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.
22
Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You
March
“ARE YOU READY YET?” I asked the brass telephone.
“Hold on,” came the muffled reply.
“What’s taking so long?”
“Is this gonna be on TV?”
“No.”
“So there are no cameras out there?”
“No cameras. You’re a contestant in a singing competition, remember—not a makeover show.”
“You’re promising me this isn’t going to be on TV?”
“Mia,” I said, heavily. “For the ten thousandth time: This is not going to be on TV. Please, let’s get this over with. It’s uncomfortable in here, and hot as hell. Can you open the hatch?”
Finally, Mia Pelosi hung up the receiver. Then a heavy scraping noise, as a bolt slid out of its metal casing.
The hatch opened.
“Ooooh…” I said, peering through the latticed grille. “That’s, uh… wow. That’s kinda…”
We were in a confessional booth—a real confession booth, fashioned from carved oak, the panels so distressed by age they had turned almost black. It had been salvaged from the burnt wreckage of a church up in Santa Barbara (or so went the story), shipped down to West Hollywood, and then converted into a novelty dressing room by the owners of Les Couilles En Mer, an erotic-themed boutique on Melrose and Crescent Heights. I’d brought Mia down here between rehearsals—Len had lent us his chauffeur-driven Jaguar for the occasion—to shop for new stage outfits. After Mia, I would do the same for Cassie Turner (more of a challenge, given her preference for dreads and general hobo-wear) and then Jimmy Nugget, and so on.
Under normal circumstances, of course, the contestants’ two hundred dollar per episode clothing allowance wouldn’t have been enough to buy so much as a single vagina-print T-shirt from this place. (The vaginas are tiny and pink, making them appear at first glance to be a vintage floral pattern.) Today was different, however. Today, as a reward for surviving three elimination nights since the live shows began, the dozen singers who remained in the competition had been presented with a two-thousand-dollar Les Couilles En Mer gift certificate.
The real reason for this? Len had been appalled by their fashion choices to date. “These kids are supposed to be pop stars, not sales assistants at Best-bloody-Buy!” he’d yelled, during a staff meeting. The vouchers were therefore designed to encourage more daring outfits, especially for the girls—the best looking of whom by far was the pale yet delicate Mia Pelosi, with her shiny black, just-out-of-bed bangs, and those sad, brown, sorry-about-last-night eyes. For all her hotness, however, Mia had a dress sense that was unusually conservative—a result, I assumed, of her years in the Metropolitan Opera. Len was determined to change that. He wanted some flesh. Yes… with the ratings still at all-time lows, and Sir Harold due back any moment, things were getting seriously desperate.
So there I was… behind the curtain in a former box of repentance, on the sinner’s side. In the priest’s compartment, meanwhile, was Mia, twirling in front of the open hatch. (When the grille was covered, the booth’s oak panels were thick enough to make conversation impossible, hence the antique two-way telephone system.)
“Tell me,” said Mia, her right arm rising defensively over her chest. “Is it too… slutty?”
“Nooo,” I reassured, unconvincingly. “It’s just…” I looked again at the purple sleeveless dress, split to within a millimeter of the crotch to