Elimination Night

by AnonYMous

  Here was the big surprise, though: Bibi wasn’t the issue.

  In fact, Bibi’s performance during the first show at Greenlit Studios had been the strongest of all three judges. For a start, she’d been allowed (as per the contract that Teddy had negotiated) to stage a “live performance” of her latest single during the halftime break. Or as Len explained it to Ed Rossitto, “live in the sense that she’ll be alive when we fucking prerecord it.” In fairness to Bibi, the song was a good deal more entertaining than the usual lip-synched affair. This was due in large part to the choreography, which involved a break-dancing mariachi band, a troupe of eighteen mostly naked construction workers, six lions, several high-wire aerial stunts, an indoor explosion, and—the masterstroke, in my opinion—a choir of Nepalese lentil-famine refugees. It lasted two and half minutes, at a cost of approximately ten thousand dollars per second.

  Bibi paid for it herself.

  She had some help in another department, too: her lines. These were mostly the work of the Oscar-winning screenwriter Tad Dunkel, who’d been hired by Teddy to sit through the afternoon rehearsals and compose emotional monologues for Bibi inspired by the contestants’ performances. (Which meant that no matter how much they improved in time for the live broadcast, it made no difference to what Bibi said.) At first, I was surprised Tad had even taken the job. I mean, the man had an Oscar on his mantelpiece. But then I discovered that since winning his sole Academy Award nearly two decades ago, Tad had sold only one other screenplay, the infamous animated comedy, Terrence the Turkey, released over the Thanksgiving weekend of 1995. It was infamous because it took in a grand total of $64.38 cents at the box office—a record that stands to this day. Tad never completed another full-length feature, although he did find work as a script consultant, becoming known in the business as “The Cry Guy” for his unfailing ability to make test audiences weep. His secret, went the Hollywood joke, was that he simply channeled the pain of Terrence the Turkey’s opening weekend.

  And now Bibi had him on retainer.

  It was, I had to admit, a brilliant move. Every time Bibi opened her mouth, it felt like the third act of a major motion picture. After a contestant’s performance of “Stayin’ Alive,” for example, Bibi embarked upon a lengthy soliloquy about how the lyrics brought to mind her tragic childhood dachshund, Frankie, who had died in her arms when she was just six years old. We learned about Frankie’s playful disposition. We learned about the time Frankie saved the family goldfish from an evil neighborhood cat. We learned about Frankie’s love of meatball sandwiches. And by the time Bibi reached the part about Frankie licking her six-year-old face one last time before snuggling up to her chest and drawing his final doggie breath—and how she’d wrapped him in a blanket from her own bed and wrote a note to the angels reminding them to feed him a meatball hero every Sunday—the audience had experienced what amounted to a collective nervous breakdown. People were sobbing so hard, Len had to switch off the studio mics. The Cry Guy had done his job. Bibi had shown her passion, her tears… her humanity. As for the contestant: He stood there motionless and somewhat confused, wondering what precisely it had been about his rendition of a 1970s Bee Gees classic that had triggered such an epic canine obituary.

  (It probably goes without saying, of course, that Frankie was a work of fiction.)

  So, anyway: Bibi wasn’t the problem. All of the caution she’d exercised during the audition rounds—her fear of being made to look stupid in the editing room—had vanished. Suddenly, Bibi was in her element. She was an actress, after all. She liked memorizing lines—it was so much easier than having to think of what to say. Which begged the question: If Bibi wasn’t ruining the show… then who was?

  It was Joey.

  Something had changed in him since that night at Maison Chelsea. His eyes were bloody hollows. His hair was a rodent’s nest. Even his mouth, with those spectacular, ever-shifting lips, looked somehow less luxurious than usual. He seemed to be… disintegrating. At first, I thought it was the Bonnie situation. But the more I found out about the circumstances of her pregnancy, the more I suspected that it had nothing whatsoever to do with Joey’s malaise. Bonnie, it transpired, had always wanted a child. And after her husband’s injury, not to mention the slaughter of his twenty-three comrades, the act of creating and nurturing a new human life seemed essential to her, a way of proving that the universe—God, I suppose—was still capable of love. But Staff Sergeant Mike Donovan was of course no longer able to father a child. And unlike many of his fellow soldiers, he hadn’t visited a sperm bank before leaving for Afghanistan: It was the married guys who jerked off into test tubes before their tours of duty, not the likes of Mikey, who was still technically a bachelor at the time he was ambushed.

