by AnonYMous
Joey was now standing, leaning over the edge of the stage, inches from Andy, who was gripped with either panic or anger, it was hard to tell which. “What was I supposed to DO, huh?” Joey yelled, before turning incredulously to his audience. “Send the girl home, emptymouthed and a hundred bucks poorer?”
He grinned to prove his point. So many teeth. Such ludicrously proportioned lips.
Silence.
Beside me, Mitch looked as though he were in physical pain.
“HUH??” repeated Joey.
Then Andy spoke.
“Yes,” he began, quietly. “That’s what you were supposed to do, Joey. Send her home, without putting your sixty-two-year-old dick in her goddamn eighteen-year-old mouth, okay? Now is that too much to ask, to save yourself and your employer from years of depositions, a public trial, jail, and/or possible financial ruin? Is it really?”
Andy’s face now had the hot, lumpy texture of rage.
“Jesus,” said Joey, throwing up his hands. “Shoot me. Just fuckin’ shoot me, okay? I had some fun. This is America. You guys should go work for Tali-Qaeda.”
“You mean the Taliban,” Andy corrected.
“Whatever, man.”
“Or al-Qaeda.”
“Jesus, okay, Mr. Dictionary.”
“Not Tali-Qaeda.”
“Suck on it, fat boy.”
Ignoring this, Andy leaned down and got closer to Joey, until their faces were almost touching. “Now answer my question, Mr. Lovecraft,” he snarled. “Will you restrain yourself? Or do you want to lose this lucrative day job of yours?”
Joey crossed his arms and tried to outstare his adversary. But Andy wasn’t intimidated. He’d clearly been given orders by Sir Harold to deliver an unambiguous message.
“Well?” demanded Andy.
“Okay—you fuckin’ win!” Joey huffed, sitting back down heavily. “Now why don’t you give me your goddamn address, so I can FedEx my fuckin’ balls to you overnight.”
14
Little Green Pills
December
AS IF JOEY’S LIBIDO weren’t enough to contend with, there was still the unresolved matter of Bibi and her cue cards—a problem that was apparently all mine to handle, thanks to Len’s shameless ass-covering. I suppose it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Len had pulled such a weasel move on me, given his long history of weaseldom. And yet… it kind of did. How did he expect me to take Bibi aside and have a “quiet word” when even Teddy often had to make appointments to speak to her? More to the point: How did Len think this notoriously imperious businesswoman—worth half a billion dollars!—was going to react when the most junior producer on Icon accused her of behavior that amounted to cheating?
My first tactic—inspired by Dad’s tried-and-true approach to conflict resolution—was to simply ignore the issue and hope it went away by itself.
And in this, I had a useful ally: Joey. After all, his unhappy encounter with Miss “I Da Ho” ’s father had left Len with no option but to halt the filming in Houston. The thirty or so contestants who had yet to audition were given flight and hotel vouchers and told to come to Milwaukee, the next stop on our tour—which of course had to be delayed by a week to give Joey some additional recovery time. His black eye wouldn’t have entirely disappeared by then, but we figured the Mojo Squad could disguise its severity, and that he could invent an excuse that wouldn’t make the press think he’d suffered another major drug relapse.
All this bought me some valuable time on the Bibi front, which was great—while it lasted. But Milwaukee came around soon enough, as inevitably did the problem with the cue cards. My only lucky break was that Len had to remain in Los Angeles for meetings (which I suspected meant an urgent Merm-maintenance appointment), giving me yet more time to come up with a plan, which I did on the second day of filming. And if I may say so myself, it was a pretty genius idea: Instead of confronting Bibi directly, with all the unpleasantness that that would involve, I would simply notify the crew of Teddy’s presence at the back of the room and tell them to keep “accidentally” bumping into him with heavy (or better yet, greasy) equipment, until it become impossible for him to remain on the set without lodging a complaint, which of course he wouldn’t do.
And guess what?
It worked. It worked perfectly… until Edouard turned up and took Teddy’s place.
Awesome. Now I had an even bigger problem.
