The Book of Guys

by Garrison Keillor

  “You wish I’d write awful?” said Norman, ever the kidder.

  “You heard me.”

  “But I’m a humorist, not a novelist.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said. “Fine. Don’t write a novel. Do whatever you want to. Be the Bard of Snot. I don’t care what you do. I’m sorry I ever brought it up. Don’t give it another thought.”

  So he thought about it for days. How hard it is to write funny, especially if you’re French to start with, which he was, born in Lyon, the son of an apache dancer named Monique who had no interest in being a mom. “Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait,” she used to say, sitting on the balcony in her pink underwear and eating breakfast at three in the afternoon, Grand Marnier on cornflakes. It was a lousy life. The lonely boy sat in the filthy apartment all day watching Cary Grant movies on television. Cary was the father Norman never had, it was good to see him. And one day, Norman said, “Au revoir, ma maman,” came to America, rid himself of his maître d’ accent, and became a humorist. He met Judy in a malt shop, an American dream girl, and they merged into marriage. He hung around bingo parlors and flea markets and watched Donahue in barrooms, trying to soak up American life. Gradually he got the hang of being American and learned to tell jokes. A triumph for an immigrant, to make people laugh in another language. Him and Victor Borge and Ludwig Bemelmans and who else? He would have preferred to be humorous in an elegant way, like Cary Grant, but in America, people laughed at boogers and farts—who knew why? it wasn’t for him to explain, he was French, he only wanted to fit in. It took him four years to write his first collection, Sew Buttons on Your Underwear, which earned slightly more than eighty-five thousand dollars. Not bad for a bucket of boogers. Judy refused to read it. She didn’t read any of his other books either—It Must Be Time for Lunch, Sidney, Somebody Cut the Cheese or Is That a Bird in Your Nose, Baby? No, It’s Snot or I Don’t Care for TWA Coffee but I Do Love TWA Tea—and if any of their friends mentioned Norman’s writing, Judy got up and left the room.

  One summer, the same summer Kimberley started work as a go-go dancer, Judy met a man named Michael Fredericks at a bovine conference in Edinburgh. Michael was a veterinarian from Yorkshire, married, with two little daughters, but he canceled everything and moved to Des Moines to become Judy’s lover and lab assistant. Judy moved out and Norman hardly noticed—it was as if she’d simply taken a vacation. Norman was busy anyway, trying to rescue his daughter. “Grandma dances topless,” she said. “Yes, but she is French,” he replied. Norman met Michael at a supermarket once—the man was slightly obese and practically bald on top. Like most Englishmen, he looked sour and pasty-faced.

  “We’re two mature men and we can handle this,” said Norman. “This town’s too small for us not to get along. I’m genuinely glad for both of you and I wish you the best of luck.” But two months later, Judy and Michael were driving to Ames for a bovine conference and struck a bridge abutment at sixty m.p.h. and were instantly killed in a flaming explosion.

  Losing Judy awakened Norman’s love for her, a deeper, finer love than he had known in marriage. “I will live for you, my darling,” he whispered at her grave, his arm around his sobbing daughter. “You will be proud.” He set out on his novel, a big novel. For her. Some days he wrote two thousand words. It flowed out of him like froth off a boiling pot.

  This morning, he starts in again to rewrite chapter seven. The Big Box is the story of a man known only as He, who has not seen another living human being except the pizza delivery person, Herb, in six years and whose life has come to be focused on his refrigerator, Fred. The action takes place entirely in flashbacks and also in Dallas. He keeps asking himself, Where did my life jump the tracks? and He keeps thinking back to a family softball game six years ago where He took a called third strike. His father was pitching, and He couldn’t swing the bat. The pitch was in the dirt, and his mother, who was umpiring, called it a strike. In the third, fourth, and fifth chapters, there’s a lot more about this game, the sisters jeering at him in the outfield, etc. In chapter six, we discover that He has an answering machine, on which He has saved all his calls for six years, fifteen phone calls, eight of them from a Toro sales representative named Bernardine who wants to sell him a snow blower. Her persistence inspires him. He’s never offered her a bit of encouragement, never even spoken to her, and yet she keeps calling. She talks and talks about herself and her boyfriends who used to shovel her walk but they’re gone, the unfaithful bastards, and she has a snow blower and she’ll never go back to sex as a tool for getting your snow shoveled, snow blowing is it for her. He looks into the refrigerator and He sees himself and Bernardine in there, in the snow of the freezer compartment, and He throws his arms around the refrigerator and it falls on him and kills him. In chapter seven, we find out that the whole story is written by a spore on a dill pickle in the refrigerator. And that not all of it is true. But we don’t know how much. This is the chapter he needs to fix today, so it segues nicely into the second half of the novel, set in a dump, where the refrigerator becomes a home for a runaway boy named Bob.

