Читать книгу Gloss - Jennifer Oko - Страница 11

IT SOUNDED LIKE A BROKEN RADIATOR, THE ALMOST deafening hiss that blasted through the Sweetwater, Texas Convention Center. And it was palpable, how the moist summer heat helped the noxious odor cling to my hair and my clothes. The smell was urinelike, and was particularly intense near the large pits in the center of the floor. Like at the pit I was standing next to as my correspondent, armed with freshly applied lipstick, protective gear and a poker, was learning how to extract the venom from a rattler who, unbeknownst to him (or maybe her), was on his way to the slaughter two pits down the way. I was in the depths of what a logical person might have thought to be the worst cliché of a Freudian nightmare imaginable. There were, in the space surrounding me, about five thousand live and very angry rattlesnakes. We were shooting a few interviews and some footage for a feature piece before we went out to participate in what was and probably still is the world’s largest rattlesnake roundup. This wasn’t exactly the place I would have liked to be when my phone rang—and the person calling was the guy who had become the subject of a more preferable variety of dreams. I probably wouldn’t have even answered except I didn’t know it was him because the caller ID was blocked.

“Hello? This is Annabelle,” I said, sounding very serious. When I answered the phone on work time, my voice tended to drop a few octaves (sort of like Faith’s, I suppose), something my friends ribbed me about to no end. My normal voice, my casual voice, was (and is) a bit on the high side; telemarketers often asked if my mother was home.

“Hello? Hello?” He didn’t introduce himself, but having watched the tape of his appearance on our show too many times to count, I knew his voice. Mark Thurber’s soft but masculine lyrics “I’ve enjoyed meeting your staff” had become the sonnet that lulled me to sleep at night. And, because Caitlin told me she had given him my number, I had been anxiously anticipating his call for the past few days.

“Hi!” My response got caught in the back of my throat and came out like a chirp.

“Hello?” he said again. “I’m sorry. I think we have a bad connection.” Now he was almost yelling. “There is a loud hissing sound. I’ll call back.”

“It’s just snakes!” I said, basically shrieking. He hung up anyway.

“What’s next?” said my correspondent, who was gripping the neck of a fanged rattler with her manicured fingers, gripping it so he couldn’t bite her and, understandably, at arm’s length.

“Did you get a tight shot of the fangs?” I asked the cameraman. He glared at me as if it was a dumb question, because it was. I looked back at my correspondent. She was looking a little ashen under all the foundation and blush. She was, after all, standing in the middle of the pit, as opposed to standing comfortably on the other side of the wall with me. There were snakes trying to strike at her steel plated boots, and more snakes slithering between her feet.

“Drop it and get out,” I said. And if that isn’t power, I don’t know what is.

The dynamic between producer and correspondent is a delicate one. On the one side you have an outwardly needy and demanding ego, and on the other, an inwardly needy and demanding ego. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. It can get incredibly tense, but without each other, we would both be unemployed; I look like a Muppet in front of the camera, and some of the correspondents I worked with couldn’t write themselves out of, well, a rattlesnake pit. To be fair, not this correspondent. This one I liked. We might have covered a lot of really silly stories, but given the opportunity, she was a good journalist—and she could write. More importantly, she was a friend.

“Oh my, he called, didn’t he?” Natasha said as she climbed out of the pit and landed safely on the snake-free cement floor.

“Huh? How did you know?”

“You are holding your phone the way I was holding that snake.” It was true. I had the phone at arm’s length, as if it might bite. “You look like you are channeling a signal from outer space,” she said.

“Maybe that’s what I need to do.”

“Let me know if you get any reception.”

So I held the phone higher, playing at the extraterrestrial idea, and as the antenna hit its apex, the phone rang again.

We both gave a start. I looked at the display. No caller ID.

“Do you think it’s him?” I let it ring again.

“Answer it!”

I didn’t. And it rang once more. Natasha grabbed the phone from me.

“Annabelle Kapner’s phone…May I ask who is calling?” She looked at me, eyebrows up. “It’s a Mr. Sage calling from Media-Aid.”

Immediately deflated, I reached over to take the call.

“This is Annabelle.”

I had no idea who Mr. Sage was, much less Media-Aid, and was quite prepared to send this call to the snakes, as it were.

“Ms. Kapner, we need to talk.”

