Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living

by Nick Offerman

  Finally, it was my turn, at the end of the circle. As Joe later described, my (Sun-In) dappled hair and tan football player’s physique filled him with loathing even before he learned that I was a born-again Christian. “Who’s the square-ass corn-boy jock?” he thought. I introduced myself and leaned upon my aptitude for farmer politics by informing the group that we were all on the same page when it came to our feelings about the Yellow Peril.

  “Hi, everybody, my name is Nicholas Offerman, but everybody calls me Olas.” With one deft rejoinder, I had informed the assembled group that I was about as wise as a wiseacre was going to get and also that we needn’t be taking any shit from the Yellow Peril.

  Monica didn’t last very long in our class. She discovered, along with several others, that despite the glowing reviews for their Lady Macbeths in the Wilmette Herald, they were in fact not cut out for a life in the theater. I hope that they are all happy now, with healthy families and rewarding vocations. Jeffrey Goodman also fell by the wayside, although I did grow very fond of him after corroborating his food yarns with another fellow named Abraham. To this day I cannot eat a bagel with lox (delicious) without thinking of Jeff Goodman’s underwear.

  * * *

  As the year went on, the further I slowly extricated myself from Christianity, the closer I grew to Joe and the little tribe of weirdos we had formed. Our group of friends voraciously consumed content of which we had all been largely deprived for one reason or another in our hometowns. I had exponentially more catching up to do than the others, but I was game. Like a young Midwesterner newly home from the cultural desert, I slaked my thirst with Tom Waits and Talking Heads. Laurie Anderson and Kurt Vonnegut and Elvis Costello. David Bowie. They Might Be Giants. The Beatles! I had not been turned on to the Beatles. Mel Brooks. Woody Allen. Kurosawa. On the Road. Siddhartha. Jim Thompson and Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs and our main entrée, Robert Anton Wilson. We thrilled to his historical fiction about the Illuminati and its progenitors, the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, and the Rosicrucians. Striving to align our own newly formed cabal with cloaked allegiance to a set of values that only we young artists could countenance and comprehend, we devoured Wilson’s books with the fervor of, well, a young initiate to Freemasonry. We met on the level, and by Christ, we parted on the square.

  We watched Twin Peaks like it was the lunar landing. David Lynch legitimately blew our minds with that delightfully masterful series, rife with humor and terror in equal doses, not to mention just honest-to-goodness weirdness. Witnessing such surrealism on a prime-time television show was incredibly inspiring to our warren of baby artists, wondering what of our own issue the world was going to be willing to swallow.

  Twin Peaks House Rules:

  No late seating, front door locked.

  Blinds down. Lights OFF!

  Peeing allowed only during commercials.

  No talking.

  No phone calls, obviously [meaning landline calls; this is long before the cell phone].

  The episode would be recorded on our VCR and then immediately screened for a second viewing, same rules. The bong would be in operation only between showings.

  Whoopsie, a bong, you say?! It would seem we have rolled into sophomore year, fully free from the constraints of the Lord and fully exploring the world of intoxicants with my tribe. Joe was very much my teacher and spirit guide, as well as my best buddy. We were inseparable; people often thought we were a couple because Joe cultivated an androgynous thing in those days. It worked for him. He saw a lot of action.

  As we trudged through our years of theater tutelage, we learned a great many methods by which to stand and move and speak, but the most important transformation taking place was in our small platoon’s growing adherence to a set of artistic principles. We were producing our own plays in a local free theater space and discovering that while our standards, or production values, were very high, our virtually nonexistent budgets caused those values to require a lot of elbow grease.

  Outside of classes, shows for school, and part-time jobs, we were mounting our own productions of Brecht and Pinter and our own rock-and-roll renditions of Shakespeare. Weed was allowed. A rather ragtag collection of tea heads and beatniks, we saw that our work was sound, and this was noticed by the rest of the department as well. By the time we graduated, the Defiant Theatre had been largely assembled, like a group of stoned, hyperintelligent Super Friends, equipped with all the piss and vinegar necessary to take on the city of Chicago.

