“But I was supposed to—”
“Never mind that. I’m much older than you and I’m taking over. We don’t want to have Stuart angry at us, do we?”
“No!”
“Okay, then, Todd, just fuck off now.”
Todd got out and Neal and I hopped in.
“Well, that was easy,” I said as we whirred away.
“Sure was.”
The contestants were to the right, but we turned left and, before a glorious panorama of Pearl Harbor, stopped to inspect the succulent contents of the contestants’ clamshell containers.
“Excellent-looking chicken tikka masala, Ray. Want to try some?”
“We need forks. Where’s the cutlery?”
Neal fished around in a bag, removed something and handed it to me. It was a forky thing, but with a round depression.
“What the fuck is this?”
“It’s a spork.”
A spork, or a foon, is hybrid cutlery having a spoon-like scoop at one end with three or four fork tines. Spork-type utensils have been in use since the late nineteenth century. Patents for spork-like designs date back to 1874, when the word “spork” was registered as a trademark in the U.S. Sporks are used by fast-food restaurants, schools, the military and prisons.
“A spork? Who the fuck would eat food with a thing called a spork?”
“Look,” said Neal. “You can see a forky bit on the edge of the spoony bit.” Neal dug into his chicken. His sporkwork was surprisingly dexterous.
“Jesus, Neal, watching you eat with a spork is like seeing Helen Keller at a ladies’ afternoon tea.”
“Sporks are the wave of the future, Ray. Oh—pass me some of that ravioli.”
“Will do.”
I took two sporks and began using them to down some of the smashingly good pasta.
Neal said, “Wait, a second, Ray—you don’t need two sporks. The whole point of a spork is that you only need the one utensil.”
“Neal, I’ll use two sporks if I fucking well want to.”
“But it’s defeating the whole spirit of the spork.”
“Spork spirit?” It’s hard to get mad at Neal, because he suffers from a medical condition called total fucking stupidity.
“Ray, don’t get mad just because I say yes to life. I like to keep myself available to the universe, because it brings me wisdom. Maybe you just don’t want me to soar.”
“It’s a goddamn fucking spork, Neal. It is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the fucking Western universe.”
“Ray, just eat.”
“I can’t. I’m upset.” It’s true. When I get exercised about something, the adrenaline kills my hunger. Fight or flight.
“But you’re going to sugar-crash, Ray, and then where’ll you be? It’ll take you days to rejigger your system back to normal.”
Neal, confound him, had a point.
“Here,” he said. “You have to eat something. Start with these.”
“What are they?”
“Mixed nuts.”
“What’s this weird-looking one?”
“A macadamia nut.”
13
When a movie is made of this entire soul-fart of an experience, this will be the point where we cut to a scene in which our hero opens his eyes to find himself in bed with an IV in his right arm, while in the background comes the sound of hooting, hollering and the loathsome Neal, singing and most likely dancing his own version of the 1984 Tears for Fears classic, “Shout.”
What the fuck?
As our hero regains consciousness, he will realize he is in a six-bed hospital ward shared with five nut-brown Samoan wrestlers, all disintegrating as a result of heart disease or diabetes garnered from a lifetime of fatty, sugary snacks purchased through welfare fraud.
The music will stop and our hero will hear clapping and laughter, and then his faithful slave friend Neal’s footsteps approaching.
“Ray! You’re awake!”
“What the fucking hell is going on here?”
“You had an allergic reaction, Ray. That macadamia nut you ate. You swelled up like one of these fellows here—you almost died.”
I shuddered and a wave of hunger went through me. “Neal, how long have I been in here?”
“Two days, Ray, but I knew you had Survival spirit and would make it through.”
“Survival spirit? I have no such fucking thing. What is wrong with you, Neal?”
“It’s a good thing I have some paramedic training. Your eyeballs were about to pop out of your skull like Ping-Pong balls.”
At that very moment, I heard a voice that made my gonads retreat into my groin.
“Darling! You’re alive! All the whores along the International Date Line must be rejoicing at the news.”
