Number Two (13 page)

The producer was visibly irritated. “He showed up and we were going to let another lady into the audience, but we let him in because he said he knew you.”

Great. Not only had my previous interview been sabotaged, but now I had unknowingly sabotaged Melissa's show because of my past connections. I looked out to the back row of the audience and Dana gave me an enthusiastic wave. I waved back tentatively. Soon this would all be over. In fact, sooner than I realized. I thought I would be on as co-host for the entire show, but in fact I was actually on for only the first half-hour—a built-in fail-safe in case one of their guests turned out to be an unequivocal disaster, like me. I bid goodbye to Melissa, Lainey, and the many producers, and I was off.

As I was walking out of the studio, Dana called out to me. “I'll see you at your book signing!”

I did my best to avoid eye contact, but I couldn't hold back a smile.
This trip could not possibly get any more weird, could it?

The next day, the trip got weirder.

T
hroughout my life, I have always had a complicated relationship with the CBC. Growing up, it was a huge part of my household entertainment, and as I detailed in
Anchorboy
, CBC Edmonton and its local sportscasts were a big part of why I decided to become a sportscaster in the first place. When you live the first nine years of your life in a prairie town of only 700 people, and the Internet has yet to be invented, the CBC is your lifeline to the world.

I watched the CBC in the morning as a little kid, starting every day with the familiar recorder-accompanied theme song to
The Friendly Giant
, a show that consisted of a friendly giant who lived alone in a castle with a rooster and a giraffe. It seems like an odd
interspecies relationship looking back now, but everyone I knew was keen on the giant's signature phrase: “Look up, waaaay up, and I'll call Rusty.” Rusty, in this case, was the rooster that the giant may or may not have been having an inappropriate relationship with at the time. Rusty “lived” in what appeared to be a burlap sack hanging from the wall. I have no idea how he got out of there to poo or have a bite of a sunflower seed or two for sustenance.

The Friendly Giant
was followed by
Mr. Dressup
starring Pennsylvania native Ernie Coombs as a guy who basically sat around his house all day singing songs, drawing surprisingly lifelike pictures, and dressing up in costumes that appeared magically inside his Tickle Trunk—a red steel trunk painted with flowers that sat in his living room. He had a puppet dog Finnegan and a puppet son Casey. Parental status was never really clarified, and we never saw any trace of a wife/mother, or any woman in his life for that matter. Parents were not supposed to question the fact that he was a single man who dressed up in costumes all day that were situated in something called a Tickle Trunk. Or that he was named Mr. Dressup. All of this seemed perfectly logical and acceptable in the '70s and '80s.

The CBC primetime lineup was a huge part of my life at the time as well.
Beachcombers
was a half-hour sitcom about, well, beachcombers who competed for logs and such in Gibsons, BC, starring an Italian man named Bruno Gerussi as a Greek man named Nick Adonidas whose arch-rival Relic wore a famous toque and owned the shittiest boat ever seen on television. This was followed every Sunday night by
The Wonderful World of Disney
.
I watched every single Escape from Witch Mountain movie and Love Bug film, but I prayed every week that we might be blessed with an actual Mickey and Friends cartoon. No Teletoon or Cartoon Network
available for this kid. An episode of
Sport Goofy
was like being given a large bag of gold.

But as I grew older, I started to become aware of how truly terrible a lot of the programming on the network was. The big Monday night anchor during my early teens was
Danger Bay
, which starred Hollywood veteran Donnelly Rhodes as marine biologist “Doc” Roberts, who was raising two kids while presumably solving crimes that involved whale poaching, all the while hitting on his hot helicopter pilot friend who provided the necessary sexual tension needed to keep the show interesting. My former TSN co-anchor Cory Woron was a child actor in the Vancouver area and actually appeared on the show at least once as the best friend of Doc Roberts' son Jonah, a feather-haired tennis-playing little douchebag. For years in my thirties, after Cory had relayed this information, I begged friends who worked at the CBC to find the lost Cory Woron footage, but alas, as of now it has still gone unseen by these eyes. More interesting to any heterosexual male my age in the country at the time was Doc Roberts' daughter, played by Hellman's mayonnaise heir Ocean Hellman. American teenage boys may have had Alyssa Milano, but we had an Ocean.

