Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan Page B

bearded fellow who was doing the shots with us, as well as several on his own, and whose surname must have been Flangey, to blurt out, “Or be FLANGEY…” But I hadn’t done that many shots, and to me the Miz looked pumped. Later, however, he would write in his online diary that he’d been nervous, for the simple reason that I was there, with my notepad and my judgments and my dubious but sincere claim of being a “hard-core fan” of MTV’s The Real World and its various spin-off reality series (of which the Miz is perhaps the best-known and best-liked cast member). And although these club-appearance things are usually cool, are typically bumpin’-bumpin’, “sometimes, like, only eight people show,” and the scene gets grim. What if tonight were like that and then it were to be written about in a magazine? That would be a fiasco. Or, as the Miz might put it—has put it, in fact, in describing a separate incident on that selfsame diary—a fiascal.
    He needn’t have worried. The place filled up so fast I thought maybe a bus had arrived. It was like those Asian noodles that explode when they hit hot oil. I went to the bathroom in quiet calm, and when I came back, there was hardly room to lift your drink. It was jumpin’-jumpin’. There were loads of the sort of girls who, when dudes ask them to show their breasts and asses, show their breasts and asses. One girl—a beautiful Indian girl who couldn’t have been older than nineteen; I wanted to call a cop and have him drive her home—requested to have her right breast signed. The Miz was given a Magic Marker. He showed, I must say, admirable concentration on his penmanship. Another of these girls—a Hooters employee who was saving up for college in a not-too-nearby town—had driven a long way alone.
    “I’m here just to see the Miz,” she said, but there was a line to talk to him now, of both chicks and dudes, and she’d seen that the Miz and I were bros, so she kicked it with me for a while.
    “Are you a fan of the show?” I asked her.
    “Oh yeah,” she said, “I’ve already seen MJ here, and Cameran [two other, more recent Real World faves]. There’s been a bunch of Real World people here.”
    “I’ve been watching it since high school,” I said.
    “Oh, me too!” she said.
    Then I reflected that, for me, this meant since the show debuted; for her, it meant since last season; which in turn caused me to reflect mournfully on what a poseur she was. Did she even remember the Miz’s cast? Probably she knew him only from The Real World/Road Rules Challenge , which—although he is awesome on that—is not the best place to get insight into what makes him such a powerful fun-generator.
    On the other hand, this young lady was a veteran of the club-appearance scene, and tonight was my first time. If a little hoochie tunnel leading straight to the Miz’s presence hadn’t opened right at that moment, causing her to sprint from my side and toward his, I was going to ask her, “What’s this all about?” Because she belonged to this thing I’d heard rumors of, what I’d come to get a peep at: this little bubble economy that The Real World and its less-entertaining mutant twin, Road Rules (essentially Real World in an RV), have made around themselves.
    I don’t know how ready you are to admit your familiarity with the show and everything about it, so let me go through the motions of pretending to explain how it operates. Once a Real World season ends, the cast members who have emerged during the filming as the popular ones (a status that can be achieved through hotness, all-American likability, and/or unusually blatant behavioral disorders) are invited into a shadow world that exists just below the glare of the series itself. This world has many rooms of its own: club appearances (like this one in Chapel Hill), spring break (which is essentially an amplified version of the club appearance, at one or another beach resort, with several bars and