• • •
I said, “Right after you teach me about gun safety, I’ll call up the Times and inform them that you are taking a well-deserved sabbatical in Weehawken and that you’ve agreed to let the staff of The New Yorker elect a new editor.”
“Hey. I appreciate your interest, Keillor. All that you know about publishing would about fit in a cockroach’s left nostril, but never mind. Come this way and let me show you how to wrest a forty-five revolver away from a crazed attacker.”
He grabbed my sleeve and started to pull me toward the Oak Room. He was pretty riled and that was my plan, insofar as I had one, to infuriate him until he was frothing at the mouth and pissing his pants and then—do something sudden and violent and unexpected like shoving my forefinger in his eye socket. Or tripping him. Or maybe a sharp blow to the nose with the heel of the hand, driving the nasal bone into the frontal lobe and causing extreme disorientation and then death. I had a number of possibilities in mind.
He towed me into the Oak Room and pulled out his pistol and aimed it at the ceiling and said, “The first lesson in how to deal with a guy who is stronger than you and smarter than you and who is just about to blow a big hole in your ear is not to let yourself be drawn into the type of situation where it’s you and him alone in a room with no other people, okay? That’s the thing you want to avoid.”
“Got it,” I said.
“Number two: Don’t attempt to distract him with a sudden move or coughing fit or that old trick of looking over his shoulder and saying, ‘Hi, Jim!’—that works in cartoons, it doesn’t work in real life.
“Number three: Don’t have illusions about your own strength. Some guys, from having watched Alan Ladd movies, get the idea that they could hurl themselves at somebody and knock him to the floor. In your case, this just fucking ain’t gonna happen. It would be like a parakeet hurling itself at a late-model Chevrolet. Strictly unproductive in the larger scheme of things.”
He was about to get to number four when a man walks in with a big Leica around his neck and says, “Is this the room where Dorothy Parker and Benchley and Woollcott and George Kaufman and Marc Connelly and Harpo Marx and Edna Ferber and their friends used to gather for the famous Algonquin Round Table? Which table was that, exactly? I’ve read so much about them and their witty bon mots and how much Harold Ross admired them but it was he, the roughneck from Colorado, who started The New Yorker and those great wits are largely forgotten today.”
And Tony yells, “Who gives a fuck! Get your ass out of here or I’ll blow it off you one cheek at a time.”
The guy says, “I’m sorry, but are you talking to me?”
“Get your ass out of here, I said.”
“We came all the way from Minnesota to see the Round Table. Is that a problem? Is now not a good time?”
Tony yells, “Get the hell out!”
“I’m sorry,” the guy says. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I just came in to take a picture. We’re New Yorker readers, going back years and years. My gosh, I grew up with the magazine. A big fan of A. J. Liebling and Wolcott Gibbs and Frank Sullivan. And I loved Benchley. And all of them.” And then he recognized me. “Aren’t you an author yourself?” he said.
“Yes, I’m Garrison Keillor,” I said. “I’m from Minnesota as well.”
“Right,” he said. “You used to do that radio show. What was it called? We used to listen to it sometimes.” He turned to ask his wife, but she was gone.
Tony held up the gun so the guy could see it. “This ain’t some book club or discussion group you walked into, this is a gangland-style execution. This is something you definitely don’t want to be a witness to because if you are, I would need to blow you away, too. You hear me?”
“I loved when you used to tell stories about that little town, Lake Wabasso or whatever it was,” the guy said. “I grew up on a farm near Morris. You ever get out that way?”
“Not as often as I’d like. I wish I were there right now.”
Tony is miffed. He stamps his foot.
“Hey,” he says. “You ever hear of the fucking Mafia?”
The guy said he had seen The Godfather, the first one, but thought the book was better.
“Brando was good and Duvall, but the rest of it was a piece of crap,” says Tony. “Only guy who can write about that stuff is Elmore Leonard.”
“Is he an actor?”
“Elmore Leonard?” Tony looks at me. “I cannot believe this yahoo never heard of Elmore Leonard.”
“Does he write for The New Yorker?” the guy said.
“You never heard of Elmore Leonard? You’re bullshitting me.”
Tony was saying something in Italian that sounded like a curse for when somebody spits in your mother’s tomato sauce. Either that, or a recipe for ground glass. And he was poking the gun in the guy’s ribs.
