Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (10 page)

WE SLEEP IN THE SAME BED

If we’re on a trip or if our boyfriends are away, and there’s a bed bigger than a twin, we’re partnering up. It is super weird for us not to share a bed. How else will we talk until we fall asleep?

I MUST BE 100 PERCENT HONEST ABOUT HOW YOU LOOK, BUT GENTLE

Your boyfriend is never going to tell you that your skirt is too tight and riding up too high on you. In fact, you shouldn’t even have asked him, poor guy. He wants to have sex with you no matter how pudgy you are. I am the only person besides your mom who has the right (and responsibility) to tell you that. I should never be overly harsh when something doesn’t look good on you, because I know you are fragile about this, and so am I. I will employ the gentle, vague expression “I’m not crazy about that on you,” which should mean to you “Holy shit, take that off, that looks terrible!” I owe it to you to give feedback like a cattle prod: painful but quick.

I CAN DITCH YOU, WITHIN REASON

I can ditch you to hang out with a guy but
only
if that possibility has been discussed and getting-a-ride-home practicalities have been worked out, prior to the event. In return, I need to talk about you a lot with that guy so he knows how much I love you.

I WILL TAKE CARE OF YOUR KID IF YOU DIE

I can’t even write about this, it’s too sad. But yes, I will do that. And you will have one awesome little kid who hears endless stories about how amazing and beautiful and perfect you were. Incidentally, your kid will grow up loving Indian food.

I WILL NURSE YOU BACK TO HEALTH

If you are crippled with pain because of a UTI, I need to haul ass to CVS to get you some medicine, fast. I should also try to pick up a fashion magazine and the candy you like, because distracting you from your pain is part of nursing you back to health.

WE WILL TRADE OFF BEING SOCIAL ACTIVITIES CHAIR FOR OUR OUTINGS

On trips together, I promise to man up and be the person who drives the rental car sometimes, or uses my credit card and has people pay me back later. Someone needs to check on Yelp to see what the good brunch place is. Neither of us gets to be the princess all the time. I get that.

I WILL KEEP YOUR FAVORITE FEMININE HYGIENE PRODUCT AT MY HOUSE

Even though no one uses maxipads anymore, like you do, weirdo, I will keep a box at my house for when you come over.

SAME WITH YOUR CONTACT LENS SOLUTION

I can’t believe you won’t get Lasik already. You can afford it. I know you read someone went blind from it, but that was like twenty years ago. Not getting Lasik at this point is like being that girl in 2006 who didn’t have a cell phone.

I WILL TRY TO LIKE YOUR BOYFRIEND FIVE TIMES

This is a fair number of times to hang out with your boyfriend and withhold judgment.

WHEN I TAKE A SHOWER AT YOUR PLACE, I WON’T DROP THE TOWEL ON THE FLOOR

Your home isn’t a hotel. I forget sometimes because you make it so comfortable for me.

IF YOU’RE DEPRESSED, I WILL BE THERE FOR YOU

As everyone knows, depressed people are some of the most boring people in the world. I know this because when I was depressed, people fled. Except my best friends.

I will be there for you during your horrible break-up, or getting fired from your job, or if you’re just having a bad couple of months or year. I will hate it and find you really tedious, but I promise I won’t abandon you.

IF OUR PHONE CONVERSATION GETS DISCONNECTED, THERE’S NO NEED TO CALL BACK

I get it. You get it. We take forever getting off the phone anyway. This was a blessing.

I WILL HATE AND RE-LIKE PEOPLE FOR YOU

But you can’t get mad if I can’t keep track. Robby? Don’t we hate him? No, we love him. Okay, okay. Sorry.

IT IS OKAY TO TAKE ME FOR GRANTED

I know when you fall in love with someone that you will completely forget about me. That hurts my feelings, but it is okay. Please try to remember to text me, if you can, if you know I have something going on in my life, like a work promotion or something.

NO TWO PEOPLE ARE BETTER THAN US

We fucking rock. No one can beat us.

Matt & Ben & Mindy & Brenda

I
WAS FINALLY
paying my bills, but Brenda and I weren’t doing anything creative. I became increasingly worried I had moved to New York City to be a professional au pair. Because no one was hiring us to act or write, Brenda and I decided to create something to perform in ourselves. There was a one-hour window per day when I could write with her. She left for her job as a public school substitute teacher in the early morning and got back home at 3:00 p.m. I left for my babysitting job at 4:00 p.m. and returned between midnight and 1:00 a.m. So between 3:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon, we met at the apartment to write. Unfortunately, we didn’t make great use of this one hour. Often we ended up lying on the sofa watching Judge Judy scream at people for a while.

More often than not, our hour work session played out like this:

INT. WINDSOR TERRACE APARTMENT LIVING ROOM, 3:10 P.M.

Bren is at the computer in my bedroom eating Honey Nut Cheerios from the box. I am sitting on the bed, near her, eating a large piece of raw salmon I bought from the supermarket. It was my homemade salmon “sashimi,” delicious and a fraction of the price it would be at a sushi restaurant, though not at all safe. Bren looks up from the computer screen.

