by Rainn Wilson
I spent countless nights in drunken stumblings and almost vomiting in taxicabs. Speeded speedily through parties and bars. Wafted, red-eyed and high, through many late-night conversations. And woke up desolate, fried, embarrassed, and sad on countless mornings during those years. Good bohemian times.
Once I even tried smoking cocaine with a guy I knew from NYU who later wound up destroying his life and career with crack addiction. That event made my hair stand on end like each strand was a tiny sparkler. And I, middling addict that I was, got scared enough and somehow found the wherewithal to quit all cocaine for good soon thereafter.
I quit pot smoking not long after that as well. After I saw the Face of God.
It was Christmas morning in the ice-cold loft. Instead of breakfast I “waked and baked” with a large joint I found on a filthy table downstairs (probably laced with something). I lit it and went back upstairs to the crow’s-nest office/bedroom to read, surrounded by several groovy lighted glass candles. John was on the phone down in the warehouse area when all of a sudden I started to seriously freak out. I mean like on-a-whole-other-level freak out. My heart started racing. Sweat started pouring off my brow. Muscles in my arms and chest started contracting and relaxing. Visions of heart attacks and imminent death were swirling through my psychedelic-Christmas drugged brain.
I started shouting to John downstairs for help. He was a bit buzzed himself and thought I was messing with him. I was shouting, desperate, as I dragged myself, heart like a jackhammer, to the door of the crow’s nest at least ten yards away. I could see John on the phone with his mom, trying to focus on the call, holding up his hand to silence me and trying to hold in his laughter at my “antics.” Sure I was going to die, I needed to get his attention so he could call 911. I knew I could never make it down the stairs, so I grabbed something to throw. The nearest throwable object? A lit glass candle. And I chucked it down at him like a grenade. The glass shattered. Still nothing from him but stifled giggles. I got pissed. I grabbed another one. And another. Lit glass candles rained down on John like the London Blitz as I hollered from above, “HELP ME, YOU ASSHOLE!” and he just turned away, continuing to try to restrain his laughter as he spoke to his mom. Eventually a pile of trash in the corner burst into flame from one of the candles. There was a long pause and I remember hearing him say: “I gotta go.”
He stomped out the fire and ran across the shattered glass and up into our dank, dark elevated bedroom to find me, having just vomited into the trash can, covered in sweat on the floor, crying like a baby.
“Call 911!” I hissed at him, clutching my heart, which was still going off like a Haitian voodoo drum. John, lucky for me, ignored my pleas and instead chose to read to me from “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” by J. D. Salinger as I slowly “came down.”
It was somewhere in here that I saw the Face of God. True story. It was a large, luminous face, like the sun, rising. No actual features like a nose or mouth or anything. More of a presence than a face, really. It expanded infinitely in gorgeous colors across a horizon like a Mark Rothko painting. Mighty, awe-inspiring, beautiful, ancient, and terrifying. And I remember saying to myself, “Wow. That’s the Face of God.”
I tearfully swore to that incredible, unforgettable Face of God™ that I would never smoke pot again.
And I never did.
I just stuck with the booze for the next ten years. Hey, I never said anything to the Face of God about the booze.
But—and trust me on this one—the best drug of all is love.
Chapter 11
VOLCANO LOVE
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Let’s fast-forward a wee bit. We’ll get back to my journey in and out of moral confusion and bohemian depravity very soon.
It’s a year or so later in our story and, on a break from doing a Shakespearean theater tour for the Acting Company (see the list entitled “Adventures in Theater”), I went to Seattle to visit my dad. The first thing I did was look up Holiday Reinhorn, the mesmerizing girl from my old University of Washington acting class, who still tickled my memory banks. I had been thinking about her for years, frankly, and was excited at the idea of reconnecting.
To try to find her, I actually looked her up in the white pages. (This was back in the day of these things called “phone books.” Pre-Internet. Pre-Google. Pre-Facebook. Pre-Chatroulette.) And, for some strange, miraculous reason, Holiday Reinhorn was actually listed in the Seattle phone book.
