The Book of Guys

by Garrison Keillor

  “Have you seen a dermatologist?” I asked, trying to make small talk.

  Joe groaned. “Everything I had is gone. Destroyed. My home, my wife, my children, everything. I was happy and then suddenly everything went up in smoke.” He looked me deep in the eyes. “Touch my sores and you will be healed,” he said softly.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  Mom brought out a tuna-salad sandwich, a glass of milk, and a Rice Krispie marshmallow bar. As he ate, groaning, she mentioned that she had heard that ashes were good for those putrid open sores. Not charcoal ash, but wood ash, and you should sprinkle them on the sores and not rub, and not use too much ash, because open sores need to breathe.

  “Thanks for the tip,” he said. He said to me again, “Touch my sores and you will be healed.”

  I said that I would rather not.

  A few months later, Dad was transferred by the Methodist church back to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to be a regional director of family counseling and professor of New Testament ethics. He would also be joining the Carl Welk Orchestra, playing his sax. “Music is so primitive in Africa,” he said. “It’ll be nice to get back to playing more waltzes and sambas.” We left our African home and flew to America.

  My leprosy had put my mom under a lot of pressure. She blamed herself for it, which was okay, because it was her fault. She lost her appetite and she ground her teeth in her sleep, with terrible force. The witch dentist had recommended sacrificing a chicken or goat, but Dad wouldn’t allow it. So Mom ground her teeth down to tiny nubbins, and by the time we settled in Sioux Falls, her speech was so awfully slurred, people naturally assumed she was sloshed, even after she got her teeth capped. Mom began drinking mixed drinks at about that time.

  Meanwhile, word got around that I was a leper. It was Dad’s fault. He took me to Bible camp in July and suggested that I stand up at the fellowship campfire and share the story of my leprosy and how God had given our family the strength to deal with it.

  Like a fool, I stood in the fellowship circle, next to the campfire, and said, “My name is Buddy and I am a leper,” and right then, I noticed people edge away in revulsion. “I look on leprosy as an opportunity for grace,” I said, but of course leprosy is a disease, not an opportunity, and everyone knew it. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near me after that. Sometimes, when their parents were watching, they pretended to, but not for long.

  Within days, everyone in South Dakota was aware of my leprosy situation, and that fall, in school, I got the nickname “Leppie.” Boys followed me in the halls, limping and jerking spasmodically—apparently making fun of my condition, though I didn’t jerk any more than other fourteen-year-olds. Nobody ever sat next to me of their own free will. Nobody said hi in the hallway or stopped by my locker to shoot the breeze. Nobody made eye contact—I became invisible—except for boys who saw me, started twitching and convulsing, rolled their eyes, gasped, and pretended to die. Everybody else considered this rather hilarious.

  “Be friendly and try to smile. Return their taunts and jeers with good-natured replies. Learn to poke fun at yourself. Be outgoing,” advised Mom. But the smile a person tries to make when people are so hostile is not an attractive one.

  A pretty girl named Phoebe liked to line up all her classmates on the playground and go down the line saying, “You’re my first best friend, you’re my second best friend,” and so on. I was always her two-hundredth best friend, dead last, though I had gone out of my way to be friendly with her. One day, I presented her with a valuable African coin from my collection, and she glanced at it and shuddered. “I don’t want that. You touched it,” she said. “If I accepted, I’d be known forever after as a girl who took money off a leper. No man would ever touch me. I’d be obliged to leave Sioux Falls and go to Minneapolis and lead the lonely life of a cashier in a cafeteria and live in a room over a drugstore and spend my evenings reading movie magazines and I’d become a withered spinster in a print dress smelling of lilac talcum, with my big watery eyes behind my pop-bottle glasses, taking vacation tours of the Black Hills on a bus. Do you want to see my life blighted because I once took pity on you and became your friend? No? Then why did you ask me?”

  Her hostility was not untypical. Once I was chased through the park by three boys who jumped out from behind the jungle gym waving softball bats. I tore off down the hill and through the trees, where I used the old low-lying-limb trick that Roy Rogers used so often—swung myself up and into the leaves and waited for them and then jumped down on top of them. My face brushed against the face of one of them and he screamed and rolled around like a bee had bit him, and the others ran off.

