Like We Care (27 page)

And now, Viceroy marveled, teenagers and young adults were feeling disenfranchised, too? True, it was just one insignificant City Council race in one nothing Illinois town, but that Joel kid had already demonstrated the wildfire quality that these campaigns could take on. Annie McCullough briefed him daily on the situation, showed him the Happy Snack and Frank Kolak websites, and the growing handful of like-minded sites springing up across the country. In Berline, the “kids” put up a black man; in a Denver suburb, a bull dyke lesbian was being encouraged by freshmen at a community college to force herself upon the buttoned-down City Council. (In a regrettable display of missing the point entirely, a bunch of young wise-asses in Dallas tried to get a local homeless man on the ballot with the campaign slogan “A breath of fresh air—and the stale stench of urine!”)

Older, more conservative residents, heretofore content to vote sporadically and trust that someone who looked and lived like them would remain in charge, were beginning to squirm.

Once again, the Good Fight: the counterculture versus the establishment, the kaleidoscopic versus the white-bread.

Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!!

With spring elections looming and the presidential elections up next, both parties were working frantically to tap into new voter streams, haunted by the recent evidence that even the smallest advantage on either side could mean everything. And now here, if cultivated carefully and with sufficient panache, was a potential goldmine—youthful, previously apathetic voters who almost certainly skewed left, particularly if they fed off R
²
Rev. Even the most apolitical young adult had to be bristling at the benign cultural fascism of a Bush America. Many could not yet articulate it, but there was a fire burning there to restore the country to the hillbilly bacchanalia that had been the Clinton Administration.

If there was the slightest chance that these stray voting experiments could coalesce into an actual movement, that should be encouraged, Viceroy felt. That fire should be fanned.

Once again, Annie McCullough was the key. She was able to show Viceroy some creatively crunched numbers from R
²
Rev’s internal polling proven that awareness of Joel Kasten and his various campaigns had legs, thanks to the repeated showings of
We’re Not Buying This Sh—!
and the stray mentions that Annie had been able to squeeze into
Week In Review
. As a figurehead for everything going on out there, the kid had absolutely zero negatives, and Annie was confident that, with careful tending, he could do even more. Bring him along slowly, she counseled. See how he takes to the widening spotlight.

“First,” she said, “I should update the original show to introduce the political angle. That’s a no-brainer. But then,” she paused for effect, “suppose we bring him in for the
VideoYears
?”

Brilliant. Now gearing up for its third edition, the
VideoYear Awards
were the net’s highest-rated and most hype-generating extravaganza. Movie stars and musicians, all eager to spice up their images with the outlaw juice that the net traded in, fell all over themselves to be part of the show. Artists most closely linked to R
²
Rev lined up to perform, each duking it out with the other to push the limits of outrageousness without throwing the live broadcast off the air and into white noise and static. This year, ScroatM was scheduled to make his first live appearance promoting his new album.

Better yet, the show had become known for its stunts, throwaway moments that milked the zeitgeist for laughs, and pop culture relevancy (last year, the voting rules—always a momentum-killing recitation of disclaimers and legalese—were livened up by having porn star Rick Rigid pretending to read them off his digitally-masked thirteen-inch penis).

Joel was hardly a celebrity, Annie admitted. You wouldn’t bring him on stage to present an award or anything—most of the audience wouldn’t know who the hell he was. But kids
were
calling in for his picture. His Happy Snack website continued to receive hits at an impressive clip. A Joel Kasten fan club had been proposed, for Christ’s sake. There was a buzz.

We could use him for a bit, Annie said, maybe a bumper coming in or out of a commercial. He was a good-looking, charismatic kid who had been receiving some national play for his stand against corporate America (
Rolling Stone
had reportedly been sniffing around for a profile). And now here he is at the
VideoYears
, protesting something.

“He’s outside Radio City,” Annie riffed, “
and he’s protesting the show!
We’ll surround him with kids, give them signs that say ‘We’re Not Buying This Shit!,’ and they’ll make like
we’re
the new thing they hate. Maybe it could be a running gag—every time we cut outside, there are more and more kids. And then we’d need a payoff, like maybe they rush the stage or something. It could be hilarious!”

Viceroy sat pensively. He tended to shut down when exposed to any form of actual creativity.

“Could it?”

“It’d be a bit, a throwaway. If nobody gets it the first time, we’d have other stuff standing by. But we got first dibs on this kid. He could break elsewhere, so we have to brand him as ours first.” Annie listened to herself talk, marveling that she had learned to speak asshole by osmosis.

“Okay,” Viceroy said warily. “But we are over-budget like you can’t believe this year. This can’t cost anything. Bring him in the day of the show and send him home the next morning. I suppose we’d have to pop for a parent to come with him.”

“He’s eighteen, I’m sure he can travel solo. It’s one night.”

“And you’ll baby-sit him?”

“Absolutely.”

“Great,” he said decisively. “Let’s do it.”

He stood, flexed, and strolled behind his desk, framing himself against the Manhattan skyline as he looked to the street below.

“You know, this is when this job is really rewarding, when we can actually influence society. This story that you brought us, it really speaks to something that’s been missing for so long in youth culture. Passion! Protest! An actual desire to reshape the national dialogue. And, I’m thinking. If you and I can continue to—”

He turned around. Annie was already gone.

