The Bassoon King

by Rainn Wilson

  While wandering about in Boston, I decided to go see the movie version of A Chorus Line at a multiplex matinee.

  It’s a terrible movie. Don’t see it. It’s filled with actors and dancers and singers going on and on and on about “making it” and “getting a job” and “being discovered” and wanting to act and dance and sing. The musical itself is wonderful, but the movie is a stilted train wreck, considered by many to be THE WORST translation of a musical to a film EVER MADE. And even though I knew it was horrible, I was deeply, deeply moved. Sitting by myself, in the dark of a near-empty matinee in a theater near Government Center, Boston, I started to ugly cry. Full-on, grotesque, racking sobs during “What I Did for Love.” The kind where you’re sort of gulping for air. As all those actors and singers and dancers were longing and yearning to act and sing and dance, I felt a kinship in my heart, which lunged toward the screen as if it would burst.

  I stepped out of the theater, tears drying on my cheeks, into one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen. Red and orange light was streaming through snowflakes that had begun to quietly fall from the Boston sky. The ground, the multiplex, the high-spired churches and offices of that great city were being dusted with white. And time, once again, seemed to slow down and stop like a train pulling into a station. I gazed up into the sky and took several deep breaths, noticing that a deeply calm, passionate decision seemed to be dropping down into my body. I decided to go for it. I knew I had to become an actor. There was no turning back. It was my calling, my vocation.

  The entire course of my life changed outside of a multiplex during Christmas of 1985 after a viewing of one of the worst movies of the 1980s. True story.

  —

  I told my parents and friends and dove in headfirst. The first thing to do? Apply for acting programs. I auditioned for the Professional Actor Training Program (PATP) at the University of Washington and didn’t get in. Not even close. The head of the program wore an actual ascot and looked at me like I was the skinniest little weirdo who had ever auditioned for him since the dawn of time.

  I then targeted the two best schools in the country that accepted people who hadn’t finished undergrad, and John Valadez and I drove his parents’ Chevy Impala at breakneck speed down to San Francisco for the auditions.

  After a nervous, sleepless night (and a bout of vomiting at a gas station on the way), I went to my Juilliard audition, entering a large, cold loft space with a long table full of stoic panelists under fluorescent lights. I don’t remember much about it other than a lot of loud sweating and gesticulating that stirred nary an eyebrow on the faces of the adjudicators. I bombed. I was rattled beyond measure. I had so much pressure on myself and my shoulders that I completely crumbled. I left, dejected. One down, one to go. The next day was my audition for the Graduate Acting Program at NYU.*

  That night we stayed with our old Dungeons & Dragons friend George Evans at his communal hippie house near Stanford. He was really going off the deep end those days and would later be found up in a tree, hair down to his shoulders, wild-eyed, on the Stanford campus, shouting at passersby about the imminent end of the world. The night we stayed there, the residents of his house were having some kind of a food orgy where dinner was spread out on a big plastic tarp and you’d crawl around on it naked, the only rule being that you couldn’t feed yourself but only others. We opted for Jack in the Box.

  That evening, once again, I was up much of the night, terrified about the audition the next day. I prayed, meditated, soul-searched, and went through what I now believe to be another transcendent, life-altering event.

  After this dark night of the soul, I surprisingly awoke in total peace and confidence. I was somehow in touch with that still, inner voice inside of me that spoke to me of my own unique brilliance. I felt a calm strength that guided me throughout the day, all the way up to the audition. I knew what I needed to do and I wasn’t going to let my own fears and inadequacies get in my way again.

  The audition was for the newly appointed head of the NYU program: the grande dame genius of the American regional theater movement, founder and artistic director of the Arena Stage in Washington, DC, and internationally acclaimed producer/director Zelda Fichandler.

  She was very insightful and perceptive and responded well to my Mercutio monologue. But when it came to the “sea monologue” by Edmund from Long Day’s Journey into Night, she stopped me halfway through.

  She spoke to me about the monologue and the play. About the life of the author, Eugene O’Neill, whom she had met once. She went into great detail about the circumstances surrounding the speech and the emotional need of Edmund to speak with his father, to share this intimate story of sublime transcendence with the man he longed to connect with.

