by Cash Peters
In passing, I was introduced to the two owners of the company, seated in their respective caves. They'd be our show runners, Fat Kid explained, if the series got picked up. They seemed friendly enough, greeting me with exuberant cries of “Hiiiii! How are you? How's it going?” the way TV types do to people they've never met before.
“Okay! Great.” Flinging himself down behind his desk with superhuman zeal, Fat Kid made up for lost time—hammered out an e-mail, scrolled down his BlackBerry, asked one of the hobbit PAs to fetch me a bottle of spring water, bit into an apple, glanced at an old black-and-white movie playing on a TV situated directly over my shoulder behind the couch, then finally, I guess once he'd run out of alternatives to actually speaking to me, turned his attention to the show.
“Assuming everything goes well with us”—meaning between me and him today—“then we have a go-ahead from the network to shoot a pilot. That'll be sometime in October. We've found this great little town in Central California. It's a Danish community called Solvang. Cute. Friendly.”
“Is it on the ocean?”
“Er … no. No, it isn't. Why?”
“Then how can I be all washed up in it?”
“Ah. That's another thing. We're thinking of changing the title. The network wants you to arrive by a different means of transport every episode. Boats are too limiting. So one week a Chieftan tank, one week a plane, and so on …”
A Chieftan tank? Already I was nervous. I thought this was my show, so how come key decisions on my show were being made without consulting me?
“Cash, it's not your show,” Fat Kid asserted commandingly “It's our show now.”
“It is?”
“Anyways, Solvang's a weird, weird little place. The people are very nice, though, so I'm sure, with your personality and your British charm, you can persuade someone to take you in, give you a bed for the night and some food.”
Uh-oh. “You mean Danish food?”
“Yes. It's a Danish community.”
“Does Danish food have lots of oil in it, d'you think?”
He had no idea. “Why?”
“Well,” I said, “I have a problem with food.”
“You can't eat food?”
“No, I …”
“All food?”
Not all food, obviously, you clown, otherwise I'd be dead. “No, just certain foods.”
He directed a bemused, unblinking stare at me. “Such as?”
“Oh … milk, butter, bread, oats …”
I quickly rattled off the top ten “danger” items, reserving the biggest emphasis for my lifelong archenemy. “The worst one of all,” I said, “the one I have to steer clear of at all costs, is oil. My body can't process oil or grease or fat.”
“Why? What happens if you eat oil?”
“My cheeks and forehead break out in hives and I get sick.”
It's true. Take two close-up photos, one of the moon's surface and another of my face after I've eaten a bucket of fried chicken, and I defy even NASA to tell which one is which. It's horrific. I can't go outside for days. Bane of my entire existence.
“Oh. Okay.” With a worried “What the hell have I gotten myself into?” look, Fat Kid returned to checking e-mails.
“You know what?” I said, sensing I might have lost his interest. “Why don't I draw you up a list of things I can't eat?”
“Yeah, thanks,” he said, typing, “why don't you?” And from there we quickly moved on. “Now, about shooting the pilot…”
1 Who among us, on a really bad night, hasn't almost fallen unconscious struggling through “fun-packed” home improvement shows called Celebrity Tools or Getting Hammered? Or transparently sycophantic travel shows called Backpakistan (and its sequel Backpakoslovakia), in which some witless boob in shorts and a T-shirt hikes across whole continents without once being amusing, genuine, intelligent, insightful, funny, original, entertaining, or informative? Or game shows called Matrimony, Acrimony, Alimony, or Battle of the Millionaire Amputees, or, better still, Phrenetic! “Blindfolded experts try to identify celebrities by the bumps on their heads, with hilarious consequences.” And the weird thing is, if you dare point out to producers or network executives that their shows are stupid, contemptible swill, they stare at you like you're the stupid one and you've simply failed to catch the many finer nuances of their truly excellent, groundbreaking, populist output.
6
Joe Versus a Volcano
After a great night's sleep at the hotel, I wake up with the larks. Or whatever the Vanuatan equivalent of larks is. Piglets, probably. Early anyway. Before five.