  Now it was too late. Half of Mikey’s groin had been taken out by shrapnel, leaving him infertile. Nevertheless, he was determined to give Bonnie a baby, one way or another, even if the child wasn’t biologically his. It was the very least he could do, he told his wife (via coded eyeblinks), given all that she had sacrificed for him. So Bonnie signed up to a donor service, and was busy reviewing anonymous candidates online, purchasing every last piece of information she could about each one of them—voice recordings, handwriting samples, medical histories, anything—when she came in for her Project Icon audition.

  It didn’t take long for one of the research interns to find out about her plans to conceive. And it took even less time for word to reach Joey, who immediately stepped in to “offer my schlong in the name of God and country.” Bonnie, who had grown up listening to Honeyload with Mikey, couldn’t have been more delighted. And after consulting with her husband, she accepted his offer. Nevertheless, there was a small misunderstanding about how the… uh, transaction would take place. Hence the whole issue of the kiss. Or more accurately, the lunge. Still, Joey handled the rejection well, and although he confessed some disappointment about the means of extraction, he stuck by his promise, disappeared into the bathroom, and emerged approximately thirty-eight seconds later with a plastic beaker practically overflowing with what he called his “love spunk number nine.” To Joey, who is thought to have at least forty-three illegitimate sons and daughters across the globe—along with his seventeen official children and thirty-five grandchildren (with another half-dozen grandchildren pending)—the idea of fathering an infant he would almost certainly never meet wasn’t exactly a new one. And while he wasn’t getting any “oopygoopy” (his phrase) out of the conception, at least it wouldn’t involve the usual paternity suit.

  Not everyone shared Bonnie and Joey’s enthusiasm for the artificial insemination idea, however. Len, for example, was especially unmoved by Joey’s generosity with regards to the distribution of his semen. In fact, when he found out about it, he called Joey into his office, printed out a copy of the Nonfraternization Agreement that each judge had signed only a few weeks earlier, and informed him that he was now in official breach of his Project Icon contract. Not only could Rabbit fire him, said Len, but it could also sue him—as could Zero Management. Then Maria Herman-Bloch walked into the room with David Gent, Ed Rossitto, and five Big Corp lawyers. In Maria’s yellow-tinged fingers was another contract, which outlined the terms of a payment from Big Corp to Bonnie of one million dollars in return for her immediate removal from the show and a promise never to take legal action over the “private incident involving Mr. Lovecraft’s supply of biological fluids,” nor discuss any aspect of it with anyone, especially not the press. The settlement included an agreement by Joey to forgo three months’ salary as a disciplinary measure. He signed without protest.

  That was what had caused the terrible scene in Las Vegas. In spite of her awkwardness around Bonnie initially, Bibi had in fact been genuinely touched by her story. It had made her go home, dismiss the nannies for the evening, and hold her young sons tighter than she ever had before. She’d even tried again to make up with Edouard, who was still upset about being fired as her cue-card holder back in San Diego. So when she w
as ordered to send Bonnie home with no explanation other than “it’s the producers’ wishes”—Len hadn’t wanted to tell her the real story, because of what Teddy might do—she threatened to resign.

  By this point, however, Len was operating on his special reserve tank of patience. So he called her bluff. He knew Bibi liked her new job too much to leave. Bibi’s breakdown in Las Vegas was therefore only partially anguish over what she had been forced to do. It was also a tantrum over not getting her own way. And Joey? Well, he felt bad, of course. But the way he saw it, he had given Bonnie a gift more precious than winning Icon. Besides, there was nothing to stop her following a singing career after leaving the show. Nothing other than the baby’s arrival in nine months’ time, anyway.

