Elimination Night (23 page)

“What the hell took you so long?”

I turned to see Joey, alone on a king-size recliner. He was wearing nothing but a fluffy white gown, his wrinkled, skinny legs—along with that enormous, fading sock tattoo on his right calf—poking out from underneath. Not even Joey’s tan could make those legs look any healthier. They were as mangled and gnarled as rotting timber—a result of forty years spent doing airborne splits while singing “Hell on Wheels.” No wonder he’d fallen off the stage that time in Houston. No wonder he snacked on painkillers like they were M&M’S. It was incredible his legs could support a grown man’s body weight, nevermind comply with the acrobatic demands of a world tour with Honeyload.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

“Gone,” he replied, sadly. He was surrounded by at least two dozen trays of half-eaten food—I caught sight of spring rolls, steak au poivre, lobster tails, steamed vegetables, a Cobb salad, three doughnuts, and a banana pudding—and as many empty champagne flutes. I hoped it had been non-alcoholic champagne. “They were all here,” Joey continued, not quite sounding himself. “Mitch, Len, Bibi, JD, the ex-human cannonball Ed Rossitto—who still creeps me the hell out, just FYI. Oh, and that nasty little fuckhead Teddy. But they all went home.”

“So soon?”

“Oh, y’know. Bibi got upset about the view.”

He pointed to the aquarium-like glass above us. Now I noticed there were swimmers in the pool. Three or four women. Young. In exceptional physical shape. And all completely naked. They appeared to be performing some kind of water aerobics for Joey’s benefit. One of them was now underwater, thrusting herself deep into one of the see-through Roman columns in front of us, leaving a trail of bubbles as she
went. She righted herself and waved, treading water. Then she flipped over and performed a split, holding the gynecologically detailed pose for as long as the air in her lungs would allow.

Joey applauded.

“Um-
hmm,
” he said, as if tasting a vintage port. “LA strippers, man. Fuckin’ outstanding. No wonder Mötley Crüe wrote a song about ’em.” He began to sing the chorus of “Girls, Girls, Girls,” humming the parts where he’d forgotten the words.

“I should leave you alone,” I said.

“Here,” said Joey, handing me a champagne glass.

“Does this have alcohol in it, Joey?”

“Chillax,
Mom.
Yours does. Mine doesn’t.”

He lit up a cigar and patted the space next him, beckoning me to sit. I couldn’t stop looking at his legs. Those poor, mangled limbs! He might as well have fallen into a wood chipper, they were in such a state. And his toes… he didn’t even have toes—he had
toe,
in the singular. A fused mass of bone, cartilage, and skin, located at the end of each twisted foot. How did the man even manage to
walk?

I lowered myself onto the recliner, leaving as much room between us as possible. Then I drank the champagne. All of it, in one gulp. It had been that kind of day.

“The numbers, huh?” said Joey, nodding at my empty glass. “Not good.”

“You said there was bad news coming,” I replied, pouring myself another.

“Sure there is. We’re gettin’ nuked. They’re giving us one last episode. No ratings, no more show.”

“Our elimination night.”

“Ha! Ironic, ain’t it? God, I could graze on that ass for a month.” He was looking again at one of the swimmers, who was performing an underwater handstand. Then he turned to me quickly, as if not wanting to cause any offence. “I fuck dudes, too, by the way,” he said. “Just in case you’re thinkin’ I’m some kinda
sexist
or something. Size is a factor, though. More than seven inches and it feels like—”

“I get the idea, Joey.”

“She blushes again!” he roared, pointing at my face. “Shit, man—the traffic lights on Sunset Boulevard turn red less often than you do. It’s cute, Bill. Very cute.”

“Do you ever
care
what happens to
Icon,
Joey?” I asked, with more bluntness than I’d planned. “I mean, if I were you, with your—y’know, the back catalog and everything—I wouldn’t want the hassle. Taking orders from Len Braithwaite. Dealing with Bibi. Or worse,
Teddy Midas.
C’mon, Joey. Wouldn’t you rather be sitting on a beach somewhere in Hawaii, writing your memoirs, sipping mai tais—”

“Whoah!” Joey interrupted, with an eruption of partially chewed spring roll from his mouth. “You got me ALL wrong, sugar. Holy crap-a-doodle-doo,
have you got me wrong.
Lemme tell you a story about how much I care, Little Ms. Bungalow Bill, about how much I
invest
in the shit I do. You remember the summer of ’83?”

