by Gina Fattore
You know, like medical professionals so often do.
Nope, the person on the phone admitted flat-out that this particular test was incredibly unpleasant and then she actually told me to take Advil before I came in to prepare for how unpleasant it would be. So there’s really no way to REMAIN CALM ABOUT THIS and spin the whole thing positively like I did last January when my charming, Omar Sharif–like ear, nose, and throat doctor called on Friday the 13th and told me I had a small brain tumor pressing on my frontal lobe.
So how about you, dear reader, if you’re out there?
Did you have a good Christmas?
I can’t say I did. In fact, it’s basically been one long, nonstop river of sadness around here since we started back after New Year’s. One night last week, we actually had to stay late and open a bottle of Dom because one of the shoe girls got her pilot picked up, and even though drinking expensive French Champagne and making awkward chitchat with your coworkers doesn’t in and of itself sound sad, somehow it took everything I had not to burst into tears during this ritual. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe I should make a list? Top Five Reasons I Might Be Sad? It was before I got the abnormal test results back, so it can’t be that. I guess I must be jealous, right? Yes, that must be it. I must be jealous that my pilot didn’t get picked up, although the big problem with that theory is that I don’t even have a pilot. I had one last year, but like most pilots, it didn’t get picked up, so instead I picked myself up, brushed myself off, and started writing a typical, by-the-numbers, Hollywood romantic comedy screenplay, and then a few days after that, I found out I had a small brain tumor pressing on my frontal lobe, and I can’t say that I’ve thought much about it since then.
My pilot, I mean.
Obviously, I’ve thought a lot about my brain tumor.
From this I suppose we could deduce that having a subfrontal midline meningioma pressing on your olfactory nerve is an excellent way to get over any lingering sadness you might have about your pilot not getting picked up. It’s sort of like Prozac in that regard.
Not that I, personally, had any sadness.
Maybe I’m kidding myself about this—maybe I’m in denial and whatnot—but when I look back at that time, I think I was more sad while I was getting network notes and writing the seventeenth draft of my pilot than I was after I found out that my pilot wasn’t going to be picked up and shot and possibly turned into a TV show. I certainly didn’t throw up or have any strange, unexplained vertigo incidents after I found out my pilot was dead. Nope, all those weird medical things happened before, back in the days when my pilot was still alive. So maybe it was sadness that made me throw up in the private bathroom of my giant office at Sunset/Gower studios and go running to my charming, Omar Sharif–like ENT? I suppose that could be it, right? Maybe sadness works that way? More likely, it was just bad sushi. Frankly, I never really trusted that place next to the Bed Bath & Beyond, and I haven’t been back there since.
Shit, can you believe it’s been a whole year since then?
Exactly one year since my pilot didn’t get picked up and I inadvertently discovered I had a benign brain tumor. That’s the great part about having a brain tumor. If you have a brain tumor, they will actually call and tell you have a brain tumor.
But if you don’t, they will also call and tell you you’re fine.
You’re okay.
Everything’s good.
That’s the call you want to get in any type of tumor-related situation. It’s the one I wanted to get yesterday, but instead I got the call where they tell you something is abnormal and you have to come back for a second, more horrifying and painful test that requires taking Advil beforehand, which shouldn’t be a problem for me because I have basically been taking Advil every day since Christmas.
Like, remember those headaches that I thought were getting worse back in December?
Well, they’re basically happening every day now.
At least the script went fine, the one I was doing with Jill. Filming started yesterday, so it’s all behind me now, and there’s no possible need to worry about it anymore. Episode 16, done. Crossed off my list of Things To Do. It is what it is. Certain things I wrote got rewritten; others did not. And for the first time in my career, I think I finally realized that there is absolutely no correlation between how much effort and mental anguish I put into writing the script I have been assigned and the result that comes out the other side. It’s sort of counterintuitive in a way, this idea that no matter how hard you work, you will never get any better at your job, and I guess that’s why it’s taken me eight years of moderately successful TV writing to figure it out and see it so clearly. The process is just too random, too arbitrary. It’s all governed by caprice—the whims of actors, the whims of showrunners, the whims of networks—so even though being rewritten is an incredibly unpleasant sensation that evokes feelings of failure and shame and makes you feel like you are a rat in one of those experiments where the rats get shocked with an electrode every time they do something wrong and that’s how you demonstrate that rats can learn things—well, when you’re a moderately successful TV writer, you’re not really that rat.
You’re actually a different rat.
You’re like this special Hollywood rat who gets shocked with an electrode at totally random times that have nothing to do with anything, and that’s how you demonstrate that rats really can’t learn things. No, even if you pay them tons of money and give them great parking spaces, when you shock them with electrodes day in and day out, they just get really confused, hopeless, and depressed and lose all connection to their original instincts. And that’s why it takes the rats eight long years of moderately successful TV writing to figure out that all the effort and mental anguish they’re putting into analyzing the system that supplies all these unpleasant shocks is completely wasted.
