(THEME. GK SINGS)
That curl of his lip, that look of disdain,
As he strolls down the boulevard,
And a spot on his tie that looks like chow mein,
It's Guy....Guy Noir.
SS: A spring day in a city that holds onto its secrets, but high above the busy streets, in a dingy office on the twelfth floor of the Acme Building, one man is still trying to find the answers to life's persistent questions --- Guy Noir, Private Eye --- (PIANO)
GK: It was spring and the sun was shining, which gave a certain irridescence to the dust and grime on the windows and also reawakened an old smell from behind the radiator. A smell like something had died back there who you wouldn't have liked even when it was alive. As for work, it was non-existent. I'd been working on a case of a missing husband and after I'd put in half a day checking the bus depot and the gin mills, the wife calls me back.....
SS: (ON PHONE) Sorry. He was in the basement.
GK: Your husband was in the basement?
SS: (ON PHONE) He got engrossed in something down there.
GK: In the basement?
SS: He was cleaning out old National Geographics and he got to reading them.
GK: Well, I been all over town looking for him, lady. I looked in the bus depot, checked out taverns, pool halls, greasy spoons....
SS: (ON PHONE) Well, maybe you shoulda checked the basement. (CHORD)
GK: It was one piece of trivia after another. You can't believe the nonsense that a private eye gets thrown at him....
TK (PHONE): Say? I ran into a woman I used to know at a party last night. Could you get her name for me?
GK: Look mister----
TK (PHONE): Tall, dark complexion, brunette, mid-thirties, black dress----
GK: Listen, you're describing half the people in New Jersey....
TK (PHONE): I wrote her name down on a slip of paper and put it in my billfold and now I can't find the billfold.
GK: Look in your pants pocket. (HANG UP) There was a day when the name Noir was associated with big cases. A deserted mansion, a body in the solarium, the heiress gone to Mexico with the chauffeur, that kind of thing. And now----
SS (ON PHONE): She's tan with white spots, she's pure dachsund, and she answers to the name Weenie.
GK: Call the dog pound. (HANG UP) Meanwhile, my bank balance was flatter than Kansas. April 15th came and went like a dark shadow and I sent off a letter to the IRS explaining that I had decided to give up my citizenship for a few years until I could afford it. I was desperate for a few bucks ---- so desperate I finally went to Gino---- (MUSIC. FOOTSTEPS ON CONCRETE, GRITTY. BROKEN GLASS. KNOCK ON DOOR)
TR (INSIDE): Yeah?
GK: Gino, it's me. Guy.
TR (INSIDE): Whaddaya want?
GK: Let me in, Gino.
TR (INSIDE): You got the cops with ya, Guy?
GK: Of course I don't have the cops with me. Open the door.
(DOOR EASES OPEN)
TR: Whaddaya want?
GK: I'm desperate, Gino. I need to earn a few bucks. Help me out, okay. I'll do some jobs for you. Drive a getaway car. Be a lookout. Be the bagman.
TR: Awwwwww. Come in. (DOOR CLOSE. FOOTSTEPS) We ain't in the bookmaking business anymore, Guy.
GK: No?
TR: Naw, got out of that three years ago. Not enough profit in it. We're in the term paper business now.
GK: Term papers!
TR: Biggest term paper operation between Chicago and Missoula, Montana.
GK: How do you earn money with term papers?
TR: How??? Ha! Lemme tell you. Kids in college today, they couldn't write a paragraph to save their life. But they gotta get a liberal education so they can be the manager of a McDonalds and not just work at the window, okay? So they're willing to pay bigtime for term papers. You want a piece of the action?
GK: Ohhhh boy. Thought I was done with this.
TR: You in or out?
GK: I'm in. (TRANSITION MUSIC) I bought a pound of coffee and a dozen bismarcks and unplugged the phone and put a fresh ribbon in the Underwood. (TYPEWRITER)....."In the Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne confronts the gender constructions of phallocentric colonialist society, working from within the contextualized vocabulary of the American historical trajectory, and in Hester Prynn, he achieves a synthesized implicit gender model that allegorizes the dichotomies of patriarchal hegemony....." ---- It was rough. I started widening the margins, I went to triple-space....I had to slap myself to stay awake (BIG SLAPS, W. BELT) Three days later....(TYPEWRITER) I had finished fourteen papers and was on No. 15....."The Great Gatsby is a prose allegory of good and evil that mirrors the archetypal phallocentric tragedy itself, synthesizing in its patriarchal subtext the conflicting threads of American postcolonialist dichotomies that divided Puritan from Tory, rural from urban, male from female, and yet contextualizing these contradictions in a vocabulary of implicit gender trajectories (HE YAWNS).....
(KNOCK ON DOOR)
GK: Yeah, come on in, the door's unlocked. (DOOR OPEN, CLOSE.)
TR (TEEN): Mr. Noir?
GK: Yeah? Who are you?
TR (TEEN): I'm Jared.
GK: I see.
TR (TEEN): I'm, like, a senior in college. You know?
GK: Good--- Right.
TR (TEEN); It's about the, y'know, term paper you wrote? Like, on Huckleberry Finn, okay?
GK: Yeah? What about it, Jared?
TR (TEEN): It was, like, in the middle of it, y'know, you kind of dropped what you were doing and decided to go with somethin' else, y'know?
GK: I'm not following you here, Jared. I'm a little tired. I been writing for three days.
TR (TEEN): Okay, but, like, when Huck gets on the raft and goes down the river, y'know? Like, you got this big white whale coming out of the water? It's, like, huge, y'know, and----
GK: I'm sorry, Jared. So what did your professor say?
