by Cash Peters
“Listen up, indigenous people, for I give you the Book of Matthew, Chapter 1,” the missionaries would stand on the beach and say in pidgin English, only to find to their astonishment—“¡Ay, Dios mió!”—that they were met, not by the naive, grinning, warmhearted Polynesians they'd seen in all the brochures, but rather by a bunch of violent men and women who resented complete strangers waltzing in and trashing their culture.
“¡Ay, mierda!! Nos están tirando cocos!” [“Shit! They're throwing coconuts at us!”] the Spaniards cried as a rain of missiles showered down upon their heads. “¡Huye! ¡Huye! ¡Ay! Todos al bote. ¡Ay, ay!” [“Flee! Ouch! Everyone back to the boat. Ouch!”]
And quite honestly, if teams of very determined missionaries over many centuries couldn't change these people and their customs, no way is a U.S. TV crew going to.
“We like the life,” Tom says again.
As if to answer my further unspoken questions, he adds: no, the tribe doesn't seek progress; no, the tribe doesn't feel it's missing out by not having modern amenities; and no, the tribe doesn't regret being out of step with the world beyond these shores. And that's their final word on the matter. At least until this policy comes up for review, in, say, another ten million years or so.
Back in the village again, it's lunchtime. In the spirit of the show, that means I have to eat what the tribe eats, which is something called laplap, Tanna's national dish. It's a lasagna/pudding cooked in a fire pit and fashioned from layers of cabbage, bananas, coconut milk, and a little more soil than I'm used to, all bound up in a parcel of coconut leaves. A big parcel it is, too. About the size of a tractor seat. It takes six women and a child to maintain the fire and pile on the rocks that weigh it down, then to take the rocks off again and lift the laplap free of the smoldering ashes onto a tree stump, where it's hacked into individual slabs using bush knives and transferred to a plate. And when I say plate, I mean leaf.
“It's good,” Tom says, chomping on his laplap. “You try.”
Staring at the thick wad of steaming green slime in my hand, I'm seriously inclined to give it a miss. But Mark and Eric are looking on and there's a camera trained on me. So, taking a deep breath, I close my eyes and sink my teeth deep into it.
Hm. He's right, actually, it's not bad. Bit dry, bit gritty, but okay. For all the world like chewing a tractor seat, in fact.
The crew, for its part, is spared the complex soily goodness that is laplap. For them, the hotel restaurant has packed two heavy-duty plastic coolers with sandwiches, fresh fruits, potato chips, and chocolate bars. These, plus bottled waters and sodas, are unloaded off the back of the van in a clearing, allowing everyone to take a well-deserved break. Except for Director Mark, who's not feeling well, his already gaunt face suddenly geisha pale. Cursed with a rogue digestive tract, he always seems to be sick with something. Right now he maintains he's not really sick at all; he just needs to take a dump somewhere, and then he'll be fine.
“Go over there,” Camera Mark tells him. “Crap in the woods. Nobody will see.”
It is, after all, what everyone else does around here.
The patient is horrified. “Dude, are you serious? Look at this place. It's unsanitary. Nah—I'll wait 'til we get back to the hotel.”
And, clutching his stomach, he turns his back on the food and retreats to the van, where he sits half in, half out for the next twenty minutes, staring forlornly at the ground.
A big feature of each episode in the series is that I must find a generous stranger to give me a bed for the night. The challenge is to get them to offer it. Once they agree to that on principle, my job is done; I'm not required to actually sleep there. After all, this is entertainment, it's not a survival show; the audience isn't going to care whether I stay 'til morning or leave after ten minutes. All that matters is that someone makes the offer.
In this instance, the “bed” Tom has set up for me is a dirty strip of coconut matting on the ground in the corner of a hut. A dark hut at that. A dark hut filled with spiders, and crawling with licorice-colored beetles and ticks and fleas and God knows what else.
“It'll be okay, I'm sure,” Eric says, not sounding sure at all. At the same time he scans the hut with his flashlight and finds, clinging to a beam right above where I'd be sleeping, a large six-legged green something with huge red bulging eyes.
