Elimination Night (2 page)

Nevertheless, by the time I got to high school—where I hung with the cooler of the uncool kids—my knowledge of early seventies Tom Waits albums and appreciation for Lou Reed’s experimental period gave me a certain kind of credibility with a certain kind of boy… and of course it did no harm that by then I’d learned how to manage my inextinguishable wildfire of orange curls, or that I’d inherited Dad’s nerves, which kept me on the bonier side of slim despite a lifelong pastry habit. (Unfortunately, this effect is no longer quite as reliable as it once was.)

As for college: Well, I was an okay student… but a little cocky. “Jesus, Sash, even your
irony
is ironic,” as Dad used to say. A classic teenage self-defense mechanism, of course. But this was lost on the admissions officers of the prestigious schools to which I applied. They took it as detachment or over-confidence, maybe both. Hence my place at the J-School you won’t have heard of, half the tuition paid for with loans, the other half by Mom, who had worked double-time shoveling meds as a Walgreens pharmacist for the best part of a decade to make sure her only child went to college. (Shockingly, Dad’s “career” as a wedding
trumpeter didn’t contribute much in the higher education department, unless you count the time he sent me a plastic-wrapped tray of hallucinogenic cookies.)

Suffice it to say, I was turned down for internships at all our nation’s great metropolitan newspapers, and quite a few of the not-so-great ones, too. Same story with the big magazines. And the TV news networks. Then Dad’s Irish peasant genes went and gave him cancer, and shortly after that god-awful funeral in the church he’d been to only once before, I embarked on my Novel of Immense Profundity. Or rather, I spent a year living at home, staring tearfully at an empty Word document. I wanted my book to be epic. A generation-spanning masterpiece. Something Gabriel García Márquez himself might have written. The problem was, I couldn’t decide where to set it. Long Island seemed too obvious. Aside from college, however, I’d never really
been
anywhere else before…

I was saved from this indecision by Brock—calm, funny, excitingly toned Brock Spencer Daniels—whose frat buddy worked at Rabbit News and was looking for a talent booker’s assistant. Before I knew it, I’d been offered the job—if the word “job” can be used to describe a position whose salary consisted of a MetroCard and a daily canteen allowance. My first assignment: help organize a panel interview with the cast and crew of
Project Icon,
led by none other than Leonard Braithwaite.

A couple of months later, Len called my cell (I hadn’t given him the number) to offer me a “dazzling opportunity in Hollywood, California.”

“I bet they’ve got you working for free over there at Rabbit, haven’t they?” he chuckled.

“Yes,” I admitted (stupidly).

“Well, then—I think we can offer you a raise,” he replied. “How does
more than nothing
sound?”

The line went fuzzy with laughter. To Len, the world’s funniest joke is the one he’s just told.

The money he offered wasn’t good, but it was good enough for
Brock and me to hatch a plan: He’d move to Honolulu to focus on his “surfing career” (while making cocktails on the weekends and finding us a place to live), and I’d take the job at
Icon
until my savings account was refilled. Then I’d join him beachside to finish my novel. He’d win the MegaWave Super Crown. I’d win the Most Immensely Profound Novel of Our Generation Award.

We had it all worked out.

So off I went to LA.

“Another one of Len’s Lovelies, huh?” sneered the vinegar-faced woman in
Icon
’s accounts department on my very first morning. “Funny—they’re usually blondes, not redheads. His standards must be slipping.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just met Len’s wife.

A Horrible Farewell

I CHECKED THE TIME
on my cell phone: Barely seven minutes to go now before the press conference—or “The Reveal” as Len insisted on calling it—was due to start.

The run-through.

Must do the run-through
…

I began speed walking down a yellowing hallway, wondering vaguely if the exercise might spare me yet another depressing visit to the Starlight Gym on Hollywood Boulevard—which typically involved an hour of heavy breathing on an elliptical machine while staring at the absolute perfection of some cow town beauty queen’s Lycra-encased buttocks. I could definitely have used
something
to burn the dumpster-sized box of sticky buns that I had emptied into my digestive system earlier, when I thought Len wasn’t there. (No such luck. “Look, everyone,
here comes Miss Cinnabon!
” he’d boomed over the PA system during rehearsal.)

