Don't Wait Up

by Liz Astrof

  He was petty, mean, and immature. He made fun of people and preyed on their weaknesses. He was the most dangerous type of person with power. He was unpredictable. As a result, so were the lives of everyone who worked for him.

  Having been a writer for many sitcoms, the learning curve on this show was easy for me. I was quick with jokes and story fixes. I didn’t even own sunglasses. I managed to remain above the fray for the longest time.

  Until I ate an apple. A small, seemingly harmless Fuji apple that I brought into the writers’ room one day.

  Just as I took my first bite, I heard an enormous groan to my left. I looked around the table at my fellow writers to see who had put on sunglasses or, worse, complimented the work of one of Tony’s peers. But they were all looking at me. I turned to Tony. His eyes narrowed as he glared at me, nostrils flaring as he exhaled sharply for a full minute.

  “What? You want some?” I asked, holding my apple out to him. Trying to keep it light.

  He told me, in a measured, singsong tone, trying to remain calm, but fury verrrrry close to the surface, that he was poor growing up and though his father had money for beer, the only thing they had to eat was . . . apples. And so, apples trigger him.

  I almost laughed—I would have laughed. I should have laughed and told him to shove an apple up his ass and roast himself before turning in my parking pass and walking out on that job forever.

  But I didn’t do that.

  I looked around. Everyone’s eyes were on me. And then on their thumbs.

  I went to throw the apple away—it was a little mealy anyway. But he stopped me, demanding in an even more singsongy, cartoon villain-voice that I finish the apple.

  “That’s okay. I don’t want it,” I said.

  “Go ahead. Finish it,” he said.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I want you to,” he insisted. One of the most successful men in television desperately wanted me to eat an apple. And he wanted to watch. It was like S&M, but with fruit.

  I looked down at what remained of the evil, offending apple—it still had its sticker on—and stuffed it in my mouth. It was so large that I could only breathe through my nose. It almost took out my two front teeth. I’d spent a lot on porcelain veneers, and in order to keep them safe, I tried to shimmy the apple to the back of my mouth with my tongue. Thanks to a great gag reflex—the same one that made me a terrible bulimic in high school—I was able to rest it at my throat and, as soundlessly as possible, suck enough juice out of it to make it small enough to manage as it broke down. The rotten part actually helped speed things along.

  Seemingly satisfied, Tony returned his focus to the dry-erase board where we’d been working out a story. Blood rushing to my head, a veil of dots shimmering across my eyes, I took a deep breath in and swallowed—the sticker the last thing to go down, scraping my throat.

  The groan Tony let out was even more giant than the first.

  I think his words were, “Do you really swallow like that?! Really?!” after which, to further legitimize his contempt, he did a five-minute impromptu stand-up set on my loud swallowing.

  Trying to deflect, wanting the attention off me, wanting to let everyone know I was okay, I sat back in my chair, casually resting the bottoms of my feet on the edge of the table, a defensive posture for sure. Putting a leg’s length between myself and what just happened with the apple.

  This, too, caught Tony’s attention. “There’s one thing I hate,” he said through gritted teeth, and I got the feeling it was more than apples. And my swallowing.

  “Genocide?” I joked. “Flat soda? Adam Sandler?”

  He raised his chin toward my shoes, his nostrils flared. “Feet on the table.” And then with sheer disdain . . . “And now you’re going to try and slam Adam Sandler?!”

  I gazed over at the propped-up feet of another writer, a comedian with semi-famous friends whom Tony adored because of his closeness to semi-famousness. The guy’s black boots were splayed across his station, with either gum or dog shit stuck to the bottom of the left one.

  I removed my offending feet from the starfucker’s view, but the damage was done.

  From then on, almost everything I did annoyed him to an explosive degree. He went after me almost constantly. I couldn’t have an opinion on a movie or television show or my own relationships without being “Completely wrong.”

