ARTICLE: JESSE CAMP [tv] THE ACCIDENTAL VJ
When MTV aired Who the Hell is Jesse Camp?, it spoke for millions of bewildered viewers. Maureen Callahan unravels the riddle wrapped in an engima shrouded in mystery

[tv]JESSE CAMP//His dad proudly notes that Jesse is "an avid reader who speaks three languages...he's a good, sweet kid who has created a bit of a facade. He did well in school, and he had a lot of fun with drama."

Since handily trouncing the 4,000 hopefuls who entered MTV's "I Wanna Be a VJ" contest in April, Jesse Camp, the 18-year old "homeless" kid with the loopy stoner vibe, has blown up, as he puts it, "like a-a-a-a-a thing that blows up!" The only thing stranger than the on-air presence of a self-proclaimed semi-literate who wears makeshift thighwarmers, speaks of "spreading the love," and proudly cops to an '80s glam jones is the clamour for a piece of him: Versace and Kenneth Cole are considering hime for national print campaigns; Givenchy is interested as well. Record labels are vying to sign him. Movie studios want him under contract. Visiting celebrities take to him instantly- one day it's Green Day woofing pizza and blunts with Jesse in their dressing room; the next it's Warren Beatty soliciting conversation over Cuban cigars. Teenage girls cluster outside the MTV studios in Manhattan, and when he emerges, they trail his gaunt, 6'5" frame through Times Square, giddily seeking shade under the outside rim of his floppy blue hat. "It's bizzare," says his perplexed colleague Kurt Loder. "When you meet him, you actually expect him to ask you for a quarter. But he just has sparkle. He doesn't have that TV patina."
Indeed, Jesse, who referes to himself as "the new boy on the air," is such a cartoonish aberration that he's been plauged by more rumours than a rehabbing rockstar: rumours that the contest was rigged (plausible); that MTV originally planned to fire him after one month (true); that Jesse himself is doing a character (hmmmm). "I don't think anybody really knows if he's pretending except him," says Jesse's high-school friend Aaron Weeks, who knew him by his given name, Josh. "But that's where the fun is."
If nothing else-and there may be nothing else- watching Jesse live it up on MTV's largesse certaintly is fun. Not since the era of Beavis and Butthead has an MTV personality so aggressively typified the proud stupidity of rock'n'roll. And for a kid who toppled the vote by imploring, "I don't really got a home to go to," he is completely without hostility or resentment, given to googly pronouncements like, "I am just really loving life!" "How can you not love him?" concedes Loder. "He's refreshingly candid and direct, he's nothing like the other VJs."
Jesse's joyously cavalier approach to a job his young colleagues treat with inordinate degree of gravity does, in fact, account hugely for his appeal. Where Carson Daly laboriously attempts to divine meaning from Jewel's poetry, Jesse takes the opposite tack, quizzically reciting an excerpt to great comic effect. Daly is assiduously prepared, tossing to the new Semisonic clip with a numbing amount of related minutiae; Jesse likes to speak extemporaneously, albeit breifly and often at the expense of the English lanuguage. "I can't believe I'm on TV, here's a raaccchh'n'raaaawwll vide-aaa!'" comprises the bulk of a typical Jesse segment. Daly's a static presence, but Jesse flails around like a marionette controlled by a Parkinson's victim: All at once, up shoots an arm, down flops the head, out juts the tummy. Daly's the sober sudent of rock; Jesse's the fan who got totally wasted in the parking lot during the opening act.

