The Greatest Love Story Ever Told

by Nick Offerman

  N: Wow.

  M: I was a very sexual child. I had a recurring dream from the time I was three that there was a witch who would put me in an oven and cook me, and then she would take me out and eat me. And when I was warming up in the oven, I would think, “Yeah. Fucking cook it, bitch.”

  N: And you later realized the witch resembled Pat Benatar.

  M: No. It was just the idea of getting heated up in that oven.

  N: Sure.

  M: You’re not springing a woody over there?

  N: I’m getting pretty interested over here.

  M: (Laughs) Maybe you should ask me questions? There’s too much material.

  N: I don’t know if we’re going to start with the whole litany . . . I was thinking major relationships.

  M: I was, too, but mine were so much more serious than yours that I hesitate to launch into that.

  N: So where did we leave off? You were the queen of the bush.

  M: Queen of the bush. In high school, fortunately for you—I would probably be married with nine children if I hadn’t been in that ballet company—I was too busy to have a full-time boyfriend, because I was rehearsing every night. So when I went away to college, that was my first actual grown-up boyfriend. I didn’t know how to have a real boyfriend. He kind of wore me down until I finally said “I love you” back.

  N: You don’t seem worn down to me.

  M: That’s really nice. I’m just talking about my puss.

  N: Me, too.

  M: Amazing. Anyway, we were together for three and a half years. My first relationship was when I discovered I was completely insane. Let me rephrase that. My first relationship was when I discovered I was crazy. And I mean only when it came to relationships, because I’d never been in one before, and I didn’t realize how my upbringing would manifest until I got into a relationship where it was applicable to be things like irrationally jealous, et cetera. Before that, nothing had surfaced, because I wasn’t in a relationship. But then I realized I had these problems, and my boyfriend realized I had these problems. And we both became progressively less enthused. I tried to change, but didn’t have the tools, and didn’t understand anything about myself or how normal people were supposed to be in a relationship. I had absolutely no clue. But it was my first real sexual relationship, I guess.

  N: The sound of a recording device hitting the wall.

  M: (Laughs) But I have since realized that as much as I had problems that I didn’t understand and didn’t know how to deal with, he wasn’t perfect either. I mean, no one is?

  N: Who is? (Pause) Conan O’Brien.

  M: Don Lemon.

  So that was that. And then I had a kind of nice relationship with a guy in Chicago named Joe. That was a four-year-long thing. I wanted to move to New York and audition for Broadway musicals, and he wanted to go to Los Angeles, so he suggested we go to Los Angeles for a month, and then New York for a month. We came out to Los Angeles first. I had already been flown out here for those screen tests, so I already knew some agents and casting directors. So I got signed by an agency right away and never left. Joe was very close to his parents and didn’t want to be away from them. He actually still lived at home. He was Italian.

  N: Consequently, we like to give Italians a hard time. Fucking pasta all over the house.

  M: A lot of pasta strewn everywhere. A lot of V8 juice. Wait, that’s not Italian. (Fake Italian accent) “I wish I had a tomato! That’s one-a spicy meat-a-ball-a!” He said that a lot.

  N: (Same accent) “I wish I had a V8!”

  M: (Laughs) He very unceremoniously moved back to Chicago two weeks after we moved to Los Angeles and just left me hanging on my own, when we were supposed to be renting an apartment together. I had just signed with William Morris and was getting a bunch of auditions and didn’t want to leave. He kept going back and forth from Chicago to LA and that was kind of the end of that. But he was a nice guy. Next to Nick, he was the nicest person I’d dated.

  Why don’t we break this up? Let’s get into your reminiscences.

  N: I guess my first real girlfriend was in high school. She was a cheerleader. She was just exuberant. She played the flute. But we weren’t really cut out—

  M: “Played the flute”? Is that a euphemism?

  N: It’s not. Although we did also engage in physical affection. (Laughs)

  M: I’m sure. I read your book.

  N: (Laughs) That ended when I started dating another young lady, who was a born-again Christian, and I pretended to be a born-again Christian so we could date. That actually lasted for four years or so. But it wasn’t very healthy, because there was some insincerity happening on both our parts.

