by Rainn Wilson
(True actual story: I’m a little resentful of ol’ Chester, as we were always very poor while I was growing up and he was super rich, a millionaire member of the Seattle Yacht Club who lived in the wealthiest part of the city. Also, the only present I ever got from ol’ Chester was when I was ten—a plaid thermos, which had obviously been regifted. I once tried to use the thermos and put hot chocolate in it. The glass interior of said thermos exploded and shot up toward my face, narrowly missing my eyeballs. RIP, Chester. I hope you’re sipping champagne out of that big plaid thermos in the sky, looking down at us Wilsons with mercy and the teeniest bit of remorse.)
When my dad was about eight, his mother was staying at a sanatorium in Chicago, where she was being treated for tuberculosis. Sanatoriums, it should be noted, were used to treat almost all women’s health issues of the era. One day he and his sister, my aunt Wendy, got all dressed up to visit their mom when she was very close to being released and there was a commotion. From a bathroom window she had seen her children in the courtyard below, run to greet them, slipped, and hit her head on a sink and died.
When I finally got the full story out of my father only a few years ago, he told it with such grace and sadness it broke my heart. He told me about going home in his little suit and tie, sitting at the kitchen table, and saying to his (probably drunk and angry) dad and relatives: “But who is going to take care of me?”
And that really is the question, folks. Isn’t it?
My grandfather promptly hired a nanny from Minnesota who had a daughter from being knocked up by a traveling salesman of the northern reaches. Chester immediately re-impregnated said nanny and was forced by cultural pressures to marry her. She was quite resentful of my dad and my aunt Wendy, Chester’s original children, and was terribly abusive to them. To this day, Bob refers to her as “Evil of Doom” and tells stories of abuse that would curl your spine.
One of my favorites from his childhood was how Chester bought a little “one-armed bandit” slot machine and would give my dad his weekly allowance in change and make him put it in the coin slot. If it “hit,” he’d do great and make several dollars. If not, my dad had no allowance for the week. Of course, it never hit and my dad went money-free for most of his childhood. This was a lesson in “hard knocks” and “how the world works,” I suppose. Dick move, Grampa.
My dad had the soul of an artist. For a middle-class boy from Downers Grove, Illinois, there could be nothing stranger than an early interest in Tchaikovsky, Lord Byron, and abstract expressionism. Chester probably thought he had fathered an alien. And in some ways he had.
At any rate, these two “interesting” people, products of their peculiar childhood traumas, lived in an artsy abode and had a peculiar conundrum: find a name for the imminent advent of their very own baby Stewie.
Apparently, my mom fought for months to name me Thucydides. Yes, that Thucydides. You know, the ancient Greek historian, author of the international bestseller The History of the Peloponnesian War.
I truly don’t know what she could have been thinking. Was there any thought or follow-through to that idea? Rainn is bad enough. What parent in their right mind would want to name their child after someone ancient, Greek, and unpronounceable?
What would it have been like to have been named Thucydides and be playing on a third-grade playground? With Rainn as my name I was frequently tortured at recess. With Thucydides, I would have been eviscerated and excoriated in contemptuous teasing until, like Carrie, I would have needed to seek my revenge with psychic dark magic.
So why Rainn?
My dad was way into Rainer Maria Rilke, the mystical Austrian poet. He was the guy who famously and perceptively wrote:
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
Living the questions. That’s the key.
So, my dad wanted to call me Rainer. The only problem? There’s a giant mountain that hovers over the skyline of Seattle, which is perilously close to the name: Mount Rainier.
I picture weird chicken-coop Mommy and slot-machine Daddy having a conversation about my name on the deck of their rainy houseboat on Lake Union in Seattle.
Shay: I want to name our baby Geebothrax.
Bob: Why?
Shay: Because I like the sound of it.
Bob: I’m not sure. . . .
Shay: Well, what would you name him?
Bob: I want to name him Lord Byron Tchaikovsky Pollock.