JESSE'S FIRST BIG SHOW WAS MÖTLEY CRÜE AT THE Cow Palace in San Fransisco. He was nine years old. "I'd say that between now and then, I've tried to start 100 bands," says Jesse, rummaging through a box of his clothes MTV has stashed outside the wardrobe department. "And the best was Easy Action. That was cool-ass." Jesse founded that one with three friends from Loomis Chaffee, the swanky Connecticut boarding school he attending after being picked up for vandalism at 16. ("Look," he politely explains, "a lotta those cars were scrap anyway.") Jesse- who says he lived with his dad in a "kinda poor" section of Connecticut after his parents separated- adapted quickly to his new enviroment. "At first I was like, I don't want to do this," he says, sounding truly agitated. "But it was a great school, 'cause it was, like, going from hanging around with kids talking about how you're gonna get something to drink, to being with everyone who has drinks."
After graduation, Jesse and his Easy Action "bros" headed to L.A., but a few months later one of the boys weathered a "wicked bad" acid trip and retired to Connecticut. Having run through what little money he had, Jesse decided to come to New York. It took him more than three weeks. "That was fuckin' hell, dude" he says, plunging a hand into his spiky thicket of hair. "Just going around the West was such a peice of ass."
Once in New York, Jesse crashed with friends, friends of friends, and whatever girl was willing and able. Food was a less pressing concern. "I think it's a fuckin' horrible thing," he begins, "but it's like, fuck, man, in a grocery store- honestly if it dont have a black ball, you tuck in your sweatshirt, put your fruit in, and you walk out." Still, it was nearly enough to send him back to his dad in Connecticut. "But then I realized, having traveled all that way...." He trails off, concentrating now on an old sock he's just unearthed. He reaches for a pair of scissors and begins cutting it up. "At the end of that three weeks I was very angry. And I was just like, Well y'know, I did all this shit to get here, and I told my father, 'Y'know, fuck you whatever you think, I'm gonna get my music going, and you can suck my dick if you don't think it's gonna work out.'" He takes each half of the sock and slides the tubes up either arm, appraising his ingenuity. "Y'know what I mean?"
His dad does, kind of. "There are always two sides to every story, and from his perspective, that's true," says J. Holden Camp. Holden was suprised to hear he was divorced and living in the slums of Connecticut; he laughingly adds that Jesse was never busted for vandalism, and that his son thrived during his four years at Loomis. "His mother and I are both educators"- his mom is the principal of a primary school and his dad is the chair of humanities at the University of Hartford- "and we felt that Loomis was a good opportunity for him." He pauses. "Jesse is a good, sweet kid, who has created a bit of a facade," he says. "He did well in school, and he had a lot of fun with drama."
So much, in fact, that Jesse was the head of the Slithy Toves, Loomis's improv group. "He was their anchor," says his friend Weeks. "He was not afraid to take risks to get the laughs." When Jesse played Polonious in the school's production of Hamlet(!), "he turned the death scene into a comic routine," recalls his drama teacher, Brian Kosanovich. "His natural inclination was always to ham it up."

JESSE IS TRYING TO ORCHESTRATE JUST THE right ensemble for an appearance tommorow; he combc through an array of faded, unwashed T-shirts, eschewing the wardrobe girl's gentle suggestions that he take along some designer gear. "Heeyyy," he says, "when ya got a vision...." He'll wear the new armwarmers, as well as the same pair of skintight bellbottoms he's wearing today- with one slight modification. He spies a plastic bag on the floor and coils it into a tube, then jams in down his pants. "I'm just augmenting what's already down there," he says. His faces, as it so often does, goes completely blank for a moment. "Aaaawww, it's all part of the fun," he says, bopping his head to a silent beat. "Give the people what they want. And, by the way, it doesn't dissappoint. Heh heh heh."
Such is the singular genius of Jesse Camp: At 18, he's stumbled on the secret of comic success- dumbing down your act enables the viewer to laugh both with you and at you. If he's augmenting anything, it's an already hightened sense of the absurd, rather than a deplorable lack of motor skills (well, maybe that too). But as entertaining as he is now, soon enough the joke will wear thin- the endless malapropisms, the Gumby gait, the cracked delivery. "I know that some people at MTV are concerned that people will get tired of this 'Heeeyyy maaan,' thing, says Loder. And while the channel insists it's commited to Jesse, his first runner-up, Dave Holmes (the Carson Daly-ish once, except Holmes still sports his class ring) has already been given his own show.
Then again, if Jesse's smart enough to keep it stupid, then he'll be smart enough to sense our collective weariness. "Jesse knows that MTV isn't going to be a permanant thing," says his dad, proudly nothing that Jesse is "an avid reader who speaks three languages. My son understands the history of TV, and he knows that this image will work now." Ever the visionary, Jesse says he plans to use his MTV gig to fuel his nascent rock-stardom, and then build "a scene for the Crüe." Meanwhile, the suits at MTV- who had Jesse talk at length about his past on the aptly titled special, Who the Hell is Jesse Camp?- claim not to care about any bio material he may have fudged. "Look, he's a kid," says Bob Kusbit, MTV's senior VP of production. "It wouldn't suprise me if me exaggerated some things. It doesn't change the way we feel about him." Jesse had no doubt figured as much. "That's the thing- you gotta know, not how to play people, but where people are comfortable," says Jesse of his overall approach to life. "My whole thing is, just, like, don't own up to everything you know. Heh hehheh."