What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (17 page)

I told Cristiano I would love to see him if he made it to Los Angeles, but that I couldn’t help him with the food and parties. And I never heard from him again.

So, here is why I really want to tell this story, despite some shame: Brazil was fantastic. Was it sordid and revolting? Yes. Am I horrified that my father is reading about it? Tremendously. Would I recommend the exact same experience to even my very own daughter someday? If she spends as much of her life worrying and overanalyzing as her mother does, absolutely. Everybody needs a little bit of
that’s crazy
, a little bit of
way too much. Balance, Dad, like you said.

So, the deep and profound moral of this trip? If at all possible, at least once (or twice) in your life, get as naked as possible with a Brazilian.

Oh, Brazil.

“Dominican Surgeons Are Not Half Bad”

2007 was the year I had emergency surgery in an island nation and sex with a Finn, in that order.

Ferris’s New Year’s trip in 2007 was to the Dominican Republic, and it fell smack-dab in the middle of the hundred-day-long Writers Guild of America strike. The strike was just and necessary; TV and film writers were not getting paid when our work was aired on the Internet, and, soon, the kids told us, no one would be watching TV or movies anywhere else. When you work in a career that has the same average lifespan as a professional athlete’s, you want to make sure you’re getting paid. Those dollars have to last for a lot of years after one is deemed too old to
write dick jokes. So we struck against the companies who were telling us that they weren’t making a dime off the Internet, while telling their shareholders (publicly, and in writing) that profits were through the roof because of the Internet.

Despite the just cause, things on the picket lines could get awkward. Other unions would come out to picket with us in support—teamsters, nurses, airport workers. So … people with
real
jobs. People with the kinds of jobs where you sometimes had to do things like, well, stand up. And who made way, way, way less than writers do. So there were days spent marching hand in hand with The People, united against The Man, before heading to The Palm for lump crab meat, steaks, and martinis. Or sometimes we slummed it and went to have free food at a nearby diner where Drew Carey ran a tab for striking writers. The postpicketing conversation was invariably about how much more exercise we were all getting on the picket lines than we had during our days spent gorging on free food in a writers’ room.

Gross. We know. But that’s what happened.

At work that year, I had been operating under what is called an “overall deal.” What this means is you are paid a lump sum to work on shows for your studio, as well as develop original shows for them (which you then shop to the networks). I had sold the studio an idea for a show that was basically
Cheers
in an expat bar in Buenos Aires (all in the hopes of getting to shoot it there), but the networks all balked at a show set in another country. Americans,
they feared, wouldn’t relate to people who wanted to do something as crazy as leave America.

As part of the deal, I was also working on a sitcom produced by the Farrelly Brothers, the guys responsible for movies like
There’s Something About Mary.
Because it was a Farrelly Brothers show, in the pilot, the lead got ass-raped by his date’s pet monkey. This meant days in a writers’ room where my talented, serious boss would shake his head and say things like, “I don’t know, you guys, I just don’t think we have the monkey-ass-rape moment of this episode yet.” And so we would hunker down and try harder.

That show only made it six episodes, and my expat show hadn’t sold, so I was not exactly “working” for a living when the strike hit and made me stop working.

You can see why the nurses and truck drivers should have hated us.

As for my personal life, I had spent the year going on a
lot
of first dates. There were a few months spent with an overly emotional French writer, who absolutely made it into my Top Three in the bed department, but who called his own writing “beautiful.” He would call late at night, tortured, wanting to make a confession:

“Tonight I feel like an emotional vampire.”

I did not know what that meant, but we still talked about it for two or three hours. There was also an unfortunate crying hand-job incident. (I was giving the hand job, he was crying.) Again, though, when he wasn’t crying, Top Three. I called him “Frenchie Summer 2007” because we
met on the Fourth of July, and I had promised my friends I wouldn’t keep him past the equinox. I extended the relationship for a couple of weeks into the fall for previously explained reasons, and then he was gone.

But other than Frenchie Summer 2007, they were coming and going pretty rapidly. There was a charming, guitar-playing development executive for a couple of months before we realized we were just supposed to be friends, an Israeli landscaper whom I fought with and kissed at the dinner table on our first date (in that order), and a tall, heavily muscled capoeira instructor I called the Black David (à la Michelangelo), whose body in my white-tiled shower will be seared into my mind until the day I die.

While the relationships did not blossom into love, all of these experiences were really yielding fruit in my career. That monkey-ass-rape show was about newly divorced people going on terrible dates. The year before, I had written on
How I Met Your Mother
, another show about missed romantic connections. And I found that, in both instances, I had some stories to contribute. Stories I couldn’t have contributed just a few years earlier. A lot of them. Like, maybe enough already. Remember when Robin went to Argentina and brought back a hot Argentine on
How I Met Your Mother
? That’s a trip paying for itself.

Meanwhile, Sasha had just had her first baby, making the wildest child in my life now officially a mother, and on to a different life, while I was still amassing stories with my husband, Hope. I realized my life was changing when I called myself a “serial monogamist” to my friend Dan, part of the Ferris Bueller posse who had only met me at
thirty,
after
my decade spent entirely with two long-term boyfriends.

“What are you talking about? You’re not a serial monogamist. You’re always single,” Dan said, laughing.

