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.
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
