He put on a knit cap and came home to Piscacatawamaquoddymoggin for Thanksgiving and found everyone in a grumpy mood. The puzzle factory had closed, and the demand for scallops was down due to traces of deadly aluminum found in a frozen dinner and the media had stressed the worst aspects of aluminum poisoning (dementia, drooling, lack of bladder control, facial collapse, etc.) and suddenly nobody in America would touch a scallop with a ten-foot pole. So the town was on the brink of disaster.
Royell told Roy, sobbing, that her job as a babysitter had come to an end. She had gotten so engrossed in a Stephen King book, the one in which a pet cat chews the throats of a family of six as they sleep and then drives away in the family car, that she hadn’t noticed the children she was providing care for had shinnied up the cold-air vent and into a crawl space in the ceiling. The fire department came and cut a hole in the roof with a chainsaw and pried the kids loose with big pincers but then a cloud of asbestos fell out too, and now the kids were under observation in a Bangor hospital and Royell was getting registered letters from the law firm of Batter, Ravage, Pound&Payne.
Roy sympathized, but the bad haircut was on his mind. Big tufts of hair poked out from under the cap.
“I guess nobody notices that I’m wearing a knit cap on account of a hair problem,” Roy grumbled.
“Let me have a look, darling,” said Roy’s mom. “Oh, it’ll grow out,” she said. “In six months or a year, you won’t notice a thing wrong with it. Except maybe the back.”
She told him to stop thinking about himself and start paying attention to his responsibilities. “You’re going to have a family,” she told Roy, “so wake up and smell the coffee.”
“Family?” said Roy.
“Royell is three months pregnant,” said Mom. “You didn’t know?”
Royell came to Thanksgiving dinner, and she looked big in front. Roy embraced her, felt the hard knot in her belly, and her breasts poked him in the chest like accusing fingers. “We’ll name him Roy Jr.,” she cried. “And we’ll roost right here in Piscacatawamaquoddymoggin! And to hell with radio. Who needs it.”
Doc Bradley was late for dinner—he had been out fishing, and forgot—and the turkey was dry and mealy. They ate in silence. Roy went to the bathroom to put water on his hair, and when he returned to the table, he got both pants pockets caught on the arms of the chair and ripped them, his best corduroys. “That happened to me once too,” said Doc glumly. Royell mentioned that the lawsuits from the crawl-space incident might total as much as eleven million dollars. “If it goes to a jury, they’ll take one look at those little snots, and I’ll spend the rest of my life on earth paying money into a fund. My baby will have to work for a living, but those rotten brats will go through graduate school on my money.”
They were almost finished with dinner when Mom’s cat, Ernie, began choking to death under the table. Mom snatched him up in a flash though he was hefty, a thirty-pounder. He had swallowed a wad of dressing and lay limp in Mom’s arms. Roy suggested opening up the cat’s trachea with a steak knife, but Mom leaned down and sucked the dressing out of Ernie’s throat. It made a sickening sound. The cat soon was resting comfortably, but Mom went upstairs and was ill for the next hour or so. Doc went to check on her and reported back that she wished everyone to leave quietly and she would be happy to see them for Christmas.
Roy walked Royell home through the thick fog that had rolled in from the sea. He told her that his life had been put on hold by his hair. “I can’t get married looking like this.”
“You’re probably right,” said Royell. He was surprised by her nonchalance. “You’re not disappointed?” he said. “You know what’s best,” she told him.
Roy wasn’t inside the Dobbs home ten minutes before Royell’s dad asked, “Whatever happened to your dream of radio?” from deep in his BarcaLounger.
Roy said he was saving to attend broadcasting college, perhaps the LaRue School in West Bend, Indiana, which offered lessons by mail.
Dad Dobbs humphed. “Why not just call up my nephew Brad?” he said. “Brad left WBE and is president of Beale Broadcasting. Owns stations in Syracuse, Scranton, Erie, Joliet, Racine, Duluth, and Sandpoint, Idaho. You want a job, he could give you one in a minute, I’ll bet.”
Royell saw Roy off on the bus to Smallton. It was confusing. She didn’t hang on him like before. Roy explained that he might not return before the baby was born, and she said, “Oh, that’s okay. No skin off my nose.”
