A Cancellation
Fiction: The first chapter of the new novel from Cairo Smith.
This is the first chapter of the novel A Cancellation by Cairo Smith, available now in digital and paperback editions from New Ritual Press.
A Cancellation is a bleak portrait of a longtime vlogger whose comedy career implodes in a train wreck of bad decisions over one grueling summer.
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1
It was a cold, flat summer in Los Angeles, the summer they exiled that actor Jonathan Majors for strangling his girlfriend, and Amanda Bannington had no idea what she was doing with her career.
In the beginning of the end, there were two YouTube channels, both Amanda’s, both successful. There was AmandaHere, and there was SusieSparkles. They were bookends, vlog and vaudeville, airbrushed life and clown routine respectively. The near-sum of her show business life.
She’d rented a whole-ass soundstage in Hollywood for the new AmandaHere theme song. What an indulgence. The location budget had run through the roof, and that was without the added costs of crew, set dressing, and gear. Her manager had begged her not to blow through good cash into such an inferno of vanity, but she was determined. She wanted the real music video experience. Her dollar meant her final word. I think on some level she wanted to be the Annalee Hope, the pop star, the icon.
The set was mainly a huge, white cyc that wrapped around from floor to ceiling a few thousand feet from end to end. Tabula rasa. The production design was a grove of foam pillars plated in pop-color plastic, signifying nothing. A look like The Wiggles or a Target ad. Real tacky shit.
The production designer had decided that morning that the plastic was too reflective, so she spent two hours hitting it with dulling spray while the ten-man crew putzed around. No one high up in the chain of command was bold enough to just tell her to fucking roll, so the setup dragged on.
In the center of dulling spray haze was Amanda. Thirty-four, head down, electric guitar in her hands. Milfy, you might say, though childless, thank God. People try to tell you now she’s not hot, she’s creepy, some sort of ghoul. Pure denial. She was English-teacher gorgeous, not a movie star, but sure to be the talk of Anywhere High if that anywhere was outside the LA studio zone. Her hair was long and healthy then, deep brown, with dark eyes and some trace of tan in her otherwise European complexion. A user named strawbshake99 on the forum Streamer Obsession posted in 2019 that Amanda’s star sign was Scorpio, height five-eight, weight 120 pounds, cup size 32C and waist twenty-three inches. Is that all true? Fuck if I know. She had a nice body and she used it.
Camera framed up on Amanda and her warm-toned Fender. She’d done her own makeup, her way, as always, bold and Millennial. The show lights came on around her and the work lights dimmed.
A gaffer grabbed a light reading behind her and gave a thumbs up. The director of photography, Jason something, cleared his throat. Even after a few months as her shooter, the burly Coloradoan was still constantly on eggshells, forced to spread himself too thin on account of her refusal to hire a director.
“Amanda, we’re ready,” said Jason.
Everyone settled in places. Amanda stayed silent. After a moment, she strummed once, flooding the mix board with color. The recordist hurried to set the right levels for her guitar amp feed.
“Alright, let’s go,” she said to the floor.
“What’s that, we’re going?” said Jason, to no reply. “Okay, we’re going! Backing track. We’re rolling.”
Go backing track. Roll camera. Speed sound. Amanda strummed the chords she had written and powered into explosive, passionate life.
I love you, You’re so special to me. I love you, Even here on your screen. So if times are tough And no one else understands, Just know that you’re enough, And you can reach out your hand And find Amanda Here. (And we’ve got five million friends!) Yes, with Amanda Here You don’t have to pretend! So subscribe! Come inside! Drop a like! Stay all night! With Amanda…Amanda Here!
This was the irresistible Amanda Bannington who had charmed early YouTube. It was all the effusive presentation of her early years, plus more presence, more technique. It just wasn’t funny, or dumb, or confessional, or angry, or accusing. It was just good. As such, it would die the online death of a lack of extremes.
She knew enough, at least, to play it to the fans. No one else understands. Those lyrics have been ripped to shreds by snarky Redditors in light of what came after.
▶
There’s a weird little tic in Amanda Bannington’s brain. You can see it in her eyes in the outtakes, in the moments where her smile flickers into inexplicable fear. In moments of focus, her mind would flash with things she could not control. Spiders, the shattering of bones, her own gruesome death manifested over and over. A frequent recurring vision was being melted alive in acid, the very same acid they used to make the rainbow-swirl AmandaHere title card. She was, in this nightmare, quite literally consumed by her work. I don’t know if the nightmare or title card came first.
