Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [51]
“Eeee-heeeeee.” Mark grinned upon seeing it for the first time. “That's sick!”
Indeed.
“Why on earth would you do this?” I asked a frightened young girl as she was being harnessed up.
“I need the buzz, the excitement,” she trembled. “I'm always trying to find something that excites me a bit more.”
“So learn to play the cello.”
“Oh no, no, no, no. Not quite the same thing!” And on the count of three she dived over the edge and disappeared.
My God.
It's an eight-second plunge to the bottom. So, after thirty seconds, when she hadn't reappeared, not unnaturally I assumed we'd lost her for good. “But hey, we should all move on with our lives,” I told her friends. “It's what she would have wanted.”
I spoke too soon. Before they even had time to begin the grieving process, the giant winch was already grinding into action, hauling her up again. A minute and a half later she was back, shaken, red-faced, screeching with delight, and definitely not as dead as some of us had been predicting.
“Regret it?” I asked.
“No. You should do it.”
One of her friends even taunted me. “You want to do it, but you're scared.”
“No, I don't want to do it,” I corrected him, “because I'm scared.”
“It's nothing to worry about,” another guy chipped in, shortly before he grabbed three oranges and stood on the very edge of a little diving board, juggling. “It's such an awesome system that's in place and you've got to put your faith in something. So I put my faith in the system itself, the bungee, the training, and all the engineering that goes into it.” Then, yodeling and juggling, he jumped. What a madman.
“Dude, you have to do it,” Director Mark told me when my turn came.
“No. Not a chance.” I dismissed him brusquely, making to go.
“But you can't come all the way to New Zealand and not jump.”
“D'you wanna bet? Just watch me.”
Well, the whole crew was stunned. Even Henry was a little at a loss for words. But I'm sorry, that's just how I felt. For a start, I'm terrified of heights; there was no conceivable way I'd be jumping out of a bloody gondola into a gorge. But beyond that, I've never understood the ballyhoo about conquering your fears and “being all you can be.” It's such a silly alpha-male thing. The rest of us, luckily, are secure enough in ourselves to stand firm. Why not be less than you can be? That's what I say. Why not do what makes you feel comfortable, especially if it also means you stay safe, happy, unstressed, and in one piece? I told them this from the very start: when it comes to refusing to do things, consider me your go-to guy.
“But dude …”
“I'm not jumping, Mark! That's final. End of story!”
Well, you can probably guess what came next: a Crew Look.
Jeez, how I wish they'd stop doing that.
It was Eric who broke the impasse. “Okay, I wouldn't ask you to do anything I wouldn't do,” he said, then promptly threw his weedy, middle-aged, entirely-dispens-able-as-far-as-I-was-concerned body off the platform into the unknown. Minutes later, he too came back, disheveled, thrilled, happy.
After him it was Camera Mark's turn to be hooked up to the harness. Mind you, I'm surprised