by Rainn Wilson
I can carry three plates of food laid out on one arm. I know what a “monkey dish” is. (Look it up, idiots.) I can still calculate the 8.25 percent tax on an NYC bill in my head. I can say “ORDER UP” with such authority that it will send cooks running within a three-block radius. I’ve served eggs at the Waverly diner and coq au vin at some extinct French place in Chelsea. I’ve poured gallons of mimosas for various brunches and laid down hundreds of pounds of deep-fried potato skins for deep-fried tourists.
It really is the perfect job for an actor, mostly because working at night and on weekends frees up your days for auditions. Also, free potato skins.
Of the many places I waited in NYC, by far the most memorable was Phebe’s Wine and Dine (whine and dine) on the Bowery. It stayed open until four a.m. and served four very distinct clienteles: actors from local downtown theater companies (including Michael Chiklis, who was the NICEST guy, even to the waitstaff); NYU students, who would buy a $5 pitcher and tip fifty cents; beefy, loud cops from the local precinct; and, by far the best tippers, the Chinese Mafia.
The Chinese Mafia dudes were serious. They had beepers and Ray-Bans and ordered snifter after snifter of Hennessy. I would routinely get tipped hundred-dollar bills and once was even tipped a baggie of cocaine.
INSURANCE SALESMAN
People outside of LA ask me all the time: “How do you work in Hollywood? Isn’t Hollywood totally corrupt and backstabby and materialistic?” Now, of course it is, but my diplomatic response is always the same: “By far, most of the people in Hollywood are truly nice folks who value their families and friends and are just trying to make high-quality entertainment. Most of what you see and hear about the grotesque, out-of-control behavior is from a handful of messed-up ego diva freaks who always make the front pages of the gossip mags. And, besides, no career is as venal, corrupt, and grotesque as the insurance industry.”
After I graduated from college I got a job in an insurance brokerage office in a dismal hovel in midtown. It went by the fake moniker of Richard Noon and Associates and was lifted straight from the pages of a lesser David Mamet play.
I was hired by a guy named Kenny from Long Island who had slicked-back hair, a gold chain, and a tight pink polo shirt. He was a real ladies’ man who immediately regaled me with stories from last night’s conquests and invited me out to the bars with him that very evening. I declined and would continue to on a daily basis. He was always buying me sandwiches and putting his arm around my shoulders.
The job? These five or six slimeballs would hire an unwitting college student (in this case, me) to make cold calls for them to try to get them appointments to sell insurance to various companies. Sounds pretty good so far, right?
Well, they handed me a stack of cards with the contact info and names of various businesses and the name of whoever would purchase their insurance on it. I was instructed to call the company, ask for this important employee, and then LIE and tell the secretary that this contact person had asked me to personally call him back six months earlier about insurance for their company.
I felt HORRIBLE about lying. Even a little lie like that would tear me up inside every day I showed up. And at every place of business I called, there would be this curious brick wall and I’d be given the worst runaround known to man and even be directly scoffed at. Then I realized something important when I pulled up a certain card one particular day.
The card read: “Kissinger Associates, Consulting,” contact name: Henry Kissinger. So I was supposed to call Kissinger Associates and tell them that Henry Kissinger had personally asked me to call back to talk to him about health insurance for his secretaries and copy boys?!
Even I, a twenty-three-year-old unemployed actor, knew that CEOs didn’t buy insurance for their employees. I dug a little deeper into the cards and, using the yellow pages (remember, kids, there was no Google in 1989), realized that these were in fact HUGE companies and corporations and that these CEOs were ridiculously unreachable. I even found a card for the FORD MOTOR COMPANY, and the contact name was whatever Ford great-grandson happened to be running the company at that time.
—
Sample conversation:
Me: Hello, is this Kissinger Associates?
Receptionist: Yes.
Me: May I speak to Mr. Kissinger, please? This is Ron Wilson returning his call.