I’m not sure why this was news to me. I was a long way from my three-guys-at-age-thirty days. And a lot of my new friends, the ones with whom I was running around the world, hadn’t even known that other me.

Another thing happened in 2007: I went back to therapy, and started taking antidepressants. In Los Angeles, this news is exactly as odd and interesting as saying you started eating three times a day, but since I know this isn’t quite as everyday in the rest of the world, I’ll explain. (Or perhaps by this point in the book, you’re not at all in need of an explanation, and are instead reacting to this news with an exasperated,
“Finally.”
)

In any case, the therapy and the antidepressants sprang out of a trip I took in November, just after my monkey-ass-rape show went down and my pilot didn’t sell. I met up with Hope for Thanksgiving in Spain, where she had been working for a week before I arrived in Madrid. A few hours after I got in, we went out for dinner, waited for our table for two hours at the bar, then had another bottle of wine once we finally sat down, and then took the party to a club, where I danced with a man who assured me he was a toreador. Jetlagged and not at all sleepy, I wanted to pursue this information further, but Hope ran out of energy, and so we took our drunk selves home at about four in the morning.

She collapsed in bed, but I was still wide-awake. I’m
normally a marathon sleeper, but I always travel with Ambien for long flights and those first couple of nights of jetlag. So I popped a sleeping pill, and sat, drunk, at my computer while I waited for it to kick in.

It kicked in.

In the morning, I would discover that I had e-mailed just about every man who had ever touched my body or soul. I even jumped on my
Match.com
account to e-mail a few who might do so one day in the future. At first, the e-mails were just drunken, typo-filled notes that looked like they had been written by a cat. But eventually, clearly, the Ambien kicked in, and that’s when the correspondence got upsetting. Here is a partial list of what I wrote:

To Matt, the boyfriend I broke up with in between my trips to Argentina, I wrote a huge amount of upsetting “miss you” stuff, which boiled down to asking if it all would have worked out if only his penis had not been so big.

To Oscar, the Argentine bartender: filthy stuff. Just … yeah. Filthy.

To Frenchie Summer 2007: very sexy, cat-typoed suggestions that also turned a little angry.

To an Asian guy on
Match.com
:

Horrifying. Even more horrifying, years later, I would of course meet this guy. A friend of a friend. Super-attractive,
super-cool, totally remembered being bummed out by our correspondence, I’m a dick.

And there were more! To a few other random guys who had not called me after date one or two or three, I sent more anger, with progressively more typos.

And then, worst of all, even worse than Asian racism, I wrote to Ben:

In the morning, I woke up with a gasp. I ran to my computer and groaned with progressive volume as I read what Ambien-fueled Kristin-Adjacent had done, and then quickly wrote about a dozen more e-mails:
rescind, rescind, rescind! Ambien! Madrid! Sorry!
The recipients were all very gracious, the Asian guy even offering to still go out with me. But Ben’s was ominous:

Years later, I would start hearing stories of other people who stayed awake and wrote on Ambien. And everyone used the same words to describe what they wrote:
angry
and
sexual.
This is apparently an Ambien thing, just like sleep eating and sleep shopping. But I didn’t know that at the time, and I felt
horrible
about all of these messages. And also, for the entire Spanish trip, disturbed. What was
all of this anger that came out of me? And this love for Ben? I had rejected him for
years
, and yet this is what came out of me when drugs and alcohol could knock down my walls? What kind of enormous, messed-up walls were in me if these were my real feelings, but I didn’t at all want to act on them in the sober light of day?

And so, a little freaked out, I went home, went back to therapy, and started taking antidepressants. I started talking about why I was so terrified of really, truly connecting with a man, of needing someone the way you need someone when you build a life with them. We talked about my relationship with my father, with whom I’d had my strongest parental relationship because I grew up with a constantly working mom, and who had then disappeared from my life completely for four years when I was nineteen.

That story is a long one, but here are the highlights: My dad had married my stepmother with three days’ notice when I was seventeen. The marriage came out of the blue, because for the prior two years they had been dating, she had told him she only wanted to marry a doctor. I didn’t go to the wedding for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I thought my dad was marrying this materialistic woman primarily out of fear of being alone.

While my parents’ divorce had at first been amicable, when my stepmother came into the picture she forbade my dad from ever seeing my mom, and limited his contact with her to phone calls about me. I spent my high school graduation searching the crowd for my father, who she had made sure wasn’t there. When I decided to go to Northwestern, my stepmother made it clear she thought I was being selfish
and spoiled. She gave me a lecture about how she knew plenty of people with houses and boats who didn’t even go to college, let alone a private university far from their family. My parents had put aside money for college for me when they divorced that covered my first two years of school, but when my junior year was upon us, and the tuition had to start coming out of everyone’s pockets, and all of that coincided with the birth of the first of my three half-siblings, my stepmother did not like it. I suddenly found that my father’s visits to bring my new baby sister to see me were getting cancelled, and, one day, that my father’s phone number had been changed, and I was not given the new one. The next day my mother was served with papers: my father was suing her to get out of paying his half of my tuition. He and my stepmother followed their attorney’s advice and slandered my mom in the suit, I flew home from college to testify on behalf of my mother, she won, and my father and I didn’t speak for four years. His parents cut me off, too—the Bible says to honor thy mother and thy father, after all, and I was apparently not doing what Jesus would do if Joseph sued Mary.