The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  The audience clapped and clapped until our production people had to tell them to hush.

  At this point, she was supposed to tell me a folktale about a mother hen and her chicks, but instead she climbed up on my lap and draped her skinny arm around my neck and put her little cheek next to mine.

  My gosh, she was hot, burning up with fever, and sweat poured off her. An extremely hot damp child. A bead of her sweat fell on the back of my hand and—this sounds insensitive, I know, but nobody had informed me if her fatal illness was contagious or not—I thought to myself: “Al, you need a fatal disease right now like you need a hole in the head.”

  I tried to pry her loose but her bony fingers were clamped on to my wrist and my lapel, and when I tried to bend her fingers back, she flopped around like a dying fish and her eyes rolled back up in her head.

  I tried to signal the staff with my eyebrows to come and take this hot potato off my hands, but they were overcome with emotion, I guess. When I tried to stand up, she clung to me like a bat and tore the rug off my head, and then Little Ginny pressed her burning face to mine and whispered in her hoarse little voice, “God says to cut out this shit. He says, stop it and shape up.”

  I knew right then that my career had peaked and that the long grim slide had begun, but of course I couldn’t know how far it was to the bottom. I smiled and said, “Friends and neighbors, I know this show is one I’ll remember as long as I live. What do you say we invite Little Ginny to come back next week?” Everybody clapped again, but Little Ginny looked at me with pure disgust. She said, “Don’t be stupid. You know I’ll be in my grave next week.”

  And she turned to the camera and whispered, “Every word he says is a big fat lie.”

  She died a few days later.

  I sat at home and thought, “What shit am I supposed to cut out?”

  Am I supposed to give away money? Fine. But where do you draw the line? There’s the heart fund and the bladder fund and the Save the Snakes foundation and the Center for the Dull and there’s a cabdriver whose mom is waiting to come over from Zagreb and a waitress with a slight limp and who do you say no to? Once you start giving away dough, if you say no they’ll write long accusatory letters and lurk around your home and attack you with coat hangers. No, a rich man can’t buy peace of mind.

  I began to discuss these issues in Empowering Others by Enabling Yourself, and the next thing I knew, there was a knock on the door and it was the FBI. An unfriendly agent in a shiny gray suit talked to me for four hours. He asked me about some Life Savings Certificates that had been sold across the country by mail, certificates issued by the Al Denny Savings Institute—I hadn’t heard about that at all!

  Evidently, fifteen thousand people had mailed in $60,000 apiece on the promise that they could live at the Study Center through their declining years and be rebirthed.

  Some of them now wished to obtain their money back.

  “Talk to Larry,” I told the FBI, but they said that Larry was gone. He had flown to the private island off Antigua, and he was not answering the phone.

  The FBI drove me to Mason City and led me through a gauntlet of TV cameras and flashbulbs and put me in a small cinder-block cell.

  Then they located Mona. She was in Akron, Ohio, not Dayton. Akron. And we had two daughters and a son named Aaron.

  “Al, you big wombat, how the heck are you?” she cried, throwing her arms around me. “I always said you oughta be locked up. Gosh, I love you, you big lug.” She wasn’t a teacher or an investment person, it turned out—she was a lawyer, and a darned good one. She got me out of the clinker and back to Akron in a jiffy.

  The kids all have her red hair and big beak and melting brown eyes. My son looked up as I walked in and said, “Did you remember the butter brickle?”

  “No, I forgot,” I said.

  “Oh.” He wasn’t surprised. Evidently, forgetting had been a habit with me.

  It’s good to be a regular daddy again instead of a big cheese, and I have promised the kiddos not to write a book again. I started one called Starting Over, which was about men finding new roles as daddies and homemakers, but then I got too busy to write. You make breakfast for Mona, pack her a healthy bag lunch, send her off, wake up the kids, and shepherd them through the cleansing-dressing process, answer all their questions, feed them, get them out the door with their lunches and homework in hand, wash the breakfast dishes, and go from room to room with a vacuum and a feather duster, and change the beds and scrub the bathrooms, and after five hours your urge to sit and write and regale the reader with insights has mostly dissipated, you would rather go dig in the garden and put in the crocus bulbs. Life is good. More than good. You have a clean house and feel like a clean man! You have not told a single lie and it is almost lunchtime! Praise God for His goodness! Now you must plan the supper.

  7.

