by Liz Astrof
But this was crisis time. “That’s okay,” I offered. “I’ll get the chickens. Whatever you need.”
“No, I mean I’m going to New Mexico with Judy,” Samantha told me, almost defiantly. “It’s not necessary to work this hard.”
I stopped in my tracks and turned to her. I had no words. It was inconceivable.
Then, I had words.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I shouted. “We have to rewrite a whole script in two days! You cannot go on vacation! This is what we moved here for! I have a Kate Spade bag that is just exposed fiberglass at this point!”
I lowered my voice and continued, quietly but firmly, “Tell Judy you can’t go.” Then I got menacing, “I’ll. Get. Chicken.” I walked off to my car, angry but happy that I’d set her straight.
And so it was that Friday afternoon, in giant “fuck you” fashion, Samantha left for New Mexico—clearly, very clearly, choosing her girlfriend over me, over our career. She left me a message saying she needed to have a life. She needed to get away. She said something about her mental health, and that was it.
She wanted a life.
This was my life.
I was on my own.
I was terrified.
But quitting was still not an option.
Forty-eight hours after I locked myself in my apartment, I emerged from a cloud of smoke, a pile of empty coffee and Big Gulp cups, candy wrappers, chicken and a plate (in case she came to her senses), Pirate’s Booty crumbs, and cigarette ashes. I had a stye, the beginnings of emphysema, legs that wouldn’t straighten all the way from sitting for so long, and a second draft.
I didn’t allow myself even a glimmer of positivity this time. I couldn’t allow even Jeff’s “I’m sure they’ll love it” to give me hope. The script was not good at all.
David Sacks loved it. Looooved it.
I breathed a giant, smoke-filled sigh of relief. Samantha was thankful, a little contrite, and very rested. I pushed down any feelings of hating her fucking guts. I had to, because with our Everybody Loves Raymond script, we ended up beating the odds and were one of the three people to get a job out of the Warner Bros. program. It was us, the cowboy, and the new mom, whose battle with postpartum had added a great depth to her Will & Grace sample.
We landed on a Warner Bros. show for NBC called Jesse, starring Christina Applegate. It was a dream come true. I was working on a staff with ten other writers and writing teams. I laughed all day and got paid for it. A writers’ room, I realized, was where I was meant to be, and I was happy.
The only problem was I couldn’t look at Samantha without becoming enraged.
As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get past the fact that I had gotten us there, alone. We were Astrof-Sideman, but Astrof had done all the heavy lifting while Sideman cracked under pressure and went on a boondoggle. I didn’t feel like she deserved to be there. Or have half of my paycheck. And my resentment began to eat away at me. Everything out of her mouth made me cringe or white-knuckle whatever surface I could find.
I separated myself more and more, leaving her to twist instead of pretending my thoughts and lines were our thoughts and our lines. I began to be included in late rewrites, when she was sent home. We grew more and more distant. We barely spoke.
Until halfway through the season, when we were thrown back together to write our own episode. Writing a solo episode was a great opportunity, but I took no pleasure from the news.
I dreaded being around her so much. I wanted to write it my way. Samantha felt my impatience as well as my hatred. She couldn’t miss it—I was an asshole, and she knew why. She tried to make it up to me. She tried to make me . . . love her again.
She even suggested couples counseling, promising that she could get a good rate from the one she and Judy saw. (They were having trouble, too, it turned out. I’m not going to lie, this made me happy.) But I’d accrued so much debt from my first year in LA, I couldn’t even afford a couch—I was currently using one I’d dragged in from off the curb and the family of birds that had been living in it hated me now.
I was not paying for couples counseling. Not for her. Not for us.
After Jesse wrapped for the season, we learned that the show wasn’t going to be renewed, and we needed to get another job. We needed to write another sample.
Other writers on the show told me confidentially that I should go out on my own. My brother told me the same.
“You’ll be great,” he said.
