitch was also clearly wondering: every sinew in his body seemed to have contracted. “What’s the problem, Len?” he snapped. “Spit it out, man.”

  “Ed’s… a wee guy—that’s all. A bit on the short side. Just so you’re prepared.”

  “… what the…?”

  “I know… I know. Not an issue. I just want you to have as much information as possible.”

  There was a long, baffled pause. I noticed Mitch begin to stare at Rossitto’s suit of armor.

  “How small, exactly?” he asked.

  “Fucking tiny,” blurted Len.

  “Jesus, are we talking… midget?”

  “No! Ssshh!” Len looked around. “He’s not a midget. He’s just, y’know—‘wee,’ as they say.”

  A troubling thought suddenly made itself visible on Mitch’s brow. With a grunt of irritation, he stood up and began to pace. “Len,” he said, “my client is extremely sensitive at the moment. He’s stressed out, to be honest with you. Couldn’t sleep last night. I got calls from him every hour, all through the night. He woke the baby up twice. Today means the world to him. The world, Len. And if you’d bothered to read the guy’s autobiography—or do any kind of research whatsoever—you’d be aware of what happens to Joey when he gets all wound up like this.”

  Mitch stared at Len, as though awaiting an answer.

  Len just stared back at him. I could tell by his expression that he was struggling to take this seriously.

  “Flashbacks,” Mitch resumed, angrily. “He gets flashbacks.”

  “Oh,” said Len.

  “He had a bad trip at a circus, Len. Summer of ’63. And d’you know why the trip was so bad?”

  Len’s eyes were blank. I began to wonder how on earth I’d missed this in the file.