Once a year or so, someone says, “I was at that show in Rochester where you leaped up into the ceiling.” It was at a community college, a makeshift stage—plywood sheets on steel legs—which was moved back under a concrete overhang to make room for more folding chairs. The lights dimmed, I ran and leaped onto the stage and crashed my head into concrete and landed on my hands and knees, jumped up and said, “Happy to be here.” I am bonded to those people by singularity, the only time a performer leaped up into the ceiling. Houdini did other things but never that.
But for every great leap into the ceiling, there are a dozen mistakes. A busy life is full of them. Whenever I go to Carnegie Hall, I remember the show I did there where I sang the New Orleans funeral march, “Just a Little While to Stay Here” and went parading into the house, waving a red umbrella, expecting the audience to sing along and they were embarrassed for me and averted their eyes. They wanted me to be funny, not do a charade of Mardi Gras in the French Quarter. I think about that night with sharp pain. “Forget about it,” you say, I wish I could.
I’ve written some dull, pretentious material—like this sentence here— and that’s why I never sit and read old work. I recently came across a folder from 1976, pages of single-spaced typing, that begins: I am leaving this dark rattan Orlon Saran wrap wingtip apartment and this wickerbasket demitasse wingback risotto kitty litter life and mindless warp of numerals flashing twelve o’clock to go bopbopbop at the wheel of a big old fishtail car screaming west out of this catatonic cocktail freak show scene of Modigliani women with American Express eyes and collagen hearts and pituitaries like shotgun shells and it goes on and on.
I regret that at the end of the last broadcast, July 1, 2016, I did not bring the Prairie Home staff out on stage at the Hollywood Bowl for a bow, the loyal veterans who’d kept the show running all those years, Deb and Kay and Theresa, Jennifer, Tony, Todd, Jason, Olivia, David and Noah and Tom and Alan, Janis, Ben, Ella, Kathryn, Albert, Sam, Thomas, and their leader Kate, and acknowledge them so they could hear the crowd roar. Why did this not occur to me to cue the staff for a bow? So simple. I forgot to do it, the man in the suit.
And most of all I grieve for the death the next spring of my grandson Frederick, seventeen, a funny boy of bottomless curiosity whose mind soaked up reams of information about cars, bugs, animals, India and China, the human environment, and unlike any Keillor I’ve known, he loved to talk, talk, talk. He had a compassion for all other creatures. He landed his first fish and then tried to revive it. A roomful of people in shock gathered for the memorial. I sat behind his brother, Charlie, and his mother, Tiffany, and his grandmother Julie. All I felt was a great heaviness, no tears, just shock. It simply wasn’t possible to imagine Freddy absent from the world. I stood up with Bob and Adam and we sang “Calling My Children Home” and sat down. We all lose our parents, but losing a child is simply not supposed to happen. The brain goes numb, God’s way of offering mercy. If we were fully cognizant, it would be unbearable.
Frederick, 6, and his cat Loretta.
33
The CEO
I GOT KICKED OUT OF public radio in November 2017, accused of an email flirtation with a freelance researcher, a friend who’d worked for the show for thirteen years, a woman of 55 who worked from home but who came to the office often to tell me about her troubles and who wrote me notes about my monologues, which she said were works of art, notes signed, “I love you” and “I miss you.” A man whose job had been “eliminated” by MPR accused MPR of doing it because he knew some dirt about her and me and he demanded a larger severance payment. They declined to pay it, so the man got a lawyer and persuaded my researcher that he’d been eliminated on her account and she joined him in his demand, asking for an enormous sum of money with the implied threat that otherwise they would drag my name in the mud and put stones in my mailbox. They drew up a list of allegations against me and MPR, demanding cash and confidentiality.