▶
Outside, her fiancé, Andy Field, waited, literally, at the stage door, leaving her a voicemail.
“—anyway, yeah, like I said, babe, I’m locked outside, so I’m sorry I missed the shoot, but I probably just wrote the wrong time. I’ll try Kale again. I love you. Bye.”
Andy Field was once a fresh Kentucky transplant with a millennial fauxhawk and a Christian indie folk singer thing that made the Zooey Deschanel types swoon. Now the fauxhawk was gone, the Christian was gone, and the Deschanels were certainly never to be seen again. All that was left was the hoodied man, and sometimes the guitar.
▶
Inside the cool and cavernous dim of the stage’s craft services corner, Amanda’s live-in personal assistant Kale Flores sat at a card table and did not hear his phone. Hopped up on a caffeinated Erewhon smoothie, the musclebound Filipino waxed poetic about his boss to the LA Times’ Jeanette Rosen. Fifty yards away, Amanda took off her guitar. “We got it,” she said, panting from the performance. “That was the one.”
Jason something inched closer to her, anticipating pain. “Amanda,” he said. “Can we go again?”
“No, that was a good one.” She tried to hand him the Fender.
“Amanda, it didn’t take.”
“What do you mean it didn’t take?”
“The card was full. We lost the end.”
Amanda stared dead-eyed at the bearded man. Her face was a mask. In her mind, he was under the guillotine, bound and bagged as she pulled the lever. On the floor of the soundstage, she composed herself. “Okay,” she said, back on her mark. “Okay, we go again.”
They went again, then again, and she decided that the second one would work with a little bit of splicing. Then they moved in for coverage and she had to do the whole thing over, posing with props and cycling through four different wardrobe changes. At wrap, Ms. Rosen had gone and returned from a touristy stop-in at the sets of NCIS, which stood abandoned amid the labor disputes that had swept town since May. For lack of accessible Amanda or Andy, she spoke again to Kale beside a tub of communal M&Ms.
“Would you say she’s self-aware?” the curly-haired woman asked, dry-skinned and thin-lipped, six years on the culture beat.
Kale cocked his head like the dogs he walked for clubbing cash. “What do you mean?” he asked. He fiddled with his straw with a Freudian affectation. “Sorry, I’m the hot bitch, she’s the brains. And, also the hot bitch, obviously.”
Jeannette saw Amanda Bannington approaching and realized her time alone with Kale was running out. “Well, let me just ask you,” she said, touching her pen to notepad bullet points, “your living arrangement.”
“We call it the never-ending sleepover,” said Kale, blasé. Since acting college, he’d been Amanda’s shoulder to lean on, and since money had allowed it he’d worked and lived at her side. This meant he was at cohabitating Andy’s side as well.
“You and Amanda and her fiancé—”
Amanda butted in, ignoring Rosen, coming close beside Kale. “I want that fucking shooter gone today.”
“Jason?” said Kale. As far as he knew, the videographer had zero strikes. “Uh, hey, Mandy, Janet from the LA Times had a question.”
“Jeannette,” Rosen clarified. “Yes, as far as your Susie character, who I noticed did not make an appearance here—”
Amanda could see where this was going. People who had gone to grad school always asked why Susie Sparkles was so mean, if she was a bad role model for the tweens who watched her in droves. As such, the YouTuber jumped into her canned answer. “Susie is a send-up of all the weird girls who are so full of themselves—”
“And the Amanda character?” Rosen’s pen hovered. “What’s she?”
The YouTuber hesitated. “It’s, I’m Amanda. It’s just me.”
Amanda broke the silence with a sudden, sharp laugh at nothing. Then she turned at a sound of footsteps to see Jason something ready to grovel. “I just want to say,” he said, making himself small, “I am so, so sorry about that thing with the card, and that literally never happens. I always have two in there but the second one wasn’t reading.”
“Oh my God, it is so totally fine,” the singsong rhapsodizing of Amanda’s Orange County roots began. It was her own West Coast version of Southern hospitality. “I do that all the time, you are so perfect. It’s been such a pleasure.”
“Absolutely,” said Jason, shaking her hand. Even after three months on the job, he still felt like he had to beg to be called back in the next day. Maybe, on that spring afternoon, he had sensed that his bell had finally tolled.
Amanda waved goodbye, bringing closing fingers to her palm like a snapping turtle. “Bye, thanksomuch!”
“Bye!” Kale echoed as Jason waved back and retreated. “I’ll call you!” Then in mutter he added, “and you might not like it.”