“What the hell is that?”
Nobody's able to say. Some kind of land-based lobster, possibly?
Even Tom draws a blank. Whatever it is, it's yet one more reason why I won't be sleeping here for any length of time. And also why we must stop nuclear testing in the Pacific. That thing was probably a squirrel once.
Aside from the irradiated-wildlife issue, the pillow Tom has given me has been improvised out of half a log sawn from a tree.
Half a log!!
Well, I'm sorry. I don't do logs. I don't do bugs. I don't do mutated squirrels. And I don't do coconut matting covered in spiders. If the crew thinks they're leaving me here for twelve hours while they return to a five-star beach resort and sleep under mosquito netting between freshly starched cotton sheets tonight, they have another thing coming. And for once Eric agrees. So the decision is made that, since staying the night here might endanger my life, and since not killing the host is a priority on this show—otherwise there won't be any future ones—we'll just grab a few shots of me snoozing on the ground in my spiffy shirt and casual trousers, and that will be it.
The final scene we need before we leave Yakel is the kava ceremony …
“Where you'll get to drink kava, Cash.”
“Oh no I won't.”
I'm adamant about that. No drugs for Sir. If necessary I'll pretend.
… which we've been told takes place at sundown. That gives us an hour to kill. Rather than waste it, Todd and both Marks take off on a circuit of the village to shoot B-roll, leaving me and Tasha to tidy away the lunch things.
B-roll is an important part of making a travel program. You see it a lot on TV. It's filler, basically—pretty, scenic shots of mountains, rivers, banyans, skeletal dogs, pigs, children, flowers, plus, whenever possible, a few shots of the host looking hunky (this is the bit I like!) as he strides purposefully across a beach, or scales precipitous cliffs, or marches with confidence down hillsides without falling (after several attempts), waving to total strangers who have no idea why he's waving, peering into people's homes uninvited, or just picking stuff up off the ground and staring at it intently in a way that suggests he's interested, when really he's not at all.
Once the boys have gone and we're alone, Tom bums a cigarette off Tasha, then he and I sit together quietly on a log, watching wild pigs chase dogs through shafts of sunlight, and dogs chase squealing children back the other way.
“You smoke, Cash?” Tom asks, taking a long drag of his cigarette.
“No. I don't.”
And that, one would think, would be the end of that conversation. We can move on to more interesting topics: “How about iPods? Wouldn't you want an iPod?”
But my response apparently has hit him like a crossbow dart between the eyes. “You don't smoke? Really?”
You should see the guy's face. The incredulity.
“No, Tom, I don't smoke.”
“But why you not?” he asks, audibly expelling a long blue plume into the air as a tempting example of how manly he looks and how majestic a true warrior can seem when immersed in a toxic cloud of gas. It seems that, here in Yakel, smoking goes hand in hand with “living the life,” even as it's steadily shortening it.
“Oh, I dunno … because it's bad for you, maybe?”
“Bad??” His howling laugh pinballs around the canopy above our heads. “No, Cash,” he says earnestly. “Smoking is good. A good thing. Good for men.”
“It is?”
“Es. Very good for men. Men smoke.” To emphasize this he crooks his arm and does a Spartacus muscle-clench gesture with it. Men smoke—grrrr!
Of course, this is where they'd bene
fit from television reception. Documentaries are handy for filling in the blanks. But for once I bite my tongue.
Still shaking his head in disbelief that we're even having such a ridiculous conversation, Tom stands up and vanishes into the trees, sidestepping a young woman bouncing a naked baby in her arms. As I watch him go, my eyes switch to the baby. In that moment, it expels a thick projectile of greeny-brown diarrhea from its ass, hosepipe-style. Then another. BLEEEEECCCCCHHHHHHH! A fecal torrent of such abundance that it cascades in a viscous stream over the mother's shoulder, down her arms and the backs of her legs.
