You’re no Doctor of Literature,
Never were and never will be.
Your writing goes from bad to worse.
You don’t deserve a doctor degree,
You ain’t even literature’s nurse.
I turned and saw my old pal Pete
Leap like a champion from his seat,
Snatch that tot and slap its wrist
And make it hop
And wash its mouth with soap
And send it home to the busted shack
Down beside the railroad track,
Where it lived in squalor with its pop,
A noted deconstructionist.
Which taught the child one thing, I hope,
And that is: merit only goes so far.
People who do their best to be
The best find out they are what they are
And have to fall back upon loyalty.
I’m too old to search for truth or
Be a follower of Luther,
But I’m glad to sit beneath their tree
(Thanks to my friend Pete) a P
h. (for honorary) D.
Mother’s Poem
Some mornings I get up at five.
With four to mother, one to wive,
I find the hours from light to dark
Are not enough to matriarch
With goals for matriarchy high
Among the apples of my eye.
This little girl with golden braid
Expects her toast a certain shade;
Her scrambled eggs must meet the test
Of excellence and gently rest
Upon the toast and not beside.
The little boy wants his eggs fried
Yet not be greasy on his lips,
Accompanied by bacon strips
Fried till they resemble bark.
The older boy takes his toast dark
And if his golden eggs should not
Be poached and served up steaming hot,
Two slightly liquid yellow bumps
Of yolk in solid white, he slumps
Down in his chair and has a mood.
The oldest girl eats rabbit food,
Berries, nuts, sunflower seeds,
Leaves and stems, and as she feeds,
She is displeased. It’s all my fault.
I bought her seeds containing salt.
And worse—some juice containing sugar.
She glares as if I were a crook or,
Worse, a mother short on sense
And guilty of child negligence.
Negligence in the name of love
Is just what we should have more of.
Don’t mother birds after some weeks
Of looking at those upturned beaks
Deliberately the food delay,
Hoping to hear their goslings say,
“What are these feathered floppy things
Attached to us? You think they’re wings?”
This helpful trusty friendly Frau
Is starting her neglect right now.
The clothes you counted on to leap
Up while you were fast asleep
And wash themselves for you to wear
Have let you down. They just sat there.
The bicycle you thought would pick
Itself up when the rain got thick,
The homework you forgot to do,
Assuming I would tell you to—
My child, you have been betrayed.
The world you thought was neatly made,
Its corners tucked in like a sheet,
Is uncomposed and incomplete.
For years I carried on a hoax.
I made you think that scrambled yolks
Or poached or boiled, fried or shirred,
Are how they come out of the bird.
I made you think that big dustballs
Tiptoe softly down the halls
Out to the trash, that your wool skirt
(The one with emblems of dessert)
Took a cab down to the cleaner,
In answer to a court subpoena.
No matter what you have been told,
The rainbow holds no pot of gold,
Babies aren’t found under rocks
Or in Sears Roebuck catalogues,
Those coins weren’t put there by an elf—
The Tooth Fairy is me myself,
The Easter bunny’s make-believe,
Cows don’t talk on Christmas Eve,
The moon is not made of green cheese,
And eggs don’t come the way you please,
Served by hens on silver trays,
And neither does much else these days.
The Finn Who Would Not Take a Sauna
In northeast Minnesota, what they call the Iron Range,
Where a woman is a woman and some things never change,
Where winter lasts nine months a year, there is no spring or fall,
Where it gets so cold the mercury cannot be seen at all
And you and I, we normal folk, would shiver, shake, and chatter,
And if we used an outhouse, we would grow an extra bladder;
But even when it’s coldest, when our feet would have no feeling,
Those Iron Rangers get dressed up and go out snowmobiling
Out across the frozen land and make a couple stops
At Gino’s Lounge and Rudy’s Bar for whiskey, beer, and schnapps—
And then they go into a shack that’s filled with boiling rocks
Hot enough to sterilize an Iron Ranger’s socks
And sit there till they steam out every sin and every foible
And then jump into a frozen lake and claim that it’s enjoible—
But there was one, a shy young man, and although he was Finnish,
The joys of winter had, for him, long started to diminish.
