There were problems with that. The big one, from Johnny’s perspective, was that he didn’t know anything about bombs. Sure, he was pretty smart in the usual sense, and a freaking genius compared to the usual LA candy, but building a bomb actually took a lot of specific knowledge.
Or, at least, it did if you wanted to make an effective bomb and not blow yourself up. You could pack black powder and nails in a piece of pipe, sire, but he didn’t want to scare people. Even if he did know how to build a bomb, which he didn’t, he had no idea how to get all that stuff without taking a surprise vacation to Guantanamo.
Which was how Johnny decided that the next person had to be the singer. Actors were too private; not only were they generally hard to get to, there wasn’t much chance of him being able to get his message across. Reality television stars, of course, were easier, but they weren’t big enough. He needed someone with true fame, someone who he could destroy in front of an audience. Someone who was famous for their hair.
Well, to be fair, that last part really wasn’t a requirement, but it was what ended up being the final straw fro Johnny. The Singer was just a kid, really, a tiny androgynous boy who looked a lot more like a tiny lesbian than a pop star. He was seventeen years old, and in the last two years he’d become one of the most famous people in the entire world. Last year, he was said to have made more than 100 millions dollars.
All because he was aping a hairdo that the Beatles made popular fifty years ago. They, at least, had talent. The Singer had approximately the same amount of talent that autotune could give anyone who could afford autotuning. Unlike most female popstars, he couldn’t even dance.
What actually sealed the bowlcut midget’s face was his movie. Johnny didn’t have any particular opinion on documentaries that were essentially informercials for his albums, aside from a sort of general contempt. No, what stoked his rage to point where he knew The Singer had to be the one was the ad campaign.
The trailers for the movie focused on The Singer having to have overcome rejection and struggled on to become a star. He was seventeen. He became famous at fifteen. He started trying at twelve. Charitably, he might have struggled a whopping two years before he became a household name and made enough money for fifty people to retire on. Johnny was not what you would call especially sympathetic to this heartwarming story of overcoming adversity.
The Singer was a different sort of animal than the Starlet, and he was going to require a different sort of strategy. He wasn’t into drugs, he was too young to go to clubs, and he was generally surrounded by screaming teenage girls, all of which meant that he was going to have to be more direct. Besides, he wanted The Singer’s death to be dramatic, to be something big, he wanted it to be something that nobody could ignore. Fortunately, Johnny Getz had a plan.
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