Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (9 page)

I spent my last week in New York unemployed, running around, being gay, and lying out in the Sheep’s Meadow. I called the morning show one last time to try to connect with the senior producer who had informed me about my eye. A newsclerk named Cornelia told me he wasn’t there.

“We kept your mailbox up,” she said. At the beginning of the summer, each of the interns was given a mailbox. I was flushed with excitement. “We all know you’re coming back here.”

I knew, too.

Sunrise with Tammy Faye Bakker

TUPPINS

After my internship, I went back to college having identified two critical things that some people take a lifetime to figure out—who I was and what I wanted to be. Now I had to figure out how to deliver on the latter. The monkey was off my back and I was out and free, but I had turned a corner smack into a new, chilling reality—AIDS.

Along with every other gay man in 1988, I was convinced I would become infected. I filled the empty bin in the back of my head that used to house all my coming-out fears with my updated paranoia, and I equated every ailment with the one I feared the most. I stared at all my bruises, sores, and blemishes, convincing myself that I was going to die. I was too scared to get tested because I thought it simply meant finding out that I had the disease. I didn’t talk to anybody about AIDS; my friends were just coming to terms with the new me and I wanted to project an image of calm, of health.

Watching Oprah and
All My Children
every day after class provided refuge from my fears. Even when I thought I didn’t care about Oprah’s topic, she had a way of making the show great. Nobody else could do that. And my hair was huge, almost as big as Oprah’s.

Just before senior year, I finally told Graciela that I was gay. I’d saved her for last for some reason. I guess I felt like if I was going to be with a woman, it would’ve been her, and to eliminate this possibility by admitting I was gay meant I was breaking both our hearts. One day at Amanda’s parents’ house, while looking at her painted toenails, she asked me if I liked girls with painted toenails. Amanda and I gave each other a long look.

“I’m gay.”

“Oh, okay,” Grac said matter-of-factly. “I have to make a phone call.” She disappeared inside the house. Amanda and I sat in disbelief, thinking she was in serious denial. Grac said later that she’d been worried how she appeared in front of us, and, like Dave, felt left out of my circle of trust. We barely spoke of it all day, and that night we saw
Do the Right Thing
. The next day we talked for hours and went deep, agreeing that if I were straight we probably would’ve wound up together. It was all very melancholy.

We recovered by reframing our friendship, becoming even closer. We were partners in crime and on the dance floor, where we always came together. We went to several B-52s concerts that year and danced our butts off. That year Grac had the best college job of all time: She was a moderator on a “Big & Beautiful” chat line, for people who are big and the people who love them. Sometimes the conversation got really dirty, and she had to jump in and tell them to clean it up. But mostly she just let them talk dirty, because she believed that fat people had a right to enjoy themselves. I agreed.

My job through college was running a pushcart at Faneuil Hall—the prototype for renovated urban outdoor malls—in downtown Boston. I sold Deadhead gear, Mexican blankets, Baja pullovers, and little woven bracelets. I was always broke in college—I have no clue what I spent my money on but I had none—so I took a lot of shifts and would just sit in my high director’s chair and listen to Tracy Chapman and the Dead and read
No One Here Gets Out Alive
and hypothesize about whether Jim Morrison was really dead. My best day was when Lisa Whelchel (“Blair” from
Facts of Life
) showed up in the mall and I ditched the pushcart for about an hour to follow her around at a respectful distance. Essentially my job consisted of watching idiots walking into each other all day (spend a day watching tourists and you’ll see that they really do become herdlike and walk right into each other) and endlessly answering two questions:

“Where’s the bathroom?”

“How do I get to Cheers?”

Occasionally I would make sure that people knew that when they went to Cheers—by the way it’s not even called that, it’s called the Bull and Finch Pub, and it doesn’t look a thing like the set of the damn show—they would
not
be seeing Sam and Diane. The irony is that I would’ve been one of those people if I was visiting Boston for a weekend. But I wasn’t, was I?

My other job during college was as a waiter at a restaurant on Boylston Street. The job of waiter may have been created especially for me. I loved talking to strangers and getting them drunk and then getting tipped for it. Sadly, I got fired—for the one and only time in my life—for accepting a “shift drink” after closing time. Every waiter was entitled to one free drink, but the glitch was that I was not twenty-one years old. Maybe that’s why I drink on my show now.

*   *   *

All my obsessing over my imminent death led me to finally go get an AIDS test at the end of my senior year. After many sleepless nights, with a backdrop of intense buildup and drama, Jackie came with me to get the news. And I was negative. I felt like I could do anything. Finally, I felt I had the opportunity to live a full life. Now I knew I had to strive to enjoy life, take opportunities, follow my dreams, showcase my worth.

That meant moving to New York after graduation and getting a job as a waiter until something opened up at CBS. I didn’t even have to get the waitering job—CBS hired me as a newsclerk on
CBS This Morning
before I had a chance to unpack my bags.

