Elimination Night

9

“I Hope You Like Celery”



TEN MINUTES LATER, I was in a teak and leather capsule, being swept along the 101 freeway in total silence at eighty-five miles per hour. Yes, that’s correct: Teak. Being inside that car was like being aboard a transatlantic steamship from an alternative, retro-futuristic universe. There was even a pull-down picnic table in front of me, the clasp as heavy and stiff as the stops on a cathedral organ. When I pushed open the sliding lid on the surface, it revealed a tiny computer keyboard in matte steel. Tapping on a key activated the iPad embedded in the headrest in front of me. There was another screen in the door pillar to my left: This served as a vanity mirror—a camera was hidden in the frame—with honey-toned backlighting that gave even my reflection the luster of good health. Impressive, given how close I felt to death. Or at least as close to death as it was possible to feel in the embrace of such a ludicrously overstuffed chair, beneath the constellation of fiber optic stars that had been woven into the padded suede above me.

“Hey—you comfortable?” asked the driver (twentyish, stubbled, his jaw so perfectly set that I had been forced to swallow an involuntary gasp upon first sight).

“Well, if I’m not comfortable now,” I replied, cheesily, “then I don’t think I ever will be. Ha!”

I swear I could win gold at the Nerd Olympics.

“Alright,” he said, nodding slowly in a way that involved his entire upper body, as athletic, overconfident young American men often do. “If you need anything…”

The car surged on, without effort.

It had taken me all of seven minutes to change out of the previous night’s clothes, shower, apply makeup (and by that I mean lipstick), and locate my least-unimpressive dress. I was actually surprised by how little thought it required to select the outfit. I mean, what are you supposed to wear when going over to Bibi Vasquez’s house for a lunch appointment? It’s not like I owned any velvet Dior jumpsuits or feathered Alexander McQueen stilettos. So my only black dress, purchased at a chain store whose name I am too ashamed to reveal, would have to suffice, as would my leopard print kitten heels, which had seemed like a good idea on the slightly tipsy (okay, totally wasted) afternoon when I’d bought them. Unsurprisingly, they weren’t standing up very well to examination in the illuminated shag pile footwell of a half-a-million-dollar automobile.

In all honesty, I couldn’t even remember Bibi inviting me over to her house. It was possible, I suppose, that the message hadn’t directly come from her. Perhaps Teddy had passed it on. Or (more likely) one of his many assistants. There was, however, another explanation: That my hangover—or rather, the alcohol that caused it—had erased a crucial section of my memory between the end of The Reveal and whenever it was that I had made it back to Little Russia.

I hadn’t planned to get wasted, FYI. I was just so relieved when the day was over, I agreed to go for a postwork drink with the crew. And the crew being the crew, they wanted to go to Timmy Dergen’s, a poorly lit, sticky-floored Irish dive over on Fairfax and Wilshire. That was fine by me: Dad pretty much raised me in sticky-floored Irish dives. Indeed, one of my first memories—I must have been five or six—is of his taking me to Billy McQuiffy’s in Long Island City for one of his wedding gigs, and then sending me out, across an eight-lane highway, at night, to buy him a pack of smokes from a gas station half a mile away. (We lived in a high-rise a few blocks away at the time.) Mom gave Dad a black eye when she found out. As far as I was concerned, of course, it had all been an incredible adventure. Dad was a hero. Mom was a bore. Parenting can be unfair like that sometimes.

Which made me think: If only Dad could see me now. He’d go nuts. Lunch at the house of Bibi Vasquez, a multi-Grammy-winning recording artist? In a white Rolls-Royce?

So anyway: Timmy Dergen’s. Me, plus ten big dudes in black T-shirts and dusty jeans. Naturally, the after-work drink soon turned into an after-work let’s-all-get-hammered. Now don’t get me wrong: I can hold my drink. Dad used to joke that the most valuable thing he ever gave me was a liver of truly prodigious capacity. I’ve seen men twice my size (that’s you, Brock) collapse into a puddle of drool hours before I’ve reached my limit. But there is a limit. And I reached it. The evening faded to black at some point while I was dancing with a valet in the Mel’s Diner parking lot, a borrowed cigarette fizzing in my hand.

And now… here I was, barely recovered, speeding my way to the home of Bibi Vasquez, a woman so famous, you could hike for weeks through the Liberian jungle, meet a one-hundred-year-old tribal elder, and he’d be able to recite to you the lyrics of “I Wanna Rock” without a moment’s hesitation. Shamefully, a part of me wanted to crow about where I was going. A casual, single-line Facebook posting, perhaps, in the obligatory format of the humblebrag: “Bibi’s for lunch—how weird is that??” But you can’t humblebrag in this job, let alone brag-brag. It’s like working for Homeland Security. They monitor you. One indiscretion—one blog post, one Twitpic, one status update—and you’re out.

