by AnonYMous
“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.”
21
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 r
oom 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.
Then a voice.
My voice.
“New York, can you hear me?” I asked.
A rush of static over the studio monitors.
“Hello, LA,” came the reply. “This is New York. We can hear you. Thirty seconds.”
A long, fuzzy tone.
Soon, the digitized image of Wayne’s face would be funneled through a heavy-gauge cable to a dish of Kennedy Space Center proportions on the roof, and from there beamed up to an orbiting satellite, before ricocheting back down to Earth—only this time in the direction of Manhattan, where it would be processed and distributed to approximately one and a half billion homes throughout the world.
One and a half billion homes.
Barely a single percentage of this theoretical “maximum reach” audience would be watching, of course—or at least by the definition of the Jefferson Metrics Organization, which doesn’t count viewers outside the US, on account of their being “nonmonetizable.” Still, you could take the largest venue in America—Michigan Stadium, with its 109,901 capacity—build nine identical replicas, put them side by side out in the Nevada desert, and you still wouldn’t have a seat for every person about to watch the first live episode of Project Icon’s thirteenth season. And this in spite of its being the least-watched season in the show’s history.
The pressure didn’t seem to affect Wayne. Up there on stage, he was focused, yes, but calm. That’s the thing with Wayne—his unshakable calm. Some take it as niceness. Professionalism, even. These people have got it all wrong.
Wayne is a functioning psychopath.
Watching him from my position in the wings, I marveled at his unbreakable confidence. Over the course of the next hour—not a second more, not a second less—he would conduct the cruel ballet of Project Icon with inhuman precision.
Not a bead of sweat. Not a syllable misspoken.
I’ve often wondered if the rise of the show in the early days was really more about Wayne’s ability to make a live broadcast seem edited—while retaining just the right amount of unpredictability—than Nigel Crowther’s “Mr. Horrible” routine. Or perhaps it was the obvious hatred between Wayne and Crowther that gave Project Icon its edge: Crowther the archmanipulator, Wayne the unmanipulatable.
A crazy fact: Before the show launched, Wayne auditioned for Crowther’s job. He was twenty-two at the time, a warm-up guy for Guess the Price. He’d lost a lot of weight since leaving his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, where he’d dropped out of high school. He’d gotten his eyes fixed, too—dispensing with the goldfish-bowl spectacles that had caused him so much grief at school. The audition was his big chance. His moment to break out. But he was a terrible, lifeless judge. He felt nothing for anyone—not even contempt—and it showed. So Len tried him out as host and couldn’t believe what he saw. Wayne read from the teleprompter with such control, he could time his sentences to within a sixteenth of a second. He could play the thing like a musical instrument. What’s more: It was impossible to tell when his scripted lines ended and his ad-libs began. And his ad-libs—well, they were something else. Breathtakingly mean, and yet delivered with a bland pseudofriendliness that somehow made them seem okay. “Hey buddy, come here, gimme a hug. Good job. Now, your mom’s in the hospital, right? Very sick. And do you worry that if you get voted off the show tonight, she might take a turn for the worse? You could actually be singing for her life, right? Tell everyone how you feel about that.”
Like I said: Functioning psychopath. In another era, Wayne would have emceed hangings and public disembowelments. “Hey buddy, come here, gimme a hug. Now, tell me what’s going through your mind as this masked butcher behind me sharpens his knives?”
Another thing about Wayne: He’s always moonlighting. Red-carpet shows. Charity specials. Afternoon drive time on Megahitz FM. Which means he’s on the clock, eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. He works so hard, he doesn’t even have a chair in his office—if he wants to sit down, he uses an exercise bicycle. I saw him in there once, pedaling away while reading his e-mails and eating with chopsticks from some kind of prepackaged meal. I was struck by the bareness of the place. No plants. No photographs. Nothing. Just an enormous poster of Nigel Crowther, on which he had drawn crosshairs in red marker pen…
Another fuzzy tone over the monitors.
“Stand by, New York,” I said.
A few seconds passed. Then a red light above the camera, flashing in sequence.
I began counting down.
“Ten… nine… eight… seven…”
The light was flashing quicker now, like a bomb ready to detonate.
“… six… five… four…”
Wayne’s expression changed. He looked poised and deadly: a killer with cornered prey.
