I was on the road, week after week, thirty-three Prairie Home shows, standing at the middle microphone in the path of powerful talents, The Iowa poet Greg Brown, the king of the bass sax Vince Giordano, the twelve-string guitar master John Koerner, big talents leaping upstream over the rapids. Vince stood in with the band, and the big honk of the bass sax was the engine that drove the bus, the piano steering, and John’s twelve was a one-man threshing machine. The DiGiallonardo Sisters’ three-part jazz vocals were right out of the Forties, an old b&w photograph come to life in full color.
Then Sunday at home and a week on the road, theaters in Buffalo, Kansas City, and Seattle, a Lutheran convention in Omaha, a college in Indiana, two-hour shows with a standing singing intermission, sometimes three hours, which is too long, but they didn’t want to leave so I stayed. I loved the pontoon boat story with its interlocking parts, Aunt Evelyn, the disgusting Bruno the Fishing Dog, the canceled wedding of Debbie Detmer the successful veterinary aromatherapist, Evelyn’s boyfriend Raoul, the visit of the twenty-four agnostic Danish Lutheran pastors, and Kyle’s attempt to fly his parasail over the lake and drop Evelyn’s ashes in—the parts all fit like a fine clockwork, and each could be extended if the audience wished—and it was all told in a rush and ended with Bruno sticking his nose up Kyle’s butt and the line, “But as we say in Lake Wobegon, it could’ve been worse,” whereupon the audience fell apart. A person never wearies of telling a story that good. I certainly didn’t. I was living in a tunnel, waking up some mornings not sure what city I was in. Arise and step into the bathroom, but actually it’s the hotel hallway, and the door clicks shut. It’s 3 a.m. The hall is empty, just me in my underwear. I pick up a house phone and a pleasant security man comes along to unlock my door. He doesn’t ask for identification, only my last name. He wishes me a good night. It’s Dallas, dummy. I flew to Austin to speak at something and the columnist Molly Ivins picked me up at the airport in her pickup truck, and we stopped at a café for chili and everybody there knew her and I basked in virtue by association.
I taught a course at the U, “The Composition of Comedy,” which was mostly about economy. A man walked into the bar with a handful of dog turds and said, “Look what I almost stepped in.”—add one word to it, and you smother the joke. I had a hundred students, and the best of them got to stand up for five minutes and make the class laugh. Men and women who’d never done this before stood up and killed. I never let anyone stand up and die, I worked with them until they were good and homicidal. Comedy sets out to gain the crowd’s attention and confidence in the first half-minute, to win over the sleepy and cynical, make it worthwhile for them and surprise them into laughter, a success shared by speaker and hearer equally. Most of what’s said in this world goes unheard and is a waste of time. Comedy is the beautiful exception.
And in the midst of teaching it I flew to Las Vegas to speak at a breakfast at the tire dealers’ convention, which I did as a favor to a cousin. Seven a.m. in Hangoverland and they want joke jokes, ripsnorters, not humorous recollections of small-town life, and after five minutes of me, they’d heard enough. I did six more minutes, got a faint trickle of laughter, cried, “You’ve been great!” and ran out through the kitchen, tore up the check, and went to the airport. It was the Worst Show of My Life and I was glad to get it out of the way and not have to wait for it anymore. It was done.
I arose at 5 a.m., worked hard, gave up reading novels and going to movies. I wrote on yellow legal pads, on planes, in hotel rooms. I got no exercise except for walking rapidly through airports, and my daily water intake was less than that of a garter snake. I was the lone writer of the show, though the credits listed Warren Peace, Xavier Onassis, Ben Dover, Rhoda Dendron, Ida Dunmore, Hugh Mungus, Barbara Seville, and sometimes John Calvin. I sat at the laptop on the long desk looking up at the big photograph of Grandma’s schoolhouse where Grandpa had followed her around, cleaning blackboards, and finally kissing her, and it was clear to me: nature cares not about our golden years, nature wants turnover, so keep going while you can, your time won’t last long. I wrote quiet weeks in Lake Wobegon, and I sent the cowboys in search of Lefty’s love Evelyn Beebalo, and every week there was A dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets but one man is still trying to find the answers to life’s persistent questions. Me. Guy Noir. Every episode began with a line about the weather. It was a gorgeous September, bright blue skies, warm sun—the weather that makes a man want to buy an easel and a beret and paint landscapes that will sell for $12 million after you’re dead for fifty years.
