Lake Wobegon Days (50 page)

Naomi turned red and bent over her notebook, pretending to study it (surrealism … surrealism … surrealism), shielding her face from the smirky looks the
A
writers gave her.
Where do you get your ideas?!!
Didn’t she know that a serious artist’s ideas come out of
himself
, out of his inner life and the struggle to realize his strange and absolutely inescapable
gift
, the dumb broad?

Her question struck John afterward as not dumb, not impossible, but certainly difficult. When
Cumulus
printed his poem “Death Dad,” he was so happy to see his name in print he sent a copy to his mother, who called him on the phone two days later and said she had never felt so humiliated in her life.

“Where did you
get
this?” she said. “
We
never talked like that! Our home isn’t like that at all! It’s so cynical! Where did you get those ideas? You certainly didn’t get them from us!”

He explained that the poem was metaphorical and that the dad in the poem, who wore blue pajamas and a red chenille robe (which Byron happened to wear), was purely fictional.

“It’s only a poem! It’s symbolic!” he said.

“Explain that to your father,” she said, and hung up.

To the serious artist in him, the question “Where do you get your ideas?” made writing seem ordinary and so
prosaic
, like a hobby (“Where do you get your Austrian first-issues?”), implying that maybe writers subscribe to an idea service, a newsletter called
Lots o’ Plots
, or maybe readers send in ideas (“Dear Mr. Roth: This may be a dumb idea but how about a novel in which a guy turns into a breast? It’s just an idea, thought I’d pass it along. Feel free to use it and fill in the details as you see fit. P.S. Love your stuff!”).

And yet—It stuck in his mind. His humanities prof, Marvin Voss, in “Hum 100: Undercurrents of American Thought,” talked about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, as if their ideas were simple reflections of their times, like so many iron filings arranged by powerful forces that they could not understand then although he did now.

When John looked at his own writing, he was disturbed by the thought that it came from Mr. Davenport, a fan of Nissan, a Zen master of the three-line
zazu
, whose tiny oblique poems Mr. Davenport recited in a thin, tremulous voice, hands upraised, wiggling his fingers. After hearing a few, John could sit in his room and write a dozen.
^*

This thought did not lead him to retire from the field of serious
writing, however; it made him resolve to try even harder that summer. His work (as he referred to what he had written) was imitative because he had never forced himself to look deep enough within, so he would go back home and write things that came directly out of his own life and experience.

He sat at his blonded maple desk every night, trying to write better. His dad had bought the desk for him when he was eight. His legs were cramped in the well. The desk lamp, with Mickey and Goofy dancing on the base, was an old birthday gift. The shelves above the desk held
old Landmark books,
A Boy’s Life of Lindbergh
, the Hardy Boys and the Christian adventures of the Minnehaha Creek Gang and the Flambeau Family,
^*
along with his Paul Samuelson Econ text, Commager’s
Living Ideas in America
, the
Our Living World
from Bio 101 and
Elements of Public Health
, and Parrington’s
Main Currents of American Thought
(abridged), which he had bought thinking that he, an American, might read it and find a current of his own. The bed was his boyhood bed, with a footboard that forced him to invent new sleeping positions, and under the bed was a peach crate full of old train track. A bullfight poster was tacked to one wall, a Leonards pennant to another.

It was hard going. He was nineteen years old, and his experience up to that point consisted of childhood, growing up and going to school, hanging around with friends, and spending a year in St. Cloud. Lake Wobegon was a lot like any small midwestern town. It had no Skid Row or bohemian section, where a writer could meet exotic, desperate, or vicious people and collect impressions and feelings to use in his stuff. Several in Mr. Davenport’s class had been to Europe and used it as a setting for poems such as “Paris: A Triptych” or “Fourth of July in Florence.” He had only been to Canada. Once. Barely.