I wondered if Len was coming today, too. I hoped not. Then again, it seemed unlikely—no, impossible—that Bibi had invited me over for a private get-together. The very thought of me and Bibi, alone, was enough to induce panic, and before I knew it, I’d cracked open the window and was gulping air, trying not to vomit.

“You okay?” asked my handsome driver, glancing back.

“Fine,” I said, pulling out my phone and dialing Brock’s number. This was long overdue.

“Yo!” said Brock, after barely half a ring.

“Hey, babe,” I began, trying to keep my voice down. “So, you’ll never guess—”

“This is Brock,” he interrupted. “I’m either busy right now, or a robot from the future has vaporized me and is impersonating my voice, hoping to lure you into a deadly trap.”

“Brock?”

“If you’re planning to meet me someplace, BRING WEAPONS. Otherwise, wait for the—”

Beeeep.

“Arrrgh! Jesus, Brock, how old are you?”

I hung up. Brock had no doubt been watching The Terminator again with Crazy Pete, his old high school buddy. Pete smokes weed like most people chew gum. I wouldn’t have cared, but Brock is annoying on weed. It makes him giggle. Men shouldn’t giggle.

About forty minutes had passed when the Rolls-Royce took a ramp off the freeway, crossed a bridge, wafted down a side street, crossed another bridge, then arrived at a gatehouse. The barrier opened automatically as we pulled up to it, and a uniformed attendant waved us in. “Welcome to Secret Mountain,” read a woodsy-looking sign on the other side. I knew the name from ShowBiz: This was a private town, with its own private supermarket, private cinema, private church, and private school, where celebrities could live beyond the lenses of the paparazzi. Or at least that was the theory. Unfortunately, the paparazzi had discovered an invention known as the helicopter.

After turning up a steep driveway, we at last reached Bibi’s house. Well, I say “house”… but the place was big enough to hold its own on the international palace circuit.

The Rolls came to halt in a circular motor court. The driver got out and opened my door. Stepping out of the car, I took in the view: Ranchland in every direction. Not a road, not a rooftop, not a single transmission tower. (I’ve since learned that Teddy paid to have all the electrical cables buried within a twenty-mile radius.) We were only a few miles from LA, yet we might as well have been out in Montana.

“Please,” said the driver—my God, he was hot—gesturing toward the entranceway.

A maid ushered me inside calmly. Russian or Polish, I guessed. Her manner was somehow both deferential and unfriendly. It occurred to me that I’d never been inside a celebrity’s home before. Not that the usual rules of domesticity apply, I guess, when it comes to the likes of Bibi Vasquez. No, for someone like her, a home isn’t so much a home as a private hotel, built and operated for the needs of a single guest. As such, they tell you little about their owners, aside from their choice of interior decorator, and the manner in which they manage their staff. In Bibi’s case, however, both of these tasks had been outsourced to Teddy, presumably in return for yet another percentage point or two on her income.

I was led down a gnarled-oak hallway. Along the way, we must have passed a dozen other household employees—not explicitly uniformed, but identifiable by their ironed polo shirts and creased khakis—attending unobtrusively to various chores. In one room, a woman was bathing five pit bull puppies. In another, a giant popcorn machine was being recalibrated. And then of course there were the cleaners, oddjobbers, security guards, and landscapers outside (using rakes, I noticed, not blowers, to avoid disturbing the peace). Finally, we emerged into a kitchen with a floating central countertop that was more continent than island. Beyond it was a table of UN Security Council dimensions, a clutter of wooden chairs, and perhaps two dozen people, none of whom I recognized. Judging by the mix in ages, they were family, not friends. All were focused exclusively on a tiny woman in a white and gold jumpsuit, pacing the floor under a wall-mounted television while brandishing a highly complicated-looking remote. “Wait, wait,” she was saying. “You gotta f*ckin’ see this shit. This shit is f*ckin’ unreal. How do I unpause this motherf*cker? Oh, here.” She jabbed at the device and the image on the screen became unstuck.

“OH! MY! GOD!” she exclaimed, hand over mouth.

