by Bruce Wagner
“You can,” said Gwen.
In the last handful of years, cheering Telma to walk on with hope in her heart had become an involuntary reflex. But now, the sickening absurdity of it hit Gwen hard. Here she was, dreaming the impossible dream, tilting at (nonfatal) cancerous windmills for her baby, grotesquely dreaming of permanent remission—a remission at least from something! Willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause . . .
To right the unrightable wrong—
“Jesselle, we’ll work this out. Telma will steal the show like she always does. We’ll regroup. She just wasn’t expecting it.”
Hearing her own voice ground Gwen down.
A Judas mom, leading her only one to slaughter . . .
“Your mother’s right, Telma, listen to her. You always steal the show. Gwen, can you take me off speaker?”
Gwen held the phone to her ear and listened, saying nothing. Then, “Oh,” “Uh huh,” “OK,” “That’s definite?”
The doorbell rang.
“Uh huh . . . OK right, yes, I’ll convey that. But I have to go now, we have company.”
She hung up and opened the door. Phoebe stood there like the priest in The Exorcist. Instead of the usual effusive greeting, Telma ignored her, still in process.
“Mama, what did Jesselle say?”
“Nothing.”
“Is what definite? Is what definite?”
Phoebe didn’t interfere; she could see she’d walked into a little tempest that need be take its course.
“Not now, Telma—”
“What did she say, what did she say!”
“She said that—that Aleisha—the little girl—she said that the little girl was going to be the last performer, that Marcy wanted her to go on last. That you had to sing before.”
Telma blinked at her mother like a robot on the fritz.
That was when she gave Phoebe a proper if stormy greeting, running tearfully into her arms.
Evening is the time of the merging of Man and Woman: the Unknowable
A l’alta fantasia qui moncò possa,
ma già volgeva il mio disio e l velle
sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa.
l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
—P A R A D I S O, XXXIII. 142–5
EXPLICIT
[Tom-Tom]
What’s Your Favorite Got In The Bank?*
*www.celebritynetworth.com
Tom-Tom
had a feeling about it in her gut, a feeling she’d grown to trust, an extrasensory feeling about Rikki & The Treasure of Sierra Leone from the beginning. How could she not?
There was no way to ignore the facts—that Rikki shared that battered fosterchild thing with Antwone Fisher, and had even read his memoir (over & over!); that the inspiration for the character Rikki was auditioning to portray was none other than Ishmael Beah, who had visited his middleschool; & that Rikki had thoroughly read/iPod’d Mr. Beah’s book as well. It all amounted to a heavy dose of what Tom-Tom called the propinquity of providence. She was especially convinced of the importance of her seductive ministrations during the making of the video that one day would have hundreds of millions of hits because people would watch the audition tape as an historical document/debut, like they did Bieber’s first youtube or Susan Boyle’s I dreamed a dream. She was certain their juices & commingled ch’i had set the stage for Rikki’s brilliance, even moreso that their coupling was, with direct obliqueness, the actual cause of three outlandish pieces of recent good fortune: 1) Rikki’s “accidental” read-through with Michael Douglas and Laurence Fishburne; 2) the bizarre, unexpected call from an old friend asking her to take up free residence in an empty, Greek-columned minimanse high atop Mt Olympus; 3) the unheralded arrival of a reality show convention in downtown LA, whose convenient appearance, as if custom-made, presented itself not merely as a gathering of like minds, workshops, hook-ups and industry connects, but as a one-stop casting shop for the washouts & almost-were’s who would form the cornerstone and fountainhead of Tom-Tom’s Big Idea.
. . .
What happened with the whole Mt Olympus thing is that Tom-Tom’s friend Cherokee was a hair & makeup gal who Tom-Tom used to run with and Cherokee called out of the blue just like everything lately seemed out of the cosmicorgasmic blue, saying Double T you gotta help me, I’m fucked. For the last 5 yrs Cherokee pretty much exclusively worked for Betty White, Betty wouldn’t let anyone touch her face & hair cept her. Sometimes when her boss was in New York or wherever but not working, Cherokee housesat Ms White’s rundown still very groovy house on Mt Olympus, which was far groovier than Cherokee’s shack in Studio City.
