Escape!

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Chapter 1

Kent

When the phone rings, Kent Duvall is in the Memorabilia Room watching himself on the reality show Endure. On days when he is feeling his age and the slab of gut hangs like an anchor at his waist, he will pop the disc into his DVD player, which clicks and snaps like an arthritic joint. He doesn't need much. The show's intro features a three-second slow-motion shot of him pounding his chest in the tropical light, hair billowing around his face. God, he had epic hair, long blond locks that in the island's unreasonable humidity looked like they belonged to the lead singer of an eighties metal band. Last year, his wife, Margaret, insisted he shave his head. "You're starting to look like you have a comb-over," she said, walking her conversational tightrope between loving joke and withering insult. He'll watch that three-second clip again and again, rewinding and replaying, rewinding and replaying, and think to himself, That is me.

He still calls it the Memorabilia Room, though most of the memorabilia has been auctioned off on eBay. He argued that they were selling his treasures for much less than they were worth. Margaret said they were only "worth" what someone was willing to pay. What's left behind are the discolorations on the wallpaper to mark where he mounted the dull machete (fifty dollars), the necklace he carved out of driftwood and strung along a circlet of woven grass (seventy-five dollars), and the single set of clothes that he wore throughout the show's forty-five days, which reeked of sweat and woodsmoke even through the pane of protective glass (thirty dollars). The lone piece of memorabilia remaining is a photograph of him holding his one-hundred-thousand-dollar check and smiling into the universe.

Kent pauses the DVD to answer the phone. A woman with the improbable name of Gita Seuss is on the line. She's organizing a charity event, she says in a voice like a cowbell, where former reality television contestants will sign autographs and mingle with paying fans. The signing will benefit . . . He misses who exactly it is supposed to benefit.

"I asked the fans who they wanted to see," Gita Seuss is saying, "and your name came up again and again. I said, Kent Duvall? He was on over a decade ago. But your fans love you, with a devotion that transcends time."

Kent rolls his eyes. "I'll need some kind of appearance fee."

"We can pay for your travel and lodging, which is what I've offered all our guests."

"My appearance fee is fifteen hundred dollars."

"This is for charity," she says.

"You have to understand, I get a lot of invitations-"

Gita rattles off a list of other reality TV contestants who will attend. Most are names he doesn't recognize or wishes he didn't. A survivalist from Naked and Afraid, a finalist from The Bachelor, two Amazing Race winners, a longtime participant on MTV's The Challenge. Some are from television shows he's never heard of, shows he isn't even sure exist. Beauty and the Geek. Extreme Pregnancy. But Kent stands firm, and eventually Gita relents.

"The fans really want to see you," she says, the cowbell clanking mournfully.

Fifteen hundred dollars off the top-what will it even matter to the diabetic orphans or homeless pets? Kent was once a mainstay on the reality charity event circuit, and he remains mystified by the economics of these affairs. A few hundred fans pay what-thirty dollars? fifty dollars?-for the privilege of getting drunk with contestants from their favorite shows. Out of that, the event organizer covers airfare and lodging for fifty-some reality stars. What could possibly be left for charity? He imagines Gita Seuss proudly handing an oversize novelty check for $23.57 to a group of confused kids from the children's hospital. But then, he thinks, the economics aren't the point. He and his fellow has-beens can recapture for a few fleeting hours the feeling of being famous; the fans get to fill the void in their lives that can only be filled by the autographs of former reality TV stars; and Gita Seuss can ascend to heaven for her efforts.

"It's for charity," Kent says to Margaret over dinner that night.

"You're not digging wells in Africa. You're getting drunk at a bar."

"Why don't you come? It'll be fun. I bet I can get them to pay for-"

"No way, buster. I end up taking pictures while you play celebrity." Margaret has just come home from her shift at the hospital, and her face looks like a bruised orange.

"That's not true," Kent says.

"You hate these things. You come back miserable and talk about how annoying everybody is. They spend the entire time either explaining why they really deserved to win their show, or making alliances for a future season, so you drink too much and come home with a massive hangover. Then I have to spend the next day nursing you like a wounded bird."

