November, 2002

But that day never came.

Tom and I were both in The Room when our assistant, Eugene, poked his head in. "Cliff is here to see you."

"Cliff?" Tom asked, surprised.

"He's the president of the network."

"We know who he is, Eugene," I said dryly, "We just didn't know he was coming."

"I didn't know, either. He just wants to talk to you for a few minutes."

The writers reacted like we had been called into the principal's office.

Ooooooooh! You're in trouuuuble!

"Fuck all y'all," Tom said with a laugh.

Cliff was already in our office when we arrived. Libby was, too. Eugene had forgotten to mention that. They stood to greet us. Cliff shook our hands, Libby gave us affectionate hugs. I noticed that her eyes were tinged with red.

"You OK?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said, with a weirdly forced smile. "I just... yeah."

We sat in our little sitting area. Cliff and Libby returned to the couch, Tom and I faced them in swoop armchairs with worn gray fabric.

"What's up?" I asked.

Cliff leaned forward, his elbows on his thighs. "This is the worst part of my job," he began, "but unfortunately I have to shut down production on King of The Jungle." He lowered his head and raised his eyebrows. The creases that appeared on his forehead were very sympathetic. But there was something about it that seemed rehearsed. "You've done great work here, boys." I felt my eye twitch at the word boys. We were the guys.

"Really great work," Libby seconded and now I could see she was crying, wiping the tears with her knuckle, careful not to smear her mascara.

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then an explosion of laughter from the Writers Room down the hall. I half-smiled at the incongruity.

"But the show is going to air, right?" Tom half-asked/half-pleaded.

The look that passed between Cliff and Libby gave us our answer. "We're still working out the schedule," Libby said, "but maybe in the summer?" That was no consolation. Summer was when they burned off their failed projects.

"Did we do something wrong?" Tom asked earnestly. Cliff shook his head.

"Turns out Danny's just not that..." He pursed his lips regretfully.

"Good? Funny? Talented?" Libby suggested. The edge in her voice hinted at a previous argument to which we had not been privy. An argument Cliff now conceded.

"In hindsight," he sighed, "we probably should have just let you do the show you pitched us." This admission was the only vindication we would get. "I'm sorry, kids. You're canceled." Not only was our show dead, we had been demoted all the way down to kids.

Breaking the news to the writers was painful. But the good thing about comedy writers was that they used humor as a coping mechanism and they quickly came up with a hilarious bit called Fuck You, Aaron and Tom, We Don't Work For You Anymore! in which they all told us all the things they supposedly hated about us. All of their grievances had a nugget of truth — my unnecessary bluntness, Tom's obsession with pointless minutiae — but exaggerated to the point of comic absurdity.

Breaking the news to the crew was absolutely excruciating. A hundred good, hardworking people — many with families — who, through no fault of their own, were about to be unemployed a week before Thanksgiving.

Jesus.

As I was the designated heavy in team Rubicon/Gilmore, it was up to me to give them the bad news. I explained that in a few hours, we'd be shooting our final episode. I am sure that some of them knew it was coming — show biz secrets were notoriously porous — but from the chorus of horrified gasps it was clear that most of them were completely blindsided.

"But I thought we had a guaranteed thirteen episodes," Deb, our script supervisor, protested. Deb was six months pregnant.

"So did we," I said with a helpless shrug.

Tom took it from there, telling everyone how great we thought they were and how much we appreciated their fantastic work. He ended with, "God bless you all," which was weird. Not a weird thing to say, but a weird thing for him to say. In all the time I'd known him, he had never said anything remotely religious, before or since. Not at births, weddings, funerals.

Then something truly strange happened: The crew applauded for us. And not in a perfunctory golf-clappy way. It was loud, sustained and sincere. And to me at least, it made no fucking sense. Applauding the people who just told you that you're out of work is like cheering for the oncologist who just diagnosed you with stage four lymphoma.

Yay, Dr. Lapkin! Yay, for telling me I'm about to die! Yay!

But I soon found out why they were so laudatory and it didn't speak well of how TV crews were often treated in Hollywood. One of our cameramen approached me and gave me an absurdly strong hug that popped my vertebrae back into alignment. "Hey, man. Thanks so much!"

"For what?" I asked, confused.

He seemed confused by my confusion. "For being straight with us, man. You guys actually had the decency to tell us the truth."

"What do they normally tell you?"

"Nothing, man! Usually when a show is gonna be shut down, nobody says anything to us. Then we get a call Monday morning saying, 'Don't come in.'"

"That's pretty shitty."

"Yeah, but you guys treated us like real people, man. I mean, I've worked other places where the Executive Producers didn't even bother to learn my name."

"That's awful," I agreed. And then I glanced down at his name tag and hoped he didn't notice.

