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"C'mon, Ev," Ms. Lake said. "You miss it a little bit."
Ms. Lake spent the next two days speaking with the representatives of the ex-celebrities from LE LOSER LIST, a handwritten list Ms. Browning had given her. The list had twelve names: the lisping albino from the starch-blocker infomercial, the Foxy Boxing champion with the green lipstick, the Teutonic star of several Israeli martial-arts films, the ranting homeless woman who considered herself the reincarnation of Pebbles Flintstone, etc. The representatives either turned down the advertising offer sight-unseen for no reason or asked their clients receive a payment Ms. Lake knew the company would consider too exorbitant, considering it had outsourced its near-minimum-wage tech support jobs to a greatly-below-minimum-wage industrial park in Burma a few months earlier.
"No luck," she told Ms. Browning during their weekly foosball game in the company recreational facility.
"Not even with Power Play [the white male rapper from San Bernardino]? Dang! Something's wrong with the universe."
"Uh, Ev�if you want something related to music in your commercial, why don't you try Asgard Viper? With all the original members? They're pretty hot right now, and I could find at least one of them pretty easily. You know, Shane the realty guy?�Just a suggestion."
A week later, Ms. Lake, the other assistants, and the company's lawyers helped reunite Asgard Viper, the Eighties heavy-metal turned hair-metal band from Los Angeles enjoying renewed popularity now that one of their oldies, "Rock with Your Cock Out," had appeared on the soundtrack to Baghdad Pimp 2: Weapons of Ass Destruction, a videogame popular among the 18-to-29-year-old American consumer demographic. All five original members agreed to appear together in the commercial: 46-year-old lead singer Rip Holden, 45-year-old lead guitarist Dale Cabrera, 43-year-old bassist Jon Greer, 45-year-old drummer Peter Temple, and 48-year-old keyboardist Shane "Dirty Dog" Summers.
"I'm surprised they all signed up so quickly," Ms. Lake said at the foosball table.
"Beats selling their own plasma," Ms. Browning said.
"I don't know, Ev. I don't think Shane's hurting for money."
"Oh Al, my poor na�ve child. Everyone needs extra money to maintain their degenerate lifestyle. Haven't you learned anything from the prime example of George W. Bush? That's why he's always worked so hard at having his father get him those well-paying jobs."
"Hey Ev, I heard a rumor you masturbate to Fox News. Is that true?"
Mr. Summers was born and raised in the same airport corridor suburban housing-slash-business development zone that now contained Nexworth's corporate headquarters, a sprawling six-story building covered with shiny white plastic tiles, even on the roof, each tile one story by one story in diameter; the employees who would survive the day Ms. Browning would call Fuck-You Friday called the headquarters the Cube, while everyone else (including Ms. Browning, who had long joked that her "unofficial duties" included "spraying Windex on the glass ceiling") called it the Men's Room. Most of the development zone's residents called the headquarters the Men's Room, too, including Mr. Summers. "That building helps keep me clean," he would say. "It reminds me of how I ruined my life, getting wasted inside every bathroom from here to Topeka. It reminds me that the god I used to pray to was porcelain."
After finishing high school at age 18 in 1974, Mr. Summers moved to Los Angeles and played keyboards for various bands until 1980, when he joined Asgard Viper, having answered a hand-lettered (not photocopied) supermarket flyer in which a "WILD new HEAVY METAL band" advertised for any keyboardist who could "CRANK UP THE VOLUME!!!" He was the last member to join and the only non-native Los Angeles resident to do so. Seven years later, he quit the band with no explanation, having just destroyed his septum due to what he now calls "just a little too much of the devil's dandruff [places left index finger to left nostril and inhales loudly with right nostril]." Soon after quitting the band, Mr. Summers had not-entirely-successful reconstructive surgery on his nose ("You can open a bottle of Rolling Rock with my honker," he likes to say), went into drug and alcohol rehab, and became a born-again Christian. In 1989 he married the events coordinator of his Bible studies group, 31-year-old Letha Delacruz, the first marriage for both. The next year the Summerses had their only child to date, a son, Quinton Jett Summers. In 1991 Nimbus House, a Christian publisher in Omaha, released his memoir Goodbye Dirty Dog: My Life of Rock 'n' Roll Sin and How I Escaped It to one review ("a few intentionally funny lines"�Dripnose Snott, from the now-defunct Grand Forks, North Dakota, zine Chainsaw Melody) and an offer from Curt Melnik, the original junior associate producer of the Dash Duke: Divine Detective series of interactive laserdiscs, to consider optioning the book for a straight-to-Canadian-basic-cable movie.
