by Cash Peters
“But what about the 'sleeping for five hours’ thing?”
After all we've been through, in Vanuatu particularly, and all the multifarious ways the integrity of the show has been nibbled at since, I realize I must come across as strangely obtuse to be defending this policy right now.
“Cash,” he says in mild disbelief, “it's a frickin’ TV show. You're not expected to risk your life for it. I mean, I'm not telling you what to do, but if you come back with us in the van, nobody's going to blame you or say anything. I'll personally tell the office how dangerous this was. They'll understand. On the other hand …” Fidgeting, he stares into the middle distance, to where the hyenas are prowling. “… if you decide to stay, we'll do our best to protect you, but—that's your decision.”
In other words, put up or shut up.
It's a major dilemma. When I started out on this yearlong adventure, an issue as basic as “Do I want to sleep in a village under siege from ravenous lions?” wouldn't have troubled me for even a split second. I'd have fled. “I am not MacGyver,” I'd have said haughtily. “I am not a type A maniac like the rest of you and I don't give a damn about being on your stupid team. I did not sign up for this show to go and put my life on the line for other people's entertainment. I don't bungee jump; I don't walk across ten-thousand-foot-high icy mountains in cheap boots with no grips on them; I may climb erupting, windblown volcanoes, but only if someone hangs onto me the whole time and I get to complain about it all the way up and all the way back down again. And, as the natives of Yakel Village will happily testify, I don't like Nature or the wild and I don't sleep on muddy, bug-ridden floors in the middle of nowhere. That's just not me. Sorry.”
My God, what a pompous ass I must have seemed back then. No wonder there were so many Crew Looks. And no wonder everyone expressed such grizzled exasperation as they frantically tried to figure out last-minute solutions to problems that would never have existed if celebrity lawyer Star Jones had been the host, or that guy with the anger-management problem from The Partridge Family.
But that's how much I've changed. Reflecting on the “me” that began filming this show a year ago is like looking at my graduation photo from the 1970s, in which I'm wearing an ill-fitting suit, a boring shirt with a supersized collar, and I have big Bee Gees hair. Frankly, I don't even recognize that guy any more. Hard to say what's changed. Whether it's the constant debilitating pressure I've been under all these months that's throwing my judgment off axis, or a side effect of the dragging fatigue that hounds me everywhere I go and never seems to lift, or just the numbness to fear that inevitably follows after you've crammed ten full lifetimes of worldly experience into a single, tumultuous twelve-month period, or the fact that I came close to dying a few weeks ago and was half a day away from never being able to complain about climbing an erupting volcano or standing on an icy mountain, or anything else for that matter, ever again … I honestly can't give you a specific reason why my MacGyver switch got flicked to on, whether it was facing the lethal rapids in Idaho or the polar bears in Alaska or drinking emulsion paint spat from a boy's mouth in Vanuatu, but, compared to all of these things, for some reason the prospect of sleeping in a house made from fresh cow dung, surrounded by preying lions and hyenas, scarcely makes me blink.
In short, of course I'll be staying in Wilson's home overnight. Now, turn on the tuck-in cam, somebody shout “Action!” and let's get on with it.
“Okay, then.” Jay shrugs wearily. “If that's what you want.”
He looks worried, and is obviously hoping I'll change my mind, though my willingness to sacrifice myself so readily in the name of cheap cable programming secretly quite impresses him, I think.
Minutes later I catch the bang of doors, the roar of an engine, and the squeak of suspension, steadily diminishing, as the van bounces away across the plain into the night, leaving the host of the show, or possibly the former host if things don't go well, lying all alone, smelling of dung, on a pile of dung, in a dark, claustrophobic cow-dung hut.
