September, 2011

In my life, I had not been privy to many secrets. Not because people feared I would betray their confidence, but because they feared I would judge them harshly. I wouldn't have, but given the hypercritical persona I had created for myself — for instance, if you used the word majority when you really meant plurality I would be all over your ass — I can understand why they thought that. As a result any furtive information that came my way tended to be third- or fourth-hand and I was like the guy who didn't get around to watching The Sixth Sense until it came out on video.

Hey, guys! Can you believe that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time?

Yes, Aaron. And also Rosebud was a sled, the Planet of the Apes was really Earth and Soylent Green was people. Thanks for the news flash, Rip Van Winkle.

(I am a firm believer that you don't have to say spoiler alert for movies that have been out for decades.)

But this time it was different. I knew Tom's secret long before just about anybody. And it wasn't just a secret, it was a huge secret, a powerful secret, a secret that breathed fire and knocked down skyscrapers in downtown Tokyo. A secret that once unleashed could destroy everything.

And what I came to discover was that once Tom let me in on his secret, and the endless lies that accompanied it — lies of self-protection, lies of necessity, lies of habit — not only did his secret become my secret, but his lies became my lies, too. When my friends casually inquired about how Tom was doing, I lied. When co-workers asked me why, in the credits, he was suddenly T.J. Gilmore, rather than Thomas Gilmore as he had been for the past twenty years, I lied. When asked about Tom's bouts of moodiness, I lied. And later, when Tom's physical changes became more noticeable — particularly the weight gain and what some people uncharitably described as "man boobs" (which were really proto-lady boobs, the product of estrogen therapy) — I lied my fucking ass off.

In a sense Tom had not really come out to me; he had, to use LGBT activist Dan Savage's terminology, pulled me into the closet with him. And it was suffocating.

I was not, as was previously established, the friendliest guy on the planet, but I tended to be forthcoming with my personal information. Sometimes too forthcoming — for instance, it turned out that not everyone wanted to hear the story of my vasectomy (in short: a public restroom, a stall with a broken lock, a very surprised very old man walking in on me at a very inopportune moment) — but I enjoyed the simplicity of candor.

During my stint in Tom's vestiary I started to understand why he had a tendency to be emotionally walled off. Because the more he revealed of herself, the more he risked people figuring out his secret. Knowing that I too had the potential to divulge Tom's secret, I did my best to keep my lies as uncomplicated and vague as I could. I desperately wanted to tell people, to let them share my burden, but I was also determined to make sure that when Tom did come out, it would be on her terms.

So, I lied.

Of course what Tom was experiencing made my difficulties pale in comparison. More than ever, Tom was leading a double life. She now spent a fair amount of time dressed as a woman: When she went to see her therapist, or visited a trans-friendly bar or, increasingly, simply out in public in parts of the city where she was unlikely to be recognized (and there were some close calls; it's amazing how often you can randomly run into someone you know in a city of four million people). The rest of the time — when she was at the office or with her kids or with me, she was dressed like a man.

As a result, she was constantly switching back and forth, Mrs. Doubtfire style, changing in the car at a red light, applying lipstick (or wiping it off) with the aid of a visor mirror, double-checking in the parking lot to make certain that her current footwear was gender-appropriate. It had to be tremendously draining. Not just the endless quick changes, but even the simplest questions were fraught with peril.

What did you do last night?

Why were you late to work?

Would you like fries with that?

Any one of them — except probably that last one (although you never know) — could have become the pulled thread that unraveled the angora sweater.

How Tom — how anyone — could juggle all that, I truly don't know. What I do know is that, given their ability to quickly and convincingly switch their identities, the CIA should definitely look into hiring formerly closeted members of the LGBT community as covert operatives. Or, if not that, maybe fashion consultants.

Queer Eye for The Straight Spy.

(Apologies. I just couldn't stop myself.)

