Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs - Dave Holmes Page 0,59
ready for a successor who would almost certainly be better at the gig than I was. On a Sunday night, I got my files in order, put my personal effects in a box, turned out the fluorescent lights in my office, and said goodbye to advertising.
At 8:00 the next morning, a Lincoln Town Car picked me up from my apartment and drove me to Seaside Heights, where the beach house was that year. Funkmaster Flex was spinning. Beautiful young people in very little clothing were oiling up their perfect bodies to begin filming “The Daily Burn,” a new fitness show with Baywatch’s Michael Bergen. An intern took my coffee order and returned with a nice, cold Dunkin’ Donuts Coffee Coolatta in less than ninety seconds. Caryn said, “Welcome aboard.”
I had stumbled into my perfect job. I had bought myself a new life. My world had exploded and the pieces had landed exactly where they were supposed to have been all along.
And I very nearly chucked it away for three more hours of sleep.
For years after Wanna Be a VJ, every single day of my life, I was asked about Jesse Camp. Every single day. Like, if I left my apartment only once, and only to go to the corner for coffee, someone would ask me about Jesse Camp. In restaurants in non-English-speaking countries, someone would wave me over and ask me about Jesse Camp. Waiters, people in the next car over at red lights, the homeless. It still happens once a week, minimum. Was that contest real? Are you angry you lost to that guy? Is he really like that? The answers are: Yes, not really, and still, after all this time, I honestly have no idea.
One of the first things I learned at MTV was that my job would occasionally include the care and feeding of our Jesse. Everyone’s would. He was like a visiting friend who got himself a little too drunk; he was entertaining, but he could break something or wander off at any minute. If I was a little disappointed to lose the job to him, the Talent Department was straight up confused and frightened. Like, who is this guy, and how exactly do you take care of him? What does he eat? Does he eat? What, if anything, is he on? Who’s going to get him to work?
Most pressingly: Is he always going to be like this?
I have no idea what he’s like now, but I am here to tell you: For the time that we worked together, Jesse was really like that. Jesse was like that all the time. If there was a deeper Jesse, we never saw or heard him. It became something of a game among Carson, Caryn, the PAs, and myself: Who could catch Jesse talking like a regular person, and how would it sound if we did? We were in a time before cell phones had cameras or even rudimentary sound-recording devices on them, so it would be tough to prove. Some of the production guys got the idea to bring a camera into the green room as he slept, hide it discreetly, and then do something to startle him awake and catch him before he was aware enough to play the character. But it didn’t work, largely because once he was asleep, nothing we could do would wake him up, so after a couple of minutes the game would evolve into “Let’s Make Sure Jesse Is Breathing.”
My theory about Jesse is that he made a face and it stuck. We all learned at around the same time that he was not in fact a street kid, that like most of the kids who begged for change down on St. Mark’s Place, he had a perfectly nice family up in Connecticut and had graduated from one of those ritzy private boarding schools. It seems to me like he was going through a kind of glammy, rebellious phase at age eighteen, the proper time to do those kinds of things. (I had worn color-block button-downs and cowboy boots during the 1992 summer of Garth Brooks, so I knew about regrettable phases.) Right in the middle of it, he became very famous, and now he’s frozen that way. If the cameras hadn’t caught him, he might have been finished with all of this and well on his way to a prosperous career at Bear Stearns by nineteen. The world will never know.
The good thing about losing the contest to Jesse and then