Elimination Night (7 page)

“Let me tell you something, boy,” Sir Harold rumbled, adjusting his steel-rimmed glasses. “We could lose HALF our audience, and we’d still be number one. And who do you think owns
The Talent Machine,
eh? WE DO. So when it goes live next fall, we’ll have ANOTHER number one show. Big Corp is
always
number one!”

The interview was over at that point. The anchor tried to ask a follow-up question about the German televised bingo market—apparently there’d been some major development over there recently—but Sir Harold stood up, unhooked the microphone from his ten thousand dollar suit, and peered directly into the camera, until the Big Corp CEO’s unmistakable turret of white-silver hair filled the frame.

“
Number one!
” he reiterated, poking a bony finger into the lens. And with that, he shuffled off the set.

Sir Harold’s confidence in
Project Icon
should have been reassuring, I suppose. But from what I’d seen over the last few months, it was practically a miracle that season thirteen had even gotten this far. And no matter how much money Sir Harold still hoped to wring out of the franchise, no one doubted for a second that he would pull us off the air if the ratings didn’t hold up. One fuck-up, that’s pretty much all it would take. One fuck-up, and the world’s most popular TV show—a format that
ShowBiz
magazine once said had “revolutionized prime time, creating an entirely new genre of programming in its wake”—would be gone, never to return. Hence, it was of such vital importance
that this morning’s press conference go flawlessly, with no delays, budget overruns, or—God forbid—
missing judges.

Yeah, it was all working out just perfectly.

There was nothing left for me to do. I had to call Len.

Oh, wow, this was going to be ugly.
“Oh, er, hi there, Len. No biggie—but you know how we were due to start fifteen minutes ago? And how the future of an entire billion dollar TV franchise depends on all this whole press conference thing going smoothly? Well, about that… Oh, Sir Harold’s sitting next to you? Cool. Anyway, uh, just wanted to let you know: I’ve been running up and down hallways for, oh, at least twenty minutes now, and I can’t seem to find the people we paid twenty million dollars to be here today.”

At least it wouldn’t the first time the new judges had caused us any problems, I reassured myself. I mean, the entire hiring process had been one bang-your-skull-against-a-rock moment after another, each more outrageous—and exhausting—than the last.

And to think how
straightforward
everything had seemed when Rabbit first made the decision—after an eight-hour board meeting on The Lot—that Joey and Bibi were the only candidates famous and qualified enough to make up for the loss of Nigel Crowther. Ed made Bibi an offer that very same day, in fact. (By then, she’d reconciled with Teddy, who’d issued a statement to the press, saying, “It is a measure of Bibi’s extraordinary humanity that she has offered me a second chance—I pledge to work tirelessly to help my client achieve her career goals of a billion record sales and the eradication of hate.”) As for Joey: although Ed had found him to be “functionally stable” after his emotional monologue under the piano, Rabbit wanted to bring him in once more, just to make absolutely sure. So a week later, back to the batcave we went, for
Sanity Check: The Sequel,
as Joey himself described it. This time, there were two other executives in the room: Ed’s boss, David Gent—another Brit, and so close to Killoch, he doesn’t need a title—plus the gargoylesque, three-pack-a-day smoker Maria Herman-Bloch, CEO of Invasion Media, the production company that
handles studio rental, crew logistics, and other tedious backstage aspects of the show.

“Make no mistake,” Len warned everyone beforehand. “Gent can
take a shit
on Sir Harold’s behalf. And chances are, that shit will land on one of our heads.”

We all knew from reading
ShowBiz
that Gent’s real job was to find a replacement for
Icon
—and that he’d personally signed off on Crowther’s deal for
The Talent Machine.
So it was hard to know what to expect. If Gent loved Joey, would he steal him for Crowther? And what if he thought he was a liability? Would he let us hire him
anyway,
so the show could go out in a bonfire of its own negative PR?

No one knew.

The meeting began calmly enough. Joey turned up on time—in lederhosen and moon boots—and leaned down to greet Ed like one of his oldest friends. As for Gent, he seemed like an okay guy. I knew from his bio that he was ex-military (wing commander, Royal Air Force), but he was making an effort to disguise it, what with his herringbone shirt, navy blazer, and wispy brown college-professor hair. In fact, it was hard to believe this was a man who had penetrated the very highest levels of Big Corp and had a policy of automatically demoting employees if they asked for business cards—titles being a sign of complacency and (a far more serious offence at Big Corp) “box-inward thinking.”