To his credit, Edouard was at least more subtle about his signals to Bibi (as I suppose you’d expect from an Oscar-nominated actor), moving constantly around the set, never looking directly at his wife, and relaying his yeses and nos via a system of casually handsome facial gestures that took me a few minutes to decode, primarily because of the unlit cigarette in his mouth. Basically, a one-finger rub of the nose was positive. Two fingers meant the opposite. The effect on Bibi was the same, regardless, however: She became noticeably distracted while peering beyond the set for her cues. It threw off the rhythm of the show completely. Where there should have been drama, there was just… Bibi squinting, followed by a half-hearted verdict, followed by more squinting to make sure she’d translated the code correctly. Heightening the problem: We had only a single take for the judges’ decisions—otherwise, the contestant would know what was coming, ruining everything—so whatever footage we got, we were stuck with.
I couldn’t understand why Bibi was so unsure of herself. I mean, there she was, this fantastically wealthy, exquisitely beautiful, worldfamous megacelebrity—and yet she needed the approval of her husband before voting a contestant on or off Project Icon. I couldn’t imagine ever taking instructions from Brock when it came to my job, or anything else, for that matter. I wondered if Edouard had the same influence over all the decisions in Bibi’s life. Was their marriage basically a father-child relationship? It just didn’t add up. I wanted to grab Bibi by the shoulders and say, “Who cares if Edouard is jealous of your career? He’s not the reason you’re here. You are! Don’t let him control you!”
Joey, meanwhile, was pretty much the exact opposite. Having loosened up since Houston, his decisions were now as instantaneous as they were emphatic. One contestant, upon reaching the third bar of a 1968 Honeyload classic, found himself interrupted by Joey’s airborne soda bucket, which exploded upon contact with the sponsors’ wall behind him. “THAT’S LIMPER THAN MY DICK IN A ROOM FULL OF FAT CHICKS!” he screamed. Another contestant opened his eyes at the end of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” to find Joey on his knees in front of him, literally worshipping his feet. Joey needed no cues. All he needed was his gut.
“That feelin’ in ma’ belly is the reason why I’ve sold enough records to buy two live-in hookers and put fifty million dollars’ worth of blow up my nose,” as he explained—in complete earnestness—to a sixteen-year-old member of the Lake Jackson Pentecostal Baptist Church, who had wept during her spirited rendition of “My Jesus, I Love Thee.”
I was beginning to suspect, however, that Joey often confused his gut with the area directly below it—namely his penis. Hence the yeses he delivered so predictably to the females wearing the fewest items of clothing. Often, these contestants also triggered within him an inexplicable urge to improvise obscene-sounding ditties, many of which, thank God, made no actual sense upon a closer listening.
Example:
JOEY: A-whop-bop-a-loo/I’d like to goo on your chew!
GIRL IN STRING BIKINI (Wrinkling nose adorably): Eew. What’s my chew?
JOEY: Why, it’s right there in your… OOOH! (Violent thrust of crotch)
But here was the thing with Joey: No matter how badly behaved he was—and as time went on, he became more and more like the Joey we’d seen in the sanity checks—we knew he could be tamed in the editing suite. Bleeping out a word or pixelating a finger is easy, unlike trying to hide the fact that a judge isn’t even looking at the podium. And Joey trusted us to take care of him in postproduction. With Bibi, it was as though she were convinced the edits would be used ag
ainst her. Why else would she be so reluctant to offer her spontaneous thoughts? Unless, of course, it was Teddy or Edouard who didn’t trust us and had persuaded Bibi that she needed to double-check every decision.
Whatever the case, something had to be done before Len got back on set. And I got my opportunity sooner than I’d expected, near the end of the first day of filming in Milwaukee, when I walked into the bathroom just off the hotel lobby to find Bibi there alone, rinsing her hands in front of the mirror. The moment I saw her, I knew what had to happen. This was my moment. My one and only chance to confront her in private, without Teddy or Edouard standing guard.
“Oh, hey there, Bibi,” I said, as casually as I could manage. Aside from my nerves, I needed to pee—urgently—but if I used one of the stalls, I’d lose my opportunity. So I held it in and stood next to her, pretending to fix my makeup… the main problem being that I wasn’t wearing any. I did have some lipstick in my purse, however, so I pulled out the tube and began to apply it. My hands were shaking. At this rate, I thought, most of it would end up on my teeth…
“Going anywhere?” asked Bibi, with a semicurious glance.
