Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me_ (And Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling [38]
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