CHAPTER 17
Minneapolis
Francis attended West High School for six years and lived with Art and Clare except when they felt under the weather. Then he’d live with Clare’s brother James and his wife Alta for a few weeks, or with Alta’s aunt Rosamond. Clare sold cosmetics at Dayton’s and the crowds exhausted her and she’d come home and lie down on the sofa and when Art got home she would whisper to him and he’d call for Francis and send him away. Or sometimes Art sent him away for reasons of his own. Art’s limit seemed to be a month, and after that, he got tired of having Francis around, no matter how nice Francis tried to be.
Francis learned how to be extremely nice, even invisible. He sat in his little room in the attic, which he kept neat and clean, and he made no noise, treading around in stocking feet, and never bothered anybody, washed and dried the dishes, did all his own laundry, darned his socks, sewed on his buttons, earned his own money delivering the Tribune, shoveled Art’s snow, listened to Art, was agreeable, and still Art would say, “Maybe it’s time you went with James and Alta for awhile, okay?” and off he’d go. James and Alta had four little kids and no spare room, and Francis slept on a couch in the basement that otherwise was their dog’s. Rex resented Francis and growled at him. The little kids stole his stuff. He woke in the morning with dog hair in his mouth. His clothes were full of it. He smelled of Rex at school. After a week, he’d creep back to Art and Clare, humiliated. They didn’t give him a key to the house but he was able to jigger the basement window open and slither through and climb onto the laundry tub and tiptoe upstairs to his room and lie in bed and hope they wouldn’t be too upset that he was back.
Art didn’t do his magic tricks or tell his jokes, except if James’s little boy William came over. He ran straight for Art’s pant leg and hung on and squealed, and then Art was the old happy-go-lucky Art. Otherwise, he read the paper and worried about the war. Art was sure that Hitler would be in Minneapolis before next Christmas, the Panzer divisions of the Wehrmacht speeding west across the plains to meet the Japs in California, the Luftwaffe settled in at Wold-Chamberlain Field, and a Heinie as mayor of Minneapolis. Art told Francis that if the Germans came, he would sell the house and they would move to Canada and Francis would have to go back to Mindren. Art said that we had made a big mistake sending ships and planes to England and that Hitler’s wrath would be all the worse for our sending weapons to kill German boys. Roosevelt had betrayed America by getting us into this war. American cities would be laid to rubble, Americans would die by the tens of thousands, all because the President was an Ivy League cookie pusher with a weak spot for the Brits.
After school, Francis liked to ride the Como-Xerxes streetcar downtown, spend an hour at the main library, and walk to the Hotel Ogden and hang around WLT and then ride home with Art. It was scary the first time: he approached the desk in the lobby and said, “I’m Francis With, I’m Arthur Finn’s nephew, I’d like to be able to go up and see him if I may, please,” fully expecting the tall woman with bright red fingernails to laugh cruelly and call a cop and have Francis pitched out into the street. But she only smiled and said, “Fourth floor,” and after that he didn’t need to ask, she only smiled. And then he didn’t go to the fourth floor, where Art wasn’t so happy to see him; he went to Three and wandered near the studios.
He had a story ready in case somebody asked him what he was doing there. He was Arthur Finn’s nephew and he was writing a term paper for school on the subject “Radio Goes to War,” about the vital importance of radio entertainment in keeping morale high on the home front. But nobody ever asked him. Men stood and smoked in the halls, men charged past and dove into studios a moment before the On Air light flashed, men in cowboy clothes sat and read the newspaper, Homer Jessie studied his scripts and practiced woofing or whinnying or chuckling or sobbing, and once a trained seal flapped past on its way to play “Silent Night” on the Jubilee, and nobody asked Francis anything. He walked off the elevator, turned left, walked through the double doors and past Studio B and into the Green Room, got a Coke out of the cooler, and sat and listened to the radio. And after a moment, the people he had just heard on the radio would walk into the room, pour themselves a cup of coffee, plop down, and shoot the breeze. Francis sat, polite and invisible, a fly on the wall.
One day, Leo was on the radio talking bravely about the value of determination and how many impossible deeds had been achieved by people simply because they refused to quit, and a moment later he was flopped on the couch and complaining to Gene the engineer that Little Buddy had spit seeds in the studio and they stuck to Leo’s pants.