He made a list of experiences he thought he should have in order
to become a better writer. He left No. 1 blank, for fear his mother might see it. No. 2 was Europe; No. 3 was despair. In April, he had thought of writing to Naomi and suggesting they go to France together and kill two birds with one stone, but after five or six drafts, the letter still lacked clarity. Europe was a long way away. It looked as if he’d have to settle for No. 3. Maybe Mrs. Mueller’s rock garden was the beginning.

“Why do you stay in your room all the time?” his mother asked him one morning as he stood at the kitchen counter, spreading peanut butter on a hamburger bun.

“I’m not in my room now, am I?”

“No.”

“So then I don’t stay in my room
all the time
, do I?”

“Well, a lot of the time.”

“I sleep in my room. There’s a lot of time right there. You want me to sleep on the living room couch?”

“Oh, Johnny.”

One reason he stayed in his room was the sheer number of
Oh, Johnny
s he heard when he came downstairs, about one every two minutes, plus his dad’s
Oh, for pete’s sake
s,
Good Lord
s,
Grow up
s, and
I’m talking to you
s. Nothing about him was right in their eyes, not his clothes, his hair, the food he fixed himself or the way he ate it, the way he sat in a chair or got up from a chair, the way he dried dishes or walked across a room or closed a door.
^*

He literally could say nothing that they agreed with,
nothing.
He had tried to come up with things at the dinner table: “I saw Mr. Berge today, he was so drunk he didn’t know where he was or why”—his dad had said that a hundred times, but when John said it, his dad told
him to have a little pity, that if he (John) had been through half what Mr. Berge had been through, he might have a weakness, too. He said, “Uncle Jim is sure a hard worker.” His dad said, “What would you know about work? You wouldn’t know it if it came up and bit you.” He said, “I was thinking maybe I’d paint the shutters tomorrow.” His dad said, “I remember the last painting job you did, you got half-done and ran off and left the brushes sit in the paint can.”

If he was to say, “I believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost,” his dad would say, “A person sure wouldn’t know it to look at you.” Or he would say, “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” or “It’s about time,” or maybe he would convert to Unitarianism on the spot (“The Trinity? Don’t be ridiculous!”).

“Dear Naomi,” he wrote one night. She lived in Sauk Center, where she was a carhop at a drive-in.

The summer is passing slowly here. I’m writing quite a bit, nothing worth mentioning. I’ve thought about starting a novel, but I hate to start something I don’t think would turn out to be good. I might join the Army in the fall or else just bum around. Right now, I’m too depressed to think about it. I hate to sound conceited but it’s hard to live under the same roof with people who have so little interest in ideas or even just conversation as my parents, especially my father. I think he must resent me for going to college, which he never did, because every time he opens his mouth, he tries to cut me down to size. Well, I don’t want to be his size. If I thought I’d be where he is in twenty years, I’d kill myself right now and get it over with. I don’t mean that we ought to sit and talk about poetry or anything (though that might be nice), I’d settle for one minute’s conversation in which he accepted that I’m not six years old. Instead he can’t look at me without coming down with both feet, and then of course the little kids pick it up—I asked my sister to please not come in my room without knocking and she said, “You’re not so smart.” Which is the general drift of conversation here: “Who do you think
you
are?” I don’t know, I’m trying to find out the only way I know how, and it’s hard enough to write without people constantly harping at you.

Well, enough about my problems. I hope you’re doing better. Call me sometime. It’d be nice to get together and talk to someone about something other than what a terrible person I am.

Writing quite a bit?
He was writing a ton. Under the influence of
Leaves of Grass
, four months overdue at the college library, he found he could rapidly fill up whole pages of legal pad.

He woke up early, ten or eleven, read Walt over coffee to prime the pump, and hit the legal pad until he was overwhelmed by how much had come out and how much more there was, and had to go out and hoe the tomatoes to settle himself down.

He wrote a story entitled “The Story Writer,” about a young man named Nils Sjogren who holes up in a rooming house to write and becomes weary of his endless egoism.

