by Steve Rushin
Gator was a short, red-haired force of nature who Dad said, even when we were eight years old, was the toughest kid on our Bloomington Athletic Association football team. “Little Danny,” as Dad still calls him, has become a muscled, indomitable wrestler, tops in his weight class in the state. Eating our sliders at Whitey’s, we speculate on Gator’s weight-lifting limits and wonder who the strongest kid at Kennedy might be. And then it happens. Gator lifts his butt from his seat and grimaces as if preparing to stage-fart. But no, his hands are gripping the edges of the table. After a weight lifter’s grunt, he stands and rips the table from its moorings. There’s a clatter of floor tile where the table has been uprooted like a tree. The manager shouts at us to stay where we are while he summons Barney. We sprint for the powder-blue sanctuary of the Bonneville Brougham, careful to grab our food, as Barney fast-walks after us with a slider in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other, shouting at Gator that he’s “banned for life!” Whether the ban applies to this Whitey’s only or every turreted castle in the realm remains unclear, but Barney is now squinting at the Bonnie, attempting to memorize Dr. Terry McCollow’s license plate.
In the parking lot, the muscle bikes of my grade school years—the Schwinn Sting-Rays and CCM Mustangs and Huffy Rail Dragsters—have morphed into muscle cars: Firebirds and Thunderturds and Trans Ams.
The lettering on the lit-up White Castle sign—an Old English font—is the same as that on the many heavy-metal concert T-shirts inside the Castle itself: Motörhead or Mötley Crüe. I’ve come to think of sliders as heavy-metal hamburgers.
We sprint through the parking lot, beneath that beacon of a White Castle sign. My heart is hammering. For a moment, I think Barney might throw himself on the hood before we can drive away. I picture him sprawled there, spread-eagled, like the Screaming Chicken on a Trans Am.
But Barney doesn’t have the speed or agility of a Starsky or Hutch. He’s approaching at a stately pace as we dive into the Bonnie.
“He’s calling for backup!” I yell at Mike, as Barney says something into his radio.
“He’s calling for ketchup.” Mike laughs, turning the key as the Bonneville purrs to life. We lurch onto Lyndale Avenue, squealing along with the tires, as the Crusaders resume singing “Street Life” on the Pioneer tape deck, and I alone cower beneath the window line, hoping not to be ID’d.
One block from the Castle, the Bonnie is filled with laughter and adrenaline. It smells of fear and diced onions. In thirty minutes I’ll be snug in bed, every nerve end still buzzing. None of us will say it out loud, but we all wish this moment could continue indefinitely. Nights in White Castle, never reaching the end.
2.
We’re the Kids in America
Tucked up in my twin bed, the satin cuff of the Sears blanket soft on my skin like a mother’s touch, I can see—through the uprights of my size 12 feet—my little homework desk beyond the foot of the shrinking bed.
The Gettysburg Address, in Jim’s unmistakable printing, is still Scotch-taped to the woodlike veneer of the bookshelf overhanging the desk, the notebook paper having yellowed in the five years since Jim had to memorize it at Lincoln High School. Jim repeatedly rendered those three words—“Lincoln High School”—in bubble letters in the margins of the famous speech. These doodles are a souvenir of his days as a high school hockey star, idling away the hours in American History. Jim is left-handed so all his writing leans backward instead of forward, each letter looking like the guy in the leather chair in the Maxell tape ad being blown back by his own speakers—hair, tie, lampshade, martini glass, all in retreat against some powerful sonic wind. Dad hates that ad because it’s famous and Maxell is a competitor. He issues a long sigh whenever he finds in my room a mix tape, borrowed from a friend, recorded on Maxell or Sony or TDK. He makes it clear that Scotch brand recording tape would have rendered, in far higher fidelity, these “Sweet Toons of Summer ’83.”
Why the Gettysburg Address is still on display on my desk I cannot say, except that it used to be Jim’s desk, and anything on it remains there with the approval of Mom, whose otherwise fanatical cleaning sometimes sees cash, baseball cards, and other valuables dispatched to the wastebasket in her daily rounds, like innocent bystanders swept up in a police raid. She likes having the Gettysburg Address around, a reminder of our once-full house.
On the two bookshelves above the desk, where Mom’s Royal typewriter is on permanent display, resides my growing collection of stolen books, some permanently borrowed from Mike McCollow’s brother’s basement bedroom while Tim McCollow is off at college.
