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

35 - Writer Boi

June, 2007

In June of 2007, Tom and I landed a three-year TV deal with the Walt Disney Company (which its employees lovingly, or perhaps not, referred to as Mouse-schvitz). It was pretty cool. We had a third floor office from which we could see the seven carved dwarves on the Team Disney building. We had an assistant named Brie, an aspiring actress who kept us entertained with her train wreck of a social life and ever-expanding list of food allergies. We had a helpful office manager named Cheryl who looked like she had been flash frozen in the sixties and recently thawed out. She was sweet and chipper and no more emotionally invested in us than she was in the furniture. Less, probably, because the furniture stayed around longer.

We also got coveted Silver Passes that gave us free admission to Disneyland. (And also California Adventure, but really, who gives a shit about that place?) Samantha was a Disneyland fanatic and I'm pretty sure I'd never given her an orgasm more powerful than the one she had when I placed that shimmery piece of embossed plastic in her hand.

Most important, though, for a compulsive worrier like me — who frequently woke up in a cold sweat, heart pounding, staring into the darkness, convinced that everything was about to come crashing down — was the three years of guaranteed paychecks (supplemented by freelance film work). That meant three years of peace of mind, three years of blissful sleep. Forget the stupid theme park: As far as I was concerned our three-room office in the Old Animation Building was the happiest place on earth.

But then, four months into our deal, the Writers Strike hit.

Although hit is probably not the right word. It makes it sound like something that happened to us. Like the Writers Strike had leapt out of the bushes and mugged us. No, this was a decision that we writers all made collectively. And like an overwhelming majority of my fellow wordsmiths I voted for it. The core issues were extremely important — we were fighting to survive in the digital age — and I was keenly aware that so many of the benefits that I enjoyed (health insurance, pension, guaranteed minimums) were made possible by Writers Strikes past. And in at least one of those strikes, the studios unabashedly turned fire hoses on the picketing writers, something which I am confident they would still do today if they thought they could get away with it.

So I was absolutely willing to do my part.

Although unlike a great majority of my fellow writers who — after helping themselves to free bagels — shook the meeting hall with their militant optimism when our leadership announced that we were on strike, I felt nothing but dread. I vividly remembered the ugliness of the 1988 strike. Worried eyes and desperate garage sale markdowns. Mirrored end tables and lava lamps sold for a fraction of their worth. And the worst part, I knew, was that after six grinding, demoralizing months in which a lot of people were financially devastated, the strike was a failure.

But we were at the beginning of our strike and when I arrived at Bob Hope Park, across the street from NBC Studios where I would over the next hundred days be logging countless miles, the atmosphere was positively festive. We were all issued picket signs that simply read WRITERS GUILD ON STRIKE in typewriter font, a T-shirt with a graphic of a powerful fist clutching a pencil, and for those of us who got there early enough, Krispy Kreme donuts courtesy of The Tonight Show's Jay Leno, who showed up in a forest green 1931 Duesenberg Town Car and passed them out himself in a show of solidarity.

And then we set up our picket line. At first it felt like a goof. The difference between dressing as a fireman for Halloween — with a plastic axe and simulated soot smeared on your face — and being an actual fireman, fighting an actual fire. People laughingly took pictures of each other with their digital cameras or, for those early adopters among us, the first generation of the iPhone, back when it had a battery life that was measured in nanoseconds and hadn't yet turned us into a nation of narcissistic douche bags.