The four years I’d spent as a professional photojournalist counted for nothing. Even worse, since the world of television journalism is all about paying your dues, those four years I’d spent not fetching coffee, not logging tapes and not making copies were seen as wasted time.
I’d had such high hopes for my new job. It had a salary. A cubicle with file drawers, an engraved nameplate and an earnest outgoing voice mail message linking my name with that of ABC News. The potential to do good journalism with a plush safety net of cash, collaborators and state-of-the-art equipment. Elevator rides with Barbara Walters. But most of the time I hated it. It wasn’t journalism so much as indentured servitude, each day slowly melting into the next in a foggy haze of phone calls, busy work and ass kissing. Even the field work tended to be boring. Because of the lights and equipment, each interview required two hours of setup time. Then there was the b-roll, which most of the time consisted of telling Mr. Expert on Train Safety or Ms. Expert on Chinese Diplomacy to look busy at their computers, or to make a phone call, or to walk gracefully, and without looking at the camera, through a train yard or down a picturesque college campus path, while your cameraman complained that if he didn’t have lunch soon, you’d be in violation of union rules. Yes, yes, we’ll break for lunch right after this shot. Okay, Ms. Expert, I know you have a class to teach, but could you please go back to that brick building and walk toward us once again? And this time, could you swing your left arm a little more vigorously?
To be fair, there were a few good things about that job at ABC. Working with lazy producers meant getting to produce stories by myself. I met Al Gore. I traveled to China. I was able to work closely with John Hockenberry, a smart correspondent—normally an oxymoron—and an old friend of mine from our days covering the intifadah. The editing room process pleased me to no end, and a story I had a large hand in cutting about an Amtrak train crash won an Emmy. But these highs were scattered amongst so much tedium, they were hard to appreciate.
I missed photography. I missed the immediacy and instant gratification of a picture well taken. I missed my blue jeans and not having to wear grown-up clothes every day and the blissful solitude. I missed my freedom and the darkroom and the adrenaline and the adventure. I missed cataloging, compressing and translating the world inside a perfectly composed rectangle.
On the other hand, I didn’t miss the danger. Or the uncertainty. Or the periodic poverty. Back then, as a senior production associate, my $32,000 a year income was moderate (for New York City, that is) and steady. It paid for our small one-bedroom apartment, for Paul’s NYU film school classes and for the opportunity for us to lead a relatively safe, conventional, normal life together. And being safe, conventional and normal, after everything we’d lived through, was all that really mattered.
Which, in a roundabout way, is the real reason I agreed to go to Haiti. Dateline hired me away from ABC at the beginning of 1994 to produce stories for them, with a caveat: I’d be what Dateline management jovially—and covertly—refer to as a “cusper,” an associate producer who produces. The world of the cusper is a nebulous production neverland wherein I rarely have to log someone else’s tapes or fetch his coffee, but I still get paid as if I do. Where I’m responsible for producing my own stories, yet often do not have the luxury of an assistant. Where when I hand over my business card after interviewing people such as congressmen, CEOs, college professors and celebrities, they balk, look down their noses and say, “Well if you’re the AP, who’s producing the story?” Where macho cameramen, the kind who brag about covering the Gulf War even though the closest they’ve ever come to conflict was when they argued over pool positions during hotel press briefings in Dahrain, will ask me with mock deference what shots I need and then shoot the exact opposite. Where one of the correspondents I produce stories for will talk to me in the tone she reserves for children, her housekeeper and people with Down’s syndrome because she assumes I don’t know what I’m doing and will therefore compose irrelevant questions for her, write her a bad script and/or make her look fat.
So when Neal asked me to go to Haiti, I knew if I said yes, I’d be showing the kind of unquestioning loyalty that inspires speedy promotions. Which, for lack of a more noble career objective, is what I’m after.