Not that you're ever really alone in a cow-dung hut, because the house, I now discover, is full of bugs, most of them entering via the hole Kevin punched in the wall. Every last airborne insect in eastern Kenya seems to have been notified that I'm here and decided to drop in on 24 Shithouse Lane to see what's cooking, because within minutes I'm being eaten alive. And in the quiet blackness of my bed, as unidentified legs crawl up my neck and I feel the brush of fluttering wings against my eyelids and lips, and as the hyenas howl outside and the lions scout the perimeter fence in search of Dinner—my new Masai tribal name—I suddenly start to feel rather proud of myself. For the first time in my entire life, I showed a modicum of bravery here tonight. I stood up to my instincts to back down and run in terror, making a decision that withstood the gravitational pull of convenience and good living, and chose to embrace discomfort instead. And I did it, not just for me, but for the show. For the good of the team. Another first. Furthermore, having made that decision, I stuck to it, rather than merely saying the words simply for effect, then changing my mind again almost immediately, which is what I usually do. In most situations, cowardice is my natural fallback. It comes very easily to me, I find.
But not tonight.
Tonight I was actually brave. And no one's more shocked than I am.
Of course, such heady foolishness can get a guy into trouble if he's not careful. For instance, it can lead to him lying in a dung hut in the middle of Kenya, being attacked and bitten by a swarm of bugs.
But for once, odd as it may seem, I don't care.
“I did it” is the only thought in my head right now. I did something brave that I didn't think I could do. I took a stand and didn't retreat from it. That's an achievement. One I should be very proud of. Doubtless, “I did it!” was the last triumphant thought that ran through the mind of my skydiving buddy Adrian, too, shortly before he hit the ground after his parachute didn't open, and it will probably be the very last thing on my mind as the lions are eating me alive, a just reward, some might be inclined to say, for being so bloody reckless. Still, I did it.
I DID IT!!!
And with that, I turn my back on the dung, the mosquitoes, the insects, the barking of the dogs at the thorn fence, the braying squeal of the hyenas outside the thorn fence, the smoldering fire choking my lungs, and, against overwhelming odds, drift into an easy, happy, smoke-filled sleep.
1 Oh, no! Not again. How many times am I going to have to apologize to foreigners for the imperialistic abuses of my forefathers? Whole nations may still despise the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and those rascally Dutch for the trouble they wrought in the past, but it was the British who, throughout Historical Times, were the real problem kids in the playground. Nobody else managed to upset the natural balances of a foreign culture, or cause quite the level of unnecessary disruption and mayhem founded on equal helpings of greed, selfishness, discrimination, and sheer supercilious, we-know-best bloody-mindedness, quite the way that the British did. And the Masai, like so many others, felt the full force of it.
2 Seriously, what were the chances? Who among us speaks Maa any more? Personally I forgot most of it years ago. The only words I know now are yes, no, tank yu, and banana.
3 It's so cramped inside that Kevin has to resort to a novel way of lighting it. I don't want to get too technical or give away professional secrets, but basically what he does is wait 'til Wilson is looking the other way, then punch a hole in the wall with his fist and place the light outside the hole, shining in. Not to worry, they can fix it next time their cow takes a dump!
21
Scar Tissue
One day I was sitting in one of the edit bays merrily tinkering with the Alaska show, which had turned out great, by the way—better than great. TV Gold. Maybe even Emmy worthy; who knows?—when Fat Kid came charging down the corridor, dressed in his usual supersuit of tight V-neck sweater and taken-in pants, black hair slicked back into an almost-ponytail, now wearing a pair of
bifocals to further hide his true identity.
As he sat down, a shadow of dark concern fell across his face.
“Something wrong? Is it Conan O'Brien? Did he cancel my appearance?”
His lips tweaked themselves into a grimace. “No, it's not that,” he said in a low voice. Low for him anyway. “The network's moving the show to Wednesdays.”
They're moving us again??
“But first they're taking us off altogether.”
“Oh—my—God. How long for?”
“No idea. Maybe a month. During the winter Olympics.”
