It was an enormous tomato, as big as a grapefruit, and it was in October and the tomato had been hit by a hard frost and turned brownish and was liquidy. It was resting on the ground just south of our pumpkin patch, where my sister was searching for a perfect pumpkin for her Halloween party. I slipped my hand under the tomato and scooped it up and observed little white life-forms swimming around very rapidly in figure eights, and I sensed an urgent desire to survive though they did know they were going to die. This is knowledge that even primitive life-forms carry in their cells, but who are we to call them primitive? We who wage war on others who’ve done us no harm. You and I possess the foreknowledge of doom in our brain stems and so do the paramecium and bacillus. I put my cheek against the tomato to offer them warmth and could feel them pushing against the wall, the inmates of the tomato, occupants of the tomato planet, meanwhile my sister was busy preparing for the Halloween party, which she would attend dressed as a queen and I as a bum. I did not mind. When I put on tattered clothes and blacked my face with burnt cork, I felt fulfilled in a way.
So there I was with the tomato nation against my cheek, its citizens silently crying out against the apocalypse, and I thought, How do we know they don’t possess a language, a culture, literature, a religion of their own? And if they do have a religion, then I must be their god. I hummed to the tomato. I thought the vibration might be something they could relate to. My sister turned around and yelled at me to put it down. She was practicing to be somebody’s mother, I suppose. I held the tomato close to me. I was the last comfort to a culture that was coming to an end and they were racing around, putting their affairs in order, knowing the end was near—it was so sad. I sang to them,
Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.
This world is rotten, Lord with me abide.
She stood, hands on her hips, and said, “Put the tomato down. Do you hear me?” I gave her a look that I knew really really irritated her, my patented moronic stare, eyes blank, mouth open, a thin trickle of drool running out of the corner. It drove her nuts. She told me I was disgusting. Well, I knew that. That was the point, wasn’t it. I was an idiot singing a hymn to a rotten tomato. It doesn’t get better than that. She said, “You make me so mad, I could cry,” and she cried and she bent over to pick up a perfect pumpkin and there was her big butt in front of me and I threw the tomato at her. It felt like it was meant to be, that the larvae not suffer but go out with a splash. The reddish brown planet flew through the air, rotating slowly clockwise, and I took off running as fast as I could go—I heard the splat, and the screech—and I ducked under the clothesline with her in hot pursuit yelling, “I am going to wring your neck”—which is not a Christian thing to say—and I dashed through a pile of dead leaves and she caught up with me there and latched on to my shoulder, like a lioness bringing down an eland in a National Geographic special, and I fell and as I did my mother cried out my sister’s name. My sister took her hand off me, but slowly. And she leaned down and said I would be very sorry for what I had done. She said I would go to prison for the rest of my life.
I thought no more of it until thirty years later, after I’d become a big success, I read an interview in Inside Radio.
“He is not the easygoing laidback character he is on the radio,” said a woman who is close to Keillor. “He has been known to throw things. People are afraid to talk, otherwise there’d be a lot more that’d come out that you wouldn’t believe.”
I read that story and realized why PR people send out gallons of Johnnie Walker at Christmas and serve prime-rib sandwiches in hospitality suites and walk up to the sleaziest writer in the room and lay an arm across his shoulders and murmur, “You remind me of that line from William Butler Yeats, ‘Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, / Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds.’ Can I get you a scotch?”
The reporter, a man with watery eyes and forty pounds of old cheeseburgers around his waist, blushes and stares down at his Hush Puppies, and for the next twenty years you will have no problem with him at all. He will go chase the university president (TAX MONEY LAVISHED ON EXECUTIVE SUITE WHILE THE DYING LIE IN DIM ALCOVES AT U HOSPITAL) or snipe at the archbishop (PRELATE FAILS TO ATTEND CRIPPLES’ DINNER FOR THIRD YEAR IN ROW) or haul off and slug the mayor (POLITICIAN DENIES PERSISTENT RUMORS OF PET MOLESTING), and he will write lovely stuff about you:
Everyone in this town knows Garrison Keillor as a wonderful entertainer and devoted father, but I wonder how many of us are aware of those dozens of little unsung deeds he does for the poor and unfortunate every week.
