Me Vs. Me

4

Lights, Camera, Action!

I’m late. How is it possible that I’m late for my first day of work? I have never been late for anything. I set my alarm for 7:00 a.m., a half hour earlier than I was supposed to get up. But it’s already eight, which means the radio alarm was singing for an hour before I even heard it.

I jump into the shower, throw on my clothes (no time to debate: black pants, green sweater), flip through the news channels as I scarf down my coffee (plane crash in Bali, hurricane in the Bahamas, kidnapped girl found alive in South Carolina), grab my bag, notebook and clipboard, then run for the elevator. No time today to test out the subway. Taxi, it is. The best part of living in New York is that you can hail a cab from anywhere, unlike Phoenix, where they’re as common as waterslides in the desert.

The cold air tackles me as I open the door. Damn, I really need to get myself a coat.

When I reach the street, I attempt to hail a cab, but a stream of occupied yellow taxis keeps passing me by. Hmm. How long is this supposed to take? Where are the empty ones? What if I’m here for hours and no cabs drive by and I miss my first day of work?

Oh, there’s one! Hello? Hello! Why didn’t he stop? How do I get them to stop? On TV, New Yorkers sometimes whistle. I don’t know how to whistle.

I see one coming and I step into the middle of the street. A Honda turns the corner, almost running me over. But then I realize something. What if I die in one life? I’ll still be around in the other. I think.

Just then an empty cab pulls up. He nods, and I get in. “Fifty-eighth and Broadway please,” I tell him.

And away we go. He chats on his cell phone while I watch the clock. Curtis Boland, the executive producer of Ron’s Report told me I’d be working from about ten to seven-thirty every day, assuming there is no crisis. Since Ron’s show tapes at six and airs at eight, I can leave after the post-tape meeting. But today, my first day, she wants me in at nine. It’s now eight-fifty.

“Excuse me, sir?”

He continues chatting.

“Sir? Can you tell me how far away we are?”

“We’re here,” he grunts and pulls over in front of The Gap, where a street vendor is selling Kate Spade purses (fake, I assume).

“Where?”

“Across the street.”

Oh. I pay him and face the tall, gleaming chrome-and-tinted-windowed TRSN building. A news ticker is featured prominently over the entranceway, informing me about the hurricane in the Bahamas. I have to maneuver my way past myriad flowerpots (security cameras, most likely) to get to the doorway.

I pull open the heavy doors and march toward the security desk, the click of my heels echoing through the room.

“May I help you?” the security guard asks, and after I show my ID, I’m told to go up to the tenth floor. The elevator doors are about to close and I throw my purse between the sensors to stop them. A woman clucks her tongue.

“Sorry,” I say sheepishly and slide inside. I slither to the back of the crowded space and accidentally elbow someone directly in the stomach. “Really sorry,” I say.

“No worries,” says a deep voice. I look up at the man I attacked.

Hello there.

The man I attacked is hot. Hmm. That stomach I elbowed was pretty hard. Muscled, I’d say. He’s tall, with short dark brown hair and big brown eyes framed in black wire glasses. Like me, he’s wearing black pants and a light green shirt. Now that’s what I call fate. He’s also giving me a big smile.

I feel my cheeks burn and I quickly turn away. It’s too early for me to even think about other guys. Stare at the floor, missy! Think about Cam, whose poor heart you broke two nights ago. Instead I glance at the outfits of the people around me. There’s a lot of black happening, I’ll tell ya.

The elevator stops on the third floor. Everyone except the hard-gut guy and me gets out. The tiny hairs on my arm stand up. Hello, sexual tension. I think. I probably shouldn’t be having that elevator-tension feeling so soon after breaking up with Cam. The entire time Cam and I were together, I never even looked at another guy.

But now you’re single! a voice in my head screams. Excellent. Now not only am I existing in two worlds, I’m also hearing voices.

