Love Me (4 page)

On the last Saturday in August we put on our shorts and Gopher T-shirts and went to the Minnesota State Fair for the ritual trek through the Swine, Cattle, Horse and Sheep Barns, the Chicken Pavilion, to the Tilt-a-Whirl, Big Jiggle, the Giant Slide, the John Deere exhibit, blue-ribbon preserves and cakes in the Home Activities Building, the fine art show, and we bought four corn dogs with mustard and a bag of miniature doughnuts, which we ate on the double Ferris wheel, and then went home, satisfied, foot-sore, smelling of grease.

And on September 7, we celebrated my birthday by staying in bed all morning. We had our coffee in bed and read the paper and talked and nuzzled and dozed and necked and at 11:30 we made love and at noon we got up. Larry Day. A grand occasion.

 

 

 

A fact: I was born on September 7, 1942, exactly nine months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, which shows you that people do react to international crises in different ways. Some folks sit and fret about the future and others go upstairs and create the future and we are the product of their optimism.

And in a burst of optimism, Iris and I put a down payment on a house on Sturgis Avenue with money I got from—O miracle of miracles!—
The New Yorker
for a story, “Nearby Person Pleases Parents,” which Roger Angell wrote me a letter about on creamy stationery saying, “We would like to publish it as soon as possible with only a few nit-pick changes. It is fresh and funny and stylish in every way and we feel fortunate to have it and hope you will write more—much more—for us in the future.” And I sat down with tears in my eyes and thought, Well, thank you, God, now my life is not utterly wasted. If I should die when I’m thirty of stab wounds in a fracas in a county jail while I’m doing ninety days for public urination, nevertheless the obituary will say that I wrote for
The New Yorker.
I won’t be just another vagrant who blew through town; my name will be associated with Literary Quality.

 

 

 

I had loved
The New Yorker
since I was 13 and rode my Schwinn bike to the Minneapolis Public Library and perched on a high stool in the periodicals room and pored over old issues. Some boys hurl rolls of toilet paper into trees and recite the limerick about the curate from Buckingham, and other boys find pleasure in reading snappy fiction.

A. J. Liebling I loved with a childlike love—“The Wayward Press,”
The Sweet Science,
his stuff about France—the man was a natural. I adored all of them, Cheever, Thurber, Calisher, Salinger, McNulty, White, Mitchell, Perelman, all of them Greek gods to me. And the minor deities: Audax Minor, Winthrop Sergeant, Whitney Balliett, Edith Oliver, Andy Logan. The very type font was sacred. I submitted my first story when I was at the U. They rejected it, but so gracefully (“Your story,‘MOBY WHO?’ came very close indeed but in the end seemed to us to lack the sureness and inevitability that we feel certain you’re capable of and though there was much to admire in it, there was also a faint sense of strain to the writing. Probably we are all wrong about this, and please do not let this disappointment slow you up for an instant. We look forward to having you in our pages.”) that I kept trying and trying and then one night—sheer blind luck—I took an antihistamine and two aspirin and some zinc tablets and four hundred milligrams of vitamin E and for about forty minutes everything I wrote was easy and powerful. I got in a groove and every sentence fit and was balanced and yet pushed the next sentence and a sort of force field ran through it. It was 1,500 words long: a kid who learns to make $50 bills on a hectograph and is able to pay a band to march past the house every Monday playing “Rampart Street Parade.”

I told Iris and she said, “Whoop-de-doo. Yippee for you.”

“This is a big deal,” I said. I tried to get her to go to Murray’s Restaurant and celebrate with the Silver Butterknife Steak for Two, but she said, “Why throw the money away when we need to buy a house?”

“Why be tightwads? Let’s be happy.”

“Nothing wrong with a little common sense,” she said.

 

 

 

I’ve been dating a wonderful woman and last night I invited her up to my apartment and opened a bottle of wine and we were sitting on the sofa which is also a fold-out bed and she asked me if I minded if she said a prayer. I said, “No, not if that’s what you want, Evelyn.” She prayed for God to show us the path He was planning for us and to teach us to honor each other and she prayed to be fruitful and bring
forth a large family and teach them to love the Lord. Amen. I said, “But
we aren’t even married, Evelyn.” And she said, “As soon as my papa knows I’m pregnant, he’ll take care of that.” Then I noticed her black bonnet. I honestly never realized until then that she is Amish. Anyway, I felt that even if God’s plan is for me to be the daddy of twelve, it’s not my plan, so I put away the bottle of Kama Sutra scented oil and I drank the wine myself and today I am feeling rotten. I really want to make love with her. How can I introduce her to contraceptives?

 

 

 

Dear Secular, You two aren’t singing from the same hymnal. Tell her good-bye. And thank goodness you discovered her Amishness now and not after several years of marriage, as happens more often than one might think. You turn to your loyal, meek, industrious wife, and say, “How about we go tie on the feed bag in some swell eatery, Snuggums?” and she says, “Thee shouldst spend thy increase on a domicile, Ezekiel, not on licentious living.” And suddenly you’re living in the 18th century, dealing with smallpox and ague and dropsy, horrible roads, the fear of witch trials, and your life expectancy drops to about 38. And you’re 36 at the time.

 

 

 

The check for $3,000 arrived and I took it to the Farmers & Mechanics Bank, and the teller looked at the name
The New Yorker,
and looked up at me, and asked for three forms of identification. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t look like a writer.”