I don’t have a PR guy, but once I did hire someone named Milo to attend rehearsals and yell “All right!” at the end of every song I sang. I was sensitive about my voice and needed affirmation in order to do my best. He yelled, “All right! Far out! Whooo! You sang that one, all right!”
• • •
One thing a PR guy can’t do is resolve your own guilt, and there I was, riding around in limos and residing in a mansion and brooding about that big tomato and the damage it did to my sister, who could never eat tomatoes after that or tomato sauce or even V-8 juice, and thinking about the curse she had put on me. Prison. Steel doors clanging shut. The squeaking of rats and water dripping in the dank sewers below. Prison. Well deserved in my case. My sister has never eaten pizza, never had a BLT.
You would think the Statute of Limitations would have run out on the tomato assault, a juvenile crime, but what they came up with was Conspiracy to Evade Detection. After a show once, a man walked up to me and said, “Is that tomato butt story on the level?” and I, not knowing he was an undercover police officer, said yes. This was in New York. I guess it was a slow day for the NYPD. It was at Carnegie Hall, where I’d done a benefit concert for an audience of elderly nuns who were enjoying the show as they wove simple cotton garments for the poor on tiny hand looms, and the cops hauled me off to the precinct station. “Tell us about the tomato,” they said. “How big was it? Why did you throw it at your sister?”
If only I had told the truth. But I lied over and over. I denied that it had hit her. I said that it slipped out of my hand. I said it was small.
“Deny everything and make them prove it,” said the lawyer my family hired, a skinny guy with dandruff whose degree is from Texas A&M and who mainly does real estate law. So I did. I told 512 separate and distinct lies and the judge gave me a year in the pen for each one. My lawyer said to give up my right to a jury trial. “You look guilty as can be. Furtive. Sweaty.” So I threw myself on the mercy of the court and got 512 years in prison.
• • •
They drive me to LaGuardia for a flight to Minneapolis. I preboard on a conveyor belt that carries me into a special section for miscreants in the rear, where trusties prod us with sharp sticks to make us squeeze in tight on the steel floor of the aircraft. There are a dozen of us, and one guy builds a campfire on the floor and we cook chunks of chicken on clothes hangers, hunkered around the fire, smoking, not talking. What’s there to say? We’re going to prison and we know it. The plane bucks and the fire flickers. Through the tiny window appear the lights of Minneapolis, a big city where I attended church regularly and tried to be a good citizen, but it’s too late to think about that now, or about the neat book reports that received gold stars, the bowline hitch I tied that was shown to other Scouts as a model of how that knot looks when it is perfect—they are immaterial evidence now that I am prison-bound.
The press waits at the gate, a blaze of lights, a thicket of microphones, and my sister—they are interviewing her. She says that she feels no bitterness at all. Her husband, Buck, is smiling. He always thought I thought I had a superior attitude, so this is a sweet moment and he has brought his video camera. “We’ll always love you,” my sister says. “We’ll do everything we can.” One thing she did the day after the big tomato was bang me on the head with a cast-iron skillet as I knelt po
uring water into the cat’s dish. I could see the Milky Way shining between the bright blue veins in my eyeballs. She yelled, “It was an accident—it slipped when I was putting it away!” and my mother accepted that story even though the skillets were kept in a drawer under the stove, which was in the other direction.
And then we get into buses for the long ride to Sandstone Prison. The walls of my cell are beige with green trim, similar to my old high school, and it smells of the same disinfectant. The bed is not unlike what we had at YMCA camp, where I hid in the woods to avoid swim class. The army blankets are like old friends, my dad having bought all our bedding from surplus stores. The food is the same as what I ate for years, fish sticks and string beans and Jell-O, and every morning the guard, Rich, who was in Sunday school class with me, stops at my door and says, “So how’s everything this morning, then?” “Oh, about the same, then,” I say. “They treatin’ you okay, then?” They’re treating me fair and square. I was the guy who threw the tomato. I am only sorry that kids who heard me tell that story on the radio may be tempted to make the same mistake I did and wind up in the slammer. Though it’s not so bad. That’s the honest truth. My sister came to visit the other day and asked how I am doing and I could see she was devastated when I told her, “I’m doing great. I’m a lucky guy. Some of us are happier incarcerated than we would be if loose and free. I had my good times, sang my song, did my dance, and now it’s like I’m thirteen again and back home.” She was hoping I’d burst into tears and apologize for that tomato, but that is one thing I am not going to do, believe me. I have no regrets.
