FIC: How You Do What You Do Is Who You Are [S60, Various, NC-17]
14 Valentines: Peace Movement. I am, at heart, a cranky, misanthropic person -- impatient, short-tempered, generally annoyed about something. And this year, I resolved that I was going to hate less. Peace is better for your blood pressure than hate is, than war is; peace is better for the world than hate is. Peace is what I'm trying to reach, for myself, and for everyone else.
Title: How You Do What You Do Is Who You Are
Fandom: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
Pairings: Matt Albie/Danny Tripp, Matt Albie/Harriet Hayes, Danny Tripp/OFC
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: Through 2x13, "The Harriet Dinner (Part 1)".
Disclaimer: Sorkin and Schlamme own 'em, I'm just fooling around.
Summary: In which there is cocaine, sketch comedy, and several ex-wives; or, a brief and hilarious history of Matthew Albie and Daniel Tripp. 14,000 words.
April 1987
In April of his junior year at Columbia, Matt set Danny up with a cute redhead who had completely bizarre ideas about Ibsen and who sat next to Matt in his Contemporary European Drama class, and Danny came home from the date with a 6'4" drag queen whose real name was Darryl.
Matt quit setting Danny up on dates and took up smoking instead.
By way of explanation as to what happened to the redhead, Danny said, "We hold completely irreconcilable notions about The Merchant of Venice," and then he made Matt get up off the couch and sit on the radiator, blowing smoke out the window, so that Darryl the Drag Queen could sleep on their couch.
Darryl the Drag Queen was the first stray that Danny brought home, but he wasn't the last, and Matt eventually almost got used to it -- coming home from class, from the comedy clubs, to find strangers sleeping on the couch that he and Danny had fished out of a dumpster and carried up the five flights of stairs, coming home to actors and dancers and singers and waitresses taking up Matt's space and Danny's time.
The apartment was hardly big enough for two people, much less two people plus Danny's charity cases, but -- helping people, doing whatever it was that Danny thought he was doing, it was keeping him reasonably happy.
And when Danny was happy, Matt was happy to sit on the radiator in the kitchen, notebook propped on his knees and Danny's copy of The Berlin Stories folded open between the hissing coils, watching Danny make scrambled eggs, and pasta with sauce straight from a jar, and peanut butter on toast.
Danny cast his strays in shows he was producing for the Columbia cabaret, or sent them out on auditions for revues whose producers he'd met, schmoozing at the wine bars Matt couldn't afford to drink in. The strays never stayed more than a couple of days, eating the college-student meals that Danny had been cooking for himself and Matt since they'd moved in together, sitting at the table whose wobbly leg was propped up with a copy of The Skin of Our Teeth.
They all talked, though, chattering to Danny about how they were going to be the next big thing, or the next big name after that, and Matt sat at the table and smirked at Danny over whatever he was reading for class. Danny just frowned at Matt, and went back to nodding at whichever stray was yapping endlessly that night -- Danny was an easy touch, and at 24, he had the funny idea that people were the key to finding the money to do what he wanted to do.
Matt knew the key was talent.
Danny brought stray actresses home for 14 months, from the failed date with the redhead who thought Ibsen was a tool of the patriarchy until he (Danny, because it took Matt an extra semester to finish) graduated. There wasn't any pattern to it. Sometimes Danny came home with comped Broadway or Off-Broadway or Off-Off-Broadway tickets, and sometimes he came home with cocktail waitresses who couldn't carry tunes in buckets and who wanted to talk to Matt about Wendy Wasserstein and, when they found out that he and Danny lived together in their tiny apartment, about William Finn and Terrence McNally.
"I don't get you," Danny said. Teresa the dancer-slash-poet was in their shower, singing something tunelessly that Matt couldn't make out over the water, and Danny was sitting cross-legged on the floor with the theater opening notices in the Times folded open on his lap.
Matt flopped over onto his back on the couch, hooking his legs over the couch arm and looking at Danny sideways. Danny had his glasses propped on his forehead and a pen stuck behind his ear; he'd been circling shows (certain to be awful) that he would make Matt go see in the next couple of weeks. "I am a very straight-forward sort of guy, Danny," Matt said. "I like burritos from the place by the Chemistry building. I think Dan Akroyd is funny. I want to go to Chicago and take classes from Del Close this summer. I wish you would stop snoring. There's very little not to get."
"I don't snore," Danny said. "She's pretty, isn't she?"
"Dan Akroyd? No," Matt said. He was supposed to be reading Mother Courage and her Children, and Danny was having a psychotic break in their living room. Matt wondered idly if his professor would accept that as an excuse.
"No, Teresa."
"I guess so," Matt said. "You like her? You haven't gone on a date since the girl with the crazy opinions about Ibsen and Merchant of Venice."
"I'm busy," Danny said. "I thought ... she's pretty, I thought you might want to go out with her."
"I can find my own dates," Matt said. "In fact, you will recall, I once had so many dates that I started passing them off to you, because you never have any dates. And, also, all those waitresses you bring home, you do know that they think we're gay?"
Danny said, "We do only have one bed," but he dropped his head and started picking at the threadbare carpet Matt's mother had donated to their cause when they'd moved in.
"And neither of us is having sex in it, with each other or with anyone else," Matt said.
Danny frowned, pulled a piece of carpet out and tossed it into a corner with one of their dust bunnies. He looked up at Matt, almost frowning, like there was something written on Matt's face that Danny could decipher, if he could just read close enough.
Teresa came out of the bathroom, wrapped in one of Matt's threadbare green towels and drying her hair with one of Danny's threadbare orange towels. "So," she said, looking from Matt to Danny and back to Matt. Matt was staring at Danny, but he could feel Teresa's eyes on him, curious. "If he's the producer," she said, pointing to Danny, who was destroying the carpet again, "what do you do?"
"I'm a writer," Matt said. "I write stuff for him."
At 20, Matt spent most of his free time sitting on the floor in the theater section of the Strand, or sitting on the radiator in the kitchen trying to make Danny laugh.
His writing for Studio 60 had mostly been for Harriet; because watching her face when something really snapped in rehearsal, when she loved him, had been worth every moment of agony after they broke up. But Matt had been trying to make people laugh longer than he'd known Harriet, because he'd been writing for Danny from the first minute Danny leaned over his shoulder in the lobby of the Columbia mainstage theater and said, "That's pretty good."
It was a sketch about Michael Dukakis and it wasn't actually very good, but Matt still has the pages, ripped from the notebook and crammed in the back of the coffee table book about Second City along with three postcards from Harriet and his first contract on Studio 60, because there was something worth keeping in it, and Danny had seen it.
Matt was a writer, and he knew a lot of words for things that were fantastic -- sketches that were perfectly paced, comedy that made Danny laugh until he cried.
Danny kept bringing home strays, trying to find something in all the strangers he talked to, and Matt kept trying to make Danny laugh.
May 1988
Danny finished his Masters' degree on time, in May. Matt had spent the summer after his junior year sleeping on improvisers' couches in Chicago, so he could take classes at Improv Olympic instead of taking calculus in summer school, and he had also neglected to take any classes that covered drama before 1910, so he did not.
When Matt walked into the living room on the morning of commencement, Danny was sitting on the couch with his head back, wearing his graduation robe, with bloody Kleenex stuffed into his nostrils, and the shower was running. "So," Matt said. "Stripper, cocktail waitress, or drag queen? Also, you did not come home last night."
"Classically trained ballerina," Danny said, sounded nasal and muffled. He lifted his head up and pulled the tissue out of his nose, dabbing carefully at his face, and Matt could see shiny spots of blood, still wet, on the collar of his robe. "Also exotic dancer. I came home this morning."
"Only you," Matt said, "would bring home an exotic dancer-slash-classically trained ballerina the morning of your graduation. What were you doing last night? Did someone punch you in the nose?"
"I was just out," Danny said. "I met Cinnamon at a bar, and she needed a place to crash for a couple of days, they're turning her building into condos and she was evicted."
"Cinnamon," Matt said. Danny's nose started dripping again, three quick spots of red fading to brown on the white shirt he was wearing under the robe.
Danny said, "Shit."
"Seriously," Matt said, fishing for something to say about a classically trained ballerina named Cinnamon, but he couldn't stop staring at Danny, blood gushing out between his fingers and dripping down his face. Danny groped for the box of Kleenex on the couch beside him, pinching the bridge of his nose while he twisted the tissue and plugged his nostrils again. "Jesus, Danny, are you okay?"
"Just a nosebleed," Danny said, and his mouth twisted strangely before he looked away from Matt. "I'm tired, we just finished finals, I'm getting sick or something. I'm fine, Matt."
Matt sank down onto the floor, crossing his legs and waiting for the shower to cut off. "So you had a good night?"
"Yeah," Danny said. "It was fine."
