And then Mother happened to see I Love Lucy one night when she dropped in next door to borrow a cup of bleach and she was gone a long time. She said she’d gotten “stuck,” but the truth was that she adored Lucille Ball, and on Monday nights after supper Mother made a habit of going next door to the Birks’. We could smell cigarette smoke on her clothing when she returned. When our Baptist neighbors, the Sundbergs, got a TV, Mother switched to their house to avoid the smoke. Were Ricky and Lucy and their goofball mishaps with Fred and Ethel to the glory of God? I didn’t think so. I loved to point out these inconsistencies to my mother and make her feel guilty for loving Lucy.
And then Grandpa went into the nursing home and was too confused to care about pernicious influences and soon after he died, when the three littler kids were in bed miserable with the mumps, Dad went to the hardware store and bought a TV set so the kids could watch Howdy Doody. It happened just like that, no discussion, like young David putting down his slingshot and inviting Goliath in for lunch. The TV sat on a swivel stand by the piano, and Mother set up her ironing board and watched shows. “I only watch while I’m ironing,” she said by way of justification. Soap operas didn’t interest her, or detective shows or West-erns—she loved the sarcastic Henry Morgan, the mild-mannered George Gobel (“I feel like the world is a tuxedo and I am a pair of brown shoes”), Jackie Gleason stammering, “Hamana hamana hamana hamana,” the big squints of Buddy Hackett, Jack Paar, and Charlie Weaver (“We had a fire in the bathroom but luckily it didn’t spread to the house”) and George and Gracie (“You’ve buttered your bread, now sleep on it”). Mother had no time for TV evangelists, but she loved a Jewish comic doing a routine about his mother—My mother made dinner, there were two items on the menu: take it or leave it. My mother was very practical. When she got old and she bent down to tie her shoes, she thought, “What else can I do while I’m down here?”
The Brethren were dead set against fiction, preferring Scripture, but to be admitted by way of narrative into the secret unwrapped lives of men and women seemed to me a great privilege. Brethren separated themselves from the world; fiction gave you intimate knowledge of how people thought and conducted themselves and what they talked about. I wanted to know these things. How could you not?
My pretty classmate Karen Brown asked me to go to the spring dance with her, and I said yes, and for the occasion I brought two Pall Mall cigarettes stolen from the Andersons. She and I stood outside in the dark and I lit one of them and took a drag and blew smoke out. She was impressed. I put my hand on her bare shoulder and it was a beautiful experience. Only a shoulder, but it was hers.
A month later, I sat in Gospel Meeting behind a girl in a sleeveless dress, the left armhole revealed her white bra and the slight curvature of her breast. The preacher came down from the pulpit and cried, “There is one here tonight who God is talking to and I beg of you, do not harden your heart against the Lord.” His gaze was on me. I thought I was saved, having grown up among the saved, but wasn’t sure if God knew this or not. The preacher walked back and forth in front of us, in full cry. “I knew of a young man just like some who are here tonight, who was taken to a revival service just like this one, heard the message of salvation, and he was moved but he decided, Not yet. I want to live a little first. I want to enjoy music and dance and movies and comedy. Comedy! Think of it! For the love of a joke—a joke!!! He went out of that place without accepting the Lord and that night, heading home, his family’s car was struck by the Evening Express and he was ushered into eternity to meet the judgment of a righteous God. Think of it. Eternity. In a burning fire. Burning but never consumed. All he had to do was say, Yes, Lord, I come. This may be your last chance. You may never have another.”
He was a powerful preacher and I wanted to respond, but I doubted my own sincerity. Shouldn’t I be crying and on my knees? I was not. I’d heard this sermon before, having grown up Brethren, and it did not shake me to my depths as a person convicted of sin should be shaken. This is not a business transaction, this is a struggle with the powers of darkness, so where is the anguish? I wondered. Why am I not falling on the ground? And the crowd sang Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me. See on the portals He’s waiting and watching. Watching for you and for me. Come home, come home. Ye who are weary come home.
