What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

  Our bonfire turned into a talent show under the stars. There was a lot of talent around that fire, and so the show was fairly amazing. People sang, and joked, and danced, and Levi and I snuggled close, my cast propped up on the log. When it came time for Levi’s talent, he sang an old Finnish folk song about a fairy in a northern wood. He sang it beautifully, and, if my decision had not already been made the first or second time he carried me into the bathroom like I was a tiny kitten, it was certainly made once he started singing about Nordic Sprites.

  The party ended abruptly when our fourteen- and sixteen-year-old Dominican host girls joined the bonfire. At first they were lovely audience members. But then they wanted to show us their talent. Adorable! The sisters got a guy with a guitar to play an acoustic version of some booty song, and did a dance for us that one normally only sees on an elevated stage, with a pole. It was when the teenagers were on all fours with their backs arched that everyone decided it was time to break the party up.

  But Levi and I stayed by the fire for a few more hours, watching the constellations move across the sky. Eventually sand started getting in awkward places, and so he carried me upstairs, and appointed himself in a way that would have made his pillaging ancestors proud, and which I wholeheartedly felt I deserved. The most revolting, rewarding, Viking-esque highlight occurred at the end of our time together, when Levi’s Thor-size special moment exploded out of him with such velocity and pizzazz that it ended up all over the headboard, and the curtains, and the walls, and, finally, on my Viking’s own pink face. If you’ve ever watched those news shows where they go into a hotel room with a black light to show that the room is covered floor to ceiling in bodily fluids, and you’ve wondered how that could have possibly happened, I can tell you: there was a Viking in that room.

  But he kept my foot elevated the whole time.

  I went home in a wheelchair, my friends all happily “taking care of me” when it came time to go to the front of the holiday airport security lines with the cripple. Will gave me his first-class plane ticket, like the gentleman he always is. I didn’t need a skin graft, but my foot took two months to heal. It’s hard to feel more single than when you live alone and are on crutches and can’t even get yourself a glass of water. I spent the first week at home with my ecstatic mom, whom I appreciated as never before as she happily cooked and fussed.

  “I’m so happy you’re here!” she gushed. “At your age the only way I’ll get you in my house for this long is if you get injured. Or maybe someday if you get married and are having problems,” she added optimistically. For once, I agreed. I couldn’t believe how good it felt to be taken care of by someone I could take from without guilt. I found myself snuggling into her lap on the couch, like when I was little. She got to rest her head on my chest for the first time in a decade, which caused her to declare that part of her wanted to die before I had children so that she could come back as my baby. I didn’t find this creepy, like I absolutely should have. When I finally left my mom, and went home to the house in which I was usually perfectly fine being alone, I cried.

  During that time the writers’ strike raged on, and my overall deal was “force majeured,” which means it was terminated because I “broke my contract” by not showing up to work. It also meant losing a year’s income, in what would have been the biggest financial year I’d ever had. Levi wrote a few weeks later that he had been inspired by my stories about Argentina, and was weary of the beach. He ended up moving that month to Buenos Aires, where he bought three apartments with his poker winnings, and where he lives to this day.

  And Father Juan had a great time in Machu Picchu … without me. But we were back in touch …

  8

  “Frodo Is the Hottest Guy in New Zealand”

  Los Angeles International → Auckland Airport

  Departing: November 12, 2008

  There is a man shortage in New Zealand. That’s what my Lonely Planet New Zealand guidebook told me as I opened it for the first time while my plane lifted off the tarmac for my solo trip to blow off steam in New Zealand.

  I was running away from home, again. One might even say that this time I was sprinting. But this time it wasn’t because of romance, or a need for personal growth. This time it was because of Hollywood.

  Earlier in the year, while waiting for my degloved foot to heal from Dominican surgery, I wrote a sitcom about my family. It was an unusual thing for me to do, writing. That may sound strange for a writer, but I had been employed on a long-running show for years, and never seemed to find the time or energy to write anything but what I was being paid to write. While other writers might spend their nights and weekends writing their novels, or their screenplays, I spent my nights and weekends playing. (And sleeping. I need a tremendous amount of sleep. It’s my least favorite thing about myself.) And, every spring, when others might really dig into their own passion projects, I got on a plane.

  Depending on my mood and level of self-loathing, I had two explanations for this. If I was on an emotionally healthy upswing, I said this was because I was just following my father’s most consistent life-advice: find balance. All work or all play is no way to live. Plus, I’d say while surfing Expedia, I needed to get out there and “live” if I was going to have anything interesting to write about. On the other hand, if it was a blacker day, I used the whole not-writing thing as evidence that I wasn’t a “real writer”—“real writers” being people who wake up in the morning and grab pen and paper like they’re bread and water.

  (I don’t define “real writers” like this anymore, mostly because of a compulsive writing-procrastination habit of mine—collecting stories of great writers who hated writing. If you’re a writer, I highly suggest this incredibly soothing pastime, as it turns out it’s almost all of them.)