BREN:
What do we want to do? What do we want to say?

ME:
I think there should be only two characters, so we don’t have to pay anyone.

Bren types this. Pause.

BREN:
Do you want to go watch the
Jamie Kennedy Experiment?

ME:
Totally.

This went on for months. We could spend the entire hour arguing about the plausibility of Harry Potter and not write a single word.

In the early 2000s, the actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck loomed large in our lives. They loomed large in everyone’s lives, actually. This was the height of Bennifer. Sorry, I hate to resuscitate that term, which the media has thankfully put to bed, but it’s important to remember what a phenomenon it was. It was like Pippa Middleton plus Beyoncé’s legs times the latest Apple product. Bennifer was so big it was as though two people had never been in love before, and they had discovered it. I think it’s also easy to forget that Bennifer created the trend of the blended celebrity couple name. Without Bennifer we wouldn’t have Brangelina or Tomkat, or even the less used Jabrobra (James Brolin and Barbra Streisand). That is the gift that Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez gave us that has withstood the test of time.

Brenda and I have always done “bits,” even before we knew they were called “bits.” Bits are essentially “nonsense time” or, to describe it more pejoratively, “fucking around.” We would take on characters, acting like them for a while on the way to the subway, or getting ready to go out. For whatever reason, around this time our favorite recurring bit was when Bren played Matt Damon and I was Ben Affleck. We played the “guys” very naturalistically, but they had a slightly jock-like, dude posture, and slightly lower voices. Again, have I emphasized how well we fit into our lesbian neighborhood?

Soon, our Matt and Ben had a rich and completely made-up backstory and dynamic. They had private jokes and shared memories: again, all made up. We did no research on the actual people, because we didn’t care about their actual pasts; the real Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were simply jumping-off points for
our
Matt and Ben. It was a special kind of fun to be two best friends playing two other best friends.

Once we had characters, albeit nutty ones, we gained focus. If I can give one bit of advice to any drama major, high school theater kid, or inmate who is reading this in a prison library with dreams of being cast in the prison play, it’s this: write your own part. It is the only way I’ve gotten anywhere. It is much harder work, but sometimes you have to take destiny into your own hands. It forces you to think about what your strengths really are, and once you find them, you can showcase them, and no one can stop you. I wasn’t going to be able to showcase what I did best in an Off-Off-Broadway revival of
Our Town.
I was going to do it playing Ben Affleck. The premise for
Matt & Ben
is weird but simple: the script for
Good Will Hunting
falls from the ceiling of twenty-one-year-old Ben Affleck’s apartment while the two are working on a screen adaptation of
The Catcher in the Rye.
They stop work and wonder about the significance of what has happened. The tone is somewhere between
The X-Files
and
The Odd Couple.
Here is one of the first scenes we wrote. Matt has arrived late to meet Ben, who is annoyed at him. Matt is late because he was auditioning for a play.

MATT

And I went, I had to go to this thing first, and then I came here.

BEN

What thing?

MATT

Nothing, just this audition thing.

BEN

For what?

MATT

For nothing. You don’t know Shepard? Sam Shepard?

BEN

Yeah, of course.

MATT

You do?

BEN

Yeah, he was in
The Pelican Brief
, I love that guy. With the wrinkles? Is he in the play?

MATT

Uh, no he wrote the play, this play called “Buried Child.” Won a Pulitzer. Anyway, it was nothing. It didn’t happen.

BEN

What didn’t happen? The audition?

MATT

No, I don’t know. We’ll see.

BEN

What’s the part?

MATT

Vince.

BEN

No, what
kind
of part? Is it good?

MATT

Yeah. They were looking for a blonde.

BEN

A dark blonde? Cause you’re not blonde.

We entered the play in the New York International Fringe Festival. Jocelyn and our friend Jason produced it, and we sold out every show. I think it was largely because of our tireless grassroots marketing. By grassroots, I mean, of course, environmentally destructive pestlike papering of the entire boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Each of us took stacks of postcards and put them in every diner, indie record store, and frites shop we could. (This was in that eight-month window in 2002 where frites were incredibly popular.)

We didn’t want to pay a director to direct the show, so Bren and I directed it ourselves. It was a given that we would also star in it, not just because it was fun, but because, again, we didn’t want to pay anyone. Our cheapness was the recurring source of our creative decisions. The set was minimal and we wore guys’ clothes that we’d borrowed from Brenda’s brothers, Jeff and Terry. We had no idea what we were doing, but we had a
purpose
after two years of living in New York and not having one.
Matt & Ben
was a respite from helplessness.

In 2002, the Fringe Festival named us Best Play of all five hundred shows.
The New Yorker
wrote of the show: “Goofy, funny, and improbably believable … Kaling and Withers have created one of the most appealing male-bonding stories since Damon and Pythias. Or Oscar and Felix.” That quote was easy to access because I have it tattooed on my clavicle.

This is when our lives started to change.