It's nearly midnight and I'm falling out of a taxi in front of the imaginatively named Luxury Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard. I've spent the past five hours drinking cocktails at Masha's on La Brea Avenue and smoking so many cigarettes my breath smells like the inside of a hoover bag.
I'm ready to start work.
A faceless PR goon in a suit that cost more than my first home leads me down the thickly-carpeted corridor and parks me outside the VIP suite. I'm here to meet a certain Richard Norvelle Spragan, better known to the world as Ricky Tuesday. In case you've had your head in a dustbin for the past eleven months, Ricky Tuesday is the flashy-smiled crooner your daughter's thinking about after you've read her a goodnight story and turned out the light.
Fresh out of the almost supernaturally popular soap
Days of Sunshine, 19 year old son of a San Simeon fisherman Ricky Tuesday has hit the charts like a runaway train overloaded with boyish charm. His debut album
Ricky's Up! has sold over 14 million copies in nine countries. What his songs may lack in originality or musical distinction Ricky more than makes up for in tight white t-shirts and a goatee trimmed so precisely his entourage must include a mathematician.
I'm expecting a no-brainer of an interview. If Ricky puts as much thought into his answers as he seems to put into his music, I can be out of here before my bloodstream reminds me it's running low on nicotine. I'm his last interview today and my guess is he'll want to be out of here as quickly as I do.
The door opens and the goon ushers me inside. What greets me is not so much a hotel suite as a branch of Radio Shack. Fax machines (remember them?), computers, PDAs, digital recorders, even paper and pens are stacked up on rows of shelves and waiting for me to use. When you shift as many units as Ricky T, record companies will spare no expense in helping journalists spread the word about their brightest stars.
And this one is cute. You have to give him that. Even after ten hours glued to a hotel chair mumbling endless non-sequiturs to fawning idiots (a heroic day's work for a pop star), he looks fresh-faced and genuinely pleased to see me. He nods and flashes me a disarming smile as I take my seat across from him at a vast metal table. He adjusts his bandana - a form of headwear that normally makes me retch - and extends a warm hand. Is that intelligence I see glinting in his suede-brown eyes? Shit, if I'd known he had a brain I would have turned up sober.
"Miss Cash. Can I get you a drink?".
This isn't the goon talking. This is Ricky.
"Sure," I say. "Sparkling water would be great." The sacrifices I make for this job.
He gets up and pours me a drink. He nods at the goon.
"You can go, Jeremiah," he says.
"You sure?" says the goon, eyeing me as if I might be a troublemaker. Which I am.
"It's late," says Ricky. "Go home to your wife. I've done nearly forty interviews today. I don't need a babysitter for one last one."
"You're the boss," says the goon with a grin. He nods to us both and leaves.
Ricky Tuesday points his gleaming smile at me.
"Hi," he says.
I sip my water.
"How do you react when people say your music is an afterthought created by marketing men to help sell Ricky Tuesday posters?"
Pow! Hit 'em first and hit 'em hard!
Ricky snorts. It's a good snort. The kind Pontius Pilate must have snorted when some dude in sandals waltzed in claming to be Well Connected.
"I have no idea," he says. "Perhaps that is because everyone who hears my music appreciates the many hours of hard work I put into each and every song."
"Sorry buster," I say, twiddling my straw coquettishly (even at my age I have no shame). "That's not how art works. If there's no spark of wit or truth or beauty there to begin with, you could work hard from now 'til doomsday and it would still suck. Ever hear the expression 'you can't polish a turd'?
This is when he punches me in the face.
My chair tips backwards, comically, as it might do in a slapstick film, but the pain exploding through my head feels decidedly unfunny. It's a good job this is the VIP suite because my head hits the floor pretty hard and is saved from splattering like a melon only by the two-inch thick plush carpet.
Ricky gets up and walks around the metal table to look at me.
"You think you're so fuckin' funny now, bitch?" he says.
I think up the wittiest reply ever but just as I'm opening my mouth to say it, he kicks me in the head with his Gucci loafer.
~=~
I hear his music. Is the radio on? Then I realise Ricky's singing. Live. To me. The little dude is serenading me. How sweet.
There seem to be ten-ton weights attached to my eyelids but I force them apart. Ah yes. There he is. Ricky has fewer clothes on now, and, I realise, squinting down at myself, it seems I have, too.
I'm still in the chair, but my wrists are tied to the armrests with the torn remnants of his bandana. My t-shirt is shredded, ditto my skirt and underwear. There is an awful lot of blood and pain where I'm pretty sure there shouldn't be any blood and pain.
