The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  “That’s a lot of balloon juice,” said Zeus. “If I weren’t going home tomorrow, I’d give a sermon and tell them to go home and hump like bunnies.” He caught a look at himself in a long mirror: a powerful, handsome, tanned fellow in a white collar. Not bad.

  “You sure you want to leave tomorrow?” asked the dog.

  “That’s the deal I made with Victor. Didn’t he tell you?”

  “You couldn’t stay until Monday? This town needs shaking up. I always wanted to do it and didn’t know how, and now you could preach on Sunday and it’d be a wonderful experience for all of us.”

  “You’re a fool,” Zeus said. “This is not a long-term problem, and the answer to it is not the willingness to accept change. You need heart, but you’re Lutherans, and you go along with things. We know this from history. You’re in danger and months will pass and it’ll get worse, but you won’t change your minds. You’ll sit and wait. Lutherans are fifteen percent faith and eighty-five percent loyalty. They are nobody to lead a revolt. Your country is coming apart.”

  The dog looked up at the god with tears in his brown eyes. “Please tell my people,” he whispered.

  “Tell them yourself.”

  “They won’t believe me.”

  “Good for them. Neither do I.”

  “Love me,” Diane told Zeus that night in bed. “Forget yourself. Forget that we’re Lutheran. Hurl your body off the cliff into the dark abyss of wild, mindless, passionate love.” But he was too tired. He couldn’t find the cliff. He seemed to be on a prairie.

  XII. THE LOVER LEAVES, THE HUSBAND RETURNS

  In the morning, he hauled himself out of bed and dressed in a brown suit and white shirt. He peered into the closet. “These your only ties?” he asked the dog. The dog nodded.

  Zeus glanced out the bedroom window to the east, to a beech tree by the garage, where a figure with waxen wings was sitting on a low limb. He said, silently, “Be with you in one minute.” He limped into the kitchen and found Diane in the breakfast nook, eating bran flakes and reading an article in the Sunday paper about a couple who are able to spend four days a week in their country home now that they have a fax machine. He brushed her cheek with his lips and whispered, “O you woman, farewell, you sweet, sexy Lutheran love of my life,” and jumped out of Wes and into the dog, loped out the back door, and climbed into Victor’s car.

  “She’ll be glad to hear you’re coming,” said Victor. “She misses you. I’m sorry you’ll have to make the return flight in a small cage, doped on a heavy depressant, and be quarantined for sixty days in Athens, both July and August, but after that, things should start to get better for you.”

  XIII. HOW THE HUSBAND SAW IT

  At eleven o’clock, having spent the previous two hours tangled in the sheets with his amazing wife, Wes stood in the pulpit and grinned. The church was almost half full, not bad for July, and the congregation seemed glad to see him. “First of all, Diane and I want to thank you for the magnificent gift of the trip to Greece, which will be a permanent memory, a token of your generosity and love,” he said. “A tremendous thing happened on the trip that I want to share with you this morning. For the past week, I have lived in the body of a dog while an ancient god lived with Diane and tried to seduce her.” He didn’t expect the congregation to welcome this news, but he was unprepared for their stony looks: they glared at him as if he were a criminal. They cried out, “Get down out of that pulpit, you filth, you!”

  “Why are you so hostile?” he said.

  Why are you so hostile? The lamp swayed as the ship rolled, and Diane said, “Why so hostile? Why? You want to know why I’m hostile? Is that what you’re asking? About hostility? My hostility to you? Okay. I’ll answer your question. Why I’m hostile—right? Me. Hostile. I’ll tell you why. Why are you smiling?”

  He was smiling, of course, because it was a week ago—and they were still in Greece, the big fight was still on, and God had kindly allowed him one more try. He could remember exactly the horrible words he’d said the first time, and this time he did not have to say them and become a dog. He was able to swallow the 1949 wine, and think, and say, “The sight of you fills me with tender affection and a sweet longing to be flat on my back in a dark, locked room with you naked, lying on top, kissing me, and me naked, too.”

