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

by Nick Offerman

  One night I was walking home to this hovel from the El train with my friend Rob Ek, who, while sweet as pie, was a very intimidating, manly guy in our tribe of troublemakers. (He was the one everybody thought of as macho, not me. Nobody in those days ever inquired of me, “How did you become so manly?” because I was usually standing next to Rob Ek.) So, we were walking home from the train one night, having taken some pints on board, when we had an unexpected social interaction with a few young men, teenagers really, who had appeared suddenly. I must have been juking about in a silly way, obliviously lost in my buzz, which they mistook for crazy. The main guy was spooked by my strangeness, and he quickly said to us, “Yeah, you better run!” and they all took off. Rob grabbed me and said, “Holy shit! Did you see that?” I said, “No, what?” Unbeknownst to me in my stupor, the guy was showing us a silver pistol in his waistband, telling us to give him our money. The depth of my intoxication revealed itself as Rob walked me through the details of what I had just missed. I went about as white as a sheet, and we realized that the perpetrators must have thought I was crazy. It worked that time well enough, so I took the ball and ran. I began cultivating this scary look, as I realized that being perceived as insane was a great defense late at night in the big city. I wore muttonchops and a brown cowboy hat that looked like something out of High Plains Drifter, and under a brown overcoat I favored this black classic motorcycle jacket with an airbrushed image of a skull on the back and the words Watch Me Burn beneath it.

  The phrase had a number of meanings. I’ve always enjoyed these triple-layered entendres. No one ever knew what the fuck I meant, but I thought I was being incredibly clever and hilariously rebellious. Part of the inspiration came from the summer after my sophomore year in college, when I was really trying to distance myself from my bucolic, wholesome upbringing. I was also coming down off a born-again Christian trip, so there’s that. I was working for these born-again Christian house builders for the summer in Minooka; it was incredible, and I worked like an ox. We were framing houses and I was carrying four-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood up an extension ladder to the second- and third-story roofs. Looking back on it, it was an act of stamina that makes me long for the strength of my younger self. I’m still strong and have a great constitution, but you have to be eighteen or nineteen and a little stupid to haul plywood like that. At that age, nobody’s terribly impressed that you can haul a sheet up, so you haul two of them. “Yeah, you guys didn’t notice? I did two. No big.” Even as a brute laborer, I needed to perform for anyone who would give me the time of day.

  We had a lot of fun, my tool belt and I, as I learned all the different aspects of house framing. At one point my job was to burn all of the trash from the construction site out in the yard. I had this big mound of trash, lumber, and other dross. Probably a ten-foot-high fire pile. And I had a smaller brush pile already going, maybe fifteen or twenty feet away. I was standing on the larger, unlit trash pile, splashing about gasoline from a five-gallon can, because that’s how it was done. We were building two houses next to each other, and the two brothers who owned the company were shingling the roofs and racing each other, one on each roof. I would add that they liked me because, as usual, I was a clown, but only just enough of one. I worked hard and cracked wise in acceptable proportion, until this particular occurrence. Screaming at them, “Watch me burn, boys! I’m going to do it!” like I was going to light the pile under me, I was laughing my ass off. Then, suddenly I saw that the vapors from the splashing gas had caught the brush pile flames and the fire jumped onto me and the unlit pile beneath my work boots. The gas can exploded and blew me cleanly off the pile and onto the ground, rolling. When the smoke cleared, I had lost a lot of my eyebrows and singed my facial hair, but, luckily, that was about it. I wasn’t personally on fire, and I hadn’t been injured in the fall, but that’s how the phrase ended up on my jacket. The brothers not only fired me, but they had the stones to charge me for a new gas can, too. At the time I was riding a 1979 Yamaha XS1100, a big, fat, brown road motorcycle, and I envisioned Watch Me Burn on my jacket on that motorcycle. It meant “Watch me haul ass out of here,” but at the same time it meant “Hey, everybody, just wanted to let you know I’m cool. I smoke weed now.” An act of public service, really, because before I had the jacket painted, I don’t think people were aware of just how goddamn cool I was.