Guy told his girlfriend, Sugar, “Of course I love you. If I didn’t love you, why would I have been dating you for the past thirteen years? It ain’t for your fabulous gams, sweetheart.” He fought off the criminal element and was drawn to interesting women. She was tall, her hair was like melted caramel. Her jeans were so tight you could read the embroidery on her underwear. It said, Tuesday. And the T-shirt with a picture of Mount Rushmore on the front. Take it from me, Lincoln and Jefferson never looked so good.
I wrote the sound-effects scripts with the singing caribou and rancid bagpipes and whooping cranes and helicopters dropping chimpanzees on parachutes. I wrote the story about the anonymous economist from Menomonie, Wisconsin, who drove a semi-load of salami to Miami for Naomi who danced Salome in a steamy pajama drama called “Mamarama” and a minute later Guy Noir was scoping out a Girl Scout cookie-scalping scam run by scantily clad schoolteachers from Schenectady. The childish concatenation of alliteration. It amuses people.
I worked all the time because I was running away from death. It had knocked on my back door and I went out the front. Comedy is God’s work. You see it in Ecclesiastes. The thing that has been is the thing that shall be; and the thing that is done is that which shall be done: there is nothing new under the sun. That’s the essence of comedy. The Resurrection was a joke. The disciples came to the tomb and saw the tomb was empty. Jesus walks up and says, “Who you looking for?” You do God’s work and He will grant you a little extra time. Studs was gone, my brother, Chet Atkins, who said, “Now that I am on the back nine, my passion for the guitar is slowly dying and it makes me sad. I never thought my love for the guitar would fade. There are a lot of reasons: as we get older the high frequencies go, music doesn’t sound so good. And for some damn reason after hearing so many great players, I lose the competitive desire.” The old Icelander Bill Holm died, collapsed in the Sioux Falls airport, having just visited Jim Harrison, who died a year later. My friend Carol Bly was gone, who loved a good contentious conversation, and I was brought up to defer to a woman and didn’t stand up to her and provide the adversary she wanted. My classmate Margaret Keenan, who became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. She didn’t claim to heal people but to lead them toward some sort of understanding. I never heard her speak with contempt or derision about anyone, not even Death, whom she saw coming a long way off and met with serenity. She contracted a cancer that stumped the specialists and finally accepted that the end was near. She called me one last time, to say that she’d been to a Hopi healing ceremony and didn’t understand one bit of it but was moved and felt wonder, a highly educated woman transformed by religious mystery. She now felt at peace and asked me to sing a song for her on the show, one her father had loved, so I did, a duet with Sarah Jarosz: When all is sad and dark within, and hope seems only born to die, He steals within the shadows dim and wipes the tear from every eye. My cousin Olive Darby died, clear of mind at 104, the last living person to have known my grandfather James, and for years I meant to go visit her in Iowa and never did.
Tom Keith died in October 2011. He was 64. He had worked the show a week before, spent a quiet week at home, felt ill on a Sunday, collapsed in the evening, was put in an ambulance, regained consciousness briefly, and died of a pulmonary embolism. His friends put on a show at the Fitz in his memory with bagpipers and a magician, tango dancers, jokes, a video of Tom in a kilt singing “A Wee Deoch an Doris,” and twice I came out
on stage with paper in hand as if to give a eulogy and Vern Sutton came out of the wings and pied me. Banana cream pie. He did it well, you don’t throw the pie, you push it. People loved it, both times. It was a eulogy I was incapable of delivering due to the fact that I owed so much to someone I barely knew. I met him in 1972 at KSJN in St. Paul, where he was a studio engineer assigned to my morning show. I wanted to be my own engineer, so I made him a sportscaster and a laconic sidekick and then found out he was happy to do sound effects, animals, engines, explosions, gunshots, dramatic stuff, and that was what led me down the path of radio comedy. Otherwise I would’ve jumped ship, gotten a job in an MFA program teaching decorative writing, and lived a quiet bungalow life going to movies and playing golf in the low 90s. My mentor was this polite ex-Marine and former right fielder who had a secret ambition to personify chickens and follow in the footsteps of his parents Jim and Betty, who played Ma and Pa Wiggins on KSTP’s Sunset Valley Barn Dance. The man changed my life, sent me down the comedy path, was a loyal colleague, did what needed to be done, stood on stage and did sound effects, and we never really knew each other.
