by Steve Rushin
Some guests at the adjacent Ramada Inn have a view of the gigantic screen and—if we’re to believe the rumors, and we always believe the rumors—so do some houses in the neighborhood behind the theater, where a boy roused from sleep at 11 p.m. might idly part his bedroom curtains to find, outside his window, a naked woman looming over his house in 70-millimeter Cinerama.
As we drive north on France, into ritzy Edina, past the condos and glass office buildings, a police car cruises south, on the other side of the median. The driver looks at us as we pass, and then makes a U-turn at a break in the median, so that he’s two hundred yards behind us. We’re going the speed limit, forty-five, but now Martin, his eyes in the rearview mirror, accelerates and changes lanes. The cop behind us does the same.
Martin has prior moving violations and would like to avoid another. “Cops” is all he says.
“Cops,” “heat,” “fuzz.” These are our names for officers of the law. Most of what we know about them comes from TV: the pressed uniforms and gleaming badges of T. J. Hooker, the hood rolls executed by Starsky and Hutch, the fat, indolent Murray the Cop in reruns of The Odd Couple, still one of my favorite shows because Oscar Madison is a sportswriter living in a sprawling Park Avenue apartment, and as far as I know that’s something that can happen in real life.
Seeing the cops in the wing mirror, I fear an imminent besmirching of my Permanent Record.
“It will go down on your Permanent Record,” Mom is fond of warning me even now, to preempt any indiscretion I might be contemplating. A Permanent Record is the list—recorded on parchment or stone, something venerable and timeless—enumerating a child’s many sins, sins that may not be expiated even by Catholic confession, sins that even God can’t fix.
Martin accelerates to fifty-five and turns right, hangs a Rodney off of France, heading over to York, which can take us into Southdale the back way. The police car, which has maintained pace with us, also hangs a Rodney, and when Martin accelerates again to put distance between us, the cop turns on his red and blue lights—his cherries and berries, as I’ve heard them called on TV—and I am frightened and relieved in equal measure, for while we’re being pulled over at least this police pursuit will end with a speeding ticket.
Except that it doesn’t end. Martin hangs another Rodney while running a red light, and Miles shouts, “What is happening?”
“I’m gonna lose my license!” Martin says.
“Pull over!”
“I can’t!”
Everything I know about police chases I know from TV and the movies, and this one is going remarkably to script. The cop car’s siren is wailing. A second car is now in pursuit. On our way to the Southdale mall, we’ve stumbled into a high-speed police chase, for no reason that we can think of, though I’m privately wondering in the back seat if the police have discovered the duct tape on the door latch of theater 4 at the multiplex.
“Pull over,” I plead, while Martin hangs a Rodney, then a Louie, and pulls into the parking lot of the Embassy Suites hotel on the western end of the Strip, only to find there is no exit. He stops the car with a screech, so that the only sound is the buzzing in our ears and “Karma Chameleon” on WLOL and an angry voice on a bullhorn saying, “Raise your hands to the ceiling and remain in the vehicle.”
I notice he said “Raise your hands to the ceiling,” not “Put your hands up” or “Reach for the sky” or any number of phrases we used playing cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians when we were kids, not all that long ago.
We press our sweaty palms to the fabric of the ceiling.
“Remain in the vehicle,” the bullhorn orders. It doesn’t say, “Freeze!” We were playing it wrong all those years with our cap guns and cowboy hats. I want to be that little boy again, or even the boy I was a half hour ago, at home with my Strat-O-Matic.
The four officers from two cars surround us. They open all four doors and pull each of us out, instructing us to place our hands behind our heads. Each one of us gets our own cop. We’re paired off like dance partners. Miles gets a woman; he’ll never hear the end of it. Martin surrenders his keys and invites them to inspect the trunk. They pop it open. I half expect five more of our friends to pop out and make a run for the Mann France Avenue Drive-In. The cops, likewise, expect to see something illicit, bundled drugs, perhaps, or bricks of cash. But all they see is a jack, jumper cables, a snow brush, and a spare tire, the usual cargo of the Minnesota sedan.
Inspecting the interior of the car also reveals nothing, save for eight moist palm-print stains in the soft fabric of the ceiling.
