by Jim Harrison
When B.D. took his seat near a window at the front of the plane he stowed the bearskin under the seat in front of him, then took off his shoes so he could place his stocking feet against the fur, making it impervious to theft. A prominent Minneapolis businessman sat down beside him and was obviously unhappy to do so. The man wore a tailored pin-striped suit and made B.D. feel more invisible than he had felt before which was some pretty stiff competition. When the stewardess came around for drink orders B.D. asked for the price and was delighted to find out they were free, though later he figured out the nine drinks he consumed in the night were actually a hundred bucks apiece. His composure was pretty firm except for the improbable land speed of the takeoff and the ungodly noise of the engines. Soon afterward his skin prickled at the beauty of all the lights of Los Angeles, drawing their vision within as an uncritical child does. And later, when the altitude reached over thirty-five thousand feet he had to say to his seat partner, “We’re seven miles up in the air, the same distance so I’m told of the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean.” The man quickly closed his eyes, feigning sleep. And later yet, far below, he could see small thickets of lights that marked villages and cities that blurred into lovely white flowers.
When the snack of a seafood salad was served B.D. quickly determined the food wasn’t of the quality of Bob Duluth’s Malibu restaurant, took his bottle of Tabasco from his pocket, and turned the contents of the plastic dish into an appealing pink. The man then looked at him longingly and B.D. passed the hot sauce.
“How bright of you,” the man said.
“Can’t say anyone ever called me bright,” B.D. said, savoring his burning tongue.
“Fuck ‘em, you’re bright.” The man had finished his third drink and was warming up.
It turned out the man had done some rather fancy kinds of hunting and fishing and was quite pleased to find someone to listen to his self-aggrandizing tales of salmon fishing in Iceland and Norway, duck hunting in Argentina, dove hunting in Mexico where in one fabulous afternoon he had shot three hundred white-winged doves. Coming down to earth he also admitted to simple grouse shooting up near Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where Judy Garland had been born and not all that far from Bob Dylan’s birthplace. The man took out his computer and showed B.D. moving pictures of his two Brittany bird dogs and the dogs actually barked rather loudly which turned the heads of passengers who were trying to sleep. Since men are men, whatever that means, the man also showed him several different photos of his Los Angeles girlfriends. He traveled to L.A. and back once a week and though he was happily married, attested by earlier computer photos of his wife and children who came right after the dogs, the road was a lonely place and a hard-working man deserved affection. If B.D. hadn’t dozed off for a few minutes he would have seen the photo of a poor French actress the man was helping to get a green card. B.D. also didn’t take note that during the entire four-hour flight the man hadn’t asked him a single question about his life. The final transfiguration was the shimmering dawn on the greenery far below. “This is the shortest night of my life,” B.D. said too loudly. Even time herself didn’t stand still in a way you could count on.
Nine drinks is quite a bit on earth let alone in a cabin pressurized to a mile high, a dangerous height for drinking in volume. When the plane landed on a cool, wet, and windy Minneapolis dawn the other first-class passengers gave the prominent businessman and Brown Dog meaningful glares which were not recorded. The businessman conked a fancy lady on the head while dislodging his briefcase from an overhead bin, tried to kiss a stewardess good-bye, and brayed he was now headed for work in his brand-new Land Rover. The co-pilot, peeking out from the cockpit with a tired smile, chided the stewardess for giving the asshole too many drinks. Even B.D. dimly knew that it was time for their friendship to end and let the man go ahead while an older woman across the aisle told B.D. that he was an “enabler.”
He was well down the long corridor and emerging into the main terminal while clutching his full garbage bag to his chest when he stopped to ask himself why the ground, the endless carpet and now the hard floor, felt so strange beneath his feet. He had forgotten his shoes and when he turned to retrieve them he saw that he would have to go through security again which was definitely a bad idea.
Outside he sat on a bench near the curb and was soon wet and cold but dared not retreat for fear of missing Delmore. Finally he unwrapped his bearskin and enshrouded himself in it, violently hungover but warm. Two eco-ninnies fresh out of Boulder, the kind that piss off left, right, and middle, stared down at him with anger from the height of their elevator Birkenstocks but he was nonchalant, safe and secure in this citified version of the north country.