Kissinger’s Secretary: Hello, Mr. Kissinger’s office.
Me: Yes, this is Ron Wilson from Richard Noon and Associates returning his call.
[pause]
KS: What is this in reference to?
Me: Yeah, uh, he asked me to call him back.
KS: About what?
Me: Is Mr. Kissinger there?
KS: You’re going to have to tell me what this is regarding.
Me: Fine. About six months ago, I spoke to Mr. Kissinger regarding an insurance policy for his employees and he asked me to call him back at this time.
KS: [scoffing] That’s impossible. Mr. Kissinger doesn’t deal with insurance policies. He’s Henry f$c*#&@ Kissinger!
Me: [unconvincingly] Well, he told me to call him. That he really wanted to find incredible savings on insurance by meeting with one of our agents and—
KS: You’re making this whole thing up! You’re lying!
Me: Yeah, well he was lying to the American public about secretly bombing Cambodia!
[dial tone]
—
When I approached Kenny about this ridiculous, futile conundrum, he offered me a sandwich and a creepy pat on the back and told me to keep up the good work.
I finally was so fed up with guilt from so many lies to so many receptionists that I quit after two weeks, and when I asked Kenny when I would get my check, he laughed at me and said because I had filled out no starting paperwork, there was no record of my ever having worked there and I was welcome to go ahead and try to sue them. The laughter of Kenny and the rest of the oily Mamet cast echoed down the hallway as I dejectedly walked away.
MAN WITH A VAN
With the money my wife and I got for getting married in 1995, we bought a 1982 Chevy cargo van.
This van was our meal ticket (and instant camping spot) for the next three years. I could place a Village Voice ad for $27 or tack up a few flyers on telephone poles (with those tearable phone numbers on the bottom) and get more work than I knew what to do with. I would charge $65 an hour for me and the van, and then an additional $25 an hour for an extra mover. (This was also really fun for me, because I could hire my friends to work with me and joke around as we “hauled cube.”)
Cash. Off the books. That’s right, folks, I’m a tax cheat.
You see, mid-Americans, New Yorkers move all the time, and because their apartments are so minuscule, they really don’t have that much stuff. The man with a van was a cheap, quick, and easy way to move your futon, books, lamp, and suitcases from one apartment to another.
True to my ever-questing spiritual identity, I called this endeavor the Transcendent Moving Company and my tagline was “A man, a van, a sense of Higher Purpose.” The flyer had a cute little van with wings on it.
Even though I was woefully skinny and out of shape, I became an expert mover and van packer. People would look askance when this gawky, gangly, pale dude with a big head would show up to move all their crap, but quickly their minds would be blown. What they didn’t see was that I was wiry/strong back in those days and was like a box-wielding, stair-maneuvering mongoose. I would haul sofas and bed frames and bookshelves and trunks up and down four-story staircases in every borough. I would fill and empty the van in impossible combinations like it was Tetris on wheels. I would strap mattresses on the roof with bungee cords and whiz up and down avenues and over bridges, cutting off taxis and blasting Wilco on the tape deck.
Most memorable move?
I once moved a young African American woman and her kids out of a cra
ck den/drug front in Harlem. I mean, full-on: armed dealers on the front stoop, kids working as lookouts, line out the door of toothless, ravaged ghosts looking for crackety crack. It made The Wire look like The Naked Gun. As I moved them out of the building, away from the numb glare of the henchmen, I was literally shaking with fear and drenched in sweat that soaked into the seat of the van. It felt like one of the greatest accomplishments of my life to move this nice family into a nicer, safer building a few miles away.
DOG WALKER
My wife, Holiday, and I had a VERY short-lived business with the best name ever recorded: “Tails of New York.” We had moved to the Upper West Side (abbreviated UWS; families, Jewy) from the Lower East Side (abbreviated LES; artists, junkies), and we saw dog walkers constantly headed back and forth, to and from Central Park. We befriended one dude with eight panting dogs on eight tangled leashes and asked him about his business model. When we found out that you could get $15 per dog for taking them on a one-hour walk, our eyes lit up like little ATMs. We owned a beautiful white pit bull named Edison and much of our New York social life consisted of hanging out shooting (and picking up) the shit at dog parks and walking Edison all over the place. So why not make some real money at it?