  The telephone rings. It is Kimberley. “Hi, Daddy,” she says. She is crying and nobody can cry like her, she weeps buckets. After her mother’s death, she quit dancing and devoted herself to geriatrics. She went to work in a nursing home. “Daddy,” she told him once, “do you realize that in thirty years, sixty percent of the population will be over sixty-five?” Now, weeping, she says, “I’m twenty-four and my life is a mess. I can’t bear it another day. It’s too painful, Daddy.” She and Trevor are breaking up. That’s exactly what Norman tried to tell her to do when she met Trevor. Trevor is a weasel who lies to everyone, steals money off countertops, listens to gruesome music, and drinks himself into a stupor. She stuck with him, the jerk, right up until last night, when he threw all her clothes out of the window. “I don’t want a big comment from you on this, okay?” she says. She is all broken up over it, poor child.

  “I love you, baby. Hang in there. I’ll come and get you. Where are you?”

  “I’m at work. I’m off in an hour. My stuff is at the reception desk. In the main building. Can you pick it up first and then get me? I’m in Building D.”

  “What about your cats, honey? They coming with you?”

  “Of course. Is that all right?”

  Norman sighs. “How many are there now?”

  “Six. Daddy, if you don’t want me there, it’s okay, I’ll go to a motel. It’s just that I thought of you first, that’s all.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Fine. I’ll pick up the cats.”

  The Oak Ridge Nursing Home was a dreadful dreary place. Geezer Camp. “It’s all in how you look at it,” Kimmy has told him, but it’s also a matter of what’s there to see. Old green indoor-outdoor carpeting with pee stains on it, the smell of disinfectant everywhere, eight or ten residents parked in their wheelchairs, collapsed against the straps, the light in their eyes gone out. What a powerful argument against growing old. He picks up six cartons of stuff and a bag of cats from the reception desk, then drives to Building D. A cell-block for old farts imprisoned in themselves.

  Kimmy is cheerful with these cadaverous folks, squeezes their withered hands, lavishes jokes and one-sided repartee on them, and then out in the parking lot, she bursts into tears. “I can’t live without him, the big creep!” she cries.

  All the way to Norman’s house, she cries. Her life is a wreck. “What do I do?” she says. They pull up in the driveway, the phone rings in the house, she tears inside while Norman lugs the boxes in and the cats. She is smiling. It was Trevor, and she has agreed to meet him at ten-thirty and so, a few hours later, she whizzes off in Norman’s car and Norman sinks exhausted into the sorrowful green sofa—the complicated lives of the young!

  Two of the cats appeared to be unwell. Listless, rheumy-eyed, with snarls in their fur. Their meows were raspy and faint. “That’s Little Boy and Tigger,” she said as she unpacked. “I found them in the alley last weekend, somebo
dy’d stuck them in a garbage can. Can you believe it? People are so cruel.”

  “They sure are,” said Norman, thinking of Trevor. When she had met Trevor three years ago, she told Norman, “You won’t like him, Daddy. I’m just going to have to live with that, okay? He doesn’t read books and he doesn’t have much sense of humor. He listens to a lot of heavy-metal rock. I don’t think you’d consider him exactly smart. But I love him.”

