Blueprints Of The Afterlife Part 11

or the horse pasture in the pictures. Or the smiling kids hunched over their books. I showed it around at the college, no luck. Same for the police station. I hit every bookstore in town and no one recognized it. It seemed I'd exhausted every possible avenue. I thought about heading home. I felt terribly alone. At one point I parked in the middle of some mall's parking lot after midnight and cried. I looked at the brochure for the hundredth time and noticed the name of the print company in tiny type on the back. It was some place called Vision Reprographics in San Francisco. That was my only lead. So the next morning I headed out.

The company wasn't hard to find. They occupied a big industrial building in the Mission District. I showed up with the brochure and asked the woman at the front counter if she knew anything about it. They appeared to print lots of stuff-booklets, concert posters, ad circulars-so I wasn't surprised when she said she didn't know. Was there someone who would know? She introduced me to a young guy named Wyatt Gross. What shocked me about him was that he looked how I would have looked had I shaved and cut my hair. He seemed to be about my age, my height and build, wearing a tight pair of jeans with a flannel s.h.i.+rt tucked in. Hair combed and parted on one side, leather shoes. I imagined for a second that he really was me, living in a reality in which my parents hadn't died. He introduced himself as a project manager, shook my hand, and asked me what he could do to help.

I showed Wyatt the brochure. He studied it intently, turning it over, thumbing the edges. They'd definitely printed it, he told me, but he didn't remember the job. Maybe there were records he could look up to find out who placed the order? Sure, they could do that, but they printed so much stuff and that could take weeks, plus they didn't just give out client information. I was trying to be polite but I was visibly frustrated. He had no reason to be helpful to me. I was just some dirty freak who looked like he'd stumbled out of an R. Crumb comic. Finally I threw up my hands, thanked him for his time, and left. Outside I sat in the van pondering my next move. I had no next move. I looked at the building and wondered if I could break in when they closed. Then a side door opened and Wyatt came out, waved at me, and jogged across the street to where I was parked. He gestured for me to unlock the pa.s.senger door and got in.

"Look," he said, "I don't know who you are. And I shouldn't be talking to you. But I want to help. The only way you're going to get the information you need is to show up tomorrow at eleven and ask to speak to Mr. Nixon. He's a warehouse manager who happens to need an extra hand. You look like you can move boxes, right? Tell him you saw the ad in the Chronicle and are interested in the job. You'll be doing yourself a favor if you take a shower. It pays s.h.i.+t, but don't complain. And don't mention you met me or that we had this conversation. By the way, are you local?"

I told him I'd just gotten here a couple hours before. He shook his head. That wouldn't do. I'd need an address. He told me there were cheap places available in the Tenderloin. I thanked him and he left without another word. That afternoon I rented a room in a purgatorial apartment building, a bathroom-down-the-hall kind of dump. Old alcoholics, prost.i.tutes, everyone a few dollars away from homelessness. I thought it was super, just the kind of texture I needed in my life. The next day I showed up at Vision Reprographics and got the job. The other guys in the warehouse didn't give me a second look. They'd seen so many temporary-type employees come through here and they just figured I'd be gone in a few weeks. Moving boxes of paper around all day. I kept my head down for a month, worked hard, didn't ask too many questions, and figured out the organizational structure of the place.

A month?

Yeah. As soon as I knew I'd be in San Francisco a while I sent a letter to Star telling her not to worry, I was just doing some work and would return soon. Told her I loved her and all that. But I felt sick writing it. Part of me knew we'd never be lovers again but I wasn't really admitting it to myself at that point.

What about Wyatt-did you find out why he wanted to help you?

I found out later, but then, per our arrangement, I kept my distance. He worked in a different part of the building, we ate lunch at different times, we left each other alone. I figured out that every print job got its own file, with the invoice, payment record, and a proof of the finished work. These doc.u.ments were kept in the bas.e.m.e.nt in banker's boxes. The only reason anyone had to go down there was to add another box to the pile. The only organizational rubric they had was by date. I had no way of knowing when the brochure had been printed. It could have been done years before Nick showed it to me. While I was pus.h.i.+ng around the hand truck upstairs, the record I needed was just sitting in one of those boxes. I had to figure out not only an excuse for getting down there, but a method for finding one stupid file in thousands of boxes. Every night I went back to my s.h.i.+tty apartment, tried to tune out the guy loudly vomiting next door, and devised a way to deal with these vast, poorly organized archives. I could be down there for years, I realized. That is, if I was able to gain access and not raise anyone's suspicion in the first place. I considered just getting in the van and heading back to Bainbridge. But at the same time, I had settled into a work routine. The money wasn't great but at least I didn't have to dip into the inheritance anymore. Then one night when I was clocking out Wyatt clapped me on the back. "Luke Piper," he said, like we were old buds. "You got plans for the weekend?" When it became clear a guy like me would have no plans, he invited me to dinner at his and his girlfriend's place.

