I was in my kitchen on 90th Street that morning, and heard a big plane flying low over the Hudson, and half an hour later a friend called and said, “Turn on your TV.” I didn’t have one so I went over to Docks, where a crowd was clustered in the bar, watching a news clip of people falling, arms outstretched, from high floors. It was too painful to watch. Men and women who walked these streets with us had, on a Tuesday morning, found themselves engulfed in horror and death. We read in the Times how many of them stifled their panic and looked out for the others on their floor and many of them, seeing that death was inescapable, called home on their cellphones to say, “I love you. Take care of the children. Have a good life.” They called in the midst of smoke and panic to give a benediction. Weeks later, the city released some of the 911 calls from the Trade Center, the woman on the 83rd floor, overwhelmed by smoke, crying, “I’m going to die, aren’t I? I’m going to die.” A man on the 105th floor, gasping for breath, who screamed, “Oh my God” as the building started to collapse. They were people whom we might have sat near in a theater or restaurant, who suddenly found themselves facing the abyss, and firemen ran into the building to save them and died in the collapse, and it was all on TV. And then the politicians came out of hiding to seize the day, and Mr. Giuliani put on his public face and Mr. Bush mounted the wreckage with bullhorn in hand and vowed vengeance. The cops and firemen who climbed the stairs represented New York at its most courageous and caring, and the self-aggrandizing Giuliani was New York at its money-grubbing worst. He went around giving speeches on leadership for a hundred grand a shot, getting standing ovations as a stand-in for the police and firemen who died because police helicopters who looked down at the inferno and saw that the buildings would collapse couldn’t get word to the fire chiefs on the ground who sent their men up the stairs to die. Giuliani had known about the radio problem for years and failed to get it fixed, and in the patriotic fervor post-9/11 escaped blame. Meanwhile, Bush, who had ignored earlier intelligence warning of terrorists flying planes into tall buildings, claimed Iraq had weapons it didn’t have and sent 4,000 American men and women to die in an evil mess with no clear purpose and no end. It was a wretched time in American history. Those lives were not given for their country, they were taken, stupidly and carelessly. Politicians sacrificed them.
Two nights later, my neighbors Ellie and Ira and I went down to the Village for dinner. Smoke in the air, trucks of debris roaring past, and yet New Yorkers were eating supper in outdoor cafés, resuming normal life as an act of resistance. You tried to blow us up: we’ll show you, we’ll go out to eat. It was an Italian restaurant, we talked for two hours, and not a word was said about the death and destruction. We talked about everything ordinary because we had no right to comment on the horror. We had read about the heroism of firemen who dashed into the burning towers, dragging hose up the stairways, who felt deep down the direness of the situation, a hundred-story tower with a huge gaping hole in the middle—dashing into the building went against basic human instinct. But there were people trapped above so up they went. Nobody cared to be the first to turn tail and head for safety. We thought about them in silence, eating our linguini in clam sauce. Heroism on such a scale demands you revise your views of your fellow man.
The next Friday evening, a spontaneous event: thousands of residents stood outside their apartment buildings, holding lit candles, singing about the spacious skies and the land of the pilgrims’ pride. I walked around the Upper West Side listening to it, a wholly other New York than anything I’d seen before. At LaGuardia, when I resumed the book tour, I met a young man who’d been on the 61st floor of the south tower, taking a training program. He said, “It was the worst day of my life, and the best.” He looked radiant. I didn’t ask how he escaped, and he didn’t say. I talked to Jenny back in Minnesota: musician friends of hers went to a church near Ground Zero to play music for salvage workers on their rest breaks. They went day after day to play Mozart and Haydn.
September 11 was a tragedy, and the tragedy was George W. Bush standing on the smoking ruins and promising revenge and promoting the fiction that war in Iraq and Afghanistan was to defend the country against terrorism. Congress, which once spent an entire year investigating a married man’s attempt to cover up an illicit act of oral sex, showed little curiosity about a war waged on false premises that killed hundreds of thousands and led our own people to commit war crimes and squandered hundreds of billions of dollars.
