Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living (16 page)

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W
e few core company members, our lives were fueled almost entirely by the ambition of youth. None of us ever had quite enough to eat, but we would work late into the wee hours of the night just the same. In a play called
The Quarantine
, I was acting in the show, so I’d rehearse the show from six until ten, then I’d go backstage to my tools and work on a life-size dummy of me, complete with a life-cast foam latex head, for, what else, the disemboweling scene. I remember driving a three-inch screw into my own knee (on the dummy) and actually thinking, “This is awesome and also kinda weird.” I’d think, “It’s opening night tomorrow night, or I guess tonight. It’s three in the morning. I’m going to maybe get about three hours of sleep from maybe five to eight
A.M
. This is the greatest fucking life.”

Exhaustion would occasionally catch up with me. There’s a scene in
Ubu Raw
in which a six-foot ladder with a two-dimensional boulder attached to its front is placed center stage, and I could, as the titular Pa Ubu, “stand” astride the boulder by climbing up the ladder and straddling the top. On the night of our final preview performance, I climbed up, struck a pose, then passed out and fell forward onto my head. After laughing for a while, Joe realized something was wrong when I got to my feet and began whispering my lines. He came out to stop the show and I said insistently, “No, no, I’m okay,” like a goddamn five-year-old. I was about to commence a broadsword fight with the character BuggerAss, but Joe took away my broadsword. We collected ourselves and then finished the show, minus the fights.

When I first moved to Chicago I lived with Joe and Ragsdale and Tatro in an awesomely crappy apartment at Chicago and Ashland in a pretty bad neighborhood. It was an old storefront that had been converted into a living space, which meant a kitchenette and bathroom had been installed, but no other rooms, so we built our own! Short on materials (to say the least), we just built four bedrooms with eight-foot-high walls (the length of a sheet of plywood), leaving a couple of feet of open air above the walls. Not exactly the most ideal situation when it came to privacy, but we were like family by this point anyway.

One night I was walking home to this hovel from the El train with my friend Rob Ek, who, while sweet as pie, was a very intimidating, manly guy in our tribe of troublemakers. (He was the one everybody thought of as macho, not me. Nobody in those days ever inquired of me, “How did you become so manly?” because I was usually standing next to Rob Ek.) So, we were walking home from the train one night, having taken some pints on board, when we had an unexpected social interaction with a few young men, teenagers really, who had appeared suddenly. I must have been juking about in a silly way, obliviously lost in my buzz, which they mistook for crazy. The main guy was spooked by my strangeness, and he quickly said to us, “Yeah, you better run!” and they all took off. Rob grabbed me and said, “Holy shit! Did you see that?” I said, “No, what?” Unbeknownst to me in my stupor, the guy was showing us a silver pistol in his waistband, telling us to give him our money. The depth of my intoxication revealed itself as Rob walked me through the details of what I had just missed. I went about as white as a sheet, and we realized that the perpetrators must have thought I was crazy. It worked that time well enough, so I took the ball and ran. I began cultivating this scary look, as I realized that being perceived as insane was a great defense late at night in the big city. I wore muttonchops and a brown cowboy hat that looked like something out of
High Plains Drifter
, and under a brown overcoat I favored this black classic motorcycle jacket with an airbrushed image of a skull on the back and the words
Watch Me Burn
beneath it.

The phrase had a number of meanings. I’ve always enjoyed these triple-layered entendres. No one ever knew what the fuck I meant, but I thought I was being incredibly clever and hilariously rebellious. Part of the inspiration came from the summer after my sophomore year in college, when I was really trying to distance myself from my bucolic, wholesome upbringing. I was also coming down off a born-again Christian trip, so there’s that. I was working for these born-again Christian house builders for the summer in Minooka; it was incredible, and I worked like an ox. We were framing houses and I was carrying four-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood up an extension ladder to the second- and third-story roofs. Looking back on it, it was an act of stamina that makes me long for the strength of my younger self. I’m still strong and have a great constitution, but you have to be eighteen or nineteen and a little stupid to haul plywood like that. At that age, nobody’s terribly impressed that you can haul a sheet up, so you haul two of them. “Yeah, you guys didn’t notice? I did two. No big.” Even as a brute laborer, I needed to perform for anyone who would give me the time of day.

We had a lot of fun, my tool belt and I, as I learned all the different aspects of house framing. At one point my job was to burn all of the trash from the construction site out in the yard. I had this big mound of trash, lumber, and other dross. Probably a ten-foot-high fire pile. And I had a smaller brush pile already going, maybe fifteen or twenty feet away. I was standing on the larger, unlit trash pile, splashing about gasoline from a five-gallon can, because that’s how it was done. We were building two houses next to each other, and the two brothers who owned the company were shingling the roofs and racing each other, one on each roof. I would add that they liked me because, as usual, I was a clown, but only just enough of one. I worked hard and cracked wise in acceptable proportion, until this particular occurrence. Screaming at them, “Watch me burn, boys! I’m going to do it!” like I was going to light the pile under me, I was laughing my ass off. Then, suddenly I saw that the vapors from the splashing gas had caught the brush pile flames and the fire jumped onto me and the unlit pile beneath my work boots. The gas can exploded and blew me cleanly off the pile and onto the ground, rolling. When the smoke cleared, I had lost a lot of my eyebrows and singed my facial hair, but, luckily, that was about it. I wasn’t personally on fire, and I hadn’t been injured in the fall, but that’s how the phrase ended up on my jacket. The brothers not only fired me, but they had the stones to charge me for a new gas can, too. At the time I was riding a 1979 Yamaha XS1100, a big, fat, brown road motorcycle, and I envisioned
Watch Me Burn
on my jacket on that motorcycle. It meant “Watch me haul ass out of here,” but at the same time it meant “Hey, everybody, just wanted to let you know I’m cool. I smoke weed now.” An act of public service, really, because before I had the jacket painted, I don’t think people were aware of just how goddamn cool I was.

