Pronoun Problems: A Novel About Friendship, Transgender and (eventually) Ninjas

1 - A Stripper Name

May, 2011

The show was called Suit & Tie. It was a daytime cartoon about the adventures of a naive and optimistic suit-wearing giraffe named Twig and a grouchy bowtie-wearing octopus named Pod. They lived in the Serengeti. And they were best friends.

Tom and I were best friends, too — for thirty years by this point— a fact that helped us land the gig as head writers. The executives at DuckGoose Animation Studios loved that Tom and I had so much shared history.

"Whoa!" effused a fresh-faced, pony-tailed Junior Executive named... I don't know. Doesn't matter. "You've been friends longer than I've been alive!" She was, I shit you not, wearing braces.

I turned to Tom in mock offense. "Did she just call us old?"

"I'm pretty sure she did," Tom agreed.

The baby exec blushed. It was adorable. "No," she said. "I just think it's really sweet."

I hadn't thought about it in those terms before, but sure, I guess it was. And it was our friendship's longevity — combined with our reasonably impressive, if dated, primetime credits — that convinced DuckGoose we were qualified to write a buddy comedy aimed at children ages two to eleven.

It was not, to put it mildly, our dream job. But as I reminded myself several times a day, it was better than the alternative of selling oranges at a freeway off-ramp. And we thought it might actually be fun, that the freedom of animation would be creatively liberating.

It wasn't.

"I just don't get it," said a confounded Brandon at a late afternoon notes session. Brandon was our Executive in Charge, an immense, broad-faced man of Pacific Island descent. Clearly uncomfortable with his conspicuous bulk, he walked with a self-conscious slouch and dressed in muted tones. "Twig is a giraffe. How can he get lost in a hedge maze?"

"That would be the joke," Tom explained, careful to rein in the condescension.

"I know, but if he lifted his head, he'd see right over it."

"That would continue to be the joke," I explained, letting the condescension run free.

We had already beaten back Brandon's other notes and he was desperate for a win, so he dug in his heels, insisting that logic was important to kids.

"Yes," I agreed sarcastically, "that's what made Spongebob such a success: its slavish devotion to logic." Game. Set. Kiss my ass.

As a palliative for Brandon's wounded ego, Tom promised him that we would come up with a line justifying Twig's unwillingness and/or inability to lift his head above hedge height.

Good cop. Bad cop.

It was early evening when we finished the rewrite. After some heated debate we decided that Twig would eat some bad acacia, which would make him dizzy and therefore too frightened to raise his head to full height.

It's called problem-solving, bitches!

I stood up and stretched, arching my back and enjoying the feeling of my vertebrae popping into alignment.

"Have a good weekend," I said, heading for the door. "Don't forget: production meeting Monday at ten." We had an assistant and she had already told him that, but I had long become accustomed to reminding Tom of our schedule myself.

"Yeah, OK," he said. And then, as I was reaching for the door knob: "Hey, Aaron?" His voice cracked as he said my name. "Can I talk to you real quick?"