The Bassoon King

by Rainn Wilson

  I got to do some stellar plays at Tufts, including Uncle Vanya with the very, very young (and strikingly handsome) Hank Azaria. I played an old man character and Hank played a forlorn, studly Russian doctor whom the ladies were always swooning over. He was amazing in the role and we all knew that he was going to be a big star one day. I played this ancient pompous professor (at age nineteen!) and tottered around indicating “senile Russian man” in heavy “old age” makeup like a reject from Bad Grandpa. I also met David Costabile there. He’s the amazing actor from Breaking Bad and Billions that you’ve seen in about a thousand TV shows and commercials and is one of my very best friends to this day.

  I was about two months into school when I got the call. My parents were getting a divorce. As much as I knew it had to happen (and really should have happened loooong beforehand), I was pretty shook up by the news. On top of everything that was new at Tufts and the incredibly difficult workload of freshman year, it was greatly unsettling to know that our bizarre little spiritually and emotionally constipated family unit had come to an end. There were obviously no cell phones or Internet back then, so the communication about this major life change happened with a calling card over the pay phone in the common area of the third floor of Tilton Hall. Plus, as I’ve stated previously, a Roomba could communicate better than my parents, especially about anything having to do with human feelings. My dad was pretty devastated by the whole thing and it was excruciating to know how much confused pain he was in and not be able to be there for him. I got pretty depressed after that; the excitement and buzz of the new school faded away and things started to become very gray—the leaves, the sweaters, the Pepperidge Farm buildings. Even the theater became more of a chore and an escape rather than a place of crazy, creative love.

  A saving grace for me was that my birth mom, Shay (formerly Patricia), had gotten back in touch with me a few years previous and wanted to have an actual relationship. She lived not far away in Salem, Massachusetts, and I would see her and her husband (number four, Chuck: great guy, thick Boston accent, clam digger, children’s shoe salesman, new age polarity massage therapist) a good deal that freshman year.

  This process of reacquaintance started at about age fifteen or so when we were still in Seattle. Shay wrote me and said she wanted to be more involved in my life and get to know me better. I was a bit skeptical as she had written in this same way several times previously and then I’d not hear from her for years. Still true to her sixties roots, she would occasionally pop by our Seattle home, inspired and obsessed with some new new-agey health trend that she was championing, like dried seaweed, vitamin E oil, or super blue-green algae. Then she was gone in a flash like a hippie Lone Ranger, not to be heard from for a couple more years.

  But this time Shay meant business. She started calling every week. She started asking what was going on in my life and taking a great interest. She sent me birthday cards and shipped me out on a Greyhound to see her in her tiny house in scenic Wapato, Washington (which was not in the slightest bit scenic and directly abutted one of the poorest Indian reservations you’ve ever seen).

  As odd as my birth mother was, she was a much better, wiser communicator than my other parents. We would have long talks about these weird, confusing things that were always bouncing around inside of me called “feelings.” She was very intuitive and insightful, and these talks and our new relationship helped me a great deal in my jumbled adolescence. Sometimes the people you need come into your life at just the right time. Shay was that. When I most needed a mom, she was suddenly there for me, and for this I will always be grateful.

  In fact, Shay took such an interest in me and my activities that once she decided to invite a bunch of her friends over and have me dungeon master (DM for short) a game of D&D at her Wapato house. That was a night I wish I had on film: a fifteen-year-old version of me taking a bunch of adult faux hippie Baha’is through a monster-filled dungeon in a tiny cinder-block house next to an Indian reservation.

  I learned a great deal about Shay in those years, where she had been, what she had done, and why she would disappear so much.

  As the details about those “lost” years began to emerge, they were more amazing than anything you could possibly make up. As shockingly absurd as this timeline is, there is a very sad underbelly of the hippie generation revealed in it as well.

  Lived on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle with a goat named Angel of the Morning. She attempted to live off of the milk from said goat.

  Got engaged to a Jewish fella while reading Exodus, converted (briefly) to Judaism, and took a boat to Israel with him and lived on a kibbutz, where she changed her name briefly to Sarah and where a chicken once laid an egg on her pillow.

  Got married and traveled in a camper van to Berkeley (of course), and then got a job as a house parent at an “awareness house” for drug counseling.

  Even though she was not a druggie, she joined a cult-like treatment center for heroin addicts in Mendocino called the Family. They would do an exercise of emotional “attack therapy” called the Game, where the participants would berate each other to break down the addict inside them. She left after a year, when it was discovered that the leaders were all secretly selling and taking drugs.

  Became a drug counselor at a rehab in Bismarck, North Dakota, where she played a lot of Ping-Pong, hung out with Native American bead makers, and had to eventually flee when a crazy patient started stalking her.

  Moved to Salt Lake City and got heavily into feminism and women’s rights while working at a local YWCA, leading marches, seminars, and “consciousness-raising groups.”

  Married another guy and they got jobs for the Park Service at the Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge in Washington as rangers.

