I knew that New York was a town to which an aspiring theater lad might emigrate, but I think I would have been equally as lost in New York as anyplace else, if not more so. Meanwhile, Los Angeles had been batting her eyelashes at me more and more during my last couple of years in Chicago, like a late-night lady in a bar, seeming more and more attractive with every beer I drank. The harsh difference between New York and Hollywood, in hindsight, was that no one moves to LA to get work in the theater.
During my last year in Chicago I did Ubu Raw, The Kentucky Cycle, and The Questioning of Nick, some of the best play productions I’ve ever been a part of. Little did I realize what a wealthy community I was leaving behind, where I habitually did five or six plays a year, built sets for eight others, and choreographed fights for another three or four. I used to love making a list on New Year’s Eve of all the shows I’d worked on that year. If a person was willing to live on a slim income, that person could be rich as Croesus in terms of satisfying theater jobs. Only by leaving that time of financial poverty behind me did I realize just how wealthy I had been artistically.
I’d also logged my first couple of legit film jobs in my final year. In one of them, a Morgan Freeman/Keanu film called Chain Reaction, directed by Andy Davis, I was cast in two scenes as Keanu’s building super, but I never even got to meet Mr. Freeman. It was batshit crazy to me at the time—I was suddenly in a movie, for real! I was going to be on the screen at the movie theater! My education continued as I later learned from the film’s premiere that both of my scenes were totally cut out, which is but one of the many harsh lessons we show folk are constantly dealt in this business. I still got my SAG card out of the job, which is a seemingly elusive necessity to finding further opportunities in the film business.
I got paid what was then two months of carpenter’s wages, for two days of acting work. Literally. It wasn’t an avenue I was actively pursuing, film work, but all of a sudden I realized that this avenue had some very attractive features to it. Shortly thereafter, I was cast in this Sundance movie directed by Mark Pellington and produced by Tom Gorai called Going All the Way, from Dan Wakefield’s excellent novel of the same name, with some youngsters like Ben Affleck, Rachel Weisz, Jeremy Davies, and Rose McGowan, all of whom were babies at the time. Toddlers, anyway. At lunch one day, to give you a sense of where we were chronologically, Ben was talking about how he and a buddy had a “script that might get made” (which turned out to be Good Will Hunting). In Going All the Way, I played “Wilks” Wilkerson, an antagonistic high school buddy of Ben’s character with a big mouth. There were more lessons in store for me: Out of my seven scenes, maybe four or five were cut from the final film, mainly because Ben had a prosthetic beard in most of the scenes that ended up not looking quite right, so they cut the whole beard story. Yet another class in the school of hard knocks, which I continue to attend even now.
The film was shot in Indianapolis, and all of the leads had been cast in LA, but fortunately my part was small enough to cast out of Chicago. I drove with another “day player” to Indianapolis for our few days of filming. This other fellow, Jeff, had done a couple of commercials on location before this, so he taught me about per diem shortly before he cottoned me to what filet mignon was all about, a blessed calling indeed. Wherever you are today, Jeff, I offer you my reverential thanks.
This was the first time I had ever heard about, let alone received, a per diem and I just thought, “Are you fucking kidding me? I get this great job acting in scenes with amazing actors for this crazily cool director for a very healthy salary, and you also give me extra money? You’re worried about if I’m going to eat?” I don’t recall what the amount was on that film, but the current MINIMUM amounts for a SAG union shoot on location are: breakfast, $12; lunch, $18; and dinner, $30!!! Some generous productions have just made a clean job of it by giving us $100 a day. Many times on location I have simply been handed a stack of Ben Franklins upon landing in town. In 1998 I did a movie in New Orleans, and it was early enough in my career that I was pleasantly surprised when they gave me a rental car. I showed up and they said, “Here’s your car, and here’s a stack of hundred-dollar bills. Your per diem is one hundred dollars per working day and you’re here for three weeks, so here’s $2,100 in CASH.” Jazz Fest was in town, and . . . oh, it was New Orleans. They tell me I had a very good time. Nice work if you can get it.