  Toward the top of 1995 I found this warehouse space on North Avenue. Rick, the landlord, didn’t quite know what to make of me, but I think he liked having a clown around. He rented this big room to me—it was probably twenty feet by fifty feet—and that was the whole of my domicile. In addition, there were a couple of larger warehouse areas where I built a lot of scenery and I had my first real shop. At this point I had finally amassed the full set of tools for a scenery shop, and for a couple of years it became my own tiny “factory” in the Warholian sense. It was right around the corner from Steppenwolf, where I had been working in some plays, so my warehouse became a safe haven for actors to smoke bongs, basically. Suffice it to say that, as far as parties go, there were some pretty good humdingers at the warehouse. Besides the more excellent aspects of warehouse living, there were also some minor downsides, like the five-minute walk from my space in the very back of the building to the bathroom in the front office, especially late at night, especially in the winter. I found it much more convenient to tinkle off of the roof out my back fire escape door, mainly into the snowdrift on a subroof a few feet below me. This arrangement was perfectly agreeable and downright convenient until the drift melted in the spring and three months’ worth of pee sat in a warm and pungent puddle beneath the windows I needed to keep open because of the uncomfortable heat. I knew, thanks to a popular proverb, what to do when life gave me lemons, but in this case, when handed lemonade to begin with, I was at a loss. I did some dumping of bleach and water and I burned a lot of incense.

  My time working at Steppenwolf, arguably the best theater company in the country, was incredibly educational. No longer the wild and woolly young Turks who had put Chicago theater on the map (along with David Mamet’s gang), they’d since become a more august, respected company. They’d grown up. Working with a budget in the millions, including some substantial corporate patronage, they had to brush themselves off and sit up a little straighter now. But not too straight—after all, my first show there was A Clockwork Orange. Once again, my beloved Robin McFarquhar was the fight choreographer and I was his fight captain. Rob Ek was in that show as well, so there were two of us representing our tribal circle. As fond as I am of the respective jib cuts of Rob and myself, it was really through our association with Robin that we got cast, because everyone in town wanted to be in A Clockwork Orange.

  We started rehearsals and I have to say it was a little eye-opening, because Steppenwolf, in our minds, had been this kick-ass, rock-and-roll, irreverent theater company. But by the time I reached them they had graduated from their time as dangerous young upstarts, having become a company in early middle age with a big, beautiful new theater building that they had constructed with a great many American dollars, partially provided by United Airlines and other generous patrons. I was still yearning for rebellion at every turn, but in hindsight, I am more understanding of their position, and I now certainly think that it was ballsy of them to even attempt mounting an adaptation of a challenging novel like A Clockwork Orange in the first place. Regardless of my immature craving for insubordination, the one thing I can tell you for certain is that I was damn lucky to be there.

  Although I ended up working there on six or seven shows over a couple of years with some of the best artists in the country, I never had the chance to shine in a major role. Instead, I performed in more workmanlike ways, filling supporting roles, choreographing fights, making masks, and even once working as a makeup artist.

  I was twenty-five and the Steppenwolf founders were all in their midthirties, so they were naturally becoming a little more sedate, while still mountin
g some of the best plays around. My thirst for experimentation and risk was slaked by other, smaller theater companies, where the work could become quite explosive. One such company besides my own was A Red Orchid Theatre, whose membership included my pal Mike Shannon. I did a play there with him called The Questioning of Nick, which is a twenty-minute play that Arthur Kopit wrote—I believe to get into Harvard. It’s a three-character play we did with Chicago theater hero Guy Van Swearingen, who was the artistic director of Red Orchid at the time. We did the play three times in a row, rotating the parts we played with each retelling. The audience, simply seeing the three interpretations, found it fascinating, much in the spirit of Rashomon. Simply by changing our personal interpretations of each role, we altered the audience’s point of view, as well, with each iteration. It was incredibly fun to do and it was a really fascinating little study in storytelling. To this day I’ve never worked with someone onstage with a presence quite like Mike. I’m forty-two and he’s probably thirty-eight, so he was a kid of nineteen when I met him. He has such a captivating physical quality about him. In one version of the play he would wrap his dinner-plate hands around my head, as he was a police sergeant and I was a teenage suspect, in the story of a high school basketball star being questioned by a police sergeant and his assistant about allegedly throwing basketball games for payoffs. So when he was the sergeant he would take my entire head in his hands and speak to me very softly. I couldn’t move. I was simultaneously terrified and in love. I have never had a more womblike experience whilst literally embraced by another actor.

