Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living (25 page)

Let’s see, we’ve discussed beauty, talent, artistry, elegance . . . ah. I see I’ve buried the lead. Megan’s finest trait, even more apparent than the glorious volcanoes of flesh gracing her upper abdomen, is her sense of humor. She has, without question, the filthiest, most hilarious predilection for phrases and gestures that would make a sailor’s cockring blush. When we became friends in rehearsals for
The Berlin Circle
, I would race home from rehearsal every night to report the day’s delicious blasphemy via her lips. She couldn’t make a crack without mentioning somebody taking a shit on somebody’s balls, or, when no one but me was looking, pretending to masturbate furiously, with the fervor of a cleaning lady scrubbing at a stubborn stain on a rug, only to play it completely cool when the attention of the other actors turned back upon us. She just makes me laugh like nobody else can and has done so day in and day out for thirteen years now. That’s one of the many reasons they call me the Lucky Bastard.

As a student of music myself, I have long dreamed of the opportunity to perform alongside Megan as she regales the audience with her brand of melodiousness. Recognizing this desire in me, she has coached me over the years to strengthen my singing voice with practice and hard work, until just in the last couple of years, to my great satisfaction, I’ve begun singing in front of audiences, mainly in my first humorist show,
American Ham
. Among the songs in my repertoire is “The Rainbow Song,” which I wrote in 2008 for Megan’s fiftieth birthday. I had asked, it being her fiftieth, if she didn’t crave something fancy in the way of a gift for this milestone age, some sort of bauble or gewgaw.

(An aside—Megan has had zero “work” done. By “work,” I refer of course to plastic surgery and Botox and all the other horrors that famous beautiful people traditionally inflict upon themselves. Let me just urge you, if you are contemplating anything in this realm, to please reconsider. There is nothing that a man or woman can do to improve upon nature. Your true self, no matter how much you dislike that self’s lack of cheekbones, is the most beautiful version of you that can be presented to the world, and no amount of any doctor brutally butchering your flesh is going to buy you more adoration than simply your own personality, created by nature. And, admitting that in some shitty arenas having “corrective” surgeries actually does show dividends, do you really want the fruits of your life’s labors to increase in bounty because you have bigger tits? Mightn’t you be happier in another situation wherein you were valued for the person inhabiting the body you showed up in? [Implied answer: yes.])

For her fiftieth-birthday gift, Megan said, “No, nothing special, just make me one of your cards or do one of your funny dances. Or, you know what? I would actually love a rainbow for my birthday.” I narrowed my eyes and scrutinized her face for a time, determining that no, she was not kidding. “Okay, honey,” I said. “Cool. Sounds good. Let me make a few calls.”

Shitcakes. A motherfucking rainbow? I was stymied for a long time, racking my brain for some way to provide Megan with a birthday rainbow (her favorite color, BTW), and coming up short. When it looked as though all would be lost and I would fail miserably, I was saved by the late, great Nina Simone and her charming song “Beautiful Land,” which lists the colors of the rainbow, one for each verse! Ha-HA!! I would live to fight another day! I wrote the following lyrics and my dear friend, the wizardly mountebank Corn Mo, helped me set them to some old Irish chords, creating my first song. Thanks again, CornMo(.com)!

The Rainbow Song

(A rousing
⁶
/
₈
time)

You RED me my rights when you arrested me,

You put me on trial and gave me life.

But ORANGE you glad I didn’t say banana,

When you made me your bitch and I made you my wife?

You YELLOW you yell when I ball a melon,

But you don’t complain when I tickle your back.

We are both a’GREEN that we’ll serve our time.

If I drop the soap I know you’ll watch my crack.

Please enjoy this Rainbow Song,

And this gift of leprechaun romance.

Please enjoy as part of this well-balanced breakfast,

The Lucky Charms you will find in my pants.

You BLUE me away when you sang “Shock the Monkey,”

Your fingers inside me let the games begin.

INDIGO . . . Is a tough one to pun with,

But when we’re apart, it’s the mood that I’m in.

We get along so well, we could never be compared

To Jesus of Nazareth and Pontius Pilate,

But if you’ll endure the slight of calling me sir

I’ll be Peppermint Patty to your VIOLET!

Please let this song be your rainbow,

I’ve got my Cialis so I shall not fail.

