The Man in the Blizzard Read online

  It wasn’t until I’d stuffed the sixth wing in my mouth that I realized the great “Labor Day Miracle” advertised on city buses was linked to the Born Free rally and to the Republican convention, which commenced the same day.

  Through the grease, I made out the title of Dexter’s column. “Holsom—Born Free, Home Free,” a reference to Minnesota governor Jim Holsom. You had to love Dex. After all the mergers and buyouts he was the last old-school lefty at the Star Tribune.

  Everybody knows about the ambitions of our puckish governor. Yes, we know that he’s angling for the vice presidential nomination.

  As a comely Republican governor in a traditionally Democratic state, Holsom’s demonstrated that he can do any damn thing he wants. Just as he vetoed bills that would have raised taxes for education and highways right before the I-35 bridge collapsed. Just as he hosted a Christian revival on the state capitol grounds during his first term. Just as he showed off his dimples during his recent policy speech against illegal immigrants. “I’ve got nothing against wetbacks,” he said sweetly, “but it’s time to hand them each a towel and send them back home.”

  And now, in his most audacious play, right during prime time, Holsom is betting that the Labor Day save-our-babies spectacle on the capitol grounds will mollify the Rush Limbaughs and firm up the Republican ticket’s conservative bona fides.

  By the way, word’s out that Born Free, the organization behind the rally, will be bringing in pregnant woman willing to be induced. They’ll be giving birth in medical tents on the capitol grounds. It’s being sold as the patriotic thing to do. The pro-life thing to do. The idea is to imbue “Labor Day” with a new meaning. Our pretty-boy guv thinks it’s a Holsom idea. He’ll be there to kiss the babies.

  I tossed aside Dexter’s horror show of a column and roared through some more wings. Might as well make it a dirty dozen, I reasoned, before wrapping the leavings in the sullied newspaper.

  Meanwhile, I debated whether I wanted to click onto Rose’s blog. I sometimes had trouble reading it. It wasn’t that I minded the kid’s voicing her feelings, but did she have to post them for the rest of the world? Throughout her adolescence, she railed about “boundaries.” They were the centerpiece of her personal theology.

  You can’t go into my room. Period. I’m talking about boundaries here. Talking about mutual respect. Good fences make good neighbors. That’s Robert Frost. The Great Wall of China, ever heard of it? And don’t look so smug, Dad. You know what you’re doing if you let the mother cross the threshold—you’re enabling her.

  Rose was bigger on the language of recovery than anybody I’d kept company with during the years I went to meetings. But now that she had a little fame, she’d forgotten all about boundaries. When Rose launched her blog, Nina referred to our daughter as “the slut of free speech.” Rose’s song “Mothers, Daughters” sent Nina up a wall.

  Mothers and daughters, they aren’t meant to mix.

  Especially when the old one’s in such a bad fix.

  The woman’s gone off on an evil bender

  Must be because she’s afraid of her gender.

  I did my damnedest to calm my wife. “It’s a fictive mother and daughter; she’s not talking about you.”

  “Of course she’s talking about me,” Nina exploded.

  I remember how odd it was to hear some of the lines the first time on the radio and realize that it was my young daughter who had written them and sang them.

  It’s so hard to groove on a mentality

  That’s spooked by your basic sensuality.

  Hey there, good women, don’t fall under that hex

  There’s nothing wrong with a little good sex.

  More recently, since so many of Rose’s songs had become overtly political, she didn’t get much radio play on the mainstream stations. They wouldn’t touch songs like “Ballad of Abu Ghraib” or “Tricky Dick Deuce on the Loose.” Fortunately, Rose didn’t need the radio, not in the age of MySpace and YouTube, not when music sites like Pitchfork championed her. The band’s own site was hugely popular, with free downloads and a culture of bulletin boards swirling around each of Rose’s lyrics.

  I peeked at Rose’s blog, skimming over her account of taking a one-hour bus trip, during some flight of fancy, from downtown LA to the beach in Santa Monica. In the last paragraph, I found myself characterized in a way that embarrassed me.

