Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
Mainly he shouted over me, but each time I repeated the story—the light, the old lady—it seemed like another sentence would slip through his shield of outrage, and slowly he began to calm down. Finally he walked back to his car. At least I thought he was doing that. In reality he was going back to interrogate the old lady about me. I watched them in my rearview mirror. She was shaking her head and clearly saying the word
no
over and over, looking at my car and saying,
no.
Was that old
…?
My tormenter returned. Others in their cars were watching and listening. It was embarrassing. “She says she’d never
seen
your car,” he said.
“What?” I turned in my seat and looked back at her with an exaggerated How could you? expression. The woman just looked scared.
The guy kept cursing. “Go back to Tennessee!” he shouted. “You got plenty of gas up there.” I didn’t live in Tennessee anymore. How did he know I once had? The license plate on the rental—I hadn’t even noticed it.
In the end I rolled up my window and blasted the music, and he melted away. There was no option, for either of us. The gas got me to more gas. But I was thinking, the whole rest of the wait, this is how it would start, the real end of the world. The others in their cars, instead of just staring, would have climbed out and joined him. It would be nobody’s fault.
GETTING DOWN TO WHAT IS REALLY REAL
It was maybe an hour before midnight at the Avalon Nightclub in Chapel Hill, and the Miz was feeling nervous. I didn’t pick up on this at the time—I mean, I couldn’t tell. To me he looked like he’s always looked, like he’s looked since his debut season, back when I first fell in love with his antics: all bright-eyed and symmetrical-faced, fed on genetically modified corn, with the swollen, hairless torso of the aspiring professional wrestler he happened to be and a smile you could spot as Midwestern American in a blimp shot of a soccer stadium. He had on a crisp, cool shirt and was sporting, in place of his old floppy bangs, a new sort-of mousse-Mohawk, just a little ridgelet of product-hardened hair emerging from his buzz cut.
In the parking lot, just past the Dumpster on which some citizen had written in white spray paint
MEAT MARKET—BITCHES
, a chalkboard sign told passersby that the Miz was inside, if any felt ready to party. He was whipping back gratis shots of some stuff that looked like flavored brandy and chatting with undergraduate girls, more and more of whom were edging closer and closer every minute. As he grinned and chatted with them, he looked so utterly guileless and unselfconscious as to seem incapable of nervousness. Granted, I’d already joined him and the owner, Jeremy (who was a good bro of the Miz’s), in doing some generous shots, one of which the Miz had marked with a toast that involved his trademark saying, his motto, as it were—“Be good. Be bad. Be Miz”—prompting a skinny, bearded fellow who was doing the shots with us, as well as several on his own, and whose surname must have been Flangey, to blurt out, “Or be FLANGEY…” But I hadn’t done that many shots, and to me the Miz looked pumped. Later, however, he would write in his online diary that he’d been nervous, for the simple reason that I was there, with my notepad and my judgments and my dubious but sincere claim of being a “hard-core fan” of MTV’s
The Real World
and its various spin-off reality series (of which the Miz is perhaps the best-known and best-liked cast member). And although these club-appearance things are usually cool, are typically bumpin’-bumpin’, “sometimes, like, only eight people show,” and the scene gets grim. What if tonight were like that and then it were to be written about in a magazine? That would be a fiasco. Or, as the Miz might put it—has put it, in fact, in describing a separate incident on that selfsame diary—a fiascal.
He needn’t have worried. The place filled up so fast I thought maybe a bus had arrived. It was like those Asian noodles that explode when they hit hot oil. I went to the bathroom in quiet calm, and when I came back, there was hardly room to lift your drink. It was jumpin’-jumpin’. There were loads of the sort of girls who, when dudes ask them to show their breasts and asses, show their breasts and asses. One girl—a beautiful Indian girl who couldn’t have been older than nineteen; I wanted to call a cop and have him drive her home—requested to have her right breast signed. The Miz was given a Magic Marker. He showed, I must say, admirable concentration on his penmanship. Another of these girls—a Hooters employee who was saving up for college in a not-too-nearby town—had driven a long way alone.
“I’m here just to see the Miz,” she said, but there was a line to talk to him now, of both chicks and dudes, and she’d seen that the Miz and I were bros, so she kicked it with me for a while.
“Are you a fan of the show?” I asked her.
“Oh yeah,” she said, “I’ve already seen MJ here, and Cameran [two other, more recent
Real World
faves]. There’s been a bunch of
Real World
people here.”
“I’ve been watching it since high school,” I said.
“Oh, me too!” she said.
Then I reflected that, for me, this meant since the show debuted; for her, it meant since last season; which in turn caused me to reflect mournfully on what a poseur she was. Did she even remember the Miz’s cast? Probably she knew him only from
The Real World/Road Rules Challenge
, which—although he is awesome on that—is not the best place to get insight into what makes him such a powerful fun-generator.
On the other hand, this young lady was a veteran of the club-appearance scene, and tonight was my first time. If a little hoochie tunnel leading straight to the Miz’s presence hadn’t opened right at that moment, causing her to sprint from my side and toward his, I was going to ask her, “What’s this all about?” Because she belonged to this thing I’d heard rumors of, what I’d come to get a peep at: this little bubble economy that
The Real World
and its less-entertaining mutant twin,
Road Rules
(essentially
Real World
in an RV), have made around themselves.
