Read Online Elimination Night by Anonymous - Free Book Online

“Hug me like you hug your
wife.
”
    They tried again.
    I couldn’t watch.
    So that was that: Bibi and Joey were hired, terms to be agreed on. Which left only JD Coolz, who no one ever doubted would accept whatever scraps were thrown in his direction to stay on the show. “Coolz is well aware that he is the luckiest man alive—or at least the luckiest man to have ever been paid more than a million dollars a year to appear on TV,” as Len once put it, after a record-breaking lunch at Mr. Chang’s that lasted from 10:45 a.m. until early evening. “His talents, such as they are, amount to saying ‘booya-ka-
ka!
’ a thousand different ways.”
    Ed Rossitto hadn’t been much more diplomatic.
    “I like to think of Joey as the devil on this new panel,” he told JD, during one of those early batcave sessions. “And Bibi—well, she’s the angel, of course. And you? You’re the American everyman, JD. Fat and ordinary. And I mean that as a compliment.”
    Poor old JD. Raised out in Bakersfield, California—a.k.a. The Most Boring City on Earth. White kid, black neighborhood. Subject of ridicule from an early age due to his fondness for the deep-fat fryer. Byhis twelfth birthday, losing weight meant getting back down to two hundred pounds. But with JD’s size came a certain presence. He moved
slow,
wore a lot of jewelry, communicated only in fist bumps and monosyllabic slang. On the whole, people found him… reassuring. There was a calmness to JD. A Great Dane–like lovability. And so, when he turned eighteen and moved to LA—after teaching himself how to play bass guitar—he soon became a fixture in the weed-smoking rooms of all the major recording studios. “Oh, that’s JD: He’s cool, man,” went the standard introduction. Which is how Jason Dee, son of a Bakersfield agricultural inspector, became JD Coolz, multiplatinum session player.
    If I’d been JD, I would have picked up Rossitto by his tiny legs and dangled him out of the window until he apologized for the “fat and ordinary” comment. But JD is Mr. Nice. He just kept mumbling “yo” and “I get it” before asking plaintively if there was anything he could do to help with the recruitment of Joey. (JD had once toured with Honeyload, in the days before
Icon
’s success made earning a living from music unnecessary.) The meeting ended with Rabbit offering JD what it described as “a generous offer,” which turned out to mean a fifty percent salary cut. He accepted right there in the room, no complaints.
    If only Bibi and Joey’s negotiations had been so easy.
    With Bibi, the problem was Teddy. It was simply impossible to communicate with Bibi unless you did so via Teddy, and even then, you could never quite be sure if you were getting through. “It’s like being at a fucking séance!” I once heard Rossitto yell into his speaker phone. And in spite of Teddy’s claim to have changed his ways since the whole
ShowBiz
leak debacle, his original sixty million dollar demand for Bibi remained the same—minus the “dressing compound” that had been ridiculed so mercilessly on the late night talk show circuit.
    So when Rabbit made its first offer to Bibi—a mere ten million—Teddy’s response was… no response. He just ignored it. It was such a derisory sum, in Teddy’s eyes, that it qualified as no sum at all.
    Things didn’t go much better with Joey—but only because he’d alreadyread what Bibi was asking for. “You ever heard the phrase, ‘mostfavored nation’?” he asked Ed during a conference call. (I remember this largely because Joey insisted on the call starting at three a.m., West Coast time, as he’d just flown to Paris to buy shoes.) “International law, guys. United Nations: Look it up in your fuckin’ dictionaries. Means whatever one cat gets, the other has to get. Not a cent more, not a cent less. I want
that
in my contract.”
    This was in fact impossible, because what Bibi wanted in addition to cash—breast