Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) Read online

  The sight of a fat child falling, lifeless, from a high distance into a pond is kind of an amazing sight, I’ll bet. You know when a kid’s getting a shot or a tooth removed, how you tell them that it’s not going to be as bad as they’re imagining it will be? Well, this was a hundred times worse than what I had imagined.

  First of all, it hurt. I don’t know how it happened, but I got a huge cut from falling into the water. (It was on the back of my left knee; to this day, I have a four-inch dark brown scar there.) Three people, including Scott, pulled me out of the water. They rushed me to shore, to the First Aid room, which, weirdly, had injections for anaphylactic shock and an eye wash but no paper towels. Scott patted down the back of my leg with beach towels.

  Ultimately they got it to stop bleeding, and Scott begged me not to tell my parents. I remember him asking me four or five times. God knows what that must’ve looked like to an observer, a seventeen-year-old boy exhorting a disoriented, bleeding six-year-old “not to tell her parents” something. But this was Morses Pond, and that’s the kind of thing that happened there.

  The scene of the cover-up.

  Lessons? When I was kid, my parents smartly raised us to keep quiet, be respectful to older people, and generally not question adults all that much. I think that’s because they were assuming that 99 percent of time, we’d be interacting with worthy, smart adults, like my aunts and uncles; my teachers; my ancient and knowledgeable piano instructor, Mrs. Brewster; and police officers. They didn’t ever tell me, “Sometimes you will meet idiots who are technically adults and authority figures. You don’t have to do what they say. You can calmly say, ‘Can I first call my mom and ask if I have to do this, please?’ ” But we didn’t have cell phones back then. The only people with cell phones were rich villains in action movies you knew were going to die first.

  When I have kids I will largely follow how my parents raised me, because, like everyone else on the planet, I think my parents are perfect and so am I. But one thing I will impart to my children is “If you’re scared of something, that isn’t a sign that you have to do it. It probably means you shouldn’t do it. Call Dad or Mom immediately.”

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  A handful of bad experiences when I was small have made me a confirmed nonathlete. In psychology (okay, Twilight) they teach you about the notion of imprinting, and I think it applies here. I reverse-imprinted with athleticism. Ours is the great non-love story of my life.

  *At the age of six, the criteria for handsome was, simply: “Is he not related to me?” and “Have I seen him on television?” That was it. By this standard, Larry Bird, Dick Clark, Andy Rooney. All handsome guys.

  Don’t Peak in High School

  SOMETIMES TEENAGE girls ask me for advice about what they should be doing if they want a career like mine one day. There are basically two ways to get where I am: (1) learn a provocative dance and put it on YouTube; (2) convince your parents to move to Orlando and homeschool you until you get cast on a kids’ show, or do what I did, which is (3) stay in school and be a respectful and hardworking wallflower, and go to an accredited non-online university.

  Teenage girls, please don’t worry about being super popular in high school, or being the best actress in high school, or the best athlete. Not only do people not care about any of that the second you graduate, but when you get older, if you reference your successes in high school too much, it actually makes you look kind of pitiful, like some babbling old Tennessee Williams character with nothing else going on in her current life. What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.

  I was never the lead in the play. I don’t think I went to a single party with alcohol at it. No one offered me pot. It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I even knew marijuana and pot were the same thing. I didn’t even learn this from a cool friend; I gleaned it from a syndicated episode of 21 Jump Street. My parents didn’t let me do social things on weeknights because weeknights were for homework, and maybe an episode of The X-Files if I was being a good kid (X-Files was on Friday night), and on extremely rare occasions I could watch Seinfeld (Thursday, a school night), if I had just aced my PSATs or something.

  It is easy to freak out as a sensitive teenager. I always felt I was missing out because of the way the high school experience was dramatized in television and song. For every realistic My So-Called Life, there were ten 90210s or Party of Fives, where a twenty-something Luke Perry was supposed to be just a typical guy at your high school. If Luke Perry had gone to my high school, everybody would have thought, “What’s the deal with this brooding greaser? Is he a narc?” But that’s who Hollywood put forth as “just a dude at your high school.”

