Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living (11 page)

This was such a huge lesson for me (and it’s also why nepotism doesn’t accomplish as much as people might suspect in showbiz. Can it get you in the door? Sure, maybe, but you still have to exhibit “the goods” to get the job), and it only made me admire Joe all the more for the integrity of his vision. I realized that we’re being paid nothing or very little for this work, at least in dollars. If we’re not going to do this job as sublimely as possible, then what the hell are we doing?

One of my very favorite of Joe’s many bedevilments over the years, and one that can well represent for you his charismatic combination of leadership and monkey business, occurred at the Abbie Hoffman Died for Our Sins Theatre Festival in 1997. Every year in August the Mary-Arrchie Theatre presents this festival to celebrate the anniversary of Woodstock in 1969. This splendid debauch was a nonstop, seventy-two-hour procession of everything from high-quality theater pieces, music, and monologues to absolute absurdism and nonsense. (I once, having had no time to prepare material, dressed as a clown and downed a fresh goblet of my own urine as my offering to the audience. They were moved, I’m guessing, at my talent?) Theater companies could sign up for a half-hour or an hour slot and do whatever they damn well pleased. Part of the charm of these proceedings was that between acts the previous group would quickly load out, and then the next players would hustle in their necessaries, props, minor scenery, and what have you. This was always a good time to nip down to the liquor store for a half-pint of Old Darling.

On the evening in question, we Defiants, some twelve hardy roustabouts or so, hustled in an entire kitchen and set it up upstage with other assorted mayhem including a six-foot penis tucked into the lighting grid, a lovely lass in a bumblebee costume, and a small hippie tuning a guitar. Downstage center was only an easy chair, a standing lamp (lit), and an occasional table upon which sat an old-fashioned telephone and a bowl of mints. After an impressively instantaneous load-in that would have given the Tasmanian Devil pause, we the crew disappeared, the dust settled, and our dear, lone thespian, our late, great champion and friend Will Schutz, sat in the chair without pomp, unfolded his newspaper, and began to read. As the silence lengthened and the audience was beginning to smirk, the phone began to ring. A good, old-school clanging telephone bell ringer.
Rrring. Rrring. Rrring.
The crowd’s smiles grew.
Rrring. Rrring. Rrring.
Will Schutz inscrutably eyes the Business section.
Rrring. Rrring. Rrring. Rrring.
Titters.
Rrring.
More rings. Minutes of ringing.
Rrring.
Finally, Schutz makes as if to answer the phone but only gathers a mint instead and pops it into his gob. The audience was experiencing differing waves of reaction from loud laughter to mild bemusement to tedious unease to insouciance as when one man in the third row began to utter, “Hello? . . . Hello?” Still, the phone rang on. Really, a surprising amount of laughter.
Rrring. Rrring.
The laughter would die, then after a lull even more enjoyment. This experiment had an audacity that the audience was largely on board with.
Rrring.
For a time.
Rrring.
Then they began to turn. People shifted in their seats and some few got up and left. Finally, a young lady trepidatiously rose from her seat. As the audience shouted more and more encouragement, she more confidently strode into the lights onstage and picked up the handset from the ringing phone. The moment the handset cleared its cradle, clearly silencing the ringing as though a switch had been flipped, Joe bellowed, “STRIKE!!” and quick as we came, we silently hustled the props and scenery out of the theater and into the night leaving nothing but an empty, black stage mere moments after the ringing had ceased. The name of this evening’s offering? “La Surprise Grand.” That’s my boy Joe Foust, folks.

My first “real” job in LA brought me out from Chicago for two weeks in 1996. Nickelodeon had a new show called
Kablam!
, which was a thirty-minute block of mostly animated shorts, with a little live action thrown in. One of these live-action shorts, “The Adventures of Patchhead,” featured me as the young hero’s nemesis, Colonel Kudzu. Four five-minute episodes. AFTRA-adjacent. Hey, they flew me out. It was super fun, although no one had told me that LA is not a proper city, like Chicago, where one can get within a block of ANYWHERE using mass transit.

I landed at the airport and found a bus that would take me downtown, which my map told me would be near Sunset Boulevard, which was the street I sought, upon which the studio resided. So I literally landed in Los Angeles and unwittingly took the bus to skid row. Anything approaching “hip” was several years away from occurring in the decrepit, forgotten streets of downtown LA. It was scary, but I had my crazy-man technique ready to fly, and so I shouldered my green army duffel and set off on foot to find Green Jelly Studios. (I’ll be right back; I’m going to Google Maps the distance.) Six and a half miles I walked with my large duffel on my back in ninety-eight-degree California sun, so I was about ready for a goddamn soda pop when I walked into the soundstage, a greenhorn drenched in sweat.

