It was one of those sweltering days toward the end of the fiscal year when Minneapolis smells of melting asphalt and foundation money is as tight as a rusted nut. Ninety-six, the radio said on the way in from the airport, and back at my office in the Acme Building i was trying to fan the memory of ocean breezes in Hawaii, where i had just spent two days attending a conference on midwestern regionalism.
It wasn't working. I was sitting down, jacket off, feet up, looking at the business end of an air conditioner, and a numb spot was forming around my left ear to which i was holding the telephone and listening to Bobby Jo, my secretary at the Twin Cities Arts Mall, four blocks away, reading little red numerals off a sheet of paper. We had only two days before the books snapped shut, and our administrative budget had sprung a deficit big enough to drive a car through - a car full of accountants. I could feel a dark sweat stain speading across the back of my best blue shirt.
"Listen," i sputtered, "I still got some loose bucks in the publicity budget. Let's transfer that to administration."
"J.S.," she sighed, " I just got done telling you. Those loose bucks are as spent as an octuagenarian after an all-night bender. Right now we're using more red ink than the funny papers, and yesterday we bounced three checks right off the bottom of the account. The budget is so unbalanced, it's liable to go out and shoot somebody."
You could've knocked me over with a rock.
"Sweetheart," I lied quietly, hoping she couldn't hear my heavy breathing, "don't worry about it. Old Jack has been around the block once or twice. I'll straighten it out."
"Payday is tomorrow," she sniffed sharply, "Twelve noon."

