Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [131]
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.
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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
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