Elimination Night

by AnonYMous

  This was precisely why Joey always went to Mount Cypress: The place was built for celebrities in distress, what with the two-thousand-square-foot “recovery suites” and counterpaparazzi squads at every entry and exit point. Not that I’d noticed any telltale blacked-out SUVs on the way in, which suggested no one knew about this yet—or at least no one other than Nigel Crowther…

  Holy crap, tonight had been weird.

  I couldn’t even begin to think about who Crowther’s “source” might be—or anything else regarding my time aboard The Talent and the Glory, for that matter. With Joey in the hospital, in God knows what condition, it made me feel almost traitorous.

  At the reception desk, I tried desperately to remember the fake name Joey had used when booking himself into hotels on the Project Icon auditions tour. It was a cartoon character, I knew that much. But which one? Think, Sash, think. “I’m here to see Mr. Scooby-Doo,” I announced, eventually, to the exhausted-looking and bespectacled African American man behind the counter. “He’s in one of the private recovery suites.”

  “No ‘Scooby-Doo’ here,” he said, without looking up from his paperback.

  “Please,” I begged, “I can’t get through to his manager on the phone. I need to be up there. It’s urgent.”

  The receptionist sighed, put down his book, and shifted uncomfortably on his chair. “Why don’t you try again,” he said, tapping a key on his computer. “Along the same lines.”

  “Oh, thank you, thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me, Miss. Just get it right.”

  I was sure it was Scooby-Doo. But there was some kind of twist to it: Something ridiculous.

  “Mr. Scooby-Dooby-Doo?” I attempted.

  He shook his head.

  “Mr. Scooby-Dooby… Doo-Wop-Dooby-Doo?”

  Handing me a laminated guest pass, he said: “Take the elevator to the fourth floor. Ward three, room 709. Oh… and Miss?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can you please ask Mr. Scooby-Dooby-Doo-Wop-Dooby-Doo to come up with a better name. I’ve been through this a dozen times already this evening.”

  “I will. Thank you again. Thank you so much.”

  I ran.

  Mitch was standing outside room 709 with a heavy blanket in his arms. The door was half-open, enough to reveal the shape of Joey’s body under starched white bed covers. Next to him was a giant rack of monitoring equipment. It bleeped and pulsed. “They pumped him out pretty good,” said Mitch. “It was touch and go a few minutes ago—I had to switch off my phone, sorry—but it looks like he’s pulling through. The docs say he should be in okay shape by the morning.”

  I was so relieved, I threw my arms around Mitch and hugged him, causing the blanket he was holding to twitch and squeal. I jumped back in surprise, almost knocking over a passing nurse. Then I watched in disbelief as two small, pink nostrils emerged from between the folds. They sniffed the air. Then an oink and a grunt.

  “Mitch,” I said, calmly. “Why do you have a pig in that blanket?”

  “Oh, uh—Joey got him last week on the advice of his psychiatrist. He’s a ‘comfort animal.’ Helps reduce depression and anxiety, or so they say. Joey takes him everywhere now.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “Benjamin Lovecraft the Third, after Joey’s great-grandfather.”

  “Quite a title.”

  “We call him BLT.”

  “… so what happened, Mitch?”

  “We just went to the pet store on Melrose. You’d be amazed what you can get for—”

  “No, the overdose, Mitch. The overdose.”

  Mitch rubbed his eyes. He looked ragged, spent. “Joey’s mom died,” he sighed. “Stage-four cancer. He hadn’t told anyone about it. That’s what caused his relapse, I think. I’m also pretty sure that’s why he’s been so… unlike himself recently. He took it really bad. He worshipped her, y’know—probably ’cause his dad was never around. But she was a piece of work, if you ask me. Remember that story he told Ed Rossitto about sitting under the piano while she played? Well, she never let him under the piano, it turns out. She’d lock Joey and his brother in their room when she practiced. The only time Joey got under that thing was when he broke out and she wasn’t looking. He fell asleep, apparently. Convinced himself she was playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21 in C major as a way of expressing her love. Tragic. He woke up screaming when he felt the boiling water on his legs. Poor kid. He still has the scars to this day. I think that’s why he can be so critical of people, y’know. He just does to them what she did to him.”

  I honestly thought I might cry. The way Joey had told the piano story to Ed… he must have so badly wanted it to be true. “How could a mother do that?” I said.

