The Book of Guys

by Garrison Keillor

  There was Earl, dazed with pleasure, having been adored all the long summer. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “We got our butt kicked,” said his mom. “We’ve got to put the house up for sale and go be powerless. And it’s your fault. Why weren’t you there?”

  BELIEVE IT OR NOT. EARL GREY TEA IS NOW THE MOST POPULAR TEA IN GEORGIA. IT OUTRANKS BOURBON AMONG MALES BETWEEN TWENTY-FIVE AND SIXTY AND IS STEADILY GAINING ON COFFEE, COKE, BEER, AND ORANGE JUICE. IT IS THE FASTEST-GROWING BEVERAGE IN THE ATLANTA AREA.

  The Greys did not return to Georgia. They spent a last Christmas in Washington—Earl’s mom gave him a rod and reel, a Bob-Bet Bait Box full of Sassy Shiners and Can-Do Lures and a Bang-O-B bait and two Lazy Ikes and a Worm Hotel, though Earl had never fished in his life and had no desire to. In January, Daddy took his remaining hundred thousand in campaign funds and they motored west to California, where Daddy would have a job at the Hoover Institution, thinking about great issues. They stopped in Minneapolis, where he delivered a speech on campaign reform at the Stassen Institute, and the following afternoon they stopped at the Lucky Spud restaurant in Platt, North Dakota, for lunch, and half an hour later they went off and left Earl there.

  The Spud specialized in mashed potatoes: there were twenty-four varieties on the menu, including Big Cheesie, White Cloud, Land O’Gravy, Tuna Whip, and the Elvis Parsley. Earl, a slow eater, ordered a Big Cheesie and a White Cloud and sat and savored every bite, while Daddy paid the check and went to the car with Vance and Vince, and Mom, who had been in a sour mood for months, said, “We’re going, Earl, and we’re not going to wait for you, and I mean it,” and then she disappeared with Vivian and Vera. Earl finished up the last four bites in a big hurry, but when he ran out the door, the car was gone.

  The waitress tried to comfort him. “They’ll be back in a jiffy, snuggums, just you wait and see. Here. Have some more spuds.” But the family never returned. Never called, never wrote, never filed a missing-child report. They cruised on to Palo Alto, enjoying the scenery, without a peep out of his brothers and sisters as to the empty place in the back seat. But he had taken up so little room in their lives, why should they notice his absence?

  Does this story strike you as far-fetched, dear reader? Then you are not a middle child. Middle children have similar experiences all the time. You go to your family’s for dinner and your mom is put out with you for some reason, won’t look at you, just talks to your brothers and sisters and their spouses, not to you, so you take her aside after you’ve washed and dried all the dishes and ask her, “Mom, what’s wrong?” and she bursts into tears and says, “Why didn’t you come to our fortieth-anniversary party last summer? I can’t understand it. Everyone was there except you and you never called or wrote or sent a present or anything!” So you explain to her: “Mom, I organized that party. The party was my idea. I put up the decorations, I bought the chocolate cake and ice cream, I hired the polka band, and I cleaned up afterward. I was there for sixteen hours, Mom.” And she says, “But then how come you’re not in any of the photographs?” Because middle children are invisible. And because we’re the ones who take the photographs. (That’s why there are coin-operated self-portrait booths in bus depots—for us, so we can be in pictures.)

  None of the Greys ever said, “Hey, where’s Earl? Gotta get Earl in this picture!” Never. And if they had reported him missing to the police and the police had asked, “What does the boy look like?” the Greys would’ve looked at each other and said, “Now, what did he look like? He was medium height, wasn’t he? Didn’t he have brown hair? I seem to remember that it was brown.”

  TEA FACTS. EARL GREY TEA HAS BEEN USED AS A WASH BY NUMEROUS PROMINENT ARTISTS TO LEND A RICH BUT SUBTLE BROWN TONE TO WATERCOLORS AND DRAWINGS. BUT EARLS HAIR IS, AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN, BLONDE.

  So Earl grew up in Platt from the age of fifteen. He was raised by the owner of the Lucky Spud, Jack, and his sister Paula, the waitress. They lived in the apartment over the Spud and Earl bussed tables and washed dishes. The Spud was two rooms, a back dining room with brown plastic-top tables and a green carpet, and the front room with the counter and stools and vinyl flooring with a pattern of large maroon chunks. The Spud was full of patrons all morning and afternoon, old guys grousing about the government, the weather, fishing, farming, and their wives who sat and chainsmoked, eyes straight ahead, saying nothing.

