Party of One (17 page)

You decide that it is a perfectly healthy decision for you to reorient your life fully around cocaine. So you keep doing more, every ten minutes or so, chasing a kind of bliss that does not exist, until there is no more cocaine to do, and you have to face what you have become, which is a toilet person.

For me and my new best friends, that time came at around 10:00 the next morning, long after I had called in sick to my temp agency from a West Village pay phone at 5:00 a.m. We sat in my living room with the TV on, scraping up whatever trace amounts existed on my coffee table, which is to say aspirating dust mites while Rosie O'Donnell fired Koosh balls into her audience and called people “cutie patooties.”

When there is no more cocaine to do, the crash begins, and there is nothing you can do about it. The quickened heart rate that was exhilarating only moments before is now cause for alarm. The perspiration that gave you a sexy glow under jazz-club neon makes you look like a sweaty fat person in the morning sun. The head that was a Tesla coil of brilliant ideas at midnight is a half-deflated basketball at dawn.

It is awful.

When I am feeling low, I know I can always do one of two things to turn my mood around: I can take a nap, or I can masturbate. In particularly dark times, I find that I can bounce back and forth between the two, all day long. Cocaine will rob you of these two valuable tools. Once I finally decided to call it a night at around noon, I found myself sweating through my sheets, fitfully trying to engage a dick that wanted nothing to do with me. My only option was to stare at the ceiling and pray for my heart rate to return to normal. It was a physical hangover unlike anything I had ever felt, but the mental and spiritual aspects were far worse. The self-loathing descended and carried me off like the Wicked Witch's flying monkeys.
Look at what you've become, Dave Holmes. You weren't ever going to do cocaine, and now you have. You're damaged goods. You're a druggie. You're one of those girls who tried to get Punky Brewster to join their gang. You're what Nancy Reagan warned you about.

You're disgusting.

And last night's show was mediocre at best.

Obviously, the only way to silence these voices was to do more cocaine. I had asked Adam for his dealer's number—the guy's name, I swear to God, was Rocko—and I fumbled for my jeans and fished it out of the front pocket. I remembered Adam telling me that a gram cost $40. I went to the Chase Bank ATM at the corner of Eighty-sixth and Lexington.

I had $32. My direct deposit wouldn't reflect my latest paycheck until midnight.

I got saved from a terrible decision that would have altered the course of my life irrevocably, by a slight bank delay. If I had had $8 more, I would probably be dead right now.

Months later, those same boys came back to town for that fraternity brother's wedding. I told Adam I'd be around that weekend in case we wanted to get the gang back together—just for a beer, to reminisce. I missed them, somehow. We had bonded. We had bonded over jazz.

Adam broke the news gently but firmly. “Dave, they…they did not care for you one bit.”

I was not the future of comedy. I was not a glamorous cocaine person. I was not cool.

I was going to have to keep trying.

MTV's first
Wanna Be a VJ
audition was an event that fundamentally changed the course of my life, and what haunts me about it now is how close I came to not going.

A few days before, I had been dicking around at my desk on a Thursday morning that was probably a busy one for whoever was doing what was supposed to be my job, when I clicked over to
Billboard.com
to check the charts, a weekly habit at the time. (K-Ci & JoJo had just leapt to #1 on the Hot 100 in an impressive two weeks with “All My Life,” while Robbie Williams's “Let Me Entertain You” debuted at #4 on the UK charts; as ever, the Brits knew what was up.) And there, on the news feed down the right side of the screen, was the headline:
MTV TO HOLD OPEN CALL FOR NEW VJ.
I remember saying, in full voice: “
Hel-
lo.” For months, I'd been thinking I needed to make a lateral move to some other industry. I was living in New York City, working at a job I hated, and doing it terribly; I could do that in St. Louis and live like a king. If I was going to live in the hardest, most-expensive, most-stressful city in the country, I might as well do something I liked and wasn't lousy at; it seemed a simple gift I could give myself. But I had no idea how to do that, and showing up at an open call was as good an idea as any I'd had. (If you have read this book in order, you will have noticed that my ideas were generally not very good.)

The audition was to be held at the brand-new MTV studio at 1515 Broadway, just down the road from my agency, the next Monday, April 13. I circled the date in my day planner and made a note on my PalmPilot:
call in sick.

