No, what burned my bacon was when you assigned your photographer Burns L. Schaper to follow me in the streets with a zoom lens.
All week, whenever I bent over or scratched myself or picked my nose, I could hear Mr. Schaper’s camera ratcheting away like a corn planter. Next day a photo appeared, 4 × 6, page one, Metro section, always a lulu. Now, I never claimed to be handsome, though in portraits by reasonable people I look presentable, a tall clean man who you would not mind welcoming into your home, but Burns had a knack for sensing when I felt gassy, or my dogs ached, or a popcorn husk was caught in my throat. Suddenly there he was, Speed Graphic in hand, and after a while, just the sight of him made my face turn to wood. He’d jump out from behind a parked car and yell, “Hey, fruitcake!,” and snap away and next day in the P-M, there I was looking like a box turtle with a migraine, a basilisk stare, brow furrowed, lip curled, looking straight at the readers as if I wanted to pound them down a rathole. Underneath, it said: “Having fed at the public trough, he refuses to come clean about his financial shenanigans.” Or some such. “Guests in his home say his medicine cabinet contains some big surprises. Reports of dirty books, liquor, sexually explicit correspondence, ladies’ underwear, you name it—how long will authorities dawdle before action is taken?” But what really squeezed my bunions were the photographs: me bending to tie my shoelace, my face all baggy. Hands to my face, rubbing dust from my eyes, hand in my crotch, easing my shorts. I asked Burns, “Why are you doing this to me? Are we not Christians?”
“Nothing personal, just a journalist’s job, y’know, being the gadfly,” he mumbled. “I know how painful it is to be in the public eye, but that’s what it’s like, and I know that a big man like you can stand it, otherwise you wouldn’t be where you are today.” As he said this, he held his camera low and squeezed off some shots of the hairs in my nose.
The Picayune-Moon is a monopoly, like the Ministry of Information in Peking, and though people discount most of what they read in it, the paper carries a big stick in the realm of the visual, what you might call the Power of Propriety. It can print a picture of a guy and label him “civic leader” or it can tattoo the word “controversial” on him, locking him in the zoo with the wackos, and the photograph can be one of him gazing sensitively into the distance like an author on the back of the book jacket, or one of him slightly cross-eyed, mouth ajar, tongue lolling out, his finger in his ear. In a high-decorum city like Zenith, this is no idle threat.
Schaper lobbed peas at me in restaurants, he put mucus on doorknobs, he once crept under the dais and tied tin cans to my ankle as I accepted an award from the Women’s Club, and finally he got the close-up he wanted: me, enraged, stricken, lurching at him, hair disheveled, waving my arms, mouth like an open wound, spit dripping, a maniac. The one you printed yesterday.
That was meanness of unusual ferocity, malice rara, and so, when I saw you sitting in the Blue Light, napkin wedged betwixt your dewlaps, humming flatly, staring at the blank wall that was Delores Whinny, I felt a civic duty. I stood up and approached your table and was about to hurl you to the carpet and kick you to death, when I had a sharp vision of the future—of Delores Whinny taking over the paper and making it into a joyful celebration of life, the editorial page coming out against ignorance and corruption, the columnists writing about their children and the hope for a better world, and the paper changing its name from Picayune-Moon to This, Our City and Our People with a big Neighborhoods&Families section, and fiction and poetry, and the Sports section renamed Games&Growth—and I turned and walked out into the gentle night.
It dawned on me then that a good newspaper is never quite good enough but a lousy newspaper is a joy forever. These words ought to be chiseled onto every newspaper office wall, right above the urinals.
These are my last words on the subject, because now, at half past one in the morning, my wife has come stark pure naked into the room, glowing pink from a hot shower, her hair damp and glittering, carrying a tray of sliced melon, smoked ham, chunks of Stilton cheese, a toasted baguette, a 1969 St.-Emilion, and a bottle of olive oil. She set the tray on top of this letter and gently removed the pen from my hand and tore off my shirt. “Come to my bed, you animal, and let that poor wilted editor lie moldering in his cups,” she murmured, chewing my ear with her perfect little incisors. “The picture of you enraged, charging the camera, has inflamed me. Come, come—I want to devour you with my body—”
She has a point. The beauty of having a Picayune-Moon peeing on your shoes is the way that it leaches the anger out of your life and opens the door to passionate love—I grab her like a drowning man and she strips the clothes off me with her left foot while we roll over and over on the floor and, though we try to make the moment last, mindless sexual passion tosses us like a Tilt-A-Whirl as if we were seventeen and now I forget which of us is her and which is me, I seem to be wearing an Acrilan carpet and am lying on my back in the stratosphere looking at the lights of the city far below and now there is a joyful updraft and now I can write no more. My best to you and yours, if any.
