Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (13 page)

“Well, I STILL think they’re pretty ugly. But what do I know?” Mom said. “I mean, Helen’s friend did say you probably got a great deal on them. I guess it’s an investment?”

“Dad?” I implored.

“Well, I just don’t know what you’re gonna do with them. You say you’re putting them out for display, but then what? I just don’t see any use for them is all.” That’s my dad: reasonable to a fault.

I broke it all with a big breath. “It was a joke,” I said.

“What?” my mother asked. “What was a joke?”

“Everything. The Shawnee thing. I don’t really think I’m a Shawnee.” I was not feeling good about myself. It seemed too big—or stupid—to explain.

“What do you MEAN it was a joke??” my mom asked. “Which part? The shoes are a joke? You’re telling me that these SHOES are a JOKE?”

“Not the shoes. Well, yes, the shoes. Everything, really. I mean, Grac and—”

“GRAC and you,” she interrupted.

“Yes, we came up with this kind of ridiculous thing about me being a Shawnee and just really kept going with it. And, I mean, it was funny. Because I love to wind you up, you know that. But the shoes—these are Grac’s from forever ago and she wrote the letter from the charity.” I was spitting it all out as fast as I could.

I’ll never forget the way my parents looked on that April Fools’ Day. Standing in the kitchen of our colonial home, drinks in hand, faces calm, both completely blank and uncomfortably puzzled.

“How long?” My mom finally spoke. “How long has this been going on?”

“I don’t know. A while. Six months, maybe.” I was speaking softly now. The fun was long over.

“Six months you’ve been doing this. Why?” My mom was as still as a painting.

I did not have an answer.

“I mean, why? Was it funny? Why did you do this?” She seemed on the verge of being genuinely upset.

“I think originally just, well, you know how I play tricks on you sometimes. I mean, I thought it was funny and you have to admit—those shoes—I mean, that letter … it’s pretty funny.” I could hear my own voice and it sounded like I was trying to convince myself. I was such a jerk.

Then my mom’s face turned. One thing about my mom: She appreciates a good joke. And I had gotten her. And now she knew it. She laughed. Thank God. “This is unbelievable. I mean, what a joke.” She was taking it well. I was relieved. Then my father left the room without saying a word.

“Lou? LOU?! Where are you going? Come in here.”

“I’m going in the other room to watch TV,” he said. He had better things to do.

On that day, the art of the prank more or less died for me. I had gotten such pleasure from the whole thing, but my father’s quiet disappointment erased it all. I don’t blame him for not knowing how to react. Now that it’s in the rearview mirror, I hardly know what it was about, either. An armchair psychologist could maybe surmise that I’d spent so many years hiding my true self from them—my gay self—that once I was out and they knew who I was, there was a hole left where the lies and pretending had been. But then I remember that I’d told them Richard Nixon was dead when I was still in the closet, and I realize maybe I was just being a dick.

Did they get over it? Yes. Did I? Not really. I never played another joke on them again. I guess you could say I became my own man. Though, in truth, Graciela probably paid the greatest price. My mom hasn’t believed a word out of her mouth since.

Ross Perot and me in a rare moment when both of our mouths were shut

BREAKING NEWS

You might be thinking that my emotional maturity was stunted at age thirteen—and if so you may have a point. But when I wasn’t goofing off, my job at CBS had become intense, and often really serious. I was in the thick of a few bona fide disasters—and I don’t mean when we added a live audience. While I loved covering entertainment stories and spectacular events such as the Olympics, I’m most proud of my work in breaking news situations. I was actually on the scene for hurricanes, floods, fires, plane crashes, and the aftermath of a bombing.

The first major disaster I covered for CBS was way bigger than those floods in Petaluma and, ironically enough, in my home state of Missouri. The Mississippi and Missouri Rivers had overflowed simultaneously, covering a massive swath of land. This flood ended up lasting seven months, from April to October, and would become, until Katrina, the most costly and devastating flood in American history.