The Arts Mall is just one of the thirty-seven arts organizations i administer, a chain that stretches from the Anaheim Puppet Theatre to the Title IX Poetry Center in Bangor, and i could have let it go down the tubes, but hell, i kind of like the joint. It's an old Henny Penny supermarket that we renovated in 1976 when Bicentennial money was wandering around like helpless buffalo, and it houses seventeen little shops - mainly pottery and macrame, plus a dulcimer-maker, a printmaker, a spatter painter, two sculptors, and a watering hole called The Barre. This is one of those quiet little bistrots where you aren't driven crazy by the constant ringing of cash registers. A nice place to drink but you wouldn't want to own it.
I hung up the phone and sat for a few minutes eyeballing an old nine-by-twelve glossy of myself, trying to get inspired. It's not a bad likeness. Blue pin-striped suit, a headful of hair, and i'm looking straight into 1965 like i owned it, and as for my line of work at the time, any one who has read The Blonde in 204, Close before striking, The big Tipper, and The Mark of a heel knows that i wasn't big on ballet.
I wasn't real smart on spotting trends, either. The private-eye business was getting thinner than sliced beef at the deli. I spent my days supporting a bookie and my nights tailing guys who weren't going anywhere anyway. My old pals in Homicide were trading in their wing tips and porkpie hats for Frye boots and Greek fisherman caps and growing big puffs of hair around their ears. Mine was the only suit that looked slept in. I feel like writing to the Famous Shamus School and asking what i was doing wrong.
"It's escapism, Mr. Schmidt," quavered Ollie, the elevator boy, one morning when i complained that nobody needed a snoop anymore. "I was reading in the Gazette this morning where they say this is an age of anti-intellectualism. A sleuth like yourself, now, you represent the spirit of inquiry, the scientific mind, eighteenth-century enlightenment, but heck, people don't care about knowing the truth anymore. They just want to have experiences."
"Thanks for the tip, Ollie," I smiled flipping him a quarter. "And keep your eyes open."
I was having an experience myself at the time and her name was Trixie, an auburn-haired beaty who moved grown men to lie down in her path and wave their arms and legs. I was no stronger than the rest, and when she let it be known one day that the acting studio where she studied nights was low on cash and might have to close and thus frustrate her career, i didn't ask her to type it in triplicate. I got the dough. I learned then and there that true artists are sensitive about money. Trixie took the bundle and the next day she moved in with a sandalmaker. She said i wasn't her type. Too materialistic.
Evidently i was just the type that every art studio, mime troupe, print gallery, folk-ballet company, and wind ensemble in town was looking for, though, and the word got around fast: Jack Schmidt knows how to dial a telephone and make big checks arrive in the mail. Pretty soon my outer office was full of people with long delicate fingers, waiting to tell me what marvelous, marvelous things they could do if only they had ten thousand dollars (minus my percentage). It didn't take me long to learn the rules - about twenty minutes. First rule: ten thousand is peanuts. Pocket money. Any arts group that doesn't need a hundred grand and need it now just isn't thinking hard enough.
My first big hit was a National Endowment for the Arts grant for a walk-up tap school run by a dishwater blonde named Bonnie Marie Beebe. She also taught baton, but we stressed tap on the application. We called the school American Conservatory of Jazz Dance. A hundred and fifty thousand clams. "Seed money" they called it, but it was good crisp lettuce to me.
I got the Guild of Younger Poets fifty thousand from the Teamsters to produce some odes to the open road, and another fifteen from a lumber tycoon with a yen for haiku. I got a yearlong folk-arts residency for a guy who told Scandinavian jokes, and i found whealthy backers for a play called Struck by Lightning, by a non-literalist playwright who didn't write a script but only spoke with the director a few times on the phone.
Nobody was too weird for Jack Schmidt. In every case, i have met weirder on the street. The Minnesota Anti-Dance Ensemble, for example, is a bunch of sweet kids. They simply don't believe in performance. They say that "audience" is a passive concept, and they spend a lot of time picketing large corporations in protest against the money that has been given to them, which they say comes from illecit profits. It doesn't make my life easier, but heck, i was young once, too. Give me a choice, i'll take a radical dance over a Renaissance-music ensemble any day. Your average shawm or suckbut player thinks the world owes him a goddam living.
So i was off the pavement and into the arts, and one day Bobby Jo walked in, fresh out of St. Cloud State Normal and looking for money to teach interior decorating to minority kids, and she saw i needed her more. She threw out my electric fan and the file cabinet with the half-empty fifth in the third drawer and brought in some Mondrian prints and a glass-topped desk and about forty potted plants. She took away my .38 and made me switch to filter cigarettes and had stationery printed up that looks like it's recycled from beaten eggs. "Arts Consultant," it says, but what i sell is the same old hustle and muscle, which was a new commodity on the arts scene then.
"What your arts organizations need is a guy who can ask people for large amounts without blushing and twisting his hankie," i told her one day, en route to Las Palmas for a three-day seminar on the role of the arts in rural America. "Your typical general manager of an arts organization today is nothing but a begman. He figures all he has to do is pass the hat at the board meeting and the Throttlebottoms will pick up the deficit. The rest of the times he just stands around at lawn parties and says witty things. But the arts are changing, Bobby Jo. Nowadays, everybody wants arts, not just the rich. It's big business. Operating budgets are going right through the ceiling. All of a sudden, Mr. Arts Guy finds the game has changed. Now he has to work for the money and hit up corporations and think box office and dive in and fight for a slice of the government pie, and it scares him right out of his silk jammies. That's when he calls for Schmidt."
She slipped her hand into mine. I didn't take her pulse or anything, but i could tell she was excited by the way her breath came in quick little gasps.
"Now anyone who can spell innovative can apply for a grant, government or otherwise," i went on, "but that doesn't mean that the bozo who reads the applications is necessarily going to bust into tears and run right down the Western Union. He needs some extra incentive. He needs to know that this is no idle request for funds typed up by somebody who happened to find a blank application form at the post office. He needs to know that you are counting on the cash, that you fully expect to get it, and that if you are denied you are capable to put his fingers in a toaster. The arts are growing, Bobby Jo, and you and me are going to make it happen."
"You are a visionary, J.S.," she murmured. "You have a tremendous overall concept but you need a hand when it comes to the day-to-day."
"Speaking of ideas," I muttered hoarsely, and i pull the lap blanket up over our heads. She whispered my initials over and over in a litany of passion. I grabbed her so hard her ribs squeacked.

