I once overheard a Brethren elder tell Dad how he’d been listening to his police radio one night and heard about a big grain elevator fire and got out of bed to go see it. “Flames five stories high and heat so fierce it bent the train tracks, fire engines from all over the city. You don’t get to see a fire like that very often,” he said. It astonished me that a grown-up could have the same exact fascination as I had. Dad thought it was juvenile. Mother thought it showed a real moral flaw. I shared his curiosity.
The summer after I joined the Herald, the notorious O’Kasick brothers went on a crime spree that ended in the woods north of Anoka where they were gunned down by a posse. A man came by the Herald office with photographs of the bodies lying face-up in tall grass, mouths open, bloodstained, and Mr. Feist glanced at them and said, “No, thank you.” I got a good look, though. I had only seen dead people in coffins, prettied up, and this was the real thing. I felt sheepish about looking, but it certainly was worth a look. Three tough guys like the Darwins who robbed a drugstore, killed a cop, hid in the woods, and met their end in a blaze of gunfire. A story waiting to be told.
This was a large year in my life, me a writer, old printers drinking gin, a drunk at the wheel pouring his heart out about the invasion of Japan, dead men in the weeds. This was the year Mr. Orville Buehler ushered me out of his shop class. I had flunked ball-peen hammer, was hopeless at sheet metal and couldn’t make a good flour scoop, and now he watched me cut plywood on a jigsaw while joking around and the plywood slipped and it scared Mr. Buehler, imagining me growing up with a prosthetic arm, and he switched off the saw and took me aside and said, “All you do is talk here, so I’m going to send you up to speech.” And up to Miss LaVona Person’s speech class I went. Life pivots on such small events. I was destined to become an incompetent factory worker and then lose an arm, but Orville Buehler sent me into radio instead.
Miss Person was a recent graduate of Gustavus, blond ponytail, ruffled white blouse and plaid skirt and loafers, a brilliant welcoming smile, a smile of theatrical quality but it was genuine, it felt like she was handing you a thousand dollars. I was a string bean, almost six feet tall, 148 pounds, geeky half-rim horn-rimmed glasses, homemade haircut with a big shaved arc over each ear, and a pair of hand-me-down jeans of my sister’s with the zipper on the side. I wore my shirttails out to cover it, but the shirt was hers too, with darts on the sides, which I was keenly aware of. I took a seat and a week later I did my oral interpretation assignment, reciting “Annabel Lee” about the lost love who winds up in the sepulchre, which I pronounced “sepulcree,” which Corinne kindly corrected, and then I balanced it off with three original limericks (clean), one about a young person of Blaine who stood all day in the rain and an old man of Ham Lake who lost his pants by mistake, and then the one I was truly proud of:
There was a young man from Anoka
Who wanted to write a good limerick.
He tried and he tried
And some were not bad
And yet something seemed to be missing.
Miss Person laughed, standing in the aisle, beaming her thousand-dollar smile my way, and that gave the class permission to laugh and they did. For a brief moment, I was a cool person, a new sensation for me, one I cherished.
Soon after I met LaVona, my English teacher, Mr. Frayne Anderson, handed me a copy of The New Yorker one day as I walked into his classroom and said, “I thought this might interest you.” I’d never seen the magazine before. We were a Reader’s Digest family. The cover drawing was of a housemaid removing her master’s boots, pulling on one boot, his other boot pushing her rear end. Inside were Richard Rovere, Janet Flanner, Wolcott Gibbs, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and John Cheever, a fine cast of writers, each stunning in his or her own way. I read that issue many times over. He’d given it to me as a rich compliment, and I soaked up the goldenness of the writing, the urbanity. I read it with the devotion I was supposed to feel for St. Paul’s epistles. I could hear in Cheever something I wanted that I had none of myself, the liquescent splendor, the shadowy wit and knowingness, the flourishes of feeling, the jazzy syntax, the beautiful sufficiency. I loved him. (I never met him, it would’ve been too much.) I read all the New Yorkers I could find, read Liebling, Thurber, Calisher, Angell, White—and all the minor deities, Audax Minor, Edith Oliver, Andy Logan. The very type font was significant, the columns wending around cartoons, the contention between the columns of prose and the glassware and tweed and ocean liner cabins in the ads alongside. Wanting to write for it was like wanting to play second base for the Yankees, much too extravagant to be said aloud to anyone, but still I wanted to.