“Oh—er—yeah,” I lied. “Date tonight.”
Bibi gave a little squeak of excitement. “Okay, tell me everything,” she demanded.
“An Internet thing,” I said, suddenly picturing Mr. Zglagovvcini in his yellow flip-flops, with his eCupidMatch.com questionnaire. “A friend’s been trying to set me up for a while.”
“Weren’t you going out with that surf guy? Mr. Hawaii?”
How did she know this? “Long-distance relationship,” I shrugged. “Too much trouble.”
Bibi laughed with more sincerity than I’d expected. “I hear you, sister,” she said. “I hear you.”
This was my chance.
Now.
Ask the question. Ask the question, Sash!
“Oh, er, Bibi?” I began, in a tone that suggested I’d just remembered something.
“Hmm?”
“About Teddy. And Edouard.”
The towel in Bibi’s hands stopped moving. “What about them?” she asked, the warmth suddenly gone from her voice.
Too late to back down. “Do you think that maybe they’re, y’know… distracting you?” I ventured, as the blood in my entire upper body diverted toward my face. “I’ve noticed that you look at them… a lot. Especially when you’re making a decision, y’know? Maybe it would be better if they weren’t on the set?”
Bibi said nothing as the towel began moving again, slower than before. Worried I might not have made myself absolutely clear, I added, “I think Edouard might even be allergic to something. He’s always seems to be rubbing his n—”
“So you take those little green pills, too, huh?” interrupted Bibi, peering into my purse. My orange-tinted pill bottle was there for all to see, with the name and address of my doctor’s office and “Sasha King, take as needed” printed on the side.
I hesitated, not quite knowing what to say. Was Bibi simply changing the subject?
“You have… panic attacks?” I asked.
“Not often, sweetie,” she said, throwing the towel into a basket under the sink and reaching for her bag. “Sometimes.” She no longer seemed interested in our conversation.
I wondered if I should risk bringing up the subject of Teddy and Edouard again. What if she just ignored my question entirely and walked out now? What would I tell Len?
“So… about Teddy and Edouard,” I said. “What do you think?”
“Oh, um, yeah…” Bibi nodded, lowering her head slightly to make eye contact with her reflection. “Well… here’s what I think about what you’ve just said to me…”
I relaxed slightly, expecting her to make a joke of the whole thing. I’d given her—very skillfully, I thought—an out. This would go no further. Just between us. As friends.
“I think that you’ve been getting prescriptions filled for Joey,” she said, abruptly. “Everyone knows he has a problem with those green pills, and that they’re the only drug that won’t show up on the pee test if you drink enough of that stoopid… kangaroo water, or whatever the hell it’s called. So what a coincidence you’re carrying them around with you, huh? That’s what I think, Bill, since you’ve been thoughtful enough to ask. I think you’ve been selling those pills, making a little money on the side, because they certainly ain’t payin’ you much here. Are you even a real assistant producer? Or are you still filling in for that other guy, the one on life support in Denver? Isn’t that why they call you ‘Bill’—so you can be replaced, if he ever gets over his head injury and comes back to the show? But don’t worry, dear. It’s none of my business how you pay the rent. Your issue. For you alone. Just like my issues are for me to deal with, on my own. Without interference. Are you understanding me yet, Bill? Are you clear with what I think now?”
I felt numb and cold. All I could do was nod.
“Good,” said Bibi. She smiled and gave my arm a little squeeze. “I’m glad you get it.”
Then with a clatter of heels she was gone. Her fingernails, I noticed, had left white marks on my skin.
15
The Moment
I MUST HAVE CALLED Brock ten times when I got home. But he had an all-night shift at the bar of the Hua-Kuwali and wasn’t answering. He probably couldn’t even hear the phone. For the first time since I’d arrived in LA, I felt a shudder of uncertainty about him. Could this really work—one of us in California, the other on a rock in the Pacific, halfway to Japan? Why hadn’t I just gone with him and taken a job as a waitress, as he’d once suggested? Wouldn’t that have been easier? But, no… I had to take Len up on his “dazzling opportunity,” mix with the celebrities, be the hotshot producer, and try to stash away enough money to take an entire year off.