It was a rough morning. After Bobby Jo's phone call, i got another from the Lawston Foundry, informing me that Stan Lewandowski's sculpture, Oppresso, would not be cast in time for the opening of the Minot Performing Arts Center. The foundry workers, after hearing what Lewandowski was being paid for creating what looked to them like a large gerbil cage, went out of strike, bringing the sculpture to a standstill. I wasted fifteen minutes trying to make a lunch date with Hugo Groveland, the mining heir, to discuss the Arts Mall. He was going away for a while, Groveland said, and didn't know when he's be back, if ever. He hinted at dark personal tragedies that were haunting him and suggested i call his mother. "She's more your type," he said, "plus she's about to kick off, if you know what i mean."
On top of it, i got a call from the director of our dinner theatre in upstate Indiana. He had been irked at me for weeks since i put the kibosh on Hedda Gabler. He had been plumping for a repertory theatre. "Fine," I said, "As long as you make it Fiddler on the roof, The Sunshine Boys, and, Man of La Mancha." Now he was accusing me of lacking a commitment to new writers. He said i was in the business of exploiting talent, not developing it.
"Listen, pal," I snarled, "As a director, you'd have a hard time getting people to act normal. So don't worry about me exploiting your talent. Just make sure you have as many people in the cast as there are parts. And tell your kitchen to slice the roast beef thin."
So he quit. I wished i could, too. I had a headache that wouldn't. And an Arts Mall with twenty-four hours to live.
"It's a whole trend called the New Naivitè," offered Ollie when i asked him why artists seemed to hate me, on the way down to lunch. "I was reading in the Gazette where they say people nowadays think simplicity is a prime virtue. They want to eliminate the middleman. That's you, Mr. Schmidt. Traditionally, your role has been that of a buffer between the individual and a cruel world. But now people think the world is kind and good, if only they could deal with it directly. They think if they got rid of the middleman - the bureaucracy, whatever you call it - then everything would be hunky-dory."
"Thanks, Ollie," I said as the elevator doors opened. "Let's have lunch sometime."
It reminded me of something Bobby Jo had said in a taxicab in Rio, where we were attending a five-day conference on the need for a comprehensive system of evaluating arts informations. "It's simple, J.S.," she said. "The problem is overhead. Your fat cats will give millions to build an arts center, but nobody wants to donate to pay the light bill because you can't put a plaque on it. They'll pay for Chippewa junk sculpture, but who wants to endow the janitor?"
"Speaking of endowments," I whispered hoarsely, and i leaned over and pressed my lips hungrily against hers. I could feel her earlobes trembling helplessly.

The minig heir's mother lived out on Mississippi Drive in a stone pile the size of the Lincoln Monument and about as cheerful. The carpet in the hall was so deep it was like walking through a swamp. The woman who opened the door eyeballed me carefully for infectious diseases, then led me to a sitting room on the second floor that could've gone straight into the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Mrs. Groveland sat in a wing chair by the fireplace. She looked pretty good for a woman who was about to make the far turn.
"Mr. Smith, how good of you to come," she tooted offering me a tiny hand. I didn't correct her on the name. For a few grand, i'm willing to be called a lot worse. "Sit down and tell me about your arts center," she continued. "I'm all ears."
So were the two Dobermans who sat on either side of her chair. They looked as if they were trained to rip your throat if you used the wrong fork.
Usually, my pitch begins with a description of the long lines of art-starved inner-city children bused in daily to the Arts Mall to be broadened. But the hounds made me nervous - they maintained the most intense eye contact i have ever seen from floor level - so i skipped ahead to the money part. I dropped the figure of fifty thousand dollars.
She didn't blink, so i started talking about the Mall's long-range needs. I mentioned a hundred thou. She smiled as if i had asked for a drink of water.
I crossed my legs and forged straight ahead. "Mrs. Groveland," I radiated, "I hope you won't mind if i bring up the subject of estate planning."
"Of course not," she radiated right back. "The bulk of my estate, aside from the family bequests and a lump-sum gift to the Audobon Society, is going for the care of Luke and Mona here." At the word "estate", the Dobermans seemed to lick their chops.
I had to think fast. I wasn't about to bad-mouth our feathered friends of the forest, or Mrs. Groveland's family, either, but i thought i just might shake loose some of the dog trust. I told her about our Founders Club for contributors of fifty thousand or more. Perhaps she could obtain two Founderships - one for each Doberman. "Perhaps it would take a load off your mind if you would let us provide for Luke and Mona," I said. "We could act as their trustees. We just happen to have this lovely Founders Club Kennel, way out in the country, where -"
At the mention of a kennel, the beasts lowered their heads and growled. Their eyes never left my face.
"Hush, hush," Mrs. Groveland scolded gently. "Don't worry," she assured me, "They don't bite."
They may not bite, i thought, but they can sue.

