"I can't cast a show in the middle of the ocean. We have to actually see these people first-hand before I choose. I do have standards."

f.u.c.king h.e.l.l. But I have to hand it to Fi: n.o.body works harder once she sets her mind to it.

"Neal," said Fiona. "I want you to go through our choice of top fifty females. Select twenty using your internal f.u.c.kometer."

"Are there any character categories we need?"

Fiona beamed as though she'd discovered w.i.l.l.y Wonka's gold ticket. "Yes! Finally someone in this absurd carnival we call life who properly understands the show's dynamic!" Fiona shook a finger at me. "Ray, you'd better look out or I'll make Neal my personal a.s.sistant." This was an actual warning, not an attempt at humour or flattery.

Neal swelled under her attention. "So we'd best get the highly fertile blondes and brunettes picked first."

I watched Diamond Head vanish behind us out the window.

Fiona dumped a stack of headshots onto the seat beside her. "Yes, and you can also separate the brunettes into either aggressive or under-the-radar. The under-the-radars win more often than not. Blondes have targets on them. It's nature's way."

"We also need a Spanish-speaking brunette with an absurdly English first name," added Tabs. "It means the parents were ambitious for their children, and it will broaden the show's viewership into the Latino market."

Fiona said, "G.o.d bless Jennifer Lopez's mother for opening that door back in the 1960s."

"Here," said Tabs, waving a fan of photos. "I've narrowed it down to the most brazenly ambitious: 1) Persimmon de la Cal Empanada Delgado; 2) Gwendolyn Rodriguez-con-Pollo; and 3) Daisy Fernandez."

Fiona scrutinized a photo of Daisy Fernandez's knockers. "Wouldn't want to get stuck eating those puppies. You'd die of vinyl poisoning before you reached for the dental floss. I say we choose Persimmon de la Cal Empanada Delgado and be done with the rest." She held Persimmon's photo up for Neal to see. "You like?"

"I like."

"Then we're agreed."

"Absolutely."

So Neal was suddenly a confident industry insider, while I, Raymond Gunt, accomplished videographer and connoisseur of womanly charm, was frozen out? "Fiona, I resent not being included in the casting process. You'd think that-"

She cut me off. "Take a Penthouse into the loo and finger-bang yourself. We're working." She returned to her stacks. "Now we have to find a hot mom. That's tricky because she has to look like anyone's mother but your own. It's a real casting challenge."

"Is that the same as a MILF?" asked Neal.

"Good question, but no. A MILF can be any female anywhere on planet Earth who is past her prime yet still exhibits some dimension of f.u.c.kability."

"Good to be clear on that."

Out the window lay five hours of featureless ocean. I opened a bottle of Chardonnay and glugged away while the unholy trio performed a task that was rightfully mine. Threatening, slightly crazy black woman. Female hillbilly. Possible lesbian. Afghan war hero. Brainy Asian.

I closed my eyes and before I knew it the wheels were touching down. I'd slept through most of the flight.

On the ground, a car was waiting just off the tarmac. The four of us hobbled to the vehicle while underlings lugged our bags to the boot. At the car door, Fiona said, "Raymond, I'm sorry if I've been a t.w.a.t. You can't imagine the pressure on me."

"That's sweet of you, Fi."

"Could you do me a favour and run and get my Hermes scarf? I left it on my seat. Pretty please with a cherry on top?"

For Fiona to apologize for anything was newsworthy, and I found that my usual defences had dropped. "Sure," I said. I went back into the plane to search. Nada. I glanced out the window only to see the limo drive off. That malignant c.l.i.t. I picked up a pile of unchosen headshots and kicked them out of the plane into an uncaring world. "f.u.c.king losers!" I shouted as they fluttered onto the tarmac.

"Mr. Gunt?"

I looked down the stairway and saw a pimpled Todd-like geek. "Yes."

"I'm Walter, your hospitality amba.s.sador."

"My what?"

"I have instructions to offer you as much enjoyment as is possible at LAX. I'm here to take you to our ultra-exclusive VIP lounge."

