The Lightning Rod (or, The Celebrity)
/Izzy Ampil
Before all this – before this record-dry high desert summer you’ve spent couchbound, before the funeral, before the crash, before you learned how to brew moonshine in the basement cupboard with your neighbor’s brother’s friend – you were really good at tennis.
I’m thinking about it as I watch you nestle in your easy chair. Sitting knees-to-chin, you look like Mom, especially with your big hair and purple nightgown. You’re still young, which – forgive me – it seems like you forget sometimes. You’re young enough to have a second life.
You tell me lately you’ve been watching The Masked Singer. You watched all five seasons last month, and then you watched them all again. I believe you, but you scroll through your DVR to show me anyway. I can’t tell if you’re proud or guilty that you have all 58 episodes saved. You tell me it’s pathetic, watching aged-out no-names grasp at the last dregs of their celebrity, and I decide that means you’re feeling guilty, so I start suggesting shows we could watch together instead.
I don’t have Netflix, you mumble, so I offer my account.
I like the colors, you tell me. You’ve started playing an old episode. Your eyes are on a rainbow seahorse belting “...Baby One More Time.”
When I drove here yesterday from L.A. I saw the billboards a few times, telling me The Masked Singer: Season Six comes out tonight. I remember giant eyes and cacophonic glitter, a bloated cupcake perched on skinny legs. I didn’t think much of the colors when I was sitting in the city, that sea of traffic lights and glossy cars blistering my vision. But in your house in Arizona, in the quiet pale of evening, the colors erupt from your TV screen. You’ve fallen silent, almost reverent. I’ve never seen you so believing. Jenny McCarthy is laughing. Ken Jeong is laughing. Have there ever been two people more desperately expressive in their laughter? A gape-mouthed, unibrowed broccoli is dancing. Its unblinking red eyes hold my gaze.
You love color like you love yourself – in excess. It’s the first thing that made you famous; you never wore the tennis uniform of fluorescent, fake teeth white. Instead, Mom handmade your dresses: pink and lilac, teal and chartreuse, shades of citrus Florida-bright. You played and won and played and won, and people noticed. Tennis aristocrats were skeptical. The critics called your outfits gimmicks. One opponent got in trouble when she said you dressed low-class.
But everyone else loved you and your psychedelic outfits. There were TikTok trends about the clothes you wore, Facebook videos Mom overshared, montage after montage to the tune of “She’s a Rainbow.” An Instagram account about your Spandex. A vlog about your visors. Once, a viral tweet comparing your blurred body to Kandinsky.
I think you’d say now that was your peak in life, the five months people loved you. You say you weren’t built to be alone, which you didn’t know until you never had to be. Now in the drought that follows fame, that lustful flood, you’re suffering.
If you ask me, you’re at your best alone: when nobody is coaching you, nobody is waiting for you, nobody needs you to do anything but love the game you’re playing.
You think about it, shake your head. No, you don’t think so.
But I was there the whole time, watched you play and watched you grow. I know what makes you tick and what derails you. We played together, once, remember? You outpaced me pretty quick. Six weeks of practicing your serve, and you slew aces half the time. One winter on the indoor courts, and you’d sprint from net to baseline in two strides. You’d slam a volley down, which I’d impress myself by saving, but then you’d barely break a sweat running back to sling me with a backhand, and I could only watch with my mouth open as it hummed beyond my racket strings. All that May you left me speechless, sliding around, desperate and bleak.
After I made myself your part-time manager, I’d film your training at high speed and slow it way down, watch the strength of your slice zing through your forearm, up your triceps, ripple in the round amazement of your shoulder. Silk in the wind; your muscles made for painting.
You didn’t know I loved you like that, which I admit is my fault. When you threw your racket at the ground so hard you took its shrapnel to the eye, you didn’t call me. It was a week after the tabloids caught you drinking, and you and Mom were barely speaking. I should have been your next in line, the remaining family you trusted. But you told me in the ER, bloody gauze taped to your face, you thought I’d yell at you. You had a red stain where your eye should be. You had a list of reasons I might be mad, and you recited them to me. For breaking courtly etiquette. For losing all control again. For letting the world see that you were struggling.
I couldn’t believe that’s what you thought of me. I admit I thought it was unfair. But by then I managed your PR, not just your playing, and we spent every minute breathing each other’s air.
We’ve watched three episodes by now, and you’re still pretending not to like this show. I don’t see how you can maintain this contradiction, much less why. Do you really think I’ll buy that you’ve watched five seasons twice in a row just for the irony? But you keep sighing like you know something I don’t, rolling your eyes and slapping at your chair’s understuffed arms.
Eventually you speak.
Here’s the thing, you say, about The Masked Singer. It’s never someone interesting underneath the glittering mess. It’s someone you’ve forgotten and are happy to forget. By the time they take the costume off, you’re not surprised to find it’s someone who’s acquired too much time, someone rich who once was famous. So, what I want to know is, who would surprise you?