These miraculous events occurred in one calendar year and clued that clueless kid in on the path to being a contributing citizen rather than a jerk or a nitwit. Grandma Keillor expected her descendants to pay attention and give a good account of themselves. And it wasn’t the Baccarat crystal I craved, it was the writing, which allowed itself liberty and subtlety denied to Midwestern speech. Plain speech was imposed on us by social pressure, the obligation to not show off, but the language itself is a capacious castle of glittering splendors so why not visit it since it belongs to us? Why not try to make a life out of turning these splendors to the service of my people?
I didn’t shine in high school. I was a B-minus student, thanks to my perfect pitch on multiple choice tests. The correct answer tended to be C. If you went with C, you could probably get a B and B was good enough. And I found a path in life there. I shied away from competition—speech contests, sports, honor roll—I didn’t care if I were 3.0 or 3.6—I wanted to be unique and so turned to writing. I needed a pen name. Gary was a lame name compared to William and James, my grandfathers, or my great-uncles Albert and Llewelyn. We called Llewelyn Lew, but I would’ve used the whole name. Llewelyn Keillor: I considered it. In the name Gary you sensed the low expectations of your parents: they hoped you’d be a gas station attendant or a mailman. I intended to be an author. So I searched the dictionary under gar-and found garbanzo, gardenia, garland, and garrison, a place where soldiers are quartered. So I became Garrison. Eventually it wound up on my driver’s license and tax return— my girlfriend Mary married me as Garrison. In my heart, however, I still am Gary: Garrison feels like a fake mustache. Like a Roy calling himself Royalton or Gene becoming Genet. I wish I had become Llewelyn and written crime novels and gone to live in Zurich, but that’s another story.
I started out playing with ambiguity, a fine way to disguise ignorance. “To be great is to be misunderstood,” said Emerson, so, in search of greatness, I wrote poems that couldn’t be understood because they made no sense. Writing poems that pushed the reader away came naturally to a Brethren boy. But deep down I wanted to make my mother laugh. Dad smiled at jokes and Mother had an innocent girlish laugh. She was fond of a particular kind of silliness. I saw two houseflies in the kitchen today. Both females. I knew they were females because they were on the phone. My father might smile at that. My mother laughed, hard. She didn’t care for riddles or knock-knock jokes. Puns: not really. She preferred plausible preposterosity. The old Norwegian was struck by lightning and died with a big smile on his face. He thought he was having his picture taken. She laughed at that. She didn’t care for Helen Keller jokes or jokes about cripples or dumb blondes. But she laughed and laughed at the one about the two missionaries caught by cannibals who put them into a pot of boiling water to cook and after a while one missionary started laughing—The other said, “What’s so funny?”—He said, “I just peed in their soup.” A joke with the little leap into unreality. But a natural sort of unreality. Hot water would naturally relax the urethra, a nurse would know that. A martyr is amused to get revenge. Why not?
12
The Amazing Year, Part 2
I HAD GOOD TEACHERS AT Anoka, that wasn’t my problem. Mr. Charles Faust taught American history, the first teacher I had adult conversations with, about history and how it comes crashing down on good people. He was marked by the Depress
ion, brought up by his grandma and older brother after his family fell apart. He wept, telling about it. Mr. DeLoyd Hochstetter taught English, pacing back and forth in front of the class, talking long twisting sentences like grapevines about Martin Luther, Freud, the myth of Sisyphus, Tolstoy, the Volstead Act, small-town life in South Dakota, the meaning of agapé, the vacuity of pop culture, the discrimination faced by German families during the World Wars, a steady drumroll of talk interrupted every fifteen minutes or so by his sudden disappearance to (someone said) go to the lavatory and wash his hands and then he’d return and resume his monologue. We didn’t know about obsessive-compulsive disorder back then, so we admired Mr. Hochstetter as a crazed genius. Maybe not a good teacher of English but a man of fortitude and powerful recall. He wrote to me years later from a hospital bed, suffering from deep depression, and said he was proud of me and would I do a benefit performance at his church, Central Lutheran, so I did. He was there, happy to see me but a wreck of a man. I introduced him as my old English teacher and he got a big ovation. It struck me that night how little I know about human suffering. He had been pushing his burden a long way down a steep uphill road, I could see it in the face of his wife, her anxiety.