He sat for a long time looking at the white page filled with words until it became a meaningless blur. Suddenly he realized he was extremely tired of writing about himself, about his view of things. Suddenly it occurred to him that all he had ever done was think about himself. Slowly he reached for the box of matches. He lit one and held it to the corner of the paper and watched it burst into flame and curl up into black ash. He thought it was one of the best things he had ever done.

Then, for want of a better idea, he sent Nils to a bar and got him drunk. Nils drank “more whiskies than he could remember” and stood
on a bar stool and delivered a speech explaining that his spirit had been crushed by small minds. “You tell me to be neat! I say neatness is the death of the soul! You tell me to take out the garbage! If I took out the garbage, there wouldn’t be much left! You tell me to be on time! What you know about time, you could tell in one second! You tell me to cut the grass! You say it’s getting long! Of course it’s getting long! That is the beauty of life! Of which you know nothing!
Nada!
” Then Nils left Tinyburg for the oilfields of Venezuela.

The search for No. 3, despair, led him to write “The Story Writer,” and then, the same afternoon, to go to the Sidetrack Tap to get drunk himself. It was a Wednesday, he was in the mood for an experience after hours at the desk, he was down to less than three dollars and in a mood to blow it, and besides, his parents would be going to church that night and wouldn’t be home to see him stagger in.

The Sidetrack wasn’t much as despair goes, but it was convenient, and his mother had told him since he was a child never to go in there, a recommendation in itself. She said it was an evil place and quoted Scripture to prove it: “Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil.” And the Sidetrack certainly was dim. When he was twelve, he’d gone in for a glass of water, which Wally gave him, and when his mother found out, she decided maybe Scripture wasn’t caution enough. She said, “You drink out of a glass down there, you’re asking for diseases I’d rather not even talk about. Filth! It’s a filthy place!” And he knew she was right. A child’s sense of smell is acute, like a dog’s, and the odor of stale beer and smoke from the Sidetrack when the door opened almost knocked him over as a boy.
^*
Once he walked by the door just as Arne Bjornson fell out, and it frightened the boy, how awful the man looked, his face dead, and how he smelled—he stank as bad as Bill Tollerud, who had a bet with another boy in seventh grade to see who could go longer without taking his gym clothes home to be washed. The bet went on into eighth grade. Bill was the winner.

By that Wednesday, a week after the crash, Mrs. Mueller was recovered from the shock and able to concentrate on what really troubled her, the prospect of sudden violent death. That morning, she unlocked the two deadbolts on her back door and stuck her head out, half expecting someone to chop it off with an axe, perhaps an inmate from Sandstone prison who had escaped in the night. She had not heard of an escape on the Maxwell House News that morning, though there was an item about an old lady taken hostage in Florida that gave her the creeps. A psychopath had jumped out from the flower bed when the old lady went to hang up clothes, and he hauled her indoors and tied her with clothesline to her own kitchen table and kept her there for thirty-six hours until sharpshooters plugged him through the heart. Imagine! she thought. The state of things today.

Mrs. Mueller has lived alone in this one-bedroom stucco house since the late Mr. Mueller died in 1951 of a ruptured blood vessel. He was putting up curtain rods one minute and the next he was dead on the floor. He was forty-seven. Now she was sixty-eight. That was how she wanted to go, too, quick, no trouble, no pain. Certainly not at the hand of a psychopath. Once in Minneapolis she thought a man was going to kill her. He almost crashed into her when she made a left-hand turn into a Super America, then he made a violent U-turn, squealed up to the pumps, jumped out, and screamed abuse at her. She was in her car, her doors were locked, and she turned on the radio to drown him out, she was so scared. The news was on: an item about a plane crash that killed fourteen people. She has never set foot on a plane,
^*
but it seemed to go right along with the horrible face in the window saying he hoped she rotted in bell. You go up in planes, you go to Minneapolis, you take your life in your hands. You’re not even safe in your own backyard.