I woke up late in the afternoon on Saturday. I was massively hungover (obviously) and emotionally drained, like I had just gone through a bitter breakup the night before. The screaming and recriminations were over, the tears had dried, and all that remained was the hollow pain of love withdrawn.

Samantha had taken the kids to her parents' house for the day so I'd be able to sleep as long as I needed, undisturbed. The girls had a usually adorable weekend ritual of waking us up in the morning by jumping up and down on our bed while shouting, and then we'd all tickle-wrestle until they were exhausted or I took a hard shot to the groin, whichever came first.

I threw on my bathrobe, catching a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror. My hair was absolutely bonkers, one half stuck to my head, the other half unruly curls. I looked like a mental patient. It made me smile.

I wasn't in the mood for breakfast food so I called Pink Dot and ordered an unconscionable amount of fried chicken and candy. Pink Dot was an iconic and now mostly defunct Los Angeles delivery service whose (invariably high) drivers would show up in blue-and-bubblegum Volkswagon Beetles topped with a propeller. The sight of them pulling into my driveway, in and of itself, justified their inflated prices.

Today's delivery guy was named Moses, whose hair looked astonishingly similar to mine. He showed up half an hour late because he had gotten lost on the way to my house. In 2002, most people still did not have GPS, relying instead on a Thomas Guide, which was an encyclopedia-thick collection of street maps (it was essentially an analog version of Google maps, but in book form and without those creepy aerial views that make it look like your house is being targeted for a drone strike.)

"Havin' people over?" he asked, the sweet scent of sativa clinging to his plaid shirt.

"Nope. Just me."

"Dude," he said. "That's awesome!"

And it was awesome. I brought it all into the den, laying it out on the coffee table, arranging the chicken buckets and candy boxes to make a medieval fortress, which I would devour over the next six hours or so. Then I turned on the TV and browsed through my TiVo queue where the entire season of HBO's The Wire had been recorded. I had resisted watching it for no discernible reason, other than everyone told me it was great. I wasn't being contrarian, but I had discovered that when everyone said to me, You know what movie you would love? I'd wind up watching some weird-ass piece of crap — Brazil or Donny Darko or Videodrome or Repo Man or The Big Lebowski or Evil Dead— and marveling, This is what everyone thinks of me?

But everyone really redeemed themselves with this one. Holy shit, people! Have you seen The Wire? If not, shame on you. And if you've only seen it once, shame on you, too (but less). It's a police drama set in Baltimore, written with depth and texture, with vivid characters and dialogue that was literate and completely authentic, and all plotted with effortless precision. I ate my fried chicken, I munched on my candy and (starting around 5:30) I drank my wine and let the whole thing wash over me. I binge-watched (even though that wasn't a term yet) seven episodes before I fell asleep, drunk, on the couch with a Good & Plenty stuck to my face.

It would be disingenuous to force some kind of epiphany on this. You know, something about The Wire showing me the staggering potential of television, thus reigniting my love for the medium which gave me the strength to pick myself up and continue onward. It didn't. But it did make what could have been a horrendously depressing day rather fantastic.

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Over Thanksgiving weekend we got the sad but not entirely surprising news that King of the Jungle would never air at all, not even as filler in the summer. The critics, naturally, took great delight in dancing on our grave. One of them actually wrote that, after The King Of The Jungle debacle, he hoped that we'd never work again. It was a shitty thing to say — Why exactly did this have to become personal? — but it also underscored once again how little critics understood how show biz worked.

Because in reality, not only did Tom and I not never work again, we not never worked non-stop for the next five, very lucrative years. Every single executive involved on that show either hired us, or tried to hire us again, while other executives and producers sought us out for their projects. We sold more pilot scripts — two a year, usually — some of which got produced, none of which, alas, went to air. But the consensus was always that we had done excellent work — we developed an odd reputation for writing the pilot that everyone thought should have been picked up, but scandalously wasn't — which meant that while the Holy Grail of sitcom stardom still eluded us, we had no trouble getting hired again and again.