From what Tom-Tom heard, Mt Olympus used to be chichi but was kinda frayed now, counting dope dealers, pimps & MMA/cagefight promoters among its denizens. Its entrance was right at the mouth of Laurel Canyon, you turned up the hill on Mt Olympus Drive, took Mt Olympus to Electra, Electra looped into Hercules, then hung a right on Jupiter, a left on Hermès, & you’re there. Betty was on hiatus from that show she did with Valerie Bertinelli, she was in NYC getting ready to come home and suddenly got cast in an Adam Sandler movie shooting in Paris, Spain & Poland. (Boo-yuh!) It kinda sucked not being Betty White. Anyway, for ten fucking weeks Betty’d be flying back and forth to the States, but only to New York, LA was just too far. She bought her pad 40 years ago when the Mount was the spanking new playground of Southland gods, more Trousdale at the time than Trousdale lite (which it quickly became), gone much further to seed in the interim. Betty told Cherokee she probably should have sold it before the bubble, now that would almost be impossible, the truth is she didn’t mean a word of it because she adored that house, it reminded her of a certain lovely time in her life, it was a living museum of nostalgia and gave her a kick plus it wasn’t like she needed the money from a sale. She was frickin rich. According to Cherokee, she didn’t want to do a big makeover on it either, a decision Ms White was positive added 20 years to her life. Plus she liked that whenever her makeup & hair doll housesat, Cherokee made helpful, practical, incremental improvements such as putting in a new water heater or recaulking/resealing bathroom tiles or even just (as Cherokee reported back) walking around with a can of WD40 unsqueaking the squeaks. The thing of it was, Cherokee was now going to have to go with Betty to Europe, the doll was wonderful at making her look wonderful but aside from that, Betty out and out enjoyed her, she raised her spirits and (mysteriously) made her laugh. Kinda like the daughter or granddaughter or great granddaughter she never had. The doll was a hoot. Betty had it written into her contract that Cherokee was her doll, they had to pay for her travel, per diem, hotel, all that good stuff. It kinda sucked not being Cherokee.
Cherokee did h&m on Season 3 of Idol and was the only one who even called Tom-Tom when she got kicked off. (Fantasia and Jennifer were such cunts about Tom-Tom’s failed subterfuge, which might even have been looked at in a humorous, forgiving light if they so chose. Clearly TT was coming from a desperate place, and one should always demonstrate compassion for desperate people, but no, they were in full-scheming skeevydiva mode. Tom-Tom never really told anyone except Cherokee but she was happy when Jennifer’s family got killed and she was happy when TMZ said that Fantasia was getting random death threats & hoped she suffered when there was a rumor she made a sextape with a married man, that’s what happens when you think you’re above empathy and treat your peers with ill-respect.) So Cherokee called Tom-Tom after they threw her off A.I. and pursued her because she liked bad girls. They became lovers and running partners, they were all about smack and candyflipping. After 2 years of untold drama (long preceding the arrival of the angel Betty White in her life), Cherokee checked herself into Serenity House, upscale Laurel Canyon rehab, where she commenced to take inventory of her life and compose a long list of those whom she owed amends, Tom-Tom being foremost among them. The h&m doll grew rife with fantasies of red roses and white picket fences, audaciously reaching out & asking Tom-Tom to join her in trudging the road
of happy recovery, which amazingly, Tom-Tom audaciously did. Sadly, T2 was asked to leave (before Cherokee even had the chance to make formal amends, and before Tom-Tom began her own 4th Step) for failing a urine test and sleeping with two of the former-patients-turned-counselors, a 27 year-old male & a 62 year-old female, separately but within a 2-hour period. More amazingly and audaciously, Cherokee had remained sober in the 84-odd months since, all of her drug cravings/energy handily refocused on a wild animalistic sexual obsession with TT, which always clouded Cherokee’s already unimpeccable vision, forcing her into a cyclical destructive dance of fight and flight, merging and separation, and who, by bestowing money and favors, manipulated Tom-Tom, at least thought she did, into agreeing/pretending/promising they might really have a future together. And now the gal was going away to be with her Angel, she’d been doing pretty well lately in protecting herself from the madness of her obsession but when the housesitter she arranged for (a friend of Amy Smart) bailed, & there was Cherokee leaving in 36 hours, & knowing Betty would be very unhappy if the house were left empty—it was an emotional thing, as long as she knew someone was staying there Betty was chill—knowing that however gracefully her angel reacted, anything short of a house sit would be a disaster.
So inadvertently she tapped into her god-sized obsession and everything old was new again. All was quickly arranged.
