The Book of Guys

by Garrison Keillor

  It was miraculous, the effect this had, like pressing a laugh button. I touched the black vinyl rim and the music warbled, and fifty feet away, people erupted in fits of happiness. I did it again. How wonderful to hear people laugh! and to be able to give them this precious gift of laughter so easily. Then I discovered a speed control that let me slow it down and speed it up. The singers sounded demented, in love one moment, carsick the next. The audience thought this was a stitch. But Bill sort of went to pieces. One prime qualification for a show business career, I would think, is the ability to improvise and go with the audience, but Bill Swenson did not have that ability. Here he was, rescued from his drippy encore, magically transformed into comedy, and he was too rigid to recognize what a hit he was. His lips stopped moving. He shook his fist at someone in the wings, perhaps me, and yelled a common vulgar expression at someone in the crowd, and wheeled around and walked off.

  I didn’t care to meet him, so I walked fast right past him onto the stage, and coming out of the bright light into the dark, he didn’t see me until I was out of reach. There was still some heavy booing when I arrived at the microphone, and I made a deep English-actor type of bow, with princely flourishes and flutters, and they laughed, and then they were mine all the way. I held on to them for dear life for the next two minutes. I sailed into “O Captain,” in my ripest and fruitiest accent, with roundhouse gestures, outflung arms, hand clapped to the forehead —– I cried:

  AOOWWW CAP-TIN, MYYYYY CAP-TIN,

  AOWER —– FEEAH-FOOL TWIP EEZ DONE!

  TH’ SHEEP HAS WETHAH’D—– EVIDDY RACK!

  TH’ PRIIIIIIIZE WE SOT—–EEZ WON!

  BUT—–AAAAOOOOOOOWWWWW

  TH’ BLLEEEEEEEDING DRRROPS—–

  OF RRRED—–

  WHEAHH—–

  ON TH’ DECK—–

  BEEEL SWEN-SON LIIIIIIIIES—–

  FALLIN—–

  CAAAOOOOWWWLD

  —–AND—–

  —–DED!

  It wasn’t a kind or generous thing to do, but it was successful, especially the “AAAAAOOOOOOO-WWWW” and also the part about Bill Swenson, and at the end there was shouting and whistling and pandemonium, and I left the stage with the audience wanting more, but I had witnessed the perils of success, and did not consider an encore. “Go out and take a bow,” said Miss Rasmussen, and out I went, and came back off. Dede and Bill were gone. Dede was not feeling well, said Miss Rasmussen.

  I watched the rest of the show standing at the back of the auditorium. The act after me was a girl from the wrong side of the river who did a humorous oral interpretation entitled “Granny on the Phone with Her Minister.” The girl had painted big surprise eyebrows and a big red mouth on her so we would know it was comedy, and as the sketch went on, she shrieked to remind us that it was humorous. The joke was that Granny was hard-of-hearing and got the words wrong. Then came an accordionist, a plump young man named David Lee, Barbara’s cousin, who was a little overambitious with “Lady of Spain” and should have left out two or three of the variations, and a tap dancer who tapped to a recording of “Nola” and who made the mistake of starting the number all over again after she had made a mistake. I enjoyed watching these dogs, strictly from a professional point of view. And then the choir returned to sing “Climb Every Mountain,” and then Miss Rasmussen stood and spoke about the importance of encouraging those with talent and how lucky we should feel to have them in our midst to bring beauty and meaning to our lives. And then the lights came up, and my classmates piled into the aisles and headed for the door and saw me standing in back, modest me, looking off toward the stage. Almost every one of them said how good I was as they trooped past—clapped my shoulder, said, hey, you were great, you should’ve done more, that was funny—and I stood and patiently endured their attention until the auditorium was empty and then I went home.

  “You changed the poem a little,” Miss Rasmussen said the next day. “Did you forget the line?” “Yes,” I said. “Your voice sounded funny,” she said. I told her I was nervous. “Oh well,” she said, “they seemed to like it anyway.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “thank you very much.”

