by Jeff Oliver
“You know who was a bad ass chef?” Cowboy mused aloud. “The dude who cooked the Last Supper. That sonofabitch had some pressure. I mean, it’s The Last Supper, right?”
“Imagine if Da Vinci’s painting had Jesus staring down at some janky-ass chicken Caesar salad or like a molten lava cake, going, really?”
“Guy was Jewish. Probably sent food back to the kitchen all the time,” said Etienne.
“You don’t even pretend to not be anti-Semitic, do you?” Tanya said.
“When you think about it, Jesus was the first Jew for Jesus,” said Cowboy. “I mean, he had to be.”
“That’s deep,” said Ghana.
“Yunno, the thing about the Jews is….” Etienne began. / “Here we go again.” / “What? I’m just saying that…” / “Someone make him stop.” / “You have to admit that the Jews…” / “Are you like trying to start sentences that identify you as antiSemitic?” / “Just because I’m talking about Israel doesn’t immediately mean…” / “You weren’t talking about Israel—you were talking about the Jews.”
“Jesus Christ, would you guys shut the fuck up? I’m trying to sleep,” said Joaquim, who was way hung over. There were a few seconds of respectful silence, and then…
“When you think about it, the first reality TV cooking competition challenge took place in Israel,” said Cowboy.
“And it begins: the meanderings of an intellectual jackhole.”
“All right, I’m up,” said Joaquim, pissed. “Go ahead, genius, tell us how the first reality TV cooking competition took place in Israel.”
“Simple,” said Cowboy. “Everyone knows the Jews were slaves in Egypt. Anyway, they escaped, and were running through the desert for like forty years. But they didn’t have time to bake bread, seeing as they were being chased. So what do they come up with?”
“Thrill us.”
“Crackers,” Cowboy said proudly.
“It’s called matzah, Einstein,” said Tanya.
“Right. So the challenge is, like, baking bread while running through the desert almost getting murdered by slave owners.”
“Can almost hear CJ Bazemore setting that up.”
“I could go for some crackers right now,” said Joaquim, “with some red pepper hummus.”
“Aw, it’s so cute the way you mispronounce hummus,” said Clora. “It’s hum, like hummer. You’re phleming ch…”
“Choomoos,” said Joaquim.
“Aww.”
Cowboy was pissed. “Ask me, he’s fucking illiterate.”
“Screw you, Cowboy,” said Joaquim.
“Fuck you, man, and your clown-ass ponytail.”
“Oh, and that two-gallon hat isn’t douchey at all…”
“I will hog-tie your ass in eight seconds flat.”
“Take me only six seconds to carve you into a Thanksgiving turkey…”
“Children!” Clora broke in. “Can you please make peace for five seconds?” A beat.
“Fuck no!” they said in unison. And so the squabbling went on…
The terrorists’ van followed close behind the cast’s, but it was mostly quiet in there. Al-Asari had local radio on to make certain that the police were still unaware of his group’s infiltration. As the van inched down a steep decline towards the shoot location, they passed several “off-limits” signs, including an old, faded billboard, written in several languages, warning of shark attacks in the area. One sign had dried blood on it.
“Where are they taking us?” one terrorist whispered nervously.
“Sshhaarrkkss,” stuttered another. “Anything but sharks.”
“It’s breeding time, so they are particularly predatory,” Sheik said. “And the water is warm, so that’s even worse.” The other terrorists shot him a look. Sheik shrugged. “What? I marathoned ‘Great White Week’ on The Shark Channel.”
SHEIK (INT.): “Most people don’t know that sharks have up to seven rows of replacement teeth. They go through thirty-thousand teeth in a life span, which isn’t that surprising given that they’ve been known to eat boxes of nails for breakfast. Also, did you know that sharks can hear prey from over three-thousand miles away? Stop me if I’m boring you…”
The beach was located in a hidden cove, a sandy enclosure surrounded by ancient boulders. There were old rusty wires poking out of the ground, slabs of wood splayed out in odd places, rags and trash long abandoned in overturned buckets. It looked like something horrible had once happened there.
