Elimination Night - By Anonymous Page 0,1
of Project Icon are now mine, or at least until Bill gets out of the ER at Denver General Medical Center.
Long story.
Len calls me Bill because he didn’t want there to be any confusion during the “transition of responsibilities.” Which means to say: Len calls me Bill because he thinks of his employees as being basically interchangeable. “That’s just how things are, Bill, when you work in live television,” he once explained to me. But really that’s just how things are when you work for Len, whose Repulsive Personality Field seems to have doubled in strength since he returned to the show for its thirteenth—and almost certainly final—season.
And so: Back in June, on the morning of that unfortunate incident in Denver, I, Sasha King—the pale, red-curled, non-girliest girl ever to work in live entertainment—became Bill. Or “acting assistant producer,” to use my official title, which no one does. The “acting” bit means I get the double privilege of responsibilities—serious, one-hour-of-sleep, lifespan-shortening responsibilities—while still being relied on for menial tasks, such as procuring obscure fried meat products for homesick Southern contestants or collecting Len’s eighteen-month-old adopted Congolese orphan from his nightly Bikram yoga class.
No, Mom really couldn’t believe it when I took this job.
“Since when have you wanted anything to do with show business?” she asked, spitting vodka everywhere. “You’ve never cared about glam or glitz in your life! You don’t even wear makeup, dear. I thought you wanted to be a writer, like that man—y’know, the one who wrote that depressing book you’re always carrying around with you, Never-ending Misery.”
“It’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mom,” I sighed. “And it’s not depressing. It’s the greatest novel ever written. Dad gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday.”
“This is just very… unlike you, dear. What about Brock? Is he going to LA, too?”
“No, Mom. Brock’s not coming with me. He’s moving to… look, it doesn’t matter. This is a short-term thing. If I’m ever going to finish my novel, I need to take some time off. And for that, I need some money. The student loans are gone, Mom.”
“What about your inheritance?”
“Jesus, Mom. Dad left me four dollars and half a pack of Camel Lights.”
“I thought he left you his moose socks, too?”
“And the moose socks, yes.”
Mom did have a point about all of this, of course: Growing up in the fishing hamlet of Babylon, Long Island—with its peeling paintwork, Babylicious Crab Cakes, and twice-weekly hurricanes—I mocked anyone with an interest in celebrities. Even as an infant (or so I’ve been told) I considered most forms of popular entertainment beneath me. Rattles? Meh. Stuffed animals? Please. Life was a serious business, as far as Baby Me was concerned, requiring deep thought and a frown at all times. Even a giggle was asking too much: If you tickled my belly, I would grunt and try my best to punch you in the face. (Dad found infinite amusement in this, judging by the camcorder footage.) Things didn’t change much as I got older. I preferred the Discovery Channel to the Mickey Mouse Club, the spelling bee to the cheerleading squad, The Times’ op-ed page to the sex quiz in Seventeen. Full-blown nerdism, in other words.
Nevertheless, by the time I got to high school—where I hung with the cooler of the uncool kids—my knowledge of early seventies Tom Waits albums and appreciation for Lou Reed’s experimental period gave me a certain kind of credibility with a certain kind of boy… and of course it did no harm that by then I’d learned how to manage my inextinguishable wildfire of orange curls, or that I’d inherited Dad’s nerves, which kept me on the bonier side of slim despite a lifelong pastry habit. (Unfortunately, this effect is no longer quite as reliable as it once was.)
As for college: Well, I was an okay student… but a little cocky. “Jesus, Sash, even your irony is ironic,” as Dad used to say. A classic teenage self-defense mechanism, of course. But this was lost on the admissions officers of the prestigious schools to which I applied. They took it as detachment or over-confidence, maybe both. Hence my place at the J-School you won’t have heard of, half the tuition paid for with loans, the other half by Mom, who had worked double-time shoveling meds as a Walgreens pharmacist for the best part of a decade to make sure her only child went to college. (Shockingly, Dad’s “career” as a wedding trumpeter didn’t contribute much in the higher education department,