Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living (21 page)

The Bud spot also contained the role of a little old peanut vendor. So there was a motley throng of hedonist-looking guys, the beer drinkers, together with a bunch of assorted little old men. I was looking around, calculating the carpenter wages I was not earning, and I realized that sitting next to me was Donald Gibb, who played the Ogre in
Revenge of the Nerds
. I was the appropriate age for
Revenge of the Nerds
to have been a hugely beloved movie for me. He was also in the movie
Bloodsport
, for mercy’s sake. This guy was a hero to me and every other teenager in the eighties, and now he was sitting next to me at this commercial audition? I thought, “Good god, you can be this minor movie star and do a ton of TV roles and then, ten years later, you’re sitting next to me at a fucking Budweiser spot.”

I was truly reeling, and so I got up and walked around the room to clear my head. Across the room I passed another guy whose face rang a bell, and I looked back, and I’ll be goddamned if it wasn’t fucking Carmine from
Laverne & Shirley
. I surreptitiously looked at the headshot in his hand, and at the bottom it read,
Eddie “Carmine” Mekka
. I was dumbstruck, thinking, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” It might as well have been John Schneider from
The Dukes of Hazzard
or Burt Reynolds. You can be fucking Carmine and now you’re at this Budweiser spot? Just then Carmine started up a conversation with the little old man next to him: “Hey, you’re Joey such-and-such, you were in
Guys and Dolls
and
Singin’ in the Rain
 . . .” Joey was apparently an old song-and-dance man with whom Carmine was very impressed. In a grinning reply, the man said, “Come on, Eddie, you saw that shit? Forget about it.” Fate, that fickle bitch, was grabbing me oh-so-firmly by the short hairs and sending me a very clear message.

I ran out to a pay phone, called my commercial agent, and said, “Thank you kindly, but I’m not doing this anymore. This is not the life for me.” There was no shame in these commercial auditions, I just knew that I would rather be making a solid $20 an hour than making zero money to sit and wait for a lottery ticket that could pay off big. I understood in that moment what Robert Mitchum had meant when he said, “Acting is no job for a man.” Years later, I got to work with Eddie Mekka on an episode of
Childrens Hospital
, and he was a dreamboat. Between takes, he would sing standards and Sinatra tunes, and he was an absolute peach. Now, if I could only shake hands with the Ogre, I could bring my Budweiser trauma to a neat resolution.

* * *

O
kay. I had quit doing commercials, but I was still incredibly depressed and drinking a lot. Baby steps. Pat and I were having a lot of fun being young drunks in LA, but we realized with each passing day that we weren’t really getting to utilize any of the talents we had. We did things for fun like watch
Dawson’s Creek
ironically. We’d run around the house saying excitedly, “Oh my god, it’s Tuesday night!” We’d sing, “I don’t want to wait . . . for my life to be over . . . ,” and get all giggly. Of course
without
irony, we loved the American institution
The Simpsons
. Pretty much my entire circle of artistic friends couldn’t help but be profoundly influenced by the genius of
The Simpsons
’s writers and animators.
South Park
, as well, but
The Simpsons
was, and still is, like an encyclopedia of comedy. By now, there is literally no joke they haven’t done three ways, and so we often turn to that venerated cartoon when we need a reference for any bit.

Every two or three months, something really exciting would come my way, which would usually end in disappointment. To wit: In 1998 I was up for the lead in a movie entitled
The Tao of Steve
. In fact, the director led me on for a couple of weeks that I had won the part when she had me in to read with other actors, but then they found out they could get Donal Logue, a great actor who had some buzz around him. I believe she sincerely thought I was going to be her choice, but the communication was left in a bit of a gray area, because, as was often the case with me, they found me to be an “adequate” choice but were still hoping they could get someone who was more exciting at the time. So, when they actually did find a more exciting actor, she had to sit me down and give me a talk. She was trying to save face in an unfortunate situation but didn’t do terribly well when she handed me the lamest line ever: “You’re more Gary Cooper and he’s more Montgomery Clift, which is more what this story needs,” as though I would think, “Oh, well, I
was
crushed, but since you compared me to Gary Cooper, no hard feelings!” I wonder if Donal knows what a powerful Monty Clift vibe he has going on, because he might be able to parlay that into at least a biopic at some point, right? The character was supposed to be really overweight and schlumpy, and Donal Logue did have a few pounds over me at the time, which didn’t help my case either.

