Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (6 page)

I got even more confidence from having a steadfast companion in my best friend, Brenda. A few words about Brenda. Bren is the shit. In college, she was the star of every play at Dartmouth from her freshman fall on. She looked the way a Manhattan socialite should look: perfect posture, gazelle-like, with a sheet of dark blond hair. Girls always worried she was going to steal their boyfriends, but she never did. (I didn’t understand that at all. It’s college! Steal some boyfriends, for God’s sake!) Bren and I befriended each other early on, became inseparable through a shared sense of humor, a trove of nonsensical private jokes, and had the same enemies within the Drama Department. We clung to each other with blind loyalty, like Lord Voldemort and his snake, Nagini. I, of course, was Nagini. If you messed with one of us, you knew you messed with both of us, and Voldemort was going to cast a murder spell on you, or Nagini was going to chomp on your jugular. It was such a good, dramatic time. Bren was the kind of best friend I dreamed about having when I was a little kid. I never knew you could have someone in your life who was pretty much on the same page about essentially everything.

In theater, Bren would play Beatrice or Medea or Eliza Doolittle, while I wrote well-attended comedy one-acts and occasionally played Medea’s little buddy or something. I felt like a big celebrity on campus. Well, the kind of celebrity you could conceivably be at Dartmouth if you weren’t a jock or a sorority girl, who were the real celebrities. My fame was akin to that of, say, Camilla Parker Bowles.

In 2010, Bren was my date to the Emmys. People thought she was on
Mad Men
and I was her publicist.

Our other best friend, Jocelyn, whom we met through our singing group, was more or less the one directly responsible for making the traditional college experience really fun. She was less competitive and intense, and from Hawaii, so she was very comfortable being naked, which was new to us and intimidating. She, along with our other friend Christina, made us go berry picking and get our faces painted for football games, and she’d host dinners in our shared dorm dining room. Jocelyn is willowy and half-Asian, and while fitting the bill technically for a model, has no interest in modeling. She’s just that cool. Me, on the other hand, whenever I lose, like, five pounds, I basically start considering if I should “try out” modeling. When the three of us walked down the street together, I looked like the Indian girl who kept them “real.” I don’t care. After all these years with friends who are five ten or taller, I have come to carry myself with the confidence of a tall person. It’s all in the head. It works out.

Jocelyn and Brenda being really adorable at something I don’t remember being invited to.

So I left college feeling like a successful, awesome, tall person. Then, in July of 2001, the three of us moved to New York.

LATE NIGHT
DREAMS, QUICKLY EXTINGUISHED

The job I most wanted in the world was to be a writer on
Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
I can’t believe that was two Conan shows ago. It seems like yesterday.

I’d been an intern at
Late Night
three years before and was famously one of the worst interns the program had ever seen. The reason I was bad was because I treated my internship as a free ticket to watch my hero perform live on stage every day, and not as a way to help the show run smoothly by doing errands. My boss, the script coordinator, greatly disliked me. Not only because I was bad at my job, but because hating everything was one of her personality traits. You know those people who legitimize their sarcastic, negative personalities by saying proudly they are “lifelong New Yorkers”? She was one of those. Her favorite catchphrase was “Are you on crack?” On my last day, she shook my hand limply and said a terse “Bye” without looking away from her J.Crew catalogue.

When I arrived in New York, I didn’t even really know how to apply for the job. I had not kept in touch with anyone at
Late Night,
because even as a nineteen-year-old, I knew that no one wants to keep in touch with the intern. I had placed a lot of faith in Woody Allen’s belief that 80 percent of success is just showing up. I said to myself: Are you
serious?
80 percent?
Sure, I can just
show up.
Here I am, New York! Give me a job!

It turns out the other 20 percent is kind of the difficult, nebulous part.

I wrote a letter to NBC asking how I could submit sketches to be considered for
Late Night.
I got a letter back saying that the network could not even
open an envelope
that contained creative material that was not submitted by an agent. I thought the phrase “cannot even open the envelope” was a tad dramatic. NBC legal, you drama queens. This initial rejection served as NBC “negging” me, to borrow a phrase from my very favorite book,
The Game.
It worked. NBC became the sexy guy at the party I needed to be with. When I finally got with him, years later, sure, he was fourth place, kind of fat, balding, and a little worse for the wear, but I still got him.

