Sooner or later, every meeting we had turned to the subject of transgender. If we were meeting with someone we already knew, they would bring it up, gushing about how amazing Tammy looked. And I would hold my hands out, palm up in a faux wounded What about me? gesture and they'd laugh and assure me that I looked amazing, too. Which I obviously did not.

If it was someone we didn't know, Tammy would inevitably find a way to work transgender into the conversation. Sometimes, she just wanted to be the center of attention; other times it was strategic, like when, for instance we were meeting on a project that had LGBT overtones. Or a project that involved superheroes or aliens or parenting or thrift stores or animated rabbits or, in one particularly impressive display of conversational contortionism, the undead.

I guess what I'm saying is that Tammy really, really liked the spotlight.

In fairness to my writing partner, people were legitimately fascinated by the subject, some of them luridly so. A surprising number wanted to know if, now that Tom was Tammy, we had thought about banging each other. (That would be no.) Others, even more brazenly, would ask questions about how one goes about designing one's own vagina. Because, you see, when you decide to have gender confirmation surgery, it's up to you do decide what it looks like. And I could not help wonder if there were standard models to choose from.

Welcome to Vaginas 4 Less! Is there any particular vagina that I can help you find today?

Do you have any Susy Galas in stock?

What size?

Medium.

I'll check.

Gay men loved to compare coming-out stories with Tammy. The takeaway for me was that the emotions are very similar — the confusion, the fear — and both require a good deal of body waxing, but only transgender necessitates a whole new wardrobe. (Clearly, transgender was the most expensive item on the LGBT+ menu. The least expensive, by the way: Asexual, because there is really no reason to dress up when you're not interested in getting laid.)

A few executives, all of them women, found our unconventional friendship very touching. One executive was so moved by our personal story that not only did she tear up, but insisted on hugging us both which she did for an uncomfortably long time.

She didn't actually hire us, though. But then again, nobody else did, either.

Tammy and I had hit a massive slump, by far the worst in our career. If you watch baseball — which as you know, I emphatically don't, but I've picked up some insight from the babbling of sports-loving private school fathers — you've seen this happen to even the best hitters. They were knocking it out of the park for months, or even years, and suddenly they just... weren't hitting. And the truly maddening thing was that, as far as they could tell, they were doing everything the same as they always had. So they changed their swing, which made it even worse, in part because it felt unnatural and in part because they didn't know exactly what they were trying to fix.

That's where we were. After the Emmys we took a few weeks off and then came roaring back to work, turning out a film spec which we loved. The working title was Fat Fuck From The Future. It was about a loser a million years in the future who steals a time machine and travels to the past (our present) because he believes he'll be worshipped like a god, but because he knows nothing about history or science, and also was a big fat idiot, he winds up being a loser in our time, too. As we did with our previous film specs, we laughed our asses off writing it. It had all the hard-hitting hilarity and absurdity that had always worked so well for us, but the collective reaction from the film community was basically a shrug. Honestly, we would have rather had everyone hate it than to simply dismiss it.

So we turned our efforts to a TV pilot spec called Cellmates which was about a white collar criminal (think Kelsey Grammar) and a blue collar criminal (think Chris Rock) who were cellmates in jail and wind up being roommates on the outside, where they realize that their combined talents could lead to a huge score. We thought it was hilarious and a lot of other people did, too. But the consensus was that it was — I shit you not — too funny. Today's audience, we were told, didn't want to be hit over the head with comedy, they wanted more subtle humor and smarter writing that would provoke an appreciative nod rather than an actual laugh.

(You can file that under: Fuck, What The.)

So we changed our swing. We wrote another spec, this one set at a fictional liberal arts college in the northeast called Ellison College about a decidedly illiberal Pulitzer Prize-winning author who returns to his alma mater to teach literature to a bunch of entitled Millennials he can't stand. It was called Trigger Warning and writing it was really strange. See, usually we spent a lot of time punching up our jokes, but now with our new mandate we were punching them down. Which made for some really surreal arguments.

I still think the joke is too funny.

You're out of your mind. If anything, it's the exact right amount of sorta/kinda amusing-ish.

Well, if it's only sorta amusing-ish, why did you laugh?

It wasn't a laugh, per se. More like an ironic chuckle.

Yeah, keep telling yourself that.

In the end, we achieved what we were going for. The consensus was that this was subtle, smart writing, but — you know where this is going, right? — they expected a Rubicon/Gilmore script to be a lot funnier.

After that, honestly, we kind of fell apart. We were constantly second-guessing ourselves and each other and it showed on the page, in the rare instances we actually wrote a page. It's not that we were slacking off, but we were now so dispirited and so sick of staring at each other week after week — choking on the dust at the bottom of a well run dry — that we mostly just argued with each other for a few hours and called it a day. There just didn't seem to be any point.

Meanwhile, our indefatigable agent, Danny, was still doing everything he could to get us on a writing staff, but that was problematic, too. For starters, we hadn't worked in primetime comedy for years and we knew shockingly few of the major players and literally none of the young up-and-comers who had ascended to prominence in our absence. Sometimes they would meet with us on the strength of our writing — writing that was a decade old or more (Danny had cagily taken all the dates off the scripts before he sent them out) — but they invariably hired people they already knew. Which made perfect sense, by the way. Every hire is a risk, and the less you know about them, the riskier they are. So of course they preferred to go with a known quantity instead of rolling the dice on us.