  She then called me forward and sat me down across the table from the other man in the room, associate dean of the Tisch School of the Arts J. Michael Miller.

  “Do the monologue again, only much simpler. Just speak to him,” she said. “Connect with the man sitting across this table from you.”

  I started up again, in a very similar vein to what I had done previously. She stopped me quietly.

  “Take all ‘performance’ out of it. Look into his eyes and just talk to him like he’s your own father. Keep it simple.”

  I took a deep breath and started again, this time carefully connecting with Michael and with the material. As I relaxed, the story flowed out of me. It felt real, natural, simple. Tears began to drop from my eyes for the first time doing the monologue. Tears of Edmund’s intense longing to connect with his father.

  I finished and there was a silence in the room. Zelda simply said, “Bravo, we’ll be in touch.”

  And I knew I was in.

  So many things occur in the course of our lives that upon reflection feel like they were meant to happen. As if God reached out a mysterious hand and opened a door to a new room. To the materialist, that mystical feeling is simply the endorphins and electrical impulses of the brain reacting to create emotional meaning in random chance. To the spiritually minded, creation, time, fate, and the Holy Spirit conspire and provide when you make the effort in showing you the path toward your destiny.

  Everything in my life to that point—Shay’s acting genes, the move to New Trier, the Elvis Costello exercise, scooping up the candy in Pygmalion, Ms. Adams telling me I had a chance to make it, the sublime decision I reached in the snow at the multiplex, the embarrassing failure at the Juilliard audition—all these things led to my going to the best possible place for me in the entire world, the Graduate Acting Program at NYU in the heart of Greenwich Village.

  Chapter 8

  THE ONLY LIVING BOY IN NEW YORK

  —

  There was perhaps no more mind-popping experience in my life than moving to New York City in 1986 to attend acting school. Complete and total culture shock. I had lived in Seattle, Boston, and suburban Chicago at that point, but nothing prepared me for the explosion of Manhattan.

  I rode to town in a crappy old van that had a couple of boxes and duffel bags (my entire life’s possessions), along with John Valadez and Steve Wilmart. Together we had made our way from Chicago, Steve on his way to the Berklee College of Music, John on his way to India to travel for a year, and me to move to my new city and what would be my home for the next thirteen years.

  We were slack-jawed and wide-eyed as we sputtered across the Manhattan Bridge and chugged on up to Union Square, where my dorm was located. It was insanity. Traffic barely moved; horns blared; loud throngs of people of every possible ethnicity roved everywhere, completely disregarding crosswalks and street signs. Seas of taxicabs surged at every red light and the ding! ding! of the bicycle bells of Chinese food delivery guys peppered the soundscape. It was like every NYC movie I’d ever seen smashed into a single city block. If I’d seen a giant ape climbing a skyscraper, I wouldn’t have been surprised in the least.

  My fir
st week in the city, all I did was walk. Walk and look. I remember walking from the Village up to the Guggenheim AND BACK one day, taking in the chaos of the beautiful city.

  And one of the main things I remember? Socks. Every other person seemed to be selling socks. There were socks everywhere. Dress socks, tube socks, tiny, frilly baby socks, you name it. Walk pretty much anywhere in NYC in the late eighties and you’d be offered socks out of shopping bags, off of sidewalk folding tables, out of the trunks of cars. Three for $5 seemed to be the going rate. Nowadays, your only options in Manhattan are Bloomingdale’s, Benetton, and Banana Republic.

  You see, New York in 1986 was a very, very different place than it is now. It was a madhouse. Ed Koch was the mayor. He went everywhere making peace signs and shouting out, “How’m I doin’? How’m I doin’?!” to adoring and contemptuous crowds alike.

  There was still all that chaotic graffiti all over the subway trains, like in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The French Connection, and Welcome Back, Kotter. (And this was before there was any air-conditioning on those trains, mind you. They were like hot, metal, underground torture boxes. And they used these weird little $1 coinlike objects called—get this—“TOKENS.”)