  JIMMY SEEKS HIS FORTUNE IN FAIRBANKS

  In 1998, when a professional wrestler named Jim Janos, a.k.a. Jesse (The Body) Ventura, was elected governor of Minnesota with 37 percent of the vote in a three-way race, I put away other diversions and sat down and wrote Me: The Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente Story, which came out three months after his election, which is rather sudden in the world of publishing. The book suffered from the sheer improbability of a wrestler who wore pink boas in the ring being elected governor of a righteous Midwestern state, but then so did Mr. Ventura, and he quietly left office after one term and went on cable TV and disappeared.

  My tour of duty in Nam as a U.S. Navy Walrus ended on New Year’s Day 1970. I was tempted to stay, but by then the war was lost, so I didn’t bother to re-up.

  One night when we pulled patrol duty along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a Walrus named Walt Unruh told me all about his home along the Iditarod Trail in Alaska and how you could take off in your float plane from Anchorage and in twenty minutes land on a sky-blue wilderness lake with no living soul within thirty miles and toss your lure in the water and catch a king salmon.

  “The north is man’s country,” he said. “Up there, you can urinate your name in the snow nine months out of the year. Nobody cares if you bathe or not or whether you eat with your fingers or lean to one side in your chair and let her rip. And cold weather, you know, is a proven aphrodisiac. Northern men can go all night where southern guys peter out in fifteen minutes.”

  Sitting in a tree in Vietnam, I thought Alaska sounded wonderful. After two years of jungle life, frozen tundras seemed like a piece of cake.

  I flew Da Nang to Los Angeles first-class courtesy of the CO whose butt I’d saved from court-martial when I told the higher-ups that he was leading the unit in battle on a particular day he had chosen to spend at the beach at Qui Nhon with a honey named Dixie Dexter.

  With about five grand in back pay and an airline pass to anywhere in the U.S., I landed in Fairbanks on January 5. Thirty-seven below zero and the airport wind sock stuck straight out, pointing east. Snowbanks as big as New Hampshire. I rented a back room in a mobile home on the edge of town, an old trailer surrounded by junked cars and oil barrels, with a satellite dish out back and a BEWARE OF OWNER sign in front. He was a guy named White Blaze who resided in the front room and earned his living with a deck of cards. He had been a thoracic surgeon in Memphis and got addicted to muscle relaxants, which did him no good in surgery but helped his poker playing enormously. After he had perfected his game (losing a wife and two houses in the process), he emigrated north, to where money flowed freely, where the sun rose at eleven and set at one and there was little else to do with money except risk it in manly games of chance.

  Everybody I met in Fairbanks was someone who’d screwed up big-time in the Lower Forty-eight. Gratuitous screwups. They’d fooled around with a sister-in-law or got hooked on cough medicines, maybe embezzled from the March of Dimes or swiped the Hopi tapestry from the Unitarian church (and then tried to sell it to the Methodists) or attempted to shoplift a garden
tractor or phoned in bomb threats to group homes for paraplegics. Having thus hit bottom and become social pariahs, they hitchhiked to Fairbanks to remake their lives as short-order cooks and reside in a trailer in a climate where, for half the year, you don’t need a freezer.

  My five grand leaked away in about a month, half of it spent on a used Rambler that wouldn’t ramble, and I was forced to hike into town and find work. I went to the courthouse and took a civil service exam and got a job in the post office, sorting parcel post.

  But Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente is not happy in a confined space performing tasks assigned to him by small-minded people. The art of clerical sorting does not engage my mind: the cogs simply do not mesh. I stuck to my post until lunch hour and then looked around at the cubicle, the helpful lists and charts taped to the wall, the pigeonholes, the tape and scissors and ruler and paper clips, and I said goodbye to it as a bear would say goodbye to a leg trap and went out to lunch and stayed there.

  In Mom’s Café I ordered a hamburger, very rare, with a raw onion, mustard, a glass of gin, and a raw egg yolk in a china cup. Next to me sat a hatchet-faced guy whose narrow head supported a toupee that looked like a raccoon crushed under a semi, all eighteen wheels. He had glazed it with gel and it glittered like cat turds in the moonlight. He wore a livid green plaid sportcoat made of petrochemicals and a yellowish shirt and blue-blob tie and brown slacks with a lived-in look. He was the unhealthiest-looking human being I had ever laid eyes on, very sallow and liverish, all splotches and rheum and exploded capillaries, a stub of a cigarette smoldering on his lower lip, a fresh one on its way. He lit it and cast his bulbous eyes on me and said, “The name’s Felix. I.W.W. International World Wrestling. You look like a warrior to me. Glad to meetcha.” Then he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a roll of cash big enough to choke a caribou and peeled off fifteen hundreds and handed them over. “That’s for fifteen minutes of your time.”

