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mrb-neiu-102 · 6 years

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Week 4 - Marc Maron - The First Marriage

I guess we can start at the end but it’s really the middle. Let’s just call it the really bad part. My second wife, Mishna, brought it to my attention that I had an anger problem. She didn’t say it like that. What she said was, “I’m leaving.”

Then she took her vagina and left.

I had it coming, I guess. I knew from the start that all I was doing was trying to hold on to her because she gave my life purpose and she was fucking stunning. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a person. Maybe if I had just relaxed, trusted myself, trusted her, didn’t freak out, everything would have been okay, but I am not capable of doing any of those things. We were fighting the odds from the beginning. When I met her I was a miserable drunk and she was just a kid. I was also married.

***

My first wife, Kim, was a nice woman. I loved her. I shouldn’t have married her. I did it because I didn’t know how to break up with her. I was too scared. It was too comfortable. She was a bit naive. I was a bit out of my mind. I thought that’s what marriage was rooted in: fear, comfort, and lies. The triumvirate. I had grown to believe that I would never be happy but if I at least were married I could rest my chaos on a firm emotional mattress, that marriage would make things okay, normal-ish. They weren’t. I felt like I was drowning in my bed.

I understood exactly what I was getting into with my first marriage. It was 1995. I was a thirty-two-year-old comic. When I met her, six years before we got married, I was just starting out. Comedians in their infancy are generally selfish, irresponsible, emotionally retarded, morally dubious, substance-addicted animals who live out of boxes and milk crates. They are plagued with feelings of failure and fraudulence. They are prone to fleeting fits of manic grandiosity and are completely dependent on the acceptance and approval of rooms full of strangers, strangers the comedian resents until he feels sufficiently loved and embraced.

Perhaps I am only speaking for myself here.

I was looking for something that would make sense of things. I didn’t know what. It was vague to me. I had an itchy soul.

My brother was getting married. He asked me to be the best man. I was all fucked-up on drugs at the time. I go to the wedding and it’s a big Jewish event. We’re all under the chuppah. My brother’s marrying this woman. She’s got a hot Jewish maid of honor who is giving me some heat. I’m looking at the bride-to-be through the haze of a cocaine and booze hangover and thinking to myself, “If she’s going to take my brother, I’m going to take her friend.” That’s sort of like love at first sight.

So I charmed her friend, aggressively. Fortunately for me, she lived in the same city, Boston. So within a few weeks, I’d moved my boxes into her apartment and terrorized her into loving me, sweetly. I was the black sheep, the brother failing rehab who had hung his hopes on a dream of show business, and was nothing but fucking trouble. Somehow, she found all of that very appealing. I was her ticket out of middle-class Jeweyness. She was my ticket back in.

I was with her for about six years before I asked her to marry me, which only means one thing: I shouldn’t have done it! If you wait six years to get engaged, you are on the fence. I should have known that. I should have known when I bought her a ring and proposed to her in front of the Phoenix airport. She got off a plane, she got in the car, I took out the ring, I said, “So you wanna break up or do this?” I’m paraphrasing, but it was something like that. And she agreed to marry me.

From the minute I got engaged to that woman I knew I shouldn’t have done it. I was not stable, I loved her but was not really in love with her, I was not a good man. I was just looking for something that would make me normal; make everything make sense. I figured: bourgeois, middle class, Jews. That should do it. Her dad was a psychiatrist. In retrospect he must not have been a very good one. I mean, he let her marry me. How did he misread the signs so badly? Or maybe I’m that good an actor.

As soon as I put that ring on her finger a switch was thrown. Rooms were being rented, bakers called, invitations sent out; family members were bickering and I might as well have been standing on a dock waving goodbye to a boat sailing off without me. Or maybe my body was on board, dead-eyed and vacant, but my mind was still on the dock, waving.