“I am sorry, I’m in the middle of a shoot. Would you mind calling back and leaving a message on my voice—”

“It’s very important that we speak…” He had a slightly affected accent that I couldn’t place.

“Sir, I’m sure it is important, but this is a really bad time for me to talk.” Didn’t he hear the hissing?

“Self-important bitch,” he said, and hung up.

Stunned, I stared at the keypad, as if it could tell me something.

It wasn’t the first time I had gotten an irate viewer call, assuming that was what this was. But no one had ever been quite so harsh. It felt as if one of the snakes had bitten me. Maybe it was the smell of the place, maybe it was the call, but my skin suddenly became cold and prickly, and I thought I might lose my balance, which is not something you want to do when standing near a rattlesnake pit. So I took a few deep breaths to still my nerves, put the phone into the back pocket of my jeans and walked away.

Natasha and the crew were already heading over to the concession area, where you could buy rattlesnake key chains, wallets and gall bladders (considered by the Japanese to be an aphrodisiac) among other things. I went to join them and distracted myself by stocking up on souvenirs, planning to expense them as props.

When I first started working in this business, a veteran field producer named John Mitchell had called me into his office and sat me down in a fatherly sort of way. Mitchell was a little creepy (rumor had it there were a number of harassment complaints filed against him), but he had promised to give me tips about how to succeed at the networks, so there I sat. He smiled, baring horribly crooked teeth, and told me that if I wanted to be a producer, which I did, I needed to learn to pad my expense reports. I started to ask about the ethics of doing such a thing, but he interrupted before I could finish the question. It’s an unspoken honor system, he said. If every producer padded then it wouldn’t be suspicious if something odd showed up. And odd things always showed up. Usually they were legitimate. Mitchell (multiple Emmy-winning, I should point out) told me he was once doing a live remote in an open field when a large cow got in the way of the shot. He asked the farmer to please move his cow, to which the farmer replied, “You wanna move her, you gotta buy her.” So there it was, under “misc. expenses”—One Cow: $1,000.00.

“What do you think of this?” said Natasha, holding out a stuffed, coiled adult rattlesnake.

“I think you should have that on set when you introduce the piece,” I declared, suddenly excited by this idea, happy to move on from the strange call. I imagined Faith having to confront a pile of dead, stuffed snakes on live TV, and I picked up another coiled one off the table, admiring the wide-open mouth, the pointy fangs up close and personal. A tiny bit of plastic dripped down from the tips, approximating venom.

Then my phone rang.

It rang again.

I was going to let it ring through to voice mail, but Natasha grabbed the antenna, and pulled the phone out of my pocket.

“Annabelle Kapner’s office,” she said, winking at me, mouthing, “Maybe it’s him?”

And then she turned paler than she had been in the pit.

“They hung up,” she said, and handed me the phone. “Annabelle, what was that story you had on last week?”

“About the Fardish beauty parlors?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“Why?”

“I think it might have pissed someone off.”

I looked at her blankly.

“Whoever that was just called you a few unspeakable terms, said something in some foreign language and then slammed down the phone.”

I tend to be a fairly nonconfrontational person, or at least I was before I landed in jail, and one of the things I liked about morning television was that we hardly ever did the sort of stories that pissed people off. We stayed positive and hopeful because negativity is hard to stomach in the morning. Of course, it did happen upon occasion that people felt misrepresented (as I mentioned, we did get irate calls periodically), but usually that was because they felt they did not get enough airtime to promote whatever it was they were promoting, not because they felt personally slighted. And if a story was somehow critical, we did our darnedest to balance it to within an inch of its life, even if it was an unbalanced story to begin with. Often after my segments aired the subjects involved sent me flattering e-mails and even flowers. Once I got a cashmere scarf, but I had to return it because the network’s news standards don’t allow us to accept gifts worth more than seventy-five dollars. Of course, you could argue that the wholesale value of the scarf was less than that, which is why I did keep the matching hat.

“Annie?”

I had fainted. I must have been out for a while because when I opened my eyes, we were in a makeshift infirmary. The rattling sounded distant, but I knew we were in the convention center because the table across from me was lined with rows and rows of bottles of antivenom.

“Annabelle? Are you okay?” Natasha was sitting on a metal folding chair next to the stretcher I was lying on, patting a cool, damp cloth across my forehead.