The real Bibi was now looking at the celebrity Bibi on the screen. I recognized the footage instantly: It was from the press conference at The Roundhouse—the last few seconds, when all three judges were on stage together, locking arms. This wasn’t the raw video feed, though. It was a clip, repackaged for an episode of The Dish, the sarcastic nightly entertainment show hosted by Jordan Wade, one of Wayne Shoreline’s less successful friends. From what I could gather, Jordan was making a joke of the improbably large fish tooth that dangled from Joey Lovecraft’s blown-out mane. “Dude, where d’you get that?” Jordan was asking the camera, holding up a rubber shark. “How did it get up there? Were you, like, cutting your hair with a hammerhead—and it just fell out?”

Bibi screeched with pleasure.

“D’oh!” mimicked Jordan. “Happens to me all the time! Damn those hammerheads and their shitty-assed dentistry! Still, give the fish some credit: It didn’t eat your head, right?”

“Goddamn, he’s a f*ckin’ funny motherf*cker!” wailed Bibi, catching my eye for a moment, but ignoring me nevertheless. It was though she were on stage, midperformance.

“Did Teddy write that?” someone yelled, struggling to be heard over the television.

“Of course!” snorted Bibi. “Well, not Teddy personally. It was that scriptwriter guy he hired. Y’know, the one who won that Oscar for that… war thing.”

“Teddy can get Jordan f*ckin’ Wade to talk shit about Joey on his show?” asked someone else.

Bibi tapped her nose theatrically, as though this were some big trade secret.

Delighted laughter.

Not quite knowing what to do, I sat down. The guy next to me—European accent, expensively dressed, and seemingly desperate for Bibi to notice him laughing and slapping the table after everything she said—nodded an acknowledgment of my presence, then passed me a bowl of celery sticks. Unfortunately for my hangover, this appeared to be the extent of the lunch. I began to wonder why Bibi had brought me here for… this. It didn’t make any sense.

And it wasn’t about to get any clearer.

After The Dish, Bibi went through her DVR playlist, selecting all the other shows that had featured the Project Icon press conference. Seven in total. Then it was time for a screening of the unedited footage of the event, which I noticed featured my left foot (complete with hiking shoe) protruding briefly from one of the wings.

“Wayne Shoreline is such a douche nozzle,” Bibi kept saying during the introductions.

The room jeered in agreement.

Due to the frequent pausing, all of this went on for perhaps two or three hours.

“She curses more in real life, don’t she?” said a voice to my left, near the end. I turned to see an Afro-Caribbean woman, perhaps late sixties, wearing bejeweled jeans and a purple leather blazer. Was this… Bibi’s mom? I didn’t have the nerve to ask.

“Hmm,” I nodded, diplomatically.

“Such a perfect face. And such a dirty, dirty mouth. You know what we call her?”

I shrugged.

“Ghetto Barbie. It’s worse when Edouard and the kids aren’t here.”

I smiled, not sure if it was safe to agree.

“It’s hard for her though, poor baby,” the woman continued, as if for her own benefit. “Everyone wantin’ her for her money. Y’know, in my own way, I know how she feels… when I came here from the islands, I worked as a baby nurse for a rich white lady in Manhattan. And oh—the men who chased me! Everyone wanted themselves a baby nurse for a girlfriend. Cash income. Woman away all the time, working nights, so they could play around. Ha! I learned the hard way how it worked. That’s why I wanted my Bibi to get herself an education, find a man with a college degree, so he could take care of her. But it didn’t work out like that, I guess.” Chuckling sadly, she continued: “I worry about that boy Teddy she got managing her things, y’know. Odd fellow. Gives me the heebie-jeebies. I’m not even sure about Edouard, sometimes. He’s a man, even if he don’t act like it half the time. And real men don’t like to earn less than their wives.”

So this was Bibi’s mom.

I could hardly believe what I’d just heard. It wasn’t much of a surprise that she didn’t trust Teddy, of course—I mean, who did? But Edouard? Her own son-in-law?

As much as I wanted to ask her for an explanation (was Edouard jealous of Bibi’s success?) it didn’t exactly seem like the place or the time. Instead I opted for some generic expression of sympathy. By the time I opened my mouth to speak, however, Bibi’s mom had already wandered off, gin and tonic in hand.