As I got older and my cable packages got better, I saw less and less of the CBC, even from a news standpoint. Only the venerable
Hockey Night in Canada
, the Olympics, and CFL broadcasts kept me coming back to the public broadcaster. I didn't think about the fact that the CBC was taking a portion of my taxes until I actually entered the television business as an on-air broadcaster in 1999 in Saskatoon. Soon after I arrived in the spectacular Saskatchewan city, I was introduced to Piya Chattopadhyay through my friend and news co-anchor Chris Krieger.

Piya was a born-and-raised Saskatoon girl who went to high school at Marion Graham and attended the University of Saskatchewan. Like me she moved on from there to Ryerson in Toronto and had returned to the province to take her first television job as a
reporter with the CBC. Piya and I did not like each other at first for reasons that are still somewhat unclear to me—I was a douchebag? She was a douchebag? Who knows. But we became the best of friends during my year working in the city, and she was kind enough to include me in her circle of Saskatoon pals on regular nights out drinking pint after pint of Sangria downtown at the Black Duck pub (I realize we were not supposed to be drinking Sangria out of pint glasses but we were twenty-four years old at the time).

I also managed to cause Piya some significant stress during my short time living in her city. I was the last person out of her door following a pre-drinking session at her apartment one evening, and I called out to her as she walked down the street, “Do you want me to lock this?”

“Don't worry about it,” she replied.

We'd all had a few drinks but I was certainly sober enough to make a judgment call. Should I just lock it anyway?
Nah
, I thought to myself.
What's the worst that could happen?

Hours later, several of us returned to her place for a post-drinking session and found the entire apartment empty. Ransacked. They had taken
everything
she owned. It was as if someone had been watching us leave and immediately backed a truck up to the front door and started hauling everything out casually like movers. Amazingly, she had home insurance at her young age, so she received a nice settlement. Thankfully, I only leave the door unlocked of apartments occupied by responsibly insured adults. She never let me forget the fact that I was last to leave, and it was probably all my fault that she had lost her copy of
OK Computer
on CD.

Piya seemed rich to the rest of us working in the television news industry in Saskatoon at the time, and that's because she was a CBC employee in a federal union. Reporter salaries at the
CBC were standardized across the country. She was making almost twice what those of us at CTV and Global were making. Years later, I realized that working at the CBC was a little like playing in the CFL. If the salaries were going to be the same all across the country, then it was better to play for Winnipeg or Saskatchewan than Toronto or BC, because your dollar would stretch a lot further.

On the second day of my “book tour,” I did a handful of newspaper, radio, and television interviews around town, then spent the afternoon in the hallowed halls of the Canadian Broadcast Company. My first stop was at the radio show
Q
, a popular interview program then hosted by former Moxy Früvous lead singer and noted teddy bear aficionado Jian Ghomeshi. Jian was out that day, and I was thrilled to learn that Piya would be filling in. How strange and wonderful was this experience? Two friends who had known each other since they first got into the media business now involved in a one-on-one interview about a book one of those friends had written about the media business. The interview went really well. Piya was even a little nervous because it was her first time filling in on the show. The studio was set up with Persian rugs on the floor where bands would often play acoustic sets on the program. I participated in a Vine video where I rolled myself up in one of them, but the joke turned out to be on me as the carpets had clearly not been cleaned since the show went on the air and were filled with the dirt and mud of a thousand stinky indie-rock boots.

I left the interview feeling so much better. So what if my media tour wasn't going exactly as planned, so what if my interview on CP24 had been interrupted by an out-of-control crackhead politician, and so what if my interview on
The Social
had been interrupted by a good friend and former employer who didn't know when to stop
talking? The important thing was that I was getting the word out about
Anchorboy
. Q was extremely popular, and I was fortunate Piya and her producers were willing to have me on to talk. Immediately, my Twitter feed fired up with tons of positive feedback about the segment with Piya. My agent, Carly Watters, and editor, Doug Richmond, along with my publicist, had come to the taping at the CBC, and now the four of us got into an elevator and headed to the final stop of the day:
George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight
.