At first I thought we were going to get married on a mountain at sunset. But there were Jews involved, so that wasn’t going to happen. Her mother put the kibosh on that plan with one sentence: “Esther can’t make it up the hill.” There’s always an Esther and she’s not going up the hill.

The other switch that got thrown the moment I got engaged was the one in my head that dropped the needle into this groove: How the fuck did I get into this? Why am I in this? How do I get out of this? Right up to the day of our wedding I was thinking, “I can’t do this.”

As I got closer, the fantasy started to take shape: “What if I just walk out on the altar?” That would’ve been amazing.

Can you imagine if you were up on the altar and the rabbi said, “Do you take this woman?” and you said, “You know what, I don’t! HA HA HA!!!” What a cathartic, profound moment that would be. At that moment everyone you know in your life would think you were a fuckin’ asshole and you would be truly free. How often do you get that opportunity? “Yeah, fuck all of you!” You could just step out from under the chuppah, walk slowly past a crowd of stunned faces, climb onto a horse, ride to Mexico, and become a cowboy. That’s how real cowboys are made. Show up at a bar in Juarez and say, “Hola, amigo. What can I get for this ring?” Clink.

I didn’t do that. I married her. I married her for the wrong reason—because it was safe. I believed at that time that people got married when they had that moment, when they’re looking at themselves in the mirror and say, “Holy shit. I’m going to compromise my dreams, get fat, sick, old, and die. I kind of want to have someone around for that.” You don’t want to be sixty, fat, sick, and alone saying to your reflection, “Look at me. I’m a fat failure.” No, you kind of want someone around to say, “It’s okay, baby. You look great. Let’s go get some Tasti D-Lite, cowboy.” You’re thinking, “I’m not a cowboy. I missed that window. Ah, Mexico.”

We were living in Manhattan but when we got married we moved out to Astoria, Queens, to be married people.

Right away I started to bust out. I had a barrel of monkeys on my back. I liked cocaine, I liked pot, I liked drinking. I was trying to keep it all under control. I was married to a woman who wouldn’t tolerate it but it started to sneak up on me. I was going on the road hanging out with gypsies and freaks and pirates and I’d come back all sweaty and broken saying, “I don’t know. I think I caught the flu on the plane.” It was nuts.

Yes, pirates. Real pirates. I don’t know what your experience is, but if you’re on a three-day blow bender, you’re going to meet a pirate. At some point after you’ve been up for about seventy-six hours in a strange apartment or hotel room you’re going to hear yourself say to someone else in the room, “Dude, why is there a pirate here?” and that person is going to say, “Be cool. He brought the coke.” And you’re gonna say, “Okay, he’s cool, but does the talking parrot have to stay? Because I’m fucked-up, man. It’s freaking me out.”

“Marc, there’s no parrot. You have a drug problem.”

“That’s what the fucking parrot said! Are you two working together? Why don’t you both get the fuck out of here and I’ll talk to the pirate for six hours.”

***

I was starting to bring the drugs home. I was not a weekend cocaine user. I’d say I was more like a half-a-week cocaine user. It’s amazing how much you can rationalize when you’re on drugs. I could actually say to myself, “Look, I’m only doing blow Wednesday through Saturday” I didn’t think I had a problem. I thought I was completely under control. I thought, “I have parameters here. I have a schedule. It’s Wednesday through Saturday.” It took me a long time to realize, “Wednesday through Saturday? You know what, Marc? Regular people never do coke! It doesn’t even cross their minds.” I would get to the drug dealer’s house early because I thought if I started early I could be done with it by nine or ten and get on with my day. Like that ever worked. Have you ever heard anyone say, “No, no, I’m good. I’ve had enough blow. Time to get on with my day”?

One day I got to the coke dealer’s house in the late afternoon, before it was dark. I was the Early Bird Special guy. When I got there he was pulling down the shades and then there was a knock on the door. A short old Colombian man with a ponytail walked in. He handed my dealer a wad of tinfoil in exchange for some cash. He was the source. I said, “Let me do some of that!” My dealer said, “Okay, just a line.”

