(Not That You Asked) (22 page)

“All right,” Simbi said. “Hold on. I need to make a call.” She went outside to contact the Executive Producer. The crew and I could see Simbi marching back and forth in my driveway, speaking urgently into her cell phone. We couldn’t hear her, but I imagine the conversation ran something like this:

“Hi, it’s Simbi. We’re here with the candy guy. Yeah, well, there’s a problem: He won’t roll in candy.”

“What?”

“He says he doesn’t feel comfortable rolling in candy.”

“But he told you he rolled in candy.”

“I know, I told him that. But he got cold feet. He says he’s afraid it will make him look like a fool.”

“So what, he thinks he’s an
artist
now? He’s too
good
to roll around in candy?” [Sound of fist smacking desk.] You get in there and convince him! Capiche? I didn’t send you three thousand miles just to film some jackass
talking
about candy.”

“What if I can’t?”

“Simbi, what’s the name of the show you’re working on?”

“Totally Obsessed.”

“Which of those words don’t you understand? Now you go talk to this punk and get me that reveal!”

Simbi came back inside and announced that she had a plan. I didn’t have to roll my
whole body
in candy. But maybe I could just show her the kind of candy I liked to roll in; I could roll my arm in candy. So I got a bunch of different kinds of candy and put them on the bed and I offered a brief lecture on candy rolling. Simbi kept saying things like, “Now, doesn’t that just make you want to roll your
whole body
in that candy? Come on! It’ll be fun!” This went on for an hour.

Eventually, Simbi gave up on the candy rolling thing. But she still needed a reveal, so I agreed to lie on my bed while Jay filmed a close-up of my face as I delivered an earnest monologue, ostensibly to a lover just off camera. “You know how I feel about you,” I said. “You’re special to me, and together, we’re really kind of magic. But I have to tell you, the time has come for us to take this relationship to the next level. I have certain
needs,
like any man.”

At this point, the shot widened and it became clear that I was addressing a piece of candy, specifically the Valomilk, a chocolate cup with runny marshmallow filling, which I bit into. As the white filling ran down my chin, I grinned and said, “You only eat the ones you love.”

I had hoped this super-quasar of glibness might be enough, but Simbi demanded a second reveal, which consisted of me dispensing pillow talk to an invisible lover—again a Valomilk, this time set atop the pillow next to mine.

Act Eleven

Chicks Dig Scars, They Don’t Dig Grafts

 

By early evening, the crew had run out of rooms in my apartment, but they needed to film a few more of my friends, so they had taken over my landlord’s place upstairs. They now controlled the entire house. I watched them ferrying equipment up and down the stairs and decided that the most effective way to take over a country was not to bomb them at all, but to send Reality TV crews.

It was close to midnight before the interviews were done. This is when the serious drinking started. Charlie had made a liquor run and come back with enough beer for homecoming at Mississippi State. Jay began mixing Red Bull and Absolut. I kicked in some decent-grade
mota
and started cranking the tunes. Pretty soon, we were into the chocolate, the good stuff, and things got very sloppy.

Andy pulled a slip of paper out of his back pocket and showed it to me. There, in loopy script, was the name
Cristal,
and a local phone number.

“Scored it at Brooks,” he said.

“Fuck yes!” Charlie said. “Call her, dude!”

“I already did,” Andy said.

“Well, call her again! Come on, get her over here. You can do her first and I’ll take sloppy seconds.”

“Fuck no,” Andy said. “
I
got the number. Anyway, I already called her. She was making all these excuses. I’m not calling her again.”

He went to call her again.

Jay began to tell a funny story about Charlie’s last Christmas party, during which Charlie had fed his cats an entire baked ham.

“You know what my favorite thing is?” Charlie asked me. “Jehovah’s Witnesses. This kid came by my house a few weeks ago and he started talking about how Jesus Christ was my only hope of salvation. I said to him, ‘Do you get to have sex as a Jehovah’s Witness?’ He said, ‘Only for the purposes of procreation.’ I said, ‘Dude, they’ve got you
brainwashed.
You’re a young guy. You should be out there fucking.’ He was trying to get away from me, but I wouldn’t let him go. That’s what I love. I
love
when phone solicitors call me. They say, ‘Do you have a minute to talk?’ and I say, ‘Oh, listen, I’ve got
all day
to talk.’”

In the other room, Simbi was crashed out on my couch, listening to Etta James at maximum volume. My pals Boris and Austin were doing shots with Derek and Andy and talking about what guys so often talk about: slang terms for degrading sexual acts.

Charlie began telling me about a motorcycle accident he’d gotten into and pulled up his pants to show me the damage. He grinned down at his leg, which was the color and texture of corned beef hash.

I told him it looked pretty bad.

“Let me tell you something,” he said. “Chicks dig scars. They don’t dig grafts.”

Then we all gathered around my coffee table and I cut up a bunch of Lake Champlain Five Star Bars.

The party went on and on, more booze, more chocolate, more pot, more music. Toward the end of the night (which is to say, toward dawn) we all started getting a little sentimental. We took pictures. We vowed to stay in touch. I felt like I’d become an honorary member of the crew. I knew this was mostly bullshit. But there was something real in it, too, the drunken riffs, the music, the fine chocolate on our tongues. It felt wonderful to be a part of such a spontaneous gathering, as if I had finally managed to show them the true dimensions of my life, which would never appear on TV, to be aired and commemorated in syndication, but would live in our collective memory as a wondrous and fleeting human communion.