Unfortunately, thinking I was going to be making this film, I had begun to happily gain weight, putting on twenty pounds over three or four weeks, with Pat’s gleeful assistance. In fact, you might say that he made me his project. I ate so much fucking ice cream and so many cheeseburgers that I thought I would clog my circulatory system right into an early grave. We had just seen an episode of
The Simpsons
in which Homer found out that if he weighed three hundred pounds he could go on disability. So he started wearing muumuus around the house, and there was this great joke that your food’s caloric level wasn’t high enough unless you could rub it against a piece of paper and have the grease turn the paper clear. Homer says to Bart at one point, “Every second I’m out of bed I’m burning precious calories.” It was as though my very own guide for weight gain had been personally delivered via the genius of
The Simpsons
! So, obviously, I started wearing a muumuu (purchased down the hill at the Rite Aid!) and packing on weight just like Homer. I started quoting the lines from
The Simpsons
to our oblivious neighbors and the mailman. Getting fat was the greatest!

Then suddenly I wasn’t getting the job and I had become overweight, and so that, of course, just made me even more depressed. Rather than take the weight right back off again, I chose to shrug and continue trudging through the hard-won life lessons of a young man, now “husky,” in Hollywood.

* * *

M
eanwhile, I was starting to more consistently land dependable character-actor gigs. I won a role on
ER
, which was very exciting, as it was the highest-profile drama on television at the time. It was to be the first live episode of
ER
, and so they wanted theater actors, because the show would be shot more like a live play than a film. Since it was live, we couldn’t stop and do it again if a mistake was made, so they wanted a cast who could hopefully avoid mistakes. It was an incredibly exciting event of which to be a part. A year or two later I was on the fifth episode of
The West Wing
. This was quite bolstering, the opportunity to work on these shows that had some prestige. Even winning a little guest-star part says to a fellow, “You have worth. Stick around—maybe next time you’ll do three episodes.” I kept getting these invaluable little signals from the business that said, “Stick it out, kid, just keep plugging away. Something good will happen.” Casting people would say things like that to me, too. One benevolent lady told me, “Look, you’re going to do great when you come into your sheriff years. Grow a moustache and you’re going to work like crazy.” I wish I could see her now and shake her hand.

I was about due for some good news when suddenly I got some. A great theater company from Chicago called Roadworks, out of Northwestern University, was coming to town with a production of Mike Leigh’s
Ecstasy
. They needed to replace a naked drunk guy in the show, and someone said, “Hey, Offerman’s in LA. Perfect.” So we staged this play at the Odyssey Theatre, which I found to be an excellent and dependable (still is today) Los Angeles institution, and let me tell you, that work put a powerful healing on me. Casting directors came to see us because the company had a great reputation, and I was able to ride on their coattails. Mali Finn, a generous and sublime casting director, sadly no longer with us, showed up, as did a few other great casting directors. Thank my lucky stars, some of these ladies saw something unique in me and began to champion me. For years they would bring me in on auditions and try to get me some really nice jobs. It took a long time, but I began to see more and more fruit from their efforts.

The best thing that happened immediately was that two casting directors—the same ones from
The Tao of Steve
, Nicole Arbusto and Joy Dickson, two of my greatest champions whom I love to death—were casting this film called
Treasure Island
, written and directed by a genius guy named Scott King. It was a delightfully peculiar script, written more like a theater piece than a film, so they were leaning toward some theater actors.

They ended up casting me and one of the lead actors from our production of
Ecstasy
(the heroic Lance Baker) as the leads of the movie, and then they cast the lead actress from the play (a winsome Rachel Singer) in a supporting role. I suddenly had a lead role in a movie, a hilarious, weird, and smart movie, and I was in heaven. The filmmakers were “old-timey people”—a sort of revival movement. Fifteen years ago in LA, there was this sect of hipsterish people who would dress in old-timey fashions, like from the big band era. Double-breasted suits and fedoras and poodle skirts and such. Every Friday night at the Brown Derby there would be big band music and swing dancing. They would use pomade in their hair and have DA haircuts and the whole nine yards.