Please don’t deny my advances,

For tonight you’re going to take it in the pail.

Please let my song be your rainbow,

I made it for you, this shit cuts like a knife.

Forever I’ll follow this rainbow,

To that fifty-year-old sweet pot of gold,

That seems to grow foxy instead of old,

From which I hope to never be paroled,

My angel in a centerfold,

She plays more than Sousa upon my fife,

My jaw-droppingly beautiful wife . . .

Finding Swanson

T
he secret to getting cast? Don’t give a shit about the audition. The secret to that? Being happy at home, being happy in love. Being happy in the rest of your life. Auditions are so depressing. There’s a hallway full of dudes, and sometimes you see three dudes you know are fucking great, and it’s horrible to see them, because you think, “Oh, perfect, these three great guys. They would all be ideal for this part.” And then six other jerks, two of whom are your good friends. Or else, there are a couple of those guys who like to try to “psych you out.”

I had this one guy—I wish I could remember his name so I could call him out in chapter 15 of my book. He’s been breathing easy through the whole thing, thinking I didn’t remember him, but now, here in this late chapter, I’m calling you out, BRO. You know who you are, all macho and shadowboxing. Actually going outside the building and then staring me down through the window. We’re actors, man. We’re just actors. I’m not interested in fighting you or anyone. I didn’t become a boxer or a soldier or a paramedic or a badass in any other way; I became an artist, and I’m afraid the same is true of you (using a loose interpretation of the term).

It’s so demoralizing—in this business that scores your abs so much higher than your enunciation—that the troglodytes can make it all the way through the filters to a callback for a fireman pilot. Half the time the people in the room for whom you’re reading are barely even TV people. Sometimes they come from music videos. Or funny Internet shorts. Or business school; that’s the worst. They might be great people, even really creative ones, no question, but their main interest is just not in telling stories.

It’s easy to let yourself get down in the mouth when you’re going to these auditions, because half the time what you have to offer they can’t even see. They don’t have the right goggles. You’re applying all of your powers of storytelling to a scene, with humor or tragic pathos, but they’re viewing you through Coca-Cola glasses, musing over whether your role might do better demographically if you were more buff, or blond, or Kardashian. It’s important that you can set aside the idea that you wield an artistic agenda, as can the writer, hopefully, because the suits have an entirely different agenda, and that is to sell diapers. And pickup trucks and breakfast cereal. You’re working with an entirely different box of logic than they. Know that going in, and you’re ahead of the game. These are just a tiny sampling of the delights of the audition process, but never fear: Once you have the right someone to come home to, be it even a pet or a poster of Billy Jack, you can then think, “I don’t fucking care. I can’t make this corporation more artistic, so I’ll just have fun here and do my best.”

As soon as you can flip that switch—as soon as you don’t care as much—your work becomes so much better, because you appear so much more confident. People think, “Hey, looks like you’ve got something going on, buddy!” After Megan and I got together, I started to religiously attend
Will & Grace
tapings, and I really hit it off with everybody in the cast and crew. I loved the show passionately. Being there while they were making the show was such a treat, especially watching all of these top-of-the-line professional artists doing their jobs so well. It couldn’t have been more of a Disneyland for me, and there was also beer.

They took a shine to me as well, which was awfully flattering. They had written the role of a new boyfriend for Grace, Debra Messing’s character, and they held a bit of a cattle call, which included me auditioning with maybe twenty other guys. The next day they had maybe six or eight of us back to read more. I was pretty excited just to get a callback. The next day, Wednesday, they had two or three of us back. It was to read even more new material, and I realized this was all getting pretty crazy and real. They were really looking at me. On the Thursday they had just me back by myself, actually reading the scenes with Debra for the producers and the director, television institution James Burrows.

They said, “Okay, we’ve written some new stuff. We really love you for this character. That funny little dance you do in the elevator is really working. But we can’t give you the part yet—we’re still working out some business. But it may go to you. In any case, we really love the stuff you’re doing.” Holy shit!

The next day, Friday, they called and told me that Jim Burrows had put in a call to Woody Harrelson back on Monday—they’d worked together on
Cheers
—and Woody had just now returned the call and said yes at the last minute. “So you were great, but sorry, you know how it goes.” And Woody went on and did this great part for the whole season and was, of course, awesome. There are some very good reasons that he’s the big shot that he is, not the least of which are that he’s incredibly lovely and charismatic and funny, so unfortunately there wasn’t much to goddamn about. But I have to say, even just going through that experience was so thrilling and really did my confidence an immense deal of good. Just the fact that they considered me in that legitimate way was a dream come true.

