Naked in Dangerous Places

by Cash Peters

  2 Probably.

  3 And before you go copying this in your TV show, I'm currently applying for a patent to protect it. So back off.

  4 Patent pending.

  5 Another disaster, by the way. The Monastery of Pithariou, an isolated twelfth-century relic up in the hills, was closed when we got there, with its gates chained up, and no amount of loud heckling or throwing stones at their chapel windows would bring the monks out to greet us. It was a huge disappointment.

  6 I don't want to spark mass panic, but I fear the world's lesbian resources may be running out, and it's a real worry. I'm doubtless not the first to blame global warming for this, although I probably am the first to advocate rationing them as a result. At the very least we all need to come together and conserve as many lesbians as we can, before they become as rare as bald eagles, bees, and Republican senators without some kind of secret sexual past.

  9

  More Crew Looks

  “So what did you say?”

  “About what?”

  “When she asked if she could have your baby.”

  Tasha is goggle-eyed with shock next day at the airport when I tell her.

  “I said no, of course.”

  Alas, to a desperate, unmarried woman whose biological clock is ticking fast, a definite no, even when it's accompanied by a wagging oily finger and a stern glare, clearly still leaves wiggle room for negotiation, because Joanna continued arguing for some time.

  “I want a baby that's as tall as you, with your beautiful blue eyes and your sense of humor.”

  “And let's not forget the glorious hives I'm bound to get all over my forehead after eating oily sardines,” I thought.

  “It would be wonderful.”

  “Yes, it would—for you. But I don't want a child!!”

  Even a firm refusal, though, wasn't enough to put her off.

  “It's okay,” she assured me, knocking back another drink and moving on to Plan B, “we wouldn't have to have physical contact, actual penetration. You could just donate your sperm.”

  Oh—my—God.

  I was due to leave Greece the following morning, so I could afford to be honest with her. Therefore, as tactfully as I could, and to spare her feelings, I blurted out, “No frickin’ way. There's not a bloody chance in hell that that's ever going to happen.”

  No offense.

  After which, I took one last swig of ouzo, and left.

  Returning to the office following the Lesbos trip—following most of our trips, actually—was an odd affair: a jarring clash of cultures, pitting those who'd flown to distant continents, stayed in fabulous hotels, eaten exotic food, and mingled with amazing people, against those we'd left behind sitting at their desks. In a short number of weeks the crew and I had seen the world, our horizons and frames of references expanding exponentially with every new location, whereas for the hobbits in the office nothing much had changed at all, and I guess they didn't want to be reminded of it.

  Unfortunately, most times, as soon as our plane touched down in L.A., I would burst in through the office door, looking tanned and jet-lagged, regaling everyone with wild tales of my adventures: of almost drowning during a river-rafting expedition in Idaho; of almost falling to my death while opal mining in the Australian Outback; of being stripped naked and whipped with wet twigs in Russia; of almost losing a leg when I fell off the back of a snowmobile in Colorado; of almost snapping my left ankle in Massachusetts after I tripped getting out of the crew truck and it rolled right over my foot, putting me in the hospital; of almost being arrested while dodging guards in Moscow's Red Square; and of how I'd come this close to sliding headfirst down the full length of an icy ten-thousand-foot-high mountain because the daffy wardrobe woman had bought me boots with no grips on the soles.

  “Wow. That's excellent,” the hobbits would coo, delighted that filming had gone so well and we had a show, but on a personal level a little envious, I'm sure. “Good for you. Nice job. Great to see you back.” Then they'd drop the subject at once and return to staring at the same computer they were staring at when I left a couple of weeks before.

  That said, everyone remained professional and it never became a huge issue. Although, once the seed of unrest is planted like that, particularly in a close environment, grievances can sometimes escalate, and even, if you're not careful, mutate into something far more serious. And that's what happened here.