I called and we spoke briefly and set a time for a date. When I walked into Holiday’s house, an eclectic abode filled with rabbits and cats and that gorgeous white pit bull, Edison, and I saw her in a beautiful vintage 1950s dress, a red cardigan, lumberjack boots, and sporting a Day of the Dead arm tattoo, I was gobsmacked.
I don’t believe in love at first sight—it simply doesn’t make any sense—but that’s what happened to me on that night. And, to be quite honest, even through the most arduous times we’ve had (and we’ve had plenty), I’ve been deeply in love with her ever since.
For the record: Holiday is just awesome. Dark sense of humor and dangerously smart. With a giant heart and a lovely Modigliani face. I hope you get to meet her someday. But don’t touch her inappropriately because then I’d have to punch you in the tooth.
A devout feminist in college (she pioneered a women’s studies degree from the University of Washington), she used to wear earrings made out of steak knives and carry around a book about women artists with a giant Medusa face on the cover called Angry Women. Her worldview became a bit more compassionate and varied when I met her, but I always respected her commitment to equality.
We had a series of amazing dates during those few weeks in Seattle that kicked off an incredible, passionate, sometimes difficult, but mostly mind-blowingly awesome twenty-four-year relationship and twenty-year marriage.
Holiday, who had been doing plays around the Seattle area as well as some other odd jobs (such as working at the Pacific Northwest Ballet box office and making giant vats of hummus for a local hummus company), had been planning on moving to NYC before I ever got reacquainted with her. Sure enough, with a little coaxing from me, a year later she shipped out her books, clothes, pit bull, and collection of animal skulls and antique lamps, and we began an incredible life together.
My wife was an excellent actor, and she moved to NYC to be a performer. After a few auditions for some dumb plays, she completely shifted gears as an artist, however. Her heroes were the performance artists of the downtown scene: Spalding Gray, Anna Deavere Smith, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Eric Bogosian, Rachel Rosenthal, Karen Finley, and most of all, our idols, the Wooster Group.
Within months she was performing what she had written at many great downtown experimental theaters, such as PS 122, Nada, and Dixon Place. It was in some performance-writing workshops with María Irene Fornés and Sarah Schulman, and studying with Mabou Mines, Playwrights Horizons, and Circle Rep, that she found her calling as a writer.
Holiday’s first pieces were absurdist performance monologues that she would present in theaters and bars and underground clubs. It was super fun to watch her perform outlandish theatrical works like “Liver of a Tourist,” “You Are in the Mood for Love,” and “Fish” in some of the most outrageous locations in downtown Manhattan.
I’ll never forget her dressed as a male CIA agent, replete with mustache, having a conversation with his talking German shepherd (played by John Valadez in a tuxedo) about the fact that his upcoming divorce would be interrupting this year’s New England fall foliage tour, onstage at the downtown lesbian performance space the WOW Cafe Theatre, in front of an audience entirely dressed in cigarette-fumed clothes and motorcycle boots.
These strange and funny monologues soon began to turn into stranger and funnier short stories, and before you knew it she had written a handful of amazing fiction (check out her hysterically twisted short story collection, Big Cats) and had gotten accepte
d to the most prestigious writing program in the country, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
It’s too hard to do justice to a twenty-some-year relationship in a silly book with a bassoonist on the cover, but if there is one aspect of our time together that best sums up our union and what Holiday brings to my life, it’s our many travels.
Holiday and I spent a great deal of time zooming throughout the wilds of the Northeast in my dilapidated “transcendent” moving van. Every few months we would throw a foam mattress, a cooler, and our pit bulls in the back and go van camping in the Catskills, Berkshires, Adirondacks, and other sad excuses for East Coast “mountain ranges.”
We’ve camped under the redwoods, snorkeled with dolphins, dined in exquisite Parisian restaurants, and watched baby sea turtles exit their eggs by moonlight and barrel toward the waters of the Pacific in Costa Rica. We’ve wandered the alleys of Marrakech and Istanbul and the moors of Scotland. We’ve hiked through Israel and the Okefenokee Swamp, the mountains of Central Oregon and the barren hills of Haiti.