Regardless, the voice is right. I am single. I’m allowed to bask in the sexual tension with other men. In fact, I should smile. It’s rude not to. Turn around. Ask him if he wants to show me the building…the city…his apartment….

I’m about to open my mouth, but I freeze. Excellent. I’ve forgotten how to flirt.

The door opens on ten and I step off. And then at the last second, I turn around. I can do it! I give him a big smile-for-the camera grin and a Miss America wave. And before he can return it, the doors close.

Well. At least I tried. Pretty cool that I’m in the building for five seconds and I’ve already spotted a cute guy. I love New York! He must work for TRSN too. A coproducer? A writer? We’ll both be here into the wee hours of the night and one thing will lead to another and—

I show my pass at the door, and am suddenly in the newsroom. No one except the mega-talent has offices here since it’s all open space: desks and cubes overflowing with papers, computers and screaming people. I might faint. I can’t believe I’m here. I made it.

What if I’m not up for this?

I walk over to where Curtis told me Ron’s crew is located and spot her waving at me from her desk. “I want that interview,” she says when I reach her. At first I think she’s talking to me, but then I notice her mobile headset. “Throw in a book deal if you have to. Just get it. No, I don’t want her talking to O’Reilly or Couric.”

Curtis is wearing faded blue jeans, a black T-shirt, a brown corduroy blazer and sneakers. Her skin is ghostly pale, as though she hasn’t seen the sun in months, and she’s not wearing any makeup. Her dirty-blond hair is tied back in a haphazard ponytail. I’d peg her as mid-to-late forties. She told me she’s been working with Ron for ten years. She’s the one who discovered him and brought him to TRSN to begin with. This show is her baby.

“Get her to talk to us. Do you hear me? I want the kidnapped girl. I don’t have time for your pathetic excuses….”

As she berates whoever is on the other end of the phone, I look around the room and think about how I almost didn’t make it here. As a kid, I had wanted to be an anchor (my dad used to tell me I had a face for television), so I decided to major in broadcasting when I applied to Arizona State. But when I got to school, I realized that everyone wanted to be an anchor and that the real power was behind the scenes, producing, so that’s what I focused on. The summer of my junior year, I interned at the NBC affiliate in Phoenix, but decided that after I graduated I would move to New York. I don’t know where my obsession with New York came from. Maybe from years of watching Law and Order, maybe from too much romanticizing about Sex and the City. All I knew was that I wanted to have a zip code that started with 1. The spring before I graduated, I applied to every available and not-available entry-level job in Manhattan and flew down for informational interviews, where I was told again and again, sorry, we’re hiring the interns from last year, why don’t you work at a local station outside the city? When you have more experience, when you’ve grown your contact list, when, when, when…So I returned to Arizona, my tail nestled firmly between my legs, and took a full-time job there.

My new boyfriend Cam told me it was for the best since New Yorkers were crazy, and anyway, he wanted me on this side of the country. I jokingly warned him not to get too attached. At my graduation ceremony, I figured I would be in Arizona another year, tops. I took typical hat-throwing pictures with Lila, with Cam (who had just graduated from law school), with my mom and with my dad. (He had come even though I’d told him not to bother, not because I believed it wasn’t worth the trip, but because I dreaded the fight that he and my mom would have if he did show up, which they had, and which I did my best to ignore.)

Lila and I kept our two-bedroom apartment in Tempe. (I had moved out of my mom’s place in Scottsdale freshman year when Goodwin, husband Number Three, moved in. Lila’s dorm room was right next door to mine. We became best friends at first by proximity, and then by habit. We moved into the two-bedroom sophomore year.) Even though I was earning decent money, I figured there was no point getting my own place, since I wasn’t planning on sticking around.

