The Insulin Express

by Oren Liebermann

  Josh’s doctors predict he won’t walk again. As a way of giving them the middle finger, Josh starts walking soon after he gets to rehab. His right ankle is still shaky, but he is doing great. And he stops smoking.

  Somewhere in the middle of all this—camped by Josh’s bedside at night, listening to the hum of the medical machinery surrounding me, or watching Josh try to walk as he balances on a shopping cart, or seeing Josh struggle as he tries to make basic connections in an occupational therapy workbook—I can’t help but think about how fragile and fleeting life can be.

  One afternoon we’re eating lunch together. The next afternoon, Josh is in the hospital struggling to survive. We’ve been great friends ever since 2006, when he walked into my bureau at WBOC in Dover, Delaware, and handed me his résumé. I remember how much he reeked of smoke, and how much his résumé reeked of smoke, and how much I had never realized that a single piece of paper could actually reek that much of anything without the generous application of scratch-and-sniff stickers. We became friends almost immediately, even living together for a year before I moved to a new job. We shared an apartment and, before he stopped drinking, more than a few beers together. And now, though our friendship hasn’t changed at all, our lives have changed dramatically.

  I come to one conclusion. It is time to travel.

  I have no way of knowing right now how much my life will parallel Josh’s, that once we begin our adventure, I will be only months away from my own life-threatening medical trauma. My life will, much like Josh’s at this particular moment, descend into medical chaos—a diagnosis that will come out of nowhere and affect every moment of my existence. Only in my case, it happens halfway around the world.

  Cassie and I get married a few months later. Josh asks to speak at our wedding, and his speech brings me to tears. I still can’t watch the video of the speech without crying. All he does is say thank you, yet it’s one of the most emotional speeches I’ve ever heard.

  After the wedding, Cassie and I began planning the trip. The future contains only promise, and we revel in our own sense of temporary immortality.

  Chapter 3

  August 29, 2013

  39°56’45.1”N 75°16’16.9”W

  Lansdowne, PA, USA

  My last day at work passes with the same fluid routine as the approximately 2,085 other days of work I have clocked over the last eight years. I go to the morning meeting, I am assigned a story, I have six hours to put my story together, I am live on-air during the 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. news. Often both.

  In the back of my mind, I keep on standby the two lines I must have ready at all times. “Live in (today’s location), Oren Liebermann, CBS 3 Eyewitness News” and “I’m sorry, we’re experiencing technical difficulties at this moment.” One I use all the time; the other is always there in case the proverbial shit meets the whirling fan in the midst of a live broadcast, which happens more often than it should, at least according to the latest poll of viral YouTube videos.

  As a television news reporter, my days become a matter of rote repetition—that is, barring any severe weather. The tiniest whiff of a thunderstorm and we are wall-to-wall with breaking weather coverage. If a branch falls down and blocks even the smallest sliver of a remote dirt road, we find that branch, zoom in tight to make it look enormous, and find someone nearby who says the thunder sounded like a freight train. After a few years in news, even weather becomes a simple function of reiteration.

  “I’m standing here at the corner of (fill in street names), where it’s been raining since (fill in time). Neighbors here lost power at (fill in another time). We’ve seen flooded streets along the way, like (fill in more street names). The rain has turned roads into rivers, and the wind has really kicked up these last couple of hours.”

  Then my station will cut to another reporter who says the same thing in different words, since the weather at point A is, by meteorological rules and empirical evidence, almost the exact same weather at a point B, which is less than twenty miles from point A. String together a few of these reporters and you suddenly have a newscast. Then wait fifteen minutes, go back to the first reporter who is standing in weather that looks awfully similar to the weather from fifteen minutes ago, and repeat the cycle.

  Most days, especially in Philadelphia, we cover crime. Or we cover the effects of crime, or someone’s attempt to fix the city’s crime problem, or the mayor’s latest initiative to fight crime, or how much crime has gone up since the mayor’s latest initiative to fight it. I try to make my stories more personal, but even crime begins to feel like déjà vu.

