Karloff in Dakota

by Jamieson Ridenhour

You can’t help but wonder about Boris Karloff

spending that year in Minot, North Dakota.

All the biographies mention it, a cold and early

footnote, the truest example of hard times you

could imagine. They murmur it like a prison

sentence, a gypsy curse written in whispers

and sprinkled with intensifiers: “He even spent

a year in Minot, North Dakota.” Granted, in

1915 Minot still looked frontier, flatline level,

a dusty cluster of houses huddled like hobos

on the prairie, a lonely Grinchless Who-ville.

Two hours south of the Portal where Boris first

touched the United States, the travelling players

settled in, poverty struck and interminably stuck,

piecing together script after script in a mad scientist

frenzy. Desperate to entertain the plains.

Did he have time to feel the cold stunting

sting of the Dakota windscape? Were 106

shows in half as many weeks enough to regret

the brusque hustle of itinerant acting, of a third

rate company in a third-floor theatre? One floor

above the bank, two above the hardware

store, seven and a half actors playing twenty

roles in The Fortune Hunter. That year the half-actor

was a Minot housewife playing part-time, but five

years earlier it had been the man himself—still Billy

Pratt and acting at half-talent. When your salary drops

while the curtain’s still up, it’s hard to believe

you’ve chosen wisely. While shopping for suits—five

dollars’ worth chosen from the cleaners’ unclaimed—

did he second-guess the self-creation, the forged résumé,

the fictions of parts never played?

When the exhaustion overwhelmed they would skip Act II,

just aim for the climax and head for the hotel, stumbling

through the snowy streets in the too-early dark. After his evening

soda at the café across the street, before he fried his dinner egg

on the back of an iron, did he look out across the prairie

and see, fitfully lit by the borealis, his heavy-footed fate inching

inexorably closer? Kicking up dust, scarred like the plains,

cold and unlovable, arms spread wide for a welcoming embrace?