Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [6]
There's no way off this volcanic, bug-and possibly dinosaur-infested prehistoric island. Not until tomorrow at the very earliest. Or, if we complete our mission—which is by no means certain—in six days’ time, when the plane will return to pick us up.
Or whatever's left of us.
1 I know, it's wrong. I shouldn't have, and I'm sorry. But, having leapfrogged over the entire Harry Potter brouhaha without so much as blinking, I realized that if I didn't help fan at least one cultural wildfire soon, I'd be locked out of every dinner-party conversation from now 'til eternity.
2 If you don't believe me, read The Journals of Captain Cook, edited by Philip Edwards, or Farther Than Any Man, by Martin Dugard, or my own book, Captain Clueless, out next summer.
3 Which went pretty much as it always did. He took another of his famous wrong turns and ran aground in Hawaii, where he was ambushed and stabbed to death. Whether this setback forced him to cancel future expeditions is not documented.
2
Star Jones Misses
Her Big Chance
The Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel is a concrete-and-glass boomerang occupying what used to be the old 20th Century Fox back lot in Beverly Hills. The day I was there, its cavernous marble lobby—part reception and part café-bar—was filled with tables and comfy couches and waiters rushing between them, bringing trays of coffee to hyperactive media types, who at first sight appeared to be talking to each other like normal people, but who, because addressing the person you're sitting with is considered soooo passé in L.A., had headsets in their ears and were talking to someone else entirely.
Because of some kind of convention going on upstairs, the place was busy, busy, busy.
“Hey—Cash?” A man in a dark suit bore down on me. “Great to meet you at last. Thanks for coming.” He flashed a smile. “So how's it going?”
“It's going great.”1
And I swear, as these words left my lips, he went: “Aaaaaaaah!”—just like that—the way dying aunts do with their last breath, at the same time cupping his ear, as if he'd caught a distant fairy bell ringing.
“What's the matter?”
“That voice,” he sighed. “How many times have I heard it on the car radio? It's great to see the face behind it. You have such a fantastic cadence.”
I do?
The short, friendly executive, pumping energetically at my hand the way he might to raise water from a well, didn't fit the Hollywood stereotype at all. In fact, his intelligent eyes and characterful good looks were at odds with the ranks of bland, homogenized go-getters lounging around in the lobby café that day. Although I will say one thing for him: he was strikingly compact. That was my first thought when he walked over: “How beautifully proportioned you are.” Like a prototype for something the Japanese are thinking of making, but which they have yet to find a use for. A real man, sure, only scaled down for convenience and ease of storage.
“With your suit off, you probably resemble a very excitable thumb,” I mused to myself as he steered me out through a set of glass doors onto a hot terrace.
We found a table with an umbrella, to protect us from the blazing Southern California sun, and settled ourselves in.
“Anyways”—right down to business—“if you don't mind my asking: what do you think of our network? Ever seen it?”
No, was the truth. Not until that first day he'd called me up. After which, curious obviously, I'd rushed to my TV and flicked up through the channels, past CNN, past QVC, even past the silly little home decorating networks where, every time you switch on, some butch woman in a tool belt is ridiculing newlyweds for their lack of grouting skills; way up, past the gay channel, past Oprah's channel, past a channel devoted entirely to boring people to tears, which I won't name, though I'm aware it could be any one of a dozen (why is it that so many networks these days seem to have the Step-ford Wives as their target demographic?), until finally I hit a cluster of travel and leisure networks that I had no idea came as