  Paula believed that by smiling and brushing her teeth and keeping her underarms dry and her home as neat as a pin, she could stay on God’s good side and avoid disease. Every day, she brushed every hair on her head into place and then sprayed it shut and put a net on it. Jack was big and clunky and lay on the couch with his cat Kathy on his chest and drank Old Crow with raspberry Kool-Aid and chortled at the dumb things said by celebrities on television: “Ho, ho, ho, get a load of that. Look, it’s Myron Gumball, the big dummy. What is he supposed to be, funny? Look. C’mere! He’s got a big booger in his nose. You call that comedy? I heard better jokes from a Swede. And look, his barn doors’re open.”

  Paula didn’t like to hear bad things said about people. “What goes around, comes around,” she said. Paula was a tea drinker at heart, though sometimes she backslid when coffee was offered. “Oh, all right,” she’d say, not wanting to make a fuss. But tea was her preference.

  “We don’t get good tea in North Dakota,” she confided to Earl. “That’s the main reason for our meanness. Coffee makes people ornery and they go out and kick the dog and throw trash in the creek. Tea brings out the best in people.” North Dakotans, she said, prefer their coffee bitter with a rainbow of oil slick on top.

  It wasn’t only tealessness that cursed the prairie, Earl thought. The land was bleak and windswept, the people were like Canadians, vague, boring, not clearly delineated. Canadian migrant workers, or “frostbacks,” flocked over the border to pick broccoli and soybeans, bringing their boring culture with them. It offered no possibility of self-esteem, no sense of irony, not even many good crossword puzzles. And for spiritual comfort, the church offered even less. The very sight of the Platt Lutheran Church made Earl’s skin clammy. Christianity taught that humanity is worthless and vile but that if we agree to hate ourselves God will forgive us. Earl longed to leave; he dreamed that a silvery spaceship descended from the sky, a ship shaped like a fish, and it smiled and he entered its mouth, stepping over the sharp teeth, and was carried to California.

  Earl wrote numerous letters to his dad at the Hoover Institution, which were answered by an assistant who thanked him for his interest and passed along the Congressman’s best wishes. Earl didn’t fare much better at the Platt Public School, where he was regarded with disgust and amusement, perhaps because he brought a teapot to school with him. For that, he was nicknamed Potty, and boys drew pictures of him wearing a dress, with snot pouring from his nose, and a petunia sticking out of his butt.

  But Earl couldn’t survive a day without tea. To him, tea represented civilization and the spirit of caring.

  He found a book in the Platt Free Lending Library, Wild Teas of North America, and from it learned to make dandelion tea, sassafras, rhubarb tea—each one delicious and comforting. Paula thrived on the teas he made, became lovelier and more self-assured. “They are even better than a high colonic,” she said. Her color improved. She let her hair hang loose and told her boyfriend, Butch, to get lost.

  Butch was a grizzled old trucker with weak kidneys who came through town once a month or so and got a ten-dollar room at the Bronco Motel and drank six beers and called her up and said, “Paula? Come on over. Let’s party. We’ll order a pizza, and watch a video. Come on over, have a Coke! See if you don’t have a good time—if you do, great! and if you don’t, that’s okay, I’ll bring you right home. I promise. All you have to do is say, Butch, take me home, and I’ll take you home. No questions asked. It’s a deal.” By the time he reached Platt, he was desperate for company.

  So Paula would put on her best dress and doll herself up and go to the
Bronco, expecting a social occasion, and there was no party, no pizza, the video was one of trucks at truck pulls, and there was Butch, alone, groping toward her in the dark, drunk.

  This time when Butch called, Paula told him to stick his head in the toilet and flush it.

  Butch hung around the Spud for two days, groveling in a purposeful way, and Paula wouldn’t give him the time of day. She slapped his mashed potatoes down on the counter in front of him without a word and didn’t say thanks when he left her humongous tips. Once he left her a twenty on a bill of $2.12. No smile did he get.

  Butch told Earl, who was washing dishes at the Spud after school, “You don’t get what you want in this world. Keep that in mind and you’ll be a wiser man than me, boy. People are no damn good for the most part.” He said it so Paula could hear, and she still said nothing.

  Earl said, “Butch, that’s a coffee philosophy. I could make you a cup of tea that would change your way of thinking. This tea could turn on the porch light in your eyes. If you drank tea, Paula would love you to pieces.”