31
Seventy
I CELEBRATED TURNING SEVENTY, SAILING on the Queen Mary out of New York harbor, a fireboat alongside shooting a fifty-foot plume in the air, the Staten Island Ferry bobbing in our wake, our funnel eased under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge with a few feet to spare, and we sailed along the coast of Brooklyn and out to sea. Jenny and Maia and I lay in deck chairs on the sun deck, behind the funnel, and of course I thought about the Titanic as any Brethren boy would. The gospel preachers of my youth loved the Titanic, the story of the rich and famous drinking and dancing as the ship sped through the field of icebergs toward its doom, wealth and privilege enjoying a high old godless time, and then the crash, the screams, the alarms, sinners ushered into eternity to stand before the Judgment Seat. We would pass over the ship’s resting place two nights later. If God wished to provide the affluent with another object lesson, here we were.
I’d been off alcohol for ten years but it was my seventieth and so at dinner on the great day itself I splurged on a bottle of 1942 Bordeaux, the year of my birth. I didn’t let Jenny see the wine menu; the price had risen somewhat since World War II to something like the price of a small used car. The figure made my brain go dark for a moment, but I nodded to the sommelier and he pried out the ancient cork in a few small pieces and some cork crumbs and poured a splash in my glass. It was not a bad wine, sort of magnificently ordinary. Bordeaux was under German occupation in 1942 and the patriotic French were not about to bring forth superior vintages to be enjoyed by Nazi butchers so there you are. Drink a glass, it’s history, and next time order a 1948.
Maia attached herself to a troupe of British actors who were doing performances on the ship and she became a faithful fan, and Jenny lay in a chaise and read books and attended lectures, and I wandered around and thought my thoughts. I am not good at relaxation. I am very good at regret and remorse. I regret periods of Prairie Home when I was distracted by my own random ambitions and lost focus on what mattered. I left a long trail of failed attempts at screenplays, a couple fragments of plays, part of a musical, an unfinished novella, bits of essays: why would you go roaming through the woods pitching tents when you own a castle? I had a Saturday night show with millions of faithful listeners—why did I spend days and days laboring over a cowboy musical nobody would ever be interested in when a big audience was waiting to hear about Lake Wobegon? I walked around the ship kicking myself for that.
I hiked stern to bow and back as the site of the Titanic sinking approached and I plowed through my regrets. All the times I offered political views on the show, my little outbursts of piety. My lifelong resistance to the idea of rehearsal. I kept rewriting the show up to airtime and now and then was known to reach over an actor’s shoulder and scratch out a few words. It was nuts, hanging onto amateurism and looking for spontaneity, throwing a show together on the fly. No production meeting: I abhorred meetings. Other people did vocal warmups, I never did. I did not want to be caught taking the show seriously.
Large regrets, small, all painful. Driving to Friday night rehearsal in St. Paul once, I was almost sideswiped by a driver cutting in front of me and I screeched at him some crazy homicidal stuff for a minute, forgetting that I had a colleague on the phone—I stopped yelling and said “Sorry” and no more was ever said about it but it’s still vivid in my mind, the things I yelled at her that were intended for him. I have a vivid memory of the day I dropped in at Uncle Jim’s farm and played chess with his little boy Jimmy who was a good chess player. This meant something to my uncle who said he hoped I’d come back and do it again but I never did. My beloved aunts faded away and a visit from the notorious nephew would’ve been welcome, I know, but in the fury of work and travel, they became strangers. I have a large ego and was unable to resist invitations to fly off and go be admired by somebody or other, the Duckburg DeMolay, the Wistful Vista Historical Society, the Loyal Order of Walleyes, the Federated Association of Organizations. As a Minnesotan, I’m good at disguising my ego as public service or professional obligation but it was a 300-hp ego in those days and it kept me on the road, going from town to town, enjoying public attention. When you are an old man you can come clean about this. I loved standing in front of people and I resented the man who recited my accomplishments by way of introduction—he was stealing my limelight—and I grabbed the microphone out of the lectern (no need for that) and walked downstage so as to give them a better view and launched in to regale and amuse. Money had nothing to do with it, it was about admiration, a thousand heads bent forward, listening and laughing.