  That saw me into college. I had a lot of fun in college. I had one serious relationship with a woman who was a stage manager.

  M: Read: lesbian.

  N: She had some insecurity issues that she wasn’t getting around. I really liked her a lot. But it ultimately drove us apart. I’m sure I was also not a complete picnic.

  Then, in Chicago, I had a girlfriend who worked in the costume shop at the Goodman. She was pretty terrific—she could play They Might Be Giants songs on the guitar. But she said pretty immediately, “Let’s get married and have kids.” I was twenty-three, and she was twenty-eight. And I was . . . not quite there. And so we had an amicable parting. Then I had another girlfriend who worked as a costume designer at Steppenwolf. We had a very nice time, and she said, “Let’s get married and have kids.” And I said, “I’m not there.”

  M: See, if I had said that, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to do it. I just never said it. I was like, “Let’s NOT get married.”

  N: No, by the time I met you, I believe I was there. I was ready. With the others, it just wasn’t yet a case of “I want to spend my life with you.” I think part of it was that I knew inherently that I wouldn’t be staying in Chicago?

  Then, there was the spicy interlude of one month with a heavy metal singer who had an EKG tattooed on the side of her head . . .

  M: Didn’t she throw you into the bathtub or something?

  N: There was a bathtub incident.

  M: Maybe don’t relay that one. Leave it at “bathtub incident” and let people think about it.

  N: It was a very tempestuous and illicit month of hijinks.

  M: I had a tempestuous and illicit thirty-year period.

  N: So I have some catching up to do. But because of the degree of felonious activity, after a month of it, I decided it was not the life path I needed to be pursuing. And that’s about it. (Laughs) Back over to you.

  M: I had a few . . . I’m just telling you the ones that were the most significant. Let’s just say I always had some boyfriend or husband or something. But I didn’t really have sexual intercourse with that many people. It just sounds like I did. Apparently, I have an amorous nature. And Nick has reaped the benefits. May I say that?

  N: Sure.

  M: And will you refute it?

  N: No, you’ll brook no disagreement from these quarters.

  M: So the ones that stand out are the two that I mentioned. And some that stand out because they were hilariously bad. There’s sort of an illicit one that might stand out a tad, which I will not talk about in book form.

  N: Which one is that? Oh—you mean before he married Angelina Jolie? Between Jen and Angelina?

  You know, I would add a nod—“to the other women I palled around with,” a gesture of gratitude and respect for some very nice romantic times while we were all getting our feet under us. Because in my twenties, I made sure I didn’t get into anything serious. I played it very fast and loose for a time. Because I knew I wasn’t settled at all. I inherently knew I wasn’t staying.

  M: Yeah, as far as sex in general goes, if it’s consensual and with a nice person and you’re not breaking any laws, where’s the bad part?
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br />   N: I can’t wait to try it.

  M: Maybe someday. We’ll see.

  N: OK, I’m here.

  M: Just try to stay in a neutral space about it. I can’t make any promises.

  By the time I met Nick, I had not been in a serious relationship for four years, and I didn’t want to be. I had mastered the art of the fling, and I was doing that intermittently. Then I met Nick, and Nick is just— He might as well be wearing a sign around his neck that says, “Not Fling Material.” And I thought, “I can’t get involved with this guy, because it will have to be a relationship.” And that’s why I held him off for a while. But I just liked him so much as a person. And then I fell in love with him.

  I’ve known the musician Tom Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, since 1985. She and Tom had already been together for several years when I met them. I said, “It seems like you guys have such a great relationship,” and she said, “We’ve been together all these years, and it always feels like the first time.” And that’s kind of how I feel about Nick. Even though we’ve been together for eighteen years . . .

  N: (Singing) “I would climb any mountain, sail across the stormy sea . . .”

  M: (Laughs) It’s nice to have a soundtrack.