Cameras lined up in formation to cover a fifty-foot area marked by pylons. Shovels leaned against two long cooking stations, each with built-in mini-stoves and a small, metal pantry. The cast and terrorists marched towards the beach and, staged in a semi-circle, were met by CJ Bazemore, who wore an understated gray-with-black-trim silk chef coat—the kind you might put on for a funeral.
“Well, well, well,” Bazemore chided, looking at the party-ravaged faces. “Looks like someone’s been sleeping with the enemy. Tsk-tsk!” Several of the female cast members grinned, while at least one terrorist bowed his head in shame.
Bazemore eyed his copy: “Welcome to Shalom-Risa Beach. During World War Two, when Jews faced extermination in Europe, merchants used this coast to smuggle refugees into Israel from Jordan. This small cove was a kind of Israeli Ellis Island, where over fourteen thousand Jews escaped annihilation. But one day, there was a shipwreck and, because these waters were heavily populated by sharks, most of the castaways did not survive.”
Bazemore paused thoughtfully, before a grin spread across his face. “In today’s Cannibal Challenge, you will walk in the shoes of those who escaped Hitler’s clutches, and cook a dish native to his land… Apple strudel.”
In the control room tent, Ruti threw up her hands. “Too stupid for words.”
Sara shrugged. “Crisco integration. They wanted something with pie crust.”
“Idiotic.”
“Thematic.”
“The twist,” CJ Bazemore said, arching an eyebrow, “is that, to make your strudel, you’ll start with only one ingredient—an apple. The rest of the ingredients, including more apples, are buried in coolers below the ground, and it’s up to you to dig them out. Your time starts… now!”
Both teams ran to their shovels and commenced digging. With only three shovels per team, the idea was that the other teammates would cheer the shovelers on. But that didn’t rest well with the zealots of Team Mise En Bouche. While Etienne, Joaquim, and LizZ were shoveling big clumps of sand over their backs, the rest of the team got down and dug with their hands. In less than fifteen minutes, they had dug a coffin-sided hole, but no cooler was in sight.
CHEF CHRISSY (INT.): “The frustrating thing about this challenge is that you may dig a huge hole and find nothing, but the idea that, only inches away, you might find a cooler is too tantalizing to bear.”
The terrorists dug hard too, and their good luck was almost immediate. After only twenty minutes, a great crack was heard and they pulled a red ice cooler out of the earth. It was packed with filo dough, bourbon, and sugar—essentially luxury items for a strudel.
Five coolers remained. Half an hour later, the terrorists found another cooler, this time containing cinnamon, raisins, and vegetable oil.
“Ta Gueule!” Chef Etienne said.
“You gots to be shitting me,” said Cowboy.
Team Mise En Bouche passed the shovel to those without painful blisters. The rest continued to dig with their hands. An hour passed, then two and three. Half a dozen holes, all six feet deep and wide, and Mis En Bouche had nothing to show for their effort. The terrorists found a third cooler—salt, chocolate chips, and milk. Though they had almost enough to begin cooking, they kept on, wondering if they might find more apples or a substitute fruit.
Team Mis En Bouche hurled insults at the terrorists, calling them murderers and sluts. Another hour passed and the sun went down. People took naps. Chrissy lay on the sand and gazed up at the sky along with Ghana and Nisha, who pulled out a harmoni
ca and played a basic blues riff.
A producer stepped in to remind Nisha to stick with public domain riffs because music clearance was an expensive nightmare. Nisha agreed. Ghana started to clap along to the harmonica; others joined in. “Well, I used to be a bigshot,” Ghana sang, channeling Howlin’ Wolf. “Used to drive in limousines.”
“Preach!” called out Chrissy.
“Morgan Stanley cut my paychecks. How I loved that money green.”
“Sing it, grrrl.”
“But I quit it all for cooking, and for culinary fame. I sure wish someone warned me, I’d be unemployed and lame.”
Ghana followed Nisha into the bridge. “So now I’m diggin’ ditches…”
“She’s digging ditches!” Joaquim shouted. “With aaaaaall my bitches!”