  OMOO THE WOLF BOY

  was born at Lost Land Lake in a pine paradise in northern Wisconsin that later became the Lucy W. Chequamagon Memorial Forest and I never intended to become a wolf but when I was eight my beloved mother died, and my dad married a nasty woman named Luverne, I took off, and the wolves took me in. It’s as simple as that.

  My mother, Lucy W. Chequamagon, for whom the Memorial Forest was named, was a famous beauty with long black hair, six feet tall and slim-hipped in her long leather skirt and lace-up boots, and she was devoted to me, teaching me the birds and trees and animals of the forest and also great show songs like “Oklahoma” and “Hey Look Me Over.” She had been a Broadway chorus girl and had hoofed through 942 performances of Let’s Do a Show! when she met my dad, Oscar, who was in New York visiting his brother Emil, a stagehand. All I can imagine, by way of explaining their romance, is that she must have been extremely fatigued. Dad wasn’t much of a looker and even less of a talker. He was a woodcutter. Mother was an entertainer. She told stories of Broadway days. She sang. She made a wonderful lamb chowder with big chunks of meat and potatoes floating in the cream sauce. Our home was in the forest, a cozy one-room cabin with a green Oriental linoleum floor and pictures of castles and royalty on the walls. My dad cut wood and operated a string of vending machines in the forest that sold maps and candy bars to lost hunters, and then, when hunters who lacked correct change shot off the locks and black bears ate the candy, he became a fishing and hunting guide and was gone for weeks at a time. My mother and I didn’t think about him when he wasn’t there. We danced and sang:

  Hey kid, whenever you’re blue

  And you want to get happy—here’s what to do:

  Put on your best clothes and pull back the rug

  And smile a smile that lights up your mug.

  Take a step to the left, a shuffle step to the right,

  Cry out “Yethir!” and reach for the spotlight,

  And step kick step kick all the way—

  You’re in Show Business, U.S.A.!

  My mother was taken away from me one cold spring day after weeks of sleet and rain. She was wrapped in a tattered yellow quilt and carried out the door of our cabin, the fever burning in her soft hazel eyes that never left my face until the door clicked shut. She gazed at me long and sweet and whispered, “Remember me, my little Lyle,” and then she was gone.

  Dad’s motto was “Don’t look back, what’s done is done, so live for today,” and a few weeks later, he brought home Luverne, who had eyes like two brown stones and cheeks as cold as ice. “We were married in Hayward after lunch,” he explained. She threw out Mother’s pictures and put up her own, woodland scenes, though we had the woods there to look at. I hummed “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” quietly as I washed dishes and she said, “Hey, who stuck a nickel in you? Put a cork in it, wouldja? Who do you think you are, Luciano Poverty?”

  The next morning, Dad sat on the step and got his pans soaped and his packs loaded for a long trip up the Namekagon. He leaned back and filled his pipe and lit up and smoked, and seemed about to say something, but then thought better of it. Dad could go for days without saying a word, so three hours was nothing. Finally, he said, “Don’t forget, you’re in charge of the woodpile.”

  He left to meet his party from Chicago, and Luverne lay in bed on her back and snored so the glasses rattled in the cupboard. I quietly poured corn flakes in a bowl and quietly ate them, letting them soak in my mouth to avoid crunching, but even a soft gumming sound awoke her. She yelled, “Wouldja kindly shuddup? Just put it back in the can and screw a lid on it!” and threw a shoe and went back to sleep, and I sat and read a book, turning the pages with utmost care, but even that slight rustling brought her charging up out of bed. She ordered me outdoors. “It’s cold,” I said, “and I’m only eight.” She
said it would be a good experience for me. “When can I come back in?” I asked. She said, “As soon as you’re ready to be good.”

  I knew then that I was in for a long haul in the woods, given Luverne’s standard of goodness, but as an avid reader, I had no fear of the woods. Bambi was there, and Thumper, Uncle Wiggily, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, Mr. Frog, Mowgli, Gub Gub, and the rabbits of Rabbit Hill, so I headed into the silent stately forest, keeping the tall pine over the cabin as a landmark, went deeper, keeping an eye on the tall pine, and then, much later, looked and realized that every pine in the forest was just that tall, and then I heard a whimper, and turned, and there was a big wolf standing on a fallen tree and staring at me with his big blue eyes.

