I’ve got a poster of Penelope and Troy Anthony now,’ he said.
I managed to squeeze out a hollow laugh but it was too early in the day for this. I didn’t have my force field up yet. Fucking interviewers. They worm their way inside your head, burrow under your skin, probing away for sensitive tissue, armed with erroneous facts and figures, clippings full of every stupid remark you ever made, ready to throw it back in your face. Never trust a journalist. Beasley told me that. ‘They’ll sing your praises, laugh at your jokes, hang on every word like you are the most fascinating being to walk the earth since Jesus pissed off to heaven, but all they are interested in is a headline.’
This was a whole rap he laid on me when we started out together. ‘The media is a whore,’ was another one of his maxims. ‘You can fuck them any which way you want but they will always make you pay.’
He was full of this shit; his Bad Wisdom he called it when he was feeling particularly pleased with himself, which was most of the time. I don’t know why I ever listened to him. Because he was usually right, I suppose. Or maybe because he was telling me what I wanted to hear. About how we were on a quest, a mission to the stars, strapped to a guided missile blazing its way to the centre of the entertainment universe. And when it detonated, stand back, cause this was gonna be the supermassive supernova of superstardom, not just a global brand but a celestial event, Elvis, Madonna, Mickey Fucking Mouse and Jesus H Himself, all collapsed into one, The ONE, preceded by a dollar sign and followed by an endless procession of Zeros, me to the power of infinity. But, as he never ceased to remind me, you can’t get something from nothing. Beasley did what no teacher in school ever managed to: tap my inner workaholic. Life with Beasley was fucking relentless.
Speaking of the devil, the smell of cordite came wafting to my nostrils, the stench of one of his godawful cigars. Beelzebub was in the house. The bedroom door swung open, briefly revealing a clatter and hum of activity (what were all those people doing in my suite?) as my manager made his usual impressive entrance, a big, bald, sweaty human cannonball in slo-mo flight, artfully tailored, stressed cotton suit billowing around him. By any objective criteria, Beasley was a very fat man, but he never struck me as soft. He was tightly compressed, as if he started out larger than life and got packed down, squashed into a body not quite big enough to contain him. The beads of sweat pricking his forehead looked like an early warning system indicating he might spontaneously combust at any moment. Clutching newspapers in both puffed-up fists, jaw clenched tight around his cigar, he glanced imperiously around the room before settling his gaze on me to triumphantly announce: ‘We are UBIQUITOUS!’
He tossed the newspapers on the bed. Kilo and the girls dutifully applauded in acknowledgement that my arrival was front page on every first edition. Even the New York Times had me stepping out of the helicopter, this descent into blatant populism excused by an ironic headline: ‘MAKE MONEY, NOT WAR: Brand Zero Appropriates Military Might for Marketing Assault on America’s Youth’. ‘Oooh, look, you’ve pushed the orphans off the front page,’ noted Kilo, perfectly aware this was exactly what Beasley wanted to hear. The plight of the so-called Orphans of MedellÍn, street children devastated by a combination of economic breakdown, political impotence and natural disaster, had become the hobby horse of the hour, with heart-rending pictures of photogenic victims going viral, and had dominated the news for several days running. But not any more.
‘They don’t buy music anyway,’ smiled Beasley, who delighted in affronting delicate sensibilities. Blowing smoke rings, he made a speedy inspection of my appearance. ‘Ready to face your public?’
I was ready to get back into bed but Beasley always made me feel I had to rise to a challenge, and that it would be craven to admit weakness or doubt. And to be fair to Beasley (though fuck knows why, I have no reason to be fair to him, of all people) it is hard to complain of overwork to a boss who works harder than you (was he my boss? Wasn’t he supposed to be in my employ?). He was usually the last man standing at night and up at the crack of dawn. Fuck knows why, since he had so many minions to do his bidding, many of whom had stealthily assembled in my suite while I was being made human.
Reflecting my status as the biggest swinging dick in town, the luxuriously appointed living area of the penthouse suite stretched the length of one side of the hotel. Which was just as well, since Beasley’s battalion of road managers, tour managers, product managers, assistant managers, assistants to assistant managers, assistants of every hue and gender, agents, publicity reps, record company reps and all the other small-credit people deemed necessary to bring my message to the world were colonising every polished surface with their smartphones, tablets, laptops and printers, comparing presentations across leather-topped tables, sticking Post-it notes to a cylindrical glass tank housing a family of exotic jellyfish and making Facetime calls from opposite ends of elongated sofas. My entrance created the usual micro-vacuum as every conversation paused, every eye turned, just for an instant. Then they all started chattering again, slightly louder than before.
I didn’t need two guesses whose bright idea it was to turn my suite into the war room. ‘If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad …’ Beasley growled, giving me a warning nod as I turned to acknowledge the digicam that had me trained in its sights, webcasting my every move to my most adoring, obsessive, or just plain bored-out-of-their-skulls-with-nothing-better-to-do fans on zero24seven.com.
‘Good morning, Vietnam!’ I bellowed, pulling a funny face. It was pathetic, really. I couldn’t fucking help myself. My inanity was greeted with gratuitous applause from the busy bees, who have perfected the kind of in-built laugh track that would make them an asset to any sitcom.
I’ve got to be honest, zero24seven was my bright idea, not Beasley’s, and one I had come to regret. Like every other homestar with a cheap mic and an IP address, back in prehistory my bedroom was my stage and the net my only spotlight. At first I wasn’t sure if the dark theatre of web dreams was empty or teeming with other lost souls until my hit counter started going haywire. I only formed The Zero Sums so I could fuck some of the honeyz in my inbox, if I’m completely honest, which, of course, I am. Maybe I should have just stayed in my room and ordered pizza, a legend in my own upload time. It was never as pure in the real world, never as easy to control, people kept straying from the script, it got complicated and messy and it all ended in tears. Not mine, obviously. So when Beasley came calling, I told him about my fantasy of webcasting twenty-four hours a day in real time, so that I could find that synthesis between my first and second life, real and virtual, invite people into my space without having to go out into theirs. At least that was the idea. Clearly, I hadn’t thought it through.
Everyone’s at it now, so it’s easy to forget that it was briefly hailed as a zeitgeist-riding nu-media sensation. I was top of the pods before I even released a single. But the 24–7 concept quickly became a royal pain. When I was younger the idea that God was watching my every move filled me with dread. Would I go to hell if I dropped dead in the middle of a five-knuckle shuffle? But when God Almighty was replaced with an all-seeing digicam and you can’t rip a fart for fear of complete strangers wrinkling their noses, or worse still your dad (although in my case that didn’t really apply cause my old man was so technophobic he needed the assistance of a child to plug in his electric blanket) then self-consciousness takes on a whole new dimension. The only way I could avoid behaving like a bad actor in the tragicomedy of my own life was to secretly get ripped off my tits behind the scenes (i.e. in any bathroom where I was not contractually bound to let Beasley install a camera). Thank fuck the impossible logistics of getting everyone we encountered to sign release forms put an end to the ideal of the over-examined life. We should be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act because these days zero24seven was full of videos and repeats. I had live content down to a bare minimum, no more than a few hours max of the most public footage, though much of my courtship with Penelope was carried out online because she was never happier than when she was on camera. At least before the blowjob at the BRITs incident, which put her off a bit. Obviously, I hadn’t answered