The corridor dead-ended.

Where the hell were the dressing rooms?

I wished for a moment we were on the more familiar territory of
Greenlit Studios. It would be
months
before we reached that stage of the competition, however. For now,
Project Icon
was still touring from city to city, prescreening potential contestants. This week, conveniently, we were in LA—but we needed a venue with a big enough parking lot for the “cattle call” of mostly delusional masochists who wanted to line up all day for the opportunity to be insulted on TV. That’s why Len had rented The Roundhouse, a big old concrete arena down by the oil fields. The place had originally been designed to resemble a Roman coliseum, only they’d slathered the entire thing in cheap sixties stucco, so now it just looked like a giant overflowing porridge bowl.

“Six minutes!”

Shit.

Another corridor.

I broke into an undignified half-jog, half-run. At last, after turning a corner, there they were… two doors, side-by-side, a golden star on each. Pushing my hair back from my eyes, I tried to breathe deeply from my abdomen. “
You’re a majestic mountain,
” I told myself. Then I knocked twice loudly, in an attempt to project confidence, before flicking through the sheaf of papers on my clipboard, one last time. Len’s notes were underlined in the right-hand margin:

      
11AM: HOUSE LIGHTS DOWN

On time, please!

      
11.05AM: VIDEO PACKAGE

      
Slow motion clips of previous
Project Icon
winners/contestants, set to Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna.”

Bill—this isn’t Carnegie fucking Hall.
Anything weepy and out of copyright will do.

      
11.07AM: INTRODUCTION

      
WAYNE SHORELINE (HOST)

      
Welcome, welcome everyone. This… [long pause] is
season thirteen
… [even longer pause] of
PROJECT ICON!
And I am your host, Wayne Shoreline, at your humble service. So, by now the whole world knows our incredible story: How the business genius Sir Harold Killoch discovered
an obscure TV talent contest in Belgium—featuring a revolutionary system of telephone voting—and brought it here to the Rabbit network in America, where it shot to the top of the prime-time ratings and became a worldwide sensation. [Audience goes wild. Close-up of Sir Harold smiling front of house.]

Bill—talk to the smile-coach again.
Need Sir H. to look more Cuddly Grandpa,
less Dark Lord of Evil.

      
And who could forget our original,
iconic
lineup of judges? America’s favorite uncle, JD Coolz [applause]; the beautiful and dare I say sometimes a little
unpredictable
Pamela Crabtree
Wayne—double-check with legal for approved crack-head euphemisms.
and of course “Mr. Horrible” himself, our erect-nippled Scottish friend Nigel Crowther…

      
[Audience boos]

Bill—let this run a bit.… Erect-nippled—really?

      
Over the years our show has gone through lots of changes—most dramatically when Nigel sadly left the judging panel last year to pursue other opportunities at the Rabbit network. We wish him all the very best, of course, and we’re sure he’ll have many, many more successes.
Wayne
—
NO FUCKING SARCASM.
But one thing has remained a constant: Our
NUMBER ONE
ratings. So! [Tense music.] Back to the news that everyone has been waiting for. There has been
talk.
There have been
rumors.
We’ve all heard mention of many,
many
names. But now, finally, here in this room, we can reveal
WHO
will be sitting in the judges’ chairs over the coming months, helping us find.… [another pause] the next winner… [pause again, spoolup title theme] of
PROJECT ICON!

Wayne—new delivery ideas?
All these pauses are getting
a bit old, no? Food for thought…

I wondered how many people would know that most of this intro was bullshit. In particular the bit about the “business genius Sir Harold Killoch” having anything to do with
Icon
’s success. I mean, yes, Sir
Harold owned both the Rabbit network, and its parent company, The Big Corporation—so in that sense he was responsible for putting the show on the air. But as everyone who’d ever read
ShowBiz
knew, it was the mogul’s younger brother George who’d seen the original Belgian format—while on a beer-tasting vacation in Antwerp—and suggested that Rabbit license it from its creator, Sven Svendsen, a reclusive Swedish talent agent.

