If at Birth You Don't Succeed (11 page)

Kristina had no production experience but knew exactly what she wanted. While other contestants were preoccupied with coming off well on camera, Kristina was focused on doing good work. She wasn't afraid to be the voice of dissension (and often reason), even at the risk of being unpopular, and she fought for what she believed in. This impressed me, and as it turned out, it impressed the judges and Oprah too.

After five weeks of competing, I had charmed my way, while Kristina had fought her way, to the final two. On our last day off before shooting the pilots we would present to Oprah, Kristina and I pleaded with producers for permission to have breakfast together at the Sheraton Universal buffet. After weeks of only being able to wave at each other discreetly, we were delighted at the chance to dine together without chaperones. Kristina learned that the mysterious bearded man in glasses with the Boston Red Sox cap was actually my best friend, Andrew, and I was able to learn Kristina's kids' names for the first time. It's hard to describe the kinetic excitement of a breakfast table where two out of the three people sitting there might have their biggest dreams realized in less than three days, and the third person is also over the moon because the buffet had bacon cooked just the way he liked it.

Somehow Kristina and I didn't see each other as adversaries but as underdogs on the same team. We were both people who society had often counted out. Now, through hard work and some serious luck, we were on the brink of becoming celebrities. But life had taught us both not to have expectations for success when things were outside of our control. We couldn't allow ourselves to get our hopes up for more than a passing moment because when one of us lost, we'd have to be okay with going back to life as it had been. After all, one of our journeys would still end with that somber walk to the Chevy Equinox. As we headed back up to our rooms, we wished each other luck, and we meant it.

Within six hours of the most optimistic breakfast I've ever had, I was laid up in bed with a hundred-and-two-degree fever, aching all over, coughing my brains out, and too sick to do anything but desperately drink a gallon of orange juice in a twenty-four-hour period. At the precise moment when I needed it most, my immune system abandoned me. But the next day I loaded up with over-the-counter meds, determined to make the funniest five-minute travel show pitch by a deathly ill cripple that Oprah and superproducer Mark Burnett had ever seen.

Even though the premise of my travel show was how to have a good time when things go wrong, I knew that my zombielike pallor would cause people to question whether or not I had the stamina to host a half-hour show where I jet-set around the country, filming twelve hours at a pop. In reality, I just had the same bug that had laid out half of the crew, but in reality TV, that bug was drama.

The producers had to take whatever drama they could get because Kristina and I weren't giving them any during our interviews. The last episode of a reality show is supposed to be rife with tension and fierce rivalry, but the last standing members of the show's opposing teams had nothing but nice things to say about each other.

Prodding, producers would ask, “Zach, don't you
want
to beat Kristina?”

“No,” I'd say, “I don't want to beat Kristina. I think she deserves this.”

“Can you just say the sentence, ‘I want to win this show'?” they'd plead.

“I don't know if I'd say that I want to win it. I want to
earn
it.”

Exasperated, they'd beg, “Just say, ‘I want to win my own show.' Just those exact words.”

“I want to win my own show…,” I said as producers held their breath, “buuuuuutt I also want Kristina to win!” and everyone behind the camera looked at one another and silently agreed that they could cut out the second half.

On the last day, as Oprah sat onstage with Mark Burnett watching our pilots, she seemed to genuinely enjoy both of them, but she had more doubts about me than about Kristina. When my pilot was shown, there was a concern that I, one, told too many jokes, and two, as I'd anticipated, may not possess the physical stamina for the grueling production schedule of a travel show.

When Kristina and I returned to the green room, we once again expressed how happy we were that we were in the finals together.

“I think you got this,” I said, smiling through the unbearable tension of waiting.

“No, I think you totally won,” she reassured me.

We were playing a very gracious game of hot potato with our pending success. But I was sure that my last appearance on television would be that footage of me awkwardly ducking behind the Chevy Equinox and pretending to drive away. The judges deliberated for over an hour.

When we returned to Stage One to hear our fates, Oprah had a surprise for us that I can only describe as Oprah-esque. “Whether you win or lose,” she said, “moments like these are important to share with people who are important to you,” and then she brought out my mom and Kristina's husband. My first thought was,
Great, Oprah's gonna make me lose a show in front of my mom.
But after talking at length about how much she'd enjoyed our presentations and how she thought we both deserved our own show, she said, “I'm going to make that happen…” (dramatic pause) “for BOTH of you.”

Holy Mother of Dragons!

No matter what you've heard, Oprah IS magic. In a split second, I had gone from being an unemployed college dropout to being a television personality, and Kristina had gone from being a hostess to the host of her own show. The dream had been realized for two people who, going into it, hadn't allowed themselves to believe for more than a fleeting moment that something like this could happen to them. Oprah and I hugged. “I promise I'll make you a good show. I'm so happy you're my boss!” I told her. Kristina and I exchanged phone numbers with everybody on the crew, and Carson Kressley even told me to call him anytime if I needed advice.

It was like a dream—everything that was happening around me didn't seem to make any sense. I'd grown up with one reality, gone on a reality TV show, and returned to a world where everything looked the same but felt vastly different. TV was no longer a thing I watched; now it was something I was
part
of. Oprah was not a larger-than-life public figure who interviewed world leaders and movie stars, but an affable woman standing right over there, eating a Pink's chili dog in a parking lot, just like the rest of us—just like me. Normally my world is all logistics and limitations, but that day was all possibilities. I didn't have to worry about anything or even hope that one day things would be different because in that moment my actual life had leapfrogged my imagination.