In 1992, in what turned out to be perhaps our strangest adventure, we traveled to El Salvador to visit my friend Phil, a poet and political activist who was working with the trade unions and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN. The FMLN were leftist rebels who had just signed a peace treaty to set aside their rebellion and form a political party. Holiday and I ventured through the countryside and up to this volcano called Guazapa that was still occupied by the very, very dangerous and armed FMLN army and surrounded by land mines placed by the very, very dangerous and armed Salvadoran military. We spent a couple of days up there hiking through the various battle zones with former rebels still carrying their AK-47s. We saw craters from bombs dropped from American airplanes (the United States was not-so-secretly funding the corrupt military dictatorship of El Salvador and its death squads for decades in its bloody fight against leftists, unions, Jesuits, farmers, students, various nuns, and those in favor of democracy), bullet casings scattered across the jungle floor, and caves filled with snakes where the guerrillas would hide when bombs were dropped. Holiday and I slept on the cement floor of a hut, under a dirty sheet with parrots barking in the trees, mosquitoes mosquitoing, and former rebels cleaning their guns all around us.
We would look at each other, sipping on coffee that had been boiled in a coffee can from local beans, as if to say, “Is this really happening? Are we really doing this?!”
An even greater, more outlandish adventure on a volcano, however, has to be our wedding.
We decided to get hitched in 1995. There was no proposal, just long, heated discussions about the pros and cons of marriage. Holiday was against it for the most part, as she was wary of being a woman losing her identity in the traditional male-dominated roles that we were familiar with in most marriages we knew. Plus she had turned down seven previous proposals already. I really wanted to get married because I couldn’t imagine being with anyone else as I loved her so damn much. Also, I wanted the tax credit. (Yes, there is a little bit of Dwight in me. Always has been, always will be.)
Holiday and I decided to get married as close to Mount Saint Helens as we could muster. We loved the metaphor of that former mountain. Plus, much of our family lived nearby in Washington and Oregon. We had access to a gorgeous piece of land next to the Kalama River just about fifty miles from the ashy remains of the volcano. And for the ceremony we created something akin to a piece of downtown NYC performance art.
As our various friends and family were ushered to the location of the wedding by a bagpiper playing “Amazing Grace,” Holiday (who looked stunning in white go-go boots and a white minidress) was rowed down the river by her father in a raft filled with flowers. As the bagpipe crescendoed, I pulled the boat to shore and helped her out onto the sandy bank. Participants read from the Bible and Baha’i prayers but also from Lewis Carroll and other favorite playwrights and poets. Our pit bull, Edison, was the ring bearer (replete with a fashionable velvet ring pouch around her neck), and we were officially joined by Holiday’s stepdad, Ed, a lawyer who had been made judge-for-a-day in Cowlitz County. After I kissed the bride and we were pronounced man and wife, Holiday and I built a fire. The attendees filed past and, having written hopes and dreams and prayers and well-wishes for us on small pieces of paper, placed them lovingly in the fire. Then we all had a salmon barbecue and jumped in the icy river (with our dog). It was a pretty glorious event, and looking back on it I wouldn’t change a thing. It was a bizarre and profound expression of our love. And a hell of a lot of fun.
Back to NYC. After shacking up deep in the East Village and then on the Upper West Side (where the local denizens had never SEEN a pit bull before), we lucked out on the apartment of the century. Folks, I’m going to straight-up brag here for a second. Bear with me.
We lived in a giant two-bedroom in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It had thirteen-foot ceilings, a bay window, tons of light, wood floors, a DECK, and, best of all, cost us seven hundred dollars a month. Yes. You just read that right. A two-bedroom in a great, diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn for SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS A MONTH!