“Where’s the crew?”

“I sent them to shoot the snake hunt. Don’t worry about it. Are you okay?”

“I think I fainted.”

“You did.”

A medic came over to check me out. He had greasy hair and was missing a front tooth, and I really didn’t want him to touch me. I sat up.

“I’m okay. I must have overheated,” I said, which was a stupid thing to say, because if anything the place was overly air-conditioned.

Natasha and the medic shared a knowing glance.

“I’m okay,” I said again, and tried to stand. They both pushed me back down and told me to sit still for a while. The medic handed me a small paper cup filled with lukewarm water. I drank it down and handed it back to him. “It was probably the smell that knocked me out. Really, I’m okay.”

“Why don’t you relax for a few more minutes?”

“We need to keep shooting,” I said. Never come back from a shoot without a story, that’s the rule. Once, Natasha and I were doing a story about lobster fishing. Actually, it was about a lobsterman calendar. Anyway, it turned out that the Dramamine my cameraman had taken had expired two years earlier, and he spent the bulk of our boat ride tossing up over the side. But every few minutes he would wipe his mouth and take a few shots of Natasha helping the beefcake lobsterman bring in the traps, before he had to return to face the sea. The video wasn’t his usual standard, but at least we had something to put on the air.

My phone rang again. I was resigned, and also by now a bit curious, so this time I answered on the first ring.

“This is Annabelle,” I said tentatively.

“Hey. It’s Mark Thurber.”

I thought I might faint again, I was so relieved. And so nervous.

“Remember, we met on your show the other day?” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “How are you doing?” As if his calling was the most normal thing in the world, as if we spoke every day, as if I hadn’t just fainted from the combined shock of receiving two really odd phone calls and the hideous smell of thousands of rattlesnakes.

“Um, I was wondering. Well, I am going to be in New York next week…” (He said “um”! He was nervous, too!) “…and I was wondering if you might be around. Maybe I could treat you to that coffee we talked about.”

What is that phrase, emotional whiplash? One second I am being harassed, the next I am being courted. I felt dizzy. Adrenaline was furiously racing through my body. I looked to Natasha for focus. She was making quizzical expressions, eyebrows up, forehead creased, desperate to know who I was talking to. “It’s Thurber,” I mouthed, and she did a little dance, which made me smile.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I’m around. Let me just check my Palm.” I counted to ten and then we made plans to meet after work on Tuesday.

The nice thing about being in jail, if one has to say something positive, is that it gives you plenty of space and time to appreciate honesty. More than appreciate it—recognize it. Or rather, recognize the bullshit. I am realizing that this is a very important skill to have, bullshit recognizing, and that it’s one I sorely lacked before I got here.

Take my history with men. My last relationship, if I can call it that, had ended about six months before the phone calls in the rattlesnake pit. It had started online, and it pretty much ended there. The guy was nice enough, and apparently a number of other virtually sophisticated women agreed with me. We had been dating for a few months when we decided to take the next step; we took down our profiles from nicedate. com. But he was a lawyer, and a slippery one at that, so when a friend of mine discovered that he still had his profile up on ivyleaguedates.com, he defended himself by saying he had never agreed to take his profile off of that site. The ethical legacy of the Clinton era, I suppose. We lasted two more months. He was quite charming, and I was entering the age of the “why aren’t you married yet” question, so I desperately tried to make it work. But when another friend discovered my beloved’s profile on swing-date.com, well, let’s just say I logged off of men for a while.

And now here I was, surrounded by thousands and thousands of very phallic creatures, being pursued by Mr. Too Good To Be True.

“Are you okay?” Natasha asked again, after we had completed our mandatory round of “Oh my God! That was him! Oh my God!”

“I feel fine.”

“I mean about that other phone call. Before you fainted. What do you think that was?”

“I think,” I said, suddenly bolstered by Mark’s call and insanely energized, “I think I have no idea, but I’m ready to go find the crew now.” She said okay, because she also knew the rules, and we hitched a ride on the back of a farmer’s pickup truck, off to hunt some snakes.

To whom it may concern at New Day USA:

You had a story on this morning about a new facial yoga that helps to reduce wrinkles. Can you please tell me where I can find these classes?

Thank you,

Bonnie Eager

Fargo, ND