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

18 - An Actual F**king Plan

December, 1993

Doug was morbidly obese and pear-shaped, his pallid sun-starved skin giving him the appearance of a T-shirt wearing cadaver. Gabe was short and round, like a beach ball, with a ridiculous forwards-leaning Groucho Marx walk. His features were so stereotypically Jewish that he may as well have been drawn by a Nazi political cartoonist. But they were, in this moment, the most beautiful men Tom and I had ever seen.

Doug and Gabe were Executive Producers. They were running a sitcom called The Has-Beens that had been picked up for the second half of the season. And they had just offered us a job as staff writers.

And not a moment too soon.

About six months earlier, and all at once, people started asking us The Question — the one that all struggling artists dread — When are you going to give up?

This was asked with varying degrees of circumspection and vastly different intentions. There were the people were worried that we were failing and there were the people who wanted us to fail. But either way, they were in agreement on the central fact: We were failing.

One of the things about trying to break into a creative field is that failure is gradual, while success is instantaneous. Not getting jobs can drag on indefinitely... but get your first break and — boom! — you are on your way! It's tantalizing and it's also a trap. It's what keeps losing poker players at the table, the knowledge that the next hand could pay off big. And you don't want to be the schmuck who walked away just before it did.

Changing direction would not have been easy for me. Five years out of college, my employment history qualified me to do absolutely nothing except continue to work as a secretary. I had the option of going to graduate school, but I blanched at the time and cost involved. If the comedy writing thing didn't work out, I would be starting over from scratch. So I was all in.

Tom, on the other hand, had massively hedged his bet. (And that's as far as we're taking this poker metaphor.) Whether this was by design or simply following the path of least resistance, he had accepted a full-time job in I.T. At first, this didn't present a problem, but then he started receiving promotions which required traveling around the country for days at a time to help other corporate branches with their I.T. issues. Our writing time diminished precipitously because of his unavailability and the quality suffered because he was almost always exhausted. He hated that job, but unlike me he could have, if necessary, seamlessly continued on his career track.

Anyway, the most aggressive version of The Question came — unsurprisingly — from my father, who called me up on the phone and yelled at me.

"When are you going to stop fucking around?" Whenever anyone accuses me of being too blunt, I want to introduce them to my father, to see how much progress has been made on that score in just one generation.

I bristled at his tone, becoming defensive. "We are not fucking around! We've written a bunch of scripts." And we had. Home Improvement, Murphy Brown, Who's The Boss, The Golden Girls, Blossom, something called The Fanelli Boys, whatever the fuck that was.

"And did they get you a job?"

"They got us an agent."

"You mean the crazy bird lady?" He knew the answer to that question, of course, but he paused because he wanted me to say it.

"Yes, Dad. I mean the crazy bird lady."

"And did she get you hired?"

"It's a process," I said feebly.