Fiona? What was she doing here?
“Hello, darling. I can see your brush with death has made you contemplative and given your soul complexity and depth.”
“Fi, what in God’s name are you doing in …” I looked at Neal.
“Honolulu General.”
“What the fuck are you doing in Honolulu General?”
“Well, for starters, I’m feasting on your tears. To me they taste of joy. Second, as you know, I was in southern France. I was having a strawberry lubricant-scented frolic with a gifted young thing who was, um, auditioning for a part in a global beverage campaign, when suddenly, just as I was about to withdraw the long string of beads from …” She paused, noting that the five belugas in the room were listening, completely rapt.
“Go on,” said Neal, also enthralled. “Tell us more. You were talking about beads.”
“Very well, I will, although before I was using beads, I was using a handful of those Babybel cheeses that come in the red vinyl mesh—just the right amount of satisfying texture and shape. And my young crumpet! Her name was Gwyn. So naive, yet so eager to learn. Skin like a peach. And so respectful of authority.”
There was total silence. Fiona looked around, clearly pleased with our reaction.
“To cut a long story short, I was in the midst of naughty, sexy, lubricated fun when the phone rang with the news.”
“News? You came all the way here because you heard I had an allergic reaction?” I was touched.
Fiona snorted and Neal leapt in. “Bad news, Ray,” he said. “That load of contestants that was about to take off when you ate the macadamia nut?” With his right hand, he made the international sign for a nose-diving corporate jet. “All gone.”
I thought about this. “Well, at least they went to their graves hungry.”
Fiona nodded. “Them and the entire casting team. So, thanks to contractual obligations, I have been dragged in to recast the show.”
Shit. I knew I shouldn’t have been so hard on Mr. Bradley. And then a chill went through me. “Wait—was Sarah on the flight?”
Fiona’s unholy left lizard brow arched upward. “Someone has a crush, do they?”
Neal said, “No, Sarah wasn’t on the flight.”
“Did someone say my name?” Sarah appeared at the door with a magnificent spray of cellophaned pink orchids, which she tossed to Fiona. She came to my bedside, sat down on the edge and smooched my cheeks while every other man in the room began to mentally schedule his next wank. “Ray, your Survival spirit saved you!”
We all stared at her.
“I’m kidding!” she said. “Fortunately, your ex here has come to help us.” She looked fondly at Fiona. “And even though Fiona was extremely busy, I thought it would be a nice gesture if she came to visit you.”
Fiona rolled her eyes.
“How do you two know each other?” I asked.
Fiona looked at me cagily; Sarah was nothing but sweetness and light. She said, “Fi and I have been helping each other with all sorts of casting calls over the years. We see each other at industry events all the time.”
Fi said, “Sarah gives the best backrub in the business.”
Sarah blushed. “I just don’t like s
eeing people tense.”
“She’s coming back to my hotel room after this to give me one,” Fi said. “I can’t tell you how badly I need it. I’ve been living on planes the past few days, and recasting a show from scratch is a Herculean task. We can’t find any of Bradley’s casting notes.”
It was funny, but right then I had a tiny out-of-body experience—one of those rare moments where you step outside of yourself and see the human condition whole. You experience a warm glow, and you get the big picture and realize what’s important in life and what isn’t. “What about me?” I asked.
“You have to stay in the hospital a bit longer,” said Neal.
“It’s that bad?”
“No,” said Fiona. “It’s just easier to keep you here instead of booking you into a hotel. Besides,” she looked around, “you have so many new friends.” She glanced at her iPad. “Whoops! Backrub time!”
“You bet!” said Sarah. “It’ll be the most amazing one you’ve ever had. I’ll make sure every inch of you is thoroughly de-stressed—anything to ensure that this season is the best season ever.”
Everybody laughed except me.
Sarah kissed me goodbye, while Fiona shook her purse like a maraca.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
“About a thousand OxyContins I swiped from the dispensary during the fire drill an hour ago.”
My posse left, and I fell asleep to the sounds of my roommates discreetly pleasuring themselves to their memories of Sarah.