I loved the road, doing solo shows after 9/11. Ann Arbor, Tulsa, Fort Pierce, East Lansing, Santa Cruz. Five nights in five cities, then the Saturday broadcast. I worked on a new book on the plane, arrived in a town, got to the hotel, took a nap. Walked to the theater, walked in the stage door, said hello to the crew, paced for ten or fifteen minutes, then took my place behind the curtain and made my mind go blank. The stagehands relax by the rope rigging, an easy night for them, accustomed to loading in massive sets and flies, and tonight, it’s one microphone and one wooden stool. The house lights dim to half, the recorded announcement about turning off your cellphone, and the crowd waits, whispery— then I drift out into the spotlight, into the applause falling like warm rain. I stop and bow. And I sing:
Here I am, O Lord, and here is my prayer:
Please be there.
When I die like other folks,
Don’t want to find out you’re a hoax.
I would sure be pissed
If I should’ve been an atheist.
Lord, please exist.
And then segue into “My country, ’tis of thee,” and the audience sings, and “God Bless America,” and that takes care of September 11th, no need for comment, and I walk back and forth, talking, picking out faces in the crowd, talking about Lake Wobegon, about my classmate Julie who liked to wrestle with me in sixth grade, the Boy Scout winter camping trip when I left the tent to pee and my extreme modesty made me wander far into the woods and almost freeze to death. The Uncle Jack story, in which his old wooden rowboat springs a leak in the middle of the lake and I try to stop the leak with my bare foot and he cries out O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, the ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won. And the story about the pontoon boat carrying the Lutheran pastors that capsized in the wake of the speedboat and the great dignity with which they toppled overboard. There are good laughers in the crowd, a cackler, a whooper, and a guy who sounds like an old truck engine turning over. People laughing at the stories and also at the laughter. At the end, the audience and I sing “Good Night, Ladies,” “Goodnight, Sweetheart,” “Happy Trails,” “Red River Valley,” and I bow and exit to applause and stand behind the curtain, counting to ten. In theaters of a couple thousand seats all full of people, the audience is excited by its own applause, so you don’t take it too personally. You count to ten and if you hear diminution, you walk away, but if it’s holding steady, you walk out for another bow. My friend, the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, showed me how to bow years ago, and I try to do it right: stop, hold out your hands to the crowd, smile a genuine smile, bend, look at your fly for a count of five, stand, smile, march off. After the encore bow, the applause fades quickly—the show was two hours long and the audience is older and aware of its bladders so I walk backstage, where the stagehands sit around a table, eating the last of their supper, an awkward moment since they have no idea who I am or what it was I did out on stage—they’re jazz guys, maybe C&W, but I always stop to say thank you, and then out the stage door I go and down the alley and cross the street and slip in the side door of the hotel and ride the elevator to the sixth floor and my room. Take off the suit and shirt and tie. Take my meds. Crawl into bed, feeling good—I gave good value to a couple thousand people and enjoyed doing it—and fall asleep. Up at 5. Make coffee. Three precious hours before I leave for the airport, the best time for work, so I go to it. There is always more to do. A writer’s job never ends. This is a good life, an easy life. I hope it never ends, knowing it will.
28
You’re The Top
I WAS SET OUT ON the writing road at the age of fourteen, handing a story to Red at the Linotype, reading the galley, watching the flatbed press slap out the Heralds and bundle them up and stayed on it, reading the New Yorker Mr. Anderson gave me, and reading Roger Angell’s letter accepting “Local Family Makes Son Happy,” and five years later the radio show appeared and gradually the work got to be fun. You start out with ambition and perseverance and with good luck and a boost from friends you get some outlandish good breaks and eventually, Lord willing, you may find yourself in the land of delight. “Sounds of Sickness” was a delight: to vandalize an anthem of idealism with lavatory humor and reduce the audience (most of them) to a puddle was a joy.
