After a broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, middle-aged men and women come around backstage and say, “I’ve listened to your stories since I was a child and my favorite one of all is your Tomato Butt story.” This is a humbling moment since Tomato Butt is far from my best story, but what can I say? Never insult someone who has just complimented you. My sister who appears in the story says that it didn’t happen the way I tell it and she is right. Here is the correct version.
It was an enormous tomato, as big as a grapefruit, and it was in October and the tomato had been hit by a hard frost and turned brownish and was liquidy. It was resting on the ground just south of our pumpkin patch, where my sister was searching for a perfect pumpkin for her Halloween party. I slipped my hand under the tomato and scooped it up and observed little white life-forms swimming around very rapidly in figure eights, and I sensed an urgent desire to survive though they did know they were going to die. This is knowledge that even primitive life-forms carry in their cells, but who are we to call them primitive? We who wage war on others who’ve done us no harm. You and I possess the foreknowledge of doom in our brain stems and so do the paramecium and bacillus. I put my cheek against the tomato to offer them warmth and could feel them pushing against the wall, the inmates of the tomato, occupants of the tomato planet, meanwhile my sister was busy preparing for the Halloween party, which she would attend dressed as a queen and I as a bum. I did not mind. When I put on tattered clothes and blacked my face with burnt cork, I felt fulfilled in a way.
So there I was with the tomato nation against my cheek, its citizens silently crying out against the apocalypse, and I thought, How do we know they don’t possess a language, a culture, literature, a religion of their own? And if they do have a religion, then I must be their god. I hummed to the tomato. I thought the vibration might be something they could relate to. My sister turned around and yelled at me to put it down. She was practicing to be somebody’s mother, I suppose. I held the tomato close to me. I was the last comfort to a culture that was coming to an end and they were racing around, putting their affairs in order, knowing the end was near—it was so sad. I sang to them,
Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.
This world is rotten, Lord with me abide.
She stood, hands on her hips, and said, “Put the tomato down. Do you hear me?” I gave her a look that I knew really really irritated her, my patented moronic stare, eyes blank, mouth open, a thin trickle of drool running out of the corner. It drove her nuts. She told me I was disgusting. Well, I knew that. That was the point, wasn’t it. I was an idiot singing a hymn to a rotten tomato. It doesn’t get better than that. She said, “You make me so mad, I could cry,” and she cried and she bent over to pick up a perfect pumpkin and there was her big butt in front of me and I threw the tomato at her. It felt like it was meant to be, that the larvae not suffer but go out with a splash. The reddish brown planet flew through the air, rotating slowly clockwise, and I took off running as fast as I could go—I heard the splat, and the screech—and I ducked under the clothesline with her in hot pursuit yelling, “I am going to wring your neck”—which is not a Christian thing to say—and I dashed through a pile of dead leaves and she caught up with me there and latched on to my shoulder, like a lioness bringing down an eland in a National Geographic special, and I fell and as I did my mother cried out my sister’s name. My sister took her hand off me, but slowly. And she leaned down and said I would be very sorry for what I had done. She said I would go to prison for the rest of my life.
I thought no more of it until thirty years later, after I’d become a big success, I read an interview in Inside Radio.
“He is not the easygoing laidback character he is on the radio,” said a woman who is close to Keillor. “He has been known to throw things. People are afraid to talk, otherwise there’d be a lot more that’d come out that you wouldn’t believe.”
I read that story and realized why PR people send out gallons of Johnnie Walker at Christmas and serve prime-rib sandwiches in hospitality suites and walk up to the sleaziest writer in the room and lay an arm across his shoulders and murmur, “You remind me of that line from William Butler Yeats, ‘Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, / Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds.’ Can I get you a scotch?”
The reporter, a man with watery eyes and forty pounds of old cheeseburgers around his waist, blushes and stares down at his Hush Puppies, and for the next twenty years you will have no problem with him at all. He will go chase the university president (TAX MONEY LAVISHED ON EXECUTIVE SUITE WHILE THE DYING LIE IN DIM ALCOVES AT U HOSPITAL) or snipe at the archbishop (PRELATE FAILS TO ATTEND CRIPPLES’ DINNER FOR THIRD YEAR IN ROW) or haul off and slug the mayor (POLITICIAN DENIES PERSISTENT RUMORS OF PET MOLESTING), and he will write lovely stuff about you:
Everyone in this town knows Garrison Keillor as a wonderful entertainer and devoted father, but I wonder how many of us are aware of those dozens of little unsung deeds he does for the poor and unfortunate every week.