Finally, after more than an hour, Delmore beeped his horn repeatedly from a scant five feet away and B.D. roused himself from a beautiful dream where he and Sandrine were whirling through the universe attached tails to teeth like Celtic dogs. He opened the car door and spread out his skin.
“I got the bearskin back,” B.D. said, near tears.
“I didn’t know you lost it. It’s a good thing you got those clothes because I forgot to tell you on the phone there’s a chance you can get Rose’s old night job sweeping the casino. So help me navigate out of this goddamn suckhole.” Delmore passed B.D. the map but he was already asleep, having heard nothing at all.
They were halfway across northern Wisconsin on Route 8 when Delmore stopped the car at a roadside park that abutted a lake east of Ladysmith. He had bought a loaf of bread, mustard, and a can of Spam as a welcome-home lunch for Brown Dog who still hadn’t awakened. The sun was out now, and though it still was only in the high fifties Delmore felt warm and good to have his relation back even though the simpleminded fool wouldn’t wake up. Delmore made the sandwiches, set out an ice chest with a six-pack for B.D. and iced tea for himself. He became a little irritated, went back to the car and turned on a Sunday morning Lutheran church service at blasting volume. B.D. sank deeper in his bearskin and Delmore opened a beer and dribbled some on his lips. B.D. fumbled for the door, got out and fell to his knees, got up and took the can of beer from Delmore. He drank deeply, blinking his eyes at the landscape, rubbing his stocking feet on the soft green grass, drained the beer and handed the can to Delmore, then half-stumbled down through a grove of poplar, cedar, and birch to the lake where he knelt in the muddy reeds and rinsed his face in the cold water. On the way back up the hill he took a longer route through the woods, half-dancing through the trees like a circus bear just learning his ungainly steps, slapping at the trees and yelling a few nonsense syllables, dancing back to the picnic table where he popped another beer and picked up his Spam sandwich, looking out at late spring’s deep pastel green with the deepest thanks possible.
I Forgot to Go to Spain
You know me but then you don’t know me and why should you? I have never had the slightest interest in riddles of any sort which is partly why I wrote my even three dozen Bioprobes, those hundred-page intrusive biographies that fairly litter bookstores, newsstands, novelty counters in airports—I even saw an assortment of my life’s work in a truck stop near Salina, Kansas. Marilyn Monroe and Fidel Castro sold the best, Linus Pauling and Robert Oppenheimer the worst. True intelligence has little time for the vulgar preoccupations that generate good life stories.
Twenty years ago my publisher charged three dollars for my little Bioprobes and now they cost an even seven which really isn’t all that much in this extended, rampaging bull market, not to speak of the fact that my chief researcher’s wage has increased from twelve grand in 1979 to one hundred grand in 1999. She’s a brutally crippled librarian living in Indiana. I’ve only met her once and the sight of this unfortunate soul put me off my feed for months. This is a lie. She’s reasonably attractive at fifty-two and is my sister. What makes her metaphorically ugly is that she considers herself my conscience. In fact she has thought of herself as my conscience since she was a precocious ten-year-old and I was a slow-learning thirteen. She began as u
nbearably acerbic and has remained so. She files her teeth listening to Schoenberg and Stravinsky and doing crossword puzzles in a half dozen languages while I struggle along with solitary English and foreign smatterings. It hasn’t been officially diagnosed but is quite plain to everyone who knows her that she is agoraphobic. She mostly only leaves our childhood home for the porch that surrounds half the house. You couldn’t prove it by me but she insists that everything she needs is available through her computer and the daily visits of various deliverymen. Certain quarrels have arisen because of this machine despite the fact that my livelihood emerges directly from it. One is tempted to use the old word “lifeblood.” I flunked out of regular graduate school at Northwestern and was forced to take the less rigorous M.F.A. elsewhere at a school that will be unnamed for reasons to be revealed later. My failure at graduate school was due to the closeness of Evanston to Chicago and, more germane, I simply couldn’t do what is called “research” and still can’t, thus my sister is worth every penny of her enormous salary which is based on a percentage of my annual gross, as is that of my younger brother Thad, who putatively takes care of my business affairs. My sister Martha and I have carried Thad in the manner of doomed sailors with albatrosses around our necks. Thad mans our little office in Chicago when it would be altogether more convenient if the office