In 1994 Mr. Summers moved back to the development zone with his wife and child, acquired a real-estate license, and started his own company, Summers Realty. "Fame is only fleeting, but home and family last forever," he would explain to anyone who asked. Today he advertises his services through billboards posted near gated communities and upper-income outdoor recreation centers, NO SONG AND DANCE printed above his disembodied full-color head: shaggy blonde hair (hair weave), gleaming tanned face (spray-on tan�he fears wrinkles and melanoma), aquiline nose (computer rhinoplasty).
Ms. Browning convinced her company's "bean counters, who count and recount their one bean with such style," to "bust open ye olde piggybank" and approve the funds to pay the company's advertising agency, Connelly Bateman Teaques, to hire one of the highest-paid talents in American advertising to direct the commercial: the man who identified himself as a 31-year-old British expatriate named Guy Bartley. (The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the development zone's police department, and the development zone's antiterrorism task force could find no evidence that anyone named Guy Bartley had legally or illegally entered the United States.) He specialized in what his official press kit termed "mind-twisting, butt-kicking spots" that would usually air only once, if at all (the networks frequently rejected them), during high-profile American television broadcasts such as the Sixth Annual Make-a-Change Awards, the Run 'em Over Celebrity Finals: Country Vs. Rap, and the live death-row interview with General Chester Woodgeard's prostitute mistress; the news media would then provide the commercials (aired or not), the commercials' sponsors, and Mr. Bartley with extensive free publicity by reporting on the controversy his ads have sparked among what official website characterized as his "b�tes noires: the tight-arsed moralists and the pansy-arsed PC crowd." He had directed the Basel Finance ad, titled "The Pooping Poodle Ad" onscreen in flowery script, that had run during the 2004 Super Bowl. His official blog asserted the ad "had caused almost as much uproar as a certain Miss Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction." Mr. Bartley never gave interviews and never appeared in public without his trademark (and trademarked) disguise: red gloves, paisley safari hat, long pink wig, large dark glasses, black plastic mask covering the lower half of his face and altering his voice electronically by slowing it down and lowering it a few octaves. "Lessssh get hot!" he would say to start filming. "Thish ishn't a bloody tea parrrrty!" he would tell anyone giving an "old-money zhombie" performance.
On Friday, December 17, 2004, at 9:06 AM, the original lineup of Asgard Viper met together for the first time in 17 years, the day of principal photography for the Nexworth commercial. The band met backstage at the shoot locale, the Eva F. Maynard Center for the Performing Arts, at Gates College, a Catholic institution of higher learning not far from Nexworth's headquarters. Mr. Summers had driven from his house and arrived at 9:03 AM, 33 minutes late. The other members had arrived from their hotel by stretch limousine at 8:27 AM. All five members, except for Mr. Holden, hadn't been inside a limousine since the group's breakup in 1987.
Mr. Summers ran into the other members at the catering table. "Hey," he said.
"Hey," said Mr. Holden.
"Hey," said Mr. Temple.
"Mmmph," said Mr. Greer, mouth full of cruller.
"Uh, hey," said Mr. Cabrera.
The five men stood in silence.
"Well, it's official," Mr. Holden finally said. "All you guys look like shit." Careful laughter and careful high-fives all around.
The shoot lasted from 10:18 AM to 6:27 PM, somewhat quick for Mr. Bartley, though the proceedings had stopped for about fifteen minutes near the end when Mr. Greer, a numerology buff, had started explicating upon "the symbolic power of seventeen-seventeen" while sitting onstage with the band, turning agitated when Mr. Holden had started saying "Sixty-two blue" over and over, causing the three dozen extras in their early twenties in the audience to start chanting "Six�ty�two blue! We�love�you!", causing Mr. Greer to lie on his back and pull at his lips with both hands until Mr. Bartley�"Where'sh my electrrric cattle prrrod?"�and his assistants restored order.
The band members each received $200,000; the extras each received $400 and a NEXWORTH: HOOK UP NOW cotton-polyester blend T-shirt, size large; and Mr. Bartley received $3.5 million and a $100,000 bonus for finishing the shoot before 6:30 PM so the members could attend the annual Nexworth holiday dinner/dance that evening at seven and perform a brief acoustic set at nine for $5,000, split five ways.
Continued on page 2. Not continued at Fiction or at Home. Sorry. You can't have everything. Only George F. Will can have everything. It's Will's world; we're just pissing on it.
� 2005 David V. Matthews