I’m not amassing stolen goods so much as assembling a stage set. This small collection of books, just enough to fill a single shelf, is really a backdrop for the kind of author photo I’ve seen on the dust jackets of some of the other books on the shelf—guy jauntily leaning on typewriter, book spines displayed behind him—just in case I write one someday.
In the back of these paperbacks are checklists of still more books that I want. All I have to do is cut out the coupon at the bottom of the page, stick it in an envelope with $1.50 in cash for The Bad News Bears by Richard Woodley, add 35 cents for postage and handling, and mail it to Dell Books, PO Box 1000, Pine Brook, NJ 07058. In eight short weeks, the book will appear in my mailbox as if by magic.
Not every one of my books is stolen. My friend Ope—Keith Opatz—has discovered a dumpster behind B. Dalton Bookseller at the Southdale mall into which the manager tosses unwanted books. Each of their covers has been torn off and returned to the publisher as evidence of the book’s unsellability. And so Ope has dumpster-dived for the annual editions of The Complete Handbook of Pro Basketball, with its pithy put-downs of lumbering white guys, including disheveled Rich Kelley of the Phoenix Suns, whose scouting report includes the burn “Hair by Weedeater.”
The books are edited by Zander Hollander, whose name I can’t see without thinking of Xaviera Hollander, author of The Happy Hooker, whose 1975 film adaptation has yet to appear in TV Week, though I know from Johnny Carson’s monologue that the memoir got her kicked out of the United States.
I can now stay up to see Carson whenever I like, though I still have to pretend not to understand certain jokes, as when his turbaned alter ego, Carnac the Magnificent, divines the contents of an envelope by holding it to his forehead:
Carnac says, “Lassie, King Tutankhamen, and the Happy Hooker.”
He tears open the envelope, removes a card, and reads, “Name a mutt, a Tut, and a slut.”
Uproarious laughter from the studio audience in Burbank. Dad gazing into the distance as if he hasn’t heard what Johnny just said, father and son sharing an unspoken pact to pretend we’re oblivious to something—the word “slut,” but also the word “hooker”—the kind of thing that might be said at school or on scrambled cable but never in your own family room on “free TV.” It’s a construction that would have been entirely redundant just last week: “free TV.”
“Free” is our guiding ethos. When Return of the Jedi came out and kids openly skipped school to line up outside the Southtown Theatre under the baleful gaze of God and TV news crews, Ope and I regarded them as fools. We walked right into the opulent lobby, stacked our quarters on adjacent arcade games, and pretended to play Frogger and Gorf for a plausible fifteen minutes before asking the ancient ticket taker for permission to use the bathroom just beyond the velvet ropes.
Ope and I occupied adjoining stalls for thirty minutes, until the rabble were allowed in, after which we melted into the crowd filing into the darkened theater and sat at the back, mesmerized.
Other days we spring for one three-dollar ticket and open the fire door inside the theater to let five friends in, briefly piercing the theater with a rectangle of light. Or we duct-tape the door latch, a trick we learned from The Rockford Files, so we can pull it open from the outside, our fingertips grappling for purchase in the gaps at the bottom of the door. At theater 4 at the Southdale multiplex, our piece of duct tape remains in place
for weeks, allowing us to see whatever is playing there. This week that means Michael Caine in Blame It on Rio, Dudley Moore in Unfaithfully Yours, and a movie called Angel, whose poster tagline gives away the plot: “High school honor student by day, Hollywood hooker by night.”
The suspense on the screen competes with the suspense in our seats. Will another patron narc on us? Will an usher’s flashlight beam fall on me, like the searchlight in a prison yard in the very escape movie I’m watching?
We even play free basketball at the Y, approaching the front desk one by one and telling them we lost our membership card, at which time we’re allowed to rummage around in a basket full of lost membership cards and choose one with the most distant expiration date.
The Y is full of red-faced forty-year-old men on their lunch breaks, bald middle managers in headbands, aging athletes in knee sleeves, glasses secured to their scalps by neoprene Croakies. Ope wears three pairs of socks, two wristbands, and Curtis Js, sweatpants jaggedly cut off at the knees in the style of Curtis Jackson in The White Shadow. Mike plays in a knit beanie. He hits a three in the face of a middle-aged defender and then Benny-Hills the man, patting him on his bald head, as Benny does to an old geezer in every episode of The Benny Hill Show.
