Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living (5 page)

Football Troubador

1
984. My hometown, the village of Minooka, Illinois, was rather devoid of anything but the most homogenized popular culture. To this day, I don’t know where the good independent record store or bookstore is. I’m certain they must exist, perhaps in Morris, the nearby town with a movie theater, but I just never had occasion to find them.

My older cousin Angie and my sister Laurie could legally drive to town, enabling them to traipse the twenty minutes to the Louis Joliet Mall in the nearby metropolis of Joliet. There Duran Duran records could be obtained, as well as the other glittering apples of their teenage-girl eyes. George Michael and his sassy young band, Wham! UK. Cyndi Lauper. Adam Ant. Madonna. In fealty to these musical phenoms, the girls also would purchase multicolored bangles with which to festoon their wrists; all well and good for them.

But there was little opportunity for a future weirdo like myself to discover the bands that would have thrilled me to pieces, like Talking Heads or Elvis Costello, not to mention Tom Waits or Laurie Anderson. If I wanted to experience popular music, I had but one apparent alternative, and that was to accompany Laurie and Angie to the concert of their choosing, which in 1985 happened to be George Michael and Wham!. Was Mr. Michael a bewitching singer and captivating dancer? Certainly. Was I as intoxicated by the lights and glamour as I was terrified by the wilding crowd of screaming, drooling housewives at my first large-scale music venue? You bet. Did any of that make me the tiniest bit inclined to answer in the affirmative when George Michael shouted, “YOU WANNA SEE MY BUM?!”? It did not, no.

Clapping along to his dance hits did not induce in me any urge whatsoever to enjoy a peek at his buttocks, as impressive as they must have been after all that “wake me up before you go-go”–ing. Experiences like this one certainly must have nurtured any developing feminine or “sensitive” side I possessed, so perhaps I entered high school looking for ways to round out the testosterone contingent in my hormonal congress.

In the 1980s there was really not much to do in a small Midwestern town. This recreational vacuum made team sports an incredibly important and prevalent part of our everyday lives. We worshipped the Chicago Cubs with a fervor now reserved for things like
Downton Abbey
. My older sister, Laurie, and I would compete on car rides in the arena of baseball statistics, quizzed by Dad at the wheel, which we could call up from our encyclopedic mind-vaults like Rain Man. Keith Moreland triples in 1982? Two. Fergie Jenkins’s last wild pitch? Nineteen eighty-three. Easy.

Laurie and I mowed the front yard on a tractor mower. It was about eighty yards to the road and back. Two laps would take ten minutes, so we’d take turns, one of us watching the Cubbies while the other mowed. We got so good at it, we’d never stop the mower, just supplant each other while in second gear. Cubs fever? . . . We caught it!! This obsession bled liberally into our own participation in baseball and basketball for me, and in softball for Laur. At about eight hundred students, our high school was small enough that we could participate in almost every activity we desired, meaning sports and then some. Thus, I immediately signed up for band, jazz band, drama club, football, baseball, and basketball. I also was on the student council, eventually serving as its president. In other words, I was an asshole.

I had already played my first dramatic villain by this time, dastardly sheriff Black Bart something-or-other, in our eighth-grade play,
Trouble in Sinnimin City
. My friend Joe Frescura—a strapping Eagle Scout of a lad—played the protagonist. I suppose he was named “Tom” or some other bullshit hero name. This was several years before I would learn the efficacy of stage combat, so we opted for full-contact face punches in the show’s climax so as not to appear weak before our thirteen-year-old castmates. In hindsight, the fact that Joe let me leave the stage on my feet with all my teeth speaks to his quiet generosity of spirit, because he could have laid me out with a single clout from his well-fed Italian knuckle sandwich. Joe went on to become an exceptional army major in the Special Forces. I became an actor, and not just an actor, but a thespian.

