by Steve Rushin
Copyright © 2019 by Steve Rushin
Cover design by Julianna Lee
Cover art: iStock Images (car); Shutterstock (remaining images)
Author photograph by Rebecca Lobo
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ISBN 978-0-316-41944-4
E3-20190717-NF-DA-ORI
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: The Game of Life
Part I: In the High School Halls, in the Shopping Malls 1. Nights in White Castle
2. We’re the Kids in America
3. Simply Waste the Day Away
4. Dancing with Myself
5. Hold On to Sixteen as Long as You Can
6. One More Summer
Part II: I Have Only Come Here Seeking Knowledge 7. The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous
8. Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jog
9. Spending Warm Summer Days Indoors
10. Money for Nothing
11. Another One Rides the Bus
12. We’ll Give You the World
13. Golden Handshake
Part III: Stompin’ on the Avenue by Radio City 14. Into the Great Wide Open
15. Nothing but Flowers
Photos
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
Also by Steve Rushin
For Mike and Keith
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Jane Bachman Wulf
Rebecca Lobo
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Introduction
The Game of Life
On a bright spring day in his senior year of high school, my brother Jim and his buddy Fluff persuaded the manager of our local White Castle to lend them two steel-blue smocks and paper hats of the kind worn by Whitey’s kitchen personnel everywhere. Jim put on matching pants, and Dad’s white belt and loafers, and arrived that evening in period resplendence at Shultzy’s house for the costume party that would live in lore among the Lincoln Class of 1979.
They left the party early, at eleven o’clock. Their night ended—as nights often did in Bloomington, Minnesota—at White Castle on Lyndale Avenue, where Jim and Fluff introduced themselves to the night manager as his newest employees, hired that very afternoon. They were assigned to the stainless-steel steam grill where the restaurant’s famous five-holed hamburgers were loaded onto square buns. “It didn’t bother anyone,” Jim would say later, “that we were completely hammered.”
Thirty minutes after Jim and Fluff punched in, Shultzy and the rest of the party turned up at the Castle, a hundred Lincoln Bears ravenous for gut bombs and roach burgers. White Castle hamburgers are known by two dozen other pejoratives, but my brother refused to serve anyone who used them. He insisted on decorum and brandished a stainless-steel burger-flipping implement at any patron who—literally or metaphorically—stepped out of line.
As that line grew, Jim frantically filled paper sacks with cheeseburgers and fries and handed them over the counter to his friends and classmates, bypassing the White Castle cashiers. When the night manager realized what he was witnessing—a meticulously planned hamburger heist, an inside job—he shouted at Barney, the Castle rent-a-cop, to chase Jim, Fluff, Shultzy, and the rest of the Lincoln seniors off the premises.
At the time, Charley Pride had a hit on the radio that went, “Burgers and fries and cherry pies, it was simple and good back then.” And while Pride was singing of a vanished 1950s drive-in culture, our White Castle remained—as the 1970s turned into the ’80s—a backdrop for our burgeoning dreams.
White Castle was a halfway house for adolescents as they moved from child to teen to young adult, in that brief period when life resembles a classroom evolution poster: the child rising from his Schwinn Sting-Ray; now walking upright with his car keys in hand; now striding away from home holding a suitcase.
The question I got most often as a child in the 1970s was “What do you want to be when you grow up?” My answers varied along the usual lines of fantasy—fireman, Vikings wide receiver, author—but the question also could be taken at face value: what do you want to be, as in how do you want to live, where do you want to live, what kind of person will you become?
For me, that becoming happened in the 1980s between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two. For forty-five minutes on that spring night in 1979—with an endless string of nights laid out before them like runway lights—Jim and Fluff play-acted as workers at White Castle. But their complementary futures had already taken shape: Jim would play ice hockey in college while Fluff would study dentistry—the symbiotic pursuits of best friends.
I was in seventh grade in 1979, and what I wanted to become was Jim: high school athlete, unflappable prankster, cinematic tough guy. For many years, without provocation, Jim made a highly specific threat to his three brothers: “I will rip your lips off.” It wasn’t until he left home for good—and I was in high school myself, frequenting the Castle on weekend nights—that I could pass his former bedroom door without clamping my lips together in self-protection.
When the five Rushin children were still under one roof, we gathered on rare occasions at the kitchen table and played Milton Bradley’s The Game of Life. As in actual life, The Game of Life encouraged participants to attend college, get a job, fall in love, amass a fortune, and have children in the form of pink or blue plastic pegs that plugged into little plastic cars. Those cars sometimes crashed, triggering hospital bills and higher insurance premiums. Luckier players got stock dividends or identical twins. Life—and for all I knew, life—was a zero-sum game. It could only end at one of two places: Millionaire Acres or the Poor Farm.