Of course, in order to have this particular aha moment, you have to be able to see yourself as some type of lab animal. If not a rat, then at least a dog, like one of Pavlov’s. Or possibly, if you’re wearing $500 shoes and feeling really glamorous, a monkey. Because at least monkeys, like overpaid TV writers, have language—rudimentary language, yes, but language nonetheless. Either way, you’re totally powerless and insignificant (and guess what, hello, you live in a cage), and nobody in Hollywood likes that feeling. That’s why we put names on the parking spaces and give everyone nice offices and constantly print up all those lists in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter of the Most Powerful This and That in Hollywood: women, minorities, directors, agents. That way, everyone who’s on the list can go to sleep at night feeling one hundred percent powerful and totally in control of their lives; whereas if you are a moderately successful TV writer with a brain tumor pressing on your frontal lobe, a fibroid on your left ovary, and some other, newly discovered gynecological abnormality that’s probably going to kill you—then you’re probably not sleeping much anyway.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been feeling so sad lately? Why I’m constantly on the verge of tears even when tears don’t really seem warranted—like when we’re forced to celebrate something in the writers’ room, or when I’m stuck in traffic on Barham and the voice of the hugely successful TV writer whose phone I used to answer reaches out to me through space and time.
Not in any sort of weird magical-realist, García Márquez–type way.
No, just because he’s the guest tonight on Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
Or, here’s another example of some sadness that should definitely make the Top Five: last night, when pizza arrived on the set for the second meal, I walked a sad, despairing walk across the lot, back to the office, to make myself a peanut butter and banana sandwich; and even though I walk that same stretch of lot virtually every day with Jill on our fake-that-we’re-going-to-get-coffee afternoon walk, this time it was cold and dark and I was alone. And when I tried to call my friend Danny in New York to tell him about my impending death from a strange gynecological issue, he didn’t pick up, so I gue
ss that made me feel even more alone. Except, of course, for all those mangy stray cats you always see whenever you have to walk across the lot at night. Someone is obviously feeding those cats. I don’t know who or why, but when I got back to the office, Dave was there—he also happened to be working late—and we ended up talking for a while in the kitchen about the cats and who feeds them and where everybody else was and lots of other stuff that didn’t really mean anything, but it made me feel better in that moment to talk to someone.
Anyone.
Or maybe specifically to Dave.
That’s the thing about Dave. Everything he does and says and even wears remind me so vividly of all the people I knew in my youth, that last night as we were talking, some odd sense memory kicked in, and for a second, I was twenty-four again and standing in the kitchen of my Brooklyn apartment. It wasn’t a Proustian thing—you know, one of those memories based on tasting or smelling some food you used to love—because even though I was making myself a peanut butter and banana sandwich, I swear I never used to eat peanut butter and banana sandwiches back when I was young and lived in Brooklyn.
Plus, I can’t really smell or taste anything right now because I have a cold.
And a small brain tumor pressing on my olfactory nerve.
No, I think my brain made this connection because it was late and no one else was around, and the last time I was alone in a kitchen with a boy talking about alternative rock with any degree of earnestness, I actually was twenty-four. And I guess some part of me must miss all those people I knew back then, or the person I was, or something about those times, those long-distant days before I moved to LA and became such a moderate success in the entertainment industry.
Only I don’t know what it is I could possibly miss.
Truly, I don’t.
At the time, those days really didn’t seem so great to me. Like back in my early twenties, when I worked at the alternative newspaper, I would always wind up crying in the stairwell every Tuesday night because I just couldn’t face any additional proofreader queries, or another Critic’s Choice that needed to be edited, or I couldn’t convince the Communist film critic to change something the managing editor wanted him to change. When I look back on those times, it doesn’t seem to me that I was so outrageously happy. At least now if my job makes me want to cry, I have my own office to do it in, and that seems like a definite improvement. But I guess I must have had something back then that I don’t have anymore, right? Something I lost along the way? I swear I don’t know what it is, but there must be something I had then that I don’t have now. Something I’m missing? Otherwise, I wouldn’t get so nostalgic whenever Dave starts going on about some band he loves. It always seems unbelievably poignant to me when he does that. Like last night when I asked him what he was doing this weekend, he said he was driving to San Diego to see Stephen Malkmus, and when I asked him why he didn’t just see Stephen Malkmus last week at the El Rey, he said he couldn’t because that exact same night he had to see My Morning Jacket at the Wiltern. When I was young, I used to have conversations like that all the time. Back then, I could barely get through a day without some guy in vintage clothes going on and on to me about Stephen Malkmus or concert venues or who was playing where on what night. Only I never seem to have conversations like that anymore.
I just don’t.
Somewhere along the way to thirty-eight, I stopped having them. I guess that makes sense, since by this age everyone has jobs and/or children they’re inordinately obsessed with, so no one really gives a shit anymore about which band is playing where, and even the people who don’t have jobs and/or children they’re inordinately obsessed with don't really give a shit because—well, to be frank, most people who work in the entertainment industry don’t have any idea who Stephen Malkmus is, so there’s no way they’re driving to San Diego to see him.
Of course, the other big topic Dave is always going on about is that elusive girlfriend of his and how much he wants to break up with her.
And that’s less poignant to me.