  “I’ve no idea—I think I’d be shoving pills down my neck, too, if I’d had that kind of upbringing.”

  “But where did he get the drugs? Did he call a dealer?”

  “God, no. When Joey’s using, he improvises. I caught him smoking the oregano off a frozen pizza once. So when he got the news about his mom, he just downed whatever was closest to hand, which happened to be a jar of maximum-strength aspirin. Thank God for Mu. She came home a few minutes later. Somehow got him into the Range Rover and drove him here. Then they gave him the pump and the gastric decontamination. Now he’s on charcoal tablets.”

  “Charcoal?”

  “Soaks up the drugs. No one knows about this, by the way, and I’m hoping to keep it that way. It might not matter, of course: The pee-test results come back from the lab tomorrow morning. It’ll be a miracle if he passes. Here, take this.”

  Mitch handed me the blanket with BLT still inside. I tried to give it back, but not quickly enough.

  “I’m going to get something to eat,” said Mitch, who by now was already halfway down the hallway. “It’s been a long night. Plus, the canteen in this place has a Michelin star. Oh—there’s some milk for BLT in Joey’s room. Bottle-feed him when he gets hungry. And call me if he shits himself. That’s a two-man emergency.”

  “Did you switch your phone back on?” I shouted after him.

  But he was gone.

  With nothing better to do, I walked into Joey’s room. It was the size of a large Manhattan apartment, with polished wooden floors, and a north-facing wall made entirely from glass, which supplied a letterbox view over the Hollywood hills and the great terrestrial constellation of the LA grid system below. Facing Joey’s bed was a hundredinch flatscreen mounted on a steel frame, along with what appeared to be every type of gaming console ever invented. Elsewhere I saw basketball hoops, a Ping-Pong table, massage chairs, and an espresso bar.

  Groaning from the stress of the day, I fell backward into a deep velvet sofa by the window. BLT nibbled at my cheek. It hurt, but I was too tired to push him away. His breath smelled of… whiskey and chocolate. What the hell had Mitch been feeding him?

  I looked over at Joey. His face was a mass of gurgling plastic tubes. It was doubtful he’d be waking up any time soon. To the left of him, I noticed, was a filing cabinet on wheels—at least ten drawers tall. Written on the side, in black marker: “Lovecraft, Joseph T.—patient history.” And then, below that: “Cabinet 14 of 28.”

  I wanted to laugh but didn’t have the energy. Instead, I let my head fall back onto the cushion and closed my eyes—and by the time I realized I was falling asleep, it was too late, or I just didn’t care. I was done. For once, everything could wait.

  27

  Love What You Do

  WHEN I AWOKE, there was sunlight on my face. I was still on the sofa, but BLT had gone. Outside: car horns, jackhammers, trucks reversing. “Twelve hours,” I murmured. A groggy fumble for my phone. The backlit screen told me it was almost ten o’clock. I’d slept all night… Jesus, and then some. Now I was late for work. More to the point: I had less than forty minutes to dial the number on the back of the business card in my pocket, and give Nigel Crowther my answer.

  An Aston Martin.

  A penthouse apar
tment.

  Two hundred thousand dollars a year.

  The services of Rick Ponderosa, literary agent.

  Yes or no, Sasha. Yes or no?

  Surely, this wasn’t going to take a great deal of thought. And yet… everything about Crowther was so wrong. His ego terrified me, for a start. I mean, that was clearly what the whole performance with the helicopter and the yacht had been about—pure male ego. Crowther’s hubris also explained why he was trying so hard to destroy Project Icon, even after it had rewarded him with global celebrity and a bank account so large he could afford The Talent and the Glory. Leaving the panel was understandable. But gloating over Icon’s failure, and calling for its cancellation every day in the press? Pure malice. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t shake the feeling that Crowther had somehow been involved in my pills turning up in Joey’s trailer. As an act of sabotage, it was just so… perfect. He would have surely known that Joey would be unable to resist; that a relapse of that scale would send him into a spiral of catastrophe… turning a bad situation for the show into something even worse.