  —

  The crack epidemic was just starting to heat up. Drugs were ubiquitous. No matter where you walked, but especially in Washington Square Park (the heart of Greenwich Village), vaguely Rasta-looking guys (white, black, and Hispanic) would come up and say, “Sense, sense?” Like a hayseed, I was innocently confused and couldn’t understand what they were selling. Scents? Incense? Sex? Common sense? (Obviously I was interested in buying all of these things.) Then someone told me they meant sinsemilla and I finally got it. Ohhhh!

  I remember trying to order a bagel in my polite suburban Seattle manner in a typical brash, harried NYC deli.

  Counter Guy: Next?

  Me: Um, may I please have a, uh—

  Counter Guy: WHAT YOU WANT???!!!

  Me: Um, a bagel please, sir . . .

  Counter Guy: WHAT KIND?

  Me: Um, just regular I guess.

  Counter Guy: [rolling eyes] HOW YOU WANT IT?!?!

  Me: Well, I suppose I uh . . .

  Counter Guy: [increasingly exasperated] TOASTED?! PLAIN?! SCOOPED?! CREAM CHEESE?! BUTTER?!

  Me: Sorry. Um, sure!

  [COUNTER GUY LOOKS AT CAMERA, MIMES SHOOTING HIMSELF IN THE MOUTH. THEN TURNS AND ACTUALLY DOES SHOOT SOMEONE IN THE MOUTH BECAUSE THIS IS 1986 NEW YORK.]

  —

  To me, the homeless seemed an integrated part of the city. They were everywhere. They seemed perkier back then. More well balanced. Like happy-go-lucky urban hobos from a musical. In fact, Tompkins Square Park, the heart of the East Village, was essentially a nonstop homeless hoedown jamboree. Vagrants, (pre-hipster) punks, and street musicians rocked out until dawn with half-broken guitars, joints, bongos, and endless liter bottles of Olde English 800. It was always a fascinating adventure to chat up a fellow who was living in a refrigerator box and hear his history and philosophy. And we did it with regularity. In fact, it was the best way to pass a day, hearing monologues from grizzled street vets on Avenue B.

  The Village was a giant, weird party. Everyone (except suburbanites) was welcome. Misfits, transvestites, hucksters, bohemians, junkies, students, cops, and the criminally insane of all races frolicked and jostled together like background actors from a Village People video.

  Heading farther east, the East Village (where the NYU theaters were) was an even more lively, dangerous adventure. CBGB was there. King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut. Performance spaces like La MaMa and the “Gas Station.” Countless booksellers lined graffiti-and-garbage-bedazzled streets. There were amazing Ukrainian diners where we feasted on $1.50 bowls of borscht and steaming plates of kasha varnishkes. And, of course, the ubiquitous pizza places with their perfect, greasy triangles of cheese and sauce for $1.25.

  There are four major north-south avenues in the East Village, Avenues A through D. This was Alphabet City. Sounds pleasant, right? Kind of like Sesame Street? However, the common neighborhood saying was “A stands for adventurous, B is for brave, C is for crazy, and D is for dead.” D, farthest east, was where the projects were. And the hard drugs. The smack, crack, and coke.

  A few dozen blocks uptown, Times Square was a seedy wasteland of abandoned movie theaters and run-down derelicts. It was a neighborhood that looked like it had watched the movie Taxi Driver a few too many times. On Forty-Second Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues you could literally buy anything you wanted. I used to buy stolen calling-card numbers for twenty bucks, call Diana in Australia, and talk for hours on some poor schmuck’s Sprint number.

  Around me, people were selling passports, driver’s licenses, stolen cars, and sex. There were peep show theaters, panhandlers, filthy bars, and rows of abandoned buildings filling the “Crossroads of the World” and the “Great White Way.” Handfuls of brave tourists huddled together, terrified, as they made their way in clumps through some of the seediest areas known to man, praying to find some kind of friendly tourist attraction or a Sbarro.

  Today Manhattan is a “New York”–themed mall for the megarich. The diversity, both economic and racial, the rich elbow to elbow with the poor, is swiftly evaporating. You can’t move to the Village without a couple hundred grand in the bank. (It used to be you needed a couple hundred. When I moved there the going rate for a room for rent was $400 a month.)

