Elimination Night

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 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.

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.

Here was the big surprise, though: Bibi wasn’t the issue.

In fact, Bibi’s performance during the first show at Greenlit Studios had been the strongest of all three judges. For a start, she’d been allowed (as per the contract that Teddy had negotiated) to stage a “live performance” of her latest single during the halftime break. Or as Len explained it to Ed Rossitto, “live in the sense that she’ll be alive when we f*cking prerecord it.” In fairness to Bibi, the song was a good deal more entertaining than the usual lip-synched affair. This was due in large part to the choreography, which involved a break-dancing mariachi band, a troupe of eighteen mostly naked construction workers, six lions, several high-wire aerial stunts, an indoor explosion, and—the masterstroke, in my opinion—a choir of Nepalese lentil-famine refugees. It lasted two and half minutes, at a cost of approximately ten thousand dollars per second.

Bibi paid for it herself.

She had some help in another department, too: her lines. These were mostly the work of the Oscar-winning screenwriter Tad Dunkel, who’d been hired by Teddy to sit through the afternoon rehearsals and compose emotional monologues for Bibi inspired by the contestants’ performances. (Which meant that no matter how much they improved in time for the live broadcast, it made no difference to what Bibi said.) At first, I was surprised Tad had even taken the job. I mean, the man had an Oscar on his mantelpiece. But then I discovered that since winning his sole Academy Award nearly two decades ago, Tad had sold only one other screenplay, the infamous animated comedy, Terrence the Turkey, released over the Thanksgiving weekend of 1995. It was infamous because it took in a grand total of $64.38 cents at the box office—a record that stands to this day. Tad never completed another full-length feature, although he did find work as a script consultant, becoming known in the business as “The Cry Guy” for his unfailing ability to make test audiences weep. His secret, went the Hollywood joke, was that he simply channeled the pain of Terrence the Turkey’s opening weekend.

And now Bibi had him on retainer.

It was, I had to admit, a brilliant move. Every time Bibi opened her mouth, it felt like the third act of a major motion picture. After a contestant’s performance of “Stayin’ Alive,” for example, Bibi embarked upon a lengthy soliloquy about how the lyrics brought to mind her tragic childhood dachshund, Frankie, who had died in her arms when she was just six years old. We learned about Frankie’s playful disposition. We learned about the time Frankie saved the family goldfish from an evil neighborhood cat. We learned about Frankie’s love of meatball sandwiches. And by the time Bibi reached the part about Frankie licking her six-year-old face one last time before snuggling up to her chest and drawing his final doggie breath—and how she’d wrapped him in a blanket from her own bed and wrote a note to the angels reminding them to feed him a meatball hero every Sunday—the audience had experienced what amounted to a collective nervous breakdown. People were sobbing so hard, Len had to switch off the studio mics. The Cry Guy had done his job. Bibi had shown her passion, her tears… her humanity. As for the contestant: He stood there motionless and somewhat confused, wondering what precisely it had been about his rendition of a 1970s Bee Gees classic that had triggered such an epic canine obituary.

(It probably goes without saying, of course, that Frankie was a work of fiction.)

So, anyway: Bibi wasn’t the problem. All of the caution she’d exercised during the audition rounds—her fear of being made to look stupid in the editing room—had vanished. Suddenly, Bibi was in her element. She was an actress, after all. She liked memorizing lines—it was so much easier than having to think of what to say. Which begged the question: If Bibi wasn’t ruining the show… then who was?

It was Joey.

Something had changed in him since that night at Maison Chelsea. His eyes were bloody hollows. His hair was a rodent’s nest. Even his mouth, with those spectacular, ever-shifting lips, looked somehow less luxurious than usual. He seemed to be… disintegrating. At first, I thought it was the Bonnie situation. But the more I found out about the circumstances of her pregnancy, the more I suspected that it had nothing whatsoever to do with Joey’s malaise. Bonnie, it transpired, had always wanted a child. And after her husband’s injury, not to mention the slaughter of his twenty-three comrades, the act of creating and nurturing a new human life seemed essential to her, a way of proving that the universe—God, I suppose—was still capable of love. But Staff Sergeant Mike Donovan was of course no longer able to father a child. And unlike many of his fellow soldiers, he hadn’t visited a sperm bank before leaving for Afghanistan: It was the married guys who jerked off into test tubes before their tours of duty, not the likes of Mikey, who was still technically a bachelor at the time he was ambushed.