  With each passing trip, the mood in L.A. became worse somehow. Looking back, there must have been a tipping point, though I was too busy making the show to notice what it might be. From my point of view the production seemed to be in good shape, the crew and staff were happy, the early episodes were turning out just great; then … well, I don't know what happened. I left for a week to shoot two U.S. domestic shows and by the time I got back things had gone south. A troubling and very palpable unease had developed around me as the host, but with no immediate signposts pointing to why, nothing to connect the dots. Instead of smiles and handshakes, I was met quite often with glum or embarrassed frowns. Or people would look the other way and begin a conversation with someone else. Or, worse, they'd spot me coming along a corridor, duck into rooms, and close the door. It was like living with my parents all over again.

  Not long afterwards, the puzzle unraveled slightly when I was summoned to Fat Kid's cave for a pep talk. One of those special little pep talks that, in the wrong hands—his, for instance—can leave you feeling ten times more miserable than when you went in.

  “Look at it like this, Cash,” he said with his characteristic bombastic firmness. “It's our job to bring your genius …”

  I'm sorry???

  “… your genius to the screen. We know you're good at what you do. You're very good at what you do. So how about you let us do what we're good at? You have to trust us. Don't fight it. Let us guide you. We're all on the same team here.”

  Aaaaaaaaaaah!!!

  Suddenly, a light went on. Hearing that word—team—it came to me: now I knew why everyone was so upset. It was because of my well-advertised aversion to, and undeniable feebleness in the face of, danger.

  Ever since Australia, when I'd resisted going down the opal mine on a faulty winch that was only marginally safer, according to the guy operating it, than hurling myself into the fifty-foot shaft headfirst, rumors had filtered back to Los Angeles that, somewhat bizarrely, the star of this major global adventure travel series: (a) didn't seem to enjoy traveling very much; and (b) was not adventurous in the least. If nobody believed me at the start when I told them I was a totally new breed of daredevil, the kind who's not remotely daring and takes no risks whatsoever, they were sure believing it now.

  In television, where people will do almost anything for money, even if they can't then spend it because of being dead, self-preservation is seen as pure heresy. Whereas in my world it's Priority Number 1, which merely proves how ahead of my time I am.

  In hindsight, if I had to nominate one incident that best illustrates the problem, and which, in some people's jaundiced eyes, spoiled the show, it would probably be the one in New Zealand.

  A breezy March morning. I was fresh off a ferry boat in Queenstown on the South Island. Billed as the Adventure Capital of the World, Queenstown cowers before a sweeping amphitheater of mountains arranged like banks of snowcapped throw pillows on the shores of Lake Wakatipu and reflected in smooth waters of cobalt blue. But here's the problem: you can't go calling your town something as bold as the Adventure Capital of anything without subsequently attracting a broad spectrum of type A daredevils hell-bent on killing themselves, if they can only figure out how. Luckily, whatever your self-annihilation needs may be—parasailing off a perilously high peak; jet-boating along turbulent, boulder-strewn rivers; bungee-jumping—Queenstown has it all. Especially the last one.

  The thing they don't tell you about bungee-jumping is that it involves throwing yourself off a ledge at a great height and tumbling at enormous speeds toward the ground. Or maybe they do; I di
dn't read the leaflet.

  The sport originated in Vanuatu, and continues there to this day on the island of Pentecost, where it's called naghol, or land-diving, a timeless ritual in which teenage boys attempt to prove to their tribe that they've matured into manhood (and possibly don't want to get any older) by building a rickety seventy-five-foot tower, then tying vines to their ankles and leaping off the top. Done right, the boy's head skims the earth, fertilizing the soil for the upcoming harvest. Done wrong, his whole body ends up fertilizing the soil for the upcoming harvest.

  Now, I need hardly tell you that jumping off rickety towers isn't an exact science. Many times the practice results in catastrophe. Either the vines snap and the kid plunges to the ground, breaking his neck. Or the vines are too long and he slams into the earth and is knocked unconscious. Occasionally, things go a little better and the boy merely feels his spleen burst open on impact. The whole thing's a lottery, really.

  Anyway, back to the story.

  New Zealanders Henry Van Asch and his business partner A. J. Hackett were the first to see the potential of land-diving as an extreme sport. If only there was a way to reduce that pesky death-toll thing, they thought, which research showed might deter repeat business and be a turnoff to certain customers. So over the next two years they worked diligently in tandem with the University of Auckland to invent a super-strong cable that wouldn't snap under pressure. This became the bungee they use today.