Most of our time, though, was spent on film. The life of a screenwriter was much more civilized than working on the staff of a TV show. It paid well and the hours for the most part pretty good — we actually got to spend time with our respective children — although we did have to pay for our own lunches and get our own coffee, which was irksome but survivable.

There was a tradeoff, however, and it was this: While television was a writer's medium, film was a director's medium and writers were waaaaaaaaay the down the food chain. Like phytoplankton, but with laptops.

Broadly speaking the difference was this: In television they may have forced you to write stuff you didn't like. In features they just fired you and got someone else to do it. Tom and I made a very nice career out of being that someone else, the ones called in to fix whatever debacle the producers had gotten themselves into with the previous writers. The technical term for what we did was Script Doctor, but we found the term too grandiose and instead referred to ourselves as Script Whores.

In fairness, we weren't the kind of whores who regarded their tricks with cynical detachment, doing as little as possible to get the job done and then going out into the alley to smoke crack; no, we were more like high class escorts, the kind who were willing to kiss on the mouth and could not help but become emotionally invested in their client's long-term happiness. Which, now that I think about it, probably isn't a real thing.

The point is that even on the shittiest of projects, we cared. We believed that we were hired not just for our talent, but our opinions as well, and we were willing to fight (and generally lose) uphill battles in the hopes of making the script as good as it could be, even though, most of time our names would never appear in the credits, which given the quality of most of the films we worked on, was probably for the best.

That said, when you were a screenwriter, getting your name in the credits — even on a bad movie — was a really big deal. Because then you'd get what is known as back end. And no, I'm not extending the ill-conceived whore metaphor from earlier. Back end referred to a payment you got for being a credited writer of a produced film. It was a pretty big chunk of change, enough to buy you plenty of the other kind of back end if you were so inclined.

The process of deciding who got screen credit was determined by the byzantine and arbitrary Writers Guild rules. The first writer always got screen credit and therefore some back end, pretty much no matter what. After that, it was kind of a crapshoot, especially in comedy where, on one project we worked on, there were nineteen participating writers (over the course of five years) on a single script. Four of the writers got onscreen credit, including of course the first writer, who didn't have a word left in the shooting draft.

Tom and I wrote some original stuff too, that was well-regarded and very nearly got produced, but our niche was being the writers who took a project that was on life support, made it good, and got it green-lit. After which, other writers would rewrite us (only to be rewritten by someone else and so on and son on) until whatever finally hit the screen was mediocre at best, dreadful at worst.

Which brings me to my favorite anecdote about screen writing.

OK, before Tom and I sold King of The Jungle, we had been hired to do a rewrite on a film called Lies R Us. It was about two womanizers who start a company that provides alibis for people who are cheating on their significant others. It all goes great until — plot twist! — one of them falls in love.

The producers handed us the previous writer's draft and asked us what we thought. And what we thought was that page one was terrific: Fresh and funny and dark. Everything else was a disaster.

Our agent made the deal, Tom and I did our thing and when we finished, the script was heralded as one of the best comedy scripts in town and soon it was green-lit under the auspices of an A-list comedy director. A win!

Tom and I headed off to do our show — we all know how that turned out — and not too long after cancellation, we got a call from an executive with the movie studio named Del, a charismatic young guy bursting with ideas, telling us that Lies R Us was shooting in a few months. It had been rewritten a few times since we left and they felt that the script had lost its way. They wanted to know if we were interested in rewriting the writer who rewrote the writer who rewrote the writer who rewrote us.

"We could really use your voice," Del explained.

So he sent us the script. Reading it was like a fever dream, a nightmarish alternate universe where things looked vaguely familiar, but wrong. So very wrong. Tom and I passed.

Thank you, but we don't understand this movie anymore.

OK, but what if we pay you even more money?

How much money?

He tossed out a figure.

OK, we understand it a little.

So we took the gig. From a creative point of view, the experience was as bad as it could be, with Del and his cohorts shoving one bad idea after another down our throats. Eventually we surrendered and gave him what he wanted. The result was an epic flop. An epic flop that, by the way, had our names on it.