Following a filling breakfast of toast, tea, and grilled fish in the restaurant—plus another large bowl of raw grated cabbage, which I don't order; it just appears at the table—I drag on the same skanky clothes I wore yesterday1 and make my way to the crew truck.
We have a new member joining our happy little band today. Joe, he's called, from the Vanuatan Tourism Bureau, a delightfully pleasant ni-Van native with a shy smile and a whispery voice that brushes the ears like warm velour. Joe is bilingual, in the sense that he has a solid command of both English and Bislama-which-is-really-just-English-too-but-spoken-funny. His job on the show is to oil the wheels behind the scenes: help translate during interviews, explain to bystanders about the show, and, if needs be, to step in and bring calm to troubled waters in the event that the non-TV guy transgresses cultural boundaries and inadvertently offends the locals. Oh, as if!
First stop: a typical Tanna bush market.
The one Joe has chosen for us sits in a flat, stony recess at the roadside overlooking a narrow bay, with a dazzling beach and ocean view that, were I given to cliché, I would probably describe as idyllic. By the time we arrive, the place is rocking. People are sitting beneath the trees, chatting, gossiping. Kids play; teenagers, too cool to mix with their parents—some things are the same the world over—lounge in the hot sun, sheltering their eyes with cupped hands as they joke among themselves.
The main focus of everyone's attention seems to be a man with a bullhorn who is on his feet addressing the crowd, most of whom look like they rue the day that bullhorns went on sale in Vanuatu.
Eric sidles up to me. “So this is the idea.” Feeling the heat, he runs a sweaty hand through his hair and adjusts his sunglasses up his nose. “It's the next day now. You've just left Yakel and you find yourself here in the market.”
“You mean I just stumble upon the market?”
“Yep.”
“Accidentally? The way I did with Yakel Village?”
“Yep.”
“And you think the audience will buy that?”
“Yep.”
I hope he's right. Even if you accept the possibility that one man could have wandered through a foreign airport in this day and age and never shown a passport or visa; hiked fifteen miles over hostile terrain without food or water; spent a day and night with a lost tribe he just happened to come across in the jungle, then got up and walked another ten miles until he came, quite by chance, here, to this market, that still doesn't account for the fact that the whole thing was done without a single detour, map, or mishap, and without asking anyone for directions. Does nobody but me think that's weird?
Of course, I shouldn't be surprised. One thing I've noticed time and again while watching reality TV over the years is how there's usually one particular element missing from it, and that's reality. In order to make it work, the whole thing has to be shrouded in a gossamer of pretense and artifice, not quite lies and not quite truth, but certainly not reality, either—somewhere in between.
“Cash—action!”
Unsure where to begin, I saunter around the market with Camera Mark and Todd, his boom microphone held at arm's length above his head, shuffling alongside me.
The job of selling the produce seems to fall to the women. They spread a blanket on the ground in the cool shade of a tree, then lay out their wares, which sometimes might be as little as a single bunch of banan
as, arranged in an eye-catching display. They then sit, supervising their stall, waiting for customers to drift by, while the men … okay, hands up, those who think this sentence ends with the words “… stand around watching them”?
Exactly.
An eclectic range of fruits and vegetables is on sale. Some I recognize: eggplant, cucumbers, taro, and I think papayas too. Others are oddly or obscenely shaped and a complete mystery. “What's this?” I ask, holding up a hairy dirty stick.
Sadly although I'm speaking Bislama—probably—the female vendors don't seem to understand a word I say. They simply stare up at me, baffled.
We stop shooting for a few moments to regroup and figure this out.
“Got it!” Director Mark has had a brilliant idea. “Where's Joe?”
Next thing he knows, the man from the tourist office has been conscripted into the show, and he doesn't seem too happy about it at all, especially since he's being forced to wear his dark blue Nike T-shirt back to front and inside-out to hide the logo. This is so that the network's sponsors back home won't start whining about how Nike's getting free air time and they're not. The result, however, makes Joe look slovenly. Not only are his seams showing at the shoulder, but the V of the neck is the wrong way round and the Nike check-mark logo is halfway down his back.