16.

I hopped onto Walter's little electric cart and we headed to one of the terminal buildings. We parked and he escorted me up a red carpetway to a pair of ornate golden Shangri-La doors. Please, dear G.o.d, let there be needy s.l.u.ts in bunny costumes on the other side.

Walter opened the door to expose a bar that looked somehow familiar. And then I saw her, the dreaded LACEY. She looked up at me. "Can I get you a drink, sir? Wait a moment-it's you."

I turned right around, but saw, through a now-closed-and-alarmed security door, young Walter driving off in his G.o.dd.a.m.n cart. I touched my left front pocket: my phone was in my carry-on in the limo, and my pa.s.sport, too. f.u.c.king h.e.l.l. I turned around to hear LACEY say, "May I see your boarding pa.s.s, sir?"

"Boarding pa.s.s? What the h.e.l.l are you on about?"

"You came in through the VIP exit. I'm required to ask all VIPs to show me a boarding pa.s.s."

"I'm on a private jet, thank you."

"Your pa.s.sport?"

"It's in the limo."

"Then I'm afraid I can't serve you alcoholic or non-alcoholic beverages." She pushed a b.u.t.ton that buzzed. "Garcia will be here shortly."

"Your gardener?"

Sour face. "Your racial stereotyping is dehumanizing. Garcia happens to be the head of security in this terminal."

"Why call security?"

"Between you and me, it's because you didn't tip me last time. This is my revenge." I was speechless.

"And as there are no microphones recording this conversation, and we're the only two people in the lounge, Garcia bangs me twice a week in the men's room. So he's in my palm. He won't listen to a word you say."

I remained mute.

"Would you like some corn nuts? The airline catering company grows half the corn in Nebraska, so I'm allowed to offer them even to people who enter this lounge without authorization. There are some napkins here, and if you feel like cutlery, please enjoy a complimentary spork from the cutlery bin. Oh, look-here's Garcia now."

A swarthy hobbit entered the lounge. "LACEY, do we have an incident here?"

"I'm not sure, Garcia. This gentleman arrived through the VIP doors without a boarding pa.s.s or pa.s.sport. You know, with the war on terror, you can never be too careful."

Garcia stared at me. "Do you have any form of doc.u.mentation on you, sir?"

"No. It's all in the f.u.c.king limo."

"Watch your language, sir. You're in the United States. People here don't appreciate profanity."

"This man here swore quite a bit at me, too, Garcia. Does that count as terror in your terror handbook?"

Garcia gave me the steely eye. "You were swearing at LACEY?"

"What the f.u.c.k is wrong with you people?" I said.

"This is the last warning I'm giving you sir. No profanity."

Trying to configure sentences without swearing caused my brain to seize up. I knew there and then exactly how a stroke feels when it strips you of the ability to speak. I began to make sound effects instead: "... #$((>@ * * *..."

"Garcia, listen to his speech patterns. I bet you anything he's high on some form of illegal drug."

"What flight did you come here on today, sir?"

"In a private ffff ... In a private jet, thank you."

"From where?"

"Hawaii."

"We're going to have to do a sweep of that jet, p.r.o.nto." He removed a walkie-talkie from his breast pocket and made a show of finding the plane on the tarmac. While he did this, LACEY offered me more corn nuts.

"Sir," said the hobbit, "I'm going to have to ask you to come with me."

"What the f.u.c.k?"

"That's it, sir." Garcia ran towards me with a pair of zap-strap handcuffs he produced as if from nowhere.

LACEY smiled.

Zzzzzzap! Thirty seconds later I was being frogmarched down the concourse, which looked even more like Mexico than on my first stop. I'd hoped to make a friendly joke about Garcia's mother fellating bored donkeys out behind the Cinnabon, but the cuffs stung too much and made it difficult to be witty.