They lived in a nicer part of town. Nicer in relation to my h.e.l.lhole, anyway. When I knocked on the door I could hear them on the other side. His girlfriend said, "He's here?" In that moment her voice seemed to suggest a history of secret conversations. Her name was Erika Vaux and she was a struggling writer, writing science fiction novels under the name Blanche Ravenwood. Tall woman, bony thin, wearing all black with dangly earrings, one of those jet-black pageboy hairdos. The two of them didn't look like a couple. For one, Erika was several years older than Wyatt. (And who was I to talk?) They were one of those couples where the woman is strikingly less attractive than the man, leading you to imagine that their s.e.x life must be really exotic and fulfilling. She was a woman whose awkward looks are thrown off by an absolutely killer body. You look at that kind of woman and imagine she suffered horribly in middle school, then experienced an epic period of carnal revenge in college. They uncorked some red wine and I almost started crying at how cool it was to sit on a couch and have a conversation with people who were so smart and friendly. Their most benign creature comforts seemed to me extravagant luxuries. Like their full-sized refrigerator. I realized I'd been locked away in my loneliness, enduring brainless work and living in a place where I had to occasionally step over hypodermic syringes. This felt like civilization.

What did you guys talk about?

That first night we just sort of got down our biographical basics. I told them the whole sad story about the mud slide, told them I'd been living with my friend's mom, but initially I left out the s.e.x part. Wyatt gave me a lecture on vitamins. He was one of those guys who talked openly about his colonic flora and based his diet on his blood type. Turns out he had ambitions beyond printing menus and brochures. He was taking cla.s.ses to become a naturopath, though he was quick to say he wasn't really interested in becoming a pract.i.tioner. He was more interested in comparing different medical traditions like homeopathy, Ayurvedic medicine, Chinese medicine. Erika, she'd grown up in Bellingham. In our first conversation it came out that she'd experienced extraterrestrial visitations as a kid. The first one was in a field behind her house. She was nine or ten years old. A cl.u.s.ter of green lights hovered above the field beyond her open window. After a few seconds staring at it, the lights seemed to realize they were being watched and whooshed away. She revealed this about halfway through my first gla.s.s of wine. I'd never met this woman before and she was saying, Hey, have some crackers and Gorgonzola, I was a.n.a.lly probed by an extraterrestrial. Why she was with a guy as seemingly square as Wyatt I couldn't really fathom. And to say that a guy who tried to convince me to give the Paleolithic diet a shot was square really tells you what kind of person I was in those days. I drank another gla.s.s of wine. Wyatt put on a Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy alb.u.m. I was feeling good, laughing for the first time in what felt like years. This couple's kindness sort of enveloped me. Their sympathy about my family situation struck me as genuine. I think we ate a Middle Eastern meal-falafel, hummus, baba ghanoush. I was so grateful for their hospitality. They uncorked another bottle of wine, slipped a Consolidated CD into the player. I perused the half dozen paperbacks Erika had written, asked questions about her writing career. There came a lull in the conversation and Wyatt and Erika looked at each other, then nodded. I was pretty drunk at this point and wasn't going to be getting up from the couch anytime soon. Wyatt disappeared into the bedroom and came out a few seconds later with a small oil painting, holding the painted side against his body.

"Okay, Luke," he said, "I thought you should see this."

He turned the painting around. It was an exact oil depiction of the picture of the Kirkpatrick Academy from the brochure.

What, he'd painted it?

No. The day I stopped by and showed him the brochure, he'd recognized the image but couldn't remember where he'd seen it before. While I'd been moving boxes around for a month he'd been racking his brain trying to figure it out. Then one day he was visiting a coffee shop he hadn't been to in a while and there it was, hanging on the wall in the men's room. He'd looked at this boring painting dozens of times while peeing. The painting clearly wasn't for sale, so impulsively he stole it, sneaking out the back into the alley. When he got it home and explained the whole thing to Erika he realized he'd made a big mistake. Now he couldn't ask the owner of the cafe where it had come from. The only clue we had was the signature, which just said "Squid."