Shay: You can’t just name him after your favorite artists! That’s not how this works, Bob!
Bob: Well, you can’t just name him after a made-up alien warlord.
Shay: Geebothrax has a nice ring to it. Besides, he kind of looks like an alien warlord with the way his head looks in the ultrasound.
Bob: Ultrasounds haven’t been invented yet.
Shay: Oh. Well, how about Thucydides?
Bob: Who?
Shay: You know, the ancient Greek historian, author of The History of the Peloponnesian War?
[pause]
Bob: Maybe Geebothrax isn’t that bad after all.
Shay: We could combine them. How about Thucydithrax?
Bob: What about Rainer?
Shay: After the Austrian mystic poet?
Bob: Exactly—
Shay: Or that enormous mountain right over there.
Bob: [gulps] We could switch it up so people don’t get him confused with the mountain.
Shay: Like Rain?
Bob: Too hippie-ish.
Shay: Hippies haven’t been invented yet. It’s 1965.
Bob: Oh, right. Well, then, let’s stick an extra letter in there for no apparent reason whatsoever.
Shay: Rrain! I love it!
They shake hands and gaze out at the mist over Lake Union, wondering about their ability to ever truly master that most difficult of tasks, for which all else is but preparation: love.
(Note: Feel free to perform this conversation as a scene in your acting class. Post the video online and I’ll give you acting notes, gratis.)
So “Rainn” was decided upon and my proto-hippie ne’er-do-wells (nerd-do-wells) continued with their midsixties lives in the rainy seaport of Seattle.
The city of Seattle was a mossy, shambly town with a dubious history.
It was created in the late 1800s by Chief Sealth, who invented salmon and wisdom. White men settled there because they loved coffee and kayaking and wanted a place to wear their new jerkins of “flannel.” The world’s first “indie” group was a jug band called Pearl Jam-boree that refused representation and would only play late nights at a waterfront bar called Cobain’s Pub. Chief Sealth was noted as saying, “I saw them before they sold out and made all those lame gramophone recordings of 1882. Now everybody likes them” (rolls eyes, puffs on enormous pipe).
None of that is remotely true, but it would be a way cooler history than the boring lumber-and-pioneer-filled one we were all taught in seventh-grade Washington State history class.
We Seattle-ites always wanted the city to be where it eventually ended up, which is not such a good thing in retrospect. Be careful what you wish for. It was a backwater in the 1970s, famous only for the film It Happened at the World’s Fair with Elvis Presley as a crop-dusting pilot dancing under the Space Needle with a little Chinese girl and wooing a forgettable, pretty young nurse with his guitar. As a city, we couldn’t get any respect back then, even with the 1979 world champion SuperSonics.
We just wanted people to like us! We wanted to be San Francisco! Ho
w come everyone in the world loved San Francisco and knew every morsel of Frisco history when our little mossy burg was such a forgotten cultural backwater?! San Francisco had the 49ers and the Golden Gate Bridge and Chinatown and Rice-A-Roni and cable cars. We had Boeing. San Francisco had redwoods and Berkeley and Steinbeck and Alcatraz. We had . . . Boeing.
Okay, now I get why.
Seattle was a moody little town, nestled under mountains and fir trees and drizzly, low, maritime clouds. There were lumberjacks around. At least there must have been with all the trucks of trees proceeding down from the mountains filled with “Washington toothpicks.” There were fishermen and airplane assemblers and surly, wool-clad Scandinavian laborers drinking Rainier Beer by the gallon.
Eventually we got a baseball and a football team, but that still didn’t help us too much. It wasn’t until the advent of Microsoft, grunge rock, Sleepless in Seattle, and Starbucks in the early nineties that Seattle became a bit of a cultural force and got finally put on the map. And what did that get us? A bunch of annoying Californians moving to the Pacific Northwest and driving up the GD real estate market! Just ask any Seattle-ite.