I didn’t have a chance to play football before arriving in high school. I’m not sure I had any business getting into it even then, but I was a decent-to-good athlete, and I was willing to buy into the whole romance of high school and homecoming and, well, cheerleaders, so I signed up. At age fourteen and fifteen I was faster than I was tough, so I started out as a receiver and a defensive back, and those first “double days” (two conditioning practices a day) in July and August 1984 left me so stiff and sore that my uncle Dan would chase me around giggling at the pain my aching muscles were causing me. Halfway through the season I broke my collarbone diving for a pass, which was admittedly pretty badass. At least it was until I started sobbing openly while my mom drove me to the hospital in Morris. We would laugh/sob every time she hit a bump because it hurt so goddamn bad that it was funny. When things get bad enough, all you can do is laugh. I feel like my mom saved my fanny like that about once a week throughout my childhood.

That injury put a damper on my football career for a while and allowed me to focus on my life in the arts. Namely, playing the saxophone in band and jazz band, kissing girls, the theater, and more kissing girls. Band was overall a really great experience throughout my school career, but it was also a place for me to explore my inner smart-ass. I would offer my belated apologies to our band director, Mr. Wunar, who had to put up with way more “hilarious” tomfoolery than any human should ever have to countenance. It was in band that I was able to learn how to carry myself as a leader with a sense of humor, whilst indulging my propensity for high-grade jackassery.

The key was in discerning just how much mischief I could get away with. The percussionists, for example, took things too far. They drank vodka and beer to excess and then allowed their alcohol to fuel some pretty flagrant insubordination, ultimately finding themselves in the principal’s office. I was interested in the grab-ass but not the consequences, so I focused on making people laugh without having my techniques detected by the administration, in this case Mr. Wunar. Apparently, I became rather adept at playing both sides of the fence, earning A’s in class while firmly establishing myself as a miscreant purveyor of chuckles.

I also, quite understandably, took to the stage whenever I could. As my involvement in the arts expanded, I found myself being cast as more bad guys or antihero protagonists, such as Jud Fry in
Oklahoma!
and Joe Ferone in
Up the Down Staircase
, and I really began to enjoy the therapeutic aspect of getting to play some version of an asshole. All of the weak human inclinations that I had been raised to eschew were qualities in which I could revel onstage, and I could even win an audience’s love through misbehaving! This was big, big news. As I worked as a professional on the stages of Chicago in later years, I continued to find that people were willing to reward me for acting like some of the jerks I had grown up around.

* * *

T
o wit: football players. Thanks largely to my dad’s genes and his coaching, I was pretty good at sports, but I was like the fifth-to-seventh-best guy on any given baseball or basketball team. I was a solid contributor, but I was never the star. I often batted second or sixth. I’d win “most improved” or “best sportsmanship,” if anything. I would be among the team leaders in rebounds or assists, perhaps. But by junior year of high school I had started to fill out, and through no fault of my own, I ended up being one of the hardest hitters on the football team. There were guys on the team who were much more imposing Mack trucks of young men, like Todd Reische and Brian Edge, to name a couple of hulks, but some badass instinct was awakened within me. By senior year I was the “headhunter” on kickoffs, which meant I was the guy who ran in front of everyone else to reach the receiver of the kickoff and exact as much punishment upon him as possible for having the temerity to carry MY FOOTBALL.

This was insane. I was a former member of swing choir (our version of glee club). Now, out of nowhere,
I
was the scary one. Instead of relying solely upon my speed, as I had in years past, to avoid confrontation on the field, I now realized that I could fucking decimate these other guys. Except Reische and Edge. And maybe Lance Pelton. (We cool, guys?)

Poor Todd Reische, most likely our school’s best athlete during my tenure, who would have definitely been sole captain of the football team in any other year, had to arrive during a year when the coaching staff had determined to have three “cocaptains” instead, and so Todd captained the defense from the middle linebacker spot, Tommy Morris captained the offense from the quarterback position, and I captained the secondary defense and special teams. If I could go back and remove this indignity from Todd’s shoulders, I would goddamn not. Are you kidding?

“Most improved rebounder” Offerman was now a cocaptain of the Fighting Minooka Indians?! I wouldn’t trade those months of athletic prowess, however specialized, for the world. In those golden moments on the football field, I was revered as a frightening, manlike teenager, and I have never forgotten the Bronsonlike confidence this instilled in me. In their defense, many of my teammates were better at sports than I was. In my defense, I set a school record for interceptions in a season. Everybody gets lucky once in a while.