Squid?

As in tentacles, yeah. This would be easy, I told them, all we had to do was call all the art galleries in town and ask if they knew any artists named Squid. Wyatt and Erika shook their heads. They'd already done that. No one had heard of this Squid person. There was no way around it. We had to find the record of that brochure. I told them I doubted the academy even existed but this only stoked our desire to find out why they'd gone through the trouble of printing a fake brochure. By the end of the evening our two systems of curiosity had begun to merge. I finally had some help, some people I could trust. We laid out all the knowns. We had to find Dirk Bickle, locate the record of

the brochure, and track down Squid. Erika suggested we use the Internet. "The what?" I remember saying. We had to ask the cafe owner what she knew about the painting. I came up with the idea of bringing the painting back to the cafe and turning it in. I'd make up a story, tell them I'd seen it next to a Dumpster and remembered that it belonged to the cafe. I also needed to get in touch with Star again to see if Nick had written. I wrote to her and set up a time for her to call me from the Bainbridge Thriftway pay phone. During the day I'd go to work as usual, load and unload trucks, pile pallets of paper with the forklift. Wyatt and I kept our distance at the warehouse but every night I'd be at his place for dinner and we'd hash out the case.

You referred to it as a "case"?

[chuckles] Yeah, like a couple of kid detectives. The first thing I did was attempt to get in touch with the cafe. Wyatt gave me the address and I showed up one afternoon with the painting under my arm, only to find the place being remodeled. The cafe had gone out of business and was being converted into an Irish pub called McGillicutty's or Shamrock O'Flannigan's or something. The workers referred me to the foreman, who referred me to the owner of the pub, a jittery little guy smoking two cigarettes at once who thought I was looking for a job. I don't think I explained myself too well. I must have made a bad impression, pointing emphatically at a painting of a building and talking about squids and human potential. Finally, just to get rid of me, he gave me the name of the former cafe owner, Sh.e.l.ley Wiggins. I found the nearest phone book and tracked her down. I called, but no answer, so I drove to the address, arriving just in time to see an ambulance out front, with-I s.h.i.+t you not-a couple paramedics coming down the steps carrying a sheet-covered body on a stretcher.

Sh.e.l.ley Wiggins?

Yep. She lived by herself in one of those thin little San Francisco town houses. They found her dangling from a rafter by an extension cord. I figured out where the funeral service was going to be, thinking cafe employees would show up who I might ask about the painting. When I got to the cemetery, no one was there, and after asking around at the main office I found I'd gotten the day wrong. It had been the day before.

Meanwhile, Erika was unable to track down any Dirk Bickles on the Internet. Actually, she did find one, but he

was a ten-year-old kid living in East Bay. Wyatt, meanwhile, was starting to comb through the Vision Reprographics archives. He had more legitimate reasons for being down there than I did, and kept inventing excuses. He started flipping through ten years of boxes, one box at a time. A week went by. No luck.

After some missed connections I got the call from Star and we had a chilly conversation. She was clearly upset I'd been gone so long, didn't understand why I needed to be down there. Besides-and she just sort of dropped this one near the end of the conversation-Nick was home now. In fact, he was standing beside her. He got on the phone and said, "What's up, Luke?" I must've stammered for a while. He said, "Why do you keep looking for me, Luke? What are you hoping to find, Luke?" He kept saying my name, which really creeped me out. I had no good answer. Why did I want to find him? He said, "Your search really isn't about me. It's about getting off on the unknown. You want to be part of something. You suspect there's some big secret you're not in on and it kills you. You're not part of anything. You're not one

of the selected. You're just some crazy dirt-head being an

idiot in the Bay Area. You have no idea how much of an a.s.s you're making of yourself. You have no idea how many people

are watching you, laughing their heads off. Quit being stupid, Luke. Apply to college and get a good job. Get married

and have kids. Die surrounded by loved ones. That's your fate."

"What are they doing to you, Nick?" I asked him.

"There is no 'they,'" he said. "There is only 'we.' What we are doing is bigger and more important than anything you will ever get involved in. I don't mean to taunt you. There's still time for you to go off and have a successful life."