He said, “I’ll do the right thing by you, don’t worry about that.”
“The right thing?” She laughed. “Who even knows what that is anymore?”
Back in Smallton, sitting in the barber chair waiting for a customer, Roy wrote a song on the back of his electric bill:
You look into the bank of mirrors
And realize your deepest fears:
It’s all gone, your charm and grace.
There’s nothing but this foolish face.
This hair looks so dumb—disastrous!
You’ll have to move out to Nebraska,
Live alone in some sod hut
Recovering from your bad haircut
While others garner fame and riches,
The lucky sons of bitches.
It wasn’t a bad song. Maybe he should have it recorded. Bud had a cousin in the song-publishing business who might open some doors.
That night, he had a dream in which he floated in a black abyss and then got on a bus. He rode for hours, with no purpose or destination. A luxurious bus with carpet so deep it almost sucked his shoes off. A woman sat across from him who hated him. “I am a disappointment to everyone I know,” he told her. She pretended not to hear.
He felt blue for weeks. Christmas was coming, and some students from Smallton High came by to ask if they could paint a Nativity scene on the barbershop window for the Christmas-window contest. “Go to hell,” Roy told them. “My life is a mess. You expect me to feel festive?” Once he told a customer to shut up and sit still. The man said he would find a new barber. “Good,” said Roy. “I’m tired of looking at you.”
And then, a week before Christmas, a big wild man with bloodshot eyes clomped in, grabbed Roy’s shoulders, and growled, “Want my hair wild, mister. Want it to stick straight up in big clumps. Big hanks of hair with dirt ’n twigs in ’em. I want it matted down in back. And on the sides I want some snarls.”
Roy sat the wild man in a chair and did his best. He whirred the hair around with a hairbrush and globbed some syrup on it and tied snarls here and there.
“You from around these parts?” asked Roy.
The wild man snorted. “Am not, never was, and never will be. I’m from a little rat’s-ass town called Parnassus, Mississippi. I sang gospel music every Sunday at the Children of Zion Sanctified Apostolic Holiness Foursquare Gospel Precious Love of Jesus’ Sweet Name Church until I was fourteen and I got a-messin where I shouldna been a-messin and got a girl in a family way, and then I switched over to the devil’s fornicatin music and got to rocking—hoooo-ee—playing in roadhouses for wads of money and driving a pink Cadillac full of loose women and living the wild-man life—how you comin with that hair, man?”
The hair looked like it had gone through a sausage grinder, and the wild man whooped and grinned and handed Roy a hundred-dollar bill. “Fifty years from now, mister, you can tell your grandkids you cut the hair of Jimmy Chuck Childs, Wild Man of the Delta,” he said, and out he went, to a pink Cadillac. And then he stuck his head back in the barbershop. “Roy Bradley?” he said. “Ain’t you a friend of Montana Montez?”
Roy nodded, thrilled to hear her name and his so close together.
“She told me she was looking for you. Went up to some little town near here, town called Piss-something, trying to find you.”
Roy dashed out the door and up the street, and caught the noon bus to Piscacatawamaquoddymoggin, and off they went in a cloud of blue smoke.
—The hundred-dollar bill! He had left it lying in the open c
ash-register drawer! And the door to the barbershop stood wide open! And yet it didn’t matter one bit when he thought of Montana.
The bus stopped with a squeal and a hiss. “Piscacatawamaquoddymoggin!” called the driver.
Roy tore up the road toward the motel, taking a shortcut through the Gun Club shooting range and over the ballpark fence and across the outfield and over the dugout and through the parking lot and around the Happy Clam Drive-In, its windows boarded, and up ahead the Cape Hope Cabins and in a window the silhouette of a woman unbuttoning her blouse. Roy came to the door as she reached behind for the clasp of her brassiere.
He opened the door and said, “Here, let me do that,” but it wasn’t Montana, it was Royell. And there was Bobo Doodad, his big eyes blinking, his bald head on the pillow, his big toes poking out from under the blanket.
“You’re messing around with a Doodad?” Roy cried. Royell faced him, bare-breasted. “You had yourself a Bradley and you reached for a Doodad?”
He turned to the man in the bed. “This woman is practically my wife, for crying out loud! What will you people think of next?”