But it was actually worse than that, because we weren't really as unknown a quantity as we thought. Because Lillian — remember Lillian? She was the one who outed Tammy for no other reason than she thought it would be entertaining? — was one of the most connected comedy writers in Hollywood we discovered that she had been taking great delight in bad-mouthing us all over town. This, I gather, was her payback for... well, honestly, I never understood what it was payback for. We had been mad at her for callously sending a mass email outing Tammy. I am not sure why she was mad at us, but somehow she had convinced herself that she was the injured party. I guess everyone is the hero of their own story.

So Danny — who, God love him — refused to give up on us — decided to mix things up even more. Yes, he'd still send us out for whatever half-hour sitcoms that he could, but he also wanted us to meet in other genres, like one-hour light dramas, horror/comedies, quirky science fiction, that sort of thing. He had to really thread the needle to find written material of ours that even tangentially related to the shows he was putting us up for, but at least we were in a realm where Lillian held no sway.

If nothing else, it was a nice change of pace to not get hired in different genres than we were used to. Which is not to say that they didn't like us. They fucking loved us. They weren't used to spending time with comedy writers and they just couldn't get over how hilarious we were. But hilarity was not a particularly valued commodity in drama. Hell, at that point in time, hilarity wasn't even a particularly valued in comedy.

And of course, sooner or later, Tammy would hijack the conversation and we'd be talking about transgender yet again. It was wearisome. Yes, I understood that Tammy felt obligated to act as sort of an goodwill ambassador, demystifying and humanizing the trans experience, and that was all for the good... but come on! Can't we, just once, get through a meeting without spending twenty minutes on Tammy's miraculous transformation?

No. No we could not. So I sat through meeting after meeting, listening to Tammy tell the same coming-out story, faceless executives asking the same cringingly invasive questions and Tammy offering up the same cringingly frank answers.

But then one day, Tammy went off script.

It was at a meeting about a staff job on a one-hour period drama about Cuban émigrés employing magical realism. (You know, our sweet spot.) Tammy had somehow managed to compare the flight from Castro's murderous regime to — what else? — being transgender.

Pirro, the boyishly handsome first-time show runner, took the bait and began peppering Tammy with questions while I cracked open a complimentary bottled water and turned my attention to the Spanish versions of American movie posters hanging on the office walls. La Guerra de las Galaxias (Star Wars), Solo en Casa (Home Alone), Yo, Robot (I, Robot). That sort of thing.

I was dimly aware of Pirro asking Tammy, "Are you attracted to men? Women?" This was a question a lot of people asked, and I was expecting Tammy's usual reply about how she had been a lesbian in a man's body and was now just a plain old lesbian. But this time she said something else entirely.

"I'm exploring the idea of men."

I choked on my bottled water.

"Are you OK?" Pirro asked me, concerned. Coughing, I gave a thumbs-up and he turned his attention back to Tammy. "Exploring the idea how?"

"Well, I never thought I was attracted to men... but now I wonder if maybe... I am."

To me, this was a really odd thing to say. After all, gay people were constantly saying that they just knew that they were attracted to people of the same sex. Tammy herself just knew that she was a woman. Gender, orientation, those things, they told us, weren't a choice, they were things we could not control, things that happened to us. Surely, if Tammy had a hankering for man-meat, she would have a pretty good idea by now, wouldn't she?

"Are you dating anyone currently?" Pirro asked, leaning forward now.

Tammy hesitated, flicking a glance my way before turning her attention back to Pirro. "Sorta. I mean... no one in particular."

"Playing the field, eh?" Pirro grinned.

"Something like that."

"So where do you go to meet people?"

"I don't go anywhere. I meet them playing Words With Friends."  For a second time, I choked on my water.

"Seriously?" Pirro asked.

"Yeah. I don't know why, but all of a sudden it's a total meat market. Guys keep asking me for my number." There was something in Pirro's reaction that seemed a bit dubious. " I have a really good profile picture," she explained. That Emmy picture. The gift that keeps on giving.

"Is it weird, dating as a woman when you used to be a man?"

"I mean, sure. It's hard to know how exactly I'm supposed to act. But I look at it this way: I want to be the kind of woman I used to want to date."

Pirro nodded and smiled at Tammy's wisdom. I should have let that alone, but I couldn't help myself.

"Um, I've met the women you dated," I said. "You should aim higher."

Tammy and I didn't talk much as I drove her home, inching over Coldwater Canyon in rush hour traffic. The silence was not unusual. Tammy liked to use this time to catch up on emails and texts and also to play Words With Friends, for reasons I had just learned.

But Tammy, I think, was also little miffed by the way I had burned her ex-wife. I didn't feel bad about it. First of all, what I said about Whitney was true, and second, it served Tammy fucking right blindsiding me for the billionth time. It was galling — not to mention embarrassing — that my best friend had nonchalantly told someone she had just met something that she hadn't bothered to tell me, even though we saw each other five days a week. And actually hadn't bothered didn't really describe it. She had chosen to hide this from me. Same shit, different decade.

This was a vulnerable time for our partnership and our friendship, which at this point were one and the same. We hadn't had paid work in over two years. It was only our sporadic residuals and the trickle of merchandising money from Suit & Tie that was keeping us from having to eat cat food. Creatively, we were out of sync and on each others' nerves. Our output was almost nonexistent, which drove poor Danny nuts. The last thing I needed was something like this, a fresh reminder that my best friend was still hiding things from me, that after all we went through, I wasn't sure I could trust her. I couldn't help but think that — especially now — if she got a better offer, she just might take it and I would be fucked.

I had always said I would never abandon Tammy. I meant it then and I meant it now. But what terrified me was that even after all of my unwavering support, I still wasn't confident that, if push came to shove, she would do the same thing for me. I wasn't being melodramatic, either. A few weeks later, the nightmare scenario would present itself.

And for better or worse, I'd finally get my answer.