  I did a production of The Crucible at Steppenwolf for a high school series they produced on their main stage. I was cast as John Proctor, the lead, which was I believe the last time I was cast as an actual “leading man.” It’s such a great piece of literature to work on, and if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you do so now. This riveting memoir chapter will be here when you return. . . .

  Okay, back? Pretty gripping, right? Arthur Miller was not too shabby with the typewriter and the dialogue and the drama and such. How about that Giles Corey, huh? Good shit. The gifted young lady who played Abigail in our production was named Cecilia, and she originally hailed from Mexico. You generally don’t want new inter-cast relationships springing up in your play. They should be generally discouraged as they can tend to rock the boat. However, if there exists the remotest possibility of romance between the actors playing John Proctor and Abigail in your production of The Crucible, then you might as well throw in the towel, because you’re doomed. The whole play is rife with an intense, forbidden sexuality between the two characters. So, naturally, Cecilia and I started dating.

  * * *

  The Defiant Theatre was this fun, weirdo, little 1920s-Vienna-wannabe theater art club that was quite an exciting bacchanal, by and large. Ultimately the pinnacle of my Chicago experience was living on North Avenue in my warehouse and building the set for Ubu Raw. We had always wanted to try this Greek scenery trick called periaktoi, which is a set of three-sided pillars, two feet wide by twelve feet tall, maybe twelve or sixteen of them, side by side, so all the front, or downstage, faces together make one enormous picture, as the upstage wall. The whole set of pillars was rigged to spin together so we could rotate between different scenes. It’s also a modern billboard technique, but to execute it writ large like that was so fun and really cheap for the considerable amount of “bang” it carried. So we had these huge expansive cycloramas that we were all painting together in the warehouse and then rigging into the three-sided pillars. One of them had a trick door in it for a surprise entrance because we loved our scenery tricks. Magical theater scenery, like secret doors, revolving turntable stages, or trapdoors in the floor, are something I love to see properly used, as they still can make me feel the magic I felt as a child. It’s like a ride at Disneyland with a more comfortable seat and better writing.

  Ubu Raw was, in a way, the superhero movie I’ve always wanted to make but never had the opportunity to do so. I was at an age then and in the sort of physical condition that playing Aquaman, or, let’s be honest, Ben Grimm from The Fantastic Four, might require. As Pa Ubu, I was in a fat suit with this huge, round belly, all in white with a big red target on the belly, and my mask was an old bike helmet with a huge latex mask built over it. The main Ubu masks were made by our incredible artist friend Stephanie Nelson, based on a drawing of the character by Alfred Jarry, who wrote the original Ubu Roi. Her mask for Pa Ubu was this huge head that came to a white point at the top, which folded over to the side like an old-timey nightcap, with these weird walrus eyes and a big moustache, so all you could see of my actual face was my lower lip and chin.

  Joe’s staging upon an absurd circus of a set designed by Emil Boulos was a joyful romp into the ridiculous. I made my first entrance on steps that were made by slaves who were holding planks—they would walk in formation and turn the planks into steps, which I would pound up and down. As advertised, much of the movement and line delivery was very Kabuki-inspired. In addition, there were vast broadsword and quarterstaff fights, which were incredibly demanding physically. At intermission it was all I could do to lurch into the alley and smoke two cigarettes and pound two beers. I’d just peel out of my fat suit, squat against the wall, and catch my breath, just in time for round two.