  Any story pitch of mine would get shot down to the tune of him accusing me of everything from trying to “destroy our characters” to “taking down the series” and even on some occasions trying to “ruin television itself”—after which he’d often pitch the same story idea I’d pitched that just seconds ago threatened to ruin television.

  All day long, little digs, insults, throwaway jokes at my expense. It was like being hit with a bag of oranges over and over and over.

  Of course, like any abusive relationship, at least the ones I’d been in, praise and acceptance were showered on me in between the “beatings.”

  “You are SO talented,” he’d gush after I turned a script in, leaving me riding high until the next outburst, further locking me into that horrible and toxic job, and before I knew it, earning my keep and keeping a relentless, manipulative monster happy became the same thing.

  His approval mattered more than anything, including my own son’s safety—a point that was hammered home when Tony, in a moment of confusing generosity, announced that he was taking the staff to a Dodger game, where we watched from a giant suite owned by the studio.

  I never would have brought my child into what I now considered a war zone, but one of my best friends—also a writer on the show and my life raft there—was bringing her son and suggested during a work session that I bring Jesse.

  It was at this point that I regretted having a son at all. If Tony hated the way I swallowed, he certainly wasn’t going to like the way Jesse threw up without warning from as little as a whiff of onion. The only good thing about bringing Jesse (having a son) would be that I could focus my attention on him and avoid stepping on any landmines with Tony.

  I still was weighing the pros and cons of bringing him (having a son), when it had been decided that Jesse would be joining us. Tony rolled his eyes but gave his permission.

  Knowing the man hated kids even more than apples and my feet, I had initially tried to keep Jesse as far from Tony as the skybox allowed. But Tony seemed taken with Jesse—engaging with him, even playing with him. Not minding my son’s tendency to touch the earlobes of people he liked, Tony instead responded to it by goofing around good-naturedly, wrestling a little with my son, and even draping a rally towel across Jesse’s shoulders. Jesse seemed to be enjoying it, based on the amount of Tony’s earlobe he had between his fingers.

  It was only later in the bathroom, where Jesse was hunched over the toilet, and I was assisting his wiping—he was getting better, but still not winning any awards—when he looked over his shoulder at me and told me Tony was being a little rough with the towel. It was bothering him.

  As far as the news made my stomach drop, it was about to fall further. “If it’s just a little rough play, can you just be cool with it?” I heard myself say over the first flush.

  “Can’t you tell him to be gentler?” Jesse asked.

  “That man pays for our lives!” I said in a panic—a hushed one, in case someone might overhear and know what a terrible mother I was. “Be cool, Jesse! Just be . . . cool!”

  In fairness to me, Jesse did say he was hurting him a “little.”

  This was how Jesse came to know Tony by name. It was also just around the time I started crying in my office a lot, losing a considerable amount of hair, and stress-buying enough dog beds, bath towels, car phone chargers, and hoodies from Amazon to have my own designated drone. It’s also around the time that I became an integral part of the show, with Tony including me in hiring decisions and casting. He started confiding in me with such mean-spirited gossip that I had to take a shower and donate to charities after hearing it
.

  Even then, as “in” with him as I was, he would turn on me, often in the most unexpected, deep-seated, and ugliest of ways.

  Like the time he mentioned to the staff that he couldn’t go home because there was an incident happening in his neighborhood, which I mistakenly referred to as West Hollywood. Tony went pale.

  “I live in Hollywood!” he spat. “You think I live in West Hollywood because I’m gay!”

  I tried to explain that I’d made a mistake, that I had a terrible sense of geography, that I didn’t even know where we were working at that moment.

  He told me to repeat what he’d told the room. I did as I was told.

  “I can’t go home,” I said, “there’s something going on in my neighborhood—”

  “Where’s that? Fat Jew Town?”

  Silence. Silence everywhere in the building. Silence next door. You couldn’t hear a pin drop because even the pins were being silent.

  “I can’t believe you think I’m fat,” I said in a small voice, once I regained any composure.