  So they did, and in the morning the boat docked at Patmos, and they went up to the monastery and walked through the narrow twisting streets of the village, looking for a restaurant someone had told them about that served great lamb.

  XIV. WHAT THE LOVER LEARNED

  The lawyer and the dog rode to the airport in the limousine, and somewhere along the way Zeus signed a document that gave Hera half his power and promised absolute fidelity. “Absolute?” he woofed. “You mean ‘total’ in the sense of bottom line, right? A sort of basic faithfulness? Fidelity in principle? Isn’t that what you mean here? The spirit of fidelity?”

  “I mean pure,” the lawyer said.

  Zeus signed. The lawyer tossed him a small, dry biscuit. Zeus wolfed it down and barked. In the back of his mind, he thought maybe he’d find a brilliant lawyer to argue that the paw print wasn’t a valid signature. He thought about a twenty-four-ounce T-bone steak, and he wasn’t sure he’d get that either.

  6.

  AL DENNY

  My Minnesota friends are stoics and skeptics, unlikely to attend megachurches to hear men with big hair and big teeth preach the gospel of prosperity or invest in a scheme to earn double-digit profits through tiny fluctuations in currency markets. They would not pay $500 to attend a one-day seminar, “Why Not Be Fabulous?” nor would they be persuaded to send away for a food additive guaranteed to make you lose 15 pounds a month, no exercise, no special diet. But of course I don’t know this for a fact. They may harbor secret desires for transformation that I am unaware of. Meanwhile, I sympathize with the hustlers and ballyhoo artists who sell the self-help books and the inspirational seminars and the secret additives. It’s no bed of roses, selling. All those naysayers looking at you, their gimlet eyes, their hard mouths.

  So much dead wood and garbage in our lives, phoniness, grandstanding, humbuggery: How to rid ourselves of it and move on to richer, deeper things? How to shuck these lures and snares and give the delicate beauty within us space in which to grow and bloom? How to be more the good person we set out to be when we were nineteen instead of this dull greedy old weasel snarfing all the food on the plate who we turned into instead?

  These questions began to bear down on me a few years ago, when I was in San Francisco to participate in a conference on Birthing Our Self-Affirmation of Wellness and I enjoyed a beautiful massage from a holist named Sha-tsi in a white caftan who completely emptied my being of all havingness (just as she said she would) and afterward my billfold was gone. It wasn’t in my briefcase or in my overcoat or my pants.

  And there was no name tag on my garment bag or my carry-on.

  A great massage, but I could not recall my home telephone number or even remember where I lived.

  Suddenly I recalled Thoreau’s advice, “Simplify, simplify.” So I called my agent, Larry. “Where am I from?” I asked. He wasn’t sure either. Ohio, he thought. I looked at a map of Ohio. Nothing rang a bell. I had been on the road for three years since I wrote Being the Person You Are, and gradually Mona and I had lost touch. “How many children do I have, Larry?” I asked. He thought three. Three sounded right. Mona had been the primary caregiver in the family, so I wasn’t sure. Three daughters, he thought, but I thought I remembered a boy.

  Arnie?

  I never thought this would ever happen to me. Being the Person You Are was short, thirty thousand words, and nobody at Chester White Publishing thought the book would cut much lumber in the self-esteem field up against giants like Wayne Dyer and Leo Buscaglia, but it went out and it sold five million copies or so in more than eleven languages and seventeen dialects.

>   Not bad for a Methodist minister who, in fifteen years of Sunday sermons, never had anyone come up to him afterward and request a copy.

  So many people have told me that Being the Person You Are completely changed their lives, and others said they have had their lives changed partially.

  Well, it changed mine, too. The book was about taking charge of your life and tapping into your deep inner chakras and power sources, but the success of the book was like a flash flood, and I floated away like a loose canoe. I ballooned from 180 to 238 pounds and chewed my fingernails and my hair got thin and three months later there I was, a big, lumbering galoot with bleeding cuticles clambering in and out of limos and adjusting his toupee, and though I could afford a good one, made of Native American hair, not nylon, still I felt stressed, jumpy, owly, and the weight gain affected my balance so I was liable at any time to topple over into a heap.

