The Red Trumbull Diet

by Patty Lin

Red Trumbull used to eat Hershey bars before every show. Four minutes before he walked out to do his monologue in front of the studio audience, I would stand in a narrow corridor backstage, holding a silver tray with two Hershey bars on it, one with almonds, one without. The tray was my idea. The first time Red saw it, I knew he’d gotten the joke, because he never called me Candace again. From then on, I was Jeeves. Once, when we were in the elevator with those bitches from the talent department, he said, “Any calls, Jeeves?” And I saw them roll their eyes at each other. They thought

I was having sex with Red, of course. Or giving him blow jobs.
But the Hershey bar days were long gone. So were the bacon double cheeseburgers, the chili fries, the Oreo milkshakes.

When Red first appeared on TV doing stand-up, he was as puffy and pale as an insurance salesman. Twelve years later—after getting his own show, struggling through years of inconsistent ratings, building up a cult following, and finally entering the mainstream and becoming a household name—he began to shed pounds. Maybe acceptance gave him the strength to tackle his food demons; maybe fear of failure left him no choice. Anyway, he was now so lean the tabloids suggested he had an eating disorder.

Some of the staffers would talk about Fat Red with bittersweet nostalgia. Fat Red had been funnier. Fat Red had been nicer. Fat Red would’ve gotten wasted with us at the Christmas party, instead of leaving at 10:30, stone cold sober and without saying goodbye. Everybody had loved Fat Red, except, of course, Red himself.

I had become his personal assistant, then, at the end of an era, just before Fat Red started trying the famous diets—the Atkins, the Zone, the Grapefruit. He’d stick with one for a month or two, and then we’d have a particularly crappy show and I’d get sent to KFC to pick up a family-size bucket of extra crispy, and the grapefruit would rot in the fridge.

Eventually, Red figured out a personalized eating plan. Every morning on the way to work, I’d stop at Zabar’s to get him four pineapples and a quart of fresh-squeezed carrot juice. Then next door to H&H, to pick up a salt bagel, toasted, dry. If they were out of salt bagels, or the ones they had weren’t fresh (you had to squeeze them to make sure), I had to hit the other H&H, on 46th and 12th. On those days, it would take me an extra 45 minutes to get to the office, so I’d call our pimply intern Lenny to cover Red’s phones until I got there.

“You know,” Lenny would say, his voice quivering, “when I took this internship, I thought I’d be doing something a little more creative.”

“Just answer the fucking phone,” I’d say, squeezing a bagel.

Lunch was sashimi from Fuji: four pieces of tuna (not the fatty kind), two pieces of salmon, two pieces of snapper, and a cup of miso soup. No soy sauce (too much sodium), no wasabi (too spicy). Don’t even put those fuckers in the bag. Pickled ginger was O.K., but you had to make sure it wasn’t touching the sashimi.

Red ate while rehearsing sketches, so he wanted his food in an orderly way. He didn’t want to be bothered with unpredictability. He thought it would throw off his timing.

I’d bring lunch down to the stage at 1:30, while the cue card guy was still setting up. Red would be sitting behind his prop desk throwing a football back and forth with Prudence the stagehand, a lesbian with the forearms of a linebacker. While they were playing catch, I’d take the sashimi and soup out of the bag and place them neatly on the desk. Soup on the left, sashimi on the right. Lids popped open, but left on top of the containers. Then I’d take the balsa-wood chopsticks out of their paper wrapper, separate them evenly, and rub them together to get rid of splinters.

“Thanks, Jeeves,” Red would say, arranging the chopsticks between his fingers.

I’d always hang around for a few minutes, in case the snapper tasted fishy.

Dinner was easier; Red didn’t eat dinner anymore.


We had six dark weeks a year—that’s six weeks of paid vacation, three times more than the average American gets to go camping at Yellowstone or to ride the teacups at Disney World. All that vacation time should’ve made up for my measly salary and the dead-end drudgery of my job. But during dark weeks, all the thinking that I hadn’t been doing before would start to happen. I’d start asking myself annoying questions. What am I doing with my life? What do I want to do? Am I really a personal assistant? Would I be able to get a better job doing anything anywhere? Why didn’t I become an analyst at Goldman, like all my other classmates?

And there was more: Will I ever be able to afford a couch that’s not from IKEA? Will I ever have a boyfriend again, or at least get laid?

What would it be like—even though it would be completely wrong, he’s my boss, he’s old enough to be my dad, and, besides, he has a girlfriend—what would it be like, hypothetically, to have sex with Red?

What would it be like to give him a blow job?

This dark week, I was going home to visit my family in Plainfield, New Jersey. I dreaded seeing my parents, especially my mother. The minute I walked in the door, she’d say, “You look terrible. Do you need to borrow money?” Of course I did, but having enough cash to buy groceries wasn’t worth having to listen to her litany of worries. I was tired of explaining things—trying to justify why I was paying an exorbitant Manhattan rent when I could be living at home for free, reassuring her that all my tuition money hadn’t gone down the drain.

The only one I wouldn’t have to explain things to was my younger sister, Jenna. She always asked a lot of questions, but they were never about me or my bank account or my plans for the future. They were about Red. She wanted to know what he wore when he came to work, how he smelled, whether he was as funny off-camera as he was on the show.

I told her about the time he sent me to buy him a pair of $150 running shoes from Niketown. (Skinny Red was an avid runner.) I jotted down the style and size, grabbed a wad of petty cash, and headed for the door.

“Oh, and Jeeves,” he called after me, “pick up a pair for yourself.”

“Really?”

“No. Are you nuts?”

Jenna cracked up. She loved this story, told all her friends at college who watched Red’s show every night in the communal area of the dorm while they pretended to study. They were in awe of Red. They couldn’t get enough.

Shortly after that story, I got a call at the office while I was cutting Red’s pineapple. It was Jenna.

“What size?”

“I’m working, Jenna.”

“What size shoe does he wear? They all want to know.”

“Eleven,” I said. “Happy?”

She was. That was enough to make her happy. This weekend, Jenna would be coming home from school to spend her winter break gorging herself on our mom’s cooking, reading books written by disgruntled former members of the Bush administration, and asking me questions about Red. That was the only reason I could tolerate the thought of going home....

Patty Lin is a television writer-producer in Los Angeles. Her credits include Freaks and Geeks, Friends, and Desperate Housewives. She admits she once worked as a production assistant on The Late Show with David Letterman, but insists, of course, that any resemblance, etc. This is her first fiction in print. E-mail: patty.lin@mac.com