Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (8 page)

Unlike Five O’Clock Julie, I couldn’t get enough of the place. I would have happily lived out of a sleeping bag in the mailroom. Sometimes I’d ditch my job and just walk around; there was no door that I wasn’t bold enough to enter. I could have come upon a door with a sign reading
MORLEY SAFER PEDICURE SUITE, PROCEDURE IN SESSION,
and I still would have barged right in. I would waltz into the
As the World Turns
studio and just stand there, or slip into the control room and watch how the soap sausage was made. (As discussed, I hated CBS soap operas, but it was still extremely cool. All the actors were much thinner and better-looking in person, and whenever any of them passed in the hallways, I always said hi, because even though I wasn’t a fan of their show, I was a fan of saying hello to celebrities and having them say hello back!)

One day, I sauntered down to the (closed)
CBS Evening News
set at airtime. I knew they’d pan the newsroom during the bumps to commercial breaks, and I wanted to be on TV. The show was in progress and the room was eerily quiet with the exception of Dan Rather’s comforting voice. I plopped my narrow ass down right behind him at a desk that didn’t belong to me and started reading someone else’s newspaper. Then I picked up that person’s desk phone and dialed my mom to tell her to watch the show closely. Everything seemed to be going fine until a tall redheaded bully came up to me and asked me who I was. I sheepishly told him I was an intern at the
Morning News
.

“You don’t belong here,” he snarled. “Get off the set.”

He kicked me off the set! At least he did it during a commercial break. I wanted my mom to see me on TV, but not being forcibly ejected.

It was utterly humiliating. What was I thinking, walking around the place like I owned it? Maybe Madonna had steered me wrong? What if they told Lynn? Needless to say, I never returned to the
Evening News
, and being bounced only added to the inferiority complex I had already with the
Evening News
interns, of whom I had not been chosen to be a member, and who all wore suits and looked like they were better at standardized tests than me. I was scared those Ivy League interns would find out what I did. Scared of what, I’m not exactly sure, since intern beat-downs weren’t exactly prevalent in the halls at CBS. (Incidentally, the big ginger-haired bully who kicked me off that set was Bill Owens, who later, probably despite his better judgment, became a great friend and the executive producer of
60 Minutes
.)

I should’ve let that little set-crash be lesson enough, but I soon got another mini-can of Whoopass shaken up and opened in my face. It happened a few days later, when a
Morning News
producer pulled me into the conference room for a “little talk.” At first, I was excited. Little talks are my favorite! And this one started out like gangbusters with him saying I was bright, and aggressive, in a good way, and well liked. He said I had a lot of potential, and that I reminded him a lot of himself, which on one hand was really cool, because he was only twenty-four and already a producer, but on the other hand was puzzling, since he was Asian and a little chubby. Did he mean that he thought I acted like him or looked like him? Did he see himself looking like me? By this point my ponytail was in full effect and I was working a coordinated suspender/tie combo almost every day. I did not see a physical connection between us.

When my wandering mind stumbled back on track, he was telling me that I could really go far this summer and make a big impression, but … And are compliments followed by “buts” ever good? No. He said that I was a bit “rough around the edges” and needed to work on some things. He said there were important people in the newsroom and that I needed to “tone it down.”

“Do I need to talk softer?” This was not the first time in my life that I’d been told to tone it down, thanks to a volume modulation problem I’d inherited from my mother.

“No,” he said. “Remember, Andrew, this is CBS News.”

I’m sure that what my older Asian twin regarded as being gentle, I mistook for vague. I asked him for a specific description of what to do. He said I needed to be more “introspective.”
Introspective, adj.: the act or process of a reflective looking inward to one’s own thoughts and feelings.
Oh, kind of like the complete opposite of expressing yourself? Dammit, Madonna! He concluded by saying the only reason he had given me this talk was because someone had given him the very same talk.

That night I went to Uncle Charlie’s, which that summer became my favorite (gay) bar of all time. There was something comforting and familiar about Uncle Charlie’s brass and wood and TV screens. (Don’t look for it now; it’s been closed for years. Of course, like the dozens of Original Ray’s Pizza Parlors in NYC, there’s another Uncle Charlie’s that also happens to be a gay bar, but that’s not it. My Uncle Charlie’s, much like most real elderly uncles, is no longer with us.)