I blanked. It was the year
Swordfishtrombones
by Tom Waits came out. That was all I knew.

“Yeah, like shit you do,” Joey went on, not waiting for a reply. “You weren’t even a sperm in your daddy’s dick! So let me remind you: It was the middle of Honeyload’s third world tour. Me and Blade, we were banging ten chicks a night, drinking, fighting, playing, using. We’d gone deep into Crazy Land, man. And I lost my shit a few times, that I admit. But that summer, Blade went psycho-fuckin’-killer on me. Said he wanted to put a bullet in my head, ’cause the band was driving him insane. Accused me of not
caring
—just like you did a moment ago. He even got it into his head that I was gonna fuck everyone over and go solo. He’d seen how well Ozzy was doing after Black Sabbath, and he was shitting his pants. Big time paranoia, like you wouldn’t even believe.

“So, it’s the last night in July,” he continued, “and we’re booked to play Yankee Stadium. And our manager—may the devil roast his soul over the hot coals of hell for all fuckin’ eternity—has this far-out idea for starting the show: He’ll give us all some parachutes, take us up in his Learjet, fly over the stadium, and at just the right moment we’ll
jump out the back, pull our rip cords, and float down to the stage. And when our feet touch the ground—DNN, DNN, BLAM!—we’ll launch into ‘Duckin’ and Fuckin,’ the first track on our new album. Genius idea, credit where it’s due. Only me and Blade were still fightin’ so much, taking us up in an airplane was pretty much the dumbest thing anyone coulda done.

“It was a bad scene, man. In that tiny plane. Bumping around all over the place. It’s dark. The door’s open. Wind screaming in our ears. Me and Blade screaming at
each other,
swinging punches, arguing over… reverb settings, would you believe—
at twenty thousand feet!
And I just go off. I fuckin’
blow,
man. I unclip my ’chute right there in the plane, and throw it out the hatch. It’s gone—a dot, a tiny dot, falling toward Manhattan. Some homeless dude in Central Park probably thought it was a sleeping bag from heaven. And I say to Blade, over the engines, I say to him, ‘It’s your lucky day, motherfucker, ’cause I’m gonna jump out this plane,
right now,
and you don’t have to do a thing. Just let me fall, let me die, and all your problems are solved. You got enough dough from royalties, you’ll never have to work another day again in your life; that’s how much I care about you,
asshole.
But if you wanna trust me, if you wanna
COMMIT
to this band as much as I do, then jump out after me, and catch me, man. Just catch me. And we’ll land together and do the gig. Your choice. Farewell, my friend.’”

I’d never heard this story before. I mean, I knew about the jump, of course. Everyone knew about the jump. After the Beatles playing
The Ed Sullivan Show,
it was the most famous event in rock ’n’ roll history. But I thought it had been some kind of prank gone wrong, an accident with a very lucky ending.

“And?” I said, when I found my voice. “What happened?”

“
What happened?
Dude caught me. We played the show. Best night of my fuckin’ life.”

“He just… ‘caught’ you?”

“Blade’s been skydiving since he was in the womb. Literally—his mom was some kinda champ, did jumps when she was pregnant. Dude
can pull midair moves like an F-18. In fact, he messed with my head before saving my life. He flew right past me, showed me the birdie, and told me to aim for the spike on the roof of the Empire State Building. I thought I was pink slime, man. I was crying, praying, wishing I hadn’t thrown away the ’chute, then—WOOOMPH—he’s right there behind me, arm around my waist. Next thing I know, he’s hooked me onto him, and we land together, best buddies again. It made me rock hard, man.”

“That’s…
amazing
—I mean, that he caught you.”

“Well, the president didn’t think so. He called me ‘Joey Dumbass’ the next day in the Rose Garden.”

“Must have hurt,” I said.

“You kidding? It was like a billion bucks of free advertising. Not that I was thinkin’ about that at the time. Honestly, I just wanted Blade to believe me when I said I cared more about the band than my own life. By jumpin’ out of that plane, I proved it to him. And believe it or not, Bungalow Bill, I feel the same way about
Project Icon.
I’m gettin’ older. Look at my legs. I can’t jump around on stage every night of the week. My doc gives me two years max before I start rollin’ in a wheelchair, Johnny Cash—style. So I need a regular job. And no, by the way, I don’t wanna sit on a beach. You think
that’s
fun? Honey, you ain’t never done it. I retired to Hawaii in 1984, after I got my first hundred million in the bank. Six days, it lasted. And I’m surprised I held out that long. I was hitting myself in the face with fuckin’ rocks, I was so bored. Beautiful place, man, don’t get me wrong. But live there? Try it, I dare ya. Relaxation is stagnation. Fuck that shit. Besides, at
Project Icon,
I can help give some cow town kid like Jimmy Nugget a shot at doin’ what I did. That means the world to me, Bungalow Bill. Where else is the next generation gonna come from, huh? Without
Icon,
there’d be no music shows on prime time. There’d be no
audience.
Shit, if you’re unknown, you can’t even get a gig these days, ’cause the venues make you guarantee the takings at the door in advance. What kind of young kid can afford to do that?”