“The little shit, somebody ought to drop a rock on him,” said Leo. “He’s spoiled rotten. The kid sits and eats grapes by the bagful and sprays the seeds in all directions. Then he gets the runs and goes fills up the toilet and doesn’t even flush it! What you gonna do with a kid like that? I’d say, drop him off the roof and be done with it.”
“Kinda sours a person on children in general,” said the engineer.
“Even his own father hates him,” said Leo.
Francis did not know Little Buddy Graves personally, only as a voice on Friendly Neighbor with his father Slim, singing “I Heard My Mother Call from Heaven” and “Little Bob the Newsboy,” and then later on their own show on Monday nights at 7:30. Slim strummed guitar and sang along, but Little Buddy, of course, was the star. He sang songs about sickly children with drunken fathers who lay dying in the snow. The show closed with Little Buddy kneeling at his radio bedside in prayer, asking God to bless his dad and his mother and his brothers Bobby and Billy and “all of the dear children listening tonight,” and when he chirped “Good-night, Daddy,” it made Francis think about his own daddy coming in to kiss him good night.
“I’m not kidding,” said Leo, lowering his voice. “I believe the kid is a midget. Check him out sometime. Follow him into the men’s room and stand next to him and take a glance at his gonads. I bet you’ll find that he’s in his twenties and a little small for his age. Yank his hair while you’re at it, five bucks says it’s a rug.”
Francis had seen Little Buddy’s picture, of course, in the souvenir songbook: he was short and plump and had long dangly golden ringlets.
“Naw, he’s a kid,” said the engineer. “You can tell by the way he’s scared of his old man. I’ve never seen a man rag on a kid like Slim does, he’s on that little bugger about every little damn thing. Other day, he yells, ‘Don’t look at me so dumb, ya look just like yer photographs, ya cheesehead.’ He stands over him and makes him sign the autographs and makes sure the kid writes big and loopy. The kid gets so spooked, he starts forgetting the words or singing off-key and then—you never saw anybody chew out a kid like Slim does.” The engineer stiffened and glared and hissed, “Shape up ya little dipshit—ya keep slowing down, yer gonna put everbody to sleep—so quit farting around and stay on the beat or I’ll kick your fanny out of here and get somebody else and nobody’ll know the difference except it’ll be better!” And then the engineer smiled warmly and said, “Welcome back, friends and neighbors, and now it’s hymn time. Isn’t it, Buddy? Yes, Buddy asked me last night, after he said his prayers, if we couldn’t do ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’ on the broadcast today, so here it is. Son?” And the engineer whispered in a little high-pitched voice, “This is for all the little children, especially the ones who don’t have enough food to eat.” And the engineer sang, in Little Buddy’s voice,
What a friend we have in Jesus,
All our sins and griefs to bear.
What a privilege to carry
Everything to God in prayer.
And then he piped, “Bye, everybody, and see you reeeaal soon!”
Leo laughed. “By God, Gene, if it wasn’t for the gin on your breath, I’d’ve thought it was the little shit himself.”
Gene smiled. “I’ve got him down pretty good.”
“That Christmas song? The one about the kid in the depot? They stole that song off a drunk in a dive on Hennepin Avenue.”
“I thought Slim wrote that.”
“Hell he did. He rolled a drunk for that song. Some poor guy, the bartender told him that Slim was on the radio, the guy comes up and says, I got this song, do you think it’s any good? Slim read it, he said, Naw, that’s nothin’, but here, I’ll give you a quart of Four Roses for it, so he wound up with the song and the guy winds up dead in the gutter and Slim takes the song and has the little shit record it and they earned four thousand dollars off it! That’s right! Four grand!”
The engineer shook his head. “That’s pretty dirty.”
“And those lyrics—that was a true story. The drunken guy was the little kid.”
“Little Jim?”
“Himself. He’d scrawled out the lyrics with carpenter’s pencil on the back of an envelope. Slim had to ask Lily Dale to decipher the last verse. He told her the whole story. The guy’s name was Jim, he was the kid, and the story was all true except that he hadn’t gotten to heaven yet. He needed the Four Roses to put him over the top. He gave Slim his song and drank the whiskey and collapsed on the floor and Slim left him lying there and brought the song over to the studio and never even bothered getting the man’s last name or his address.”