  The beach was pretty raggedy-ass, with litter blowing all over, but I was glad to be there. There were some poor Latino families, the kids running through the white water, getting their shoes and pants all nasty, but having the time of their life. I realized that those poor families were far happier than my family, which has gone on sad times, the old folks separated now. What can I say? The mama bear went out on her own. I’m all about liberation, though I’m sorry for the damage done to the sad-sack dad, and to the yours truly of the tale.

  CUL-DE-SAC

  The violinist was breathless when she finally called. “He’s just about out the door, and he’s taking the violin case with the gun in it.” Great, I thought, I’m really in the mood for tailing boy-beautiful and his violin gun.

  Perry Odegard’s creamy white Jaguar was a virtual beacon leading me west out 394, south on 10, and west again on County 5, until he vanished for good somewhere among the cul-de-sacs near Deephaven. I inched through the maze, searching for the sleek, white Jag for a while before I lost heart.

  I lit up a half-smoked joint, flattened by a roll of parking meter quarters in the ashtray. After a half-dozen tokes, I noticed that I was being followed by a private security guard who fixed a spotlight on me as I limped along in my rusted Mazda, my beloved forest green 626 with the yellow passenger-side door that I’d never bothered to have painted since getting broadsided a few years ago, in the suburb of Savage, by a teenager masturbating while driving his mother’s Cutlass.

  The bulbous-nosed guard buzzed down the window of his Skylark. “What are you doing out here, chief? Teaching yourself how to drive?” I didn’t have the heart to tell the old guard that I was just a little dick who’d lost his way, so I simply asked for directions back to County 5. Rose’s sad-sack dad. The detective who’d lost his way. I winced at the thought of the song my daughter could write about this episode.

  TESTOSTERONE

  I had a little trouble getting myself going the next morning. Twenty-four deep-fried chicken wings and a tub of gizzards will do that to a guy. After the debacle in the suburbs, I ended up with a compelling case of the munchies. There was nothing to do but return to the office and polish off the remaining wings.

  I showered until the hot water ran out, brushed my teeth, then broke open a couple of packets of AndroGel for my testosterone deficiency. I rubbed the clear, cold jam across my hairy paunch. The humiliations involved with this daily ritual were legion, not least of which was making my belly shine with gel each morning as I faced the bathroom mirror. All this, because blood tests associated with a routine physical in early July showed my testosterone numbers slumping.

  Dr. Jacks, the sixty-something endocrinologist, a feel-good “our-hormones-are-our-buddies” kind of guy, wanted me to keep a journal from the day I began applying the goop. Fat chance.

  “The changes can be very subtle at first,” the doctor said, “and I’d like you to participate in every part of the treatment. One of the best ways for us to do that is to become dedicated observers.” I made a point of watching Dr. Jacks’s prominent Adam’s apple as he spoke, convinced that the guy had gone into his specialty because of issues he’d had with his own “buddies.”

  “So this stuff’s not going to turn me into a bar brawler or some kind of a cretin flaming with road rage?”

  “Not unless that’s what you were to start with.”

  “You’d have to ask my ex-wife.”

  Dr. Jacks laughed. “You should feel a difference; you should feel a little bit more like this,” he said, throwing three or four hard right jabs into the air. “You should feel a li
ttle more pop, a little more bombs away, a little more bring ’em on.”

  “If this is the hormone they’ve been feeding George Bush, I don’t want any.”

  “No, no, no, no, no,” Dr. Jacks said, his Adam’s apple going off on such a spirited bounce that it looked as if it might somersault out of his throat, “I’m only trying to describe the kind of pick-me-up you might feel. On the other hand, you may not feel anything.”

  “Then why would I do it?”

  “We can’t know until we try.” The doctor threw his fists in a right-left-right combination. “The upside is that you may feel…you may feel more…verve for life.”

  “Isn’t that an existential concern, Doctor?”

  “The body and the spirit are not unrelated, Mr. Boyer.”

  “And the downside?”