The house we bought was stucco, three bedrooms, screened porch, garage, rock garden, dry basement, two blocks from West 7th Street, in a rundown neighborhood of bungalows and old frame houses, a few duplexes, with ratty yards, some wrecked cars up on blocks, dogs running free, and up above us, like El Dorado, the ridge where the fancy lived, the Summit Avenue swells. “Someday,” I said, “we’ll make it up the hill.” “What’s wrong with this?” she said.

When the alarm went off at 6 A.M., I arose from bed and went to work in the back bedroom, my studio, at a Selectric typewriter with Webster’s
Second Unabridged
and
The Desktop Thesaurus of Ideas
and
Chapman’s 77 Basic Plots
and I turned out publishable stuff. Iris walked to her job at Lutheran Social Services and then, she and her do-gooder friends started up a nonprofit called Minnesota Advocates for Moral Action, which specialized in programs for crazy old people and drug addict moms, with St. Iris at the helm.

 

 

 

We celebrated with a garden party. Jug wine and burgers on the grill and ice cream. Our pal from the U (her pal more than mine) Frank Frisbie, who we hadn’t seen in years, came and he said, “I hear you’re writing for
The New Yorker.”

“Oh, now and then,” I said, as if it were something I did when I had a spare moment.

“I used to read that magazine,” he said, “and then—I don’t know—”

I used to think you were an ordinary decent person, I thought, and now I see you’re a shit.

“I’ve been busy writing a book,” he said. “I should send you a copy.” He let those words hang in the air for a long minute, during which I did not say, “You? Write a book? You couldn’t write enough to fill a book of matches!”

“Who’s publishing it?” I said, expecting to hear The Wisteria Press or Gerbil Books or The Fund for the Verbally Handicapped.

“Random House,” he said.

He said this the way you’d say, “Four-fifteen,” if someone asked you what time it is.

I hadn’t seen the guy in years. I wanted to choke him. I wanted to give him a swift kick where the sun don’t shine. “That’s great,” I said. I wanted him to die a natural death but someplace where I could watch. “When?” I said. “In the fall,” he said. “Terrific.” He sent me a copy, of course. Signed, “To Larry, my friend and comrade.”

I wanted him to choke on a bratwurst and fall down and hit his head so that he’d be in a wheelchair, steering it with a pencil between his teeth, and I could do a benefit for him, to raise money to pay for his colostomy, and he’d come up on stage to thank me, and sort of gurgle deep in his throat, and we’d be photographed together for the newspaper.

Frank is a pleasant guy, basically a suck-up and a loser but not evil or anything, just one more dust bunny under the bed of life, and here he had gone and written a novel. This was a shock. Like seeing Ray Charles sink nine out of ten free throws.

Fair Henry.
A novel of 135 pages about an amnesiac deaf-mute who is beaten by drunken cowboys in a Wyoming tank town and befriended by Basques and hired to herd sheep, which he does over a winter and then the rancher’s black-haired daughter falls in love with him and he with her, but he knows he would only ruin her life, so he rides away one night and never returns and is assumed to have drowned himself in the river.

That was it. End of story.

Two months later, the rave reviews started coming. “Look at this,” Iris said and waved the newspaper at me—“has a lyrical luminosity that takes the breath away,” she read. Frank was interviewed in
The Pioneer Press
about the importance of storytelling in building a sense of community. They compared him to Wallace Stegner.
Wallace Stegner! You mean Wally Ballou!

This slack-jawed opportunist had parlayed his taste for pretentious crapola into a raging success—his little steaming turd of a book won the Mary L. Quimby Award of $50,000, a major pile of lettuce. It went into a third and a fourth printing. Frank bought a house on Summit Avenue. I could see his carriage house from our backyard. He was pictured in the Sunday rotogravure looking winsome and modest and thoughtful, a pipe clenched in his teeth, seated at an antique desk, pretending to write on a pad of paper, a shelf of leather-bound tomes behind him. I wished it would fall and squash the bastard like a June bug. I wanted to throw a dead raccoon in his yard. The thought that a pea brain could write a successful book was, to me, the handwriting on the wall and it said: GET BUSY.

So I set out to write your basic Great Midwestern Novel, an epic tale of sinewy people wrestling with the land, and enduring privation and blizzards. A guy who comes from silent people, as I do—my ancestors were fishermen who spoke rarely so as not to alarm the walleyes—is not going to write social comedy. I have no ear for dialogue.

“So how’s it going then?” they would say.

“Oh, not so bad, I guess. How’s it with you then?” they would reply.

I went at the GMN and accumulated a pile of yellow paper containing thousands of words about the Petersons, a heroic family descended from ship captains, their odyssey to Minnesota, their struggles and privations.

Sometimes late at night I walked out the back door and looked at the flashing
1
and thought, “O, St. Paul, Maker of Scotch Tape, Mail Handler, Insurance Underwriter, Player with the Nation’s Commercial Cleaning Compounds, City of the Swollen Ankles, let this boy write a novel that earns millions of dollars and is made into a movie and I’ll never ask another favor as long as I live, I promise you.

 

 

 

I told my old classmate Katherine that I prayed to the First National Bank and she wrote a poem:

She was one of the literati of our university crowd, a little wisp of a thing, like Laura in
The Glass Menagerie,
her mouth in a perpetual 0. She stood up at Frank’s thirty-fifth birthday party and everyone hushed and she recited in her tiny breathless voice