Like We Care (28 page)

But the dude sure was working it, Joel thought as he peered through the lens of his video camera. Down there on the stage, Scroat was screaming pure acid into the microphone, the veins on his neck straining, his lean body bent sharply at the waist as he seemed about to retch on what he was bringing up, kind of like what Joel’s cat looked like when it had a hairball.

He was shirtless and newly tattooed. His boxers were riding halfway up his back. Having spent hours as a young fan studying ScroatM’s image, Joel had never before considered how easy it would be to give the singer a wedgie. As the millionaire punk worked through his choreographed temper tantrum, Joel for the first time thought that maybe a wedgie might be a good thing.

The stage was empty except for ScroatM. Surely there’d be more going on during the actual show. Live hip-hop had almost nothing to do with
music:
The tracks were recorded, the rapper—if he couldn’t get away with lip syncing—just stalked the stage and shouted his rhymes into a microphone. Maybe a deejay up back was working the turntables. You had to have dancers or props or special effects or
something
to keep the kids entertained. The more successful hip-hop shows had more to do with
Sesame Street On Ice
than rock and roll.

Surely the people who ran the ScroatM machine knew that—

And then he was down.

As the song built to its fist-pumping, spit-spewing finale, Scroat—who seemed not to know where his marks were on the stage—turned into a confetti cannon just as it went off. He took it right in the face.

Joel jumped as intended at the surprise, then noticed for the first time that the stage was lined with cannons that had just erupted in sync. The bits of paper snowed down over the theatre, all the way up to the balcony. This was to be ScroatM’s big finale. Since he wasn’t there in 1975 when Kiss did this, Joel thought it was pretty cool.

The theatre was slapped into deathly silence as the track was cut off. Somewhere, a Teamster couldn’t suppress a laugh as ScroatM’s handlers rushed the stage in horror to tend to their fallen meal ticket.

He was back on his feet almost immediately—it was mostly surprise that brought him down.

But his fury was red hot, raging. “Motherfucker!
Motherfucker!!
” he bellowed between spits of confetti. Joel kept the video camera running.

ScroatM dove at the first handler who reached him. It was a frenzied, arm-swinging assault, scary in its savagery. Loser kids on the playground fought like this when they snapped, Joel noted.

Several more members of Team ScroatM tried to subdue their boss as he flailed and kicked wildly.

“Get offa me, motherfuckers!! I’ll fire your
fucking asses!!!
You’re all— Get your fucking hands—”

His team swarmed him and started dragging him off the stage, getting in a few discreet kicks as they did. Some of these goons were knee-capping to collect bad loans when Ronald Gerber was in diapers. They didn’t care who was writing the checks now. They weren’t going to take shit from this kid.

Tattooed arms and legs fought wildly from inside the no-necked ScroatM entourage as his protests echoed into the wings and trailed off. There was stunned silence for a moment. Then crew men slowly emerged from the shadows with brooms. They started sweeping up the confetti.

“Okay,” the stage director coughed nervously over the P.A. “Next on stage, I need to see Satan.”

Roadies started wheeling the next band’s gear into place.

“Hurry please, Satan. Our time is almost up.”

“This is so sweet!” Joel chuckled to himself as he lowered the camera. He picked up a fistful of the confetti, figuring it would make a great souvenir. He examined it: it was little balls of toilet paper, dyed shit brown.

Dingleberries! ScroatM was planning to actually shit on the crowd!
Pretend
shit, anyway. It was all pretend.

He shook it from his hand distastefully and let it flutter from the balcony to the seats below.

The dinner break didn’t happen. Show prep was running way behind schedule.

Annie was right—these people were wound way too tight. Annie herself was short with Joel the couple times she checked up on him. When this trip was first proposed, Joel fantasized that this would be the opportunity to see if what appeared to be a mutual flirtation could be acted upon as a sex type deal. Joel was a man of the world, he had done it with girls several years older. But back when he was 17, Annie scared him. Now that he was an adult, he figured he might go for it.