Grossed out, Tasha takes in a sharp gulp of air behind me. Then, before it's even fully registered on any of us what just happened, a small dog, one of those emaciated bag-of-bones animals I saw roaming the village earlier, scurries out of the trees, clearly unable to believe its luck. Before the pigs can come running over, the dog wraps itself around the mother's feet and begins gobbling up the elasticated tongues of shit dripping from her arm.
Too stunned to recoil, too sick to throw up, I just stand there, staring, hand clutched to my mouth, thinking to myself, “This is the life? Seriously?”
1 The Past is divided into eight distinct periods, so that people sitting history exams can remember them better.
i. Modern Times. Covers the period generally known as “nowadays.” Began about ten years ago and is still going on.
ii. Yesteryear. A sunny, carefree era, remembered only by lonely grandmothers and tiresomely chatty uncles, and which happened just long enough ago that it prevents you arguing with them, when gas was a penny a gallon, songs had tunes you could hum, acid reflux was still called indigestion, cigarettes were considered nutritious, and wars were fought for good reason.
iii. Days Gone By. An ill-defined time shortly before the birth of everyone alive today, spoken of with great fondness and recorded at length in books, but otherwise with no proof that it existed at all. For instance, Marconi is said to have invented the telephone in Days Gone By. Yeah, right.
iv. Historical Times. 1300 to 1870 A.D. Americans fought the Civil War. Shakespeare copied Francis Bacon's plays and sold them as his own. The fifteen laws of aerodynamics were written down. Captain Cook sailed the world, randomly renaming things, and was killed in Hawaii (renamed the Island of Sudden Stabbings). And Vanuatu was discovered.
v. The Days of Yore. 1000 to 1300 A.D. (Later merged with the Dark Ages to avoid confusion.)
vi. Ancient Historical Times. 5000 B.C. to 1000 A.D. Incorporates Biblical Times and the era of great ancient civilizations: Greeks, Ephesians, Corinthians, Colossians, Romans, and a bunch of other people St. Paul wrote to. During this time, Buddha invented doing nothing and called it meditation, Vesuvius erupted, Atlantis sank, and aliens visited our planet and gave us Stonehenge, marijuana, pyramids, Scientology, fire, algebra, and wheels.
vii. Time Immemorial. A catch-all for the five thousand years before history really got started, when nobody can account for what happened, but certain things—things that were showing promise and would come into their own later on—are thought to have had their origins. Man, for instance. And fish. Otherwise, lots of waiting around.
viii. Prehistoric Times. Started with the Big Bang and lasted for hundreds of millions of years. Made famous by its colossal ice ages and the Jurassic Era, when dinosaurs ruled the earth. Grrrr.
5
Fat Kid
Coming up with the concept for All Washed Up turned out to be the easy part. Next, it had to be fleshed out into a full-blown TV series (the act of watching television taking a different set of skills to actually making it, apparently), and since I had no idea at all how to do that, a creditable production company needed to be found, one with experience making travel shows that could help me fully crystallize my vision.
“I've worked with these guys before,” The Thumb said one day, calling from his office on the East Coast to tell me he was hooking me up with some old friends of his. “They have an excellent track record. Always produce great stuff for us. Maybe you could go for a coffee with them, hang out, see how you get along…”
He was confident he'd found a good match: the production company's many years of experience combined with my absolute confusion about what was happening to me being the perfect recipe for making quality TV.
“And what if we don't get along?”
“Hey, let's not be negative. We're gonna make a great show. I've given them your number. I'm sure there's gonna be a chemistry there. Let—”
“And if there isn't?”
“—me know how it goes. Always feel free to call me. Bye.”
The meeting couldn't take place for two weeks. (According to my imaginary calendar, I was fully booked until then.) When it did, it happened in a Starbucks in Santa Monica.
I arrived first.
Soon after, The Thumb's friend showed his face. Turned out to be a real ball of fire, bursting through the doors in a typhoon of creative urgency, chest out, dagger eyes darting this way and that, looking like he'd just been hit by a car and flung twenty feet.
