for being there for me each mourning (sic), bringing the important events of the world into my home. They are both so smart and well informt (sic) and Faith is so lovely and Ken is like the brother I never had. Would it be possible to have them send me autographt (sic) pictures? It would mean the world to me.
George Albridge
Allentown, PA
CHAPTER TWO
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