We did the math. If we could do two shifts of ten dogs each, we could make $300 in a day! And there would be time here or there for fitting in the occasional audition.
Delicious. We put up flyers and started with three neighborhood dogs, who immediately started fighting with each other. They were lunatics, pulling in every direction. One, a crazy Lab puppy, loved to find other dogs’ crap and immediately start rolling in it. Another, a standard poodle, would go after squirrels like a crazed Bengal tiger, frequently slipping from his collar and dashing off into Central Park. We were done after a week. Tails of New York curled up its tail and slunk away into the shrubbery of brilliant mistakes.
SANDWICH “HO”
Holiday and I and many of our friends worked at a catering company and lunch delivery place in Chelsea called Beauty and the Feast. Every late morning we would roll into the kitchen and load up these HUGE straw baskets with gourmet sandwiches. Every sandwich seller would then get a route on a map in midtown Manhattan and we’d be off to sell our wares. We were door-to-door sandwich vendors, or, as we called ourselves, “sandwich hos.” We’d get forty bucks for the day and some tips occasionally. It really wasn’t a bad job, although it was challenging to slog around the heat and cold of Manhattan with a fifty-pound basket of sandwiches.
The highlight? Every day, I would take my tips to a fine off-track betting establishment and bet the six to fifteen dollars I got in tips that day on the ponies. I got a lot of funny looks from the vagrants, drunks, and semihomeless tongue-chewers who spent their days there, this twenty-six-year-old in torn jeans and a Pixies T-shirt with a giant, mostly empty wicker basket with a red-and-white checked cloth inside. I’d give out a sandwich or two to the hungriest looking of the lot, just to be all friendly-like. Sometimes I would hit a horse and make a nice tidy bundle, but mostly I would lose it all to the New York State Gaming Commission and slink out of the stinky place with my basket and pockets empty.
ACTING TEACHER
After moving to Los Angeles in 1999, I was mostly able to support myself as an actor, although we definitely went through some hard times. As a matter of fact, when I got cast in The Office, I had been so hard up in the months previous that I had been paying rent by putting it on the ol’ credit card—with those little shame-filled “checks” that come with your bill, attached to the statement like leeches.
I needed to get a money job, so I went to my friend who ran an acting school in Hollywood. I had, at that point in time, enough experience in TV and film to teach an “on-camera” class. I boned up on some teaching techniques, got prepared, and even learned how to use a video camera. I was told that the students all had scenes already prepared from another class and that we would film them, watch playback, and learn from that experience. What I was NOT told was that the students were almost all from foreign countries. Also what I was not told was that the scenes they would be presenting were all from now-canceled eighties TV shows.
When I walked into class it was the oddest assemblage of actors I had ever met, and I’d met some pretty odd assemblages of actors in my day.
It was like walking into the Muppet Babies United Nations. There was a Russian dude in a fake leather jacket; an Armenian gal with big hair; a couple of giggly, demure Japanese actresses; a Brazilian mixed martial artist in a muscle shirt; and a couple of Swedish beauties who walked like serial killers. To call the language that the students in that classroom spoke “English” would be a stretch. Having a conversation with many of them could be challenging, let alone understanding them in a scene from a long-canceled TV show.
There is a huge international population of actors in the LA area who are not native English speakers, all following their dream of Tinseltown stardom. It’s hard enough to build a career even if you don’t have a thick accent, which makes this a very sad side of Hollyweird.
—
True story: One of the most delicious scenes that has ever been presented in the history of acting was one I saw presented by two young women, one Italian, one Swedish, from the hit 1980s TV cop show juggernaut Cagney & Lacey.
