by Mindy Kaling
Carson and I finished the announcements; I stuck around for a few pictures and then bolted. The instant it was over I took off my heels, slipped sweatpants on under my dress, put on my glasses, and drove to the McDonald’s on Sunset and Crescent Heights, where I ordered two Egg McMuffins, hash browns, and a large orange juice, and ate them all in the parking lot. With a little time to distance myself from it, I was surprised by how genuinely happy I was for the friends whom I had been able to announce nominations for, like Lizzy Caplan and Stephen Colbert. I was also proud of myself, a notorious bad sport, for being a gracious grown-up, something I have never been.
Of course, people still wrote articles. But because there was no story, they wrote these sad little pieces about how there was no story. One website published a piece called “Watch Mindy Kaling Keep It Together as She Announces Her Own Emmy Snub.” I loved that one because it’s basically “Watch Nothing Happen but I Have to Write Something Mean and Today Is a Slow News Day.” After breakfast, I drove to work, where I have the best job in the world, lips greasy from my hard-earned McMuffin(s). I’m lovin’ it (them).
Throwing a tantrum feels good because you think you are ruining everyone’s good time when you feel your very worst. But the truth is, you’re not ruining their good time, you’re just giving them another good story. I would like to think this experience helped me to kick off a lifetime of grace and the ability to express happiness for people who are doing well when I am not. But I doubt I will always have a camera pointed at me, live, with millions of people watching to keep me honest. So we shall see.
SOUP SNAKES
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.
—HOLDEN CAULFIELD1
B. J. Novak and me, in 2004 (left) and 2014
I’M VERY LUCKY. My favorite writer is someone I can call up on the phone whenever I feel like it. That’s because my favorite writer is my friend B. J. Novak.
I will freely admit: my relationship with B.J. is weird as hell. He is not my boyfriend, but he is not exactly my best friend. The best way I would describe him is that he is my ex-husband, and we have a son who is away at boarding school, so our fighting can never get that bad, because it would upset our child. I don’t think Facebook would accept that as a new status. They would just categorize it as “it’s complicated.”
The occasional way we’ve described our relationship is “soup snakes.” This term comes from a season 7 episode of The Office where Michael Scott is reunited with his ex-girlfriend Holly and is pretending he doesn’t have feelings for her anymore. Later, he privately confesses to camera:
MICHAEL
I wrote down a list of bullet points why Holly and I should be together, and I’m going to find the perfect moment today and I am going to tell her.
(Michael pulls out a ratty little piece of paper with writing scribbled all over it. He reads from it.)
Number one: Holly, you and I are … soup snakes. The … and the reason is … because … in terms of the soup, we like to … that doesn’t make any sense. (realizing he is misreading his own handwriting) We’re soul mates. Holly and I are soul mates.
I think I love the scene because it reflects how love works. “Soul mates” is what you aim for, but soup snakes is what you get sometimes.
I show B.J. everything I write. Though he generally loves my writing, he doesn’t always love everything. And when he doesn’t, I don’t take it very well, which will come as a surprise to no one. When B.J. doesn’t like something I write, I am deeply wounded, extremely mad, and vow to never show him anything again.
“Maybe you’re just not the audience for this?” I respond icily, like I am a relevant, important female voice expressing myself and he is some out-of-touch Brooks Brothers shirt who can’t handle my real-ness. “But thanks for your criticism. I’ll take that into account.” Exasperated, he’ll respond, “I’m sorry, did you just want me to tell you how great it was?” Yes, I did, B.J.! Is that so horrible? People don’t say “Give me your honest opinion” because they want an honest opinion. They say it because it’s rude to say “Please tell me I’m amazing.”
We hang up and don’t talk to each other for a few days. Then he calls me to see if I want to go get sushi and watch Gone Girl. Three hours later we are marveling about how Ben Affleck is the movie star you’d most want to plan your bachelor party, and how you didn’t really get to see that much of his penis in the shower scene, and we have completely forgotten about our argument. The truth is, the reason I take B.J.’s criticism so hard is that I just want to impress him.