“… three… two…”
“THEY SAID WE’D NEVER MAKE IT,” began Wayne, his face still in almost total darkness. “They said it was… impossible. Well, they say a lot of things, don’t they? And sometimes they’re wrong. Very wrong. Because here we are, back again for our thirteenth year of live broadcasts from Greenlit Studios, right here in Hollywood—with some of the most outstanding talent not just in the history of our show… but in an ENTIRE GENERATION. Mia Pelosi. Jimmy Nugget. Cassie Turner. These are already household names, folks. But who knows if any of them will make it over the weeks and months to come. We are in uncharted territory, my friends—in oh-so-many ways. It’s gonna be quite a ride. Who will survive? Who will face ELIMINATION? And will our new judges be able to handle the pressure of sending home these talented girls and guys when they just don’t make the grade. Well, if you want answers to these questions: Stay tuned—because THIS…”
A pause, lasting precisely two-point-six seconds.
“Is PROJECT…”
Blinding whiteness as the lights came on.
“… ICON! ”
It was nothing short of an act of God that we’d made it onto the air. I mean, Sir Harold had practically announced our cancellation during an interview on the Monster Cash Financial Network just a few days earlier. “The Jefferson numbers stink so bad, I gotta light a bloody match every time I walk in the studio,” he’d raged, with his usual thumping of the table. “Nigel Crowther is absolutely bloody right: A prime-time franchise that can’t give us twenty million eyeballs a week needs to be put down.”
A few people at Zero Management—including Stacey, the emotional receptionist—never showed up to work again after that. They just assumed it was all over.
But then… well, some extraordinary luck. Sir Harold became distracted. The entire executive board of Big Corp became distracted, in fact. The problem was Rabbit’s German division. Those “local difficulties” it had been experiencing for the last month or so? They’d suddenly become a lot more urgent.
As I learned from the reports in ShowBiz, Rabbit had for years been producing a live Saturday night “bingocast” for one of Germany’s largest broadcasters. But now the show, Bingo-Bitte!, had been exposed as a huge scam. Basically, a handful of employees of Rabbit Deutschland had figured out a way to hack into the Bingo-Bitte! computer (operated on air by two fulsome-breasted teenagers in Bavarian-maid outfits), which meant they could predict the numbers called with a hundred percent accuracy. This wouldn’t have been of much use, of course, unless the hackers had also been able to make their own bingo cards… or unless, say, the largest printer and distributor of Bingo-Bitte! cards happened to be a daily tabloid
newspaper, Schnelle Lesen, which was yet another subsidiary of…
Yeah: Big Corp.
Having already broken into the Bingo-Bitte! computer, it wasn’t much of a leap for these algorithm-savvy Teutons to start meddling with Schnelle Lesen’s presses—and before long, they’d fixed the entire game, allowing them to collect several million euros per week in winnings, via the generously bribed friends and family members who played on their behalf. As a criminal enterprise, it was brilliant. And like all brilliant criminal enterprises, it couldn’t last forever. Eventually, one of the players got nervous and turned himself in, worried that someone else would do it first. One plea bargain later, and the Berlin Fraud Squad knew everything.
At first, they thought the scheme had gone on for a few months, making the “Bingo Betrügers” some ten or twelve million euros each. (The whistle-blower had been one of the last to get involved.) But then more evidence emerged: The Bingo-Bitte! hacking had in fact gone on for years—which meant the illegal winnings weren’t in the millions at all. They were in the billions. Worse: An official at one of Berlin’s most-respected auditing firms appeared to be in on the ruse. As a result, Rabbit’s broadcasting license had been temporarily revoked, and Sir Harold, along with his most senior Big Corp lieutenants, had been called to give evidence to the Bundestag. Suddenly, the company was having to contemplate the possibility of arrests, bail conditions, and extradition demands—not to mention dual investigations by European Union officials and US financial regulators. Sir Harold had made a lot of powerful enemies since using the cash from his father’s gold mine to buy his very first newspaper in Cape Town.
Now it was their payback time.
Given all this, it was hardly surprising that the ratings of a televised singing competition were no longer at the top of Big Corp’s agenda. And thank God for that, because the first live episode of season thirteen was terrible. Not can’t-take-your-eyes-off-the-TV terrible. More like switch-off-the-TV terrible. Something about it just didn’t work. It seemed dull, spent; an exhausted, obsolete franchise. Which meant we had to find the cause of the problem, quickly, and put it right before the Big Corp Gulfstream got back to LAX. A week of interrogation by angry Germans wasn’t exactly going to put Sir Harold in a very patient mood.