Determined to make something positive come out of that hellish experience, Samantha and I used my back end money to fund college savings accounts for both of our daughters.

Fast forward to a few years later. Del had brought us in on another project that needed saving. He was once again giving us notes, which we once-again disagreed with.

"Let me ask you something," I said, a friendly tone masking my exasperation. "Aren't you the guy who gave us all those notes on Lies R Us?"

"Yeah," he replied, amused by the directness of my question. "Now let me ask you something: Did you make enough off that movie to put your kids through college?"

"Yeah," I admitted. "Yeah, it did."

"Then shut up."

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July 4, 2006

While the Rubicon/Gilmore juggernaut was continuing apace, Tom and The Destroyer's marriage was going through tremendous upheaval. And yes, I know what you're thinking: When weren't they going through tremendous upheaval? (Ha-ha! Good one! I look forward to your comedy special on HBO!) But this was something different; they were truly on the brink. They rarely saw their marriage counselor anymore, but they couldn't quite bring themselves to quit. Legal forms had been acquired, but they couldn't quite bring themselves to fill them out. Lawyers had been contacted, but they couldn't quite bring themselves to hire one. Clearly they were on the precipice.

But then they did something I did not expect. They decided to do a major renovation on their house. One that would take nine months to complete and cost a boatload of money (which meant eighteen months and two boatloads, because everything always took at least twice as long, and cost twice as much, as the contractor originally estimated).

When they were finished, Tom and The Destroyer threw what was presumably a Fourth of July party, although I couldn't help but notice that there was a complete absence of red-white-and-blue decorations, no doubt because they would have clashed with the design aesthetic they had painstakingly crafted over the the previous year-and-a-half. They did, however, have hot dogs. And they were delicious.

It must be said that Tom and The Destroyer had done a magnificent job. By which I mean that for guests, saying that — or words to that effect — was quite literally a must. Not that people needed any particular coaxing, least of all Samantha who kept up with all the latest architectural trends and pronounced it supremely voguish. Open concept, granite island, stainless steel appliances, glass tile backsplash, exposed beams, master suite, spa bathrooms, waterfall faucets, bamboo floors. Tom and the Destroyer checked every box.

But I was underwhelmed. Not because I didn't think it was a fabulous house, because it unquestionably was; exponentially more sophisticated than the one Samantha and I had recently purchased. Tom and the Destroyer's house had style while ours had character, which was what real estate agents called a property when it was old and falling apart and, in our case, lousy with hidden fire and water damage that our house inspector somehow missed entirely.

(Never hire your real estate agent's brother-in-law as your house inspector. That's some free advice from me to you.)

On the other hand, we did have a big yard (by Los Angeles standards) and a beautiful English garden that would eventually be annihilated by a punishing drought and our dog, Cookie, the sworn enemy of flora, curtains, squirrels and sanity.

It also had a guest house which I thought was super-cool even though we almost never used it for anything except to store the boxes that we hadn't gotten around to unpacking yet. Samantha joked that the spare house would eventually come in handy when we got divorced and I needed a convenient place to live.

In any case, the reason I wasn't particularly impressed with Tom's house was that I had kids in private school which meant I had been to countless parent-hosted functions and I had seen this stuff many, many times before. The stylistic consensus of the wealthy.

By the way, if you ever want to feel really bad about yourself, spend some time with L.A. private school parents. I mean, I was doing pretty well at the time yet I felt like a colossal failure because I didn't have a trophy case full of Academy Awards and I hadn't taken my kids to Europe (or even Maui, for God's sake!) and I just had a forty-inch TV and not a professional-grade theater with four rows of stadium seating and a vintage popcorn maker.

The other reason I was being sort of curmudgeon at Tom's Fourth of July "Everybody Tell Me How Great My House Is!" Party was that I thought the whole endeavor was lunacy, and I had told him that, in those words, when he first brought up the subject.