And, of course, he is very difficult to impress. He has impossibly high standards, and you can never predict what he is going to like. For instance, he dislikes the theatre. All theatre. Categorically. As a mode of artistic expression.
One time, ten years ago, I got tickets to see the Broadway play Doubt. It had won a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize, which are my two favorite prizes because they are classy and New Yorky and less thirsty than other awards. I love seeing Broadway shows, because I get to dress up in fancy clothes, but unlike when I attend Hollywood stuff, I get to feel educated and smart while I’m doing it. I feel like a real patron of the arts when I’m flipping through a playbill. “Oooh, what else has this fight choreographer worked on? Peter Pan!? I thought I recognized that sword play!” I also like that every seventy minutes they give you a break to go drink alcohol and eat candy. But I didn’t have anyone to go with, so I begged B.J. to come with me. I could tell he really didn’t want to go, but he also didn’t have any other plans, and I think Doubt’s flashy awards and my second-row orchestra seats swayed him. Also, I lied and said, “I hear it’s really fun.” I had a fantasy that when the play ended, B.J. would turn to me, emotional, and say: “This experience has completely changed the way I think about theatre. You were right, Min. You are always right. Culturally, you blow me away. Now, what can I buy you to thank you?”
I was careful not to tell B.J. too much about the play beforehand, because Doubt is not the most fun play. In fact, I might venture to say it’s the least fun play. Here’s what Doubt is about: child abuse at a parochial school, and the cast is two nuns and a priest. As the lights were dimming, I could see B.J. reading the program, realizing with horror that this was not a fun musicalization of a hit comedy movie. This was a small, depressing play about unspeakable acts; that reeked of class, as theatre should be! And he was trapped.
Doubt is a really good play, so for much of the first act, I was too absorbed to check in on B.J. But about forty minutes in, I started hearing little noises next to me. I turned to look at him, and he was shifting his weight in his seat, drumming his fingers on the armrest between us, and letting out little put-upon sighs. B.J. was bored and he was restless. I am 100 percent certain that he was also looking at his phone during the play, but B.J. disputes this vehemently. I elbowed him. We were so close to the stage that the actors could see us! He was going to distract Cherry Jones with his fidgeting! B.J. finally stopped. An hour or so passed.
Then, during a pivotal scene where the priest is being confronted by a nun about his alleged child abuse (almost certain child abuse, IMO, but it’s called Doubt, so whatever), I glanced over at B.J. again to see if he was paying attention. He wasn’t; he was fast asleep. Worse yet, he had fallen asleep on the shoulder of an older gentleman sitting on the other side of him. If the man was bothered by B.J.’s giant head resting on him, he graciously didn’t make a big deal about it, which is crazy because B.J.’s head is like 30 percent of his total body weight. All the older gentleman did was throw me a look like: I guess this guy is just gonna sleep on me? I mouthed, I’m so sorry! and reached over to wake him up. The man shook his head like No, don’t bother, perhaps knowing that sleeping B.J. was better than fidgety B.J. We both turned back to the play to watch its dramatic
conclusion (spoiler alert: I think the priest did it, and I think the nun had doubt about it?).
Thankfully, at curtain call, the riotous applause and standing ovation woke B.J. up. He was pink-faced and disoriented, like a man who had been asleep for a year. In the cartoon version of this, he might have leapt out of his seat, saying, Who dat? Where is I? looking around, frightened, with a long gray beard. B.J. saw that he had been napping on his seatmate and apologized. The man nodded politely.