"Get into any trouble, besides the exotic dancer houseguest sort?"
"I only get into trouble when you're with me," Danny said, sounding fond. Or sad, Matt couldn't tell which. "It was fine, we went a bunch of places and drank a lot of champagne. People want to give me money to produce things."
Matt said, "Okay." Danny had been a ghost lately, spending half his time in the library and the other half in Manhattan bars, sweet-talking anyone who would let him shuffle papers, manage money, track down advertisers. He hadn't brought home nearly as many strays recently, and Matt had spent a lot of time sacked out on the couch, scripts and notebooks folded open on his chest, waiting for Danny to come home.
"I haven't been sleeping much," Danny said. Matt tried to hear a clue, a clue about anything, about what was really wrong, in Danny's voice, but Danny really did just sound tired, and Matt knew he was probably overreacting. "Lots of work on the thesis." He stood up and offered Matt his hand. "Come on, my folks want to take us out to dinner."
"Cinnamon, too?" Matt didn't understand Danny's thesis, but he'd been living with Danny for two years and he still didn't understand how you could get a Masters' degree in raising money for theater, either, but Danny had done it.
"No," Danny said.
"Okay," Matt said. He tried not to stare at the spots of blood on Danny's collar while Danny's mother made awkward small talk.
Later he'd wonder how he missed any of the signs, any of the ways that he should have seen Danny falling apart, but Cinnamon the exotic dancer stole all of their silverware while they were out at dinner, and at the time, a nosebleed seemed like small potatoes when compared to eating ramen with their fingers.
September 1988
Danny moved to Los Angeles and sent postcards. Matt stayed in New York and got a C- in Calculus and an A in Jacobean Theater, and when the air conditioner broke down in July, he lugged it up to the top of the building and threw it down into the alley, just to see what it would do.
It shattered, and Matt wrote Danny a postcard about it. He got one back that said, I bet you could have sold it at a pawn shop, even if it was busted. Send pictures.
In June, Matt met an English major named Star in his calculus class. She was funny and she had six tattoos, and she could do things with her tongue that would make grown men weep. Matt spent most of his free time in bed with her, and four postcards from Danny piled up on the kitchen counter before Matt remember to send one back.
He wouldn't have remember at all, except that Star picked the one on the top of the stack up on the 4th of July and said, "Who's Danny?"
"My roommate," Matt said.
Star peered around the apartment curiously. "Two people live here?"
Matt said, "Past tense," and went back to rooting through the take-out containers in the fridge, because he was certain there were two beers in there somewhere.
"Oh," Star said. "Bad breakup."
"What?" Matt said, backpedaling out of the fridge. "No, no. Roommate, platonic."
"This one says, don't you love me any more, Matthew?" Star said. "It's okay if you're gay."
"Danny's just fucking with me," Matt said. "He does that."
"Sure," Star said.
She didn't return his calls after that, and Matt sent Danny a postcard that said, I think I just got dumped because I'm gay for you.
Danny sent one back that said, I'm glad to know that it was a nice piece of tail keeping you from answering my cards and not the fact that you were dead in a gutter somewhere. P.S. You are gay for me, you asshole, didn't you know that? It had a picture of Dodger Stadium on it, and Matt stuck it in his notebook, between the pages of a sketch about a Mets fan married to a Yankees fan. The sketch sucked, and the postcard made Matt's head hurt.
None of Danny's postcards said anything about Danny's life -- they were nagging reminders to Matt to pay the electric bill, or stories about celebrities that Danny saw doing outrageous things in public places. Like a lot of things, later he figured out that he should have been worried, but he wasn't, and more often than not, Danny's postcards ended up left in library books or at bars.
The only one Matt hung on to was the one of Dodger Stadium
Matt graduated in August, and sold everything left in the apartment except 16 vintage concert t-shirts and his word processor. Danny called on Labor Day, sounding tired and distant, and when Matt told him that he'd sold everything but the t-shirts and the word processor, Danny said, "Even your pants? I don't think most people hire screenwriters who don't wear pants."
"If you're famous, you can wear whatever you want," Matt said. He hadn't sold his pants.
"You still have to wear something," Danny said.
Matt said, "Vintage concert t-shirts are eternal." He was trying to cram all of his clothes (including the t-shirts) into one small suitcase that he'd salvaged from a dumpster because it didn't smell terrible and didn't have any visible stains.
"You can't wear them to accept an Oscar," Danny said.
"Sure you can." The suitcase groaned, and Matt wedged the phone between his shoulder and his ear so he could sit on it. "You should come to Chicago and help me move in."
"I can't," Danny said, tightly, his voice clipped.
The suitcase snapped shut, and Matt collapsed on the floor beside it. "Sure you can," he said. "You're just fetching coffee for some executive right now, aren't you?"
"I can't," Danny said.
"Come on, man," Matt said. "You're my best friend! I'm starting an exciting new chapter in my life! You owe it to me to be there! You owe it to yourself, Daniel. I'll buy you a beer."
"You own 16 t-shirts and a glorified typewriter. Move yourself," Danny said, and hung up. It wasn't until the dial tone started bleating in his ear that he realized he hadn't asked Danny about Los Angeles at all.
Matt picked Chicago because he didn't own a car and he didn't have a driver's license, he didn't particularly want to acquire either of them, and Los Angeles traffic scared him. The UCB wouldn't open their theater for years -- wouldn't write their first sketch together for years -- and in 1988, Matt didn't want to do stand-up. He hadn't had a single professor who'd understood that. He had one who wanted to him to be a serious playwright, the next Eugene O'Neill, and one who thought he should try his hand at a Jay McInerney style novel, but none of them thought that comedy was real.
So he went to Chicago, where comedy was a hell of a lot more real, and nobody would make him own a car. Danny left Matt a list of everyone who'd gone through Second City and ended up on SNL or S60 when he moved out -- Matt found it, in the middle of August while he was trying to clean the place well enough to get at least part of their security deposit back, tucked underneath the sink with the jug of bleach and a note that said, Congratulations, this is your prize for deciding to clean the bathroom: reassurance that you've made the right decision geographically.
Matt called Danny to thank him, but all he got was Danny's scratchy answering machine, and he hung up before the beep. It was 4 a.m. on a Thursday, and either Danny was still out or he was asleep. Matt folded the list of everyone who'd succeeded because they went to Chicago into his notebook next to the postcard of Dodger Stadium.
Chicago was less big and less noisy and significantly less scary than New York had been, his first week at Columbia. The son of a cousin of Matt's mother let Matt sleep on her couch for two weeks while he figured out how to get from her Bucktown apartment to the places he wanted to go, without a map, and she took him to a free midnight show at Improv Olympic, where a skinny kid (who Matt would later figure out was named Mike Myers, when he made it big on SNL) made Matt laugh so hard he cried.
The bars were closing when they left the theater, and Matt stood on Clark Street surrounded by several thousand incredibly drunk Cubs fans, and he thought, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. He wasn't sure how, but Danny hadn't gotten a Masters' degree in making money for nothing, Matt was certain -- Danny could tell him how.
Matt had a couple hundred bucks left from selling all his possessions and some of Danny's, too, and it was just enough to find himself an apartment and enroll in the first writing class that Second City offered. He didn't have anything left over to pay the rent in October, but that was a problem he'd figure out when he got to it. He called Danny, 8:30 on a Wednesday, and Danny wasn't home.
He hung up without leaving a message.
Six weeks after he got to Chicago, Matt was trying to wedge the mattress he'd bought from the bartender at Second City ETC through his front door when his phone started ringing. "I'm in Kansas City," Danny said. "My flight lands in Chicago in 72 minutes. Meet me at O'Hare."
Matt left the mattress in the middle of the living room and rode the Blue Line out to the airport, notebook propped on his knees, watching the people and their luggage on the train. It took him 15 minutes glancing between his watch and the arrivals from Kansas City to figure out which flight was Danny's, and by the time he did, Danny was off the plane, slumped in a chair by the gate with his eyes closed.
Danny was skinnier than he'd been when he left New York, and Matt kicked Danny's foot and said, "What, the Chinese food in L.A. is that bad?"
Danny sat up and scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. "I'm working a lot."
"Fetching a lot of coffee?" Matt said, and he stuck his hand out to help Danny up. Danny stared at Matt's hand for a long moment before he took it, hauling himself to his feet and shouldering a carry-on bag that had seen better days.
"Reading a lot of crap," Danny said. "I could write an essay on how not to write a script, but I still don't know what makes a good one."
"Sure you do," Matt said. "It's good if I wrote it."
"Have you written one yet?"
"No," Matt said. "But I will."
"Sure you will," Danny said. "Come on, show me this place you're keeping all your t-shirts."
"Hey, I bought a coffee pot," Matt said, and Danny smiled, for the first time since Matt had picked him out of the crowd. He looked tired, despite the smile, and Matt put his hand on Danny's back without thinking about it.
