He watched some old Britain’s Got Talents on YouTube. Everyone amazed. Everyone astonished. Everyone was unforgettable. Everyone was making their mark, everyone was being launched from the filth and petty madness of anonymity into eternal stardom, everyone had rounded letters and rutabagas. Everyone was a pauper and ventriloquist-assisted frog prince, plucked from the sewers of minimum-wage schlepdom and installed in castle keep of the Immortal Kingdom of (at least) 10,000,000+ Hits, a finger would hit the playback machine, their mouths would open and just a few soulfully sung notes later they’d each be born aloft on a magic carpet of judges’ tears and thunderous standing ovations, relocated from the Götterdämmerung of murderously American small towns and deadend English villages, whose very names elicited a doom of mental retardation, perma-poverty & quicksand obscurity, from those sickening black holes to the supernovae pastures of galactic e-Lysiums & beyond. Bud was old enough to remember that astonishing bit of television history when Jennifer Holliday sang “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going”—now every week there were chubby adenoidal 11 year-olds vomiting it up on Good Morning America, and vomiting it pretty well. God wasn’t dead, epiphany was. The Internet had bestowed the thumbnail-transcendent Epiphany Channel; giddy passion plays of two-minute portable pop-cult fairytales ruled, with their hyperlinks of fall and rise/rise and FAIL/rise & rise mythos, appiphanies the new opiate of the people.
Bud wondered if Franco, Franzen or Fran L could sing, really sing. Franzen probably had a voice like an angel. Franzen and DeLillo could probably do a kickass Sesame St. “Alphabet Soup.”
He slipped into bed under fresh, Marta-laundered sheets. He noticed a crease. Jesus, she ironed them. A fucking saint.
Rihanna was on an old rerun of Ellen. Before Bud shut it off, Ellen said, “I hope you know how amazing you look.”
He closed his eyes and pictured the cover of his book. He didn’t know yet what he was going to call it, so he focused on the part that would go just below the title: A Novel by Bud Wiggins. He pictured a cover quote by Jonathan Franzen and blurbs on the back from David Simon and Michael Tolkin. A half-hour later his thoughts were still racing (too much Coke Zero), so Bud decided to listen to the guided meditation CD a couples therapist gave him back in the day, when he was coupled.
He turned on the light to retrieve it. That’s when he saw a piece of mail Marta must have left for him some weeks back. It was from the Library Foundation, inviting him, for a small donation, to become a “Library Associate.” The clever solicitation came in the form of book cover:
They happen every day…
Indeed they do. The gods of his understanding were at work and at play. Only moments ago, he lay dreaming his book, and now the book was dreaming him.
He would take his miracles where he found them — small, medium or large.
EXPLICIT [Tom-Tom&Reeyonna&Rikki]
The Social Network
So
far, Tom-Tom hadn’t had much luck drafting loosers for the cause. In the end, she had no choice but to cast a wider internet but was hampered in that she had to intrigue without giving her idea away. She spoke to idle Idol primadunces; crampy Top Model supermidols; erased Amazing Racers; uncaught Deadliest Catches; bored Hoarders and belligerent Bridezillas; undercooked Hell’s Kitchenettes and stinky Think You Can Dancers. She even had the brainstorm of conscripting one of the “tribute” actors gonged out of The Hunger Games—didn’t happen.
To date, she had but a single conscript for her troubles — Phil Dean, an affable 63-yr-old interventionist from Intervention’s 2nd season. Phil had suffered a heart attack after shooting just three episodes & took a “sabbatical” to have a quadruple bypass. A&E elected not to rehire. Back in the day, Tom-Tom’s very own Dr Phil specialized in expediting the recovery of washed-out child stars (Johnny Whitaker of Family Affair, Todd Bridges of Diff’rent Strokes) and mentoring their new careers as drug counselors.
The first thing the loosers did after Tom-Tom called to pitch them was google her ass. (A lot of times they did it right during the call.) Not everyone had a sense of humor about her colorful past. So Tom-Tom started using an alias, introducing herself as the backer and producer of an as-yet-untitled reality show. A requisite for any decent candidate was a large, dysfunctional dose of narcissism so Tom-Tom made sure to climb up everyone’s ass first thing, the whole rigmarole about how amazing they were, what a following they still had, how aggrieved everyone had been when he/she didn’t make the cut, bla. Usually, the earlier in the season the loosers were sent packing, the easier they were to handle. (Tom-Tom did realize she might be forced to resort to the bottomless pool of contestants who never even made it to televised rounds.) When she managed to get hold of a late-rounder — someone who made it to the last month or so in the life of whatever show — the delusional looser invariably acted like they couldn’t be frickin bothered, & Tom-Tom better cough up what she wanted & fast, because they were like in the middle of a frickin world tour & already late to catch the private jet that was taking them to the Giants of Reality Programming Crystal Frickin Award Ball in frickin Monte Carlo — you know, the oldschool Lear with Snooki, Bethenny, Ryan Seacrest & half the Kardash Klan onboard. Some of the loosers actually wanted to know—demanded—how Tom-Tom got their emails! Because you netpuked it to the e-niverse, you shitty anus. But she had to chill, reminding herself that however pathetic, they had something she potentially wanted. She had to remind herself that she was using them.
TT didn’t want her idea plashed all over the web either, so she wouldn’t do email, other than the initial contact — she insisted on talking on the phone or in person. Which again was trippy because the social distortion vibe of the loose coozers was still always like I don’t DO phone like EVER so you have SIXTY SECONDS & it better be worth my time. She made sure to drop the BETTY WHITE bomb right away because that got their attention, Betty White has graciously given us the use of her Mt. Olympus home yes Betty is a producer but a silent partner in the venture. Everything after that required a little more tact. What the show’s really about (she read from the text on her computer) is the individual and collective journeys of an eclectic group of reality show veterans who find themselves under one roof on the Hollywood rollercoaster bonding over shared triumphs and broken dreams but never straying too far from embracing the house motto: ‘Tomorrow is another day.’ The louche douches would then get that thing in their voice, that seen it all done it all thing like they were the ex-exec producer of the original Survivor or the retired co-co-co-creator of The Bachelor/The Voice or Simon fucking Fuller or the CEO in charge of grooming Christina Aguilera’s twat—already brands, ubiquitous cultural touchstones, perfect hundred-year showbiz storms/entrepreneurial f5 tornadoes—you know, like they wanted you to think they had all this hot shit in the hopper, just around the corner, their shit was going to hit large, they didn’t need your shit, because while they were waiting for their own major shit to hit, like while they were waiting, the Hard Rock was paying them the same or maybe just a little bit less than what they paid The Situation to show up at some Joe Francis/Demi Lovato/Brenda Song hooker-wannabe bday gangbang in Vegas so like hurry up with your dumbass pitch because I’m gonna be all late for the premiere launch of my first fragrance for K-Mart… well is that it? they’d say, all tightass disgruntled. Just people living in a house? People who were once on reality shows? I don’t understand what they’re supposed to be doing like why would anyone want to watch. (Just what TT expected to hear but from the Jewsers not the loosers.) I mean is it supposed to be like Real World or Big Brother? Can you please say again what everyone’s supposed to be doing? Because it’s really not making sense to me. Sometimes Tom-Tom would give them a tentative title, maybe say it was Daydream Believers in hopes that would give it a simple soft cool dreamy spin but she really wanted to tell them the networks wanted to call it House of Losers.