I don’t have a PR guy, but once I did hire someone named Milo to attend rehearsals and yell “All right!” at the end of every song I sang. I was sensitive about my voice and needed affirmation in order to do my best. He yelled, “All right! Far out! Whooo! You sang that one, all right!”
• • •
One thing a PR guy can’t do is resolve your own guilt, and there I was, riding around in limos and residing in a mansion and brooding about that big tomato and the damage it did to my sister, who could never eat tomatoes after that or tomato sauce or even V-8 juice, and thinking about the curse she had put on me. Prison. Steel doors clanging shut. The squeaking of rats and water dripping in the dank sewers below. Prison. Well deserved in my case. My sister has never eaten pizza, never had a BLT.
You would think the Statute of Limitations would have run out on the tomato assault, a juvenile crime, but what they came up with was Conspiracy to Evade Detection. After a show once, a man walked up to me and said, “Is that tomato butt story on the level?” and I, not knowing he was an undercover police officer, said yes. This was in New York. I guess it was a slow day for the NYPD. It was at Carnegie Hall, where I’d done a benefit concert for an audience of elderly nuns who were enjoying the show as they wove simple cotton garments for the poor on tiny hand looms, and the cops hauled me off to the precinct station. “Tell us about the tomato,” they said. “How big was it? Why did you throw it at your sister?”
If only I had told the truth. But I lied over and over. I denied that it had hit her. I said that it slipped out of my hand. I said it was small.
“Deny everything and make them prove it,” said the lawyer my family hired, a skinny guy with dandruff whose degree is from Texas A&M and who mainly does real estate law. So I did. I told 512 separate and distinct lies and the judge gave me a year in the pen for each one. My lawyer said to give up my right to a jury trial. “You look guilty as can be. Furtive. Sweaty.” So I threw myself on the mercy of the court and got 512 years in prison.
• • •
They drive me to LaGuardia for a flight to Minneapolis. I preboard on a conveyor belt that carries me into a special section for miscreants in the rear, where trusties prod us with sharp sticks to make us squeeze in tight on the steel floor of the aircraft. There are a dozen of us, and one guy builds a campfire on the floor and we cook chunks of chicken on clothes hangers, hunkered around the fire, smoking, not talking. What’s there to say? We’re going to prison and we know it. The plane bucks and the fire flickers. Through the tiny window appear the lights of Minneapolis, a big city where I attended church regularly and tried to be a good citizen, but it’s too late to think about that now, or about the neat book reports that received gold stars, the bowline hitch I tied that was shown to other Scouts as a model of how that knot looks when it is perfect—they are immaterial evidence now that I am prison-bound.
The press waits at the gate, a blaze of lights, a thicket of microphones, and my sister—they are interviewing her. She says that she feels no bitterness at all. Her husband, Buck, is smiling. He always thought I thought I had a superior attitude, so this is a sweet moment and he has brought his video camera. “We’ll always love you,” my sister says. “We’ll do everything we can.” One thing she did the day after the big tomato was bang me on the head with a cast-iron skillet as I knelt pouring water into the cat’s dish. I could see the Milky Way shining between the bright blue veins in my eyeballs. She yelled, “It was an accident—it slipped when I was putting it away!” and my mother accepted that story even though the skillets were kept in a drawer under the stove, which was in the other direction.
And then we get into buses for the long ride to Sandstone Prison. The walls of my cell are beige with green trim, similar to my old high school, and it smells of the same disinfectant. The bed is not unlike what we had at YMCA camp, where I hid in the woods to avoid swim class. The army blankets are like old friends, my dad having bought all our bedding from surplus stores. The food is the same as what I ate for years, fish sticks and string beans and Jell-O, and every morning the guard, Rich, who was in Sunday school class with me, stops at my door and says, “So how’s everything this morning, then?” “Oh, about the same, then,” I say. “They treatin’ you okay, then?” They’re treating me fair and square. I was the guy who threw the tomato. I am only sorry that kids who heard me tell that story on the radio may be tempted to make the same mistake I did and wind up in the slammer. Though it’s not so bad. That’s the honest truth. My sister came to visit the other day and asked how I am doing and I could see she was devastated when I told her, “I’m doing great. I’m a lucky guy. Some of us are happier incarcerated than we would be if loose and free. I had my good times, sang my song, did my dance, and now it’s like I’m thirteen again and back home.” She was hoping I’d burst into tears and apologize for that tomato, but that is one thing I am not going to do, believe me. I have no regrets.