I haven't seen you since that night, Donna. I've told the sauna story to dozens of people over the years, and they all thought it was funny, but I still don't know what you think. Are you all right?
MY LIFE IN PRISON
E
VER SINCE THE DAY I FIRST WALKED out onstage, and blinked and cleared my throat, people have written some terrible things about me that aren't true, but it doesn't matter. I've done a lot of terrible things in secret that nobody wrote about, so it all evens out.
My sister used to say terrible untrue things about me to my parents, but it didn't matter, because they didn't believe in innocence anyway. When they caught us pounding on each other, they just grabbed the nearest one and sent him up to his room, and if I said, “She hit me first!” (the truth) it made no difference: I still got punished to make up for the times they probably had made a mistake in my favor.
Their punishment backfired in my case. I loved to be sent up to my room. My books were there, my tablets, my plastic soldiers, it was good up there. If they wanted to punish me, they should have sent me out to play with other children. Solitary confinement was my idea of fun. It was a chance to sit down and talk to myself, and that's what naturally led me into radio, which led to so much more, including those terrible untrue things.
This is the sort of thing I mean, which happens often: A reporter calls up and says how much he's always liked my work, could he take me to lunch, so he does, something expensive like walleye sushi, and he asks me ten questions about life and love and laughter, and then he turns on his tiny tape recorder and asks, “What's the worst thing your folks ever did to you?” I tell him that sometimes they punished me for nothing, and he writes his story, “RICH WRITER BITTER TOWARD MOM, 74.”
I understand, he's only doing his job, there's nothing personal about the piece. Journalism is a moral art, it draws pictures in bold strokes. The newspaper columnist back in St. Paul who combed the town for children whom I had disappointed is a deeply moral writer:
TIMMY LIES IN PAIN WHILE “HERO”
LAPS UP N.Y. GLITZ AND GLAMOUR
A very sick little boy lies on a broken bed in a dank basement apartment on the South Side waiting for hours for the mailman. A few minutes after one o'clock, when he hears the rustle of mail in the fetid hallway, he climbs painfully from the soiled sheets and limps to the door and stops with his little hand on the cold knob and says an Our Father.
But so far it hasn't been answered.
Every day Timmy whispers Garrison Keillor's name and looks for an envelope containing the autographed photo he requested from the former “Prairie Home Companion” host ⢠way back in March 1987. Doctors say that such a signed photo could give Timmy the spark of hope he needs in order to live. His Aunt Brenda, Timmy's custodian since his parents and sister died at the hands of a furloughed maniac on Christmas Eve, says, “If only Garrison knew how much it means to us, surely as a Christian he would spare thirty seconds to autograph a picture.”
But would he?
Keillor, who sleeps all day and spends his nights cavorting with the glitterati in the niteries of Sodom, is said to be quite satisfied with his new famous friends and his new life of luxury and excess.
Last Tuesday night, while Timmy was running a 110° fever and moaning, “Please, please, an autograph,” over and over in an inaudible voice, Keillor was stuffing his face with expensive crab salad in the company of fancy-pants friends at the Stork Club, two of them known homosexuals.
With so many Americans unemployed, you might think that the bard of Lake Wobegon would at least choose a domestic wine.
Well, guess again.
A 1984 Pouilly-Fuissé.
Thirty-five bucks.
Meanwhile a little boy lies waiting.
Hoping. Believing.
A lot of folks could probably use $35 to put food on the table, but never mind. I can understand a big shot wanting to indulge himself, and that's his right. Still, couldn't he take ten seconds to put his John Hancock on a napkin and maybe save a kid's life?
I understand very well the idealism behind a column like that, and should I complain that the columnist has left out a few facts that might have favored me? Should Moses in his description of the Midianites have mentioned that sometimes they sang songs and were fun to be with? No, certainly not. Nevertheless, I have canceled my subscription to that paper, and I've gone from bookstore to bookstore, collecting copies of Geek:
An Unauthorized Biography of You Know Who (The Big Jerk)
and reshelving them in Religion, behind C. H. Mackintosh's
Commentary on Ephesians.
My sense of guilt is as powerful as a locomotive. I don't appreciate a book that's packed full of people grumbling at me.