  After being married a year, she left for Yakima, Washington, and became executive director for the YWCA there, heading up a program and shelter for battered women.

  This is about when I got to know her again. But here are a few more scrumptious details from the years that followed. . . .

  Decided to help form a Baha’i theater company along with a (literal) Gypsy friend and moved to Salem, Massachusetts, to launch it.

  Got a job as a witch at the Salem Witch Museum, where, in a witch hat, she would scare tourists for ten bucks an hour.

  Became a yoga teacher in 1990 and is still one to this day! (A very good one, I might add.)

  Now, to back up a bit. I mentioned previously that there was a significant, impactful event that happened with my mom around her leaving my dad and me when I was a child.

  When I was in my early twenties, having graduated from NYU and having begun my career, I finally asked Shay about the divorce. It really was the first time I had ever asked her about it in a direct way. This would turn out to be one of the most important conversations I would ever have. (Note: We were in a graveyard for some reason. Surrounded by the dead of Salem, which probably included some famous, actual, historical witches. The graveyard location made this conversation that much more memorable. In fact, any conversation you have in a graveyard is made about 20 percent more meaningful and resonant simply by the association with the location. Try it! Call it the Rainn Wilson Graveyard Conversation Challenge!)

  As the words “So why did you and my dad really get a divorce?” left my mouth, Shay’s face transformed.

  “You mean your dad never told you?” she said, stunned.

  “No,” I said.

  (My dad, when prodded, would always just say sadly, vaguely, wistfully, “Oh, I don’t know, we just went our separate ways, I guess.”)

  She was shocked and had assumed my dad had told me (and everyone else for that matter) the entire sad, seedy story.

  So she perched on a headstone and filled me in.

  Shay had become an actress in the late sixties and had performed in several plays. The fact that I had never known or heard of this and was finding this fact out in my mid
twenties after I had become a professional actor was pretty mind-blowing. She had fallen in with some crazy experimental-theater types and in one somewhat infamous production had run around in the play naked with her body painted blue. (The Blue Woman Group?)

  Shay told me that my dad did not look too highly on these pursuits and was a bit put off by all the crazy hippie/bohemian shenanigans of the theater artists. Apparently they were too “out there” even for my wackadoodle dad.

  (As a matter of fact, when I was a teen and started taking an interest in theater, my dad always acted rather strange about it, almost like he wasn’t sure I should go in that direction. I always thought that was a little bit bizarre, as he was always so supportive of my other artistic pursuits. He wasn’t negative about it; there was just this odd air of trepidation and concern when it came to my interest in it.)

  Shay explained that all these theater shenanigans finally brought the marriage to an end. When I was about a year and a half or two years of age, Shay came to my dad and told him that she had been having an affair with the director of the play she was in. My dad begged her to stay in the marriage, but she decided to go off with the director dude and left us.

  My dad was beyond devastated, apparently. When I eventually told him of this discussion and sought his point of view on everything, he described that time as the lowest of his entire life. He couldn’t sleep and cried for weeks, abandoned and alone, caring for his gargantuan toddler in the rain.

  He painted a small, personal masterpiece after these events that perfectly sums up his feelings.

  Yes, that’s a male figure lying prone on an operating table with a naked woman and a knife standing next to him. You can clearly see the words kill, money, and lamb in the painting. I think you get the idea.

  Shay only stayed with the hippie director for a couple months (around the time she had the goat) and then tried to reconnect with my dad soon after. But by that time it was too late. My sad dad had fled the country for the jungles of Nicaragua and quickly remarried on the rebound. The rest you know about.

  I remember a wash of conflicting feelings coming over me in the graveyard that day. (It’s odd sometimes, isn’t it, that we can feel two or three very different things at the exact same time?) I was shocked by the events of the story, astounded that these details had never been shared with me by Shay or my dad previously. But mostly I felt relieved. Suddenly the whole family history made sense and the puzzle pieces fit together. I sighed deeply with both anguish and peace.

  Many things are fascinating to me about this tale: the fact that I was only finding out about all this secret family history in my midtwenties, the underlying idea that my discovery of and fascination with acting probably had some mysterious genetic components to it, and the realization that my dad’s reticence about my devotion to acting had its roots in some devastating heartbreak. And, most of all, a serious understanding of the kind of guilt Shay had felt and why she had such a hard time being a part of my life when I was a child. She was filled with such disgrace at her behavior, about the affair, the leaving of my dad and the abandoning of her child, and the fact that she thought that the whole world knew about all of it, which my dad, out of principle, had kept secret and I am now trumpeting to the world (with her permission), that she avoided us, constantly moving and changing up her life as a form of escape from the shame.

  Shay turned out to be a great mom to me, all things considered. She was a loving mentor, friend, and teacher right when I needed her in my late adolescence and early adulthood, and I’m very close to her and her husband, Chuck, to this day. After a wonderful, invigorating, but depressing year at Tufts, I went back home to be near my newly divorced parents, knowing I wouldn’t go back to Boston in the fall. I felt inexorably drawn back to them, their misery, and the city of Seattle, where they had both relocated. Kristin had begun selling her silver jewelry at the Seattle Public Market (which she still does to this day). My dad was back managing the office at Jim Dandy Sewer and Plumbing, licking his wounds and trying to pull himself together. Why he was hurting so much from a divorce from a woman he didn’t really love, I have no idea. Life, I guess.

