Naked in Dangerous Places

by Cash Peters

  What records don't show, however, is if, once these visitors had settled in, their enthusiasm faltered any, or they had second thoughts. Especially when:

  a. It became clear that the islands weren't uninhabited at all and were in fact littered with indigenous tribes, known collectively as the ni-Vanuatu—or ni-Van—most of whom were distinctly hostile to intruders; and

  b. They were subsequently set upon by the ni-Van, thrashed with sticks and clubs, run through with spears, dragged by their hair into the hills, and finally—just when they thought it was over and the natives were roughing them up merely as a precursor to releasing them back to their ship with a stern warning never to return—boiled alive and eaten, a common fate in those days for anyone who stopped off in Vanuatu to say hello.

  Though not Captain James Cook, you'll be pleased to hear.

  Sensing a certain antagonism from the welcoming committee—“They by no means seem reconciled to the liberty we took in landing upon their coast,” he wrote in his journal at the time2—he made his escape, giving the place a sparkling new name as he left.

  Explorers used to do that a lot. Upon arriving in a new country, and overriding all wishes of the locals, they'd sweep aside centuries of tradition and instantly rename it, the way you might a litter of puppies. “This one I shall call Whitsuntide,” Cook would say as he wafted by, “and this one over here Desolation, and that one Cape Circumcision.” He was a menace. And, true to form, the day he saw Vanuatu, he cried, “From now on this shall be called the New Hebrides—because it reminds me of Scotland, which I discovered while I was looking for Brazil.” Then he pranced off back to his ship, HMS Disoriented, and sailed out to sea once again to renew his quest for Antarctica.3

  Having plunged out of the sky like a torn kite, we're down at last.

  Spontaneous applause trickles through the cabin and the pilot grins broadly.

  Following a short taxi along a surprisingly smooth, freshly mown runway, the propellers' last few guttural sputters give way to total silence, interrupted only by the occasional buzz of an insect or a bird's staccato trill.

  It's like someone suddenly switched off your hearing aid.

  Once we're fully at rest, the pilot runs around to drag out the bags, aided by Mark and his soundman, Todd, a well-built guy of Polish descent with a balding head, big heart, and downtrodden smile, who claims he's the least important of the crew, there to make up the numbers. “Oh, I'm just tagging along with Mark,” he'll mutter, disingenuously, bottom lip pushed into a pout. “I'm not important.” But that's not so. Without him there's no sound, and without sound on a show like this the pictures are mostly worthless. That aside, Todd is simply a gem of a man. Funny, solid, and reliable. He brings to the production, I feel, whatever Baloo brought to The Jungle Book, only without the annoying songs and the ant-eating, and everyone loves him for it.

  As I struggle out of the plane, the heat hits me like a falling couch. It's not even lunchtime, but the thermometer's already into triple digits.

  “Hey—stay there!” Mark calls out to me. Muscular legs in baggy khaki shorts run to a spot several feet away, from where he can shoot me struggling out of the plane door. “Everyone clear the frame. Eric—you need to move back, please. Okay, Cash—go inside the plane and come out again. Quiet, everyone.”

  Obediently, they fall silent. They have to. I'm supposed to be alone.

  That's the premise of the series we're making. A stranger, dumped in a strange country with no money, no food, no facilities, and nobody to help him find them, has to survive for three or four days on his own. Which all looks very wonderful on paper, but is proving harder to execute in practice than we thought.

  For a start, if I were really on my own out here, the show would never get made. Who would tell me where to go and what to do? Who would film me going there and doing it? Who would record the sound? Who would make sure that everyone I talked to along the way signed a legal release form to allow what they say to be featured on TV and to prevent them from changing their mind later? And who would boss the others around until they couldn't stand him any more? That's what we have a director, cameraman, sound technician, field producer, and coordinating field producer for. And the audience is savvy enough to know that. They're aware of the conceit/deceit of reality TV. That it's a group effort and I can't possibly be alone. Yet, in the name of maintaining the illusion and being entertained, they and we pretend I am.