(Four years later, after Holiday had received her degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and I had done a bunch more plays that no one really saw or cared about, we were “bought out” of said apartment by our landlords so they could sell the building for oodles of cash. We were paid sixty-five grand to move. It was more than three times what I ever earned in a year. We thought we were rich and would never have to work again. Like the Beverly Hillbillies. Of course, six months later, after paying off credit cards and some student loans, having some sushi dinners, and moving to LA, most of that money was sadly gone and we were broke-ass broke again.)
It was a glorious place to live. We got another little neighborhood pit bull named Harper Lee and proceeded to get to know the locals really well at the dog park. They were truly the most diverse group of people in the world. Young artsy students from the nearby Pratt Institute, well-off African American professionals (Fort Greene was the neighborhood The Cosby Show was supposedly set in), some folks from the nearby housing projects, and, of course, offbeat bohemians like us. We would have huge parties and invite the neighbors AND their dogs to the party. The mutts would run around the apartment in a huge mob, chasing a ball or wrestling over a dirty sock, thundering around like a herd of bison as the eclectic of Brooklyn sipped Rolling Rocks and talked about art and life and pets. Occasionally someone would be brought down with a thud when the pack slammed up against the back of their knees, but the party would always pick right up again after a few seconds.
We’ve been through so much together on our spiritual and artistic journey through marriage and travels and life. Our ups and downs and sidewayses could fill another entire tome. We grew up together. We became artists together. Ate frozen burritos while watching the sunset in Red Hook together. We even spent some difficult time in separation and therapy, dealing with issues concerning ourselves and our coupleship. I won’t fill more of this book with those many stories, but I truly believe I’m the luckiest man on the planet to have such a brilliant woman with the biggest possible heart to journey alongside me. Also, she’s hot. So that’s cool.
I’m going to skip even further ahead in the timeline to tell you the final story, however, which is also the most harrowing. Of all the adventures Holiday and I have had, the most horrific and transcendent was the birth of our son, Walter, in 2004.
It’s a grueling tale and if you’re squeamish and/or pregnant, I advise you to skip ahead. It’s a bit bloody and scary too, with gory details about vaginas and fluids and whatnot. Just wanted to warn you. Also, the story does have a happy ending. So eventually there will be much rejoicing.
After we tried to get pregnant for over a year, my seed finally took. We were older at the time. I was thirty-eight and Holiday was forty. My sperm were a bit decrepit and spun to the left, and her eggs were already sipping mai tais in Palm Dese
rt. Finally (right after shooting the Office pilot, actually), the pee stick glowed with its magical plus sign. Her eggo was officially preggo.
The pregnancy was a breeze and health-wise everything went incredibly smoothly.
Then, just two days before her due date, a bunch of really weird blood clot thingies started periodically coming out of her vagina. We scooped one of those suckers out of the toilet in a Tupperware one day and took it in for inspection. We went into the swanky Santa Monica hospital where we were scheduled to give birth, and our (horrible) ob-gyn dismissed it as this common thing called “bloody show” and sent us right home. Boy was he wrong.
At three a.m. the night she was due, Holiday got up to pee, and instead of peeing her water broke, and instead of water it was bloody water. Tons of it came pouring out of her into and around our San Fernando Valley toilet. She called out and I ran in to find her toppling over, pale as paper, about to pass out. I had no idea what to do. Blood was everywhere. The love of my life was about to lose consciousness, perhaps worse, and what was happening to the baby inside her?! I started to panic.
I did what I had learned from that time I had almost passed out at that SoHo party with all those models: I hoisted her incredibly pregnant body over to the tub and started running cold water over her head as it lolled around (along with her eyes). She was about to completely give in to unconsciousness. Blood continued to come out of her as I called 911. No idea if keeping her awake was a good or terrible idea, but she stayed conscious and later thanked me for my Clooney-during-ER-like impulse.
I had never been so scared in all my life. Neither had she. But things were about to get a whole lot scarier.
Within ten minutes an ambulance was at our door and a bunch of confused firemen types tromped into the bathroom to find my completely wet, nearly naked, nine-months-pregnant wife almost passed out on the linoleum floor covered with blood and amniotic fluid. They were more than just a little bit freaked out.