"It's fifteen hundred dollars," he says, holding out his hands. The truth is, even more than they need the money, he needs the money. He's tired of being a freeloader, tired of watching his wife drink day-old coffee. Kent Duvall's wife deserves five-dollar lattes! Most of all, Kent is tired of the way Margaret looks at him. Like she doesn't expect anything more. Like she's resigned herself to life with a lump.

When he won the show, he quit his job to travel the country on the speaking circuit. His last paid speech was over four months ago. They gave him travel expenses and a five-hundred-dollar honorarium, and for that he rode a bus twelve hours to Shamrock Lakes, Indiana, on a frigid December afternoon. Seven bored kids swiped on their phones while he clicked through his PowerPoint and told them that if they believed in themselves, they could accomplish anything. Afterward, the tweedy professor who had organized the event drove him to the bus depot.

"It's very cold," the professor offered. "I can think of quite a few people who said they would come, but it's very cold."

Kent nodded.

"And the students have finals next week."

"Bad timing," Kent agreed.

"Well, I'm a huge fan," the tweedy professor said, bristling as if Kent were blaming him. "But I have to get back to campus. Do you mind if . . . ? The bus should be here any minute." And Kent waited for an hour in the bus depot, which was nothing more than a ticket kiosk and an out-of-order toilet that stank of piss, watching two meth heads bicker over which of them was at fault for ruining the other's life.

Margaret used to come with him, back when he could still fill auditoriums. While he spoke, he would find her in the first row of the audience, and they would lock eyes and share a little smile that said, Isn't this all so silly? She'd drive him home, his right leg still jackrabbiting from the adrenaline, and she would mock the tweedy professors and the pompous administrators who were so honored to introduce-"Honored? Really? No offense, babe, but you're not the president"-and he loved it because he could see her pride. He would see it in the twist of her mouth when people stopped him on the street, or that time he was on the cover of a magazine. Sure, it was his college alumni publication, but still, a glossy object you could hold in your hand. She had the look of a skeptic waiting for the two-bit magician to reveal the wrong card, when suddenly he pulls a dove from the air. She liked dating a reality star. And it seemed in those days that the audiences for the speeches would grow. That a meeting with a producer could turn into a TV hosting gig.

But for Margaret that dream died long ago, and in dying embarrassed her, like he had tricked her into exposing her most secret parts. And he was still giving these speeches.

"This could be an opportunity," he says to her now. "Billy Phillips will be there-"

"Billy Phillips the tech entrepreneur?"

"He was on this past season."

"Why would Billy Phillips do reality television?" she asks, with the disdain she now harbors for the one significant thing in his life.

"I don't know. Because he can? I was thinking-I could hit him up for a job."

"A job?" She looks suspicious. "What kind of job?"

"Any job," Kent says. He hadn't even thought of it before this moment, but it's true. He really could ask Billy Phillips for a job. The man employs hundreds, maybe thousands, and Kent has a way with people. "You know how these things work. Some HR employee gets a résumé forwarded by the CEO. They almost have to find something for me."

"Oh, Kent." Margaret takes his hand and kisses his fingers with a tenderness he hasn't felt from her in years, and Kent thinks maybe he can pull magic from the sky.

Chapter 2

Beck

I only took the gig on Surf Dogs because the prodco offered me showrunner with an EP credit. My work until that point had been teen moms and feuding housewives, emotional stuff, and Surf Dogs was exactly as ludicrous it sounds. Dogs were pulled by their owners on surfboards into the sea and then rode back to shore, where they were judged on balance and poise. My dad had thought I'd be a doctor. "We're bringing you in because we're hoping for a more elevated surfing-dog show," the network exec told me in my interview, quite earnestly. In my vanity, I let myself believe him. The show was tucked so high on the cable dial that flipping there too fast could make your ears pop. Still, we had a niche audience of animal fanatics and stoners, and our production crew had the scrappy unity of a high school math team.

Short, slobbery Buster the bulldog was going to be an audience favorite. Between rides, he'd dig holes in the sand and snap his jaws at the sand crabs. But while the show was ostensibly about the dogs, really it was about their owners, and Buster's hairstylist owner Dave was TV gold. He was six foot three with an extra inch of bleached-blond hair. While Buster surfed, Dave patrolled the shore like a jumbo-size bird of paradise, squawking at curious onlookers to keep away from his "hound."