As I sat thinking over a few beers, I decided that it was possibly possible that I was acting a teeny bit too familiar with certain people. Like, the one day I was introduced to the newsblock producer and I said, facetiously, “I think I read about you in
The Undoing of CBS News
.”

And another day, when I was answering phones and someone called us from an affiliate in Spokane, Washington, I asked them if they were number one in ratings. When they said they were, I said—loudly—“We don’t know how that feels here!”

Then there was the time Erin Moriarty gave me some tapes to transcribe, and I, summer intern to this seasoned news reporter, replied, “I don’t transcribe.” And that seasoned news reporter looked like she wanted to shove the tapes down my throat and use my nose as the “play” button. She was pissed, and it was the first time I’d ever been yelled at by a superior.

“Are you kidding me? You do now.” And I did.

Oy. I’d easily thought of three examples right off the top of my head while drunk at Uncle Charlie’s! I vowed at that moment that I must remember that this was CBS News, and I was only an intern, there to learn, but not a true member of the team. Not yet, and maybe not ever if I continued to put the “punk” in “spunk.”

Since we’d kind of shared a moment, and we maybe looked alike, I’d hoped that that producer would notice my new self-reflective streak. Maybe I’d earn his respect. And then maybe he’d stop asking me to hold the elevator for him. Literally, he’d make me run down the hall two minutes before he went to the elevator. Was he that important? And, by the way, can I point out in the light of 2012 that there’s got to be some kind of teachable moment in that elevator story for him? I’ve never made any intern fetch an elevator for me, no matter how introspective he or she wasn’t.

Later that summer I pulled Green Room duty for a whole week. That meant a Town Car pickup at five-thirty in the morning, which was a privilege surpassing even free food. I didn’t care that I had to wake up in predawn darkness; the idea that I got to take a black car through empty Manhattan streets to a live network TV show where there was unlimited coffee and people getting ready to appear on-camera was so glamorous that I could barely handle it. When I got there, I headed to Studio 47—“the fish bowl”—and checked guest pickup times while Charles Osgood anchored the morning news. Then I greeted those guests in the Green Room and escorted them to the studio. In that week, I met the Karate Kid (Ralph Macchio); a hair expert; the writer of a book about only children; a Vietnamese author; Jack Scalia, who had been a regular on
Dallas
; some actor from
Batman
; Martin Luther King III; and Kerry Kennedy. Although I was only an intern, and it wasn’t televised, or probably very much fun for any of them, for me working the Green Room was like hosting a cocktail party. Actually, a weird cocktail party with a group of incongruous attendees that took place way too early in the morning. To this day, putting oddball combinations of people in one room is one of my favorite party devices, and a hallmark of
Watch What Happens Live
. When I was in that Green Room, I felt like I was in the center of something very, very good.

On the day that gay rights activist Vito Russo appeared to talk about AIDS, I felt as if I was in the center of something great. Russo was one of the storytellers in
Common Threads
, a documentary that had just been released about the first decade of the AIDS crisis, told through profiles of thousands of victims memorialized by the AIDS Quilt Project. Russo had contributed a quilt panel honoring his companion, Jeffrey Sevcik. As Russo spoke about contracting the disease himself, I was proud that he was on our show—that a gay activist and a gay issue were considered important enough to merit the thoughtful interview Harry Smith was conducting that morning. As I watched his appearance from the control room, though, a few staff members started laughing and cracking dirty homophobic jokes while Russo recounted the death of his lover. Despite my vow to be true to who I was, at that point in my life, there was no way I was going to speak up and say something to these people, who were my superiors. It was a crushing moment. But internships are a time to learn, and some lessons are way harder than how to collate scripts. Vito Russo died the following year.

*   *   *

Despite my initial doubts, I immersed myself in the consumer gig, and the more I got into the groove, the more responsibilities were entrusted to me. One afternoon, I was doing research on a tattoo-eyeliner scam and another story about contaminated orange juice, when at 5 p.m. someone yelled “Plane crash!” The whole room froze, and Charles Kuralt came on with a Special Report. A United Airlines DC-10 carrying 296 people from Denver to Chicago had crashed in Sioux City, Iowa. Miraculously, there were reports of survivors in the smoking debris.