  “You think you’re fat.” Tony grabbed my hand tightly with his large, bony fingers and squeezed it. Hard. “You think you’re fat,” he repeated, in case I didn’t hear him the first time.

  I was having a skinny week, too. I even had my thigh gap back, having lost even more of my sense of reality along with the weight.

  Expectedly, the writing staff had a quicker turnover than the IHOP in Ventura on a Sunday morning. By this point, the Hipster Millennial and the comedian with the famous friends and dog shit on his boots were both long gone. Seeing the way Tony treated me, what I unleashed in him, the other writers were afraid to speak. The one who would go to speak and then not speak went to speak less and less. They all became catatonic and eventually got fired.

  By the end of my second season working on the show, we were down to maybe four people from the original team. One of them stuttered so badly that we didn’t have the time for her to finish a sentence, so it was really maybe only three people.

  Walking to the soundstage one afternoon, a new writer we’d just hired (who wouldn’t last either) told me she studied me and tried to do what I did. I asked her what that was.

  “He beats you down, and you just keep going,” she explained. “Over and over and over. But you never run out of jokes or pitches. He shits on you, and you come up with more! You’re like a Whack-a-mole—how do you do it?”

  “I just had a shitty childhood,” I said, blushing at what felt like a really great compliment instead of the observations of a sane person.

  It was true, I had my childhood to thank for providing me with pretty much all the tools I needed to succeed in television. You could just ask that mirror I couldn’t get rid of. My resilience in the face of derision and men who couldn’t stand me, coupled with my ability to bury my pain under jokes, had seasoned me for sitcoms better than any of the Thanksgiving turkeys I used to eat all the skin off of, much to my father’s disgust.

  Tony was a monster. But he was no match for the ones who had come before him. And, like them, he did pay for my house.

  It was what I knew—monsters and jokes.

  • • •

  TONY’S APPRECIATION OF me was as wildly inconsistent as his contempt. Like when, at a party celebrating the show’s long-running success, he made an effusive speech thanking a room full of hundreds—from the cast, crew, executives, and assistants to anyone and everyone who had darkened our soundstage up to and including the water delivery guy—everyone, except for me. Glaringly.

  Then there was the time when he caught wind of the fact that my brother and I were going to try to create a show together—based on us, about adult siblings who were forever bonded by a shared shitty childhood who now lived in an unhealthy codependent relationship from which hilarity would ensue. On that occasion—as our final season together was winding down and everyone was looking for their next job—Tony decided to bestow upon me the ultimate praise, in the form of changing my contract to prohibit me from taking on outside projects until after we wrapped. The story was good, though, and Jeff and I both wanted to see it move forward, even though that meant my brother would have to find someone else to write about us with.

  Enter another very successful, temperamental, high-strung, and notorious monster named Dean.

  It was only through his magnanimity (and my brother’s insistence) that I was eventually brought on board to help out with the pilot. Based on my own life. That I had helped create. So, I was one of the few writers allowed at the cast read of the pilot script. Dean didn’t want too many writers “breathing near him.” I sat behind him and my brother, off to the side, out of the way, keeping my breathing to a minimum.

  Though I’d read it many times, hearing our script aloud was surreal to me. Two much better-looking and younger versions of Jeff and me were speaking our words, saying “safe-safe” to each other without any understanding as to what those words meant, not knowing what they were borne of or how they kept me from falling apart completely. I found myself praying the actors had experienced enough trauma in their lives to really sell ours.

  After a table read, the network executives—the people who ultimately decide whether to put the show on TV—leave the room to talk amongst themselves about what they’ve just seen. Basically, they tear apart what they had approved of up until that moment.