MAROONED
remember exactly when the marriage took a weird turn. I was on the examining table with my shorts draped around my ankles and my tail pointing high in the air and Dr. Miller surveying my colon through a cold steel periscope and making hmmmm sounds, his ballpoint pen scratching on a notepad, and at this delicate moment, he said, softly, “Do I strike you as a selfish person?”
“No…why?” I asked. The periscope felt like it was about six feet up me and I’m only five-foot-eight.
“I took a personal-inventory test in that book about getting ahead that everybody’s reading—you know, the book that I heard you’re related to the author of,” he said. According to the test, he said, he was rather selfish.
I groaned, feeling the excavation of the Holland Tunnel within me, but of course I knew which book he meant. My dumbbell brother-in-law Dave’s book, that’s which one.
He told me Dave’s book had meant a lot to him. “I never buy books other than science fiction,” he confided, “but my partner Jamie gave it to me for my birthday and I opened it up and I couldn’t put the rascal down. Heck of a book.” Meanwhile, the periscope was way up there in my hinder, probing parts of me I had been unaware of until now. “He says that what holds us back is fear, and that fear is selfish, and that getting ahead is a problem of getting outside yourself,” and he gave the periscope a little nudge for emphasis. “You have to really focus on a goal outside yourself in order to succeed. My goal is to open a restaurant. Jamie’s a wonderful cook. Chinese and Mexican, what do you think?”
I felt sore afterward. I went home and told Julie that a person as dim as my proctologist was exactly who Dave’s book was aimed at, one ream job deserves another, and so forth. I was steamed.
She said, “You’ve always resented Dave, Danny, and you know why? I’ll tell you why. Because your life is in Park and the key isn’t even in the ignition. You’re totally into negativity, Danny. You stopped growing twenty-six years ago. And how would I know? Because I’m your wife, that’s how I know.”
* * *
Twenty-six years ago I graduated from the University of Minnesota journalism school with honors, the editor of the Minnesota Daily, and got a job as a professional copywriter at a Minneapolis ad agency. Dave Grebe was a clerk in his dad’s stationery store, peddling birthday cards. He and I played basketball on a Lutheran church team; that’s how I met his sister Julie; she picked him up after the game because he’d lost his driver’s license for drunk driving. He was twenty, big and porky and none too bright, just like now. “I’d sure like to get the heck out of stationery, I hate the smell of it, mucilage especially, and the damn perfume, it’s like someone vomited after eating fruit,” Dave remarked to me more than once.
So I was not too surprised when, one fine day, Dave walked away from his job and shaved his head clean and moved to a commune in south Minneapolis, living with sixteen other disciples of the Serene Master Di
ego Tua, putting on the sandals of humility and the pale-green robe of constant renewal. “I have left your world, Danny,” he told me on the phone.
Julie, who had become my wife, thought that Dave “just needed to get away for a while.” I pointed out to her that the Tuans were fanatics who roamed the airport jingling bells and droning and whanging on drums, collecting money to support their master and his many wives and concubines. The Tuans believed that they held the secrets of the universe and everyone else was vermin.
Julie thought they were Buddhists of some sort.
“They could be Buddhists or nudists or used-car salesmen who like to dress up in gowns, but whatever they are, they’re working your brother like a puppet on a string.”
She thought that Dave was only doing what he felt was best for him. Subject closed. So I did double duty for a few years—was a copywriter and kept the Grebe stationery store going—and Dave went around droning and whanging and dinging and making a holy nuisance of himself.
