Romantic Comedy(48)

I’m embarrassed that you remember when I said I’d be leaving TNO sooner rather than later. The truth is that it’s probably time for me to go, but with all the other uncertainty now, I was too chicken. Plus, selling screenplays is a far less reliable paycheck than writing for a weekly show. I’m not that eager to work in a typical writers’ room—the freedom and craziness and instant gratification of TNO may have spoiled me for life—although maybe I should try it before I decide. Now that there are Zoom writers’ rooms, I could theoretically remain in Kansas City while joining one in NY or LA, which sounds like the worst of both worlds?

The full story of my departure from the city is that I lasted about two weeks after things shut down. My apartment （on the Upper West Side） is pretty small and dark, and ambulances were racing past at all hours. I wasn’t interacting with anyone and I wasn’t eating that much because I didn’t want to go out and buy food, but I also felt uncomfortable asking some delivery guy to bring it to me. （I wasn’t NOT eating, but I was eating weird shit I found in my cupboard like protein bars two years past their Best By date. And no, I don’t like to cook.） One evening after a day of not leaving the apartment, I was washing my hands in the kitchen before eating a can of soup from when Obama was in office, I knocked a knuckle on my right hand against the faucet spout, and my knuckle came away smeared with some kind of black grime or mold. I bent over and looked up at the underside of the spout, and it was caked in this grime. I then went and looked at the faucet in the bathroom and it was the same. And I have a cleaning person who comes every few weeks. But I’d been drinking the water, using it to brush my teeth, etc. and I just felt so grossed out and like I’d been holding my sanity together so tenuously and feeling so worried about germs and the virus and what it was or wasn’t on the surface of, and I almost couldn’t withstand simultaneously confronting Covid and my disgusting faucets. （Do you remember speculating a few emails ago about if I’d think you were a baby for feeling terrible when you had Covid? Well, babies who live in glass playpens, etc., etc.） I got on a car rental website right then and I left at 5 a.m. the next morning, and I arrived at Jerry’s house a few minutes before midnight Kansas City time. Because I was terrified of making him sick, I then slept in the semi-finished basement for two weeks, and I wondered if leaving New York had actually improved anything, but after almost four months of chair yoga and conversations about a beagle, I’m sure it IS better. Although I don’t want to stay in KC forever, Jerry has such good manners that he acts like I’m doing him a favor by being here. When really my only contributions are 1） the grocery shopping and 2） cutting Sugar’s nails because the groomer he normally takes her to has shut down.

Btw it’s an awesome flex that when I ask if you’ve ever been to Missouri, you can casually be like, Oh sure when I played in that stadium that holds 18,000 people. You might be appalled to hear I have never been to a show at Sprint Center （which was recently renamed T-Mobile Center）， though if this is a good excuse, it wasn’t built until after I’d graduated from college. Do you LIKE performing in stadiums? Is it stressful? Fun?

I really am sorry that your parents aren’t supportive of what you do, and I imagine that that would be hard and very hurtful. I’m glad you’re close to your sister—I remember meeting her and thinking she seemed nice. Regarding my parents, my dad was a pathologist （aka the people who look at biopsies, etc.）， and also a depressive person who self-medicated （literally） through the inadvisable and illegal method of writing himself prescriptions for morphine. He and my mom, who worked in merchandising for Hallmark （yes, the maker of greeting cards and cheesy Christmas movies, though only the greeting card division is headquartered in KC） separated when I was a toddler. I have no memories of us all living together, though I do remember that when my dad came to get me for Saturday lunches, he almost always wore khaki pants and navy blue polo shirts, with a gray sweatshirt over them if it was winter. We usually got hamburgers. Even though from an early age I found hamburgers to be a disgusting bumpy circle of meat, I intuitively understood that I shouldn’t express my disgust to him because it would be rude. That is, I understood I should be polite as you would with a family friend, as opposed to more blunt, as most kids would be with a parent.

When I was in second grade, on November 3, 1989, my mom picked me up early from school and took me to a park where we had never been and told me my dad had died from taking too much medicine. I assume the location was a strategic decision so that she didn’t ruin a more familiar place, including our house. She told me that we’d never know if he’d taken too much medicine by mistake or on purpose but that really there wasn’t much of a difference because even if he’d taken too much on purpose, it had been because he’d believed more medicine would make him feel better. I actually think this was a profound lesson about how with incomplete information, we choose our narrative. I also think my mom believed he did it on purpose, because before I left for college, she told me that no matter how bad I ever felt, the one thing I shouldn’t do was kill myself. She said that ideas that seem right in the moment can seem wrong later, and that a lot of things are reversible but killing yourself isn’t. She said this matter-of-factly, not unlike the way she used to say that you don’t brush your teeth because it’s interesting, you brush your teeth because you need to brush your teeth （as a kid, I complained that brushing my teeth was “boring”）。