The first person I saw was a tall, McQueen/Nolte–lookin’ dude in a battered straw cowboy hat, painting the slats on a cartoony picket fence with wood grain and knots. Upon closer inspection, I saw that he had made the last set of knots read “666,” and the cowboy hat had a large Chewbacca button on the front. Enter Pat Roberts, genius clown artist. We were fast friends and were soon roommates and drinking buddies. (This guy is still the funniest, most confederate thinker I’ve ever come across. Whatever opinion anybody posits, doesn’t matter who, Pat will playfully oppose it just to get a rise out of everyone and make them laugh. Which can grow irksome should you be in the habit of positing opinions.)

Gifted with a rascally talent for embroidering intelligent themes and guileless emotions into his paintings and collages, Pat eschewed conventional methods of applying color to canvas, instead using his fingers or whatever implement was handy. I learned of his stubbornness the hard way when I bought him some artist brushes for Christmas. He snapped them in half and painted with the broken handle ends. My adoration and admiration only swelled.

One of the secrets to maintaining my gassy artistic integrity over the years, I was to learn, was in allying myself with a like-minded miscreant whenever possible in order to protect and maintain my self-imposed “outsider” status. As two largely footloose and fancy-free (unemployed) artist types, Pat and I fit that bill to a T.

So long as one had an operable motor vehicle, Los Angeles could be a lot of fun when one was young, broke, and stoned to the gills. For example, Pat and I were once contracted to create some three hundred custom-painted hubcaps as a giveaway promotion for a band pleasantly called Suicide Machines. We had worked on the art department of a music video the band made centered around a demolition derby and shot in an enormous automobile graveyard deep in the San Fernando Valley. After sourcing and acquiring the hubcaps, we then painted each with splatters of black, white, and red, finally applying a decal with the band’s name to the center.

This was the kind of work a man could perform whilst in an “elevated” mood, so to speak, with Johnny Cash accompanying our toils under the sun over a large blue tarp in the producer’s yard. As we were waiting for the production gofer to pick up our masterpieces, and as nobody was home, we rooted around in the garage for some diversion. We found exactly that in a can of electric-blue PVC cement, the kind that gets a person “high” if he or she should catch a whiff of its vapors.

“Shit, let’s take a crack at it,” we remarked, and manfully huffed one single draft of the noxious devilry emanating from the can’s orifice. Well, folks, I can assure you we got plenty high, as a kite, really, for a good forty-five seconds, before the dull roar became simply a splitting headache. “Well, that was stupid.” “Yup. Ow.” I clearly remember thinking that things must be going pretty not-so-great for me, standing unsteadily in someone’s yard, squinting from the pain of a glue huffing. Pat picked up an overripe grapefruit off of the ground beneath the tree which had spawned it, and stated, “Watch how hard I can throw.”

His six-foot-three-inch form wound up and delivered that pregnant globe of citrus to a cinder-block wall across the street like a veritable six-pound lead cannonball. Old Pat Roberts could put some mustard on it. The resultant explosion of pulp and bejeweled juice droplets, in an expanding aurora of dazzling refracted sunshine, made the discomfort recede handily. It was almost as though he had placed a soothing poultice over my eyes and brain. I looked at him, unsteadily statuesque there in the valley’s heat signature, and knew in my pith that I had never beheld a finer man. Goddamn, we lived like kings.

If you were a shiftless wino in Hollywood and you did not frequent the auspices of Jumbo’s Clown Room, well, sir, you were a fool. No fools we, Pat and I could be found with some regularity in the smoky environs of that hallowed dive, watching the incredibly varied collection of ladies disrobe and dance upon the runway. The nomenclature that Roberts bestowed upon the scantily clad members of this motley coterie established him as my favorite living brain, beyond the belch of a doubt. The pallid young lady who seemed to pretty clearly be using heroin on her breaks (as evidenced by the way she aimlessly wandered about the stage, pausing occasionally to pump her fists, eyes closed, as though willing herself to continue breathing) was dubbed Power Surge.

Next up, a rather lovely young blonde who seemed all too innocent for this entire neighborhood, let alone this room, wore her disappointment at her circumstances plainly on her crestfallen face as she politely two-stepped in a bustier plucked from a Betty Grable pinup. She bore the name Miss Nebraska. Now imagine a young Toni Braxton, with just a knockout Playboy Bunny’s figure, exhibiting to the funky bass of “Brick House” that she had about as much rhythm as a crescent wrench. Heartbreakingly beautiful and 100 percent unattractive was Ebony and Irony.