I tried not to imagine that I would actually pass through this audition and get anywhere. I told myself: This is a way to meet people. This is a networking opportunity. But of course, my mind went there. A lot. Like, what if they hire me and I end up on-air? Would I be friends with Duff? Would I get a muffin basket from Martha Quinn? How often does the society of current and former VJs get together? Is it a potluck kind of situation?

Sunday, April 12, was Easter, and my friends and I were too broke to spend it with our families or get a decent brunch anywhere, so we did our budget version of a Circle Line tour, also known as taking the Staten Island Ferry there and back. We celebrated the risen Christ with Budweiser tallboys and ham sandwiches. We wore pastels. We stayed up late. I didn't tell anybody what I was doing, because what I was doing was ridiculous. I was a twenty-seven-year-old man, with bills in my name and a job that people would give an arm for. I was going to stand in a line and audition to be an MTV VJ? Preposterous.

It was so stupid I had to do it.

It is important to know yourself, and what I knew about myself was that I wasn't going to blow them away with my outsized personality. I wasn't going to overwhelm them with my looks. I was a chubby, average-looking guy who could hold a conversation, and while people like that are likely to be in short supply at an open call for MTV VJs, people like that ought to arrive early, before the casting people get sick of faces and voices. For an average person to make an impression, it is important to get there before humanity becomes a giant, irritating blur. I set my alarm for 4:00 a.m.

My alarm went off at 4:00 a.m. I rolled over and looked at the giant red numerals. Blinking, screeching: 4:00. My first thought that morning was
What the fuck are you even thinking?
Perhaps this is a thing you've done yourself: you make a plan to get up and hit the gym before work, or to run around the park, or to surf as the sun is rising. At night, warm and energetic and lit from within by a few beers, it seems like exactly the right thing to do. “We'll go together,” you tell your friends. “Meet you there at five.” You agree. You rejoice. It's so simple to live the right way! And then your alarm goes off, and you remember that neither you nor your friends are this kind of person at all, and you reset it for your regular waking time and go back to sleep, secure in the knowledge that all of your friends have done the same thing. So it was on this morning: I stared at those numbers, my eyes burning with the desire to re-close.
Seriously, what the fuck are you even thinking, showing up to an open call like some kind of jackass. Lining up to introduce videos to a demographic you have aged out of. It's embarrassing. How dare you?

And then one thought saved me, and one thought only:
On the other hand, you hate and are terrible at your job.

I got up and showered.

As now, my wardrobe was very “aging prep-school boy”: lots of Brooks Brothers button-downs, lots of khakis. I put on the closest thing I had to a hip outfit: a navy sweater with one red stripe through it, blue jeans, and my one pair of John Fluevog shoes. I was as on trend as I was ever going to be.

Four-twenty a.m. is the only time when there is no traffic in New York City, so I hailed a cab with ease and made it from the Upper East Side to Forty-fourth and Broadway in less than ten minutes. The official auditions wouldn't start until 9:00, but the line wound around the building. I was #168. The 167 people who beat me there were exactly what I expected: showbiz fellas with big smiles and too-firm handshakes. Long Island girls with loud, trumpety voices and all of the makeup. A couple of metal guys who agreed they should go in there and tell MTV to play some
real
shit. And just a few people ahead of me, a very tall gamine with ratted hair and a tattered army jacket covered in punk buttons.
Well, she's interesting,
I thought.

The thing about any kind of audition is that most people think the waiting room is the real proving ground.
Dazzle your fellow hopefuls with your talent and personality;
that's their motto.
Get in their heads so that when they make it into the audition room, they're feeling inadequate in the sparkle department.
The secret, I have learned, is to simply let these people tucker themselves out. Having had the foresight to bring my Discman along, I popped my headphones on and let Whiskeytown's “Strangers Almanac”—the first we would hear of a young Ryan Adams—drown out some desperate attempts at psychological warfare.

At around 8:00, some production assistants came around with forms to fill out, including a questionnaire, to which a Polaroid would be stapled.
How would your friends describe you? What's the last CD you bought? In high school, you were voted most likely to…
I wrote in “…introduce the latest Savage Garden video.” I had had extensive comedy training, you guys.

Just before 9:00, they started letting people in, and once we got in front of 1515 Broadway, the line began to snake back and forth, like we were waiting for a ride at Disneyland. As the line moved, I kept passing the beautiful androgyne in the army jacket—this way, then that way, then this way. She was a foot taller than anyone else in the line, and she seemed in a very real sense to be in her own atmosphere. Her face was serene and hopeful. Or just completely blotto. It was hard to say.