Now, though, she was kind of. . .
not hot
. Watching as she barked orders at those under her, only to turn around to be yelled at by those above, Annie suddenly seemed ordinary and, worse, adult. She wore no makeup to speak of, she reeked from cigarettes, and the cameras that were set to trip live at nine sharp seemed to be driving her mad.

“Okay. So you know what you’re doing, right?” she snapped.

Joel laughed. “No! You’ve haven’t told me anything.”

“Oh, Jesus,” she kicked herself. “Okay, you’ll be out front—”

“Where’s the front?” He was a kid from Illinois standing inside Radio City Music Hall. How was he supposed to know?

She ground her teeth. “Listen, you be on this spot at eight o’clock. Okay? This is serious. Make sure I can find you
right here
, and I’ll lead you out there. There’ll be a bunch of kids with signs and stuff and you’ll be their leader, like at the Happy Snack.”

“Got it.”

“And you’re protesting R
²
Rev because. . .” She rubbed her forehead with exhaustion. “I don’t know, you’re just doing it. If we decide to cut back to you throughout the show, somebody will come out to interview you and you’ll just do your thing.”

“My thing?”

“The boycott thing,” she said impatiently, “the ‘We’re Not Buying This Shit’ thing. But about R
²
Rev. And funny.” A staffer started pulling at her.

Joel squirmed. For the first time, this started to feel scary. “Todd comes up with most of that stuff.”

“You’ll be fine,” she said, leaving to put out another fire. “Just be yourself.”

“Hey, do I get dinner?”

“Craft service!” she shouted as she vanished.

Craft service. This was the damnedest thing Joel had seen so far: table upon table of snacks and junk food and soda, there for the taking—for free!— by anyone connected to the production. He learned that there were union positions, paying like forty bucks an hour, that did nothing but make sure the buffet was constantly stocked. You could take four or five donuts, which Joel did, and a half-hour later they would have magically grown back.

Every A-list performer in R
²
Rev’s heavy rotation was downstairs doing their soundchecks, and Joel ended up hanging out at craft service, trying to catch the Teamster elf who replaced the donuts.

He was still 18 going on nine.

He bounded into the shadowy backstage nook set up for the food. The place was empty. In the final 90 minutes of live prep, the R
²
Rev-ers weren’t going to take time to eat. Like Annie, they all seemed to exist on cigarettes and abuse, both issued and endured.

Joel circled the pristine spread strategically, trying to determine where his point of attack would come this time.

Brownies, he was thinking.

Then he heard the wet, stomach-churning sound of someone dredging a healthy wad of snot from the back of his throat. In the darkened corner of the room, Joel now saw someone slumped over in a folding chair, his elbows on his knees and his eyes to the floor.

This person slowly, meticulously let go of a long, mid-air snail trail of mucus that splattered to the floor between his feet. There was more sputum puddled there; he’d been at this for a while.

Joel gagged and moved off the brownie. Then he nearly shit.

It was ScroatM.

Joel almost ran off, remembering how pissed the singer had been earlier in the afternoon. But then he got ballsy. He cleared a spot on the table and propped up his video camera just so.

He approached warily.

“Hey. ScroatM. Right?”

Scroat looked up hazily. His cloudy eyes were elsewhere. He stunk of pot.

“’Sup?”

“Too numerous!” Joel smiled. “Fuckin’ ScroatM! How you doin’? Shit, I’m a fan, dude. A
real
fan. From back in the day, absolutely. I can’t—shit, I can’t believe this!”

Joel stuck out his hand and the singer clasped it limply, letting his arm jiggle bonelessly as Joel attempted a clumsy soul shake.

“
Right White Nigga!
Right? The fuckin’ bomb, dude. Played that CD until it fuckin’ melted, seriously. That disk, man. . . It got me through a lot.” Joel let something vulnerable get through. “It helped me.”

The rapper looked up to the kid blandly. “You a fag?”