I didn’t get a chance to answer this question—because without warning, Joey lunged. I guess I must have leaned in closer while he was speaking, or maybe it was the nude Olympics going on in the background that had triggered some sex impulse in his head. Whatever—I couldn’t get out of the way fast enough. And by that I mean,
I couldn’t actually get out of the way fast enough.
So there I was, pinned on the recliner, with the tongue of a sixty-two-year-old man trying to push its way between my clenched jaw and into my mouth. It lasted, oh, five seconds. The moment I struggled against him, Joey broke away, surprised at my reluctance. He’d miscalculated. He’d mistaken my interest for attraction. But as he retreated, something light and hollow fell out of his gown pocket and rolled across the floor. I looked down—and Joey made a dive for it. But it was too late.

I’d seen them.

I’d seen my jar of little green pills, with “Sasha King, take as needed” on the side.

“How the
hell
—!” I screamed, in a rage that took hold of me with a sudden, almost frightening force. The lunge had been bad enough: But this? He’d
stolen
from me, too?

“You left ’em right there!” Joey yelled, now slurring his words. It was now so horribly obvious what had happened. He must have taken a pill—or
pills
—right before I arrived, and they were only just beginning to enter his bloodstream.
He was high.

“
Where?
” I demanded.

“My trailer. In Las Vegas. Shit, Bill, I’m sorry. But you left ’em, you left ’em right there, man.”

It was a lie.
It had to be a lie.
I’d never been near his trailer, not in Las Vegas, not anywhere.

“Joey—
how could you?
” I said, the rage beginning to pass. Now I just felt confused. Depressed and confused. “And I thought you were one of the good guys. I really did, Joey.”

I stared at him, still trying to process what had just happened.

He said nothing.

“Dammit, Joey,” I sighed. “I liked you from that first moment in Ed’s
office—even when you weren’t even being
likable.
And after all the shit we’ve been through with Bibi—what she did to Bonnie—I thought you were better. Jesus, what a sucker I am.”

Joey’s entire body stiffened. “… you think
Bibi
was the reason Bonnie left the show?” he said.

An awful silence. “Yeah. Why?”

“Oh, man. I’m a terrible person. A terrible,
terrible
person.” He stood up and walked over to the balcony. I hoped he wasn’t about to cry. Tonight had been bad enough already.

“What
happened,
Joey?” I asked, anger still in my voice. “Just tell me what happened.”

“… I didn’t mean to,” came the forlorn reply. “I just… I’m just built that way, Bill. And that’s what people want, isn’t it? The whole rock star thing. Ain’t that why they pay me all that money to be on the show? It was a
kiss,
goddamnit.”

“
You KISSED Bonnie?
”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, Joey… oh…”

“They made a whole big fuckin’
thing
out of it.” Wiping his eyes, he stared out at the groaning, howling city below. “Guess they were just mad at me,” he sighed. “Y’know… for making her
pregnant
and all.”

Bingo-Bitte!

February

WAYNE SHORELINE WAS
standing in complete darkness. Or rather, it would have been complete darkness, if not for the single, tiny uplight attached to the microphone in his hand: It shone against his lower jaw, casting shadows across his blandly androgynous features.

To Wayne, it must have seemed for a moment as though he were alone on soundstage three of Greenlit Studios—as though the only noise in the room were coming from his lungs, as they rose and fell in their machinelike rhythm.

But of course he was not alone.

Out in the blackness, a few yards beyond the stage, was a long table at which Joey, Bibi, and JD were seated. And beyond
them
was a live studio audience—only two or three hundred people in total, but the wall-to-wall mirrors made it seem as though there were more. Facing Wayne, meanwhile, was the cloaked hulk of a pedestal-mounted TV camera, its giant monocle of a lens taking in every last detail of his semi-illuminated face, and rendering it a high-definition video signal.