Finally, our hands-down favorite, also gorgeous in all the right superficial physical departments, a perhaps forty-year-old athletic dancer who could have been an action heroine. She commanded the stage and pole with a warrior’s confidence, working her magic to “Crazy Train” as she disrobed down to, oh, what are those? IRON CROSS PASTIES and a G-string. Heil that! As if that wasn’t badass enough, she would then lose the thong and, on her knees, lean back, spread a bit of fuel, and LIGHT HER PUDENDA ON FIRE. I believe she was what David Mamet had in mind when he penned that “coffee is for closers.” She was a goddamn closer, and Pat righteously branded her Clitler. Pat Roberts, ladies and gentlemen.

That was about as low as things got, I would say. Weathering squalor and then staying together once the grass has grown exponentially greener (420, bro) is a true test of friendship, one that ours has passed with high marks.

In my forty-two years of good fortune (and some scattered bad I suppose), several other stalwarts have ridden shotgun to my cockamamie schemes, and although I lack the space in this tome to detail all of their flatulent and heroic exploits, I would like to give a hearty lumberjack’s shout-out to Mssrs. Rapcan, Mitchel, Olichwier, Karr, Decker, O’Brien, Hinshaw, Rusty, Kimmel, Flanigan, Hynes, Ragsdale, Garno, Wheeler, Leman, Tesen, Prescher, Primeaux, Clements, Loquist, Tatro, Kruse, Gerson, and Healy; my brother, Matt; Lee; Jimmy Diresta; and especially Rob Ek and Martin McClendon, two true brothers who have stood by me regardless of my weakness, to set an example for me and all of us in how to conduct oneself as a man of worth in this modern age.

Doing Time

I
n the midsize college town of Urbana, Illinois, along the former Big Four and Wabash railroad lines, there sits a picturesque little train station that served local passengers from 1923 until the line shut down in 1957. It’s just as cute a little brick train station as you might imagine.

In 1972, an enterprising group of long-haired hopheads (Commies) took ownership of the building and established the Station Theatre. The combination of open-minded citizenry (freaks) and the students from the local University of Illinois theater department (younger freaks) has made for forty years of surprisingly high-end theater productions in the Station’s modest black-box stage space. I am proud to have served my time as one of the enlisted weirdos at both the U of I and the Station Theatre. During my delightfully hedonistic college career, I enjoyed performing in and building scenery for several productions at the latter, and I made some very good friends there amongst the confederacy.

A word about live theater: A great many of you have likely never seen a production at your local small theater company. I urge you to correct that deficit, as live theater is loaded with a certain sense of altruism that cannot be found in any other art form. By engaging in the act of “putting on a show,” a theater is holding up a mirror to our hilarious and tragic human foibles so that we, society, may see ourselves therein and thereby receive a dose of social medicine.

That “holding up a mirror” line is not mine, by the way, but I can’t remember who said it first, Aristotle or Hamlet. Banding together with others to achieve a common pursuit cannot help but engender a strong feeling of community, whether you’re baling hay or mounting
A Chorus Line
in a tiny theater space.

Thus, when you produce a play with friends, you feel very gratified to be contributing in some small way to the spiritual health of the community, especially nice since you never stand to make any actual money. Theater artists are paid in the coin of an audience’s laughter and tears, a sentiment which sounds corny, but, let me assure you, is anything but. There is nothing so delicious to me as tickling a room full of people with a gesture or well-timed rejoinder. We thespians are doing our part to keep humanity on the road to decency, and also to take a pie in the face so that everybody can enjoy a chuckle. Let me take this opportunity to again cajole all thirty-seven of you who are still reading this drivel to get out and see some live theater, music, art shows, etc. Is a movie more convenient? Yes. More spectacular? Most often, yes, in a superficial way, but more prone to mediocrity.

There’s a reason a night in the theater seems to take all night. It’s not meant so much as a comfy diversion, like, say, watching an episode of
The New Yankee Workshop
, as it is an
event
in which to engage the hearts and minds of the audience. It’s a bit more like church than your local multiplex, because the performers, the celebrants, are there with you, the audience, participating with complicity in a rite. When you see a play and consider that the artists are pulling this show off
every night
, it’s impressive in a much more immediate way than seeing James Bond jump over a hedge.

Good theater is necessarily more viscerally engaging than other art forms, because you, the audience, are participants. Movie theaters and stadium concerts have their advantages, sure, their pyro and their Dolby sound, but I will always prefer the intimacy of small-theater plays and live music where I can see the details on the mandolin’s pegboard. Seeing a performer’s facial expression goes a long way toward experiencing his/her charisma. I can happily tell you from experience that watching Patty Griffin weave the spell of her songs in person spins an enchantment entirely superior to hearing her records, already amazing in their own right.

