Kevin Kling's Holiday Inn (6 page)

I would have liked to learn from Jesus’ example, but we don’t know anything about those years.

The Bible is conspicuously blank on this period. Did he have acne? Did his hormones go crazy? Did he crash the family donkey? I visited a museum in Prague once that boasted they had Kafka’s skull. Actually, they had two skulls, one from when he was a child and one from when he was an adult. I thought, that’s how we think of Jesus: Child in manger and thirty-year-old Leader of disciples, no years in between.

In my teens, I really could have used some help. I wanted to find love. I knew there was someone for me, but who? Who would like me? My body was definitely working against me. It was more than my height. My left arm is quite a bit shorter than my right, with only four fingers. I wear thick glasses—when the eye doctor says, “What letter can you see?” I know the big E is in the room somewhere, but I don’t have a clue where. My friend Buffy used to say my knees look like I’m smuggling walnuts.

Oh, and my head.

I found out about my head at a Halloween party. We were playing a game called “Who can break the most pumpkins with their head?” Which pretty much covers the rules, as well. I kept breaking pumpkins, one after the other. Finally, a game I was good at. Then I met up with the pumpkin that was better at the game than I was. I hit it with my head and knocked myself out. When I woke up, my buddies said I should probably see a doctor. There is usually a good friend, almost always with glasses even thicker than mine, who knew a guy who knew a guy who hit his head, felt fine, went to bed, and never woke up. Somehow those stories have a resonance that exponentially increases as the next hours unfold. I told my mom what had happened and she drove me the well-worn path to the doctor’s office.

Our doctor was Dr. Braun. He still had a thick German accent, which provided a strong sense of authority and calm when he gave his diagnosis.

He looked in my eyes and said, “Zey look fine, ja,” then in my ears. “Goot.”

Then he x-rayed my head from various angles and told me to wait in the room out front. I sat pretending to read a
Highlights
magazine, but I could clearly see Dr. Braun poring over the x-rays, going from one to the next and back again. Finally I couldn’t take the waiting any longer. I walked back to his office and said, “Dr. Braun, is everything all right?” and he said, “You have ze head of an ape.” I said “What?” and he explained to me that I had extra skeletal matter formed at the front of my skull, what was referred to as a “protruding browline,” which in the x-rays did look like a thick mass of bone. He said I even had some skull “vere a little brain ought to be.”

I asked, “Dr. Braun, don’t you regularly see skulls like this?”

He said, “Not for sousands of years.”

Doctors are always telling me how “interesting” I am, even when they’ve just met me. I’ve also learned when a doctor is happy it’s not necessarily good news. Sometimes they’re looking at a “new discovery.”

As far as dating in high school, given the fact that, biologically, women are looking for a mate to pass down strong genes, I had to hope for a heck of a lot of “personality” to make up for lost ground.

Then Judy Martinez moved to tows. She was small like me, but beautiful. So beautiful. Judy Martinez, oh Lord, I would say her name over and over again. M-A-R-T-I-N-E-Z. I would trace her name on my notebook, replacing Big Daddy Roth Hot Rod drawings with her name. When she entered the room, I would gobble up every second, using seconds as fast as they could arrive, and holding them, trying to make the time stop just another second, just another second, Judy. The cracked cup of love, after all, is in constant need of filling.

And, when Judy tells me I look good, I believe her.

When a man in love looks in the mirror, he sees exactly what he’s told. But when a woman looks in the mirror, she’ll glance over and see who is doing the telling. When I tell Judy she’s beautiful, she looks at me and says, “You think so?”

I say, “Yeah, I know it.”

I was torn apart in love and rebuilt in her eyes, and like a star-crossed Italian lover, I would dauntlessly march into hell’s gaping maw for her. She was like Sophia Loren throwing a basin of water screaming, “But Mama, I love him,” until we ride off on a three-wheel Harley to join a circus.