Scott King was sort of an adjunct to this crowd but he held himself apart from it, and therefore above it. He had come into some money, so he whimsically fashioned himself as an old-time studio head with his company King Pictures. He had a 1932 BMW convertible that he drove around, and he was very generous with all of us working in his company. We had a lot of fun, both shooting the film and socializing outside of it. I had finally found an artistic circle in which I could hang my hat and a benevolent leader whom I could serve with ardor in Scott, a good friend of mine to this day.

We shot in a studio in Silver Lake, on a period camera called a Mitchell. The movie was set in 1943 and a Mitchell was the actual camera one would have used in the forties. Scott ran a very civilized set, insisting that we only shoot eight-hour days. I loved working with him and the producers.
Treasure Island
was also where I first met my good friend Austin filmmaker Bob Byington, who was the script supervisor on the film. Speaking of Bob, I ended up making a couple of prosthetic penises for the movie, because they didn’t have anyone else who could, and I had made a lot of stuff like that for theater in the past. We also shot a week up in San Francisco, including some amazing locations in the city and in front of the Bay Bridge.

It was such an incredible feeling to finally have the lead in a movie that reminded me of the Defiant Theatre in its combined irreverence and intelligence. These people valued me as an actor but also as a dependable contributor; I consulted on acting scenes, drove the art truck, rigged lights, and more, which did my self-worth a world of good. The movie went to Sundance in 1999, and it really got us a lot of nice attention. We were awarded a special jury prize for “Distinctive Vision.” I finally felt like things were beginning to sputter to life for me in Los Angeles. The snowball began to pick up speed, almost imperceptibly, but still, that was a good sight better than slowing down and melting.

* * *

N
ot long after this small triumph, planted in front of
Dawson’s Creek
one night with our preferred dinners—a can of Virginia blister peanuts and a mason jar full of Jim Beam, water, and ice—Pat and I were undoubtedly feeling romantic after seeing what those rascals Pacey and Dawson were up to. We observed, “Okay. This is pathetic. There’s gotta be some high-quality women in this town looking for us. We’ve met a lot of ladies, we’ve seen how this town works now. We’re smart, after a manner of speaking, and we know that we have unique, weird talents and personalities. There are definitely ladies of refined taste looking for us. We just gotta find ’em.”

Well. I’ll be goddamned if that speechifying didn’t work, as though we had uttered some sort of necromantic, romantic incantation. Isn’t that
The Secret
? You just say what you want out loud, and it comes to you? Had some arcane kabbalah from a random episode of
Oprah
infiltrated our psyches? Whatever the case,
Secret
or no, within two weeks of saying it Pat met his future wife, Courtenay Valenti, who is a magnificent, beautiful, tasteful woman who also happens to be a brilliant film executive at Warner Bros. and classy as all get-out. It had happened exactly like we wished in our Secret! THANK YOU, DAWSON!!! PEACE, PACEY!!!

Through the cloud of smoke and patina of Silver Lake dirt, she was able to see the best version of Pat, in effect saying, “You are a brilliant, good-looking guy. Your artwork is somehow simultaneously hilarious and acutely intelligent, and I am laying claim to you.” (And she was right. They have two amazing kids now, and Pat is a champion dad and husband, even as he continues to crank out uproarious, thought-provoking art.) Before we knew it, they were an item.

* * *

S
hortly after Pat and Courtenay started dating, maybe a couple of months later, I was telling my friends, “Guys, ladies, I’m losing my mind. I have to do a play. That’s my mother’s milk. It’s the only thing that can save my life.” Once again, my heroic casting directors Nicole and Joy, who had put me in
Treasure Island
, hooked me up with an audition for a play at a new company called the Evidence Room, which had just purchased a building in the Echo Park area. They needed to build a theater in this old warehouse and they also needed to build a set for the show. There was a character in the play who was an East German soldier who had a monologue at one point comparing his anus to his phallus. I said to them upon our meeting, “You don’t know it yet, but you are looking for me.”