“Hey,” the guy said. “I can take a hint. Don’t get all hot and bothered. I can come back another time. We’re here for the whole week. I apologize for the trouble. Have a nice day, okay?”
And that was when I killed Tony, when the man said, “Have a nice day, okay?” Tony sort of lost control of himself at that point. He threw his head back and snarled and his arm twitched, and I grabbed the wrist of his gun hand and he yanked with all his strength and in the process pulled the gun down and shot himself in the forehead. The room goes boom and Tony falls down like a load of fresh sod and the guy says, “What happened to him?”
I said, “He tripped on a wrinkle in the carpet. It happens all the time.”
“Is he all right?”
“He’s better than he’s been in a long time. He’s resting now. Let’s tiptoe out and leave him to his thoughts.”
And Tony opens one red eye and says, “You’ll never write for my magazine again, Mr. Keillor.”
I tried to think of a witty retort—Oh? Really? Who died and made you editor?—and his head rolled to one side and he was out of here, he’d left the building. A powerful publishing tycoon murdered by a second-rate writer. Accidental, in a way, but in another way, quite deliberate. I certainly had homicide in mind when I entered the Algonquin, but the manner in which it happened was unintended so probably it’d be second- or third-degree manslaughter. My defense lawyer would argue that Tony, in resisting my attempt to disarm him, had caused his own demise, and the jury would deliberate for ten minutes and I’d go scot-free and soon thereafter would be waylaid by a van full of shooters and my bullet-riddled body lie on Ninetieth Street, with punctured containers of chicken salad and tabouli strewn from hell to breakfast.
“Should we call an ambulance?” the guy says.
“The hotel will take care of it.”
I leaned down and opened Tony’s jacket and got a roll of bills out of his breast pocket. No sense leaving it for the cops. “Just making sure he’s got cab money,” I say to the guy. I’d never seen ten-thousand-dollar bills before. I didn’t know Reagan’s picture was on them. “I sure never expected something like this,” the guy says to his wife, and then remembered she wasn’t there, so he went to look for her.
The money came to $128,656. I stuck it in my pocket and thought to myself, This whole thing would make a good story, except I’d change it and make the murder more deliberate. I’d have the writer struggle with the tycoon and trip him and the tycoon’s noggin would bonk the leg of the sideboard and the tycoon’s eyes glaze and the writer snatch up the pistol and kill him. Or hold him until the cops arrive. Or maybe kill him, but with a fork. And I wouldn’t have me be a writer. Maybe a choreographer or composer. A more lethal line of work.
I walked out through the lobby. A bellman had locked the front door and pulled the drapes, and waiters had put up partitions to shield the brunch crowd in the Rose Room. A man in a black suit got off the elevator pushing a wheelbarrow. He went in and got Tony and covered him with a tablecloth and wheeled him out to the curb
and laid him in the backseat of a taxi and gave the cabbie some bills and away he went. The janitor tore up the carpet Tony died on and laid a black rug there and set a table on the rug. The place was back in business in ten minutes. That’s New York for you. When we die, we leave a hole behind that it takes them less than half an hour to fill. I turned left on Forty-fourth Street past the man with the sign FORMER NEW YORKER WRITER DOWN ON LUCK and I dropped forty dollars in his lap.
I felt good. While I as a Christian am opposed to homicide, nonetheless the death of Tony Crossandotti was for the good of journalism. The New Yorker would live on, thanks to me. But I would have to leave New York. Publishing tycoons would be gunning for me after I offed one of their own and I’d be safer in St. Paul because New Yorkers are not sure exactly where it is. They keep getting it mixed up with Omaha.
• • •
So R.I.P. Tony Crossandotti. Goodbye to Manhattan and 25 West Forty-third. Goodbye, Rainbow Room and Tower Records and H&H Bagels and Scribner’s beautiful bookstore on Fifth Avenue with the wrought-iron railing around the balcony. Goodbye to all that. I return to Minnesota, home of humorous, charitable, modest, soft-spoken people. A state on the same latitude as Italy, with the same slant of light that moved Raphael and Michelangelo illuminating our trees in the afternoon. A state of passionate hockey teams and world-class choirs where, God willing, I shall gain some clarity and lead a happy, productive life.
9.