  Paula, her back to them, snorted.

  “Truck drivers do not drink tea,” said Butch. “It does not happen. Only thing that could put a light in these eyes would be if Paula pulled up her dress and gave me the green light. And that’s not going to happen either.”

  “You’re right,” she said softly.

  TEA BULLETIN. TRUCK DRIVERS NOW DRINK TEA BY THE THOUSANDS, AND NOT ONLY THE ONES HAULING LOADS OF FROZEN QUICHE OR LACE CURTAINS EITHER. GUYS HAULING STEEL BEAMS, CARS, EVEN HOGS AND STEERS—-MORE AND MORE, THEY REQUEST TEA AT TRUCK STOPS AND TELL THE WAITRESS HOW TO MAKE IT CORRECTLY. NEVER BRING A TRUCKER A CUP OF HOT WATER AND A FRESH TEABAG LYING NEXT TO IT ON THE SAUCER. NEVER. THE TEA MUST ALWAYS BE PUT IMMEDIATELY INTO THE BUBBLING BOILING WATER. AND A TEABAG IS VASTLY INFERIOR TO FRESH LOOSE TEA WRAPPED IN A TINY CLOTH TEABAG THAT CAN BE TIGHTENED WITH DRAWSTRINGS.

  For a few years, Earl kept checking the Personals section in the Platt Pilot, hoping to see: “Lost: our beloved son Earl Grey, at a restaurant. Call home, honey, and we’ll come and fetch you. We love you so much. Mom and Dad.” But no such ad ever appeared, only ads from men seeking younger women (Married Guy, 57, seeks single woman 18–19, must be a real looker; pert and perky, and have a thing about bulky fellas who don’t say too much. Send photos.)

  “Your folks’re sure missing a good thing, not watching you grow up, honey,” Paula told Earl six years later, when he was twenty-one. It was January and the arctic winds swept the frozen tundra and moaned in the weatherstripping around the front door of the Lucky Spud and whistled in the chimney. It was cold and dark and a heavy pallor hung in the air, the aroma of burnt coffee.

  And then a beautiful thought occurred to him: I don’t have to stay. I can go.

  (Middle children often suffer from stationariness as a result of being crunched in the middle with siblings on either side, and many of them take years to realize that choice is an option—that a person can, if he wishes, have a will of his own, decide things, and act.)

  Earl withdrew his savings from the Platt State Bank, $420, and arranged a ride with Butch, who was hauling a load of soybeans to San Francisco.

  “God bless you, Earl Grey, for making my life a lot less dingy,” said Paula, and they had a last pot of tea together. It was delicious. So calm and good. While Earl was rinsing the cups, the phone rang. Paula answered. It was Butch.

  “Just come and spend twenty minutes with me, Paula honey,” he said. “That’s all I ask. Twenty minutes. If you don’t like it, I’ll bring you right back. Just say, Take Me Home, and back you come. I promise. Twenty minutes. Find out what kind of a guy I am. When I’m relaxed. When I’m being myself. Try it out. What do you have to lose? After twenty minutes, if you want to stay half an hour, great, I couldn’t be happier. Otherwise it’s hasta la vista, and you never have to see me again. All I’m asking is a chance to make you happy. Twenty minutes. If you don’t do it, you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering, what if? So give me a try. Not asking for a night or even an hour. Just twenty minutes. What do you say?”

  “I say go put your head farther down the toilet,” she said.

  “A man can’t get what he wants in this world,” Butch told Earl as they cruised west in the big rig. “Don’t you forget that.” Earl dropped off to sleep, and when he awoke, the truck was in Palo Alto, parked in front of the Hoover Institution, a Spanish-mission edifice like a California bank.

  “Well, this is as far as you go, I guess. Hope you enjoy your family. See you around,” said Butch, anxious to get going.

  “Goodbye, Butch,” said Earl, knowing he probably would never see him again. He climbed down from the cab and a moment later the big rig pulled away and disappeared over the hill.

