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