“Action.”
And off we go. Take two.
On TV, Joe and I make convincing best buddies from the start, without any plausible explanation offered as to why, or where he came from. One moment he's not there, then suddenly he is, trotting at my side in his strange back-to-front shirt, smiling weakly, looking not the least bit excited by his meteoric rise from complete anonymity in local government to almost total obscurity on U.S. cable television.
“A bush market is the focal point of village life,” he explains softly. “It serves as a meeting place, a place to find out what's happening in the community.”
Today there's some kind of rally going on. A trestle table has been set up at the far side of the glade; behind it sits a panel of older men with serious expressions on their faces, waiting their turn. Another man, recently acquainted with the power of amplification and how it allows you to talk very, very loudly, drowning out anyone who disagrees with you, has been babbling for fifteen minutes or more through the bullhorn and sees no reason to stop now.
So what is this? What's going on?
“It's Women's Day,” Joe elucidates. “We're trying to promote women's rights.”
Well, what do you know!!! About time. Finally, someone is acknowledging the pivotal contribution women make to this society and campaigning to free them from their underdog—or, more accurately, underpig—status.
Curious, I ask, “What kind of rights do women have now?”
Thinking hard, Joe does his best to come up with an example, but eventually quits.
“Because,” I help him out, “women are inferior to men here, right?”
“Yes, inferior,” he nods, silently complimenting me on grasping the concept so quickly, and we walk on.
Shuffling from stall to stall, I sprinkle a fine dusting of ignorance over everything I touch, coming to rest by a heap of what appear to be lazily made cheerleader pompoms. “Joe, what are these?”
“Grass skirts. You wear them around your waist.” Adding emphatically: “But only women.”
“I know, because they're skirts. But what would happen if a man wore one?”
He's quite taken aback by this. “You'd … look … like a woman.”
“And?”
Instead of replying, he visibly shudders, as if being mistaken for a woman, even as a joke, would be social suicide.
Moving on: “And what's this?” I pick up an ugly green bulb with tentacles that I recognize.
“This is the most important part of our kastom,” he explains, for the benefit of the audience. “This is kava. It's a traditional herb drink. See the roots here? That is the most important part of the kava. The young boys chew this …”
“Young boys? Why does it have to be young boys?”
“That is their job.”
“So it's like homework?”
“Yes. Homework.”
“Okay. The little boys chew the root. And?”
“And they spit it out onto a leaf, strain it into a coconut shell, mix it with water, and that's it, you have a delicious bowl of kava.”
Wait a second. So kava, then, if I'm understanding this correctly, is a processed liquid that's first combined with the spit of little boys, then strained through an old sock or something, and finally served up in a shell to drink. Oh—my—God.
“And have you,” I ask, indicating Joe, who looks too sensible ever to have put such a vile thing within three feet of his lips, “ever drunk any of this …”—unhygienic bilge—“… stuff after it's been spat out by little boys?”
“Oh, yes,” he says cheerfully. “Yes, I drink kava. Sure.”
I think I may faint.
“What's the point of celebrating National Women's Day anyway?”
“They're trying to recognize women,” Joe says.
“Who's trying?”
And then something dawns on me, something I didn't spot at first. Scanning the table at the head of the rally, I quietly count the number of female speakers on the panel. Marking them off on my fingers, I estimate the total to be somewhere around … zero. The Women's Day committee is made up entirely of men!
“But of course!” Joe explains quietly. “Women aren't allowed to speak.”
“Hang on. So you're telling me that the only people allowed to campaign for women's rights are …?”
“Men. Yes.”
Oh, that's just great.
“We would like to share everything in the home,” one woman tells me. She's a gray-haired firebrand with a real sense of purpose about her. “So sometimes if the woman is sick, then men take over. Women is used to doing cooking morning, lunch, and dinner. We've decided we both have to do it.”
“Good for you,” I cheer.
“Women is used to being under men. We're starting to come up.”