SNOWMAN
I used to live across the street from a triangular park in St. Paul which featured a statue of Nathan Hale, his hands tied behind his back, about to be hung by the British for spying on assignment from General Washington. Every winter, the Parks Department hung strings of hundreds of white Christmas lights from tree to tree, and flooded the park to make a skating rink, and Mr. Hale appeared to be not a martyr for the Revolution, but the Spirit of Christmas Present. Our neighbors made a snowman on a snowbank facing our house and I looked at him as he looked at us and I put him into a story before he got diminished by mild weather.
Once there was a snowman who stood in a park in St. Paul in front of a statue of Nathan Hale. The park was on a quiet street where the streetlights lit up soon after five and Christmas lights flickered in the front windows of the big brick houses. He was tall and had nice strong shoulders. He worried that his head might fall off. It felt unsteady sometimes. And then one day a boy accidentally skied into him and knocked his head off and set it back on his shoulders but at a different angle so instead of looking across the street he was looking at the trunk of a tree and the front yard of a green stucco house where a person who seemed to be made of snow stood perfectly still in the yard. She said good morning. “I was waiting for you to look at me,” she said.
She was beautiful, shining, shimmering.
He was already familiar with the tree, a black walnut named Joanne, who had been nattering at him for months, criticizing his posture, laughing when dogs peed on him. She told him that the end was imminent, that soon he would melt and become part of her and she would grow longer limbs so as to caress Ingvar, the Norway pine who stood next to her. “You are precipitation, baby. The purpose of your life is to give me a big drink of water,” she said. “You’re not the bluebird of happiness, you’re not the spirit of Christmas past, so don’t give yourself airs. You’re nothing but snow. So get over yourself.”
The snowman thought there should be more to life than simply melting. He had plenty of time to think and now, thanks to the boy, he had a fresh perspective. Until now, he’d been looking at the row of lighted houses and thinking how cheerful it would be to live inside a house until Joanne informed him that the houses were heated and he would die in there and so would she—“They chop trees into little pieces to fit them into a house. My daddy went like that. Oh, it looks very pleasant from a distance. But it would kill you. Remember that.” But now he looked at the Snow Queen, who stood fifteen feet away, only a sidewalk between them. It was she who, after Joanne said he was “nothing but snow”—she, the Queen, who whispered, Look up in the sky, that’s where we come from, we’re made of stardust. And when our life on earth is over, we’ll rise up into the sky and become clouds and be even more beautiful than you are now.
“O goddess of East Thirty-eighth Street light, glimmering with evanescent desire and invisible emanations of licorice and languish and cinnamon and sycamore,” he said to the Queen. (His thoughts had been a little disconnected since his head got knocked off.) “O you and thou and we and thee! O there is so much more to this world than we will ever ever know.”
Joanne chortled in her low woody voice. “You just wait.”
• • •
Water dripped from the trees sometimes. He noticed kids walking around in shirts and jeans, no jackets. A man walked by who was all excited about a trip to Phoenix to visit his girlfriend LaVonne and yet the snowman could see that in another two days the man would walk into the Phoenix terminal and collapse onto the marble floor and die of a cerebral hemorrhage without ever feeling the warmth of the desert. He told the Snow Queen and she said, “You and I are made of millions of unique crystals and we pick up what’s in the air around us—we can feel what people are thinking sometimes as they walk by.”
“Why did the creator give a brain to someone who can’t walk or even move his head and look around and see the world?”
Joanne said, “Here she comes. Ask her.”
A girl in a pink parka and furry cap came into view and stood at the curb by Nathan Hale, apparently waiting for a ride.
“She and her dad made you a few days before Christmas,” said Joanne.
The snowman didn’t know what a dad was, nor Christmas, for that matter, but he said nothing, not wanting to display his ignorance.
“They made you in their own image,” said the Queen. “Winter is lonely for them and it gives them pleasure to see you here.”
“But I have a brain and the power of speech!” cried the snowman. “What is speech for if not to discuss things and make rational choices?”
Joanne laughed. “You ever hear them talk?? It’s nothing but noise. The rustling of my leaves makes more sense than all their talk. What matters is the sun, and rain, and Ingvar. When he touches the tips of my leaves, he thrills me with happiness.”
Cars passed, their tires whispering on the snowy street, and the girl in the pink parka stood at the curb, texting on her cell phone. When she pressed SEND, it gave the snowman tremors and he could feel her message pass through him.
WHERE R U?????
And then: R U MAD AT ME??
He could feel what she felt, her being alone on a cold day and expecting someone to come who did not come and did not come, and then her fear that she had offended the Great U and was unworthy and would now be punished by abandonment.
R U THERE?