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Samantha once told me a story about her Uncle Squisho (Samantha's uncles all had weird nicknames like that). At Christmas one year, the family noticed that Uncle Squisho was uncharacteristically quiet. He just sat in his chair, taking in the room, looking around at everyone, studying their faces.

Someone asked if he was all right and Uncle Squisho said that this was his last Christmas and he wanted to take it in. Everyone told Uncle Squisho not to be silly; he was old but he wasn't that old and he surely had plenty more Christmases in him. He died a few months later. I have never seen his headstone, but I'd like to think it says, Told ya.

I felt a lot like Uncle Squisho as we shot the last episode of King of The Jungle. Taking everything thing in. Savoring it.

On the whole, it was a good show. Raucous and twisted and really funny. This one centered around Lisa Lang's character and she was fabulous. It was, Tom and I realized, a little taste of the show we wanted to do in the first place.

Danny, by contrast, had pretty much checked out by that point. All week he had been ornery, his role having been severely pared back and the news of our demise only made him worse. He skipped a rehearsal, refused to take direction from anybody and wouldn't learn his blocking, so we just had him sit in a chair in the middle of the living room set.

He left as soon as he was done with his last scene. He didn't even stay for the curtain call which was interpreted as a bit of a fuck you by cast and crew alike. Especially since we could hear him say, "Screw this!" on his way out and, a little while later, his tires squealing as he fled.

I couldn't defend his lack of professionalism, but I understood where he was coming from. This was his one and only chance to be a bona fide lead and he had blown it. Or maybe, as he was apparently telling people, we had blown it for him. And maybe we had. My only copies of the episodes are on VHS and I don't have a VHS player, so I have no way of knowing for sure.

——————————

After the taping there was an impromptu wrap party on the stage. Somehow, with only a few hours' notice, our people had pulled it all together. A DJ, a bartender, catering, themed decorations. That was another thing about the below-the-line people in Hollywood. They got shit done really fast. Especially if alcohol was involved.

And it very much was. Particularly for Tom and me, who were bombarded by invitations to do tequila shots. I wasn't really a fan of tequila but I didn't want to be rude, either, so I did shots with everyone who offered. Clearly, my mama raised me right.

The mood of the party could only be described as bittersweet. A lot of hugging and crying and reminiscing. Also, a surprising number of people were making out on the makeshift dance floor with people they very much shouldn't have been. The fallout from this would eventually lead to one marriage and one divorce. So, a wash.

At one point, our casting director, Connie, told a story about an encounter she had with an actor who subsequently went on to be one of the male leads on Friends. (I'm not going to tell you which one.) The story involved sex, premature ejaculation, and an angry Connie throwing his clothes out the window and kicking him out of her apartment, naked.

Most of my memories of the party are rather indistinct but I remember that story with tremendous clarity, it being one of my top three recurring nightmares, along with being force-fed cockroaches and having to re-take the SAT's.

I made a mental note to never have sex with Connie. Or the minuteman from Friends, either. I wasn't into men, but if I was, I felt I deserved better.

————————————

Tom and I emerged from the stage at (and here I'm guessing) 1 a.m. We were (and here I'm not guessing) drunk as fuck. Or, as we said at the time, funk as druck. Which, as far as we were concerned, was the funniest thing anyone had come up with ever. We made plans to have funk as druck T-shirts printed, but we never followed through. Which is too bad, because I just noticed that people are selling funk as druck T-shirts for twenty bucks a pop. (The hoodie version goes for forty!) Man, we could have been so rich!

Anyway.

We staggered towards our production office. Tom stopped short and I bumped into him, almost knocking him over.

"Aaron," he said, almost reverentially, and pointed. And then I saw it. It was a noisy, gas-powered golf cart, one of the two that had been assigned to our now-defunct show. It was so beautiful!

We exchanged a look. Which one of us will drive? (To us, the idea of drunk driving around the Universal Studio backlot was so obviously a great idea that we didn't even bother to discuss it.)

We decided to flip a coin, but we didn't have a coin, so we flipped a piece of gravel, but when it hit the ground, we realized we never decided which side was heads and which was tails. Also, we couldn't distinguish the flipped piece of gravel from all the other pieces of gravel lying around.

"I'll drive," Tom said, climbing into the golf cart.

"Shotgun!" I jumped in next to him and the cart creaked under my weight. The engine sputtered, then caught, and we were off. As I've mentioned, Tom was always an aggressive driver, and if I thought that the combination of exceedingly weak headlights and a blood-alcohol hovering around Winston Churchill levels was going to make him more cautious, I was very much mistaken.

"Look at me!" he shouted gleefully above the engine noise. "I'm drinking and driving!"

"Well, technically," I countered, "you're not." Just because I was wasted didn't mean I wasn't going to start a pointless semantic argument.

Tom took umbrage at this. "I am so drinking and driving!"

"You were drinking earlier. Now you're just driving."