CBS sent me to Southern Illinois for what was supposed to be just a day, to produce a live shot. I grabbed a rescue worker named Rick Shlepper (in case you didn’t know, in Yiddish that means someone who’s awkward or dumb—I love a name with a double meaning). By the time we went off the air, I was told that I was staying indefinitely and that Harry Smith was coming down to broadcast from a different water-gutted town every day. I spent the next week shooting during the day, writing a script and editing the piece at night, then driving to a new spot and doing it all over again.

My next stop was St. Louis but in a part of town I’d never even seen, and I felt far from home. I was in a neighborhood of low-lying land and tract houses when I met an older man named Rufus White, living on his own. He showed us around his soaked living room—all of his belongings were ruined, the place stank like hell, and the floor was a big muddy puddle. As we surveyed the damage, shoes soggy and noisy, he tried to salvage scraps of keepsakes and knickknacks. I watched him go through his damaged photographs—the record of his life erased by water. When I asked him about his plans for the future, he tried to be optimistic but his voice cracked. At that moment, I realized that I had started to cry.

A few days later, I arrived in Rocheport, Missouri, before my colleagues. It looked like it had once been a beautiful town. My assignment was to book flood victims for the next day’s show. I met a group of wonderful people who were filling sandbags for anybody who needed them in the parking lot of the firehouse. The simple things people were doing for each other felt very Midwestern, and that’s when I finally felt I was indeed back home. I joined them, shoveling sand for several hours and feeling good about helping, rather than just taping and watching. Eventually I hit a wall, probably built on a combination of sleep deprivation, hunger, and pre-heatstroke. I’d been up for a couple days, I stank, and I could feel myself on the precipice of turning nasty, so I wandered away from the folks I was helping to be alone. Kind of like David Banner would right before he turned into the Incredible Hulk—though no such transformation awaited me.

A couple hours later I was sitting on the curb in the middle of town talking on what was probably a brick-sized cell phone (that’s how we rolled in ’93), and I looked up to see Harry, normally one of the sunniest and most decent people in the business, towering over me. I got off the phone to discover that he was in a mood as bad as mine. He said he didn’t like the guests I had booked for the next day’s show and told me to un-book them. He paused and glowered at me. “You’re putting out really bad energy. It’s all wrong, sitting down on the ground on your phone while other people are going through this mess and working all around you.” He turned and walked away.

I was sleepless and dirty and pissy, and at that moment I thought I might cry. Or maybe I would just leave. What the hell was I doing there, anyway? Was this what I’d signed up for? I flashed back to my lunch five years before with Susan Lucci. Should I have tried to work in soaps? Before I could answer my own question, a woman came over and thanked me for helping to fill sandbags and for being a considerate reporter.

“See that man over there?” I pointed to Harry. “Will you tell him that?” And she did. Probably not the most altruistic request, but I felt somewhat vindicated.

The next morning’s mission was right up my alley. We got word that Ross Perot was coming to Rocheport to survey the flood damage. We booked him to talk to Harry live. Perot had taken the country by storm the year before as a fast-talking, shoot-from-the-hip Texas billionaire who’d made an unlikely, but quite serious, run for the presidency. Perot didn’t win, but his “maverick” campaign style—candid, anti-insider, folksy—set the stage for your George W. Bushes and Sarah Palins in the decades to come. Perot was like a one-man band, traveling with no handlers or hype. I was put on Perot duty and he was sent a message to meet a kid with a ponytail (I swear, that hairstyle will haunt me forever) in the lobby of our Best Western hotel at 5 a.m.

Morning dew covered my filthy rental-car windshield as I rolled out of the parking lot with the most recent object of America’s obsession as my passenger. He exuded eccentricity and a heavy scent of lotion. (No surprise there.)

“Say, boy, got any SHPRAA!?!” he shouted. I couldn’t understand him. “SHPRAA!” he repeated, unhelpfully. “Got any?”

What the hell was this pint-sized politician yelling at me about at 5 a.m.? I told him I still didn’t understand. “The wipers! You need SHPRAA! Clean ’em, kid! Use your SHPRAA!”