  So I sat and listened.

  “It’s a new pro wrestling circuit, the I.W.W. We’ve got a terrific show here. Eight guys. You fight the same guy every day, you get to know each other’s moves, it’s like ballet. Good money. Winter is great. No sun for three months, and the towns are full of construction guys and oil workers, their pockets full of dough, going stir crazy, desperate for entertainment, and these are not theatergoers here. The night shift gets off at seven in the morning and by seven forty-five they’re pretty well oiled and that’s when we put on our first show. We’ll pack a hangar, a warehouse, with a thousand men, all of them betting like mad—I’ll handle your side action for you—and when we’ve milked that cow, we go up the road to the next venue and do it again at four and come back to the first place for the midnight show. You go out and perform and I handle all the monkey business. How does four hundred a day sound?”

  It sounded good to me. It sounded fantastic. I packed my stuff and Felix’s bus picked me up at noon. An old Eskimo guy named Iron Eyes was at the wheel and Felix was camped in the seat behind him, wrapping bundles of tens and twenties and plopping them in an open suitcase. It was almost full. Behind him, sprawled across the seats, leaning every which way, buried under quilts and bear skins, were eight men fast asleep, mouths agape, each one snoring in a different tempo and key, each one quietly emitting his own brand of gas. One man, with a dirty blond beard, wore a horned helmet and a black mask. The floor was littered with pistachio shells and empty beer cans and pizza crusts. The aroma was pretty stiff and a guy would think twice about lighting a match: between the alcohol and the methane, the bus had enough fuel to achieve low orbit.

  Felix nodded toward the helmeted man. “That’s Svend. He’s the foreman. Soon as he wakes up, he’ll work you into the show.”

  I flopped down in back and a crusty old dude in the seat opposite opened one bloodshot eye and said, “You wouldn’t be interested in purchasing a crossbow and a broadsword and a Satan cape, would you? Sell you the whole kit and caboodle and toss in my Mongolian goatskin boots free, all for five hundred bucks. What do you say?”

  I said it sounded good but what would I use them for?

  “I’ll toss in a wooden altar, six candles, a hex medallion, and a vial of powdered elk antler,” he said.

  He reached over and shook my hand. “I’m the Duke of Dubuque and this sad sack next to me is the Dauphin Louie de Louie.” He nodded toward a figure wrapped in a horse blanket, dead to the world, snoring like a Piper Cub on takeoff. The Duke leaned toward me, confidentially. “We are only temporarily in the wrestling line while we get our real-estate licenses. Came to Alaska last spring with a theater troupe. Did Beckett and Shepard and all the newer playwrights. Taught acting, stage movement, public speaking, deconstruction if there was a call for it. But alas, Alaska is no fit home for the artistic temperament. The conceptual way of thinking is not welcome in the North, my boy. These are engineers, not savants. And so we were forced to join this gang of cretins and thugs and common ruffians.”

  He lowered his voice. “I blush to say it, but the Dauphin and I wrestle in the altogether. Au naturel, in other words. It’s been a big hit and a boon to our social lives, but it’s time to move on.”

  He leaned closer. “I sense that you possess a noble spirit, sir, and that I can confide in you.” He glanced at the Dauphin to make sure he was truly asleep. “I am the illegitimate son of Nelson D. Rockefeller,” he whispered. “A love child by an actress who shall remain nameless. Shoveled into an orphanage and deprived of my heritage so as not to compromise my father’s presidential hopes. A Rockefeller by birth, entitled to a country estate and a fourteen-room apartment on Sutton Place, but instead—this.” And he gestured limply toward the detritus in the bus aisle and dabbed at his eyes. “A life of squalor in the frozen north among rug-chewing goons.”

  I said, “You seem a little old to be the son of Nelson Rockefeller.” The moment I said it, I could see I had struck a nerve.

  The Duke looked away, stung, and said quietly, “I knew I shouldn’t have put my trust in you. You’re like all the others. Forgive me for imparting that information. And now excuse me. I must rest.”

