Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [52]
Then Director Mark went, followed by Todd, who dumped his sound equipment on the floor and leaped care-freely from the gondola, whooping loudly.
And finally, when it looked to them like I was still balking at the prospect, brave Tasha got harnessed up. Biting her lip and laughing, but with deadly worried eyes, she nevertheless dug up the courage from somewhere, counting down from three to one, and went for it, skipping off the platform and flinging her body into the wind, plunging freestyle 134 meters toward the river below.
“Oh my God. OH MY GOD!!!!!” she screamed moments later, her face packing in a thousand emotions all at once, as the winch pulled her into the arms of shortcake Henry Van Asch once more. “That was so amazing! Oh, Cash, you have to try it.”
“Okay,” Henry said, placing his hand on my arm. “You're up next.”
And all eyes turned in my direction.
“But it's my show,” I told Fat Kid back in the office weeks later, in response to his pep talk, which was not going well, “and if I don't want to do something on my show, why should I have to? Real, ordinary people don't bungee-jump. Most people are like me; they're scared. Why should my show not reflect how …?”
I got no further. His olive cheeks began to glow red and, as if triggered remotely by a cell phone some distance away his rage blew up in my face.
“It's NOT …” Sparks flew from his eyes. “… YOUR show.”
“It's not?”
“No, it's OUR show, okay? OUR show,” he yelled, rubbing a manly hand through his gelled spiky hair. “Yours, ours, the network's show. NOT yours. Understand?”
Every superhero has a dark side. But this transformation—BOOOM—this switcheroo from light to dark, meek servant to dark overlord, was quite extraordinary. I was so shocked by it that I almost swallowed my gum.
“TELEVISION IS A COLLABORATIVE EFFORT.” He was at full volume now. “IN RADIO, YOU OPERATE ALONE; YOU'RE A ONE-MAN BAND. AND THAT'S GREAT. BUT THAT'S NOT HOW TV WORKS, CASH. TELEVISION IS A TEAM EFFORT. AND IF YOU CAN'T ACCEPT THAT AND WORK AS PART OF OUR TEAM, THEN YOUR SHOW WILL FAIL.”
Deep down, I knew he was right. Flustered and frustrated beyond measure at what he saw as an insufferably lame host who lived for comfort and ease and never took risks, he was at a loss for what to do. The very idea that the presenter of a TV adventure show would travel to an opal mine in the Australian Outback, then be too afraid to go down it; or climb a volcano in Vanuatu, but leave almost immediately because he was afraid of heights; or stand shivering on a ten-thousand-foot snowy mountain, unable to move because he found the ice too slippery; or fly halfway around the world to New Zealand, the home of bungee-jumping, then refuse outright to bungee-jump,1 even after the rest of the crew had done it, was unheard of, and a catastrophe for the show. The whole production was being thrown for a loop by these minor acts of rebellion.
“WHAT YOU HAVE TO ASK YOURSELF IS THIS.” And he lunged at me from his seat. “AM—I—A—TEAM—PLAYER?”
Well, maybe in the competitive, ego-driven type A world of television that he inhabits I do, where life is all politics and scoring points and proving how great you are, and where you never want to be seen to stand alone, or be the odd man out, or do the unpopular thing. But in my world, where you plod along on your own, working at your own pace, rarely competing with anyone but yourself, such factors are much less vital.
“SO?” he prompted after a long pause. “ARE YOU? ARE YOU A TEAM PLAYER, CASH?”
Er …
“No,” I muttered, matching his pause moment for moment. “No, I'm not.”
His eyes almost exploded from their sockets.
“THEN I'M SORRY,” he proclaimed in a voice loud enough to steer ships away from rocks in a fog, “BUT YOUR SHOW WILL FAIL.”
And on that grim note of foreboding, with a face as dark as raked-over embers, he launched himself across the room, and even looked for a moment like he was going to fly out of the window and away. Instead, he dived back behind his