I Stayed Up for 24 Hours with a Stranger in a Performance-Art Airbnb

I say I could never live in New York because I hate the weather, but really, it's because I don't like people. Not new ones, anyway. I have a big smile and a hearty laugh, but I assure you, under those sunny genetic mistakes is a standard-issue misanthrope who once walked out of a yoga class because the teacher told us to "Find a partner! Make a friend!"

Nowhere are there more new people than in New York City. Even so, I went there on purpose, with the intention of meeting someone new, because there is an apartment in Brooklyn where you can stay for free if you agree to stay there with a stranger. Actually, it's a little more complicated. Miao Jiaxin is an artist living in Bushwick, who opens the rooftop studio in his home to anyone who is willing to rendezvous with someone there who they only know through social media, and then spend 24 hours awake with that person, "making something," all while being broadcast on a Livestream.

I asked my Facebook friend Lauren Vino—a fellow comedian and writer who virtually works with me at the same blog—if she would do it with me. I knew from her writing that she was funny and sarcastic, but most important, she has a possum on her head in her profile picture, which made me think she shared two of my favorite interests: animals and doing dumb things.

The night before Lauren and I were to rendezvous at the studio, I had plans to make the most of my free stay in the city. I debated over which Broadway play to see, and then changed my mind completely and decided to do the most entertaining thing in New York: getting stoned and watching The Bachelor with my friend Zoe. One of those rainstorms that is just two degrees too warm to be a snowstorm had blown in with the sunset; my feet got soaked after I accidentally stepped into a couple of half-frozen puddles. I was almost to her place when—WHOMP. My head cracked against the iron gate before I even realized I had slipped on ice. I screamed. After alarming Zoe, who had assumed someone was being mugged, she came downstairs to find that it was just me with a bloody temple.

The next morning, I arrived at the studio before Lauren, and was greeted by Miao, who took my shoes and gave me slippers in return. He led me up several flights of stairs that turned sharply on top of one another. After some small talk about where I was coming in from, we entered the studio, which was tiny and smartly laid out. Miao took my picture and advised me to leave my hat on, presumably on account of the Band-Aids that were plastered to the side of my face. He showed me where the cameras were, and how to turn them off after 24 hours. Then he went downstairs and grabbed Lauren, whom he took through a similar process. He quietly bid us goodbye, and Lauren and I, alone for the first time, immediately started talking and then hugged, remembering that we hadn't actually met before.

When emailing about what to make together, we'd realized that we both had a junk drawer of abandoned ideas in our minds. We decided we'd each put three abandoned ideas in a hat, and then pull one out to be rescued. We would have to finish it within the 24 hours. In addition to this deadline, we agreed that we wouldn't use phones or internet for our entire stay. We were both nervous as Lauren pulled one of the slips out. Unfortunately, she chose one of mine.

"Muttheads."

I should have apologized, but instead, I explained every detail I'd hatched around the pilot for Muttheads so far: "Dogs are people, and people are dogs." She stared at me for a second before realizing I was done talking. We didn't have time to tell me to fuck off, so instead we made coffee and spent the next 45 minutes taking puffs from a one-hitter and swapping heartwarming stories about times we had gone batshit crazy on our boyfriends.

Then we sat down and began inventing cartoon dogs. We started with the jobs dogs have: digger, licker, trash-eater, protector, humper. The humper took us down a tangent, as humpers so often do. If people were dogs, did that mean people wanted to have sex with dogs? We couldn't do that, right? Not even if it were for Adult Swim?

As we finished rounding out the characters, we came up with one named Whitney, who, in the words of her character description, is a "startling bulldog." Whitney has dreams of being a Hollywood starlet, despite her abrasive looks and mannerisms. She's part Mae West, part Chunk from The Goonies, and we both immediately saw her materialize in front of us in exactly the same way. We were cackling at visuals that we had yet to write, and already knew we'd be fighting over who got to play her in the read-through.

Characters done. More coffee. More weed. More talking: mutual friends and weddings and gossip and work shit and—wait—this was being filmed.