And that night, I spoke to Brother Tomkinson and he prayed with me. I told him I wanted to make my testimony that I belonged to the Lord. I just thought it was something I should do. The next day, in front of a crowd of Brethren, I walked into Lake Minnetonka, the same lake Roger drowned in, and was baptized by Brother John Rogers, as people on shore sang: When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Lord of glory died, My richest gains I count but loss and pour contempt on all my pride. I wore a white shirt and white trousers and he a dark blue suit, white shirt and tie, wading into the water up to his waist. I was impressed that a grown man would walk into a lake in a suit and tie, and he put one hand on my chest and the other behind my head, and down I went in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and I arose dripping wet, a skeptical believer who hoped baptism would wash away his doubts, and it did not.
I lived a divided life: I knew I should stand in downtown Anoka and hand out tracts, Where Will You Spend Eternity? and I did not. The baptism was to please the Brethren and would not be divulged to my school friends. One never knew the other. Corinne never set foot in my house. I told nobody at school about the gospel service. The two were incompatible. I never confided in my parents. No information was offered except under direct questioning. I made a tiny niche of my own, Anoka Boy of Letters, and carried myself in a serious literary manner and went on to the U where, if you could write lines that sounded like a translation from the Japanese, you were considered a poet. I was a failure in marriage, avoided the unhappiness of my wife by going into a small room with a typewriter and closing the door. My first wife, Mary, hoped we’d find a comfortable domestic arrangement as her parents had done, but I ducked away from misery and the silence between us got heavier. I dodged the military draft and never suffered the consequences. I escaped into books, reading them and then writing my own. I created a radio circus in which I was ringmaster and solo writer and nobody cracked the whip. I shunned meetings, committees, movements. I followed this strategy of evasion all my life, joining nothing, living in fictions. When Prairie Home started, I had no more idea how to manage an organization than I knew how to build a house or butcher a pig. Other people had to manage things, and I sat in a room and made up things and tried not to get in their way.
11
The Amazing Year, Part 1
THE SUMMER I TURNED THIRTEEN, my dad swung the car onto Highway 10 and headed west with Mother and us four kids to visit our cousins in Idaho. Philip and Judy, the trustworthy ones, eighteen and seventeen, stayed home to work at jobs they’d found and guard the house and tend the garden. I sat in back by the window, landscape rolling by, Dad maintaining a steady 65, edging up to 70, as eastbound semis blew past like ICBMs and my mother shuddered at each one. Johnny, could you please slow down? I read a book across North Dakota and we stopped for the occasional historical marker (IN MEMORY OF OFFICERS AND SOLDIERS WHO FELL NEAR THIS PLACE FIGHTING WITH THE 7TH UNITED STATES CAVALRY AGAINST THE SIOUX INDIANS ON THE 25TH AND 26TH OF JUNE, A.D. 1876) and I said to myself the beautiful names of Montana and the Bitterroot Valley, the Sapphire Mountains, the Mission Range and Rattlesnake Creek, and finally got to Idaho and Edith and Edmund’s farm jammed up against mountain slopes on the banks of the St. Joe River. I was a little too well dressed but tried to blend in with my cousins, and one afternoon, while the grownups were away visiting, cousin Chuck told me to take the wheel of the Allis-Chalmers and I did, a terrifying pleasure for a city kid, driving a big tractor up a twisting dirt road through stands of tall trees, the great black treads throwing up dirt, the engine throbbing beneath me and, far beyond, the forested peaks mounting into the sky and the road curving into the folds of the
foothills. I took deep breaths of the balsam air, putting my sneaker down on the gas pedal, shifting up to second gear, the tractor tipping, bouncing, going up a steep slope, Chuck standing behind me, hanging on, me feeling wildly alive and also on the verge of violent death. It was a burst of freedom. My cousins were fearless. They drove hard and fast on mountain roads and took a rifle, hoping to see a mountain lion. When they wrestled, they meant it. They talked about saving up money to buy an old plane and flying it home, learning to pilot it by trial and error. Their mother, Edith, was a farm girl, she let her boys run free. I survived my tractor run. We came back to Minnesota. The tractor ride was remembered.
