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

51 - Money To Buy Green Beens

The year after we were fired from DuckGoose — or de-optioned or fucked over or whatever the legal term was — was pretty depressing.

Post-production was always a grind, but now it was made even more insufferable by our lingering bitterness. And our lingering bitterness was made even more insufferable by our well-meaning former employees who would report to us about how horrendously disorganized the production of Suit & Tie had become since we'd left. Which for some reason was supposed to make us feel better.

Hey, guys! Remember how when you ran the show it was a well-oiled machine? Well, good news! It's total chaos now!

Um... yay?

Creatively, Tammy and I were pretty tapped out. We did manage to sell our Guest House pilot to CBS, but that was basically a pity fuck. We pitched to a room full of executives who knew and liked us — executives who had heard about Tom's transformation and were now seeing Tammy in person for the first time — and they didn't have the heart to pass on our idea. We dutifully wrote the script and only got a handful of rewrite notes, which was a pretty clear sign they weren't particularly invested. When we turned in our revised draft they thanked us and then our script vanished forever. Or, to use TV executive parlance, it was "in the mix."

We also scrounged up some film work, rewriting a tremendously stupid animated film about anthropomorphic cicadas. It was clearly a suicide mission. The concept had a lot of flaws, the biggest one being that it was about cicadas which are insects that (a) nobody cares about, and (b) spend seventeen years dormant underground doing nothing until they briefly emerge in a noisy swarm for a few weeks after which they are never seen or heard from for another seventeen years. The studio hired us knowing the script was in shambles, but we had previously salvaged three of their projects and they hoped we could do it again. But this one was beyond saving and our hard-won reputation as miracle workers took a pretty big hit. That studio never hired us again.

The moral of the story: When you volunteer for a suicide mission, you're probably going to die.

But in a way, our career felt like background noise. What I remember most during that time were all the surgeries. Three of them, in fact. The last one was Tammy's. But the first one was mine.

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Sensei Gilbert finally warmed up to me. It was at the conclusion of a Saturday class in which we learned some really cool techniques for dealing with a gun-wielding attacker, none of which, Sensei sternly cautioned us, was likely to work in a real-life situation. "Your best bet is to toss him your wallet and run away," he said. But we practiced the techniques anyway, as a last resort.

He also talked about the psychology of an attacker and how important it is to make him think that you are not a threat, that he is in control and therefore less likely to shoot you. "Cry. Beg. Ideally, you should even pee yourself." We didn't practice that technique. But I was sure I could do it, if the need ever arose.

Ninja!

Anyway, after Saturday class Sensei and the dojo loyalists would all go to lunch at a Japanese (of course) restaurant. I had never joined them and didn't plan to go that day, either. I had my gym bag slung over my shoulder and was about to bow out when Sensei stopped me.

"Hey, Pirate!" I had taken to wearing a black head wrap to class, prompting the other students to refer to me as The Pirate. Everyone thought it was a stylistic choice, that I was either trying to look cool or hide a bald spot, but actually I was doing them a favor. I tended to sweat prodigiously and without my head wrap there would have been puddles on the mat.