Lake Wobegon Summer 1956

by Garrison Keillor

  “Luckily they came into some money when her father died. He hung himself with an extension cord, you know.” No, we didn’t know, we had no idea. The Andersons live next door to us and we know nothing, because Mrs. A. and Mother are no longer on speaking terms on account of something Mother said to an Anderson child about torturing a cat. “Yes, he came up from the basement one night looking for an extension cord and of course his wife had no idea what he wanted it for. He was down in the dumps over something or other. She gave him the cord and she went off to bed and when she went down the next day to do laundry, there he was hanging from a water pipe. Anyway, the Andersons got fifteen thousand dollars from the will. No need for him to work for years! They’re sitting pretty.”

  Aunt Flo knows everyone’s story and she doesn’t mince words. People try to cover up their sins, they lie like rugs, but Aunt Flo knows what time it is. Poppycock, she says. Horsefeathers. Balloon juice. What’s His Face and Miss Coles, the two English teachers—those two are shacking up and anybody with eyes in his head can see it. Remember the Lutheran pastor who went guest-preaching to Granite Falls and came home with a love note in his Bible? Remember that? Aunt Flo had him figured out from the git-go. That man was a secret only to himself and an open book to anyone who looked him straight in the eye. You can tell by the eyes. Flo can.

  I try not to look Aunt Flo in the eye as she sips her ginger ale. She might look me in the eye and see young Julie losing her inhibitions and moaning like a truck in low gear.

  Aunt Flo is flying high tonight. She is going a mile a minute. She gets up from the daybed and walks the length of the porch, past me, past Mother, to the screens facing the Stenstroms, and then paces back to the Anderson side. She reminisces about that pastor and his nice manners and his three-piece suits and all those women who came to him for spiritual guidance. “Guidance!” she snorts. “The man only knew one direction and that was toward the bedroom!”

  This is her great theme. All the Lake Wobegon men who got caught in adultery and never expected to. One after another, caught at the old game like a weasel in the moonlight, held up, dangling from the leg trap, and people cry Shame! Shame! and among the shamers is a man thinking, “Lucky for me that I covered my tracks. Nobody’ll ever find out.” And they sniff him out two weeks later, and tar and feather him and ride him around on a rail, and of the men carrying the rail, one thinks, “Good I burned those letters when I did.” Two weeks later, they find two unburnt letters addressed to Angel Eyes, and put him in stocks, and people throw dead fish and used fruit at him and buckets of slime and entrails, and one of the main hurlers thinks, “If I’m ever caught, which I won’t be, I’ll deny everything,” and two weeks later, he’s caught. He denies it, but they have found the pink garter, the hotel-room key, and he is made to walk around with a deceased pelican hanging around his neck, and the man who ties the pelican to him thinks, “I’ll call her and tell her I can’t meet her again until after this all blows over.” And two weeks later, he meets her, and when they are at a high pitch of excitement, suddenly red lights flash and two cops arrest him for gross indecency and drag him downtown, and one cop thinks, “I am the last person anyone would ever suspect of misdeeds.” And two weeks later, he stands up in the HiDeHo, wearing his fake beard and glasses, and he inserts the $10 bill in the dancer’s bodice, and feels the hand on his shoulder, and it’s his wife’s brother, who drags him home, where he sits in the dark basement and weeps for all the pain he has caused, and the wife’s brother is thinking, “I’ll meet Trixie tonight, as planned. Nothing to fear. We’ll go to Sauk Centre, where nobody knows us.”