Act Twelve

The Ax Falls

 

It began with Dana. It began with Dana and her insufferably frantic phone calls, which beset my life a month later. She wanted to know if I had any more footage of myself. I e-mailed her back a message that said, in essence:
What in God’s name are you talking about?
I and my friends had already provided some fifteen hours of footage, for a segment that Simbi eventually informed me would run four and one half minutes.

Dana kept calling, demanding “more footage,” so I called Simbi.

“We need shots of you eating candy,” Simbi explained. “What we got is great. Everyone here loves it. But the Executive Producer wants more shots of you actually eating candy.”

“Didn’t we do a lot of that already?”

“Yeah,” Simbi said. “But she wants more.”

“If I say no, does this mean they cut the segment?”

“No, not at all. It would just make what we have stronger. And no one is going to ask you to roll in candy. I promise.”

I had that same bad feeling, like I was Montezuma being asked to invite Cortés back for a nightcap. But I also felt that my publicist and my friends were counting on me. And, of course, some of that same fame panic set in, the dumbshit hunch that I would be perceived as a failure if this fell through. So I told her okay.

Simbi followed up with an e-mail in which she noted, matter-of-factly, that a new crew would arrive in three days, and that they needed to reshoot all of the scenes in my house, along with the scene at Brooks.

In great confusion, I called her.

Simbi explained that the Executive Producer wanted more of a feeling of “us just being a fly on the wall.” She went on for several minutes, until it became clear that she had no idea what the Executive Producer wanted. I told her I’d be available from 10
A.M.
to 4
P.M.
on Sunday, and happy to reshoot anything inside my apartment, but that was all.

Simbi called the next day to tell me the segment had been cut. I had expected she might be apologetic, but she sounded more self-pitying than anything. I don’t suppose I blame her. She was the one, after all, who had to wake up each morning and go to work at
Totally Obsessed.

So I was pissed off. But that actually lasted only a minute or two. After that, I was merely relieved. I was so tired of dealing with Reality TV, tired of their tireless manipulation, tired of my own willingness to go along with what had clearly become a bad charade, just plain tired.

Contemplative Interlude III

The central illusion of Reality TV, the notion that the viewer is merely “a fly on the wall” watching life unfold, is, as you have seen, bogus on virtually every level. The people who appear on Reality TV are carefully vetted. The producers put them in artificial situations and goad them to behave in ways they wouldn’t normally. Indeed, the main criterion for those who want to appear on Reality TV is the extent to which they will allow themselves to be humiliated—the Shameless Quotient.

I hadn’t realized it at the time, but throughout the filming of the segment I (and my friends) had been engaged in an unstated power struggle. We hoped to represent my obsession with candy not as a pathology, but as an exaggerated—or perhaps liberated—version of the obsessions that live within all of us. All that is fine and well, but it’s not what Reality TV is about.

So what is Reality TV about? It’s about the careful construction of two central narratives: false actualization and authentic shame. The nubile bachelorette on the brink of true love with one of several men she has known for seven hours. The brazen cad who manipulates his beloved on cue. They need actors who can ignore the contrivances, who can put their tears and howls on public display, who will roll in candy when asked to do so.

The success of the genre is certainly a measure of Hollywood’s imaginative failures. Even more, it reflects our unrequited yearning for the authentic. Americans are drowning in a cesspool of fake emotion, nearly all of it aimed at getting us to buy junk. But we really do want to feel, even if that means indulging in the jury-rigged joy and woe of others. It’s quite a racket, actually, to feel so truly moved, even as we fall farther and farther away from the truth.

BLOG LOVE

A ROMANTIC WEEKEND WITH MY VERY OWN CYBER NEMESIS

A
couple of years ago, a writer friend of mine sent me a link to a weblog in which a guy named Mark Sarvas posted the following statement, under the headline
THE TRUTH MUST BE TOLD
:

The adulation accorded Steve Almond constitutes one of the blogosphere’s enduring mysteries. From the very first days of this site, I’ve shaken my head in a sort of dazed wonder at the wake of overheated prose stylings the guys [
sic
] leaves behind. So I am, of course, delighted that the
Washington Post
’s Jonathan Yardley finally steps up and speaks the truth.

An excerpt from Yardley’s review followed. Then this summation:

If Almond devoted a fraction of the efforts [
sic
] he brings to self-promotion to his writing, he might finally be on to something. But I doubt it.

Who was Mark Sarvas? Well, he was a writer of course. You could tell this because there was a portable typewriter right next to him in his photo, which was taken outside. So he was clearly dedicated to his craft. But he was also a cool writer, the kind who wore a leather jacket and shades while hanging out next to typewriters outside.

Sarvas lived in Los Angeles. This meant he was a novelist
and
a screenwriter. Somehow, between novel drafts and pitch meetings, he managed to produce a blog which he had named, unpretentiously,
The Elegant Variation.

His entries were literary gossip items for the most part, links to articles, an occasional belch of schadenfreude. His prose style stressed elevated diction, convoluted sentences, serial use of the royal “we,” and, in an effort to convey a stream of conscious-ness…lots…of…ellipses. Writing like Henry James (or at least Henry James for the learning disabled) apparently helped Sarvas preserve the fantasy that he was not just a wannabe writer bravely dedicated to long-distance slander.

A FEW MONTHS
later, I received an e-mail from another friend, directing me to an online forum in which Sarvas described the birth of his blog:

I launched The Elegant Variation in a fit of madness on October 14, 2003 with a declaration of my love for James Wood and my loathing for Steve Almond. Nine months later, my positions remain unchanged.