“He was awful darn hard to work with,” recalls Chuck Frick, who parked cars behind the World Theater. “He'd come in here before the show and hardly speak to us, maybe say, âHi, how ya doin'âwhat kinda recognition is that for guys who bust their butts parking cars so he can have an audience? Once I gave him a tape of my songs and didn't hear back about it for
three weeks,
and then he didn't offer any constructive criticism or anything, just said, âSorry, it isn't quite right for us'âwhat kind of thing is that to say? I worked on those songs for six years and he dismisses them with six words. Those were good songs. He treated them like they were
nothing
to him. He didn't even invite me out to lunch. He was a crummy tipper, too. And his car was messy. Burger wrappers on the back-seat floor. Once I saw him get in the car with a woman who worked on the show. They were talking real quiet, and you can't tell me there wasn't some hokey-pokey going on there. But people are afraid to talk, otherwise there'd be a lot more that'd come out that you wouldn't believe.”
I read that book and suddenly realized why PR people send out gallons of Johnny Walker at Christmas and serve prime-rib sandwiches in hospitality suites in hotels. Journalists are hungry people. The PR guy, courtly, English, walks up to the sleaziest writer in the room and lays an arm across his dandruffy shoulders and murmurs, “You know who you remind me of? Edward R. Murrow. I mean it. You've got that same intensity, that kind of grace, like what Yeats wrote aboutâhow does that line go? âNor law nor duty bade me fight / Nor public men nor cheering crowds / A lonely impulse of delight / drove to this tumult in the clouds.' Can I get you a Scotch?”
The reporter, a man with watery eyes and forty pounds of old cheeseburgers around his waist, blushes and stares down at his Hush Puppies, and for the next twenty years you will have no problem with him at all. He will go chase the university president (“TAX MONEY LAVISHED ON EXECUTIVE SUITE WHILE THE DYING LIE IN DIM ALCOVES AT U HOSPITAL”) or snipe at the archbishop (“PRELATE FAILS TO ATTEND CRIPPLES' DINNER FOR THIRD YEAR IN ROW”) or haul off and slug the mayor (“POLITICIAN DENIES PERSISTENT RUMORS OF PET MOLESTING”), and he will not go writing your unauthorized biography full of everybody who has a grudge against you. He'll write:
Everyone in this town knows Garrison Keillor as a wonderful entertainer and devoted father, but I wonder how many of us are aware of those dozens of little unsung deeds he does for the poor and unfortunate every week.
A PR guy would sing some of those deeds in a nice low voice so that a columnist could hear them. I don't have a PR guy, but once I did hire someone named Milo to attend rehearsals and yell “All
right!”
every time I sang a song. I was sensitive about my voice and needed affirmation in order to do my best. He sat among the band and in that awkward silence after a song, when the musicians reach for a smoke, Milo yelled, “All
right!
Far out!
Whoooo!
You sang that one, all right!” Milo is quoted in
Geek
as saying that I was selfish.
I was selfish, and I'm sorry about it, but the one thing a PR guy can't do is the one thing you really need, which is to resolve your guilt, compared with which bad publicity is a picnic. A rotten story by a jerk who snapped the picture when your face was blank and your finger was in your ear is a mild heartache compared with the violence a man can do to himself, given the right start in life.
One deed my parents never sent me to my room for was hitting my cousin on the head with a pair of stilts one summer day behind our garage, back in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. (I don't want to use his real name so I'll just call him Abel.) The stilts were mine. Abel had them, and I grabbed them away, and when he grabbed at me I whacked him with the stilts across the side of his skinny head. He had good presence of mind for a ten-year-old. When he looked around and saw no adult to appeal to, he turned and said to me in a clear small voice, “You know what's going to happen to you someday? You're going to go to prison for the rest of your life.”
The quiet way he said it made me believe him instantly, absolutely. I offered him the stilts and he accepted them, but that didn't change anything. It would be prison for me: no trial, no judge or jury; a policeman would simply pick me up and drive me to the state prison and take me to the children's cellblock. The steel doors would clang shut and the big key turn, the officer's footsteps fade away back down the long concrete hall
tap tap tap tap tap
toward the light, and not far away a maniacal laugh and the squeaking of mice and water dripping in the dank sewers below. Prison.
When you're a little kid, your heart is open and tender and a harsh word can go straight in and become part of your life. I've been living under his sentence for almost forty years now, going along from year to year, waiting, knowing that all the good things I've done won't matter one bit when the cops come and take me away. Once, I was helping Grandma and she said, “I never saw anyone who could grease a cake pan half as good as you can.” Her kind compliment made me feel talented and useful, and I still feel talented, even competent sometimes, but that doesn't change fate. Probably I'll be making a useful contribution to society right up to the day I go to prison, and then I'll make good license plates.
