What's a Girl Gotta Do by Sparkle Hayter Read Free Book Online

for
credibility.”
    “Credibility?” I asked. I made a face.
    “Give it up, Robin. We are not doing that
special report on death you want to do so badly.”
    “It’s a good idea, a non-nonsense look at
what happens to you when you die, your body, I mean, and what it
costs. Boomers are facing the last half of their lives and it’s
starting to become an issue. I thought we could demythologize
it.”
    “You want to do it because it’s morbid.”
    “No, I want to do it because . . . ” I
began.
    “Because you fear death,” Claire said.
    “It’s morbid,” Jerry said. “And how are we
going to get someone to sponsor death? No company wants its
products associated with that subject—except funeral homes and
places like that.”
    “And arms makers,” Claire said, although she
didn’t really like the idea either. Her area of interest was exotic
diseases. At the last editorial meeting, she fought for a series on
a virus emerging in Africa that made your blood boil over until you
kind of exploded.
    “Don’t go running to McGravy again, crying
about how I’m a sexist sleazeball who makes Edward R. Murrow turn
over in his grave,” he said, reading my mind. “At least I never
belched during a White House news conference carried live over
national TV. While the mike was right above me.”
    Touché,’
    And he went on. “At least I never asked a
woman who ate her dead companion after their plane crashed what he
tasted like.”
    (Like tough, fatty chicken.)
    “At least the mailroom still delivers my
mail.” It was the best retort I could come up with as I stomped
off, the office door swinging behind me, and went to find McGravy
to lodge my daily complaint about Jerry Spurdle.
    God. If I close my eyes I can still see that
mike hovering over me; I can feel the eyes of the other reporters
on me, the eyes of the vice president, and on the other side of the
television screen the eyes of thousands of hard-core ANN viewers.
It is the first question I’ve been called on to ask (and now, for
the life of me, I can’t remember what it was). I stand, I open my
mouth—and I burp. Not one of those delicate, barely a hiccup,
burps. A ripping Richter-registering roar of a belch. After that,
all I remember is tumultuous laughter and a hot chill of
mortification.
    All right, so I belched during a White House
news conference carried live to half the globe, thus aborting my
brief career as a Washington correspondent. Consider this:
Everybody belches. It’s natural. The queen and the pope belch.
    The trick is not to do it when there’s a
high-powered mike hovering right above you.
    And yes, I asked a woman who survived a plane
crash by eating her dead companion, Bud, what human flesh tasted
like. She was very open about the incident and I am a curious
person. Don’t you wonder about things sometimes? Don’t you ever say
things you regret?
    Somehow, though, I got a reputation as being
sensational, grotesque in my thinking, and with my career spinning
out of control, down towards the hard earth, Bob McGravy convinced
the powers to be at ANN, the network mandarins and the court
eunuchs, to give me another chance. I thought they’d give me my old
beat, Crime & Justice. Instead, they plugged me into Special
Reports.
    I never thought I would end up like this,
writing and reporting on such gems of journalism as “Grannies Who
Like Sex” and “The He-She Report,” with everything given an extra
sensational twist in the copy-edit process by Jerry Spurdle.
    But Jerry’s all-time low, the worst series he
ever did, was “The Cancer That Dare not Speak its Name,” on colon
cancer, before I worked for him. A previous special reporter, now
in our London bureau, told me about it. It wasn’t a bad idea
really, looking at colon cancer as a sidebar to the Reagan polyps
story, dispelling some of the myths, encouraging people to have
themselves checked out. The mistake was asking viewers to send
samples of their excrement on a Popsicle