Tom-Tom GPS’d the greek salad of streets. The doll intro’d her to the house & its mild old-house eccentricities. Gave her the keys and told her which opened what. Showed her the ancient alarm system thingie, still in perfect working order. Showed her the museumpiece home intercom system, still in perfect working order. A little pool cover retraction demo. Then Tom-Tom devoured her in bed god she’d do anything Tom-Tom asked, she’d suck a napping dog’s dick like in the Czech Animal Gangbang vid they watched before/during their fuck. She’d put a snake up her cunt like that other video, head in the cunt tail in the ass how the fuck did they even get the snake to do that she’d get reamed by a pig or a horse & do it unloaded. Tom-Tom always told her what riches lay ahead when they fucked, she’d whisper shit in her ear while she licked her clit and worked her dark * with a dildo, Tom-Tom’s deliberate funny retail sextalk which actually would have been hahaha if she wasn’t always on the verge of coming, like how she would buy her a $3,000 Katie Holmes–designed pantsuit or these $500 Opening Ceremony shoes by Chloë Sevigny or an Olsen twins $34,000 backpack or how some day she would lavish her with custom jewelry like the $25,000 diamond-encrusted pendant of Stewie from Family Guy that Justin Bieber had made. The Double T drove her to LAX & passionkissed her in Cherokee’s SUV (she gave TT the keys), Tom-Tom put all kinds of subtle notes, flavors and colors in that kiss, going-away bonus tracks, freebies Tom-Tom threw in as acknowledgement and compensation for the seriousness of the scarily timed Mt Olympus aerie temp gifting, in that she knew in her gut just how large and important a part it was to play in her immediate plans & fortunes, notes, colors & flavors that implied I think I might really love you, Cherokee, this time I’m not so blind I can’t see, to know we can have a life together, so hurry home my love, hurry home from yr white angel to yr angel of meth . . .
On the way back from the airport Tom-Tom thought about that whole period of her life: Season 3. Season of the witch, no doubt. She got suicidal when Fantasia leaked her Idol artifice to Perez H (she was sure it was fatass-ia) and in like 3 seconds it viral’d the web and national/international tabloids too . . . then backfired on the h8trs & she started getting calls like from Jimmy Kimmel, and Amy Poehler played her on SNL (Maya Rudolph did Fantasia & Ben Affleck played Simon). She got hundreds of emails from Idol h8trs—death threats too—she was having her quintessentially American-ironic Tonya Harding folk hero Anti-Idol t-shirt moment. Letterman even wanted her to read the Top 10 and she went to an office in Hollywood to be put on tape so they could see if she could do it. There weren’t any Top 10 jokes written for her yet so she read a Ten Questions You’re Afraid to Ask Condoleezza Rice. She read well so that they flew her to NYC & put her up in a hotel not far from the apt she used to deal out of. Tom-Tom was so nervous in the car that took her to the studio that she puked. Had to do a little unplanned smack. The studio was freezing, Letterman never talked to her backstage and introduced her by saying “We’re happy to have Tom-Tom on the show with us tonight. She flew out from California in Ryan Seacrest’s private jet . . . and if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge with multiple schlerosis to sell you.” The crowd roared & something sour shifted in her. She could smell the stink waft up from her panic mouth.
Top Ten Reasons Tom-Tom Should Have beaten Fantasia To Become the “American Idol”
10. In porn, “Tom-Tom”’s a top; “Fantasia”’s a bottom . . .
In a month, all the attention faded away. She became a self-h8tr whose dreams died stillborn.
Until now.
. . .
Her Big Showrunner Idea:
She was part of a loose network of loosers angling for their own reality show . . . well Tom-Tom was angling anyway. A sorority/fraternity house all composed (in her conception) of one-time Idol contestants—though lately she’d considered broadening her sights to be more inclusive of The Voice, The Sing-Off, The Singing Bee, X-Factor, Going Platinum, &tc—who were sent home late or even way early in the game. Naturally no one could necessarily compete with Tom-Tom’s famous winnowing as a consequence of out-&-out larceny. No, the others would be more than content to make encore appearances, standard bearers of the usual sometimes-ludicrous sometimes-laughable always-lamentable hard-/softluck stories. Tom-Tom hadn’t yet begun her official reach-out, she took the reality show convention as a sign, that’s where she was intent on doing a major scout of minor talent. She believed in the s and their signs, that one needed only to cultivate the innate ability to interpret their meanings; she recognized the convergence of the convention and the Betty White godsend in which she would house and film her loser brethren a la Real Life/Big Brother to be a karmic omen in itself.
She had a wishlist of losers and loosers & was checking it twice: A) That punkbitch from Idol’s very 1st year who “signed” “When I Fall in Love” to his shit for brains deafass parents; B) Chris Golightly (season 9), who was raised by like 10,000 foster families, & ultimately bounced because he was already under contract to some fagboyband; C) Asia’h Epperson (season 7th), she of the annoyingly spelled name whose father’s head got Islam’d in a car wreck right before her audition so she changed the song to “How Do I Live Without You” & later got arrested for assaulting some ho at a hollywood club (which actually happened to be the night Asia’h & T’om-To’m f’irst m’et); D) Jamielynn (season the 6th), whose dad caught his wife with a lips-to-nuts dick in her mouth, so he agro-capped her then capped himself into below-the-chest paralysis, self-consigning to perma-bedsores, shit-stink rooms & morning hard-ons he probably never would even know he had, for the rest of his disgusto-burden life. And she really wanted to get Chris Medina, the shameless cunt who wheeled his useless, brainfucked wife onstage to blow Steve Tyler, and made Jenny from the Half-Black cry.