The newsroom went into a frenzy. People were screaming, “Call, call, call! Book everyone in Sioux City!” “We need families of victims!” “Get rescue workers!” I picked up the phone and, working on instinct, was able to book an interview with the Sioux City fire chief. Then, out of nowhere, some magical elves laid out a huge buffet for dinner, and everyone buckled down to work through the night. Most of the other interns had left, but I couldn’t fathom going home when actual news was breaking. The adrenaline, smarts, and intricate choreography that came together to feed a story as it unfolded live on-air was incredible. The whole night was controlled chaos and, terrible tragedy aside, wildly energizing.

When I finally stumbled out of the newsroom at eleven o’clock, I went straight to Uncle Charlie’s. My mind was about to explode. I couldn’t believe I’d booked someone for the show, that I’d been part of something that was kind of important. I started to have second thoughts about my plan to go to a small town and be a reporter after graduation the following year. What if I just moved straight to New York to try to get a job at CBS? Even if I didn’t get on the air right away, wouldn’t working behind the scenes at a network in New York City be worth it?

As my internship drew to a close, I managed to finagle a lunch with one of the senior producers of the show, who had been nice to me all summer. I wanted to pick his brain about what he thought my next move should be. He said he admired my people skills and how I was always so happy. He impressed upon me that it was crucial not to let your job run your life, because there were no paybacks in this business, and nobody would congratulate you for not taking a vacation. He mentioned that it was good that I didn’t seem to let important people affect me.

At the end of the lunch, I just blurted out the question I really wanted an answer to. I asked what he thought of me going on the air.

“Your face is good,” he allowed. “But…” And are compliments followed by “buts” ever good? The answer is still no! “Your overall look needs some work,” he said. My overall look. What the hell did THAT mean? My ponytail? I’d cut it off. Done! Then he went for it.

“Your wandering eye might keep you from any on-air career entirely.”

My wandering eye? What the fuck was he talking about? I’d had these eyes my whole life and this was the first I’d ever heard of either of them wandering and he’s talking about my entire career goal and everything I’d decided was my reason for living!

“Wha—what do you mean, wandering eye?” I stammered. Great, now I had a speech impediment, too.

“Oh. Every so often your left eye goes off course,” he replied a little too nonchalantly and a little too authoritatively for my taste, using his index finger to point down and to the right in front of his face. I started thinking maybe he was trying to make me feel bad, or maybe he was jealous of my unbridled youth. Had he said the same thing three years before to my faux twin, the Asian producer?

I went back to the office and called my mom.

“That’s just BULL, Andy!” she over-modulated into the receiver. “What the hell is he talking about, wandering EYE? I’ve never SEEN IT. You do NOT have a wandering EYE. Get OVER IT.“

And that was pretty much it. I believed her. For twenty years, I pursued a career behind the scenes, but because that’s what I ultimately decided I wanted, and not because I was thinking about some nonexistent lazy eye. And then someone actually let me be on TV, and boy, did I hear about it. Every blogger and tweeter and commenter that encountered me on-air had something to say about my wonky eyes. And of course, now when I look at a picture of myself it is all I see. Come to think of it, it’s kind of miraculous that I can see anything at all, when you consider how horribly crossed my eyes are.

I was on the bus heading to my final day of work when I glanced over at the magazine the man sitting next to me was reading. It was called
Blade Trade
, all about the knife industry. I’d been in New York long enough to stop assuming that every unfamiliar man was a serial killer, so I all but dismissed the notion that he was placing a murder weapon order before writing another fake roommate ad. A slightly more likely explanation was that he was just a fella who worked in the knife biz and was catching up on the latest knife knewz. That concept floored me. Had he always wanted to be a knife guy, or had he just bopped around going from job to job until he fell into the knife lifestyle? This odd voyeuristic moment on the bus made me so grateful to have figured out what I wanted to do in my life, something glamorous, exciting, and important. I was going to work doing something in TV, somewhere. Not only that, I had learned about modulating the level and tone at which I expressed myself, and maintaining some kind of decorum. In the office.