Elimination Night

by AnonYMous

  Joey slumped back on his pillows. The speech had left him exhausted. Then he leaned forward again. “Tell you what, Bill,” he said. “If you wanna write so bad—why don’t you write some lines for me in your spare time? I’m sick of that fuckhead Tad Dunkel putting words in Ghetto Barbie’s mouth. I’ll pay you. Whatever Len has got you on right now, I’ll give you the same. Double your salary.”

  I thought I must have misheard. “You mean—”

  “A payin’ gig. Ain’t that what all writers want?”

  For the first time in what felt like months, I smiled—a real smile, the kind that just arrives on your face, without thought or planning, requiring the use of unfamiliar muscles and sinew. When Joey saw it, he couldn’t help but do the same.

  “If you suck, though, your ass is fired,” he added quickly.

  “Okay,” I agreed, still unable to stop myself grinning. “It’s a deal. Thank you, Joey. Thank you.”

  So that was it: my future decided.

  As long as Project Icon remained on the air, which now seemed more likely than not thanks to Sir Harold’s bingo problem, I had finally done it; I had become a writer.

  Okay, so it wasn’t precisely the way I had expected my career to turn out. But it was a start. And in terms of subject matter, what could possibly beat The King of Sing, the Devil of Treble, the Holy Cow of Big Wow? Not much. Not much at all. I was delighted—and I guess relieved. Not just because of the extra money (which would solve a number of increasingly pressing financial issues), but also because it gave me a legitimate excuse to turn down Nigel Crowther’s two hundred thousand dollars a year. It also meant that I could see Project Icon through until at least the end of season thirteen, and as horrifically dysfunctional as my colleagues at Greenlit Studios might have been, I’d become fond of many of them: Mitch and Joey, Mu and Sue, the crew guys I went drinking with every so often (all right, a lot). Even Nico DeLuca, the strange-voiced barista, who’d started to leave freshly brewed americanos inside my cubicle at Greenlit Studios every morning, thus sparing me from the green room’s 1998-vintage jar of instant coffee. And Len? Sure, he was an asshole, and yet… no, actually, he was just an asshole. But that didn’t stop me from feeling a certain loyalty to him.

  Then I remembered something.

  Oh, crap, how could I have forgotten? I looked at the time on my phone. Nigel Crowther’s deadline had passed, but another was approaching. “Joey,” I said, urgently. “Your pee test.”

  “Huh?” he replied, sounding bored.

  “Your pee test. It’s due back from the lab this morning.”

  “Oh.”

  “Joey, you took my pills. You took the whole bottle. That stuff doesn’t leave your system for months. You’re going to fail. What are you gonna tell Len? He doesn’t even know you’re here, does he? And what if ShowBiz—”

  “Will you relax already?” said Joey. “First of all, Len will never know. Doc says I can leave here after lunch, before rehearsal. And the pee test? Seriously, man, not a problem. All you’ve got to worry about is getting on the phone to Brick or Brack, or whatever the fuck your invisible boyfriend is called, and tell him your plans have changed, and that he needs to get his ass over to LAX. And don’t be surprised if he pulls some bullshit excuse. In fact, if he ain’t already boning some hula-skirted surf princess with a snatch as tight as a bee’s fuckin’ asshole, I’ll eat my own underwear. No offence. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna watch some TV here and play a game of five-knuckle shuffle under the covers. You’re welcome to stay for the main event—but if I were you, I’d go make that call.”

  With that, Joey waved a remote at the TV, and the screen lit up like the scoreboard at the Super Bowl. It was tuned to one of the local Rabbit channels; the kind that employ young and invariably blonde female anchors to wear lipstick and strapless dresses while reading the news at ten a.m. Just what Joey needed.

  I grabbed my jacket and got up to leave.

  “See you later, Joey,” I said. “Enjoy the ‘news.’”

  I was halfway to the door when I heard the smash and clatter. Joey’s breakfast tray had slid off the bed, creating a slick of coffee and orange juice under my feet. A muffin rolled in the direction of BLT, who seemed baffled and yet duly grateful for this unrequested gift from above. When I looked over at Joey, he had the remains of an omelet in his lap and was half out of bed, pointing dementedly.