Matt bought a case of Old Style and they drank the whole thing sprawled out across Matt's mattress, still afloat in the middle of the living room. "Sometimes I think it was a mistake," Danny slurred. He was lying on his back with his legs hanging off onto the floor, and Matt didn't have any curtains so the streetlight outside Matt's window dropped its shadows across Danny's face.
"What, moving to Los Angeles?" Matt groped for a beer, and all four that he could close his hands on without moving, opening his eyes, or hitting Danny in the head turned out to be empties.
"L.A.," Danny said expansively, gesturing with his beer and slopping it onto the mattress. "Theater. Hollywood. Cigarettes. Alcohol. Marijuana. Cocaine."
"First," Matt said, "marijuana is never a mistake. Second, you are spilling beer on my mattress."
Danny snorted and tried to pat Matt's face with his beer bottle. Matt's brain caught up to the conversation, and he levered himself up suddenly and said, "Wait, cocaine?"
Danny turned his head away.
"Danny, cocaine?"
"I don't want to talk about it," Danny said. The street light shut off, suddenly, and when Matt looked out the window, he realized it was almost dawn.
"Danny," Matt said.
Danny said, "I don't want to talk about it," and later Matt would tell himself that he just wasn't thinking when he leaned down and kissed Danny. He kissed Danny because he was drunk, and because Danny wouldn't look at him, and because Matt was 22 and stupid and scared.
It was the first time they slept together, and there were two fumbled blowjobs and a car alarm going off in the middle of Matt trying not to choke or laugh or cry or anything. It wasn't the worst sex of Matt's life, but it was close -- except that it was Danny, Matt's best friend in the entire world, which trumped any of the women Matt had ever fucked. Afterwards, the sun starting to turn the sky outside pink and orange as it came up, Danny turned to Matt and said, "I'm scared shitless."
"Join the club," Matt said.
Danny was quiet, and when Matt looked over, Danny had fallen asleep, one hand tucked underneath his head, the other stretched out and curled around Matt's bicep. A bus rumbled past below his open window, and Matt fell asleep staring at Danny's face, smoothed out in sleep but still too thin.
When he woke up, Danny was gone.
October 2006
None of the news stories that tout 18-years-of-Tripp-and-Albie mention what Danny calls The Missing Years. Matt keeps threatening to write it himself. "It'd be an instant bestseller," he says to Danny over dinner. "Tripp and Albie -- the fucked up cocaine years."
"These are still the fucked up cocaine years," Danny says. He steals a French fry off Matt's plate and chews thoughtfully. "You don't even really know what happened then."
"Because you are a close-mouthed bastard," Matt says cheerfully. "And you don't want me to exploit your life for personal gain, which I just don't understand."
The news stories talk about college roommates and lifelong friends and working together for almost 20 years, but they don't talk about the fact that Danny didn't produce or direct any of Matt's work until the late '90s. Matt thinks that if the only things he knew about his relationship with Danny were the things that he read in the media, he wouldn't know a damn thing about it.
"Personal gain, front pages of the tabloids, whichever," Danny says. "Not that we haven't spent enough time on the tabloids this year."
"It would be good publicity," Matt says.
"I don't think those words go in the same sentence together," Danny says.
The fact is that Matt still doesn't know the story. Suddenly, when Danny dropped back into his life, there was money, money to try and make a go of something, anything they wanted, and Matt never asked questions because he was 26 and Danny was offering him a big break, the big break. Matt wasn't stupid enough to ask questions, but there are still too many answers he doesn't have.
Danny's his best friend, and there are plenty of things they don't talk about.
"I know what I was doing," Matt says. "I'll just call it Albie: The Missing Years. I can write about all the lousy tips I got waiting tables at that place on Rush Street, and maybe some of the customers who stiffed me will send me their damn 20%."
"You don't need the money," Danny says. "And you were a lot skinnier then, nobody would recognize you."
"It's the principle of the thing," Matt says.
"It's always the principle of the thing with you," Danny says."
Matt says, "That's why we're taking the job, right?"
"No," Danny says. "But it's close enough."
April 1993
Danny was thinner than he'd been the last time Matt had seen him. Danny called, said, "I'm in the Omaha airport, I'll be there in an hour and a half."
Matt, who was hungover and naked at the time, said, "Fuck you," and hung up. He turned around, barfed in the sink, and then he fell asleep on the floor. He woke up with someone's foot nudging his ribs, and Danny was standing over him.
"You still haven't bought a couch?"
"Fuck you," Matt said. "It's not like you walked out of here six weeks ago and I still haven't bought a couch."
Danny sat down on the floor, leaned back against the fridge, and said, "You should put some pants on."
"You should go away," Matt said. "This is one of the great joys of living alone, without any significant emotional attachments, relationships, or obligations. If I want to lie on my kitchen floor naked, I am perfectly free to do so."
"That's depressing," Danny said. "Go put on your pants."
Matt stood up and the world shifted disconcertingly underneath his feet, but Danny -- Danny looking tired, and sad, and needy -- smiled at Matt from the floor, and Matt went and put on pants.
In 1993, Matt's possessions included a word processor, a blender, 27 spiral bound notebooks full of sketches (numbered chronologically based on date finished, with permanent marker, on their covers) a case of typing paper, and 27 vintage concert t-shirts. Danny was flipping through notebook #22 when Matt emerged from the bedroom, buttoning his shirt. Danny said, "You've gotten better."
"Four years," Matt said. "Something had to give."
He leaned in the doorway and watched Danny set #22 (mostly sketches based on horrible yuppies he saw on the train and in the restaurant where he was waiting tables) down on the windowsill and pick up #14 (mostly sketches about horrible heterosexual relationships where someone was always leaving, which Steve Carell said was Matt sublimating his issues about "that guy you lived with in college").
Danny's suit hung off him badly, and when had Danny started wearing suits? Some nights, Matt came home from waiting tables full of rich assholes who under-tipped and tried to write and felt older and more tired than his 26 years, but Danny looked that tired.
"So," Matt said, and Danny jumped like he'd been shocked. "It's nice to see you, glad you're not dead, thanks for calling, where the hell have you been?"
Danny frowned. He wiped the back of his hand against his nose and sighed. "I've been busy," he said.
"That's the worst fucking excuse I've ever heard," Matt said.
Danny said, "Matt," and he sounded a little broken, like he did the last time Matt saw him and Danny said that he thought he'd made a lot of mistakes.
Matt had made a lot of mistakes in four years, because everybody makes a lot of mistakes no matter who they are, and Matt's mistakes started with the crazy red-headed stockbroker he'd dated for two years (her West Loop apartment was nicer than his Logan Square cockroach hostel) and ended with forgetting to lock his door before he passed out last night. If Matt had locked his door, Danny wouldn't have waltzed right in as though he'd been there all this time.
Seven years, and Danny still surprised the hell out of Matt all the time. Seven years, and Matt was still surprised when Danny did something surprising. It was a vicious cycle, and Matt knew without a doubt that he was never going to break out of it.
He didn't like the world without Danny in it -- he didn't like the things he wrote without Danny to tell him how to fix things, he didn't like the girls he dated without Danny around to terrify them into breaking up with Matt.
His life was poorer for the lack of Danny, and Matt, pants on, walked into the living room, sat on the floor, and said, "Tell me what you've been doing."
Danny dropped his head, and sighed, and sat down next to Matt. He leaned over and rested his forehead against Matt's shoulder, and Matt jumped. Matt touched Danny, and Danny let him, but Danny didn't touch people, voluntarily. "Hey," Matt said.
"I am in so much trouble," Danny said, and he shifted, pressing his face against Matt's armpit.
His breath was hot against Matt's skin, and Matt wrapped a hand around the back of Danny's neck and held on. He had no idea what to say, but he was wearing pants and he had Danny, and Matt had always thought they could figure anything out together. Anything except maybe why they'd slept together -- and maybe that, too.
Matt said, "It's going to be okay," and Danny pressed his mouth against Matt's throat, and then Matt's mouth. Okay, Matt thought, anything at all, and he kissed Danny back.
Danny had always said, sleep on the problem and we'll figure it out in the morning. It wasn't an answer, it wasn't the problem, and Matt once again had no idea what was going on, but he never had, and he wasn't homeless or completely broke yet. He'd spent four years talking to an imaginary Danny, because his life felt awkward and off-balance without a real Danny, and Matt was angry and freaked out.
But he was, if he admitted the truth to himself, happier to have Danny than he was angry at Danny for disappearing. (Later, it would turn out that Matt should have been angry first and happy afterwards, when they fixed things, but the whole truth was not something that was necessarily important between them. In 1993, Danny said the things he thought were important, and Matt said the things he thought were important, and that was enough, except when it wasn't.)