It may have seemed like lunacy to me, but it made perfect sense to Tom. Before the reno, he and The Destroyer had barely been on speaking terms, but this undertaking united them in common purpose, making decisions about knob style versus cup style cabinet pulls, antique bronze versus brushed nickel hinges, all the little details that would have made me want to slit my own throat, but they seemed to care deeply about.

It did not, I can attest, put a stop to their arguments, or even dampen their ferocity, but it did provide them with a marital adhesive as they forged a shared vision, and by implication a shared life. It was destined to fail, but still, it bought Tom eighteen more months of normalcy, eighteen more months with the woman he loved. For him, I am sure, worth every penny.

Especially because it led to this moment. The sun had set and fireworks were scheduled to begin. Tom and The Destroyer were standing together as we heard the muffled whumph! of fireworks being launched. They gazed up in unison as the fireworks cleared the treetops, their joyful reflections undulating in the swimming pool, framed by a rippling halo of exploding pyrotechnics of every conceivable color, her arm now around his waist, his face buried in her hair as he kissed her cheek. To the assembled guests, this was one of the most romantic moments they'd ever witness; the happy ending of the world's sappiest chick flick.

Unsurprisingly, I had a different view. Perhaps this is a myth, but years ago I heard something interesting about women who hired hit-men to kill their husbands. Apparently, the wife, knowing that her husband's end was near, would suddenly become a lot friendlier and loving towards him. All the things that drove her to this moment became tolerable with the knowledge that they wouldn't need to be tolerated much longer. That's all I could think of watching that saccharine tableau.

The Destroyer had not, of course, made any plans to kill Tom, but a few days later she finally filled out those long-neglected court forms and filed for separation, and hired a lawyer, putting a bullet in the back of their marriage's skull.

Thank God.

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Tom bought another, much smaller house that had even more character than mine did. Objectively, it was fine, a charming and eminently livable space that would feel a lot more homey in the coming weeks when he hung some art and got real furniture, rather than the mismatched castoffs from his former abode.

But compared to the house he had just left it felt like he was moving into a Soviet-era gulag. A gulag in a good school district and in walking distance from not one, but two Starbucks, but still, a gulag. It was dark and musty, with dirty windows and the scent of death which filled your nostrils.

(That, by the way, turned out to be a possum who died in the crawl space under the house.)

I didn't help Tom with his move. It wasn't a slight; I had made a promise to myself when I turned thirty that I would never, ever help anyone move again because fuck that shit (Tom understood, having made the same pact himself). But I did bring a pizza and some beer for dinner on moving day, which were served on an old card table, surrounded by four beach chairs from Target that Samantha and I had loaned him with the explicit understanding that we would get them back.

Tom and I conspicuously avoided discussing his current situation, instead talking shop. The trials and tribulations of our current projects. The stupidity of executives that we had to endure. Our disbelief in some of the absolute crap the networks had picked up for the fall season when our pilot was clearly so much better. The usual.

We soon ran out of conversation and lapsed into silence. And then we heard it: The aggravating sound of water dripping in the kitchen sink. Tom's eyelid twitched and he rubbed his eye to make it stop. "God damn it," he said under his breath. "God fucking damn it."

I couldn't help but ask. "So out of curiosity... why does Whitney get the good house?"

"She deserves it," Tom said.

I stared at him like he had three heads, each more grotesque than the last. "Why?"

"For putting up with me."

I now know what Tom was referring to — and maybe he was right — but at the time I just shook my head at Tom's self-loathing and let the matter drop. It was all so utterly depressing.

But it was also, I now realize, a crucial turning point. The Destroyer hadn't just taken Tom's house, she had completely shattered his illusions. Tom had always been willing to cling to even the tiniest sliver of hope that he could have his old life back. But now, that hope was irrefutably gone. Tom's world was destroyed, reduced to ashes. He was at the beginning of an arduous and sometimes terrifying journey, but out of those ashes, she would rise.

She would not, however, return our beach chairs.

Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

But still.

Annoying.