The day after Labor Day, 7 a.m. I stood on the highway and waited for the yellow bus to start seventh grade. For the next six years, I rode the bus for twelve miles to Anoka High School every day, a bus kid, in snow or rain or bitter cold—school was never canceled ever. I waited for the bus knowing it would be full of kids who didn’t want to sit next to me. Mine was the last stop. Six years, anticipating rejection. The bus appears, stops, the door swings open, I climb up the steps past the unhappy driver, and I face forty kids avoiding eye contact. The boys in back are braced to defend their seats. The bus driver watches me in his mirror. “Find a seat and siddown,” he says. In the front sit the girls, who do not give me the time of day, except Corinne Guntzel sitting with Elaine Ness in the third seat on the left. Corinne smiles at me and moves over, and I sit with my right arm across the back of the seat and thus is formed a lifelong bias in favor of women. I trace my heterosexuality to the offer of a seat on the bus at the age of thirteen. Boys defended territory. Girls were civilized and shared.
The bus ran up the West River Road and around the sharp curve by the Coon Rapids Dam where, in winter, if the road was icy, the boys in back flung themselves to one side and then the other, trying to throw the bus into the ditch. We crossed the river to Anoka and along Ferry Street, past the big white house where I was born, and pulled up in front of the old high school. We piled off and entered through an arch and past a plaque listing the dead of two world wars and into a grand central hall thronged with town kids and farm kids, the two easily distinguishable. The prim and studious girls with books held against their bosom and the social girls gathered in gaggles, poking at each other, the oddball boys all too aware of themselves, and the jocks who’d all been on teams together, and the black-leather hoods fixing their hair to look like James Dean’s. We Benson School kids were aliens; the town kids ruled. A few deformed misfits with an odd gait, slurred speech, a drooping arm, an off-kilter eye, suffering from some disability for which we then had no name other than “feeb” or “retard,” and we shunned them lest it be contagious. I climbed the great staircase to the second floor, old floorboards creaking underfoot, to the library, where Mrs. Goodner stood in her pulpit of a circulation desk and surveyed the four long study tables, students bent over their work, gossiping. I discovered Webster’s Unabridged here and Civil War histories. I read Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt and stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, two Minnesotans who made the grade. And, wonder of wonders, the Gershon Legman collection of limericks, including filthy ones, the young man of Antietam who loved horse turds so well he could eat ’em and the young man of Madras whose balls were made out of brass— he could clang them together and play “Stormy Weather” as lightning came out of his ass—I laughed so hard, involuntary gasping and snorting at the thought of metallic testicles and electrical flatulence, it hit me in a deep and visceral way. But the book that struck me most deeply was Anne Frank’s diary. I read it over and over. I felt closer to the Franks in their attic in Amsterdam than to my own family. Anne opened her heart to me, my family did not. I wrote a story in high school, in which she came to Anoka as an exchange student and I became her best friend. Mr. Hochstetter gave me a B, saying it was very well-written but pointing out that the assignment was to write about a personal experience, not an imaginary one. Frankly, I didn’t see the difference or why it mattered. She was real and so was my feeling for her.
In choir, I stood with the altos and Miss Hallenberg raised her pencil baton and we sang, April is in my mistress’ face, and July in her eyes hath place. And in Latin, Helen Hunt taught us Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant. In gym, Mr. Ziegler insisted we do chin-ups and the impossible rope climb and run and dive over the horse and do a forward roll, though I was nearsighted and timid, and then there was the misery of showering in the nude, gangly boys with tiny penises shrunken by self-consciousness, other boys stroking their penises and displaying them to rivals. I didn’t care for nakedness, I simply wanted to be normal. Brethrenism was not, it was like driving a Studebaker. I hid my Brethren light, such as it was, under a bushel. A true Brethren wouldn’t laugh at the young man of Madras—he’d go to Mrs. Goodner and ask that the book be removed from the library. I did not do that. A good Christian would not say, to a classmate who asked for help in Latin, “Go to Helen Hunt for it.” And that was what happened to me at Anoka High School, I found out I was going to leave Us and become one of Them. I was a dodger, I avoided trouble.
