EXILE ON VINE ST.

[levendis]

"Channel Z"
House gen comedy
Turn on, tune in, cop out.






One cheery late-summer morning in New Jersey, Dr. Gregory House awoke to find his subconscious mind had solved a problem he'd been working on for weeks. He sat up, then quickly laid back down, a bitch of a hangover making itself known.

"I can't believe I didn't figure this out earlier," he said, though it came out more as a sort of death rattle, his lips dry and throat closed up. He looked anxiously around, blearily checked the calendar on his cell phone (it was Tuesday), then turned over to stare at the light on the answering machine blinking on and off.



Three hours later, he sauntered into his office. "Some shit's gonna go down," he announced.

"Why?" Foreman raised his left eyebrow as far as it would go.

"Because it's Tuesday. Patients always come on Tuesdays. Alternately, patients explode on Tuesdays. Still, point is, shit gon' go down, homes."

"What's this now?" Cameron was empathetically stirring a cup of coffee, tastefully shaking back her bangs.

"Drugs," Chase said. "Bet you twenty bucks he's on drugs."

"Nothing I'm not usually on!" House exclaimed. "Painkillers, some uppers to get me here, some downers to keep me here, few hallucinogens to keep me entertained. You know me, always drinking the special Kool-Aid. "

He paused.

"Yes?" Foreman's right eyebrow joined the left.

"Have you ever noticed? It's Tuesdays, always Tuesdays, when something exciting happens here. Also! Have you noticed!" He leaned over and took Cameron's coffee from her hand, and drank it down. "You and your sugary coffee, Miss Sweetlumps. Have you noticed how strange things are around here? Besides the Tuesday thing?"

"You're a terrible parody of a human being and I've lost 8/10 of my soul since agreeing to work with you. Stranger than that?" Foreman, having run out of eyebrows, now folded his arms across his chest and approximated a Streetwise look.

"Stranger than that. For instance, Cameron, your lab coat. Lab coats are not fashion accessories, and yet that thing clings just so."

Cameron glowered, and started to interrupt.

"Shh-shh! Loose lips sink ships. Chase! Your hair! You're a doctor, real doctors don't have boy-band hair. You're too pretty. Foreman! I haven't figured you out yet." He refilled Cameron's sparkly pink mug and raised it to his lips, then put it back down on the counter. "And me! I should have been fired years ago. I am a parody. An asshole parody. And I say things funny. What sort of accent is this supposed to be, anyway? I make Chase sound normal."

"House..."

"Wilson has a thing for cancer," House mused to himself, sipping at the princess mug. "Cuddy wants a baby and she's getting me of all people to stick needles in her ass."

"Did what now?" Chase asked hopefully.

"Anyway, the point I'm getting at here, people, is that my life, as we know it, is a TV show."

"Candid Camera?" Cameron had a distant, frantic look in her eyes. "What?"

"There are more corroborating details, of course, but I can't share them right now because my pager is about to go off." It went off, playing the theme song from The Flintstones. "See? We'll talk more later."





Later that night at the hospital, he sat with a bottle of Yuengling in one hand and a TV Guide in the other, eyes glued to a TV set tuned to static.

"Come in," he told Wilson, who had previously thought he was exhibiting ninja-like qualities.

"What're you watching?"

"Channel Z."

"V.I.P is on," Wilson said hopefully.

"Not interested." House took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The TV hissed and bubbled.

"It does have a certain appeal," Wilson said after an appropriate interval. "The idea that all this is just part of a dramatic arc. Lends a sense of dignity to everything."

"TV isn't dignified."

"No."

"I wonder if we're being played for laughs."

"Comedy is tragedy plus cameras?"

"Something like that." House cracked open another bottle. "Do you think," he began meaningfully.

"Yes?"

"Do you think you could go get me a glass and some ice?"

"Fuck off," Wilson said fondly. "Anyway, I have to go, I have some cancer to be sad about."

"Ta," House said, then started whistling and whooshing along with the television, in harmony.





He bought a hand-held digital camcorder at Best Buy, half-listening to the scrawny, spotted employee list technical specs before hurrying the camera, a tripod, and the remaster of Purple Rain through checkout.

At work, he started filming without warning. He clicked the camera onto the tripod, which he'd placed on his desk, humming along with the faint whine of analog parts. He filmed closeups of his pencil jar, his iPod, the drapes. He swept the camera - swiveling around like a machine gun; he changed the tune he was humming to "Ride of the Valkyries" - over to the glass wall and through it to Chase, Foreman, Cameron, closeups of her face, zooming in on an eye, an ear, a lock of hair, the image grainy from the strain of stretching so far. She looked up and saw him. Saw him watching her: for a second she was open, vulnerable, then she was angry.