Royell said, “I tried for years to be your wife, Roy Bradley, and now you got no right to deny me a little pleasure.”
Roy strode to the door. “This goes against every principle known to civilized man. This is disgusting. You will never see me in Piscacatawamaquoddymoggin ever again, either of you.”
Back at his mom and dad’s house, Ernie’s dish was piled high with a month’s supply of cat chow, and on the cupboard was a note to Sandy Doodad, Bobo’s wife, asking her to please not water the plants so much as last time and to make sure the tank float was shut in the upstairs toilet. Sandy did odd jobs for the Bradleys. Roy wrote at the bottom: “P.s., Sandy, yr husband is in the sack with Royell Dobbs, in case he seems grumpy these days.”
He picked up the phone and called Brad Beale and poured out his heart. The older man was sympathetic. “Bad hair and your affianced in bed with a Doodad—it’s not how a guy imagines life will be, but heck, Roy, why not make the best of it? Bad hair can serve as a passport to places the well-groomed never know. Such as the Midwest, for example. I own a station in Duluth. You could be doing the midnight-to-five-a.m. shift Monday morning if you want. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise, getting you into broadcasting.” He said, “If you don’t do it now, Roy, you never will.”
Roy arrived in Duluth on Sunday, took a room at the Duluth Hotel, and on Monday evening, hiked over to KDU, shook hands with the janitor, and at midnight, turned on the microphone and said, “Mornin, all you hoot owls, this is Big Daddy Bradley with the Blue Loon Ballroom, where the lonely come to forget their all-night blues—a-wooooooooooooooooo—sponsored by Highball, the name to trust in women’s undergarments and sleepwear.” He played a Sinatra recording of “Bartender” and then Julie London (“Never Without You”), then Tony Bennett (“After You’ve Gone”), and the Ellington Orchestra playing “Solitude,” and then he talked about sleepwear for a couple minutes. Highball made a satin nightgown that would keep you warm and yet make you feel as if you had no clothes on at all. Interesting. Then he played Sinatra’s “One for the Road,” and Elisabeth Welch singing “When You’re Young,” and then he talked about Golden Girl transmission fluid for trucks.
Roy had studied The BBC Handbook, the chapter on “Late Night” which said, “Speak in a low smooth voice. Don’t talk too long. Imply as much as possible,” and he did. He could talk about an approaching warm front in a way that made people feel they knew him intimately. They wrote to him, I’ve been disappointed by people so often but never by you. You make me feel I could love someone again.
He sat in the little nest of a studio, so comfy, the mess of news on yellow teletype paper, hundreds of tape cartridges on carousels an arm’s length away, a script podium atop the control board, the big foam-covered microphone, the clock, the ring binder thick with commercials, the shelves of LPs close at hand, the three turntables, the stack of tape machines, and from this safe enclosure he spoke in a low voice, implied much, was loyal and punctual, and soon began to draw fan mail, on pale-lilac stationery in scented envelopes, in slanty handwriting with the i’s dotted with hearts. “I listen to you every night when I go to bed,” they wrote. “It’s like you’re right there in the room with me. Send me an autographed picture of yourself. Or if you’re physically repulsive, autograph a picture of someone good-looking and send me that. Are you married?”
No, he was not, and he never did get married, though Royell wrote to him and suggested they get hitched. Bobo was out of the picture—-he had gone to gargle one morning in the dark and grabbed a bottle of drain cleaner by mistake and the acid ate up his whole body except for the metal hasp on his pajamas. The baby, Roy Jr., was born in May, a big healthy boy. The million-dollar asbestos lawsuit had been thrown out by a jury of Piscacatawamaquoddymogginites who knew the Dobbs family and knew Royell would never harm a flea. “Could you forgive me too?” she asked Roy.
He was earning good money and had found his place in the world, which was the wee hours. I am single on that show, thought Roy. Everyone else in radio talks with the voice of marriage and duty. I speak with the voice of one who eats his dinner at an odd time out of white cardboard containers while standing at the kitchen counter and reading the sports page. People sense this. They recognize it in my voice: a man who keeps his clean socks and shirts on the dining-room table and spreads newspapers on the floors to keep the dust off them.
