Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (19 page)

I tried to reach Willa at her mother’s, but she was in New York, and I saw her the next morning on “America, How Are You?” Essentially, she told Monica Montaine the same stuff, plus she said that I was “compulsive.” She said, “He walks around humming the same tune over and over, usually ‘Moon River.’ He taps his fingers continuously, and he taps his foot in his sleep. He compulsively rips the labels off beer bottles. And at dinner he always eats all his meat first, then the potato, then the vegetable.” Monica Montaine got a big kick out of that. “Sounds like he’s missing the Up button,” she said.

Two days later, someone from “Today” called and wanted me to get on a plane to New York and join Willa on the show for a dialogue. He said, “I think the country would like to hear your side, Earl.” I told him I had no desire to engage in a public debate with my wife over matters I considered personal. Willa did the show herself, then a number of other daytime shows, and though I made a point of not watching, my friends were starting to ask questions. “Is it true about the almost total lack of any attempt at communication?” a guy at work wanted to know. “And you wearing socks in bed—any truth to that?” He said the story had given him a lot to think about.

In October, Willa testified before a House subcommittee, revealing new details about our marriage under oath. Several congressmen expressed shock at what she said about my lack of affection, my “utter insensitivity” to her needs. “What was he
doing
all this time while you were suffering?” one asked. She said, “He watched football on television. He played seven different types of solitaire. He carved a new stock for his shotgun. He acted like I didn’t exist.” That was the quote they used on “ABC World News Tonight.”

I WAS lonely as winter approached. I’m not a man who can live by himself. Some men are cut out for the single life, but not me. So I told my boss I was available for all the charters I could get. I spent November and December mostly on the road, going to Orlando six times, Disneyland four, making two runs to San Francisco. Meanwhile, I read in
People
that Willa had sold her story to Universal Pictures and was in California ironing out some wrinkles in the deal. The next week, she got a call from the Pope, who expressed hope that efforts would be made to reach a reconciliation. “I’m ready any time Earl is,” she told the Holy Father. She told him that although she was not a Catholic she respected the Church’s view on marriage. “It’s a two-way street, though,” she said.

Finally, we met in New York, where I had driven a four-day “New Year’s Eve on the Great White Way” tour and was laying low at the Jaylor Hotel, and where she had rented a great apartment on the upper West Side and was on her way to a cocktail party. We met at her place. It was in a new building on Broadway, with a beautiful view from the twenty-fifth floor. Biddy was living with her, of course. Biddy looked wonderful, though she was a little hostile toward me. So were Willa’s three friends, who worked in publishing. “What do you do?” one man asked, though I was sure he knew. The other man mentioned something about socks. The woman didn’t talk to me at all. She kept telling Willa, “We’ve got to get going—the invitation said five o’clock.” Willa kissed me goodbye. “Let’s be friends,” she said. “Call me sometime.”

I did call her, four or five times, and we talked, mostly about her projects—she was writing a book, she was being considered as a substitute host. We didn’t talk about our marriage until one day in April, when she mentioned that Biddy was sick again, and she said she missed me. Biddy died a week later, and Willa brought the body back to Minnesota for interment. She came to the condo for dinner one night and wound up staying.

My friends can’t believe I took her back after all those things she said about me, but I can’t see where it’s any of their business. I told her there was no need for her to apologize, so she hasn’t. She did scrap the movie project and the book, though. The substitute-host deal fell through when the regular host decided he wasn’t so tired after all. Except for our two dogs, Betty and Burt, we’re almost where we were last summer. The ice has melted on Lake Larson, the lilacs and chokecherries are in bloom, soon the goslings will hatch and their mothers will lead them down to water, and everything will be as if none of this ever happened.

1984

GARRISON KEILLOR

MEETING FAMOUS PEOPLE

W
HEN
Big Tim Bowers just happened to turn to his left and see the little guy with the battered guitar case emerge limping from Gate 4A at the Omaha International Airport on July 12, 1985, he held out his big arms to greet his best friend, which, although they had never met in person, Sweet Brian surely was.
It was Sweet Brian himsel
f
! There! In Concourse C!
His “White Boy” album was what got Tim through the divorce from Deloyne after three loving months of marriage, when she notified him that he was hopeless and the next day upped and split for Cheyenne with a bald bread-truck driver (unbelievable), after which Tim lost his good job and apartment and would’ve lost his mind except for Sweet Brian, so of course he yelled, “Hey, you’re my man! I got to shake your hand! Hiiiiya! Sweet Brian! Hey!”

