The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  “Dave recommended a great book to me and it opened my eyes. The Silent Chrysalis. I read it twice. Danny, in some way my love for you is a symptom of my denial of myself, an attempt to make myself invisible.”

  The starter cranked over once and wheezed and coughed a deep dry cough.

  Julie’s eyes locked with mine. “We need to change that love from something angry and selfish to a mature giving love,” she said. “I can’t use you as an instrument of my self-hatred.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “Dave thinks you’re trapped in narcissism, like a lot of guys. You just honestly are incapable of thinking outside the box that you are in.”

  How does a stationery-store clerk suddenly become an expert on the human heart? I wondered, but then Rusty’s face appeared in the hatch, his boyish confidence gone, a little taut around the eyes. “We may have to ditch the boat in a minute, you guys. We’re coming real close to the reef, I think. The water looks sort of bubbly out there.”

  Julie grabbed my arm when I got up to go topside. “You’re not going to just walk away from this one, Danny. You’re going to face up to what’s wrong, which is your selfishness. Your selfishness is a fact, Danny. Let’s stop denying it. Let’s deal with it.”

  Rusty’s voice was hoarse. “Come on, folks. No time for yik-yak. Gotta go.”

  I poked my head up. The Great Navigator had a horrified expression on his face, and his chin was aquiver. He wore an orange life jacket. “Want me to take the helm?” I asked.

  “No helm left to take, and there’s big jagged rocks up ahead, folks, so if you see a cushion, better grab on to it. This is not a test.”

  There was a distant roar of waves that was not as distant as before.

  I ducked down and told Julie we were about to abandon ship. “If you can’t deal with the truth, Danny, then I can’t be married to you,” said Julie, softly. “I don’t want a marriage based on a lie.”

  I was just about to tell her that she wouldn’t have that problem much longer, when there was a jagged ripping tearing crunching sound from just below our feet, and the boat lurched to a dead stop. Water began boiling up from below. I grabbed Julie and hoisted her through the hatch, grabbed a carry-on bag and a couple cushions, and took Julie by the hand, and we jumped into the water. Rusty was already on shore, waving to us. It was shallow, all right; the water frothed around our hips as we crossed the jagged coral, but we managed to wade in to shore, a beautiful white sandy beach that curved around and around a very pretty island—uninhabited, we soon discovered. “Well,” said Rusty, “looks like you guys may get a little more than two weeks. Nice place, too.” And he glanced down at Julie. Her T-shirt was wet from the surf, and her breasts shone through. He looked at her a little longer than a hired man ought to, I thought.

  We made a hut from palm fronds and the jib sail. Julie had rescued her purse and suntan oil and four books about marriage and communication, and I had dragged in our suitcase and a bottle of Campari, and Rusty had salvaged the oregano, sweet basil, rosemary, chives, coriander, cayenne pepper, paprika, orange zest, nutmeg, cinnamon, pine nuts, bay leaf, marjoram, tarragon, caraway, and saffron.

  “The boat sinks and you rescue the spice rack?” I cried. “You’re the captain and your boat goes down and you come ashore with the spice rack?”

  Rusty looked at Julie. “Just because we’re marooned on an island doesn’t mean the food has to be bland and tasteless,” he said.

  She nodded. “It’s no dumber than bringing a bottle of Campari. You don’t like Campari,” she said. “You only like beer.” I didn’t explain that Campari is useful as a bug repellant; I read that somewhere.

  And an hour later, Julie had made beds out of pine boughs and Rusty had carved a salad bowl from a stump and tossed a salad in it—”Just some ferns and breadfruit and hearts of palm,” he said. He had also baked a kelp casserole over an open fire. Julie thought it was the best salad in salad history. Actually, it was okay. “And this casserole!” she cried. “I have never tasted kelp that tasted like this kelp tastes. What’s the secret?”

  “Paprika,” he said.

  Julie couldn’t get over it. She said, “Danny couldn’t boil an egg if you held a pistol to his head. I kept offering to teach him the rudiments of cooking, but he never wanted to learn.”

  It was hard not to notice that she was talking about me in the past tense.