At the tender age of twenty-eight, I’ve become an unapologetic pragmatist. Simply put, Paul and I want to make babies. We want to make babies so badly it’s all we can talk about lately. We love each other. We’ve done the run-off-and-see-the-world adventure thing. We’ve witnessed death up close (too closely, perhaps), and we are both aware (too aware, perhaps) of our own mortality. We’re ready to give, to relinquish a bit of our selfishness. We’re curious to see what our babies will look like. We’re becoming more domesticated—staying home more often, nesting. We think we’d make good parents, and we want to be young enough to enjoy our kids, see them grow up, get married, have babies of their own. Then there’s the whole Holocaust thing. As far as our reasoning goes, two Jews who get married have a moral responsibility to populate the world with more Jews. Add on top of that the fact that Paul has no blood relatives save his twin brother and that I’ve started to weep at both the sight of frolicking children and cotton commercials, and, well, it’s time. Parenthood beckons.
But a baby, we know, requires more than just mental preparedness on the part of its parents and a promise of undying love. A baby will require money. And time. This is where things will get tricky for us. Paul is still finding his employment footing—he’s now working on a documentary for ABC and earning very little—and I’m being underpaid with an AP salary for the job I’m actually doing, which is producing high-quality, well-researched and extremely lucrative stories for NBC News. I know if I could just earn that silly producer title, my now $65,000 salary would increase by at least 33 percent. More important, although there’s no precedent at Dateline yet for part-time producer work, I hear that at ABC’s 20/20, they’ve started to allow producers to job share. Which would mean, if I could petition NBC to do the same for me (i.e., a 33 percent salary increase for the title minus a 33 percent salary decrease for lopping off a day or two of work), I could spend time with and afford to house, clothe, educate and feed a small critter or two in an expensive city like Manhattan, the first place I’ve ever lived that feels like home.
Okay, so perhaps a trip to Haiti at this fragile juncture in her history is an odd way of achieving this goal, but the logic is all there: go to Haiti, get promoted, have baby, work part-time, find perfect work/family balance, be happy. Simple. Besides, I work in television now. I’m not actually expected to go out and record violence and bloodshed up close. Even if all hell breaks loose, I’ll most likely be booking interviews, writing scripts and feeding tape from satellite trucks while the cameramen are out there risking their macho little butts.
Then again, you never know. A lot of weird stuff has happened since Paul and I left Moscow, despite our attempts at “normalcy.” On our way back through Paris, the entire stairwell and first floor of the narrow, five-story apartment building we were staying in caught fire in the middle of the night, stranding us to luck and near-fatal levels of smoke inhalation on the top floor while the pompiers in the street below yelled at us to stop screaming, close the windows and stay calm.
Then there was the whole Dima and Anton fiasco. When we finally made it to New York at the beginning of 1992, Dima and Anton, two beefy, thick-necked Russian actors whose portraits I’d shot in Moscow on assignment for L’Express, showed up on our Upper West Side doorstep and asked Paul and me to help them find jobs working in gyms. What we didn’t realize back in Moscow, when the two actors politely called and asked us to help them get tourist visas to the U.S., was that the director of their film, Pavel Loungine, often chose his actors according to how closely their real lives intersected with their roles. Loungine’s film, Luna Park, was about the Russian mob. In it, Dima and Anton played bodybuilding mobster
thugs, because they were, in fact, bodybuilding mobster thugs. And the reason they wanted to work in a gym was that they’d smuggled an entire trash bag filled with illegal steroids into the U.S., which they hoped to sell to muscle-worshiping Americans for a tidy hard-currency profit. Unfortunately, Anton was also using some of the stash himself, which led to violent outbursts like the one that prompted him to drag Dima under the boardwalk in Brighton Beach and stab him eight times in the heart.