Todd wasn’t mature enough to hide the hurt. Joel was off to New York, for another taste of national TV exposure, to actually
be there
at the fucking
VideoYear Awards
, and Todd was staying behind. Yeah, he heard from Joel and from Annie herself that this trip was being done on the cheap, that Annie had to scrape and claw just to get Joel there. But Todd thought that if Joel had made an issue of it, the network would’ve kicked in a couple hundred bucks to include the kid who—
excuse me?
—started all this.

Hell, Todd had money. He would’ve paid for the plane ticket himself—he could’ve slept on the floor of Joel’s hotel room. His parents were already giving him a long leash. He had earned their trust. They would’ve let him go.

But, no, it was just to be Joel.

Joel landed at LaGuardia a little before one in the afternoon, only eight hours before the nine o’clock broadcast. Annie met him at the gate and grinned, seeing him come bounding off the plane, not a trace of nerves about him. He had attempted a kind of restrained white boy hip-hop look, which she would have to chip away at throughout the day to bring him back to his Midwestern essence. But she was startled at how glad she was to see him.

“How was your flight?”

“Sweet. They had some extra kosher lunches, so I ate three of ’em. I’m burpin’ like a Jew guy now.”

Annie shook her head with a smile. Joel had just a carry-on for this overnighter, so they were out the door and in a cab within minutes.

“Look,” she said as Joel trained a tiny video camera at the sprawl they drove toward. Ira Zimbaugh had laid the camera on him with instructions to bring back material for the website. “I know your first trip to New York, somebody’s supposed to take you around to all the sights—the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty—but I have to work! We’re just in complete meltdown on the day of these live things.”

Joel didn’t care. The whole experience was going to be fine no matter what happened. “That’s cool.”

“But I was thinking, you’re going to be outside tonight, you’re not going to be able to see the actual show. So how about I bring you over to the theatre this afternoon? They’re doing a run-through, all the musicians will be doing their soundchecks. You can just hang out.”

He struggled so hard to maintain his cool. “No way.”

“Sure. But, look,” she said gently, “I’m kind of in charge of keeping an eye on you, but they’re going to have me running all over the place the minute we get there. I would just need you to be cool and stay out of the way. These things can get pretty intense.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

She gestured to his video camera. “And that has to be put away while you’re there.”

“No problem,” he shrugged.

“We’ll break for dinner at six, and get you checked into your hotel room then.”

As Manhattan enveloped him, Joel grew quiet. He was just a kid, Annie had to keep reminding herself, all by himself in New York City. He was a throwaway gag, a minor bit for an enormous TV show. But Annie was the one who had to make sure he got home okay.

“You ready for this?”

He bucked up. “Rock and roll.”

He looked to the cab driver and noted his turban. He pointed from behind his hand and whispered to Annie, “
Towelhead.
”

It was a blur, a dream. He wished Todd had been there to share it with him.

Ambling around Radio City Music Hall with a laminated All Access pass swinging from his neck, Joel drank in everything. Over there was Nicole Fine, who had broken through R
²
Rev’s no-diva policy by successfully cultivating the look and manner of a freshly-fucked 16-year-old in her breakthrough dance club hit “Fruit Cocktail (Not Gonna Take My. . .)” (“You can take my pineapple, you can take my raspberry, I might try your banana, but you’re not gonna take my. . .”). Over there was Sweetie-P, wreathed in gold and juggling three cell phones as he barked orders at his posse.

And on stage: SuicideAll, a retro death metal band convulsing over their instruments, spasmodically and with great violence, to a song about going down on their dead mother’s corpse against a backdrop of cadavers and porn stars in go-go cages.

They seethed, they snarled, they defiled all that was decent and pure—until a genteel voice on the P.A. broke in over the racket: “That’s fine, thank you.”

The band set their instruments down and shuffled away obediently.

Earlier, Joel had been present for a real event, the kind of thing he knew he could take back to Berline and crow about for months: ScroatM’s first-ever live performance in nearly two years. A bunch of muscled men with pinkie rings had attempted to clear the theatre of all but essential personnel, but Joel—feeling bad-ass and invincible in New York City—slipped up to the balcony and watched as a lone, scrawny figure shuffled out onto the bare stage and waited dispassionately for the track to kick in.

The man himself. Scroat.

The canned backing rolled. It was the song from the upcoming album, the one that R
²
Rev was playing every damned hour of the day, “Dingleberry.” The groove was massive, the industrialized crunch and thud of beats and scratches threatening to reduce the tacky old theatre to rubble. The sonic assault smacked Joel in the chest and reverberated throughout his body—from his groin, to his feet, to the base of his neck. Mighty, mighty phat, this was.

Joel felt the song work on him, which was a surprise: Prior to this, he thought the track was. . . lame. Poo-poo stuff. If it had been on the first album, released way back when Joel was 15 and the perfect age to be enthralled by such sniggering stupidity, he’d be swooning right now, awash in nostalgia at this cut from the soundtrack of his young life.

But now he was 18—an adult, for Christ’s sake—and ScroatM maybe didn’t matter much anymore. Joel was savvy enough to know that the first single hyped from an album was meant to represent the very tightest that the disk had to offer. If “Dingleberry” was the high-water mark of
Freakal Matter
, Joel figured that there was another thirteen bucks he was going to keep for himself.