“HEY, CASH!” People glanced up from their coffees. “HOW'S IT GOING?”
An attractive man in his mid-thirties, he was five-foot-eight in person (seven feet or more in his own head), with a round Hawaiian face and spiky black hair pulled back from a dickering hairline that seemed undecided whether to stay or go. High-octane, intense, and driven, he was at once Goliath to my David, Argentina to my Falklands, Nintendo to my Etch-a-Sketch, and cartoonishly masculine, the way so many of these Hollywood type A guys tend to be, which I always find amusing. As if they've spent the past twenty years stockpiling testosterone, anticipating a shortage.
“I'VE HEARD A LOT ABOUT YOU. A LOT!”
“Really?” Stepping up to the counter, I took out my billfold …
“NOW, WHAT ARE YA HAVING?”
… and quickly put it away again. Well, you don't want to seem pushy.
Once we had our drinks, we retired to the smokers’ patio, where the natural cacophony of the guy's voice would blend in with the traffic and not distract other patrons.
Clad in designer jeans and a figure-hugging black cotton V-neck—the kind worn by superheroes, and also by people who've been told “you look good in that” as a joke—his body was thin and serviceably buff while somehow hinting at an old weight problem. Not sure why. Just the way he handled himself—that classic fat-kid trick of being extra-extrovert to compensate for childhood insecurities.
“The network's VERY excited about this show,” he said after we sat down. “And I love the concept as well. It's great.”
It certainly is, I thought. That's why it's doing so well for CBS.
“What other programs have you produced?” I quizzed him.
“Oh, a whole bunch of great stuff.”
He was a successful freelancer with irons in fires all over L.A., he said, reeling off a long list of shows he'd worked on, none of which I'd ever heard of. Nor can I recall anything about them, except that they ranged from (a few) mainstream ratings-winners to (mostly) low-end reality series with names like Celebrity Tools, Splurge!, Extreme Dwarf Makeover, or somesuch nonsense. I really wasn't paying attention.
TV is awash in programs like these. The kind of series where you'd swear they arrived at a campy title first, then somehow devised a concept to fit around it.1 Cheap, mindless, generic fluff that's fine in short bursts but ultimately forgettable, wheeled out by the networks each year to entertain … no, not entertain, preoccupy complete pinheads, and foisted on them for so long now that, numbed by mediocrity, especially the kids, they're no longer able to discern between quality and dross. Which is lucky, because dross like Celebrity Tools seems to be cheap and plentiful nowadays.
“Altogether …” a quick calculation on his fingers “… I have ten series in production currently. That's ten parties I can go to.” His eager brown eyes slashed a triumphant Zorro Z across my face. “And I know All Washed Up is gonna be great too. Come on, drink up, I'l
l show you.”
His office was located in Westwood, in a network of one-story buildings configured awkwardly like a badly thought-out puzzle. The moment I walked inside, my ears were assailed by a jangling timpani of slamming doors and rock rhythms blaring from TVs, like an electronic Middle Earth, a Tolkien netherworld of feverish endeavor. All around us, enthusiastic hobbit producers and hobbit technicians scurried back and forth, diving into rooms, out of rooms, shouting, laughing raucously. In cramped, twilit caves with their curtains drawn to make them seem subterranean, young, bleary-eyed hobbit editors sat hunched over keyboards, squinting at computer monitors while binge-eating Oreos and Frito-Lays. Lights flashed, pictures flickered, interspersed every so often with booming detonations of sound—snatches of dialogue or music—that would explode from speakers for an instant, then just as suddenly quit.
In public radio, we can boast nothing even remotely comparable. Our studios have a disturbing, almost sinister quiet to them. Confined to individual gray cubicles, armies of highly competent producers, reporters, and managers coexist for eight solid hours a day, crafting show after show, week after week, carrying out their work with almost catlike stealth, barely making a sound.
The same is not true in television. In television, where youthful urgency is considered a worthy substitute for being good at what you do, and making a great deal of noise is all too frequently mistaken for creativity in action, bedlam tends to be the norm.