  In the genre of “making you feel like you’re not having an awesome American high school experience,” the worst offender is actually a song: John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane.” It’s one of those songs—like Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven”—that everyone knows all the words to without ever having chosen to learn them. I’ve seen people get incredibly pumped when this song comes on; I once witnessed a couple request it four times in a row at Johnny Rockets and belt it while loudly clapping their hands above their heads, so apparently it is an anthem of some people’s youth. I think across America, as I type this, there are high school couples who strive to be like Jack and Diane from that song. Just hangin’ out after school, makin’ out at the Tastee Freez, sneakin’ beers into their cars, without a care in the world. Just two popular, idle, all-American white kids, having a blast.

  The world created in “Jack and Diane” is maybe okay-charming because, like, all right, that kid Jack is going to get shipped off to Vietnam and there was going to be a whole part two of the story when he returned as some traumatized, disillusioned vet. The song is only interesting to me as the dreamy first act to a much more interesting Born on the Fourth of July–type story.

  As it is, I guess I find “Jack and Diane” a little disgusting.

  As a child of immigrant professionals, I can’t help but notice the wasteful frivolity of it all. Why are these kids not home doing their homework? Why aren’t they setting the table for dinner or helping out around the house? Who allows their kids to hang out in parking lots? Isn’t that loitering?

  I wish there was a song called “Nguyen and Ari,” a little ditty about a hardworking Vietnamese girl who helps her parents with the franchised Holiday Inn they run, and does homework in the lobby, and Ari, a hardworking Jewish boy who does volunteer work at his grandmother’s old-age home, and they meet after school at Princeton Review. They help each other study for the SATs and different AP courses, and then, after months of studying, and mountains of flashcards, they kiss chastely upon hearing the news that they both got into their top college choices. This is a song teens need to inadvertently memorize. Now that’s a song I’d request at Johnny Rockets!

  In high school, I had fun in my academic clubs, watching movies with my girlfriends, learning Latin, having long, protracted, unrequited crushes on older guys who didn’t know me, and yes, hanging out with my family. I liked hanging out with my family! Later, when you’re grown up, you realize you never get to hang out with your family. You pretty much have only eighteen years to spend with them full time, and that’s it. So, yeah, it all added up to a happy, memorable time. Even though I was never a star.

  Because I was largely overlooked at school, I watched everyone like an observant weirdo, not unlike Eugene Levy’s character Dr. Allan Pearl in Waiting for Guffman, who “sat next to the class clown, and studied him.” But I did that with everyone. It has helped me so much as a writer; you have no idea.

  I just want ambitious teenagers to know it is totally fine to be quiet, observant kids. Besides being a delight to your parents, you will find you have plenty of time later to catch up. So many people I work with—famous actors, accomplished writers—were overlooked in high school. Be like Allan Pearl. Sit next to the
class clown and study him. Then grow up, take everything you learned, and get paid to be a real-life clown, unlike whatever unexciting thing the actual high school class clown is doing now.

  The chorus of “Jack and Diane” is: Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.

  Are you kidding me? The thrill of living was high school? Come on, Mr. Cougar Mellencamp. Get a life.

  Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (Or, How I Made My First Real Friend)

  IN NINTH GRADE I had a secret friend. Her name was Mavis Lehrman. Mavis lived a few streets away from me in a Tudor-style house that every Halloween her parents made look like the evil witch’s cottage from Hansel and Gretel. (This is amazing, by the way. It behooves anyone who lives in a Tudor house to make it look like a witch cottage once in a while.) The Lehrmans were a creative and eccentric family who my parents deemed good people. Mavis was my Saturday friend, which meant she came over to my house Saturday and we spent the afternoon watching television together.