  “No, Danny couldn’t have made a salad like this in a million years. Are you kidding? Not him,” she chortled. “No, no, no, no, no.”

  We sat under the palm tree as the sun went down, and Julie and Rusty talked about the American novel, how they didn’t care for John Updike, who had never written strong women characters and was hung up on male menopause and had no ear for dialogue.

  “No ear for dialogue?” I cried.

  “No ear for dialogue,” she said.

  “John Updike? No ear for dialogue? Are you kidding me? Updike? That’s what you said, right? Updike? His dialogue? No ear?”

  “He has none,” she said.

  “None. Updike.”

  “Right.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I said. “You’re sitting here under this palm tree and saying that John Updike—the John Updike, who wrote the Rabbit books—that he has no ear for dialogue? Tell me something. If John Updike has no ear for dialogue, then who do you think does have an ear for dialogue?”

  Rusty looked at Julie. “Maya Angelou. Alice Walker. Doris Lessing,” he said.

  “Doris Lessing,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “Doris Lessing.”

  “Pardon me if I should lose my kelp,” I said. I stood up. “You know, I must be going deaf, but I could swear you just said Doris Lessing. Or did you say Arthur Schlesinger?” I kicked a little dirt toward Rusty.

  “I said, Doris Lessing,” he said.

  It was the first of many discussions where I was in the minority. One morning, over a dried-seaweed breakfast, Julie said she thought there is such a thing as a “masculine matrix” and that it is basically controlling and violent. Rusty agreed. “But some of us are working to change that,” he said. Julie felt that men are inherently competitive, i.e., linear, hierarchical, and women are circular, i.e., radiant. “I think you have a good point,” said Rusty. Julie and Rusty started meditating together every morning, sitting on the beach facing east. “Hey, mind if I sit in?” I said cheerfully.

  Julie squinted up at me. “I think you’d block the unity of the experience,” she said.

  Rusty nodded.

  “Well, far be it from me to block anyone’s unity,” I said, and walked away.

  That night, Julie and Rusty were cooking a bark soup and she looked up at me and said, “Rusty is such an inspiration. I’m glad this happened, this shipwreck. Out of this wreck, something wonderful is coming.”

  I grabbed her arm. “This numbskull who ran the boat onto the rock is an inspiration?”

  Rusty confronted me later that night, after Julie went to sleep. “I’ve decided to take Julie away from you,” he said. “You two do nothing but fight, and she’s obviously attracted to me, so if she and I paired up, at least there’d be two happy people on this island. It makes more sense that way. Two out of three isn’t bad. So why don’t you go and sleep in the jungle someplace. This tent is for Julie and me.”

  I said, “Okay, you’re right,” and I turned and bent down and picked up my Campari bottle and then whirled and swung it straight up into his nuts and he staggered back and I threw a handful of dirt in his eyes. He bent down, blinded, and I kicked him as hard as I could in the gut, and he went whooomph, like a needle sliding across an LP record, and down he went, and I picked him up and threw him over the cliff and into the ocean and suddenly the water was whipped to a froth by thousands of tiny carnivorous fish and the frenzy went on for a half a minute and subsided a
nd whatever was left of Rusty sank bubbling to the bottom.

  It wasn’t the Zen way but it got the job done.

  Julie was distraught in the morning. She dashed around the island screaming his name. “What have you done to him, Danny?” she shrieked.

  “He got high looking at the Milky Way and he fell into the water and the fish ate him,” I said.

  “You killed him!”

  “Nothing ever dies. He is at one with the fish.”

  Two weeks later, when the big cruise ship saw us and anchored a half mile to leeward and sent in a launch to take us off, Julie had calmed down and was almost ready to talk to me again. I could tell. I yelled up to her where she sat on the ledge of the rocky promontory, “You know something? I think the secret of marriage is that you can’t change the person you love. You have to love that person the way he or she is. Well, here I am!”

  “You didn’t think of that, you got that out of a book,” she called back. It was the first time she’d spoken to me in two weeks.

  A man in officer whites with big tufts of hair on his chest was on the launch. He said, “You the couple who went down with the Susy Q? Where’s the captain?”