  After several months of driving marine supplies around the city (see the list entitled “Shitty Jobs”), I signed back up for college at the University of Washington. Another school, another drama department. I had some good teachers and did some terrific productions there, but the greatest event was meeting my future wife, Holiday Reinhorn, in an acting class.

  We didn’t date but became good friends, and both of us felt quite a romantic spark doing a scene from the existentialist classic Waiting for Godot together. At one point during the darkly comedic scene, we gave each other piggyback rides, and that was always my favorite part. (Does that sound weird?) She would ride horses in her off time and was always showing up to acting class wearing fancy jodhpurs, a kind of tight-fitting riding pant. It’s an exotic and flattering pant, the jodhpur. Even more so than other types of flattering pants, such as bell-bottoms, skinny jeans, parachute (can’t touch this!) pants, and Hillary Clinton pantsuits. In fact, I highly recommend jodhpurs as an everyday pant for both sexes!

  She was a mesmerizing girl with a bizarre sense of humor and a crazy genius brain, and I was secretly smitten. Especially when I saw her play May in Fool for Love by Sam Shepard in a sexy tour de force. She had a boyfriend at the time, so I held back from making my feelings known. Little did I know that the payoff wouldn’t be until years hence. (More on that later. You can read all about our relationship in chapter 11, “Volcano Love”!)

  I moved out of my dad’s new sad bachelor apartment and got a funky little pad with John Valadez in Wallingford, right next to the Dick’s Drive-In, where I sometimes ate two or three delicious fried meals a day.

  It was around this time that I got my first real post–high school girlfriend. Diana was an Indonesian Australian with long dark hair and a very arresting look. Like most Aussies do, she had just spent a year traveling the globe and was stopping in Seattle for a spell on her way back to her native land. She was staying nearby with some friends and I was infatuated. We spent three love-filled, postadolescent weeks together, me playing Bob Dylan songs on the guitar and trying to seem intense and tortured, her saying mysterious and exotic things in an Aussie accent while looking mysterious and exotic.

  The only drawback was, however, that she most likely gave me scabies (probably from one of the thousand youth hostels that she stayed at on her around-the-globe tour). If you’ve never had scabies before, what a treat! They’re microscopic little vermin that live in your skin. When you lie still to go to sleep, that’s when they come out to play. These little buggers emerge from their tiny skin caves and eat your dead skin and scamper about on your skin lawn. The sensation is not something I would wish on my worst enemy. It’s like you’re being tickled by microscopic ticks with feather dusters just as you’re nodding off to sleep. The only solution is to put this noxious pink poison called Kwell all over your body and to wash the hell out of your sheets, clothes, and towels, as they spread around like . . . like . . . well, like scabies. Here’s a fun picture!

  —

  It was during Christmas of that year (1985), after I had successfully rid myself of all parasites, when I decided once and for all to become a professional actor. It was on a trip back to Boston, where I finally resolved to put all my chips on the table and pursue a career as a THESPIAN!

  I flew to Massachusetts to visit Shay and Chuck and was deeply considering what to do next in my life. Major crossroads stuff. John Valadez was going to take off for India in a couple of months to do some volunteer work and teach photography at a Baha’i school there, and he really wanted me to come. I wasn’t that happy being around my depressed, divorced parents or the University of Washington and was very seriously considering going with him. I was having moderate success in plays but had truly hit a rut as an actor. I was not very good. I was indicating and sti
ff and stuck in my head all the time. I wanted, longed, yearned to be a real actor, but I knew, after a few professional auditions in the Seattle area, that I was nowhere near good enough to make it in the real world. I knew that if I wanted to proceed in any way, shape, or form I needed some real training. There were a number of very good, legendary training programs out there and I started to look into them. But I was terrified. This would be a HUGE decision, an investment of tens of thousands of dollars and many, many years. Leaving undergrad early to enter a rigorous actor’s training process was a daunting prospect.

  But I also knew that to be a professional artist, there was a level of commitment that one needed to undertake that was simply staggering. I didn’t want to half-ass it, be mediocre, or have acting as a “hobby.” I knew that I would need to dive in completely.

  My dad inspired me toward this goal. He was a painter and a writer but had a family to support and was always having to focus on his day job. I was grateful for the food and rent and solidity he provided but was well aware that this was a man greatly saddened by the fact that he never truly got to fully pursue his artistic dreams. I didn’t want to follow that path. There’s nothing like having a parent who didn’t get to become the artist he wanted to be to focus and inspire you in your career decisions.

  I was truly terrified by this crossroads and quite stumped as to what to do when I had one of the many mystical experiences that seemed as if the universe was folding itself toward me and taking a bow, inviting me onto an exhilarating pathway.