Party of One (19 page)

At 8:00 the next morning, a Lincoln Town Car picked me up from my apartment and drove me to Seaside Heights, where the beach house was that year. Funkmaster Flex was spinning. Beautiful young people in very little clothing were oiling up their perfect bodies to begin filming “The Daily Burn,” a new fitness show with
Baywatch
's Michael Bergen. An intern took my coffee order and returned with a nice, cold Dunkin' Donuts Coffee Coolatta in less than ninety seconds. Caryn said, “Welcome aboard.”

I had stumbled into my perfect job. I had bought myself a new life. My world had exploded and the pieces had landed exactly where they were supposed to have been all along.

And I very nearly chucked it away for three more hours of sleep.

For years after
Wanna Be a VJ,
every single day of my life, I was asked about Jesse Camp. Every single day. Like, if I left my apartment only once, and only to go to the corner for coffee, someone would ask me about Jesse Camp. In restaurants in non-English-speaking countries, someone would wave me over and ask me about Jesse Camp. Waiters, people in the next car over at red lights, the homeless. It still happens once a week, minimum. Was that contest real? Are you angry you lost to that guy? Is he really like that? The answers are:
Yes, not really,
and
still, after all this time, I honestly have no idea.

One of the first things I learned at MTV was that my job would occasionally include the care and feeding of our Jesse. Everyone's would. He was like a visiting friend who got himself a little too drunk; he was entertaining, but he could break something or wander off at any minute. If I was a little disappointed to lose the job to him, the Talent Department was straight up confused and frightened. Like, who is this guy, and how exactly do you take care of him? What does he eat?
Does
he eat? What, if anything, is he on? Who's going to get him to work?

Most pressingly: Is he always going to be like this?

I have no idea what he's like now, but I am here to tell you: For the time that we worked together, Jesse was really like that. Jesse was like that
all the time.
If there was a deeper Jesse, we never saw or heard him. It became something of a game among Carson, Caryn, the PAs, and myself: Who could catch Jesse talking like a regular person, and how would it sound if we did? We were in a time before cell phones had cameras or even rudimentary sound-recording devices on them, so it would be tough to prove. Some of the production guys got the idea to bring a camera into the green room as he slept, hide it discreetly, and then do something to startle him awake and catch him before he was aware enough to play the character. But it didn't work, largely because once he was asleep, nothing we could do would wake him up, so after a couple of minutes the game would evolve into “Let's Make Sure Jesse Is Breathing.”

My theory about Jesse is that he made a face and it stuck. We all learned at around the same time that he was not in fact a street kid, that like most of the kids who begged for change down on St. Mark's Place, he had a perfectly nice family up in Connecticut and had graduated from one of those ritzy private boarding schools. It seems to me like he was going through a kind of glammy, rebellious phase at age eighteen, the proper time to do those kinds of things. (I had worn color-block button-downs and cowboy boots during the 1992 summer of Garth Brooks, so I knew about regrettable phases.) Right in the middle of it, he became very famous, and now he's frozen that way. If the cameras hadn't caught him, he might have been finished with all of this and well on his way to a prosperous career at Bear Stearns by nineteen. The world will never know.

The good thing about losing the contest to Jesse and then being brought around to do some on-air stuff is that I benefitted from the comparison. Jesse was without a doubt a big presence. He was a person you could talk about and speculate on, a guy who could render a group of teenage girls instantly batshit. I wasn't those things, but I could get to work on time and say words. I looked like Walter Cronkite in cargo pants next to him. Some of the on-camera stuff Jesse was supposed to do got funneled my way, just because the production crew figured they'd have a better chance of getting it done on time. And things that weren't supposed to exist at all—like
Lunch with Jesse,
a daily show where he got to just talk about whatever with whomever—got greenlit and fast-tracked. We both won. (Mostly him, because I actually lost.)

There were out-of-town shoots and events, and we traveled together a good amount, me and Jesse (and Caryn, and a minder, and Jesse's manager). It is impossible not to attract attention when you are with Jesse Camp, because he is an eight-foot-tall troll doll who shouts. I remember a layover at O'Hare Airport in Chicago in which Jesse folded his whole body up like origami to actually use a single airport seat as a bed. We had just eaten a hangover lunch at the airport McDonald's, and his half-eaten Big Mac and fries lay on the seat next to him, just over his head. A pair of thirteen-year-old girls with autograph books silently, slowly approached him, starstruck. They took one cautious step toward him, and then two. Just as they were within a yard of him, he unfolded and sat up quickly, opened his McDonald's bag, vomited into it, closed it back up, refolded his body, and went back to peaceful sleep. And then Caryn woke him up and walked him to the men's room: “Wash your mouth! You get in there and don't come out until you have washed your mouth!” The girls watched all of this in silent amazement, and then looked at me. I said, “Yeah.” Caryn asked the girls if they wanted my autograph, and they were like: “No, that's okay.”

