Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs - Dave Holmes Page 0,60

being brought around to do some on-air stuff is that I benefitted from the comparison. Jesse was without a doubt a big presence. He was a person you could talk about and speculate on, a guy who could render a group of teenage girls instantly batshit. I wasn’t those things, but I could get to work on time and say words. I looked like Walter Cronkite in cargo pants next to him. Some of the on-camera stuff Jesse was supposed to do got funneled my way, just because the production crew figured they’d have a better chance of getting it done on time. And things that weren’t supposed to exist at all—like Lunch with Jesse, a daily show where he got to just talk about whatever with whomever—got greenlit and fast-tracked. We both won. (Mostly him, because I actually lost.)

There were out-of-town shoots and events, and we traveled together a good amount, me and Jesse (and Caryn, and a minder, and Jesse’s manager). It is impossible not to attract attention when you are with Jesse Camp, because he is an eight-foot-tall troll doll who shouts. I remember a layover at O’Hare Airport in Chicago in which Jesse folded his whole body up like origami to actually use a single airport seat as a bed. We had just eaten a hangover lunch at the airport McDonald’s, and his half-eaten Big Mac and fries lay on the seat next to him, just over his head. A pair of thirteen-year-old girls with autograph books silently, slowly approached him, starstruck. They took one cautious step toward him, and then two. Just as they were within a yard of him, he unfolded and sat up quickly, opened his McDonald’s bag, vomited into it, closed it back up, refolded his body, and went back to peaceful sleep. And then Caryn woke him up and walked him to the men’s room: “Wash your mouth! You get in there and don’t come out until you have washed your mouth!” The girls watched all of this in silent amazement, and then looked at me. I said, “Yeah.” Caryn asked the girls if they wanted my autograph, and they were like: “No, that’s okay.”

At the end of his MTV career, as he readied the release of Jesse & The 8th Street Kidz, I actually began to feel sad that he was leaving. He was a character all right, but a good soul. A decent person. We went on one last trip from coast to coast for Wanna Be a VJ Too, and my mood was spiked with melancholy. He’s off to become a rock star, I thought, but I’ll always cherish the moments we had. We sat side by side on our final flight together, from Chicago to New York, and I thought: I might actually miss this person. And we both drifted off to sleep, dreaming of our new lives: me with a new multi-year contract with the network, him with an album on the way and a tour to plan. We’d come a long way together, he and I.

Because the thing about Jesse is that he is pure of heart. He is a person who got massive, blinding, nationwide attention when he was a teenager, a fate I would not wish on my worst enemy. He was a good kid, and I wished the best for him. I still do.

And then in the middle of the flight, he tried to climb over me to get to the bathroom, spindly spider limbs gripping the seatback and the armrests so as not to wake me, when something slipped and sent the whole situation tumbling down. And in the same instant, Jesse stepped on my foot, knocked my glass of red wine into my lap, and broke wind directly into my open mouth.

Goodbye, Jesse Camp.

The weirdest thing about working in television was that I was the only one who thought it was weird. Carson could grab a mic and talk to the audience like it was nothing. Ananda worked the room and dropped knowledge about TLC casually, naturally. Matt Pinfield was going to be sharing facts about Semisonic with someone, so he might as well have done it into a camera, which he did with ease. Jesse was from another planet entirely, and everyone had learned to adjust to his rhythms, because it was obvious that he was never going to adjust to ours. I was doing the strangest and most exciting job in the entire world, and I couldn’t say