“Why were you fleeing us if you had nothing to hide?” the driver of the first cop car asks Martin.
“Why were you chasing us?” Martin reasonably asks, in what rapidly becomes a chicken-or-the-egg conundrum.
“You were rubbernecking me,” the officer says.
Martin explains his fear that he would lose his license if he was caught driving one mile over the speed limit, a fear that now appears to have been well-founded and self-fulfilling.
The police radio squawks. Our faces are bathed in the blue and red lights, revolving, at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. Guests are gathered at the hotel entrance and peering through upper-floor windows to rubberneck us, the alleged rubberneckers. My hands are still raised behind my head, though at least this position allows me to air out my equatorial armpits.
I keep waiting for them to say they’re taking us “downtown,” while wondering where exactly downtown Bloomington is. In the ’70s, when Dad bought a famously unreliable wood-paneled Ford LTD Country Squire station wagon at Freeway Ford, it came with a complimentary pop record, a 45 called “Downtown Bloomington,” whose protagonist was told to meet a girl in the center of our suburb: “She said, ‘Go to downtown Bloomington, that’s a great place to go.’ / But where is Downtown Bloomington, nobody seems to know…”
But we won’t be “booked” downtown. After fifteen minutes, a cop asks Miles, Ope, and me if we have someplace nearby we can walk to. Or failing that, he says with a straight face, would we prefer a ride home?
I see Mom, devastated, as the squad car pulls into the driveway. I type it out on my left thigh: D-E-V-A-S-T-A-T-E-D. Another left-handed word.
“We’ll walk,” the three of us say in unison.
Martin is being “detained.” With a backward glance—relief masquerading as sympathy—the rest of us set out for Ope’s house, a mile away. They never read us our Miranda rights. We don’t get fingerprinted. A rogue cop like Animal on Hill Street Blues doesn’t threaten to bite off my nose while calling me a “hair bag.” The only TV police trope we’ve encountered is the female officer who frisked Miles.
“Was that Cagney or Lacey?” I ask him as we jog south through the Target parking lot toward Ope’s house.
“It wasn’t Heather Locklear,” Miles says, of T. J. Hooker’s rookie colleague. “Officer Stacy Sheridan can frisk me any day.”
To make light of the terror we all just felt but cannot acknowledge, we imagine being frisked by various fictional policewomen: Sergeant Pepper Anderson from Police Woman. Any one of Charlie’s angels. Officer Bonnie Clark on CHiPs.
From Ope’s house, I walk the three miles back to South Brook, emerging from the park across the street into my own driveway like Shackleton returning to base from his Antarctic misadventure. All told, I’ve been gone three hours, or about how long it takes to see a matinee. When I finally walk through the front door, wearing a look of practiced ennui, Dad is dozing in front of the TV and Mom is watering the houseplants. I’m relieved that she doesn’t ask why I’ve walked home from a place to which I had been driven. But more than that, I’m relieved to be arriving home by any means other than a squad car, with nothing whatsoever on my Permanent Record.
“How was the movie?” Mom says, tending to her spider plants and philodendrons.
“Okay.”
“Just okay?”
“Funny, I guess.”
Taking them four at a t
ime, it’s three strides up the stairs, then three more to my room, where I lie on my bed. It’s still too small but suddenly feels just right.
3.
Simply Waste the Day Away
In these moments, I think of John, eleven years old, sleeping in my old room, and I envy him his trivial pursuits, among them Trivial Pursuit and the other board games that fill our basement cabinet, with fewer takers each year, as the required participants on the box (“4 to 6 Players”) exceed the number of kids in our house.
Our house. It’s no longer the house in “Our House,” where “there’s always something happening and it’s usually quite loud.”
Some days I’m home from school before John and Amy and can hear a clock ticking on a basement shelf. The clock is an executive award presented to Dad, with a brass plate on it engraved with his name and the acronym of some trade organization. If Mom is out running errands and isn’t playing her Cats original-cast recording cassette in the kitchen, or listening to Steve Cannon on The Cannon Mess on WCCO, then all I hear is the clock ticking, and the compressor of the basement fridge kicking on and off.