Hustling to football practice from, say, a rehearsal for
Oklahoma!
created an interesting situation. Of course, some of the team members were macho, homophobic guys of the sort that have come to be considered the norm for American high school football players, also known as “bullies.” But in reality, most of the team was comprised of really nice guys with whom I had grown up playing sports. However, I do remember one specific bully, a guy my age named Biff, who wanted everyone to know that he was the dominant male in any given situation. Sadly, even then, we all knew that Biff’s family had undergone some turmoil at home, of the sort that was most likely the source of his Steven Seagal–style posturing and preening, but that didn’t make them any easier to swallow.

Suffice it to say, ahem, that Biff was not happy with the choirboy-cum-cocaptain headhunter. If you read back a paragraph, you’ll notice that
Biff
was not the name of any of the three cocaptains, even though our Biff had been excelling at football since he was in something called Pee-Wee. Biff worked his tail off, a strong, fast, and gifted running back, but his fate was such that he was maybe the number five guy on the squad.

Now, this may be distressing news for Ron Swanson fans, but I have never in my life been in a fistfight. Really never even close. The closest I ever came was being taunted by Biff in the locker room or at a couple of barn parties. By the way, Biff was and still is a good guy, overall. In the hallway between classes, we were friends. He recognized his antagonizing tendencies even then, but, like an alcoholic or a fan of the Dave Matthews Band, he ultimately couldn’t control his self-destructive addiction.

My dad had taught me to never throw the first punch, and so when Biff would want to unload some rage onto my face, I would simply suggest he go ahead and do it. I would say, “I’m not going to fight you, Biff, so you better just beat me up,” while silently shaking in my boots.

Biff was the kind of person who used the term
faggot
rather liberally, and really never to describe a smoldering bundle of sticks in the fireplace in a Victorian novel. Biff had a violence in him that was frightening, and I’m very thankful for my dad’s lesson, because if I had ever engaged young Biff in fisticuffs, I fear I would have been very seriously, well, fucked up by him. Instead, he would say something imperious and admonishing, ending with “I thought so, faggot,” before heading back to the keg or his locker, depending on the location. This happened, I believe, three times over eight months or so. It is not the stuff of a coming-of-age film, so, Disney, please don’t option this chapter. It’s just the closest real-life experience I had to some of the violence I now love to pretend to in my day job.

* * *

I
was to learn later in theater school of Aristotle’s observation that theater is the mirror held up to society. But I was already inadvertently picking up on that heady notion by mere good fortune. By and large, I was learning to be decent to people in real life while engaging in delicious human indiscretions in my performances. Think about it: If you perform
A Clockwork Orange
onstage, you can be paid cash money to indulge in both ultra-violence
and
a bit of the ol’ in-out-in-out!

Meanwhile, I was beginning to get an inkling of what I wanted to be when I grew up. Sophomore year I was in this horrible play called
The Prime Time Crime
. It was a “wacky caper” play starring Inspector Clouseau, the Pink Panther, Kato, Starsky and Hutch, Kojak, Baretta—it was truly ungodly. Why must high school plays be so ham-handed?! There is so much excellent writing available that must certainly be acceptable to any school board, even creationist idiots.
To Kill a Mockingbird
?
The Crucible
? Jesus, I’ll even take some Neil Simon over
The Prime Time Crime
! The first good play I was in was
Up the Down Staircase
, from the sixties, in the vein of
Blackboard Jungle
. I played the sort of brooding James Dean role. It was funny—I took a lot of shit from the football team because I’d have to miss practice to go to a speech competition or band performance, but then those same meatheads (except Reische and Edge—totally cool dudes—not meatheads!) would be screaming and cheering at the curtain call. It seemed that in my small pond I was halfway decent at entertaining people from the stage. That was enough to send me on the road to theater school, where I promptly learned that I sucked. I hadn’t fully discovered the value of my own unique voice.