Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

When he was growing up in Michigan, his own father had been a good woodsman and had instructed him well. When you think you’re lost just sit and calm down. When you’re frantic you lose your energy. Notice how the trees tend to lean a bit to the southeast. That’s because of the prevailing winds and the immense storms from the northwest off Lake Superior. The day the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald went down it had blown over ninety miles per hour for a couple of days. He had been at his remote cabin then and did not stray from the protection of its sturdy logs. He read and listened to trees crashing down in the landscape. “Widow makers,” they were called. He finally left the cabin for a much needed drink at the tavern. He drove down to the lakefront and watched as giant waves smothered the pier. Even in his car he shuddered in fear. The waves actually thundered.

By far the biggest jolt of aging was the disappearance, coming up on seventy, of his sexuality. The doctor improperly joked when he explained the problem. He was angry and the doctor said that it happens to everyone. In fact there was a bench in front of the town hall on which the same five old men sat every day called “the dead pecker bench.” There were medications available now, and there was a joke at the tavern that if you had an erection more than three hours just visit the Starlite Alleys on women’s bowling night and announce your problem. You’ll get plenty of exercise. But the idea of taking a pill to get a hard-on left a bad taste.

He couldn’t help trying it once the year before at the Modern Language Association annual meeting in Washington, D.C., a city he loathed for political reasons but tolerated when it was full of old writer friends. The target was a graduate student girl he had made love to years before when she was a sophomore. The price was that he had to write her a glowing recommendation to the Hunter College writing program in New York City. He readily agreed. She was a bit dumpy but used to have a nice body. They went to his room at the Mayflower after dinner and drank. She was in a hurry because she had to see an old boyfriend, also a writing professor. Unfortunately, the pill gave his gray room a deep green aura which irked him and then he came off in a minute. He apologized and then she quickly left to visit her friend without working up a sweat. To his surprise he noticed while watching CNN that he still had a hard-on, evidently a peculiarity of the pill. He went out in the street on the odds he might meet an acceptable pro, which he did a few blocks from the White House. They strolled along chatting amicably about music, which raised a warning flag in his head. A doctor friend had warned him never to sleep with a prostitute who also hung out with musicians as there was a higher incidence of AIDS in such women. Once again he apologized, gave her twenty bucks for the chat, and turned back to the hotel and the torpor of a thousand English professors at their evening meetings through which many dozed.

Years before when he was teaching at a university he had helped out the chairman who had hired him to do preliminary interviews with a half dozen creative writers applying for the vacancy. He had already tossed out about fifty résumés. The university was only a couple of hours from New York, a magic city, at least for writers. It was all in all very unpleasant, especially the air of pleading in their eyes, and interviewing the half dozen candidates was grueling. The most obnoxious and smug man, also the best dressed with probably a rich wife, had gone so far as to write a good review of his own first book of poems and presumed that it gave him an inside track. He could barely wait to get him out of the room and pretended to make a phone call saying, “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” though ten minutes was far too long. He ended up giving the highest recommendation to the writer with the most kids.

The whole economics of work depressed him. He made a good salary, doubtless more than he deserved, but the candidate with the most children admitted that the night before he had missed the last bus back to the area of Virginia where he was staying with a relative. He had mostly walked the streets until about 4:00 a.m. and then went back to the hotel and took the elevator to the fifth floor where he recalled that there was a sofa near the elevator entrance. He had barely gotten to sleep when a bellhop woke him and offered to help him to his room. He deftly said that his roommate was sleeping with a very noisy woman. The bellhop laughed and continued on his way. He was then awakened at 7:00 a.m. by the first room service cart.

The award-winning poet asked the man why his college wouldn’t pay for a room. He said it was because he had taken this last year off to write a comic novel. His wife and two daughters had all worked at McDonald’s and they made it through okay. But he was not tenured and the department was replacing him with a young hotshot from Iowa. “That’s why I’m here. I haven’t sold the novel yet.” It turned out the candidate had been cutting Christmas trees for four bucks an hour which was admittedly “chilly” in Michigan. He told the man to go into the bedroom of his suite and gave him a shooter, a two-ounce bottle of Canadian whiskey. He had one himself and the man wobbled off to sleep.

It was a good story, he thought. They hired the man, whose novel was published and did well. He wanted to quit his new job and just write but his wife was fearful and told him she would shoot him if she ever had to go back to work at McDonald’s. The family was overwhelmingly pleasant. The award-winning poet reminded himself to keep his hands off the man’s two pretty teenage daughters.

He could date the moment desire had fled or when he had truly noticed it. It was a late August afternoon in 2013. It was warm and he sat at a table in the tavern. He was alone because he always arrived at 4:00 p.m. and his friends showed up at the more proper time of 5:00. There were two girls at the bar and one of them was in a very short summer skirt twirling on her bar stool. It was electrifying or would have been in the past. He felt nothing and pinched himself lightly to make sure he was actually alive. No, a curtain had dropped and he wondered if it was a recent bad cold. He certainly didn’t feel the iron bite of lust which should have been automatic. Not very far in the past, minutes to be exact, he would have been up at the bar buying the girls drinks, cajoling, letting drop a few credentials like “I was just in New York seeing my publisher,” looking down at the smooth legs of the twirler and imagining her resplendent pubis on his not so lonely pillow. Her friends came in and the girls left but not before the twirler winked at him. The display had been for his own frozen body. He couldn’t even manage to return the wink because his heart had abruptly darkened.

He had been distressed a long time by this nominal experience which wasn’t nominal to him. It was more like a resounding crack of doom. So much of his life since youth had been consumed thinking about women.

One late afternoon when he and his neighbor John had sipped two bottles of good wine rather than one he had impulsively confessed that sex had “fled” his life.

“ Sic semper tyrannis, ” the man said.

“I forgot what that means.”

“It means your tyrant is dead. Sex is the most powerful bully in our lives. Last year I saw an extraordinary number of young women going in and coming out of your place. They rarely lasted more than an hour. It all was an amusing diversion while I was cooking dinner. I certainly questioned your timing.”

“I had to get at those before I got drunk which would render me unworkable. The minute they left I was free to have a big drink of whiskey or whatever.”