Cinnabon is a chain of American baked-goods stores and kiosks normally found in high-traffic areas such as malls and airports. The company's signature item is a large cinnamon roll. As of July 2009, over 750 Cinnabon bakeries are in operation in over thirty countries around the world. Its headquarters are in Sandy Springs, Georgia. For many people, the odour of a Cinnabon quickly alerts the reptile cortex that one is in the middle of an unpleasant travel experience. Curiously, scent scientists have done multiple a.n.a.lyses of airport environments and came up with an interesting observation, published in the March 2013 issue of Boarding Pa.s.s magazine: if one were to take one bottle of all the perfumes and colognes on earth and mix them together, the resulting odour would be exactly that of a duty-free shop.

Garcia marched me through a door emblazoned with a janitor's icon, which, in fact, opened into a corridor in LAX's ma.s.sive underground security system. Were Neal there with me, he'd have said something charmingly childish along the lines of, "Oi! It's like entering the Matrix! I wonder if we'll meet enchanted animals who speak Jacobean English!"

Not me, however. My extensive life experience had prepared me for being hurled into a room filled with innocent middle-cla.s.s people, all of them face down on rectal probe tables while burka-clad TSA agents used hot-dog forks to dig in deeper and deeper, ferreting out smuggled nail clippers, Bic lighters and containers of shampoo larger than 1.5 ounces.

I was partially correct. I ended up in a cell with old-fashioned steel bars and a chrome toilet, like in a seventies cop show. My cellmates were two cold-sored Venezuelans detained, they told me, for smuggling fertilized parakeet eggs, along with a Mrs. Peggy Nielson of Kendallville, Indiana, who, through some form of accidental keystroke in a system somewhere on the planet, had landed on the no-fly list with a level red warning attached to her.

Peggy, G.o.d bless her, wouldn't stop yammering on about how, instead of returning with her family to her numbingly dull cornfields after a Disneyland holiday, she was being whisked off to Guantanamo Bay without legal recourse.

I was in a foul mood, even for me. "Listen, Mrs. Nielson. You might as well get used to a life of gang rape and prayers five times a day. It's a nasty, s.h.i.tty world. How do we even know you're really who you say you are? You could be a very good little actress, for all I know."

She began to cry. "Disneyland was so amazing-and now this. Why are they doing this to me? My life is boring. I'm no terrorist."

"Are you sure about that?"

"What is wrong with you? Why are you being so mean to me?"

"What's wrong with me? What's wrong with you ... Peggy bin Laden? Your mom-pants and that poorly styled meerkat on your head don't fool me for one second. The more you snivel, the more I question your supposed ident.i.ty."

More boohoos and even more snivelling. A merciful spirit swept over me. "Mrs. Nielson, for G.o.d's sake, look at life for what it is-a repulsive waste of self-important protein molecules. It's not you who did something wrong. It's life."

"That's so negative. You're so negative!"

Well, I had tried to be nice. "Peggy, you're wearing out my patience. What sort of place is Kendallville, anyway? A hub for the manufacturing of crybabies?"

"I hate you."

"But I don't hate you. I, actually, in some hard-to-describe way, like you."

"Really?"

"I do. But you have to tough this out, Peggy. What comes around goes around. I prefer to think I lead a fine and upstanding life. When things turn to rat s.h.i.t-as they invariably do-I never think it's me who's done something wrong; it's the f.u.c.king universe having a bad day, and I just happened to be there."

"That's a new way of looking at things, Mr. ..."

"Gunt. Raymond Gunt."

Miracle of miracles, she stopped snivelling.

The Venezuelans regarded both of us with disdain, and I stared right back. "Look here, you two. Go f.u.c.k dead goats or whatever it is you do in your taco factories back home." I turned to Peggy. "Venezuela. Dreadful country. Nothing but cocaine and Miss Universe contestants."

"Nothing but grief."

"See there, Peggy? You really can turn that frown upside down."

"Thank you, Raymond Gunt. Tell me, where were you headed before you ended up here?"

"Kiribati. I'm a cameraman on that TV show Survival, and if I ever get out of this hole, that's where I'm headed, on one of the posh private jets the TV network uses to fly me around."

"I have to admit, I love Survival."

Oh, c.r.a.p.