* * *

L
ater that fall they were doing their Thanksgiving episode, and as a bit of a consolation they gave me a small part as a plumber. I had these great scenes with Megan and it was super fun, but I’d never done a multicamera show before, so it was also kind of scary and stressful. Everything moves really quickly, especially with Jim Burrows, who could do it with his eyes closed, and often does (he directs by ear more than eye; it’s mighty impressive). There’s not a lot of rehearsal, so I was nervous and had the live audience there to boot. I was about to make my first entrance of the night and Sean Hayes is standing by the door, saying, “Okay, here it comes, get ready. Getting close. Don’t fuck this up. You ready?” and making me giggle and freak out. I chased him away with as much composure (not much) as I could muster.

* * *

G
etting to do that role on
Will & Grace
was very fortifying for me. It made me feel like I could play with the professionals at the breakneck pace of a multicamera sitcom, and getting to work with my lady, who had also quite quickly become my hero, was incredibly exhilarating. Shortly thereafter I got cast in a Fox pilot called
Secret Service
. As a young actor, or really an actor of any age starting out from scratch in LA, you have to take whatever you can get. You have to build up your union points, first to earn your union cards, and then, with cards in hand, continue to qualify for your medical and dental insurance. Eventually, when you start getting jobs and doing a little better, should you be so lucky, it’s hard to break the habit and begin saying no to any jobs. I remember auditioning for and getting a guest-star job on this terrible Tom Sizemore show called
Robbery Homicide Division
. He was some sort of heroic homicide cop? I’m not sure. Never saw it. The part was some sort of psycho beating in a small child’s head with a hammer. I had gone to the audition on autopilot and booked the job—I feel like I must not have known exactly what the whole script was about when I took the audition. In any case, when it all came to light, I decided to pass on it, which was a first, but even for pretend, I didn’t want to beat a kid’s face in. Let somebody else spend his day doing that.

It was really hard to learn that I didn’t have to accept every job offered. A lot of early hopes were placed in the TV pilot basket. To roll the dice on a pilot and hope you might land on a
Will & Grace
. Or a
Friends
. Or an
ER
or an
NYPD Blue
. A great show that would pay you really well for eight years. So I was tickled when I got this pilot,
Secret Service
, until they suddenly said to me, “Oh, if this series goes, it’s shooting in Toronto.” And Megan was like, “Excuse me? Yo, buddy, what the fuck just happened?” We were just starting to set up house with each other, and a move to Toronto was not in the cards. Thankfully, everything pointed to the show not going. I really liked the people involved, but it was honestly pretty embarrassing. It was peopled by Fox’s flavor of actors circa 2001, which basically meant models playing Secret Service agents. I was the only one who could have remotely passed as a Secret Service agent, and I would have been a tiny Secret Service agent. I’m five foot ten and a half and maybe two hundred pounds, which, on this Fox show, made me “the fat guy.” This was a great example of how real life can unexpectedly supersede casting dreams. I finally won the actor lottery and booked a pilot, and because of the love in my life, I didn’t want it to go to series.

* * *

I
continued to describe myself as a slowly rolling snowball. I was still getting TV jobs. As I had become good friends with a lot of the
Will & Grace
writers, who were some of the best comedy writers working, a couple of them ended up gratifyingly writing me parts in new pilots they were working on.

One of them wrote a new pilot and wrote me a very specific and hilarious series regular role on his show. I went through the audition process, which was kind of a cakewalk for once, because it was written specifically for my particular sense of humor. The part was a weird navy intelligence guy in DC. I don’t usually have my moustache—I know people now know me with my moustache—but, clean-shaven at the time, I thought, “This guy should have a kick-ass moustache.” So I was sporting some fresh new whiskers, as I am wont to do, and I cruised all the way to the final network test to get the job, which was for CBS. I arrived at the test, and there were some other great actors there whom I knew, but I thought, “I got this. There’s nobody here like me and it was written for me.” I did the audition and, reportedly, Les Moonves, the head of CBS, said after I left the room, “This guy’s good, okay. But you know, I’m not really feeling the moustache this year.” And my friend the writer said, “Okay, he could shave it.” Les replied, “Well, we’ve got a couple of weeks left before we need to cast this part, so let’s just see if we can get someone with a little more juice.” That is an exact quote. Network executives like to throw around terms like
juice
and
heat
. Eight days later they gave the part to an actor apparently dripping with the stuff, Mr. James Van Der Beek. That’s right, gentle reader, it was Dawson from
Dawson’s Creek
. So we’ve come full circle once again.