Year in, year out, Roy broadcast five nights a week, and it was exactly what people wanted, a familiar voice that didn’t tell them too much, didn’t hustle, didn’t crowd them, that gave them the slack to make him whoever they wanted him to be, and a few years ago the show observed its twenty-fifth anniversary, and KDU presented Roy with a green Thunderbird.
The news from Piscacatawamaquoddymoggin over the years was nothing but dismal. Royell’s mom went off in the bushes during a picnic and a swarm of black flies ate her, everything except her yellow anklets, and Royell’s brother Ronnie was changing the oil in his Nash Rambler when, for no reason, the engine started and he was quickly sliced into small chunks by the fan. Royell’s sister Rhonda was draining the bathtub after her bath and saw tiny people waving at her from inside the bubbles as they swept drainward and then suddenly she was in a bubble speeding swiftly toward the black hole of oblivion and then she was in the state asylum for the deranged in Bangor, restrained by canvas straps, wearing a ratty old hospital gown slit up the back so your hinder hung out. Royell’s dad caught a pretty big lobster one day near the Cape Hope Spa and hauled it up on shore in a fireman’s carry and had it almost to the spa’s back door when suddenly it got loose and grabbed him and threw him into the hot tub and pushed him under and cooked him. The coffin at the service was small, the size of an eyeglass case.
“You are all I have left, Roy,” wrote Royell. “Don’t you think I’ve suffered enough for my indiscretion? Why not let’s get married, what do you say?”
No way, he told her.
He almost got married once, to the Iron Rangerettes, a cowgirl singing group, who came in to do singing commercials for Golden Girl transmission fluid, four beauties who squeezed in close around Roy’s microphone, pressing up tight against him with their young firm bodies and their slender thighs so lean and taut from years of farm work, and every night those thighs got tauter and tauter. And, being in show business, they were casual about nudity. A Rangerette’d walk into the studio with her underwear in her hands and her breasts dingle-dangling loose and free and say, cool as a cucumber, “Which bra do you think I should wear tonight, Roy? this one? or this one?” And then they’d be squeezed against him, singing, “Hey trucker, slow that big rig down, / What’s your hurry to get to town? / We got all night, just you and me, / I like a man who drives deliberately,” and then Roy said, “Golden Girl transmission fluid! Golden Girl is the fluid that really loosens up your truck’s transmission, so if your clutch slips or you’re lo
sing your grip in the lower gears, try Golden Girl transmission fluid. Isn’t that right, girls?”—and they sang, “O Mr. Trucker, you’re so smooth and strong, / With Golden Girl fluid you can drive it all night long.”
Roy wanted to marry all four of them, but radio was not ready for polygamy, he knew, and rather than ruin a good deal, he remained single. He is still broadcasting “The Blue Loon Ballroom,” midnight–five a.m., and you can catch him as you’re driving your load of potatoes east from Grand Forks to Duluth on Highway 2, a smooth voice in the night, and even though he doesn’t say much, you know that this man has had some bad haircuts in his day and lost a true love or two. This man has come home to empty rooms and confronted Sunday mornings that stretched for weeks. He has wandered the trashy streets at 2 a.m. imagining that happiness might emerge from an alley and take him by the hand. He has known futility and grief in full measure. Heartbreak is what makes the broadcaster. Without it, there is no gravel in your voice, no weight, no twang, and nobody remembers you ten minutes later. Heartbreak is the key to broadcasting success.
GARY KEILLOR
hen I was sixteen years old, I stood six feet two inches tall and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. I was intense and had the metabolism of a wolverine. I ate two or three lunches a day and three full dinners at night, as my family sat around the kitchen table and observed, and I cleaned off their plates too when they had poor appetites or were finicky. There was no food I disliked except muskmelon, which smelled rotten and loathsome. Everything else I ate. (It was Minnesota so we didn’t have seafood, except fish sticks, of course.) I was a remarkable person. I was a junior in high school, Class of 1960. I was smart, so smart that poor grades didn’t bother me in the slightest; I considered them no reflection on my intelligence. I read four books a week, and I sometimes walked home from school, all twelve miles, so I could relive favorite chapters out loud, stride along the shoulder of the highway past the potato farms, and say brilliant and outrageous things, and sing in a big throbbing voice great songs like “Til There Was You” and “Love Me Tender.”
The Book of Guys Page 13