Excellent. “How long d'you think it'll take before you're the superior species?”
“Well, it'll be a long time, obviously,” she chuckles.
“Oh—why?”
“Well, we have just started last year.”
“Last year?”
Oh God. Watching this great bulldozer of hope march off into the crowd, I turn to Joe and mumble despondently, “Nothing's going to change, is it?”
He gives me a strangely knowing look, but doesn't reply.
Farther along, in among the vegetables, we pass what for me is the most harrowing sight of the trip: a chicken trapped in a small cube-shaped cage made of sticks.
Let me define “small.” First, imagine a chicken. Now imagine a cage. Now shrink the cage until it's a lot smaller than the chicken, then lock the chicken in it anyway. For a culture supposedly in tune with Nature, the ni-Van abuse it a little too wantonly for my liking.
Distracted, I step out of the TV show for a moment and speak to Eric: “We need to release this thing.”
“We can't release it, it's somebody's chicken,” he says, and Joe agrees.
“So let's buy it. If we buy it, it's ours and we can release it. Please?”
Since, in the spirit of the show, I'm not allowed to have any money in my pockets, this makes me feel like a child asking for an advance on his allowance.
“You can't just release a chicken,” Eric says. “It'll run into the road and get hit by a truck.”
Yeah—so?
One part of me knows he's talking sense. The idiot part. The rest of mes with the chicken. I know if I were trapped in a cage with not a millimeter of latitude for movement, I'd probably fantasize the whole day about being hit by a truck. It's all I'd think about. It would be my dream. Anything but being inhumanely guantanamoed into a space no bigger than a cookie jar and left to die.
“But we can't just leave it here
.”
There follows a brief exchange of looks among the crew. It's a look I've seen before a few times. I spotted it first while we were shooting our Guadalajara show, when I was taken to a traditional Mexican rodeo, or charreada. Inside the ring, some cowardly men in stupid costumes were lassoing bulls with ropes, pulling them over, then dragging them along the ground for sport. I became so enraged by the despicable cruelty of it all that I started to cry—something TV hosts routinely don't do, I'm told—holding up filming for several minutes until I'd recovered my composure enough to carry on. So I know that look. It's secret crew language for exasperation. It means, “Uh-oh, the host is behaving like a baby again—what do we do now?”
What they do is placate me with sympathy, pretending that they are as concerned about the chicken as I am. However, these are the islanders’ indigenous ways, and there's nothing we can do. “It's how things are. We mustn't interfere, and the chicken should be left to its fate.”
“Aw, come on, guys,” I find myself begging. “We can't just do nothing.”
However, not only can we do nothing, but we're going to.
“Okay, then—what if”—I'm thinking fast—“we bought it and gave it away.”
“Cash—it's a chicken!” Eric, already ruffled by the time it's taking to shoot this market scene, is losing his temper. “The person you give it to will probably eat it, so either way it's dead. Now, we're running late. Let's move on.”
At my feet, unable to move more than a millimeter in any direction, the chicken, already half-dead in the baking sun, its head jammed against the bars, watches our argument with failing eyes. Eyes that say, “Just kill me. Please, do it now.”
I hear you, pal. I work in public radio. Believe me, I know that feeling.
The remainder of the day and the morning of the next are given over to shooting B-roll, picturesque shots of the host ambling this way and that, up leafy slopes, through undergrowth, trekking along vast operatic beaches of black, volcanic sand that stretch all the way from here to a dark, jagged headland half a mile away, reducing me in the camera's eye to a mere polyp on the ocean's edge, as the two Marks skillfully recapture the awe those original explorers must have felt in Historical Times when, thinking they'd found Australia, they rowed triumphantly ashore, expecting to be greeted with warmth and handshakes and beers and barbecued shrimp, but instead were showered with sharp stones and beaten with sticks. It's epic shots like these that, later on, will be cobbled into a montage and used to pad out the otherwise inexplicable gaps in the narrative between my arrival at the airport and—next minute—striding chirpily into Yakel Village, over fifteen miles away, with not a scuff mark or bead of sweat on me.