The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  I had earned fifteen hundred bucks that first day, what with the percentage of the gate. I counted it six times. My gosh, it was like a license to steal. To ride around on a bus and sleep and three times a day go and work hard for fifteen minutes—who couldn’t handle that?

  • • •

  The I.W.W. routine was a snap compared to Vietnam. We wrestled three bouts a day, six days a week, and ate four meals a day. The chow was good if you like meat. On Monday, our day off, we chowed down on unabridged T-bone steaks washed down with a snootful of hooch strong enough to take the chrome off a Cadillac. We continued drinking at a nightclub where ugly women dance on your table and you stuff twenties in their garter belts and they remove their underwear. We stayed until midnight and awoke at 5 a.m. with headaches you could split kindling with and crawled out of bed and resumed the suffering.

  We wrestled in hangars, warehouses, the holds of ships, we wrestled in mud or coated with oil, and sometimes we wrestled in a ring with a few thousand live mackerel flopping around, just for the added interest. The alpha wrestler was Svend the Yellow-Toothed, a Nordic warrior with shoulder-length snowy blond hair and a caribou-skin cape with the head and teeth intact, and there was Ahmad Jihad in Bedouin robes, and Oberkapitan Werner Wehnnadd with his black boots and jodhpurs and gleaming monocle, and Ivan the Terrible in his fur cap and red sickle-and-hammer cape. There were various heroes, Yukon Bob and Matanuska Mike and Dawson Dave. And there was me, the Flower Child.

  Svend had the best rant of anybody. He’d grab the microphone away from Felix, the ring announcer, and yell that he had never, never in his career, ever set foot in the ring with such heinous trash as this—pointing at his opponent, whoever it was—and he cried out, “I put it to you, the fans: What shall I do with this bucket of pus, this pisspot, this maggot, this abomination?”

  And the crowd roared, “KILL HIM!”

  And then he asked the fans on the other side of the arena, and they felt that homicide was the only fair solution, too.

  Svend climbed up onto the turnbuckle and screamed, “I will thrash him, lash him, paste him, waste him, batter and lambaste him, and force the contemptuous blackguard to crawl across the ring and lick the sweat off my socks!”

  This suited the crowd just fine.

  Sometimes his opponent was Ivan, the perfidious Russian, and sometimes it was Prince Harry Belial, and sometimes it was me.

  “Behold this degenerate molester of women!” he screeched, pointing at me one night when I was taking a night off from the Flower Child and wrestling under the name Richard Speck. “Tonight, my friends, this putrid pervert gets the punishment he deserves!” And the crowd roared, like high surf hitting a cliff, and Svend hurled himself at me and we locked arms and he said, “Stomp and chin kick,” and I stomped on his foot, and he fell down, writhing, and I took a run at him and kicked him about two inches east of his chin, and he clutched at his face and toppled over and lay, legs twitching, and I dove on him for the pin and he said, “Fourteen, double T, seventy-eight, sixteen,” and I jumped up and climbed onto the turnbuckle and jumped, my feet landing a couple inches south of his testicles, and he flopped over and writhed around on his belly as if he’d been reamed with a hot poker, and I got him in a toe twist, and that caused him no end of agony—of course the audience by now was foaming and raging freely, standing on their chairs, trying to hurl beer at me—and then I smacked him in the small of his back, and he screamed and banged his forehead on the canvas and his legs twitched, and then I got him in the Stretcher hold, and he was in hellish agony, but not so much that he couldn’t tell me what came next—“Forty-four, nineteen, thirty-six, ten, and down double,” he said, and then he managed to wriggle out of the Stretcher, bonk me on the forehead, run and carom off the ropes and do a flying mule and knock me down, do a pile driver, get me in a half nelson, and pin me, and leap up, arms raised, for the adulation of the mob, as I slithered under the ropes and into the protective custody of the ushers and limped back to the dressing room.