Sweet Brian made a sharp right, climbed over a railing and a row of plastic chairs, and walked fast toward Baggage Claim, which didn’t surprise Tim one bit. After all, the guy who wrote “Tie Me Loose” and “That Old Highway Suits Me Pretty Well, I Guess” and “Lovers Make Good Loners” is no Sammy Davis, Jr., and Tim respected him for the uncompromising integrity and privacy and sincerity of his art, which had been crucial to Tim when his own sense of self was chewed up by Deloyne, all of which Tim now needed to say to Sweet Brian. He galloped down the concourse after the fleeing singer-songwriter, who heard his two-hundred-and-sixty-two-pound fan and panicked and went through a door marked “N
O
A
DMITTANCE
” and clattered down two flights of steel stairs, Tim’s big boots whanging and whomping on the stairs above, convincing him that death was very near, and burst through a pair of swinging doors marked “W
EAR
E
ARPLUGS
” and headed across the tarmac, a man once nominated for a Grammy (for “Existential Cowboy”) and once described as the Dylan of the late seventies, panting and limping around some construction barriers along the terminal wall toward a red door twenty yards away. Incredible, Tim was thinking. I come to the airport to hang around and maybe get an idea for a song—not to meet anybody or anything, just to think about something to write about, maybe about not having anybody to meet—and I meet
him.
Fantastic. Tim was six strides behind him when he burst through the red door. There was a second, locked door a few steps beyond, and then and there, in the tiny vestibule, Tim expressed a lifetime of appreciation. He hugged Sweet Brian from behind and said, “Hey, little buddy, I’m your biggest fan. You saved my life, man.”

The star pushed Big Tim away and sneered, “You know, it’s vampires like you who make me regret ever becoming a performer. You and your twenty-nine-cent fantasies. I don’t know what you— You sicken me.” And he slapped Tim.

At this point Tim wasn’t thinking lawsuit at all. An apology would have been enough—e.g., “Sorry, pal. I’m under too darn much pressure right now. Please understand.” He’d have said, “Fine, Sweet Brian. No problem. Just want you to know I love your music. That’s all. Take care of yourself. Goodbye and God bless you.” Instead, Sweet Brian said those terrible things and then
slapped him
and shoved him aside and went to the hotel and wrote an abusive song about him (“Your Biggest Fan”) and sang it that night at the Stockyards, and that’s how they wound up in U.S. District Court two years later.

TIM had lost quite a bit of weight in those two years, ever since he got a great job at NewTech, thanks to the company’s excellent weight-loss program, which, in fact, Tim himself initiated (he’s executive vice-president in charge of the entire Omaha and Lincoln operations, about eight thousand employees and growing daily since NewTech bought up SmetSys, ReinTal, and Northern Gas & Hot Water), and he looked blessedly happy at the courthouse, which might have had something to do with his new wife, Stephanie, a blond six-foot former
Vogue
model who accompanied him, leaning lovingly on him and smiling fabulously as photographers jockeyed for position. A handsome couple. Rumor said she was two months pregnant. They looked ecstatic. Young and rich and very much in love.

