Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (13 page)

ME:
What a clean desk. If it were mine it’d be a disaster, ha ha.

RECEPTIONIST GUY:
This isn’t my desk. They moved me here when the season ended. I literally have nothing to do with this desk.

We stared at each other for a few moments, until he told me to sit down next to a full-size cutout of Peggy Hill.

Marc had warned me that Greg was “a little quiet and pensive,” but no one could have warned me just how quiet and pensive. Greg is the frequent perpetrator of crazy-long pauses in conversation. Like, minutes long. My meeting with him was about two and a half hours, but if you transcribed it, it would have had the content of a fifteen-minute conversation. Greg would reference all kinds of books and articles, and instead of paraphrasing them, like any normal lazy person, he’d insist on going online and finding the exact line or quote from the secondary source, adding another five-minute silent section to the meeting, during which he wordlessly surfed online. Later I would realize this is Greg’s signature style. He likes to take in people past the point where they can be putting on a show to impress him. Or, this is my interpretation. He might just have been zoning out and forgot I was there.

Greg’s a very low-key guy, with the bearing of a gentle, athletic scientist. We talked about New Hampshire, our dads, books, and elaborate Indian weddings. It was fun, and I unexpectedly learned a lot. I remember leaving the meeting with a few printouts; one was MapQuest directions to a diner Greg loved eating at, called John O’Groats, and the other was an article about the history of the architecturally interesting library where Greg went to high school.

Now, I should give some context of that year in television. NBC had high hopes for three comedies that year:
Committed,
a show about eccentric friends living together in New York City; an animated show,
Father of the Pride;
and
Joey,
the spin-off of
Friends.
I could not get meetings with any of these hot shows. Like, not even close. Marc hustled and got me a meeting with only one other show,
Nevermind Nirvana,
a pilot about an interracial married couple. I drove to Burbank to meet with the executives. While I was sitting in the waiting area, the producer got a call: the show had not gotten picked up. The receptionist informed me of the news, and immediately started packing her stuff up in a box. I validated my parking and left. I literally didn’t even make it into the room. So, technically, meeting Greg was my first and only staffing meeting in my career.

A week or so later, Marc called and told me Greg wanted to hire me as a staff writer for season one of
The Office.
Before I could get too excited, he let me know I had been hired for six episodes for a show that was premiering mid-season. This was the smallest amount of contracted work you could do and still qualify for Writers Guild membership. I didn’t care. I was a television writer! With health insurance!

Friendless, I celebrated the best way I could. I went straight to Canter’s Deli, sat in a booth, and ordered a huge frosty Coke and a sandwich called the Brooklyn Ave. (a less healthy version of a Reuben, if that is possible), and gabbed with my best friends and mom on the phone for two hours. An elderly man who was eating with his wife at a nearby table came over to my booth. “You’re being very loud and rude,” he said. “Your voice is so high-pitched and piercing.”

I started work in July. At that time, I lived alone in a small, damp apartment I found on Fairfax Avenue and Fountain Boulevard, which I did not know was the nexus of all of transvestite social life in West Hollywood. I did not even have the basic L.A. savvy to ask my landlord for a parking space, so I parked blocks away from my house and enjoyed late-night interactions with strangely tall, flat-chested women named Felice or Vivica, who always wanted rides to the Valley. If my life at the time had been a sitcom, an inebriated tranny gurgling “Heeeeey, giiiirrrrrll!” would have been my “Norm!”

A giant billboard for a gay sex chat line was twenty feet from my apartment door. You have to understand, this was before I became the international and fabulous gay icon that I am today, so it made me uncomfortable. (Now I’m basically Lady Gaga and Gavin Newsom times a million.) When my parents came to visit me, I would try to distract them from seeing it by pointing across the street to a Russian produce market, which I was 70 percent sure was a front for a crime consortium. “Isn’t that cool, Mom and Dad? I can get my produce locally.”

My parents visited a lot. It was a lonely time. I started to look forward to my encounters with Felice and Vivica. “Heeeyyy, Curry Spice! Heeey, Giiiirrrrll!”

But mostly, I just wanted to start work.

Being a staff writer was very stressful. I knew I was a funny person, but I was so inexperienced in this atmosphere. Joking around with Brenda and writing plays on the floor of our living room in Brooklyn was intimate and safe, and entwined in our friendship. But I wasn’t friends with these guys. I was the only staff writer on the show (the others outranked me) and had never been in a writers’ room. Most of the stress came, honestly, because the other writers were so experienced and funny and I was worried I couldn’t keep up. I was scared Greg would notice this inequity of talent and that he’d fire me in a two-hour, pause-laden meeting. I dreaded the pauses more than the firing.

The full-time writers for season one were Greg, Paul Lieberstein, Mike Schur, B. J. Novak, and me. Larry Wilmore and Lester Lewis were consultants, which meant they wrote three of the five days of the week. For some reason I thought Greg, B.J., and Mike were all best friends, because they had all gone to Harvard and been on
The Harvard Lampoon
(even though their times at Harvard didn’t even overlap). I’ll never forget one day at lunch, when Mike asked B.J. to go to a Red Sox–Dodgers game, while I stewed angrily on the other side of the room, feeling left out.

“I’ll get you, you clique-y sons of bitches,” I thought.

You know what? I never did get them. I’m just realizing now. I should totally still get them.

But as is the case with most people you are stuck with for many hours, they slowly became my good friends. The job of comedy writer is essentially to sit and have funny conversations about hypothetical situations, and you are rewarded for originality of detail. It is exhilarating, and I didn’t want it to stop. I soon started dreading the weekends, because weekends meant saying good-bye to this creative, cheerful atmosphere.

