Naked in Dangerous Places

by Cash Peters

  “… and …”

  The balloon I'd been soaring in for the past year took one massive lunge into the air, buoyed up by the propane of hope …

  ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHTTTTTTTTTTT!

  “… I'm sorry …”

  … and nosedived into a hedge.

  “I know how hard you worked on this and how much it means to you, but we won't be …”

  Noooooo!!!

  Come on. You're kidding around. It can't be.

  Did my scrotum deceive me?

  “… picking up the show for season three.”

  Well, apparently, yes it did.

  The show was canceled. Things had come full circle, All Washed Up being not only the original title, but now, coincidentally, my new career status.

  The main reason for the cancelation wasn't a secret: it was the viewers. More specifically, there weren't any. At least, not enough to set the ratings on fire, and certainly not enough to make a very expensive series like ours worth the financial outlay.

  Networks live or die by “the numbers;” they'll all tell you that, and our numbers must have kept dwindling, I guess, killed either by the move from Mondays at 9 P.M. to Mondays at 8 P.M., or by the move from Mondays to Wednesdays, or perhaps by being taken off the schedules for three weeks to allow for a major sporting event; or even by being subsequently moved again, this time from Wednesdays to Fridays, and then from Fridays to Saturdays. All in the space of fourteen episodes! It's hard to figure out the logic behind this. Maybe the guys at the network were embarrassed by the show. It's possible. And especially by their new, renegade host who—confound him!—kept giving his honest opinion about places he didn't like, rather than sugarcoating it in the usual bland PR blurb. Maybe they simply had to keep the series out of the public gaze, like a loud and difficult uncle who gets drunk at weddings and starts telling dirty jokes to children, then cancel it ASAP, or risk never being able to shoot future travel shows in the places he'd criticized ever again. Honestly, I have no real idea what went on; it's a mystery to me. All I know is, there's a simple equation that executives are taught at television-making school: No Audience = No Advertisers = No TV Show.

  That's the hay and rags of it.

  Yet, though I understood the reasoning behind the decision—and I did; it was all very logical, simple mathematics, nothing personal—it still felt for all the world like someone had just ripped my newborn baby's head off and was using it to play volleyball.

  I continued sitting on the floor, hugging my knees, dazed, stymied, giving my Mystified Look one final surprise airing, only this time it was for real.

  “Pah, that's okay, never mind,” I bounced back, evincing exemplary calm in the circumstances. “I'm always very philophosical about such things.”

  Philophosical?

  The fact that I stumbled over the word betrayed the true depth of my distress. Truth is, I wasn't philophosical about any of this. Nothing like. I was seething mad.

  “But I did it for you,” I wanted to scream down the phone. “I gave up a year of my life—and one of my organs, let's not forget that—for you. And now what? You betray me? What the hell is that about? You Judas! It's a perfectly—pleasant—little—show. No less a person than the TV critic of the New York Times said so. How can you give up on us now? Oh, and another thing,” I ranted silently in my head, “if what you say is true, and you care so much about the numbers, how come I never appeared on Conan O'Brien?”

  Then I realized that this last bit wasn't in my head, I'd said it out loud. Oops.

  I don't know for certain how many viewers Conan has, but let's say fifty (He's on late at night.) Surely, if all the people who caught me on there were tantalized enough to tell their friends and they all tuned in to our show to see what the fuss was about, wouldn't that have boosted our meager audience significantly? I bet it would.

  The Thumb agreed. It probably would have helped, yes, but… well, it just hadn't worked out. He couldn't explain why. Clearly, somebody had dropped the ball. Sorry.

  From here, we turned our attention to the future. I let him know that I was thinking of writing a book about all of this: about my year in the wilderness. Or as he would call it: television.

  For some reason this led to a surprisingly awkward moment. I could imagine his eyes rolling to the ceiling in paranoid exasperation. Oh, God, please no, not a book!

  “You will be kind about me, won't you?” he jumped in, anxiously.

  About you? Kind?

  Er … honest answer? I'm very upset right now. You've just ripped my newborn's head off and you're playing volleyball with it. So … probably not.

  “Of course I'll be kind,” I told him.3 “I'm always kind, you know that.”

  “Yeah,” he said, not entirely believing me. Then, in a sardonic tone of voice sharp enough to slit my throat from ear to ear, he issued one last, and very conclusive, “Bye, Cash.”

  And the line went dead.

  It was over.

  All of it.

  There's really no disguising the level of disappointment I felt after I hung up the phone that day. I'd be lying if I told you otherwise. The best I could manage was a minicollapse behind the door, where I stayed for an hour or more, deflated and chagrined (if that's even a word), 'til my ass grew roots. Couldn't think straight, couldn't stand up, couldn't even muster the energy to drag the corpse that was my confidence off the mat and onto a chair. There's a peculiar gray area between grief and relief at times like this, I find. One I've only experienced once before, and that's after my mother died: another catastrophic and badly timed ending to something rather worthwhile, but also a source of major relief, knowing that the months of excruciating pain had finally loosened their grip and she'd been granted release at last. Well, same goes for the show. Along with the abject misery of defeat came that same sense of release, an undeniable rush of thankgoditsoverness that was profound and, quite honestly, uplifting.

  “You're going to cry, aren't you?”

  “Certainly not,” I told myself defiantly. There'll be no crying, no self-pity. It's only TV; it doesn't matter. (#14, this, maybe!4 Although I was very touched, I confess, by the hundreds of messages that came flooding in from fans once word leaked out.

  I just wanted to express how upset I am that your show was canceled and how badly treated it was at the end. It almost seems like a seek & destroy mission.