  I don’t want to use the word “fresh,” but it always feels new and fun and like we just got together. I just like him and what he has to say. I think he’s funny. And nice. And that’s a good thing, to not be sick of each other. Or super irritated by everything the other person does. That’s the luckiest thing, because then you can be together forever. The problem with a lot of my exes—and I’m sure you feel the same, Nick—is that at a certain point, sometimes way sooner than one might’ve hoped, everything about them just makes you want to jump out of a moving vehicle. “I would rather jump out of this car that’s going forty-five miles an hour than listen to one more millisecond of this person speaking.”

  N: Sure.

  M: Unfortunately, because I didn’t know what a normal relationship was supposed to be like, I’d just think, “Maybe it’s my fault that this person is driving me to drink. Because this is a perfectly nice person on paper.” I didn’t understand that there are very few people that . . . You’re very lucky if you find one person who you’re actually compatible with. But if you do find that one person, odds are that you’re going to stay together.

  There was some fun palling around on my part also. And when you get older, you look back and think, “Oh, the rock drummer with the BO and the vintage plaid pants! He was awesome!”

  N: I’m having a flood of memories. I had a juvenile idea that I should be able to be a player. It comes from growing up in a rural area and watching a lot of music videos. “Man, if shit goes right, I’m going to drive a Corvette like David Lee Roth. There’ll be chicks in bikinis, and I’m going to be having tons of crazy casual sex.” And I tried that, I tried having . . .

  M: (Laughs) That’s so not you.

  N: I tried playing around. And I failed, because my parents’ influence was so strong. “Look, I know we just did a bunch of drugs, and we’re going to have sex, but I feel like we should have a meaningful relationship first.” That was my problem.

  There was one time, back when I knew I would be leaving Chicago. My girlfriend from The Crucible, Cecilia, had disappeared and I had six or eight months left. I was dating a couple of women who were great. If I had stayed in Chicago, one of them may have developed into something. But one of them—she was one of those—maybe once a year, we’d run into each other and hook up. She always had a boyfriend, and I never knew . . . it was always a different boyfriend. But it became a thing. She was brazen about having a thing for me, and she’d tell her boyfriend. It was the only time I was ever involved in something like that. I eventually had a rare moment of maturity where I said, “I don’t want to indulge in this. I don’t think that’s right, what you’re doing.” It was interesting. That was kind of my own—I guess I grew up all of a sudden, to the point where I was done playing around.

  Then things got pretty bleak. (Laughs) I moved to Los Angeles. I was maturing enough that I wanted to find something more serious. And man, I could not find a lady. Every time my friend Pat and I would go anywhere and meet someone who was cool—because he was also on the make—it became a rule that they were either married or gay. It became laughable. As soon as we’d meet someone who was cool, we’d say, “Are you married?” And they’d say, “I’m a lesbian. And yes.”

  M: This might sound weird, but I think I always knew that someday I’d find the right guy.

  It’s funny that I always assumed I’d eventually have a happy relationship, because my parents had a terrible relationship—and then, it happened.

  N: Boom.

  M: Papi, do I treat you right?

  N: Yeah. I keep asking you to treat me more like the gamekeeper.

  M: (Laughs) Nick just paused and said, “You’re not going to talk about so-and-so? And so-and-so?” And I said, “No.” Because they don’t factor in to this. I’m mentioning only the relationships that for whatever reason were the most significant or had the most impact.

  N: So those other ones would be included in the general “mistake” comments that you made. Rather than going into specifics.

  M: Yes. The ones that I didn’t mention would all be lumped into “not as memorable,” even if you’d think on paper that they’d be more memorable.

  N: I just remembered, actually—it’s pretty juicy if I talk about my first girlfriend.

  M: The flautist?

  N: No, this was in junior high. She was a cheerleader—see a pattern here?

  M: How many cheerleaders are there in Minooka?

  N: There are, like, fifteen girls in the class, and twelve of them are cheerleaders. So the odds are in my favor. She was from the next school over, Channahon, where my dad taught.

  M: Long-distance relationship!