Now it was too late. Half of Mikey’s groin had been taken out by shrapnel, leaving him infertile. Nevertheless, he was determined to give Bonnie a baby, one way or another, even if the child wasn’t biologically his. It was the very least he could do, he told his wife (via coded eyeblinks), given all that she had sacrificed for him. So Bonnie signed up to a donor service, and was busy reviewing anonymous candidates online, purchasing every last piece of information she could about each one of them—voice recordings, handwriting samples, medical histories, anything—when she came in for her Project Icon audition.

It didn’t take long for one of the research interns to find out about her plans to conceive. And it took even less time for word to reach Joey, who immediately stepped in to “offer my schlong in the name of God and country.” Bonnie, who had grown up listening to Honeyload with Mikey, couldn’t have been more delighted. And after consulting with her husband, she accepted his offer. Nevertheless, there was a small misunderstanding about how the… uh, transaction would take place. Hence the whole issue of the kiss. Or more accurately, the lunge. Still, Joey handled the rejection well, and although he confessed some disappointment about the means of extraction, he stuck by his promise, disappeared into the bathroom, and emerged approximately thirty-eight seconds later with a plastic beaker practically overflowing with what he called his “love spunk number nine.” To Joey, who is thought to have at least forty-three illegitimate sons and daughters across the globe—along with his seventeen official children and thirty-five grandchildren (with another half-dozen grandchildren pending)—the idea of fathering an infant he would almost certainly never meet wasn’t exactly a new one. And while he wasn’t getting any “oopygoopy” (his phrase) out of the conception, at least it wouldn’t involve the usual paternity suit.

Not everyone shared Bonnie and Joey’s enthusiasm for the artificial insemination idea, however. Len, for example, was especially unmoved by Joey’s generosity with regards to the distribution of his semen. In fact, when he found out about it, he called Joey into his office, printed out a copy of the Nonfraternization Agreement that each judge had signed only a few weeks earlier, and informed him that he was now in official breach of his Project Icon contract. Not only could Rabbit fire him, said Len, but it could also sue him—as could Zero Management. Then Maria Herman-Bloch walked into the room with David Gent, Ed Rossitto, and five Big Corp lawyers. In Maria’s yellow-tinged fingers was another contract, which outlined the terms of a payment from Big Corp to Bonnie of one million dollars in return for her immediate removal from the show and a promise never to take legal action over the “private incident involving Mr. Lovecraft’s supply of biological fluids,” nor discuss any aspect of it with anyone, especially not the press. The settlement included an agreement by Joey to forgo three months’ salary as a disciplinary measure. He signed without protest.

That was what had caused the terrible scene in Las Vegas. In spite of her awkwardness around Bonnie initially, Bibi had in fact been genuinely touched by her story. It had made her go home, dismiss the nannies for the evening, and hold her young sons tighter than she ever had before. She’d even tried again to make up with Edouard, who was still upset about being fired as her cue-card holder back in San Diego. So when she was ordered to send Bonnie home with no explanation other than “it’s the producers’ wishes”—Len hadn’t wanted to tell her the real story, because of what Teddy might do—she threatened to resign.

By this point, however, Len was operating on his special reserve tank of patience. So he called her bluff. He knew Bibi liked her new job too much to leave. Bibi’s breakdown in Las Vegas was therefore only partially anguish over what she had been forced to do. It was also a tantrum over not getting her own way. And Joey? Well, he felt bad, of course. But the way he saw it, he had given Bonnie a gift more precious than winning Icon. Besides, there was nothing to stop her following a singing career after leaving the show. Nothing other than the baby’s arrival in nine months’ time, anyway.

So the question remained: Why had Joey become so… boring on camera suddenly? It didn’t make any sense. He was supposed to be the King of Sing, the Devil of Treble… the Holy Cow of Big Wow!