were in New York near the headquarters of my publisher which, not oddly, is owned by a German mogul so eccentric that he makes the late Howard Hughes look like Mary Poppins. Thad loves to travel back and forth between Chicago and New York at least once a week, though once a month would be adequate. Neither my sister nor myself are particularly venal but Thad is a chiseler. He’s also a clotheshorse which makes New York a perfect destination. He uses limos for the airport while I’ve always settled for taxis. Like many Thad uses an air of condescension as a masquerade of intelligence. By arrangements made by my sister Thad’s secretary receives a sizable annual bonus for warning us in advance of any of his financial shenanigans. All of our corporate checks must now be signed by two of us. At one time the double signature wasn’t necessary for anything under a thousand dollars but Thad managed to pocket an extra one hundred thousand several years back through a witless swindle. I used to think Thad might be gay but my sister Martha insists he is only the world’s leading narcissist.
Why do we put up with this thoroughly modern monster, this thorn in the mind and flesh? Because he’s family, as they say. He’s our little brother and we’re still wiping his nose, tying his shoes, telling him rather explicitly not to shit in the sandbox.
I was eighteen, Martha fifteen, and Thad a mere twelve when our father, a botanist, died on a small research vessel anchored in the Galápagos, after the boat turned turtle from improperly balanced ballast tanks. Six months later our mother, who taught history at the University of Indiana, took her own life under the absolute conviction that she had a fatal brain tumor and it was pointless to go to a doctor. An autopsy revealed that she did have the sort of brain tumor that is invariably fatal. When her batty sister from New Jersey arrived to take care of us I quickly perceived that I would not be able to go off to college as planned. It was the spring of my senior year in high school and I had been accepted at the University of Chicago, but I couldn’t very well leave my sister and brother in the hands of this woman who resembled in every respect the cartoon character Daffy Duck. Instead I enrolled at my hometown University of Indiana and became a perhaps premature adult.
There. I’ve laid things out but have I? “Nope,” as many midwesterners say. Even the most wise among us strike others from the East and West as vaguely corny. Who better than I should be aware of the essential nature of the biographical hoax? I admit I’m off my feed a bit because it’s late April and I’m on the lip of a garden-variety depression, but then some of them have been almost enjoyable because they are a relief from work. In both my small studios in Chicago and New York I have banks of fluorescent tubes that emit artificial sunlight. They almost do the job for a man in a habitual spring funk but not quite. My own father was an unwitting victim of the seasonal affective disorder but determined early in his career that all of his “slumps,” as he called them, could be cured by a trip to the tropics, if only for a week or so. He was lucky indeed to be a top research botanist for Eli Lilly & Co. which didn’t mind funding his trips, as certain of his discoveries in the realm of tropical botany were profitable indeed.
To be frank I’ve lately had a pratfall of a double nature, an enormous one at that. My sister sent me one of her countless faxes, this time quoting a poet named Gary Snyder who said, in effect, that all of our biographies are essentially similar, it’s our dreams and visions that count. She appended a “Ha!” Of course I had read Snyder but not for nearly thirty years when I entered the feckless voyage of becoming a truly professional writer. If I spent a whole week reading poetry I’d get a blasting attack of eczema. In 1969 when I wrote and published a book I now refer to as Murgatoyd in SOHO, I was nearly crippled with eczema, so much so that I came to a publication party at my alma mater with my clothes literally pasted to the various salves on my body. M.S., to use the book’s nickname, was a vaguely avant-garde intermix of poetry and prose, a faux autobiography of a young New York City suicide who, scorned by the young woman he loved, flung himself from the Empire State Building in a Buddhist orange cape. It was a “succès d’estime” which means you get good reviews but no money. Sad to say it was nearly a true story, thus the eczema. My marriage to my own true love had lasted only nine days, annulled at the insistence of her parents. She was eighteen, an undergraduate, and I was twenty-four, just finishing my M.F.A., and teaching freshman comp on a nasty graduate assistantship. She was my student and though eighteen she looked fifteen. It was legal back then to make love to your students. I had very long hair and wore a pair of velvet bell-bottoms to parties, difficult to admit but then so are so many of the contents of one’s life.