  I could see that redemption was impossible in Sioux Falls, that I would have to grow up and move away before my life could begin. Often, a person so persecuted will turn out to be a genius like Hans Christian Andersen or Tennessee Williams, but aptitude tests showed that, among the bright stars in life’s galaxy, I was a small dim moon. A moon without a planet to orbit around, a moon adrift in the cosmos, a leper moon.

  There were a reporter and a photographer from the Associated Press who were nice to me, though. They visited me often. I was one of only two lepers in America who would give interviews, and the other one was a grumpy geezer in Coral Gables who only wanted to talk about the national deficit and rant and gibber about Congress. I was willing to talk about my disease. “You don’t have to,” Mom told me. But I wanted to, in order to create better public understanding of leprosy, I said.

  But that wasn’t the real reason. There were only a few of us in the country; how much public understanding do a few people need?

  I did it hoping to make my classmates guilty and also because Skip and Doug were friendly guys and I was starved for company. They came, shot a picture of me smiling and showing my coin collection, did the interview—“How do kids treat you at school?” asked Skip, and I said, “They treat me just great. They have taken me into their hearts and given me love and support beyond anything a leper could dream of. They are always there, cheering me up, inspiring me, making me feel wanted. This is the greatest place in America. I love South Dakota”—and then we sat in the backyard and talked, off the record.

  “Kids treat you like shit, I’ll bet,” said Skip.

  I said, “You’re not kidding.”

  “You know what might be a good idea for you?” he said. “Take a shotgun to school and blow away a couple of them. You’re fourteen. You’d be sent to a reform school for a few years, get a good vo-tech education, it might be a good experience for you.”

  I told them that, as the son of missionary parents, I would find it hard to take a shotgun to school and kill classmates. They said they could understand that.

  “Maybe a .22 then,” said Skip. “Twenty-two is a good number. It’s the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. In the I Ching, the twenty-second book is the Book of Grace. Did you know that?”

  I did not.

  “And,” said Doug, “it might be good for you to express the anger inside you, rather than repress it and screw up your life.”

  Skip said he thought that any jury would find me innocent and I’d be sent somewhere for treatment.

  “Wouldn’t it be hard for a kid my age to get his hands on a gun?”

  No, Doug said. Not necessarily. In fact, he thought it would be easier for me to find a gun than to find a girl.

  It was nice to have homicide as a possibility. When classmates looked at me with loathing, as if to say, “What are you doing here, you piece of garbage you, you’re blighting our teenage experience with your extremely depressing presence,” I looked at them real cool and thought, “You should be more careful with your contempt. I could bring a gun tomorrow and put a hole in you the size of a pieplate. You would die with evil thoughts in your heart and go directly to hell. Isn’t that a big price to pay for treating a classmate so bad? Big clumps of your hair stuck to the wall, your blood spattered on the floor, and the rest of you under a sheet, an
d you in hell and God scowling down at you and saying, Huh-uh. No way. Wouldn’t it have been easier to invite me to your birthday party?”

  Mom kept telling me, “Don’t complain. The reason kids aren’t nice to you is because you don’t smile, Buddy. You don’t go out of your way. Forget about leprosy and just be you, and people will be friendly. You wait and see.” Mom was drunk as a skunk most of the time. She figured that as long as her dental problem made her sound drunk anyway, she might as well have the pleasure, so she drank a raft of vodka gimlets in the morning and screwdrivers in the afternoon. I knew that Mom would never be of any help to me again the rest of my life. And Dad was too busy teaching ethics and supervising family-counseling programs and playing dances. I went to the Sioux Room at the Dakota Hotel once to see him and perhaps have a word, but the band breaks were only ten minutes long and a number of his ethics students were there and he yukked it up with them while I sat alone in the corner. My portly dad playing “Bésame Mucho” and candles flickering and stale potato chips on the table with plastic cups of whipped cheese and glasses of warm grape pop. A bad scene.