  “He drowned,” I said. Julie said nothing. She still has said nothing about Rusty to me at all, and nothing about our marriage, but we have had sex more often than any time since we were twenty-four. It has been nice. I definitely think there is a vital connection between anger and an exciting sex life.

  When we got back to the States, I saw a newspaper in the Newark airport with a picture of Dave on the front page glowering at the photographer and trying to stiff-arm him. He had been arrested for fondling a couple of young women in his swimming pool at his birthday party and was charged with six counts of sexual assault. I chuckled, but it was a low chuckle, and Julie didn’t hear it. We were back two days and a publisher offered me $50,000 for a book about our “desert-island” experience. “Nah,” I said, “nothing happened. Worst part was having to go around in a wet bathing suit.” Since returning, I have done little except be a help and a support to Dave and Julie and the whole Grebe family. I have been a monster of sympathy and understanding. I have been there for them every moment in their terrible suffering. Dave sat weeping in our kitchen and told us, “I’ve been under so much stress, and it was like it was somebody else tugging on those girls’ thongs, and I was only watching.” I said, “Don’t feel you have to talk about it.” He told me that he didn’t know what he would do without me and thanked me for the strength I gave him in this awful time. “It’s my pleasure,” I said sincerely. I suppose he will write a book about this. I don’t care. Heaving Rusty into the sea has given me an enormous sense of peace. I suppose it was a transformative experience for him, too. Death is the ultimate reality check. His death at my hands has leached away all my anger and I am devoted to Julie in a way I never could be before. She wants to return to our island and erect a stone cairn in Rusty’s memory and maybe take Dave with us. I am all in favor of it. I can’t wait. We never did learn Rusty’s real name—the owner of the Susy Q had vanished—but in whatever plane of existence Rusty is experiencing now, names don’t count for much, and we feel there is a universality about a cairn with no name on it. Both Julie and I do.

  10.

  MOTHER’S DAY

  As my mother got older and older and then older still, I liked to amuse her now and then by putting her into stories, making her into a Thirties movie musical star or a champion skeet-shooter or the head of a crime syndicate. She listened faithfully to my show on the radio and hearing these tales gave her a good jolt and also inspired people she knew to call her up and say hello. “Oh, we listened to Gary’s show and heard about how you jilted Scott Fitzgerald,” they said. “Oh, he just makes up that stuff, you know,” she said. When you embark on a career in fiction, you can’t imagine the uses it will have someday, and there is one unexpected one: making your old mother laugh and shake her head.

  I was going to visit my mother on Sunday and bring her a jonquil and a ballpoint pen for Mother’s Day, but that’s all off thanks to my brother Larry, who is awaiting trial for mail fraud. His lawyers have asked me not to discuss his case, and so I won’t, except to say that he’s guilty, the little stinker, and richly deserves what’s coming to him, but of course you can’t tell Mother that, she thinks he is the sun and the moon.

  She turns ninety-four this week and still lives in her own home, drives her own car, and only recently gave up playing senior women’s hockey. She was tough, let me tell you, and as she slowed down, she resorted more and more to high-sticking and tripping. As she says, “I didn’t get to be ninety-four by baking cookies.”

  I went shopping for a Mother’s Day gift at a clothing store, but, as it turned out, it was a men’s store. So as long as I was there, I bought myself a few nice suits.

  And anyway, Mom said, “No gifts for me until Larry gets out of the pokey.” I said, “Mom, Larry was selling Powerball Bibles with the winning number hidden in Scripture. He was selling stock options to evangelicals with the promise that the Lord would come again in 2008. It didn’t happen. He’s going to spend ten to fifteen years making license plates.” She said, “So he misread prophecy. He’s not the first.” I said, “Ma, he misread it to the tune of 1.6 million dollars in profit to himself that is sitting in a bank in the Bahamas.”

  She said, “You can’t believe everything you read in the papers.” I said, “Ma, he’s been a liar and a cheat since he was a kid. Remember for your birthday he used to give you those little certificates that said ‘Good for one hug’ and ‘Good for doing dishes’—Ma, you never collected on those. It was a scam.” She said, “It’s the thought that counts.”

