My grandfather James, whose middle name was Crandall, left New Brunswick to rescue his sister Mary on the verge of widowhood and her three little children. Our relatives who took our family in during the war were cut from the same cloth. My brother Philip was a good father and grandfather, worthy of esteem. I am a hanger-on in this line of worthies, but I do hang on.
Years later, I was hung out to dry for a mutual email flirtation and my career came to a screeching halt, which I felt was unjust, and then I came to believe it was justice for my cowardice of 1976 when I ended the marriage to Mary. Justice deferred, and all the more painful for it.
We had a quiet marriage that became silent and unbearable. I’m a person who maneuvers out of difficult situations by subterfuge—I evaded the Darwins, I skipped out on swim class and then persuaded my mother I could swim, I slipped away from the Brethren without confrontation or explanation. And I broke up with Mary without ever facing her and saying why. I needed to depart swiftly in silence by the cowardly device of a love affair with someone else. I have revisited those scenes many times over the years. How a gentle, evasive man, aware he is doing a dishonest thing, will hurry up and try to dismiss it from his mind. I know that man and I could find excuses for his behavior—I could argue that self-righteousness does not teach ethics, that the invisible middle child learns how to get away with deceit—but it doesn’t alleviate the damage I caused. I could argue that I was single-minded in my vocation and cut corners on honesty. I could argue that humor is itself an act of evasion. Give me five minutes, I can come up with other explanations. But really, it’s cowardice.
My wife, Mary, had stood by me through hard times when I worked eighteen-hour days and we were isolated in a farmhouse far from her people, and in 1976 I left her behind, simply walked away. Her mother, Marjorie, and I reconciled ten years later, but I failed to make amends with Mary and that lies heavy on my conscience. The inability to forgive and to reconcile and resume decent friendly relations with people you care about whom you broke away from. This is a heavy weight forty years later.
Soon after I left her, she found her vocation as a social worker, advocating for the elderly and impoverished in their complicated dealings with weary bureaucrats. Where the clients were sheepish and confused, she was forceful and direct on their behalf and, if necessary, spoke with faintly concealed cold fury. She’d had a habit of timidity with me, but for clients in desperate circumstances, she looked authority in the eye and demanded attention and mercy. We saw little of each other except at funerals, and at our son Jason’s graduation we sat together. The sight of her made me forlorn. A man would like his former wife to remarry and be happy with someone else, but that didn’t happen.
Over the years, I heard stories of her good work defending hopeless cases, and every year around her birthday, March 8, I thought of calling her and wishing her well but didn’t, not sure she wanted to hear from me. She died the Friday before Palm Sunday, 1998, in Fairview Hospital in Minneapolis, of a massive infection after a hip replacement. Jason had spent days at the hospital, talking to her though she was in a coma, and spent the last night at the hospital, holding her hand, talking. She was 53. I had sent her gifts of money over the years but I should’ve asked for her forgiveness.
Her death hit me like a hammer. It was the Friday before our annual Talent Show at Town Hall in New York. People said it was a good show, but people always say that. I flew back to Minnesota and helped Jason clean out his mother’s apartment. A grim afternoon. So many mementos of our married life. A photograph of the white frame cabin where we’d met when she was nineteen. At her funeral, I sat in the back row next to Judy Larson and I wept a bucket of useless tears, thinking of that girl’s wistfulness, longing for a life, lying on a dock at the lake in northern Minnesota or sitting at a piano in a practice room in Scott Hall, playing the Bach French Suite No. 6. We longed together, the fragile man and the fearful woman, he waiting for her to affirm her love, she mistaking his silence for anger, when all either had to do was to reach over and embrace the other. The music at her funeral was a Gillian Welch song:
There’s a mile of blacktop
Where the road begins,
It takes a time or two to recognize.
Growing at the roadside,
Scattered by the wind,
Are everybody’s unsaid sad goodbyes.
But there’s only one and only
Who could go and leave me lonely.
Tears poured out of me, at those words “only one who could go and leave me lonely.” I never cry at funerals, but I’d never attended the funeral of one whom I had so badly disappointed. The funeral ended, I edged through the crowd, people reached over to pat my shoulder, but there was no comfort, no words, and there still are not.