But we also find a full basketball court in the rafters of a barn on the campus of Bethany College of Missions, a private Christian school on Auto Club Road, and let ourselves in late at night. We usually stride with confidence through the open front door—there’s a poolroom and lounge on the main floor—but when it’s locked we climb a ladder to the upper barn door, the former hayloft, and climb in like burglars.
In the stifling heat of that airless space, we play for hours, for free basketball is our God-given right. The barn roof slopes so low in the corners that a baseline jumper is impossible. The baselines themselves are flush with the walls on which the baskets are mounted, so we can use the wall as a vertical ramp and run up it for monster dunks. The ball and my boom box provide a double bass line. “They’re playin’ basss-ket-ballll,” Kurtis Blow’s background singers wail. “We love that basss-ket-ballll.”
We speak in urban playground slang that is out of place in a barn on a campus of missionaries. We shoot the J. We dish the rock and call for the pill. We throw down sweet jams. We don’t jump, we sky. We don’t block shots, we erase that shit. Most of the slang we’ve picked up from books: Rick Telander’s Heaven Is a Playground, checked out from the Penn Lake Library and never returned, and something called The In-Your-Face Basketball Book, by two white guys named Alexander Wolff and Chuck Wielgus Jr. I ordered it from B. Dalton in eighth grade. Ten agonizing days later, the store called to say it was in. Mom drove me there, $7.95 in birthday money burning a hole in my pocket. I read half the book’s 187 pages on the car ride home. It contains everything a suburban white kid needs to act and speak and dress like a black teenager from what after-school specials always call the “inner city,” including a glossary of slang and street fashion tips, not to mention intricate shoelace-tying patterns, which I immediately emulate.
“That’s it?” Mom said when I finished the book an hour after purchasing it. “That didn’t last long.”
“I’ll read it again,” I promised. And I have, over and over.
My appetite for basketball and books is exceeded only by my appetite for food. At the Shakey’s Bunch of Lunch buffet, we stack tottering towers of pizza slices and chicken wings on our plates. Whenever a Shakey’s employee delivers a fresh pizza to the buffet, we are waiting for her, fogging the sneeze guard with our heavy breathing, ready to denude the silver pan of every slice. Our bottomless cups of soda are never emptied. We drain their Pepsi reserves. And we do all of this for $3.37.
We never dine and dash. We eschew the chew and screw. Still, at the twenty-four-hour diner inside Byerly’s grocery store, where we sometimes go late on a Friday night while the heat cools off at White Castle, we order bacon and eggs and sausage and toast and always—always—“twelve grape jellies” on the side. The waitress complies, and we eat the jelly packets as a free side order, using the toast as a jelly-delivery system.
Every meal is a banquet. There’s a Burger King across from JFK, and a girl who works there has a crush on Mike, so she hands us, through the drive-through window, a contraband stack of one hundred trivia scratch-off cards. We hit on almost all of them, scoring thirty Whoppers, two dozen large fries, and nine chocolate shakes. We deplete the cards in two weekends. By myself, I can put away twenty White Castles in a single sitting, whole frozen pizzas, and an almost limitless number of Steak-umm sandwiches, thin translucent layers of meatlike product that I lay out on paper towels, top with sliced Velveeta, press between two halves of a roll, and nuke until the microwave dings like my typewriter, the whole thing tasting of salt and moist paper towel.
“You’re eating me out of house and home” has always been Mom’s redundant phrase. “Where are you putting it all?” A year after getting my driver’s license, I’m six foot five and weigh 175 pounds.
I’m now working during the school year at Met Center arena, popcorn vending during Minnesota North Stars hockey games and occasional concerts. My reticence to shout in public makes me a good boy but a terrible vendor. I walk up and down the steeply staired aisles in a green polyester smock and matching visor with a pin on its crown that says “$1.25.” There is literally a price on my head, but I also feel as if there’s a metaphorical one, for I wander the arena trying to go unnoticed.
I look for raised hands without ever shouting “Popcorn!” until one night I’m told by a supervisor that I have to hawk the goods. I am still looking, in the manner of an auctioneer, for the smallest twitch from a fan—a woman stretching her arms, perhaps—as a demand for my popcorn.