  He snuffled and tossed his head at me, as if to tell me to follow him, and turned and trotted along a path, looking back to make sure I was coming. We ran about a mile, and scrambled up a rocky slope and into a deep crevice and a dark den, and inside were five more wolves.

  They gathered around, talking and laughing, sniffing me, discussing my clothing. And they lay down and I lay in the middle of them. And they licked my face and hands. They became my family and the den my home for the next ten years with my wolf dad and den mother, my two sisters, and my beloved grandfather Omoo.

  They were deeply affectionate, always touching me gently, licking me, and I needed their comfort and support, because life was terribly hard sometimes. Wolf grammar is complicated: the vocabulary is only about a hundred “words” and each one has hundreds of possible meanings—sneesha, for example, can mean “the place where the deer come at night to browse” or “the way the sky looks when winter is approaching” or “Are we going to have squirrel for the fourth day in a row?” or “There were fresh droppings on the trail today—yours? No?”—and verb tense is indicated by the angle of your tail, and I didn’t have one—so I was limited to the present. As for the diet, I just never developed a taste for very rare meat. On the other hand, I loved howling, which we did several times a week. I taught them to howl Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” even though it was night, and they did it right on key. They loved Broadway songs, especially my mom and Omoo. I put some pebbles between my toes and tap-danced on a stone ledge and sang a song for my mom:

  Hey folks, step this way

  To see the greatest little lady in theater today.

  Get your tickets, grab your popcorn,

  Take your seats and a star is born!

  She’s got the body and she’s got the voice,

  She amuses the women and amazes the boys!

  So open the curtains and beat the drums

  Cause, baby, here she comes!

  And she beamed and Omoo barked, he loved it so much. I loved Omoo. He taught me to talk, he asked me many questions about music (he said he preferred Irving Berlin to Rodgers and Hammerstein, but Meredith Willson’s The Music Man was his favorite), and when he died, the family and I removed his beautiful silver fur and I wore it for the next six years. And I took his name.

  When I turned eighteen, my younger brother, who, due to wolves’ shorter life expectancy, was now an old man, took me aside for a talk. “I love you,” he said, “but it’s time we face up to the fact that you’re—well, you’re different.”

  “You think I don’t know?”

  “You’re a horseshit hunter, and on your own, you’d starve. You’d be forced to subsist on grubs and snakes, snack food. And worse, you have an accent, a pretty dumb one. Other wolves aren’t going to help out anyone who pronounces words like you do. Nobody’s going to invite you on the hunt, nobody’s going to share his kill with you. You’ll be a lone wolf. You’ll die.”

  “I disagree. I’m smell-impaired, that’s all. I’ll be okay. Wolf society is changing. These things take time. But I’m going to devote my life to the cause of equality for us wolves who can’t hunt. We have a right to a full, rich life, too.”

  “There’s one other thing. You’re a crappy singer too. You can’t sing worth beans. And we’re tired of Oklahoma. Grandpa only liked it because he was deaf. It’s dumb.”

  And then he bit me. He bit my neck and he kept biting. He got me down and started chewing on my neck and it hurt so bad I smacked him across the snout and ran away and up a tree. He growled and barked for a while, called me a “pussy” and a “whiskerless wimp,” called me a pantywaist and a cake-eater and a tender-paws and a foreigner. And he turned and trotted home.

  I walked in the other direction, wondering where I had come from, wondering what the future would bring, except I didn’t have a tail to indicate future, and I walked for miles, then smelled a man, and heard a ding and a click. The man, who wore a red-plaid jacket and a fur cap, held a long gun. He stood with his back to me, putting a coin into what I now know was a vending machine, but at the time I thought it was the Mind of Death. He was humming a tune to himself that sounded to me, a wolf, as if he was saying, “There’s a big hairy raccoon around here,” which is a huge insult in our tongue. So as he took the map from the machine, I threw back my head and howled.

  He jumped three feet, the gun went off, he tore into the underbrush, leaving fresh droppings in the grass, and I picked up the map and followed him. Eventually I found a road. A sheriff found me. I was put in a hospital but nothing was wrong with me so they had to let me go. They sent me to a foster home in Wausau run by a Grandma DeLisle. At first, she had to feed me rats and chipmunks, it was what I was used to, and it was months before I could bear the feeling of underwear on my body. To wear trousers at all felt like my legs were caught in the jaws of a trap.