Anyway, I was sitting in the Cajou last night eating my “raie au beurre noir” after a dozen oysters, admitting that my taste for seafood in blackened butter depended quite a bit on blackened butter. A woman down the row was leaning over in her chair, her butt a bit off to the side so the crack was on the chair edge with one half compressed and the other half hanging. A jolt to the brainpan. My fork tingled my chin as I missed a bite. Tears nearly formed. It was a clone of Cindy’s butt. If our marriage hadn’t been annulled we were going to change her name which wasn’t appropriate for the wife of an artiste. That intention was one of a list of items that, perhaps properly, enraged her parents.
Of course I couldn’t commit suicide way back then because who would look after Martha and Thad, my sister and brother? I should add that my mother didn’t mention the responsibilities in her elaborate suicide note. What peerless grammar.
The girl with the Anjou pear fanny got up from her chair, straightened her skirt, and went to the toilet. Her sallow boyfriend smirked like a weasel with a fresh pullet. To avoid his glance I looked at the ceiling where Cindy’s image blazed in her gardening shorts. I had met her in my class, acknowledged her attractiveness, but when I saw her poking around in her dormitory’s flower beds I was poleaxed. She was kneeling there talking to an old Italian, one of the college’s gardeners, and a lecher to boot, and her butt was flexed skyward as she diddled with the flowers.
And that touched on the other side of my double pratfall. The first, the implication of my sister that my life’s work was worthless because it is our dreams and visions that own true significance, not our petty biographical details, was difficult to handle but the second was more poignant. On a morning American Airlines flight (I have three hundred thousand Advantage Miles!) the day before I had picked up the airline’s magazine and there smack-dab in front of me were a number of photos of Cindy in an article titled “A Woman of Many Flowers,” a hundred acres of them to be exact on a farm along the Mississippi just north of La Crosse, Wisconsin. She was fifty now but rather handsome in that Palm Beach way of women who have s
pent too much time in the sun. She had been married several times, “thrice divorced” in the usual magazine prose, with “two grown children” of indeterminate sex. Had our nine-day wonder counted as one of the marriages? She was bent on preserving rare “heirloom” flowers, and she and her assistants had traveled far and wide to gather seeds from flowers that had passed out of current gardeners’ fancies. When I left the restaurant after my habitual sorbet I was so distracted that I nearly said to the proprietor that my meal had been “a triumph of the human spirit,” as I had said a few weeks before to Mario Batali at Babbo, where I eat at the far end of the bar on Wednesday nights when I’m in New York. Mario had looked at me and repeated, “A triumph of the human spirit?” These are the petty details of life. I assume that I loathe ironies but it is easy indeed to become a victim of them. Ironies are a way to shield ourselves from the obvious life-sucking vulgarities of our culture. You could say that they make life more endurable but not better. They are mental heroin. To say “a triumph of the human spirit” is merely the sort of thing that comes up when you write three dozen Bioprobes. If only it were true but under the most diffident scrutiny it’s not, or extremely rarely, in public life. Private life is another matter but the separation between the two has become problematical. Pick up and feel the heft of a National Geographic. Read a supposed article, say, “Greece: A Country at the Crossroads,” and try to remember the smarmy blur the next day. You’ll have the feeling that you’re on a television program because you are. Your thumping little heart is a boiled offering.
What fun it was to try to call Cindy on the phone, a crisp, indomitable thing to do, so unsoiled by irony. Of course she wasn’t there. Her house sitter said that it was spring (so easy to forget in a city) and that Cindy was off in Kansas as “busy as a bee” investigating early spring wildflowers. Why not, I thought, neglecting to leave my name and number.