I don’t know why they love me so much. They’ve all got smiles plastered to their heads and all of their beady eyes have found me as a focal point. It is amazing for me to watch these people, who’ve gathered in a horde, just to sit together behind the cameras and cheer for every single remark I make. If I remark negatively about somebody they fancy, they cheer for me. If I remark, in any way, about something they’ve never heard of, they cheer for me. Just me walking onto the stage drives them wild; they stand and flail their arms and they scream and whistle, just for me. They love me.

It wouldn’t be inaccurate to consider their gathering together in this building as some form of worship.
Making eye-contact with them is a rare occasion; I usually reserve eye-contact for those less-fortunate souls at home, sunk into their sofas, watching me through an electronic window. Of course, I never actually see their eyes, I just see a tinted, bulbous piece of glass that immortalizes me on a slice of film, to be sliced up and re-born at a later moment in time, in the context of dish-soap and Viagra commercials. Those people at home, halfway through their box of ice cream, delicately mixing the fine tastd met lee ee of salted excess with the gentle bite of dollar beer, those people see my eyes and its magic for them. Do they stand up and flail and scream and whistle when I first step foot into their electric window frame, onto the monologue stage? To be perfectly honest, I can’t imagine a scenario otherwise.

The lights aimed at me are bright enough to make eye-contact with the crowd almost impossible. They are always bright enough to draw a bead of sweat from the side of my head. That droplet of perspiration is my cue to cut the monologue short, sometimes in half, and introduce my first guest. The crowd will never know what joke I had saved for the end, but I’d rather them live in ignorance of that than in awareness of that beaded sweat. That drip of anxiety, of imperfection. They would sweat down their face in my position, in front of all these lights and all this love; the fact that they, too, would do it is, in fact, the reason I must hide it from them. I would be just like one of them. I would be able to sit in a herd, gawking like a baby zebra at a big, beautiful giraffe, lavishing every word some Harvard graduate reads off of a teleprompter. I wasn’t meant to sit there, with them. I wasn’t born to do that. I was born to be broadcast to them, placed in their living room and their bedrooms, inviting them so graciously to watch me speak and make witty conversation.

I took a seat behind the desk and introduced my first guest. This is always the worst part, greeting some newcomer to my religious pedestal only to hear them cheered for louder than I, worshipped with more soul than I. Why? This lady is no god, she’s just another brainless diva, granted a minute of fame among her very specific division of the cosmos and yet they cheer for her. They cheer louder for her than do they for me.

She walked onto the stage, waving like some fucking politician, mirroring back all of those dumb monkey smiles, sparkling with her dress and her hair and her unnatural white teeth. They cheer for her. They whistle. Somehow, it’s like the crowd has multiplied in mass; from the sound of my monologue, there were 150 people in the crowd; from the sound of her entrance alone, I would have guessed there were 400 people here.

I hate her so much.

I’ve had practice at this, though. Its part of what I do, keeping the smile, keeping civil, drowning all of my hate in a pool of bright lights and orchestrated laughter.

She made some snide, arrogant remark, assuming I’d want to have sex with her. My reply was drowned out by the herd, as they screamed obnoxiously, and she turned her head to smile and giggle at them in flattery. I didn’t want to have sex with her. Not even in a dream. The crowd however, so rudely believed she was talking to them and took it upon themselves to reply incoherently with hollers and claps. Of course, they all wanted to have sex with her. Even the women.

Bitches like her are how they define beauty. Symmetry doesn’t matter, the dress doesn’t matter, and
the walk doesn’t matter. She and her kind define the symmetry, the dress and walk. If you make enough money and suck enough dicks around Tinsel-Town, you stop looking beautiful and beautiful starts looking like you. She didn’t know this. The crowd didn’t know this. If they did, it may cause the whole infrastructure we’ve built to reduce itself into crumbs. So, of course we don’t talk about this on the show. We talk about bullshit. We talk about her product. People watching this thinking they’re watching a conversation between two stars; they are wrong. A normal conversation can’t be had in front of a crowd, 9 cameras and 25 timed lights. So, we replace that conversation with a commercial. The guests and I find it much less straining to ‘talk’ about their most current release. It’s good for business all around, more people watch her movie because I talk about it, and more people watch my show because she’s on here, talking about her movie. It’s a well-maintained little cycle we have.

Our few minutes of conversation passed and we were granted to speak without microphones, in private. Neither of us spoke. She did something on her cell-phone and I had a cigarette. At home, some million fools asked each other “I wonder if they’re going to hook up after the show.” No, we did not and will not. I have no interest in women or men, especially that of a ‘sexual’ nature. The extent of my relationship with them is the extent you see on the screen.