[Int. Police Locker Room. Day.]
Cagney enters to find Lacey getting changed at a nearby bench.
Cagney: [thick Italian accent, think Chico Marx] Ehhh, Lacey! Why-a you-a hea-uh? You letta me so down outta theh today. You have-a som-a nerv-ah!
Lacey turns to face her partner, livid.
Lacey: [think the Swedish Chef from the Muppets] Cagney, you-ah awlways-ah gettin-ah so-ah mad-ah. You were the one-ah who is a-tellin’ me to give you a-your space-uh. And I thought-uh we were a-partners! Get-a out-a my face-ah!
Cagney sits.
Cagney: [intense] Don’t-a you tella me what to do-ah! You mite-a gotten us a-killed!!
[Lacey pauses. Then, with great intensity]
Lacey: That’s-uh lie-uh! I was-uh just-uh doin-uh my job-uh!
[And, SCENE!]
—
You get the idea. And somewhere in a Hollywood acting studio there sits a videotape of that scene. Someone please find it immediately.
Chapter 10
THE FACE OF GOD
—
In an immense theater at the Juilliard School, every single agent, manager, and casting director in New York City assembled to watch the acting talent of all the top schools in the area perform scenes for them. This is called the “League Showcase” or something similarly grandiose and idiotic. Wait, maybe it was the “League of Extraordinary Theater Dorks.”
For most of us, this was the ultimate finale and payoff of our three years together. Getting seen in a good light on this day meant the possibility of signing with a good agent, which meant quality auditions and a tremendous leg up on carving out a name for oneself in the pursuit of that most precious and impossible of all things: an acting career.
We had been working for weeks on our presentation, and because I had literally just finished performing as Hamlet, I didn’t have any time to find good writing that highlighted my moderate talents, so I ended up in some very dubious scenes.
I did one from an obscure British play (Stoppard’s The Real Thing) filled with subtextual verbal nuance, and another one where I played the Woody Allen character from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Yes, me, a twenty-three-year-old Baha’i stick insect from suburban Seattle playing one of the most iconic Jewish New York roles of ALL TIME in front of hundreds of jaded New Yorkers. Terrible idea. (Although, when it comes time to remake Annie Hall, I AM available, Hollywood!)
It was one of the most nerve-wracking events I’ve ever been a part of, but my talented class comported itself quite well during our hour of various scenes and we were happy, exhausted, and breathless as we left the stage
for the dressing rooms.
Now would come the tough part. . . .
An hour or two after the performances from Juilliard, NYU, and Yale, these sheets of paper would go up on an enormous bulletin board in a remote hallway. On them, all the industry executives would request meetings, headshots, and phone numbers of those actors they were interested in.
I’ll never forget the anxious, shallow breathing echoing in my enormous braincase as I tenderly jostled my way up the stairs to the bulletin board, a pen and paper ready to take notes in sweaty hands. I nervously scanned sheet after sheet, which all asked for meetings and contact information from most of my various classmates.
My name wasn’t listed. Not once.
I checked again. Surely there must have been a mistake? So many actors were being called in for so many meetings with so many agents and producers and casting people! I mean, this was what it was all about. Our future. Our career. My name must have been there somewhere. Surely someone who had watched the presentations had seen at least a tiny glimmer of talent in me and wanted to meet and talk to me and eventually help cast me in something. Nope. My name was nowhere to be found on that great big actor’s wall of shame.
I was a reject. Me. The guy who had just played Hamlet to such great acclaim the previous month!
(In fact, a large agency had seen me in Hamlet and called me into their offices. They were incredibly complimentary of my work in the play and told me they would be back in touch after the “League showings.” After the showcase they weren’t interested. I guess the two-and-a-half-hour performance in the greatest role in the English language was overridden in their minds by the two crappy three-minute scenes they had just witnessed. Which just goes to prove the old showbiz adage “You’re only as good as your last Woody Allen impression.”)