He sat on his living room floor without a shirt and kissed Danny, because he didn't know what else to do, and he figured it couldn't hurt anything.
January 2007
They talk about the day-to-day operations; Matt's writer's block, Darius and Lucy's development. They talk about Harriet, they talk about the quiet way that Tom may or may not be falling apart underneath his manic exterior. They fight about the way Matt thinks he can't write without a cigarette in his hand, and about where to have Suzanne order dinner from.
Suzanne walks into the room where they're fighting and rolls her eyes and bangs things around until they stop sniping at each other and pay attention to her; Tom and Simon ignore them. Harriet avoids both of them when Matt and Danny are yelling, and she always has. She's never understood it -- why the yelling is something they just have to do, how they can be so mean to each other. Harriet never understood that it was just how they were -- Matt's mother said that it was just boys being boys, even though Matt and Danny were well into their 20s when she said it and Matt had rolled his eyes at being called a boy, but neither he nor Danny had denied the accusation -- that all the sniping, the name-calling, was just how they related.
Sometimes -- and it's why he doesn't want another director, he wants Danny, always -- he forgets that not everyone works like that, and that's a good explanation about a lot of Matt's employment history. He forgets that it's only Danny he can call a cock-sucking son of a goat and not get punched.
Only Danny knows that's a term of endearment; Harriet was never fond of being called that.
"That's why it will never work out with you and Harriet," Danny says. Danny is stacking Matt's cigarette butts into tiny pyramids in the ashtray and playing Devil's Advocate. Matt is smoking another cigarette, drinking a beer, and trying not to drop ash all over Danny's fingers.
"Harriet is my destiny," Matt says, and flicks his ash on Danny's fingers just to be a jerk.
"I love Harry," Danny says. "I always have, but you and Harriet are fundamentally mismatched, and I would hate to see a child raised in that atmosphere." He's deadpan when he says it, and Matt narrows his eyes and waits for the quirk of Danny's mouth that gives away his jokes.
Danny stares right at Matt, and his mouth twitches, and then he smiles, huge. "Yeah," Danny says. "That was a total flop, right?"
"There's a reason I'm the one who writes the jokes," Matt says.
"You really think that the two of you are going to get back together?"
"I have a great white hope," Matt says. He crushes his cigarette out on the edge of a plate from Craft Services and offers the butt to Danny, who takes it without a word and adds it to the pyramid in front of him. "Opposites attract and so on and so forth."
"I love that you take comfort in clichés," Danny says. "Since you won't tolerate them in sketches."
"What," Matt says, "you don't think we're opposites, too?"
Danny snorts, and the back of his hand knocks his tallest pyramid into pieces. Matt fell in love with Danny's hands back in college, before he had the vocabulary to verbalize what he kept thinking about whenever he watched Danny talk. Matt can't sit still; it's why he smokes, so he has something to do with all his energy when he has to sit still. Danny can sit still. Danny is very good at watching things, silently -- Matt keeps thinking that eventually he'll figure out Danny's tells, the things that will let Matt know when Danny is creeping up on him, but it's been 19 years and he still hasn't managed.
Danny is very still, and very quiet, and very perceptive -- and his hands give him away, entirely. Danny's hands are still when everything is going well, and when Danny worries, his hands are the biggest tell he has, the only one Matt's ever figured out.
"Besides," Matt says. "First, I don't want children, and second, I think a child raised in Studio 60 would be completely well-adjusted."
Danny's hands stop, two crushed cigarettes pressed between his fingers, and Matt thinks that even when Danny was married, he never had a line on his finger from the ring. Matt can't ever remember Danny wearing a wedding ring. "Absolutely," Danny says. "Like Tom is well-adjusted?"
"Tom is well-adjusted for a comedian," Matt says.
"That's not saying much," Danny says, and something Matt can't read crosses over his face. Danny drops the cigarettes back into the ashtray, wipes his fingers on Matt's couch, and for the moment, his hands are still.
January 1995
Being married was apparently what Danny had been doing.
Three things happened in January, '95: Danny's divorce was final; Matt got hired to do rewrites to a summer blockbuster script that was frantically reshooting late clips; and Danny ended up bleeding all over their bathroom and Matt checked him into rehab.
It was a Friday in January, and Matt had found the final papers that Danny had to sign -- giving Tara, who Matt still hadn't met, far more money than Matt thought she deserved, that football-player-screwing bitch -- stuck behind the vodka in the freezer three weeks earlier. Danny was still closed-mouthed about where he'd been and what (who, Matt always corrected him) he'd been doing (who Danny had been doing) during the years he was a ghost, a fond memory of Matt's, floating around L.A. invisibly, but Matt had weaseled the story about Tara out of him one night when Danny had come home fucked up on something and had then drunk gin and tonics with Matt in the empty bathtub until four a.m..
Tara had been a cocktail waitress at the bar three doors down from Improv Olympic West, and Danny had owned a car and had a jones to play the slots in Vegas.
Danny moved to Los Angeles because he knew it was what he needed to do. Matt moved to L.A. because he didn't really have anything better to do, and because all the stuff he owned fit in the back seat of Danny's car.
Matt always thought that he would be the one who got married stupidly in Vegas, because Danny at least had a plan.
He moved to Los Angeles in June of '94, and it took him about six weeks -- finding out who Danny had been hanging out with, buying them enough drinks to get them talking, buying Danny enough drinks to get him talking -- to piece together what Danny had been doing while Matt had been serving nouvelle cuisine to yuppies and sneaking in backstage to Second City and taking notes.
Matt heard the same words over and over again for the first four weeks: brilliant, but unstable; cocaine; driven, but unstable; cocaine; cocaine, cocaine, cocaine. He heard them from other people, and Danny said lonely, not certain that this is what we -- always we, always including Matt, and Matt appreciated that, because he definitely didn't have any idea what he was doing, so he was glad that Danny seemed to, even if Danny was unsure about it -- are supposed to be doing. Danny said uncertain, and Danny said a little fucked up.
He got the story about Tara from a bartender at a place behind Studio 60. The bartender said that Danny was a good customer -- never made trouble, never drank too much, and all those producers do a lot of blow, nobody ever makes trouble -- and Tara was a shitty waitress, and Danny was her third husband.
"She liked the producers," the bartender said. "And they liked her, and I think she thought that she'd eventually find one that was rich. Never did, though, and your friend was too good for her. Plus, she's always trading up."
Danny told Matt that he didn't really remember much of that evening, and the only reason that it took this long to divorce her is that he tried to make it work. "She was kind of sweet," Danny said, and Matt rolled his. "I didn't -- I thought better of her than I guess I should have."
Danny had always thought the best of people; Matt thought about Darryl the Drag Queen and Cinnamon the flatware-stealing exotic dancer.
Matt said, "Yeah, that's what I've heard."
"It's not a problem," Danny said. "You worry too much, Matt."
"I worry just enough. Perhaps not even enough. I think I am really undershooting the worrying," Matt said. "Sign the papers."
Danny signed the papers and acted mostly normal for the rest of 1994. Matt started worrying about money, and about whether or not he'd ever finish anything longer than ten pages, and stopped worrying about Danny so much. He kept looking for signs that Danny was in trouble, and he didn't see any.
The day Danny collapsed in the bathroom, Matt was sitting on the floor of the living room -- "I can't believe that you made fun of my apartment," Matt had said to Danny when he got to L.A., "because you have just as little furniture as I do." "Fewer t-shirts, though," Danny said, and he had leaned against Matt, shoulder pressed against Matt's back, and then pressed his fingers against Matt's lower back and propelled Matt, and his word processor and his t-shirts, into the apartment they'd live in for almost six years, although they got more furniture, later -- outlining what would turn out to be his first screenplay and listening to U2.
He shouted, "Hey, where should we order dinner from?" He typed three exclamation points after and then they have sex in the outline. He heard a thump in the bathroom.
Matt found a spray of white powder on the counter, and Danny on the floor, covered in blood.
Matt cleaned out his savings account ($67.48) and Danny's savings account (a couple thousand dollars), and then he called his mother in Connecticut and borrowed the rest of it. He checked Danny into rehab on February 1, 1995.
He didn't visit Danny once. Danny sent postcards, first scrawled in an unsteady hand, accusatory and angry, and then later steadier and openly apologetic, and finally steadiest, with big plans, and coded apologies. Matt finished the rewrites for the blockbuster (which tanked spectacularly) wrote his first screenplay while Danny was in rehab (it won him a Golden Globe in 2004). It was probably the most depressing thing that Matt had ever written -- would ever write -- but he bundled the whole thing up and put it in the front seat of Danny's car.
He picked Danny up from the clinic and as soon as Danny climbed into the car, he picked up Matt's screenplay and started reading.
Matt took the long way home, and when he parked the car in the apartment complex lot, Danny looked up, looked over, and said, "Thank you."