Obviously, I don’t know her. In all this time, I’ve never met Dave’s girlfriend, but whenever he goes on about her, I always tend to go into Teenage Melodrama Work Mode and break the situation down into scenes and think about it from the point of view of all the different characters involved, and then I assign each character an intention and a goal, and whoever she is, Dave’s elusive girlfriend clearly deserves to have a boyfriend who’s head over heels in love with her.
That’s her goal, right?
Her motivation.
Her intention.
Again, I don’t know her, but I doubt she ever sat around as a girl wishing and hoping that one day she’d have a totally Wishy-Washy boyfriend who stays late at the office talking to other girls about how much he wants to break up with her. She probably wanted to have someone who loved her and thought she was special. That’s it, right? That’s the ultimate motivation everyone seems to be working with in GirlWorld: the shoe girls, the actress-girls, the girls who bring me coffee. They all seem to have this weirdly touching faith that their lives will be made perfect by love, which is a strange philosophy that somehow just never occurred to me when I was younger. Now that I think about it, I guess this begs the question of Dave’s goal, his motivation, the thing he’s striving so hard to get. But that seems pretty clear to me. I mean, dull…
He wants to break up with his girlfriend.
In fact, the other day it occurred to me that perhaps the reason Dave spends so much time talking to me about how much he wants to break up with his girlfriend is that on some deeply subconscious level he wants my help in breaking up with his girlfriend. Could that be right? Certainly, if I deleted myself from this story and recast the female lead with a ridiculously beautiful actress-girl, or a shoe girl, or pretty much any girl who’s not a thirty-eight-year-old, size-fourteen, brain-tumor-ridden spinster, distracted and depressed because of her impending death from a gynecological issue, it’s likely that some second-act complications might ensue. The new female lead would probably be all sympathetic and vulnerable and take Dave’s side a lot more frequently than I do. She’d touch his arm, maybe toss her chemically straightened hair. And then during February sweeps, the two main characters in this saga would end up having sex, causing the shitty situation with Dave’s girlfriend to get much shittier, but at least it would come to a head in some way instead of dragging on for years and years and nearly killing the girl as it did in the case of the not-so-young Miss Frances Burney and that asshole clergyman.
But I don’t really know any of this for sure.
It’s just a theory I have.
After all, if someone talks to you at great length about a problem they’re having, usually they want your help with it, right? I’m not exactly sure because I don’t talk to other people at great length about my problems. It’s considered vaguely ridiculous to bore people with stories of your personal difficulties when you’re a spinster (cf. Miss Bates in Emma). Also, it’s always been my experience that other people make matters worse in a crisis, like tomatoes you have to pick around in a salad. Although I guess I did tell Jill about my latest gynecological ailment and that helped. Maybe we all need that? Someone to talk to so we don’t go mad? That was Fanny’s big problem when she took that shitty job working for the Queen, especially after the King actually did go mad and Colonel Digby jilted her for Miss Gunning and her 10,000 pounds. That was a rough year for Fanny—the year she turned thirty-eight, arguably the worst of her life. And it’s not even like Colonel Digby actually needed that 10,000 pounds. You know, like in Pride and Prejudice, when Mr. Wickham is rumored to be courting a Miss King who has 10,000 pounds, or in Sense and Sensibility, when Willoughby jilts Marianne for Miss Grey and her 50,000 pounds. Digby wasn’t some hot young Regency rake with good manners, bad morals, and an even worse credit rating. No, the guy was a forty-six-year-old, depressive, gouty widower with four children and some of his front teeth missing, but for some reason Fanny
took a liking to him, and he obviously took a liking to Fanny, because in November 1788 when the King started going mad and the entire court was cut off from civilization and confined to the palace at Kew for one of the coldest, most depressing winters on record—way more depressing than the one we’re having now—he started hanging out all the time in Fanny’s room.
That’s right.
Hanging out.
If I’ve schooled you well, you should know that this is going to end badly.
Oh, sure, for a while things seemed promising. I can’t tell you how often during this sad, mad part of the diaries, Fanny returns to her room at the end of some shitty, depressing day to find Colonel Digby just sitting there waiting to talk to her.
And that seems kind of sweet, right?
It won’t happen till Part Five of my six-part mini-series—if I ever get there—and obviously it’s going to be difficult to convey to modern audiences just how shameful and dangerous it was, circa 1790, for a gouty widower and a lady novelist to be hanging out completely alone in the lady’s bedroom. It caused a fair amount of scandal at the time, but in the end, Fanny decided that she didn’t care about the scandal because it was so nice to have someone to talk to while the King was going mad. Actually, now that I think about it…that’s basically what happened last night when I came back from the set and Dave was there. Not that anyone’s gone mad on the set. Nope, things haven’t gotten that bad.
At least not yet.
No, last night Dave and I just stood there in the kitchen and talked, which is exactly the kind of thing Fanny and Digby would have done while the King was going mad—except that we talked about 30 Rock, and they talked about Pope’s Essay on Man and other eighteenth-century hot topics, like whether earthly happiness is possible. Another difference is that I never form any expectations that Dave might possibly marry me and take me away from my shitty, depressing job waiting on the Queen.