But in love’s game of Red Rover, Red Rover, tragedy is often called to come on over. Alas, Judy was transferred that spring to another school. Although we promised to write and stay in touch, our love grew pastel. Time and distance make for wonderful in-laws but poor lovers.

In this life a person gets his allotment: a lot of circus motifs, a few hot rods, a couple of ballerinas, but precious few that say, “Be My Valentine.” Luckily, I’ve been blessed with love anew, and I count the seconds with her as treasures.

I recently read an article in the paper about an elderly couple in Chicago. The woman was crossing some train tracks, and her heel became lodged in the rail. Her husband rushed to her aid, yet despite their attempts, the shoe and the foot would not pull free. As a train approached, and it was apparent he would not be able to free her in time, the husband kissed his wife and said goodbye, and then held her as the train passed over them both. There were speculations as to the man’s reason for holding on. Some said he could not bear to live without his wife. Some said he wanted to join her in eternity. But I feel he was thinking, “One more second, just one more second.”

ST. PATRICK’S DAY  

I’m in Australia in 1987, performing at the Sydney Festival. Some of my favorite performers on earth are there, and what’s more, they turn out to be great people. I am in heaven.

Another company visiting is the Druid Theatre from Galway, Ireland, performing a play called
Conversations on a Homecoming,
by Tom Murphy. It tells of a man who returns to his home in Ireland after making his fortune in America. It is a brutal, beautiful piece on the difficulty of a returning “hero.” A huge hit at the festival, for good reason: Murphy is uncompromising and hilarious. The performers, as well, give it their all. Each character drinks five pints of Guinness stout during the play. They’re using real Guinness. There are bathroom breaks written into the text, and you can tell these actors are running for it. Even at curtain call, there is a little tipsiness in the bowing. But they carry it off without a hitch. I’m saying here and now, kids, leave this method acting to the professionals. It’s not as easy as it looks. My favorite is the stage manager, Padraic. After a performance, I notice he is a bit tipsy. He tells me he has five pints during the show, as well, to stay
in simpatico
with the actors. I say, “Padraic, you know, you could use root beer on stage. No one would know.” He gets a profoundly serious look on his face and says, “Oh, you can’t fake Guinness, man.”

I went out with the Druids night after night. Luckily, they were five pints ahead, so I had a chance of keeping up. Our conversations ran the gamut. Tom Murphy in person was just like his play: hilarious and frustrating as hell. He would try to wind me up, night after night. I am very slow to anger—I don’t just harbor it, I dry-dock it for years. But Murphy was unrelenting. Finally one night, he hit the tipping point. He decided it would be good for me to get in a fight. So he began looking for a likely candidate in the bar. After many failed attempts, he finally found him: himself. This was the last straw, and I went off. When I get that mad, it’s like a blackout, and the next thing I know I’m looking at someone who is looking back in terror. Suddenly I’m looking at Murphy and he’s grinning. In his mind, now he’s ready to be friends. But I can’t, I am still so mad at him. I know our détente is down the road a ways.

I have to say I felt a strong kinship to this company. So did the Australians. Our three countries share a great deal of history. We’ve all had similar relationships with England at one time or another. To start with, England couldn’t send its ne’er-do-wells to America after our revolution, so Australia became the next colony to get them, and somehow this included a number of Irish. It turns out many of us come from the same clay. My grandmother’s maiden name was Catherine O’Brien. She made sure I knew we were of the Cork O’Briens and told the story of her father coming to America where he became one of the Indiana O’Briens. Somewhere back in my past are the Celts and the Druids, the keepers of the knowledge.

One night Steven Dietz, dear friend and the director of my play, came to me and said we’d been invited to perform at a hotel in downtown Sydney. It would occur on a Saturday after a performance, in the hotel’s lobby; it would be great publicity and a way to get word out on the show. I said, “Sure, sounds fun.”