"I'd have done it for anyone," Matt said, but it wasn't true. He did it for Danny because Matt didn't know what else to do.
"It's good," Danny said, and climbed out of the car with the screenplay still in his hands.
On to Part 2.
Title: How You Do What You Do Is Who You Are
Fandom: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
Pairings: Matt Albie/Danny Tripp, Matt Albie/Harriet Hayes, Danny Tripp/OFC
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: Through 2x13, "The Harriet Dinner (Part 1)".
Disclaimer: Sorkin and Schlamme own 'em, I'm just fooling around.
Summary: In which there is cocaine, sketch comedy, and several ex-wives; or, a brief and hilarious history of Matthew Albie and Daniel Tripp. 14,000 words.
April 1987
In April of his junior year at Columbia, Matt set Danny up with a cute redhead who had completely bizarre ideas about Ibsen and who sat next to Matt in his Contemporary European Drama class, and Danny came home from the date with a 6'4" drag queen whose real name was Darryl.
Matt quit setting Danny up on dates and took up smoking instead.
By way of explanation as to what happened to the redhead, Danny said, "We hold completely irreconcilable notions about The Merchant of Venice," and then he made Matt get up off the couch and sit on the radiator, blowing smoke out the window, so that Darryl the Drag Queen could sleep on their couch.
Darryl the Drag Queen was the first stray that Danny brought home, but he wasn't the last, and Matt eventually almost got used to it -- coming home from class, from the comedy clubs, to find strangers sleeping on the couch that he and Danny had fished out of a dumpster and carried up the five flights of stairs, coming home to actors and dancers and singers and waitresses taking up Matt's space and Danny's time.
The apartment was hardly big enough for two people, much less two people plus Danny's charity cases, but -- helping people, doing whatever it was that Danny thought he was doing, it was keeping him reasonably happy.
And when Danny was happy, Matt was happy to sit on the radiator in the kitchen, notebook propped on his knees and Danny's copy of The Berlin Stories folded open between the hissing coils, watching Danny make scrambled eggs, and pasta with sauce straight from a jar, and peanut butter on toast.
Danny cast his strays in shows he was producing for the Columbia cabaret, or sent them out on auditions for revues whose producers he'd met, schmoozing at the wine bars Matt couldn't afford to drink in. The strays never stayed more than a couple of days, eating the college-student meals that Danny had been cooking for himself and Matt since they'd moved in together, sitting at the table whose wobbly leg was propped up with a copy of The Skin of Our Teeth.
They all talked, though, chattering to Danny about how they were going to be the next big thing, or the next big name after that, and Matt sat at the table and smirked at Danny over whatever he was reading for class. Danny just frowned at Matt, and went back to nodding at whichever stray was yapping endlessly that night -- Danny was an easy touch, and at 24, he had the funny idea that people were the key to finding the money to do what he wanted to do.
Matt knew the key was talent.
Danny brought stray actresses home for 14 months, from the failed date with the redhead who thought Ibsen was a tool of the patriarchy until he (Danny, because it took Matt an extra semester to finish) graduated. There wasn't any pattern to it. Sometimes Danny came home with comped Broadway or Off-Broadway or Off-Off-Broadway tickets, and sometimes he came home with cocktail waitresses who couldn't carry tunes in buckets and who wanted to talk to Matt about Wendy Wasserstein and, when they found out that he and Danny lived together in their tiny apartment, about William Finn and Terrence McNally.
"I don't get you," Danny said. Teresa the dancer-slash-poet was in their shower, singing something tunelessly that Matt couldn't make out over the water, and Danny was sitting cross-legged on the floor with the theater opening notices in the Times folded open on his lap.
Matt flopped over onto his back on the couch, hooking his legs over the couch arm and looking at Danny sideways. Danny had his glasses propped on his forehead and a pen stuck behind his ear; he'd been circling shows (certain to be awful) that he would make Matt go see in the next couple of weeks. "I am a very straight-forward sort of guy, Danny," Matt said. "I like burritos from the place by the Chemistry building. I think Dan Akroyd is funny. I want to go to Chicago and take classes from Del Close this summer. I wish you would stop snoring. There's very little not to get."
"I don't snore," Danny said. "She's pretty, isn't she?"
"Dan Akroyd? No," Matt said. He was supposed to be reading Mother Courage and her Children, and Danny was having a psychotic break in their living room. Matt wondered idly if his professor would accept that as an excuse.
"No, Teresa."
"I guess so," Matt said. "You like her? You haven't gone on a date since the girl with the crazy opinions about Ibsen and Merchant of Venice."
"I'm busy," Danny said. "I thought ... she's pretty, I thought you might want to go out with her."
"I can find my own dates," Matt said. "In fact, you will recall, I once had so many dates that I started passing them off to you, because you never have any dates. And, also, all those waitresses you bring home, you do know that they think we're gay?"
Danny said, "We do only have one bed," but he dropped his head and started picking at the threadbare carpet Matt's mother had donated to their cause when they'd moved in.
"And neither of us is having sex in it, with each other or with anyone else," Matt said.
Danny frowned, pulled a piece of carpet out and tossed it into a corner with one of their dust bunnies. He looked up at Matt, almost frowning, like there was something written on Matt's face that Danny could decipher, if he could just read close enough.
Teresa came out of the bathroom, wrapped in one of Matt's threadbare green towels and drying her hair with one of Danny's threadbare orange towels. "So," she said, looking from Matt to Danny and back to Matt. Matt was staring at Danny, but he could feel Teresa's eyes on him, curious. "If he's the producer," she said, pointing to Danny, who was destroying the carpet again, "what do you do?"
"I'm a writer," Matt said. "I write stuff for him."
At 20, Matt spent most of his free time sitting on the floor in the theater section of the Strand, or sitting on the radiator in the kitchen trying to make Danny laugh.
His writing for Studio 60 had mostly been for Harriet; because watching her face when something really snapped in rehearsal, when she loved him, had been worth every moment of agony after they broke up. But Matt had been trying to make people laugh longer than he'd known Harriet, because he'd been writing for Danny from the first minute Danny leaned over his shoulder in the lobby of the Columbia mainstage theater and said, "That's pretty good."
It was a sketch about Michael Dukakis and it wasn't actually very good, but Matt still has the pages, ripped from the notebook and crammed in the back of the coffee table book about Second City along with three postcards from Harriet and his first contract on Studio 60, because there was something worth keeping in it, and Danny had seen it.
Matt was a writer, and he knew a lot of words for things that were fantastic -- sketches that were perfectly paced, comedy that made Danny laugh until he cried.
Danny kept bringing home strays, trying to find something in all the strangers he talked to, and Matt kept trying to make Danny laugh.
May 1988
Danny finished his Masters' degree on time, in May. Matt had spent the summer after his junior year sleeping on improvisers' couches in Chicago, so he could take classes at Improv Olympic instead of taking calculus in summer school, and he had also neglected to take any classes that covered drama before 1910, so he did not.
When Matt walked into the living room on the morning of commencement, Danny was sitting on the couch with his head back, wearing his graduation robe, with bloody Kleenex stuffed into his nostrils, and the shower was running. "So," Matt said. "Stripper, cocktail waitress, or drag queen? Also, you did not come home last night."
"Classically trained ballerina," Danny said, sounded nasal and muffled. He lifted his head up and pulled the tissue out of his nose, dabbing carefully at his face, and Matt could see shiny spots of blood, still wet, on the collar of his robe. "Also exotic dancer. I came home this morning."
"Only you," Matt said, "would bring home an exotic dancer-slash-classically trained ballerina the morning of your graduation. What were you doing last night? Did someone punch you in the nose?"
"I was just out," Danny said. "I met Cinnamon at a bar, and she needed a place to crash for a couple of days, they're turning her building into condos and she was evicted."
"Cinnamon," Matt said. Danny's nose started dripping again, three quick spots of red fading to brown on the white shirt he was wearing under the robe.
Danny said, "Shit."
"Seriously," Matt said, fishing for something to say about a classically trained ballerina named Cinnamon, but he couldn't stop staring at Danny, blood gushing out between his fingers and dripping down his face. Danny groped for the box of Kleenex on the couch beside him, pinching the bridge of his nose while he twisted the tissue and plugged his nostrils again. "Jesus, Danny, are you okay?"
"Just a nosebleed," Danny said, and his mouth twisted strangely before he looked away from Matt. "I'm tired, we just finished finals, I'm getting sick or something. I'm fine, Matt."
Matt sank down onto the floor, crossing his legs and waiting for the shower to cut off. "So you had a good night?"
"Yeah," Danny said. "It was fine."
"Get into any trouble, besides the exotic dancer houseguest sort?"
"I only get into trouble when you're with me," Danny said, sounding fond. Or sad, Matt couldn't tell which. "It was fine, we went a bunch of places and drank a lot of champagne. People want to give me money to produce things."