The flirtation was not the classic #MeToo story of a powerful bully trying to extort intimacy. She wanted to go on working for me past my retirement, and I had said no, but she persisted. She wrote numerous affectionate emails and confided in me about her personal life. She wrote an email about wanting to ride a train with me and share a bunk; I wrote that I’d like to lie in a hammock with her. We never tried to catch that train or reconnoiter. There was no kissing, no unbuttoning, because we weren’t attracted to each other, we were just two aging adults having an adolescent fantasy. I once, as she left my office, put my hand on her bare left shoulder by way of comforting her, and she winced, and I wrote her a note of apology the next day and she forgave me. The flirtation stopped. She worked for the show to the endand asked for a job recommendation, and I wrote her a good one and she got the job she wanted.We exchanged a few emails after the show ended. She said she had been afraid she wouldn’t hear from me again and was glad to. She wrote to me in May 2017 to say she missed the show but enjoyed her teaching job and expressed condolences on the death of my grandson. She said that I had brought so much good to her life, that she would never say anything that would hurt me, which struck me as odd; I’d never imagined she might.She stayed friends until her attorney demanded the money.
MPR decided from the start that I was expendable. Their lawyer said, “There can be no mutuality or consent when there is a power imbalance,” declaring me guilty, no need for discussion. I disagree. It was not a problem in physics, it was about two human beings, a flirtation that was manipulative on both sides, appealing to my vanity, proclaiming her loyalty. To saythat a mature woman cannot, freely and of her own will and for her own pleasure, flirt with whomever she wishes is to make her a child. Over the years, there had been numerous romances at MPR, some of which wound up in marriage. When people are dedicated and work long hours, work life and social life may intermix. It’s a simple story of proximity.
I don’t blame her for trying to cash in: I suppose she needed the money and figured I could afford the damages. She never spoke to me through all of this and if she had, I would’ve apologized for offending her. I should have dismissed the notion of sharing a bunk on a train. I am truly sorry for her trouble. She only asked for money and confidentiality; I never had reason to believe she bore ill will toward me or the show and I still don’t think she did.
MPR was named in the allegation, though she worked for me, and this may have made the CEO uneasy, knowing that, in December 1989, he had been accused of sexual harassment in Ramsey County District Court by his development director at KSJR where he’d been station manager. The case never came to trial and I assume he was innocent, but in the atmosphere of 2017, an accusation was the same as conviction, and certainly he didn’t want the story to be MPR SLAMMED AGAIN FOR SEX OFFENSES and it wasn’t. He threw me under the bus, and so it was not his picture that appeared on the front page of the New York Timesin a story about men brought down by the #MeToo movement, but mine: the writer of flirtatious emails thereby linked to rapists and brutes who exposed themselves and threw women up against walls.
He kicked me out over the phone, a call that lasted less than two minutes. That’s what hurt: the cool impersonal corporate tone of the execution. The executioner didn’t show up in person to drop the trap, he did it by pressing Delete. An accusation of libidinous interest was handled as a piece of paperwork, like a real estate transaction except with no house or lawn. No voices were raised. I never saw my accuser face to face, nor the CEO, my co-accusee. There was no anger, no feeling expressed, nobody quoted Scripture or poetry or a line from a movie, there was nothing real about it. It was a play with no scenery and the script was deliberately boring.
It wasn’t simply about money, a man’s work was at stake, his vocation. The meeting should’ve taken place around a table in a tent in the woods, a bottle of vodka on the table, a crowd of the curious outside, crows screeching in the trees. The accuser wears a bandanna, a pistol in her belt, with a Rottweiler on a leash, slavering, it can taste my leg. She looks me in th
e eye and says, “You insulted and demeaned me but I was afraid you’d fire me and I needed the money so I feigned interest. I can never be the person I was, you hurt my soul, and I have a right to hurt you back.”
I say, “I intended no harm. It was a game. It stopped when you said to stop.” She says, “I’m taking your house.”
The CEO says, “I never knew you. You’re no part of anything. Your name will never be spoken in my presence again.” And he walks out and mounts his horse and fires four shots in the air and rides away.
But it was all done quietly to the low hum of the AC. And when the bad news comes, it’s by email. Viking-Penguin has canceled your book, the Washington Post has dropped your column, your upcoming tour is canceled and all of your dates from the lecture agency. Your daily show, The Writer’s Almanac, which you did gratis for twenty-five years, with a poem a day, young poets, old, newcomers, classics, to millions of radio listeners, is gone, in the trash.