Toward the top of 1995 I found this warehouse space on North Avenue. Rick, the landlord, didn’t quite know what to make of me, but I think he liked having a clown around. He rented this big room to me—it was probably twenty feet by fifty feet—and that was the whole of my domicile. In addition, there were a couple of larger warehouse areas where I built a lot of scenery and I had my first real shop. At this point I had finally amassed the full set of tools for a scenery shop, and for a couple of years it became my own tiny “factory” in the Warholian sense. It was right around the corner from Steppenwolf, where I had been working in some plays, so my warehouse became a safe haven for actors to smoke bongs, basically. Suffice it to say that, as far as parties go, there were some pretty good humdingers at the warehouse. Besides the more excellent aspects of warehouse living, there were also some minor downsides, like the five-minute walk from my space in the very back of the building to the bathroom in the front office, especially late at night, especially in the winter. I found it much more convenient to tinkle off of the roof out my back fire escape door, mainly into the snowdrift on a subroof a few feet below me. This arrangement was perfectly agreeable and downright convenient until the drift melted in the spring and three months’ worth of pee sat in a warm and pungent puddle beneath the windows I needed to keep open because of the uncomfortable heat. I knew, thanks to a popular proverb, what to do when life gave me lemons, but in this case, when handed lemonade to begin with, I was at a loss. I did some dumping of bleach and water and I burned a lot of incense.

My time working at Steppenwolf, arguably the best theater company in the country, was incredibly educational. No longer the wild and woolly young Turks who had put Chicago theater on the map (along with David Mamet’s gang), they’d since become a more august, respected company. They’d grown up. Working with a budget in the millions, including some substantial corporate patronage, they had to brush themselves off and sit up a little straighter now. But not too straight—after all, my first show there was
A Clockwork Orange
. Once again, my beloved Robin McFarquhar was the fight choreographer and I was his fight captain. Rob Ek was in that show as well, so there were two of us representing our tribal circle. As fond as I am of the respective jib cuts of Rob and myself, it was really through our association with Robin that we got cast, because everyone in town wanted to be in
A Clockwork Orange
.

We started rehearsals and I have to say it was a little eye-opening, because Steppenwolf, in our minds, had been this kick-ass, rock-and-roll, irreverent theater company. But by the time I reached them they had graduated from their time as dangerous young upstarts, having become a company in early middle age with a big, beautiful new theater building that they had constructed with a great many American dollars, partially provided by United Airlines and other generous patrons. I was still yearning for rebellion at every turn, but in hindsight, I am more understanding of their position, and I now certainly think that it was ballsy of them to even attempt mounting an adaptation of a challenging novel like
A Clockwork Orange
in the first place. Regardless of my immature craving for insubordination, the one thing I can tell you for certain is that I was damn lucky to be there.

Although I ended up working there on six or seven shows over a couple of years with some of the best artists in the country, I never had the chance to shine in a major role. Instead, I performed in more workmanlike ways, filling supporting roles, choreographing fights, making masks, and even once working as a makeup artist.

I was twenty-five and the Steppenwolf founders were all in their midthirties, so they were naturally becoming a little more sedate, while still mounting some of the best plays around. My thirst for experimentation and risk was slaked by other, smaller theater companies, where the work could become quite explosive. One such company besides my own was A Red Orchid Theatre, whose membership included my pal Mike Shannon. I did a play there with him called
The Questioning of Nick
, which is a twenty-minute play that Arthur Kopit wrote—I believe to get into Harvard. It’s a three-character play we did with Chicago theater hero Guy Van Swearingen, who was the artistic director of Red Orchid at the time. We did the play three times in a row, rotating the parts we played with each retelling. The audience, simply seeing the three interpretations, found it fascinating, much in the spirit of
Rashomon
. Simply by changing our personal interpretations of each role, we altered the audience’s point of view, as well, with each iteration. It was incredibly fun to do and it was a really fascinating little study in storytelling. To this day I’ve never worked with someone onstage with a presence quite like Mike. I’m forty-two and he’s probably thirty-eight, so he was a kid of nineteen when I met him. He has such a captivating physical quality about him. In one version of the play he would wrap his dinner-plate hands around my head, as he was a police sergeant and I was a teenage suspect, in the story of a high school basketball star being questioned by a police sergeant and his assistant about allegedly throwing basketball games for payoffs. So when he was the sergeant he would take my entire head in his hands and speak to me very softly. I couldn’t move. I was simultaneously terrified and in love. I have never had a more womblike experience whilst literally embraced by another actor.