WLT

by Garrison Keillor

  “Well, as you can imagine, out in radioland, all the friends and neighbors woke up in a flash. There they were, dithering around the kitchen, when suddenly this deep horrible voice three feet away says asshole. It’s like the escaped rapist is sitting by the toaster holding a shotgun on them. Then they heard this awful breathing, and a bout of throat-clearing, like a swamp being drained, big gobs of phlegm rattling—and then he retched, a big dry heave—and you can imagine out in the friends’ and neighbors’ kitchens, where the good folks are fixing breakfast, the sound of a man retching on the radio is pretty darn disgusting.

  “Well, Itch leaped out of the chair and waved at Burns that Your microphone is ON! and Burns, who was operating in dim shadows, looked up and said, ‘Oh fuck you.’ The friends and neighbors looked up from their coffee. I happened to have just turned into the parking lot and I made it from the car to the control room in six seconds. Burns saw me the moment he realized what had happened. He didn’t say a word, and neither did I. He got up and went out the door and became a shoe salesman.

  “That was six years ago. He’s still down at Thorn McAn, kneeling and smelling the feet, and you’re here in radio, Frank, which is preferable. Just remember the rule: BE THERE. And never curse around a microphone. Never.”

  “Did you get a lot of complaints that time?”

  “If we’d apologized for it, we’d’ve gotten an avalanche, but without an apology, people couldn’t be sure they had really heard what they thought they heard. It was five a.m. People don’t exactly hear the radio at that hour. It’s more like a warm thing that hums and reminds you of your mother.”

  “Did this happen to take place in Studio B?” asked Frank.

  “Of course,” said Roy, Jr.

  Ray found Patsy at the Antwerp, banging away at the typewriter, her radio blaring, a band playing a polka—he had to pound hard on the door, ten heavy thumps, before she opened it.

  “I’m sorry, Ray,” she said. “I heard the show. Cripes, I’m embarrassed as I can be. Come in and have a drink.” Ray sat down in a leather chair and accepted a shot of bourbon. (Who do you keep bourbon around for? he thought.)

  “I am burning the candle at both ends trying to keep all these shows and all these small towns going,” she said, “and—do you know how taciturn Midwesterners are? No, you don’t unless you have to write scripts about them. Sometimes these buggers just plain won’t talk. So you got to keep pushing them and poking them and sometimes it gets so hard, writing late at night and you don’t feel like doing anything but going to a movie, and to keep yourself awake, you write a few pages of risque stuff, and then, of course, you yank it out, but these pages in Friendly Neighbor weren’t quite bad enough to catch my eye and I left them in by mistake. I feel dumber than dirt about it, but there you are. Care for another shot?” Yes, he said, another shot would be nice.

  “What sort of risque stuff do you write that does catch your eye?”

  “A few weeks ago, I was starting to grind out another Hoho”—Hoho was short for Hills of Home—“and I looked down and I was already on page 12. I couldn’t believe it. So I read back, and I’d written ten pages in my sleep! Frieda had murdered Fritz—sunk a hatchet in his head as he sat and mumbled over his fried eggs—and Babs had buried the body and gone out and shanghaied the grocery boy—walked up to him in produce and grabbed his head and put it between her breasts. Then they went in back and made love. Then Fritz walked in and so she shot him this time, the big lug, and stuffed him in the freezer and she and the stock boy hurried off to the dairy section and they humped some more. Then there was a commercial break, and then I woke up.”

  “Maybe you ought to take naps. You could come up to the Ogden—borrow my room—it’s nice. On the sixth floor. You can see all downtown from there.”

  “You took me up there once, years ago. Remember?”

  Ray grinned. “Of course. A man always remembers the girls who said no.”

  “You’re a dirty old man, Ray. Funny you should come over here to complain about a script of mine. The dirtiest line in that script was a nursery rhyme compared to your life, Ray.”

  Ray smiled. “I have wasted half my life among boring men,” he said, “but I have yet to regret a moment I have ever spent alone with a beautiful woman. All my life people kept telling me I’d be sorry but, hell, I haven’t been, never, not for a moment, except I was sorry that you never would come to New York with me. That’s all. I’m still sorry about that.”