It was like what happened to Studs when Ed Clamage called him a commie, but I could also see a rough justice behind it: all my life I’d used subterfuge to avoid uncomfortable situations, and it had worked, and now someone else’s subterfuge had dehorsed me.
What grieved me was the silence. Bill Kling called me and other friends, but none of the hosts of national talk shows where I’d been a guest in the past, and none of the station managers for whom I’d done benefits, nobody. It was a time of what Shakespeare called “puking cowardice,” MPR News assigned three reporters to interview ex-employees of PHC, women who’d worked briefly for the show and then left, and they found several who felt unappreciated.No allegations of harassment, though a couple of them said I looked at them in a way that made them uncomfortable. In 2017, this accusation carried considerable weight. I once sat across a dinner table from Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who looked at me in a way that made me uncomfortable, but he looked at everybody that way, and his wife was wonderful to talk to so I ignored him. What the story didn’t say was that I worked nonstop in small rooms and didn’t need employees, male or female, to write Guy Noir or Lake Wobegon stories, so indeed they were not appreciated by me but if they were good at their jobs, they would’ve been appreciated by other employees. MPR News got a Sigma Delta Chi Award for locating five women who left the show feeling unhappy. Somebody could write the same story about former MPR employees and win a Pulitzer Prize.
The real news was not the unhappiness of five employees but the fact that for decades a staff of fifteen or so put on thirty-five broadcasts a year and another fifteen or twenty shows in a summer tour, plus a dozen Prairie Home cruises with 1,200 guests, plus marketing and The Writer’s Almanac and much more, and did it quietly and stayed friends and took pride in their work.
MPR disposed of me without remorse and, oddly, life was better for it. They showed me the emptiness of corporate culture—everyone is disposable, forty years is a box of Kleenex. What endures is true friendship and thanks to the CEO, all false friendships are gone, all the hot buttered flattery, all the invitations to speak at graduations and receive a Distinguished Achievement award on a chunk of Lucite.The University took my picture down from its gallery of distinguished alums. I finally got the chance to live a quiet domestic life with the woman I love and write comedy. This is the beauty of misery—it invigorates you to work, work is what relieves misery. Good work rouses your heart to live another day: a good start means the job is half-finished.
It was a pleasure, in the midst of a week of corporate emptiness to go to the Mayo Clinic fora colonoscopy, and experience something real. The nurse decided I needed a bonus enema to make sure I was empty and in the middle of the procedure, with the nozzle in me and liquid gurgling, she said, “I have to tell you that I’m a fan of your show and I’m so sorry you retired. I think your singing has gotten so much better over the years.” A classic Minnesota compliment: you’re getting better. The doctor said I should have a prostate biopsy. A Russian urologist and his second banana did the job and their jokeswere almost funny (“This will be like having wasps up your butt,” said the banana, “except for the fact he’s Jewish. And what we hope to find is a happy ending.”), and then it was over, and I said,Thank youand prostate cancer was ruled out, which felt like a bargain—between slander and cancer, I choose slander—maybe the slander will scare some bully into behaving himself, and meanwhilesticks and stones and so forth.
I agonized over the #MeToo episode for a good long time, and then one Sunday morning I walked downtown to work at the New York Public Library on 42ndand was early so I walked by the Church of St. Mary the Virgin on 46th, and the door was open and I walked into the vast Gothic splendor, so stunning among the pawnshops and rummage sales. The priest was inviting people to come forward for healing, so I did. I didn’t even stop to sit in a pew. I went forward and put myself in the hands of a tall Black deacon in vestments. She put her left hand on my right hip and her right hand on my left shoulder and her cheek against mine, and I whispered that I had been generously blessed in this life and I wanted to be healed of anger and bitterness at an injustice done to me. It was stunning to say this in the embrace of a stranger. I said, “I feel that this anger owns me, it’s taken over my life, I can’t talk myself out of it, I need to be free of it.” I told her that I was a writer and had work left to accomplish and needed this stone to be removed. She did not blink at any of it.She simply laid her cheek against mine and prayed in a whisper that the poison of anger should be cleansed from my heart and my spirit go free. She prayed at some length and it was a powerful thing. I said Amen with her and walked over to Fifth Avenue to the Rose Reading Room and worked for a few hours.