  So the question remained: Why had Joey become so… boring on camera suddenly? It didn’t make any sense. He was supposed to be the King of Sing, the Devil of Treble… the Holy Cow of Big Wow!

  My guess was the drugs. Although I’d reclaimed my jar of green pills (by then almost empty), Joey could easily have found another supply. He was an addict, after all. And an addict will do anything to get his fix, especially if the addict in question is a multimillionaire rock star with his own private staff. I’d alerted Mitch to the issue, of course—but there was only so much he could do without drawing Rabbit’s attention to the matter, and that was the last thing he wanted after the whole Bonnie fiasco. “Let me handle it, Bill,” he told me over the phone after the Maison Chelsea incident. “I’ll call his sponsor. We’ll get him fixed, don’t worry.”

  Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but think back to Las Vegas Week. Was there any way I could have left my pills in his trailer? Was there a chance, no matter how infinitesimal, that he was telling the truth, and that he hadn’t actually stolen from me?

  It just didn’t seem possible. I couldn’t even remember what Joey’s trailer looked like, to be honest with you. I certainly hadn’t been inside it. Which meant Joey must have seen the jar in my purse—just as Bibi had done in that Milwaukee bathroom—and then waited for his opportunity. It wouldn’t exactly have taken a criminal mastermind to pull it off. The only flaw in his plan being that once his addiction was reactivated, he got through most of the jar in twenty-four hours. And then he needed more. So what did he do? He invited me over to his private club, on the pretence of a “last supper” with Mitch and the others, in hopes that by then I’d refilled my prescription. Better to steal from me (again) than call up one of his old dealers, with all the risk that involved. Only he was so wasted by the time I got there—and so driven into a frenzy of lust by the nude aerobics in the pool—that he made that desperate, fumbled pass at me instead.

  Strangely enough, however, I still had enough faith in Joey to believe that he hadn’t gotten hold of any more pills after I busted him. In fact, I suspected that he’d done exactly what Mitch had told him to and called his sponsor. When you’re an addict, relapses happen: I’d learned that growing up from one of Dad’s alcoholic friends. In rehab you’re taught to prepare for them, recognize them, shut them down. Pray for potatoes, but grab a hoe, as they say. The reason for Joey’s recent behavior, therefore, was probably more a combination of justified anxiety at the live shows coming up—during which he was expected to talk, not sing—and postrelapse shame. After all, he had another pee test due before the next live episode (they were scheduled every six weeks now) and he’d taken so many of my pills—at least forty, by my estimates—that not even an ocean full of Kangen water could flush all traces of the drug from his system. Which meant Joey was probably facing yet another self-inflicted career disaster. I doubted Len would fire him, even so. Way too much hassle. But that wasn’t the issue. The issue was Joey’s pride. If he failed the pee test, there was a good chance the story would get into Showbiz, thus proving Blade Morgan and the rest of Honeyload right about the shit they’d said about him over the years—i.e., that he was the biggest junkie in the band, a terminal fuckup, and essentially unemployable.

  The whole point of Joey taking the job on Icon had been “to stick a middle finger up to those fuckin’ hypocrites.” To say, “Screw you guys, I’m fine.” And now… it might do the very opposite. Hence Joey sinking lower and lower into a private, croc-filled swamp of despair. His confidence, his swagger… his showbiz sheen—it had all gone. Just as Bibi had been afraid of Icon’s editors during the prerecorded episodes, Joey was now afraid of himself. He was paralyzed. He simply no longer trusted what might come out of his mouth on live TV. The King of Sing had become the Duke of Dull. The best he could manage after a contestant’s performance was, “Yeah, that was nice, man. You did great.”

  He said it to everyone.

  “That was nice, man.”

  Over and over.

  “You did great.”

  Here was the problem, though: Self-censorship wasn’t keeping Joey out of trouble. It was getting him into more trouble, just of a different kind. The Rabbit network wasn’t handing over a million dollars per month to the man who had once urinated on Buckingham Palace, eaten a snake during a gig in Tel Aviv, and driven a Lamborghini Countach over Niagara Falls, to have him turn into another JD Coolz. No, they wanted a rock star—a lunatic who’d bang and crash around the place, making headlines and offending people. And yet they’d somehow ended up with the very opposite of that. Back at The Lot on Sir Harold Killoch Drive, David Gent was furious. So were Ed Rossitto and Maria Herman-Bloch. If Joey wasn’t careful, he was about to become the first celebrity in the history of show business to be fired for not misbehaving enough.

