Fun House

“Mark it. It’s gold. Pure gold.” He presses a button on the side of a handheld radio. “Rutger?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Get me a close-up of that ping-pong ball in Mike’s cup when he goes to drink it.”

“There’s a bug in the cup.”

“Beautiful. Shoot it.”

“You got it, Chief.”

“Rutger Reinhertz is the best director in reality TV,” Mandrake announces to the world. “Gets the money shots. Doesn’t cost a fortune.”

Ceepak clears his throat. “Mr. Mandrake?”

“Yeah?” Mandrake keeps his eyes glued on the three TV screens flickering in front of him.

“We’d like to talk to you about Paul Braciole and the anabolic steroids. If he cooperates with us, the county prosecutor might be interested in discussing a deal wherein no charges are brought against him or Ms. Kemppainen.”

“Great. Give me a minute. We need to wrap this sequence.”

“Marty has an ambitious day planned,” Layla whispers. “Including a company move down to Morgan’s Surf and Turf for the etiquette competition later tonight.”

Ceepak just nods. His wife, Rita, used to waitress at Morgan’s. Me? I’m wondering what the heck goes on in an etiquette contest.

“Come on, Paulie,” Jenny Mortadella (the skanky one) shouts as she cozies up to The Thing in a very skimpy bikini that shows off the mermaids tattooed all over her boobs. “Beat this bitch. Bounce a ball up his ass.”

“Um, we’ll, you know, clean that up in edit,” says Layla.

“You win this competition, I’ll give you a pwize.” Jenny’s doing drunken baby talk now.

“Oh, yeah? Like what?” says Paulie.

“This.” She tugs up her bikini top and flashes “The Thing” her things. She’d probably wiggle them but I don’t think that kind of plastic shimmies.

Now Ceepak’s closing his eyes, and, if I’m not mistaken, uttering a silent prayer.

“We’ll, you know, pixellate over those, block them out,” Layla explains.

The middle monitor shows a horrified reaction shot of Soozy K’s face when Jenny flashes her tattooed nay- nays. The mermaids look like they are harvesting pistachios for the winter.

“I thought you had an alliance with Mikey?” Paulie says to Jenny. Yep, there are a lot of “ee” names in the house.

“Not after he fell on his ass playing Skee-Ball because he was so drunk-”

“I wasn’t drunk, bitch-”

In my head, I start adding in the bleeps.

“Yes, you BLEEPING were.”

“So?” says Mike. “You’re a BLEEPING cow! Flashing your BLEEPING BLEEPIES. What kind of pig does that? A cow, that’s who.”

“You want to hook up later?” Jenny says to Paulie.

Paulie shrugs. “Whatever.” He bops a ping-pong ball off the picnic table and into the beer cup Soozy’s holding in her hand.

“What the BLEEP!” shouts Soozy when beer sloshes up and splatters all over her chest.

“Maybe you better take off your top too,” jokes Paulie. “Hang it up to dry!”

Now the guy named Vinnie, another bodybuilder type who spikes his hair up into a waxy Mohawk, comes stomping out of the house.

“Yo, Paulie? What the BLEEP? I found this BLEEP under your bed.” Vinnie has something in his hand. We can’t tell what it is.

“Get me a close-up!” Marty Mandrake shouts into his radio.

Two of the cameras rush in to see what Vinnie found.

“This is huge!” says Mandrake. “I’m working your drug investigation into my storyline!”

“What the BLEEP,” says Jenny Mortadella. “That BLEEP will shrivel your BLEEP, you stupid BLEEP.”

In the close-up on monitor three, we see what Vinnie found in Paulie’s room.

Another little glass vial with a cartoon label.

More Skeletor steroids.

5

“You’re putting illegal drugs on national television?” says Ceepak.

“Maybe,” says Mandrake. “This is a reality show. We shoot a ton of footage. But we don’t know what we’ll actually air till we get in the edit suite and start hacking away at it.”

Dialogue seeps out of the live monitors.

“That’s not my shit,” from Paulie.

“I found it under your fucking bed,” from Vinnie.

“That’s how you fucking beat Tone?” from Mike. “Dope?”

Anthony “Tone” DePalma was the first guy kicked out of the house back in July. He lost to Paulie in the Beach Badminton Beer Blast (they played with racquets and wadded-up aluminum beer cans instead of the more traditional shuttlecock).

“Your balls are going to fall off,” from Jenny Mortadella.

Ceepak leans forward and snaps off the audio.

“Hey!” protests Mandrake, who was gobbling up the garbage faster than a rat in a Mickey D’s dumpster after they clean out the Big Mac bin.

“You realize,” Ceepak says to Mandrake, “that since the enactment of the Federal Anabolic Steroid Control Act, steroids are placed in the Schedule III class of illegal drugs, along with barbiturates, veterinary tranquilizers, and narcotic painkillers?”

“No,” says Mandrake, somewhat sarcastically, “I did not know this. Now can I go back to doing my job?”

“By simply holding the illegal steroids …” Ceepak gestures toward the silent monitor because, I think, all the Fun House kids look pretty much the same to him (muscles, olive skin, too much hair gel).

I help out. “Vinnie.”

“… Vinnie is committing a federal offense, punishable by up to one year in prison and/or a minimum fine of one thousand dollars.”

Mandrake grabs his walkie-talkie. “Rutger? Cut! Hold the roll!”

The camera crews do as they’re told.

“We’re cutting,” squawks out of the radios attached to Layla, Grace, and Mandrake. Even though they’re not spinning digital tape, the cameras are still feeding images to the monitors. The Fun House boys stop yelling at each other. The girls adjust their boobs inside their bikini tops. It’s kind of funny watching the cast when they think they’re not being filmed. It’s real reality. It’s also boring.

“What if that ampule is empty?” asks Layla.

“Come again?” This from Ceepak.

“What if Vinnie is in possession of nothing more than an empty glass bottle with a Skeletor sticker glued to