  I’m so very grateful that I had that moment to revel in what turned out to be the greatest strength of my youth, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. Even by age twenty-eight or thirty we all began to realize what a key ingredient youth had been in the rigorous performances at our Defiant Theatre company. As young ne’er-do-wells, we were able to give ourselves over to the lifestyle so wholly that we sacrificed so many necessary and practical (i.e., grown-up) parts of our lives. Like, I exclusively drove vehicles with no insurance or registration (because those things cost money), which really could have ended badly when I totaled my motorcycle on the freeway on the way to a performance of A Clockwork Orange, and because it wasn’t registered to me and had no plates, I just left it on the side of the highway. So, with youth, apparently, came a certain amount of assholery, at least on my part.

  I had been engaged, the day after the motorcycle crash, to drive my friend Todd’s moving truck to Los Angeles, but I had three ribs out of place and all the blood vessels in my eyes had been broken. Todd, his wife, and I finally determined that I could see plenty well enough to truck their entire life’s possessions a mere couple of thousand miles. In deference to my injured state, we did take a slight detour through the mystical town of Sedona, Arizona, where they had a friend named Mindy who practiced white witchcraft. She laid a poultice on my ribs and cleaned up my energies and whatnot, and it smelled real good in her room, so I was pretty down with a witching, all things considered. We rolled into Los Angeles the next day, and I just looked like a serial killer. At the time I was cultivating this “style” consisting of a porkpie hat, the completely bloodred eyes, a thick dog chain around my neck, old leather combat boots, and these weird sort of Swiss paratrooper red camouflage pants with matching cloth suspenders. I met any intimidation that Hollywood created within me in a full-on Mad Max mode, which is really the way to attack any frightening new terrain. I discovered that there was really not too much to be scared of in LA, beyond a lot of assholes and maybe some venereal diseases.

  * * *

  My final chapter in Chicago was centered around the venerated, unassuming Irish whisky bar across the street from Steppenwolf by the name of O’Rourke’s (now sadly gone). For some reason the magnanimous proprietor, Jay, took a shine to me and hired me part-time as a bartender. Not only was I a twenty-six-year-old drunk, but he added, “You can give your friends the first pint free.” I thought, “You’re insane. You effectively just told me to hand out a couple hundred bucks a week to my pals.”

  We had the greatest time at O’Rourke’s, the most idyllic of what you might imagine as a smoky, dark pub filled with show folk laughing and dancing, or some
times railing with all seriousness about the state of affairs surrounding the price of tea in China and so forth. Jay was a very benevolent avuncular figure who really supported the theater community, which, in turn, supported his business. He had Tom Waits and Jacques Brel and Nina Simone on the jukebox, one of the best lineups I’ve ever seen. The pub, after all, is where so much of theater life takes place. Romances are consummated and then torn asunder, theater seasons are planned, plays are cast, and chuckles are plentifully expended. While studying there, I served Albert Finney and Laurie Metcalf, Malkovich, and Jessica Lange, and I drank with Keanu. It was the place where I first began to rub elbows with hotshots from the world of film who came to perform in or just see plays at Steppenwolf, which has easily the most knockout ensemble of acting talent assembled this side of the Royal Shakespeare Company. I worked on Buried Child with Gary Sinise and Ethan Hawke, and Sam Shepard came to do some rewrites. Sam slipped me $40 and sent me out for a bottle of Maker’s Mark one night, and it took a long time after that for anything in my life to eclipse that instance as the most exciting thing that had ever happened. I guess I still had a lot to learn, about bourbon whisky and about being starstruck, which I’m glad I got out of the way in the shadows of O’Rourke’s, before I ever even heard of the blinding lights of a red carpet.

  * * *

  I know I have deep gratitude for this time in my life, because whenever I would later think things like “I missed the prime years of my acting life building fucking scenery! Jesus-goddamn, John Cusack had done two dozen films by this point!” I know I wouldn’t trade anything for the time I had with the Defiant Theatre and Chicago theater in general, easily the most fecund and exciting theater community in the country.