Then Mona barked. Instantly, i was on my feet, but the dogs beat me to it. The sounds that came from their throats were noises that predated the Lascaux Cave paintings. They were the cries of ancient Doberman souls trying to break through the thin crust of domestication, and they expressed a need that was far deeper than that of the Arts Mall, the arts in general, or any individual artist whom i would care to know. The next sound i heard was the slam of a paneled oak door closing. I was out in the hallway and i could hear Mrs. Groveland on the orther side saying, "Bad Luke, naughty Mona!" The woman who had let me in, let me out. "They are quite protective," she informed me, chuckling. If a jury had been there to see her face, i'd have altered it.
When i got back to the office, i gathered up every piece of corrispondence in our National Arts Endowment file and threw it out of the window. From above, it looked like a motorcade was due any minute. I was about to follow up with some of the potted plants when the phone rang. It rang sixteen times before i picked it up. Before Bobby Jo could identify herself, i'd use up all the best words i know. "I'm out," I added, "Through. Done. Kaput. Fini. The End. Cue the creditor. I've had it."
"J.S.," she began, but i was having none of it.
"I've had a noseful of beating money out of bushes so a bunch of sniveling wimps can try the patience of tiny audiences of their pals and moms with subsidized garbage that nobody in his right mind would pay Monopoly money to see," I snapped. "I'm sick of people calling themselves artists who make pots that cut your fingers when you pick them up and wobble when you set them on a table. I'm tired of poets who dribble out little teensy poems in lowercase letters and i'm sick of painters who can't even draw an outline of their own hand and i'm finished with the mumblers and stumblers who tell you that if you don't understand them it's your fault."
I added a few more categories to my list, plus a couple dozen persons by name, several organizations, and a breed of dog.
"You all done, J.S.? she asked. "Because i've got great news. The Highways Department is taking the Arts Mall for an interchange. They are ready to pay top dollar, plus - you won't believe this - to sweeten the deal, they are throwing in six point two miles of Interstate 594."
"Miles of what? Then it clicked. "You mean that unfinished leg of 594? I choked.
"It's been sitting there for years. There are so many communities groups opposed to it that the Highway Department doesn't dare cut the grass that's growing on it. They want us to take them off the hook. And if we make it an arts space, they figure it'll fulfill their beautification quota for the next three years."
"We'll call it The ArtsTrip!" I exclaimed. "Or The ArtStrip! The median as medium! Eight-lane environmental art! Big, big sculptures! Action painting! Wayside dance areas! Living poetry plaques! Milestones in American music! Arts parks and Arts lots! A drive-in film series! The customized van as Artsmobile! People can have an arts experience without even pulling over onto the shoulder. They can get quality enrichment and still make good time!"
"Speaking of making time -" Her voice broke. She shuddered like a turned-on furnace. Her breath came in sudden little sobs.

I don't know what's next for Jack Schmidt after the Arts Highway is finished, but, whatever it is, it's going to have Jack Schmidt's name on it. No more Mr. Anonymous for me. No more Grey Eminence trips for your truly. A couple of days ago, i was sitting at my desk and i began fooling around with an ink pad. I started making thumbprints on a sheet of yellow paper and then i sort of smooshed them around a little, and one thing led to another, and when i got donewith it i liked what i saw. It wasn't necessarily something i'd hang on a burlap wall with a baby ceiling-spot aimed at it, but it had a certain definite quality that art could use a lot more of. I wouldn't be too surprised if in my next adventure i'm in a loft in SoHo solving something strictly visual while Bobby Jo throws me smoldering looks from her loom in the corner. In the meantime, good luck and stay out of dark alleys.

© Garrison Keillor

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