I wanted to branch out badly. But the only way it was going to happen would be if Samantha either dropped dead or dumped me. I wasn’t going to be the one to end our marriage.
Never a quitter, I stayed in bad relationships. I always had. Josh was just the latest in a long line of bad boyfriends and losers I couldn’t break up with.
The guy who shared a one-bedroom apartment with nine other guys in a fire-hazard situation.
The painfully immature man-baby who kept a Polaroid picture in his wallet of a shit he’d taken because he was so proud of it.
The guy who, after a fun dinner out, pulled me toward him in a passionate embrace, at which point a glass he’d stolen from the restaurant fell from his jacket and smashed on the ground (the most upsetting part was that he didn’t think to steal a matching glass for me).
The guy who invited me to a barbecue and told me to bring my own meat.
The widower who wanted to get married right away until he met someone who looked even more like his dead wife than I did.
The guy who took me to Central Park on my birthday with a filthy rolled-up tube sock, where he’d stored a joint for us to share and who smoked the whole thing without sharing.
Andy, who I wanted to hate but couldn’t.
Josh. I hated Josh.
In each instance, I didn’t do the breaking up. What if it turned out that I was wrong to feel the way I felt? What if this was what I deserved? What I was worthy of?
What if I couldn’t write on my own? What if Samantha was the talented one, and the rewrite I’d done was a fluke? What if I was a fraud? What if I never worked again?
On our last day of Jesse, I walked into our office, where she was cleaning off her desk. She looked up at me. “What’s up?” she asked, looking angelic, actually.
I flashed back to that night on the subway steps, the last night of that bogus class with that bogus teacher, Mort. That night in New York when she’d “proposed” to me, asking me to be her writing partner.
Samantha was the reason I’d come to LA—I never would have done it on my own. I would never have had the guts. If she hadn’t bailed on me in the Warner Bros. program, I may never have known what I was capable of.
And she was a good friend. She was a partner. She was my work-wife. I owed so much to her. My resentment had driven a wedge between us.
But in that space, I found my own voice.
She helped me find it, and now I was going to use it.
“I want to break up,” I started, and it was over.
My first breakup.
After that, I felt a relief I’d never felt before. A weight had been lifted. If I never worked again, it was worth this feeling of freedom.
• • •
FIFTEEN YEARS LATER, on the Warner Bros. lot, in that conference room where it all began, I took my seat at the square oak table behind a placard that read “2 Broke Girls Executive Producer Liz Astrof” and opened a bottle of water.
I heard an old voice in my head say, “Water is for writers,” and laughed. I was a writer. And then I chugged it, just in case anyone tried to take it away.
End note: Mort Scharfman, it turns out, did in fact write for All in the Family, Three’s Company, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Odd Couple, Good Times, and The Jeffersons, to name but a few of his credits. As for David Sacks—I have no idea where he is. I do know that Samantha went on to be a renowned child psychologist in Los Angeles. She and Judy are still together—and still not attracted to me.
It’s Not Brain Surgery<
br />
* * *
I was always running. Always moving. Always in motion, fearing that if I stopped, I would never start again.
I was just one afternoon nap away from disappearing under a pile of blankets for days, just one unfinished script away from never finishing anything again, one missed workout from letting myself turn to jelly, just one ignored load of laundry away from living in filth. It was a slippery slope to becoming my mother.
So, I kept running. Kept moving.
I ran circles around my husband Todd—literally. I was like a whirling dervish, a blur. I did the laundry, the food shopping, I organized our shit, made our plans, made our dog’s plans, and I mainly supported us financially. And I was super cool about it.
Until one Saturday almost a year into our marriage.
I was leaving for my first workout of the day and took in my husband sitting on the couch, a crushed velvet throw over his shoulders (a wedding gift), eating cereal out of a large salad bowl (a wedding gift) with a giant serving spoon (a wedding gift), and realized that I still needed to write our wedding thank-you notes. I’d never finished the ones from my Bat Mitzvah, and several relatives had died never having known if I’d gotten their checks. It had been rude of me and was also probably why my great-aunt Frances, heir to the Maidenform Bra fortune, left me out of her will. Which I didn’t want to see happen again.