At 9:15-ish, I got through the doors, up the escalator, and down the hallway full of backlit promo posters of shows (
Singled Out! The Real World! Dead At 21!
) and artists (Madonna! The Fugees!
Hanson!
). Shit was getting real.

Finally, I walked into the 1515 Broadway studio. The studio was, I would later learn, actually three studios that could be turned into one massive one, like a hotel ballroom. And if this were a movie, which in my memory it is, the camera would do a full 360-degree circle around my head before settling on my dazzled face as I took it all in. It was huge and humming with activity. Twelve audition stations ringed the room, against floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Times Square, a part of town I'd always done my best to avoid, but with which I was suddenly, deeply in love. Production assistants hurried to and fro, toting clipboards and following instructions their bosses gave them through their earpieces. The big wigs, who in this case were a maximum of thirty-two years old, sat along the periphery and surveyed the action. Carson Daly, handsome as on TV and somehow taller, prepared to do a VJ segment from the middle of the action, just as I might do someday. There was a palpable sense of joy in the air. The MTV gang was busy, but busy doing something they loved and were happy to do. Following their bliss, even if their bliss stressed them out a little. It was a world where people devoted all of their energy to all of the silly things I loved, and it was
right here,
eight blocks down from my office. It had been here, right under my nose, the whole time. Like Narnia.

We were called up to the audition stations twelve at a time. I went to station #5, where a guy named Joe sat me down on a stool and talked me through the process: “ 'Kay—we're gonna just talk for a minute, so just be natural and be yourself and don't worry about it, 'kay? And then we'll read some shit and then that'll be that, 'kay? S'gonna be fun.” 'Kay. I was ready. He bent down to grab his clipboard of questions and his T-shirt rode up, revealing a tattoo of two cherries, like you'd see on a slot machine, just above his ass-crack. I loved Joe immediately. I have no idea what we talked about or what I read or how long I was there—I remember it the way one would remember a really fun car crash—but apparently Joe saw something in me. He pulled a yellow slip of paper from his clipboard, signed it, and handed it to me. “ 'Kay, girl—here's what you're gonna do next: you're gonna go over to the Downtown Studio and you're gonna talk to the people there, 'kay? Just ask one of those bitches with a headset how to get there. You got it?” I had it. “Go.
Now!
”

I went, then. There were two more auditioners waiting by the door of the Downtown Studio, two young, fabulous types, whom I could immediately picture on MTV. I looked back at the audition area and watched as the other eleven people I'd been brought in with went out the exit.
Wait,
I thought,
is this some kind of a callback?

It turned out to have been some kind of callback. In the room were three people I would come to know as the Talent Executives: Rod, Caryn, and Amanda. They welcomed me with warm smiles—it was still early in the day; my plan was working—and we chatted about my favorite bands, what I liked to do on the weekends, what kind of show I would like to host. Again, I have no recollection of what I said, but I know I tried to tell them exactly what they wanted to hear. A lifetime of anticipating people's needs and changing my personality to meet them was once again revealing itself as a job skill.

Amanda told me they'd be picking a top ten the next day and that if I made it, I'd be notified by phone by midnight. “And then the rest of the show will start on Wednesday.”

The rest of the what now?

What the post on
billboard.com
failed to mention—because maybe it hadn't been decided yet, who knows—was that once the auditioners for the VJ job got boiled down to ten, the rest of the job application process would take place on live television. First, a panel of on-air talent, former VJs, and celebrities would narrow the field to five on Wednesday's
MTV Live,
and then in live events Thursday, Friday, and all Saturday afternoon, MTV viewers would cast their votes. My fate would be decided by stoned children. That this all made sense in the moment speaks to how deeply in shock I was to be in the MTV studios, gabbing away with talent executives and watching Carson Daly be all strong-jawed ten feet away, like it was all perfectly normal. “Great,” I said. “Hope to hear from you soon.”

I left 1515 Broadway and went straight to a phone booth to call in sick for the next day, so that I could devote my full attention to fixating on this. I called home to tell my parents about what I'd just done, and what Dad
thought
was probably whatever someone thinks when their twenty-seven-year-old son calls and says he has called in sick from work to stand in line to try to be an MTV VJ. But what Dad
said
was, “I have a good feeling about this. I think you're going to get that job.” I have a good Dad.