Amanda shot Kale a warning glare, like Rosen might hear him, which of course she did. “Trouble in paradise?” the Times reporter asked. It was an irritating turn of phrase to Amanda’s ears. It felt, possibly intentionally, like she was implying Amanda had stumbled into idle success, that it was not a constant grind to maintain. YouTuber wealth at Amanda’s level, while sitting somewhere in the low seven figures by most estimates, was nothing to retire on in comfort.
“Always some things to work out, when you’re giving new people a chance,” said Amanda. She sounded like her father, and he may well have spoken those words at the dinner table in her youth, explaining why so-and-so intern at his office wouldn’t be getting an offer of return. Now, she employed it as a shut-down.
“I have to go,” Amanda added, shaking hands with Rosen in the same ‘fuck off’ way she’d shaken with now-departed Jason. As a rule, she didn’t stay for wrap and load out, and she had already decided this reporter was far too up her own ass to ever truly ‘get’ the Amanda empire. Her work was done.
▶
The swinging stage door almost hit Andy Field as Amanda rushed out. “Oh!” she said, having forgotten him. “You didn’t end up sitting in? I think it was good.”
“I was locked out,” said Andy, killing an Android crack of Tap Tap Revenge 4 and ending his hundred-tap streak in “Bad Romance.”
“Oh, baby, poor baby,” Amanda cooed, and they kissed.
“I ordered us Chipotle,” he said when their lips separated.
“Marry me.”
“Say when.”
Neither one of them noticed the lurking black sports car across the street as they cuddled in embrace. Neither one saw the man with the gloved hands within, or the telephoto camera. They drove separately home, both taking the 101 past the Bowl as the light turned orange. It was a slog, as always.
Amanda listened to a lot of showtunes in those days, Wicked and Phantom and her other old acting school favorites. She listened to the Billboard hits, too, but mostly to scout new fodder for her parody tracks. Andy told me she bought her white Polestar SUV specifically to be ‘good for babies,’ but there were never any babies forthcoming. Her channels, at that time, were her full-time children.
▶
That night was a Kale-at-the-club night, a rare house-to-ourselves time for Amanda and Andy. The house in question was 1387 John L. Vega Road, Encino. They’re not there anymore. It was a safe, flat Valley suburb a few blocks from that creepy estate where Michael Jackson perfected the moonwalk and kept a chimpanzee. Amanda had bought the single-story ranch home in 2019 for two million dollars, which her father had called outrageous, and it was now sitting half a million higher. The flippers who’d sold it had done everything white and black, kitchen and bathrooms as sterile as an East Berlin hotel room. Even after four years, she’d barely made it more than a video studio and place to eat dinner.
Andy, then Amanda, then the Chipotle delivery driver pulled in. Amanda showered and jerked off thinking about a vampire. Then she came out and ate her keto bowl and had a pamplemousse La Croix. Andy had a burrito and a Bud Lite.
“Is this a nightly thing?” she asked as he cracked the beer.
“I’m just getting through the pack,” said Andy. “The half pack Robbie left on Friday after D&D.”
After dinner they went to the bedroom and had obligatory missionary sex as a self-help book had said they should. For Andy, it was the fifteen minute highlight of the week. His favorite part was the lack of phones between them. He made a bid to stay up and cuddle, but she said she needed to sleep, and by the time he re-emerged from washing up in the ensuite bath she was dead to the world.
▶
Amanda slept until three in the morning and woke with a jolt to the front door jostling open. She rose, putting on her gray fuzzy robe, and walked through the dark of the hardwooded hall to find Kale getting home from the club. It was rare for him to be back at night, not staying till dawn in the bed of another man or two.
“Everything good?” she asked, more awake than he was.
“Yeah, the vibes were just off,” Kale mumbled. He chugged tap water from a glass at the kitchen island sink. “I’m getting too old to go that hard.”
It was the times when Amanda wasn’t expected to work, like plane flights or the middle of the night, that she was sharpest. She tried to make the most of it.
“I want you to put a call for new camera guys on Entertainment Careers,” she told her live-in assistant, rattling off tasks. “And make sure you get the new bullet points in there that we wrote after last time, and let’s book that same Santa Monica office for Saturday afternoon for the interviews, I don’t want people coming anywhere near the house, and—” She noticed his fatigue. “I’ll just text you all this. Get some sleep and we’ll circle back tomorrow.”
Find the rest of A Cancellation by Cairo Smith on Amazon, available in digital and paperback editions.