Unlike my friend, I wasn't leading anything resembling a double life, but I did experience my own kind of bifurcation. Because what I knew about Tom/Tamara was determined by whether or not someone else was around. If it was just Tom and me I was Aaron Who Knew; but as soon as someone knocked on our office door, I became Aaron Who Didn't. The stress of which turned me into Aaron Who Drank.

The one piece of consistency I had was that I never referred to Tom as Tamara (or, perhaps more accurately, I always referred to Tamara as Tom). This caused my writing partner some understandable consternation. She had very much wanted me to use her new name, but as I explained to her, I was very worried about making a devastating public slip, unwittingly calling her Tamara in a meeting or in The Room. But I couldn't possibly call her Tamara by accident, I reasoned, if I never called her Tamara at all.

She accepted in good faith my logic, but if I'm being totally candid, that wasn't the real reason. The real reason I didn't call her Tamara was that I didn't want to. No, it was more than that. I couldn't. I tried, but the word stuck in my throat. It made no sense, applying that name to the person I knew as Tom.

OK, imagine that one day your best friend in the world says, in all earnestness, "From now on, I'd like you to call me Crunchberry Razorscooter." It would would be pretty tough to call them that, right? Even if you knew it was important to your friend. Even if you thought Crunchberry Razorscooter was a great name. Which it is. I'd happily adopt another child just to give that name to him. Or her. One of the great things about Crunchberry Razorscooter is that it works for either gender.

Look, I'm not trying to be glib or trivialize Tom's momentous life change. I understood that what Tom was doing was all for the best and I had vowed that I would support her wherever I could (which I did) and defend her if it ever became necessary (which it did). As I told my kids ad nauseam, you should do the right thing even if no one thanks you for it. (Although in fairness, Tom did thank me for it. She was very appreciative of my efforts, as well as extraordinarily patient with my learning curve.) But at this point in time, Tom was transitioning, but she hadn't transitioned. She had spent more and more time as Tamara, but I had yet to see her that way. And I held out hope — an embarrassing, childish, selfish hope — that Tom would change his mind and everything would go back to normal. He didn't, and she shouldn't have, and I'm glad that I kept that particular foolishness to myself.

Naturally, there were some very funny moments — how could there not be? — when someone would say something in jest that, unbeknownst to them, was incredibly prescient. For instance, during a thumbnail review (which was where we saw the early drawings that would eventually become storyboards) the artist made a joke about Tom wearing an evening gown, which made our Executive In Charge, Brandon, burst out laughing.

"Can you imagine that?" he said hoarsely. "It's such a funny image!"

I smiled smugly to myself, feeling like a time traveler from the future. Oh, Brandon, I thought. Dear sweet innocent massively overweight Brandon. You have no idea what lies ahead.

Mostly, though, dealing with Tom during that period was weird. Weird because of the way things were changing, but also weird because of the way things stayed the same. We could be talking about whatever — politics or movies or the show — and it would feel like any other conversation we had over the decades — but other times...

OK. So there was an argument that Tom and I had had dozens if not hundreds of times in our career, where creative disagreements would spiral out of control and turn into a screaming match. It always began the same way: One of us (it could be either of us, but for the sake of this example let's say me) would be dismissive of the other's idea_, rejecting it too quickly or too derisively.

The other one (in this case Tom) would take offense and complain about my sneering tone.

I would accuse Tom of hypocrisy, since just moments earlier Tom had used the exact same tone that he was now accusing me of using! But he didn't hear me whining about it, did he? No, he most assuredly did not!

Soon, we couldn't even remember what our creative disagreement had been about, we were too busy lobbing unrelated recriminations, old and new, at each other. And then the screaming and cursing would commence.

Once, this happened when we were on an airplane, working on a laptop, rewriting the doomed Lies R Us script on the way to a table read in Vancouver. That dispute went to DefCon one, with us shouting obscenities at each other — which must have been such a joy to our fellow passengers — and then we discovered that the big drawback to fighting on an airplane was that there was nowhere to go — we couldn't exactly storm out at forty thousand feet, could we? — so all we could do was turn away from each other, fold our arms belligerently over our chests, and spend the next three hours trying to kill each other with our thoughts.