  And so it goes. One after another. Each one dumber than the one ahead of him in the parade. Ping-Pong balls for brains! Pudding heads! She sits on the daybed and snorts. Mr. Hansen, that gilded idiot, who fell for the size 38-DD waitress at the Chatterbox and bought her a dozen tubes of crimson lipstick and promised her the moon and stars and inveigled her to accompany him to a truckers’ motel on Highway 10, and who should be parked in a booth at that very same motel coffeeshop but Hansen’s brother-in-law, eating a hot pork sandwich! He rose and collared the old goat before he could get his paws on the room key, and oh how the pitiful miscreant begged the brother-in-law to please look the other way. Oh, he was ten yards short of glory—oh, please please please, but no, he was hauled home and there was hell to pay and women yelling at him, How could you be so dirt stupid? He was in the doghouse for years! And yet—did that keep Clint Bunsen from flirting with the very same waitress? Sitting there drinking coffee and suggesting he show her Chicago. Show her Chicago! What is that supposed to mean? And him a former mayor and deacon of the Lutheran church. Didn’t stop him for one minute. And Mr. Hansen’s brother-in-law? He of the hot pork sandwich? Six months later, he was pulled over by the Benton County sheriff for speeding; and sitting next to him was the reason for his haste, a married woman from Kimball in a pink negligee with little fur puffs on the sleeves. The man returned home with his tail between his legs and had to sleep on the couch for six months and was made to take his dinner and go sit in the garage. And for what? A roll in the hay. A ride on the Ferris wheel. Wham bam, thank you, ma’am. For this they’re willing to give up everything? But that’s men. Men believe in their hearts that God will make an exception in their case and look the other way.

  I sit listening to Aunt Flo as she paces, like a captain walking the bridge of his ship, looking out ahead past the lawn and the street and the distant red light to some stormy seas ahead in the stilly night, and it slowly dawns on me that I am being preached to, not Mother, and that all of this is not about adultery, it’s about High School Orgies and Kate and me in the boys’ toilet and the Sunday-morning wine and everything else. Men prefer darkness to light because their hearts are evil, and in the dark the truth is less troublesome, you can invent beautiful illusions. Don’t grow up to be like them, young man.

  The county extension agent was a smart young man with a bright future. He’d gone to ag school and knew everything there was to know about soil conservation, and yet he could not keep himself from visiting the Weiss farm when the mister was off at the cattle auction in Melrose and the extension agent and Mrs. Weiss did some dancing between the sheets and made the bedsprings squeak and this went on for three months and did the smart young man ever stop to think that in open country on flat terrain a car can be seen for half a mile and it’s no big mystery whose car it is? No, he just kept on taking his pants off. And finally the news reached Mr. Weiss, who didn’t take it well and marched straight to the extension office, next to the post office, and spattered the young man’s brains all over the soil-conservation map he had been studying that very morning. A St. Cloud jury found the husband not guilty by reason of temporary insanity and the young man was laid out in a box with his head half reconstructed of molded rubber so his grieving mother could view the remains. A gruesome tale—and yet did it make Jim the barber stop tomcatting around at night with Mrs. You Know Who of the lavender toreador pants? Did the mechanic at the Chevy garage stop tiptoeing through the tulips with his daughter’s best friend’s mom? Not on your Prince Albert, he didn’t. Because men have no more self-control than a dog in a bratwurst factory, and so it is up to women to lay down the law.

  She is so right. I have no self-control at all. If Julie said, “Come outside and let’s neck in the backseat of my car,” I’d be out the door in a minute.

  18

  In the Press Box

  I got to the ballpark an hour early for the Sunday game so I’d have time to write some possible leads—The resurgent Lake Wobegon Whippets, coming off a nifty win last week against Bowlus, nearly made it two in a row Sunday but alas fell short against the Bards of Avon—and strolled up the battered wood stairs and into the grandstand and stopped, struck by the beauty of a diamond on a summer day. So green, and the infield dirt raked smooth and watered to a deeper shade of brown. And at the top of the stands, the seat of privilege and royalty, the press box, fifteen feet long, wit
h four big windows behind the foul net that swooped up from the top of the backstop to the press-box roof.

  “I don’t have the key to that up there,” said Mike the groundskeeper. He was rolling and raking the third-base line so that bunts would roll foul. “I wash my hands of it. That’s Jim Dandy’s bailiwick. He installed the locks on the door. Those aren’t my locks.”

  “When does he arrive?”

  “Who knows? They bring in this two-bit skirt-chaser in tight pants and a duck butt hairdo to handle the PA announcing, who by the way doesn’t know a sacrifice bunt from his sacroiliac—he mispronounces names, gets the score wrong, you name it; meanwhile, he and his dipshit friends are having a party up there and getting high on snake smoke from their funny cigarettes—all I can say is, don’t come to me about it, okay?”

  “I have to get into the press box.”

  “Climb in the window.”

  So I stood on the seats below and raised the window and crawled inside.

