Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [2]
“How about Wednesday? I'll be in L.A. for a programming conference, so I'm thinking, how about we get together over a coffee?”
Coffee?
I didn't bother checking my calendar. To do that I'd have had to buy one. But I knew that, in Hollywood, it's important that you play hard to get. The other person must hear you struggling to rearrange your schedule, otherwise they won't respect you. Everything's politics. A game.
“I'm only in town for a couple days. As I said, Wednesday's best for me.”
I have to say, this couldn't have come at a better time. He'd caught me at a highly pivotal stage of my broadcasting career, in the sense that I didn't have one. In fact, the technical term for what I'd experienced so far in broadcasting, I believe, is “a slump.” A twenty-three-year slump as a travel journalist on public radio, first in England, then later, after that flopped badly, in America, where my career had continued to flatline in spectacular fashion, going nowhere, doing nothing, and impressing absolutely no one. Well, except for this guy apparently, the deputy-vice-whatever-he'd-said-he-was of a remote cable network I'd never watched. It was a miracle.
“What day do you have in mind?”
“I just told you—Wednesday!!”
Er … Wednesday … Wednesday … hm, let me see.
“Act breezy,” I told myself. Nonchalant, like you don't care. Never gush in negotiations. The less you appear to want what the other person is offering, the more of what he's offering he'll want to offer you.
After a lengthy pause to suggest I was flicking through a list of engagements a mile long, debating if there was even one I could drop to squeeze him in, I concluded that—oh look!—there was. What luck!
“That's okay. I'm sure I can switch things around,” I said eventually, closing my imaginary calendar. “Yup. Wednesday it is.”
“Excellent. I'll call you later with a time and place.”
“Sure. One thing, though: how will we rec—”
“Looking forward to seeing you.”
“—ognize each other?”
The Twin Otter is listing badly. We're battling fifty-mile-an-hour headwinds from the southeast. With each monstrous gust, the wings flap, as if the charter plane, suspecting all may be lost, is pondering flying for real. Each time it does, the cases containing our delicate camera equipment convulse erratically, emitting the kind of noise a box of tools makes when you drop it from a second-story window.
Below us, far below, but approaching faster than any reputable flying manual would advise, I'm sure, a Band-Aid of trimmed green swings into view among the trees. An airstrip! This is it—we're here.
Mark, our cameraman, twists around, and, steadying himself against his seat across the aisle, turns the camera on me, eager to capture the about-to-be-buried-alive look on my face.
“I'd rather you didn't,” I tell him. “I'm not feeling too good.”
The brutal rotations of the plane have left me dizzy, weightless. My breakfast is working its way back up my throat.
For a moment Mark looks concerned. But only for a moment. Then he sticks his eye to the viewfinder and shoots me anyway, his smile on full beam.
Bastard. I've never met anyone so determined in all my life.
Oh wait, yes I have. One person.
And he died.
It was a sound engineer at the radio station I used to work for in London years ago: Adrian. Wonderfully gregarious guy: blonde, craggy, debonair in an English-nobility kind of way, yet also, by some weird quirk of genetics, one of those type A daredevils—like certain reality TV cameramen I could name—who are convinced they're utterly indestructible. Not only that, but they're driven to test out this crackpot hypothesis again and again and again, until, inevitably, something bad happens.
After radio, Adrian made a radical life change. He became a professional skydiver, notching up ten thousand successful drops and in the process making quite a name for himself. Until one day not too long ago, he was up in the sky experimenting with a new type of parachute, one that doesn't open before you hit the ground, apparently, when he plunged to his death in a tangled frenzy