  Don’t Walk Alone

  A chapter pertaining to the string of noble friends in my life whom I would call best. I am lucky enough to have counted several, and I’m still young, by gad. The adhesive joining us, always, has been a sense of confederacy. A penchant for mischief and irreverent humor. Us against Them. As long as we were together, we managed to have as much fun as possible, because really, otherwise, what’s the fucking point? As The Book of the SubGenius (the main text of a hilarious faux religion based in Dallas—get The Book of the SubGenius) says, “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke,” right? Even if we were in church or somewhere even less fun than church, if such a place exists, like, I don’t know, in the galley of a slave ship? A vegetarian restaurant? Limbaugh’s colon? Sequestered there in church of a Sunday, we would be plotting and turning red with the knowledge of our various current jokes, which, perhaps nothing more than Mr. Dollinger farting again, was sufficient amelioration for us to withstand another dreary lecture. Marching through life with a confederate in mirth is one of the greatest pleasures that can befall a man, woman, or chipmunk.

  I’m subtitling this chapter “Pilotus,” inspired by a wonderful writer named William Least Heat-Moon, who has given us, among other excellent works, Blue Highways, a thoroughly edifying philosophical journaling of his circumnavigation of the United States and its people, undertaken in a simple van. What unfolds is a sojourn eschewing any major highways, sticking rather to the two-lane state and county roads, registered in blue on most maps, hence the title. A book I strongly recommend. Strongly.

  Then, as if that wasn’t enough, he completely bowled me over with another of his books, River-Horse. It’s a similar undertaking to Blue Highways, at least on paper, but River-Horse details his journey from New York Harbor west to the Pacific Ocean, across these United States, BY BOAT. It’s an intensely fascinating adventure undertaken in two different watercraft—one flat-bottomed motorized cruiser for the lion’s share of the miles, especially necessary on the bigger water, and then a canoe for the more intimate streams where the motor would run afoul of the shallow bottom.

  Traveling thus, he always needed a subsidiary team to be transporting whichever second boat he was not himself occupying at the moment to the next swap-out location by trailer and road, and whenever possible he also carried a passenger aboard with him, for company, safety, and the occasional assistance. No one friend could stay by his side for the entire journey, which lasted months, and so Heat-Moon took to referring to the string of them collectively as “Pilotus,” simplifying the literary task of rendering all of these individual characters by combining them, symbolically, into one charismatic helpmeet. The compatriots in this chapter of mine have represented my own copilots, but, unlike that thankless bastard in the boat, I will use their names so that we may know them as separate people.

  The first was my pally cousin Ryan Roberts, who was born six months after me. We ran much like brothers for the first sixteen or seventeen years of our lives, living some few miles apart. We grew up working on the family farm side by side, although I always envied his much heavier involvement, as he actually lived on the farm. To this day, Ryan is about as good as an American can get, as far as I can tell. He has a hilarious sense of humor, but only up to the point of indecency, where he draws the line (a line I would have also gladly drawn, were I not too busy sticking the chalk up my fanny). While I ran from Minooka as fast as I could, Ryan stuck around and became a parame
dic, while still working on the family farm, firmly establishing him as one of my heroes.

  Our age difference of a half year put him one grade behind me in school, otherwise we might well have burned the place down. Still, we managed to create enough havoc in the time we shared in band class and on sports teams to require a few trips to the disciplinary wing. For me, mostly, not Ryan. We developed a sort of secret language around a mispronunciation of José Feliciano, complete with weird facial expressions and little hand gestures, surrounded by an air of conspiracy, that has stayed with me throughout my life.

  Ryan played the trumpet and I played the saxophone in school band, then marching band, then jazz band, and we were lucky enough to hold the “first chair” in those instruments, which meant we were afforded a little more respect by the rest of the kids. This allowed us to formulate a deadpan sense of leadership that we thought was goddamn hilarious. We always enjoyed giving each other a solemn nod, as though we were army officers keeping everyone calm in the midst of a gaggle of civilians. Even playing our solos in jazz band, we managed to try to insert grace notes in a way we each thought the other would find amusing. There was not a lot to do for fun, so we made our own fun whenever and wherever we could. It was around this time that we developed together what has remained one of my signature moves to this day. One of us would bleat out a sonorous ass-toot, and the other would respond by giving him a steely glare, like he had just received some catastrophic news, perhaps from Leslie Nielsen in a scene from Airplane! or The Naked Gun.