I don’t know how ready you are to admit your familiarity with the show and everything about it, so let me go through the motions of pretending to explain how it operates. Once a
Real World
season ends, the cast members who have emerged during the filming as the popular ones (a status that can be achieved through hotness, all-American likability, and/or unusually blatant behavioral disorders) are invited into a shadow world that exists just below the glare of the series itself. This world has many rooms of its own: club appearances (like this one in Chapel Hill), spring break (which is essentially an amplified version of the club appearance, at one or another beach resort, with several bars and clubs jammed into several consecutive days of straight wildin’-wildin’), “speaking engagements” (at colleges, or to youth groups or antismoking groups, or what have you—especially advantageous here is if you’ve revealed some side of yourself on the show, such as gayness, alcoholism, bulimia, unhappiness over your breast implants, severe and unprovoked instantaneous anger, neediness, fainting when you see large ships, or crypto-racism, which speaks to a certain specialty population); “um, product launches”; and finally, most important of all, the highly visible and jealously guarded spots on
The Real World/Road Rules Challenge
, where former cast members team up to compete for—oh, fuck it! You know how it works. It’s like a ten-times-as-excellent version of
Battle of the Network Stars
—and of course, this being the twenty-first century and reality having long surpassed our fictions, a few of the
Real World/Road Rules Challenge
standouts, among them the Miz, have been cast in a revived edition of
Battle of the Network Stars
. Point being, one never really leaves
The Real World
, not if one is blessed with ripped abs or a boomin’ rack.
The agent who sets up most of these gigs, a guy named Brian J. Monaco—who’s been doing it for eleven years and is “the one we trust,” according to the Miz and every former
Real World
cast member with whom I spoke—told me that there are even instances of unpopular
Real World
ers and
Road Rules
ers “hustling” on the circuit, desperately offering themselves to club owners who don’t really want them, asking only “part of the door.” And on
The Real World/Road Rules Challenge
, which has evolved its own
shadow
shadow culture, in which cast members transmit messages to one another via silk-screened T-shirts and nurse trans-seasonal grudges and self-generate weird rivalries (veterans versus new guys) that then become official story lines, I’d even seen two girls rend the veil and fight over something that happened out there, in the “real world,” one accusing the other of stealing speaking-engagement business away from her by telling a college administrator that she, the accuser, was “quite demanding” and cursed too much. A whole little picture bloomed in the mind, of all those former cast members out there, a Manson family with perfect teeth, still hanging out, still feuding, still drunkenly hittin’ that (a bunch of them even lived on the same block in Los Angeles, I’d been told), all of them just going around being somebody who’d been on
The Real World
, which is, of course, a show where you just be yourself. I mean, my God, the purity of that …
A lot of the young people yelling questions into the Miz’s face seemed mystified by the particulars of it all. They’d ask him, “What are you doing here?” and the Miz, who’s a pro, would always say, “Avalon brought me here.”
Apparently stunned, they’d ask him, “Are you getting paid to be here?” And the Miz would say, “Yeah, I do all right.” And they’d say, “Just to party?”
Some of the youngsters badgered me, thinking maybe I was the Miz’s manager or something. “Does he go all over doing this?” two sophomore dudes in polo shirts wanted to know.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, “he’s huge.”
Then they asked me, “Why are you here?”
And I said, “I’m writing about him.”
And they said, “What about him?”
We turned and looked at him then, as though in his face we might find the answer. He was all goldeny. For a moment, it seemed we were unified in the humor and puzzlement of it all. There was music that sounded like a rabbit’s heartbeat in the core of your brain. There was a gangster-style guy onstage, sort of conducting the crowd, making them sway from side to side with his hand. “Are you an undercover cop?” one of the two dudes asked me. When I said I wasn’t, he said, “Then why is your hair so short?” It gave me pleasure when the Miz refused to buy those two little fuckers beer.
He’d broken away from his fans for a minute and was resting with his back to the bar. One couldn’t help but marvel at how fresh he looked. He’d been drinking since he got off the plane. The owner had picked him up and whisked him off to a cookout, where everybody did tequila shots. Then there’d been stops at a couple of bars in town, at the first of which I found him slurping martinis (an activity the Miz referred to as “a little pregame warm-up”). For a minute there, before he decided to put on his “big-boy pants,” the Miz had wondered whether he’d even make it to the club. And not only that, but things had been even wilder the night before, in Austin, where the Miz had done a tag-team club appearance with MJ and Landon, two male cast members from the
Real World
season that was currently airing on MTV. There were, like, 280 people at that one. It was thumpin’-thumpin’.
It is a truism by now that every
Real World
cast features some combination of recurring types—the slutty one, the sweet one, the racially ambiguous one, the gay one, the slutty-sweet Southern one, and so on. MJ and Landon were two new versions of the Miz, if you savvy. They were super-ripped white guys from tiny towns who didn’t know poop from peanuts, multiculturally speaking, but who were soon to learn, and in learning, they’d grow. Yeah, well, the Miz invented that shit. MJ and Landon took the whole typological thing to another level, by looking disconcertingly alike, with tight curly blond cherub hair and unblinking eyes that had never known fear. They horrified, even before Landon got drooling drunk and half-naked and approached his fellow housemates with a butcher knife behind his back. Naturally, they’d both been superpopular, and you can bet they’d been doing a ton of club appearances. The Miz has been at it for years.
I was like, “Mike”—that’s his real name—“doesn’t this lifestyle wear you down?”
He goes, “Yeah, but I take care of myself. First thing, dude: I don’t mix my drinks. If I’m drinking vodka, I keep with vodka. Shots make that hard, though. Somebody hands you a shot, it’s hard to be like, ‘Can I have something else?’ But for the most part…”
“But what about your soul?” I said. “Does it take a toll on your soul?” He looked down at his drink.
Psych! I didn’t ask him that.
Some girls came up and started grilling the Miz about the
Real World/Road Rules Challenge
season then showing on MTV. Was so-and-so really a cold bitch? Was so-and-so really as nice as he seemed? Was the Miz’s team going to win this season?