OxyContin is the brand name of a time-release formula of oxycodone produced by the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma. It was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1995 and first introduced to the U.S. market in 1996. By 2001, OxyContin was the bestselling non-generic narcotic pain reliever in the U.S.; 2008 sales in the U.S. totalled $2.5 billion. An analysis of data from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency found that retail sales of oxycodone “jumped nearly six-fold between 1997 and 2005.”
In 2001, Purdue Pharma permanently suspended distribution of 160 mg tablets in the U.S. It is speculated that the DEA had requested Purdue to discontinue manufacturing them.
Nobody ever mentions the good side of OxyContin: it makes you feel like Jesus fucking a horse.
When I came to again, I found a note from Neal on my bedside table, penned on the frayed corner of the cover of a five-year-old copy of Us Weekly magazine. I looked at its central photo: an off-the-rails starlet whose twat must, by this point in her career cycle, be dangling between her legs like Luciano Pavarotti’s tonsils.
Ray! Off to a 4G with the nurses on night duty.
Meet you at the airport.
Airport?
Just then, Fiona, clad in jodhpurs, entered my room once more, looking annoyingly relaxed.
I was polite. “Had a lovely time pussy-boxing with Sarah?”
“Yes, indeed. Our bodies sang.”
“I’m sure.”
“Her flesh—so velvety yet muscular—soooo pliable. I suppose I shouldn’t tell tales out of school, but she blows off heat like a cheap baseboard radiator.”
My tallowy Polynesian roommates snapped to attention.
“Am I allowed out of this wretched hospital or what?”
“You are. In addition, out of the warmth of my heart, you’re coming to the airport in my limo. We’re on the same flight. Lucky us.”
“Lucky us, indeed. Wait—why did you come up to the room to fetch me instead of sending an assistant?”
She rattled her purse, newly refilled with Oxy, and smiled. “Tabitha is downstairs waiting for us.”
“Tabs is here?”
“You’re not the only one who wants a slave, Raymond.”
Fiona burst out laughing, and two of my Samoan cohabitants threw soiled garments of some sort at me.
I got out of bed. “That’s our cue to leave, dear.”
Haole, in the Hawaiian language, is generally used to refer to an individual who fits one (or more) of the following categories: “White person, American, Englishman, Caucasian, any for-eigner.” Its use historically has ranged from a sociological description to racist epithet. Anyone who’s spent time in the Hawaiian public school system knows it is almost exclusively used as a racist epithet.
14
The limo was waiting for us out front. Tabs stood beside it, chewing gum and smiling as a trade wind blew up her schoolgirl-style skirt to reveal the cleanest, whitest, softest panties in the western hemisphere.
“Ray! I was so worried about you!” She gave me a smashing hug and we clambered into the car.
“You know me, Tabs. Living life to the max. I—”
Fiona cut me off. “Raymond, you could no more live life ‘to the max’ than you could doggy-paddle to the fucking moon. Your voyage through time is like the journey of a small piece of cat shit passing through a human colon, where it squeaks and slithers until one day it drops into a toilet called the grave.”
I gave Tabs a brave smile. “Poor, poor Fiona, always wearing the mask of wit to cover her withered interior world.”
My thinking on Tabs was that, although I was in love with Sarah, nailing Tabs would be a commitment-free treat, like finding a ten-quid note on the sidewalk.
The limo careened forward, and we headed off to the airport. “So, Fi, where’s Billy in all of this?”
“He’s on a flight from LA. We’ll see him later.”
Tabs continued to sneak glances at me. I still had no idea whether looking like her father, Mr. Molesty, was a good or bad omen in the screw department. Only time could tell.
The car slowed to a stop and Fi snapped, “Fucking hell, it’s an eight-lane freeway on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the day and it’s a fucking traffic jam.”
From her tone of voice, I could tell she was entering one of her dreaded hate warps.
She threw perhaps five hundred male headshots at Tabs. “We’re looking for the top twenty most fuckable. Here’s a Sharpie. Start rating them one to ten now.”