You may have noticed that on the back of
Anchorboy
there's a quote from George Stroumboulopoulos that reads: “I can't remember if we've ever met or if I've even heard Jay Onrait speak, but I do know that a book from him at this stage must mean he's set to retire . . . so it can't be all bad, right?” I
wish
I was all set to retire! I love that quote—and it's more accurate than most people probably realize. George and I barely know each other at all. I met him at a Gemini Awards ceremony a couple years ago, and that was pretty much it. He probably wasn't lying when he said he couldn't remember!

So why did I reach out to him for a quote on the back of my book? Because my publisher, HarperCollins, asked me to, I thought it was a decent idea, and George was more than happy to oblige. Admittedly, I also had a somewhat ulterior motive. If a quote from George made its way onto the back of my book, then surely George would invite me to appear for an interview on his television show. George has a fascinating interview style that involves sitting directly across from his subject and leaning forward so that his face is just inches away. Then, he gazes into the subject's eyes with an intensity that suggests he is staring into their very soul. I was looking forward to sitting in the red club chair across from George and making every effort not to laugh as he stared deep into my eyes and asked me:
“Jay, is it true you have a serious problem controlling your bowels?”

That opportunity never came. When I was sent the list of interviews I would be doing for
Anchorboy
in Toronto,
George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight
was on the list, but I wasn't going to be interviewed one-on-one: I would be part of a panel. This meant sitting around a table with George and two comedians, riffing on some of the subjects of the day—a time filler that allowed the show not to have to find a worthy interview subject for every segment. I figured there must be a pretty exciting guest booked on the show that day.

When I got off the elevator where George's studio was located, I was suddenly face-to-face with Steven and Chris. Steven Sabados and Chris Hyndman were the new faces of afternoon television on the CBC—the former stars of
Designer Guys
on HGTV Canada now had a daily lifestyle show on the public broadcaster, and they had just finished taping for the day. I lived in a beautiful condo building at the corner of Queen Street East and Sumach Street in the east end of downtown Toronto from 2003 to 2006, and I would often pass the two of them in a Lexus SUV as I entered and left the parking garage. Their office must be in this building, I always thought to myself. (I am not exactly a genius when it comes to perception.) They came out as a couple a few years later. I snapped a quick photo with Chris because he looks like Dan O'Toole if Dan dyed his hair, and to me that is hilarious.

I was led to the green room by Carly Heffernan, a former member of Toronto's Sketchersons comedy troupe, whom I had met years earlier while hosting the troupe's
Sunday Night Live
show. Carly has the manic energy of a sketch comedian and is always “on.” We cracked jokes all the way to the small room where everyone gathered on couches to munch on what was without question the worst
food in the history of television talk show green rooms. George had recently gone vegan, and (I mean this with the utmost love and respect possible) he looked absolutely terrible. He looked like Adrien Brody preparing for his Oscar-winning role in
The Pianist
. I was genuinely concerned for the guy. In keeping with George's new lifestyle, the spread in the green room mostly consisted of dried apple chips that were so tasteless I think I would have rather had George spoon feed sand into my mouth. I grabbed a bag to take on the set and hopefully have a little fun. Then the producer of the panel segment, Steven Kerzner, walked into the room.

Fans of Canadian comedy and pop culture may recognize that name. For years Steven plied his trade at various media outlets as the alter ego of the curmudgeonly, cigar-chomping puppet Ed the Sock. Ed was a mainstay on MuchMusic during the 1990s and was especially well known for his “worst of” end-of-the-year video show,
Fromage
, which for several years was one of the funniest, most-underrated things on Canadian television.
He also hosted his own talk show that appeared Friday nights on CityTV. Ed was paired with various co-hosts over the life of his talk show, culminating in Kerzner's real-life wife serving as co-host for the final years of the program. In a weird coincidence, his brothers Mitch and Jordan were both longtime employees of TSN as a producer and editor, respectively. I had known Jordan, the youngest Kerzner brother, since my first days at TSN in 1996. I had never met Steven, however, and I had no idea that he was now producing these comedy segments on George's show. Steven was a short, slight, and talkative guy and we hit it off right away, going back and forth and riffing on the recent news about Mayor Ford. Steven told me he was also writing a book under his Ed the Sock persona and that he had read mine and enjoyed it. I immediately felt a rapport with the guy and began to look forward to the panel segment more and more.