*   *   *

Newsclerk—I hated the sound of it. The “clerk” part was what bugged me. But then again, look what I was doing: I answered phones, ripped scripts, collated packets for the anchors, and did irritating grunt work for producers, some of whom seemed to me like Michelangelos of the mediocre. I was a ball-and-chain to the ringing phones and absolutely stank at ripping scripts, but my respite was how I began each morning, running the Green Room, which was always a parade of insanity—a coffee-based cocktail party featuring an always unusual guest list. One morning, Tip O’Neill asked Sammy Davis’s widow, Altovise, if she was “here to sing.” She said, “No, but my late husband was the greatest singer of all time.” Why do white people always assume black people are going to sing?!? Every morning saw some type of weird interaction, and I lived for those moments.

Me as a newsclerk at CBS. This is what we used to call a computer.

Even though it sometimes took years to get promoted, and the show always seemed to be a hair away from cancellation, after about six months I was convinced I’d outgrown my role as a newsclerk. They’d been letting me produce live segments, and when Connie Chung filled in for Paula Zahn, I produced a whole series for her about soap stars (I’m pretty sure it was award-worthy). I was also sent to West Palm Beach to help book a juror in the William Kennedy Smith trial. We got juror Lea Haller, and everyone said it was a coup. Years later, she would marry the prosecuting attorney, Roy Black, and years after that, she became a Real Housewife of Miami. (Small, freaky world.)

My new best friend Lynn let me conduct my first interview ever (I was off camera). It was with Robin Williams, renowned for his manic energy during interviews. I stuck to my questions, didn’t listen to his answers, and essentially killed all of his shtick. Later, we watched the tape together and she critiqued my performance. Lynn gave me a C- (equivalent to credit for getting through it).

Maybe because I was openly gay, or maybe because my boss was giving me a shot, I was sent to LA—for my first time—to try to book somebody associated with Magic Johnson, who’d just revealed he was HIV-positive. Even though by that point I’d tested negative a couple times, I was still racked with fear, and the news of Magic’s diagnosis was huge, symbolic of this being more than a gay disease. I booked a Laker, and it felt important, being part of a story that was to be a watershed moment in the history of AIDS.

On the plane ride home from LA, flying MGM Air (where every seat was first class!), I was sitting behind these two guys who seemed to be talking about CBS. Since I never met a discussion I didn’t like to bust in on, I leaned right over their seats, poked my head in between them, and said, “Hey! Do you guys work for CBS?” I was humiliated when one turned to me and I immediately recognized Jeff Sagansky, then president of the network. I quickly told him I worked for
CBS This Morning
and to please not cancel it, then made my head pop away to a place where he couldn’t see it again.

When I got back to New York I was promoted to assistant producer. Free from the ringing phones and Xerox machine, I was exactly where I wanted to be. At that broadcast, I went on to become associate producer, producer, and senior producer and always made it a point not to give the newsclerks my grunt work. I knew one day I’d be working alongside—and for—them.

*   *   *

After I’d been working at CBS for a few years it dawned on me that as I traveled the country, I wasn’t merely parachuting into stories: I was parachuting into lives. I would land smack-dab in the middle of someone else’s drama, before disappearing forever. I became a highly trained professional voyeur. I had a walk-on role in everyone else’s soap opera.

I had produced a slew of feature-y live shots, and they all amounted to pretty fun little vacationettes, but not always scintillating television. It sounded great in New York when I pitched going to Boulder, Colorado, and having the cute editors of a rollerblading magazine demonstrate the latest craze to Harry and Connie Chung in New York. If you’re lucky, you missed that actual segment, though, because it boiled down to Harry and Connie wondering on live TV what they were doing watching two people doing lame rollerblading tricks in a half-dark parking lot at dawn. As bad as that one sucked, it was miles ahead of the “National Family Learn to Bowl Week,” remote from a bowling alley in San Francisco. The piece I produced featured the darling bowling Higa twins, who could neither bowl nor were very darling. And have you ever seen a bowling alley at 5:15 a.m. PST? You’re not supposed to, is the thing. I called my mom after the segment. “That was so BORING!” she said, supportively. “Is that NEWS?!?! It’s no wonder your show is in the PITS.” When I got back to New York, I kept saying, “It wasn’t my idea!” to anyone who would listen. That’s the thing about morning shows: You have to fill a
lot
of time.

I wasn’t always assigned to the nobodies. For instance, I spent the morning with Mary Jo and Joey Buttafuoco at exactly the time all three networks aired movies based on the insane story of Joey’s teenaged lover walking up to their front door and shooting Mary Jo in the face. The saga of the Buttafuocos and Amy Fisher, the “Long Island Lolita,” was the biggest story going that year, and I was in their living room after courting Mary Jo on the phone for a week.