The Keanu movie was amazing in its own right; I was walking amongst the giant playground of a big-budget action film set around downtown Chicago (although I was “local hire,” so no per diem). Seeing how a movie was shot, through the fresh eyes of a new employee of said film, went a long way toward making me think about that side of the business. These thoughts were further bolstered on Going All the Way, where everybody was super friendly and very encouraging. “You should totally move to LA,” they said, “you have a great mug. You’ll work like crazy.” In California, months later, struggling to find my ass with both hands, I was fortunate enough, at least, to find those same people, remind them of their goddamn encouragement, and then shake them down for a sandwich or a couple of tacos, to which they really had no choice but to “generously” acquiesce.
All of these factors played an important part in my calculations as I pondered the notion of leaving the womb of my Chicago theater family and illogically leaping into the mysterious void of either New York or Los Angeles. In truth, a major source of persuasion was a lower molar I was sporting, which boasted a hole so large I could fit a peppercorn into it. Yes, that was handy on long hikes, but not the healthiest place to stash extra spices. This made the promise of dental insurance through SAG a tasty-looking carrot indeed, leading me West. Another substantial factor at the time was my pretty serious relationship with a young lady from Tampico, Mexico.
My girlfriend, Cecilia, said, and I quote, “Motherfucker, I’m a skinny Mexican girl. I’m not moving where it snows. We’re goin’ where it’s sunny.” After weighing all of the pros and cons and applying logic as carefully as possible, I guess that settled it. It’s truly amazing what a woman can accomplish when she’s chilly. I put what small wheels I had access to in motion and set everything up. I had lined up a couple of minor jobs in LA and laid some groundwork for places to live. All very tenuous plans, but the beginnings of a new life nonetheless.
It was about this time that Cecilia fully flipped out about the serious reality of our moving to another city together. A pretty big step that, as it turned out, she was not ready to take. All of a sudden, she disappeared. Cecilia sort of dropped out of my life, then vanished farther from the entire city. None of her friends knew where she had evaporated to until she turned up back in Mexico, where I believe she has gone on to become a Mexican movie star. Based on my eventual ability (or lack thereof) to provide or even just contribute to our domestic comfort in Los Angeles, I think she and I would agree that she made the right call.
* * *
By now, I’ve driven between LA and Chicago so many times that I could start a courier business. The cheapest way to do it back in the day was a service called “drive-away cars.” Please heed this warning, and don’t ever use a service like this. “Why not?” you might ask. “It’s much more reasonably priced than having my car shipped.” Here’s why: You’ll get a fucking stoned asshole like me driving your car across the country. They give your car to me or any asswipe with a license, and all I have to do is put gas in it and leave a deposit of about $150 (in the nineties). I actually totaled somebody’s car once. I was driving from Chicago to LA, on one of maybe six such trips in a “drive-away,” and I was hauling ass through Colorado in the winter. I was driving through the Rockies at about three A.M., I was cranking the music, and, of course, I was baked. Now, let me make something clear. The Offermans and the Robertses, as a rule, are great drivers. A lot of our livelihoods have revolved around driving domestic and industrial vehicles. No exception, I spent years calmly learning to back up a truck loaded with tons of asphalt,
or a tractor with a wagonload of corn, and so I am a very dependable driver.
Having established this, however, sleep deprivation, a preponderance of marijuana, and its being three in the morning may have slightly hampered my dependability, resulting in my hitting some ice on a mountain highway and slowly spinning out of control. I turned down Bone Machine and thought, “Okay, friend, we’ve had a fine run. We’ve done some good shit, and now it’s over.” Fortunately for this idiot, instead of one of the cliff-top drop-offs that much of this mountainous route rides alongside, there was a huge, sheer concrete wall rising up on the right shoulder. I gently slammed into it and slid abrasively along it for maybe one hundred yards. I slowed to a sparky halt, checked my drawers for effluvia, and realized the car was still running. “Great,” I thought, but when I got out to survey the damage, the entire passenger side of the car was, well, gone. It was just rubbed off, to put it simply. I thought, “Well, all right.”