I stared at Fiona. She looked back at me. “No, Raymond, I am not going to give you the female candidates. Your taste in women is useless.”
“Fi, I’m bored out of my mind. I have to have something to do.”
“Then hand these photos to the driver and ask him to decide which ones are the most fuckable.”
I asked, “Why don’t you just use your own judgment, dear?”
“Because I am toying with lesbianism, Raymond, and I’ll just end up choosing the women who look like the guys who show up to grout my new kitchen back-splash tile. The driver looks like an average guy with centre-of-the-bell-curve taste. I trust his judgment more than yours. Or mine. Driver!”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“My assistant, Raymond, is going to show you a pile of photos of models. I want you to rate their fuckability on a scale of one to ten.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
And that is how I ended up spending an hour of my life gridlocked on the 801 showing headshots of dick bait to HARLAN, who truly had pedestrian taste. Example: “I could do her. She’s like that actress you never see anymore, Julia Roberts. Yeah. I could do her good. Yeah.”
When I was through penning his ratings on the photos, Fiona screeched, “Raymond, shut Harlan’s window so he can wank in private.”
I shut his little window, and perhaps he did, indeed, have a boxer fiesta. We still weren’t going anywhere. Fiona and Tabs, for their part, judged mounds of headshots in the same tone of voice they might use to order Chinese take-away.
“Fuckable?”
“Nose is too weird.”
“This one?”
“Looks like he undertips in restaurants.”
“Him?”
“Pepperoni nipples.”
“Him?”
“Kind of poofy.”
I interjected, “Fi, maybe I could be of assis—”
“Raymond, you are really getting on my nerves. If you bother me one more time, I am going to start looki
ng into how it was that Matt Bradley died on that plane, because I know, Raymond, in my heart of hearts, that you are somehow responsible. If I decide to investigate, your deed will be exposed and you will spend the rest of your life as pubic bling within the California penal system. Do you understand me?”
I shut up and looked at the traffic.
“Okay, Tabitha, now we have to divide the fuckables into the twelve standard reality TV categories. Make piles. Here goes: blond stud … brunette stud … hillbilly … gay guy … useless black guy … semi-fuckable nerd … token ugly-but-hot guy … fiftysomething guy … average Joe … and former pro-athlete-or-astronaut. Remember, they all have to be fuckable except for the semi-fuckable nerd. He’s like a poodle thrown into the centre of a pit bull fight to get things warmed up.”
“Righty-o.”
And that, dear reader, is how you get on the show.
15
When traffic finally evaporated, we roared to the airport in what felt like seventeen seconds. Our trusty private jet awaited us and, in a wonderfully pre-9/11 way, we were up its mobile stairway in a flash.
Neal was already onboard. He had loaded our bags and was looking annoyingly relaxed. “Ray, ever tried enemas? Right hot if administered by a real nurse. Oh, look—bottles of free chilled Chardonnay here in the side console!”
The doors closed and the jet began moving. “Wait—it’s just the four of us on this flight? Really?” I asked.
“It is. Move your butt,” Fiona said. “We have to lay out female candidate headshots.”
“What time do we land in Kiribati?”
“Kiribati?” said Fiona. “We’re going back to Los Angeles.”
“What the fuck?”
“I can’t cast a show in the middle of the ocean. We have to actually see these people first-hand before I choose. I do have standards.”
Fucking hell. But I have to hand it to Fi: nobody works harder once she sets her mind to it.
“Neal,” said Fiona. “I want you to go through our choice of top fifty females. Select twenty using your internal fuckometer.”
“Are there any character categories we need?”
Fiona beamed as though she’d discovered Willy Wonka’s gold ticket. “Yes! Finally someone in this absurd carnival we call life who properly understands the show’s dynamic!” Fiona shook a finger at me. “Ray, you’d better look out or I’ll make Neal my personal assistant.” This was an actual warning, not an attempt at humour or flattery.
Worst. Person. Ever. Page 7