I started the new job, liked the job and got promoted from assignment editor to producer eleven o’clock news, to producer 6:00 p.m. news, to executive producer 6:00 p.m. news. I was good at my job. I could smell a story. Maybe smell is the wrong word. When something big is going on, my mouth gets zapped dry. I don’t know why, but that’s what happens, that’s when I know I’m onto something. My dry mouth has never been wrong. Anyway, I bought the Jetta, Cam made me a bookshelf, and after two years, I started settling into my life. I had my boyfriend, my job, my bookshelf. I got to go into work at nine and come home at five-thirty, watch my newscast from my couch. I started to think that maybe I didn’t need to move, that I could settle in Arizona.

And that was when a dark-haired Melanie Diamond, a twenty-five-year-old Phoenix elementary school teacher, was photographed leaving a hotel room with the very married, very “it’s all about family values” Senator Jim Garland.

My mouth was drier than the desert.

Every producer in the country wanted to talk to Melanie. And like everyone else, I called her. I pleaded with her to tell me her story.

“I know you must be going through hell,” I said repeatedly to her answering machine. “And the last thing I want is to make it worse. But until you tell the world your side of the story, it’s not going to go away.”

That night she called me back. “There’s something about your voice,” she said, sounding a little lost and overwhelmed. “You sound a bit like my sister. Like someone I can talk to. Get your butt over here.”

So I got the interview. I brought a camera to her place and got her to tell her side of the story. Afterward, when the cameraman was gone, she ordered me to stay for coffee and I did. She told me about how she hadn’t left her house in two weeks. How she never expected this to blow up in her face. How she can’t believe what a jerk the senator turned out to be. I told her about Cam, about my messed up parents, about my dream of going to New York. And I knew that we were going to be more than interviewer and interviewee. We were going to be friends.

After the show ran, every station in the country picked up my story. My exclusive interview. The details Melanie had given me. Illicit trips to Greece, promises of marriage. A tearful, black-haired Melanie, swearing that the bald and sweaty Garland had sworn he was married in name only, that he and his pig-nosed wife Judy didn’t even sleep in the same bed. I edited the pig-nose part out of my interview. I also edited out my own questions—like I always did in this type of interview. Producers stayed behind the scenes.

As the weeks passed, I became the one who listened to Melanie cry about how she would never love anyone again, and promise that she would. I found her a lawyer through Cam’s firm when her school threatened to fire her for the negative publicity.

As the weeks passed, doors that had been bolted only two years before were suddenly swinging wide open. Because of my newfound notoriety as the producer who got the Melanie Diamond exclusive, job offers around the country started flooding in. Opportunity. Cash. Health benefits.

“I’d like to talk to you about working for us,” Curtis said via cell phone.

I’d watched Grighton’s show—as a news producer you have to watch everyone’s show—and I thought he was smart, tough and intimidating. And I wanted to work for him. But most importantly, he wanted to hire a young, female producer who could deliver. Me.

And here I am.

“…Report back to me at eleven,” Curtis says to whatever poor soul is on the phone with her. Then she lowers the headset to rest around her neck and stares at me. “So, Gabby, you made it. Welcome to national news.”

In the next hour, I’m given a desk, a computer and a BlackBerry.

Curtis tours me around the building, barking out orders. “Morning meeting is at eleven, afternoon meeting at three, post-show meeting at seven-ten. All take place in the seventh-floor conference room. Ron hates tardiness, so don’t be late. Ever. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“He also detests guests who stutter, so don’t book them.”

“That’s fine.” N-no p-problem.

She shows her pass to the security guard and we enter a small puke-green room. “The green room. Obviously.”

In Arizona, the green room, where the guests wait to be interviewed, wasn’t actually green. But I always thought that was kind of lame. This one has a watercooler, a coffee brewer, a loaf of banana bread, a TV and VCR, and a blue leather couch.

“If he catches a grammar mistake in the script,” Curtis says, “he’ll think you’re illiterate. Watch out for sloppiness. And always get your facts right. He’s known as one of the most trusted newsmen in the nation for a reason. Us.”

“Got it.”

She presses her finger against her lips. “Control room,” she mouths and opens the door.

