Jim Harrison - The Ancient Minstrel

“I assumed you were feeding them also.”

“Not so, except some good cheese and Spanish olives I get Fed Exed from New York. It’s my only food habit.”

“You might not have figured out that I’m gay though I have a daughter from an early unfortunate marriage I made to please my parents. They had figured out that I was gay so I married to show them otherwise. You met my daughter two years ago.”

“Yes, a lovely woman.”

“It was mannerly of you not to make a run at her.”

“When you had gone inside and I said something flirtatious to her she said she preferred boys from the car wash to academic men.”

He had made a great deal when his novellas sold to Warner Bros. He wanted to quit teaching but his wife wanted him to hold on. She had her own money but was a maniac on the subject of saving for retirement. He had noted that she got this from her father who had saved a fair amount but then promptly died within a year of retiring. Her mother also had her own money but with the death of her husband she speedily went off to live in a nunnery for older women in Kentucky, an escape she had long planned. Since retirement was at least twenty years away he could not quite imagine that condition.

A dour confusion took hold of him. It slowly became apparent that it was caused by the quadri-schizoid nature of writing his own poems and novels, teaching, and now writing screenplays for what to him was lots of money. Starting out he received, he learned, the minimum fee of $50,000, which exceeded his academic salary for the entire year. Early the next year his agent got him $150,000 for a screenplay that was needed right away. He wrote it in three weeks. They said they “loved” it but never made the movie. Contrary to what he expected success had made him angry and unhappy. The reasons were elusive except that he had been thoroughly out of balance. He loaned a lot of money to friends and never got paid back except a thousand dollars apiece from two Native American couples who lived near his cabin and needed to pay off trapping fines. Both couples visited in the following years with their debt contained in a cigar box and counted it out slowly. He didn’t learn anything from being stiffed but kept stupidly waiting for people to repay. It occurred to him that times had changed. His father had taught him that a personal loan was like a gambling debt, a first priority.

The first signs of his wife wanting them to separate into different residences were at a time when he was drinking a great deal. Her point was well taken. He was no longer the man she had married who was calm, intelligent, mannerly, and slender. She used to love his body but his total weight gain since their marriage was seventy pounds. In his periods of walking mania he’d sometimes drop twenty-five pounds, and one year by dint of pure will he knocked off forty but wrote poorly. His very best work had come during a period when he was utterly indulgent at the table. How could he write well if he was thinking about food all the time? It didn’t work to try to write about sex, doom, death, time, and the cosmos when you were thinking about a massive plate of spaghetti and meatballs. Of course all the extra weight had a bad effect on their sex life. He was too heavy for the orthodox missionary position plus his breath was bad from his gorging. She could only make love to him with her back turned. Also he was chronically fatigued. There was little left of him after a full day of writing. All that he wanted at the completion of the workday was a big drink, at least a triple. The tavern named a drink after him which was a quintuple tequila with a dash of Rose’s lime juice. He quit drinking it when the price of his favorite tequila, Herradura, skyrocketed due to an agave disease in Mexico and the fact that fine tequila had become fashionable in Japan. He could afford it but resented it like the poor boy he once was. He had become a free spender with his habitual table always full with friends and acquaintances, some of the latter hanging in there for free drinks.

In a peacemaking ceremony with his wife he agreed to have no more hard liquor in the home, just wine. He played it honest for about a month, then began to feel like a deprived artist. When he shopped for wine at the liquor store he would buy a half dozen shooters. He continued buying and hiding them, mostly in his studio, until he had fifty. Such were his alcohol needs that he made a clumsy map of the hiding places knowing his own forgetfulness. Now that he had devised this stupid rule to please his wife he could sneak a shooter with the glass of red wine he had late in the afternoon. To his credit he never drank while writing except for a sip as he drew his work to a close for the day. He and a friend had a game while they were reading Faulkner, finding passages where it was easy to see that the great man was deep in the bag. Faulkner would fall off his horse and then get drunk to alleviate the pain. Anything could make him go on a comatose bender, even getting the Nobel Prize. A horrid photo of his face after shock treatment was fortunately blocked from publication, though it later surfaced. Seeing it actually made the award-winning poet think about quitting drinking, a very rare and insincere impulse. His own father drank sparingly, not much beyond a cold beer when he was grilling on a hot summer day. He explained that when you had five children and a small salary it was one of the things you cut out. He himself tended to overdrink both when he was broke and when he had extra money. One excuse was that drinking too much guaranteed marital fidelity. He had never told his wife this because he didn’t want to be closely observed during sober periods, but it is a well-known fact among drinkers that too much and you won’t get the necessary hard-on. He never met anyone accessible anyway except the tavern tarts. He had tried one the year before but she puked within a minute of entering the motel and the smell made his tender organ instantly wilt. She rinsed her face and then finally said, “What’s wrong with you?” He was too well mannered to say that the smell of vomit turned him off.

Students were strictly off-limits these days, in no small part due to feminism, but in the old days when he was teaching everything was possible and ignored by all. He clearly recalled some domestic horror caused by professors and their student lovers. Once he had taken a lovely girl on a ride to a big woodlot outside of town not knowing that his wife was following with his pistol at a distance in her car. She had become suspicious when she found a note in his jacket that said, “I just love it when you go down on me.”

His wife crept cautiously down the log trail and through the woods. She knew the area well from bird-watching. She had seen many spring warblers in the carapace of hardwood trees, also morel mushrooms to pick whose season was the same time as the warblers arrived from the south.

She was now close enough to hear the sound of their coupling and the habitual overloud shout of her husband’s orgasm. She pulled the.38-caliber pistol from her shoulder holster and fired the pistol near the open window of their car. It was immensely loud.

“I’m shot. I’m dead,” he yelled, dramatically.

The girl bailed out the far side of the car and sprinted down the log road deeper into the woods. She was nude from the waist down which would be a problem with mosquitoes. She ran amazingly fast and another shot was fired in the air to encourage her and perhaps discourage fucking another married man. His wife leveled the pistol at him who had recovered enough to swig from a pint of Canadian whiskey.

“I can legally shoot you,” she said.

“Tell someone who gives a shit,” he replied jauntily with whiskey courage.

She tilted the gun and shot out the far window. He cringed and yelled “No” beginning to sob. She looked down at his guilty peter thinking of shooting him there but it had retreated like a turtle’s head. She threw the pistol into the woods after he said, “Don’t kill me before I finish the screenplay or you’ll be out a hundred grand,” his whisper choking him.