by Rainn Wilson
I looked down at my blank notepad and, red-faced, slunk away back down the stairs, hoping not to be noticed or spoken to by any of the excited, fresh-faced young actors jabbering in the hallway.
That night was the first night I tried cocaine.
I don’t remember exactly how I got my hands on it, but I obliterated my feelings of total failure with a bunch of white powder that went up my nose and exploded my dopamine receptors. I was not only successfully numbed out, I was utterly transformed.
We had a graduation party that night and the power of the coca leaf changed me from an awkward college kid to the LIFE OF THE FRIGGIN’ PARTY! I actually remember dancing that night like I had never danced before. It was like David Bowie had been cloned with Patrick Swayze (or at least his less attractive brother, Gary Swayze). People kept coming up to me and saying, “Wow, I had no idea you could dance so good!” I merely grinned, my eyes looping like Angry Birds, and kept on boogying up a Bolivian disco until dawn.
You see, my moral compass had started to spin and fall into the mud during my final years at NYU. I had gradually left behind and even all-out rejected the faith of my childhood and its beliefs, entering fully the life of the Greenwich Village bohemian. Maybe it’s because I was angry about childhood experiences that weren’t in line with Baha’i principles. Maybe walking away from faith is a necessary step in every young person’s development. I’m not sure. But if you ask me . . . it all started with sex.
While at NYU, my girlfriend Diana moved from Australia to the city and right into my dorm room. Soon thereafter we relocated to that aforementioned East Harlem hellhole. We did the “sexy time” a lot (Borat voice). I felt extremely guilty about this, as premarital sex was contrary to the moral guidelines of the Baha’i Faith. I also really enjoyed it, couldn’t get enough as a matter of fact, and knew that stopping and abstinence was not a realistic option in my life at that point. This was quite a quandary.
Many of us come to a time in our lives when the beliefs we grew up with collide with the reality of the world we find ourselves living in. It’s a common theme for the twentysomething-or-other.
Besides the sex, it was around this time when I became intimately acquainted with drugs and alcohol. When I started, I didn’t hold back. I was like an Amish kid on Rumspringa. Or, the Baha’i version: Baha’imspringa.
I had a “friend” from acting school, a total addict, who turned me on to pot and booze in my third year of school. We would skulk around the streets of New York smoking weed and sipping from huge cans of malt liquor out of brown bags. (You used to be able to wander the streets of NYC with whatever you wanted to ingest and be pretty much left alone by the cops as long as it was in a brown paper bag. And if you were white. Which I was. Very much so.)
Besides the sex and drugs and rock and roll, there was a building feeling of unease with the whole religion thing in my life. I didn’t want anything to do with morality.* I really didn’t know if I bought this whole “God” concept anymore. I didn’t want any pressure on me from above or anyone telling me what to do. Like many young people, I wanted to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it and screw the consequences. I was sick of my parents and their eccentric hypocrisies, disgusted by some of the wackadoodle Baha’is I had met in New York, and tired of any overarching responsibilities to my eternal soul or the planet or a Higher Power or to anyone other than myself.
So I went from active Baha’i dork to full-on atheist dork.
I didn’t want big daddy Zeus looking over my shoulder, scowling judgmentally at my every move. Real artists and scientists didn’t look up to and bow down to some mythical, supernatural father-creator guy, right? (Of course, many of the most brilliant artistic and scientific minds in history have had faith in a unifying force that some people label “God,” but I was unaware of that at the time.) I didn’t want some obsolete books from a bygone era determining what I should or shouldn’t do or what to feel guilty about.
Religion was for the weak, the old, and the old-fashioned, after all. Faith was for grandparents and fundamentalists who believed Jesus rode around on dinosaurs. (Kind of like Chris Pratt in the last Jurassic Park movie, except Jesus was even more ripped.)
In this brave new world we lived in, the strong made their own decisions separate from any obsolete strictures written in some ancient, highfalutin language.
