the child. There was, in fact, something oddly familiar about the shape of his—
“Holy shit!”
“Yeah,” nodded Joey. “Ed fuckin’ Rossitto! Guess how old he was when he got this part?”
“Eleven?” guessed Mitch.
“Thirty fuckin’ three!”
“Wow.”
“You shoulda WARNED me about this guy, man. He’s freakier than a cow who goes ‘quack’! And have you seen the… the shit he put on TV before Icon?” He passed Mitch an entry from Wikipedia that Mu or Sue must have printed out for him earlier.
“When Sharks Eat Babies,” Mitch read.
“Yeah. Dude belongs at a fuckin’ circus.”
Awkwardly, Mitch then had to reveal that JD Coolz and Maria Herman-Bloch were on their way to that night’s show (Ed couldn’t make it, thank God) to help convince him to sign the contract that Ed had just e-mailed over. “Ain’t nothin’ to discuss,” Joey huffed. After another hour of complaining, he agreed to at least give them both backstage passes, so they could watch from the wings.
It wasn’t until Blade dropped to his knees for the guitar solo in “Hell on Wheels”—while staying within the contractually mandated No Lead Singer Zone drawn around him in chalk—that Joey even acknowledged their presence. He did this by running over to Maria, grabbing her hand, dragging her out on to the stage, and forcing her to dance. When the music stopped, he bent her over backward until she was about to fall. “More, s’il-vous plaît,” he whispered.
It was the last thing he said to anyone all night.
Eventually, revised offers were made to both Bibi and Joey: Twenty million dollars combined. To keep Joey happy, the basic salaries were exactly the same, but Rabbit came up with all kinds of other tricks to guarantee millions of dollars’ worth of publicity for Bibi’s various enterprises. Everything was ready to go.
And then came the weeks and weeks and weeks of arguing over every subclause and footnote, right down to the number of Balance Bars in the minibar of Bibi’s trailer, versus the number of Ghirardelli chocolate squares in Joey’s. Finally, when all this had been agreed in writing—it took July, August, and some of September—Mitch and Teddy were loaned private jets from Big Corp and told to go find Bibi and Joey, wherever they happened to be in the world, and get their signatures within twenty-four hours. But Teddy couldn’t help himself: He leaked a story to ShowBiz bragging of how Bibi had gotten the better deal. Example: She’d been given a dressing room for The Reveal, when Joey had been told to show up “camera ready” with nowhere to sit but the backstage lounge area.
Mitch was so mad, he had to be strapped to a gurney and shot up with Xanax. By the time he’d calmed down, it looked like the whole thing was off. But then Ed got on the phone and convinced Mitch that Teddy had been bullshitting.
All the judges had to turn up camera ready.
“If it makes you feel any better, I’ll give both of ’em both dressing rooms,” he said. “How about that? We’ve got an assistant producer down at The Roundhouse—Len will get you her name—who can sort it out. Tell her exactly what you need.”
Grudgingly, Mitch agreed. It didn’t change the fact that Bibi and Joey wouldn’t actually need the dressing rooms. But it was enough of a symbolic gesture to finally get some ink on the contracts. That’s why I had to spend eight days and fifty thousand dollars making sure every last detail was taken care of, right down to Bibi’s red iPads, which had to be custom-ordered from a store in Hong Kong. It never occurred to me the judges would never even see the result of all this work.
Clearly, when it came to celebrities, I still had a lot to learn.
7
The Run-Through
LEN’S PHONE WAS ringing now.
The tone was broken and distorted, probably due to interference from the microwave trucks outside.
Still ringing.
My panic had now mutated into a kind of existential doubt: Was this even the right day for the press conference? Had I somehow completely misunderstood Len’s instructions? Was I about to wake up in my old bedroom at Mom’s house, soaked and trembling, from some horrendous anxiety dream? Nothing about this situation made any sense whatsoever. How could Bibi, Joey, and JD—even Wayne Shoreline—just disappear, at the exact moment they were all due on stage? And where the hell were Teddy and Mitch when I actually needed them?
I thought I might throw up. But then a strange kind of anger came over me.