On those days, it’s a relief to hear the Nativity bus go by, and thirty seconds later John’s footsteps on the kitchen linoleum upstairs. In some ways, he is who I was, in thrall to whatever sport is in season. John plays baseball all summer in two Franklin batting gloves—they have to be Franklin—and real eye black. Mom used to burn a cork and smear it on my cheeks for eye black. She used the same technique to give me a dirty face and five-o’clock shadow when I dressed as a “bum” for Halloween. But John has some authentic, professional-grade eye black bought at Kokesh, probably during Kokesh Krazy Days, when “Prices at Kokesh go kompletely krazy” and everything is deeply discounted, and we ransack the bins on the sidewalk for shirts with subtly botched sponsor names. You can get a sweet basketball jersey for a couple of bucks if you don’t mind that the back says MURPHY’S PUBIC HOUSE.
John’s a good athlete. He plays football in the fall, too big to carry the ball so he’s on the offensive and defensive lines. Right now, he’s still playing hockey in mid-spring. The kids wear the colors of their high school district, so John has the Kennedy jacket. Mom dutifully sews on his tournament patches: SQUIRT CLASSIC. PEEWEE SHOWDOWN. SILVER STICK. Youth hockey players look like decorated soldiers. “John” is stitched in script on the front of the jacket, though Tom and I and all our friends call him Junie, short for Junior.
At Nativity recess, John plays Smear the Queer, in which you kill the guy with the ball until he coughs it up. It’s always best in winter and spring, when the snow and padded snow clothes soften the impact of getting tackled. John’s pal Mike Broiles has his pants and shirt ripped so frequently by the baying mob that his mom has to drive on a near-daily basis to Nativity all the way from PWB—Prestigious West Bloomington, as they say in the real-estate ads on the radio—to deliver spare uniform pants and shirts.
I picture Broiles sitting in the office shirtless and bloody but uncomplaining, waiting for Mrs. Broiles to resupply him with a fresh uniform. Nothing has changed at Nativity. The ladies in the office, the nurses and the secretary and the principal, take it all in their stride. John still goes in on Monday mornings to find the CCD kids have stolen pens and erasers from his desk.
On Saturday afternoons, when we go to four o’clock Mass at Nativity, the school across the parking lot looks shrunken. I imagine the eyes of the parish are on me as I walk up for communion, head bowed, in my Kennedy letter jacket, purchased with great ceremony at Westwood Skate and Bike: The navy wool body with the navy leather sleeves, and the letter B—navy, trimmed in gold—on the right breast. Made of felt and chenille. “Kennedy” in script on the middle bar of the B. A gold basketball pinned to the letter. And sewn to the right sleeve, just below the shoulder, that navy-and-gold “84.”
I do the math. John will be in the Class of ’91, a decade so distant—the nineties—as to be science fiction. He’ll essentially be a kid forever, and I envy him. John spends his summer days playing ping-pong and box hockey at Parks and Rec, my old summer hangout in the otherwise-empty Hillcrest Elementary School across the street. But he’s also a frequent visitor of the high dive at Valley View, the municipal pool on 90th Street. I never had the balls to climb the ladder to the top of the high dive, much less jump off it, ten meters down into a pool that must look from the platform like a footbath. But John doesn’t just jump off; he dives. “So the water doesn’t go up my nose and drown my brain,” he explains, a persistent fear of his that I do nothing to dispel.
My irrational fears of age eleven (quicksand, killer bees, lake sharks) have grown into the rational fears of seventeen: girls, military draft, nuclear annihilation. On a Sunday night a few months ago, I sat in the basement and watched The Day After on ABC while Mom, upstairs, watched part one of the seven-part NBC blockbuster miniseries Kennedy, starring Martin Sheen as JFK, assassinated twenty years ago to the week. The Day After was terrifying from the get-go, the dread building from its opening disclaimer: “Because the graphic depiction of the effects of a nuclear war may not be suitable for younger children, parental discretion is advised.”