Plus, I knew the biggest rebellion I could have against my parents and the strongest move toward a postadolescent individuation would be a total rejection of God and faith. This synced up well with the angry young man who was emerging from inside. And all this religious blather and folderol would get in the way of the thing I had really come to New York City for—to be a BOHEMIAN!
That was my dream. I mean, I had read Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, The Catcher in the Rye, and A Moveable Feast. I had listened to Patti Smith and Blondie and Lou Reed and Tom Waits. I had seen all the Woody Allen films and I had even once seen Andy Warhol crossing lower Broadway, his face clouded with intensity and light.
I knew what I wanted and I was finally living it. And, for an artsy East Village actor, there was simply no room for God, morality, or devotion. Or, at least, none that I could conceive of at the time.
In my quest for this tantalizing bohemian street cred, during my first year at NYU, I dyed my hair jet-black and started smoking a pipe. The hair dye I got from a box of Clairol “Midnight Black.” You know the kind. So toxic that there’s an emergency 800 number right on the box in case you accidentally dump the concoction into your eyes.
I looked ridiculous. The first issue was that I had forgotten about the eyebrows. The hair on my head was like Bruce Lee’s and my eyebrows were a light brown with ginger highlights. I looked like a serial killer who had just written his manifesto on the walls of a cabin in his own blood and feces. (Which, coincidentally, were the secret ingredients in “Midnight Black” hair dye.)
And the pipe? My aunt Wendy (my dad’s sister) smoked one. Always had. She was a rebellious, artistic, pipe-smoking inspiration and I had always loved her rebellious, artistic, pipe-smoking spirit.
As with most things in my life I was simply trying WAY too hard.
We were such a pretentious lot, us Village artists. I remember having one ridiculous late-night conversation with a bunch of pot-smoking artistes where the question was posed: “Would you ever do . . . a commercial?”
I remember a friend of mine paused dramatically and considered this disgusting capitalistic question quite deeply, stroking his goatee and drawing on his Camel Light. “I might do a commercial . . .” And then he added headily . . . “For soy milk.” True story. (And would actually make a pretty hilarious soy milk commercial.)
We dove into big ideas and the meaning of art. We mourned the commercialization of pretty much everything in the world. (In fact, we were the very first group of people in history to complain that “MTV doesn’t even show music videos anymore, man!”) We compared Miller and Williams to Chekhov and Shakespeare and fiercely debated the intersection of politics and art. We wanted revolution but through a visceral storytelling that would grab the audience by the throat and never let go.
Later, as I was further along on my spiritual and artistic journey, I made some important realizations about this phase of my life. I came to see that my passion and zeal for my faith when I was younger had merely transitioned to a passion and zeal for art and theater. There was still a religious fervor about what we were doing. We wanted to turn people on, ignite their consciousness. Both Baha’is and downtown theater artists wanted to change the world and touch people’s hearts but in different (and related) ways.
We seriously thought that we could change the world with great art and challenging, arresting works of transcendent theater. We discussed how doing the right production of The Cherry Orchard at the right downtown theater in the right church basement for the right audience of twenty-seven could so e
xplode the minds and hearts of the theatergoers that their lives would never be the same for the rest of time.
I had become a “born-again” theater artist!
So, now that God was out of the way (as well as the corresponding guilt), I could dive into my bohemian proclivities and downtown depravities with unrestrained gusto.
Here I was. I had graduated. The world was my oyster. My whole life was in front of me! What was next in my artistic and spiritual journey?
Depression. I was unemployed. I was broke.
Without a dime in my pocket, my old Seattle friend John Valadez and I moved to an abandoned beer brewery in the remotest part of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
This was not the hip, fun, funky, developed world of Williamsburg today. This was the desolate crack-infested industrial wasteland of East Williamsburg circa 1989. (To give you an idea of how intense it was: There was not a SINGLE artisanal cheese shop in sight! I know, I’m shuddering at the thought too.)