I will always remember
Chappelle’s Show
very fondly because besides being one of the funniest shows ever, it served as my good friend at the time. I’d watch every episode, and then watch them again later that day to hear the jokes again. Sometimes on a Saturday night I would fall asleep watching it on my sofa, like Dave Chappelle and I were best friends chatting until we fell asleep. I was twenty-four.

I did not know at the time that this year with Greg, Paul, B.J., and Mike would be where I essentially learned how to write comedy. This small group wrote the first six episodes of that first season of
The Office.
They were, and are, four of my favorite people in the world. They are also the four funniest people I know. I have fought bitterly with them, too—I mean real fights, knock-down-drag-outs—which I’ll rationalize to mean they are my true friends. I won’t say anymore about them, because none of them are lacking in confidence, and honestly, they’re like three compliments away from becoming monsters.

WRITER FIGHTS, OR DON’T FIGHT WITH GREG DANIELS!

Writer fights are always exciting and traumatic, and I get into them all the time. I am a confident writer, a hothead, and have a very thin skin for any criticism. This charming combination of personality traits makes me an argument machine on our staff. A halfway compliment my friend and
The Office
showrunner Paul Lieberstein once paid me was that “it’s a good thing you turn in good drafts, because you are impossible to rewrite.” Thanks Paul! All I heard was “Mindy, you’re the best writer we’ve ever had. I cherish you. We all do.”

This was taken between takes of “The Dundies,” the season two premiere, which I wrote. We shot from dawn until late at night in a former Chili’s restaurant in the deep San Fernando Valley. I am taking a ladylike nap on the floor while Paul Lieberstein writes notes on a script. (
photo credit 14.2
)

I tend to fight with Greg the most. My friend and fellow
Office
writer Steve Hely believes it is because I am emotional and intuitive and Greg is more cerebral and logical. Or, as I think of it, I am a sensitive poet and Greg is a mean robot. Our fighting is legendary. One time, late at night, our script coordinator, Sean, and our head writer, Danny, both brought in their dogs, and upon seeing each other, they got into a violent, barking fight. Paul Lieberstein glanced over and joked, “Oh, I thought that was Greg and Mindy.”

What do we fight about? I wish I could say they were big, smart, philosophical issues about writing or comedy, but sometimes they’re as small as “If we do that cold open where Kevin dumps a tureen of chili on himself, I will quit this show.” We did that cold open, by the way, and it was a hit, and I’m still working at the show. I can get a little theatrical. Which makes sense, because, after all, I came up through the
theater
(said in my snootiest
Masterpiece Theatre
voice).

I will tell you about the worst fight we ever had. In a particularly heated rewrite session for the season-three episode “Grief Counseling,” I was arguing with Greg so much, he finally said, in front of all twelve writers, “If you’re going to resist what I’m doing here, you can just go home, Mindy.”

Greg never sends anyone home, or even hints at it. Greg is the kind of guy who is so agreeable I frequently find him on our studio lot embroiled in some long conversation with a random person while his lunch is getting cold in his to-go container. And he’s the boss. I would never talk to anyone if I were boss. I would only talk to my attorney and my psychic. So, anyway, my very nice boss had just hugely reprimanded me. Greg suggesting I go home unless I adjusted my attitude was the harshest he’d ever been to anyone in the three years I’d been on the show. There was silence. No one looked at me. People pretended to be absorbed in their phones. One writer didn’t even have a phone, so he just pretended to be absorbed in his hand.

I was so embarrassed and angry I got up, stomped out the room, stole a twenty-four-pack of bottled water from the production office, kicked the bumper of Greg’s car, and left the studio.

This is what I get for trying to make the show better? I’m funnier and a better writer than every single one of those assholes,
I thought, angrily. I pictured myself accepting the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center, and all those other writers watching from home, with the hope that I might acknowledge them, and I pointedly wouldn’t. Instead, I’d thank Thalia, the Greek muse of comedy. I’d freaking thank
Thalia
over those guys. I drove to a nail salon in a mini-mall a mile away and angrily sat down for a manicure.

“Señora has the day off?” the woman soaking my nails asked me, congenially.

“Nope! I got kicked out of work!” I replied. She stopped what she was doing.

“Oh, you fired?” she asked, concerned.

Hearing her say “fired” sent a spiky shudder down my spine. I looked at my soaking cuticles. I saw the soft hands of a babied comedy writer who had never known a hard day’s work. Did I really want to be unemployed? Did I want to jeopardize this amazing job I had dreamed about having since I was thirteen? Did I really want to be a receptionist at my mother’s ob/gyn office, where I would need to learn Spanish?

I immediately stood up, dried my hands, handed some cash to the puzzled woman, and raced back to work. I quietly entered the writers’ room and sat down.

My friend and fellow writer Lee Eisenberg looked at me quizzically and texted:
WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN
?

I texted back:
THE BATHROOM.

Greg did not acknowledge my absence, or find out that I’d kicked his car, and it blew over. The bottles of water remained mine, bwah ha ha! That evening, when I had my nightly chat with my mother on the way home from work, I made the mistake of telling her about what had happened. I was hoping to get consoled for a bad day at work. Instead she yelled at me. “Are you crazy? You owe everything to Greg Daniels!” Mom always says “Greg Daniels,” as though there were a few people at work with the first name Greg and I might not know who she was talking about. (There aren’t.) “Greg Daniels took a chance on you and changed your life! Don’t fight with Greg Daniels!” Dad got on the phone from the upstairs line, as he always does. He agreed with Mom. “I know you get upset, Min. But you have to be professional.” I am still trying to follow this terrific advice, only somewhat successfully, five years later.