  “(Mother’s name) will never see her son again. (Son’s name) was killed when police say someone shot the (fill in age)-year-old in the back at (fill in time).”

  On this day though, there is no crime, or at least no major violent crime, which means it’s one of three or four good days a year in the Philly metro. Just someone stealing football supplies from Lansdowne County’s Penn Wood High School locker room a few months after another student—although possibly the same student—torched the same school before finals. My cameraman and I knock out quick interviews with the coach and assistant coach, grab a statement from police, shoot a few quick shots of the football field, and call it a day.

  I’ve enjoyed nearly every moment of my three years here. Even if TV news is in trouble as a business, in large part because of mobile and the Web, it is one hell of a fun industry to work in. No two days are alike. Though the weeks share a cognitive similarity and my mind goes through the same process every time I write a script, each day is at least geographically and socially different. I see new places and meet new people all the time.

  I’m generally nowhere near my bosses, and I get along great with all the cameramen, which is essential considering how much time we spend together in live trucks and how much beer we drink both on and off the clock.

  We’ve been through Hurricane Irene, Superstorm Sandy, the Jerry Sandusky sex scandal, the Catholic Church sex scandal, the Basement of Horrors sex scandal, and hundreds of other stories—a disturbing number of them sex scandals, but not nearly as many as the number of shootings—that I don’t particularly care to remember. Some stories are easy to put together, others are a royal pain in the ass.

  My goal every day is the same: enjoy lunch. During summer, my goal is slightly more complex. Do a story at the beach … and enjoy lunch. Most days, I am successful at least on the latter part.

  Initially, I signed on for two years, then re-upped for one more year when Cassie landed a great promotion at her job and we decided to hold off on traveling for a year so we could save more money. After three years in Philly, I can tell you the best place to get a sandwich (Koch’s Deli), the best place to get a drink (Prohibition Taproom), the best ice cream (Franklin Fountain), and all sorts of other superlative locations in the City of Brotherly Love. Philadelphia has stopped feeling like a location and started feeling like home. Reporting is no longer my job. It is my career.

  I fell into TV news in much the same way dinosaurs fell into vast pits of hot tar. It was unintentional and, once the process began, inescapable. All I wanted to be growing up was a pilot. Specifically a fighter pilot, though any type of pilot would have been just fine. My dad would have none of it, and he sent me to study business in college. Seems like a wise move, right? A young Jewish boy goes into business. What could possibly go wrong?!

  In 2001, I was watching the NBA playoffs, having just discovered that sports can be fun to both watch and play. (You’ll have to forgive me. I was on the debate team in high school, so sports weren’t exactly my thing. I went to debate camp—twice.) I instantly decided that I was a diehard Sacramento Kings fan and that I hated the Lakers, never mind that I had never been to LA or Sacramento and had only stepped foot on Californian soil once.

  Some time later, while watching a Kings game, I had the epiphany that inadvertently set my life on a path it would follow for the next decade. I say epiphany only to give this moment some weight. In
reality, I just had a hunch of something that sounded like fun, and I decided to follow the thought—one that might be most accurately described as a brain fart—to its logical conclusion.

  My epiphany was that I was going to do the radio play-by-play for the Sacramento Kings. No one was going to talk me out of this. It was my destiny. Except for one problem: I had no idea how to go about doing the play-by-play for the Sacramento Kings, let alone any sports team in any sport.

  I called up an FM station back home, WRAT 95.9 The Rat, and landed a summer internship in the promotions department. My job description was basically to wear a station T-shirt and hit on girls, which was pretty difficult for me since I was painfully shy then. Halfway through the summer, one of the DJs, Steve Hook, sat me down while we were both working at a Lakewood Blueclaws game. The afternoon broadcast had just wrapped up, and he was sitting in the open door of our truck smoking a cigarette, probably after consuming between one and six beers since the station was running a promo series with the recently released Sam Adams Light.