  I fell on a woman in the lobby of the Four Seasons Clift hotel in San Francisco. She was small and delicate, Japanese, visiting our country perhaps for the first time, garnering impressions, and suddenly a big load of blubber lands in her lap. I apologized profusely but she thought I was hitting on her, I think, and went away. I fell across the head table on the dais at the Bobist Institute in Santa Fe, tumbled into the tofu salad, arms and legs akimbo. People applauded, thinking that I had done it to illustrate a bold point that would be clearer to them later.

  Doctors puzzled over my dizziness. An acupuncturist put needles in my knuckles, an herbalist made a saffron sachet to hang around my neck. One morning, I woke up in Dayton, Ohio, fully dressed, sprawled across a hotel bed, my pants moist from creamy desserts stuffed in my pockets. I was registered there under the name Dr. Santana Mens, and a pink name tag with the Mens name on it was gummed to my breast pocket. It was a name tag from a large bookstore in a nearby mall, and I assumed I was supposed to go and autograph books, but when I called, they said that I had been there a week ago.

  Was Dayton, Ohio, my home? Had some homing instinct brought me there, some unconscious imprint of flight schedules? There was no Al Denny in the phone book. Had Mona gone back to being a Thompson?

  “You’ve got to get your life on track, Al,” I thought, and Larry had provided a week’s break on the lecture tour, so I hunkered down in the Mayfair Hotel in Chicago and wrote Rebirthing the Me You Used to Be, and that sucker sold fourteen million copies—in fact, it’s still selling—in thirty languages, including a New Guinea tribal dialect in which my book was the first written literature. Through an interpreter, the chief, a man named Wallace Boogada, invited me to come and be their deity. They had been Christianized by Army chaplains during World War II, but God had disappointed them and they wanted to try me.

  Evidently, Rebirthing rang the wind chimes of a lot of folks, and it certainly dinged my doorbell too. I thought, “Al, you have got to simplify your life now.” One day, I met Larry for lunch and noticed his tie, deep blue with a majestic stag elk standing on high rocks as ducks wing across an autumn sky and an Indian paddles a canoe across a broad pine-rimmed lake—“Larry,” I said, “I’m taking the loot and buying a mountain and building a log lodge on top of it and moving up there with nothing but dry clothes and a notepad and some coffee beans and warm bedding and a scout knife. Doggone it. And I want an elk. And a canoe.”

  “Great,” he said. “I’ll take care of that, while you finish up the lecture tour.”

  I told him I desperately needed to get out into nature and put my priorities in order, but he had put together a great package, “An Evening with Dr. Al Denny,” thirty lectures in twelve cities, at $90,000 per crack, and it was too late to back out, so I went—BIG SUCCESS, standing room only, hockey arenas packed with quiet people in meaningful T-shirts, people with interesting hair, there were press conferences and blizzards of questions about polarity and rebirthing and chrysalis awareness and re-aging and the ancient Inca secrets channeled through a Cleveland man now known as El Hugo, and three-hour autographing sessions and people fawning over my every word—I’d say, “Hi, how are you?” and they would say, “Yes! Of course! How are you! It’s not the whereness or the whyness or the whoness of the You, it’s how! How!”

  A month later, the tour ended in Tallahassee, and Larry sent a Learjet to take me to the mountain. Except it wasn’t a mountain, it was more like a plateau, and it was in Iowa. A vast complex of buildings he had bought from the Maharishi for $200 million. He drove me around fast in the dark on a golf cart, pointing out a dormitory here and a dormitory there, a gymnasium that would be our TV studio, a barn where the llamas would be housed.

  “Llamas?”

  “A very peaceful creature. You’ll love them. They’ll be in the petting park, with the deer,” he said. “People will come, live here at the resort, go to the spa, take your courses at the study center, be rebirthed, pet the llamas, visit you in your home, and have a tremendous two weeks. We have more than two thousand reservations for June already. You’re hot, Al. People want to be near you.”

  All the buildings looked the same to me, three-story light brown brick things with narrow windows and flat roofs, like nursing homes or an office park. The gymnasium had a thirty-foot satellite dish in back of it.