Dima survived the stabbing, if barely, and while drifting in and out of consciousness he gave the police our names and numbers as his only contacts in America. We wound up spending the next two days either in the Brighton Beach police precinct answering questions or wearing flak jackets up in Spanish Harlem to help the cops look for Anton or in the hospital where Dima lay recovering but in critical condition, helping to sort the whole mess out. In retrospect, the NYPD abused our cooperation. They sent Paul as unarmed bait up the stairs of Anton’s rooming house, while they followed at a safe distance behind him with their guns drawn. Then they arrested Anton in front of Paul, made him realize that Paul had betrayed him. They also made Paul translate and recite to Anton his Miranda rights once they booked him, because the one—one!—cop on duty in Brighton Beach who was supposedly fluent in Russian couldn’t get beyond “Kak vas zavoot?” (“What is your name?”)
Anton was eventually sentenced to seven years in jail for aggravated assault and battery. A few months after his incarceration, he started sending us menacing letters from an upstate New York prison with cartoons of himself toting multiple assault rifles and dressed like Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator, replete with thought bubbles coming out of his head that read, “I’ll be back.” The police assured us that Anton would be deported to Russia after he got out, but they could not promise us that once he got there he wouldn’t just immediately turn around, take the next flight back to New York and seek his revenge.
Then there was Serge, Paul’s former partner from his Russian business days in Paris. Philippe, Paul’s other partner, had recently flown into New York to meet privately with us. He told us that he was now fairly certain that Serge had surreptitiously started buying and dealing Ukrainian arms during the time the three of them had worked together, that he had perhaps stepped on many toes he shouldn’t have. There were rumors about a contract on Serge’s life. Philippe urged us to be cautious because of the earlier business alliance. After that meeting with Philippe, any time we heard Russian spoken on the streets of New York, especially behind us, especially the crude, cursing Russian of would-be thugs, we’d panic.
Indeed, in a year’s time, Serge would be killed by an assassin’s bullet through the glass door of his new apartment on the Avenue Foche in Paris. His murder would be the first confirmed Russian mafia hit on French soil.
Then there was the winter after we got married when ABC sent me to Moscow. I was going back there to collaborate on a couple of stories, one about the decrepit Russian space program, the other about a newly popular Jew-hating fascist named Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Our team’s fixer, who oddly enough had gone to kindergarten with Paul, agreed to help me locate Paul’s biological father, Pavel, during the few hours of downtime I had before my scheduled flight back to New York. Now that Paul and I were officially married and thinking about children, I had a vested interest in checking out the roots of the family tree. But even more important, as Paul was helping me in the cab the day I left for Moscow, he’d suddenly said, “Find my dad.”
Though Paul had lost the scrap of paper with his father’s phone number on it, Pavel Senior was not hard to track down. Russia may no longer have been communist, but Moscow still had enough of an apartment shortage to keep most people put. I just went to the same complex of buildings on the Ulitsa Krasnaya Armayskaya where we’d stumbled upon his anti-Semitic grandmother back in ’91 and asked around. “I was only twenty-five. A boy. So stupid. We all make mistakes,” the poor, shocked man lamented through glistening eyes, sitting with me at his kitchen table, sucking on a cigarette and gulping down yet another stiff shot of vodka. He promised to write to his son, to explain the inexplicable as best he could. My fixer took a few souvenir snapshots of the two of us together to show Paul. Then I left for Sheremetevo Airport, never to return.
You know, just your standard weird stuff. The kind of stuff that makes you crave a normal life. And while I do not exactly know what a “normal” life is, I definitely know what it is not. It is not a life riddled with near-death experiences. Or a life where a thug who knows where you live stabs his best friend and brings you down with him and sends you threatening letters from an upstate New York prison. Or a life where your ex-colleague gets murdered by the mob. Or a life where fathers don’t stick around to love and take care of their children.