  “You’re too late,” she said. “I am spending my nights alone with a beautiful man.”

  Ray winced. He shook his head. “I envy him. Don’t tell me who he is or I’m liable to shoot him.” He said that maybe he would like to have another shot of bourbon.

  She went to get him one. “You didn’t used to drink so much,” she called from the kitchen.

  “I’m scared. I don’t think I’m going to be around a lot longer,” he said.

  She stood in the doorway, hands on her hips, studying him.

  “No, I try not to look too far down the road because down the road doesn’t look too good. I think I got something. I hurt a lot down in my gut. And I’m scared to go to a doctor.”

  She sat on the arm of the chair and put her hand on his cheek and pulled his head against her hip. “Baby,” she said softly, “you have to go to a doctor.”

  He looked up, his eyes full of tears. “Before I die, I want to make love to you,” he said. “That’s all the doctor I need. Then I’ll be glad to die. I’ll die with a smile on my lips.”

  She shook her head. “Baby, I’ve got to get you to a doctor.”

  “Come to bed with me and afterward I’ll do anything you like.”

  No, she said. She was sorry. She liked him. But she valued her self-respect and—

  “You talk like a fourteen-year-old Methodist,” he said.

  She took her hand away from his cheek. She stood up and told him to get the hell out.

  “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said. She steered him toward the door and opened it for him. She said, “I didn’t mean to be offended. But I am.”

  She was listening late that night when Frank came home. He drank two glasses of water, peed, took off his shoes, and put a sheet in his typewriter and pounded away for ten minutes. His typewriter sat on the kitchen table, whose legs sat on a beam, apparently, because his pounding made her silverware rattle.

  Dear Daddy, he wrote, I have learned four important things this week. One is the value of Trust. I want people to trust me. It’s the only way for a person to do a job. Trust MUST be won. A man MUST be the same person to everybody, you can’t swing with the breeze. No. 2: The WAY to win trust is to LISTEN and to let people know that you DO listen. The way to do that is: RESPOND exactly to what people actually say. NOT to be smart and make wisecracks. NOT to show off with big words. NEVER be sarcastic. I am determined that I WILL BE a good listener. No. 3: Avoid profanity and smutty talk—it CHEAPENS your company and it KILLS TRUST. No. 4: Be CHEERFUL. SMILE if possible. And I do. I have met a wonderful girl. Love from your loyal son, Frank.

  CHAPTER 28

  Lily

  Ray was glad to see 1950, he told Frank. The old decade had worn him out and the change would be a tonic. “We’ll get rid of a few more old bastards and some more girls will become legal age,” he said cheerily. For New Year’s Eve, he opened his house, Villa Fred, and threw a WLT party—Vesta was in Florida, speaking at the Tampa Chautauqua on “What Radio Can Do to Change Minds.” Slim and The Blue Movers played jitterbug music and even Dad Benson got tipsy. Late in the evening, he almost fell on Frank and Maria, who had scootched down behind a divan and were necking like a house afire. He gazed down at Maria, her top three buttons unbuttoned and Frank in a lather, and cried: “Good! Go to it! Stolen pleasures are the sustenance of life!” They dressed immediately.

  It was 2 a.m. when Mr. Odom dropped them off at Maria’s boarding house. “You go on,” Frank told him. “I’ll catch up.” He guided her to the
front door, and she stopped and put her arms around him and looked sleepily up at him. “What do you dream about?” she asked.

  “You.”

  “Liar.” She put her head on his shoulder. “I have such a good time in dreams. We sit around and laugh and eat plates and plates of spaghetti. I don’t know any of the people but we have a wonderful time, and they understand me completely and they don’t mind a bit.”

  “Can I come up with you?”

  She kissed him. “I’m glad you want to,” she said. “Good night.”