Helen Story was an English teacher who became a friend. I ate supper in Cully’s Café on nights when I covered games for the Herald, and she invited me to sit with her. She ate a big salad and a slab of pie. She was a Minnesota farm girl who became a teacher so she wouldn’t have to marry a farmer. She landed in Anoka in 1946 and boarded with a family, as unmarried women teachers were required to do, and ate supper at the café, arose early in the morning and took a shower at school. She was a tall birdlike woman, keen eyes behind her horn-rimmed glasses, who gave us Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, correcting our wild attempts to impress her. She saw through me easily, my fake sophistication. She was the genuine thing; she truly loved theater, it was her life. “I could go every night of the week and someday I hope to,” she said. She and her friend Lois Melby often took a bus to Minneapolis to see Shakespeare, Shaw, or Oscar Wilde, at the Lyric or Guthrie, and watched the last act from the door, waiting as long as possible before dashing to catch the last bus back to Anoka. She said, “Talent is worth about twenty percent and all the rest is experience. You are a writer. I know it and you know it.” I hadn’t known it, but when she said it I devoutly hoped it might come true.
Years later I got to speak at LaVona’s retirement dinner and say how much her smile meant to me. Later I visited her at the hospice where she lay dying of breast cancer. She said she listened to my show and admired the Lake Wobegon monologue. She took my hand and said, “I’m going to beat this thing.” She was so disfigured by chemo I hardly recognized her, but her voice was clear. I recited the Young man of Anoka limerick to her and she laughed. I helped her down the hall to her PT workout. That wonderful woman had given me the first dazzle of big possibilities. We have all sinned and come short of the glory of God, but I did make the class laugh out loud and Miss Person gave me encouragement, which I was desperate for, a boy with bad hair and wearing girl’s clothes. Her gift was to help self-conscious youngsters step out of the bubble: It’s not about you. It’s about the material. Work on the material. Don’t make the performance be about you. Let yourself be a vehicle for something greater than yourself. In the sixty years since, I’ve never had to multiply fractions or distinguish maple leaves from elm or birch, or talk intelligently about Moby-Dick, but her teaching—“It’s not about you, it’s about the material”—sticks with me. Shyness is not a trait; it’s a shtick, and when it gets in your way, you should drop it. When she told me on her deathbed that she enjoyed my monologues on the radio, I felt complete. She was the last word. If she was proud of me, it is enough.
I thanked DeLoyd and LaVona, and I wished I’d thanked Hilmer and Helen, Corinne’s parents. All through high school and during breaks in college, their house was open to her friends; all of us would-be intellectuals held forth in the lofty living room with the tropical fish drifting around their tank, the picture window overlooking our old sliding hill and the Mississippi, arguing about Injustice and Free Enterprise and Race, while the parents sat pleasantly, saying nothing, Helen on the couch with a glass of sherry, Hilmer in his big chair by the door with a bourbon in hand, smoking a Lucky. Christine was there, Thatcher, Tom, kids with big opinions. Corinne wasn’t sheepish about her parents: she was resolutely loyal. She could denounce big corporations and the nuclear arms race, and she also attended the national plumbers’ convention to make her parents happy. Those evenings looking out at the river were all about good manners. You could denounce capitalism with conviction, and the plumber and his lady listened with interest, smiling, made gentle inquiries, said, “I’ll have to read more about that.” All was easy and pleasant and Help yourself to more cookies and May I warm up your tea?
The 1950s gave birth to the term “teenager,” but I looked forward to 1963 when I’d be 21 and could vote. In 1972, I’d be thirty, by which time I should have done something distinguished like maybe write a novel—that was the plan. Somewhere in the future, though I couldn’t imagine it, a woman waited. None had shown interest so far but I hoped that one would appear.