The most magical part of the whole thing was being able to go back to the Sheraton at the end of the day and celebrate with my mom and Andrew. They'd both believed that this could happen for me long before I ever could. As the three of us were sprawled out on the carpet eating a post-victory bounty of In-N-Out Burger, there was a knock at the door. It was Kristina. She ran in, hopped on the bed, and started gleefully shouting, “I can't believe we both have shows!” and then, spotting a Trader Joe's carton on my dresser, “Are those chocolate almonds?!” with nearly equal enthusiasm. We were now officially off the clock, and so could finally officially begin our friendship. October 14, 2010, was the day that Kristina Kuzmic and I both made it.

January 3, 2012, was also an important day. A week earlier, the last two episodes of
Rollin' with Zach
's first season had aired back-to-back on the Oprah Winfrey Network. I was still in Buffalo for the holidays, but with New Year's over, winter transformed my hometown from a place to frolic in the wonder of Christmas snow to a place to grumpily trudge through January slush and hibernate for five months until either spring or death came to greet you. That's what winter in western New York feels like. To get ourselves out of the postholiday funk, my family and I were planning to go to our favorite Indian restaurant for dinner. It was 4:00 p.m., so naturally I was just about ready to consider putting on pants when the phone rang. It was Maitee Cueva, the executive at OWN in charge of overseeing my show. I knew as soon as I heard her tone what this call was going to be.

“Hey,” she said, “it's Maitee. How were your holidays?”

“Fantastic!” I said.

“Good,” she continued. “Well, I'm calling because unfortunately I have some bad news. As you know, the network as a whole has been struggling to find its legs and many of our shows are not doing well. We had really high hopes for yours and we're very proud and happy with how it came out, but the ratings were not good. We're all very sad about it, but we won't be moving forward with a second season of your show.”

Unsure of how to respond, I just said, “I'm sorry I couldn't do better for you.”

“No, no, it's nothing to do with you,” Maitee reassured me. “We're all still trying to figure things out. I just got off the phone with Kristina and broke the news to her as well. We loved working with you both and you'll always be part of the OWN family. Please don't hesitate to call us if you ever need anything. We really do wish you the best of luck. I'm sure you'll go on to do great things in the future.”

We exchanged good-byes and that was that.

Both Kristina and I had spent the past year and a half chasing down this dream and in two consecutive three-minute phone calls, those dreams were over.

Immediately after I got off the phone with Maitee, I called Kristina.

“He-ey,” she greeted knowingly. “Did you get the call?”

“Yep!” I said. “First of all, let me just say that I think that they're idiots for dropping you. Secondly, I was thinking that we could pitch them another show starring both of us, called
Oprah's First Failures.
What do you think?”

“I think that's a great idea! Hold on, let me call Maitee back,” she joked.

We consoled each other on the phone for half an hour, and then I went out for Indian food with my family for the first time as an unemployed TV host. It wasn't the most fun dinner I've had, but naan bread does make the death of a dream settle a little easier.

Over the coming months Kristina and I were faced with readjusting to life without a camera crew, wardrobe person, producer, or makeup artist. I had no one to comb the knots out of my hair or halt production for ten minutes while my collar was futzed with. It was like being the star quidditch player at Hogwarts and then going back to being a muggle. The first paycheck I ever got was for a hundred thousand dollars when I won the OWN reality competition. A little over a year later, I wasn't sure if I'd ever have a paycheck of any amount again. But losing
Rollin' with Zach
felt like I was losing a lot more than financial security and a team of stylists to gently explain to me why a neck beard is a bad idea.

When my show was canceled, I felt like I had broken a promise to people—not just those with disabilities, but everyone who'd entrusted me with carrying a torch for the disenfranchised and the underestimated. I'd become a symbol of hope for a lot of people who didn't know how they fit into society. They saw themselves in me and I imagined that in my failure, I had let them down. Months after my show went off the air, people on online forums would ask, “What happened to this guy? I wonder if the show was too much for him.”

I was used to being pitied, just not by quite so many people all at once. I had battled uphill my entire life—I knew how to do that. What I didn't know was how to stop from sliding downhill. I was worried that at the age of twenty-seven, I might have already peaked. I hadn't accomplished enough to just join the twenty-seven club, so there was pretty much no other option but to grit my teeth, keep working, and keep dreaming.

The most awkward thing about that post-Oprah limbo was that people still recognized me on the street and never failed to ask, “What's going on with that Oprah show?” I held off saying it was canceled as long as I possibly could because, inevitably, the follow-up question would be, “What are you doing now?” If I answered this honestly, I'd have said, “Oh, just wandering aimlessly through the produce aisle, projecting myself onto a beat-up grapefruit that's been picked up, thought better of, and cast off in the cucumber bin.” But the only respectable response I could come up with was, “Um … You know, I'm working on some things,” hoping they didn't press for details. Kristina, meanwhile, had hooked up with a high-powered manager who sent her to meeting after meeting with network executives who fell in love with her story and her personality and agreed that she had to be on television. All evidence suggested she was well on her way to her next big thing.

I took a different career approach. I couldn't just simply put my entire livelihood and image in the hands of some Hollywood big shot who looked at me primarily as a chance to cash in on that lucrative celebrity cripple market. Plus, no agents approached me. I had to figure something out so I wouldn't have to pawn the super-fancy, electronic bidet toilet seat that I'd splurged on back when I still had high hopes for my earning potential. I just wanted to pursue projects I was passionate about and not have to go back to my previous career as an unemployed person.