My guess was the drugs. Although I’d reclaimed my jar of green pills (by then almost empty), Joey could easily have found another supply. He was an addict, after all. And an addict will do anything to get his fix, especially if the addict in question is a multimillionaire rock star with his own private staff. I’d alerted Mitch to the issue, of course—but there was only so much he could do without drawing Rabbit’s attention to the matter, and that was the last thing he wanted after the whole Bonnie fiasco. “Let me handle it, Bill,” he told me over the phone after the Maison Chelsea incident. “I’ll call his sponsor. We’ll get him fixed, don’t worry.”

Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but think back to Las Vegas Week. Was there any way I could have left my pills in his trailer? Was there a chance, no matter how infinitesimal, that he was telling the truth, and that he hadn’t actually stolen from me?

It just didn’t seem possible. I couldn’t even remember what Joey’s trailer looked like, to be honest with you. I certainly hadn’t been inside it. Which meant Joey must have seen the jar in my purse—just as Bibi had done in that Milwaukee bathroom—and then waited for his opportunity. It wouldn’t exactly have taken a criminal mastermind to pull it off. The only flaw in his plan being that once his addiction was reactivated, he got through most of the jar in twenty-four hours. And then he needed more. So what did he do? He invited me over to his private club, on the pretence of a “last supper” with Mitch and the others, in hopes that by then I’d refilled my prescription. Better to steal from me (again) than call up one of his old dealers, with all the risk that involved. Only he was so wasted by the time I got there—and so driven into a frenzy of lust by the nude aerobics in the pool—that he made that desperate, fumbled pass at me instead.

Strangely enough, however, I still had enough faith in Joey to believe that he hadn’t gotten hold of any more pills after I busted him. In fact, I suspected that he’d done exactly what Mitch had told him to and called his sponsor. When you’re an addict, relapses happen: I’d learned that growing up from one of Dad’s alcoholic friends. In rehab you’re taught to prepare for them, recognize them, shut them down. Pray for potatoes, but grab a hoe, as they say. The reason for Joey’s recent behavior, therefore, was probably more a combination of justified anxiety at the live shows coming up—during which he was expected to talk, not sing—and postrelapse shame. After all, he had another pee test due before the next live episode (they were scheduled every six weeks now) and he’d taken so many of my pills—at least forty, by my estimates—that not even an ocean full of Kangen water could flush all traces of the drug from his system. Which meant Joey was probably facing yet another self-inflicted career disaster. I doubted Len would fire him, even so. Way too much hassle. But that wasn’t the issue. The issue was Joey’s pride. If he failed the pee test, there was a good chance the story would get into Showbiz, thus proving Blade Morgan and the rest of Honeyload right about the shit they’d said about him over the years—i.e., that he was the biggest junkie in the band, a terminal f*ckup, and essentially unemployable.

The whole point of Joey taking the job on Icon had been “to stick a middle finger up to those f*ckin’ hypocrites.” To say, “Screw you guys, I’m fine.” And now… it might do the very opposite. Hence Joey sinking lower and lower into a private, croc-filled swamp of despair. His confidence, his swagger… his showbiz sheen—it had all gone. Just as Bibi had been afraid of Icon’s editors during the prerecorded episodes, Joey was now afraid of himself. He was paralyzed. He simply no longer trusted what might come out of his mouth on live TV. The King of Sing had become the Duke of Dull. The best he could manage after a contestant’s performance was, “Yeah, that was nice, man. You did great.”

He said it to everyone.

“That was nice, man.”

Over and over.

“You did great.”

Here was the problem, though: Self-censorship wasn’t keeping Joey out of trouble. It was getting him into more trouble, just of a different kind. The Rabbit network wasn’t handing over a million dollars per month to the man who had once urinated on Buckingham Palace, eaten a snake during a gig in Tel Aviv, and driven a Lamborghini Countach over Niagara Falls, to have him turn into another JD Coolz. No, they wanted a rock star—a lunatic who’d bang and crash around the place, making headlines and offending people. And yet they’d somehow ended up with the very opposite of that. Back at The Lot on Sir Harold Killoch Drive, David Gent was furious. So were Ed Rossitto and Maria Herman-Bloch. If Joey wasn’t careful, he was about to become the first celebrity in the history of show business to be fired for not misbehaving enough.