  “For your cable show,” he explained, parking the cart, and we opened the big steel doors and there was the studio, three hundred feet long, bleachers for two thousand, six cameras on dollies, a set with a long white couch and fake windows and plants. “State of the art,” he said, proudly.

  So I had to write another book to pay the overhead.

  Coexisting with Your Other Self did not do as well as Rebirthing but it sold five million and had a blue cover with primitive masks on it. It was about using your inner potential to create an outer protective self to guard the secret beautiful you.

  Meanwhile, I moved into my home on the grounds of the Dr. Al Denny Study Center, fully furnished, toothpaste and night-light and wine carafe, throw rugs, accent pieces, all there and ready. Larry took care of it. I seldom left the home due to the disciples lurking in the trees and because I was a little down since losing track of Mona and the children. Mona and I had been married for twenty-four years, and I loved her, but I was never clear on exactly what she did—some sort of teaching, I believe, or investment services—so it was hard to trace her through professional associations. I believed she used to attend meetings now and then in Chicago, but forgot why. I laid low for a while. I watched old movies and slept, and every day Larry drove a van into the garage (attached) and closed the door, I climbed in and lay on the floor, he zoomed out past the disciples and took me to the studio.

  On The Circle of Life with Dr. Al Denny, a half-hour program carried everywhere in America, I sat on the couch in front of the audience and chatted with persons of wisdom such as quilt-makers, for example, and woodcarvers and Southern people and farmers and old blues singers and old ballplayers and old shepherds and Iowans and people over eighty and country doctors and guys named Walt, people you seldom see on TV. Their simple philosophies were deeply moving to me though also confusing.

  They all said that the best things in life are spiritual, and I myself was in a very acquisitive stage of life at that point.

  I owned four Bentleys. I owned paintings. I owned two fine horses, who terrified me. I owned 164 cases of a 1952 Bordeaux that I loved to drink with a particular kind of lobster that was flown in live from the Mindanao archipelago. I kept buying sweaters and loafers and those baggy pants with the fronts that pooch out. I purchased expensive dogs, one after the other, because I kept losing track of them. I’d leave them in stores and places. One was a Dalmatian, and another was a Weimaraner, I think. Somebody said it was, and then it was gone too.

  Once on my show there was a heavyset gal from Mobile named Vernelle Tomahasset who devoted her life to creating art from bread bags and said the most important thing in life is to keep busy—she gave me a little horse made out of nine hundred brea
d bags—and a one-armed accordion man said he felt lucky because he had his health, and the very same day I paid $7,000 for a German-made CD player. Only a hundred like it in the world, and I have one, and Prince Charles has another. It was like that a lot of the time.

  A shepherd came on and said, “Waste not, want not, that’s my motto. Also: There’s such a thing as too much of a good thing.” Meanwhile, I owned three separate houses within ten miles of each other, two on the Study Center grounds, and one in Mason City that I never saw, the remodeling went on and on.

  An old rug-hooker from Omaha said, “Dr. Al, you know it’s true: There’s no summer without winter.”

  I had just purchased a $3.5 million home on a private island off Antigua where I planned to spend December, January, February, March, and the first part of April.

  But before I got to fly down there, a child Autoharp player named Little Ginny came onto the show. She was terminally ill, and Larry had read somewhere that dying children possess preternatural wisdom. She died a few days afterward of a mysterious raging fever. She was an assertive little tyke and she spoke right up in her sickly voice and told you what she thought. She wasn’t whiny or grumpy. When I asked her what her name was, she said, “God gives us new names in heaven, and I want to be a Theresa but right now I’m Ginny.”

  I’ll never forget the hush in the studio when that tiny pale child staggered to the couch in her pure-white dress, lugging the harp, and climbed up, and sat there with an oxygen tube in her nose, her chin on her chest, listing to one side, and strummed “O Dem Golden Slippers” and faintly sang, “I’se goin up de ribbah wheah de golden rainbow shine,” as her relatives collapsed sobbing in the wings. She was white and had learned the song from an old book of spirituals.