  He couldn’t have done it himself, of course. Maybe Teddy was acting on his behalf. It made sense. Maybe the two of them had set up some kind of communications back channel, months ago, so The Talent Machine could hire Bibi if—or when—Project Icon was taken off the air. Maybe Teddy was Crowther’s “source.” Maybe Bibi was in on it, too. Would that really be so strange, so impossible to imagine, after everything that had happened this season? Bibi herself had once threatened to frame me for selling pills to Joey. If she was capable of that, then she was also surely capable of an even grander, even more diabolical conspiracy.

  A final reservation about Crowther: If the exploitation of Mia Pelosi had made me so uncomfortable, how would I handle The Talent Machine? Crowther had recently admitted to hiring an in-house “psychological counselor” for the first season’s contestants, for example. Two Svens had done the same at Project Icon, of course—only his shrink was brought in to actually help the contestants, to stop them going out of their minds from the fame and the weekly threat of elimination. Crowther’s shrink, on the other hand, had been given a very different brief. A former psych-ops specialist from Guantánamo Bay, his job was to break the contestants, to accelerate and heighten their emotional distress—so the results could be captured on hidden cameras throughout the studio. That was the point of The Talent Machine: drama of the lowest, cruelest kind.

  Still… two hundred thousand dollars was two hundred thousand dollars. A year on that salary, and I’d have enough in the bank to write three novels, nevermind one.

  “Have you forgiven me yet, Bungalow Bill?”

  Joey’s voice—an octave lower than usual—startled me.

  I’d almost forgotten he was in the room.

  “You’ve alive,” I said, hauling myself upright.

  Joey was more than just alive. He was propped up on pillows, a morning feast laid out on a silver tray in front of him. The tubes were out of his nose. Fresh flowers had been placed around the room in tall vases. And in the far corner by the door—which was closed, with the red “privacy please” light switched on—BLT was nosing around in what appeared to be some kind of custom-built piggy playpen.

  “You had every right to be mad with me, y’know,” he croaked. “It’s okay. I get it.”

  “No, Joey,” I sighed. “If I’d have known about your mom… that she was sick… what she did to you… I wouldn’t have given you such a hard time about the pills. Or, y’know, the other stuff. I’m so sorry this happened. My dad died from cancer, too.”

  Joey nodded slowly.

  “So what’s new?” he said, changing the subject. “Apart from me takin’ enough aspirin to cure every goddamn headache in China. Shit, man—Joey Dumbass strikes again.”

  “You were upset.”

  “My mom… she wasn’t real emotional, y’know? Some fucked-up Danish thing. Or maybe it was just her, I dunno. Me and my bro, we had a rough time dealin’ with it. That ain’t an excuse for doin’ what I did, ’course. There’s no excuse for that.”

  “Look, Joey” I said. “I know this is a bad time, so don’t answer this if don’t feel like it. But I need to know. When you took my pills, did you really find them in my trailer?”

  Joey laughed, which seemed to cause him some pain. “You’re still busting my ass about that?”

  “I don’t care if you stole them, Joey. I just need to know.”

  “They were right there in my trailer, man,” he said, leaning forward. “I fuckin’ swear! Look at me: I’m done. Game over. Why would I lie to you about that now? They were in the bathroom, on the countertop. When I saw ’em, I was all alone, with the door fuckin’ closed. I spent thirty goddamn years on those pills, and another ten getting off ’em. I thought I was hallucinating. I thought the devil himself had come along to tempt me. And I failed, Bill, I failed the test. But I swear to you, they were in my trailer. So either you left ’em, or some asshole put ’em there.”

  I believed him. As much as I felt like a sucker—never trust an addict—I really believed him.

  “Now let me ask you something, Bungalow Bill,” said Joey, his voice strengthening. “Why are you even doing this job? I mean, you asked me if I cared about Project Icon the other night. But what about you, huh? You act like you’re too cool for school half the time, like none of this means a goddamn thing.”

  No one had ever asked me this before. Not directly, anyway. I’d certainly never had to explain it out loud. “Before my dad died,” I began, aware how deluded I was going to sound, “he told me to do what I love. And what I love is… I love to write, Joey. But the problem is, no one’s going to pay me to write a novel when I’ve never been published before. So I need to save up some money, take some time off, and…”—I gave him the spiel about Brock, Hawaii, the whole master plan—“… and that’s why I took this job. I never even wanted to work in TV. It just came up. Len called me and it seemed like a good idea—”

  “What did your old man do?”

  “He played the trumpet.”

  “He made a living doing that?”

  “Barely. He played in a wedding band.”