“That’s right!”
“I got splinters on my hands, got sand in my teeth. I’m digging ditches…”
“With aaaaaaall her bitches!”
The cast hooted. Nisha hugged Ghana and they laughed so hard they fell onto each other in the sand. When they stopped laughing, their eyes met long enough for Chrissy to notice.
“Well, aren’t you two a regular Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr?” she said.
“Who?” Nisha asked.
“From Here to Eternity?” Ghana said. “How old are you that you don’t know that famous beach kiss?”
“Old enough to know that Burt and Deborah are names of two dead people, and dead people making out on a beach is gross.”
“True that.” Ghana patted sand off her pants. She helped Nisha up and they kept holding hands well after they were both standing.
In the pit, LizZ and Etienne shoveled side-by-side, whispering new ingredient combos that might work for their birdshaped pastry.
“Shallots,” LizZ said, heaving sand over her shoulder, “with dried lavender flowers.”
“Plum reduction,” added Etienne, “and a pinch of black cocoa.”
“Oh you are a naughty man,” said LizZ.
At one point, Tanya found herself shoveling near the terrorists. Spotting Ramin, she noticed that his hands were raw, bleeding on the handle of his shovel. A strange maternal instinct sprang up inside her. “Here,” Tanya said, and tossed a pink bandana at Ramin’s feet.
The other terrorists just stared at her, but Ramin picked up the bandana and wrapped it around his hand. “I am deeply grateful,” said Ramin, who continued to dig. Tanya wondered if she was going crazy by helping the terrorists win an important challenge.
Feeling tapped out, she let Cowboy dig in her place. Afterward, as Tanya watched Ramin dig, and saw him holding the bandana to his cheek and sniffing, she couldn’t help but smile.
To everyone’s surprise, local police showed up asking to see film permits, wondering just what in the hell was going on here. Sara took care of it. But when the cops called it in, the radio sequence was intercepted by a group of vacationing Israelis with a shortwave radio. They couldn’t believe their ears when they heard that an American reality TV show was shooting at the infamously abandoned beach once known as Israel’s Ellis Island. The vacationers decided to bring a party to the beach to watch. Soon, a police line was set up as dozens of drunkards and some environmental activists, watching to make sure none of the natural habitat was displaced, cheered on the diggers.
Al-Asari was pissed. “This was supposed to be low profile. One wrong move with the police and I give the order—everyone dies.”
“Relax,” said Sara. “They’ll get bored and leave eventually.”
The good thing about a challenge that forces cast members to engage in meaningless and frustrating activity is that drama is inevitable. Once Team Mise En Bouche tired of insulting the terrorists, they began to bicker among themselves. It was the usual cattiness expected from a reality cast. Even eye-rolls would play as story once they got interviews, but what Sara didn’t expect was the discord among the terrorists. They spoke in Arabic, so Ruti became the de facto translator.
“They are saying that ISIS training camp in Syria was better than this. At least there was a point, killing infidels,” she said. “And now, the four of them who did not go to ISIS training camp in Syria are claiming that the people who did train in Syria are always bringing that up whenever they can, like they went to Harvard or something, and they should shut up because right now they are all digging ditches.”
“Wow, that is good stuff,” Sara said.
“Just messing with you,” said Ruti. “They’re complaining about sand in their ass-cracks.”
Chef Dex, aka Cowboy, began to dig a hole outside of the fifty-foot square. He did so feverishly, with the intensity of a man escaping prison. It was a burst of energy not seen in many hours. With each hurl of his shovel, he cried out. Tears streamed down his red and veiny face. One camera caught him close up and it appeared as though his eyes had rolled back in his head.
“Hey, genius, that’s outside of the square,” said Chef LizZ. “There’s nothing over there.”
“Cowboy, chill,” Etienne implored him. “Save your energy, dude.”
“He’s trying to be a hero. Earth to Cowboy: You get more camera time if you sleep with someone,” said Joaquim.
“True that,” said Tanya.