  It was the TV.

  The local Rabbit channel was showing live news footage from a helicopter. The camera was pointed at the side of a high-rise building somewhere—but the image wasn’t quite in focus. Then it zoomed slightly, and the clarity improved. Through the window—which must have spanned thirty or forty feet—it was now possible to make out the interior of some kind of upscale condominium. In the center of the main room was a huge bed, surrounded by wheeled cabinets of some kind, and a figure sitting up on the mattress, arms outretched. Behind him was another figure, near the door. She had… red hair and looked…

  Oh, Jesus, we were on TV.

  Joey was now stabbing furiously at the remote, trying to raise the volume.

  “… infamously described as ‘Joey Dumbass’ by President Reagan for his parachute-less jump over Manhattan…”

  Every phone in the room began to ring. I didn’t know which one to answer first, so I just stood there, uselessly, watching myself stand there, uselessly, on the giant screen.

  “… troubled history of extreme behavior, resulting in a decade-long visit to the Betty Ford…”

  Joey was out of bed now, heading for the window. His robe had fallen away, leaving him completely naked—a vision of ruined human anatomy, like one of those cautionary photographs they put on cigarette packs in Europe and South America. Someone had started to bang on the door while at the same time holding down the buzzer. The phones were still ringing.

  So much noise.

  But I couldn’t move.

  “… and comes just as Project Icon has finally seen the first sign of a turnaround in its ratings, after seeming for months to face certain cancellation. A spokesman for Mr. Lovecraft could not be reached for comment at this hour, although Honeyload bandmate Blade Morgan has taken to Twitter this morning, saying this doesn’t come as a…”

  The news had now cut to a three-way shot. On the left: the anchor, all tight leather and gold jewelry, still talking. Below her, a scrolling caption: “SHOWBIZ WEBSITE CLAIMS ICON JUDGE HOSPITALIZED—FANS AND COLLEAGUES FEAR DEADLY OVERDOSE. STATEMENT IMMINENT.” And to the right, the feed from the helicopter—which, if you looked carefully enough, displayed the outline of a sixty-two-year-old man, unclothed and in an unambiguous state of sexual arousal, screaming from behind tinted glass.

  28

  Chaz Chipford’s Greatest Hits

  May

  “BILL, MEET DICK.”

  This was at Greenlit Studios, a few days before the season finale.

  Len had just led me into his backstage office, where a tall, heavyset man with a look of barely suppressed rage in his eyes was sitting neatly at a circular table.

  “Uh… hi, Dick,” I said.

  Dick blinked twice. Cheap tie, I noticed. Collar too tight. A bull on a leash.

  “Dick here is a licensed private investigator,” Len revealed. “And yes, before you point out the obvious—that literally makes him a private dick.” Len laughed at this for—oh—a full minute. Then, turning to Dick: “That is your real name, right?”

  “Correct,” said Dick, unpleasantly.

  “Please, Bill—make yourself comfortable,” Len resumed, pulling out chairs for both of us. (A worrying sign: Len never wanted me to be comfortable.) “Dick is now going to tell you exactly what kind of dicking he’s been doing for us over the past few weeks.”

  Dick stood up.

  I’d already guessed the reason for his presence, of course: To investigate the source of all those “Project Icon exclusives” that had been appearing on the ShowBiz website recently. It had started with the news abou
t Joey’s admission to Mount Cypress—resulting in the spectacle of a nude grandfather parading on live TV at ten o’clock in the morning (for which the news channel had been fined for both invasion of privacy and indecency)—and had just gotten worse from there. A new scandal was breaking every day, it seemed. Sometimes twice a day. It was a wonder Chaz Chipford’s tubby little fingers could type fast enough to keep up.