Tom-Tom knew it wouldn’t be easy getting all the leave-it-to-diva loosers to agree on what direction they should go viz her Master Plan. Just two weeks ago, a stoned/stoked TT called one of her fellow Idol ejectees to float the idea of a houseful of underdogs, a chronicle of the lives of a merry band of inside-outsiders (she was calling it Bad News Bears in her head, from one of her favorite movies), an odd squad overcoming kicks in the face on the road to Tinseltown triumph. Pitch it to VH1, Starz or TRU, one of those looser channels, they’d fuckin jump at it. Chrystle-Leigh (season 3) right away Debby Downer’d her by opining like some freakin expert on constitutional freakin law how Tom-Tom could never use Bad News Bears as the title without getting permission from the studio that made the movie, which of course . . . they never would grant, she said, no way. Like that was the point of the phone call, to ask this cunt what she thought of Tom-Tom’s provisional frea
kin title for her genius freakin show. Tom-Tom said, You know what? No one’s even seen the movie [you CUNT], no one even [fucking] remembers it [CUNT]. Wherein Chrystle-Leigh, Visiting Professor of Cuntology said, Well YOU did plus they don’t care if anyone remembers or not, they won’t let you use it unless you give em money upfront & even then they’re going to ask for ownership. Own this, you fucking diseased hooker. Then of course the cuntologist said ditto to Tom-Tom’s fallback title, Daydream Believers, TT felt like an ass for even bringing it up but she was loaded, she liked the way it sounded, she was excited & just wanted to put it out there. I don’t give a shit what we call it, she rejoindered, which of course wasn’t true, before puckering up: I think it’d be cool if you wanted to be part of the show. Tom-Tom knew she was going to have to kiss some looser ass if she wanted to get things rolling.
Tom-Tom hated to have to align herself or even deal with her fellow loosers, she was more than just one of them, a loser mouseketeer, she was the CREATOR, the one with the VISION that would shower unknown riches down upon them if they were smart enough to latch on and go for it. She was going to do them the insane favor of frickin hand carrying their lame, out-of-work, no name selves from obscurity into the crystal light. She knew what she wanted the show to be, she wanted it to be poignant, but wild and woolly too, with that demented freewheeling super-spontaneous smells-like-Gary Busey spirit, the problem was she knew more about the Looser Syndrome than she cared to, knew she was going to have an uphill battle not because of the show’s concept, which was trippy and dynamic, she was 1000% certain she could pitch it and sell it for real, no—not that, but rather because she knew all of the loosers had a deluded sense of importance, delusional self-worth came with the looser territory, the irony being they were incapable of seeing the truth (which in the end probably saved them), that they were drowning, and only by the benevolence of the stars (manifesting through Tom-Tom’s dreams and actions) were they being thrown life preservers, in the shape and form of a venue in which they could once again but this time maybe finally succeed at being losers. Tom-Tom knew she needed to be patient and merely consider them as spoiled invalid children, she knew they wouldn’t be able to shut up, they would be combative, they couldn’t help themselves, they were barely in the position to maintain breath in this world let alone bargain with Tom-Tom over the size and color of their fucking floatation vests, which was fine, but she’d rather be dealing with all that when they were already in the house, and filming—Tom-Tom wanted a reality show, fuck out-of-touch reality, at least if you were going to be out of touch be out of touch while the show’s fucking filming, though not too out of touch, because there wasn’t poignance in that and poignance was part of her Vision—not surrealism, she wanted no part of The Surreal Life’s Asshole World, fuckin Omarosa living in that senile piece of shit Glen Campbell’s old Holly estate, fuckin rickety Jerri Manthey, fuckin Ron Jeremy, fuckin Flavor Flav & mini-me, Tom-Tom wanted the folks at home to laugh at em then for em then with em, cry w/em too, tears were the secret sauce, Tom-Tom the creator/producer wanted to hit viewers in the gut & slap their hearts, wanted them to see themselves in the looser wrecking crew, you know, like all of us are only a fartbeat away from humiliation and defeat, & must then find the strength to pull ourselves up . . . Bad News Bears/Daydream Believers/whatever must present the same suspenseful indomitability of spirit as magnificently evinced by Marky Mark & Christopher Bale in The Fighter, ergo apprehension & delight, and finally, invested emotion, she wanted the preverbial audience at home to be completely in sync with the houseful of loosers as they underwent painful public transformation, their pitiable collective charms finally breaking thru losershells to catharsis & chrysalis luminosity, with that special excitement glow ascribable only to newborn s and wingdusted butterflies taking virginal flight.
