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

7 - The Words That Changed Our Lives Forever

June, 1986

Tom and I were often asked about how we made the decision to become comedy writers. Our answer was always, "In the least interesting way possible." Not all pivotal life-changing moments are thunderbolts. Sometimes, they happen quietly, off-handedly. This one happened, quite literally, between yawns.

I had vowed to stay in touch with Tom, and I did, but it wasn't easy. Our colleges were hundreds of miles apart and back then there was no Skype, no FaceTime, no texting, no email. We used the telephone. But you couldn't use it to call a person; you used it to call a place — a home, an office — and you hoped the person was there (or, if not, a person who knew where they were). Yes, there were answering machines, but they were still considered a luxury. For most us, if we wanted to talk to someone, we called and if they weren't there, tough shit, we called back later.

The hardships we endured, kids. You have no idea.

Tom had visited me at Ellison College in October of my Freshman year. When I announced to my gaggle of friends that Tom was coming up, I let them know they were in for a real treat. "You think I'm funny?" — they did — "Wait until you see the two of us together!"

In almost all situations, I preferred to undersell, but if there was one thing that I was confident about, it was that Tom and I were hilarious together. If you look through my yearbook from Senior Year high school — and I'd caution you not to, unless you have a high tolerance for suburban white kids with bad perms — that is certainly the consensus.

"Tom and you make me crack up so hard!" wrote some wordsmith named Mike, apparently believing himself to be so unforgettable that he didn't need to bother with a surname. But not only did I forget Mike, I also forgot the other Mike who signed my yearbook because he didn't include his last name, either.

Foresight, people. Come on.

So I had every expectation that the weekend would be a blast. And it was. We riffed, we laughed, we completed each others' sentences. Plus, I had brought Tom up to speed on my group's inside jokes — Amy's unshaven feminism, Bruce's indecipherable inner-city idioms, the time a drunken Martin passed out while going down on Tanya (from then on, we all referred to extreme drunkenness as being "cooch-faced") — giving him an insiders' perspective that made him feel relaxed and included. The weekend, I thought, had been a tremendous success.

My friends disagreed.

"He's abrasive and déclassé," said Colette, a Bohemian art history major who unselfconsciously used words like déclassé. She had anointed herself the group spokesperson for this particular conversation. And if anyone disagreed with her, they were keeping their opinion to themselves.

"But you've got to admit," I replied, "He's funny."

"He's puerile." She lit a clove cigarette and took a drag. "Face it, your friend is a dud." I thought the word "dud" was an odd choice for someone who had just used the word déclassé.

"That's your opinion," I said dismissively, waving away the sickly-sweet smoke.

"That's everybody's opinion," she insisted, trying to tip the argument's scales in her favor with the combined weight of my peers. "Are you saying we're all wrong?"

"Yeah," I said matter-of-factly. "You're all wrong."

My friends were exasperated, but they shouldn't have been surprised. I was frequently — perhaps reflexively — at odds with the group. When I was about ten years old, my father sat me down for a talk. Not the sex talk (that particular trauma was a few years off) but one that proved far more consequential in shaping my world view.