At the end of his MTV career, as he readied the release of
Jesse & The 8th Street Kidz,
I actually began to feel sad that he was leaving. He was a character all right, but a good soul. A decent person. We went on one last trip from coast to coast for
Wanna Be a VJ Too,
and my mood was spiked with melancholy.
He's off to become a rock star,
I thought,
but I'll always cherish the moments we had.
We sat side by side on our final flight together, from Chicago to New York, and I thought:
I might actually miss this person.
And we both drifted off to sleep, dreaming of our new lives: me with a new multi-year contract with the network, him with an album on the way and a tour to plan. We'd come a long way together, he and I.

Because the thing about Jesse is that he is pure of heart. He is a person who got massive, blinding, nationwide attention when he was a teenager, a fate I would not wish on my worst enemy. He was a good kid, and I wished the best for him. I still do.

And then in the middle of the flight, he tried to climb over me to get to the bathroom, spindly spider limbs gripping the seatback and the armrests so as not to wake me, when something slipped and sent the whole situation tumbling down. And in the same instant, Jesse stepped on my foot, knocked my glass of red wine into my lap, and broke wind directly into my open mouth.

Goodbye, Jesse Camp.

The weirdest thing about working in television was that I was the only one who thought it was weird. Carson could grab a mic and talk to the audience like it was nothing. Ananda worked the room and dropped knowledge about TLC casually, naturally. Matt Pinfield was going to be sharing facts about Semisonic with someone, so he might as well have done it into a camera, which he did with ease. Jesse was from another planet entirely, and everyone had learned to adjust to his rhythms, because it was obvious that he was never going to adjust to ours. I was doing the strangest and most exciting job in the entire world, and I couldn't say “Isn't this strange and exciting?” to anyone, because everyone else was used to it. So I just had to pretend that it was totally normal that I was suddenly wearing makeup and getting my clothes picked out for me and talking about 98 Degrees into a camera that was recording images that would get played in people's living rooms, sometimes right that very second.

Otherwise, I am fairly certain that I spent my first year at MTV in a constant state of shock. It's the only way to explain my lack of nerves, my even emotional keel, my sudden habit of saying yes to everything without thinking. And it started right away: as I taped the pilot for the show that would become
Eye Spy Video,
my producer George got a call. It was from Tony, the head of production, and he was asking for me. It seemed that Carson and Ananda and Toby would all be heading down to Seaside Heights the next day to get ready for the MTV Summershare programming launch, so they needed someone to host
MTV Live,
the daily, ninety-minute live show from the Times Square studios. “You wanna do it?” Tony asked casually, as though it were no big thing to ask a guy who one month earlier had been standing on the sidewalk outside the building whether he could be the sole anchor for ninety minutes of live television programming. “Sure,” I said, as though it were not a terrifying thing to do. “Great!” he said, and it was settled.
Tomorrow, I'm just going to be on the air, on my own, for ninety minutes,
I thought, and for some reason that I will never understand, I did not have a TV-movie nervous breakdown right there on the spot. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

My guests would be Doug Savant of
Melrose Place,
who was appearing in the Matthew Broderick
Godzilla
reboot, and Stacey Dash from both the movie and the television versions of
Clueless.
And then the rest of the time, I'd be doing whatever: taking callers, talking to viewers out in Times Square, just doing whatever we felt like on live television.

Hosting live television is a dream, in that it doesn't make much sense, it's nothing like real life, and you forget almost all of it when it's over. You have an earpiece deep in your ear canal so that the control room can tell you to stretch, or to cut things short, or to stop making that face. There's a teleprompter with your lines on it, or in the case of MTV, just vague bullet points so you have a general sense of what you're talking about. There's a roomful of production assistants and producers and cameramen and audio engineers and lighting guys and a stage manager and sometimes an audience and everyone's looking at you. As the show is about to start, everyone seems nervous; there is a palpable tension in the air, because anyone could fuck anything up, and if anyone fucks anything up, it's live, so there are no second takes. Of course, the person on camera is the only one who can
visibly
fuck up, and that's you, and you're new here. Then they're counting down in your ear (TEN) and your heart starts beating faster and faster. The person in your ear says you're going to start the show into Camera Two, but then fifteen seconds in you're going to Camera One and staying there, until you move back to Two. (SEVEN) And you don't know which one is Camera One and which is Two, and then there's the one on the big swinging lever thing that you will later find out is called a
jib,
and is that Camera Three? Or is that Camera One? (FIVE) And also they're moving the news segment with Kurt from act three to act five. (THREE) Wait, where do I look? (TWO) Your mic is picking up clothing noise, so use the stick for act one (ONE). And you're on.

