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

28 - Cupid's Evil Twin

March, 2001

I used to derive a perverse amount of satisfaction from predicting the failure of couples' relationships. It was something I started doing during show night on Cool, Man! to kill time. It took six hours to film an episode and while it was fun — there was food, alcohol and, usually, the laughter of the audience — there was a tremendous amount of downtime. So after consuming a sufficient quantity of bread pudding and middling wine I would ask people — writers, executives, actors, basically whoever wandered into Video Village — about their current relationship and then, usually, I would tell them bluntly that it wasn't going to work.

Them: I'm moving in with my fiancee.

Me: I give it a month.

Them: You can't possibly know that. (ONE MONTH LATER) Damn you, Rubicon!

And so it went. Everyone would doubt me, but then — one after another — their relationships collapsed. There was one week in which three of the relationships I had marked for death, died. It was glorious. And very quintessentially me back then, combining two of my favorite things: Armchair psychoanalysis and smugly throwing stones in a house made of bullet-proof glass.

After a while, it became a spectator sport, with people delighting in watching some hapless victim squirm as I probed for romantic weakness — incompatibility, dishonesty, ambivalence, an unacceptably large (or small) body part, etc. — and gave it the Aaron Rubicon Seal of Disapproval. Tom, in particular, found this very entertaining — You're like Cupid's evil twin! — unaware that I had given his relationship an expiration date, too.

My prediction was that his marriage to The Destroyer would only last five years. But I hoped it would be less. Which sounds horrible, I know, but I looked at it this way: If Tom had a malignant tumor, would I really be wrong for wanting it excised as soon as possible, before it metastasized? And by "metastasized" I meant, "had children."

Which, I know, also sounds horrible, but I'm not really saying that children are like tumors — although they do grow very quickly and make your hair fall out — I'm saying that if you're going to divorce, it's better to do it before there are children involved. That way, you can just shake hands and walk away friends. Or enemies. Or solo artists writing bittersweet songs about each other. Or whatever. And yes, I acknowledge the enormity of the heartbreak involved. And I also realize that the division of assets can be complicated and painful. The salient point, though, is that when it's all over, you can walk away.

This, to me, was the lesson of Dungeon Master Eric and The Anti-Christ. Marriage was one thing, but when a child came into the picture, it was a whole different story. A story called The Omen.

As it happened it was at the five-year mark, give or take a few months, that Tom and The Destroyer had the knock-down drag-out fight that should have ended their marriage.

I learned about it on a Saturday morning, while we were working at my cramped home office on our second feature film spec. It was a comedy called Sex Drive, about a horny guy named Craig whose hair growth medication kills his libido and he comes to realize how much time he had wasted, and how many dumb decisions he had made, because he was led around by his dick. We sold it ("Gilmore & Rubicon Sell 'Sex'" Variety quipped) but it ultimately wouldn't see the light of day because the studio president, when he finally read it, declared that only an idiot would make a movie about a guy who didn't want to get laid.

A valid point.

If memory serves — and these days, that's an iffy proposition — we were in the middle of writing a scene — in which libido-less Craig is talking to an incredibly hot girl he had been hitting on for months and realizing, for the first time, how unbelievably dull she is — when Tom stood up abruptly and said, "I'm sorry, I can't do this right now."