douglaskoke.com

"We Americans have always considered Hollywood, at best, a sinkhole of depraved venality. And, of course, it is. It is not a Protective Monastery of
Aesthetic Truth. It is a place where everything is incredibly expensive."
-David Mamet

He transplanted to Hollywood to occupy the bottom right square on a television game show, seated just below Ben Affleck, diagonal from the puffy, effeminate Englishmen who played Mr. Belvedere.

The show's call sheet dictates his arrival as five o'clock, but he's been there since three, pillaging the craft-service table and pitching improvements
to the producers, hustling for more camera time. The producers, annoyed and altogether disinterested, have asked the director's assistant to give him another call sheet, one that says "SIX" in bright red letters. He will pretend to lose it.

Backstage he gobbles pinafores and stuffs bottles of Evian water into his gym-bag, parsing the greenroom for anyone he suspects has better representation, cornering them with sweaty, awkward discussions of residual earnings and
shares of domestic gross. Trading pithy barbs with Jonathon Taylor Thomas while being fitted with his microphone, contemplating having an affair with his
tax attorney in the back of her Escalade.
Ten minutes until airtime.

He pauses, lips trembling above plastic; one slow, cool swallow of mineral water and the lithium moves down his throat, pinched between tight, panicky
breaths. The pill goes down, the larynx relaxes; he adjusts his mic-pack and slouches into a glorified office chair, wheeling up to his key-light. Eyes cracking under the par-cans, lilac suit and canary cabana shirt permanent-pressed, ready to seduce America from cue cards. Smiling at the demographic, primed for the big funny. Tonight he's going to hand out the keys to the Chevy Cavalier-- not that leathery, cantankerous Shannon Dougherty. She can choke on her Emmy, toothy bitch.

Twenty-four years on the road, two gold records, a 16 share on Hard Copy, and he knew Britney best, before the implants. One more appearance on VH-1's "The List" and he would've been sunning in Malibu, not scratching out autographs on glossy 8x10s at boat shows in a booth next to the Olsen twins, the mutts. Fate had taken his plate and pissed on it.

Now age 50, sagging, in the midst of a painful, messy divorce, telling homo jokes off the air between commercials for dish-soap and baked potato chips. All he wanted to do was to sing songs and milk a free tab at The Belagio. But they cut him down, the fuckers. The masses had left him; flaccid, ramped-down like a sugar high, leaving him jumpy and bitter. The world had found some new
cheery confection, some other filmic, domesticated honey to suckle at. The world did not want to get together and sip pina coladas anymore.

Lost.

The red light comes on above the teleprompter. He smiles, masking his rancor, envisioning the lovable Justin Timberlake-- now in his forties but still fabulously handsome --being run through with a lighting tree, blood spurting from his gaping Versace wound. The boom mic hovers in his periphery, listening, swaying in the halo of resentment above his head, crackling with
acrimony and suspicion. He swats at it like a housefly when he is off-camera.

He never wanted to hurt anybody. Good clean money and fun. Tinsel and fringe on every outfit. Everyone too gleeful to look drunk. Contracts to sign, CDs to press, heaps of eager young teenagers to splay wide, to lever open and breathe song into. Sequins and beads and choreography and tour-busses, schedules with no time to think. Everything about it so quick, so fast -- the business,
the process, the scam -- the whole thing was so exhilarating… and so easy. The equation was so elegantly simple; he made the records, and they felt
obligated to buy them; it didn't matter if they came from someplace real or not. He was a star -- they said so, and so he was. No one had ever thought to
contradict them.

But now they were on to him, now they pried into him with microphones and tape recorders, waggling them in his face, gleaming like dental appliances. They came after him in the questions of attorneys and interviewers and promoters, they judged him in the sniffs of hotel bellboys and receptionists.

They tracked him everywhere, mockery and ridicule on the faces of young women with long legs and flat stomachs drug down to the studio by their mothers, watching him perspire in a girdle, turning their attention to a medicated,
cagey Carson Daley, who no longer returned phone calls.

Somehow they had caught on, heard his shame rippling in the deep, shining waves that bled from top 40 radio towers, squinting at his blurry deceits
through the glare of their televisions. It wasn't him; it was the suit, and they knew it. It was the fabric, that shimmering, luminescent purple, the static that hissed on their radio dials, the insect hum in the speakers.

It was everything around him. Not the man, but the mechanisms behind him, the unseen hands moving in shadows behind curtains, the hushed conversations on cellular phones, the sound of shuffling papers and money. He was just in front, lulling them to dance in their sleep, calling their bodies down to the floor with that same chintzy line, over and over again. That glorious, cheesy rock and roll call to arms, repeated one too many times. The rap never changed, just the venue. The snappy patter had stopped rolling in years ago. No one was feeding him the lines now, and the act had grown stale.

They weren't coming out to dance anymore. The sheen had worn off, and now they saw the body, without the patina. Just him; chubby, half-blind, stumbling
uncoordinated, warbling off-key, intoxicated and ungrateful of their love. And so they abandoned him, banishing him to the bottom right square and eternal
syndication. Spiteful and sulking, clutching a tattered press clipping and a Mai Tai, staring odiously at the inventor of the Beanie Baby, who politely
avoided eye contact. Alone. Rejected.

The world did not want to get together and sip pina coladas.