And then it's a blur of images and sounds—the face of Master P, that Wallflowers remake of that Bowie song, a viewer won a car maybe? In the blink of an eye, it's ninety minutes later and you're on the other side. You're sweating and disoriented and tired somehow, like you've just gone on a long road trip through a thunderstorm, and you say: “Again. Let's do it again.”

That's how it went. I was asked to do absurd things, and I said yes, and they kept asking me. I showed videos in a musty Seaside Heights bar for
Eye Spy Video.
I asked my audience questions, and if they got them wrong, they had to do dares—like guys and girls switching swimsuits, or someone kissing a stranger.
Eye Spy
had actually started as a drinking game show where contestants had to chug a beer when they got a question wrong, and we did three episodes that way. Then Standards and Practices reminded us that our demographic was
children,
and promptly shut that part of the show down.

The bar at which we shot opened at 7:00 a.m., 365 days a year, and at 7:05 a.m., 365 days a year, the front half was crowded with third-shift workers and morning drunks. We shot in the back half. I asked the off-duty cop who doubled as our security exactly who the patrons of our bar were. “These guys are the people I had to arrest once a week ten years ago. These are the people who used to be the troublemakers,” he said. “Now they're too tired.” They also had children, so in mid-June, once school let out, the day drinkers' side of the bar was full of seven-to-ten-year-olds with rat tails and tank tops and angry eyes who played shuffleboard all morning until it was time to walk Mom or Dad home. Those kids are probably the troublemakers now.

I learned very quickly that the Beach House, which I watched and loved for its live performances, dance shows, and Jon Sencios, is just a set. It's a real house, but every room was either outfitted with cameras or repurposed as a dressing area, makeup room, or production office. We wouldn't actually be
living there.
I wouldn't actually be microwaving leftovers and splitting chores with Carson and Ananda. I should have known that, probably.

I also should have known that working in television means watching yourself on television, and watching yourself on television is like looking into an unforgiving mirror in a room where everyone else is beautiful. You see your dumb face and your boring hair and your idiot clothes, and you compare them to everyone else's and just think:
Something needs to be done here. This cannot stand.
Plus, in my case, the camera not only added ten pounds, it revealed the forty pounds I'd gained since college. Where I had previously only snuck quick looks into mirrors—only at the right time with the right lighting while I was wearing the right thing—I suddenly had to face the truth, in motion: I got fucking
fat.
Somehow a steady diet of chicken wings, draft beer, and sitting had resulted in weight gain. Luckily, there is a whole department of people who will fix your hair and put you in new clothes and make you look current and fabulous. It works for a little while, but then almost immediately you get sick of your new look, so you change it all up again.

You know how sometimes you go through an old photo album and you see a picture of yourself from high school, and you say,
What could I possibly have been thinking fifteen years ago when I wore those clothes and did my hair that way,
but you have enough distance to be able to laugh about it and maybe even post it online on Throwback Thursday? When you change up your look on television, by, say, growing out your hair and flat-ironing it and bleaching it so that it looks like you have just come out of some kind of hayride situation, and then you pair that up with the finest in 1999 Chandler Bing bowling shirts and baggy jeans, you get to have the Throwback Thursday experience
right away.
It was mortifying and even with the best style team on the planet—they tried, they really did—I simply couldn't bring myself to like the way I looked.

Falling in love with pop music all over again soothed the body shame. About a week after I got to MTV, the teen pop explosion happened, and even though I was fifteen years too old and 100 percent too male for its intended demographic, I genuinely loved it. We all did. To be in that studio, at the center of the pop universe, with all the screaming kids inside, and all the hundreds more screaming kids outside, as “I Want It That Way” played and everyone sang along, nobody could deny the power.

There is a name for this, and as best I can figure, it refers to Max Martin's Swedish heritage: Stockholm syndrome.