At the center of the board was a wheel of fortune. I would sometimes spin it as a solitary pursuit, just to see what number came up. The following pages are set during that quicksilver time—high school, college, and leaving home forever—when the great wheel is still spinning and, for a moment at least, everything in life remains possible.
Part I
In the High School Halls,
in the Shopping Malls
1.
Nights in White Castle
There are two masterworks called 1984 that the Class of 1984 has to reckon with. The first is required readi
ng for seniors at John F. Kennedy High School, whose address is stamped all over the Signet Classics in our hands. Those addresses are a theft deterrent, the exploding dye in a bank robber’s bag of cash, meant to shame and identify a would-be thief, though who would want to steal a copy is an open question in room 101. “As if,” says a girl in front of me. Her friend replies: “I know, right?”
On page 9, deeper than most of my classmates will make it into Orwell’s dystopia, Winston Smith sees a book in the window of a London junk shop and is “stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it.” I know the feeling. Fanning the pages of the paperback, I see a stick figure drawn in blue ballpoint by a previous student spring to life in flip animation. He runs across the upper-right corner of every right-hand page of the book in a futile effort to escape. It’s what many of us here want to do.
This isn’t the 1984 that any of us cares about in 1984. The new album by Van Halen—also called 1984, rendered in Roman numerals as MCMLXXXIV—better reflects our senior year, yielding “Hot for Teacher,” “Panama,” and the unavoidable “Jump.” In the video looping on MTV, David Lee Roth leaps about in yellow spandex pants worn under a red Speedo—what my big brother Jim would call, when mocking Speedo wearers at Bush Lake Beach, a “marble bag.” As in: “Look at the squid in the purple marble bag.”
Last week, before basketball practice, some fry tried to persuade our team that David Lee Roth could beat every one of us in basketball. “Diamond Dave,” he said in a voice honey-cured by Marlboros. “There’s a real athlete.”
This brought howls from my teammates, some of whom had just seen Van Halen in concert at the Saint Paul Civic Center, where Roth dressed exactly as he does on MTV. “Roth came on like Charo in a codpiece,” went the withering review in the next morning’s paper, “a crimson jockstrap worn over his tie-dyed pants.” And now, for the first time, this startling image is available for home delivery, piped directly into my family room. For I arrive home on this day to find that a remarkable change of fortune has occurred at 2809 West 96th Street. While I was in Reading Comprehension, cable TV arrived at the Rushin house, in January of 1984. The coaxial cable buried beneath South Brook finally snaked its way into our family room like a long, lit fuse. I can practically hear it hissing.
A wood-paneled cable box sits on top of our wood-paneled TV, trying and failing to camouflage itself. There are twelve buttons on the front of the box and, next to them, a plastic lever with three settings. That lever, like the gearshift on my old Schwinn three-speed, turns those twelve buttons into thirty-six channels, where this morning there were seven. Each of the buttons makes a satisfying chunk when I press it, the same sound the cigarette machine at the Bloomington Ice Garden makes when I idly pull its knobs.
“Pull this knob,” Tom would say if he were here, except that he’s no longer sharing our bedroom, as he did for all of my seventeen years. Tom is two hundred miles away, a freshman at Iowa State, where his genius for pyrotechnical mayhem is already playing out on a grander stage, in and around the fraternity houses and emergency rooms of Ames, Iowa.
My own room. At long last there is no shadowy figure five feet away in the dark, whispering to me over a midnight soundtrack of Steely Dan cassettes. I still watch the tape deck’s wheels turn when I can’t sleep, like little spoked ship’s wheels forever steering to the right. But now there is no brother bursting through the door to breathe in my face on a Friday night and say, “Smell anything?”
“Peanut butter and Grain Belt?” I’d ask, sending him down the stairs to spoon more Skippy onto his tongue, or bite into a raw onion as if it were an apple, anything to disguise the beer on his breath.
In Tom’s place, there is only an empty twin bed, forever made. His high school mementoes—graduation tassel, prom photo, pin-backed homecoming button—have turned our room into half a museum. On his side, in the wall-to-wall blue carpet, Mom’s vacuum tracks remain untrammeled. I half wish Tom had left a set of footprints in them, as at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, to prove he’d ever been here at all.
I drop my book bag. In it is the copy of 1984 that I’ve just stolen from room 101 at JOHN F. KENNEDY HIGH SCHOOL, NICOLLET AT OLD SHAKOPEE ROAD, BLOOMINGTON, MINNESOTA 55420 (as the cover stamp reminds me). I add it to a small library of paperbacks I’ve stolen elsewhere—including Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer and Jim Bouton’s Ball Four—fruits of my budding career in biblio-kleptomania.
Downstairs, the new cable box sits like so many boxes of fable before it. Pandora’s box, the presents under the Christmas tree, the wrapped prizes on the TV game show Treasure Hunt. Except that I already know what’s in the cable box, disguised to look like wood. This Trojan horse is smuggling into our house Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” and Atlanta Braves telecasts and scrambled soft-core movies on premium channels that Mom and Dad scarcely know exist.