TR (TEEN): Well, I mean, like, he was, like, totally bummed, y'know, and he goes, like, "Oh no," and I go, like, "What?" and he goes,like, "You're outta here." And anyway, I got an Incomplete.
GK: I'll get it straightened out, Jared, don't worry. I'll rewrite it. (PHONE RING) Excuse me. (PICKUP) Yeah?
TK (OTHER END): How you comin' on that woman I saw at that party a couple days ago? The one whose name I wrote on the slip of paper and put it in my billfold and now I can't find it?
GK: Where's your billfold?
TK (OTHER END): That's what I'm asking you.
GK: Did you look in your pants?
TK (OTHER END): Which pants?
GK: The ones you wore to the party.
TK (OTHER END): Oh. Okay. Thanks. (HANG UP)
GK: Sorry, Jared.
TR (TEEN): No problem.
GK: Jared, I'll rewrite that term paper for you, but it occurs to me that even if I do, your teacher might not think that you wrote it.
TR (TEEN): Oh, really? I mean, like, why? Y'know?
GK: Well, because, for example, I'm using words like "phallocentric" and "contextualized" and I'm writing this paper in a number of different verb tenses, like the imperfect indicative, the past imperfect, the subjunctive. Lots of different tenses. And you pretty much speak in the present indicative.
TR (TEEN): Huh? I speak?
GK: No, you don't speak....you go.
TR (TEEN): Yeah?
GK: Other people, they have gone or might have gone or could go or will have gone, you just pretty much go, go, go, go.....
TR (TEEN): Yeah, but, you know, I'm going, like, "What do you mean?" Y'know?
GK: Never mind, Jared, you go, and I'll get back to work, okay?
TR (TEEN): Cool. (FOOTSTEPS) Later, man. (DOOR CLOSE)
GK: And right then, for the first time in my life, I thought of becoming a writer. Somebody's got to do it. With all these kids with baggy pants and funny hair and active vocabularies of about two hundred words, talking in the present tense, it's not a generation of great storytellers we're raising here. Teenagers use the English language the way bounty hunters used the buffalo. And that's when I sat down and started The Memoirs of Guy Noir. (BIG CHOPINESQUE PIANO, CHORDS, THEN UNDER....)
She walked into my life one spring morning when I'd come back from a month marlin fishing in Key West and I was picking up my mail before I headed for Paris and there she was, leaning against the front desk of my hotel.
SS: You Noir? Guy Noir?
GK: A little wisp of smoke came out of her mouth as she said my name, and her eyes flickered. She brushed back a strand of auburn hair.
SS: My name is Scarlet. Scarlet Anderson. I'm an associate professor. Women's studies. That scare you? Women's studies?
GK: I've been studying women all of my adult life, Dr. Anderson.
SS: Call me Scar.
GK: She raised the cigarette to her lips and as she did, her green dress, green the color of a neon sign over a door you know you shouldn't go in, her green dress rose slightly in a way that thrilled me in a way I particularly like to be thrilled. (PHONE) (PICKUP) What?
TK (OTHER END): It's not in those pants.
GK: Then look on your dresser.
TK (OTHER END): I did. Not there.
GK: Look, I'm busy writing, okay? (HANG UP) I put my elbows on the front desk and (DING) rang for the clerk and as I did, I could smell her perfume, it was the smell of orchids at high noon.
SS: If you asked me to dinner, I would probably say yes. I would know better, but I would. Say yes, that is. I just wanted you to know that.
GK: So, like a fool, I asked her to dinner. (DINNERWARE CLATTER)
SS: You come here often?
GK: I do. I like the context.
SS: I shouldn't say this, but I've always had a thing about a guy who knows when to use the word context and when not to.
GK: I like the trajectory this conversation is taking.
TR: (APPROACHING, AS GINO) So what can I get for you two?
GK: Why are you asking me that question?
TR: Who do you want me to ask? The table?
GK: She and I are here as two individuals. There's no patriarchal hegemony here, pal. What? you think I'm going to order for her?
TR: Who you talking about patriarchal hegemony with, pal?
GK: You. You're working from a colonialist context of dominant gender models, ya big dummy---
TR: You want to see dominant gender models, stupid, how's this? (HE SWINGS. GK OOOF)
GK: Okay, mister, you want to get into gender issues with me, how's this trajectory right here? (HE SWINGS, TR OOFFF, FALLS) There. So much for hegemony.
SS: You're pretty --- archetypal, but in a way I could get to like.
GK: What way is that, angel eyes?
SS: You know what I mean.
GK: Maybe I do, maybe I don't.
SS: You've completely recontextualized certain modalities of the patriarchal myth.
GK: I'd be careful who you call myth, gorgeous.
SS: You're myth and yet you transcend myth ---- that's part of your postmacho dichotomy.
GK: I don't know what you're talking about.
SS: I think you do.
GK : In a sense I do and in another sense I don't.
SS: Try the first one.
GK: I just might do that.
SS: If you kissed me forcefully right now, I might not resist this as much as you probably think an associate professor of women's studies might.
GK: I just might test you on that, beautiful.
SS: Good. Don't be surprised if this evening takes a trajectory that one might possibly describe as postfeminist.
GK: Whatever you say, baby. (THEME)
SS: A dark night in a city that keeps its secrets, and there on the twelfth floor of the Acme Building is a guy still trying to find the answers to life's persistent questions. Guy Noir. Private Eye. (MUSIC OUT)
© 1997 by Garrison Keillor