  Inside was a splintered plywood table with thousands of cigarette-butt burns and numerous dark rings from old beer bottles. An old silver microphone and amplifier and a child’s phonograph sat on it with Prop. of J. Dandy written on them, on strips of masking tape. On the back wall were scrawled hundreds of insults and salacious messages and desperate dirty thoughts, phone numbers for Donna and Tina and LaVerne and Dolores, some with a word or two about each one’s specialty. There were two chairs, an easy chair covered with an Army blanket and an old busted folding chair. I figured that one was for me.

  As one-thirty approached, the fans filed in, like men taking their places at a urinal, nobody getting too close to his neighbors. The gloomy old diehards in the plaid shirts and feed caps camped behind the home dugout; the teenagers sat behind the visitors’ dugout, where they could rag on them; the fathers and sons were directly back of home plate; and the gamblers sat at the very top of the stands along with the drunks. I busied myself making descriptive notes on the pre-game spectacle—The crowd trickled in like rivulets of muddy water on a hillside of seats—The crowd fluttered in like birds of many feathers settling down on a bank of phone wires—The little white spheroids made expressive arcs in the air, higher or lower, as if the throwers were speaking a geometrical language. I made a list of words to work into the story, to give it tone—auspicious, harry, thwart, drowse, entreaty, pliant, incipient, plaintive, sortie—and then I heard the key in the padlocks, and the bolt opened, and there stood Mr. Jim Dandy, in a seersucker suit and straw boater and white bucks, mirror shades, his curly black hair slicked back on the sides. He was carrying two brown paper sacks that clinked when he set them down.

  Mr. Dandy took off the shades and gave me the hairy eyeball. “What in the hell are you doing in here?” he said. “There better not be anything missing.”

  “I’m writing up the game for the Herald Star.” My voice came out a little squeakier than I was hoping for. What I wanted to say was, I listen to the Doo Dads almost every night on Wonderful Weegee and you are my favorite group.

  “Next time ask permission before you go barging in.”

  It was already one-thirty when Mr. Dandy appeared. Game time. The ump behind home plate turned and looked up toward us and waved. Jim Dandy eased down in his easy chair and switched on the microphone and blew into it—people jumped as if a bomb had gone off—and he said in his six-foot-deep voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Wally (Old Hard Hands) Bunsen Memorial Ballpark, home of your Lake Wobegon WHIPPETS! Let’s honor America and rise and salute the Stars and Stripes and join together in our national anthem,” and he held the mike up to the phonograph and put the needle down and a scratchy version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” blasted out. I wondered how many of the fans were aware of his eminence, a man whose records were heard in thousands of homes and cars across the Upper Midwest every night on the radio. Meanwhile, he fetched from his sack a bottle of vodka and a bottle of tomato juice and sploshed equal parts of each into a paper cup and tossed it down before the home of the brave and shouted into the mike, “Let’s play ball!” and the crowd below let out a sickly cheer as the Whippets trotted onto the field and Roger Guppy strode to the mound and picked up the resin bag and threw his warm-ups.

  “That’s my brother pitching,” said Jim Dandy. “You be sure to treat him right. I don’t want to be reading snide comments just because he throws a gopher ball or two.”

  Jim Dandy had a little black mustache that suffered from a hair shortage. It was raggedy in a couple of places and he kept fussing with it. He had doused himself in a syrup-sweet cologne, but his breath smelled like he’d been eating dead raccoons. It was rank. He removed his jacket and hung it on a nail. “When my buddies come, we’re going to have to ask you to make room,” he said. He freshened up his drink with more vodka. He asked, “What’s your name?” and I told him, hoping he wouldn’t associate me with the man from the bank who repossessed his car.

  “I gotta keep the place locked up because we store product up here.” He nodded toward a stack of cardboard boxes in the corner, marked DANGEROUS/DO NOT OPEN/THIS MEANS YOU!

  “You’ve heard of my singing group. right? The Doo Dads?” I nodded. “Yes, sir,” I said. I was about to say more about this, but he wasn’t looking at me, he was scanning the crowd for hot babes. And then he picked up a pair of binoculars for a closer look. “Nice set of maracas over behind first base,” he said. “Boy, I wouldn’t mind doing the cha-cha with those bazoongies! And look at that honey in the blue cap. Oh, baby. Mr. Jim Dandy would sure like to spend a few hours doing some bed dancing with you, darling.”

