through persistent badgering and well-placed guilt did Hutch come up with VP of Special Projects.
Which, for the past year, had translated into just one thing: Casey Lattimer.
It wasn’t that Casey wasn’t popular. True, Mimi SoWett got most of the press in the early days, particularly once enterprising teens figured out that with a picture-in-picture television they could simultaneously watch Mimi interviewing Snoop Dogg while being gang-banged on DVD. Even Newsweek ran a “What has the world come to?” piece about this internet-fueled phenomenon.
The zeitgeist was strummed; the conquest drew nearer.
But Casey was hanging in there, holding down the early evening shift when latchkey kids were home from school and able to hook into R 2 Rev before their parents got home. Hanging with Casey Lattimer was like being left in the care of the dopiest, most degenerate outlaw at school—the kind of kid who would’ve been Ritalin-ed down or booted out for spouting the kind of idiocy that flowed from his mouth. And yet, here he was, set loose before a TV camera four hours a day to bust things up between videos.
The problem was that Casey was stupid—book stupid, life stupid, hygienically stupid. Hutch knew Casey was stupid when he plucked him out of the open casting call, which drew every aspiring actor, musician, and miscreant within a 1,000 mile radius of Manhattan.
It had been both the most exhilarating and depressing day of Hutch’s life—this horrid stew of narcissistic kids, each raised with the promise that somehow celebrity was owed them, all looking to ride R 2 Rev to a life of fortune and mass adulation. Hutch needed just a handful of the perfectly tattooed, pierced, and sneer-laden to populate his world. The rest would have to be sent away to suckle their delusions somewhere else.
Casey had stood out because he really didn’t care, kept insisting that he was there to audition for Wheel of Fortune , which, the staff kept telling him, was taped in Los Angeles and, regardless, would turn a hose on him before allowing him within 100 yards of Vanna White.
“Vanna White,” he crooned. “Vanna Wet . Heh heh heh. I gotta buy me a vowel, Pat!”
From the observation suite next door, Hutch watched Casey over the live feed and detected something fresh and raw in the kid. Every other auditioner had some kind of shtick—wizened club slut, rap-sheeted rap slinger, white boy slacker. But few were able to ape the demographic as effortlessly as Casey. If R 2 Rev was to mirror its intended audience, then this was precisely the kind of kid who could deliver a daypart.
Casey was brought back for a series of interviews, during which he entertained Hutch’s selection team with a mortifying lack of candor and a reasonable knowledge of current pop culture. His prime negative was that he stank—literally—to the extent that the interviews were finally moved out of doors, where the dank and gritty winds of 52nd Street could blow Casey’s less favorable qualities in someone else’s direction.
Hutch observed it all—the interview sessions, the mock video links that Casey taped with goggle-eyed wonder—and began to sense that this was his man. It would be a gamble, throwing someone this unstable before a live camera, but Hutch knew that victory would come only from walking that razor’s edge between canned, demo-stroking anarchy, and actual garbage.
After insisting that someone steer Casey toward a shower and a bar of soap, Hutch met with his future star for a one-on-one.
“Can I get you anything?” Hutch asked as he relaxed casually in a chair across from Casey. He noticed immediately that the kid’s stench was only slightly bettered by a summery waft of apricot shampoo.
“Know what I’d like?” Casey began. “I’d like to be inside a bomb when it goes off, right? But in slow motion. Right? It’s, like, black inside there, all quiet and nice, and then—boom!—I’m flyin’ out. Flyin’ up. I’m lookin’
Which, for the past year, had translated into just one thing: Casey Lattimer.
It wasn’t that Casey wasn’t popular. True, Mimi SoWett got most of the press in the early days, particularly once enterprising teens figured out that with a picture-in-picture television they could simultaneously watch Mimi interviewing Snoop Dogg while being gang-banged on DVD. Even Newsweek ran a “What has the world come to?” piece about this internet-fueled phenomenon.
The zeitgeist was strummed; the conquest drew nearer.
But Casey was hanging in there, holding down the early evening shift when latchkey kids were home from school and able to hook into R 2 Rev before their parents got home. Hanging with Casey Lattimer was like being left in the care of the dopiest, most degenerate outlaw at school—the kind of kid who would’ve been Ritalin-ed down or booted out for spouting the kind of idiocy that flowed from his mouth. And yet, here he was, set loose before a TV camera four hours a day to bust things up between videos.
The problem was that Casey was stupid—book stupid, life stupid, hygienically stupid. Hutch knew Casey was stupid when he plucked him out of the open casting call, which drew every aspiring actor, musician, and miscreant within a 1,000 mile radius of Manhattan.
It had been both the most exhilarating and depressing day of Hutch’s life—this horrid stew of narcissistic kids, each raised with the promise that somehow celebrity was owed them, all looking to ride R 2 Rev to a life of fortune and mass adulation. Hutch needed just a handful of the perfectly tattooed, pierced, and sneer-laden to populate his world. The rest would have to be sent away to suckle their delusions somewhere else.
Casey had stood out because he really didn’t care, kept insisting that he was there to audition for Wheel of Fortune , which, the staff kept telling him, was taped in Los Angeles and, regardless, would turn a hose on him before allowing him within 100 yards of Vanna White.
“Vanna White,” he crooned. “Vanna Wet . Heh heh heh. I gotta buy me a vowel, Pat!”
From the observation suite next door, Hutch watched Casey over the live feed and detected something fresh and raw in the kid. Every other auditioner had some kind of shtick—wizened club slut, rap-sheeted rap slinger, white boy slacker. But few were able to ape the demographic as effortlessly as Casey. If R 2 Rev was to mirror its intended audience, then this was precisely the kind of kid who could deliver a daypart.
Casey was brought back for a series of interviews, during which he entertained Hutch’s selection team with a mortifying lack of candor and a reasonable knowledge of current pop culture. His prime negative was that he stank—literally—to the extent that the interviews were finally moved out of doors, where the dank and gritty winds of 52nd Street could blow Casey’s less favorable qualities in someone else’s direction.
Hutch observed it all—the interview sessions, the mock video links that Casey taped with goggle-eyed wonder—and began to sense that this was his man. It would be a gamble, throwing someone this unstable before a live camera, but Hutch knew that victory would come only from walking that razor’s edge between canned, demo-stroking anarchy, and actual garbage.
After insisting that someone steer Casey toward a shower and a bar of soap, Hutch met with his future star for a one-on-one.
“Can I get you anything?” Hutch asked as he relaxed casually in a chair across from Casey. He noticed immediately that the kid’s stench was only slightly bettered by a summery waft of apricot shampoo.
“Know what I’d like?” Casey began. “I’d like to be inside a bomb when it goes off, right? But in slow motion. Right? It’s, like, black inside there, all quiet and nice, and then—boom!—I’m flyin’ out. Flyin’ up. I’m lookin’
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