Will the police arrest a performer, a man who stands onstage in his tuxedo singing and saying funny things, a microphone in hand, a smile on his face, delighting the big audience? Will Sergeant D'Agostino march out from the wings and into the spotlight and grab that man's wrists as he sings “O you, it's you I adore, I give my life to you” to the beautiful audience and slap the cuffs on him and advise him of his right to remain silent? Maybe if the audience is big, and if the biggest ones sit in the first row, and if it's a good audience, with a lot of liberals, some nuns and community organizers, some extremely good people like vegetarian Danish Catholic theologians who are fasting for the salvation of South America and sit smiling weakly in their wheelchairs enjoying the show as they weave simple cotton garments for the poor on tiny handlooms, then the police may decide to wait until the show is over, but they'll come eventually, and then I'll be on “Eyewitness News” that night, cringing, holding a newspaper over my face, a forty-six-year-old humorist being hauled away to the precinct station for something like Failure to Declare Value of Illegal Drugs on 1979 Income Tax Return. If I'd been caught in 1979 I'd have done twelve months in the county workhouse, but each year the penalty doubles and now I'm going to the pen for 512 years. There's no trial, because under this particular set of circumstances, after six years you forfeit your right to one. So ruled the Supreme Court in a 1985 case exactly the same as mine.
“You could deny everything and make them prove it,” says a lawyer who is in the holding tank with me, charged with a minor securities infraction, “but I'm afraid guilt is written all over your face.” He's right. Sweat pops from every pore, my eyes dart back and forth furtively, and I cannot stop biting my lips and humming. I jump at the slightest sound. My heart pounds. My knees buckle as they lead me into the tiny green interrogation room.
“Care for a cup of coffee?” Lieutenant Matthews asks. I drink the bitter black municipal coffee and wait, but there is no interrogation. He and his partner, Sergeant Sloan, know everything. I know they know everything and they know I know they know, so we're cool and relaxed. “The van should be here in twenty minutes,” Sloan says, offering me a Pall Mall. I light it. I quit smoking four years ago, but now that I'm bound for the Big House all bets are off. It tastes good. The van arrives. The guards are four guys I went to high school with, who used to call me Foxfart. They're glad to see me. “Hey, Fox, we've been reading about you for years, man,” they say. “You really made us proud, the way you were going along so great there for a while, but then you went to Denmark and you got sloppy. You must've figured you were in the clear. Too bad you came back so soon. The statute of limitations would've come into effect in three more days.
Three days.
Now you're going to spend the rest of your life in prison. Five hundred years. That's a tough break, huh? Oh well. You're tough. You'll be okay. See ya, Fox.” And Carl pops me in the shoulder the same way he always did in English when I got an A and he got a D.
They drive me to LaGuardia and put me on board a Northwest flight to Minneapolis. All fugitives are sent to prison in Minnesota on Northwest, which preboards us on a conveyor belt that carries us into a special section to the rear, behind Smoking, where flight attendants prod us with sharp sticks to make us squeeze in tight. We sit on the steel floor of the aircraft. There are two hundred of us, all fugitives and their families, plus fifty head of sheep and quite a few goats and some crates of chickens. The others carry big shopping bags full of clothes, and after takeoff, when the captain turns off the “NO COOKING” sign, they light fires and cook up some pork fat and succotash in old bean cans. Children sob in the corners and old women rock back and forth moaning and praying for the good earth to return to the bottoms of their feet. We men sit hunkered around the fire, smoking, not talking. We're all going to spend the rest of our lives in prison and we know it and what is there to say about a thing like that? The plane bucks and the fires flicker. Night comes on. We sit and chew and spit. The plane shakes as the flaps are lowered. Through the tiny window appear the lights of Minneapolis, a big city where I attended Sunday school regularly for many many years and worked hard and tried to be a good citizen, but it's too late to think about that now, or about the neat book reports that received gold stars, the maps of the states correctly labeled by me and carefully colored using forty-eight different crayons, the bowline hitch I tied that was shown to other Scouts as a model of how that knot looks when it is perfect, the certificate from the American Legion Auxiliary for the prizewinning essay “America the Beautiful”âthey are immaterial evidence now that I am a crook.