It was beginning to seem like an almost delusional plan—especially given the current status of my Novel of Immense Profundity, which had recently undergone some significant revisions, mostly to the grandfather character’s dialogue. I’d deleted it, basically. So now my manuscript was one sentence long. As for those unresolved plot issues, they remained very much unresolved—I’d finally had an idea about where the Black Lake of Sorrow might be located.
“Hey, it’s me,” I told Brock’s voicemail, sounding croaky as hell. “I know I haven’t been calling you back… I’m sorry. And I know I’ve been bad on e-mail and Facebook and pretty much everything else. It’s just… things are crazy. I’ve had a bad day, babe. I’m not sure I can do this. Call me, okay? Just call me.”
Click.
I wondered if he’d get my message tonight. I had to talk to someone, tell them about Bibi, the whole situation. I mean, what an unbelievable bitch! I didn’t doubt for a second that she could get me fired by saying I’d given pills to Joey—or more likely, relaying the accusation via Teddy. I wondered if anyone at Rabbit would even bother to ask Joey if it was true. Probably not. An addict’s word can never be trusted. And besides, for someone like Ed Rossitto or David Gent—Bibi would definitely go that high, if not all the way to the top—it would be more trouble than it was worth. Better to just fire the stand-in producer (what was her name again?), keep Bibi happy, and forget it ever happened. And Len wouldn’t object. Better me than him. That’s why he’d put me up to this in the first place—just like he’d had me take the fall for Joey’s treatment during The Reveal. The whole thing was crazy, like my worst day at high school squared. I also felt a bizarre kind of shame—as if this were all my fault, as if only a world-class loser could make an enemy of a woman so admired and so powerful.
I debated calling Mitch. He’d understand. He’d tell me what I wanted to hear. But he’d also tell Joey everything, which would be a disaster. That left only one other person whose number I could dial: Mom. But it was past midnight on the East Coast. And she’d worry. Or rather, she’d lecture me about how I should have never gone to “Hollyweird” to begin with, and then she’d start checking in with me every day, asking questions
, making me paranoid, getting herself into a state. Which meant calling Mom was an option best left for real emergencies. Like if I was fired. Or if Icon was cancelled, which basically meant the same thing.
Slumping down on the bed, I allowed myself a fantasy of escape; of not going to San Diego—the next stop on the Icon audition tour—and instead taking the morning flight to Honolulu. If I could find a ticket for less than a thousand bucks, I still had enough credit left on my Visa card. No more Bibi. No more Len. No more clipboards and swollen toes. Just white sand and flip-flops… and Brock making me breakfast. Ah, yes… lovely, blue-eyed Brock, muscular and bare-chested, holding up a tray of… ooh, yes, Danish pastries… as the Tom Waits version of “Ol’ ’55” plays on the radio… and our pet sea turtle—all my Hawaiian daydreams involve a pet sea turtle—rests in his shell on the rocks beyond the lanai…
I closed my eyes.
That was more like it.
“Hey—me again.”
I was back on the line with Brock’s voicemail, sitting upright, the hoarseness now gone from my throat. “What if I get on a plane tomorrow? Seriously. Screw Icon. I can find a job—whatever. I can write on the weekends. Call me, call me, call me.”
But he didn’t.
When I awoke the next day—still in my clothes (I know, I know)—my phone showed no new messages, no missed calls. Not even an e-mail or a Facebook message. WTF. Usually, Brock was the one chasing me. Had he just had a busy night at work? Had he left his phone on the beach? Or did I no longer have a boyfriend? (If I’d been having doubts, maybe he’d been having doubts, too.)
What a perfectly shitty end to a perfectly shitty week.
So.
I made myself coffee. I ate a week-old bun. I took a shower. I found some clean clothes and put them on. I decided to buy cigarettes. I walked to the 7-Eleven up the street. I decided against buying cigarettes. I walked home again. I changed my mind. I walked back to the 7-Eleven up the street. I changed my mind again. The guy behind the counter asked me if I was okay. Uh-oh—sobbing redhead! He gave me a soda on the house. I reassured him that I was okay. I reassured him again that I was okay. I told him that, no, seriously, I did not need his cell number.