  Mavis and I bonded over comedy. It didn’t matter if it was good or bad; at fourteen, we didn’t really know the difference. We were comedy nerds, and we just loved watching and talking about it nonstop. We holed up in my family’s TV room with blankets and watched hours of Comedy Central. Keep in mind this is not the Comedy Central of today, with the abundance of great shows like South Park, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report. This was the early ’90s, where you had to really search around to find decent stuff to watch. We’d start with the good shows, Dr. Katz, Kids in the Hall, or Saturday Night Live reruns, but when those were over, we were lucky if there was some dated movie playing like Porky’s or Kentucky Fried Movie. With all the raunchy ’80s sex comedies Comedy Central played, at times it felt like we were watching a confusing soft-core porn channel. It wasn’t our favorite programming, but like the tray of croissants from Costco my mom left for us on the kitchen table, Mavis and I devoured it nonetheless. We loved comedy and wanted to watch everything. And more than that, we loved reenacting what we saw. The Church Lady’s catchphrases were our catchphrases, and we repeated them until my mother said, exasperated: “Please stop saying ‘Isn’t that special?’ in that strange voice. It is annoying to me and to others.”

  At fourteen, Mavis was already five foot ten. She had short, dark, slicked-back hair like Don Johnson in Miami Vice. She was very skinny and had women’s size eleven feet. I know this because she accidentally wore my dad’s boat shoes home one time. Mavis was a big, appreciative eater, which my parents loved. When she visited, she made a habit of immediately opening the fridge and helping herself to a heaping bowl of whatever leftover Indian food we had and a large glass of orange juice. “This roti and aloo gobi is delicious, Dr. Chokalingam,” she’d say to my mother, between bites. “You should start a restaurant.” My mother always protested when Mavis called her by the formal “Dr.” name, but I think it secretly pleased her. She was sick of some of my other friends saying things like: “Hey, Swati, how’s the practice going?” in that modern, we-call-parents-by-their-first-names fashion of liberally raised East Coast kids. Both my parents were very fond of Mavis. Who wouldn’t love a hungry, complimentary, respectful kid?

  But that was Saturday. At school, I had a completely different set of friends.

  My posse at school was tight, and there were exactly four of us: Jana, Lauren, Polly, and me. We had been friends since middle school, which was only two years, but seemed like a lifetime. The number of people in our friend group was important because of all the personalized best friend gear we had that read “JLMP,” the first letters of our first names. We had JLMP beaded bracelets, JLMP embroidered bobby socks. We commissioned a caricature artist at Faneuil Hall in Boston to do a cartoon of the four of us with JLMP in giant cursive letters underneath. These mementos cemented our foursome to both us and the other people at school. You couldn’t get in, and you couldn’t get out. Nothing says impenetrability and closeness like a silk-screened T-shirt with an acronym most people don’t understand. JLMP knew who Mavis was—she was a lifer at our school, which meant she had been there since kindergarten, and longer than any of us had been there—but she made no impact on our view of the social landscape. We didn’t really talk or think about her; it was as if she was a substitute Spanish teacher or something.

  The Cheesecake Factory played a major role in JLMP’s social life. We went there every Friday after school. These were our wild Friday night plans. Remember, this was back in the ’90s, before the only way to be a cool teenager was to have a baby or a reality show (or both). We’d stay for hours chewing on straws and gossiping about boys, and collectively only spend about fifteen dollars on one slice of cheesecake and four Cokes. Then we’d leave and have our regular dinners at our respective homes. Obviously, the waiters loathed us. In a way we were worse than the dine-and-dashers because at least the dine-and-dashers only hit up Cheesecake Factory once and never showed up again. We, on the other hand, thought we were beloved regulars and that people lit up when we walked in. We’re back, Cheesecake Factory! JLMP’s back! Your favorite cool, young people here to jazz up the joint!