  Comedy films of the day also played a big part in our matriculation, most notably John Hughes offerings. For some reason, the grandparents in Sixteen Candles cracked us up to the point of choking, and Paul Gleason’s definitive portrayal of Principal Richard Vernon in The Breakfast Club (“Don’t mess with the bull, young man. You’ll get the horns”) was likely the seed of what became the full blossom of the comedy fruits found in our facial expressions and mannerisms.

  Leaving Ryan and my boyhood in Minooka (at least symbolically—I believe I still have a healthy portion of inner child in my pocket), I found my next Pilotus at theater school in a wise but puckish lad you may recall by the name of Joe Foust. Our illicit work commenced almost immediately, as we shared a mutual need to engage in some form of insubordination. We were excellent students, as our artistic passions drove us to work as hard as we could, and we excelled as a result, but our mischievous natures were not completely on board with this level of diligence.

  It’s important that I chronicle the fact that Joe taught me to smoke weed. He had patiently waited more than a year for me to excuse myself from the Bible study group and find my way to the party. Traditionally, a first-time pot user would claim to “feel nothing” and often threw in the towel before achieving a proper bake. To guarantee that I would have no such problems, Joe told me a bald-faced lie.

  He had a favorite pipe which was, if I recall correctly, a zombie knight with fake rubies for eyes and a large, open mouth that was the bowl. His name was Sir Frop-a-Lot. Packing a good-size bowl with buds, Joe casually imparted that it normally would take seven or eight of these bowls to feel anything, so by the time we had actually hoovered in four or five such bowls, I began to cotton to the idea that Joe was full of shit, because I was completely wasted. I laughed my first long, teary stoner laugh then, giggling maniacally at my Pilotus’s delightfully dirty trick with the straight face that has been the key ingredient to all of these friendships. Deadpan humor required.

  As well as the plays of Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco, Sam Shepard, Charles Ludlam, Bertolt Brecht, and beyond, Joe and the rest of our weird tribe—Ragsdale, PeePee, Kimmel, Flanigan, Tatro, and Prescher—were deeply studying the Church of the SubGenius, and we were collectively invigorated by these sources of humor we were finding in the “grown-up” world. These signposts assured us that we too could find careers engaged in artistic pursuits that contained a subversive sense of humor.

  One night while working in the costume shop, we decided to borrow a couple of wigs and head out on the town. We walked over to Green Street and, like most troublemakers, ended up at the video arcade. We were big fans of Kubrick, of course, and we aspired to be our own Alex-and-Dim kind of mischievous duo. We would stand next to a dude playing a game, we would give each other a nod, and as the guy was about to get a high score I would shoulder him to the floor and then we’d run. That was our big prank. Brilliantly crafted. We would run screaming back to the costume shop and laugh maniacally at our triumphant bout of grab-ass. If you’re out there reading this book and I did this to you, I am very sorry. Sometimes we’re assholes. We thought it was just so unbelievably funny then.

  Joe and I sort of came into manhood together as artists, with Joe’s creative puberty prefacing my own. We formed part of the spine of the Defiant Theatre, where we were able to fully flex our creative muscles once we arrived in Chicago. The two of us continued to live together for our first year in Chicago and had what I would call a rich time, indeed. Working together in Champaign–Urbana at the U of I and also at the Station Theatre, a very high-quality local company in an old Urbana train station, we learned a lesson that we would later exploit to great pleasure in Chicago: If one was responsible and hardworking when the job required it, then one was free to fuck around as much as one wanted to when the work was over! People were comforted by our dependability, for they knew we would sweep up any mess we made, which gave us the freedom to be the finest class clowns working. The key resided in the first part—make sure you work hard and do the job right. Once that notion was implemented, the fun began and has really never ended.