Cowboy, however, kept digging. His body was not under his control. He axed at the earth as if he was trapped and suffocating underground, with oxygen just on the other side. His shovel flew back and forth with such force that eventually the handle broke. But that didn’t stop Cowboy. He got down on his knees and hacked away with the broken handle, desperate.
Some people in the crowd noticed and began to cheer him on, laughing and hurling insults in Hebrew. Cowboy dug more feverishly. He took the broken shovelhead and slammed it into the earth. His hands bled. Chef Ghana put a hand on Cowboy’s shoulder and Cowboy bared his teeth and hissed.
“Devil’s got him,” Ghana said, backing off. “He’s got exorcist eyes.”
And then a crack. Unlike the sound made from the plastic coolers, it was more like the sound of bones breaking. In fact, the sound was so loud that the crowd promptly went silent, as did the crew.
Sara sat up in the control room and peered into the quad. “What happened?” she walkied her producers. “I said all coolers go in the square. Who fucked this up?”
“It’s not a cooler,” one of the Producers walkied back. “It must be something else.”
“You sure?”
The jib camera stretched out above Cowboy.
“Did he make it to China?” a heckler yelled from the crowd, but the subdued laughter was mixed with curiosity.
Several of the chefs crowded around Cowboy. Tanya and Nisha got down on their hands and knees and dug along. Their hands met the edges of something hard, wooden. Their fingers explored the edges.
“What is it?” asked Chrissy.
“It’s wood. Curved.”
“Like the front of some old boat,” said Nisha.
Cowboy rose to his feet as if he’d been yanked by strings. He threw his arms up to the heavens and again dropped to his knees. “Thank you, Lord!” he cried out. “For guiding my hand to your highness.”
“What the hell is it?” Sara said.
Cowboy looked up to the jib camera. His eyes were insanely red, his face mapped by veins. A voice emanated from deep within him—a voice devoid of his trademark Texas twang, but low and guttural like Jabba the Hutt. “It’s Noah’s Ark,” he said.
Then he fainted.
Tanya pulled out her iPhone and took a duckface selfie with the Ark framed in the background. “I’m totally going to win the internet!” she said, pushing her boobs together for another photo.
It was precisely at that moment that an impeccably manicured woman in a silk blouse and Jimmy Choo heels casually entered the control room tent, simultaneously texting on her Blackberry and sipping a chai tea latté.
“Is there anywhere in this country you can get decent Wi-Fi? I’m so behind on cuts,” the woman said.
> Sara recognized the voice of Genevieve Jennings, the Network Exec on Natural Dish-aster: Season Five, and said the only thing she could: “Oh shit.”
“What is it?” Ruti asked.
Jennings looked up from her Blackberry, waved at Sara, rechecked her Blackberry, then made her way to Sara with the confident smile of someone used to getting good news from those she employed.
“Did I miss something?” she said.
“Genevieve, I was just going to call you,” said Sara.
“Like hell you were, Sara. You’ve been dark for two days. Where’s Lopez?” she said.
“He’s sick. Bad hummus,” said Sara.
“Lopez is never sick—I saw him eat a poisonous snake in Peru. He just added hot sauce. Didn’t so much as burp. Where’s Strider?”
“Ate the same hummus, I’m afraid. I’m looking over cameras,” said Sara.
Jennings thought back to Sara’s resumé and remembered something about her directing a couple of pilots for VH1. She wondered if they had any style, and decided that she would have to keep a close eye on the quad just in case.
“Any drama yet?” she asked, plunking down in the director’s chair as if it had been waiting for her all along. “I want a full story download.”
“Ms. Jennings, I presume,” Al-Asari cut in, a charming smile spreading across his face. “Ms. Sinek didn’t tell me what a natural beauty you are.”
Jennings looked up at Al-Asari skeptically. She turned to Sara. “Who’s this guy?”
“Our local consultant,” said Sara. “To make sure everything’s organic with the terrorists. He’s highly respected in his community. Uniquely qualified.”
“Yes, I’m the ISIS expert, and I’ve kidnapped your production! We will not relent until justice is done for The Network.”
Jennings laughed, deciding to play along. She put up her hands. “What are your demands, you scary man?”