Excerpt
Back After This
Chapter OneThe PitchIn Studio D, I was trying to record a short intro that should have taken less than fifteen minutes. The board in front of me was lit up, the mic lights were green, my headphones were on, and the host was in the chair on the other side of the glass. I pressed my talk button. “Tell me what you had for breakfast.”
“Well,” Miles began, leaning intimately toward the microphone, as if I were really asking. “I had an omelet. Four eggs, goat cheese, and arugula. Oh—and a diced tomato.” He knew that one purpose of this exercise was to make sure his P’s didn’t pop unpleasantly at the poor public, but he managed never to eat anything for breakfast with P’s in it. No potatoes, no pepper, no prosciutto or pancakes.
“I’ve never known anybody who eats as many eggs as he does,” Julie muttered from the chair next to me in the booth, firing up her laptop. “I’m never sure whether he actually smells like eggs, or whether I just think he smells like eggs because I look at him and I can’t stop thinking about eggs.”
I pressed my button again. “I need to hear some P’s, Miles.”
“Oh!” he said, always freshly surprised, months into production. “Peter Piper.” I heard Julie moan in the corner.
“A few more than that, please,” I told him, “and back off the mic about an inch, you don’t need to swallow it. As we’ve talked about before.” I looked over at Julie. “Too much?” I asked.
She nudged her glasses up on her nose. She must have gotten a late start with her daughter and not had time for her contacts. “Nah. I think it’s charming how every day is like the first day. He’s like a newborn baby.”
“Pizza!” he said. “Pickles, popcorn. Sergeant Pepper. Yellow Submarine.”
How had he gotten lost over the course of seven words? “Right,” I muttered. I fiddled with the sliders and talked to him again. “Okay. Go ahead on the intro, please.”
Miles had come to audio from one of the biggest newspapers in the country, where he’d won the biggest awards in journalism for reporting on the biggest corruption scandal in the history of his state. My boss, Toby, had been perched atop a mountain of investor money, jonesing for respect after getting Palmetto on the map with a pulpy true-crime podcast and an addictive series of marital-infidelity confessionals. He was trying to keep the place on track after Rob, his co-founder, who had recruited me, cashed out. Toby had snapped Miles up like a blue-ribbon hog at the state fair, bidding and bidding until the competition threw up its hands. The paper could, after all, hire three young reporters (or twelve interns) for what it would cost them to keep Miles, which was easy math for people who now worked for venture capitalists. So Miles Banfield became a podcast host, interviewing newsmakers, presenting some of his own reporting, and delivering commentaries that Julie and I would cut down from seven or eight minutes to a tight two and a half.
He was very bad at it. He made mouth noises—tsks and gulps and smacks of all kinds—while other people were talking. He would overlap the first few words of the next question with the final few words of the last answer, which signaled his impatience and rattled guests. He asked the same question in different ways four times in a row. He refused to read any of the research Julie stayed up late creating for him and then told Toby we hadn’t prepared him. He would spend most of a half-hour interview asking a prolific author about the dedication in a single mid-career book, ignoring our efforts to interrupt, sometimes pointedly taking off his headphones. He clattered his watch on the table every time I didn’t remind him to take it off. He hummed tunelessly while I was trying to solve technical problems. I couldn’t get him to improve his active listening past an obnoxious “oh-oh-oh-OHHH,” which he occasionally unleashed ten times in the same interview. A former senator emailed me once and complimented me for editing his interview with her to the point where you couldn’t hear him making “that car alarm noise.” I told no one.
And now, as he spoke, I heard his mouth clacking and sucking, like an octopus playing with a wheel of cheese. He was three sentences in when I hit the talk button again to interrupt him. “Hey, did you by any chance drink Mountain Dew before you came into the studio again?”
He paused. Looked at us through the glass. Shrugged. “So what?”
I silently turned to Julie, who chuckled and looked determinedly at her notes. “Oh, boy,” she said. “Just remember, it could be worse. It could be the true-crime guy with the big glass of milk.”
I leaned on the desk, flattening my palms against it on either side of my script so I wouldn’t raise my voice. He had already told the boss—his and mine—that he did not like it when I raised my voice. So I inhaled deeply, puffed out air several times until my lungs emptied of what Toby called my
tone, and spoke again. “Do you remember when I told you drinking Mountain Dew makes you sound like your mouth is sticking to itself?”
“No.”
“Well, I did. A couple of times. There’s a bottle of water right there. Take a few sips. And please don’t drink Mountain Dew when you know we’re tracking. It doesn’t help you sound your best.”
Looking away from me, down at his phone, he said, “It’s journalism, Cecily. The audience is smart. I don’t think they care what I drank with lunch. Let’s not get distracted by the small stuff.”
“Well,” I said. “Your smart audience has things to listen to that don’t sound like they were recorded inside a Saint Bernard’s mouth.” I heard Julie snort. “The microphone you are talking into cost as much as my first car. You’re in a room designed to make sure that the sounds that come out of your face are the one thing that everyone is one hundred percent guaranteed to hear. Right now, that means it’s picking up every time your lips pry themselves off your gums. So again, please stop drinking Mountain Dew before we track.”
I could hear Julie take a breath. “Oh shit,” she whispered.
Miles turned and looked at me, hard. I raised my eyebrows at him. Tilted my head. He rolled his eyes, then held up one hand in my direction. He put down his phone. “Let’s take it again,” he said. “You wrote ‘debut’ in here, and ‘introduction’ will sound better.”
I had written “introduction” originally. Over email, he had changed it to “debut.”
It took Miles thirty-two tries to get through the seventy-two-second intro, interrupted by multiple water-swishing breaks. Halfway through, I had a Slack from Toby: “Can you come by when you’re done? Have great news to share.” I promised I’d be there soon, and after I saved the tracks and shut down the board, I turned to Julie and said, “I have to go see Toby.”
She scowled. “What’s he want?”
“No idea. He says it’s good news.”
“Oh no,” she said.
“I bet he wants to tell me something about promos.” Toby had Slacked me throughout the previous day about fifteen-second promos versus twenty, because he said he couldn’t decide. He’d added a GIF of a cat following a tennis match with its eyes.
“Better than talking about his divorce,” Julie said. “I’ll do a first pass on this and you should have it by the end of the day.”
“Oh, blergh, what if it
is about his divorce?” I asked.
“Well, then at least memorize everything. I’m morbidly curious.” Toby was a middle-aged skinny-pants-wearing, hip-haircut-sporting, nerd-glasses-affecting overachiever who loved to talk about investing and eating paleo. He’d recently split from a funky ceramicist who, just before they met, had spent two years following a jam band around the country. Their union had made no sense to me. If he’d followed anybody around for two years, it would have been a productivity guru who sold unregulated protein powder out of the trunk of his car.
“Pray for me,” I said, and I threw my body against the heavy studio door.
Palmetto was open-office (a wild idea for audio, I thought, but nobody asked me). Everybody wore headphones at their desks, whether they were listening to anything or not, and only the sounds of phone calls and hushed bitch sessions created a low murmur. The décor had been described as “industrial” in a couple of magazine articles about our early successes. This mostly meant you could look up and see pipes and ducts zigzagging across the ceiling, and some of the walls had wide expanses of reclaimed wood. The floors were a light gray laminate, and bright pops of yellow showed up in chairs and sofas in our break rooms. Potted palms rested in corners like the afterthoughts they were, and modest succulents were grouped on conference tables.