It would have been easy to caricature Dave as a classic stage dad. From the way he name-dropped his salon's clientele-surf royalty I'd never heard of and eighties sitcom actors who'd retired to the shore-I could see in his mind he was basically already a celebrity. There was just the minor fact that he'd never appeared on-screen, and Surf Dogs was the very thing to buff out that flaw in the universe. But I wanted to give Dave more than a snarky parody edit. A decade of filming reality television has taught me that within every fussy fame whore lies a telenovela's worth of heartbreak, so I'd scheduled one last day of filming. One last chance to spelunk into Dave's subconscious and discover whatever trauma he was displacing onto his goofy little pet.

My crew set Dave up for an interview with his back to the ocean. Buster was cradled in his arms. The dog's tongue lolled from his mouth as he panted contentedly. It was a hot afternoon in Huntington Beach, the kind of brutal summer day in climate-apocalypse California where the air itself could ignite. Down the coast, tourists swarmed the pier. A little boy was standing on his tiptoes to stare through a rusted-out spyglass. Kids clustered around a kiosk where a hippie sold shark-tooth necklaces, clamoring for a totem of danger in their innocent little lives. My awareness was like a sonar, constantly pinging the world for stories.

"We've been talking for days about Buster," I began. "Let's talk about you. Why did you want to be on this show?"

"I'm out here to celebrate Buster and all the surfing dogs who bring joy to the community through their talents!" Dave scratched Buster behind the ears, and the dog snorted happily.

I smiled and nodded. "Did you have any personal reasons for applying?"

"I personally believe so much in these incredible dogs."

I kept smiling. This was the challenge of filming reality TV today. People lived inside a carapace of clichés. They'd read so many hyperbolic articles from entertainment media that their internal headspace was like a breathless headline from People.com. But for the sake of Dave's story, I needed to shuck that shell like an oyster. Let the camera slurp up his salty-sweet humanity. I'd been noticing his accent. You can learn a person's life story from their diphthongs, and Dave's flattened vowels suggested small-town Midwest. I imagined a taciturn farmer dad, a long-suffering mother standing over the stove. And here this bleached-blond man-child was racing across a California beach playing hype monster for a surfing bulldog.

"You're not originally from California, are you?" I asked.

"Iowa, actually."

Nailed it. I feigned surprise. "I'm from Chicago. Look at us, two Midwesterners. What brought you out west?"

"The same thing that brings everyone, I guess."

"Fame?"

He nodded, suddenly wary.

"When I moved here from Chicago, I figured I'd be an Oscar-winning director by now." I shook my head and laughed, though I was never interested in following a script. Reality television lets you tie a bow out of the tangled ribbon of life.

"I wanted to be an actor," Dave said.

"Let me guess. You were a high school theater star who moved to Hollywood?"

He shifted on the sand and ran his fingers through his spiky hair.

"You can imagine how my doctor dad feels about reality TV," I said. "My mom-she passed away. Aneurysm. When I was four."

Sharing your tragedies is a tactic. You make the subject comfortable by showing that you're vulnerable too. The trick is that you have to show real feeling, because people have sensitive barometers for BS. I pictured the tickle of my mother's hair falling on my face as she read to me in bed. The rough corduroy of her skirt in my hand as I hid behind her legs. I had to come at it sideways-fragments, discrete sense memories-or I'd lose it for real. A lone tear slid from the corner of my eye. I could see the sympathy well up in him.

"I was the same. A . . . disappointment," Dave said tentatively, not performing anymore but genuinely sharing. I had him. "I thought if I made it big, I could show everybody back home."

Normal producers would end the conversation there. I was sure Dave would give me more. I said nothing and let the silence build. Silence exerts its own pressure. It demands to be filled.

At last Dave whispered, "If I can give Buster his moment in the spotlight, maybe I didn't fail."

If my cameraman wasn't zooming in on Dave's face, I'd have to strangle him to death later.