In my junior year, our Anoka Tornadoes basketball team, a cinch to go to State, played little St. Francis in the first round of the district tournament—and in the fourth quarter our team froze and a bunch of awkward farm boys with bad hair beat us 53-50. There was profound grief at school the next day, cheerleaders weeping in the lunchroom. I wrote a poem about it: The sky was cold and remorseless, a day to end romances— which rhymed with St. Francis. I showed it to a girl who sat behind me in English, and she invited me to come over to the house where she was babysitting that night, so I did, and after we put the three children to bed, she and I slipped into the parents’ bed and she scootched up close to me. I once found a book in my parents’ dresser, Light on Dark Corners, a marriage manual where I learned the word “coital,” which I pronounced COY-tle and which involved the PENN-iss and VAGG-in-ah, and now I imagined something profound was about to happen but we heard a car in the driveway and leaped out and straightened the bed. It wasn’t the parents, only someone turning around, but the mood was gone. We laughed. We sat and held hands and watched TV. I went home. Still, a girl had shown interest in me. This overshadowed the tragedy of St. Francis completely.
One June night the Class of 1960, 300 strong, filed out of the cafeteria in our long blue gowns and down the hall past the band room and out the back door of the high school and onto Goodrich Field as flashbulbs popped in the grandstand and we marched under the goalposts to sit in ranks of folding chairs set up between the twenty- and forty-yard lines, and we heard a speech by someone about the great debt we owed to our community for educating us, though we knew by now it wasn’t a very good education, and then we lined up to go forward to receive our diplomas and be marched out into the real world. We returned our caps and gowns to the cafeteria and I noticed classmates huddling to talk about which parties they were going to. I hadn’t been invited to any and had no idea how to wangle an invitation, so I went home with my parents. Among the shining stars of the Class of 1960, I was a small dim moon. I was reading Emerson, Aristotle, the Bhagavad Gita, and The Compassionate Buddha, making my parents very uneasy, but it was like trying on shirts, one after another. Fortunately, I had been pushed by four impressive teachers, who put a few ideas in my head, and I was allowed my illusions and kept ignorant of the difficulties ahead. Ignorance was my strong suit for a long time to come.
Two days later, I landed a job as a dishwasher in a residential hotel for women in Minneapolis, running racks of dirty dishes through a steaming hot machine as women brought their plates and bent and set them down on a low ledge, the open necklines of women bending low so they could say hi. It was inspiring. Stepping out of the steam and heat and into the green world, I lit up a smoke, walked into Loring Park, practiced expressive exhaling, figuring smoking to be a basic requireme
nt for a writer. Working hard in a hot steamy room makes the rest of a summer day very pleasant. My boss, the cook, was an ogre, but the graciousness of women made it all bearable. I didn’t miss Anoka at all, not for a minute, and I never would, one advantage of being a nobody. I was free of the ignominious past and happy to be.
I saw my first movie, Elmer Gantry with Burt Lancaster as the corrupt evangelist and Jean Simmons as the godly woman he loves. I identified with Burt. I had applied to the University but wasn’t confident, so I wrote to a Trappist monastery in Iowa, asking to visit and maybe join—I liked the idea of silence, which the Trappists practiced, and if you were silent, who would care if you were Catholic or not? The Trappists wrote back and suggested a visit, but Mother was distressed to see a letter from the Abbey of Saint Melleray. She said she was praying for me. “I love you, you know,” she said.
I was surprised to hear her say it. We didn’t talk like that in our family. To us, it came under Flattery, like saying “You are so smart.” It moved me that she said it. I was glad when the U of M (Omnibus Artibus, Commune Vinculum) opened its arms to me, a B-minus student with a wistful ambition to be a writer. The acceptance letter came in late August. I went to campus and paid $71 for a quarter’s tuition. My dad took me aside that night and told me he couldn’t contribute money to help pay for college. I felt liberated by this. It meant that I was free to do as I pleased, no need for permission.
That Time of Year Page 11