That Saturday we approached the hotel to find people crowding to get in, lined up clear into the street. We couldn’t even get near the door. Dietz says, “I’ll find out what’s going on.” He works his way into the crowd and comes back fifteen minutes later carrying two Foster’s Lagers. They’re these beers that back in the States come in cans the size of oil barrels, huge beers. I ask if we are in the right place. He says yes, we are. Then he says he asked somebody waiting in line what the big crowd was about, and the guy said, “Last week the comedian Robin Williams did a surprise performance here. It was brilliant. And this week there’s a guy who’s supposed to be even funnier.”

Dietz says, “Guess who that is?”

I say, “I hope you didn’t think one of those Foster’s was for you.”

It was time for fight or flight. I take the two beers from Dietz and walk toward the hotel, finishing one before I hit the door.

It seems that the ancient Celts had a similar view of the earth as some of the native people in America and Australia. It’s sacred in the same way the body is sacred. More than simply home, it’s part of them as they are part of it. This includes all the two-legged and four-legged creatures, as well as those that swim and fly through the air. It’s also true of the trees and plants and even the rocks, rivers, and sky.

St. Patrick brought the Christian God to the Celts. In many ways the stories of each religion fit perfectly, so for some it was not a great leap. It also brought about one distinct advantage. In a land-based religion, one needs to be near the rock or river that houses the deity. But now, according to St. Patrick, God lived in your heart, therefore he was portable. Now the Irish could travel and bring God along, and travel they did.

But it’s interesting that Irish people still speak so fondly of home. Not just “home,” but of the land, the “auld sod,” missing it so much that they don’t ever feel complete when away from their clay. Even to generations removed, Ireland carries this sense of deep belonging. Grandmother O’Brien felt it, and I do as well.

What caused our ancestors to take flight? And what did they bring to the new country that we carry to this day? To answer this, I think of Zeus, our pony. He’s a Dales pony, a breed born of the north of England, descended from native ponies of the isles. They’re small in stature, which meant they could survive on the nutritionally poor grasses. They became all-purpose farm horses and also served in the dark underworld of the lead mines.

The more I know these animals, the more I am in awe of them. Opposable thumbs are highly overrated. Robert Bly once said he felt a certain neurosis developed in our nation when we stopped working with large animals. I believe it. You feel a calming force, a noticeable drop in blood pressure, when working with a horse.

Horses are prey animals, so everything they do is based on avoiding getting eaten. You cannot lie to them, because they read your body, not your words. All they know is you have eyes in the front of your head, like all predators; you are moving toward them; and you smell like meat. Talk about a relationship off to a rocky start.

We bought our pony as a newborn. The breeders mailed us pictures and wrote that his name was Zeus. When he was five months old, they brought him to us in a trailer from Canada to Minnesota. There he stood in the pasture. Tiny black colt, all legs and eyes, not quite sure of his surroundings. He seemed happy. Eating, playing. He loved the huge old Shire, Ben, who wanted nothing to do with him. So Zeus adopted Fritha, a beautiful Fjord horse, as his new mother. Fritha wouldn’t necessarily be described as maternal, but she loved him immediately.

One thing was clear. Zeus had a great spirit. My partner, Mary, and I immediately fell in love with him, too.

We had him about a week when Zeus ate some white snakeroot. For some reason, probably due to that summer’s rainfall, the plant had an unusually high toxicity. Seven horses died from it just south of us in the town of Jordan. Little Zeus was down. Mary alertly ran him up to the equine hospital in Anoka. They ran tests and found the poison was eating his muscles. When it got to his heart, that would be the end. They gave him an IV to flush his system, but finally his legs could no longer support him. This is not good for a horse, whose organs are situated for standing.

The next day the vet called us to come in to see him. What he didn’t say was he’d called us to say good-bye.

I sat in the stall with Zeus’s head in my lap. This was the first horse I’d ever known, and he was leaving. Mary said, “Zeus, if you have to go, it’s okay. But I wish you would stay.”