I disappointed several women badly. I was too restless to be a good father or a true friend. I found it terribly hard to set aside hard feelings and make peace. I’m not a good person, but I did a radio show for forty years that attracted a great many good people—teachers, social workers, nurses, musicians, skilled workers—and I did my best to amuse them for a couple hours. My own life was tangled and ragged, but when I walk down the street, sometimes a person sees me and smiles, remembering a show I did, and that counts for something.
By all reasonable standards, I was rather unemployable in this world, which turned out to be an advantage. The smart guys went off to become serfs in tall buildings, and I, at the lower end of mediocre, was well-positioned to be wildly lucky. As my friend Sydney Goldstein said, “That you could make work for yourself that suits you and has ended up giving you and other people a lot of pleasure—what more could you ask for?” She lived in San Francisco, ran City Arts & Lectures, which she’d invented, was smart and elegant and loyal, and every year she invited me to come out and do a show in her theater on Nob Hill and enjoy the trolleys rumbling along Market Street, the Mediterranean buildings, the river of fog in the Golden Gate, and the beautiful faces of young people, with their Asian eyes, Hispanic cheekbones, Creole skin. One friend as good as Sydney is enough, and I had her plus Bill Kling, and my artist friend Joe O’Connell, and my old J-school professor Bob Lindsay with the dent in his head. Bob was a Marine, sparing with praise, but when he said, “Last week’s show was pretty damn good,” to me, it was the Peabody Award. He sent the note on Sunday and I read it on Monday, and it was all the encouragement I needed.
21
Coast to Coast
IN MAY 1980, THE SHOW went coast-to-coast, uplinked live by satellite. Bill Kling had pushed for that and I was the defeatist—the show was local—but he said, “You’ll never know unless you try, and if you don’t try, you will someday wish you had.” So he pushed us out of our comfortable nest and he was right. New York turned out to be a hot spot for the show, along with Seattle, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, and big names were glad to come on the radio, the Everly Brothers, Renée Fleming, James Taylor, Marilyn Horne, Taj Mahal, Yo-Yo Ma, John Sebastian, just as Kling said they would. I grew up, as Minnesotans do, with a keen sense of inferiority, and Kling was a skier and said, “If you stay on the beginners’ slope, you’ll never get better.”
He’d campaigned for the national satellite system but public TV was in the driver’s seat, radio being considered an antique, like the Victrola. Public TV was riding high on the basis of BBC costume dramas and a puppet show called Sesame Street and a soft-spoken guy in a cardigan sweater named Mister Rogers. Parents could park their kids in front of the PBS screen and they’d never see violence except for sword duels. A retired Navy admiral was in charge of the satellite project, no mention of radio, until Bill Kling stepped in. He formed a consortium of radio stations that demanded thirteen regional uplinks rather than the one uplink that NPR wanted for itself in Washington. The admiral, after vigorously denying the need for radio, gave him a twenty-four-hour deadline to name the thirteen uplink sites, knowing that in public radio, due to the Eeyore tendency to form task forces to consider worst possible scenarios,
decisions take years, not hours, but Mr. Kling promptly delivered the list of thirteen, one in St. Paul, and that put us in business. Mr. Kling was an entrepreneur who believed in the power of a good idea to win out over cliques and claques, inertia and neurosis, and he prevailed.
The show went up on the satellite May 3, 1980. Same show, staff of four plus the stage crew, now available to listeners in New York, LA, and all stops in between. I wrote the show. Same drill. Friday rehearsal. Extensive rewrites. Sound check on Saturday: once through each script, more rewrites, and then I jiggered the order of the show and typed it up and passed it around.