No one looks up as we sneak inside. Jane Hickey’s morning show is filming.

I love control rooms. I always feel like I’m in the center of the world. Two rows of producers at their computers face a wall of television monitors. The center monitor shows the two smiling blondes, Cameron Diaz and Jane, discussing Cameron’s new movie. The monitor beside her shows the police chief in South Carolina, the one who found the kidnapped girl. As soon as Jane finishes her interview with the movie star, the feed will switch to the police chief. Built into the side walls are fifteen television monitors showing the news on every other news station in the country.

“You’ll be working here,” Curtis mouths, pointing to one of the desks, which a tall, lanky man now occupies.

She motions me back toward the door.

When we’re back outside, Curtis continues growling orders. “Ron’s ratings are highest when he gets a good debate going, so don’t book any wimps. Make sure the guest can stand his ground.”

“No problem,” I say.

“And make sure to know who else the guest is talking to. If he appeared on Larry King last night, we don’t want him tonight. Ron won’t be happy with you. He won’t be happy at all.”

“Got it.” Butterflies are anxiously flying around my stomach. If I was intimidated by Ron before, I’m scared shitless now. What if Ron doesn’t like me? What if he thinks I’m some sort of hack? What if he thinks I’m illiterate?

“And remember,” Curtis says as we step back into the elevator, “he’s very happily married. And we want him to stay that way.”

I try to keep the shock from my face. What exactly does she mean by that? Does she think I’m going to try to sleep my way to the top? Or is it my responsibility to keep guests from hitting on him? He’s not exactly a rock star. I can’t exactly imagine screaming teen girls pressed against the tinted windows flashing him their panties. “I understand,” I say.

“Good.” With a glance at her watch she adds, “It’s time for the morning meeting.”

My hands are shaking. I’ve moved them under the conference-room table so nobody notices, but there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do to make them stop.

Curtis, the reporters and the associate producers are all chatting among themselves. Ron is expected any minute and I can’t get my hands to stay still. Ron will probably think I’m some sort of crack junkie. Just as I’m about to try putting them on the table again, so I can use the right one to take notes, he enters the room.

“Good morning, you guys!” he sings.

“Hey, Ron,” everyone chants back.

Ron looks exactly like he does on television, only taller. He comes across as the ideal dad: smart, trustworthy, handsome and in control. His hair is short, dark gray and parted to the side. He’s wearing beige pleated trousers and a navy collared sweater. He places his steaming mug of coffee at the head of the oval table and sits down.

“Everyone excited for today’s show?” he asks, scanning the table. His gaze rests on me. “You must be Gabby. Welcome to the team.”

My cheeks flush when he says my name. I’m not surprised he knows who I am, but the familiarity of my nickname catches me by surprise. “Thanks, Ronald,” I say, trying to sound smooth and praying I don’t stutter. “It’s a pleasure to be working for you.”

He smiles, and I’m surprised to see that he has two dimples. “How do you feel about the cold, Arizona? No dry heat here, is there?”

He’s so sweet. And what a cute new nickname. “It’s a bit of a shock to my system.”

“Wait till January. You’ll be wanting to get on the first plane back to Phoenix.”

I don’t need a plane for that. I just have to fall asleep. “I doubt that,” I say, smiling. I am bantering with Ronald Grighton!

“Wow, what a great smile,” he says.

My smile gets even bigger.

Curtis rustles through her portfolio. “Welcome to Ron’s Report, Gabrielle. Now let’s get started on today’s show. Since we can’t get the kidnapped girl—I just heard she’s talking to Paula Zahn—”

Groans from the table.

“—I think we should stick to our program. We’ll do the segment about the elections first. Then the hurricane in the Bahamas. We have the director of the National Hurricane Center and the governor-general scheduled. Then we’re supposed to go to—”

Suddenly my bag begins to vibrate. What the hell?

In a split second, everyone at the table whips out his or her BlackBerry, apparently the cause of said vibrating.