  And afterward Svend and I would have a beer and he gave me pointers on how to improve my performance, how to roar better and harangue the crowd and work on my rant, using a thesaurus to piece together new expressions, like “malodorous moron” and “nefarious nincompoop” and “perfidious pipsqueak.”

  He explained how to receive his flying mule and flop throat-first against the top rope and hang there by my chin, tongue out, eyes crossed, to be hauled off and put in a toehold and pinned. He taught me to get the right kind of trunks, with strong elastic waistbands so they stretch tight over your butt and don’t bunch up in your crack. And a nut cup that can stand up to a steel-toed boot or a folding chair. He taught me breathology and escapology and how, if you need to pee real bad during a bout, you have your opponent lift you up and do the Helicopter and the pee doesn’t land in the ring.

  I enjoyed being the Flower Child because I was good at it. I added a pink boa to the act and let my hair grow out long and dyed it blond and took to wearing long dangly earrings. The sight of earrings on a man in Alaska made a crowd go bananas. I loved being the bad boy.

  One night as I slept, someone filled up my bed with butterscotch pudding. I said nothing. The next night someone took the lightbulb out of the socket in my bathroom and put Saran Wrap over the toilet so when I peed, it all ran down on my shoes. The next day there was a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice by my bed when I awoke. My suspicions should have been aroused, but I am a Minnesotan, a trusting soul. The juice was doctored, as it turned out, with a mysterious homeopathic powder that gave me the worst case of hemorrhoids in the Arctic, a set of butt grapes that made bowel movements not the pure pleasure they should have been. It got so I couldn’t sit down. I had a foam doughnut sewn into the seat of my trunks, which got me the nickname Balloon Butt. And one night someone spooned a soy supplement onto my corn flakes that resulted in a rock-hard stool. It was like passing an axe. I fainted in the can.

  That was the night the Flower Child lost it. I truly went ballistic.

  I was the last event, fighting Yukon Bob, and I hurt like blazes. I grabbed the mike and I bent over and pointed to the relevant spot and told the crowd to pucker up. I was out of my mind with pain. I told the crowd to stick their hands in their pants and see if they could find their manhood. I said I was proud to be an atheist and Communist and that I could beat anybody in the place with one hand. And then Bob came waltzing in and I tore him apart—he kept yelling in my ear, “Cut it out, man! Slow down! What’s got into you?” and I kept whopping him in the chops, and the crowd went berserk and stormed the ring, waving two-by-fours and ball-peen hammers. Iron Eyes tore off his referee shirt and dove for safety, and Yukon Bob followed him, and I was all alone, surrounded by six thousand berserk oil riggers who were feeling no pain whatsoever.

  I climbed up on the turnbuckle and held my arms up for silence and said, “Whoever wants to die first, step forward. I’ll kill ten of you before you so much as scratch me, and probably by that time the cops will be here. And when I’m on trial for mass murder, I am going to plead diminished mental capacity on account of hemorrhoids, and believe me, in my case it’s the truth. I am no flower child. I am a mad dog veteran of the U.S. Navy Walruses, a walking time bomb, and I want to die and take you with me!”

  And two guys stepped forward with pistols drawn and knives in their teeth. The crowd shrank back.

  “Walrus,” they said. “Bark.”

  I barked the Walrus code for “brother.”

  They said, “You were kidding about the Communist stuff, right?” I barked in the affirmative.

  They barked back, “Three Walruses together can rule any mob.”

  And we moved toward the now-silent crowd and they melted away in front of us. We charged up the aisle and into the locker room and I pulled on my clothes while they guarded the bus against tire slashers and I ran to climb aboard and we three gave each other the Walrus neck
lock and the secret woof and the snuffle of brotherhood. And then I walked to the back of the bus and addressed my colleagues.