"You're not being yourself," I told him.

"I'm more myself than I've ever been," he said. "I am so thoroughly myself it isn't even funny."

"Who's Squid?" I asked.

"How do you know about Squid?" There was a little edge of panic in his voice.

I told him we were going to find him.

He laughed and said, "And then what, man?"

I told him I didn't know yet, but I could tell whatever he was doing was dangerous. The conversation went in circles like this for a while, like some junior-high-level film noir project. Through it all I had this suspicion that he was right. I was never going to be in on what he was doing. And you know what? Part of me really didn't care anymore. Almost accidentally I had started to build a life for myself in San Francisco. I had a job, I had friends. The place I lived in wasn't much to speak of, but I knew I could go in on a house with some roommates if I wanted to. The thought of going back to Bainbridge made me sick to my stomach. So I said good-bye to Nick, seemingly for good. I looked around my studio apartment with the bare mattress on the floor with no fitted sheet, my dirty clothes piled in a corner, paperbacks everywhere, and saw that I had been presented with a choice. The first thing I did was visit the nearest drugstore and buy a hair clipper. Back at my place I shaved off the beard and clipped my hair down to about a half-inch fuzz. If I was really going to find out what Nick

and Bickle and Kirkpatrick were doing, I needed to change my whole life. I needed discipline, routine, and patience. Most of all, I needed lots of money. Lucky for me, I was living in San Francisco and it was the middle of the 1990s.

NEETHAN F. JORDAN.

An image materializes: framed by the open limousine door, the red carpet stretches past a phalanx of press to the vanis.h.i.+ng point. Neethan f.u.c.king Jordan steps from the private interior of his transportation into this real-time, flash-lit, and filmed public spectacle, the red path slas.h.i.+ng wound-like across the parking lot, the rented polyester fiber unfurled alongside a barricade behind which photographers and camera crews wait enc.u.mbered with their gear. To his right stands a vinyl backdrop some ten feet high printed with thousands of logos for Season Four of Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin. Neethan models a pair of black sungla.s.ses, prototypes from his line. His face tingles from a facial. Two Altoids effervesce on his tongue. The product holding his hair in a swept-back wave is composed of organic materials harvested from ten countries, six of them war zones. Black pants, jacket, leather shoes crafted by hand in a little-known region of Italy where livestock still wander dirt roads, a white starched s.h.i.+rt with the top b.u.t.ton unb.u.t.toned. Neethan is a tall dude, six-eight, and watching him come out of a limo is like watching a cleverly designed j.a.panese toy robot arachnid emerge from a box, propelling a torso on which nods his head, across which is splashed a smile of idealized teeth, teeth so gleaming you could brush your own teeth looking into them, teeth that still look fantastic blown up two stories tall on the side of a building, a s.e.xual promise to nameless fans encoded in bicuspid, molar, incisor, and canine. The arm rises, a wave, a h.e.l.lo, an acknowledgment that the a.s.sembled journalists exist and through the conduits of their cameras exist the public. Neethan F. Jordan has arrived!

As these things go, the first twenty or so yards of carpet are reserved for photographers. Crammed three deep, the back two rows of shutterbugs wobble on progressively taller step ladders. They scream his name over and over as if he might mistakenly turn to face the backdrop. This part used to perplex him. Obviously they have his attention, he knows he is expected to pose. Why the name yelling? Ah, but here's why-by yelling his name so voraciously they make it impossible for him not to smile. Neethan pivots, does an open-mouthed smile like what crazy freakin' fans!, transforms his fingers into guns, transitions into mock-angry . . . into slightly amused . . . into humbled . . . into ecstatic . . . each expression provoking cl.u.s.ter bombs of flashes. He imagines photo editors clicking to find the right image to complement the editorial slant of the accompanying 150 words.

"People! Yes!" Neethan exclaims and that's all it takes for the shouting to boil over, rising to Beatlemania temperatures among the photogs. Pointing out individuals behind the spastically stuttering cameras, he says, "Jimmy! Isamu! Marti, you dress so s.e.xy! I can hardly take it!"