  “Jell-O. Good,” she said over and over, spooning green blobs into my mouth. “Napkin. Use it. And don’t bite me. No. No bites. I’m a woman. That’s me. Woman.”

  In wolf culture, we do a certain amount of playful biting, and I had to learn not to, and learn not to mark the door to my bedroom with urine, and for months, I greeted Grandma by poking my head up under her skirts and sniffing her hinder and making her whoop, and it was hard to remember not to. But love is tender in any language, and she’d pet me and murmur sweet things, and I recognized that she loved me and somehow she was able to see possibilities in me, even though I was so different.

  She clipped my toenails, which hurt, but she was as gentle as she could be and sympathetic. It hurt her when I hurt—for example, when she bathed me and I screamed at the terrifying sensation of hot water and immersion, she hugged me, wet and naked as I was, and I clung to her, both of us dripping and bawling, Grandma and me. “Omoo, I know this hurts,” she said, “but you must brush your teeth and use a mouthwash,” and when it stung me and my gums bled, she hugged me again and again. She taught me to read and write again, and of course this brought back sweet and painful memories of my mother, Lucy W. Chequamagon. I lay in bed and wept and moaned for days and days, and when I crawled out of bed, I had decided to wear a dress. In memory of my darling mother and in tribute to Grandma. Trousers were too painful. Trousers reminded me of my dad and he was a jerk.

  Grandma accepted this, and so did her grandniece Doreen, through it took her awhile. She was eighteen. She came and visited us in our cottage every weekend. Doreen was beautiful, though not so much as she imagined, and she was bossy. “Why such big skirts?” she said. “It’s too loose. You have a very lithe, trim, erotic body, why not show it off more? And I don’t like your hair at all, but that’s up to you.”

  In honor of Grandma, I had bleached my hair white and then used a blue rinse. She and I had blue hair in the same powder-blue shade. I wore voluminous white skirts with petticoats, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes, and had blue hair, and I sang “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” and “Till There Was You” with dramatic howls interspersed.

  One day, Doreen was helping me fit a skirt and she reached up between my legs and touched my rooney, as we wolves call it. “Well, maybe you should stick with loose clothes,” she said, smiling. “You got quite a member there.”

  A few weeks later, she went into hea
t, and I took her clothes off. She didn’t seem to know that she was in heat, or what effect this had on me, and she yelled at me to stop. I tried to mount her and she hit me, but this sort of foreplay is common in the wolf world, and I persevered and coupled with her, and she accepted it. She even cried my name and kissed me. She bitched to Grandma about it afterward, though, and made a holy fuss to her brothers, who came with guns and drove me out into the woods. No problem. I enjoyed it. I found a rocky den near the house, spent my nights watching, guarding, and brought fresh meat every week, and in the spring Doreen had a litter of three babies. I was allowed to move back in.

  We married and we live with Grandma in her house and we get along fine. Doreen watches too much television, but then I enjoy looking at the river flow, and it’s all the same. Everything’s goin’ my way, as it says in the song, and all I need to do is sit and watch it go and keep an eye on the kids. They are only a year old but they lope around and get their noses into everything, a regular floorshow. We’re bringing them up bilingual.

  THE COUNTRY MOUSE AND THE CITY MOUSE

  nnie was a Minneapolitan and Mesa Bob was from northern Minnesota on the Mesabi Range, north of Duluth. They met in Minneapolis. Her play, Nothing but Zero, had opened in a 1958 Oldsmobile at a junkyard, and he was “with the post office,” as he told her, though he didn’t mention that his job was chewing mail and that he was a volunteer. They met at a reception. She invited him to her play the next night, and although he considered her slightly overdressed (rhinestone whisker clips?) and she was put off by the acorns on his breath—when their whiskers touched and their dark eyes met, they fell instantly in love. Her play was eighty words long, and he couldn’t follow it. Nonetheless, he punched out a mouse in the back seat who sneered in Annie’s direction.