“We are God’s roadblocks,” said the Happy Master, Diego himself, “warning the people that the bridge is washed out.” His real name was Tim U. Apthed; he chose the name Diego, Die—ego, and crunched his initials into a surname, and founded a church for jerks. My agency, Curry, Cosset, Dorn, flew me to Atlanta or Boston or Chicago occasionally, and I’d come running through the terminal to catch a plane and hear the drums and bells and there were the Tuans in the middle of the concourse, holding up their signs, “Your Life Is a Lie,” and chanting, “Only two ways, one false, one true. Only one life, which way are you? Back! back! turn away from your lies! And God will give you a beautiful surprise!” and I’d be trying to squeeze through the crowd of shaven men including my blissful brother-in-law and get on board the plane. It was like Run, Sheep, Run.
“Well, when he talks about people being so materialistic, I think he has a good point,” said Julie.
Then, fifteen years ago, Mr. Grebe died of a cerebral hemorrhage—clapped his hand to his forehead one morning and said, “Oh mercy. Call Ann and tell her I’ll be late,” and fell over dead onto the ballpoint-pen rack. The rest of us were living in the felt-tip era but Mr. Grebe never gave up on ballpoints, which worked better on carbon paper, he explained patiently, ignoring the fact that photocopying had replaced carbons. The family was devastated at the loss of this vacuous and bewildered man. They mourned for weeks, during which I was the bulwark, arranging the funeral, paying the bills, ordering stock, and Dave sat in a corner weeping. They never found out who Ann was.
Dave left the Tuans and let his hair grow out and went to work at the Wm. Grebe Stationery Shop. Every few days he’d call up and say, “I don’t know how I can ever make it up to everyone for the terrible things I’ve done.”
You get sick of remorse when it becomes a broken record. Dave kept saying, “You’ve been so great, Danny, and I’ve been a jerk. I don’t know why God lets me live.” After a few months of it, I told him that I didn’t know either but that he could take his guilt and put it where the sun don’t shine. He reported this to Julie. She vindictively canceled our vacation trip to the Bahamas. “I can never forgive you for saying that to my brother,” she said, and she was right, she couldn’t.
Meanwhile, Dave, who once had renounced material things, took over Wm. Grebe, stocked it with felt tips and expanded into malls and branched out into discount bookselling, got rich in about three years, and became one smooth guy: bought a Hasselblad camera, Finnish furniture, a Steinway, a Martin guitar, four Harleys, a Peterbilt truck, an original Monet (Girl with Light Hair), and next thing I knew he was going around giving pep talks to Kiwanis clubs, and then, he wrote his book about getting ahead, Never Buy a Bottle of Rat Poison That Comes with Gift Coupons. It sold more copies than there are rats in Rio (millions). He turned Tuanism inside out and restated it in capitalist terms, and made low cash flow seem like a denial of God’s love.
On the same day that an interview with Dave appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, I got canned at the agency. Twenty-five years I had labored at Curry, Cosset, Dorn, and on a Monday morning, as I sharpened my No. 2 pencil, a twenty-nine-year-old guy in a red bow tie leaned over the wall of my work cubicle and said, “The folks at Chippy called and cut back on the campaign, Danny, I’m going to have to let you go for a while.”
“Are you sure?” That’s all I could think to say. A quarter-century with the company—“Are you sure?” He was sure.
I crawled home, bleeding, and Julie was glued to the TV, watching Dave talk about the irrelevance of suffering. It was a videotape, not a live appearance, but even so, she did not turn it off when she heard my tragic news. She said, “That’s too bad,” and then, “I’m so proud of him. This is one of his new videotapes. He’s going to put out twelve of them. He just seems to touch a chord in people, don’t you think? People can’t help but respond to him. It’s a natural gift.” She recommended that I study Rat Poison to give me the confidence to find a new job and wait for his next book, How to Find Your Rear End Without Using Both Hands.
“Your brother,” I said, “is one of the world’s biggest b.s.ers.”
This was when Julie decided that we needed to face up to my problems. “You are a dark cloud in my life, Danny. A small dark cloud,” she said.