  N: Yeah. We met, and her friend somehow got my phone number, and called me and said, “Michelle likes you.” And I said, “Where do I sign?” We talked on the phone and started going together before we met. (Laughs)

  M: (Incredulous) Wow . . . That’s like early Tinder or something.

  N: We’d seen each other, but I don’t think we’d shaken hands or anything. So we started this thing up, and . . . maybe we went to something once and held hands. I think it was the roller-skating rink. But we never kissed or anything. It was pretty brief. But the intrigue is that her name is Michelle McCoy, and years later, I found out that my dad had been adopted by my grandpa Offerman, and that he was a Hatfield by blood.

  M: (Laughs) Oh my god! That’s a real Romeo and Juliet situation right there.

  N: So I guess it wasn’t meant to be for this Hatfield and that McCoy.

  M: That’s dramatic!

  I was going to say one other thing: I mysteriously attracted to myself a number of fully gay men who, for whatever reason, wanted to make out with me and have romantic relationships. So there were, like, four gay men who I had relationships with. Not having coitus, but other things. Very strange. Four gay men who made the first move, and I was like, “All right.”

  N: You don’t count me among those?

  M: I do. Indeed.

  N: Am I the third or fourth?

  M: You’re the fifth. The fifth and final gay man.

  N: I’m a growing concern.

  M: (Laughs)

  N: I’m developing some thoughts . . .

  M: He is. He’s still developing his gayness.

  I don’t know. I was never like Gisele Bündchen, but for some reason, I had suitors.

  N: First of all, foul on the past-tense verb. I’ve seen photographs. From soup to nuts, you’ve been the foxiest thing in the county.

  M: (Laughs)

  N: The pictures of you, from ballet and high school—I would have crashed my car if I drove by you
. You’re being very modest.

  I’m trying to remember if there’s anything I left out.

  M: Come on, who are you kidding? That’s one of the really big reasons that I love you. Because you’re not the kind of guy who had a million women and was a dog. I always hated those kinds of guys.

  N: That’s always been a big thing for me. I think it’s because of my parents. I don’t have an infidelity channel. Even when I was at my youngest and randiest—say, age eighteen to twenty-five. I remember having a girlfriend in college and thinking other young women were attractive. But it never occurred to me. It wasn’t like I made a cognitive choice—“You should be true to your relationship.” I just didn’t have that channel.

  M: You really don’t. There have been so many times throughout the course of our relationship when we’ve been out in public somewhere and some really good-looking woman has walked by, and I’M looking at her, and I always clock Nick to see if he’s looking, and he never fucking is. He doesn’t even notice. Which is great. (Laughs) Because every other guy I dated definitely did. I love that you don’t have that chip.

  N: I just think that’s only decent.

  M: Oh boy. Dad, I want to kiss. I love you. You’re a good man.

  N: I’m embarrassed.

  M: (Laughs) Let’s do the next one. AGE DIFFERENCE!

  N: Aha.

  M: It’s sort of a nonissue.

  N: The story is there’s no story. I was born in June of 1970.

  M: I was born in November of 1989.

  (Both laugh)

  N: When we met—the whole time we’ve known each other—we’ve always felt normal. We felt like two people.

  M: It’s just like Mark and Nikki from 90 Day Fiancé!

  (Laughter)

  M: I’ve never noticed a cultural gap. For example, I once dated a guy who was ten years younger than me. I said something about Aretha Franklin, and he said, “Who?” And I said, “BYEEEEE.”

  N: Here’s your hat.

  M: Yeah. Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?

  Once I got to be about thirty, younger men suddenly started to pursue me. I could never find someone my age or older. They were always younger. And I was pretty sick of it. Not for any particular reason—I just thought, “Why do they have to be younger? What’s the deal? Let’s mix it up.” So I met Nick, and I thought, “This is good, because I’m forty-one, and he’s probably thirty-seven or thirty-eight, so at least that’s in the ballpark.” So we were driving along one day, and I don’t know how it came up, but I said, “Wait, how old are you?” And he said, “Twenty-nine,” and I said these two words: “You. Motherfucker.” And I almost crashed my car into a tree. I was really mad about it.