He was a Finn, the only Finn, who would not take a sauna.
“It isn’t that I can’t,” he said. “I simply do not wanna.
To jump into a frozen lake is not my fondest wish.
For just because I am a Finn don’t mean that I’m a fish.”
His friends said, “Come on, Toivo! Let’s go out to Sunfish Lake!
A Finn who don’t take saunas? Why, there must be some mistake.”
But Toivo said, “There’s no mistake. I know that I would freeze
In water colder than myself (98.6°).”
And so he stayed close by a stove for nine months of the year
Because he was so sensitive to change of temperature.
One night he went to Eveleth to attend the Miners’ Ball.
(If you have not danced in Eveleth, you’ve never danced at all.)
He met a Finnish beauty there who turned his head around.
She was broad of beam and when she danced she shook the frozen ground.
She took that shy young man in hand and swept him off his feet
And bounced him up and down until he learned the polka beat.
She was fair as she was tall, as tall as she was wide,
And when the dance was over, he asked her to be his bride.
She looked him over carefully. She said, “You’re kinda thin.
But you must have some courage if it’s true you are a Finn.
I ain’t particular ’bout men. I am no prima donna.
But I would never marry one who would not take a sauna.”
They got into her pickup, and down the road they drove,
And fifteen minutes later they were stoking up the stove.
She had a flask of whiskey. They took a couple toots
And went into the shack and got into their birthday suits.
She steamed him and she boiled him until his skin turned red;
She poured it on until his brains were bubbling in his head.
To improve his circulation and to soften up his hide,
She took a couple birch boughs and beat him till he cried,
“Oh, couldn’t you just love me no
w? Oh, don’t you think you can?”
She said, “It’s time to step outside and show you are a man.”
Straightway (because he loved her so, he thought his heart would break)
He jumped right up and out the door and ran down to the lake,
And though he paused a moment when he saw the lake was frozen
And tried to think just which snowbank his love had put his clothes in—
When he thought of Tina, Lord—that man did not think twice
But just picked up his size-12 feet and loped across the ice—
And coming to the hole that they had cut there with an ax—
Putting common sense aside, ignoring all the facts—
He leaped! Oh, what a leap! And as he dove beneath the surface,
It thrilled him to his very soul!—and also made him nurface!
And it wasn’t just the tingling he felt in every limb—
He cried: “My love! I’m finished! I forgot! I cannot swim!”
She fished him out and stood him up and gave him an embrace
To warm a Viking’s heart and make the blood rush to his face.
“I love you, darling dear!” she cried. “I love you with all my might!”
And she drove him to Biwabik and married him that night
And took him down the road to Carl’s Tourist Cabins
And spent a sleepless night and in the morning, as it happens,
Though it was only April, it was absolutely spring,
Birds, flowers, people put away their parkas and everything.
They bought a couple acres around Hibbing, up near Chisholm,
And began a life of gardening and love and Lutheranism.
And they live happily to this day, although they sometimes quarrel.
And there, I guess, the story ends, except for this, the moral.
Marriage, friends, is a lifelong feast, love is no light lunch.
You cannot dabble round the edge, but each must take the plunch.
And though marriage, like that frozen lake, may sometimes make us colder,
It has its pleasures, too, as you may find out when you’re older.
5
STORIES
MEETING FAMOUS PEOPLE
WHEN BIG TIM BOWERS just happened to turn to his left and see the little guy with the battered guitar case emerge limping from Gate 4A at the Omaha International Airport on July 12, 1985, he held out his big arms to greet his best friend, which, although they had never met in person, Sweet Brian surely was. It was Sweet Brian himself! There! In Concourse C! His White Boy album was what got Tim through the divorce from Deloyne after three loving months of marriage, when she notified him that he was hopeless and the next day upped and split for Cheyenne with a bald bread-truck driver (unbelievable), after which Tim lost his security job and apartment and would’ve lost his mind except for Sweet Brian, so of course he yelled, “Hey, you’re my man! I got to shake your hand! Hiiiiya! Sweet Brian! Hey!”