I made an attempt to be normal in eighth grade when my friend Billy Pedersen went out for football; I tried to join him and went to Dr. Mork for the required physical. He put his stethoscope up to my chest and heard in the badadum badadum a click and, though the term “mitral valve prolapse” was not in his vocabulary because echocardiography wasn’t around yet, Dr. Mork looked at me and said, “I can’t sign your permission. You have a clicky heart.” So, on the authority of a doctor who was only guessing, I skipped football. I had a pair of leather shoes with steel cleats, handed down from a friend of my brother, and I threw them away. Two days later I got up the nerve to walk into the Anoka Herald and ask the editor, Warren Feist, if he had a sportswriter (knowing he did not) and if he did not, could I have the job? He hired me. Two dollars for a home game, three for an away game, copy due on Monday, the paper came out on Thursdays. He hired me, thinking I was the son of my uncle Lawrence Keillor, who was head cashier at the First National Bank, an important Herald advertiser, so I got the job on false pretenses. But I was hired. My name was on the masthead: Gary Keillor . . . sportswriter. And on Friday night, as the Tornadoes ran onto Goodrich Field and the crowd sang Fight, fight, Anoka, fight. Go, go, Tornadoes. Win, win, Maroon and Gray, we’re with you tonight, Tornadoes, I sat in the little press box perched at the top of the grandstand with a notebook and a couple sharp pencils.
I sat next to Chuck McCartney and Rod Person, broadcasting the game on KANO, and thanks to them, I got an idea what was happening on the field. I had no money for the bus, so I hitchhiked after games and the ride home was often more interesting than the game itself. After one game, I stood out on Ferry Street and a man in a Cadillac stopped and between Anoka and my house twelve miles away, he told me never to get married and to enlist in the Navy, not the Army. He’d been in the Army and was on a ship heading for Japan when the war ended. “I would’ve been in the invasion of Japan getting my head blown off but Uncle Harry dropped the big one.” I asked him what the Army was like and he said, “It was hell. None of us wanted to be there. We were expendable. They would’ve sent us ashore in Higgins boats until the Japs ran out of ammo.” The men who picked me up were not idealists. They knew that politicians were a bunch of damn crooks and the game was rigged in favor of the rich. Roosevelt was a drunk, Eisenhower cheated on his wife, and both parties were full of damn liars and soon there’d be another crash like the one of 1929 except even worse, so only an idiot’d put your money in the bank, buy gold coins and put them in a Mason jar and bury it in your flower bed but don’t tell your wife. My rides had a view of the world not found in history books or the Minneapolis Star, and it struck me again and again that teenage boys playing a game was of far less importance than the conversation of lonely men late at night, but I was assigned to sports so I wrote sports.
The Anoka Herald was the lesser paper in town, the Union was twice as thick, owned by the lor
dly Arch Pease who honked when he spoke, and the kindly Mr. Feist was scraping along, hoping that Arch would buy him out (which soon happened) so he could get a job with a salary (which he did), but meanwhile I was a professional writer at the age of fourteen and my aunt Eleanor read the paper weekly and thought I was a better writer than Jack Blesi who wrote for the Union. I went to the Herald office after school on Monday and sat at a desk in the front window and pecked out a thousand words on a Royal typewriter and turned it over to Red and Vernell who sat at the Linotypes and batted out my copy, line by line into hot lead in a tray, both of them sipping straight gin out of coffee cups. I came back on Tuesday to read galley proofs, then on Wednesday to watch them print the Herald on a flatbed press, Red lifting one side of the 8 x 12-foot sheet of paper atop the stack and flipping it off the pile and onto the bed like setting a cloth on a table and pulling the lever and the roller rolled over it and it slipped down into the trimmer to be folded. I pulled a copy out of the stack and saw my name in print and that was it—instead of a fourth-string B-squad end, I was a person of consequence, a writer. I wanted to be one so I could see things and describe them. When Frankie Renko drowned in the Mississippi, we heard the sirens and I wanted to go see, but Mother said, “There’s no point in a bunch of people standing around gawking.” She said it was immoral to look upon the sufferings of others unless you could do something to help. She said rubberneckers only got in the way, and sometimes the traffic jams of the morbid kept ambulances from reaching the victims in time. I didn’t argue, but I knew that somebody needed to write about Frankie’s death. It shouldn’t be ignored. A boy my age had fallen into the river near where we boys played and his life came to an end. This demanded attention. When the Morrow house burned one winter day, I rode my bike past the smoking ruins. Chuckie Morrow was my classmate.
That Time of Year Page 10