I drive up to North Miami Beach. The TV studios are situated in a three-story concrete building. As I go through automatic doors, I instantly sweat under the blast of cold air conditioning as my body recalibrates. I’m feeling gross as a doorman escorts me to a sterile reception area. Valerie is waiting, her own forehead reassuringly beading. We get a black coffee and exchange bland pleasantries. Soon the producer appears, a late-thirties blonde, with the inevitable Botoxed android half-smile, thinly plucked brows, and pass clipped to her tan jacket, which she sports with matching slacks. Hooped earrings hang at her caked face like satellites over a desert planet, and a dangling necklace droops into a pushed-up rack of silicone. She intros herself as Waleena Hinkle. As she leads us through security doors, I catch her sneak a fearful glance at the young receptionist, the fresher meat who will soon replace her in the corporate sandwich. We follow Waleena, along with the string of inanities spilling from her mouth, down a corridor and into a boardroom.
We sit for a spell, with more talk about the weather. It’s just getting unbearable, when Thelma ceases her power play and deigns to join us. I know through Lieb’s time-management books that if somebody is late for a meeting they are either 1) an incompetent asshole (62 percent), or 2) trying to make some power statement (31 percent), and seldom, if ever, 3) fighting fires at some emergency (7 percent), as Thelma pathetically tries to make out now. B-fucking-S: I’ve got her number.
After some small talk about the flash flood I’ve had from press, camera crews, and photographers (thankfully done now, surely), Waleena springs into some sort of animation, flagging up a presentational display on video, explaining to me the concept of the show (I still haven’t opened the email attachments). It seems that they’ve moved on from the simple makeover premise. — We feel that your profile and Miami as a location allow us to be more adventurous, Waleena gushes. — The show is now tentatively entitled Shape Up or Ship Out. It will take place on a boat, a cruise liner, which sails from Miami around the Caribbean for the duration of one series. But this luxurious boat will also have two gyms and be a floating torture chamber. As we go around the islands, we ditch various failures at differing ports — Nassau, Kingston, Port of Spain, etc. — all the way back to Miami. — It’s essentially The Biggest Loser at sea, Waleena explains, — hopefully with a hint of The Love Boat thrown in. We’ll have a plank-walking ceremony at the end of each show, the plank also being a scale that tips the fattest contestant into a secured area of the sea.
I burst out into loud laughter, unable to contain myself. From their expressionless faces, it’s impossible to tell whether it’s the Botox masks or if they genuinely consider my glee inappropriate. I decide to test the water further. — It would be great if we could have some sharks in the secured area of sea, chomping away at all that blubber.
More silence as the masks seem to freeze a few more degrees. — We did want to introduce a punitive element, Waleena nods, — and we will have several menacing nautical and pirate themes running throughout the show.
Thelma chips in, — The one we’re particularly excited about is “booty call.” She twists her collagen-stuffed lips to Waleena, who carries on. — Yes, this is where we open a series of treasure chests we have mounted on the wall, all of them displaying the near-naked ass of each contestant scheduled for elimination. A guest panel have to guess, first the owner of the ass, then the weight lost that week by the individual on the basis of the size of their butt.
— Get the fuck outta here, I declare.
— You don’t like it? Waleena whiplashes to Thelma, then back to me.
— Shit, no! I love it! They need to be confronted with how gross their asses look, and I glance around the table, lowering my voice gravely. — But I do hope you realize that I wasn’t being serious about the sharks, and I wait for a reaction.
— Of course. . Valerie says.
— We knew that, Thelma agrees.
— Only because it would be totally fucking cruel to subject animals to the toxins in those junk-fed bodies!
They look at each other, and Valerie smiles, while Thelma laughs, a low wheezing mechanical sound. — That’s funny! You’re terrible, Lucy!
We spend the rest of the afternoon looking at homemade videos from a previous similarly themed show last year, which never got off the ground. — We couldn’t find a suitably charismatic, local fitness instructor to present, Thelma informs me in a smug purr. There are literally thousands of fat losers who have sent clips in, begging to be contestants on the show. Few, if any, demonstrate real signs of aspiring to change themselves.
Then I’m telling Valerie, Thelma, and Waleena about the two clubs I work out of, and I mention Jon Pallota, the owner of Bodysculpt. I explain that Jon was swimming up in Delray Beach and lost a large portion of his genitals after being attacked by a poisoned barracuda, stunned and lurking in the shallow waters. They tried to save what they could when they detached the fish, but his cock had to be more than half amputated and one testicle was lost.
Of course, everybody remembers the incident, and it becomes the cue for a round of familiar jokes. Tales of the genital mutilation of powerful young men resonate easily with middle-aged, middle-management women who have have been splattered against the glass ceiling by the myopic stampeding of that breed, on their relentless corporate ascent. I look around the table at the three Botoxed witches and think, with a chill, that this is quite probably me ten years on. And that’s the best-case scenario. And I feel disloyal, as Jon and I. . well, we tried but we couldn’t make shit work. Now he’s been engaged in a lawsuit for three years against the company who were found to have dumped the chemicals at sea, detected at very high dosage in the fish’s body. The company had already been fined for illegal dumping, but are contesting that the chemicals could have poisoned the fish to the extent that it would have headed into the shallows and attacked a bather.
— Did the fish attack any other people? Waleena asks. — Like, before your friend?
— I don’t think so.
— Tough one. I don’t really see any grounds for an individual suing the company here, unless he can find other people who’ve been attacked by poisoned fish and they do a class-action lawsuit.
— That seems to be the legal feedback he’s gotten, I tell her.
Jon’s been understandably depressed since then, and has spent much more time in the SoBe dive bars than at Bodysculpt. But as I’m telling Valerie, Thelma, and Waleena the backstory, I can see them thinking it would great to get this in the show. Then Thelma actually says, — Do you think that Jon would—
— No. Not acceptable, I cut her off. — He hates the media. He might let us film in the club, but that’s about all, and I swear I can see her Botox face melt under my gaze.
— Of course, Lucy, she purrs, — you know best!
Despite that hiccup, I come out the meeting pretty buzzed and I’m actually enjoying the drive home, which is almost impossible with all the crazies behind the wheels of Miami’s automobiles. The devastating combo of Latin Americans, really old white people, and young all-year-round Spring Breakers is not a mix that encourages complacent driving.
I pull up outside my building — still no photographers (both good and worrying) — and get settled back in my apartment. Miles calls, with more of the same hero bullshit, now all conciliatory after us yelling at each other on our last encounter. He’s a firefighter I trained to kickbox in a tournament against the police. He was flirty as hell, and I thought I’d seen the last of him, till he found me on hookup.com, a dating-slash-fucking website I used to subscribe to. We all make mistakes. He tells me he’s still off work with his famous back issue. He never had this going on when we first met, and the shit has been getting worse. — I gotta examination by the service’s medical board, then a meeting with personnel and their insurance people lined up. You wanna come round tonight? Or I could swing by your way?