Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [30]
“We can't release it, it's somebody's chicken,” he says, and Joe agrees.
“So let's buy it. If we buy it, it's ours and we can release it. Please?”
Since, in the spirit of the show, I'm not allowed to have any money in my pockets, this makes me feel like a child asking for an advance on his allowance.
“You can't just release a chicken,” Eric says. “It'll run into the road and get hit by a truck.”
Yeah—so?
One part of me knows he's talking sense. The idiot part. The rest of mes with the chicken. I know if I were trapped in a cage with not a millimeter of latitude for movement, I'd probably fantasize the whole day about being hit by a truck. It's all I'd think about. It would be my dream. Anything but being inhumanely guantanamoed into a space no bigger than a cookie jar and left to die.
“But we can't just leave it here.”
There follows a brief exchange of looks among the crew. It's a look I've seen before a few times. I spotted it first while we were shooting our Guadalajara show, when I was taken to a traditional Mexican rodeo, or charreada. Inside the ring, some cowardly men in stupid costumes were lassoing bulls with ropes, pulling them over, then dragging them along the ground for sport. I became so enraged by the despicable cruelty of it all that I started to cry—something TV hosts routinely don't do, I'm told—holding up filming for several minutes until I'd recovered my composure enough to carry on. So I know that look. It's secret crew language for exasperation. It means, “Uh-oh, the host is behaving like a baby again—what do we do now?”
What they do is placate me with sympathy, pretending that they are as concerned about the chicken as I am. However, these are the islanders’ indigenous ways, and there's nothing we can do. “It's how things are. We mustn't interfere, and the chicken should be left to its fate.”
“Aw, come on, guys,” I find myself begging. “We can't just do nothing.”
However, not only can we do nothing, but we're going to.
“Okay, then—what if”—I'm thinking fast—“we bought it and gave it away.”
“Cash—it's a chicken!” Eric, already ruffled by the time it's taking to shoot this market scene, is losing his temper. “The person you give it to will probably eat it, so either way it's dead. Now, we're running late. Let's move on.”
At my feet, unable to move more than a millimeter in any direction, the chicken, already half-dead in the baking sun, its head jammed against the bars, watches our argument with failing eyes. Eyes that say, “Just kill me. Please, do it now.”
I hear you, pal. I work in public radio. Believe me, I know that feeling.
The remainder of the day and the morning of the next are given over to shooting B-roll, picturesque shots of the host ambling this way and that, up leafy slopes, through undergrowth, trekking along vast operatic beaches of black, volcanic sand that stretch all the way from here to a dark, jagged headland half a mile away, reducing me in the camera's eye to a mere polyp on the ocean's edge, as the two Marks skillfully recapture the awe those original explorers must have felt in Historical Times when, thinking they'd found Australia, they rowed triumphantly ashore, expecting to be greeted with warmth and handshakes and beers and barbecued shrimp, but instead were showered with sharp stones and beaten with sticks. It's epic shots like these that, later on, will be cobbled into a montage and used to pad out the otherwise inexplicable gaps in the narrative between my arrival at the airport and—next minute—striding chirpily into Yakel Village, over fifteen miles away, with not a scuff mark or bead of sweat on me.
Another example: by all accounts, I'm in for a fabulous treat later this afternoon, though exactly what that treat might be is kept strictly under wraps. All anyone will say is that it's one of the things Tanna is famous for around the world, and it lies on the other side of the island, about twenty-five kilometers from our hotel, as the pterodactyl flies.
“No problem. And how do I get there?” I