Joel flinched and laughed nervously.

“What?”

“You look like a fag. A farm fag.” He laughed drunkenly and picked at a scab on his forearm.

“No,” Joel smiled hopefully. “I’m, I’m on the show tonight. Me and some friends—”

ScroatM summoned up some more snot and watched it dangle to the floor. Joel looked to the camera. He couldn’t believe he was taping himself being dissed this way.

“Well, hey, I better get outta your way,” Joel stammered. “But, hey. . .”

He looked around and saw a stack of note cards. He grabbed one and a pen and offered them shyly to the rapper.

“Could you maybe. . .?”

Scroat stared at the card and pen dumbly. Then an idea took shape.

He took the note card, bent down to the slime pooled between his feet, and slowly swiped the card through it, collecting a pale green glob on its edge.

He held it up to Joel.

“Lube up, Gomer. I’ll fuck your ass, send you home with a real story for all your farmer friends.”

His laugh rattled and sliced. He barely missed Joel as he spun the card at him.

Joel had tears in his eyes. He didn’t know what to do.

ScroatM started fishing down his baggies for his dick.

“How much do you love me, kid? Show me how bad you want it.”

Joel turned and ran, remembering at the last moment to grab his camera.

ScroatM crowed mockingly, then slumped forward again in the chair and fell silent.

J
oel was home just after noon the next day and went straight to Todd’s. The trip had left him feeling rattled and completely un-Joel-like.

He grinned as he presented Todd with the All Access pass, which Todd accepted graciously while thinking that it was kind of like giving someone a used rubber: Hey, here’s what I had on while I was having all the fun you weren’t having. Enjoy!

On TV, the
VideoYears
sure looked like a blast. R
²
Rev’s stellar roster of puppets and miscreants had paraded across the stage to accept the accolades of their peers, the rappers thanking Jesus and giving teary-eyed shout outs to their posses and illegitimate babies, and the metallers making devil horns and saying “fuck” a lot. Whoever was riding the delay at R
²
Rev did stellar work; not a single “fuck” got through. Even in cases where “fuck” and “Jesus” were contained within the same half-sentence, Jesus got his props while the offending word was duly censored.

All the performances were smoking, with the exception of ScroatM, who tore off a listless rendition of that stupid song from his upcoming CD. At the end, he stood triumphantly at the front of the stage, arms raised in exultation, as the audience was pelted with what Mimi SoWett later said appeared to be used toilet paper.

She sniffed at it warily.

“But it’s not!” she declared brightly. “ScroatM, he so
bad!
”

The bits with Joel were brief and pretty worthless, the first showing up as the show went to commercial about 25 minutes in. There he was, in front of a bunch of fake-looking teenagers, straining to get past a mock police line that had been set up outside the theatre. Signs reading “We’re Not Buying This Shit!”—the naughty word scrambled for air—were peppered throughout the crowd. Todd saw them and grew even more pissed that he wasn’t there.

Manny Clarke, pretending to be a newsman, reported that these kids— led by Joel Kasten, just a regular kid from Berline, Illinois—had turned up en masse to protest R
²
Rev, to complain that the network had become a corrupt and cynical tool with which to exploit America’s young people. There were a couple nice close-ups of Joel exhorting the crowd, but he didn’t speak to the camera. There was just a lot of jostling and pretend shouting. The gag didn’t last more than fifteen seconds.

“We’ll cut back out here the minute the cops start firing on the crowd!” Clarke smirked.

They weren’t seen again until a commercial break about 40 minutes before the scheduled conclusion of the show. There were more kids now, some of the fake cops were scuffling with some of the fake protesters, and this time Clarke elbowed his way to the center of the “insurrection” to interview the kid who had triggered the event.

Only it wasn’t Joel.
Joel
stood forlornly over the shoulder of some preppy-looking kid, who mumbled something obnoxious into the microphone before losing it to giggles. Manny, seeing this was going nowhere, threw it to commercial.