Tom Keith (and, later, Fred Newman) was the key to the kingdom of comic surrealism, which had never been my ambition but the audience loved it, a bloodhound reciting “To be or not to be, that is the question,” Bach played by a duck pecking a glockenspiel, that sort of thing. Writing prose fiction, I never came up to the high plateau of Thurber or Perelman or Charles Portis, but writing the show was child’s play. NPR was high-church solemnity, and we were the kids who saw the butt crack of the man knelt in prayer. The beauty of nonsense became clear: in our jittery times, with the winds of correctness blowing through public radio, playing to a crowd that was somewhat leftist and feministic and sensitive to stereotyping or biases or unfair generalizations, nonetheless the crowd liked to be teased and toyed with, as once, for Father’s Day, a poem with the lines:
Sperm beneath their shiny domes
Contain important chromosomes
And their tails can kick just like a leg.
O nothing could be fina
Than to swim up a vagina
In search of a rendezvous with an egg.
The laughter at the word “vagina” was gender-balanced, as many trebles as baritones, and so was the laughter at my limerick about the girl from St. Olaf, an Ole, who spread herself with guacamole and two theologians put on their Trojans and had her completely and wholly. The pun, “wholly” was not lost.
I’d loved limericks since the eighth grade, and now I had a reason to write more of them.
There was an old man of Nantucket
Who died. He just kicked the bucket.
And when he was dead
We found that instead
Of Nantucket he came from Barnstable.
The crowd got excited at “Nantucket” though they knew they shouldn’t, it was bad, and then “Barnstable” came along as pure innocence.
GK at Lake Harriet Band Shell show, August 4, 1979. A huge crowd, thanks to free admission and good weather. A first indication of Prairie Home’s appeal, and that is puzzlement on his face.
I was happy to tread the boards of low comedy on the air, just as Chaucer and Shakespeare had, but what I loved most about the show were the great singers who sat in a dressing room sipping tea and then came out on stage and sang from their heels and made the room levitate, singers like Hazel Dickens, Dave Van Ronk, Cathal McConnell, Aoife O’Donovan, Joel Grey, Renée Fleming, Jearlyn Steele, Soupy Schindler, Odetta. Each one singular, indelible, nobody else like them—between Hazel’s haunted, evangelical voice and Joel’s Yiddish patter song learned from his dad, Mickey Katz, and Jearlyn’s soul and Renée’s soul and Soupy’s R&B honk, each one carrying the full force of distinguished ancestry, a whole world on their shoulders. I loved them all. Soupy was master of the harmonica and the jug, sang in a blues growl, whooped and cried, and whatever he did, the audience wanted more, so I had to step on his applause. Soupy had the raw passionate voice I wished for myself: there was nothing soupy about it, it was all muscle, all heart. He’d grown up singing in synagogue in north Minneapolis, the son of Fanny and Julius, two Holocaust survivors, and he took up blues during a hitch in the Air Force, won everyone’s heart with his big personality. A Jew singing Black music, one oppressed people adopting another to make something beautiful out of pain. Soupy was funnier than I was and he could have taken over the show but for one thing: Soupy laughed hard at his own jokes. I never laughed at mine. In radio, cool trumps hot. Soupy’s spirit was strong, but he couldn’t earn a living in music and he worked as a men’s clothing salesman, drove cab, became a public schoolteacher, a fine one, and one day he dropped dead of a heart attack at 57. A great man in a difficult life.
Soupy.
I was so engrossed in writing the show, I couldn’t see what a beautiful thing it was, a loose variety show with gallant musicians playing hot numbers interspersed with the comedy of loon calls and glass breakage and French double-talk, and a slow sweet story in the middle—a homely miracle but I couldn’t tell, I was too busy. We did good shows, the band shell at Lake Harriet and a ballfield on Nicollet Island, the Guthrie Theater, and in 1978 we rented the World Theater, an old rundown picture house whose owner, Bob Dworsky, was weighing a developer’s offer to tear it down and put up a McDonald’s. The World was a second-run theater, where if you had an afternoon to kill, you could sit in the dark and see the double feature for a couple bucks. Bob had four kids, a singer, a violinist, a drummer, and a pianist (Rich, who in due course, became our musical director), and in honor of his kids, Bob rented the place to us for $80/show. A gang of volunteers came in to scrape gum off the seats, and a crew of feminists whited out the “Ladies Toilet” sign in the lobby and painted “Women” over it. Our home. We renamed it the Fitzgerald in 1994.