  Anxiously waiting to hear what the network would have to say, and before anyone could speak, Dean snapped in a loud, angry tone that he wasn’t changing anything. The director casually mentioned a huge flaw in the story—the character’s actions weren’t warranted and led to an unsatisfying ending. Much like Tony always had in the face of criticism, Dean went to “ten” immediately. Refusing to listen to reason, he became a runaway train. Nothing I wasn’t used to—but I had a fix for the story snag in my head. Yet, while it was my life story, it wasn’t my show. It wasn’t my place to speak up. Or breathe.

  But I couldn’t help myself.

  “You could have them go to—” I started to say, and before I could finish the sentence, Dean had wheeled around in his chair. Not two inches from my face he screamed at the top of his lungs, “DONT TALK, LIZ!”

  Everything stopped.

  I started to shake, my lip started to quiver. I told myself to hold it together. That I was used to this. I was a Whack-a-mole who could withstand abuse. I was a professional who needed to be taken seriously. A man wouldn’t cry. I couldn’t be the woman who cried, I thought, wiping the tears away as quickly as they rolled out of my eyes.

  My defenses weren’t up, that was for sure. I wasn’t expecting what had come at me. Or maybe the situation had been emotionally charged to begin with, and I’d missed the signs. I looked over at Jeff; he was just sitting there, staring at his new thumb, looking down at his shoe, waiting for the moment to pass. Dean’s yelling wasn’t Jeff’s fault, I reminded myself. This rage was customary, it was sanctioned by the powers that be, by everyone who knew about Dean’s temper (and Tony’s temper and that of so many others) and still hired them to make shows.

  Abuse like what had just befallen me was a small price to pay for the “genius.” We weren’t making art for art’s sake, after all: we were doing it for money. And it was understood that if a few eggs needed to get broken to make a good omelet that hopefully went into syndication, so be it.

  I’d survive. Hadn’t I always?

  Or . . .

  Had I?

  Dean screaming at me, not letting me get a word out, Jeff looking on but doing nothing, I was once again my eleven-year-old self, broken in my bedroom, begging the monster to let me stay in my house. Then, like now, I wasn’t safe-safe.

  The difference was, I wasn’t eleven anymore. I didn’t have to “earn my keep.”

  The monsters didn’t buy my house, or my kids’ toys—I did.

  I didn’t have to put up with this. I was an adult who could stand up and walk out.

  So, I did.

  I drove home and went st
raight to the garage. I dragged my childhood mirror out from behind some shelves, breaking a few things in the process—very dramatic—and brought it into the house.

  Dean had a daughter, same age as mine. What would he do if someone screamed in his daughter’s face? What would I do if someone screamed in my daughter’s face?

  What kind of behavior would she accept as the price of doing business?

  I had a responsibility now to be a role model for my fearless daughter. At least if I wanted her to stay fearless.

  That afternoon, I enlisted Todd to help hang my childhood mirror in Phoebe’s room, on the wall across from her bed. The same place it occupied in another little girl’s room a lifetime before. I told Phoebe that with the mirror hanging this way, she would always be able to see for herself that there were no monsters under her bed. I had found the mirror’s purpose, why it had followed me this far. My spiritual friend was right, it was a character in my life.

  “No more monsters,” I told her. “Okay?”

  “No more monsters,” she repeated, then asked if she could get another panda backpack.

  And I took her to the mall for a present for no reason, but not before standing in front of the mirror and saying it to myself.

  No more monsters.

  The Stain

  * * *

  There’s a great saying that “when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” Having been given the mother of all lemons in the lemon of all mothers, I tried to find lemonade. Though Cathy was decent step-lemonade—on top of helping to raise me, she taught me how to behave like a person—like, to always use a top sheet, and whenever I’m invited to someone’s home, always bring a (wrapped, non-regifted) hostess gift—I needed someone who would accept me, warts and all. And Cathy had seen more warts than any step-lemonade should see. So, for years, I continued to search for a mother figure I could start fresh with. Fresh lemonade.

  And just like when people see Jesus’ face in a potato chip or cloud formation, I saw my mother figure in the form of a raised paint stain on the wall of my yoga class.