Sweet Brian made a sharp right, climbed over a railing and a row of plastic chairs, and walked fast toward Baggage Claim, which didn’t surprise Tim one bit. After all, the guy who wrote “Tie Me Loose” and “That Old Highway Suits Me Pretty Well, I Guess” and “Lovers Make Good Loners” is no Sammy Davis, Jr., and Tim respected him for the uncompromising integrity and privacy and sincerity of his art, which had been crucial to Tim when his own sense of self was chewed up by Deloyne, all of which Tim now needed to say to Sweet Brian. He galloped down the concourse after the fleeing singer-songwriter, who heard his 262-pound fan and panicked and went through a door marked “NO ADMITTANCE” and clattered down two flights of steel stairs, Tim’s big boots whanging and whomping on the stairs above, convincing him that death was near, and burst through a pair of swinging doors marked “WEAR EARPLUGS” and headed across the tarmac, a man once nominated for a Grammy (for “Existential Cowboy”) and once described as the Dylan of the late seventies, panting and limping around some construction barriers along the terminal wall toward a red door twenty yards away. “Incredible,” Tim was thinking. “I come to the airport to hang around and maybe get an idea for a song—not to meet anybody or anything, just to think about something to write about, maybe about not having anybody to meet—and I meet him. Fantastic.” Tim was six strides behind him when he burst through the red door. There was a second, locked door a few steps beyond, and there, in the tiny vestibule, Tim expressed a lifetime of appreciation. He hugged Sweet Brian from behind and said, “Hey, little buddy, I’m your biggest fan. You saved my life, man.”
The star pushed Big Tim away and sneered, “You know, it’s vampires like you who make me regret ever becoming a performer. You and your twenty-nine-cent fantasies. I don’t know what you—You sicken me.” And he slapped Tim.
At this point Tim wasn’t thinking lawsuit at all. An apology would have been enough—e.g., “Sorry, pal. I’m under too darn much pressure right now. Please understand.” He’d have said, “Fine, Sweet Brian. No problem. Just want you to know I love your music. That’s all. Take care of yourself. Goodbye and God bless you.” Instead, Sweet Brian said those terrible things and then slapped him and shoved him aside and went to the hotel and wrote an abusive song about him (“Your Biggest Fan”) and sang it that night at the Stockyards, and that’s how they wound up in U.S. District Court two years later.
Tim had lost quite a bit of weight in those two years, ever since he got a great job at NewTech, thanks to the company’s excellent weight-loss program, which, in fact, Tim himself initiated (he’s executive vice-president in charge of the entire Omaha and Lincoln operations, about eight thousand employees and growing daily since NewTech bought up SmetSys, ReinTal, and Northern Gas & Hot Water), and he looked blessedly happy at the courthouse, which might have had something to do with his new wife, Stephanie, a blond six-foot former Vogue model who accompanied him, leaning lovingly on his chest and smiling fabulously as photographers jockeyed for position. A handsome couple. Rumor said she was two months pregnant. They looked ecstatic. Young and rich and very much in love.