But I’m a little ahead of myself. Back to the midsixties. It was somewhere around this time of maritime child-naming that my parents both became members of the Baha’i Faith.
The Baha’i Faith is a lovely, peaceful religion that believes all religions are actually one faith and all people are worshipping the same God. This all-loving God sends down special teachers every thousand years or so to impart the next chapter in humanity’s ongoing, inevitable spiritual education. Besides believing that Krishna, the Buddha, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad were all divine spokesmen, Baha’is are followers of the most recent of these “manifestations of God,” a man named Baha’u’llah (whose name means “the Glory of God”) who lived in Persia in the mid-1800s and brought a modern message of peace for today’s disunited world.
There’s a lot more to it than this, but I just don’t want to get all “religion-y” on you so soon in the story. Please refer to the addendum at the end of the book, “The Baha’i Faith: An Introduction,” to find out more.
Just do me a favor. Don’t Wikipedia it. That drives me crazy. You’ll end up a “wikipediot.”™*
So my parents, as oddball as they already were (and I think I’ve painted a pretty clear portrait of their oddball-ishness to this point), decided to become members of an obscure religious faith, which removed them even further from the mainstream.
Bob had found out about the Baha’i Faith from some bohemian dude he met on the not-so-mean streets of Seattle and had a profound, mystical experience in which he was inspired to embrace what the Baha’i Faith professed was indeed true. After looking them up in the phone book, he got an appointment with the Local Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Seattle (as there are no clergy in the religion, democratically elected bodies serve as administrative heads on the local, national, and international level) and told them he wanted to become a Baha’i. The group of nine members incredulously told him, essentially, “Well, you can’t just walk in off the street and become a Baha’i—you have to at least read some books first.” They handed him a big stack of Baha’i books and told him to come back when he had finished them. He read them all and came back the next week, and after quizzing him a bit, they somewhat reluctantly allowed him to join. Things were a bit different back then.
My dad was a clerk at several of Seattle’s best bookstores at the time, Hartman’s and Shorey’s. He spent his time painting abstract oil paintings, listening to Dave Brubeck and Mahler, and, now, reading mystical texts from nineteenth-century Persia.
—
In 1968 a strange and dramatic thing happened that resulted in my mom and dad getting a divorce. I’m not going to tell you what this event was. I’m saving it for later because for me it’s pretty darned profound and has to do with the course of my life’s journey. (And, frankly, I’m saving the juicy details for special dramatic effect in chapter 7.)
My folks got a divorce. My mom took off and I remained with my dad.
He was heartbroken and devastated and did what any recently divorced bohemian Baha’i dad with a tumescent tot would do in his situation: He moved to Central America and got remarried.
Chapter 2
THE WORMS OF NICARAGUA
—
Apparently, bob’s bloated, ivory pupa made my dad somewhat of a chick magnet, and he remarried as soon as he possibly could to my stepmom, Kristin, also a Seattle-ite and a Baha’i.
Kristin Harris (now Wilson), a recent graduate of Seattle University, had come down to Central America at the same time as my father. She babysat me a lot and was very sweet and kind and pretty, and so my dad married her in a trice.
They had no idea what they were getting into.
After a brief stint in Mexico City, where the wedding occurred, we ended up for some reason in the town of Bluefields on the remote Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Bluefields is a loco place.
There still are no roads in or out of Bluefields, just a dirt landing strip cut out of the thick jungle. Or you can drive from Managua to the mountain town of Rama and then take a five-hour ferry ride down the Rio Escondido. The city was founded by Dutch pirates on the lam from the Spanish, and the Mosquito Coast was claimed by the English soon thereafter. This remote, jungle-y swamp became a haven for escaped slaves from throughout the Caribbean, and many locals can claim ancestry from the slaves who got down with the now essentially extinct Arawak Indians of the Caribbean.