  None of which had harmed us in the ratings, of course. Precisely the opposite. After the first two weeks of revelations, we were back in the top spot across all networks. The week after that, the numbers from the Jefferson Metrics Organization came in at over twenty million for the first time since the season twelve finale. The following week: Twenty-five million. And now, well, it was hard not to laugh: We were closing in on the big three-zero. People had even started to vote for the contestants again. I mean, okay, so the landline volume was still down. But if you counted text messages, Facebook “likes,” and the Rabbit website survey, more Americans had participated in season thirteen of Project Icon than in the last two presidential elections combined. It was incredible.

  As for Sir Harold: still very much in Germany. Things weren’t looking too good over there. Big Corp had practically moved its entire HQ over to Berlin in an effort to get the bingo crisis under control. Meanwhile, all non-bingo-related issues were being left to the divisional chiefs to handle, which in our case meant David Gent and Ed Rossitto—who seemed delighted with the way things were going. They’d even stopped mentioning Nigel Crowther’s name every other sentence.

  There was no doubt about it: Those “bingo betrügers” over at Rabbit Deutschland—each now facing twenty years in federal prison for their epic scam—had bought Project Icon enough time to save the franchise. This wasn’t of much comfort to Sir Harold, however. Having caught the fraudsters, the German prosecutors were now going after Big Corp—relentlessly and with overwhelming popular support, thanks largely to the cheerleading of rival news organizations. It was beginning to look as though they wouldn’t stop until they’d driven the company out of business, or at least inflicted a lot more damage.

  Thankfully, the scandals appearing in ShowBiz every day weren’t criminal in nature. They were mostly to do with the contestants’ personal lives—and, of course, Joey, who never did admit to that overdose. The official explanation was he’d been “overcome by tiredness and emotion” following his mother’s death, and therefore—as a precautionary measure—had checked himself into Mount Cypress to spend the night under observation. This spectacular untruth was made a lot easier to maintain when Joey’s pee test came back clean. I thought he must have just gotten lucky, or that he’d somehow managed to drown himself in enough Kangen water to fool the lab. It was only when he also sailed through the next test—in spite of having ingested a year’s supply of maximum-strength aspirin—that I started to get suspicious. And then of course came Chaz Chipford’s story (on which more later), which blew everything apart. By that point it was too late for Joey to get fired, however. Besides, he claimed that it had all been a practical joke, a publicity stunt in the spirit of Honeyload’s early days on the road.

  “Let’s get straight to the point,” said Dick, prodding at a remote control barely wider than his thumb. The lights dimmed as a motorized projection screen lowered itself from the ceiling at the far end of the room. To the sound of a tiny fan blowing cool air over hot circuitry, an image wobbled onto the white rectangle in front of us: a stock photograph of a burst pipe, spraying water everywhere.

  “As you’ve probably noticed, Miss King, we have a leak here at Project Icon,” announced Dick, nodding with almost fatherly pride at the visual metaphor now being displayed for my benefit. “Someone in this building—someone with the most intimate of access to our talent—has been passing along highly sensitive information to members of the press, and by that I mean a certain trumped-up jackass at ShowBiz magazine, who writes under the name of Chaz Chipford.”

  Dick clicked his remote again, and a photograph of Chipford—taken from afar, seemingly without his knowledge—appeared on the screen. He was emerging from a Russian dry cleaner’s somewhere, with a curious expression on his face.

  “Now, we can only assume that whoever has been providing Mr. Chipford with his information has being doing so in return for monetary compensation,” Dick went on. “And this of course would be a gross violation of any Icon employee’s contract. Make no mistake: Zero Management and the Rabbit network cannot and will not tolerate such breaches of confidentiality. That’s why they’ve retained my services to locate this mole. And when I do, Miss King, he—or she—will be held accountable, to the maximum-possible extent under the law.”

  Before I could object to the implicit accusation, Dick had activated the projector again, causing Chipford’s face to dissolve into a montage of his recent ShowBiz front pages.

