Going Bovine

A group of television-perfect teens in headsets and bathing suits work the crowd.

“Hey, would you like to be on our TV show?” a girl in a yellow flowered bikini and an edgy black haircut asks. She’s got a clipboard in her hands and a kitty-cat pen that looks like it should belong to a third grader.

“We have to find somebody …,” I say, craning my neck.

“Can you just answer some quick questions, then? Please? It would totally help me out?”

“Go for it. Don’t worry about me,” Gonzo says. He’s looking over at a group of tattooed guys smoking cigarettes. His video-game geek monitor must have picked up their signals.

The girl smiles at me. “Please?”

“Just a sec,” I tell her. To Gonzo I say, “Okay. But keep a low profile. We’ll meet up in an hour over there by the stage. Got it?”

“Stage. One hour,” he says. He walks right over to those guys and starts talking. It’s the amazing thing about Gonzo. For all his weird-ass phobias about dying, he’s absolutely fearless about people.

“Ready?” the girl asks, taking my arm.

“Guess so,” I say, following her into the Party House.

“What’s your name?” she asks, leading me into a gigantic, glassed-in living room where we have to squeeze between sweaty dancers. I can barely hear her over the thumping bass line of the music.

“Cameron,” I say. “What’s yours?”

“Iphigenia,” she shouts.

We leave the living room and enter a kitchen area, where some kids are reading from scripts for a table of three judges. The judges give them notes about reading “more pissed-off” or “let’s create drama.”

“What’s that?” I whisper.

“Oh,” Iphigenia says. “We’re casting for a realitymercial. It’s like a reality TV show mixed with an infomercial. If you like what you see happening here, you can call the 1-800 number and order up any of the custom-made lives demonstrated by the characters and, you know, try them on for size.”

“Custom-made lives?”

“Yeah. We send you the clothes and the name and the backstory. So you can be the troubled kid from the trailer park who comes with the Wrestle Craziness! package. Or the bright, hopeful inner-city kid of Dope I. Am. The wardrobe and sound track for that one are killer. Or the rich heiress of Envy Me. That one comes complete with a small dog and a cell phone that you can have surgically attached to your wrist. And there’s Gosh, I’m Lucky, which is the innocent country girl with the awesome singing voice. That tested huge.”

Iphigenia pushes open a door to a small office space and offers me a chair in front of a desk. She slips into the chair behind the desk. Something’s ringing.

“Excuse me for a sec.” She locates the ringing device and attaches herself to a headset. “This is Iphigenia. Uh-huh … uh-huh … do you want the Rad XL, the Rad Diet, the Rad Sport, or the Rad Clear and Brite?” Iphigenia makes some notes on a pad with her kitty pen. “Nuclear!” she says brightly, and hangs up.

I’m still puzzling over the realitymercial thing. “I don’t get it. Why would anybody want to order up somebody else’s life?”

Iphigenia looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Why? Because figuring out who you really are is hard work. Why do all that if somebody else has done it for you, if they can tell you who to be? It’s like me with Iphigenia.” She whispers, “That’s not my real name.”

“No?”

“No. My real name? Ann. Jones.” She rolls her eyes and giggles. “Can you imagine anything more boring? Yeah, Ann Jones is not going to get behind the velvet rope. So I changed it. I read that name in some Fake It! Notes and liked it.”

“You know, the Greeks sacrifice Iphigenia. So they can get home.”

She lights up. “Hey, so it has a tragic feel to it? Big drama name. I love that!”

“But why not just be who you are?”

“Hello!” she says, pushing away from the desk and twirling around in the rolling chair till she’s facing me again. “Nobody wants to be themselves. That’s why there’s TV. So you know what to want and who to be. That’s what I did. I mean, Ann Jones? Ann Jones played flute in marching band, okay? Ann Jones’s future was going to include a good state college and a few boyfriends and, you know, like maybe a used compact car to get to her job at a yogurt shop. But Iphigenia, one name, is, like, a totally different person. She’s ethnically ambiguous—you’re like, ‘Is she Afro-Greek-Japo-Indian chic?’ She has a dad who had a slight alcohol problem, which gives her street cred, and a mom who used to model in her native country, wherever that is, which makes her hot. She wears the latest jeans and everybody copies her. Everybody listens to her and sees her and wants to be her. I mean, you’re nobody unless everybody knows who you are.”