“His lucky day, I guess.”
Leo got up and poured another cup of coffee. He was getting warmed up to the subject. He didn’t notice Francis sitting behind the Coke. Francis was studying the holes in the ceiling, counting them.
“Christmas in the Depot,” the song Slim stole from the drunken Jim, was what got Buddy and Slim the Cottage Home Show, six days a week, at $350 a week, said Leo. Mr. Dameron, the president of Cottage Home Cottage Cheese, heard Little Buddy sing it and had to pull his car over to the side of Highway 12 and sit and weep. He didn’t know Slim had swiped it off a dying man. Mr. Dameron’s mother was ill in Des Moines. He had just turned fifty. Cottage Home stock was down to 2.28, due to lagging sales. He had had harsh words with an employee that morning and had fired the man on the spot. He had left work early, feeling depressed, to return to his mansion, Brearley, on Lake Minnetonka and there perhaps to take his own life. To Mr. Dameron, “Christmas in the Depot” was a call to action. He rehired the man, visited his mother, hired Little Buddy and Slim, and sales of Cottage Home almost doubled. Mr. Dameron said, “Nothing sold more cottage cheese than when Little Buddy said, oh boy.”
Francis had heard the Cottage Home commercials, of course. Everybody knew them. Kids at West High would say, “Oh boy!” in a high-pitched voice and everybody laughed.
SLIM: I’ll tell you one thing Buddy loves more than ice cream, and that’s a big helping of Cottage Home cottage cheese.
BUDDY: Oh boy.
SLIM: Yes, Cottage Home is chock full of vitamins and protein and all the good stuff that helps little skeeters like Buddy grow up to be straight-shooters and real go-ahead guys, but best of all, Cottage Home is the cottage cheese with that mmmmmm-good real honest-to-goodness homemade flavor. You just ask Little Buddy.
BUDDY: Oh boy.
SLIM: That’s right. That’s Cottage Home. Sing it, son.
BUDDY: I’m a good boy, ain’t I, dad,
So can I have more, please?
That real good—makes me feel good—
Cottage Home Cottage Cheese.
Oh boy!
Leo said the commercial took away his appetite for cottage cheese forever, but what could you do? They were a big hit. The little shit’s face appeared on the front of the carton, “Little Buddy’s Cottage Home Songbook” was published and then a storybook and then a coloring book, and Dameron paid WLT a bonus to expand the show to a half-hour and then signed a two-year contract at double the existing rate—evidently, the little shit was going over big with the friends and neighbors.
“The man must be a pederast to pay $350 a week for a so-called child to mince around like that. So what does that make us—pimps, I guess,” said Leo. Francis did not know what a pederast and a pimp were, but he could guess. Leo snorted. “If that kid’s a kid, then I’m Greta Garbo. I keep seeing razor nicks on the little nipper’s cheeks, don’t you?”
Gene said he thought that Little Buddy was no more than ten years old.
“Some hermaphrodites do not experience the change of voice until their late twenties,” said Leo. “They have only one gonad, like John Wilkes Booth. A famous case. Booth had a piping soprano voice and played women’s roles until he was thirty. Had no lead in his pencil. That’s why he shot Lincoln. Another was Typhoid Harry, the Georgia farm boy who milked his father’s cows day and night and spread the deadly disease that almost wiped out Atlanta. Another hermaphrodite. An accident of nature, but the pattern for these little fellas is not cheery.” Leo put two cubes of sugar in his coffee. “Think about it. Little Buddy going berserk with a handgun. Don’t laugh. A child is more than capable of handling firearms, especially if he’s in his early twenties and a freak of nature. Even hermaphrodites want a woman, you know. The desire is even more pronounced with the lack of apparatus. That’s why the little shit is such a winner with the women, they can hear that sob in his voice.” Leo sipped his coffee. “A real man’s man can no more sing than a dog can read books. Singing, any kind of performance: it’s pure frustration that causes it. Blue balls. Yes. It’s true. Men who can get it up don’t need to prance around and lay it on like show people do, that’s a fact. All that la-di-da and the costumes and the big grins, that’s hermaphrodism talking. The same, by the way, is not true of women.” He leaned forward and pointed a finger into his own chest. “I,” he said, “have no talent for performance whatsoever, nor any desire to have any. I am quite happy to be normal.”