“Who the hell wants to listen to a bunch of piss-poor wannabes who
can’t
sing?” was Sir Harold’s response, according to his unofficial biography,
Harold’s Killing.
Nevertheless, he ordered Rabbit to buy the rights, and within a few weeks, a pilot had been commissioned. “Old Harry thinks it’s the dumbest TV pitch he’s ever heard,” as
ShowBiz
reported at the time. “But his baby brother George—like all Killoch family members—is a voting shareholder in Big Corp, and therefore needs to be indulged. We predict a swift cancellation.”

Rabbit aired the first episode at midnight on a Friday: “The hospice slot,” as I’ve since learned it is known (due to the fact that ninety percent of viewers at such an hour reside in assisted living communities). That in itself might have been enough to kill
Project Icon,
if not for the fact that Sir Harold asked Sven Svendsen—a.k.a. “Two Svens”—to help run the show.

Two Svens’ first move? Hiring his old friend Leonard Braithwaite as supervising producer.

I had no idea who Len was back then. No one in the US did. It was only later I found out he’d starred as a cruel-to-be-kind mentor in
From Arse End to the West End,
an acclaimed British TV documentary about the creation of a theater production using actors cast entirely from soup kitchens. That’s how Len persuaded Two Svens to hire exactly the same kind of villain for the Rabbit version of
Project Icon.
He couldn’t cast himself, though—the network wouldn’t let him—so he found a doppelgänger, Nigel Crowther, and spent months coaching him on “sneer technique” and “insult metaphors.”

Oh, America had
no idea
what was coming.

Pretty much everyone remembers the first time they saw Crowther
on TV. Me? I was at my friend Maggie’s house, pretending to study for a math exam. I’d actually wanted to watch a
NOVA
documentary about long-whiskered Peruvian owls (that’s how hard I partied as a thirteen-year-old), but Maggie insisted on loading up
Icon
from her early-model TiVo. And thanks to Crowther, I couldn’t stop watching: Here was this aging, pudding-bellied, apparently heterosexual Scotsman with a toilet-brush hairdo, who kept his shirt unbuttoned to several inches below the navel, and appeared to have doused himself repeatedly in some kind of fluorescent orange tanning solution. More extraordinary, however, was his willingness to insult contestants to their faces, even if they were deranged or sobbing with fear—or both, which was more often than not the case.

“When you reach for the high notes, David, you look like a brain damaged orangutan with a genital itch who’s trying to lick poo off its nose,” he informed one visibly quaking teenager, who promptly fell to his knees weeping.

Within a few days, “Mr. Horrible” was a national sensation. The Concerned Parents of Young Christian Patriots tried to sue to remove him from the airwaves. Several members of Congress petitioned. Even the president of the United States himself made a personal call to Sir Harold, which the mogul put on hold, then sent through to voicemail, before leaking the voicemail—out of habit—to the editor of one of his more prominent news websites.

“PREZ BLASTS MR. HORRIBLE FOR POO-LICKING RETARD JIBE,”
read the headline.

Everyone wanted to know:
Who the hell was this guy?

It didn’t take long for
ShowBiz
to dig up an answer: Before
Icon,
Crowther had been a talent scout in Glasgow, best known for discovering a pop duo named the Dreami Boyz, whose gimmick was to appear on stage wearing only pajama bottoms. They’d been a spectacular hit with both the grandma and gay demographics—hence the two million sales of their abominable first album,
Sweet Dreamz & Warm Cuddlez,
which received the first ever negative-starred review from
NME.

Perhaps inevitably, Two Svens—three hundred pounds, ice-skating enthusiast, face like an exploded dumpling—couldn’t stand Crowther. He swung a punch at him a couple of times, in fact. Even Len fell out with his protégé within a few days. But it didn’t matter. By the end of
Project Icon
’s first season, “Mr. Horrible” had become one of the most famous men on earth. And by the second season, more votes were being cast by the show’s viewers every week than it takes to win the keys to the White House. As a result, Crowther was able to negotiate a contract that made him the best-paid performer in TV history.

And now?

Well, as the script said—there wasn’t any hiding it—Crowther had left. What the script
didn’t
say was that Two Svens had turned almost homicidal with rage upon learning this news, especially given that he’d offered Crowther a “Triple Oprah”—i.e.,
three times
the salary of the Queen of Daytime TV during her final season on network TV—to stay on for another year. Crowther’s counteroffer? No salary. But one hundred percent ownership of everything.