  I know what you’re thinking, that I ditched Mavis because she wasn’t as cool as my more classically “girly” friends, but that wasn’t it. First of all, JLMP wasn’t even very cool. High school girls who have time to be super cliquey are usually not the popular girls. The actual popular girls have boyfriends, and, by that point, have chilled out on intense girl friendships to explore sex and stuff. Not us. Sex? Forget it. JLMP had given up on that happening until grad school. Yep, we were the kind of girls who, at age fourteen, pictured ourselves attending grad school. Getting a good idea of us now?

  Mavis had her own friends. Maybe because of her height and short hair, she hung out with mostly guys. Her crowd was the techie boys, the ones who built the sets at school and proudly wore all black, covered in dried paint splatter. The techie boys all had fancy names like “Conrad” and “Xander” and “Sebastian.” It’s as if their parents had hoped that by naming them these manly, ornate names, they might have a fighting chance of being the leading men of our school. Unfortunately, the actual leading men in our school were named “Matt” or “Rob” or “Chris” and wouldn’t be caught dead near our student theater unless they were receiving a soccer trophy in a sports assembly. Mavis and her guy pals built gorgeous sets for our plays like Evita, Rags, and City of Angels, and got absolutely zero recognition for it. They were just kind of expected to build the sets, like the janitors were expected to clean up the hallways.

  Though Mavis could have been confused for a boy from almost every angle, she had the pale skin and high cheekbones of an Edith Wharton character. Thinking back on her now, she had all the prerequisites to be a runway model in New York, especially since this was the early ’90s, when it was advantageous to look like a flat-chested, rail-thin boy. But our school was behind the times, and the aesthetic that ruled was the curvy, petite, all-American Tiffani Amber Thiessen look, which Polly and Lauren had to some degree. At school, Mavis was considered neither pretty nor popular. Neither was I, by any stretch of the imagination, but at least I didn’t tower over the boys in our class by a good five inches.

  We both lived by a weird code: Mavis and I might be friends on Saturday afternoon, but Friday nights and weekend sleepovers were for JLMP. If it sounds weird and compartmentalized, that’s because it was. But I was used to compartmentalization. My entire teenage life was a highly organized map of activities: twenty minutes to shower and get ready for school, five-minute breakfast, forty-five-minute Latin class to thirty-minute lunch to forty-five-minute jazz band rehearsal, etc. Compartmentalizing friendships did not feel different to me. Mavis and I would say “hi” in the hallways, and we would nod at each other. Occasionally we would sit next to each other in study hall. But Mavis did not fit into my life as my school friend.

  Then things started to change.

  One Saturday night, I had JLMP over my house. They wanted to watch Sleepin
g with the Enemy, you know, the movie where Julia Roberts fakes her own death to avoid being married to her psycho husband? And I wanted to watch Monty Python’s Flying Circus and show them the Ministry of Silly Walks, one of their funniest and most famous sketches. Mavis and I had watched it earlier that day several times in a row, trying to imitate the walks ourselves. I played it for them. No one laughed. Lauren said: “I don’t get it.” I played it again. Still no response to it. I couldn’t believe it. The very same sketch that had made Mavis and me clutch our chests in diaphragm-hurting laughter had rendered my best friends bored and silent. I made the classic mistake of trying to explain why it was so funny, as though a great explanation would be the key to eliciting a huge laugh from them. Eventually Polly said, gently, “I guess it’s funny in a random kind of way.”

  Within the hour we were watching Julia Roberts flushing her wedding ring down the toilet and starting a new life in Iowa under an assumed identity. I could barely enjoy the movie, still stunned by my closest friends’ utter lack of interest in something I loved so much. I had always known, yeah, maybe JLMP wouldn’t be as interested in comedy as Mavis had been, but it scared me that they dismissed it so completely. I felt like two different people.

  What happened to me was something that I think happens to a lot of professional comedy writers or comedians, or really anyone who’s passionate about anything and discovering it for the first time. Most people who do what I do are obsessed with comedy, especially during adolescence. I think we all have that moment when our non-comedy-obsessed friends or family are like: “Nope. I’m at my limit. I can’t talk about In Living Color anymore. It’s kind of funny, but come on.”