  As the director of our best Defiant plays, Joe was a great teacher to me. For years he had refused to give me the plum roles for which I thought I was perfect, because I wasn’t yet a good enough actor. As you can imagine, I pulled him aside and said, “Look, maybe I still have some things to learn as an actor, but we’re best friends. Cut a guy a break?” to which he replied, “Listen, you muscular fool. I am trying to make this production the best that it can possibly be, so I’m going to cast the best actors I can, even if they’re strangers. You’re getting better. Excruciatingly slowly, yes, but you ARE improving, and the day will come when you WILL get the part.”

  This was such a huge lesson for me (and it’s also why nepotism doesn’t accomplish as much as people might suspect in showbiz. Can it get you in the door? Sure, maybe, but you still have to exhibit “the goods” to get the job), and it only made me admire Joe all the more for the integrity of his vision. I realized that we’re being paid nothing or very little for this work, at least in dollars. If we’re not going to do this job as sublimely as possible, then what the hell are we doing?

  One of my very favorite of Joe’s many bedevilments over the years, and one that can well represent for you his charismatic combination of leadership and monkey business, occurred at the Abbie Hoffman Died for Our Sins Theatre Festival in 1997. Every year in August the Mary-Arrchie Theatre presents this festival to celebrate the anniversary of Woodstock in 1969. This splendid debauch was a nonstop, seventy-two-hour procession of everything from high-quality theater pieces, music, and monologues to absolute absurdism and nonsense. (I once, having had no time to prepare material, dressed as a clown and downed a fresh goblet of my own urine as my offering to the audience. They were moved, I’m guessing, at my talent?) Theater companies could sign up for a half-hour or an hour slot and do whatever they damn well pleased. Part of the charm of these proceedings was that between acts the previous group would quickly load out, and then the next players would hustle in their necessaries, props, minor scenery, and what have you. This was always a good time to nip down to the liquor store for a half-pint of Old Darling.

  On the evening in question, we Defiants, some twelve hardy roustabouts or so, hustled in an entire kitchen and set it up upstage with other assorted mayhem including a six-foot penis tucked into the lighting grid, a lovely lass in a bumbleb
ee costume, and a small hippie tuning a guitar. Downstage center was only an easy chair, a standing lamp (lit), and an occasional table upon which sat an old-fashioned telephone and a bowl of mints. After an impressively instantaneous load-in that would have given the Tasmanian Devil pause, we the crew disappeared, the dust settled, and our dear, lone thespian, our late, great champion and friend Will Schutz, sat in the chair without pomp, unfolded his newspaper, and began to read. As the silence lengthened and the audience was beginning to smirk, the phone began to ring. A good, old-school clanging telephone bell ringer. Rrring. Rrring. Rrring. The crowd’s smiles grew. Rrring. Rrring. Rrring. Will Schutz inscrutably eyes the Business section. Rrring. Rrring. Rrring. Rrring. Titters. Rrring. More rings. Minutes of ringing. Rrring. Finally, Schutz makes as if to answer the phone but only gathers a mint instead and pops it into his gob. The audience was experiencing differing waves of reaction from loud laughter to mild bemusement to tedious unease to insouciance as when one man in the third row began to utter, “Hello? . . . Hello?” Still, the phone rang on. Really, a surprising amount of laughter. Rrring. Rrring. The laughter would die, then after a lull even more enjoyment. This experiment had an audacity that the audience was largely on board with. Rrring. For a time. Rrring. Then they began to turn. People shifted in their seats and some few got up and left. Finally, a young lady trepidatiously rose from her seat. As the audience shouted more and more encouragement, she more confidently strode into the lights onstage and picked up the handset from the ringing phone. The moment the handset cleared its cradle, clearly silencing the ringing as though a switch had been flipped, Joe bellowed, “STRIKE!!” and quick as we came, we silently hustled the props and scenery out of the theater and into the night leaving nothing but an empty, black stage mere moments after the ringing had ceased. The name of this evening’s offering? “La Surprise Grand.” That’s my boy Joe Foust, folks.