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

34 - Script Whores

I woke up late in the afternoon on Saturday. I was massively hungover (obviously) and emotionally drained, like I had just gone through a bitter breakup the night before. The screaming and recriminations were over, the tears had dried, and all that remained was the hollow pain of love withdrawn.

Samantha had taken the kids to her parents' house for the day so I'd be able to sleep as long as I needed, undisturbed. The girls had a usually adorable weekend ritual of waking us up in the morning by jumping up and down on our bed while shouting, and then we'd all tickle-wrestle until they were exhausted or I took a hard shot to the groin, whichever came first.

I threw on my bathrobe, catching a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror. My hair was absolutely bonkers, one half stuck to my head, the other half unruly curls. I looked like a mental patient. It made me smile.

I wasn't in the mood for breakfast food so I called Pink Dot and ordered an unconscionable amount of fried chicken and candy. Pink Dot was an iconic and now mostly defunct Los Angeles delivery service whose (invariably high) drivers would show up in blue-and-bubblegum Volkswagon Beetles topped with a propeller. The sight of them pulling into my driveway, in and of itself, justified their inflated prices.

Today's delivery guy was named Moses, whose hair looked astonishingly similar to mine. He showed up half an hour late because he had gotten lost on the way to my house. In 2002, most people still did not have GPS, relying instead on a Thomas Guide, which was an encyclopedia-thick collection of street maps (it was essentially an analog version of Google maps, but in book form and without those creepy aerial views that make it look like your house is being targeted for a drone strike.)

"Havin' people over?" he asked, the sweet scent of sativa clinging to his plaid shirt.

"Nope. Just me."

"Dude," he said. "That's awesome!"

And it was awesome. I brought it all into the den, laying it out on the coffee table, arranging the chicken buckets and candy boxes to make a medieval fortress, which I would devour over the next six hours or so. Then I turned on the TV and browsed through my TiVo queue where the entire season of HBO's The Wire had been recorded. I had resisted watching it for no discernible reason, other than everyone told me it was great. I wasn't being contrarian, but I had discovered that when everyone said to me, You know what movie you would love? I'd wind up watching some weird-ass piece of crap — Brazil or Donny Darko or Videodrome or Repo Man or The Big Lebowski or Evil Dead— and marveling, This is what everyone thinks of me?

But everyone really redeemed themselves with this one. Holy shit, people! Have you seen The Wire? If not, shame on you. And if you've only seen it once, shame on you, too (but less). It's a police drama set in Baltimore, written with depth and texture, with vivid characters and dialogue that was literate and completely authentic, and all plotted with effortless precision. I ate my fried chicken, I munched on my candy and (starting around 5:30) I drank my wine and let the whole thing wash over me. I binge-watched (even though that wasn't a term yet) seven episodes before I fell asleep, drunk, on the couch with a Good & Plenty stuck to my face.

It would be disingenuous to force some kind of epiphany on this. You know, something about The Wire showing me the staggering potential of television, thus reigniting my love for the medium which gave me the strength to pick myself up and continue onward. It didn't. But it did make what could have been a horrendously depressing day rather fantastic.

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Over Thanksgiving weekend we got the sad but not entirely surprising news that King of the Jungle would never air at all, not even as filler in the summer. The critics, naturally, took great delight in dancing on our grave. One of them actually wrote that, after The King Of The Jungle debacle, he hoped that we'd never work again. It was a shitty thing to say — Why exactly did this have to become personal? — but it also underscored once again how little critics understood how show biz worked.