  Once the long shot is complete, Mark wants one more rerun for close-ups.

  “And remember to act surprised,” he calls out.

  “I will.”

  Returning inside the aircraft, I re-emerge from the door, surveying the terrain as though I didn't spot it the first two times, looking perplexed, listening, sniffing.

  The air here in Vanuatu is strange. That's the first thing you notice. It's unlike anything we're used to in Los Angeles. Can't decide what's so different about it at first. Then, I have it: it contains oxygen. From trees, too, not a cylinder! Can you believe that? As a city kid who grew up in Manchester, England, and is now based in Hollywood, this is a first for me. I suspect my lungs are going to have a problem adapting.

  Several feet to my right, out of shot, Tasha's feeling the same way. Taking a moment to absorb the alien wooded landscape around the airport, she soaks up the almost eerie tranquility and breathes in deep lungfuls of healthy air, then combats the evils of both by firing up her iPod and lighting a cigarette.

  Behind me, the propellers chug back to life. We're going up again! Just me and Camera Mark this time (and possibly the pilot if he has a few minutes), for a rerun of the landing sequence. That way we can pick up shots we missed on the way in, of my face staring out of the window in horror, with the island in the background. As it is, on this occasion the flight is a whole lot smoother and convinces me that I was probably wrong when I referred to the plane as a clockwork junk heap; it's not as unsafe as I'd first thought. That, or I've become better at not crapping my pants in panic.

  Once we're down on the ground, the Twin Otter begins taxiing back the way it came. The pilot's been given orders to circle twice overhead to ensure we get a shot of him flying off. This he dutifully does, before banking away to the west. Moments later, swallowed by clouds, the plane's steady hornet-swarm drone recedes into the distance, its place taken by silence once again. And that's when it really hits us. Even daredevil Mark, I'm thinking. That, land or crash on Tanna, the result is the same: you're stuck.

  There's no way off this volcanic, bug-and possibly dinosaur-infested prehistoric island. Not until tomorrow at the very earliest. Or, if we complete our mission—which is by no means certain—in six days’ time, when the plane will return to pick us up.

  Or whatever's left of us.

  1 I know, it's wrong. I shouldn't have, and I'm sorry. But, having leapfrogged over the entire Harry Potter brouhaha without so much as blinking, I realized that if I didn't help fan at least one cultural wildfire soon, I'd be locked out of every dinner-party conversation from now 'til eternity.

  2 If you don't believe me, read The Journals of Captain Cook, edited by Philip Edwards, or Farther Than Any Man, by Martin Dugard, or my own book, Captain Clueless, out next summer.

  3 Which went pretty much as it always did. He took another of his famous wrong turns and ran aground in Hawaii, where he was ambushed and stabbed to death. Whether this setback forced him to cancel future expeditions is not documented.

  2

  Star Jones Misses

  Her Big Chance

  The Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel is a concrete-and-glass boomerang occupying what used to be the old 20th Century Fox back lot in Beverly Hills. The day I was there, its cavernous marble lobby—part reception and part café-bar—was filled with tables and comfy couches and waiters rushing between them, bringing trays of coffee to hyperactive media types, who at first sight appeared to be talking to each other like normal people, but who, because addressing the person you're sitting with is considered
soooo passé in L.A., had headsets in their ears and were talking to someone else entirely.

  Because of some kind of convention going on upstairs, the place was busy, busy, busy.

  “Hey—Cash?” A man in a dark suit bore down on me. “Great to meet you at last. Thanks for coming.” He flashed a smile. “So how's it going?”

  “It's going great.”1

  And I swear, as these words left my lips, he went: “Aaaaaaaah!”—just like that—the way dying aunts do with their last breath, at the same time cupping his ear, as if he'd caught a distant fairy bell ringing.

  “What's the matter?”

  “That voice,” he sighed. “How many times have I heard it on the car radio? It's great to see the face behind it. You have such a fantastic cadence.”

  I do?

  The short, friendly executive, pumping energetically at my hand the way he might to raise water from a well, didn't fit the Hollywood stereotype at all. In fact, his intelligent eyes and characterful good looks were at odds with the ranks of bland, homogenized go-getters lounging around in the lobby café that day. Although I will say one thing for him: he was strikingly compact. That was my first thought when he walked over: “How beautifully proportioned you are.” Like a prototype for something the Japanese are thinking of making, but which they have yet to find a use for. A real man, sure, only scaled down for convenience and ease of storage.

  “With your suit off, you probably resemble a very excitable thumb,” I mused to myself as he steered me out through a set of glass doors onto a hot terrace.

  We found a table with an umbrella, to protect us from the blazing Southern California sun, and settled ourselves in.

  “Anyways”—right down to business—“if you don't mind my asking: what do you think of our network? Ever seen it?”

  No, was the truth. Not until that first day he'd called me up. After which, curious obviously, I'd rushed to my TV and flicked up through the channels, past CNN, past QVC, even past the silly little home decorating networks where, every time you switch on, some butch woman in a tool belt is ridiculing newlyweds for their lack of grouting skills; way up, past the gay channel, past Oprah's channel, past a channel devoted entirely to boring people to tears, which I won't name, though I'm aware it could be any one of a dozen (why is it that so many networks these days seem to have the Step-ford Wives as their target demographic?), until finally I hit a cluster of travel and leisure networks that I had no idea came as part of my basic cable package, one of which was midway through an hour-long special that I think is fairly typical of shows at this end of the dial: The World's Top 10 Pony Trekking Vacations. And oh boy, I'll tell you this for nothing: I was horrified. Horrified!! And disappointed. And chagrined, if that's even a word.

  “Er … well, I may possibly have caught it once …” I fumbled around, trying to think of a polite way of describing the show I'd watched, “… and, I'll be honest with you, it was …,” crappity crap crap crap, “… not my cup of tea at all.”

  “Exactly!!”

  He surprised me by almost bouncing out of his seat with excitement.

  “Research has shown,” he continued in short breaths, “that people only watch shows like that for eleven minutes at a time. D'you know why that is?”

  Since I was in full self-sabotage mode by now and he seemed genuinely interested in my opinion, I took a daring position. “Because they're awful?”

  His eyes dimmed slightly. “Er … well, I wouldn't put it quite like that. I mean, I know where you're going with this, and the problem …”

  “The problem,” I cut in, emboldened, “is that too many travel and leisure programs on TV—and I mean generally—are just talking wallpaper. That's why I don't watch them. And when I do, it's only for eleven minutes. Much of the time they sugar-coat the truth with a bunch of bland PR blurbs and pass it off as information. I mean, where are the real, gritty travel experiences? The third-rate rental cars with used condoms under the seat. The inedible food that glues your jaws together. The hotels claiming to have ocean views, and they do, but only if you climb up on the roof with binoculars. That's real travel. That's what it's like for regular people. Oh, and FYI,” I tacked on by way of a final flourish, “I find most TV travel hosts to be bland, characterless, patronizing, over-smiley mannequins.”

  “Exactly!” he said, even more excited. “Which is why I called you.”

  “I'm sorry?”

  “The shows you're referring to, they're old-school. On our network, we intend to populate our schedules with fascinating, authentic shows and cool hosts. Cool hosts who are passionate about travel.” He trained his eyes on me without blinking. “And you, Cash, would be perfect. You're personable, funny … and … er …”

  Er …?

  When no other adjectives came to mind he stopped and stared. And I stared too.

  Quite honestly, I was trying not to show how enthusiastic I was, but, oh my God, I so wanted to be on TV in the worst way. I'd even go as far as to say I needed to be on TV. Really. With my radio career in the doldrums, where else was I going to go?

  It's just that …

  Well, I didn't want to do a travel show.

  I'd been a travel journalist for over twenty years and it had never worked out. I'd simply ended up lonely, depressed, jaded, and, often, less informed about a place at the end of a trip than before I'd set off. That's precisely why I'd stopped—because I was no longer passionate about travel. What I needed was a new challenge. Something interesting and different, but—and I can't stress this enough—in no way travel-related.

  “So what do you say?” His eyes were trained on me.

  “No thanks. That's very kind of you, but I'm going to pass.”

  Is what I wanted to say. But he was so very excited the whole time, and you don't like to hurt an excited guy's feelings. So instead I mumbled a plausible excuse. Something about currently fielding other offers and not being sure which one to take.2

  “Well, at least think about it,” The Thumb said, wilting. (Nobody turns down the chance of having his own TV show. Ever! It's unheard of.) “Hey, why not come up with a list of things you might like to do, and e-mail them to me anyway? Let's start there.”

  “Great.”

  And that was it. The thrust of our meeting.

  Despite not being interested, but having been utterly bamboozled by the man's earnestness—he'd blown the smoke so far up my ass that it was clouding my brain—that same afternoon I sat in a local coffee shop for twenty minutes and rustled up a bunch of ideas that would make good television. And how did I know they would? Well, because they were straight rip-offs of shows already on the air, that's how. Shows that, as far as I could tell, seemed to be doing rather well.

  My favorite idea of all was a broad copy of the CBS hit reality game show Survivor, only I called it All Washed Up and changed things around a little: made it more personal, got rid of the game element. And, just to be on the safe side, the survival element as well, turning it into more of an entertainment show. I had this notion that the host could be dumped, literally, out of a boat, and washed up with no money on a series of faraway islands, forcing him to coexist with the indigenous culture, brave the elements, and live on his wits, which he would do very successfully due to his ample reserves of strength, determination, and tenacity.

  Wow, how brazen of me, you're thinking, ripping off someone else's idea like that. But wait. The only reason I felt okay about doing this was because:

  a. I never imagined in my craziest nightmares that any network would go for it. Most cable channels are run on a shoestring. No way would they be able to afford something as epic and ambitious in scale as All Washed Up; but on the other hand …

  b. If the show did, against the odds, get made, I was convinced that The Thumb would come to his senses and bring in a real TV host to present it. Someone with experience. Celebrity lawyer Star Jones, for instance. Viewers would love to see her dumped on a faraway island and left there, I'm sure. Or that guy who us
ed to be in The Partridge Family, the angry one who seems hell-bent on hurting himself. He'd do. A professional, basically. A man's man. Someone who'd be unafraid to rough it a little, and wouldn't mind, if the job called for it, getting eaten by wild animals. After all, who in their right mind would want to risk big money on a show as elaborate as All Washed Up, then have it feature a complete unknown who lacked every quality necessary to carry the idea off—including, but not confined to, personal strength, determination, and tenacity? It didn't make sense.

  Although, having said that, you know what did make perfect sense? Being removed as host but seeing the show get made anyway. In other words, selling the idea to a network with deep pockets for a boatload of money and then, if it turned out to be a smash hit, coining in the residuals for the rest of my life. Brilliant!

  With that in mind, I confidently e-mailed my list to The Thumb, then sat back and waited.

  And waited.

  In the lengthy gap that followed, I confess that the initial rush of enthusiasm (masquerading as cool detachment) I'd been feeling started to wane a little. Obviously, he hadn't liked what I'd sent. Or, worse, he'd liked it, but saw no point wasting money remaking programs that were currently showing on other networks, or wasting valuable time telling me so.

  But then, just as I was on the verge of giving up and moving on, the phone rang.

  “Hey, is that Cash?” It was The Thumb—bursting with enthusiasm, as ever. “I've been talking to people around here and we like the All Washed Up idea very much. Really, man, we think it's gonna be great and you'd be the perfect host. LET'S DO IT.”