Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs - Dave Holmes Page 0,73

it is true that the Shower Rangers hit the fire, they also hit other things that were farther away, things they never intended to hit.

Specifically, the Shower Rangers hit two teenage girls. Let’s call them Caitlin and Other Caitlin. Caitlin’s father was a bigwig and was therefore able to swing VIP audience passes for his daughter and her friend. A VIP audience pass gets you right there in the front row. Into what we may now call “The Splash Zone.”

So there Caitlin and Other Caitlin were, two teenage girls covered in strangers’ feces. I am told, and I believe, that they were not too psyched about it.

The production staff hurried out into the audience once they grasped what had happened, armed with towels and bleach and very hot water and a second goodwill deployment for Nick Lachey. And great attitudes: Ha! Wasn’t that crazy? Aren’t you two good sports? Look, a TRL T-shirt just for you! Here again, the MTV people are straight-up magical: I am told that once the girls had been cleaned up and apologized to and promised tickets to every single MTV event that would ever go down until the end of time, their frowns turned most of the way upside-down. Such is the power of the promise of an eventual audience with JC Chasez.

It seemed that the shitstorm had blown over, but soon enough, famous lawyers were retained. Tapes of the show remain the sole property of the California State Police. The Codys were taken from their homes and forced to undergo a battery of tests for a variety of illnesses, because if they were HIV-positive or had hepatitis, their act would be considered something like assault with a deadly weapon. (They tested negative.) The whole thing became a huge legal mess that towels, bleach, even Nick Lachey himself could not clean up, and while it did eventually get settled, dude, that must have sucked.

The show got picked up, was renamed Sink or Swim, ran for a season or two with me as host, and featured about 300 percent more Hula-Hooping, freestyling, and juggling. We left the butt stuff to Steve-O from that point forward, and you can’t say he didn’t run with it.

But it was clear that things were changing at the network. Music was becoming less important, shock more so. The producers were getting younger and younger. While for my first couple of years I found myself working alongside people who wanted to do their best and make exciting, unpredictable, memorable television, more and more I was meeting people whose highest artistic goal was to be friends with Melissa Joan Hart. The ground was shifting under my feet.

And like the Shower Rangers, I was starting to feel like I needed to go.

I’m really sorry about this chapter. Here is Nick Lachey, and the rest of 98 Degrees, to cheer you.

That last chapter aside, I am determined not to write a showbiz tell-all, mostly because there’s not much to tell; if there were crazy cocaine sex parties when I was at MTV, I was not invited. But something has to get excerpted on Popsugar if we’re going to make this book work, so, you know, here.

Kid Rock

At Spring Break 1999, a just-barely-pre-fame Kid Rock DJ’d the festivities, and at the end of a particularly long shoot day, a few of my coworkers and I relaxed in the hotel Jacuzzi. Let the kids pound liquor Slurpees at Señor Frog’s, we thought, let’s be grown-ups and drink wine in the tub. We were having a perfectly nice conversation when who showed up but Kid Rock, shirtless and in cut-off jean shorts, holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He splashed himself into our midst. “Where the pussy at?” he bellowed. “Ha haaaaa I’m just serious.” One of the women in the tub said, “You’re in here with women. Don’t talk like that.” “Whooo! Ha haaaa, that’s cool, I’m just serious. Y’all mind if I smoke?” He pulled out a cigar and lit it before anyone could answer, which was really the only way he could have made himself less pleasant. Our conversation stopped, and one by one everyone left except me; I was not going to let him win this Mexican standoff. “All right, Holmes. Where the titty bars at? Let’s go get some pussaaaay!” I said, “Yeah, no, Kid, I’m gay.” “All right. All right,” he said, “Ha haaaa,” and took another long, sad pull off the bottle. “Whoo.” You guys, I wanted to live in this