Many races and cultures mix into a giant, swampy jambalaya in Bluefields. You would, on the docks of the seaport, hear Jamaican patois, various versions of Creole, Spanish, and Miskito (the local native dialect), as well as many variations of English. The music was a mash-up of reggae and dancehall from Jamaica, calypso and soca from Trinidad, son from Cuba, salsa, and even country and western, which was brought to the area by the American employees of the venal United Fruit Company (which raped and pillaged the land for cheap bananas as well as staged multiple coups and invasions all over the hemisphere! Hence the name “banana republic.” An amazing history. Check it out. But not on Wikipedia.). Many of the popular songs of all genres were then re-recorded in Bluefields with Miskito lyrics!
(In fact my dad later had a radio show on Sunday afternoons on the local Catholic-owned Bluefields radio station, where he played his classical music records and talked about the composers and their syphilitic lives.)
And now? One of the poorest sections of the Caribbean is also one of the principal havens for drug runners moving cocaine from Colombia to Mexico. The narco-traffickers control the politics and the local economy on every level. Fishermen can make a great deal of pesos when they find “white lobsters,” the bales of cocaine that float up to shore, having been thrown off cigarette boats during occasional drug raids. It’s also one of the most dangerous places in Central America, with a ridiculous murder and kidnapping rate. Throw in malaria, dysentery, sharks, parasites, quicksand, and jellyfish, and you’ve got yourself a party!
—
The good and loco people of Bluefields probably didn’t know what hit them when our weird, white family showed up: my dad; my naïve, curly-haired stepmom, Kristin; and a blond, thunder-egg-headed, wide-eyed, three-year-old gringo potato boy. For seventy-five dollars a month we rented this giant, haunted Victorian house on top of a hill, overlooking the rickety seaside town.
Everyone there probably hoped that the ghosts would eat us like in the movie Poltergeist. The local rumors about our haunted house involved a crazy American shrimp boat captain who had kept the body of his dead wife up in the attic and whose corpse was eventually discovered there. Neighbors swore that there was an occasional late-night light in the attic window, and that was the lamp of the ship captain waiting for his wife.
My dad swears that there were real, actual ghosts in that rickety old house. Every
night he would hear this mysterious screeeeeeee sound. Like something scraping on the floor. And every morning he would come downstairs and notice that the furniture was arranged a bit different. So he got some chalk and put little circles around the chair and table legs to mark their locations on the floor. In the morning, after once again hearing the scraping noises, he noticed that literally every single piece of furniture had been slid several inches or several feet outside of the chalk circles. Freaky.
So my dad did what any good Baha’i living in a haunted Victorian house in Central America would do. He said some Baha’i prayers for the dead. And you know what? It worked. Those pesky Nicaraguan poltergeists stopped their shenanigans forevermore. Take that, Nicaraguan poltergeists! Take that, ghoulish shrimp boat captain! Baha’i power, yeah!
I was pretty young in Nicaragua, but I have some very distinct and fond memories of the insanity of that place. I remember seeing several movies, including The Sound of Music, at the movie theater downtown. The theater experience was a little different down there. The place would be PACKED, no matter what the film. You would bring in food and beer and babies, and there were rats and stray dogs begging for food everywhere. People talked through the entire movie, which blared at full volume on the cheap, tinny sound system. And the strangest thing of all was that because Nicaragua was so Catholic, anything deemed “disrespectful” to the nuns had been edited from the movie. So every time a nun started to sing or dance or joke, there was a hard, abrupt edit and the film would skip jerkily ahead to the next scene, making the film about half as long and far more fun.
My dad took many trips out in the jungles to visit the Miskito Indians. He tells some amazing stories from his time there. Once, in the remotest possible village, he was asked to teach them baseball. He got these hard round fruits from the trees and had them carve a bat out of a branch with a machete. They cleared out a little field from the jungle and the entire village lined up to play—men, women, children, and even grandparents. The fruit-baseballs would take about three at bats before finally exploding into mush, at which the entire village would applaud. They played all day long, day after day, from sunup to sundown, and who knows, maybe they’re still playing to this day.