The owner was a Dutch real estate tycoon (i.e., slumlord) who was salivating over the idea of transforming his various abandoned industrial buildings into “artist lofts,” so he allowed my friend and me to live there for free so he could get a tax credit and lure other artists to the building. He was a giant bear of a man in a trench coat with a name like Van Dam or Don Vom or something like that, and he reeked of cigars, poo, and ill-gotten money (which he used to buy more cigars and poo).
My friend and I shared a small living space that was in an elevated crow’s-nest former foreman’s office that overlooked an ENORMOUS loft space. In this tiny office, we had two mattresses on sheets of plywood elevated by milk crates. Glass botanica candles from a bodega lined the shelves, along with our many books and plays and the jars of peanut butter and jelly that kept us going. I remember seeing the movie Taxi Driver at the time and thinking, Huh. This Travis guy’s apartment is a lot nicer than mine.
It was about 15 percent really cool and 85 percent super awful and sucky. Free rent has its price. Let me explain.
(Please note, I am not exaggerating any of the below IN THE SLIGHTEST.)
THE COLD: We had no heat in our loft for the first several months and it was one of the coldest winters on record. I remember being on the phone with my mom, wrapped in blankets, spitting on the cement floor and watching it crackle and freeze in seconds.
THE FILTH: We were not the cleanest duo and other than some occasional sweeping with a push broom, we never cleaned the place. Piles of boxes, lumber, bricks, cardboard, and plastic sat clumped in the corners from when we first moved in and never actually made it out of the loft. Eventually, those piles were formed into “chairs.”
THE TOILET: The toilet was the filthiest, most craven porcelain monstrosity in all of Brooklyn. It was down a floor from our “loft” and frequently surrounded by surly rats the size of poodles. Fortunately they would scatter (along with the cockroaches) when you’d click the string on the lightbulb that hung from the ceiling. Getting to the toilet, especially in the middle of the night, proved to be so onerous and arduous that we did something that I’m a teeny tiny bit ashamed of. We kept cranberry juice bottles next to our mattresses and would fill them with pee rather than brave the cold, dirt, and rats. Mostly we remembered to empty them out in the morning. Mostly. Sometimes the rats would get grossed out and do it for us.
THE ENTRANCE: Here was your choice: You could go in the door to the old warehouse and be met by the mad Dutchman’s angry guard dog, a Rottweiler, who was chained to the wall in a similar fashion to Cerberus. This ferocious creature would bark and lunge at you repeatedly, but if you slunk along the far side of the wall, he didn’t have enough length of chain to allow his jaws to reach your flesh. (He was surrounded by piles of poo and yes, we yelled at the crazy Dutchman and called the Humane Society repeatedly, but to no avail. I would throw him pizza and Slim Jims, but it didn’t make him like me any more.)
OR
You could climb up eight feet on the outside front wall of the loft on a series of brick handholds and get directly into the loft via a steel loading-dock door. This was a slippery, cold, and tricky maneuver but was still more palatable than dealing with Ol’ Brooklyncerberus.
THE SHOWER: We had none. There was no shower. There was not a place to wash one’s naked body. There wasn’t even hot water. This is not good. Helpful hint: If you’re thinking of moving someplace, you’ll want to see if that place has a shower of some kind. Otherwise you will be completely miserable.
So what I would do is pack a towel, soap, and shampoo in my backpack, and one of the central focal points of any given day would be to find a place to bathe myself. I discovered a secret shower in the basement of the Tisch School of the Arts building that came in very handy (it’s not there anymore . . . or maybe it is, and I’m not telling you). More often I would stop by friends’ houses to “say hello” and then, as if by afterthought, would say, “Oh, hey, do you mind if I take a shower?” It was a grotesque manipulation, I know, but my body is a temple and I needed to keep it clean. I once dated a girl simply because she lived very close to the L train, was home a lot, and had a beautiful shower with plenty of hot water. God, I miss that shower.
