Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [74]
“Hey, buddy, how's it goin'? Cool. Listen, dude, I wonder if you can help me?”
… have failed to produce the breakthrough he's hoping for. As of now, nobody, least of all the airlines, has any idea where the equipment went. And I say “airlines,” plural, because these trips rarely involve direct flights on a single carrier. Too often, in the name of being economical, we're booked onto multiple carriers, which means multiple layovers in multiple airports before we reach our destination. Sometimes the layovers are really out of our way, too. In the past month alone, for example, I've visited Madrid four times. Four times! Which would be fine if even one of our shows was set in Spain, but it wasn't.
Over lunch, Mike calls American again, angling for an update. Still they're unable to say what happened. “Stolen, probably,” is their best guess. Unhappy, he follows this with a call to the office in L.A. to take up the matter with them.
I can't tell you what Fat Kid's response is to these concerns, because I can't hear it. All I know is, by the time Mike hangs up, he's very, very unhappy. Furious even. Which is highly unusual for him. Bear in mind who we're talking about here: a California surfer dude. A cool, mellow Buddhist who practices yoga every morning. His elfin face, with twinkling gimlet eyes, is generally awash with good humor, revealing a man wonderfully at ease with himself and his world …
“Man, this is all such bullshit.”
… just not while he's working on this show.
“I've never come across a crew more at war with its own producers,” Nick admits to me later that night at his townhouse on the outskirts of the city.
True to Fat Kid's new edict, I must sleep in someone's home each episode for a minimum of five hours. To prove that I did, the crew has been given a Sony mini-DV camera equipped with night vision. Called “the Tuck-in Cam,” it's rigged up at my bedside to make sure I really lie down and sleep, in case anyone challenges us later. However, the tapes usually run out after an hour and the machine switches off automatically. That leaves me free on this occasion to get up again, trot downstairs, and wait out the remaining four hours with Nick and his wife, and grab a beer or two 'til a taxi arrives to ferry me back to the hotel.
Unfortunately, this being Dubai, alcohol laws are so strict that you have to apply for a license to drink in your own home! So I settle for tea and nibbles, while Nick stands out on the patio smoking, one of the few vices you don't get jailed for around here.
“Why are your people at the office being such pricks?” he asks, exhaling into the night sky.
“I don't know that they are. It's hard coordinating all of this, the trips, the flights. I'm sure they're doing the best they can. It just doesn't seem that way when you're here.”
Off duty, Nick's chipper-Dan raciness lifts like a burka to reveal a degree of glum dissatisfaction beneath. The way he tells it, he's one of thousands of people who left England for a new life here—80 percent of the labor force is made up of ex-pats, a lot of them British—only to find that the new life they'd run away to wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
“You get 'ere, and everything seems wonderful,” he explains, “and yes, sure, mate, there's tons of money to be made. Tons. It's very lavish. Plus, the weather's great, and everything's new and exciting, know what I mean? But then after a while it… I dunno, something 'appens. It starts to get on your nerves, wears you down.”
“What does?”
“The chaos. The temperature. The unfinished roads. The language. Culture barriers. Just the general atmosphere here. You must have noticed it.”
I admit that I have, and that I too find it subtly menacing. Their gargantuan malls, ski slope, perfectly landscaped racetrack, ritzy airport, their art gallery to rival the Louvre—a thousand dazzling baubles and novelties heaped up and brimming over and meant to be so very enticing, when all they do really is transmit a shrill cry of warning, letting the