Inside, Tim’s lawyer described Sweet Brian as a “candy-ass has-been who can’t hit the notes and can’t write the hits, so he hits his fans” and asked for a half million dollars in damages. The little guy sat twenty feet away from Tim, his ankles chained together. He looked bloated, sick. His cheap green sports coat wouldn’t button in front. It had stains down the lapels. The story of his downfall was in all the papers. Sweet Brian and Tania Underwood had had to interrupt their Hawaiian honeymoon to fly to Nebraska for the trial and in Concourse C Brian was nabbed by the Omaha cops for possession of narcotics with a street value of three hundred and twenty-seven dollars. Tania was furious. She slapped him around in the police station and left town. It snowed three feet and his lawyer was stuck in L.A., and Sweet Brian sat in the clink for six days. That was when Tim saw him in court looking morose. “Can I help?” he asked, but the sullen singer turned away in anger. That night, a rodeo rider from Saskatchewan who was doing thirty days for bestiality beat the daylights out of Brian and knocked out four front teeth. Next morning, the county dentist, Dr. Merce L. Gibbons, had to drill out the stumps without Novocain. Brian bled so much he fainted and toppled forward, and the drill went through his cheek. The dentist panicked, thinking
malpractice suit,
and he tore his white smock slightly and roughed up his thin hair so as to claim that Brian had attacked
him,
and then he clubbed the former star hard, twice, with a mallet and yelled for the cops. They took Brian to the hospital and he got an infection from the blood test and died. Nobody came from L.A. for the body, and finally some reporters collected three hundred and ten dollars around the newsroom and Brian was buried in Omaha under a little headstone: “Brina Johnson, 1492–1987.” The two typos weren’t noticed until it was too late. So what could they do? A local columnist taped a note to the stone saying, “His name is Brian. Listen to his albums sometime. Not ‘White Boy,’ which is too pretty, too nostalgic, too
self-conscious,
but ‘Coming Down from Iowa’ is not bad. I think it’s on the Argonaut label.”

Tim was in Palm Beach when someone told him Brian was dead, and although he was extremely busy in meetings all day, he wondered, “Could this have been avoided if I had approached him differently, maybe been more low-key?”

“He was a big hero to me back then,” he told Stephanie as they strolled along the beach toward The Palmery, where they were meeting some Florida associates for drinks and dinner. “I really wish we could have been friends.”

EVEN today, after he settled out of court with the singer’s estate for a rumored $196,000, Tim feels bad about the incident. He is not alone. Tens of thousands of people have approached very famous men and women intending to brighten the lonely lives of the great with a few simple words of admiration only to be rejected and abused for their thoughtfulness. To the stars, of course, such encounters are mere momentary irritations in their fast-paced sensational lives and are quickly forgotten, but for the sensitive fans personal rejection by an idol becomes a permanent scar. It could easily be avoided if, when approaching the celebrated, those who practically worship them would just use a little common sense:

1. Never grab or paw the famous. They will instantly recoil and you will never ever win their respect. Stand at least thirty-two inches away. If your words of admiration move him or her to pat your shoulder, then of course you can pat back, but don’t initiate contact and don’t hang on. Be cool.

2. Don’t gush, don’t babble, don’t grovel or fawn. Never snivel. Be tall. Bootlicking builds a wall you’ll never break through. A simple pleasantry is enough—e.g., “Like your work!” If you need to say more than that (
I think you’re the most wonderful lyric poet in America today
), try to modify your praise slightly (
but your critical essays stink
). Or cough hard, about five times. That relieves the famous person of having to fawn back. The most wearisome aspect of fame is the obligation to look stunned by each compliment as if it were the first ever heard. That’s why an odd remark (
Your last book gave me the sensation of being a horned toad lying on a hot highway
) may secretly please the famous person far more than a cliché (
I adore you and my family adores you and everyone I know in the entire world thinks you are a genius and a saint and I think I’m going to fall down on the sidewalk and just writhe around and foam for a while
). Be cool. Famous people
much
prefer a chummy insult to lavish nonsense: a little dig about the exorbitant price of tickets to the star’s show, perhaps, or the cheesiness of the posters (
You design those yoursel
f
?
). Or a remark about the celebrity’s pet (if any), like “How much did you pay for that dog?” Personal stuff (
Do you have to shave twice a day? Do you use regular soap or what? What was it like when you found that out about her going out with him
?
) can wait for later. For now, limit yourself to the dog. As it gazes up in mealymouthed brown-nosed, lickspittle devotion, glance down and say, “Be cool.”

3. Autographs are fine, photos are fine, but be cool. Don’t truckle (
Oh, please please please—I’ll do anything—anything at al
l
), don’t pander (
This is the high point of my life
), and never cringe or kowtow (
I know that this is just about the tackiest thing a person can do and it makes me sick with shame but
.
.
.
), and never, never lie (
My mother, who is eighty-seven, is dying in Connecticut and it would mean the world to her if
.
.
.
). Hand the famous person the paper and simply say, “I need you to sign this.” Hand the camera to one of his hangers-on and say, “Take a picture of us.”