  At the doctor’s office once, I saw a magazine ad: “ATTRACT WOMEN TO YOU EVEN IF THEY DON’T WANT TO BE—EASY! IN LESS THAN 60 SECS.!” A picture of gazellelike women in thin cotton garments, their thick pouty lips parted slightly, their garments soaked with perspiration and pasted tight to their bodies. “Learn the ancient secrets of hypnotic conversation and send subliminal erotic messages that hot babes are powerless to resist. Talk about sports, weather, hobbies, etc., and in one minute you can focus her unconscious sexual desires on you! Hot babes have NO IDEA what’s happening, only that they lust for your body and feel revulsion for ALL OTHER MEN! After an hour, they’re TAKING OFF THEIR CLOTHES and yelling, Do it! Do it! Or your money cheerfully refunded.”

  I was tempted to send $24.95 for the booklet and cassette and learn those hypnotic conversational techniques. The worst part of being a leper is to be shunned, to see people turn away and avoid touching you. A person needs to be touched. South Dakota is not a touchy place even under the best of circumstances, and if you are a leper, you can go for months without a caress or a pat on the back. I was a missionary child, and sending subliminal erotic messages went against my upbringing, but I sent for the materials. I gave the name William Rehnquist in case the FBI tried to trace the recipient.

  “You’re lucky,” said Mom, sauced as usual. “Look at lepers in India, they have to stand and beg in the streets, and all their fingers fall off. You have parents who love you, you live in a nice home and sleep between clean sheets and eat good food, and you’re on a very good-flavored medication. Quit your bellyaching.” But a person’s misery is never diminished by the greater misery of others, you know. And the food wasn’t that good. Breakfast was cold cereal and bad sweet rolls, with Mom sitting there drinking vodka, or “potato juice,” as she called it, and by nightfall, she was leaning badly as she cooked our dinner, sometimes hanging on to the cupboard door to keep vertical. She fixed veal chops, which I couldn’t bear to eat because the poor calves are chained in dark fetid stalls knee-deep in excrement and also because she burned the meat to a crisp. The vegetables were burnt and the mashed spuds were full of lumps the size of golf balls and everything was covered with melted cheese. Garbage au gratin.

  Dad couldn’t see what was happening. “Mary, what’s wrong with you? These string beans are inedible,” he complained. “And they have dirt and twigs in them.”

  I told him that Mom was bombed out of her gourd. I said, “Our family is falling to pieces. You’re a minister, Dad. Do something.”

  “Don’t speak so of your mother,” he said. “She’s only tired because she works hard taking care of us. I’ll hire a girl to help.”

  She arrived a week later. Lulu Rivera. She arrived on the day after my hypnotic conversation tape and instruction booklet came in the mail. “Who’s William Rehnquist?” asked Mom. I read the booklet and listened to the cassette that evening; it was written and narrated by a guy named Sandy, who suggested that hot babes could be yours for the asking if you learned to talk slow. “Guys get excited by a babe’s you-know-what and the hot hungry look in her eye and pretty soon they’re yapping like sled dogs,” said Sandy. “But babes go for guys who go slow, if you know what I mean. Leave long pauses—use few words—be deliberate—focus—maintain eye contact but don’t push, don’t lean—draw her to you with silence.”

  Lulu Rivera had long black hair and wore a red satiny dress, and smelled of flowers and earth and rainfall. South Dakota women smelled of chalk dust and laundry starch, but she smelled of precipitation. I stood close to her, downwind, and exhaled off to my left, afraid I might have bad breath from the au gratin. She carried all her possessions in two paper sacks, except for her guitar. She moved into the guest bedroom, next to mine. I liked her a lot. I kept thinking, Here’s someone who doesn’t know that I have leprosy. I rubbed my forehead to make it hot so I could stay home sick from school, because she would come and sit on the side of my bed, put her hand on my forehead, sometimes rub goose grease on my chest. I did not say much to her and what I did say I said slowly.

  Late at night, through the bedroom wall, I could hear her softly strumming her guitar and singing “Come to my arms, my darling, sleep in my arms, my love,” a song about love so powerful one cannot resist:

  The sight of your face,

  The touch of your hand,

  The sound of your voice

  I am helpless to withstand

  The feeling that comes over me

  Like the mighty sea

  Beats against the land.