  Anyway, being hobbled during the writers’ strike limited my options: I couldn’t work. I couldn’t picket. I couldn’t get on a plane. And so, for the two months that it took the open wound on my heel to heal, I actually wrote something.

  The show was about half autobiographical. There was a terminally single thirtysomething girl at the middle of it. Familiar. But this girl’s problem was that she was so busy taking care of her parents and their lives that she was ignoring her own. Not familiar. Now, years of incorporating semiautobiographical details into scripts had caused me to notice a pattern: network executives almost always zero in on the autobiographical parts and end up saying something like, “When the character does that, I just don’t find her all that likable.” This is why so many writers are in therapy. Even though you tell yourself all great characters are flawed, and that TV executives just want everyone to be cheerful vanilla people who are, for some reason, always, always, good at their jobs, deep down you are a crazy neurotic writer type motivated almost exclusively by your need to be liked, and so you grind on it when people don’t like a character who is so very obviously you. I once worked on a show where the main character was a hopeless romantic, modeled after the show’s creator. During the successful show’s first season, both the audience and the network gave feedback that this character was a “pussy”—more romantic than any straight man would ever be. Stung by the criticism, the show’s creator “butched up” his TV version of himself. Even more interesting, though, he started to adjust his own romantic behavior, becoming more of a player, more of a “cool guy.” It was a fascinating thing to watch, this art imitating life that then changed because of the criticism of the art.

  So, the “me” in my pilot got a little cleaned up.

  My parents got the TV treatment as well, but in the other direction. Because you’ve gotta root for our selfless girl at the center, you see, as she faces down an army of crazy! So my classy, married, well-spoken mother got turned into a fast-talking, man-eating corporate star who was still single and living a much sexier life than her daughter. My father was a little closer to his real self—a sweet, easygoing, boxed-wine-drinking couch potato who had a second round of kids at a late age wh
om he parented with an excruciatingly hands-off style. In the pilot, his wife has left him, and our girl is busily co-parenting her own half-siblings with her father. In real life, my stepmother was still married to my father, and I saw my three little half-siblings (who were now seven, thirteen, and fifteen) every two or three months.

  When you create sitcom characters, you need to figure out two things: what their flaws are that make them funny, and what their special talents are that make them lovable, so that people want to spend half an hour with these people in their house every week. Think of the racist Archie Bunker, who you nonetheless loved like your own father. As you’d imagine, coming up with your parents’ flaws is not difficult. But what I found wonderful was how easy it was to come up with what was special about them as well. The process of writing all of us, even in an only partially accurate way, was the most therapeutic thing I’d ever done. Years of actual therapy had helped me understand my family better, but hadn’t really made a dent in the amount my parents could drive me crazy. But writing the pilot did. My dad and stepmother and I had moved past the lawsuit and four-year estrangement a few years earlier, but I still had lingering resentment toward them for causing the first and biggest heartbreak of my life. Writing the pilot somehow finished all of that off.

  (It also helped my relationship with my mom to honor her only request: that the actress playing her be thin. When we were discussing Kirstie Alley for the role she was weeping and having a lot of nightmares.)

  The truly remarkable thing about all of this was that the pilot was a success. During the course of the strike, the networks dumped most of the hundreds of pilots they had commissioned before the strike started. So almost none were being made that year. And yet, in this impossible year, in the middle of an almost dead sitcom market, once the strike ended, a big, fancy network decided to make mine. Statistically, this was a miracle. I told myself that this was the reason my foot had been run over in a third-world island nation! So I would be forced to sit still, in the void, and write this show, which would cause me to find peace with my crazy family, learn to trust my writing abilities, and acquire fame and fortune.

  We shot the pilot, and I cast my family as extras in the scenes with the actors who were playing them. My dad showed up to set coincidentally wearing the exact outfit I had my actor dad wearing for the scene (Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, outdoor slippers). The shooting process was not smooth, but in the end, the pilot tested through the roof.

  The network president was unhappy with parts of the pilot, but his executives all made a big play for my show, and, miraculously, against all odds, we got an order for twelve more episodes. But, again, he wasn’t happy with the pilot, and wanted rewrites and reshoots. No problem, I thought! We can do that! I hired writers, we wrote ten more scripts, we built three stages full of sets, and the new episodes seemed to write themselves. The show felt alive and organic; the magic was there. But then I would get a call from the network, saying that the president still wasn’t happy with the twentieth, or thirtieth, rewrite of the pilot that everyone else loved.

  When people ask me what it was like to have my own network TV show, I describe it like this: it’s like spending your day going back and forth between two rooms. In one room, you have just won the lottery. All of your loved ones are there showering you with praise and love, and you are handed a huge check in front of a big banner that says “YOU DID IT!” while a triumphant brass band plays and confetti falls from the ceiling. But then you are yanked out of that room, and put into a second, dark room, where gray-faced angry people, perhaps lit from below like in a Kubrick film, scream, “YOUR BABY HAS CANCER AND IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT!!!” The girl who was mean to you in high school (she’s there, too) then adds, “BECAUSE YOU’RE AN UNTALENTED WHORE WHOSE HUGE THIGHS RUB TOGETHER WHEN SHE WALKS!!!” Then you get to go back into the first room … for a few minutes.