  “I don’t see a downside. But let me be clear: you don’t need to do anything. This is simply a quality-of-life consideration. You can stay the way you are and it won’t be the end of the world. Of course, it’s a bit odd for an otherwise healthy man of fifty to be running low on testosterone. But not to worry,” the doctor said, nodding his head meaningfully. “We’re all missing something.”

  Somehow, that comment didn’t comfort me and I found myself wondering what I’d trade to have back a full measure of my manliness—a bit of my hearing, my sight, maybe my sense of smell? But the notion of swapping one ill for another brought me back to myself, and I thought of the sick convoy of medical curiosities on its way to pick off all of us. Half the people I knew had cancer.

  When I asked Dr. Jacks what had caused my drop in testosterone, he threw up his hands. “We don’t know. It could be stress. It could be grief. Have you had any unexpected losses recently?”

  Although I was tempted to say that my entire life had been an unexpected loss, I shook my head. I didn’t care to discuss, with the good doctor, the fact that my wife had left me for another man. Or that my career had already peaked, and it had never been very distinguished at that. As to the testosterone, my most recent theory was that smoking too much marijuana is what had nudged my numbers lower.

  Standing in Dr. Jacks’s office, I tried to conjure up an image of my father at age fifty, ten years before he dropped dead on the sales floor at the Emporium in San Francisco while helping a customer into a suit jacket. I could see my father, walking home from the bus stop in his overcoat and wool cap. “Another day done,” he’d say once he got in the door. “Another day further in debt.” Surely, by fifty, my father’s testosterone level had dropped as well.

  After more than a month of laying this jelly across my tummy, I could testify to experiencing no added pop or pick-me-up or verve. The only thing that had increased was my self-consciousness. I doubted myself now more than ever. Would Nina have left me if I had maintained the hard-jab certainty of my manliness? And worse yet, I’d begun to have trouble staying hard with my girlfriend, Erica. It was the first time in my life I’d had that difficulty. I felt certain that the problem was more in my head than in my body. Dr. Jacks had planted a worm in my brain and I rubbed on the jelly.

  IMAGINARY FRIEND

  I glanced a little sadly at myself in the mirror and recited my daily portion from the epic poem I was memorizing, “Letter to an Imaginary Friend,” by Thomas McGrath. Bobby Sabbatini had got me hooked on memorizing verse, but I did it on the sly. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of thinking he had another convert. I figured I’d spring the poem on him once I had it down. But since it had more than ten thousand lines and I was memorizing at the rate of nine or ten lines a day, it was going to be a while.

  I’d seen McGrath in the flesh more than twenty years ago. I hadn’t heard of him, but happened to wander into Hungry Mind Bookstore one night when he was reading from his epic. Dude wore a black glove on his right hand and looked as if he was aching for a cigarette and a blast of bourbon. Fifteen or twenty people were sitting on folding chairs and a funky sofa, listening to this sour-looking old sucker read a long, heavenly passage about a small boy being pulled on a sled through open country in North Dakota on Christmas Eve.

  Years later, after finally having fallen under Sabbatini’s sway, I decided to look for McGrath’s poetry. Somehow, I’d managed to remember his name. By then the poet was dead and the bookstore defunct, so I went by Micawber’s, in Saint Anthony Park. When I mentioned McGrath, one of the guys brought me a fat volume and said, “The greatest poet that nobody’s read.”

  “Have you read him?” I asked.

  “Not me.”

  McGrath seemed like the perfect imaginary friend for me—the kind of dead man who’d talk back to you. I nailed my daily portion, nine lines from the fourth section, where he talks about the “immortal girls” of his North Dakota youth.

  And under the coupling of the wheeling night

  Muffled in flesh and clamped to the sweaty pelt

  Of Blanche or Betty, threshing the green baroque

  Stacks of the long hay—the burrs stuck in our crotch,

  The dust thick in our throats so we sneezed in spasm—

  Or flat on the floor, or the back seat of a car,

  Or a groaning trestle table in the Methodist Church basement,

  And far in the fields, and high in the hills, and hot

  And quick in the roaring cars, by the bridge, by the river….

  No testosterone problem for young Thomas.