Matt said, "Okay." Danny had been a ghost lately, spending half his time in the library and the other half in Manhattan bars, sweet-talking anyone who would let him shuffle papers, manage money, track down advertisers. He hadn't brought home nearly as many strays recently, and Matt had spent a lot of time sacked out on the couch, scripts and notebooks folded open on his chest, waiting for Danny to come home.
"I haven't been sleeping much," Danny said. Matt tried to hear a clue, a clue about anything, about what was really wrong, in Danny's voice, but Danny really did just sound tired, and Matt knew he was probably overreacting. "Lots of work on the thesis." He stood up and offered Matt his hand. "Come on, my folks want to take us out to dinner."
"Cinnamon, too?" Matt didn't understand Danny's thesis, but he'd been living with Danny for two years and he still didn't understand how you could get a Masters' degree in raising money for theater, either, but Danny had done it.
"No," Danny said.
"Okay," Matt said. He tried not to stare at the spots of blood on Danny's collar while Danny's mother made awkward small talk.
Later he'd wonder how he missed any of the signs, any of the ways that he should have seen Danny falling apart, but Cinnamon the exotic dancer stole all of their silverware while they were out at dinner, and at the time, a nosebleed seemed like small potatoes when compared to eating ramen with their fingers.
September 1988
Danny moved to Los Angeles and sent postcards. Matt stayed in New York and got a C- in Calculus and an A in Jacobean Theater, and when the air conditioner broke down in July, he lugged it up to the top of the building and threw it down into the alley, just to see what it would do.
It shattered, and Matt wrote Danny a postcard about it. He got one back that said, I bet you could have sold it at a pawn shop, even if it was busted. Send pictures.
In June, Matt met an English major named Star in his calculus class. She was funny and she had six tattoos, and she could do things with her tongue that would make grown men weep. Matt spent most of his free time in bed with her, and four postcards from Danny piled up on the kitchen counter before Matt remember to send one back.
He wouldn't have remember at all, except that Star picked the one on the top of the stack up on the 4th of July and said, "Who's Danny?"
"My roommate," Matt said.
Star peered around the apartment curiously. "Two people live here?"
Matt said, "Past tense," and went back to rooting through the take-out containers in the fridge, because he was certain there were two beers in there somewhere.
"Oh," Star said. "Bad breakup."
"What?" Matt said, backpedaling out of the fridge. "No, no. Roommate, platonic."
"This one says, don't you love me any more, Matthew?" Star said. "It's okay if you're gay."
"Danny's just fucking with me," Matt said. "He does that."
"Sure," Star said.
She didn't return his calls after that, and Matt sent Danny a postcard that said, I think I just got dumped because I'm gay for you.
Danny sent one back that said, I'm glad to know that it was a nice piece of tail keeping you from answering my cards and not the fact that you were dead in a gutter somewhere. P.S. You are gay for me, you asshole, didn't you know that? It had a picture of Dodger Stadium on it, and Matt stuck it in his notebook, between the pages of a sketch about a Mets fan married to a Yankees fan. The sketch sucked, and the postcard made Matt's head hurt.
None of Danny's postcards said anything about Danny's life -- they were nagging reminders to Matt to pay the electric bill, or stories about celebrities that Danny saw doing outrageous things in public places. Like a lot of things, later he figured out that he should have been worried, but he wasn't, and more often than not, Danny's postcards ended up left in library books or at bars.
The only one Matt hung on to was the one of Dodger Stadium
Matt graduated in August, and sold everything left in the apartment except 16 vintage concert t-shirts and his word processor. Danny called on Labor Day, sounding tired and distant, and when Matt told him that he'd sold everything but the t-shirts and the word processor, Danny said, "Even your pants? I don't think most people hire screenwriters who don't wear pants."
"If you're famous, you can wear whatever you want," Matt said. He hadn't sold his pants.
"You still have to wear something," Danny said.
Matt said, "Vintage concert t-shirts are eternal." He was trying to cram all of his clothes (including the t-shirts) into one small suitcase that he'd salvaged from a dumpster because it didn't smell terrible and didn't have any visible stains.
"You can't wear them to accept an Oscar," Danny said.
"Sure you can." The suitcase groaned, and Matt wedged the phone between his shoulder and his ear so he could sit on it. "You should come to Chicago and help me move in."
"I can't," Danny said, tightly, his voice clipped.
The suitcase snapped shut, and Matt collapsed on the floor beside it. "Sure you can," he said. "You're just fetching coffee for some executive right now, aren't you?"
"I can't," Danny said.
"Come on, man," Matt said. "You're my best friend! I'm starting an exciting new chapter in my life! You owe it to me to be there! You owe it to yourself, Daniel. I'll buy you a beer."
"You own 16 t-shirts and a glorified typewriter. Move yourself," Danny said, and hung up. It wasn't until the dial tone started bleating in his ear that he realized he hadn't asked Danny about Los Angeles at all.
Matt picked Chicago because he didn't own a car and he didn't have a driver's license, he didn't particularly want to acquire either of them, and Los Angeles traffic scared him. The UCB wouldn't open their theater for years -- wouldn't write their first sketch together for years -- and in 1988, Matt didn't want to do stand-up. He hadn't had a single professor who'd understood that. He had one who wanted to him to be a serious playwright, the next Eugene O'Neill, and one who thought he should try his hand at a Jay McInerney style novel, but none of them thought that comedy was real.
So he went to Chicago, where comedy was a hell of a lot more real, and nobody would make him own a car. Danny left Matt a list of everyone who'd gone through Second City and ended up on SNL or S60 when he moved out -- Matt found it, in the middle of August while he was trying to clean the place well enough to get at least part of their security deposit back, tucked underneath the sink with the jug of bleach and a note that said, Congratulations, this is your prize for deciding to clean the bathroom: reassurance that you've made the right decision geographically.
Matt called Danny to thank him, but all he got was Danny's scratchy answering machine, and he hung up before the beep. It was 4 a.m. on a Thursday, and either Danny was still out or he was asleep. Matt folded the list of everyone who'd succeeded because they went to Chicago into his notebook next to the postcard of Dodger Stadium.
Chicago was less big and less noisy and significantly less scary than New York had been, his first week at Columbia. The son of a cousin of Matt's mother let Matt sleep on her couch for two weeks while he figured out how to get from her Bucktown apartment to the places he wanted to go, without a map, and she took him to a free midnight show at Improv Olympic, where a skinny kid (who Matt would later figure out was named Mike Myers, when he made it big on SNL) made Matt laugh so hard he cried.
The bars were closing when they left the theater, and Matt stood on Clark Street surrounded by several thousand incredibly drunk Cubs fans, and he thought, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. He wasn't sure how, but Danny hadn't gotten a Masters' degree in making money for nothing, Matt was certain -- Danny could tell him how.
Matt had a couple hundred bucks left from selling all his possessions and some of Danny's, too, and it was just enough to find himself an apartment and enroll in the first writing class that Second City offered. He didn't have anything left over to pay the rent in October, but that was a problem he'd figure out when he got to it. He called Danny, 8:30 on a Wednesday, and Danny wasn't home.
He hung up without leaving a message.
Six weeks after he got to Chicago, Matt was trying to wedge the mattress he'd bought from the bartender at Second City ETC through his front door when his phone started ringing. "I'm in Kansas City," Danny said. "My flight lands in Chicago in 72 minutes. Meet me at O'Hare."
Matt left the mattress in the middle of the living room and rode the Blue Line out to the airport, notebook propped on his knees, watching the people and their luggage on the train. It took him 15 minutes glancing between his watch and the arrivals from Kansas City to figure out which flight was Danny's, and by the time he did, Danny was off the plane, slumped in a chair by the gate with his eyes closed.
Danny was skinnier than he'd been when he left New York, and Matt kicked Danny's foot and said, "What, the Chinese food in L.A. is that bad?"
Danny sat up and scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. "I'm working a lot."
"Fetching a lot of coffee?" Matt said, and he stuck his hand out to help Danny up. Danny stared at Matt's hand for a long moment before he took it, hauling himself to his feet and shouldering a carry-on bag that had seen better days.
"Reading a lot of crap," Danny said. "I could write an essay on how not to write a script, but I still don't know what makes a good one."
"Sure you do," Matt said. "It's good if I wrote it."
"Have you written one yet?"
"No," Matt said. "But I will."
"Sure you will," Danny said. "Come on, show me this place you're keeping all your t-shirts."
"Hey, I bought a coffee pot," Matt said, and Danny smiled, for the first time since Matt had picked him out of the crowd. He looked tired, despite the smile, and Matt put his hand on Danny's back without thinking about it.