  “What the hell are you doing here, kid?” I’m not sure he knew my name then (or now). He also had no idea how much this short conversation would affect my life.

  I summoned up all the courage I could find and said in my most manly voice, “I’m going to do the play-by-play for the Sacramento Kings.” I’m sure it sounded as idiotic then as it does in your head now.

  “Hmm.” He paused. “Then here’s what ya do.” His advice came between puffs of cigarettes, as if even the shortest respite from vaporized nicotine would take the signature rasp out of his voice. “Go back to school. Call up the local AM station and do whatever it takes to get on-air. Whatever ya gotta do.” His deep, gravelly voice was perfect for radio, and I can still hear him saying those words.True to my word, I went back to my third year of college at the University of Virginia and called up WINA 1070 AM in Charlottesville, VA. I showed up for my interview in a suit, and I have never been more overdressed. I was lucky. The sports director wanted to expand the station’s sports coverage, and he was looking for free labor, which I was more than happy to provide.

  “We’ll bring you along slowly,” he said. “First, we’ll have you shadow our sports guys as they go out on stories, then you’ll voice your own pieces that don’t air, and eventually, you’ll do your own stories. You’ll be ready in a few months. Probably three.”

  Steve Hook was right. I was on my way. I didn’t quite know where I was headed, but I was definitely going there.

  Five days later, my sports director called me.

  “Do you want to do live updates from our high school football show?” My training was over before it began. I would give a pregame, halftime, and postgame update from high school football games. To most people, especially those who attended high school football games or paid any attention to major American sports leagues, this wouldn’t have been a big challenge. Except I did neither of those. I never went to a single Ocean Township High School Spartans football game and I never paid any attention to the NHL, MLB, NASCAR, MLS, NFL, or any other league, with the recent exception of the NBA.

  I was terrified, but I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity. I had no idea whether I would succeed or crash and burn, but it was definitely going to be one of those extremes. There would be no middle ground here.

  That game on a random Friday night was the first time I was ever on-air. It was the beginning of what would become my career. And it was absolutely dreadful. I mean God-awful in the truest sense of the Lord’s name. If the Almighty had tuned into that particular broadcast, he probably would’ve struck me down with a lightning bolt or sent Moses to afflict me with plagues 1, 3, 5 to 7 inclusive, and 9.

  Yet, for some unfathomable reason, I was asked to do it again the next week. Somehow, I had found a way to crash and burn while succeeding.

  For the next two years, I covered all sorts of high school and college sports. If you’ve ever wondered what kind of radio wannabe does the high school junior varsity girls’ field hockey updates, you have your answer. I worked my way up to covering college football and basketball, which, at least to me, felt like the big leagues. I decided it was time to get better. I signed up for graduate school at Syracuse University, the academic mecca of broadcast journalism. I was determined to follow in the footsteps of Bob Costas, Mike Tirico, and Kevin Maher. And that lasted for all of one week.

  At the time, Syracuse’s program focused on news. They viewed sports as a side project that some of the men in the program pursued in their spare time. On the first day of class, my professor gave me a basic news test. I failed. Miserably. I couldn’t even name the three network anchors, who were Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw. But my professor was not one to sugarcoat anything.

  “You don’t want to do sports radio. You don’t know shit about sports, and you don’t want to work in radio.”

  “So what should I do?”

  “You’re going to do TV news.”

  “But why? I don’t know anything about TV or news.”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  That’s all it took. I abandoned the epiphany I had in college and focused on TV news. At a Syracuse recruiting day, a small station from Salisbury, Maryland, came up to meet some of the prospective reporters. I signed up for the first interview spot of the morning, and after a few trips to Salisbury to meet the managers and see the newsroom, I landed my first job in TV news.