I don’t know, I say. You’re the one who’s watched it all.
You tell me I’m not being helpful.
Well, who’s been on it? I’ve never seen them with their costumes off.
You tell me: Jackie Evancho, Nick Lachey, Jesse McCartney, LeAnn Rimes.
Wait, it’s just singers? Like, real singers?
Oh, it’s stupid. I haven’t told you? It’s the worst damn part of this whole show. They just hire back singers whose careers crashed years ago. People we didn’t care about the last time we saw their faces. They come back singing with their faces hidden to, what then, be reborn? It’s a cheap trick. An ego trip. And I always care less about them than I did before.
You were still in stitches when you competed for the last time. I don’t remember why we let you play with that gash over your eye. The swelling was still purple the morning you arrived. You walked on with your head bent low, visor tucked down past your nose, but when you squinted up at the skittering clouds, the cameras swerved in. I was standing on the sidelines when the crowd’s noise got sucked away. The sight of your face. The drooping warmth of your split eyelid. The commentators murmured about last time, how you lost in two straight sets and screamed for mercy. Their voices hummed over the silent seats like thunder in the valley. I tried to catch your eye, but you ignored me.
You played great the first twelve games; you were up 6-3, 3-0. The crowd was in a hopeful mood, happy to see you calm and sober. Your service toss was perfect, the ball rising in a thin green string; you pressed the game up to the net with the certainty of homecoming; you pulled no faces, took no breaks, wasted no time dribbling. When you served, the sun retreated, smoothing the sky grey as a blessing. The watch face on your inner wrist cast flares of crystal where you stepped.
Game thirteen, unlucky number: rain from a freak storm came down hard. The ball went dead, the hard courts bristled. Couples on their Sunday dates fled, holding sweaters overhead like cashmere kite sails. You stood in the tunnel chewing on your lower lip. I handed you a Clif bar. You spit blood out with the wrapper.
The last match you ever played got delayed twice in two days. The rain wouldn’t let up once it began. You were on a hot streak and then you weren’t. The third morning we woke up in New York you didn’t. I found you on the hotel floor breathing sweet, fermented breath. And it was over.
You nearly jump out of your chair when you realize season six already started. You’re crushing buttons on your remote, trying to get there. I’m looking at my watch, remembering the long drive home I have tomorrow, wishing I were sleeping on your old, cracked leather couch. When the new episode comes on, you’re rapt, hair raising. Your face reflects light from the screen like a red moon.
You’ve been sober a whole year today. We’re meant to celebrate; it’s why I came. The last time we were together you were holding Mom’s grey hand. You wouldn’t leave her. You spent the whole night draped over her still body like a prayer. You wanted her to see you now; she would have known how to show you she was proud. I think today I was supposed to be a better sister, take you out instead of letting you waste the day on The Masked Singer. I’m relieved I didn’t think of this until now that it’s too late.
The first time you drank alcohol, you went through every bottle of Mom’s liquor by the capful, swilling whiskey, gin, and Cointreau in a little plastic cup. You were twelve, you told me, and got scared after thirty minutes. You threw up in the sink and retreated to the driveway, where you spent two hours doing drills: high knees, suicides, karaoke steps, butt kicks. You liked it. Not the drinking but the whole thing. It felt religious: sinning and regretting, then atoning through self-discipline. You didn’t mean to, but you got really good at exercising drunk. You came to practice buzzed and no one noticed. You couldn’t get a ride one day, but you knew the roads were never crowded.
I didn’t tell Mom this, but I get it. You were used to being good at everything. And tennis was, for you, its own religion. The divisions get porous. You live and play and drink and pray. You climb into the driver’s seat. You start the engine. You can’t remember if your failures will be wholly or not at all forgiven.
You wake me up five minutes before the season six premiere ends. Look, you say, they’re unmasking him. I still don’t get the difference between being unmasked versus eliminated.
Onstage, there’s a fuzzy purple octopus in a three-piece suit and glittering glasses. He towers over the people. He must be eight feet tall. He bobs his enormous, woozy head, and I worry his glasses will fall off. The octopus has dozens of tentacles, coming from everywhere – his cape drips with tentacles, his head is crisscrossed with tentacles, each of his fingers is a bejeweled, gilded tentacle.
A room full of grown adults starts chanting “Take it off!” like it’s their first time at a frat party. It’s incredibly disconcerting, but never more so than when Robin Thicke chants it while wearing a snakeskin suit. The octopus needs help taking his head off. The octopus is Dwight Howard. I guess that busts your whole theory about how the only people on this show are washed-up singers from the mid-aughts. Your eyes dart across the screen; you’re calculating.
In the unfurnished guest room, you put me to bed. You thank me for coming to see you this weekend. You tell me not to worry, you’re not lonely, only bored. That makes me worry more. You pat the quilt flat around me, speak directly to the sheets. I admit I’m falling back asleep and can’t quite listen.