Writing “Guy Noir, Private Eye” was easy work but work nevertheless. What gave me joy was songwriting, which had never been my ambition—I wasn’t a singer by trade, didn’t play guitar, had no urge to write a song that moves a crowd into standing with arms waving back and forth in the air and weeping and thereby making the world a better place— songwriting was purely for recreation. I like to write rhymed verse, limericks, sonnets, song lyrics, it’s all the same. It wasn’t about creativity, I stole freely. I wrote new words for Jacques Offenbach’s lovely “Barcarolle.”
I once learned to play melodies
Even the difficult parts
By bending down and gently releasing
Lovely melodic farts.
I was a promising baritone
Off on an opera career,
But many more people wanted to hear
Music come out of my rear.
I did a show from Rochester, home of the Mayo Clinic, and wrote new words to “The Glory of Love”—I’d give you my blood, give you my kidney, ’cause God told me to take care of you, didney, so I’m sticking with you everywhere, I’ll manage your meds and push your wheelchair. No matter what, you’re my story, whether or not you are ambulatory. That’s not theory, it’s the reality, dearie, of love. It was the childish pleasure of rhyming “kidney” with “didn’t he” and “theory” and “dearie.” A child could do it. Children do do it. So did I.
Unlike other songwriters who had to wait months for their work to see the light of airplay, I wrote mine on Friday and sang them on Saturday. Sang them once and never again.
And then I rediscovered Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top,” the raggedy 1934 hit with the sweet backbeat in which he rhymed “symphony by Strauss” with “Mickey Mouse,” and “summer night in Spain” with “cellophane,” the first person ever to think of that. The tune kept going through my head so I wrote new words to it.
You’re the top
You’re Honolulu
You’re the whop
Bop a be bop a lula
You’re so terrific, you’re a South Pacific home
You’re Barack Obama, you’re the Dalai Lama, you’re the pope in Rome.
You’re Bill Gates,
You’re Laurel and Hardy,
The candidates
Of the Republican Party
I’m a tragedy, a schlump from the Midwest
But if, baby, I’m the bottom, you’re the best.
The Porter rhythm was irresistible, and I was hooked on it and did a version for Nashville:
You’re Earl Scruggs
You’re Jerry Douglas.
You’re some hugs
When I’ve been hugless.
You’re a pecan pie with a satisfying belch
You’re an opera house, you’re Alison Krauss, you’re Gillian Welch.
I could not stop myself. I was addicted. And the Cole Porter Estate did nothing to stop me either. For a show at Goshen College, I did “You’re the Top” for Mennonites, surely a first, and they sat and listened in awestruck wonder:
You’re the top
You’re Anabaptist
You’re the whop
When the truth just slapped us
You’re pacifists, who persist in seeking peace
You’re in the business, of forgiveness, may your tribe increase
God has promised
You will rise like eagles
You’re like Amish
But with motor vehicles
I’m a fallen sinner utterly contrite
But if, baby, I have fallen, you’re upright.
It was so much fun rewriting Porter (You’re the FBI, Guy Noir, and Scotland Yard. You’re Giuseppe Verdi, the Bach concerti, you’re the National Guard ) and people loved hearing it so I kept at it (You’re the cloth on my down pillow. You’re Philip Roth, you’re Don DeLillo.) and nobody suggested I stop so I didn’t (Goodness knows, you’re worth knowin’, like Francine Prose or Leonard Cohen) because if the great Cole Porter could get delicious delight from rhyming in metrical timing, then why shouldn’t I?