THE BUS FINALLY ARRIVES at the Haitian border, a dusty, middle-of-nowhere strip of land bifurcated by a simple chain-link fence and guarded by armed border police. Today, the fence is alive, crawling with anxious, cursing journalists trying to connive, sneak or force their way past it. Jack, the Today show unit manager, whose role seems to be that of our cruise director, runs off with our passports, paperwork and manifests to present to whichever armed man looks to be the most in charge. Pascale volunteers to accompany him and help with translation. “Shit. How do you say ‘manifest’ in French? Or ‘bat phone’?” she asks me.
I don’t know what a bat phone is in English, let alone French, and my nausea is peaking. “Le téléphone bat?” I say. “I have no idea. Just wing it.” Then I exit the bus, clutching my stomach. I manage to make it twenty yards before retching. I’m definitely sick, no doubt about it. Then again, I’m not too concerned. Ever since the dysentery in Afghanistan, my stomach has never been the same. Especially when I travel.
If only it were morning sickness. Paul and I have been actively trying to get pregnant for the past six months, but just before I left I took yet another one of those E.P.T. home pregnancy tests, and, once again, the magic red line never materialized. Which means I should be getting my period, which is now five days late, any minute. Which means, if history’s any indication, I’ll start bleeding right here in the middle of nowhere.
I’m wiping off my mouth with a tissue when I feel a hand grabbing my shoulder from behind. “Come with me, young lady. You’re under arrest.” The hand and the German-accented voice (Nazi!), whispered into my left ear from behind, startles me. Makes me shriek and jump, even, but then I turn around and see my old friend Klaus, a photojournalist colleague from my Moscow days. He’s wearing the usual costume. Photographer’s vest. Two Canon EOS cameras, now the de rigueur camera for all photojournalists. Dirty clothes. Benignly devilish smile.
“Klaus, what the fuck! You scared the shit out of me.” I can feel my heart pumping at double speed in my chest.
Klaus is bent over, laughing. “I know, I know,” he says, catching his breath. “I saw you standing there and couldn’t resist. Anyway, are you sick? What are you doing here? Where are your cameras?”
I take a deep breath and compose myself. “I’m fine, working, and I sold them,” I say. Around my neck, where my cameras used to hang, is a fancy, laminated press pass dangling on a long silver chain, the kind TV producers collect and string from thumbtacks on their office bulletin boards to show how cool they are. Klaus reaches out to grab it with a quizzical, almost sad expression on his face. “Ooh, ‘NBC News in Haiti,’ ” he says, reading the press pass. “Such pretty colors. How impressive.”
“That’s nothing. Wait until you get a load of our air-conditioned bus.”
Klaus laughs. “So you’ve gone over to the other side,” he says with a smirk. “Expense accounts. Drivers. Blow-dried correspondents . . .” Photojournalists and TV producers have always had a friendly, mocking rivalry. Photojournalists pity the producers’ reliance on others, their need to work in teams of three or more, their cumbersome equipment, their inability to really live and breathe t
he story. But they also envy the producers’ muscle, their access, their infrastructure and their abundant resources. TV producers, logically enough, pity the photojournalists for their need to cram together into hotel rooms or even camp out in their rental cars to save money. They pity the financial and emotional burden of never knowing whether a photograph taken, especially a photograph shot in a dicey situation, will ever help pay for the photographer’s trip or even see the light of day. But producers envy—really and truly envy—the whole photojournalist-as-cowboy thing. They envy the photographers’ freedom to move around where they want when they want and with whomever they choose. They envy the way a photojournalist’s end product, a still photograph, is the sole vision of a single, curious mind.
As for me, having now been on both sides of the visual journalism divide, I no longer envy either one. Though I miss photography more than I’d ever miss television if I quit, I think the aspects that are enviable about each profession are outweighed by the pitiable ones. Having the name, power and money of network news means very little to me when the end product, be it a five-minute story or a fifteen-minute story, is so often diluted, sensationalized and mediocre—not to mention fleeting—by the time it airs. And who cares about running around the globe making “art” if part of what makes the art great is being a scrappy, reckless loner with no permanent ties or responsibilities to any other human being?
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