  Roger set the Bards down in order, and when the first Whippet came up to bat, Mr. Dandy cried out his name—“RIGHT FIELDER—WAYNE TOMMERDAHL!”—and let out a wolf howl as if to arouse fan fervor, but it was like trying to make whipped cream from skim milk. The fans made no more noise than if they were at a plowing contest.

  “Norwegians,” said Mr. Dandy. “I’ll tell you, when God created Norwegians, he was still learning. He used what he knew about sheep and gave them hands to drive a tractor and jerk off, and there you have it. The dumbest of the dumb. Men who go fishing for fun. Imagine it! Sitting in boats and staring at the water! You want to know what’s fun, kid? Walking across the parking lot with a 19-year-old babe to get in your car and take her to the beach. That is what makes for a happy man.

  “Norwegians!

  “Kid, if Elvis Presley had grown up among Norwegians, he’d still be driving a truck for a living. These people cannot be entertained in any way, shape, or form! I’d rather do a show for a herd of Holsteins! I’d rather sing for a bunch of brook trout!”

  He got friendlier and more confidential as he got deeper into the vodka. He told me the story of his career. How the Doo Dads started out as the Coral Kings—him and Mitch and Donnie and Dutch—the first rock ’n’ roll group in the Midwest—1954! before Elvis!—and they got an offer to go to New York and work for Alan Freed—Moondog!—and Dutch wouldn’t go on account of his dad needed him at the linoleum store. The Coral Kings stayed up all night pleading with Dutch and plying him with strong drink. It was their big chance, man. Give us two months! Give us two weeks! If we don’t hit big in two weeks, we’ll come home, no hard feelings. But Dutch wouldn’t budge, so they gave him the ax and found Richie and taught him the ropes, and now they were called the Hot Rods, and they came out with “Mama Mama” on the Band Box label—he sang a little for me—Two and two is four,

  And two and three is five.

  My little mama mama gonna smile when I arrive.

  Three and two is five,

  And three and three is six.

  There ain’t no kind of blues that a woman cannot fix.

  Three and four is seven,

  And four and five is nine.

  I’m ridin up to heaven on the Mama Mama Line.

  The song shot to No. 6 in the Midwest with no publicity or anything, and they went on a six-week package tour headlined by Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison
, both of whom said the Hot Rods were the real thing, but now it was Donnie’s turn to chicken out—his girlfriend wanted him back home or else—so they came back home, Donnie being the high tenor, not easily replaced, and the Hot Rods pleaded with Bonnie to marry Donnie and move to Memphis and in two years’ time we’ll all have fourteen-room mansions with white pillars and fifty-foot swimming pools and be driving pink Cadillacs, and Bonnie said she could never leave her family and if Donnie wanted to go, fine, he could go by his own self and have his ring back too. There was no pleasing Bonnie. (Two years later, she broke up with him anyway.) So they wasted six months shopping around for a high tenor. Got Earl the Girl. Got him from the Cowlicks when that group broke up. He could go high and keep going higher. But he and Mitch didn’t get along. Fought like dogs from day one. Mitch quit. He was the lead singer, not so hard to replace. They stole Stevie John from the Diddlybops. Then he wanted to change the name from the Hot Rods to the Blue Jays. Jim Dandy begged and pleaded—man, they had four hot records as the Hot Rods, “Mama Mama” and “Please, Baby, Let It Be Tonight” and “Home Base Man” and “Out in the Cornfield,” let’s not give away the franchise—but the three new guys outvoted him, thinking that the Hot Rods’ name was holding them back. So they did a record for Band Box, “It’s Summer, It’s Midnight, and It’s You,” but as the Blue Jays they were lost in the confusion of bird groups—the Robins, the Lovebirds, the Flamingoes, the Flickers, the Swallows, the Thrashers, the Starlings, the Warblers, the Woodcocks—and “It’s Summer” languished on the charts, so did “I Don’t Need the World If I Have You” and “Zsa Zsa Zsa,” so in April they became the Doo Dads, and now Band Box is talking about doing a long-play album of car songs with their “Hot Rod Alley” as side 1, band 1.