  Now Trevor, having thrown her away like a used shopping bag, was beckoning her back into his life. Norman had offered to go beat the crap out of him. She laughed and she left in the car.

  That night all the cats were unaccountably drawn toward Norman. Kimmy stayed out until midnight, came home—Norman was sleeping on the couch so he could get up early and work on his novel and not disturb her—he heard her tiptoe in, and the herd of cats stirred around him, four at his feet and two by his head. He tossed them on the floor but in the morning they were nestled close to him.

  Kimmy went off to the nursing home at six a.m. She seemed cheerfuler. Norman worked on his novel. The cats gathered around the computer, their eyes fixed on him and his fingers on the keys, watching the screen when he rolled the text up. He was trying to make the dill pickle into a blood clot in his main character’s brain, so that in chapter fourteen we finally see the truth—this entire novel is a single neuron of pain in the mind of a dying man, and there are billions of such neurons. The phone rang five or six times—twice, someone hung up when Norman answered, probably Trevor, and once it was the editor of Ding Dong wondering if Norman could do seven hundred words about tits by six o’clock that evening—“I’m working on a novel,” Norman told him—and once it was a lady from next door. “I know it’s none of my business, Mr. Conquest, but don’t you think she’s a little young for you?” Norman explained that Kimberley was his daughter. “Right,” said the woman, “your daughter.” Then it was his mother, calling from Lyon to find out how Judy was.

  “She’s dead, maman. I’ve told you ten times. She and her lover died in a car crash,” he said. Norman told her that he was writing a novel.

  “For a humorist, you’re such a grim person,” she said. "A novel! What does the world need with more novels? People haven’t even read Anna Karenina yet.”

  “It’s all right, maman. I don’t need your support. I’m an artist now. We are used to derision.”

  She said something he didn’t understand—his French was rusty, he had lost a lot of vocabulary over the years—and then she said, “So—are you with anyone yet?”

  No, Norman said, he wasn’t.

  “My darling boy, this is not good,” she said. “You need someone or you go cuckoo. A lover, a roommate, a mama, somebody. When an elephant goes by in the street with a red parasol in its trunk, you need somebody to say to, ‘Look, an elephant, and that parasol is similar to one my mama used in her nightclub act.’ Otherwise you become a sad little man who eats meat pies alone in cafeterias and has pee stains on his trousers.”

  Norman said he was busy to live with anyone. “I’m almost done with my novel. Parts of it are pretty good, actually. Judy suggested that I write one. I never would’ve thought of it myself.”

  “You never desire to have sex?” she asked. “Are you sick? Are you loping your camel?”

  He said that he did not wish to discuss his sex life with her, because there was none to discuss.

  “Let me come and take care of you,” she said. “I’ll be good for you. We’ll talk, laugh, hug, do all those things we missed when you were a little boy. I wasn’t ready then. Now I want to be a real mama to you, Norman. I’m old, my boy. I have been an eighteen-year-old dancer for fifty years, same blonde hair and baby-doll outfit and the lacy pants, but now everything is droopy and my tits are like prunes, and I perform by candlelight, wrapped in gauze, and, Norman, I want to be your mother!”

  He said he was sorry she was unhappy.

  “Make me happy, Norman,” she said. “Send me an airplane ticket. Forgive. Open your heart. We will be for each other.”

  He promised that he would give it serious consideration.

  He had thought that Mom liked living alone. She used to say she preferred that her lover come to her once a week—“I rejoice to see him and I rejoice to see him go,” she had said. “A man is like a fish, only good for a couple days and then it starts to smell.” Mom lived for her audience at the club, the old boulevardiers who sat at the front tables lusting and longing for a glimpse of her breasts. For lovers, she preferred intellectuals, writers, men who needed loneliness and were grateful for an hour of love now and then. “We are each and every one of us alone, and all else is a lie,” Mom had said to him once. She was nobody’s fool, and her astringent view of life had somehow prepared him to love Americans, their goofy manners and vast sentimentality, their wonderful dumb booger jokes. To think of her pining for him, longing to relate to him and renew the family bond—had she lost her mind? Was she sleeping in doorways, wrapped in garbage bags?—he could see her, his mama, fishing through trash cans for returnable bottles and crusts of pizza and weeping for her lost boy—how could he refuse her? Easy, he thought. Just say no.