  TEA LORE. TEA IS A PART OF FAREWELL CEREMONIES IN MANY CULTURES MORE ADVANCED THAN OUR OWN. AMERICANS, ESPECIALLY AMERICAN MEN, DON’T GO IN FOR EMOTIONAL GOODBYES AND LIKE TO PRETEND IT ISN’T FINAL, EVEN IF IT OBVIOUSLY IS. BREAKING UP WITH A WIFE, FOR EXAMPLE, THEY ARE LIABLE TO STROLL AWAY AS IF GOING TO THE CORNER STORE FOR A PACK OF SMOKES. IN OTHER CULTURES, PEOPLE SAY GOODBYE BY SITTING AROUND A TABLE AND ENJOYING A LAST POT OF TEA TOGETHER. THEY BELIEVE THAT TEA GIVES THEIR TEARS A BITTERSWEET FLAVOR. THEY WAIT AS THE TEA STEEPS, RECALLING LOVELY INCIDENTS FROM THEIR YEARS OF ACQUAINTANCE, RELISHING THEIR COMMON HISTORY, FEELING THE TUG OF TIME’S PASSAGE, AND THEN THE TEA IS POURED INTO EACH CUP AND DOCTORED WITH SUGAR OR MILK OR LEMON AND SLOWLY SAVORED, FOLLOWED BY A SECOND CUP, AND THEN:

  1. STANDING

  2. BOWING

  3. EMBRACING AND WEEPING

  4. EXCHANGING SORROW AND REMORSE

  5. CLOSING THE DOOR AND BURSTING INTO SOBS

  6. KEENING AND RENDING GARMENTS

  7. FACING THE FUTURE BRAVELY

  The Hoover Institution was locked. He pushed the buzzer and a voice came over the intercom: “State your name, your business, and whom you wish to see.”

  “My name is Earl Grey, and I am here to be reunited with my father, Congressman Grey,” said Earl, looking into the intercom speaker as if it had eyes he could appeal to.

  “The Congressman is gone,” said the voice. Earl asked, Where? The voice said it did not know, nor did it know when he would return. Furthermore, it said, he had never mentioned a missing child.

  Earl asked if he could leave a message for his dad. “Go ahead,” said the voice.

  “Tell him,” said Earl, “to go and get stuffed.”

  Once he found out once and for all that he was abandoned, Earl Grey was free to go and make his own life. And he did, with one stroke of rare good fortune after another. He met Malene Monroe, who was then singing with the Tommy D’Orsay Orchestra, and he made her a pot of Earl Grey tea that cured her croup and enabled her to go on and record “Tea for Two.” His royalties from that paid for three years in Sumatra, where he perfected his tea blend and also had two children by Anna Tin. He set up shop in London, promoted his tea, and developed a nice accent, and when he arrived back in America in 1970, people assumed he was English nobility, and his tea took off.

  But success didn’t affect him. He knew that middleness is an inner quality and you carry it all your life, in all circumstances. A middle child can become a star, stand on a stage in a gold lame suit with six spotlights trained on him and his beautiful pectorals, and sing his heart out and people in the audience will be looking at the band, the third saxophonist from the right, and thinking, “He reminds me of somebody, but who? A guy who was at my wedding…But which marriage? The third, I think. Was he one of the caterers? Was he Barb’s brother? Or was he in the orchestra? Of course. He was in the orchestra! And he played saxophone, didn’t he? Yes! He did. It was him! That man played saxophone at my wedding!”—meanwhile, the middle child has just wound up a version of “My Way” that traversed six octaves of vocal dexterity and is now about to sing the Sextet from Lucia, all six parts, but the audience is unable to focus on that golden figure—his essential middleness deflects their
attention to the decor, the candle in the lamp on the table, the waiter—doesn’t he remind you of someone who was in a movie once?

  Once Earl thought he had found a sacred Shoshone tea leaf that gives one the power to transcend middleness, but it was only parsley, and Shoshone Indians did not make parsley tea. They put parsley on their fish and they made tea from tea leaves wrapped in very thin paper that the white men gave them in exchange for Idaho.

  Earl and his folks were reunited on a cable-TV show called Bringing It Home in 1987. His mom and dad grinned, and the host of the show, a smiley man named Brant whose hair was as big as a breadbox, said, “I think all the folks out there are ready to see a good hug right now, aren’t we?” and the studio audience clapped, and Earl joined in the hug, but without pleasure. He didn’t hug hard or long.

  Oddly, Brant participated in the hug too, though he had met the Greys only fifteen minutes before. His eyes glittered with tears, he whooped, and he grinned like a house afire. “Earl Grey,” he cried, “today your tea business has made you a multimillionaire, your name known around the world. Wouldn’t you have to agree that maybe, just maybe, your being left behind in North Dakota may have been the best thing that ever happened to you?”

  Earl looked at him in disbelief. “No,” he said, “of course it wasn’t. Don’t be ridiculous. Children should never be abandoned by their parents.”