But I barely had time to write a phone number, much less seventy-three note cards. I was swamped taking care of myself and Todd, who I was starting to suspect was taking advantage of me. He seemed pretty comfortable not having much to do most days and spending his weekends relaxing with Olive—who he surprised me with after rescuing her from the pound and who became our first (and favorite) child—so, to be fair, it wasn’t like he was doing nothing for us.
Still, I got so angry that day at his perpetual state of Zen that I slammed one of the doors in our apartment. But because of its 1920s charm, our door frames were warped, and the door just sort of floated almost-closed and then floated back open, forcing me to announce, “I slammed a door!” When that failed to raise interest, I took a pack of Life Savers and angrily threw it on the floor. But our apartment also had charming 1920s floors that were so soft and uneven that the Life Savers just landed almost soundlessly and rolled downhill to our bedroom.
“I threw something!” I called. When even that didn’t rouse my husband, I finally marched into the living room and told him in no uncertain terms that it was time he got off his ass and helped out.
“Like with what?” he asked. “Every time I try to do anything, you just tell me—”
“ ‘I’ve got it,’ I know.” It was true—I even took care of his sentences for him. I took care of everything.
There were times, like any new bride, I asked myself, “Whyyyyy did I marry this person?!” I wondered if I’d sold myself short by not marrying a successful comedy writer. But living with a neurotic guy who’s constantly worried that every joke, every idea, every job is his last would be exhausting. It would be like marrying me . . . and who needed that? Or maybe I should have married a businessman, like a banker or a hedge fund manager. I didn’t know anything about finances—even my own—and I probably wouldn’t understand most of what he was talking about a lot of the time, so I’d be bored. But he’d pay for my life.
Todd, on the other hand, didn’t even know what the Dow was (shouldn’t one person in a couple know what the Dow is?!). But he knew every line of National Lampoon’s Vacation—one of my favorite movies. He could also recite, word for word, the entire opening scene in Airplane 2. Which is in jive, by the way.
I didn’t set out to marry Todd, but I knew early on that I would. About a month after we started dating, we had plans on a Saturday night. He was going to pick me up around eight. He never called or texted that entire day to confirm. Well. I certainly wasn’t going to call him! Morning turned to afternoon, then evening—and still no word from Todd. He was blowing me off. That bastard. It was for the best, I reasoned—I was nearing thirty, and Todd was five years younger (four from October ’til January). He wasn’t serious enough about his career, either—he was laid back and liked having fun. I clearly needed to focus on meeting a successful businessman.
In spite of Todd not living up to my “nearing thirty” standards, I was hurt that he was planning to let me down. So, I did what I always did when a guy treated me like shit—I went to my brother. I got in my car and cried all the way to Jeff’s house and up the walkway to the front door. But just as I was about to ring the doorbell, I stopped. If I cried to Jeff about Todd, I realized, my brother would hate him, and I didn’t want him to hate Todd. I wanted Jeff to like him. So, in an unprecedented move, I turned around and cried back to my car.
I got home to find Todd waiting. He was there to pick me up. He hadn’t been blowing me off—he’d just made the wild assumption that since he said he’d pick me up around eight, that he would pick me up around eight. And it was exactly around eight. I could trust him. And so could Jeff.
And standing in our living room about a year into our marriage, when he got up to clean the dishes and I made him sit back down—I realized that was exactly how I wanted my marriage to be. I wanted—I needed—to be beholden to no one, completely self-sufficient so that in case my husband got sick or left me or suddenly dropped dead, I wouldn’t be slowed down in any way.
I could keep running.
Todd was happy to oblige my not wanting to be taken care of—even at those times when I was at my most vulnerable, which was during one of the explosive headaches that would descend on me when I laughed really hard.
