city council and getting his way more often than not. I never forgave him for humiliating my father one night at a council meeting. I was twelve or thirteen. We lived in the poorest part of the city, the part called the Hills. My father wanted to know when a long-promised skating rink would be built for people on our side of town. He said, “It ain’t right to keep promising and not making good on it.” I was embarrassed; I still remember the shame I felt. And then I hated myself for feeling shame. My father had only gone through eighth grade in the Depression. He read a lot, but every so often an “ain’t” would slip out. Lou Bennett stood up in the front row and said, “Well, we sure ain’t going to break our word no more, Mr. McCain.” I imagined that my father could still hear the laughter of that night; I still could. It was one of those moments nobody but my father and I would remember. It was a moment I’d never forget.
2
“ You don’t put salt in your beer anymore, Huh?”
“No, I read this article about salt intake.”
Kenny Thibodeau, our town’s soft-core pornographer and writer of tall tales for men’s magazines, looked across the table and smiled. “I don’t have to tell you about ‘articles,’ do I?”
“This one’s legit, Kenny. By a doctor.”
“I’m a doctor.”
“Yeah, of ‘sexology.’”
When not writing books with titles such as Satan’s Sisters and Pagan Lesbians, or “true” articles such as “Hitler’s Love Maidens” and “The Wild Rampage of the Sex-Crazed Pirate Women!” Kenny writes a sex advice column under the name Dr. William Ambrose, “PhD and renowned Sexologist.” He cribs all his material from the Playboy Sex Advice column. His real name appears on none of this material. He’s saving that for the serious novels I know he has in him, though I’m not sure he himself knows that anymore. There’s one more reason for the pen names. J. Edgar Hoover and politically ambitious DAs across the country have been trying to send soft-core editors and writers to prison. Two publishers were already serving time. Their number-one target is comedian Lenny Bruce, of course. He was recently sentenced to jail again.
“So what happened at the demonstration tonight? I’d have been there except Sue had a doctor’s appointment in Iowa City and her car’s in the garage. I had to give her a ride.”
In high school Kenny’s idols were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He was messianic about the entire Beat movement. I was his only convert. I even subscribed to the Evergreen Review, which was the bible of the movement. One summer Kenny drove to the Beat Mecca, San Francisco, where he spent three days running in City Lights Bookstore. This was where he also met the soft-core publisher who convinced him he could make a reasonable living writing the stuff. Until two years ago Kenny still wore the uniform: the goatee, the dark clothes, the hipster talk. Then he met Sue and she changed him, which explained the short hair, blue button-down shirt, and chinos he was wearing tonight.
“Bennett really flipped out, huh?”
I described what happened. Including the angry appearance of Linda Raines.
“Yeah. She gives bitches a bad name.” He stood up. “Have to hit the can.”
I gave myself over to the pleasures of Nealy’s, the front part of which used to be a drugstore and the back half of which is a tavern. The east wall in the front still has the old glassed-in wooden cabinetry used for the pharmacy. There’s a soda fountain across from it where four or five generations of blue-collar boys and girls made each other happy and broke each other’s hearts.
You’ll find the town’s two finest pinball machines here, as well as a pretty good shuffleboard table. There are booths along one wall where you can bring the plump roast beef sandwiches-their only menu item-and relax. It’s a workingman’s place, so country music fights rock for dominance on the jukebox and three blackboards chart the betting on various baseball, football, and basketball games. When Cassius Clay came on the scene, they started betting on boxing, too.
After Jane Sykes decided to go back to the husband she’d divorced, I sort of took up residence here. One night I even got belligerent and got into a fistfight out on the sidewalk in back. Since I’d started it, I was on an informal probation here for two weeks. It was like being back in Catholic school after you got caught dropping a water balloon out of the second-story window. I apologized to the guy and we were now friendly if not friends, though I still wince when I see him. Not the finest entry on the biographical sheet.
Kenny returned bearing two glasses of beer. He stretched out in the booth. “What a family. Bennett and all his military bullshit and Linda acting like Scarlett O’Hara and the kid-Bryce-I had some hope for him, though. I’d see him at the library a lot when he was in high school.”
“I thought he was a football player.”
“Just because you don’t like sports, you think everybody who plays is an idiot.” Kenny loved football games.
“You’re right. That was a stupid thing to say.”
“God, I must’ve caught you on an off night.”
“Nah. I’m just worried about my dad. I was just being sanctimonious because I’m in a bad mood, I guess.”
“I need to pick up Sue pretty soon here. Maybe you should stop by and see your folks.”
Gloom tends to paralyze me. I can sit and brood for long angry hours. Between the ruined peace rally and my mom’s whispers over the phone this afternoon, I felt alone and useless. Kenny’s suggestion got me going again.
“Thanks for saying that.”
“Saying what?”
“To go see my folks.”
“Yeah, that was a pretty brilliant idea if I say so myself.”
“Make a joke, asshole. It’s what I needed to hear.”
He pushed out of the booth and stood up. “I’m going to start charging you for these ideas I have.” Then he was gone.
There was a time when my mother was eager to tell my father which TV show she wanted to watch. And he was just as eager to tell her which show he preferred. As near as I could figure, they pretty much split even on their respective TV choices.
But now as they sat in the living room, I saw they were watching a Western show called Laredo, which meant that my mother would not be seeing Bewitched, which was on at the same time. She wanted the shrunken man next to her on the couch to see whatever he wanted. Though neither of us ever said it out loud, my mother and I knew that my father’s heart condition would take his life any time now. Of course the doctors had told him three different times over the past four years that he was about to die. But this time it felt different. It felt scary.
I’d come in the back door and stood in the darkness of the dining room just watching them sit there together. She had his hand in her lap. She’d told me a few days ago that she spent most of her time thinking back over their lives. How they’d grown up in the Hills and how they’d gone dancing every weekend and won prizes they were so good, and how my father doted on the three of us kids and stood crying outside our bedrooms the night he got his draft notice five weeks after Pearl Harbor. She said he wasn’t worried about dying; he was worried that something would happen to us while he was gone. And then after the war getting a job so good at the plant that they were able to buy a modest house in a respectable neighborhood and live out at least a few of those American dreams the politicians were always bragging about. The most devout dream of all in Black River Falls was to escape the poverty of the Hills.
He’d lost nearly twenty-five pounds and he’d never been a big man anyway, a scrappy Irisher whose two favorite pastimes were bowling and reading Westerns. Watching him now, how even the slightest move either caused him to gasp or wince, I was afraid I was going to cry. I was a child again facing the unthinkable. I’d come here after seeing Lou Bennett fall apart. I suppose I wanted to reassure myself that my own dad was all right.
When I walked into the room, my mom smiled. In the flashing colors from the TV screen I was able to see my