  I had to admit—it was an impressive body of work:

  THIS LITTLE PIGGIE WENT PEE-PEE-PEE!—HOW WILDMAN LOVECRAFT BEAT PROJECT ICON DRUG TEST

  (A CHAZ CHIPFORD EXCLUSIVE)

  SORRY GIRLS, HE’S YODEL-GAY-HEE-HOO: LI’L NUGG GETS SNUG WITH BIBI’S MYSTERY HUNK DRIVER

  (A CHAZ CHIPFORD EXCLUSIVE)

  #METHHEADMIA: BAZOOKA-BOOBED DIVA STOLE TV FROM DYING GRANDMA TO BUY “ONE LAST FIX”

  (A CHAZ CHIPFORD EXCLUSIVE)

  “COMRADE CASSIE” EXPOSED: SHE LIVES ON FOOD STAMPS WHILE DADDY MAKES $200BN A YEAR

  (A CHAZ CHIPFORD EXCLUSIVE)

  When Dick was sure I’d fully digested Chaz Chipford’s greatest hits, he sat back down with a grunt.

  “Thank you, Dick, for that insightful presentation,” said Len, yawning. “Now, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea here, Bill. No one suspects you of anything. You’re far too tediously honest for that kind of behavior. Nevertheless, I can’t ignore what my dick’s telling me—so to speak—and he’s observed some lifestyle changes that need to be explained, so you can be ruled out of our investigation. You took a cab to work today, for example. Highly unusual, as I’m sure you’ll agree. After all, we pay you as close to nothing as makes no practical difference. And then there’s this issue of your attire. I found myself looking at you this morning and not feeling slightly depressed, Bill. That’s unusual. Then it came to me: You’re wearing a dress—which is frankly nothing short of extraordinary. It’s not even one of those hideous tie-dye things you sometimes drag from the swamp of your wardrobe on the hottest days of the year.”

  “It’s a Diane von Furstenberg,” I volunteered.

  “It’s a bloody miracle, that’s what it is,” said Len. “With some heels and a bit of makeup, there’d be a serious danger of someone finding you attractive.”

  “You’re such an asshole, Len.”

  Len feigned shock. “Finally!” he cried. “She fights back. I’ve been wondering how long that would take. You can’t deny it now, Bill: Something’s up with you. What it is?”

  “I’m not your leak.”

  “But you know something, don’t you? Yes, you do. Tell us everything, Bill. Tell us what happened.”

  Silence.

  Honestly, I didn’t even know where to begin.

  When it came to my new wardrobe: Boris was what had happened. Remember that time he’d invited me over for dinner, to taste his grandfather’s… meatball recipes? Well, when I finally calmed down enough to call him back, I accepted. And guess what? Boris can really cook. Oh, and he can really kiss, too. We did that. We did that… a lot.

  The point being: Boris made me feel so good about myself, I was inspired to go clothes shopping for the first time since moving to LA. Hence the Diane von Furstenberg and a number of other not-usually-my-type-of-thing outfits—all of which had given me enough confidence to stroll right into Nico DeLuca’s backstage coffee bar the next morning, and not even be questioned by the two ex–Secret Service guys at the door. They just assumed I belonged there.

  Of course, my upgraded look wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t also been m
oonlighting for Joey as a scriptwriter. This meant I had some money to spend on things other than the rent. Mitch had even fronted my first paycheck as an advance.

  I felt rich, almost. Plus, it wasn’t like I had to save up for a year in Hawaii any more.

  Yeah… about that. So I called Brock from Mount Cypress, just like Joey had told me to. To make things more difficult, it was a crappy line—or maybe it was the soundtrack to Apocalypse Now in the background, provided by the circling newscopters, I don’t know—but I pushed on with the conversation anyway. I knew I was essentially breaking up with him. But the ways things had been going, “breaking up” was a technicality. I didn’t even expect him to be surprised.

  Oh, I had no idea.

  “Look, Brock,” I opened, pacing the hospital lobby, hand over one ear so I wouldn’t have to keep asking him to speak louder. “I’m gonna stay out here until the end of the season. I might even stay longer, actually, if we get picked up for another season.”

  “What the hell, Sash? You said—”

  “I got a writing job. This is real, Brock. It’s not just me sitting on a beach, composing some novel that no one will ever read. It’s a paying gig. It could lead to something.”

  “I thought you hated LA,” Brock protested, without actually sounding too upset about it. He seemed to be taking this very well. A delayed-shock thing, maybe.