CRIME: There was oodles of crime and drugs around our abandoned brewery. My roommate saw someone get shot in the playground across the street. We could look down from our steel loading-dock door and see folks smoking crack and shooting heroin and passing out in an abandoned lot. One night a bunch of teenagers started throwing rocks at our door and windows for some reason at the exact same time as I needed to get into the city for a date. I was screwed. I was forced to wend my way through the rat-infested, mazelike brewery building to the back side, where it abutted a lumberyard. I scrambled out of a fire exit, down a steep dirt embankment, and into the lumberyard, where I was lucky not to be shot by the very surprised security guard as I made my long way out and around to the subway entrance a few blocks away. Believe it or not, when I arrived for my date, I discovered that “I just clawed my way through rats and dirt and lumber to be with you” is NOT considered an effective opening line.
—
Around this time I started seeing a Wall Street corporate lawyer who doubled as a drug dealer. We’ll call her Jesse. She was all business during the week, wearing those lawyer-y outfits and carrying a five-hundred-dollar leather briefcase. Jesse would look at briefs and spreadsheets and case files and legal precedents (or whatever lawyers do; I’ve only seen two episodes of The Good Wife) during the week, but on the weekends it was a different story.
She had what she called her “magic bag.” It was a small zippered leather bag with various pouches and sections, each one containing a type of drug. She had pills of various shapes and colors, mushrooms, heroin in a tiny Ziploc, perfectly rolled joints of both hash and marijuana in leather loops meant for pens, and, most important from my standpoint, she had lots and lots of cocaine.
Apparently she had some kind of coke connection from some Bolivian hooligan. (Note: Use of the words cocaine, Bolivian, and hooligan in describing your girlfriend’s social circles is what relationship specialists refer to as a “red flag.”)
We didn’t have what I would call a very mature relationship.
She gave me drugs. I gave her . . . I don’t really know what I gave her. I suppose I was entertaining in my own weird way.
We spent several weeks together doing insane amounts of drugs. I remember her getting mad at me for trying to snort incredibly pure white piles of powder with a one-dollar bill once. She insisted on using hundreds or at least twenties. I thought that ridiculous. I would have used a Krazy Straw, a flower stem, or a toilet paper roll. One time, I did. I didn’t care. Besides, I didn’t have any twenties or hundreds. Here I was, an unemployed actor who could barely afford a falafel, inhaling thousands of dollars’ worth of drugs from the well-manicured hands of a Wall Street lawyer/drug mule.
When on the drug, I
was articulate, charming, snappy, and filled with boundless ideas and enthusiasm. When coming down or waking up the next day, I felt like the lowest, most grotesque form of hungover sloth-beast, miserable and self-hating. Remember how Robin Williams once said, “Cocaine is God’s way of telling you that you are making too much money”? God was warning me—and I didn’t even HAVE any money!
—
I remember going to a party at a beautiful loft in SoHo filled with models tottering about on enormous high heels. I snuck in with some of my druggie bum artist friends from the Lower East Side and I started smoking a HUGE Cheech and Chong–size joint in the corner with them, judging everyone there from the comfort of my big army jacket.
After countless drags on some very powerful herbage and several lagers, I suddenly felt a wave of nausea, paranoia, and insanity come over me. I went to the bathroom (which was built into the loft space with walls of plywood and an open ceiling so you could hear the party going on all around you). I started to pass out; the music was throbbing in the background and I fell to my knees. My head was spinning like a Vitamix®. After a few minutes like this, I started vomiting up whatever pizza or bagel I had ingested that day. Then the knocks at the door started. I propped myself up on the toilet trying desperately to not pass out. I looked in the mirror and my eyes were red as beets. I crawled over to the bathtub and started running cold water over my head and hair so as not to lose my feeble consciousness. It worked. The swirling brain slowed down. I got up after a few more minutes, the knocking and outraged calls of drunk models and their boyfriends echoing through the throbbing disco music; stumbled my way to the door; and opened it.
There I was in all my glory. Vomit on my army jacket and chin, my hair dripping with water. Water all over the floor. I pulled myself up tall and started out through a small crowd of angry SoHo-ites. “Have a very good evening, laaadies,” I said as I strode along upright, out the front door, and into the icy winter evening.