“My head, my head, my head, my head . . .” I would say.
The most he would do to help—the most I wanted him to do, and he knew it—was pause the TV and wait patiently for me to finish massaging away the pain in my temples so we could get back to Jackass or whatever juvenile obsession of ours had set off the throbbing. He knew I needed to do my own temple massaging; I didn’t want to be touched on my temples by anyone. Even him.
Todd was concerned about my headaches, though, and was forever suggesting I go to a doctor, to which I’d suggest he turn the TV up. I was fine. Also, I didn’t have time to go to the doctor. Also, they were just headaches, and I probably just had a low threshold for searing pain around my temples. I thought maybe they were caused by eye strain—I read from a monitor all day. Or grinding my teeth at night. I had a night guard, but after I neglected to wear it for a week, it shriveled up into a useless $500 rubber ball that I gave to Olive to chew. Her teeth started to improve, though.
Unfortunately, spending my days in a room full of comedy writers was making my head hurt more. I was working on The King of Queens, a funny show with funny writers, and it was literally killing me. I would go into every laughing fit hoping the headaches wouldn’t appear this time, and every laughing fit ended with me massaging my temples, inhaling sharp breaths, wincing, and waiting it out, trying not to let anyone at work see. But they were getting harder to conceal.
One day (well, morning), during a 3:00 a.m. rewrite session, a writer was telling a hysterically funny story about his mother. It was so funny that I almost lost consciousness from the pain, sliding off my chair and under the table so no one would be bothered if I blacked out. My friend Melissa poked her head under the table and passed me a Post-it with her doctor’s number on it.
“Go. See. Him,” she commanded. “You need to do something about those headaches.”
“I’m fine,” I whimpered, trying not to throw up. The headaches were starting to make me nauseous, too, and the fear of throwing up makes me . . . well, throw up. So, I went to see him.
• • •
DR. SUNG WAS in his forties, handsome and dapper in a white dress shirt and tie. An Asian American George Clooney, I’d say. His good looks, combined with the fact that he didn’t take insurance or validate parking, assured me that he was a great doctor.
He checked my eyes, my ears, my glands, and
throat and listened intently while I described my headaches. I made lots of jokes, deflecting. I wanted him to like me and, in the moments when I didn’t have the headaches—which were most moments—I’d honestly forget how bad they were.
At the end of my appointment, he walked me out to the receptionist, prescribed anti-inflammatories, and then, when I wasn’t looking, put his dapper hand on top of mine, which was resting on the counter. As Todd could attest, my usual reaction to sudden affection is to flinch or jerk away or assume a fighting stance with karate chop arms. I chalk it up to not being hugged as a child. But this happened too quickly for me to react, and before I knew it, his hand was there, resting atop mine. It was soft and reassuring. I was unsure whether I was supposed to put mine on top of his, huddle style. How does hand-touching work?
He looked me in the eyes and said, “You’re going to be just fine, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, desperate to move my hand—this kindness, much less from an older father-type figure, was almost too much for me.
Several okays later, I was out the door. I had a good feeling about the anti-inflammatories.
Parking was really expensive.
The anti-inflammatories didn’t work, and the throbbing was now happening not only when I laughed but also when I coughed, when I sneezed, when I rose from a forward-fold in yoga, and when I lifted my head off my pillow too fast. It got to the point that, when I woke up, I’d have to keep my head down and roll off my bed to get on all fours before slowly standing up, without letting my head know I was lifting it.
But they were still just headaches—and a small price to pay, I reasoned, for a pretty happy life.
Nonetheless, I went back to Dr. Sung.
I sat on the edge of the exam room table, watching him—think. Thinking. Thinking. He thought so much. He twisted his mouth from side to side and recommended an MRI, “just to be on the safe side.”
He had his receptionist schedule the procedure, along with a follow-up appointment with him—again, just to be on the safe side. Before walking off and leaving me to pay my out-of-pocket fee, he looked me in both eyes and told me I was okay.