As soon as the lights came up, several people rushed toward us. My first thought was that these were fans of The Office who wanted to talk to B.J. and me, and I was prepared to take a few photos. Ah, the trials of stardom! I thought as I touched up my makeup. I was wrong. They didn’t want to talk to us. They wanted to talk to the older gentleman seated next to us. Because it was Edward Albee. Edward Albee, our greatest living playwright, American treasure, who watched Doubt from beginning to end and loved it, all while a bored B. J. Novak slept on him.
Once I was recounting this incident at a party, and B.J. responded:
I don’t know why you were embarrassed of me. The embarrassment should rest squarely on the shoulders of theatre itself. If you put me, a well-educated, curious person, interested in seeing a Broadway show, in a second-row seat at the finest play of the year, and you still can’t prevent me from falling asleep, then there is a problem with your medium of communication.
That’s verbatim, because I couldn’t believe how self-righteous he was being, so I started to record his rant on my phone. I disagree with him completely, but I’m actually impressed by his reasoning and charmed by his outrage. He’s who I want Donald Trump to be.
I have a feeling B.J. will not like me telling that anecdote, so I want to move on to something he might like a little more.
On the Friday night before Thanksgiving in 2007, B.J. and I were flying from Burbank to New York on a JetBlue red-eye. The flight was packed and there was a celebratory feeling in the air; everyone was flying to the East Coast for a week of vacation. I was drinking a glass of red wine, something I rarely do in life, but it was free and seemed like a cool and decadent thing for a worldly adult to do on a plane. B.J. and I watched Lost on his portable DVD player, which is just about the most 2007 thing you can do. Every few minutes I would pause it so he could explain what was going on. About twenty minutes into the flight, the plane began to shake. The captain came on and told us not to worry, that it was just run-of-the-mill turbulence, but then told the flight attendants to take their seats, and we heard the familiar ding of the “seat belts on” sign. If anything, this only enhanced the spooky/suspenseful experience of watching Lost.
A minute later, however, the turbulence got worse, way worse, and our TV screens went black. B.J. and I glanced at each other. This is weird. Then the plane seemed to drop thousands of feet in a free fall and then rise up quickly. Then it kept doing that, arbitrarily. Without TVs to distract us, the panic filled the cabin. Our pilot spoke to us again, but gone was the relaxed man who had cooed, “Folks, this is your captain speaking …” and made me feel like a valued member of the JetBlue community. “There seems to be some kind of an electrical storm … ?” he began, nervously trailing off in a way where the end of his sentence can only be: “… which is scaring the shit out of me.” Then he says: “This really came out of nowhere. Very weird.”
Very weird? You don’t get to confide in us about what you think is weird, guy! You’re supposed to roll with it and tell us everything’s fine while you silently sweat it out in the cockpit, rubbing your rosary beads. The uncertainty of our pilot, combined with the random lurching of the plane, caused yet another spike of fear in the passengers. Babies began to cry. Water bottles started rolling down the aisle. I turned back to see the flight attendant seated with her arms folded tightly across her chest. Her eyes were squeezed shut and she was mouthing something. It became clear to me she was praying. If you have never seen a flight attendant praying, I hope you never do, because it is one the scariest things in the whole world. Scarier than when my doctor looks into my ear and gasps. Scarier than that plane crash in Lost. Ah! There is a plane crash in Lost and now we are going to die in a plane crash while watching Lost! And I’m too scared to tell anyone my cool observation!
People had started shouting a bit now, but I was, surprisingly, not one of them. I’m the kind of person who becomes silent when I get scared, because I hope Death will not notice me if I am very still and very quiet. It has worked well so far. And then, after a few minutes, something weird happened. There was a certain inevitability that made me actually relax. If this plane was going down, there was nothing I could do. It wasn’t like we were trapped in a burning building where I could decide if I should jump out the window or make a rope out of all my clothes and climb down naked. (The answer is rope of clothes, by the way. I have thought about this a lot.) There was nothing to do on a plane but close my eyes, sit, and pretend this was just an amusement-park ride, not a real-life plane that was possibly hurtling us toward our deaths. And if I died, at least I wouldn’t have to figure out how to get this red wine stain out of my shirt.