But no matter how (or where) the fight started, sooner or later it always ended the same way, with apologies about unnecessarily harsh tones, admissions that we were both to blame for the fight, and with promises to make more of an effort to listen to what the other one was saying in the future.

It had been months since we last had that argument, but one night when Tom and I had to stay late to fix a script that we had ill-advisedly agreed to let Brie write (great person, terrible writer) we had it again. Now, I'm not saying I was excited to be fighting with Tom or that I was enjoying the mutual enmity, but after the months of awkward eggshell-walking there was something reassuringly familiar about having an unrestrained, unselfconscious knockdown drag-out. We were being us as I understood us.

The argument was wending its way down its well-trodden path, approaching its predictable climax. Tom shouted, "Fuck you, Aaron!" and I shouted "No, fuck you, Tom!" and then... Tom burst into tears.

"Jesus fucking Christ," I mumbled under my breath.

I was not prepared for this. With Tom openly weeping, the argument was clearly over, but my nervous system was still in combat mode, my whole body vibrating with adrenaline. I clasped my hands together to keep them from shaking.

"You OK?" I asked. It was meant to sound sympathetic, but I think it came out as exasperation.

"I'm sorry," Tom said, turning away and fanning herself with her hand like an antebellum Southern Belle with the vapors. "It's the hormones. You know?"

Oh, yes. I knew.

At that point in time, it seemed that hormones ruled my life. I had not one, but two daughters in the throes of adolescence. And a perimenopausal wife. (Plus, my dog Cookie was acting even nuttier than she usually did, which as far as I was concerned was probably hormones, too.) So I was very much acquainted with the mercuriality, the door-slamming anger, the inexplicable sadness, the explosions of joy, the smothering clinginess and brittle standoffishness of hormonal women. This was something that I had been expecting from my wife and daughters — although maybe not all at the same time — but from Tom? I did not sign up for that.

And that's when it hit me: All of the significant relationships — and all the important friendships — in my life were with women. In fact, with the (very important) exception of my father, I had no meaningful connections with men at all. I had colleagues with whom I could exchange quips, private school dads with whom I could exchange pleasantries, and former classmates on Facebook with whom I could exchange greetings — "Great to hear from you!" "Great to hear from you, too!" — and then, generally, never communicate with again.

I had completely lost touch with all my groomsmen. Ivan, The World's Strongest Jew was the first to go. It was almost fifteen years earlier, when I called him to give him the good news that Tom and I had sold our first film script, The Guy Who Sucks At Everything.

"That's great, boychik!" he said exuberantly. I thanked him for his congratulations and, also, the moral support he had given me during the Dark Times.

"So how much did they pay for your script?" he asked with traditional Israeli tactlessness.

"I'd rather not say," I demurred.

"Come on. Ten thousand? Twenty?" He waited a beat and then asked, almost nervously, "Twenty-five?"

I kept deflecting but he finally wore me down and I told him the number (suffice it to say it was a lot higher than he was expecting). There was a long silence and finally he said, "Mazel Tov," in a flat tone and hung up. I never heard from him again.

I communicated sporadically with Dungeon Master Eric, but eventually cut the cord because, well, he was almost forty and he still went by the title Dungeon Master Eric.

More recently, my stupid criminal cousin Joe tried to rob a convenience store in Tallahassee and was shot dead by the store clerk. (Floridians, man. They do not fuck around.) Joe and I didn't talk much after that.

Now my Best Man — and only real male friend I had in the world — was joining the other side.

It was interesting. For months, I had felt off-balance, unsure, adrift, and several other synonyms. And at first this new realization seemed like it would only compound the problem. Another question mark tacked onto the run-on sentence that had somehow become my life. But my confusion soon yielded to a moment of glorious insight as this amorphous deficiency, this elusive need, finally took shape. I knew what was missing from my life. And I knew what I needed.

Guy friends.

Masculine energy.

Man shit.