  It was hard not to take this as an invitation.

  I drilled a tiny hole through the wall, and saw her naked left shoulder once. Then she moved a dresser in front of it.

  She brought me tomato soup in bed when I stayed home from school. She wore flipflops and when I heard her walk down the upstairs hall, flipflip-flipflipflipflip, all the juices in me rose. Mom passed out around noon every day and slept until dinner. Lulu sat on the side of my bed, talking to me in a normal way about the future and about being happy, new topics for a leper boy. I almost told her, Hey, you know what’s so great about you? You don’t know I’m a leper! Can you imagine what that’s like? No, probably you can’t. Let me tell you. It’s the greatest feeling in the world, that’s what. But I remembered Sandy’s advice. I said, “Not everyone is meant to be happy, Lulu.” But I was thrilled by her. To be normal in the eyes of one person! After years of wearing the badge of LEPER around my neck. And I loved looking down the front of her dress. She had beautiful little brown bazookies.

  She told me, “I’m here to help for a while, but this is only a pit stop for me. I’m on my way to California, where I understand a person can go around buck-naked if she wants to. People are freer there. A woman she can do what she wants to, when she wants to, with whoever she wants to do it with. I like you really a lot. Did you know that? Eh? I do. I wish I could make you so very very happy. So tell me. What makes you happy, Buddy?”

  Evidently, conversational hypnosis was working. “I don’t know, except—” and I paused for a long moment—“a man can’t be happy alone. But—I don’t have broad parameters when it comes to happiness. Happiness always seemed accidental to me. It comes and it goes.”

  “I’m an ethnic person, and to us ethnics, happiness is no accident,” she said. “Happiness is written into the deal. It’s part of the plan.”

  I was helping her make my parents’ bed as we talked, and I was having a hard time getting a good tight corner on my side. Evidently, my silence excited her. “I want to experience life with you,” she said softly.

  She came over to my side of the bed to help me, and suddenly her hand was roaming the front of my shirt. I said, “I don’t think happiness is—it’s not like going to the store for a—a quart of blueberries. If it were, then it—it wouldn’t be so special.” I was really getting the hang of the long pause.

  She
unbuttoned my shirt. Nobody had ever done this to me before. “It’s exactly like getting a quart of blueberries,” she said. “You just happen to come from a place that has no blueberries.”

  She pressed her body against mine. “My dress has a ripcord, right under my left breast,” she said. “It’s an ejector dress, developed by U.S. Navy pilots. Pull this little string and tiny explosive charges will fling my clothes off like you’d shuck an ear of corn.”

  I laughed. “You’d never guess to look at it that—it was an explosive dress. It sure doesn’t—look like it’s loaded.”

  “Pull my string,” she whispered, her lips inside my ear.

  “Does it make a—big bang?” I asked. “I’m kinda—leery of explosives. I’d hate to—pull that string and—have your dress blow up in my face.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said.

  I held the string lightly between my thumb and index finger. “Maybe we ought to—stop right now before somebody gets hurt,” I said, as a missionary child should say.

  And then she threw me onto the bed and there was a poom-poom-poom, and the red dress fell apart into four separate streamers and her naked body fell on top of mine, and she had her way with me. I forgot all about my other chores. I did what she wanted me to do. I felt as if I were in a car racing through great stands of primeval trees, and through tunnels and thick forests of ferns and past steaming lakes where flocks of herons rose from the water and then to a natural geyser that blew millions of gallons of water a half-mile into the sky, and I was in the back seat of the car. She was at the wheel.

  Afterward, I said, “Not bad. Am I—supposed to—get used to that?”

  “You’re so nice, Buddy,” she said. “I think I could learn to like you. You’re young but you have a sweet sadness about you that I find so attractive.”

  We did it again and again, day after day, and every day, I worried that she’d talk to the milkman or the mailman or the meter-reader from the gas company and the truth would come out, the terrible word “leper” would be spoken, and then I would be cast out in the cold again.