  No sooner had I walked into his office and met Henry, a cheerful, strapping, curly-haired shortcake in a padded anorak with his company's logo on the back, than he decided to take the morning off work and drive me to his best site, at Nevis Bluff, the highest bungee jump in the country. Do I have the luck of the Devil or what? The Nevis setup is an engineering marvel. Somehow, Henry's team of wizards has managed to magic a large metal gondola the shape of a blunted acorn across the gorge on four wires and suspend it midway. You reach it by means of a small, fragile-looking cable car, though I'm unable to confirm this since I closed my eyes the instant someone mentioned the words “cable car” and told me I'd be going on one. When you get there, the gondola feels a lot sturdier than you'd imagined. It's made up mostly of windows, to be scenic, but then totally bucks the idea of the fourth wall by only having three of them. On one side of the main platform, a yawning gap opens up to a dizzying, uninterrupted 134-meter drop to the Nevis River below.

  “Eeee-heeeeee.” Mark grinned upon seeing it for the first time. “That's sick!”

  Indeed.

  “Why on earth would you do this?” I asked a frightened young girl as she was being harnessed up.

  “I need the buzz, the excitement,” she trembled. “I'm always trying to find something that excites me a bit more.”

  “So learn to play the cello.”

  “Oh no, no, no, no. Not quite the same thing!” And on the count of three she dived over the edge and disappeared.

  My God.

  It's an eight-second plunge to the bottom. So, after thirty seconds, when she hadn't reappeared, not unnaturally I assumed we'd lost her for good. “But hey, we should all move on with our lives,” I told her friends. “It's what she would have wanted.”

  I spoke too soon. Before they even had time to begin the grieving process, the giant winch was already grinding into action, hauling her up again. A minute and a half later she was back, shaken, red-faced, screeching with delight, and definitely not as dead as some of us had been predicting.

  “Regret it?” I asked.

  “No. You should do it.”

  One of her friends even taunted me. “You want to do it, but you're scared.”

  “No, I don't want to do it,” I corrected him, “because I'm scared.”

  “It's nothing to worry about,” another guy chipped in, shortly before he grabbed three oranges and stood on the very edge of a little diving board, juggling. “It's such an awesome system that's in place and you've got to put your faith in something. So I put my faith in the system itself, the bungee, the training, and all the engineering that goes into it.” Then, yodeling and juggling, he jumped. What a madman.

  “Dude, you have to do it,” Director Mark told me when my turn came.

  “No. Not a chance.” I dismissed him brusquely, making to go.

  “But you can't come all the way to New Zealand and not jump.”

  “D'you wanna bet? Just watch me.”

  Well, the whole crew was stunned. Even Henry was a little at a loss for words. But I'm sorry, that's just how I felt. For a start, I'm terrified of heights; there was no conceivable way I'd be jumping out of a bloody gondola into a gorge. But beyond that, I've never understood the ballyhoo about conquering your fears and “being all you can be.” It's such a silly alpha-male thing. The rest of us, luckily, are secure enough in ourselves to stand firm. Why not be less than you can be? That's what I say. Why not do what makes you feel comfortable, especially if it also means you stay safe, happy, unstressed, and in one piece? I told them this from the very start: when it comes to refusing to do things, consider me your go-to guy.

  “But dude …”

  “I'm not jumping, Mark! That's final. End of story!”

  Well, you can probably guess what came next: a Crew Look.

  Jeez, how I wish they'd stop doing that.

  It was Eric who broke the impasse. “Okay, I wouldn't ask you to do anything I wouldn't do,” he said, then promptly threw his weedy, middle-aged, entirely-dispens-able-as-far-as-I-was-concerned body off the platform into the unknown. Minutes later, he too came back, disheveled, thrilled, happy.

  After him it was Camera Mark's turn to be hooked up to the harness. Mind you, I'm surprised he didn't simply do away with the bungee cord altogether and just jump, hoping for the best.

