GASGATE

By Garrison Keillor

Monday afternoon, I drove into town for gas and stopped at the self-service, and the pump wouldn't work. Gas wouldn't come out. So I drove down the hill to another self-service, and I got about a dollar's worth in when a heavy-set woman strode up and said, "You just come from the Stop 'N Shop?" I said I had. "You drove away without paying for your gas," she said.

She was the manager of the station up the hill, and she had chased me in her car. She said I owed her $3.79. I told her that was wrong. The pump at her station didn't work. No gas came through the nozzle. Not a penny's worth. The pump dial showed all zeros. "Check my gas gauge," I said. "The needle is way below empty."

"How do I know your gas gauge works?" she said.

"You can watch it work as I fill up with gas," I said.

"I don't have time for that," she said. "I need $3.79 from you, or I'm going to have to call the cops."

And then I thought of those aging screen stars over the years who've been arrested for shoplifting, handcuffed, hauled down to headquarters for boosting a set of barrettes, and I decided I did not want to end my career that way. The presumption of innocence is not strong in this country. And so I paid up--to avoid bringing shame to my family.

What hurt most was the triumphant crime-stopper look on the heavy-set woman's face, her moral hauteur as she jabbed her finger at me and raised her voice so that she could be heard by passersby 50 ft. away. She wasn't just collecting on a debt, she was testifying before a Senate committee. She was Acting. This hurt me. Especially as I remembered having behaved that way myself. And it struck me that Gasgate was my penance for the Solidarity Forever affair.

I did a concert in Chicago on Labor Day Sunday and a week before sent the lyrics of Solidarity Forever to be printed in the concert program for the audience to sing. The sponsor sent back a message: "Can't sing Solidarity Forever--too political." I looked at that message, and I heard the rattle of drums and the skirl of bagpipes. I heard the Authors Guild lining up behind me. PEN. The A.C.L.U.

Being censored is a high privilege for any American writer, and we experience it approximately zero times in our career. Our great bugaboo is not censorship; it's getting remaindered, seeing our brave writing stacked on the bookstore floor, marked down to $1.89--and nobody buying it at that price either. Writers of today know that the nobility bestowed on Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence will never be ours, that nobody bothers with repression anymore because everyone knows that to crack down on an artist is to promote him. Even Jesse Helms, not the swiftest intellect in the U.S. Senate, knows this, having personally raised Robert Mapplethorpe from obscurity. Performance artists who languished for years, underwhelming tiny audiences for practically no money, have been rescued by a ringing denunciation from the religious right and given a career.

The suppression of Solidarity Forever was the closest I had ever come to being censored, and I was not about to pass up my chance. I sat down and fired off an indignant letter about the meaning of Labor Day, faxed it to Chicago and was thinking how to proceed further (WRITER PLANS SING-IN; POLICE CHIEF THREATENS ARRESTS; MAYOR PLEADS FOR CALM), and it was lovely to contemplate. I mentioned the Solidarity affair to a woman friend, and she threw her arms around me and told me she admired me. This is not an everyday occurrence in my life.

The very next day the sponsor called up and said, "Fine. We'll print the lyrics if that's what you want," and my balloon went pfffffffffft. I did the concert, and the words to Solidarity Forever were there in the program, and the audience sang all four verses lustily, including, "They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn./ But without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel can turn./ We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom, when we learn/ That the union makes us strong."

That was that. I came home, and the next day I glanced at the fax I had sent to the sponsor. The tone of self-righteousness was a little mortifying. More than a little. When you write a sanctimonious letter, it is hard to keep it under control; there is a tendency to rise to indecent heights of piety. You don't simply argue the facts at hand, you rise in defense of godliness and decency and the First Amendment and oppressed peoples everywhere. Then, six weeks later, a heavy-set woman jabs her finger at you and accuses you of having filched $3.79 worth of gas and says it in a shrill voice so that a woman filling up her van at a nearby gas pump hears it and looks your way and thinks, "That poor man. I hope he gets some counseling before it's too late."