He opened the foil to reveal what seemed to be a jewel of blow. He flaked some off the rock into two lines. I snorted them. I felt a tingling behind my eyes that spread up through my brain like a wildfire of joy coursing through my nervous system. Apparently I had never felt the effects of pure cocaine. I said, “Holy shit! Why don’t you just sell that?” He said, “Because people would never leave me alone.” Then he crushed the gemstone and dumped it into a Baggie of last night’s stepped-on crud. It was heartbreaking.

My comedy career was stalled. Dramatically stalled. I was all bloated and sweaty and fucked-up. I was hosting segments on a local TV program on the Metro Channel, which I don’t think even exists anymore. It was awful. I would interview people on the street at a desk we would haul around the city. It was a “talk show on the street” segment. It was cute but like being dead but accepting it. I was married to a woman who had just added prenatal vitamins to our kitchen vitamin lineup. I was thinking, “That can’t happen.”

I’d surrendered. I’d given up. I would lie in bed blasted on coke with my heart exploding out of my chest, next to somebody sleeping comfortably, and I wanted to wake her up to tell her I was dying but I would’ve rather just died.

***

I thought that was the only way to get out of my situation. I wanted my heart to explode. I didn’t have the guts to leave her. I didn’t have the guts to be honest. I was fucked. My career was done. I was bitter.

Then a miracle happened, I guess you can call it a miracle. I’m going to go ahead and call it that even though it ended up the disaster with which I opened this chapter. But at the time it seemed like a miracle, a silver lining. Maybe it was just foil.

I’m at the Comedy Cellar in New York. I’m hanging out. I’m sweating. I’m talking to a few young comics. I’m probably having one of these conversations: “Well, I think if you really want to talk about the history of it, Pryor was really the first....” You know the rap. Holding court. And this woman comes up to me. This woman like a spirit, an apparition. I didn’t know who she was. What she was. But this six-foot-tall, spectacular-looking being walks up to me and says, “Hey, you’re Marc Maron, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am,” I say, defensive but as charming as possible.

“What happened to you? You look like you’re going to die.”

“Huh? Yeah, well . . . what? I’m cool, I’m good. What do you mean? What’s the deal?”

“I’m just a big fan, and I don’t know, you look like you’re in trouble. If you want to get sober I can help you get sober.”

“What? You mean like meetings, AA and that kind of shit? Like the God thing? Are you a God person?”

“I can just point you in that direction.”

“Uh, okay,” I say.

In my mind I had no desire to get sober or even live, but every part of my mind and body wanted to be as close to her as possible, so I said, “Yeah. Hell yeah, I want to get sober. I need to get sober.” But in my mind all I was thinking was, “I’ll do anything with you. I’ll go anywhere. I’m going to follow you home now even if you don’t want me to follow you home.” And I did.

We walked thirty-five blocks. I smoked. We talked about cigarettes and about addiction and about comedy and about everything else. We got to her apartment. It was a walk-up on Forty-sixth Street. I’m in her living room smoking a joint, holding a Foster’s, and saying, “So, get me sober! Come on. What do you got?”

I start going to meetings, to lunch, to dinner, to wherever this perfect woman wanted to go. I fell in love as much as a newly sober, insane, angry bastard who was miserable and married could be in love, but I was in love, which meant I was going to hang every one of my hopes on this twenty-three-year-old girl. I was thirty-five.

Of course, I was married to another woman. That put a crimp in things a little bit. Courting is difficult when it has to be shrouded in mystery and secret pager codes. There was no texting then, just pagers. So we had numbers that meant, “I love you,” “I miss you,” “What are you doing?” I was running around the city, sweating and beeping.