In 1982, I boxed up a batch of stories (“Jack Schmidt, Arts Administrator,” “After a Fall,” “Don: The True Story of a Young Person,” “U.S. Still on Top, Says Rest of World”) to make my first book, Happy to Be Here, and thanks to the radio show it sold pretty well. I cut off my beard, an immense one that made me look like a man eating a sweater, and I did a publicity tour and as the book crept up the best-seller list, my accommodations upgraded from Holiday Inns to hotels with heated towel racks and rosemary-scented soap. At the end of the book tour, in Utah, I was put up in a private lodge at Sundance with high windows and views of snowy peaks and tall pines, where, alone on a chill March afternoon, I took off my clothes and went out to the hot tub and the door closed behind me and clicked. A solid click. It was locked. I had no key. Naked men often don’t. (Where would you put it?)
I sat in the tub, hoping a cleaning lady might drop in, or St. Jude, or a Saint Bernard, and when nobody did, I wrapped myself in a blue plastic tarp I took off the woodpile and trudged barefoot down the gravel road and knocked on the door of another lodge to ask for help. I learned that a naked man wrapped in blue plastic does not win friends easily. I knocked on the doors of five lodges with lights on and cars in the driveway and nobody showed their faces though I did see curtains move slightly. I waved in an urgent way to three men driving by in a pickup and their heads swiveled left and they drove on. The blue plastic was cold. My feet hurt from the sharp rocks. I considered dropping the tarp and being arrested for public indecency and getting warm in the back seat of a squad car. At the sixth house, a woman came to the door and opened it a crack. She agreed to call the resort office. She didn’t invite me in, so I walked back to the hot tub and was rescued an hour later by a security man, and that was the parable of the naked author in the blue plastic. Moral: A best-selling author is somebody and a naked best-selling author is nobody. You may be a big success, but be sure to put on pants.
GK at his Selectric in a rental apartment on Lincoln Avenue, St. Paul, 1981. A pack of smokes by the typewriter, old radio scripts on the floor. On the table behind, he’s assembling his collection, HAPPY TO BE HERE. Bachelor décor, a beer sign.
An old poet friend wrote to me: “My advice: work as little as you can for as much money as they’ll pay. Get the rent money and depend on your pen for the rest. Be a writer, not a comedian. The show is okay short-term but you have better things to do.” But he was wrong: I had found a vocation. My good intentions had found a road and a car to drive down it. The show was my education. Had The New Yorker hired me, I might’ve spent six years living in a basement in Brooklyn and trying to be E. B. White. Instead, I’d found an old abandoned house—th
e radio variety show—and put a new roof on it and moved in with my friends and made a house party every Saturday and learned to step up to the microphone and talk to the people. I learned to write compact sketches that delivered jokes, do a meandering monologue about minor issues, and as a reward for good service I got to sing a duet now and then, but mostly I talked. After Jearlyn and Jevetta Steele came juking onstage to do “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” my story about Clarence and Arlene Bunsen’s miserable Florida vacation fit very nicely, like after the high-wire act it’s nice to bring out the man who juggles cats. It was not hard labor. Any third-grade teacher worked harder than I. Once a week, two hours at 5 p.m. Central, a lazy man’s dream.
With the proceeds from Happy to Be Here, I went to Murray’s and ordered the Silver Butter Knife Steak, and then I bought a big frame house on the corner of Goodrich and Dale in St. Paul, a hospitable house with four bedrooms, a fenced-in backyard, a commodious screened porch in front. Guests moved in when they played the show and stayed, sometimes for a week—Jean Redpath was a perfect houseguest and could remain for two or three weeks, no problem. Cereal and fruit were set out in the morning, the coffee was on. Help yourself to the refrigerator. She stayed in her room and wrote letters and read, and every day she sang for a half hour or so, songs in Scottish Gaelic that maybe she wouldn’t have sung to an American audience but my God they were magnificent—her voice came down the back stairway and I listened. In the evening, we met for a meal and I never told her how I admired her singing for fear she might prefer privacy.
That Time of Year Page 19