Matt bought a case of Old Style and they drank the whole thing sprawled out across Matt's mattress, still afloat in the middle of the living room. "Sometimes I think it was a mistake," Danny slurred. He was lying on his back with his legs hanging off onto the floor, and Matt didn't have any curtains so the streetlight outside Matt's window dropped its shadows across Danny's face.
"What, moving to Los Angeles?" Matt groped for a beer, and all four that he could close his hands on without moving, opening his eyes, or hitting Danny in the head turned out to be empties.
"L.A.," Danny said expansively, gesturing with his beer and slopping it onto the mattress. "Theater. Hollywood. Cigarettes. Alcohol. Marijuana. Cocaine."
"First," Matt said, "marijuana is never a mistake. Second, you are spilling beer on my mattress."
Danny snorted and tried to pat Matt's face with his beer bottle. Matt's brain caught up to the conversation, and he levered himself up suddenly and said, "Wait, cocaine?"
Danny turned his head away.
"Danny, cocaine?"
"I don't want to talk about it," Danny said. The street light shut off, suddenly, and when Matt looked out the window, he realized it was almost dawn.
"Danny," Matt said.
Danny said, "I don't want to talk about it," and later Matt would tell himself that he just wasn't thinking when he leaned down and kissed Danny. He kissed Danny because he was drunk, and because Danny wouldn't look at him, and because Matt was 22 and stupid and scared.
It was the first time they slept together, and there were two fumbled blowjobs and a car alarm going off in the middle of Matt trying not to choke or laugh or cry or anything. It wasn't the worst sex of Matt's life, but it was close -- except that it was Danny, Matt's best friend in the entire world, which trumped any of the women Matt had ever fucked. Afterwards, the sun starting to turn the sky outside pink and orange as it came up, Danny turned to Matt and said, "I'm scared shitless."
"Join the club," Matt said.
Danny was quiet, and when Matt looked over, Danny had fallen asleep, one hand tucked underneath his head, the other stretched out and curled around Matt's bicep. A bus rumbled past below his open window, and Matt fell asleep staring at Danny's face, smoothed out in sleep but still too thin.
When he woke up, Danny was gone.
October 2006
None of the news stories that tout 18-years-of-Tripp-and-Albie mention what Danny calls The Missing Years. Matt keeps threatening to write it himself. "It'd be an instant bestseller," he says to Danny over dinner. "Tripp and Albie -- the fucked up cocaine years."
"These are still the fucked up cocaine years," Danny says. He steals a French fry off Matt's plate and chews thoughtfully. "You don't even really know what happened then."
"Because you are a close-mouthed bastard," Matt says cheerfully. "And you don't want me to exploit your life for personal gain, which I just don't understand."
The news stories talk about college roommates and lifelong friends and working together for almost 20 years, but they don't talk about the fact that Danny didn't produce or direct any of Matt's work until the late '90s. Matt thinks that if the only things he knew about his relationship with Danny were the things that he read in the media, he wouldn't know a damn thing about it.
"Personal gain, front pages of the tabloids, whichever," Danny says. "Not that we haven't spent enough time on the tabloids this year."
"It would be good publicity," Matt says.
"I don't think those words go in the same sentence together," Danny says.
The fact is that Matt still doesn't know the story. Suddenly, when Danny dropped back into his life, there was money, money to try and make a go of something, anything they wanted, and Matt never asked questions because he was 26 and Danny was offering him a big break, the big break. Matt wasn't stupid enough to ask questions, but there are still too many answers he doesn't have.
Danny's his best friend, and there are plenty of things they don't talk about.
"I know what I was doing," Matt says. "I'll just call it Albie: The Missing Years. I can write about all the lousy tips I got waiting tables at that place on Rush Street, and maybe some of the customers who stiffed me will send me their damn 20%."
"You don't need the money," Danny says. "And you were a lot skinnier then, nobody would recognize you."
"It's the principle of the thing," Matt says.
"It's always the principle of the thing with you," Danny says."
Matt says, "That's why we're taking the job, right?"
"No," Danny says. "But it's close enough."
April 1993
Danny was thinner than he'd been the last time Matt had seen him. Danny called, said, "I'm in the Omaha airport, I'll be there in an hour and a half."
Matt, who was hungover and naked at the time, said, "Fuck you," and hung up. He turned around, barfed in the sink, and then he fell asleep on the floor. He woke up with someone's foot nudging his ribs, and Danny was standing over him.
"You still haven't bought a couch?"
"Fuck you," Matt said. "It's not like you walked out of here six weeks ago and I still haven't bought a couch."
Danny sat down on the floor, leaned back against the fridge, and said, "You should put some pants on."
"You should go away," Matt said. "This is one of the great joys of living alone, without any significant emotional attachments, relationships, or obligations. If I want to lie on my kitchen floor naked, I am perfectly free to do so."
"That's depressing," Danny said. "Go put on your pants."
Matt stood up and the world shifted disconcertingly underneath his feet, but Danny -- Danny looking tired, and sad, and needy -- smiled at Matt from the floor, and Matt went and put on pants.
In 1993, Matt's possessions included a word processor, a blender, 27 spiral bound notebooks full of sketches (numbered chronologically based on date finished, with permanent marker, on their covers) a case of typing paper, and 27 vintage concert t-shirts. Danny was flipping through notebook #22 when Matt emerged from the bedroom, buttoning his shirt. Danny said, "You've gotten better."
"Four years," Matt said. "Something had to give."
He leaned in the doorway and watched Danny set #22 (mostly sketches based on horrible yuppies he saw on the train and in the restaurant where he was waiting tables) down on the windowsill and pick up #14 (mostly sketches about horrible heterosexual relationships where someone was always leaving, which Steve Carell said was Matt sublimating his issues about "that guy you lived with in college").
Danny's suit hung off him badly, and when had Danny started wearing suits? Some nights, Matt came home from waiting tables full of rich assholes who under-tipped and tried to write and felt older and more tired than his 26 years, but Danny looked that tired.
"So," Matt said, and Danny jumped like he'd been shocked. "It's nice to see you, glad you're not dead, thanks for calling, where the hell have you been?"
Danny frowned. He wiped the back of his hand against his nose and sighed. "I've been busy," he said.
"That's the worst fucking excuse I've ever heard," Matt said.
Danny said, "Matt," and he sounded a little broken, like he did the last time Matt saw him and Danny said that he thought he'd made a lot of mistakes.
Matt had made a lot of mistakes in four years, because everybody makes a lot of mistakes no matter who they are, and Matt's mistakes started with the crazy red-headed stockbroker he'd dated for two years (her West Loop apartment was nicer than his Logan Square cockroach hostel) and ended with forgetting to lock his door before he passed out last night. If Matt had locked his door, Danny wouldn't have waltzed right in as though he'd been there all this time.
Seven years, and Danny still surprised the hell out of Matt all the time. Seven years, and Matt was still surprised when Danny did something surprising. It was a vicious cycle, and Matt knew without a doubt that he was never going to break out of it.
He didn't like the world without Danny in it -- he didn't like the things he wrote without Danny to tell him how to fix things, he didn't like the girls he dated without Danny around to terrify them into breaking up with Matt.
His life was poorer for the lack of Danny, and Matt, pants on, walked into the living room, sat on the floor, and said, "Tell me what you've been doing."
Danny dropped his head, and sighed, and sat down next to Matt. He leaned over and rested his forehead against Matt's shoulder, and Matt jumped. Matt touched Danny, and Danny let him, but Danny didn't touch people, voluntarily. "Hey," Matt said.
"I am in so much trouble," Danny said, and he shifted, pressing his face against Matt's armpit.
His breath was hot against Matt's skin, and Matt wrapped a hand around the back of Danny's neck and held on. He had no idea what to say, but he was wearing pants and he had Danny, and Matt had always thought they could figure anything out together. Anything except maybe why they'd slept together -- and maybe that, too.
Matt said, "It's going to be okay," and Danny pressed his mouth against Matt's throat, and then Matt's mouth. Okay, Matt thought, anything at all, and he kissed Danny back.
Danny had always said, sleep on the problem and we'll figure it out in the morning. It wasn't an answer, it wasn't the problem, and Matt once again had no idea what was going on, but he never had, and he wasn't homeless or completely broke yet. He'd spent four years talking to an imaginary Danny, because his life felt awkward and off-balance without a real Danny, and Matt was angry and freaked out.
But he was, if he admitted the truth to himself, happier to have Danny than he was angry at Danny for disappearing. (Later, it would turn out that Matt should have been angry first and happy afterwards, when they fixed things, but the whole truth was not something that was necessarily important between them. In 1993, Danny said the things he thought were important, and Matt said the things he thought were important, and that was enough, except when it wasn't.)
He sat on his living room floor without a shirt and kissed Danny, because he didn't know what else to do, and he figured it couldn't hurt anything.