Love is love and being in love is being in love. Wherever your loyalty is, whatever rules you think you won’t break in your life, sometimes you just can’t fight being in love. Some of the best memories of my life are moments like following her up the stairs of that Forty-sixth Street fourth-floor walk-up apartment. Watching her move up the stairs in a plaid skirt, watching her smoking cigarettes, and then laughing on her old couch, lying in her bed after we had sex and listening to her piss, feeling impressed and ecstatic, like, “Holy shit! Listen to that! It’s so powerful!” I told my friend Sam about my fascination with the power of her stream and he said it sounded like I was talking about a Thoroughbred horse. I think I was. I thought, “Maybe this is my chance to disrupt my bipolar Jew gene line.”

I didn’t know what to do. I’m in love with this woman, I’m married to this other woman, and I’m in trouble, so I call my two friends. That’s all I need, two. I need the main guy and the guy I go to when I drain the main guy.

The guys at that time were Sam, a bitter and brilliant writer, who was married and had just had a kid, and Dave, a comic and borderline sexual predator. I call Sam first and I say, “Dude, I’m in love. This is crazy. Things have been over with Kim and me for years. What should I do, man? This woman is perfect. I’m getting sober. It’s everything I wanted.” He says, “Man, you’re married. Be responsible. You made a commitment. Try to honor it. This thing will pass.” I say, “You know what, man? Take a day off.” Then I call Dave. “Hey, Dave! What’s going on? Take a break from pursuing eighteen-year-olds online and talk to me. I’m in love with this woman. She’s twenty-three and I’m married but I’m getting sober and I think it’s the right thing.” And Dave, thank God, says, “Ah, dude . . . you gotta go for it! What the fuck, man?! You only live once. This is it! This might be it!” And I’m like, “You’re right, man, thanks. I knew I could count on you.”

We all have the right to cherry-pick the advice given us in order to do exactly what we wanted to do in the first place.

As I said, courting is a little difficult when you’re married and when you’re newly sober and when the woman’s only twenty-three and you’re a dozen years older. I just know that in traditional courting this is not a conversation you should have after sex:

Me [yelling]: So, are we doing this, or what? Because I’m going to fucking leave her. Are we doing this? Do you fucking love me? Do you fucking love me? Are you taking me? Are we doing this?

Her [crying]: I don’t know!

Me [still yelling]: What the fuck!? Yes or no? Are we doing this?

Her: I guess so.

Me: Good enough. I’m on it.

If you don’t believe in magic, if you don’t believe that there are phrases, incantations, mantras, that can change the universe completely, literally change the entire course and trajectory of your life, even the objects in your periphery, you are wrong. There are. This is one of them: “Honey, I’m in love with someone else, and I’m having an affair with her.” Abracadabra! Locks are changed. Objects are moved and missing. You are dispatched into exile to a sublet on the Lower East Side, where you will remain alone, isolated, broken off from the world you knew. You deserve it. You have cut yourself off from a wife, a family, a future, your money. Everything.

But I had that girl. Yes. I had that girl. And she was enough.

We embark on this crazy thing, this girl and I. I’m getting sober. I’m going to meetings all the time. I’m writing a book. I’m doing a one-man show. Things are okay. I know some of you are thinking, “What about that other woman, you heartless fuck?” Yeah, what about her? She was a good person, I know. I felt like shit, but I had to do what I had to do. And some of you may think, “Well, you didn’t have to do that.” Well, yeah, I did. I did have to do that. It saved my life. I divorced that woman and married that girl and she eventually left me. Karma? Sure. She got me sober, though. I am still sober. I have her to thank for that.

I actually use sobriety to try to frame the pain of my second divorce. I was at the Comedy Cellar one night, miserable and in the middle of it. I was talking to the late Greg Giraldo, who was always struggling with drugs and alcohol. A struggle he eventually lost. I asked him how much money he had spent over the years on rehabs. He said, “About two hundred and fifty grand.”

My divorce cost me less than that. And I am still sober.