Here I am, ruining my guest appearance on my hero’s talk show with dorky gesticulation. (
photo credit 7.3
)

HOME IS WHERE THE BED IS

I was jobless, but so were Brenda and Jocelyn. Together we rented a railroad-style apartment in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. The railroad apartment, for those of you who’ve never seen one, is styled after the sleek comfort of a 1930s industrial railroad car. All the rooms are connected in a line, and you have to walk through one room to get to the next. Everything about it is awful, except if you need a set for a play that takes place during the Great Depression. The only people this intimate setup worked for were three female best friends who had no secrets from one another, were comfortable (enough) being walked in on naked, and had no boyfriends (or no boyfriends who were ever invited over). Enter us!

Real estate was our first disappointment in New York: we had set our sights on trendy Williamsburg, which had plenty of chic coffee shops, cool boutiques, and cute, straight guys. I knew I wouldn’t have been able to afford those coffee shops and boutiques, or had the nerve to talk to any of those hipster guys, but I would have liked to be around them, and felt that it was plausible I could have that life. After visiting several basement-level tenements that were out of our price range, we settled for Windsor Terrace. When we moved there, Windsor Terrace was a Park Slope–adjacent mini-neighborhood that could’ve been the exterior set for much of
Welcome Back, Kotter.
Not grim, but not great. It was populated mostly by middle-age lesbian couples who had taken on the noble challenge of gentrifying the neighborhood.

Brenda and I shared the center bedroom and the single queen bed it would hold, and Jocelyn fashioned herself a sort of bohemian-chic burrow out of the last bedroom, which, while it was the only room with true privacy, was also the size of a handicapped bathroom. She installed a twin loft bed and hung a batik tapestry over the lofted area, where she would read books and magazines for hours. Jocelyn is the kind of person who goes into any room, sizes it up, and immediately tries to loft a bed there. To this day, she lives in an apartment with a loft bed.

This was a good arrangement because Jocelyn has hoarding tendencies, and some degree of containment was crucial. (Hoarding has pejorative connotations now, but you have to understand this was before the show
Hoarders
depicted hoarders as gruesome loners with psychological problems. Joce is a hoarder of the cheerful, social, Christmas-lights-year-round variety.) Jocelyn would save stacks of six-year-old magazines because there might be a recipe in one of them for jambalaya, which she would need someday if we threw a big Mardi Gras–themed dinner. (This wasn’t crazy, because we would occasionally do things like that.) People who visited our apartment and saw her curtained lair probably assumed Jocelyn was a gypsy we had inherited as a condition of getting the apartment.

I was going through a phase where all my photos had me making a “whoo!” face.

And the stairs. Oh, the stairs. The staircase in our third-floor walk-up was the steepest, hardest, metal-est staircase I have ever encountered in my life. It was a staircase for killing someone and making it seem like an accident. Our downstairs neighbor was a toothless man, somewhere in his eighties or nineties. He lived with what seemed like two younger male relatives, with “younger” meaning in their sixties. In the dead of summer or winter they would wear those ribbed white tank tops grossly named wife beaters, which is how we knew they were rent-control tenants (if anyone wears year-round wife beaters, it is the same as saying they are enjoying the benefits of a rent-controlled apartment). They also spoke a language with one another that seemed like a hybridized version of an Eastern European language and the incomprehensible mumble of
Dick Tracy
henchmen. They would’ve been frightening, except they were incredibly timid and scared of
us
for some reason. Like when that monster in the
Bugs Bunny
cartoon gets scared of a mouse and runs screaming all the way back to his castle.

In the summer, feral cats in heat clung onto the screens of our living room, meowing mournfully until we threw a glass of water at them. When it got cold, the roaches migrated in and set up homes in every drain. Sometimes, when I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I would feel a disgusting crackly squelch under my foot, and I’d know I’d have to rinse off a roach from my heel. That was our apartment. We took the bad with the pretty good. Plus, we could afford it, Prospect Park wasn’t too far, and people already assumed we were lesbians, so we fit into the neighborhood right away. It was all good.

Until we tried to pursue our dreams.