“So, Joey, tell me:
Why
do you think you can do this job?” was his opening question, after a round of handshakes. “You’ve never even watched our show, have you?”

In an instant, the temperature of the room seemed to drop ten degrees. I swear Mitch groaned.

“It’s true… I’ve never seen it,” Joey answered. “But, y’know, I’ve
heard
about it plenty.”

A seriousness had descended over Joey’s face that I’d never seen before. There was also a tone in his voice I didn’t recognize. Not so much anger. More like petulance.

“I’ve
heard
that your ratings have been falling by ten percent a year,” he went on. “And I’ve
heard
that you made a giant fuck-up with your
panel last season, ’cause you hired a chick who can tell you how to bake a cake”—he was almost yelling now—“
but can’t tell the Rolling Stones from her FAT TALK SHOW HOST ASS.
”

“Easy, Joey,” urged Mitch.

Joey ignored him.

“I mean, if it were
me,
” he continued, “and
I
had a show about MUSIC that made a billion bucks a year, I think I’d be looking to hire someone who knew a little about
MUSIC.
Maybe someone whose mom was trained at the Royal fuckin’ Academy, maybe someone who grew up under a grand piano, who plays five instruments, who taught his band everything they know, who can fuckin’
sing,
man. And I mean SING—not blow into a goddamn computer. But what do I know, huh? I’m just a rock star! I’m just someone who’s sold one and a half billion records during my career! But if it were up to me—li’l old me, who doesn’t know shit and belongs in the crazy house—I’d want to give the job to someone who actually KNOWS WHAT THE HELL HE’S TALKING ABOUT.”

Joey sunk back in his chair. He looked spent. The rant had clearly been forming for some time.

Gent was smiling.

“I share your sentiment entirely, Mr. Lovecraft,” he said. “Just so you know: We’re also talking with Ms. Bibi Vasquez. How would you feel about working with her?”

For a moment, Joey looked bewildered—as though he were halfway through a gig and had just realized he was at the wrong venue, in the wrong city, playing with the wrong band. Then he showed the room his magnificent teeth.

“
Man,
” he said, pointing at Gent and drumming his feet. “You had me there! You
had
me, man!”

“So what about Bibi?” asked Gent again.

“Bibi?” Joey replied. “Just saw her in a movie. Mitch, what was that thing we saw on the plane?”

“
Nannyfornia,
” answered Mitch.

“There you have it,” Joey confirmed. “
Nannyfornia.
”

“And how did you like it?”

“Can I be honest?”

Gent looked surprised. “Of course,” he said.

“As long as I have a face,” said Joey. “Bibi Vasquez will always—
always
—have a place to sit.”

I thought we might have to call an ambulance for Len, he choked so hard. Mitch studied the carpet. Gent said nothing—he just stood up and offered Joey his hand.
Sanity Check: The Sequel
was over, and Joey had surely passed. Ignoring Gent’s outstretched arm, he moved in for a hug, only to pull back in frustration: The Brit had tensed instinctively, unused to such man-on-man contact.

“Hey, don’t fuckin’ hug me like that, man!” Joey scolded, loudly. “Hug me like you hug your
wife.
”

They tried again.

I couldn’t watch.

So that was that: Bibi and Joey were hired, terms to be agreed on. Which left only JD Coolz, who no one ever doubted would accept whatever scraps were thrown in his direction to stay on the show. “Coolz is well aware that he is the luckiest man alive—or at least the luckiest man to have ever been paid more than a million dollars a year to appear on TV,” as Len once put it, after a record-breaking lunch at Mr. Chang’s that lasted from 10:45 a.m. until early evening. “His talents, such as they are, amount to saying ‘booya-ka-
ka!
’ a thousand different ways.”

Ed Rossitto hadn’t been much more diplomatic.

“I like to think of Joey as the devil on this new panel,” he told JD, during one of those early batcave sessions. “And Bibi—well, she’s the angel, of course. And you? You’re the American everyman, JD. Fat and ordinary. And I mean that as a compliment.”