***

In the middle of my second divorce, from this once-magical woman, I was a broken man. I was fucked-up on all levels. I was on my way to my mother’s in Florida, which means I was in real trouble because she is really the last person I ever want to lean on. Not that she’s a bad person; she’s just a bit boundaryless and draining. I’m at the airport in Los Angeles. I’m walking through the terminal to my gate, trying to catch a 6 A.M. flight. Shattered. My duffel bag was even sad as it bounced off my butt as I walked. I was about four months into my separation from Mishna. I looked up from my drudging and that’s when I saw her: Kim and her new husband, standing with their luggage at the gate I was passing.

I think, “I can’t handle this. There’s no way” So I do that thing where you put your hand up over your forehead, look the other way, and think, “There, I’m invisible.”

I know she knows everything. Her best friend is my brother’s wife. She has to know all about the disaster that my life’s become. I get past the gate and I think I’m out of the woods but then I hear, “Marc!”

I turn around and there’s nine years of history running toward me with a very familiar gait. She gets to me and asks, concern in her eyes, “How are you doing?”

I explode in tears and uncontrollable blubbering. I cannot stop it. And without missing a beat, my first wife says, “Not so good, huh?”

I was so happy she had that moment. I deserved it, she deserved it. And the sick thing about me is that right after we had that exchange there was a part of me that thought, “So, are we good? Can I go with you now?”

Works Cited

Maron, Marc. Attempting Normal, Spiegel and Grau, 2013, pp.19-28.

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mrb-neiu-102 · 6 years

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Week 4 - Mindy Kaling - Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

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 be-cause 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 ex¬plore 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 Sleeping 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."

And more and more, I found that I didn't want to do what JLMP wanted to do. Like one time Lauren wanted me go to the yarn store in Harvard Square with her so we could both learn to knit. I reluctantly used my allowance to buy a skein of yarn. Who was I knitting stuff for? If I gave my mother a knitted scarf she'd be worried I was wasting my time doing stupid stuff like knitting instead of school work. Presenting a homemade knitted object to my parents was actually like handing them a detailed backlog of my idleness.

And Jana, sweet old Jana, was crazy about horses. Like super-nutso crazy about horses—that was her thing. All her drawings and back-from-vacation stories and Halloween costumes were horses. She would even pretend to be a horse during free period and lunch. We had to feed her pizza out of our hand, and she'd neigh back "thank you." Now I was getting bored of driving forty-five minutes with her parents to the equestrian center to pretend to care about her galloping back and forth in her horse recital or whatever.

I found myself wanting to spend more time with Mavis than JLMP. I spent the week looking forward to Saturday so I could write sketches with her. I didn't want her to be my secret friend anymore.

One Friday in November I didn't go to the Cheesecake Factory with JLMP. I asked Mavis if she wanted to hang out at the mall after school. We had never spent time together outside of our houses. Mavis was surprised but agreed to go. We went to the Arsenal Mall after school. We bought sour gummy worms at the bulk candy store; we walked around Express and The Limited, trying things on and buying nothing. It felt weird being with Mavis in the real world, but good-weird.

The next Friday I bailed on JLMP again so my brother, Mavis, and I could see Wayne's World together. We spend the whole night afterward chanting: "Wayne's World! Party Time! Excellent! Schwing!" Mavis and I spent a long time discussing Rob Lowe's emergence as a comedy actor. (Again, we were comedy nerds. This was exciting to us.) The following Friday we went to her house where Mr. Lehrman showed us how to use his camcorder so we could tape a sketch we had written, which used the characters in Gap Girls, that old SNL sketch with Chris Farley, Adam Sandler, and David Spade dressed up as female Gap employees. Mavis played David Spade and Adam Sandler. I played Chris Farley and all the other characters. Sometime around then, Mavis and I became real friends. Friends at school.