I completed the drive to Los Angeles and turned the car in to the drive-away company. I was pretty nervous, naturally, because I had never really read the shit that I signed when I picked up the car. Was I on the hook for this fucking thing? I managed to keep my cool when I learned that no, they were covered. They kept my $150, but that was it. I walked out of their front door and just played it real smooth until I got a couple of blocks away, whereupon I sat on a bus bench and wept for relief. This seems like a good juncture at which to reiterate, DO NOT ENTRUST YOUR CAR TO A DRIVE-AWAY SERVICE.
* * *
This exodus at the end of 1996 was about eight years after the original collegiate Subaru leaving. I’d spent four years in Chicago, so rich and full that it felt like a decade. When my parents first came to see my plays down at school, they really enjoyed them, despite my own usually underwhelming casting. I think they were just relieved that I was allowed onstage in the first place. They would generally come away terribly impressed with the production values, which were of a quality that was indeed quite professional. They were always very supportive, which was never lost on me, because there was no small amount of faith involved. When I got to Chicago and they saw me working at actual professional theaters they said, “Wow, okay. You’re making nine thousand dollars a year, and that’s tough, but you’re resilient, you’re doing okay, and we support you,” which meant more to me than they knew. Then my dad would slip me $80, which I’m sure he didn’t have to spare. Those are the types of people whose level I’m trying to live just halfway up to every day.
They saw everything I did in Chicago, which was a pretty intense calendar to maintain from Minooka, and they were close enough to Chicago that I was always able to bring friends home for dinner, which was like vacationing from Gotham to an episode of The Andy Griffith Show. By that time I had a couple of tattoos and had become very hedonistic. I was very interested in flexing my artistic muscles and letting everyone in Minooka know that I was an artist and I was different. That I was a nonconformist. They didn’t particularly give a shit. It was more like peacocking that I needed to do for myself, to sort of cut myself loose from the security of my family and town. By the time I decided to move to Los Angeles I don’t think anybody was too surprised. I had been traveling up this slight incline of better and better gigs, at bigger and bigger theaters, so making the admittedly daunting move to a coast was only natural.
It wasn’t the nicest thing to do, looking back, driving two thousand miles directly away from my family on Christmas, but I had always had a flair for the dramatic, and I wanted to lend to the occasion a sense of the vital impending sea change I sensed occurring in me. Given the time of year, it was certainly a chilly leaving. Same driveway as 1988, same Mom and Dad. My dad’s funny—he’s one of those classic guys who keep their emotions tucked deep inside, although he’s improved leaps and bounds over my lifetime. He’ll now end a phone call with, “We love you,” but he won’t say, “I love you.” He doesn’t have to say shit; I know he loves me. For Christ’s sake, he and my mom have made their lives nothing if not a graceful demonstration of their love for their four kids. He’s always been very humorously taciturn, but now I’m tickled to report that he hugs me in moments where we used to shake hands.
My mom handled that leaving with a teary stoicism, and I’ll always remember the gratitude I felt toward her and Dad as I drove west across Illinois’s wide, rolling river valleys, the darkness dotted with sporadic farms that had been properly bedecked with Christmas lights. Parents have to weather a lot of fear throughout the normal rearing of a child, and I can’t imagine the guts it took for my folks to stand on the chilly front porch and watch me putter away down Osceola Street in a rusty Subaru with a mightily be-tusked boar’s face at the prow, collecting snowflakes like a Dada figurehead, pointing toward St. Louis and an even greater unknown beyond.
