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

19 - The Room

Picture the funniest person you know. The friend who can make you spit out your drink, the one most likely to make you burst out laughing in the middle of a eulogy. OK, now imagine that there are ten of that person. Now imagine that those ten people are hired to write a TV show. And finally, imagine that all of them are killed and eaten by ten other, far funnier people, all of whom are Harvard-educated white guys who know each other from the time they spent writing for the Lampoon and who refer to you as an "affirmative action hire" because you're a white, male, non-Harvard graduate.

That should give you a good idea of how intimidating it was when Tom and I first met the other writers of The Has-Beens. It should also give you a good idea of what Hollywood diversity looked like in 1994.

Up until that moment, Tom and I had given very little thought to the other writers we'd someday be working with. Honestly, we didn't think we'd have that much interaction with them. We had assumed that, as script writers, the vast majority of our time would be spent in our office writing, you know, scripts.

The reason we thought that, of course, was because we were naive idiots. In reality, writing scripts was the least time-consuming part of our job. I'm not saying we did no script writing — a few times a year, we'd be sent off for a week or two to bang out a draft — but mainly we spent all day, and much of the night, sitting around a conference table with the rest of the staff in the writers room.

Which we just called The Room.

It was fortunate, then, that our Crimson coworkers turned out to be extraordinarily nice guys. They were also quirky as hell — with great comedy comes great idiosyncrasy, I guess — in ways both big and small. We had a former professional mathematician who would scribble complex equations whenever he was agitated, an MBA who, whenever the room went silent, would sadly say, "I'm gay" just loud enough for all of us to hear, and a former prosecutor who, when he felt he wasn't being heard, would leap onto the conference table in a crouch, flap his arms and make chicken noises until he got to say his piece.

That took some getting used to.

By the end of the second week, we found the rhythm of The Room. We were not the funniest and certainly not the weirdest people in The Room, but we definitely held our own. In the months to come, they accepted us as one (well, two) of their own. Eventually, actually forgetting that we hadn't gone to Harvard and would include us in their reminiscences, as if we had gone there, too, the ultimate compliment.

You guys remember that time that Aminder tried to eat an entire cheesecake and threw up in the quad?

Of course we do!

Who could forget Aminder throwing up?

Or the quad!

What a great quad that was!

So much better than Yale's quad!

The quad to end all quads!

Ahhhh... Harvard.

We led an extraordinarily sedentary existence, sitting around a conference table under faintly buzzing fluorescent lights. The closest thing we got to actual exercise was restlessly swiveling in our office chairs and throwing pencils at the ceiling, trying to make the points stick in the acoustic tile. Worse, we also had access to unlimited amounts of junk food. Donuts, muffins, candy, cookies and chips. At lunch and, frequently, dinner we'd order take-out — pizza, fried chicken, barbecue, pad thai, quesadillas. And at least once a day a P.A. would go on a caffeine run, returning with sludgy coffee drinks brimming with chocolate, butterscotch, caramel and whipped cream. We were like veal. Veal that understood story structure.