In addition, while movie theaters are traditionally a place to get romantic (although please note that anything more than hand work is crossing the line), seeing a musical or play with your date can be very stimulating to conversation and the stimulating cranial exploration necessary to further your relationship to the level of, well, stimulating. Theater, to me, is always a bigger turn-on than film. It’s alive. Maybe if the play goes well you can then catch a movie next time and tug and twaddle each other to your heart’s content. Do as you please. Now that you know how I feel about participating in live theater, you can more fully grasp the sense of camaraderie and loyalty that thrived amongst we young initiates back in Urbana.

It must have been 1990, after a summer performance of the Neil Simon classic
Biloxi Blues
at the Station Theatre, that the infamous Boneyard Bust occurred. Myself and two frequent compatriots, hardy lads Tatro and Craig (who was so skinny we had a contest to determine an appropriate nickname for him—after rejecting the likes of Wisp, Sliver, Wafer, and Spook, not to mention the generous estimation of T-Square, the winner was Line), were sitting upon the large, two-foot-diameter sewer pipe that spans the Boneyard Creek behind the theater and acts as a footbridge of sorts for the not-so-faint of heart.

Aged twenty or twenty-one, we three lads spent our days together in the U of I acting studio class of ’92, but our nights, especially over the summer break, were consigned to the Station Theatre. Like any self-respecting young, aspiring actors, we were seriously involved in the study of smoking cigarettes, and the pipe bridge was a favorite classroom of ours.

We settled comfortably upon the pipe and fired up our squares with élan and my Zippo, our surroundings ideal for a real artistic think-tank session, except for the annoying presence of someone using power tools across the creek somewhere in the darkness. This particular night, we were also sampling some of the illicit weed marijuana by means of a kick-ass new one-hitter and dugout box of teak with ebony and holly inlays that Tatro had purchased just that afternoon from Bogart’s head shop. Puffing away, fulminating over the finer points of the new Dead Can Dance record, striking ne’er-do-well poses we thought worthy of a young Malkovich (John Malkovich, like Gene Hackman, remains a hero of my brand of actor, as he too matriculated in central Illinois), we were aglow in the torrents of a bohemian reverie seldom achieved by any of we three before or since.

Awash in the euphoria of Urbana’s finest Mary Jane, we lost ourselves in the tinkling burble of the Boneyard’s waters, echoed by the ghostly babble of water through the pipe beneath our bottoms, and the bobbing, faerielike lights along the bank upstream. It was a beautiful peace we had discovered there, as we lightly floated, buoyed upon an updraft of hallucination.

That was right about when Line whispered, “Hey, you guys? Those are flashlights.” We each reluctantly tugged our consciousness back from its field of dreams to focus in on the flashlights searching the area fifty yards upstream, across the creek. Yep, those were people. What could they . . .

“Cops!” Tatro hissed. “Shit. What tickles?”

“The Fuzz,” I said. “Ditch the weed.”

“Right,” he replied.

We slowly and carefully gained our feet so as to tiptoe back to the safety of our benevolent train station, gripped in the paranoia of the young, inexperienced stoner. When the police shouted, “Stop! Hold it right there!” we, of course, took off running like shit-faced squirrels in a blind panic.

We scattered, and I’m not sure where my friends got to, but I made it around the theater and into the parking lot next door before being neatly tackled by a diminutive female officer, who popped to her feet, placed her boot on my head, then pointed her pistol at a spot slightly below her boot. What in the fucking what? Hang on, whoa, please and thank you.

This was all insanely wrong; what in the fuck was going on?! In my estimation, toking up on the Boneyard did not equate with a gun to the head, not remotely, so I calmed right down real quick-like.

“Um, okay . . . I don’t think we did what you think we did,” I sagely remarked.

“Save it, dipshit,” she replied.

She was impossibly tiny and incredibly scary. As my heartbeat slowed from the tempo of a twin-prop seaplane to the cadence of a playing card in a bicycle wheel, I saw that my two fellow dipshits had been welcomed similarly across the lot. The three of us, confused and terrified, were hustled and herded into three police cars and hauled all of the five-odd blocks to the Urbana sheriff’s station, where we were kept in separate areas so we couldn’t get our stories straight. As I was being
deeply
patted down and then booked, I whispered a silent thanks that Tatro had had the good sense to lose the weed.

* * *

T
hankfully, and due no doubt in part to the cornucopia of acting techniques we had all gleaned, spongelike, from that legendary tome
Acting One
by Robert Cohen, we all three managed to explain to the baffled police interrogators that we had just been hanging out, talking, and smoking. You know, tobacco. This elicited repeated utterings on their part of “Then why did you run?” to which they received an endless sequence of shrugs and unintelligible mutterings.