  Repeat. For six months.

  In the 2012–13 television season, at least two show-runners I know of had to leave their shows in the middle because of nervous breakdowns, and a third committed suicide. So by comparison I did okay: my worst day as a showrunner was when I accidentally pooped my pants, which was how I learned why my fancy office had a remote-controlled door and private shower.

  Ultimately, days before shooting episode two, as Ohio was called for Obama and the confetti fell on his beautiful family on that stage in Chicago while I popped Tums, my show was shut down before we even got to try. The thing that had felt meant to be was not meant to be. Hundreds of people were out of work, and it was all anyone in the city wanted to talk to me about. And while shows fail 99.9 percent of the time, and so you go into this business expecting it, my show failed at a point in the process that was very unusual. Usually, the network doesn’t let you shoot the pilot at all, or they do but then don’t pick up the pilot to series, or they air your show but the ratings are bad so you get cancelled after a few episodes. But getting cancelled after the show’s been picked up, but before shooting or airing anything that could prove that we were indeed doing good work … that was a sucker punch. It felt like I had really, personally, blown it.

  So on the day my show was cancelled, like some people run to church or a bottle, I ran to Expedia.

  Three days later I found myself with my Lonely Planet book, drinking on a transpacific flight heading away from Hollywood, learning that Kiwi men share my need to run away from home. That’s why there is a shortage—so many of them go on walkabout for so long that they find women in other countries, marry them, and never return. Which sounded like kind of a great idea if I had only been traveling to a country with enough men to go around.

  I landed, and went straight to the home of a high school friend who was living with his Kiwi wife about forty-five minutes outside Auckland, in sheep country. I hadn’t seen my friend Josh for years, and we had lost touch. But when I was desperately trying to think of where I should run to, I remembered that Josh lived in New Zealand, which sounded like the perfect combination of far and exotic yet safe and easy. So I shot him an e-mail asking if I could land at his house for a few days while I licked my wounds and got my bearings, and he immediately said yes.

  I had only met his wife, Olivia, once before, at their wedding seven years earlier. They had gotten married in San Francisco on a trolley pulled up next to a park that was hosting a needle-exchange program, several months after they met at a rave at around ten in the morning. A few months after the night/morning when they met, they found themselves climbing a tree, and, when they got to the top, Olivia proposed.

  “It just seemed like the thing people do,” Olivia said.

  A few months later, they were married by a club-kid friend of theirs who had gotten ordained online, and who shakily read the ceremony off the back of one of those plastic-windowed envelopes. Josh wore a tux that was a little too big, and Olivia wore a high-necked, thrift-store, old-timey lace wedding dress, and so the tiny blond bride and groom looked like kids playing dress-up. Someone’s dog cut its paw and jumped on Olivia, so there was a bit of dog blood on the front of her gown. For her footwear, the bride chose a black rubber river sandal.

  Now happily ensconced in a little house in sheep-covered countryside, Olivia and Josh were all smiles and good vibes. Their equally happy dog loped through snout-high wildflowers toward me when I arrived at their green, blooming place, and my mood immediately lifted. We went hiking that first day, and brainstormed fun things for me to do in New Zealand. Olivia suggested a silent meditation retreat near the black sand beach where they shot The Piano. Her friend had recently spent ten days there, not reading, not writing, not exercising …

  “So, what do you do for ten days?” I asked Olivia.

  “You just sit and be silent.”

  Now, you may remember some of my issues with silence. So this idea resonated like a gong. Silence. Might that be exactly what I needed? The argument could certainly be made that at least 25 percent of what had gone down with my show could be blamed on my mouth. W
hat I had said to whom, and the varying degrees of politicking I had managed and mismanaged, had certainly been part of the show’s downfall. I had been an open book to untrustworthy people, and that had been my undoing. And it was not the first time my prolific lip-flapping had gotten me into trouble in my life, professionally or personally.

  I had even had medical problems as a result of my mouth. For years I’d been losing my voice. On a good day people said I had a sexy, Demi Moore sort of timbre, but after a night out it was absolutely more post-op Kathleen Turner. I ignored it for years, but finally was losing my voice entirely so often that I went to a doctor to find out it was basically the result of every kind of nodule and nighttime acid reflux and allergy you could think of that would attack one’s vocal cords.

  But the doctor emphasized that my hoarseness was also caused by a more pressing problem—my personality. His main advice was just to talk less. Which had only been my unaccomplished New Year’s resolution for thirty or so years. Oh, and there was also this nugget from him, given to me while he fed a camera up my nose and down my throat, with regard to sleeping with my cat, which was adding to the problem:

  “Try to get something with two legs into your bed instead of four.”

  “I TYING!” I had protested, while choking on the camera.

  In addition to finding love, getting rid of my pet, and changing my personality, I was supposed to stop eating and drinking basically everything that gives life meaning. So … I was hoarse. And walking through the hills of New Zealand wondering if all signs in my life were pointing to me shutting up for a little while.