  “So he did what he loved, and he made a paycheck.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Listen to me, Bungalow Bill. Your daddy was right: You should do what you love. But here’s what he didn’t tell ya: You’ve also gotta find a way to love what you do. I bet you any money you like, your old man never dreamed of working his ass off—playing two gigs a night, probably—in a fuckin’ wedding band. I know trumpet players, man: They all wanna be the next Miles fuckin’ Davis. That’s why most of ’em end up drunks or junkies. Either that, or they give up altogether and go kill their souls in an office somewhere. But not your daddy. No, he found a way to love what he HAD to do to pay the rent. Life ain’t perfect, Bill. It’s easy to complain about the job you’ve got, how it ain’t exactly what you want, and this, that, and the other. I used to hear that bullshit from Blade all the time. ‘Why are we playin’ this shitty little club, now that we’re a stadium band? Why are we doin’ this stoopid MTV video, when it should be about the music? Why are we doing that commercial, this book deal, that reality TV show?’ Well, hey, guess what? No one owes you a living. In the entertainment business, you snap your fingers, your audience has moved on, you’ve spent your money, and you’re back home, livin’ with your mom. So you wanna be a writer? Why the FUCK do you need a year on a beach with Mr. Hawaii to do that, man? You’re already a writer: You ghostwrite for the contestants, dontcha? It ain’t War and Peace—I’ll grant you that—but everyone’s gotta start somewhere.”

  I’d never thought about my job that way before. But it was true—I did ghostwrite for the contestants. I wrote those cheesy backstories to the songs they chose every week.

  I remembered now what Dad had told me about his old band, Baja Babylonia: Stevie on bass, Jimbo on keys, Fitz on drums. They’d recorded this jazz album—three tracks, each la
sting twenty minutes or so—and it had been reviewed by one of the underground listings magazines. A huge deal, in those days. All of a sudden, celebrities were turning up to their gigs. Within a month, they’d been picked up by the same label the Mahavishnu Orchestra were on. And a month after that, they’d been dumped. The album sold a few dozen copies. Stevie, Jimbo, and Fitz couldn’t take it. For them, it was a record deal or nothing. For Dad… well, he loved the trumpet too much to give up. That’s when he joined the wedding band, and gave music lessons at Babylon High when he wasn’t touring. He’d always hoped for another break. But he still got to do what he loved for a living.

  “I just wish I didn’t feel like we were taking advantage of the contestants so much,” I said. “I mean, that whole thing with Mia’s dress. And have you ever seen the contracts that Two Svens makes them sign? They don’t even get paid.”

  “Oh, honey,” said Joey, as though my ignorance were endearing. “You ever heard of Brian Epstein?”

  “Of course. The Beatles’ manager.”

  “That’s right. And d’you know what Epstein told Ed Sullivan when he offered the Fab Four a mountain of fuckin’ cash to come on his show in sixty-four?”

  “It wasn’t enough?”

  “Try again.”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “He didn’t want the money.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Swear to God, look it up on Googlepedia. Ed Sullivan was offerin’ a one-shot deal: one night, three songs, big fuckin’ payday. Same thing he’d given Elvis a few years earlier. But Epstein didn’t give a shit about the money. He didn’t want a one-shot deal—he wanted The Beatles on the show three times in a row, top billing each time And for that, he was happy to take almost nothin’ at all. The Ed Sullivan Show was a national ad campaign, as far as Brian Epstein was concerned.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “You’re ten years old, how could you? The point being: Brian Epstein was a smart motherfucker. The Beatles were lucky to have him. Just like those contestants are lucky to have Two Svens. If the greatest band in history was happy to give up a payday to get on prime-time TV, then why can’t those kids do the same? Trust me—for the ones with the talent, who can work hard and take the pressure—it’s the best deal they’ll ever make. And before you tell me The Ed Sullivan Show was cooler beans than Project Icon, think again, man. Ed Sullivan was a Grade A fuckin’ cheeseball. He had ventriloquists’ dummies and tapdancing farm animals and shit on his show. He damn near ruined the Beatles, too. Go watch the tape. He had ’em do a cover of a show tune—and when John Lennon opened his mouth to sing, he put a caption up that said, ‘Sorry, girls, he’s married.’ Project Icon is like Shakespeare compared with that goddamn corny bullshit.”