It’s morning. I’m driving home from Chino Valley when you call me, which you never do. I’ve been wondering what to do with you, how to lure you from the house you haven’t left since last September, when you offer me an answer you’ve come upon yourself. You’re auditioning, you tell me, breathless, and you’re angry when I ask, for what?
You make me turn around and get you. The drive from your house to mine is 6 hours, 40 minutes. With the part I’m now repeating it will be closer to ten. You don’t have a license, so I’ll have to drive it all myself, even though I told you twice over the phone The Masked Singer doesn’t audition. They only take celebrities, who probably negotiate through agencies, and even the people who have forgotten you wouldn’t fill up half their seats. How would you even talk them into taking you? Who do you know who works at NBC?
It’s on FOX, you tell me. Under the gritty cell phone static, I can’t tell if you’re smug or disappointed. I wait for you to say something. When it comes, it’s one question broken into three: Didn’t I do your PR? Don’t I live in L.A.? Don’t I know anyone?
I can’t believe you’re hinging these absurdist dreams on me. But this whole weekend – this whole summer – I’ve been a shitty sister. I turn around and drive back east.
You’re waiting on the front steps with a duffel bursting at the seams. I’m in the driveway but haven’t put the car in park yet; you’re already tugging open the backseat. This is when I know you mean it. In the rearview mirror your face sharpens to a point, the skin under your cheekbones sucked hollow. Sweat seals a shock of hair to your left temple. The sockets of your eyes are shadowed blue and deep.
The whole drive to California, you say nothing. You slink low, keep your eyes level with the window’s dusty rim. You make no comments on my fusty music, make no moves to dominate the stereo. You count the passing tips of the saguaros. You watch the canyons erode, become flat sand, regrow. The yellow hills roll, studded with cedar, pines, low oaks. You wonder why the mountains look purple from a distance, and also gold. You squint to decipher them. They’re shot through with sage and blue and the occasional streak of vital red. You squeeze my fingers on the steering wheel and sigh. Along the highway, windmills lope their long, white arms all through the air, slicing up the diffuse colors of the desert sky.
Because you’re good at everything, even redemption, that steepest path to bliss, you find a way to try out for a show that doesn’t audition. You get to be onstage and everything. I get to sit with a test audience. Your hand wrapped around the microphone looks like it belongs there. You hold it like a racket, an extension of your arm. You stand with your knees bent and ready like the athlete you are.
When you open your mouth, at first, I think it’s a different person singing. I’ve never heard you do this or even mention practicing. Your face is bleached under the spotlight. I see the sweat run down your neck and the breath fill up your cheeks. I see your lips tremble and part. They catch in the middle where the gloss has made them sticky.
You sing “At Last.” It pours out lush and windy. Your voice is deep and tastes of maple, a touch of sweet. I’m eyes and ears and hands gone sweaty. I’m watching until there’s no more watching, and there’s just you, standing, panting, all alone up there, your forehead glazed with effort. And I’m standing, I’m the only one, I’m clapping. I’m feeling the cool, dense flesh of my palms smacking. I’m crying and I’m shrieking. I feel our loss add up to victory in the pink innards of my scream. You’re smiling when you look at me– no, you’re even laughing. I’m calling out to you – from so far away, can you hear it? – that I’m with you, I love you, that I know already what your costume should be.
Author’s Note: I wrote this story in the fall of 2021, as I was getting back into tennis for the first time in years. In September, I watched the U.S. Open final between Emma Raducanu and Leylah Fernandez, which was the first time two teens had played in the women’s final since 1999. When Raducanu won, she became the first qualifier in the history of tennis to win a Grand Slam title – i.e., she’d arrived in New York ranked No. 150, an underdog without a guaranteed spot in the tournament, and she clawed her way up in a feat of wonder. She dominated sports coverage for about a week, but by October, when I moved to LA, she’d started losing again, and the triumphant headlines of a month before became taunting. Fame and its fickleness and its falls from grace are of course always swirling around LA, and as I drove down streets lined with billboards, I was always struck by their transient glamor, the way everything glossy was scheduled to fade and come down. Around the same time, I read Emily Adrian’s “Brawny, Brainy, Good,” and I loved the story’s frank admission of the pop cultural landscape we live in, the way the story’s plot cohered around the Friends reunion that was being heavily promoted by HBO at the time. Reading that story gave me permission to use real, peripheral details of my life as anchor points in my fiction. Not only that – it also showed me how to elevate background elements of a collective cultural consciousness into meaningful character study. I’d already begun a story about a tennis player by the time I drove by a billboard for The Masked Singer, and I knew I had to use it. All the pieces were ready to fall into place.
Izzy Ampil is a writer living in Los Angeles. She is the current Culture Fellow at BuzzFeed News. In her free time, she climbs, designs, and blogs about music & entertainment at izzyampil.substack.com. You can find her on Twitter @izzyampil or at izzyampil.com.