  It was a big week. Vince Upton said he wanted to quit Up in a Balloon and Ray talked him out of it. “But I only meant to work here for a summer,” said Vince. “That was twenty years ago. I wanted to earn a few bucks and take Sheridan to Mexico.” He turned to Frank. “Twenty years I’ve been riding around in the damn balloon, Frank, and I’ve never been anywhere.” Ray walked to the window, looked at the Foshay Tower, and gave him the Speech. Frank had heard it six times before. These are hard times. Radio’s in trouble. We’re a family. We have to hold the ship together. We need you. It’s your decision but remember that it affects each one of us. People here look up to you. I know it’s hard. But if you give up, it makes it that much harder for the rest of us to keep on going. Vince stayed.

  Ray bought a television the next day. He saw it in a store window on Harmon Place as he walked to work. His doctor was making him walk and Ray was trying to avoid it. “There is nothing between here and there that I want to see,” he said, but then he came upon a crowd peering into the store window. General Television & Tires said the sign. There were six screens inside, and he stopped and watched. One screen showed the head of a blonde woman talking, then a chimpanzee drinking coffee, then a man pointing to a chart, then a car crashing into a wall, and the other five screens showed the crowd on the sidewalk. An immense camera on a tripod took the picture. A dozen people stood in close and watched themselves on the screen and another thirty squeezed in and looked over their shoulders. There was no microphone and nobody said a word. Ray went in and bought one from an old coot in a red checked suit. “You’re lucky, that’s the last one on the floor,” he said. “We’ll see about that. Have it sent to my office,” said Ray.

  The television was as big as an icebox and the screen was the size of a dessert plate. They trundled it in and set it against the window and pulled the shade. A pinpoint of light appeared in the center of the screen, which a minute later blew up into a fuzzy picture, a man behind a desk talking, but Ray couldn’t get sound. He turned the volume all the way up and only got a loud hum. “Here, make this work,” he said to Frank.

  Roy Jr. was there and Ethel Glen and Uncle Art, and Dad Benson came in, and some people hung back in the doorway, as if the thing might explode. Frank swivelled the antenna and turned a knob that made the picture flip over and over, and he made it go black and then bleached white. Then he turned the channel knob a notch and BLAAAAAAUGHHH—the thing blared so loud he jumped and the people in the door ducked away. He turned it down. “There,” he said. “Just a matter of adjusting it.”

  Ray sat behind his desk and Roy Jr. perched on the desk, his arms folded, and Art and Dad took the couch and Ethel leaned against the wall, then sat on the floor, and the people in the doorway edged into the room, a few and then more and then about ten. Everyone was quiet. The man on the screen was reading the news, apparently. He looked up as he finished each sentence. He was young, wore a dark sportcoat, had a crewcut and horn-rimmed glasses, and once in awhile he glanced off to his right, nervously, as if someone were holding a gun on him. There was a clock on the wall behind him and a plant on the desk. It looked to be dead.

  The news seemed to be about Truman and the Republicans in Congress and a steel strike and the crash of an Eastern Airlines plane in Washington, the President embroiled, people had been killed, but nothing in the news was half as interesting as the young man, not that he was interesting but that he was on television, and that was fascinating. Once he licked his lips, and Ray said, “Look. He’s nervous.” He licked them again.

  His script lay on the desk and he took off the pages one by one with his right hand and then, suddenly, for no perceptible reason, he used his left. His eyes appeared dead: when he looked into the camera, he didn’t look all the way in. When he came to the end and looked up and wished everyone a good day and smiled a grim smile, it was a little disappointing. It would’ve been something if he’d knocked the plant off the table, Frank thought.

  A commercial for Chrysler was next, and it was good —a man in a tux walking from car to shining car and by each car a beautiful woman stood, in an evening gown with long white gloves, and she stroked the car a long loving caress and smiled a sexy smile as she stepped back and gestured down toward its underside. It would’ve been something if her dress had fallen off but you didn’t really need it to, she was all right with it on. Another commercial, for a headache powder, and then a puppet show, a pig and a goose and a horse, and behind the backdrop, a man doing squeaky voices. “Oh boy!” cried the pig. “Heyyyyy!” whinnied the horse. The goose bit them both and they bit back. Then a clown came on and scolded the goose. “What do you say, boys and girls?” he cried. “Should we spank Goosey-Loosey?” There were forty children packed into a little grandstand and they looked wild, demented, they screamed “Yaaaaaay” so loud you could see their tonsils. They punched each other and jumped up and down and waved like maniacs when the camera came at them. Ray went out for a cup of coffee and when he came back, a western was on. “Turn it up,” he said.