That was two years ago and I still hear her voice, slightly Caribbean, and feel her hands on my hip and shoulder. I was in her embrace, her prayer in my ear:Lord, release this man from the poison of injustice, relieve him of anger so that he may do the work You have put him here to do, in Jesus’ name.It was moving, a Black woman praying for me to be freed from anger and injustice, a woman who surely knew more about it than I ever will. I think of her whenever I sit in the Rose Reading Room, an anonymous old man among the college kids at their laptops. The room is like a church. Hushed. Everyone is occupied in her or his small space. I had my day and now my ambition is burnt away, but more than ever I love to work. Whenever anger whispers in my ear, prayer drives it away. I start by giving thanks for my wife and daughter and family and friends and colleagues, naming them one by one, and in two minutes, the darkness is gone, bitterness is washed away.
34
Toast
They love you still, your Mom and Dad.
You may not think so, but they do.
They gave you all the love they had
Though they were crazy, busy too.
Forgive the bungling of your folks,
Honor their memory through the years.
Turn your sorrows into jokes,
Water the flowers with your tears.
Everyone’s life is in a mess,
Everyone did the best they could.
Treat your kids with tenderness,
Turn away wrath by doing good.
I WAS A WELL-LOVED CHILD with eighteen aunts and a string of teachers, Estelle, Fern, LaVona, Helen, who put an arm around me and told me I was smart, which obliges one to be a humorist, no way around it. It was your ordinary confusing and tumultuous childhood, but the road wound through the foothills and the red light on the water tower gave me my bearings, and I got where I was going. My dad wanted a garden so he could enjoy fresh tomatoes and sweet corn, and so I grew up a country boy and did not view the world as treacherous. At the age of ten, I rode my bicycle into downtown Minneapolis, past factories and Skid Row and two burlesque houses to the public library and enjoyed the scenery, the old bums, the bright lights, the flashy billboards, the Egyptian mummy, the burger stands. I was a happy kid, no foreboding. Like Anne Frank, I believed that people are good at heart. The Brethren anticipated the end of the world and the Judgment,
and I went to the ballpark and had a bratwurst. I wrote anguished inscrutable poems in my twenties and then my hero Berryman jumped off the bridge and I knew I would not, so why pretend? I quit drinking in 2002 because it was leading me to a dark place I was not entitled to. My aunts put me on the road to pastoral comedy. Why go to the town dump instead?
I earned money for my downtown explorations by hoeing corn for Fred Peterson, who did not think I was smart, and that was a good thing, too. He walked down the row and yelled, “What’re you slowing down for?? Work!” I still hear his voice. I am a good worker. I don’t remember vacations in any detail, but I remember my 15 x 20 studio in the woods, a box on stilts with windows looking out into the trees in winter, the desk a long shelf under the windows where I spread out my papers, a landscape so serene that the flight of a bird through the trees startled me. I remember every workroom clearly and restaurants and resorts not at all. I sit in the ornate reading room in the public library on 42nd Street and think of Leeds and Barry and Roger, whose lives snapped shut when they were the age of the men and women around me working at laptops, and I want to do good things in honor of my dead, and so I press on against the tide. The Internet has stupefied us, millions of songs available free, all of them XLNT, listen to one for 15 secs, move on. The culture rolls past me and I am a white grammar-centric binary atavistic dextromanual chauvinist, and so be it, the Oxford English Dictionary now includes the word “ish” and I feel the onrush of time and I wonder, What does my life add up to? Shouldn’t a man who’s written a memoir know this? I’m 78 and it feels like the outcome still hangs in the balance.
That Time of Year Page 37