  The next night, Norman accompanied his daughter to a Guns n’ Roses concert at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. She said, “I have this extra ticket, but you don’t need to go, okay?” So he went. Of the fifty-some thousand people there, most were young men with their shirts off, well-molded pectorals, earrings, upper-arm tattoos, and cans of beer in their hands. Norman was the only one in slacks, a pressed white shirt, and a houndstooth sport coat. The stage at the end of the field was high and draped in black; long runways extended to either side, where the bare-chested guitarists pranced back and forth like cannibals in an old B movie, leering, glowering, their fists thrust in the air. All of it blown up on monster TV screens, with twenty spotlights, strobe lights, billowing clouds of fog, flash pots blowing fifty-foot columns of flame into the air, bombs bursting onstage, beach balls bouncing in the crowd, people swinging their long hair round and round and back and forth in time to the music, girls in front of the stage reaching up toward the savages, articles of underwear thrown onstage and snatched away by roadies scooting in from the wings, slam-dancing at the other end of the field, and the crowd standing throughout the music, nobody sitting down. “Are we still in Iowa?” Norman wondered. In front, the guitarists danced and hopped around and strutted, and there, at the prow of the stage, was a powerful spotlight aimed straight skyward with a grille over the lamp where the lead savage stood, a bare-chested man on a spotlight, fist thrust in the air. The music made a great racket that twanged your small intestines—it felt good—does a person’s interest in being twanged ever completely disappear? He turned to Kimberley to yell, “I like it!” but she was gone. Vanished into the maw of the crowd. And two minutes later he saw her on a TV screen, her face fifty feet high, she was perched on a guy’s shoulders, her arms in the air, her shirt off, her young breasts wobbling, as fifty thousand young men emitted a thunderous testosterone roar. The guy with the shoulders was Trevor. Norman recognized him instantly. He could hardly recognize his daughter. Displaying your breasts to fifty thousand men and making them roar—was this the upshot of working in a home for the dying?

  Norman drove home alone. Kimberley didn’t call that night. He had a bad dream, in which his novel was published and all the reviews were torpedoes—“a fourth-rate pastiche of American minimalist fiction…has all the charm and sophistication of a handful of boogers”—and she didn’t call the next morning. He called Mama in Lyon, and the phone rang twenty times before she picked up. “Allo?” She had been entertaining a gentleman from Chicago, she said, and now he was washing up. She couldn’t talk long. They were going to Burger King. He said, “Mama, you’ve got to get out of the profession. It’s too dangerous. AIDS, Mama. It sneaks up on you.”

  “I use condoms,” she said. “I need sex, Norman. Your mama is not a nice person. If they wouldn’t pay me, I would pay them.”
r />   “And you want to come and practice your trade in Des Moines, Mama? In my home?”

  “I like Americans, they’re so clean,” she said. “And of course I would use hotels, my darling.”

  He said Kimberley was missing. “I’m not surprised she doesn’t come back to your place,” she said. “Not surprised at all. She’s a healthy young girl.”

  He called the Humane Society. He said, “I’ve got some cats here I’d like to have picked up.” The woman said the soonest pickup would be Tuesday.

  The cats were all over him, purring, rubbing, for the next two days as he futzed with his sinking novel and waited for his lost daughter to call and thought of his mama shacked up with Chicagoans. The cats could feel betrayal in the air and they were trying to make him change his mind. They sat and looked him straight in the eyes, searching for clemency. Please, they were saying. Please. We’re just cats, we’re doing the best we can.

  Finally, Tuesday morning, came the knock on the door. The cats looked at Norman in panic. They dove under the couch. A little guy in a trench coat, a wicker basket in his hand, stood at the door. “You the guy with the cats you want us to plant?” he asked, a cruel glint in his eye.

  “Actually, they’re my daughter’s ex-boyfriend’s cats.”