8.
DROWNING 1954
The death of my cousin Roger was a dark episode in my childhood and not because I knew him so well but because I heard such horrible grief in my mother’s voice when she took the call. She was standing in the upstairs hall of our house and picked up the phone on the second ring and a half-minute later said, “Oh no,” in a tone I’d never heard before. Roger was Aunt Margaret’s youngest, seventeen years old, and it had been only fifteen years since Margaret’s husband had run off and never come back, leaving her to a straitened life, and then came this even harder blow. Roger was a sweet-tempered kid, something of a comic, and was graduating from high school when he went out on Lake Minnetonka with his girlfriend. I met the girlfriend on a flight to New York fifty-some years later and wanted to ask her about Roger and she didn’t want to talk about him. “Drowning 1954” is all true but it would be even truer if she could be here in it somehow.
When I was twelve, my cousin Roger drowned in Lake Independence, and my mother enrolled me in a swimming class at the YMCA on La Salle Avenue in downtown Minneapolis. Twice a week for most of June and July, I got on the West River Road bus near our home in Brooklyn Park Township, a truck-farming community north of Minneapolis, and rode into the stink and heat of the city. When we rounded the corner of Ninth Street and La Salle and smelled the chlorine air that the building breathed out, I started to feel afraid. After a week, I couldn’t bear to go to swimming class anymore.
Never before had I stood naked among strangers (the rule in the class was no swimming trunks), and it was loathsome to undress and then walk quickly through the cold showers to the pool and sit shivering with my feet dangling in the water (Absolute Silence, No Splashing) and wait for the dread moment. The instructor—a man in his early twenties, who was tanned and had the smooth muscles of a swimmer (he wore trunks)—had us plunge into the pool one at a time, so that he could give us his personal attention. He strode up and down the side of the pool yelling at those of us who couldn’t swim, while we thrashed hopelessly beneath him and tried to look like swimmers. “You’re walking on the bottom!” he would shout. “Get your legs up! What’s the matter, you afraid to get your face wet? What’s wrong with you?” The truth was that my cousin’s death had instilled in me a terrible fear, and when I tried to swim and started to sink it felt not so much as if I was sinking but as if something were pulling me down. I panicked, every time. It was just like the dreams of drowning that came to me right after Roger died, in which I was dragged deeper and deeper, with my body bursting and my arms and legs flailing against nothing, down and down, until I shot back to the surface and lay in my dark bedroom exhausted, trying to make myself stay awake.
I tried to quit the swimming class, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it, so I continued to board the bus every swimming morning, and then, ashamed of myself and knowing God would punish me for my cowardice and deceit, I hurried across La Salle and past the Y and walked along Hennepin Avenue, past the pinball parlors and bars and shoeshine stands to the old public library, where I viewed the Egyptian mummy and the fossils and a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence. I stayed there until 11:30, when I headed straight for the WCCO radio studio to watch Good Neighbor Time.
We listened regularly to this show at home—Bob DeHaven, with Wally Olson and His Band, and Ernie Garvin and Burt Hanson and Jeanne Arland—and then to the noontime news, with Cedric Adams, the most famous man in the upper Midwest. It amazed me to sit in the studio audience and watch the little band crowded around the back wall, the engineers in the darkened booth, and the show people gliding up to a microphone for a song, a few words, or an Oxydol commercial. I loved everything except the part of the show in which Bob DeHaven interviewed people in the audience. I was afraid he might pick me, and then my mother, and probably half of Minnesota, would find out that I was scared of water and a liar to boot. The radio stars dazzled me. One day, I squeezed into the WCCO elevator with Cedric Adams and five or six other people. I stood next to him, and a sweet smell of greatness and wealth drifted off him. I later imagined Cedric Adams swimming in Lake Minnetonka—a powerful whale of happiness and purpose—and I wished that I were like him and the others, but as the weeks wore on I began to see clearly that I was more closely related to the bums and winos and old men who sat around in the library and wandered up and down Hennepin Avenue. I tried to look away and not see them, but they were all around me there, and almost every day some poor ragged creature, filthy drunk at noon, would stagger at me wildly out of a doorway, with his arms stretched out toward me, and I saw a look of fellowship in his eyes: You are one of us.