"So you're saying I'm drinking or driving?"

"That's right."

Tom seemed disappointed, but then I remembered my flask. (Pro tip, kids: It's always a good idea to have vodka in your flask, because vodka is compatible with everything. The more you know...)

I unscrewed the top and handed it to Tom. His face lit up and he took a swig. "Look at me! I'm drinking and driving!" Then he turned to me. "Thanks, buddy!"

"Got your back, pal!" Then my eyes went wide and I screamed, "Watch out!"

Watch out!, by the way, is one of the least helpful things you can yell at a driver; heavy on panic but light on actionable intelligence. To help clear up Tom's confusion I then screamed, "Stop!"

Tom braked hard. I lurched forward, hitting my head forehead on the dash. The next day there would be a big black-purple bruise that looked like I had gone to mass on Ash Wednesday, but in the moment it didn't hurt at all. We came to a stop inches a way from a parked green-and-brown roadster. It took us a few moments to realize that we were in Whoville, one of the attractions on the Universal Studios tram tour. The Seussian architecture was whimsical during the day, but at night it cast cockeyed shadows that were sinister and disorienting.

Tom honked the horn and comically shook his fist at the roadster and its invisible driver. "Fuck you, ya stupid Who!"

"Um... maybe I should drive," I suggested.

"That would probably be for the best," Tom agreed.

We switched places, although it's unclear in hindsight why this was necessarily an improvement, given that I was just as hammered as Tom, if not more so. "Where to?"

"Jaws!" Tom said emphatically. This was another stop on the tram tour, where tourists watched as a laughably fake-looking great white shark — even faker than the one in the film, if you can imagine — committed fake-looking acts of animatronic mayhem. It was very popular.

"You got it!" Off we went again, this time quoting lines from Jaws. We did a passable version of Quint's monologue — And the thing about a shark is he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. — and a spirited, but awful, version of "Show Me The Way To Go Home."

The song actually worked on two levels, first because it was from the movie and second because we were totally lost. I had driven past the Psycho house four or five times. I couldn't understand it. I kept trying what seemed like different roads, I'd keep following what seemed like the appropriate signs, but I kept winding up back at Casa de Bates. Shit!

Eventually, we found ourselves on Colonial Street, a cul-de-sac of residential facades that had been used, and reused, in countless classic films and TV shows. Leave It To Beaver, The Munsters, Dragnet.

We had shot a few scenes here ourselves for King of the Jungle, including one of our favorites in which Rex enlisted his reluctant kids to help steal a grouchy neighbor's lottery tickets. There were stunt men! And women! And stunts! It was so fucking cool!

The memory of that first made me smile, then brought me crashing down to earth. I turned off the engine and stretched. Then I rested my feet on the steering wheel.

"I can't believe this," I said.

Tom was silent for a long time and then he simply said, "I know." After that, we retreated into our own thoughts. Tom's face registered devastation; a man wandering uncomprehending through the smoldering ashes after his house had been burned to the ground.

What I felt more than anything, I think, was betrayal. It wasn't that I was betrayed by anybody specific or, really, anybody at all. Even the decisions foist upon us — and there were many — were intended to help us succeed.

No, the betrayal I felt was more fundamental than that. For much of my life, I had been criminally lazy. Even when I did well, it was always considering (i.e. "I got a good grade on that book report considering I didn't read it" or "I'm in pretty good shape considering I'm Jewish"). But I truly believed that when the time came that I fully committed to something — when I would give that mathematically ridiculous 110% that world class athletes were always blathering on about — I would doubtless prevail. That was the implicit pact I had made with with the universe. But now, I'd actually given every ounce of effort I had and it turned out that wasn't enough. The universe, it seemed, was a lying bitch.

I started the engine again and we headed off. We figured we'd give the Jaws thing one more shot before we gave up. We tried what we thought was a new route, which seemed very promising up to the point where we passed the Psycho house yet again. What the fuck?

And then we became aware of flashing lights. We couldn't quite figure out where they were coming from until Tom turned around and saw that it was a Security golf cart. We burst out laughing. It was like we were being pursued by a clown car.

Tom and I had a brief debate about whether or not I should try to lose him. Specifically:

Aaron, try to lose him!

No!

The unamused security guard got out of his cart. He was short and solidly built with a Marine haircut. He had been, we assumed, a pit bull in a previous life. Normally, we might have found him intimidating, but we were on a backlot, not public streets, and he was a rent-a-cop, not a policeman, so there was very little he could do to us.

"Hi!" Tom said, smiling "Could you tell us how to get to the Jaws ride?"

"Have we been drinking?" he asked dryly.

"Well, I can't speak for you," Tom said, "but I'm funk as druck."

"Trademark Rubicon/Gilmore," I added.

The security guard actually laughed at that.

"You two are funny."

"Of course," I said, "we used to be comedy writers."