I spent most of winter break with Mavis, going to Harvard Square to see movies and buying comic books. I discovered she wasn't into going shopping as much as JLMP had been, but I had my mom and Aunt Sreela for that, anyway. I still considered JLMP my best friends, but began flaking on them more and more. Jana's mom even called my mom to tell her how hurt Jana was that I missed a big horse show. One Friday evening in mid-February, Mavis and I were at the RadioShack trying to find a tripod to use with her dad's camcorder. It was the mall with JLMP's Cheesecake Factory. On the escalator ride down, you could see right into the restaurant. That's when Mavis and I saw it. Jana, Lauren, and Polly were sitting in a booth together.

They were laughing and talking over a slice of cheesecake, but without me. Just JLP. I was so hurt and embarrassed. Yeah, I had made another friend, but did that give them the right to orchestrate a hangout where I was so left out? For a second, I hated Mavis. I wasn't sure why, exactly, maybe for witnessing this humiliation, or for unwittingly being the cause of it? My immediate reaction was to rush over to them and confront them. But then I thought ... why? What was I going to do with them after I confronted them? Sit with them and gossip about all the things I didn't really care about anymore?

Mavis said, quietly, "If you want to go with them, I totally get it."

There was something about the unexpectedly kind way she said that that made me happy to be with her, and not them. For some reason, I immediately thought about how my parents had always been especially fond of Mavis, and here was this moment when I understood exactly why: she was a good person. It felt so good to realize how smart my parents had been all along. "Are you kidding me?" I said. "We have to go home and film this sketch."

By the time we got down the escalator and walked to the parking lot to get picked up by her parents, my ego was still bruised, but I was also able to identify another feeling: relief.

Pretty soon after that, the rest of JLP disintegrated too. Polly was getting into music more and was getting chummier with the kids who all smoked regularly across the street in the Fairy Woods. It was Jana, surprisingly, who first got a boyfriend. A cool Thai kid named Prem, who was a senior, asked her out. Prem was pretty possessive, and within weeks Jana was learning Thai and I never saw her. Lauren and I, with whom I had the least in common, faded out quickly without the buffer of the other two. It was almost a lifting of a burden when we weren't required to stay in touch.

By the end of freshman year, it was just Mavis and me. I once half-jokingly suggested naming our friendship M&M, and Mavis looked at me with friendly but mild disgust. That was so not Mavis's style. She stayed friends with her techie guy friends, and I even had lunch with them sometimes. They were smart guys, funny and edgier than any other guys at school, and they were knowledgeable about politics, a subject barely anyone cared about. But my friend group definitely shrunk. I was without a posse, no small herd to confidently walk down the hall with. There was just Mavis and me, but it never seemed lonely because we never stopped talking. I could have an argument, in earnest, about who was the best "Kid" in the Hall, without having to explain who they were. One friend with whom you have a lot in common is better than three with whom you struggle to find things to talk about. We never needed best friend gear because I guess with real friends you don't have to make it official. It just is.

Junior year of high school, the Lehrmans moved to Evanston, Illinois, but Mavis and I kept in touch. She would call me and tell me about the amazing shows her dad took her to see at Second City, and we planned for me to visit, but it never materialized. When we graduated high school, she went to the Cooper Union in Manhattan to pursue her love of set design, and I went to Dartmouth to pursue my love of white people and North Face parkas. We e-mailed a bit for a year or so, and then by sophomore year, the e-mails stopped. We both just got so consumed with college. I would be reminded of Mavis when my parents asked about her over summer and holiday breaks. "How is Mavis doing these days?" my mom would ask. "I think pretty good," I replied, vaguely, reminding myself to send her an e-mail one of these days, but never following through.

Mavis helped me learn so much about who I am, and who I wanted to be. I love comedy and now surround myself with people who love to talk about it just as much as I do. I like to think that Polly is in a band, that Lauren joined the right knit-ting circle, and that Jana found a nice horse to settle down with. Even though Mavis was my secret friend, she is the only one I hope I see again. She's the only one I wonder about. I hope she wonders about me too.

Works Cited

Kaling, Mindy. “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (Or, How I Made My First Real Friend.)” Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns.) Crown Archetype, 2011. pp. 35-44.

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