  A posse rode through the woods and along the river, a long line of riders snaking through the trees. A lone rider raced far ahead, a man in a fringed buckskin jacket who kept looking over his shoulder and urging his horse on—but did not whip him or pull out his six-gun—just rode hell-for-leather and then stood in the saddle and leaped for a tree branch and hauled himself up into the foliage a moment before the posse swept beneath him. Then he jumped down, whistled, and his horse trotted out of the underbrush. He mounted and rode back toward town. There, at that moment, four masked men were tying a struggling woman to a chair. A gag was in her mouth but she tore it out and yelled “Lemme go!” The leader of the four laughed a rich, evil laugh. “Lucky’ll be here, he’s on his way, you just wait and see!” she said, fists clenched, fighting them off for a moment. The leader chortled. “Lucky cain’t come. Lucky’s goin’ to a necktie party,” he said. “And he’s the honored guest!” The four of them laughed as if it were the funniest joke they’d ever heard in their lives. She slipped from their grasp and tore into the next room and barred the door. Lucky came galloping hard along the river, bent low, his head against the outstretched neck of the big palomino. They hit the river full-speed and disappeared in the plume of water and bounded up the other shore and galloped away into the trees. The girl locked the door. The leader of the four stepped back and drew his revolver and blasted the lock.

  “Have you seen Dad?” asked Dale Snelling in the doorway. “It’s noon. We’re starting the theme.” Dad leaped up off the couch and careened off down the hall. Ray waved toward the radio—Frank switched it on—the voice of Reed saying, “. . . by Milton, King Seeds and as we join them today, the family is sitting around the kitchen table where Jo is fixing lunch . . .” and a soft clinking of utensils and Faith saying, “Well, I wonder where he is.”

  Up in Moorhead, Roy had looked at television too. He wrote to Ray: “Television offers the aural quality of a telephone and the video quality of a very poor snapshot, and to produce this requires an immense and unwieldy technologic apparatus, the equivalent of the brontosaurus. It will fall of its own weight. It simply will not work. It corrupts everything it touches, makes it flat and dull and empty. It is less than photography and less than radio and it combines the two to make something that is nothing but a minus. It is novelty, and it has its day, but when radio returns, when it comes for the second time, television will go the way of Smell-o-Rama. Perhaps it will have some
use in hatcheries.”

  He is dead wrong, thought Frank when Ray showed him the letter, but Ray didn’t ask him for an opinion, Ray wanted him to do a favor. “It’s about my sister Lottie,” he said. “You know. Lily Dale. It’s her birthday. Buy her something.”

  Frank knew Lily Dale but not that she was Ray’s sister Lottie. He only knew that when her fans showed up to visit with her, he had to make up excuses why they couldn’t. She brought sunshine into their day and they wrote her faithfully and told her how wonderful her singing was, that when they heard her theme song, “Just a Little Street Where Old Friends Meet,” they immediately started to feel cheerful, so they wanted to see her, of course, her oldest, dearest fans.

  No, she was not able to visit. She was at the hairdresser, she was ill, she had gone shopping, she was resting. Oh, they said. Well, tell her hello.

  Lily was young and lovely, coquettish, a true romantic, one of those gloriously cheerful young women who fly through life untouched by sorrow or dismay, but Lottie was fifty-four years old, big and squat, riding in a wheelchair, her face dark and bloated, her eyes black slits, her hair like wisps of moss. Cheerfulness was all she had left in the world. “Oh, don’t look at me!” she cried to Frank, the first time he was assigned to help haul her upstairs. “I haven’t done my hair or anything. Oh, you dear boy —what’s your name? Frank White? Oh, I’ll remember it. I’ll remember it forever. It has the ring of true nobility. Oh, be true to me, Frank.” “Is she crippled?” he asked Gene later. “Polio,” he said. “And weak ankles. One o’ these days, we’ll have to winch her in through the third-floor window.”