Elimination Night by Anonymous Read Free Book Online

the report by Chaz Chipford that appeared in the following week’s
ShowBiz.
As Teddy left the restaurant, his bodyguard, Mr. Tiddles—seven one, four hundred pounds—“accidentally” fell on the manager, breaking his leg in three places. Teddy left a half-a-million dollar tip, so the matter never went any further.
    No further than
ShowBiz,
anyway.
    Exactly how Teddy and Bibi’s friendship developed is something of a mystery. If I had to take a guess, however, I’d say Teddy saw a lot of himself in his future client when they first met in a TV studio a decade ago. Born to Chinese immigrant parents in rust belt Indiana (they owned a Laundromat), Teddy was a musical prodigy, but ended up on the street at the age of sixteen after his father caught him in bed with the eldest son of his business partner. Teddy never spoke to his family again. Instead he went to Nashville to work for BeeBop Records as a writer of country songs, of which his biggest hit was the Christian radio favorite, “I Love Ya, Honey (But Don’t Git Between Me & Jesus).” After that, Teddy relocated a second time, to New York City, where he became a houseguest of his janitor uncle, with whom he lived for all of seventy-two hours—long enough for him to later create a TV drama series about the experience.
    Boy King of the Bronx
was the title.
    Teddy was able to move out of his uncle’s place so quickly because he got a job at Galactic Records, where he rose with similar speed to senior vice president, charged with overseeing the career of the nightclub owner/rapper/all-round hustler Bossman Toke—a.k.a. Bossy T. And it was Bossy T who introduced Teddy to Bibi: She was his girlfriend at the time, having just appeared as a thong-wearing, bare-nippled Queen Victoria in Bossy T’s music video for the multiplatinum hit “Kneel for the King.” In the extended ten-minute cut, which cost twenty-five million dollars to make, Bossy T plays a black English royal from the future who builds a time machine so he can sleep with every “smokin’ hot bitch queen since history began.” The video ends with him unzipping his fly in front of Cleopatra, allowing a solid gold asp to slither from his pants. It won Best Artistic Vision at that summer’s Cool Beatz Video Awards.
    And
why
did Teddy and Bibi have so much in common? Well, Bibi had also been thrown out on the street at the age of sixteen, after refusing to accept a place at hospitality school. The Vasquezes lived inMiddle Village, Queens: Bibi’s mother, a Dominican baby nurse, had come to America to work for a wealthy family in Manhattan; her father was a French Canadian dishwasher. Bibi took her mother’s surname on the advice of her manager: “Bibi Le Poupe” just didn’t have much of a ring to it.
    Bibi’s parents yearned for their daughter to become a successful, independent American woman—and hospitality was something, the
only
thing, she seemed to be any good at. Or at least, when she waited tables at the French restaurant where her father worked, she earned more tips in a week than the manager made in a month… which she found out soon enough because she married him.
    It lasted nine days. And still Bibi didn’t want to go to hospitality school. No, she wanted to be a dancer, an actress, a model… a singer. So she moved into a squat on the Lower East Side and auditioned every day. Eventually she got a two-week gig as a bikini-wearing pole dancer on a late night music TV show and wound up giving an onscreen lapdance to Bossy T, who by then had been profiled in
Forbes
thanks to his unexpectedly successful diversification into the plus-size underwear market.
    I didn’t even need to Google the rest of this story when I was putting together my research file: Bibi’s breakthrough casting in
Elsa,
a movie about the tragic life of the
narcocorrido
singer Elsa Melindez; her first single, “My Love Goes Bang-Bang,” which spent four months at number one largely thanks to the publicity created