  There were four of us, Larry, me, my other brother, who works in a small dim office and does something he can’t explain, and my sister the singer-songwriter, who recently had her lower lip pierced and a large wooden disk implanted in it which she says gives her more resonance.

  The other day, Mom said, “Notice anything different about me?” Which of course made me nervous. A man wants to come up with the right answer to this question. You don’t want to say, “You got a haircut” if the correct answer is that her leg was amputated. I checked her out: snow-white hair, hockey jersey, jeans, high heels. I said, “Only thing different about you, Mom, is that you’re looking younger than ever.” And she said, “Nope. I’m carrying a concealed weapon.”

  My mom, packing a pistol. She said, “I am not going to let your brother rot in jail because of a big misunderstanding.” I told her to read the indictment—Larry is a creep—but she stood up for him, as she has all these years despite his dirty deeds, and then on Tuesday she got the drop on three U.S. marshals and freed Larry at gunpoint and drove him to a grass landing strip south of Minneapolis and they took off in a small jet and made it to Venezuela, and there they are today, my little mom and her son the felon. She is learning Spanish and working as a cleaning lady and he is at the beach, plotting how to get his fingers on that Bahamian treasure.

  And here I am, the loyal son, the one who has looked after her all these years, the one who had made his mark in the world as a syndicated newspaper columnist. Why does she devote her life to a cheater and ignore the son who has done everything in his power to make her proud?

  Frankly, I think that mothers have a masochistic streak that makes them love the bad eggs more. I wish I could be meaner to my mother, but it’s too late. I wouldn’t know how. I pass this on for what it’s worth. Go out and steal a car, she can’t do enough for you. Happy Mother’s Day.

  A serious author driving down Lake Street in Minneapolis with his photographer friend Tom Arndt in 1971, looking defiant, back when there was plenty of time for driving aimlessly around and when defiance was a useful defense against raging self-doubt.

  III

  GUYS I HAVE KNOWN

  Back around 1992 I did a tour with the singer Kate MacKenz
ie and the pianist Richard Dworsky, an evening of duets and stories, and also a monologue that succeeded in eliciting cheerful booing and hissing from a lot of women in the audiences wherever we went. It was a knowing sort of booing and hissing, ironic booing, and it put them in a cheery mood. They knew they were supposed to boo and they did it with relish, but very stylishly. My marriage to a staunch Danish feminist had broken up, ending a five-year period when I tried hard to be a Dane and a social democrat—and it was a relief to stop trying and to resume life as a Midwestern American guy. And a pleasure to do shows in America again and to see the Great Plains and the Rockies and the Gulf and the California coastline.

  One of the stories I told was about one January night when I drove my truck deep into the woods north of Anoka to attend the annual Sons of Bernie bonfire in a grove of birches, twenty below zero, five feet of snow, and there, under the Milky Way and a nearly full moon, we ate chili out of cans and drank bourbon and sang mournful songs like “Long Black Veil” and “Old Man River” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” about thirty of us, not exactly my crowd, guys unluckier than I who had suffered cruel fathers, treacherous lovers, abject poverty, dust storms, prison, tuberculosis, car wrecks, the boll weevil, and poor career choices, not to mention bad skin, halitosis, bleeding cuticles, and lusterless hair. They looked so much older and sadder than you want people your own age to look. I was by far the soberest and handsomest one in the bunch. I decided to stay for a while and write about them so that they would not be completely forgotten, but as the night wore on, I came to see that we were truly brothers. It was an epiphany. It changed my life.

  We stood close to this fire, smoke in our eyes, hot coals landing in our hair, left arm over the shoulder of the man to our left, right arm free to pass the bottle, and we sang “Hard Times Come Again No More,” “Abilene,” “Love in Vain,” “Streets of Laredo,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and recited poems, such as “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes I all alone beweep my outcast state,” and then someone recited, “There was an old sailor named Tex who avoided premarital sex by thinking of Jesus and terrible diseases and beating his meat belowdecks.”