Jennifer Oko - Gloss

“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 on from the strange call. I imagined Faith having to confront a pile of dead, stuffed snakes on live TV, and I picked up another coiled one off the table, admiring the wide-open mouth, the pointy fangs up close and personal. A tiny bit of plastic dripped down from the tips, approximating venom.

Then my phone rang.

It rang again.

I was going to let it ring through to voice mail, but Natasha grabbed the antenna, and pulled the phone out of my pocket.

“Annabelle Kapner’s office,” she said, winking at me, mouthing, “Maybe it’s him?”

And then she turned paler than she had been in the pit.

“They hung up,” she said, and handed me the phone. “Annabelle, what was that story you had on last week?”

“About the Fardish beauty parlors?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“Why?”

“I think it might have pissed someone off.”

I looked at her blankly.

“Whoever that was just called you a few unspeakable terms, said something in some foreign language and then slammed down the phone.”

I tend to be a fairly nonconfrontational person, or at least I was before I landed in jail, and one of the things I liked about morning television was that we hardly ever did the sort of stories that pissed people off. We stayed positive and hopeful because negativity is hard to stomach in the morning. Of course, it did happen upon occasion that people felt misrepresented (as I mentioned, we did get irate calls periodically), but usually that was because they felt they did not get enough airtime to promote whatever it was they were promoting, not because they felt personally slighted. And if a story was somehow critical, we did our darnedest to balance it to within an inch of its life, even if it was an unbalanced story to begin with. Often after my segments aired the subjects involved sent me flattering e-mails and even flowers. Once I got a cashmere scarf, but I had to return it because the network’s news standards don’t allow us to accept gifts worth more than seventy-five dollars. Of course, you could argue that the wholesale value of the scarf was less than that, which is why I did keep the matching hat.