I need a patter, a rap, and decide to shout “Pop-CORN,” with the emphasis on the second syllable, “corn,” to distinguish me from guys who are selling pop—Coke and Sprite. Except that I’m hawking popcorn in Bugs Bunny Brooklynese circa 1940: “Pop-CAWN! Getcha pop-CAWN HEAH!”
It is unfortunate that my maiden call of “Pop-CAWN” comes just as Kenny Rogers—bestriding the Met Center stage like a rhinestoned colossus—begins singing his hit ballad “Lady.”
“Lay-deee,” Kenny begins.
“Pop-CAWN!”
“I’m your knight in shining armor…”
“Getcha pop-CAWN heah!”
“And I love youuuuu…”
“Pop-CAWN!”
The catcalls that rain down on me do little for my self-confidence: “Be quiet!” “We can’t hear Kenny!” “Hey, Orville Redenbacher, shut the hell up!”
I’m shamed by the Gambler’s middle-aged groupies, and warned by one man that if I do not desist I will need a surgeon to remove his pointy-toed lizard-skin cowboy boot from my rectum. At North Stars games, I receive similar abuse when blocking the sight lines during a Norris Division donnybrook, so I return to wandering the stands in silence, simultaneously hoping to be noticed while trying to disappear, the way I am around girls and other strangers.
North Stars rookie defenseman Randy Velischek was a teammate of Jim’s at Providence. Twenty-two years old and far from his hometown of Montreal, he comes to dinner at our house in Bloomington, even though he plays in the National goddamn Hockey League, where his job is to prevent Wayne Gretzky and Bernie Federko and Michel Goulet from scoring on Stars goalie Donny Beaupre. My God, the names in the National Hockey League! The North Stars have Dino Ciccarelli and Willi Plett. Willi, without the e, the way some girls at school have gone from Sandy to Sandi or Nancy to Nanci. I wonder if Willi dots the i’s with smiley faces, the way girls do when signing yearbooks. Other people’s yearbooks, obviously, for I solicit yearbook signatures the way I solicit popcorn sales: in silence, hoping in vain they will come to me.
There’s a real NHL referee whose magnificent name—Swede Knox—has become a euphemism among my friends for a lady’s bosom. In the kind of Navajo code talk that we often employ, “Swede Knox” is a thinl
y disguised stand-in for “sweet knockers,” which derives from a memorable comment that a barber made when I was ten years old. Poised above my scalp with comb and shears, he paused to gaze through the shop window at a woman walking across the parking lot at Penn Lake Plaza. With a wistful tone in his voice, he said to no one in particular: “Would ya look at the knockers on that gal.” After a reverential moment of silence, he returned to snipping at my scalp.
The mention of Swede Knox on an NHL telecast always brings an illicit thrill, but so do other sports names, including Börje Salming, the great defenseman for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Hearing his name, I think of Gutzon Borglum, designer of Mount Rushmore, as I learned in a baseball book by Roger Kahn. “Gutzon Borglum,” went one line I can quote by heart, “sounds like a fart in a bathtub.”
I didn’t know you could write like this. Roger Angell, in a baseball book I bought with my own money at B. Dalton—Late Innings, $3.95 for the paperback, or two shines of Dad’s wingtips—likens Reggie Jackson swapping the orange tops of the Baltimore Orioles for Yankee pinstripes to “Clark Gable no longer in the Klondike or on the China seas but entering a drawing room in a dinner jacket.” Royals rookie Joe Zdeb has a surname that is “the last draw in a Scrabble game.”
I love how the surname of Twins rookie Tim Teufel is German for “devil,” and the surname of Blue Jays pitcher Jim Gott is German for “God,” so that Gott pitching to Teufel is a Teutonic battle of good and evil. Perhaps I’m overthinking it, but all of baseball—the names, statistics, ballparks, uniforms, logos, and objects—are a self-contained universe, with a language that sings: Dubble Bubble bubble gum, twi-nite doubleheaders, Rawlings gloves with the Edge-U-Cated Heel. I stopped playing organized baseball after ninth grade, after taking a one-hopper to the eye while playing third base, having already given my front teeth to the game. I no longer want to play major-league baseball; I want to write about it, use its names and characters as modeling clay.