January 2007
They talk about the day-to-day operations; Matt's writer's block, Darius and Lucy's development. They talk about Harriet, they talk about the quiet way that Tom may or may not be falling apart underneath his manic exterior. They fight about the way Matt thinks he can't write without a cigarette in his hand, and about where to have Suzanne order dinner from.
Suzanne walks into the room where they're fighting and rolls her eyes and bangs things around until they stop sniping at each other and pay attention to her; Tom and Simon ignore them. Harriet avoids both of them when Matt and Danny are yelling, and she always has. She's never understood it -- why the yelling is something they just have to do, how they can be so mean to each other. Harriet never understood that it was just how they were -- Matt's mother said that it was just boys being boys, even though Matt and Danny were well into their 20s when she said it and Matt had rolled his eyes at being called a boy, but neither he nor Danny had denied the accusation -- that all the sniping, the name-calling, was just how they related.
Sometimes -- and it's why he doesn't want another director, he wants Danny, always -- he forgets that not everyone works like that, and that's a good explanation about a lot of Matt's employment history. He forgets that it's only Danny he can call a cock-sucking son of a goat and not get punched.
Only Danny knows that's a term of endearment; Harriet was never fond of being called that.
"That's why it will never work out with you and Harriet," Danny says. Danny is stacking Matt's cigarette butts into tiny pyramids in the ashtray and playing Devil's Advocate. Matt is smoking another cigarette, drinking a beer, and trying not to drop ash all over Danny's fingers.
"Harriet is my destiny," Matt says, and flicks his ash on Danny's fingers just to be a jerk.
"I love Harry," Danny says. "I always have, but you and Harriet are fundamentally mismatched, and I would hate to see a child raised in that atmosphere." He's deadpan when he says it, and Matt narrows his eyes and waits for the quirk of Danny's mouth that gives away his jokes.
Danny stares right at Matt, and his mouth twitches, and then he smiles, huge. "Yeah," Danny says. "That was a total flop, right?"
"There's a reason I'm the one who writes the jokes," Matt says.
"You really think that the two of you are going to get back together?"
"I have a great white hope," Matt says. He crushes his cigarette out on the edge of a plate from Craft Services and offers the butt to Danny, who takes it without a word and adds it to the pyramid in front of him. "Opposites attract and so on and so forth."
"I love that you take comfort in clichés," Danny says. "Since you won't tolerate them in sketches."
"What," Matt says, "you don't think we're opposites, too?"
Danny snorts, and the back of his hand knocks his tallest pyramid into pieces. Matt fell in love with Danny's hands back in college, before he had the vocabulary to verbalize what he kept thinking about whenever he watched Danny talk. Matt can't sit still; it's why he smokes, so he has something to do with all his energy when he has to sit still. Danny can sit still. Danny is very good at watching things, silently -- Matt keeps thinking that eventually he'll figure out Danny's tells, the things that will let Matt know when Danny is creeping up on him, but it's been 19 years and he still hasn't managed.
Danny is very still, and very quiet, and very perceptive -- and his hands give him away, entirely. Danny's hands are still when everything is going well, and when Danny worries, his hands are the biggest tell he has, the only one Matt's ever figured out.
"Besides," Matt says. "First, I don't want children, and second, I think a child raised in Studio 60 would be completely well-adjusted."
Danny's hands stop, two crushed cigarettes pressed between his fingers, and Matt thinks that even when Danny was married, he never had a line on his finger from the ring. Matt can't ever remember Danny wearing a wedding ring. "Absolutely," Danny says. "Like Tom is well-adjusted?"
"Tom is well-adjusted for a comedian," Matt says.
"That's not saying much," Danny says, and something Matt can't read crosses over his face. Danny drops the cigarettes back into the ashtray, wipes his fingers on Matt's couch, and for the moment, his hands are still.
January 1995
Being married was apparently what Danny had been doing.
Three things happened in January, '95: Danny's divorce was final; Matt got hired to do rewrites to a summer blockbuster script that was frantically reshooting late clips; and Danny ended up bleeding all over their bathroom and Matt checked him into rehab.
It was a Friday in January, and Matt had found the final papers that Danny had to sign -- giving Tara, who Matt still hadn't met, far more money than Matt thought she deserved, that football-player-screwing bitch -- stuck behind the vodka in the freezer three weeks earlier. Danny was still closed-mouthed about where he'd been and what (who, Matt always corrected him) he'd been doing (who Danny had been doing) during the years he was a ghost, a fond memory of Matt's, floating around L.A. invisibly, but Matt had weaseled the story about Tara out of him one night when Danny had come home fucked up on something and had then drunk gin and tonics with Matt in the empty bathtub until four a.m..
Tara had been a cocktail waitress at the bar three doors down from Improv Olympic West, and Danny had owned a car and had a jones to play the slots in Vegas.
Danny moved to Los Angeles because he knew it was what he needed to do. Matt moved to L.A. because he didn't really have anything better to do, and because all the stuff he owned fit in the back seat of Danny's car.
Matt always thought that he would be the one who got married stupidly in Vegas, because Danny at least had a plan.
He moved to Los Angeles in June of '94, and it took him about six weeks -- finding out who Danny had been hanging out with, buying them enough drinks to get them talking, buying Danny enough drinks to get him talking -- to piece together what Danny had been doing while Matt had been serving nouvelle cuisine to yuppies and sneaking in backstage to Second City and taking notes.
Matt heard the same words over and over again for the first four weeks: brilliant, but unstable; cocaine; driven, but unstable; cocaine; cocaine, cocaine, cocaine. He heard them from other people, and Danny said lonely, not certain that this is what we -- always we, always including Matt, and Matt appreciated that, because he definitely didn't have any idea what he was doing, so he was glad that Danny seemed to, even if Danny was unsure about it -- are supposed to be doing. Danny said uncertain, and Danny said a little fucked up.
He got the story about Tara from a bartender at a place behind Studio 60. The bartender said that Danny was a good customer -- never made trouble, never drank too much, and all those producers do a lot of blow, nobody ever makes trouble -- and Tara was a shitty waitress, and Danny was her third husband.
"She liked the producers," the bartender said. "And they liked her, and I think she thought that she'd eventually find one that was rich. Never did, though, and your friend was too good for her. Plus, she's always trading up."
Danny told Matt that he didn't really remember much of that evening, and the only reason that it took this long to divorce her is that he tried to make it work. "She was kind of sweet," Danny said, and Matt rolled his. "I didn't -- I thought better of her than I guess I should have."
Danny had always thought the best of people; Matt thought about Darryl the Drag Queen and Cinnamon the flatware-stealing exotic dancer.
Matt said, "Yeah, that's what I've heard."
"It's not a problem," Danny said. "You worry too much, Matt."
"I worry just enough. Perhaps not even enough. I think I am really undershooting the worrying," Matt said. "Sign the papers."
Danny signed the papers and acted mostly normal for the rest of 1994. Matt started worrying about money, and about whether or not he'd ever finish anything longer than ten pages, and stopped worrying about Danny so much. He kept looking for signs that Danny was in trouble, and he didn't see any.
The day Danny collapsed in the bathroom, Matt was sitting on the floor of the living room -- "I can't believe that you made fun of my apartment," Matt had said to Danny when he got to L.A., "because you have just as little furniture as I do." "Fewer t-shirts, though," Danny said, and he had leaned against Matt, shoulder pressed against Matt's back, and then pressed his fingers against Matt's lower back and propelled Matt, and his word processor and his t-shirts, into the apartment they'd live in for almost six years, although they got more furniture, later -- outlining what would turn out to be his first screenplay and listening to U2.
He shouted, "Hey, where should we order dinner from?" He typed three exclamation points after and then they have sex in the outline. He heard a thump in the bathroom.
Matt found a spray of white powder on the counter, and Danny on the floor, covered in blood.
Matt cleaned out his savings account ($67.48) and Danny's savings account (a couple thousand dollars), and then he called his mother in Connecticut and borrowed the rest of it. He checked Danny into rehab on February 1, 1995.
He didn't visit Danny once. Danny sent postcards, first scrawled in an unsteady hand, accusatory and angry, and then later steadier and openly apologetic, and finally steadiest, with big plans, and coded apologies. Matt finished the rewrites for the blockbuster (which tanked spectacularly) wrote his first screenplay while Danny was in rehab (it won him a Golden Globe in 2004). It was probably the most depressing thing that Matt had ever written -- would ever write -- but he bundled the whole thing up and put it in the front seat of Danny's car.
He picked Danny up from the clinic and as soon as Danny climbed into the car, he picked up Matt's screenplay and started reading.
Matt took the long way home, and when he parked the car in the apartment complex lot, Danny looked up, looked over, and said, "Thank you."
"I'd have done it for anyone," Matt said, but it wasn't true. He did it for Danny because Matt didn't know what else to do.
"It's good," Danny said, and climbed out of the car with the screenplay still in his hands.
On to Part 2.