  “I have taken enough crap from you idiots,” I said in a low cold voice. “It is enough to endure the bus rides, the darkness and cold, the drunken mobs, the lice-ridden hotels, the vile foods and condiments. I will not tolerate your perfidious schemes and evil powders. Whoever is responsible, prepare to die. I know six ways to kill a man with my bare hands and I am working on a seventh. Stand up like a man and take your punishment or else be exposed as the coward that you are.”

  Felix stood up and smiled. “You were beautiful tonight, babes. All you needed was a little motivation. We cleared almost a hundred grand. You earned fifty grand in side bets. It was worth the pain.”

  I pointed at him. “Et tu, Felix?”

  He nodded.

  “I will get you for this,” I said but with less conviction. Fifty grand. I’d never earned that much in one night.

  8.

  AT THE NEW YORKER: MY OWN MEMOIR

  More memoirs have been written on the theme “Me and The New Yorker” than about the Spanish-American War or homesteading in Nebraska or train trips down South America way, which is a tribute to its legendary editors Harold Ross and William Shawn and also to the hot steamy self-consciousness of some of their writers. Mr. Shawn was followed by Bob Gottlieb, who could easily have become legendary but didn’t stick around long enough, who was followed by Tina Brown, who was legendary in her own mind and didn’t need to be remembered, and then David Remnick, a good guy who will surely inspire a memoir or two someday. But the magazine now is rather straight compared to the bundle of eccentricities I loved so much in my youth in Anoka, Minnesota—the absence of a masthead or Table of Contents, the unsigned Talk of the Town pieces with their brisk whimsical tone, the Letter from Paris signed simply “Genêt,” the horse-racing column by “Audax Minor,” squibs about Ivy League football, the Long-Winded Lady, “The Wayward Press,” the great two-initial authors (E.B., J.D., A.J., S.J., J.F.), and enormous long pieces about exotic places winding their way through columns of ads for Baccarat and Jaguar and Chanel. It was another world from mine. I only knew Mr. Shawn from his neatly penciled comments signed W.S. in the margins of galley proofs and a couple of awkward lunches at the Algonquin, not enough material for a book-length memoir. So I invented some stuff about him and stuck it in the novel Love Me. And while I was at it, I murdered a publisher, which I’d always wanted to do.

  William Shawn took a shine to me right off the bat when I arrived at the magazine back in the fall of 1969. “Glad you’re not creepy and obsessive like some of these introspective sons of bitches around here,” he said. “I’ve had a bellyful of neurotics. White and Thurber drove me nuts, and all those Harvard snots. You look like a Midwesterner. Me, too. Chicago. Call me Bill.”

  We liked to shoot pocket billiards at a little smoke-filled joint called Patsy’s and we discovered we shared a fondness for old Chicago bands like the Jazz Equestrians and the Skippers of Rhythm and we both knew the rules for a poker variant called footsie. He was an excellent bowler and arm wrestler and could toss playing cards into a top hat with accuracy at up to thirty-five feet, farther if he was drunk. He could size a man up by studying the soles of his shoes and the back of his shirt collar. He could tell if you’d recently been to church or taken an unmarried woman to the movies. He knew every species of bird and he could open any lock with a paper clip and could disassemble a typewriter and put it back together in two minutes flat. One night over a pitcher of martinis he told me his life story: it just flowed out. His childhood in Chitown. His Irish dad, Sean Hanratty, a button man for the Bugs Moran gang, killed in the Arbor Day Massacre. Young William changed his name and hitchhiked to Vegas to deal blackjack for Bugsy Siegel and then a man named Crossandotti sent him to New York as Harold Ross’s stickman, back when the magazine was a hotbed of steady tipplers and wisecracking women with hinges on their heels.

  “The Mafia owned it, you know,” he told me.

  “They owned The New Yorker?”

  “What we talking about? Silk undies? Yes. The New Yorker. Still do.”

  “The Mafia owns the magazine?”