He wanted me to clean the damn windows with the wiper spray. I did, and he visibly calmed. Then the ride turned into the Ross Perot Show. I barely had to ask him a question before his conversational autopilot kicked in and then there was no shutting him up. He told me he’d run into Michael Jackson in the Bahamas. Jackson apparently said, “You wouldn’t remember me, but we met a few years ago.” Perot thought that was hilarious. “HOW am I gonna FORGIT Michael Jackson?! Now, later that day, I took him motorboating with that kid he’s always with—the
Home Alone
kid. Nice kid!” (Okay, so Ross Perot, Michael Jackson, and Macaulay Culkin are motorboating in the Bahamas. Is that not the beginning of a joke? Or the end?)

Perot was proud of the fact that he traveled sans entourage and he wore it like a badge, but his boast became my burden when we pulled into Rocheport. Everyone in town wanted a piece of Perot. Suddenly, I was clearing a path for him like a security dude, answering reporters’ questions about whether they could interview him, taking pictures of him with fans, and all the time attempting to move him closer to Harry and the live shot we had set up. It was, as they say in the news biz, a clusterfuck, and I was at the center of the cluster.

My day as Ross Perot’s personal escort wore on. The longer we were together, the more I realized that Mr. Perot never, ever shut up, blabbing away without caring who he was talking to or whether anyone was even listening. I had finally met my match! Years later, sitting in the middle of the Season 4
Real Housewives of New York
reunion show, I was overcome with a feeling of déjà vu when I realized that my PTSD (Perot Talking Stress Disorder) had been aggravated by the ladies.

After I dropped Grandpappy Perot back at the hotel, I was scheduled to go up in a helicopter to shoot a piece with a team of search and rescue guys. I had done a similar piece with the Coast Guard on a search-and-rescue mission over the Louisiana bayous in the days after Hurricane Andrew, and I couldn’t wait to go again. First, there was the chance that we’d be able to help someone and get some dramatic footage. Second, Ross Perot wasn’t coming. Finally, there’s just something about being up in a whirlybird with burly rescue guys in jumpsuits that’s a brilliant palate cleanser to a sleepless week. Everything went well, I gathered some aerial shots of the flood, and we landed without incident. I got my seventh wind and was happily editing my footage in a remote truck that we were working out of somewhere near Jefferson City when, around midnight, the door of the truck opened and Harry grabbed me.

“I have a big favor to ask you,” he said.

I bristled. I was still smarting from the other day when he’d chastised me for giving off bad energy. “I beg you to get me a toothbrush,” Harry said. “Can you? I have to go to sleep and I don’t know where to look for one, and I don’t have anyone else to ask. I will be forever indebted.”

A
toothbrush
? I drove around like a maniac—cursing at the top of my lungs—looking for an open gas station. I finally found one and drove back to where The Anchor was waiting, and I bit my tongue as I handed off his toiletries.

The next day was Friday. Everyone was in a great mood. Harry was going home to New York for the weekend and he and I drove to St. Louis together. High from a week of grueling work and a light at the end of the tunnel, I forgot my anger as he told me stories of his early days.

We pulled up at the airport. Harry gathered his things, then shocked me by turning to me and acknowledging the elephant in the car. “I’m sorry I yelled at you at the fire station in Rocheport,” he said. “I was a putz.”

Harry was, and is, a truly good guy, and working with him reminded me of why I loved this business. In a galaxy of journalists who pretend to be “folksy” and of the people, he is the real deal.

It was also while covering breaking news that I got my first taste of Orange County. Prior to my visit as a news producer, the only thing I knew about the OC was that it was home to Disneyland and rich right-wingers. One day in New York, I was sitting at my desk, whining to a coworker that I had nothing to do that week. As if summoned by the very words, my senior producer appeared to tell me that wildfires were raging in Laguna Beach and I had to go. I went from thinking of leaving work early to hustling home to pack and catch a 6 p.m. flight to Los Angeles for who knew how long.