I put the cigarette out before the cameras began rolling again, and hid the ash-tray in a place well-hidden from the health-freaks who could endanger the show’s ratings. I politely asked her to, more or less, get the hell away from my desk so the next guest could sit by me and engage in what the studio executives like to call “Talk.” She did, of course. She is used to men with ties telling her what to do, where to sit, what to say, what to suck, how to bend, where to lay, what to say, how to say it and most importantly: when to leave. She left the seat and I introduced the next guest. He was, unsurprisingly, a fashionable, good looking man. The crowd loved him so much that I think I felt my stomach bleed.

Some barely-legal girl in the audience caught the actor’s attention and he pointed and winked to her numerous times before sitting down so as to let the security guards know that’d he like to find her in his dressing room after the show.

I shook his hand and he took a seat. I am used to beginning the conversation, asking the first question, but he took it upon himself to do this first. As a result, I took it upon myself to ignore his opening remarks and sip from my mug full of air. I made it look like the air was really hot.
He may have asked me a question; I’m not sure, because after he was done speaking, he just looked at me. I don’t know what he said, but the crowd found it hilarious. So did the actress. I looked to the director for guidance and he just motioned me to keep talking.

I began asking him a question, and before I even finished asking, the smug little son-of-a-bitch cut me off with a question of his own.

“What gives us this aura of phosphorescence?” He asked me. I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Yeah,” he said, “I know ‘phosphorescence’ is a big word for a blond actor.”

“It’s a big word for me!” I said and laughed. The crowd didn’t laugh. My arrogance had crept through and now everybody in the world could see it. They all hate me. I kept the civil face behind the desk.

“What, I mean,” he said, “is…well, look at this crowd.”

I looked. I could only see silhouettes of their hatred.

“They look at us like we’re gods. They cheer on our unfunny jokes like a teenage boy hoping to get laid. They gawk and go ‘awe’ over what we wear and praise us for our fashion sense when we don’t even pick out what it is we’re going to wear! I got into this scene a year ago and before then I’d look at the people on TV and on the silver screen, well, like they were gods. They had achieved this status of class and eloquence and they had become immortal through some art medium or some magazine. When I finally broke into the scene, had my face tucked onto a magazine cover with an inane rumor written beneath it, I didn’t feel any different. My flesh didn’t turn to crackers; my blood didn’t turn to wine. Is it just the fact that our names will be known longer than the average persons? The fact that our movements could still be seen after we die on some movie screen?”

I wanted so badly to interrupt him, but I felt every word on my tongue melt and slide, with great burn, down my throat.

“I’m actually asking you,” he told me. “Are we seen as Gods?”

I put on the modest face and the modest voice: “I really doubt it, I mean–”

Then he interrupted me. “All of these people have to make a God out of something. Look at it, they’ll make one out of the sun or the stars or the moon or the ocean, but to make one out of a person? That’s just irresponsible. The sun is not capable of as much ugliness as a person, nor is the moon or the ocean. So what is it? Is it just because we look at a magazine cover or a movie screen, and since we see a person we think ‘that could be me?’ If so, I understand this a little bit more. I mean, your chances of becoming a celebrity are really low—and I mean REALLY low—but they are a lot higher than your chances of becoming the ocean or the moon.”

I took a sip from my air. I looked at him. He made eye contact with me and I broke it immediately, looking straight to the camera for a second and then into my empty coffee mug. He looked at the crowd and continued talking.

“Seriously, don’t get so excited that I’m talking to you right now, I just want an answer. Why do you people care about my divorce? Why do you care what I named my kids? I don’t know any of you! Why do you need to know what I’m wearing or who I’m fucking? What does it do for you?”

I had never heard the crowd so silent.

“Turn off the cameras,” I said. The director shook his head at me.

“TURN THE FUCKING CAMERA OFF!” I told him. The lights dimmed and the holy vessel that was immortalizing me and my guests stopped capturing images. Somewhere on some millions of TVs there was a screen that said something about ‘technical difficulties.’ Everybody at home would be stupid enough to assume some camera or cable broke. I believe in their stupidity.

“Come with me,” I told the actor. What I was going to talk to him about was not something the crowd was meant to hear.

“Why? I thought we were supposed to talk here. Isn’t that why they call this a Talk Show?”

“Listen to me you little shit, if you think you can just fucking walk onto my stage, in front of my cameras and my audience and try to belittle the entire institution we’ve set up, you have another thing coming.”

“And what is that?” He asked me

I felt violence on my tongue. I turned and saw the crowd. They reminded me of my coffee mug.