  He was lining up a very tricky bank shot, a Lucky Strike in the corner of his mouth, smoke curling up under his fedora—“What does it matter? Owners are owners. Thank God it’s not the Newhouses, I say. At least the Crossandottis know they don’t know anything. All the Newhouses want is to stick their noses up the butts of the rich and famous.” And then he banked the eight ball into the side pocket off the fourteen and picked up the money off the bar and stuffed it in his breast pocket. “Want to go again? For double?” he muttered.

  “You’re so different from the William Shawn I always imagined,” I said. “James Thurber portrayed you as a flustered guy who spoke in a whisper and obsessed over commas and ate dry cornflakes for lunch and dreaded elevators and other motor vehicles.”

  He chuckled. “Thurber was blind, you know. The phone rang and he’d pick up the steam iron. He needed a lot of supervision. Him and White both. White struggled to operate an ordinary stapler. A coffeemaker was beyond him. His ambition was to raise chickens. And The Years with Ross was about as true to life as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

  “Sometimes I feign fluster—it’s a useful stratagem with women,” he said.

  He gave me the nickname Prairie Dog and he’d ring me up around 5:30 on a Friday afternoon and holler into the phone, “Come on, Skip, let’s go get our pantlegs wet,” and off we’d go to the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin with a sack of grub and a bottle of bourbon and board the Shawnee and cast off the lines and motor down the Hudson. “Ain’t this the life!” he said. “To hell with Harvard and fuck the fact-checkers, let’s have a party!” He got out of his suit and into shorts and a black muscle shirt as midtown Manhattan slid past on the port side, the cross streets like corn rows, and when Forty-third passed, we yelled, “Boogers!” and hooked little fingers. Around Canal Street I hoisted the mainsail and we caught fresh wind at the Battery and flew around Governors Island and out under the Verrazano Bridge to sea and he sang out, “The sun’s over the yardarm, Prairie Dog!” and I broke out the bourbon and poured two china cups full and he drew a chestful of salt air and started talking.

  “I’m a hunted man. Crazy magazine’s got me jumping like a poisoned rat in a coffee can. Some fool stuck his head in my office today and asked what’s the difference between a solecism and a solipsism. Go spend a week with a dictionary, I told him. A writer is supposed to know the English language, dang it.”

  I asked him about the perils of success and how fame and fortune seem to dig a deeper hole for a guy. I was thinking of J. D. Salinger and J. F. Powers, two heavy hitters who hadn’t been heard from for a long long time.

  “They’re swinging too hard. Trying to aim the ball.” He hawked and spat. “Listen, kid. Every writer I know is on a winding mountain road in the fog, headlights on high beam, worried about plunging over the cliff. That’s what it means to be in the business. Some of these bozos get confused about their capabilities, like a sumo wrestler trying to run the four-forty low hurdles. Or they wind up as preachers pandering to high-minded dipshits. The Betterment of Man is the worst motive for writing. Better to write out of sheer cussedness and fling a cherry bomb into the ladies’ latrine and make them all jump out of their camisoles than climb into the pulpit and pontificate about the sun and moon and the Milky Way and the meaning of it all.

  “John O’Hara had it about right. The purest motivation for a writer is to earn a pile of money. Which of course makes you the target of envy and you wind up with gobs of spit on your shoes and you don’t win the Pulitzer and critics spitball you for the rest of your life. But what the hell. You can cry on your way to the bank.” Mr. Shawn walked to the rail and looked at the houses of Brooklyn as they slipped past in the twilight. “That’s Bay Ridge,” he said, point
ing to a low rise. “I was in love with a lady who lived there. Bright red nail polish and curlicue hair and some of the nicest epidermis you ever saw. Met her at a party at Norman Mailer’s. What an arrogant blowhole he was before I slapped him around a little. He was coming on to the Brooklyn girl at that party and I had to take him outside and give him a nosebleed. Now the guy can almost write sometimes. My gosh, she was an angel. I’d be sailing along and she’d come swimming out from Coney Island with her clothes tied on top of her head. Not that the woman needed clothes. My gosh.