Out of the many things Neethan can't fathom, what he most can't fathom is anonymity. He knew it only briefly as a child. The vast unfilmed, the people n.o.body knows anything about, are conceptually exotic to him. The only time he gets close to understanding how it might feel to be unfamous is when he plays one of them. In those instances he is expected to empathize with the plights of migrant farm laborers and other people doing, you know, stuff like that. He can't tell anymore whether he's done something to instigate his fame or whether he has merely been chosen as its filter. Fame is a sticky, candy-like substance; a river of it courses through his life. It is as close to religion as he will ever likely get. Of course the kicker is he lived in a group home in Seattle until the age of six and has never known his birth parents. The staff at the group home couldn't agree on what he was, ethnicity-wise. Filipino? Mexican? Whatever it was it had brown skin and black hair and a honker of a nose. As a kid the nose had haunted and shamed him until the rest of his Cubist handsome face rose around it like a village maturing around a cathedral. Then one day a woman named Mrs. Priest showed up. The hope that she would be his mom lasted about fifteen minutes. Nope, he was being hustled to another group home of sorts, the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential, where he wouldn't have to clean toilets or empty trash. He was only expected to become one thing: famous.

At present a lithe form appears un.o.btrusively in Neethan's periphery. He speaks sideways through a motionless smile, "I suppose you're Beth-Anne."

"Yes, Mr. Jordan," says the a.s.sistant publicist. She wears a $4,000 dress and a lanyard with a laminated card indicating she belongs on this side of the barrier. Brunette, b.o.o.bs. She takes his arm and leads him a few feet down the carpet to the first of the television crews.

"This is Access Hollywood," Beth-Anne whispers. "Geri McDonald-Reese, reporter."

As the words enter his ear Neethan is already extending his hand and broadening his smile, providing full-on gums now, processing Beth-Anne's info concurrently as he speaks. "Access f.u.c.kin' Hollywood! h.e.l.l yeah! I haven't seen you since the premiere of The Barack Obama Story!"

Was this the slightest blush from Geri? One of the A-list celeb reporters, bordering on famous herself, she is rumored to have been canoodling on yachts with a qputer-technology magnate. She swims through celebrity like a little amphibian, accustomed to imbibing from the medicine cabinets of capital-n Names. She's wearing Michel D'Archangel; Neethan recognizes the jacket from the fall show. Her camera guy hovers over one shoulder, partially obscured in shadow. Maybe it isn't a blush. Maybe she isn't so blown away that he remembers she exists, as the less evolved reporters downstream will be.

"Neethan," she says, "let's do this, shall we?"

"Roll it."

Geri speaks into the microphone. "I'm here with Neethan Jordan at the Season Four premiere of Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin, the preapocalyptic thriller created by Burke Ripley. Neethan, tell us a bit about your character-"

"Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin, Season Four, is the latest season in the award-winning Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin franchise. I play Dr. Uri Borden, a clone scientist who gets involved in the uprising and must decide whether to abort the messiah. It's a thought-provoking series, featuring state-of-the-art effects and wall-to-wall action, with more than a little tenderness."

Geri says, "Tell me a bit about what it was like working with director Burke Ripley."

Here it's appropriate for Neethan to take his hand and place it on his forehead, sweeping his hair back in a gesture that communicates having survived challenging, creatively rewarding work. "What can I say about Burke? He's a genius." Neethan remembers, then pretends to remember, an anecdote, chuckling. "You know, everyone thinks of Burke as this intense, driven guy, but he's got a playful side to him as well. We happened to be shooting on Halloween and he showed up to the set dressed as me." Neethan laughs at his own not very funny anecdote. Message: I can make fun of myself despite my perfection: I am more like you in this regard: it's safe for you to like me: please desire me: please give me your money for the honor of desiring me. "I mean, he had the gla.s.ses, the hair. He even got my makeup girl to match the skin tone. Walked around the set that morning grinning like an idiot, just like me. Hilarious."

What was that, about eight seconds of dialogue? He figures the piece will probably run one minute. Intro, red carpet montage, a bite from him, preview clip, bite from a costar, more montage, closing summary.

Presently, from Beth-Anne: "Tom Parsons, Fox Entertainment News."