  —Ted.

  Well, I see the network finally got what they wanted. I'm SO sorry to hear about the show being canceled. I'm PISSED. I wrote to them to let them know how much they sucked.

  —Jacqueline.

  I can't say I'm shocked your show was canceled. Every time I find a show that rises above the general crud on cable TV, it's like my brain sends a signal to the executives whose job it is to keep intelligent and original content from being broadcast. I should have known that my loyal patronage would be your show's demise.

  —Brian.

  You should be proud! The show was unique, creative, and different. You had a strong vision and stayed true to it every step of the way. Please don't diminish what was a great creative outlet for you.

  This last one wasn't from a viewer. It's how one of our show runners summed it up later that day.

  And I was proud of the series. No doubt about that. If you discount Fat Kid's input, as well as that of The Thumb, Eric, Jay, Tasha, the camera crews we used, and all the planners, editors, producers, and technicians back at the office, then I'd single-handedly made thirty-two travel shows in just over a year, and done it without dying. That's an incredible achievement.

  Now, at the very least, I could look the Vice President of Sales (Pacific Rim) in the eye and say, with the humility of a man who'd been beaten by the odds more than once, but survived, “You were wrong, pal. See how wrong you were? Here I am, I'm still alive, I didn't get addicted to coke, and my relationship is still intact.

  “Oh, sure, I was hospitalized three times, twisted my knee badly at one point, threw up
on-and off-camera, visited Madrid on four separate occasions for no reason at all, got stoned, bitten by giant fleas, stripped naked and whipped, run over with an Infiniti SUV, fell down several hillsides, lost an organ, sustained permanent damage to the hearing in my left ear (from too many takeoffs and landings in one day), and aged ten years in the space of one, but really, isn't that a small price to pay to be where I am today?”

  And after a pause for thought, he'd no doubt look at me and go: “You mean unemployed?” because he can be sassy that way; he's got a bit of a mouth on him.

  Once again, though, that's where he'd be wrong.

  I wouldn't be unemployed, would I? Not at all. Having the show axed prematurely was a drag, there's no denying that, but it wasn't the end of the world. Quite the opposite: essentially, the cancelation freed me up to (and if I was going to cry, this would be the point, I think) resume my career in public radio, which, now I come to think of it, is not unlike being unemployed. For me, it carries exactly the same sense of hopelessness, despair, and underachievement. The only difference is that someone pays you to feel that way.

  Though that's not what I told him, actually.

  The next time we met, it was on a crisp spring morning about two weeks later, at the end of our respective driveways at the base of the Hollywood Hills. The Vice President of Sales (Pacific Rim) was on his way to work, as usual, and I was … well, I was watching him go.

  “So what's next for you?” he asked, climbing into his executive car.

  “Next?” I said, surprised.

  What was actually up next, although I didn't know it yet, was six months of physical therapy, plus a further two years of psychological counseling. Beyond that …

  “Oh, rest. Take a few months off. Write a book about my travels.”

  “Great. And then?”

  Er … no idea.

  Genuinely, I had no clue. After the hobbits at the office had assured me that the network would not make the mistake of canceling the show, I'd been foolish enough to buy into their optimism and therefore had lined nothing up. But you can't leave a fellow hanging like that, or tell him you're doing something utterly lame like heading back to radio with your tail between your legs. At least I can't. So, on a wild impulse I came up with something a lot more interesting.

  “Movies,” I said, boldly. “I'm going to be in movies.”

  And before he could respond, or ask me any further tricky questions, such as “Huh?” or “You?” or “Are you out of your mind?” I ran back up the driveway and closed the gate behind me.

  www.cashpeters.com

  1 Note: Davidson, Basil: award-winning historian. Prior to the Carnation Revolution, he was considered one of the world's top experts on Portuguese Africa. Further note: Revolution, Carnation: coup d'etat ushering in democracy in Portugal in 1974. In light of this, I guess the guy's right—I am definitely no Basil Davidson.

  2 I'd had a similar epiphany some time earlier, as a matter of fact, following a short trip to Harvard University. Those particular lessons are featured in my previous book, Gullible's Travels: The Adventures of a Bad Taste Tourist.

  3 Ooh, that could be my #13. It's something I've picked up from television people over the years, both in Britain and the United States. In the world of TV, where scruples are often rarer than unicorns, bosses and colleagues seldom say what they truly mean in case it incriminates them somehow in the future. So they'll say something tangential and unfathomable instead. That way nobody can call them on it later, because it never made sense in the first place. A devilish trick that destroys trust and corrodes the foundation of any earnest endeavor—but hey trust is grossly overrated anyway right?

  4 By the way, there's synchronicity, then there's coincidence, then there are events that are simply too whacko to be true. No word of a lie—I swear on the life of my now-headless child—the date my professor friend and I fixed months previously for my talk at her college, a random Wednesday in May, was the exact same Wednesday the TV travel show I'd be talking about was canceled. Surely, only something as mean and uncaring as Reality—with a capital R, not the fake TV kind—could perpetrate a deed as cruel as that and get away with it.

  Copyright © 2009 by Cash Peters

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are

  registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Peters, Cash.

  Naked in dangerous places : the chronicles of a hungry, scared, lost,

  homesick, but otherwise perfectly happy traveler /

  Cash Peters.—1st ed.

  1. Peters, Cash—Travel. 2. Voyages and travels.

  3. Television program. 4. Manners and

  customs. 5. Local history. I. Title.

  G465.P4772 2009

  910.4092—dc22

  2008025285

  eISBN: 978-0-307-45264-1

  v3.0