“What can we do?” he cried, and the Queen said, “We can only be here for her and feel what she feels.”
The girl was crying. He could almost taste the salt of her tears.
I LOVE U. PLEASE TEXT ME.
She turned toward the snowman and her face was red and rubbery and tears ran down her cheeks. And then he felt tears on his own face. Sharp rays of sunshine through the branches of Joanne. He was starting to melt.
The girl in pink walked away. She looked at the snowman but said nothing. He heard a door slam. A car rolled up a few minutes later. A boy looked out the window. A girl drove the car and three girls sat in the back, all of them laughing and singing. He turned to the driver and said, “Oh well, never mind,” and the car drove away.
• • •
The next day the snowman felt smaller. Small and wet. People walked by whistling and commenting on the nice weather. They were all happy and the snowman felt nauseous.
“You doing okay?” said the Snow Queen.
“My head feels like it’s just about to slide off my shoulders.�
��
“You look good. And I have a feeling we’re going to get a cold snap.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You have to have faith,” said the Queen.
It was a miserable day. Snow was melting in the street and cars went by and splashed sheets of water onto the snowman and he got smaller and smaller and grayer and sadder.
Joanne was singing.
“Snow’s gotta melt,
Water will flow.
I feel my branches
Starting to grow.”
And then his head slid off his shoulders. He could feel it going and there was nothing he could do. It fell on the ground and there he was looking up at the sky. He watched it get dark and he watched the stars come out. A red light crossed the sky and the stars got brighter and brighter. All he could see was the stars and that was his last look and in the morning he was not there, just a park and green grass, and the girl, who had changed from a pink parka to a blue jacket with a big S, walked by in a hurry to get somewhere.
The author looking authorly in 1990, wearing a three-piece suit and big horn-rims, flashing a warm authorial smile, which now looks faintly smug to me. He was earning good money at the time and felt that he had it all figured out, and if the guy on page 160 had run into this fellow, he would've sneered at him as a sell-out. I contain both of these men and have to endure their bickering on a daily basis.
IV
LIFE’S LITTLE DAY
Comedy is a fundamental part of ordinary civility and an antidote to anger, the screaming meemies on the radio, the furious motorists on the freeway, the drunks in the bar railing against the TV screen. A man like me who has escaped disaster by the skin of his teeth on a few occasions comes away with a finer appreciation of the ordinary pleasures, of steam rooms, steak cooked rare, rhubarb pie, a cappella gospel singing by bluegrass bands like Del McCoury’s or Doyle Lawson’s, lying in a lower berth on a night train clipping along through little towns, talking to tall women, watching baseball in June, jumping into a cold swimming pool, St. Paul the morning after a snowstorm, standing in the middle of a frozen lake late at night, napping in a hammock between two trees, telling jokes. In Lake Wobegon on a cold rainy day, you’ll find farmers, carpenters, painters, roofers, and backhoe operators in the Sidetrack Tap, enjoying lunch and a beer, telling jokes. Ole on his deathbed says to Lena, “Forty-eight years we’ve been married. You’ve stuck with me through it all. The tornado that blew the house down, the lousy crops, the year all the pigs died, my bankruptcy, my heart attack, the night the lightning struck and burned down the house, and now liver cancer. And you know what? I’m starting to think that you’re bad luck.” If you were new in town, this is where you might come to get a little acceptance. If you sat on the periphery of a circle of people telling jokes and you listened appreciatively and laughed appropriately and didn’t thrust yourself into the group but waited for a lull and then offered your joke (So—Ole is on his deathbed and he whispers to Lena, “Lena, is everyone here?” Lena says, “Yes, Ole, we’re all here, Ole Jr. and Christina, Svend, Solveig, your brother Karl, your sister Lottie, your cousin Hjalmar, we’re all here, Ole.” Ole said, “If you’re all here, why are the lights on in the living room?”) and if it is at least somewhat fresh and if you tell it well and don’t flounder around in the setup and if you drop the punch line gracefully, you’ll be welcomed here. It is a skill, like hammering a nail. If you teach your children to tell jokes, you’ve given them a skill that’ll be useful in all sorts of situations. You can go your whole life and never need mathematics for a minute. So—Ole lay dying and he smelled Lena’s rhubarb pie and it was so good, he crawled down the stairs to the kitchen and reached up on the counter to get a bite, and she slapped his hand, and she said, “That’s for the funeral, leave it alone.”
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