It's Hard To Be Holy

EP. 3: The Author (Cont'd)

Some coarse language; Reader Discretion Advised.

In every culture, from the northern most icicle to the southern most tundra, there have been certain names that have graced our collective conscious. Names that mean something. Names of legends. It is through legends that a society connects to its past, how it understands itself, how it rationalizes the concept of a 'higher power'. Let us look for a moment at Western culture, for this story will have much to do with modern, Western culture, which at present is most closely associated with America.

In the beginning, Americans gathered in worship around tales of heroism and bravery. They flocked to the stories of George Washington, Christopher Columbus, Abraham Lincoln and Lewis and Clark. The truth of these men meant little, and was willfully lost to the fantastical realities spun out over every fire lit campsite and backwoods tavern. No one wanted truth. They wanted inspiration, and for generations the roots of these mythical characters flourished until fiction became reality, and reality a Judas to the honor of the country. Yet time, as it does, passed, and with the dawn of the Age of Information and Critical Thinking and Politicization, the legends were primarily abandoned for something more tangible and instantaneous. Hero worship was no longer reserved for stories of honor and adventure, but adapted to fit the term 'celebrity'. A special kind of 'Celebrity', one that is easily bottled and packaged and sold. 'Celebrity' that is built up and revered, and then torn down as quickly as it came, only to be replaced by a newer, fresher 'celebrity'. It comes and goes at a whim. You absorb and disregard it with leisure, and it costs you nothing. No thought, no joy or sorrow, no lessons. It is merely a simple, sadistic distraction. It is to Americana what gladiators in the Coliseum were to the Romans, and above all things, 'celebrity', unlike legend is attainable. Rich and poor and middle-class can all pine for it in equal measure.

Everybody wants to be a 'celebrity'.

Everybody can be a 'celebrity'.

But Alan Carr somehow rose above all tawdriness.

Alan Carr was different.

Alan Carr was untouchable.

His face, thin and swarthy, was the most recognized in the 50 states. His voice, graveled and husky, the most heard in the world. Everyone, from the smallest child, to the most wizened elder wanted a piece of the man. He was a bountiful meal that seemed to never grow stale, that fed the hungry and desperate, a meal of familiarity, yet different and delectable with every bit. You dream of him. You pin your hopes on him. You damn near pray to Alan Carr. He is everything you want, and everything you will never be.

But how had Alan come to be this way?

Nobody knew for sure. It seemed as if he'd always been around. An almost divine figure, for only the divine intervention could propel such a figure to these extreme heights of popularity and renown, and keep him there, decade after decade, untouched by a drab and fickle world. Of course you, the rational reader, might raise a skeptical eyebrow to these lofty descriptions, but what you must understand is that the fever and mania of Alan Carr was tantamount to such feelings as a dictator, newly anointed, would receive from their population. Alan Carr could have been a dictator if he'd wanted, but he shunned such boorish and basic notoriety. He preferred to operate under a cloak of mystery, a carefully cultivated cloak that covered every magazine, news outlet, and media platform; on every screen, in every eyeball from the New York offices of Lumières, to the flattest hellscape of Timbuktu. It made him so much more interesting than a some 'celebrity'. It made him—

'Another egotistical, chauvinistic—he's such a fucking bastard!' Ms. Blanchet went on. 'But nobody cares. People just lap it up! Lap, lap, lap—it's sickening!'

'Mm,' said the Author, thinking it best not to point out Ms. Blanchet's culpability to the sin of lapping.

'There's a special place in hell for men like him. Isn't there?!'

'Mmm,' said the Author a second time. For all of her education, there was some faint feeling of shame at the sacrilege that spewed from Ms. Blanchet. A remnant feeling of the Author's youth, more specifically a single day when she'd once voiced the opinion at dinner that Alan Carr really wasn't all that good of a singer. Her mother had proceeded to curse the Author out so thoroughly and explicitly that whenever she spoke of Alan Carr again, she did it in near the same reverence as she would use for Jesus Christ Himself.

'Ah, Darling,' continued Ms. Blanchet, lighting her 3:35 cigarette and blowing the smoke over her shoulder in an aggravated way. 'I can smell a game from a mile away. I wouldn't be me if I couldn't. And he is playing a game! I know him better than most. He thinks he's going to have his little fun with me. Well, I'm telling you, he can rot in hell! We're going to expose the fucker!'
Ms. Blanchet then descended into one of her notorious 'expose him!' rants, and the Author could barely hold in her sigh of disappointment. She'd been called into the office, not for a real assignment worth real money, but for yet another negligible task of coming up with an article that tactfully slandered the Great Carr. In the 15 years she'd slaved away at Lumières, the Author must have written a hundred different columns that mad some opaque reference to the legend and his wild younger days. The article itself didn't have to be related to Alan Carr, it could be on any subject. A 'Return to 80s Fashion', or 'Synthesizers in Modern Music', as long as the piece contained at least one reference to 'cocaine' and 'heady nights' and 'Alan Carr'.

The antagonism that existed between Ms. Blanchet and His High Holiness was notorious and cantankerous and vibrantly vicious. Those who knew the origins of the acrimonious relationship were either long, or recently, dead, and thus, had taken the secret to the grave. But still, the death of witnesses only gives rise to the birth of rumors, and to use Ms. Blanchet's term, rumors are far more 'delicious'. Rumors of wild and passionate love affairs, of betrayal and heartbreak, of closeted secrets and jilted brides, of warm and passionate men and the frigid bitches they love. For all her success and achievement, from rags to riches, ignorance to enlightenment, Emily Blank to Emmaline Blanchet, a calculation had been made without the editor's consent. A societal decision. Successful though she was, Ms. Blanchet would only be remembered as a footnote in the more potent and entertaining story of the 'greater' man. She was simply a device of no great consequence. The more successful her and her empire became, the more formidable the rumors and rivalry and one-sided acrimony grew, until Ms. Blanchet made a calculation of her own. If she was never going to escape the shadow of the one and only Alan Carr, then she would prosper from it. She would play the perpetual skeptic to his exemplary talent for captivation. It didn't have to be a perfect role, nor even glamorous. It just had to sell. It is true to say that a good percentage of her readership only bought her magazines to feel enraged by the defamation of their idol.

'Expose him,' muttered Ms. Blanchet darkly.

'How do we do that?' asked the Author in what she hoped was a respectful tone. Think of the money, she urged herself. Keep thinking of the money!

'We're going to take whatever game he thinks he can play and we're going to turn it around on him. We're going to trap him.'

Really, thought the Author, why do all old people act like children? What happened to the notion that with age comes wisdom? No, she pleaded with herself, now more forcefully, just think of the money! 'What game...exactly?'

Ms. Blanchet leaned back out of the sun, her pointed chin suddenly jutting towards the Author. 'He wants to do an interview.'