* * *

I
was getting these nice shots at success with some frequency, but I was consistently losing to douchebag corporate decision making like that. I have nothing bad to say about Mr. Van Der Beek, who does fine work, but when a comedy role written
for me
is handed to a heartthrob from a young-adult soap opera on the WB—a very different type than myself is what I’m driving at—I’m going to find that upsetting. I don’t care if it’s James Van Der Beek or Ryan Gosling or Anthony Hopkins. But that’s the business. (For the record, I have lost no jobs to Gosling or Hopkins. Yet.) Eventually one learns that many of the jobs for which one is “rejected” turn out to be incredibly bad experiences in one way or another anyway, which allows one to be more unaffected by the guys who don’t “feel like a moustache” this year. So. I continued to plug away. I was getting good movie parts in delicious Sundance movies, also known as really intelligent independent films. I was becoming slightly more known around town as a dependable character actor, and that went a long way toward supporting my artistic morale. I was able to maintain my confidence, thanks to little signals here and there from the universe. One evening Megan and were strolling along the beach in Malibu, enjoying the tickling of our toes in the surf, when we unexpectedly happened upon none other than Garry Shandling. He and Megan exchanged greetings, having been previously acquainted, before she introduced me to him. I was (and am) a very big fan of his, so I was hanging back a bit. When I stepped forward to shake hands, ankle-deep in the gentle Pacific swell, Garry looked piercingly into my face and asked if I was in the business. I replied that I aspired to be so, and he said, “Stick around. You’ve got something.” Such random moments of generous magick would feed me through months and years of artistic starvation. Whenever I would even begin to think about changing paths, Shandling would appear in my mind’s eye, reassuring me to stay the course.

* * *

I
went to an audition for
Deadwood
and met David Milch. After reading the delectable script, I literally said to him, “Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been looking for this show for my whole life.” We got along, and I got this really great part in the second episode of the series. Unfortunately, I got killed by Wild Bill. Spoiler alert: He shot me in the belly at the end of the episode. Still, to this day it’s one of the best dramatic items I have on my actor’s reel. That moment in Milch’s embrace fed me for five years. Receiving the approbation of an artist of his ilk went a long way toward bolstering my persistence.

Around this point something started to seem weird to me. I was reading for a lot of dramatic stuff but not much comedy. As a theater actor, one generally engages in whatever’s in the season that year. You’ll do a Shakespeare, you’ll do a Sam Shepard, then you do a Feydeau farce, then some August Wilson. Or Martin McDonagh. You’re facile. I love doing comedy as much as I love drama and everything in between, but it began to dawn on me more and more that people really want to compartmentalize you in Los Angeles. They want you to be a specialist. They want you to do comedy, or play tennis, or speak French, but they don’t want you to do all three.

I started griping to my agents—I should mention that right around the time I met Megan I moved to a slightly bigger agency, the redoubtable Silver, Massetti & Szatmary, and I started griping to them, “Ben Stiller just did this movie with all these weird, funny male models. I never even heard about an audition. This other movie was all firemen. There wasn’t one guy out of thirty-seven firemen that I could audition for?” Just as I was starting to grouse in earnest, I ended up landing a part on the George Lopez sitcom. A great director named John Pasquin cast me on
George Lopez
as Randy, which was a little bit of a leap of faith, since I didn’t really have the character nailed down. He and I played around with it on set and he even had me try it with an Irish dialect for fun, with a touch of the leprechaun. We finally dialed it in with this silly, sort of bombastic dumb-guy voice. On the show, I was dating and then got engaged to Belita Moreno, who was playing George’s mom, Benny. Randy was this much younger, weird trucker type who was really silly and great fun. I ended up recurring for a couple of seasons and had an absolute blast with the good people over there.