by Steve Rushin
From my concession stand, a small patch of right field is visible. