by Cash Peters
What? Me? Go traveling again? Oh … er …
Simultaneously elated and depressed, I thought, “Fabulous!” and also, “Hell, no!” both at the same time. This was certainly not the career breakthrough I was hoping for.
“Are you okay?” he said. “You don't sound thrilled.”
“No. No, it's fine. I'm fine. Really.”
Yippee! Oh crap!
I've lived in Hollywood for eleven years, in one of the leafier, more upscale neighborhoods close to Griffith Park, an area that seems to attract a wide range of media types, including studio executives and celebrities. Ours is a seductively peaceful enclave, where the only real sound you hear all day is ecstatic birdsong, the hum of distant traffic, and, just occasionally, when you least expect it, the thunderous roar of SUVs filled with paparazzi as they take off up the street, letting us know that one of our celebrity neighbors has just left his house and is on his way to the supermarket.
By sheer good fortune, my partner and I also live next door to an important Hollywood TV executive. You won't know him—he's Vice President of Overseas Sales (Pacific Rim) for one of the major studios. But if you ever travel to Bangkok and see an episode of According to Jim and hate it, then, chances are Matty had something to do with it. He and his glamorous wife are immensely smart people. Worldly, practical, no-nonsense. Not like us on our side of the fence, whose disorganized, schemeless lives they watch play out from their upstairs window with dismay, if not outright disdain. Basically, they're the Kravitzes to our Darren and Samantha. But because he's in showbiz, Matty's a good guy to know, especially if you want free According to Jim DVDs. So when crunch time came for agreeing to do the show, naturally I went over to gauge his reaction.
The verdict was swift and cruel: “You're going to die,” he said.
And this was before I'd even sat down.
“How long will the series take to make?” Pouring himself a glass of wine.
“By the time we're done,” I said, “up to a year.”
“A year?” He shook his head. “And what's your job on the show? What are they asking you to do?”
“Well, of course I'll be traveling, and hosting it, writing the script…”
“That's too much.”
“… logging the tapes, coproducing it, doing the voice-over …”
“Oh God.”
“… coediting it, supervising the sound mix, and representing the network at various junkets to promote it. The whole thing's my show, so a lot of jobs fall to me.”
Off the back of a long sigh, the Vice President of Overseas Sales (Pacific Rim) took another sip of merlot, easing back into the couch while he weighed up all the options. Then, conclusively and with the kind of conviction that got him where he is today, he declared: “Yup—you're going to die.”
“Oh, great. Thanks.”
“I'm serious. You can't be traveling around the world each week like that without destroying your body, your health, your relationship, and your social life. It's too much pressure on one person. Nobody wears that many hats in TV and survives. And if you're allergic to foreign food …”
Which I am. Some. Mostly stuff with preservatives and additives in. Plus shrimp, crab, lobster—the bottom-feeders. Also, I touch gluten or dairy products at my peril. And as for oil—if I eat oil of any kind in any way, my body begins to break down. It's like I'm being consumed alive from the inside by a virus. Which is why I go to enormous lengths never to touch it. Easy to do when I'm at home, of course, and in control of my environment, but out on the road visiting distant lands, particularly in the Middle East or the Mediterranean, where oil's practically all they eat, that was going to be a whole lot trickier.
“Nothing is worth killing yourself for,” he continued. “For God's sake, you're a radio journalist.” Which is his shorthand for saying, You don't do anything. “This will be like going from zero to one hundred in ten seconds. You're taking on way too much. If you work this schedule for a year,” he concluded, “you'll end up on coke, or in the hospital, or both. Nobody works that hard.”
“Maybe I'll be the first.”
“No.” He was adamant. “No, no, no.” Looking me straight in the eye, he said with great gravity, “Trust me, Cash, this is going to kill you.”
1 Huge mistake, this. When someone in Hollywood asks you how you are, you never tell them. Only a total novice would mistake an idle inquiry for real concern. Best thing: say nothing. The other person will not notice. Nobody in the entertainment business has any interest in how you are, only what you can do for them.
2 Which wasn't a total lie. There were offers. The first was a cooking show called Recipe for Disaster, suggested by a TV producer in Nashville. His idea was for a half-hour program in which I would break into a different celebrity's home each week while they were out and rustle up a three-course meal before they got back. Then we'd eat, presumably while we were waiting for the cops to arrive. The second show idea was from the same guy. In response to my telling him a flat-out no to his first suggestion, he'd come up with a variation: this time the celebrity would be forewarned that I was going to break in, and so might not be quite as freaked out when they came home and found a TV crew turning their kitchen upside down. Which wasn't bad, I guess. Yet, though this promised to cut down substantially on the jail time, I still wasn't interested.
3
A Kiss from a Ghost
“Everybody in?”
Bundling ourselves aboard a white shuttle van, we bounce, suspension creaking like old bedsprings, out of the airport and onto the main road, with a second vehicle trailing close behind carrying all our camera gear.
Maybe I shouldn't be, but I'm feeling nervous. About the show generally, but also about the lack of amenities on the island.
Time has not only stood still in parts of Tanna, I hear, but it actually seems to be going backwards, with the result that there's a great big gaping hole where convenience ought to be. Everyday facilities you and I take for granted in our world are almost completely absent from theirs. Simple, fun things. Like electricity, for instance. Or fresh running water. Or technology. There are no laptops here, no TV, no cell phones, no Cheerios, no fresh water, no towels, no magazines, no Hot Pockets; come to think of it, they have no pockets, period. Because they have no trousers. That's what I'm hearing. And that's precisely why season nine of Survivor was set here.
In 2004, eighteen type A contestants were flown in and dumped on Efaté, the country's main island. The chief inducement being, of course, money: one million dollars in the pot. Which must have seemed like a helluva prize going in, but whose value diminished rapidly, I'm sure, as the full horror of what they'd signed up for unfolded. Paradise, it turns out, is not all it's cracked up to be—something the contestants quickly found out as they ran cheerfully ashore on Day One, straight into the yawning jaws of Mother Nature, who for the next thirty-nine days mauled them alive. I watched every episode. I saw the whole thing play out. The bug-ravaged flesh, the menacing filth, the starvation—ugh! How I wish I could scrape those images from my retinas. Even Robinson Crusoe would have perished.
According to the guidebooks, some parts of Tanna Island are shockingly primitive, and covered in the kind of impenetrable, steamy jungle frequently described as “godforsaken” by old-time novelists, even down to the smoldering volcano I mentioned earlier. They are so bleak, so far from civilization, that they're the very last place on earth you'd ever want to be stranded, even for a TV show.
Viewed from the air coming in, the terrain is coarse and forbidding. A verdant fist shaken angrily at visitors to scare them off. By the time we reach the ground, though, all that has changed. The jungle turns out to consist of gorgeous lush woodland filled with sinewy streams and butterfly-peppered glades and warm sunshine, like you might find in rural New England. All of which makes our twenty-minute drive to the hotel the most delightful treat, as we roar along a winding artery of dusty black asphalt that hugs the coastline, flanked by dense undergrowth through whi
ch a tangle of improvised pathways twists out of sight into intriguing leafy darkness.
Whenever we draw to a stop, which is often—once to let a family of pigs cross the road, another time because our driver spots a friend of his pushing a cart filled with strange hairy vegetables and wants to say hi—a loose crowd congregates and, for a short while, the van takes on the role of a waterless aquarium, as inquisitive faces press up against the glass, checking us out with impenetrable brown eyes.
I must say, these people don't look a bit like they do in encyclopedias—glum, hostile, naked. That's the next big surprise. Instead they're happy, welcoming, relaxed, reserved, and quite stylishly dressed in some cases. Their daywear tends toward surf-shop casual: baggy Hawaiian this, loose-fitting summer that. One kid even sports a Jackie Chan T-shirt. How, I wonder, can folks who are preyed upon daily by velociraptors possibly move with unhurried grace and have such transparently kind faces?
Farther along, in a clearing, I spot some gangly teenagers in yellow soccer shirts kicking a ball about while their parents—mostly the fathers—sit close by, propping themselves up against a tree in the shade. At the same time, not too far away, weary-looking women in floral Mother Hubbards are hard at work, staggering along the road in the sun, spines stiff as mop-handles lest their bodies buckle under the weight of the heavy bundles balanced on their heads.
“What language do they speak here?” Tasha asks our driver. She's itching to talk to someone.
“Bislama,” comes the reply.
“Oh! So how do I say hello?”
Actually, I know the answer to that. There are phrases in the back of my guidebook. According to this, if you want to say “Hello” to a Tanna person, you say, “Alo.”
“You say, ‘Alo,’” the driver agrees, then goes on to provide us with a string of other words and phrases we might find useful during our stay.
“If you want to say, ‘Good morning,’” he shouts, driving forward and staring back at us at the same time, an alarming technique, “then in Bislama you say, ‘Gud morning!’”
Oh, really?
“‘Telephone’ is telefon. ‘Market’ is maket. ‘Excuse me’ is skusmi. And ‘thank you,’” he adds, “translates as ‘tank yu.’”
Okay. Got that. Anything else?
One more: “A simple ‘yes’ and ‘no’ can be communicated easily and efficiently by using the Bislamic words ‘yes’ and ‘no.’”
Hm.
I've always had a gift for tongues and dialects, but this one came particularly easily. Honestly, the nerve of these people, claiming to speak a foreign language when they don't.
Suitably encouraged, Tasha decides to give it a go.
“Alo!” She puts her face to the van window and calls to a small boy hovering bashfully by a hibiscus bush. He laughs and runs away.
Hm. Maybe she didn't pronounce it correctly.
For the remainder of the drive the crew zones out. Five heads bob lazily against torn leather seats, showing only vague interest in a vista of untamed jungle scenery that people not here to shoot a travel show would most likely consider captivating and be taking photos of like mad. This lot, however, they're diehards. Though still relatively young, most of them have seen and done it all many times over.
Eventually, Eric and the two Marks close their eyes and nod off, the tinny scratching of their respective iPods competing with the erratic growl of the van's worn-out gears as we continue on toward the hotel.
Personally, since I wish to retain my hearing into old age, I don't own an iPod. So instead, too anxious to doze, I lose myself in a thick folder of research materials.
According to this, the people in Vanuatu speak around 110 different languages in total. That's roughly one each.
In the early days, because there were many villages spread across the island, the inhabitants had only limited contact with one another. So, rather than remain mute for centuries, which I guess was an option, each community went ahead and developed its own language. As a result, a total of nine hundred separate tongues developed in Melanesia.1 Then, as Vanuatu metamorphosed from a grab bag of isolated tribes into a unified nation, the tongues were consolidated, merging with English and French to become Bislama, a term that derives from the French word “bechede-mer”—literally, sea cucumber. But of course! I mean, what else would you call your national language? “Sea cucumber” was a natural choice.
Before very long, the van turns in through an anonymous gate and rumbles down a narrow track leading to the hotel.
“Alo,” I call to one of the porters as I disembark.
“Alo,” he calls back, shooting me a relieved smile, as if to say, “Thank God someone took the time!”
“Alo,” I call to the man at the reception desk.
“Alo,” he beams, sounding Australian. After a brief flurry of the usual paperwork, he hands me the key to my bungalow.
“A bungalow? Oooh, how great. Tank yu.”
My linguistic dexterity earns an enthusiastic grin, generating the same rush of triumph in me that Doctor Dolittle must have felt when addressing his first terrapin.
Check-in complete, I'm just debating which of the crew I should enlist to carry my bags when a teenage porter scurries over and grabs them.
“Alo,” I say.
“Alo. Me carry, sir,” he insists, grabbing handles.
Sir.
Hm, being British, I rather like that. We had an empire once. I'm not sure what happened to it; doubtless we squandered it away on women and booze. Still, like it or not, that unique sense of unearned authority as well as an inbred right to lord it over the little people remains in my blood to this day, I can't help it.
“Why, tank yu,” I say to the porter.
And without help—though to be fair, none was offered—he staggers off, dragging the luggage along a wiggly wooded pathway that takes us through wild gardens of plumeria and radiant orchids.
The production office has done us proud. On other occasions, either out of necessity or to save money, we've been holed up in scruffy wayside motels that were, in my opinion, one step up from wrapping yourself in cardboard and sleeping under a viaduct. But this time—perhaps because motels and viaducts have yet to reach Tanna—we've been booked into a glorious five-star resort nestling right on the edge of the ocean and, at high tide, very possibly in it.
The bungalows are basic, but comfortable. I only have one complaint about mine: the roof doesn't fit. Some might say I'm quibbling to bring this up—“Typical Westerner, so spoilt. Can't sleep unless his bloody roof's nailed down”—but I'm sorry that's how I am. In most hotels these days it's become quite the thing for the ceiling of your room to be attached to the walls. So much so that I no longer ring up in advance to check. But not here. Here, there's an alarming four-inch gap between the top of the walls and the beginning of the thatched eaves, a gap that, unless I'm mistaken, leads directly to the outside, the same outside where millions and millions of bugs are.
Oh, and, not to be a whiner, but the bungalow door ends woefully short of the floor. An open invitation to any insect or rodent, and possibly midgets as well if they crouch, that wants to just walk right in.
I figure I can fix the door by wedging a rolled-up bath towel underneath it. But the gap around the ceiling—well, that I have no answer to. Unless it's a clever device for ventilating the place, and …
A-haa, I see!!!
“How,” I ask the porter before he leaves, “do I make the roof go down?”
He regards me a little weirdly at first, then brightens up when I start conveying roof-lowering movements to him through the medium of mime. “Yes,” he nods.
“I knew it. Is there a lever …”
“Yes,” he replies.
“… or a switch?”
“Yes.”
“No—which one? Which is it? Lever or switch?”
He's looking puzzled now.
I turn to the room and spread my arms. “Can—you—show—me—where—the—roof—control�
�is? Where in the room?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Fabulous, thanks.”
And I wait.
We both do.
For quite a while, actually.
Until eventually I snap, “You've forgotten where it is, haven't you?”
He nods again. “Yes.”
Then, slightly panicked, he gives a small bow and shoots out the door without his tip.
Well!
More than a little annoyed, I set about searching for the controls myself, because I know I'll never sleep if I'm exposed to the outdoors in this way. Optimistically, I even flick what appears to be a light switch. But in keeping with a roof that doesn't fit, they also have lights that don't work.
As I'm cursing my bad luck, Tasha arrives at the door carrying a clipboard and wearing her backpack, a fine sheen of perspiration across her brow.
Actually, at a certain angle, and with the afternoon sun glancing off her face like it is now, she bears a striking physical resemblance to a young Sharon Stone, her beauty enhanced further by a winsome street-urchin quality that most actresses would die for, that tends to attract male attention wherever we go, drawn by the large brown eyes, big smile, and funky, short, blonde-streaked hair that sticks out in wisps and tufts at all angles, as if it was cut in the dark. With a potato peeler. By Andrea Bocelli.
As she absorbs the interior of my bungalow, her lips hitch into an “Ugh!” shape, and I know she's thinking exactly what I'm thinking: found the lever that lowers the roof yet?
Preempting her, I shake my head. “I was just looking for it when you arrived.”
“Looking for what? What are you talking about?”
Oh. Okay. Then she wasn't thinking what I was thinking. Sorry.
“My room is full of bugs. I'm so pissed,” she shudders. “They're everywhere. God, how could the office send us here during bug season?”
“Maybe they didn't know. Every season's probably bug season in Vanuatu.”
“Yeah, well, it sucks, and I'm going to tell them.”