In general terms, networks only resort to such desperate tactics just before the axe falls. In essence, they're raising a red flag, telling you you're officially on life support. It's tactical; there's nothing personal about it. A show gets jerked around erratically from night to night, slot to slot, playing whack-a-mole with viewers’ loyalty and patience, in the hope of somehow garnering new fans, even if in the process it means losing the old ones. Above all, though, a slot change tells you that your balloon's started to lose altitude.
“The wind isn't behind us any more,” I confessed grimly. “We're a 9 P.M. show, an adult show, not an 8 P.M. show. That's the problem. That's what's dragging us down.”
Those “family” viewers at 8 P.M., they can be an ugly crowd, I discovered. Whoever gave these people computers and e-mail accounts and access to the network's message boards has a lot to answer for.
This show would be great if it wasn't for the host. My seven-year-old said that she thought he was very rude and annoying.
—Karl, Kentucky.
I think [Cash's] next trip should be a week in Abu Ghraib, or drop his white butt off in Iran wearing flip-flops, American flag shorts, and a “Who farted?” tank top. Am I the only person who can't stand this dildo?
—Bill W., Miami.
Apparently not, Bill. Look—here's someone else:
Sir,
I find you to be an imperialistic, uneducated cultural elitist. The things that come out of your mouth are abominable and I cannot bear to watch you make fun of cultures that are not your own. I only watch your show to see how far you will go …
Oh, so you do watch it, then.
… and each time you disgust me further. You are NO Basil Davidson.
Now, hang on! That's quite enough. And please don't bring Basil Davidson into this, unless you're also going to explain who he is.1
You suck, basically, is all I'm saying …
Wow.
Looking depressingly mortal for once, Fat Kid reached deep into his reserves of American gung-ho spirit and gave my leg a pat. “Hey, you know what? It's not over yet. We have a great show. It'll find its audience.”
“You think?”
I only wished I was half as sure as he was pretending to be.
To add to the general level of despondency, a couple other series with remarkably similar concepts to ours had sprouted up on other networks. I'm not one to point fingers, but in the same way that I'd taken the theme of Survivor and made it my own without first checking with CBS if that was okay, these other shows seemed to have taken my theme—guy dumped in the middle of nowhere, having to survive with nothing—given it a jazzy new title, and waltzed off with my viewers. More annoying still, audiences were flocking to watch them. Both shows had become ratings sensations in no time at all. It was very dispiriting.
On my way out the door that night, my mind swimming, I bumped into one of the editors, who said the same thing Fat Kid had said, more or less, all the while beaming a one-hundred-percent-confident smile that caused my floundering spirits to soar again.
“Dude, this shit is groundbreaking,” he said. “It's the best goddamned series the network has. They'd be idiots to shut us down. They're testing the waters, that's all. Remember, NBC almost canceled Seinfeld after two seasons. The original Jeopardy! was canceled. The Police Squad series—that was canceled after only one season. Hell, even Star Trek was canceled after only three seasons.”
“But it was canceled—right?”
“Er … my point is, that won't happen to us. These things take time to grow, and a network knows that. They're smart people. Someone there will have the vision and the courage to keep us going. It'll be fine, you'll see.”
Ironically, on the morning the decisive call came through, I was busy preparing a talk. A favor for a professor friend of mine. She'd asked me to give a short address to her art students at Woodbury University in Los Angeles. The subject: “What I Learned from Having My Own Travel Show on TV.”
I'd marked the date on my imaginary calendar six months previously, then completely forgotten about it until the week before it was due to happen, when I was at my laptop, deleting requests for money I routinely receive from Nigerian dignitaries, and found an e-mail.
“All systems are go for Wednesday,” my friend had written, adding that flyers had been posted all over campus with my face on them, so she was expecting a big turnout. “See U then. !”
Damn.
“P.S. There'll be cheese and crackers.”
Oooh.
Which explains why, on that particular Wednesday morning in May, having just returned from our final trip, to Barbados, and with work on season two all but wrapped up, I found myself sitting in the kitchen at home with a notepad, trying to figure out what on earth a guy of my years could reveal to a bunch of ADD-eenagers on the subject of “What I Learned from Having My Own Travel Show on TV” that might help them launch a career in the creative arts, and, you never know, maybe someday take them one step closer to ripping off a CBS reality show of their own and appearing in it.