  22

  Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You

  March

  “ARE YOU READY YET?” I asked the brass telephone.

  “Hold on,” came the muffled reply.

  “What’s taking so long?”

  “Is this gonna be on TV?”

  “No.”

  “So there are no cameras out there?”

  “No cameras. You’re a contestant in a singing competition, remember—not a makeover show.”

  “You’re promising me this isn’t going to be on TV?”

  “Mia,” I said, heavily. “For the ten thousandth time: This is not going to be on TV. Please, let’s get this over with. It’s uncomfortable in here, and hot as hell. Can you open the hatch?”

  Finally, Mia Pelosi hung up the receiver. Then a heavy scraping noise, as a bolt slid out of its metal casing.

  The hatch opened.

  “Ooooh…” I said, peering through the latticed grille. “That’s, uh… wow. That’s kinda…”

  We were in a confessional booth—a real confession booth, fashioned from carved oak, the panels so distressed by age they had turned almost black. It had been salvaged from the burnt wreckage of a church up in Santa Barbara (or so went the story), shipped down to West Hollywood, and then converted into a novelty dressing room by the owners of Les Couilles En Mer, an erotic-themed boutique on Melrose and Crescent Heights. I’d brought Mia down here between rehearsals—Len had lent us his chauffeur-driven Jaguar for the occasion—to shop for new stage outfits. After Mia, I would do the same for Cassie Turner (more of a challenge, given her preference for dreads and general hobo-wear) and then Jimmy Nugget, and so on.

  Under normal circumstances, of course, the contestants’ two hundred dollar per episode clothing allowance wouldn’t have been enough to buy so much as a single vagina-print T-shirt from this place. (The vaginas are tiny and pink, making them appear at first glance to be a vintage floral pattern.) Today was different, however. Today, as a reward for surviving three elimination nights since the live shows began, the dozen singers who remained in the competition had been presented with a two-thousand-dollar Les Couilles En Mer gift certificate.

  The real reason for this? Len had been appalled by their fashion choices to date. “These kids are supposed to be pop stars, not sales assistants at Best-bloody-Buy!” he’d yelled, during a staff meeting. The vouchers were therefore designed to encourage more daring outfits, especially for the
girls—the best looking of whom by far was the pale yet delicate Mia Pelosi, with her shiny black, just-out-of-bed bangs, and those sad, brown, sorry-about-last-night eyes. For all her hotness, however, Mia had a dress sense that was unusually conservative—a result, I assumed, of her years in the Metropolitan Opera. Len was determined to change that. He wanted some flesh. Yes… with the ratings still at all-time lows, and Sir Harold due back any moment, things were getting seriously desperate.

  So there I was… behind the curtain in a former box of repentance, on the sinner’s side. In the priest’s compartment, meanwhile, was Mia, twirling in front of the open hatch. (When the grille was covered, the booth’s oak panels were thick enough to make conversation impossible, hence the antique two-way telephone system.)

  “Tell me,” said Mia, her right arm rising defensively over her chest. “Is it too… slutty?”

  “Nooo,” I reassured, unconvincingly. “It’s just…” I looked again at the purple sleeveless dress, split to within a millimeter of the crotch to reveal a long, milky (and slightly bruised) left leg. The split was provocative, that was for sure. And yet it was nothing compared with the suicidal free fall of the neckline, which left enough of Mia’s surprisingly large breasts on display to put the average male imagination out of business for the duration of “The Power of Love,” her first song choice of the night.

  “It’s funny,” said Mia, looking down at herself. “In the opera, I was the trash from New Jersey. Those snooty fucks were always trying to improve me, turn me into one of them—like I was Eliza Doolittle or somethin’. Guess it must have worked. I’ve never worn anything like this in my life. I mean, it’s beautiful, but—”