Discern Your Ass from a Hole in the Ground
My dad is a map guy. While I was growing up we as a family drove the twelve or so hours to our fishing cabin every year in Minnesota, and every year we took a different route through Northern Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, sometimes veering into Iowa, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, or the Dakotas on side trips. He loved getting out his collection of maps and, scrutinizing them, he would say to me, “Well, Jasper, let’s go this way, through Verndale, Bluegrass, and Hubbard, and we’ll miss the speed trap north of Wadena.” Using methods like this, we discovered treasures over the years that became tradition, like stopping at Grandma Schmercker’s restaurant for her excellent pie.
I loved the power that those maps, and my dad’s mastery of them, gave us. “Going south we can stay in LaCrosse, we’ll pick up some cheese curds, and the next day we’ll try to make it home without traveling on an interstate or through a town of more than one thousand people. We almost made it last year, but I got caught driving into Somanauk when your mom nodded off, and I lost my navigator. A five-and-a-half-hour ride happily took us ten hours.”
To me this ability is akin to the tying of a knot, the building of a fire, or the changing of a tire. Maps are easily as valuable as any other tool, but in this day and age I’ve been very disturbed to see people neglect their maps and instead completely depend upon their GPS units. When Global Positioning Systems began to become prevalent in cars, what with the talking instructions and video-game-like street scroll, I grew disturbed. Now we have GPS and maps on our phones, with all kinds of extra information like traffic conditions and the location of the nearest Pinkberry.
Now, hold up. These developments are great, no question. I mean, I can ask my phone device to tell me where the barbecue joints are, as well as what people think of the brisket at each of them! NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.
What does unnerve me, however, is the technique with which I employ this information. I often use the handy “maps” function on my phone, but I still do it like my dad, meaning I suss out the route and situation before I go. What I cannot allow myself to do is acquiesce to being led by the nose to my destination by a computer. I’ll decide where to turn, thanks. Surely you all have been through the experience at least once of your computer giving you completely asinine directions because it simply looks for the biggest arteries for driving through an area, giving no consideration to context or mitigating circumstances. Even if it did, I just can’t shake the feeling that the more we people depend, infantlike, upon such coddling, the weaker we grow in character.
Once we begin to depend on the sugar teat of the GPS to change our diapers and drop us off at whatever destination we require, then we might as well just climb back into the stroller and caterwaul until Mommy brings us a cookie. The day will come when your phone is broken or dead and you’re stranded in a remote, desolate location, like Schaumburg, and you’re going to have no idea where you are and how to get out of there. You will find yourself a day late, yeah, and a dollar short, because you lost the use of your map.
I don’t want to be caught in that predicament. I read an article recently that said a new kind o
f robot car is coming on the market soon that literally drives itself. BUT I DON’T WANT ANY HELP DRIVING. Driving well in concert with all of the other people driving well, or at least trying to, feels good. It feels like we’re participating in society. We’re present in the moment as we share the road with one another, passing on the left, waving for one another to go ahead and pull out of that driveway, giving one another a spirited middle-finger salute. . . .
When will it end? I found the infantile grown-ups in the great film WALL-E to be poignantly frightening. Fat, mewling adult larvae, floating about in cradle-chairs, being fed their daily pap in the form of only blended shakes. Orwell predicted that shit, and it scares me to death. Here’s my trip: Our cool, new technologies provide us with a surplus of convenience, and it seems to me that an overabundance of convenience leaves us with a surplus of leisure time. Our technologies then provide us with a panoply of choices of ways in which to fill that time, like video games, social networking, vapid television and film content, etc. We thereby end up spending money and time upon “their” diversions, when we could have been just performing all of the simple acts that our technologies are saving us from in the first place. Driving our vehicles. Looking at our maps. Fishing. Walking in the woods. Doing the dishes. Splitting firewood. That’s living, plain and simple, and I feel like a crotchety old man saying this, but there is a great satisfaction in a drying rack full of dishes that cannot be found on Twitter or Scrambley Town. By all means, we should use these wonderful new tools in all the wonderful ways that we can, but we should also be wary that they don’t begin to consume us, devouring our time and money that could be better spent on a mouthwatering stack of quarter-sawn oak planks.
Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living Page 19