The paper suggested no one under twelve should watch, so John was exonerated while Amy and I cowered beneath two afghans knitted by Grandma Boyle and watched Jason Robards try in vain to save his fellow citizens from the nuclear warheads raining down on Kansas. Cows grazed and bees flitted in a final tableau of life-on-earth-as-we-knew-it. The Emergency Broadcast System sounded its shrill alarm, but this was not a test. The ensuing horror of locals getting liquefied by the Russkies was so terrifying that I feared I would need Mike Broiles’s mom to bring me a clean pair of pants. The prime-time hellscape of charred bodies and irradiated skin would have been unbearable if not for the North Stars–Black Hawks game on channel 9, and my pressing need to check that score from time to time.
After two hours of unremitting bleakness on channel 5, Robards returned to the ruin of his family home, fired up his homemade radio—I was reminded of the Professor from Gilligan’s Island, and the jerry-rigged radio’s central role in survival—and pleaded over a black screen: “Hello? Is there anybody there? Anybody at all?” The only answer was a slow scroll, white on black: “The catastrophic events you have just witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States. It is hoped that the images of this film will inspire the nations of the earth, their people and leaders, to find the means to avert the fateful day.”
One hundred million Americans watched The Day After. It left me utterly bereft, though there was some consolation when Neal Broten notched the game winner for the North Stars with two minutes and twenty-three seconds left at Chicago Stadium. By the time The Bud Grant Show came on channel 4 at 10:30 to break down the Vikings’ win in Pittsburgh that afternoon, enough was still right and true and familiar in the world that I could face the night alone, or at the very least in the company of Steely Dan on the boom box. But not Prince: “Everybody’s got a bomb, we could all die any day…”
John doesn’t listen to music on the other side of the wall. His dreams are untroubled by The Day After. On nights he does watch TV, he basks in the cathode-ray glow of Happy Days and Diff’rent Strokes and Mrs. Garrett’s other show, The Facts of Life, and, on Saturday nights when he can stay up later, The Love Boat and Fantasy Island back-to-back on channel 5. I still love these shows too.
John has no desire to be “out” on a weekend night, nor any anxiety that he is the only one among his friends who is home, watching TV with Mom and Dad. This is precisely where and with whom he wants to be, without embarrassment for now.
I’ve spent my whole life wanting to be older, and now that I’m on the cusp of adulthood, I envy my little brother.
There are parties most weekend nights at Kwai Chang’s house. Kwai Chang was David Carradine’s character on Kung Fu, a show that’s been off the air for nine yea
rs. I don’t know how our Kwai Chang got his nickname, or what his real name is. But I’m exceedingly uncomfortable at these or any other parties. I’ve never drunk a beer and I have no intention of starting now, pounding Hamm’s beneath a bare bulb in Kwai Chang’s garage, not because I’m morally abstemious but because I’m underage and don’t want to get in trouble. “Stay out of trouble” are Mom and Dad’s parting words when Tom goes out, but not when I do. On the contrary, they’re surprised and delighted when I go out, and their expressions seem to say: Get into trouble.
Kwai Chang was thrown through the picture window of his house while playing poker—his defenestrator thought he was dealing from the bottom of the deck—and now the window is boarded up. I don’t have the sangfroid to get into that kind of trouble and brush it off, like shattered glass from my shoulders.
Adam Ant—adamant—is singing about me: “Don’t drink, don’t smoke—what do you do?”
What I do is bowl. To give it an ironic cool, Mike and Oly and Z and I say we’re “rolling the rock,” as in “Man, wanna roll the rock?” The best nights out are when I get that call, to go to Airport Bowl, on the Strip by Airport Beach, for there will be laughter, semi-athletic competition, and the chance to witness criminal damage to property—from some patron comically heaving a fifteen-pound bowling ball into an adjacent lane or through a drop-ceiling panel. At least once a night Z will chase Oly across the parking lot while swinging a sixteen-pound Ebonite at him like a wrecking ball as the manager meekly implores both of them to remove their rented shoes before taking their dispute outside. The manager would likewise prefer we not write our names on the scorecard, visible for everyone to see on the overhead display, as “Hugh Jass” or “Ben Dover.” But a quick scan of the adjacent scoreboards reveals an unbroken line of Mike Hunts, Phil McCrackens, and Seymour Buttses.