Inside, Tim’s lawyer described Sweet Brian as a “candy-ass has-been who can’t hit the notes and can’t write the hits, so he hits his fans,” and asked for a half million dollars in damages. The little guy sat twenty feet away from Tim, his ankles chained together. He looked bloated, sick. His cheap green sportcoat wouldn’t button in front. It had orangeade stains down the lapels. The story of his downfall was in all the papers. Sweet Brian and Tania Underwood had had to interrupt their Hawaiian sex tryst to fly to Nebraska for the trial and in Concourse C Brian was nabbed by the Omaha cops for possession of narcotics with a street value of $327. Tania was furious. She slapped him around in the police station, called him a loser, and left town. It snowed three feet that night, and his lawyer was stuck in L.A., and Sweet Brian sat in the clink for six days. That was when Tim saw him in court looking morose. “Can I help?” he asked, but the sullen singer turned away in anger. That night, a rodeo rider from Saskatchewan who was doing thirty days for bestiality beat the daylights out of Brian and knocked out four front teeth. Next morning, the county dentist, Dr. Merce L. Gibbons, had to drill out the stumps without Novocain. Brian bled so much he fainted and toppled forward, and the drill went through his cheek. The dentist panicked, thinking malpractice suit, and he tore his white smock slightly and roughed up his thin hair so as to claim that Brian had attacked him, and then he clubbed the former star hard, twice, with a mallet and yelled for the cops. They took Brian to the hospital and he got an infection from the blood test and died. There was no autopsy. The lawyer was in China. Nobody came from L.A. for the body, and finally some reporters collected $310 around the newsroom and Brian was buried in Omaha under a little headstone: “Brina Johnson, 1492-1987.” The two typos weren’t noticed until it was too late. So what could they do? A local columnist taped a note to the stone saying, “His name is Brian. Listen to his albums sometime. Not White Boy, which is too pretty, too nostalgic, too self-
conscious, but Coming Down from Iowa is not bad. I think it’s on the Argonaut label.”
Tim was in Palm Beach when someone told him Brian was dead, and although he was extremely busy in meetings all day, he wondered, “Could this have been avoided if I had approached him differently, maybe been more low-key?”
“He was a big hero to me back then,” he told Stephanie as they strolled along the beach toward The Palmery, where they were meeting some Florida associates for drinks and dinner. “I really wish we could have been friends.”
Even today, after he settled out of court with the singer’s estate for a rumored $196,000, Tim feels bad about the incident. He is not alone. Tens of thousands of people have approached very famous men and women intending to brighten the lonely lives of the great with a few simple words of admiration, only to be rejected and abused for their thoughtfulness. To the stars, of course, such encounters are mere momentary irritations in their fast-paced sensational lives and are quickly forgotten, but for the sensitive fans personal rejection by an idol becomes a permanent scar. It could easily be avoided if, when approaching the celebrated, those who practically worship them would just use a little common sense:
1. Never grab or paw the famous. They will instantly recoil and you will never ever win their respect. Stand at least thirty-two inches away. If your words of admiration move him or her to pat your shoulder, then of course you can pat back, but don’t initiate contact and don’t hang on. Be cool.
2. Don’t gush, don’t babble, don’t grovel or fawn. Never snivel. Be tall. Bootlicking builds a wall you’ll never break through. A simple pleasantry is enough—e.g., “Like your work!” If you need to say more than that (I think you’re the most wonderful lyric poet in America today), try to modify your praise slightly (but your critical essays really suck). Or cough hard, about five times. That relieves the famous person of having to fawn back. The most wearisome aspect of fame is the obligation to look stunned by each compliment as if it were the first ever heard. That’s why an odd remark (Your last book gave me the sensation of being a horned toad lying on a hot highway) may secretly please the famous person far more than a cliche (I adore you and my family adores you and everyone I know in the entire world thinks you are a genius and a saint and with your permission I will fall down on the sidewalk and writhe around and foam for a while). Be cool. Famous people much prefer a chummy insult to lavish nonsense: a little dig about the exorbitant price of tickets to the star’s show, perhaps, or the cheesiness of the posters (You design those yourself?). Or a remark about the celebrity’s pet (if any), like “How much did you pay for that dog?” Personal dirt (Do you have to shave twice a day? Do you use regular soap or what? What was it like when you found that out about her going out with him?) can wait for later. For now, limit yourself to the dog. As it gazes up in mealymouthed brown-nosed, lickspittle devotion, glance down and say, “Be cool.”
We Are Still Married Page 28