Once this unfortunate graveyard shift of Urbana’s finest copped to the reality that we were, in fact, relatively innocent, they filled us in on the malfeasance behind the whole night’s episode. Apparently those power tools we had heard across the creek (so obviously suspicious in hindsight; a Skilsaw at twelve thirty
A.M
.?) were the sound of a team of thieves quite loudly breaking into a restaurant where, it turns out, was stashed a ridiculous amount of cash. About $20,000, I seem to recall.

The robbers made off with the dough, and the police were notified, thanks to an alarm system and a more alert neighbor than we pipe dwellers. The police had arrived to investigate what must have been at least partially an inside job, and as they were scanning the surrounding area for evidence, suddenly there were three young men in eyeliner, fleeing in panic. Understandably, it seemed pretty obvious to them that we must be somehow attached to the caper, although we pointed out that if we were involved, it would have been pretty stupid to lurk about the scene of the crime once the money had been properly purloined, ha-ha. Ha. We all had a pretty good laugh by the time the ordeal had passed. Ahem.

We were released the next morning after a nerve-racking night in the hoosegow, just as the sun was coming up. Walking onto the front lawn of the police station, we laughed with relief that our freedom had survived the tests of the previous night. Comparing critiques of the prisoner’s bathroom, Line and I were suddenly horrified to see Tatro reach into his crotch and produce his one-hitter box. He said, with the most righteous of indignation, “I just got this fucking thing yesterday. It was forty-five bucks; I’m not about to toss it into the Boneyard.”

Once I finished up the warm and free release of urine into my own jeans, and it seemed clear that no one was going to sound an alarm or unceremoniously tackle us onto the pavement, we each fired up a hit, exhaled, and felt the warming sunlight on our young, relieved faces. We set off on foot to face the day and get a nap before the show that night. We had been—and we remained—men of the theater.

* * *

T
he moral of this story? Clearly, when the po-po give you a hassle, stand your ground and talk to them. Don’t run. Just be cool.

One minor detail that may have further colored my character in the eyes of the officers that night, adding to our collective suspiciousness, was the fact that I had a record. That’s right. A rap sheet. The Boneyard bust was not in fact my first dalliance with the Urbana sheriff’s department. Let’s rewind the tape to the previous autumn. (“Rewind the tape” is what we said in my youth when audiovisual content was recorded on media “tape,” wound or rolled around “reels” in an actual “cassette.” It was fucking crazy, kids. Like wiping your ass with a corn cob.) The previous autumn. So, 1989. As a sophomore in the theater-acting conservatory at the University of Illinois, I was newly eligible to be cast in feature productions (aka “fresh meat”). The department produced two main-stage and two studio plays per semester, for which the entire body of eligible actors, fifty or sixty strong, would audition at the beginning of each semester.

Each auditioning actor would perform two contrasting monologues for all four play directors at once. The directors would then hold “callbacks,” and the actors they liked for each role would come back and read specific material, often with other actors, to get a look at chemistry and physical size matchups and what have you. Then the directors would go behind closed doors and engage in a sweaty round of horse trading, mother-fucking, and mollycoddling to try to land the best actors in their own shows.

According to apocryphal student legend, a staggering quantity of oral and manual pleasuring was exchanged between faculty in these negotiations. For example, rumor had it that scoring Michael Shapiro as your Jacques or your Sky Masterson cost two rim jobs and a finger blast. (He really was much sought after. It was his sublimely wry enunciation more than anything.)

Finally, a four-show casting list would be posted on the hallway bulletin board (again, youngsters, public announcements used to be made using paper hung in one physical location. Hilarious, right? You had to walk to the location to see the news!), with everyone’s casting assignment for that half year. Can you imagine the drama that unfurled at this posting? Children and young adults, having dedicated their lives to embodying the tender renderings of history’s most sensitive playwrights, publicly witnessing the joyful tidings of a whole semester’s work, or else the devastating lack thereof.

Oh, there was wailing. Ho boy, there were tears. There was indeed gnashing of teeth. (PS: If you think you might end up gnashing your teeth in public, send a friend to read the casting and bring you the news in private. Looking at you, Greenberg.) Yes, there also leapt jubilation and at times deafening caterwauls of sheer elation shook the building to its roots.

But the real show was in the disappointments. For many young hopefuls, having chosen an admittedly dicey program of study to begin with, in regards to future chances of financial stability, on Mom and Dad’s dime no less, the casting sheet could spell the doom of their entire life’s dream.