  I tried to apologize but he waved it off. “It’s nothing. A man’s story is his own and he should keep it to himself. Silly of me to forget. Have a good life, sir.” And then the bus turned at the Fairbanks International Airport sign and stopped in front of the terminal and the Duke shook his partner’s shoulder. “Daylight in the swamps, your highness. Up and at ’em,” he growled, and he hauled down a duffel bag from the overhead and shouldered it and marched off the bus, the Dauphin slinking behind. Felix gave them each a manila envelope and shook hands and into the terminal they went. Felix patted the seat next to him. I sat down.

  “Big Boy, I have come to a decision. The show needs a fairy, and, son, you’re the one who can do it for us. Hear me out. Your name will be the Flower Child, and you’ll come out and mince around with daffodils twined about your brow and a peace sign painted on your scalp and you’ll blow kisses to the crowd and talk about the importance of preserving the environment and not doing anything to negatively impact the caribou herds.”

  “Please. No. I am a Navy veteran,” I begged him. “People will shun me in the street, nobody will sit next to me in bars, even hookers will look at me with moral disfavor.”

  “Exactly. And we’ll double the gate, kid. We need that extra attraction. We got all the heroes we can stand, what we need is somebody the crowd can hate. There’s nothing that brings joy to so many people like giving them the chance to despise you.”

  “I’d rather kill myself with a dull knife.”

  “Please. For the guys’ sake. For the sake of the pure art of wrestling.”

  “What would my Walrus buddies think if they saw me? You can’t make me do it, Felix.”

  He sighed. “This is a privilege, kid, what I’m offering you. Any idiot can be a hero. It takes ability to play a heel. Did you ever hear of acting? You
think actors would rather play George Washington or Count Dracula? How about I pay you four hundred a match plus a percentage of the gate to maintain your interest?”

  He was a persuasive guy, Felix. He appealed to my vanity. He made me feel like Lon Chaney, Jr. And that night I walked into the Tanana High School gymnasium with daffodils on my head and wearing beads and sandals and an R. Crumb T-shirt as Felix screamed, “At two hundred and thirty-eight pounds, in the tie-dye trunks, a man who wishes to dedicate this next match to his friends Ralph Nader and Jane Fonda—from Berkeley, California, the Flower Child!” and a thousand oil workers booed from the depths of their beer-soaked hearts.

  I danced up the steps to the ring and posed for the crowd and grabbed the microphone and asked everyone to join me in singing “Give Peace a Chance” and someone yelled, “Give me a chance to get a piece of you, fruitcake!” and I ranted about love and brotherhood and about how the exploitation of our precious oil resources was interfering with the breeding patterns of the great snowy owl and that for the sake of our children we should place a moratorium on drilling until we learned how to lessen its impact on these owls and also on the extremely rare snow spider and the Arctic moth—I yik-yakked until everyone was standing and screeching and shaking their fists at me and frothing at the mouth, and my gosh, what a thrill it was to have that audience in the palm of my hand—to stand in the ring and throw a pose and feel the anger flow my way—and then Yukon Bob came trotting down the aisle to thunderous acclaim, a figure of manly rectitude preceded by his booming belly, and he grinned a purposeful grin and heaved his great carcass into the ring and bared his chest and flexed his breasts and did a couple knee bends and we dove into a clinch and circled and I proceeded to whale away on him for a while, getting him in an illegal nostril hold, rubbing his eyes along the top rope, giving him an instep stomp, a nipple pinch, playing my dirty tricks as the referee, Iron Eyes, looked on solemnly, until Bob was dizzy with pain and then came the heinous Hangman maneuver—hurling him into the ropes so his head caught between them and he flipped over and hung by his neck and I kicked him a few times in the groin—Oh my! The pain! The exquisite suffering!—and then came the Backbreaker and then somehow Bob struggled free of my grasp. He shook his noble head. His nostrils flared. His outrage was awakened. He popped me one on the jaw and I fell and convulsed for a while and the crowd was in ecstasy. He whaled away on me and I popped my blood cartridges and the audience ate from our hands, it was exactly what a thousand sex-starved pipe fitters sky-high on boilermakers wanted to see at twilight on a Wednesday in January, blood smeared on the canvas, and the Flower Child in a dazed stupor, poleaxed by Yukon Bob’s Flying Augur, and the victor modestly acknowledging the cheers and the vile environmentalist, bloody and dejected, hustled away by security guys warding off the drunks trying to kick me in the gonads, and then Bob and me had a beer, showered, climbed on the bus, and Felix said that the gate was twice what he’d estimated and Yukon and Mike and Dave and Felix continued their bridge game as we rolled on toward Koyukuk.