  Then Director Mark went, followed by Todd, who dumped his sound equipment on the floor and leaped care-freely from the gondola, whooping loudly.

  And finally, when it looked to them like I was still balking at the prospect, brave Tasha got harnessed up. Biting her lip and laughing, but with deadly worried eyes, she nevertheless dug up the courage from somewhere, counting down from three to one, and went for it, skipping off the platform and flinging her body into the wind, plunging freestyle 134 meters toward the river below.

  “Oh my God. OH MY GOD!!!!!” she screamed moments later, her face packing in a thousand emotions all at once, as the winch pulled her into the arms of shortcake Henry Van Asch once more. “That was so amazing! Oh, Cash, you have to try it.”

  “Okay,” Henry said, placing his hand on my arm. “You're up next.”

  And all eyes turned in my direction.

  “But it's my show,” I told Fat Kid back in the office weeks later, in response to his pep talk, which was not going well, “and if I don't want to do something on my show, why should I have to? Real, ordinary people don't bungee-jump. Most people are like me; they're scared. Why should my show not reflect how …?”

  I got no further. His olive cheeks began to glow red and, as if triggered remotely by a cell phone some distance away his rage blew up in my face.

  “It's NOT …” Sparks flew from his eyes. “… YOUR show.”

  “It's not?”

  “No, it's OUR show, okay? OUR show,” he yelled, rubbing a manly hand through his gelled spiky hair. “Yours, ours, the network's show. NOT yours. Understand?”

  Every superhero has a dark side. But this transformation—BOOOM—this switcheroo from light to dark, meek servant to dark overlord, was quite extraordinary. I was so shocked by it that I almost swallowed my gum.

  “TELEVISION IS A COLLABORATIVE EFFORT.” He was at full volume now. “IN RADIO, YOU OPERATE ALONE; YOU'RE A ONE-MAN BAND. AND THAT'S GREAT. BUT THAT'S NOT HOW TV WORKS, CASH. TELEVISION IS A TEAM EFFORT. AND IF YOU CAN'T ACCEPT THAT AND WORK AS PART OF OUR TEAM, THEN YOUR SHOW WILL FAIL.”

  Deep down, I knew he was right. Flustered and frustrated beyond measure at what he saw as an insufferably lame host who lived for comfort and ease and nev
er took risks, he was at a loss for what to do. The very idea that the presenter of a TV adventure show would travel to an opal mine in the Australian Outback, then be too afraid to go down it; or climb a volcano in Vanuatu, but leave almost immediately because he was afraid of heights; or stand shivering on a ten-thousand-foot snowy mountain, unable to move because he found the ice too slippery; or fly halfway around the world to New Zealand, the home of bungee-jumping, then refuse outright to bungee-jump,1 even after the rest of the crew had done it, was unheard of, and a catastrophe for the show. The whole production was being thrown for a loop by these minor acts of rebellion.

  “WHAT YOU HAVE TO ASK YOURSELF IS THIS.” And he lunged at me from his seat. “AM—I—A—TEAM—PLAYER?”

  Well, maybe in the competitive, ego-driven type A world of television that he inhabits I do, where life is all politics and scoring points and proving how great you are, and where you never want to be seen to stand alone, or be the odd man out, or do the unpopular thing. But in my world, where you plod along on your own, working at your own pace, rarely competing with anyone but yourself, such factors are much less vital.

  “SO?” he prompted after a long pause. “ARE YOU? ARE YOU A TEAM PLAYER, CASH?”

  Er …

  “No,” I muttered, matching his pause moment for moment. “No, I'm not.”

  His eyes almost exploded from their sockets.

  “THEN I'M SORRY,” he proclaimed in a voice loud enough to steer ships away from rocks in a fog, “BUT YOUR SHOW WILL FAIL.”

  And on that grim note of foreboding, with a face as dark as raked-over embers, he launched himself across the room, and even looked for a moment like he was going to fly out of the window and away. Instead, he dived back behind his desk and started typing.

  The pep talk was over.

  Relieved to be out from under his acetylene gaze, I slipped into the corridor, shaking slightly, and put in a call to The Thumb to inform him of the news, that the show was going to fail, bec—