My first thought was simply to amuse them by plucking a few travel stories from some of the locations we'd visited over the course of thirty-two shows, because there had been some incredible ones: Tokyo; Cambodia; Kenya; New Zealand; Romania; the Australian Outback; Savannah, Georgia—places I would return to in a heartbeat given half a chance, and, more important, if someone else was footing the bill. Then there were a few more I didn't warm to quite so much: Niagara Falls (a bit dreary), Seattle (it rained nonstop), and Philadelphia (see Seattle; also, when I asked for free food in the spirit of the show, street vendors in Philly actually yelled at me and chased me away!). While a couple of places fell squarely into the “hell will freeze over before I'd go back” category. I won't name them here; that would be unkind. All I'll say is that I'd rather drink formaldehyde straight from the bottle than ever again step into a town where half the population is called Bent, Ulle, or Bjorn. Let's leave it at that. Diabetic indeed!
So travel anecdotes was one way to go. The predictable way.
OR, and this was more intriguing, I could tell the students something else.
Given carte blanche to say whatever I wanted to, I was feeling more than a little rebellious that day and in the mood to spread unrest, which is never a bad thing in college, is it? Fired up by this, I began jotting down ideas.2 Not conventional ideas—stuff they might be expecting to hear—but, rather, stuff I thought they should hear. Life lessons. The kind of stuff that can only be taught from the perspective of someone who's circumnavigated the globe on someone else's dime, experiencing close-up and firsthand a wide variety of foreign cultures, and almost died doing it.
Delivered in no real order—although I find numerical works just fine—they came to me, as these lists often do, all at once in a rush, and went as follows:
#1: The news networks are wrong: it's not a hostile world. The vast majority of people out there are good, kind, and friendly. Go visit them, see for yourself.
#2: An excellent way to repel mosquitoes is to stick a sheet of Bounce fabric softener inside each of your socks. Bounce is kryptonite to mosquitoes.
#3: Courage is a valve. Turn it on, even a little bit, and the knob gets stuck.
#4: Most people stick with what they know—traditions, beliefs, boring studies, depressing jobs, stifling marriages—not because it's good for them or even because they like it,
but because they fear what might replace it if they let it go.
#5: Strangely, what replaces it if you let it go is usually a thousand times better than what you had. Belief first, proof later, always.
#6: Nature is not our friend. (A concept most adults are entirely familiar with, but I figure it's never too early to begin indoctrinating the young with our fiercest prejudices.)
#7: The people who start wars are seldom the people who die fighting them. Ask your average Cambodian.
#8: Just because you believe something, doesn't make it so. For every principle you'd stake your life and reputation on, there are millions of people around the world who fervently disagree with you and think you're nuts. And very probably you are.
#9: There's no limit to the extent of human gullibility when it comes to believing what they're told. And the more far-fetched or ludicrous an idea is, the more people are likely to buy into it.
#10: Women are oppressed the world over. In fact, I'd venture to say that, except perhaps for where you live, feminism barely has a foothold. And don't even get me started on homosexuality.
#11: Hard work is good for you, but working too hard and stressing out will stop your liver from functioning and apparently can kill you.
#12: Most people in the world totally freak out if you try to hug them.
#13:
Sadly I didn't make it as far as twenty. I'd just scrawled “#13” on my pad when the phone rang. “Hi—Cash?” It was The Thumb. A TV person calling to talk to another TV person. Happens all the time. “How's it going?”
“Great.” Flopping down on the mat by the kitchen door, I felt my scrotum start to tingle. Uh-oh. “So is this it? Is this the call?”
“Yes…”
Ohmygodohmygodohmygod.
I couldn't bear the tension. It was like waiting for the results of an AIDS test. “And …?”