I don’t know what she meant by that. I’m a happy guy who loves life, it’s just that I have a moony face. A guy can’t help it that his face won’t light up. Inside, I’m like a kid with a new bike. Though being flushed down the toilet while your brother-in-law is getting rich certainly puts a crimp in a guy’s hose. Dave was hot. I was dead. For twenty-five years, I had been a happy guy who created dancing ketchup commercials, who made high-fiber bran flakes witty, who wrote those coffee commercials in which the husband and wife share a golden moment over a cup of java. I brought lucidity to capitalism, and Dave brought gibberish, and he walked off with the prize.
The next day, Julie told me that Dave thought we should go away and be alone and he’d given her fifteen thousand dollars so we could charter a fifty-foot schooner for a two-week cruise off Antigua, where we could try to put the marriage back together.
“Fifteen thousand dollars would come in handy in other ways than blowing it on a cruise,” I pointed out. “We could invest it. I’m unemployed, you know.”
“Aren’t you willing to invest in our marriage?” she said.
“We could buy a boat for that kind of money and sail every weekend.” She said that fifteen thousand wasn’t enough to pay her to get into a boat with me at the tiller.
“Remember the time we drifted powerless down the Mississippi because you put oil in the gas tank? Remember how you tried to rig up an overcoat on an oar to make a sail? Remember how we drifted toward that oncoming coal barge and stood and waved our arms and cried out in our pitiful voices?”
Ten years had not dimmed her memory of that afternoon.
So off we flew to Antigua.
We flew first-class, in those wide upholstered seats, where everything is sparkly and fresh and lemony and candles flicker on the serving cart. A painful reminder of how cheery life can be for the very rich, people like Dave. The flight attendants wore gold-paisley sarongs slit up the side and pink-passion lipstick, they were Barnard graduates (cum laude) in humanities, and they set a vase of fresh roses on my table, along with the seviche and salmon loaf and crab puffs with Mornay sauce, and they leaned over me, their perfect college-educated breasts hanging prettily in place, and they whispered, “You’ve got a nice butt. You ever read Kant?” I knew that they only flirted with me because I was holding a first-class ticket; I wanted to say, “I’m forty-seven, I’m broke, ashamed, in pain, on the verge of divorce, and sponging off a despised relative. I’ve hit bottom, babes. Buzz off.”
We stayed one night at Jumby Bay, dropping a bundle, and headed off by cab to the Lucky Lovers Marina, and there, at the end of the dock, lay the Susy Q. I put my arm around Julie, who was shivering despite the bright sunshine and eighty-five deg
rees.
“Is that a schooner or a ketch?” I said.
“It’s a yawl,” she replied. It was hard not to notice the frayed rigging and rusted hardware, the oil slick around the stern, the sail in a big heap on deck, and what appeared to be sneaker treadmarks along the side of the hull. But we had put down a deposit of fifteen hundred dollars already, so we banished doubt from our minds.
“Hello! Anybody below?” I hollered. There was a muffled yo, and a beautiful young man poked up his head from the cockpit and smiled. His golden curls framed his Grecian-god-like face, his deep tan set off by a green T-shirt that said “Montana…The Big Sky.” He was Rusty, our captain, he said. “I was just making your bed downstairs. Come on down. Your room’s up front!”
This struck me as odd, that he said downstairs instead of below decks, and I mentioned this to Julie as we stowed our bags in the cabin. “How can you get upset about poor word choice when our marriage is on the rocks?” she asked.
The Susy Q cleared port and sailed west toward Sansevar Trist, and she and I sat below discussing our marriage, which I have always believed is not a good idea for Julie and me. My experience tells me that we should shoot eight-ball, sit in a hot tub, go to the zoo, rake the lawn, spread warm oil on each other’s bodies, do anything but talk about our marriage, but she is a fan of those articles like “How Lousy Is Your Marriage: A 10-Minute Quiz That Could Help You Improve It” and of course the first question is, “Are you and your husband able to sit down and discuss your differences calmly and reasonably?” No! Of course not! Are you kidding? Who discusses these things without screaming? Name one person! So she launched off on a reasonable discussion of differences, and two minutes later we’re screeching and hissing and slamming doors so hard the pictures fall off the walls. We simply are unable to discuss our marriage—does that make us terrible people? Our marriage is like the Electoral College: it works okay if you don’t think about it.
The Book of Guys Page 9