  I dressed quickly in a pair of clean khakis and a rayon shirt that sported a pattern of dominoes. Popped a multivitamin, a fish-oil capsule, Lipitor for high cholesterol, and Lisinopril for high blood pressure. How high could it all go? Twenty-four deep-fried wings should have taken it to the roof. I drank a tall glass of water, gobbled down a low-carb energy bar, and spilled exactly ten roasted almonds into my left hand. I munched them slowly. It was time to go on the diet for real.

  Next, I checked the plants. Since I’d lived alone in the house, the same house in which Nina and Rose and I had lived together, I’d been filling it with plants, taking a crazed pride in the fact that everything seemed to thrive. My African violets were still going since last spring, and the large topiary rosemary, which the florist had doubted would make it past the New Year, was continually sending out fresh shoots. The crotons and the Norfolk pines loved the south windows of my dining room. My gorgeous, bent-trunk cypress took my breath away some mornings. It occurred to me that I should get a few grow lamps and raise a crop of cannabis, despite the fact that I enjoyed the monthly ritual of buying my stash from Conrad, my hipster supplier.

  Almost out the door, I paused by the hall table, slid open the wooden lid of my scarab stash box—a vintage tobacco container from Indonesia. Getting low. Time to call Conrad. I rolled a fatty and slipped it into my shirt pocket.

  WORKING MAN

  Despite all my morning rituals, I still made it to Minneapolis by seven. Not bad for a Saturday morning. Who said I didn’t have a work ethic? The Odegards’ condo was in a small pretentious building, Le Palais, located beside the seven-floor nameless complex that dominated the street. I had bad associations with Le Palais.

  Instead of open parking around the rear of the building, the joint had a gated garage. The night before, when I waited for Perry Odegard’s Jaguar to emerge from the garage, I sat a ways up the street in my Mazda, aiming a homemade code grabber at the garage’s electronic eye.

  Now I parked in front of my office on Harmon Place and walked around to the Odegard condo, carrying an old canvas book bag, featuring a moo-eyed cow, from Hungry Mind Bookstore. The bag held the code grabber and a few other tools of the trade. I aimed the device at the double doors of the Odegards’ garage and pressed the soft black button. The doors whined for a couple of seconds before sliding open. I pulled on a pair of white silk gloves and took a look around before entering the garage. There were only eight units in the building, and the association hadn’t sprung for a security camera.

  The Jaguar was protected by a red Club locked across the steering wheel. An
antitheft sticker, Twitchell Covers Your A, featuring a black-gloved demon, was posted on the driver’s-side window. I held my white gloves up to the devil. Good meets evil. I wanted to get into the car without tripping the alarm. I thought about it for a minute, but I no longer had the nerves for this kind of work.

  At 7:30, I called my sometime assistant Blossom Reese in Saint Paul and asked if she could meet me in a half hour.

  “You’re going to get me out of bed on a Saturday morning, Augie?”

  “I need your help, Blossom.”

  “You’re lost without me, aren’t you?”

  “I’m wandering in the desert.”

  “Buy me breakfast at that Cajun joint, Boudreau’s, up on Hennepin.”

  “You need breakfast first?”

  “Hey, I only operate as a well-oiled machine, Augie. I’ll be there by eight.”

  THE ARMAJANI

  To kill time, I climbed the stairs to the iron pedestrian bridge that crosses a dozen lanes of traffic to the Walker Art Center. The quirky bridge was among my favorite places in town. I’d become a fan of the architect, Siah Armajani. I once stood behind him at the cash register in Hungry Mind, though I didn’t know who he was. He had a pile of books worth a couple of hundred bucks and I remember craning my neck to make out the odd philosophy and archaeology titles and gazing with wonder at his heaping stack of poetry volumes. The guy looked like a middle-aged Persian pothead who might bounce a check. But he and the owner, Unowsky, grinned at each other and exchanged pleasantries. I knew Unowsky pretty well—we’d chattered about baseball, and civil liberties, and books that neither one of us had read. So, when his eccentric customer left, I said, “Hey, Uno, who is that dude?”