I ran from them, but clearly I was well on my way. Drinking and all the rest of the bum’s life would come with time, inevitably. My life was set on its tragic course by a sinful error in youth. This was the dark theme of the fundamentalist Christian tracts in our home: one misstep would lead you down into the life of the infidel.
One misstep! A lie, perhaps, or disobedience to your mother. There were countless young men in those tracts who stumbled and fell from the path—one misstep!—and were dragged down like drowning men into debauchery, unbelief, and utter damnation. I felt sure that my lie, which was repeated twice a week and whenever my mother asked about my swimming, was sufficient for my downfall. Even as I worked at the deception, I marveled that my fear of water should be greater than my fear of Hell.
I still remember the sadness of wandering in downtown Minneapolis in 1954, wasting my life and losing my soul, and my great relief when the class term ended and I became a kid again around the big white house and garden, the green lawns and cool shady ravine of our lovely suburb. A weekend came when we went to a lake for a family picnic, and my mother, sitting on the beach, asked me to swim for her, but I was able to fool her, even at that little distance, by walking on the bottom and making arm strokes.
When I went to a lake with my friends that summer, or to the Mississippi River a block away, I tried to get the knack of swimming, and one afternoon the next summer I did get it—the crawl and the backstroke and the sidestroke, all in just a couple of weeks. I dived from a dock and opened my eyes underwater and everything. The sad part was that my mother and father couldn’t appreciate this wonderful success; to them, I had been a swimmer all along. I felt restored—grateful that I would not be a bum all my life, grateful to God for letting me learn to swim. I
t was so quick and so simple that I can’t remember it today. Probably I just stood in the water and took a little plunge; my feet left the bottom, and that was it.
When my boy was seven, he showed some timidity around water. Every time I saw him standing in the shallows, working up nerve to put his head under, I loved him more. His eyes are closed tight, and his pale slender body is tense as a drawn bow, ready to spring up instantly should he start to drown. Then I feel it all over again, the way I used to feel. I also feel it when I see people like the imperial swimming instructor at the YMCA—powerful people who delight in towering over some little twerp who is struggling and scared, and casting the terrible shadow of their just and perfect selves. The Big Snapper knows who you are, you bastards, and in a little while he is going to come after you with a fury you will not believe and grab you in his giant mouth and pull you under until your brain turns to jelly and your heart almost bursts. You will never recover from this terror. You will relive it every day, as you lose your fine job and your home and the respect of your friends and family. You will remember it every night in your little room at the Mission, and you will need a quart of Petri muscatel to put you to sleep, and when you awake between your yellow-stained sheets your hands will start to shake all over again.
You have fifteen minutes. Get changed.
9.
COLLEGE DAYS
The night before classes started in September 1960, my freshman year at the U of M, I took a Greyhound bus up to Isle, Minnesota, to pick up a car at my uncle’s Ford agency, and as I rode along, reading a book, there was a burst of light up front and a big jolt that threw me to my feet and then the bus careened into the ditch and onto an open field and stopped. Some of us passengers herded up the aisle—the driver sat, in shock, but opened the door—and we walked out into a cool fall night, stars overhead, and on the highway, a long line of headlights stopped. A station wagon full of people had collided head-on with the bus and as we walked along the shoulder of the road we saw three bodies sprawled on the pavement and one in the wreck. I made it back to campus for my Latin class at 8:00 a.m. and then political science and composition and walked around all day with the burden of that experience that I wanted to tell somebody but couldn’t. It felt like the beginning of real adult life.
The Keillor Reader Page 35