Forgiveness. This is what I go to church for. I can’t forgive myself, but Sunday morning at church, in the midst of Black and Asian and white families and gay and morose and miscellaneous, we kneel and lay down our sins in a deep silence and we are absolved, and people ramble around the sanctuary shaking hands and hugging, a cheerful democratic moment, milling in the aisle, smiling, saying Peace of the Lord. God be with us. This is what I go to church for.
Meanwhile, the parade of losses continues. My cousin Bruce Bacon, an organic farmer who lived in a wreck of a house and kept a beautiful garden. He taught young people how to care for soil, working land that had been in the family for more than a century. He kept bees and whenever he visited, he brought a jar of honey. He was hopeful to a fault.
I lost track of Arnie Goldman when he was 78, alone in Sydney, planning a trip to New York, misquoting Thoreau (“As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail or marriage or a retirement home.”), promising he’d ride shotgun with me up to Tanglewood that summer, passing the red-eye, smoking dope, keeping an eye out for the federales, and I never saw him again.
The poet Louis Jenkins, author of Nice Fish, the world’s only play about ice fishing, an independent observant man unencumbered by careerism. My stage manager, Albert Webster, who brought a happy spirit to backstage, had a great laugh, was never flummoxed, and though he was a big man, he could leap into action when necessary. My New York neighbor Ira Globerman, who, though his office was across the street from Yankee Stadium, never went through the gates because he grew up in Brooklyn and was still loyal to the Dodgers, though they were long gone to LA. He brought the same fidelity to his judicial duties. I had dinner with him and his wife, Ellie, three days before he died. He roasted steaks. He was moving slowly and deliberately, but his mind was lively. He talked about his Brooklyn boyhood and not much about old age except a joke—a psychologist takes a survey on frequency of male sex: many men have sex once a week, others once a month, and then he meets an old man who has sex once every two years. “Oh, that’s so sad,” says the psychologist. The man smiles: “Yes, but tonight’s the night!” Ira died that week in his sleep.
Meanwhile, this easy life fell to me while people I knew were dying, and I am standing on a
stage and singing:
A man walked past the insane asylum:
They were shouting, “Twenty-one! Twenty-one!”
So he looked through a hole in the fence;
It sounded like they were having fun.
He put his eye to the hole in the fence
To see what crazy people do
And they poked him in the eye with a sharp stick
And yelled, “Twenty-two! Twenty-two!”
I told about Florian and Myrtle Krebsbach, their classic argument, which goes exactly like this:
MYRTLE: Why don’t we ever go anywhere? I’m sick of staying at home.
FLORIAN: What do you mean, “never go anywhere”? We went to Rapid City in September.
MYRTLE: Rapid City, I don’t call that somewhere.
FLORIAN: There’s just no satisfying you. Fight, fight, fight, it’s all we do. Why should I pay a fistful of money to travel and be miserable when I can sit and be miserable at home.
That’s how the argument goes, but this time he didn’t give her the line about Rapid City, he said, “Where do you want to go?” and she said, “California,” knowing how cheap he is, and he, to get back at her, said, “You got it. Deal.” So they flew to La Jolla to visit their son Wesley. He was the quiet boy who did well in school and became a software engineer and what it is he does, they have no idea, only that he is very successful. Wesley and Donna and their three kids live in baronial splendor in La Jolla and go around in sweatpants and T-shirts and are always doing six things at once and apparently adhere to no religion other than physical exercise. The whole family is deeply involved with triathlon, running, swimming, biking. The weather was perfect, the grandkids remarkable but mostly busy elsewhere and both parents are mysterious and speak a language that is mostly English and partly something else. What the old folks realized after a week was: (1) they were eager to return home, and (2) their rascally son Donnie, with the whiskey habit and the roaming eye and the screwed-up kids, is the son they know very well and the successful son is a complete stranger. Donnie needs them, Wesley doesn’t. La Jolla was full of wonders; Lake Wobegon is where their hearts are. Scripture says, Be ye not conformed to this world but rather be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Stories are essential in the renewing of the mind. We must renew our minds to love what we truly love. I enjoy being in New York because I’m a visitor here and don’t have a big stake in the outcome. Minnesota is my home, which I know because it can break my heart. I don’t care what Wisconsin, Iowa, or the Dakotas do, but if Minnesota voted for Donald Trump, I would feel it my duty to jump off the Washington Avenue Bridge.
That Time of Year Page 34