"Are people watching us? They really might be watching us."

"My face itches."

"If you want to take those Band-Aids off, it won't bother me," Lauren offered. I did. Writing with someone is showing them the fresh wounds on your face anyway.

Breaking the story took hours. "So, they all work at a dog park?" We both checked our phones, knowing they were off.

"Like, really work, or they just call it work? How do we get Todd and Misty alone so he can try to hump her?" We shoveled Goldfish crackers into our mouths.

"Does this even make sense? Like, this whole thing?"

"They're dogs."

We were right under the skylight, but I didn't notice it was dark until after sunset. We made more coffee and powered through the last beats of our outline by focusing on the Indian food we were going to get to have delivered when we finished.

Leaving the room to get the food was technically against the rules, so it was really fun. The rest of the house was being rented as an AirBnB, and we tried to stay quiet as we tiptoed down the never-ending staircases and went down hallways that led to nowhere and accidentally walked into rooms we didn't belong in. Somehow, we ended up in a kitchen with a friendly but confused-looking German woman.

"We're just getting our food."

She responded in what I took to be German for "Have a seat."

"No, thank you. We're just…" Where was the door in this place? Finally, Lauren spotted the shoe rack where we had gotten our slippers and we followed that to the front door.

Back at the room, we pulled out the table and ate our take-out. The window was open and it had started to snow. After 14 hours in our vacuum, the mere presence of outside food felt like a big event.

After dinner, it became clear, for the first time, that our time in the studio had become finite. During the day, time had seemed like a non-issue. Twenty-four hours had stretched out so far ahead of us that we felt we might even have to much of it. Now, we were too screwed for time to screw ourselves over wasting time. This kind of forced focus was, as it always is for a procrastinator, both anxiety-inducing and a huge relief.

The first few pages of the script went fast. The jokes came easily. We were riffing dialogue without thinking about it. There were already great Whitney jokes. When it was time to write a line for her we both got excited. I, while trying to come up with a joke for her, did her face, and thus got cast as her in the read-through. (Totally something Whitney would do.)

Then we got tired. The window was still open. Outside below us, sirens rang through the snowy streets. The layer on of snow had grown much thicker. We were being buried in it. I made more coffee. We stretched and paced around. We took turns typing.

"Is this even funny?"

"They're dogs. Keep typing."

We found a flashing party light under the sink and turned it on to inspire a party ambience. The colorful lights kept reflecting out to the snow covered balcony outside. It was giving us both the heebie-jeebies but we kept it on for posterity's sake. We stuck our faces out into the cold and did yoga and spent an entire hour staring hypnotized by the party light, stuck in a rut, before I finally came up with the line that could move the scene forward: "Time is like the stuff that passes between poops and foods." It did not bode well that Lauren thought this line was, in her words, "so good!"

We pressed forward, half-conscious, and swinging between second-wind giggles and glazed-eyed defeat. Then, we stumbled on a new ancillary character. His name was Crack Dog. He was a dog who did crack, and, like Whitney, we liked him so much we almost forgot we invented him. Fueled with the shaky and misguided enthusiasm that Crack Dog had given us, we kept typing, hitting that glass pipe that is a keyboard just before the break of dawn.

As the sun came up through the snow, the street outside stayed quiet and we rung in the new day with bloodshot eyes, smoking the hitter and cackling as we wove Crack Dog and Whitney into the last scene of Muttheads, before typing THE END.

With three hours to spare for edits or polishes, we both decided to make the most of our last hours by falling asleep sitting up. We did wake up, though, with enough time to do a read-through. A couple of hours of sleep gave us at least a modicum of perspective about what we had done during the fit of manic giddiness that last night had been. We hardly remembered what we had done while in the eye of last night's caffeine tornado. We felt like sleepwalkers walking to survey the damage they had done. As we read, it was different from we had it expected it to be.

I wish I didn't have to say this, but we both thought Muttheads was pretty fucking good.

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