It must have been seven o’clock before I found the courage to leave. Not that I really knew how to leave: I’d arrived in Bibi’s Rolls-Royce, after all. And it didn’t seem right, either. I mean, there I was, at Bibi Vasquez’s house, in her inner-inner circle, doing what presumably millions of her fans would love nothing more to do. And yet I was, well, bored. Bibi wasn’t exactly a terrific conversationalist. She just made statements, with which everyone agreed. And they weren’t even interesting statements. In fact, her commentary on the ShowBiz coverage of Project Icon made me yearn to be home, in bed, reading a long essay in The New Yorker. I felt like one of those foreign military generals you see on the news, pretending to be amused by the latest interminable speech from their beloved dictator. And I suppose that wasn’t too far from the truth. For as long as I worked at Project Icon, Bibi’s power over me would be absolute. Without her—or Joey, for that matter—the show didn’t stand a chance of holding on to last season’s twenty million viewers. And without those twenty million viewers, the advertisers wouldn’t pay to air their commercials during the breaks. And without the commercials… well, the whole thing would fall apart. No show. No job. No chance of me going to Hawaii. No mai tais with Brock. Bibi’s mom was right: Everyone wanted her daughter for the money. Depressingly enough, that included me.

Nevertheless, as it got dark, I had to go home. My hangover had entered the must-sleep phase, and I was no longer able to contain my yawns. Bibi had by now disappeared somewhere, so I found the maid who’d shown me in, and asked her for the address of the house, so I could call for a cab. “Oh, you don’t need to do that, Miss Bill,” she said—she knew my name!—“David is waiting for you outside in the car.”

“David?”

“Your driver.”

I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t delighted by this news.

In the kitchen, I said my good-byes—no one seemed particularly interested—and made my way back to the front door. It troubled me that I hadn’t spoken to Bibi. Had this been my fault? Had I failed some kind of test? And then, in the hallway, a hand grabbed my arm. I turned, and felt a cold trickle of fear; the sensation of a teacher waking you from a classroom daydream with a difficult question to which you don’t know the answer. It was Bibi, wearing pajamas.

“I’m glad you could come over,” she said. Then, laughing: “I hope you like celery. Blame my new nutritionist. She says it’s okay to be famous for a big butt, but not a fat butt. So the cheeseburgers are on hold for now, along with all the other fun stuff.”

“I love celery,” I blurted. “I’d be totally happy as a Wonder Pet.”

I couldn’t believe that I’d just made a Wonder Pet joke. Only teenage stoners with nothing to do all day are familiar with children’s TV shows like Wonder Pets, and therefore know that Linny, the caped Guinea Pig, likes celery. What a hopeless dork.

“Right,” said Bibi, absently. “Anyway: I just wanted to tell you, honey: It’s not true.”

What the hell was she talking about?

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“About you, honey. About you being ‘poison.’ All that stuff that Joey said when he was being mean.”

“Oh, that…”

“It’s pretty rich, coming from him, y’know,” she continued. “I mean, he’s says he’s not in this for the money or anything, but that’s, like, total f*ckin’ bullshit. Trust me: He’s more into the money than Sir Harold Killoch. Don’t fall for the act.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“At least I’m honest about what I want,” Bibi went on. “With Joey, it’s all this, ‘Hey, I’m just diggin’ the High Lama Yuti whatever-the-f*ck-his-name-is. He’s the fake, not you.”

I nodded dumbly.

“Whatever,” she concluded. “Enjoy the Rolls, honey. Just stay away from David. He’s all mine.” Then she gave me a smile—the very same smile that had been framed in lights and hung from skyscrapers in every major world city—and walked away.

I watched as she padded barefoot up the hallway.

When the maid spoke, it made me jump. “Shall I let David know you’re ready now?” she asked.

“I’m ready,” I confirmed, with relief. “Very ready.”

I tried to sleep in the Rolls, but couldn’t. The day had been just too strange. Besides, the toxic fog of my hangover was now finally beginning to lift, making me feel suddenly energized. So I folded down the picnic table in front of me, tore a sheet of paper from the “BV” monogrammed notepad in the armrest, and began writing, pausing to think carefully between each line. And when we finally got back to Little Russia, I slipped the result of my work under Mr. Zglagovvcini’s door.

It read:

Hey there, Mr. Z:

Okay… so I’m not including “oxygen” or any smartass bullshit like that. That said, here goes:

SIX THINGS I CAN’T LIVE WIHTOUT





Brock (my BOYFRIEND).

Mom (tied with No. 1).

One Hundred Years of Solitude (first edition hardback, gift from my dad).

Maker’s Mark on ice.

Sweet potato fries (or horseradish—tough call).

Blue (the color, not Apt. 23-A’s goldfish, though he’s adorable).



This DOES NOT mean I want you to create that profile, Mr. Z!!! I’m leaving for Hawaii to see “Mr. Invisible” very soon. If you want something to do, send me your own list.

Later,

“Crazy Woman” (Apt. 7-B)