  I spent two years at my first job, working the night shift out of the bureau in Dover, Delaware, a city that sextuples in size during NASCAR races. I was only two hours south of the upper middle class suburban town where I grew up, yet I felt like I was somewhere in the middle of Alabama, especially when hordes of race fans invaded the miniscule metropolis with their cases of Miller Lite and wads of chewing tobacco. Josh was one of the cameramen here—his stroke would come years later, long after we left the station.

  Two significant things happened at my first job. First, I earned my pilot’s license on March 14, 2007. I had wanted to be a pilot for as long as I could remember. I built model airplanes as a kid and read every book I could about flying. I knew what every instrument in a cockpit did long before I was ever allowed to climb into one. Although I consider this to be one of the most important days of my life, it is almost completely irrelevant to the rest of this story. Almost.

  The second significant thing that happened in Dover was that I was kicked out of my job. I asked my managers if I could get out of my two-year contract early so I could find my next job and move up in the world, since I aspired to greater heights than making $26,000 in Delaware, a state so insignificant it couldn’t come up with anything more recent than “The First State” to put on its license plates (they had to go back to the signing of the Declaration of Independence to find a noteworthy event in the state’s history). My managers agreed to let me go. I was free to leave as soon as I found my second job. But less than a month later they announced a new hire.

  Some girl named Cassandra Kramer. She was a Temple University graduate. And she would work the night shift at Dover. They had hired my replacement.

  I was being forced out.

  I was furious. I was so pissed off that day I forgot my camera on a shoot and had to go back to the station to get it. I vowed I would never do anything to help this new reporter. She could learn for herself how to deal with the managers, how to find stories, how to report breaking news, who she had to know, and all of the other nuances and tricks that make a reporter’s job easier. She was dead to me.

  We got married five years later.

  One month after Cassie took over my shift at my first station, I took my second job in Norfolk, Virginia. It was the perfect place to be for an eager young reporter. We had great cameramen, awesome managers, and it was a fun city. I spent three years there before it was time to move on.

  By this time, Cassie had left TV news and was finishing up her graduate degree at the University of Delaware. She had had a passion for
teaching English as a second language ever since she spent a summer in Ecuador while in college, and that’s what she studied for her master’s degree. She landed a job teaching in Philadelphia, and thanks to Josh’s help (he was, by now, working on the assignment desk at the CBS affiliate in Philly), I got a job reporting there. Cassie and I moved in together, and I proposed on the morning of her graduation, having called in sick to ensure that I wouldn’t be late to the commencement ceremonies. I wish I had some great, romantic story of how I proposed or a YouTube video that went viral to which I could point you, but I just wrapped the ring as her graduation gift and gave it to her over breakfast. Nothing goes together like coffee and diamonds.

  After two years in Philadelphia, we wed near her parents’ home in Macungie, a town that was virtually unknown until a local couple stole a cop car in New Jersey a few months before our wedding, led a wild police chase across the Ben Franklin Bridge into Pennsylvania, stole another cop car while police were busy stopping the first cop car, led a second wild police chase, and finally got caught.

  Right before our wedding, I signed a one-year extension in Philadelphia. Cassie and I weren’t yet sure if we were traveling, but we were planning our trip and saving for it as if it were a sure thing.

  We stopped going out to eat, stopped buying new clothes, stopped going on weekend trips, and stopped spending money on anything we considered luxurious or unnecessary. We even scaled back on our wine consumption.

  By April 2013, we were committed. Over the next few months, we sold off as much of our furniture as we could. We put her car up for sale and donated my car, since there was no way anyone would pay money for a 2001 Toyota Camry with 260,000 miles on it and an eclectic array of dings and scratches. As we sold everything we deemed unnecessary, we bought all sorts of things that were suddenly very necessary in the process of trading one life for another. We swapped our living room for a backpack, our cars for hiking shoes, our kitchen for a water filtration bottle, our suits for dry-fit shirts and pants, and our medicine cabinet for a portable first-aid kit. We drastically downsized our lives. In the end, everything we could still call our own fit into a seven-by-ten storage space, and there was plenty of room to spare.