"Tom!" Neethan says, arm cantilevering from his trunk, using the handshake as a Judo-esque method of pulling this Tom character closer, slapping him on the back in the kind of hug grown men give their dads. He has never met this guy. Clearly someone on the downward slope, career-wise, probably accustomed to reporting hard news, probably glorified those FUS days when reporters braced against hurricanes or emoted beside a slag heap that up till then had been a megamall. Now he was feeding the machine that barked for nubile starlets to release their gynecological records. Tom Parsons, graying at the temples, doing his professional best to convey a sense of levity, failing for the most part, probably owing to the fact that he'd never been within p.i.s.sing distance of the caliber of celebrity that was Neethan f.u.c.king Jordan. (Real middle name, btw. He'd had it changed legally around the release of Legislative Deception.) Tom says, "Harvey, you ready? Rolling? Okay. Neethan! I understand you just started a new philanthropic venture."

Neethan's lips fall around his smile. He c.o.c.ks his head to one side, a little low, eyes raised semiwaif-like. "Thanks for asking, Tom. The Neethan f.u.c.king Jordan Foundation has a simple goal-help kids to stop abusing the Bionet and stop becoming each other's embodiments . . ." Neethan's mind goes into another room and cracks a Bud as he recites his spiel about the nonprofit that bears his name. There is one part of him that moves his mouth while another part imagines a highlight reel of Tom's career. Here is Tom the young reporter blubbering and weeping into a wind-sc.r.a.ped microphone before a scene of utter smoking devastation. "Oh, my G.o.d! All of Atlanta! Holy f.u.c.king s.h.i.+t! Oh, people, dear Jesus Christ, we're all going to die! Get me the f.u.c.k out of here!" A few more clips like this pa.s.s through Neethan's head, shots of Tom on a makes.h.i.+ft raft on a vast expanse of polluted water, confiding in the camera that he'd just consumed his dead cameraman's thigh. There's only so much of this FUS footage Neethan can imagine so he logs out. ". . . because, uh, when you give a child a future, you give humanity a future," he concludes.

Tom seems satisfied with the answer and asks what the new season is about.

"Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin, Season Four, is the latest in the award-winning Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin franchise. I play Dr. Uri Borden, a clone scientist who gets involved in the uprising and must decide whether to abort the messiah. It's a thought-provoking series, featuring state-of-the-art effects and wall-to-wall action, with more than a little tenderness. Thanks so much!"

According to Beth-Anne, the next reporter is Nico Renault from Hollywood j.a.pan Network. Nico's recently had his face tattooed to look like the Kabuki-made-up Gene Simmons of the pre-FUS rock band Kiss. He wears his hair in bright blond spikes. He also wears the body of a cow suit without the head, the rubber udders protruding at crotch level, lending the getup a rather multip.e.n.i.sed look. Neethan remembers Nico from when he hosted f.u.c.k Show. He'd been a guest once, on the same night as the recently defrosted Ted Williams. The slugger had stolen Neethan's thunder and the movie star still resented the whole disaster. During the skill-testing segment of the program, Williams had outperformed Neethan in a contest where they dressed up as porcupines and raced through a labyrinth trying to spear as many apples as they could with their spines, with each apple representing $10,000 given to the charity of their choice. Thanks to thawed Ted Williams's skills, a few hundred kids in the Dominican Republic now had protective eye wear. Not one of Neethan's finer PR moments. The blogosphere had chortled at the clips of him rolling around in the porcupine suit seemingly incapable of spearing an apple. But he'd been doing a lot more drinking in those days and had been adjusting to the LA/Tokyo jet lag. He'd vowed never to do f.u.c.k Show again.

"Neethan Jordan! Tell me about the size of your b.a.l.l.s!" Nico says.

"Nice ink, Nico," Neethan says, in no mood to play along. "You still molesting little Malaysian boys?"

"Neethan Jordan! When are you going to perform penetration again?"

"You're still on the air?"

"Neethan Jordan! Please tell us when you will f.u.c.k for the world once again!"

"I'm surprised you made it to this position on the red carpet. I thought you'd be stuck with the Icelandic-language print journalists."

"Neethan Jordan! j.a.pan wants to know! When are you to finally decide to get your nipples pierced!"

"I still think Ted Williams had an advantage."

"Neethan Jordan! Please say a few words about your show!"

"Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin, Season Four, is the latest in the award-winning Stella Artaud: Newman a.s.sa.s.sin franchise. I play Dr. Uri Borden, a clone scientist who gets involved in the uprising and must decide whether to abort the messiah. It's a thought-provoking series, featuring state-of-the-art effects and wall-to-wall action, with more than a little tenderness."

"Neethan Jordan! j.a.pan says keep on rocking and rolling!"

Into the camera: "And you keep rocking and rolling, too, j.a.pan."