I felt a pain in my arm and looked down to see B.J.’s hands gripping my forearm incredibly tightly. Oh yes, B.J. was here. I had momentarily forgotten him, preoccupied as I was with my death scenarios and my meta Lost thoughts. And then I saw something legitimately surprising: There was genuine terror in his huge blue eyes, something I had never seen before.
For anyone who has ever met B.J., the first thing you notice about him is how calm he is. Actually, the first thing you notice is how much he is on his phone. Like more than a tween girl in a fight with her boyfriend. The second thing you notice is how calm he is. He has a detached air that makes you think, Whoa, what is that guy thinking? and, Boy, that guy gets it. He’s the kind of person who knows the coolest new place to have dinner and the best new songs on the radio. He knows the most interesting facts about famous people like Steve Wynn, Mark Twain, and Mia Farrow, and can insert them into conversations without seeming like he just looked them up on Wikipedia. It always seems like he’s read the entire New Yorker, not just the cartoons and those ads for Adirondack chairs. His first impression is the opposite of mine. He’s cool and a little elusive. On the other hand, when you meet me, within the first ten minutes I have loudly explained my whole deal to you. With the exception of an auctioneer and maybe Kris Jenner, there is no one in the world less mysterious than me.
And he is so funny. When I first moved to Los Angeles, and I was lonely and homesick for New York, B.J. cheered me up simply by making me laugh. Sometimes it was inadvertent. If you went into the writers’ kitchen after B.J. had been there, you could always tell. Several of the cabinet doors would be wide open, and one time he even left the refrigerator door open. It was like a teenage ghost had been there before you and had taken all the Chex Mix and soy milk with him. It was so funny to me. But more often, though, it was intentional. He wrote my favorite joke of all time: “I learned nothing in college. It was really kind of my own fault. I had a double major: psychology and reverse psychology.” His impression of the character Stanley Hudson on The Office makes me laugh harder than anything. If you ever run into him—even if he’s at dinner or on a hike—definitely stop him and have him do his “Stanley.” He’ll really appreciate you asked, I promise.
I, in return, decided he was the best person I had ever met. In my relationship with B.J., he has always been the more worldly, cleverer, and more poised one. Why? Because he has lived in L.A. longer, he was a comedy writer before me, he is more well read than me, he even seems to understand Lost somehow. He has always played that role. Suddenly for the first time ever, he was looking to me for reassurance. It felt so foreign to me. “It’s going to be OK,” I said, not sure if I had ever uttered that phrase to another person. “I promise.” He closed his eyes and nodded, his grip on me still tight.
When the plane stabilized a few minutes later, and our pilot reverted to his confident, fol
ksy self—“In a few hours there’ll be a great view of the Finger Lakes to your left!”—I felt B.J. relax, and he loosened his grip on my arm. I knew he was a little self-conscious now, but I was happy. When the pilot explained we had to make an emergency stop in Buffalo for more fuel, I nodded at a worried B.J. and said, “It’s fine. Don’t worry.” He was relieved. Most people who know B.J. will go the entire length of their relationship with him without having the moment where he is vulnerably looking to them for help. Now I had experienced it, and I felt closer to him. All it had taken was a dangerous electrical storm that terrorized a plane full of innocent people and ruined one perfectly good shirt with a red wine stain. I think it was worth it.
My mother passed away in 2011. She was a warm and sociable person, but she did not suffer fools. In fact, that policy extended beyond fools. She did not suffer lazy people, pretentious people, liars, the sloppy, or the inarticulate. Basically she suffered very few people, and it was hard to earn her respect. But she always really respected B.J. Maybe it was something about his confidence, but I think it had more to do with the fact that he, like her, is a very serious person who loves nothing more than a smart joke. They had a fondness and mutual respect for each other, even through the tumultuousness of our twenties.