"Turn it off," she yelled (quietly) after she'd stomped indignantly into his office. He tilted the camera down but did not turn it off. Later, when he transferred the footage onto his computer, he saw the perfectly-framed shot of her sharp-turn hips, her voiceover almost entirely drowned out by the noise of the auto-focus struggling to lock on to the shifting fabric outlining her thighs.





"If you think you're on a TV show, then why are you filming everything?" Wilson avoided making eye contact with a patient staring at him from far across the cafeteria. "Don't look now, but Mrs. McElhenny is giving me sexy looks."

"It's postmodern," House said. He focused on a stray potato chip, Wilson's square-clipped fingernails closing around it. "Film of a film. Like 8 1/2, or A Cock and Bull Story."

"Can't you at least pick something slightly less banal?"

"Hey, Tristam Shandy never even got around to being born. Besides, God's only as great as his worst creation." He moved on to the rest of Wilson's lunch tray. A napkin fluttered, crumbs settled, Wilson sighed heavily. "Man is an image of God, films are images of man. Images create images. Like an echo, getting weaker with each repetition."

"The half-life of symbols," said Wilson, attempting to keep up.

"God is the original, and no one goes to church anymore. This is the twenty-first century, the word 'authentic' is meaningless."

"Authentically meaningless."

"And see?" House trained the camera on Wilson's face, sweeping over the cinematic forest of eyebrows and nose hairs. "See? This is what I mean. Real people do not talk like this."

"Too clever for prime-time, don't you think?"

"Never underestimate the power of an audience desperate to believe they're really thinking. I've got Nielsen on my side, don't worry."

Wilson smirked and stood up, catching the edge of his tray with his belt buckle and flipping it up and out, potato chips spraying everywhere, one landing in his pocket protector. He fished it out and threw it at House.

"Beware the tides of starch!" House crowed, easily dodging the missile. "Yes! What a clever line. And I'm paying for my own lunch this time; you're starting to get subtext all over my sitcom."





"What's up?" Chase asked through a mouthful of yellow gummi bears.

House was filming Foreman arguing with Cameron (silent from this distance, but the gestures! Later he'd add music from a Buster Keaton movie.) "Dead finks don't talk," he said.

"Mrrngh?" Chase asked.

"It's okay, you're just looking for love in all the wrong places. Classic drama device."

"Is today non-sequitor day?" Chase asked, finally finding his question-asking groove after swallowing down the bears.

"It's one of my specialities, Dorian. Clever-clever remarks."

"You know, I've never actually read that, The Portrait of Dorian Grey. I saw the movie about Oscar Wilde, the one with the guy with the wierd nose."

"Your erudition and eloquence continually astonishes me, Kangaroo Jack."

"Hate you too, House," Chase said amiably, then poured a handful of red gummi bears into his mouth.





"Whup! One wrong, two wrong, three wrong, cure!" House shouted as the patient flung an arm at him.

"It could be vasculitis!" Cameron said as she fiddled frantically with tubing, getting into the swing of things.

"Smile!" House barked at Foreman, then wiggled his fingers. "Lighten up, it's just a seizure."

He ambled out of the operating room and over to the clinic, warding Cuddy away with a clipboard. He cleared his throat at the waiting room, and when they looked up at him, he smiled brightly and waved his cane in their general direction. "Good morning! I'm Dr. House, and I have something clever to say! No, no, just kidding - I'm conducting a survey. Question number one: who thinks my facial stubble gives me an air of authenticity? Show of hands, please."

Eleven people raised their hands.

"Alright. Question two: does this jeans-jacket-faux distressed t-shirt combination make me look hip and 'with it'?"

Nine people raised their hands.

"Trends change, you're right. Question three: The new Pirates of the Carribean movie. Is Baudrillard rolling in his grave?"

No one raised their hand, but a nasal voice from the back said "Baudrillard's not dead yet, phillistine."

"Question four!" House said forcefully, brandishing a Bic pen at his audience. "Coke or Pepsi?"





He sat, again, in the dark, in front of the de-tuned television set, clutching an empty crumpled can of Pepsi. He had a headache. The new corollary to the theory was: if he were to keep going past the layers of character archetypes, past maverick and gruff but loveable, he would not arrive at soul. Instead, beyond all the layers of his complex personality, the only core was nothingness, a sort of static between stations, whining and whooshing and blinking frantically and meaninglessly. He stared at the TV, Narcissus and Peeping Tom. Or Dedalus, maybe Sisyphus - certainly no Prometheus.

"What's up?" Wilson slid into the chair beside House's, looking drawn and tired and old.

"Brushing up on mythology. Homer Simpson pushing a giant donut up a hill. Hegelian dialectic of Hot Pockets." He gestured at the static with the can. "Looking for patterns."

"Find anything?"

"Hell no," House said, and laughed. Wilson managed a smile.

And they sat, slumped in the oncology ward arm chairs, covered in the warm glow of television.

"There's a Vin Diesel movie on CBS," Wilson said.

"Yesss," House hissed excitedly, and changed the channel.