Two houses down, a different wood-paneled box has arrived in the Nelsons’ driveway: a brand-new Plymouth Voyager, a whole new kind of automobile for the model year 1984. While it looks like a bloated Ford Country Squire and calls itself a wagon—the “Magic Wagon,” in ads—the Voyager is really the death knell for the station wagon, the fixture of every South Brook driveway only a few years ago. The Voyager is a kind of van—also sold as a Dodge Caravan, the name a double entendre suggesting it’s part car, part van. But really, it’s a smaller version of the van I wanted in the ’70s, the kind that had wall-to-wall carpeting, a tinted bubble window, and a mural painted on the side—a wolf howling at the moon. The Voyager is a miniature van. A minivan.
All these wood-paneled boxes—television, cable box, minivan—designed to transport, to take us away from our humdrum present, to move us from where we are now to a place less ordinary. I want to leave home, I suppose—run off the pages of 1984, like that stick figure whose physique I share—but mostly I want to stay, and I’ve heard very few pop songs about teenagers wanting to stay. “She’s Not Leaving Home”? “We Don’t Gotta Get Outta This Place”? I feel myself, with every passing week, walking the plank into adulthood, nudged at sword point another foot closer to the drop.
Jim, the oldest of the five Rushin children, graduated last spring from Providence College. In the final hockey game of his career, the Friars lost 2–0 to Wisconsin in the NCAA semifinals in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Weeks later, at Jim’s graduation, Dad gave him the Golden Handshake, officially absolving Don Rushin of any future financial responsibility for his firstborn. With that, Jim vanished from sight. He shares a house in the city of my birth, Elmhurst, Illinois, and works in the business office of the Sheraton Hotel near O’Hare Airport. Where once he gave me the 99 Bump—99 shots to my sternum with a raised knuckle on his right fist—he now gives me unsolicited presents: most recently, from the accounting office of the Sheraton, the autograph of hotel guest Ivan Lendl. The dour tennis champion from Czechoslovakia signed the translucent onionskin imprint of his American Express card, unaware that it would be sent to a seventeen-year-old boy in Minnesota, who keeps it in a Tretorn shoebox in his closet. It is a small comfort to have access, should I ever need it, to the vast fortune of a four-time Grand Slam runner-up.
My two younger siblings remain under our roof, a roof still spangled with sporting goods—the dry-docked Frisbees and guttered tennis balls that are already becoming a relic of a rapidly fading era in the Rushin yard and driveway.
In a few months, Amy will complete her nine-year stretch at Nativity—a.k.a. Captivity—the Catholic K through 8 whose desktops bear the scratched initials of three previous Rushin children. She already has one foot in Holy Angels, the Catholic high school, where she’ll be a cheerleader, performing on ice skates between periods of boys’ hockey games. One night, doing the splits at the blue line, she’ll remain there, adhered to the freshly Zambonied ice, crotch frozen to the rink like a tongue to a lamppost. Her complicated removal will involve hot water and a putty knife.
John is in fifth grade at Nativity. In one more year, Mom and Dad
will allow him to bail and become the first Rushin to attend public junior high school, whose girls will routinely phone our house late at night, asking for “Johnny.” Dad will wake from a blubbering coma to answer his bedside phone and hear a giggling high-pitched voice purr: “Is Johnny there?” A comic-strip stream of ampersands and exclamation marks will issue from Dad’s mouth before he slams down the receiver of his Band Aid–colored Ma Bell telephone. Its blunt handset weighs three pounds. That phone, an instrument of authority, is already antiquated next to the push-button, plastic models of modernity. On New Year’s Day, Ma Bell was “broken up,” smashed to pieces like a false idol.
It isn’t just Jim, Tom, Amy, John, Ma Bell, and me—everyone is moving on, matriculating in one way or another. When Mom asked me last year where I wanted to go to college I said, “The U,” as the University of Minnesota is known here. It’s a few miles away and as far from home as I care to imagine living. If the biggest rock star on the planet—bigger even than Diamond Dave—has stayed in Minnesota, why shouldn’t I? Some girls from Kennedy claim they’ll be in the movie Prince filmed here last summer, dancing in front of the stage down at First Avenue. They’re waiting for this summer’s release of Purple Rain to see if they made the cut.
“I like Hollywood,” Prince said on TV, “but I like Minnesota better.” Nobody in Minnesota has any desire to live anywhere else. But my inertia is particularly acute, for while I like Minnesota, I like my particular corner of it—the maroon love seat in our family room—even better. Maroon is right. I am marooned here, as on a desert island.
Dad comes home from work one evening and announces some news he heard on Sid Hartman’s WCCO sports update. Tom Copa, the football and basketball star at Coon Rapids High School, has decided to play college basketball at Marquette University in Milwaukee.