  Back in the day, there was always an uproar whenever a national chain company would open a store or restaurant in the area. I remember the outraged petitions and demonstrations against the Gap and Blockbuster and Target in the East Village in the late nineties. As the city prospered and flourished in the Giuliani and Bloomberg years, the rents started climbing up, and now you have a situation where only the very rich and the very corporate can afford to lease real estate. That’s why every corner in Manhattan is a Duane Reade drugstore or a Chase Bank, and the young folks wandering the streets with their $5 lattes are mostly trust-fund kids and aspiring stockbrokers, not down-and-out, struggling artists as in decades past. The gritty Times Square of my youth is now fully sponsored by Disney, Red Lobster, and, for some inexplicable reason, M&M’s.

  (If I sound like a grumpy curmudgeon extolling the virtues of a bygone era, I am. Sorry. I’m almost fifty. It’s what we do. Someday you’ll understand, you insufferably upbeat millennials.)

  I’m incredibly grateful that I got to experience the city during those years. During my most formative time, my twenties and early thirties, I got to live in the Manhattan that took place in the cinematic era of Big, Basquiat, Desperately Seeking Susan, Stranger Than Paradise, and Hannah and Her Sisters rather than the one portrayed in Maid in Manhattan, Girls, and Sex and the City 2.

  And someday I hope to be in New York for its inevitable apocalyptic demise! As portrayed in I Am Legend, Soylent Green, War of the Worlds, The Avengers, and Sex and the City 2.

  —

  The late eighties were some harsh, crime-ridden times in the Big Apple. When I was in my second year of training at NYU, I got some firsthand experience with a bit of the ol’ ultraviolence.

  Diana and I had moved up to East Harlem. (She had moved to New York City that same fall to go to fashion school.) We lived near 105th and Second Avenue, which is still a pretty bad neighborhood but in 1987 was the epicenter of the crack epidemic. It was super-cheap rent and a beautiful apartment. It was also hell. And a terrible decision.

  During the summer I had some German subletters staying in the apartment while Diana was back in Australia, and some robbers broke in through the fire escape window and took their cash and cameras. WHILE WE WERE ALL ASLEEP!

  Right after that, I bought an old beater car to get around in and parked it out on the street one night. In the morning the battery was gone, stolen, the hood up. I was super bummed, as $40 for a new battery was a lot of mo
ney for me at the time. I went off to work and returned home with a new battery in the evening, only to find that the entire car had been stripped. Everything. Up on blocks. Tires gone. Parts yanked. Wires sticking out. Broken glass. I sighed. Hundreds of dollars evaporated. Just like that. I ended up using the battery as a makeshift, modern ottoman, which impressed no one.

  And then, sure enough, I was mugged big-time. Attacked is more like it. Twice.

  The first time, I was waiting for Diana and John Valadez to get off the subway at the 103rd Street station at around eleven at night. I was going to walk her back to the apartment, as I often did.

  While entering the station, I saw this roving gang of East Harlem kids running around “wilding” like something out of The Warriors or A Clockwork Orange. This posse of around twenty kids, who ranged in age from twelve to sixteen, was throwing bottles, tipping over trash cans, and shoving people aside. I had never seen anything like it before. My pulse was racing as I went down into the station hoping to get away from them and not be seen, this big white misfit loping through East Harlem at night. I thought wrong. They came down into the station. Not seeing me, they jumped the turnstiles and started literally beating an old black homeless guy with sticks, throwing bottles at him, and then THROWING HIM ONTO THE SUBWAY TRACKS! I hid behind a pillar and gestured to the woman in the token booth, who, noticing the violence, nonchalantly ignored it and went back to her magazine and doughnut.

  I hid in the corner until the next train pulled into the station and John and Diana got out. The gang had taken off, and the homeless guy, bleeding and staggering, had crawled back onto the platform. I decided not to tell them about the insane gaggle of hellions, as I didn’t want to scare them, and we went up the subway stairs—right into my worst nightmare. We literally walked directly into and through the mob of kids.