"Hey baby!" says Ricky, stopping his song mid-flow. "You ready for some more Ricky?"
"I have to tell you, mate," I say, testing a suspiciously wobbly tooth with the tip of my tongue, "if you're after a favourable write-up you're going about it the wrong way. A backstage pass and a free CD will usually do the trick."
"You ain't funny, bitch. You fuckin' bitch," he spits at me and, just in case I'm having trouble getting his gist, he slaps me hard across the face.
"You know," I say. "It's true what they say. You should never meet your heroes. They always disappoint you."
"You ain't fuckin' funny," he says, wiping my blood off his hand with distaste. "One out of five? Is that all you think my album is worth? ONE OUT OF FUCKING FIVE?? You think you're fit to pass judgment on my music? A piece of shit limey bitch like you? I read your columns, your reviews. Girl, you need to get the fuck over yourself. You don't know the pain an artist goes through. You don’t know how bad it feels when something you've spent years honing to perfection is dismissed by some fuckin' critic with a few cruel words. Well, know what, honey? You will."
He slaps me again.
"No one knows you’re here," he says. "Starving fuckin' freelancer. No one will miss you."
He yanks my head back by the hair.
"You think this is torture, you wanker?" I say. I manage to yawn. "This is nothing. Listening to your last album. That's torture. Fuck me, I wouldn't inflict that on the inmates at Guantanamo Bay."
Ricky scrabbles under the table for his jeans and produces a gun. A tiny, golden thing.
"You look like a Bond villain," I say. "Except ten times more camp."
"Fuck you," he says. "Always got something smart to say. Always putting down the artist. You never create anything yourself. Just fuckin' destroy. Well tonight I'm the fuckin' destroyer. And ain't no-one gonna miss no fuckin' over-the-hill skank English journalist."
Over the hill? I admit, that did hurt.
"I got someone waiting downstairs gonna dump your fuckin' body in the mid-Pacific, babe, where no one ain't never gonna find it. You're sharkfood, bitch. Whattya say to that?"
I breathe in and out deeply. A little bubble of blood expands from my nose, then pops.
"Got a cigarette?"
He does the snort again.
"Figures," he says, taking a pack out of his jeans pocket. He offers me a cigarette. "Knock yourself out, unhealthy bitch."
I resist the urge to tell him I prefer it when
he knocks me out and open my lips. He places the cigarette between them. A Zippo snaps open. Flame flickers. I gulp down the smoke.
"I know I've been a little rough on you, Ricky boy," I say, the cigarette bobbing up and down in my mouth. "And I apologise for that. But, fact is, there is one thing I genuinely do like about your music. No kidding."
"No kidding, huh?" says Ricky, sneering. "What would that be?"
I mumble something incoherent but make sure he can make out the last word, which is "dogshit".
"What you say, bitch?" he hisses and moves his head closer to mine.
I jab my head forward. The burning orange-gold tip of the cigarette touches Ricky's right eyeball. It makes a crackling sound.
Ricky Tuesday yelps and drops to the floor, one palm pressed to his eye, blood and eye-goo running between his fingers. He writhes, screaming like one of his own teenage fans. I jab my heel into the back of his head as hard as I can. He stops screaming and lies still. I spit out the cigarette.
"Marlboro Lights?" I say. "Fucking pussy."
~=~
The explosion you just heard is the sound of a hundred thousand entertainment lawyers slamming this book shut and racing over to Ricky Tuesday's Santa Monica beach house in their Ferraris. Libelling someone as massive as Ricky? Gotta be worth a buck or two! But if I were you, fellas, I'd save yourselves the gas. Every second of my 'interview' was filmed on the web cam provided by Ricky Tuesday's own record company and saved onto a PDA that sits right beside my PC, all ready to upload to the Internet - should the need arise. If Ricky's goon had stuck around for the fun he might have reminded the young crooner to turn it off. Let this be a lesson to you, Ricky. Record companies hire those people for a reason.
I know what I write here will almost certainly end Ricky's career - for even the American public will not stomach a rapist to sing to their children, however beautiful his smile (boxing in front of them is another matter, of course). But let's be realistic. Ricky's gone off the boil of late. Granted, he sings just as sweetly as ever, but the brain damage prevents him from doing even the most perfunctory interview or public appearance. And while his newly-acquired shades make him look cooler than ever, even they can't disguise the fact that his record company are looking for the next big thing, the new Apollo to make the teens swoon. He'll have your talent, Ricky. He'll probably have your fine bone structure, too. But what he won't have is your fucking glass eye, you worthless piece of shit.
~=~