This sense of delight I trace to a decision I made in 2002 when I was with my family on a cruise to Alaska and after a year of worrying about it I simply stopped drinking. Moderation didn’t work for me, and I didn’t want to join a group and sit in a circle of folding chairs in a church basement and talk about my emotionally distant father. I had an enormous capacity for wine and liquor and could do two stiff martinis and half a bottle of Barolo and a snifter of brandy and still talk in sentences and walk without holding on. I didn’t want to keep going down this path and become a debauched nobody and cause anguish to my wife and embarrass my little girl and be pitied by friends, and in my mind, an alcoholic is someone who can’t stop, so I decided to stop and not be one and not have to go into a 12-step program. Fear of therapy led me to change bad behavior. I’d been wayward long enough, time to straighten out. And I did. I made no announcement. My mantra was It’s easy to quit drinking so long as you don’t drink. Jenny noticed, and it came as a relief to her. I got back my good mornings when I woke up clearheaded with good ideas and could edit with a bold hand. A good early start leads to cheerfulness that lasts the day.
I’d drunk whiskey to loosen myself up, but actually it made me gloomy. Sobriety made me giddy. I started writing funny songs. It was a sweet mystery.
When God created Woman
He gave her not two breasts but three
But the middle one got in the way
So God performed surgery.
And Woman stood in front of God
With the middle breast in her hand
She said, “What can we do with the useless boob?”
And God created Man.
In my giddy sobriety, I became enamored of the name Piscacadawadaquoddymoggin and started sticking it in scripts every week. We worked our guests into the scripts, if they were willing, and most were, and we made a running joke of putting Piscacadawadaquoddymoggin into the guest’s lines, which made some of them blanch during the sound check but we assured them that it would draw a big laugh, which it did. And so Jack Lemmon, Martin Sheen, John Lithgow, Meryl Streep, John Cleese, Kelli O’Hara, Cokie Roberts, Walter Bobbie, Elvis Costello, Ira Glass, all found the P-word staring up at them—and it focused their minds but good. The fans in the audience knew the word was coming when the illustrious thespian approached the mike, paper in hand. Of course, he or she had been coached—the stress is on the third syllable and also the quod—and nobody fluffed utterly, but the anticipation of fluffage was fun to watch. Renée Fleming did it, as Renata Flambée, and Allison Janney as Carol Toledo of San Diego, and Emanuel Ax as Max Sanders, and maybe the line was Piscacadawadaquoddymoggin on the Penobscot peninsula and maybe they’d try to sell me a preparation made from pumpkin, peppers, peapods, peach pits, poppy seeds, purple peppers, and papyrus protoplasm that could cure priapism, pimples, impropriety, palpitations of the pupil, perspiration due to plumpness, and a propensity for pomposity. The guest who traversed all the pops and whistles got plenty of applause.
I was sober and flying high and the show was doing well, I bought a black Armani suit and a seersucker one for outdoor shows. I bought a bigger laptop. I had too much money, which gave me the chance to
be stupid about real estate. Real estate ads were my pornography—I came close to buying a stone house on the Isle of Harris, it was insanity. I bought eighty acres of Wisconsin farmland and built on it, then realized I was a city guy and rural quiet made me uneasy. I grew up rural and rode my bike into the city and now I belonged there. By rights, I should have a legal guardian in real estate matters. I opened a bookstore, Common Good Books, a good deed that turned into a cash drain. It opened in a cellar under a coffee shop at Selby and Western in St. Paul: hundreds of people who walked by never noticed the tiny Open sign. I painted quotations from old heroes on the walls: Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. —Flannery O’Connor. But she and Updike and Roth, who painted recognizable American landscapes, were gone and the customers wanted novels about growing up abused and ostracized: ostracization was very big. The humor shelf was untouched, people preferred memoirs by widows, orphans, the mortally ill, mentally unstable, recovering fundamentalists, drug-dependent dental hygienists, that sort of thing. I was selling apples and people wanted zucchini. I lost a fortune. I was an absentee owner and when I walked in, the employees were shocked. The day I signed over the store to a new owner was a day of liberation. Someday I’ll earn back the money with a memoir about bookstore ownership and how the loss of quality fiction led me to drug addiction.
That Time of Year Page 30