Poor old JD. Raised out in Bakersfield, California—a.k.a. The Most Boring City on Earth. White kid, black neighborhood. Subject of ridicule from an early age due to his fondness for the deep-fat fryer. By
his twelfth birthday, losing weight meant getting back down to two hundred pounds. But with JD’s size came a certain presence. He moved
slow,
wore a lot of jewelry, communicated only in fist bumps and monosyllabic slang. On the whole, people found him… reassuring. There was a calmness to JD. A Great Dane–like lovability. And so, when he turned eighteen and moved to LA—after teaching himself how to play bass guitar—he soon became a fixture in the weed-smoking rooms of all the major recording studios. “Oh, that’s JD: He’s cool, man,” went the standard introduction. Which is how Jason Dee, son of a Bakersfield agricultural inspector, became JD Coolz, multiplatinum session player.

If I’d been JD, I would have picked up Rossitto by his tiny legs and dangled him out of the window until he apologized for the “fat and ordinary” comment. But JD is Mr. Nice. He just kept mumbling “yo” and “I get it” before asking plaintively if there was anything he could do to help with the recruitment of Joey. (JD had once toured with Honeyload, in the days before
Icon
’s success made earning a living from music unnecessary.) The meeting ended with Rabbit offering JD what it described as “a generous offer,” which turned out to mean a fifty percent salary cut. He accepted right there in the room, no complaints.

If only Bibi and Joey’s negotiations had been so easy.

With Bibi, the problem was Teddy. It was simply impossible to communicate with Bibi unless you did so via Teddy, and even then, you could never quite be sure if you were getting through. “It’s like being at a fucking séance!” I once heard Rossitto yell into his speaker phone. And in spite of Teddy’s claim to have changed his ways since the whole
ShowBiz
leak debacle, his original sixty million dollar demand for Bibi remained the same—minus the “dressing compound” that had been ridiculed so mercilessly on the late night talk show circuit.

So when Rabbit made its first offer to Bibi—a mere ten million—Teddy’s response was… no response. He just ignored it. It was such a derisory sum, in Teddy’s eyes, that it qualified as no sum at all.

Things didn’t go much better with Joey—but only because he’d already
read what Bibi was asking for. “You ever heard the phrase, ‘mostfavored nation’?” he asked Ed during a conference call. (I remember this largely because Joey insisted on the call starting at three a.m., West Coast time, as he’d just flown to Paris to buy shoes.) “International law, guys. United Nations: Look it up in your fuckin’ dictionaries. Means whatever one cat gets, the other has to get. Not a cent more, not a cent less. I want
that
in my contract.”

This was in fact impossible, because what Bibi wanted in addition to cash—breast insurance, for example, or the discounted advertising rate for Bibi Beautiful—Joey simply wasn’t equipped to receive. The closest thing he had to a cosmetics company,
any
company, was a twenty percent share of a Colorado brewery, which had repeatedly offered to buy him out because of “urination issues” during shareholder meetings. While putting together Joey’s offer, Rabbit had also been under the impression that Joey wasn’t interested in the money. “I AIN’T FUCKIN’ INTERESTED IN THE FUCKIN’ MONEY!” as he’d screamed on many occasions. What Joey
really
wanted, Rabbit thought, was leverage against Honeyload. But things had changed during the week or so between the first sanity check and Rabbit’s offer: Namely, Honeyload had reformed. They still weren’t
speaking.
They had simply agreed to perform together. None of them had any choice in fact because when Joey had taken out his injunction against the band for allegedly considering Billy Ray Cyrus as his replacement, they countersued, arguing that if Joey was going to prevent their hiring a new singer, then he had to go back on tour immediately to allow them to continue earning a living. That’s what Joey had wanted at the very beginning, of course, but everyone had forgotten about that by then—including Joey.

Fortunately, Mitch was able to remind him before yet another court date was set.

Meanwhile, Honeyload knew nothing about Joey’s interviews for
Project Icon
(he’d denied all rumors)—and if they had, they would have almost certainly done everything possible to kill the deal. After all, Joey couldn’t exactly appear on a twice-weekly TV show
and
play a gig
with Honeyload in a different city every night. Being a judge on
Project Icon
would render all his promises about touring meaningless.

The day Rabbit finally approved Joey’s appointment, Honeyload was booked to play a gig at the Freaky-Cola Amphitheater in San Bernardino. I was in the room when Len and Ed tried to make the call to Joey personally, but he was already on the road and wasn’t answering. So instead they called Mitch, who was still in LA. He knew exactly what was coming, of course—thanks to the story that had gone up a few moments earlier on the
ShowBiz
website: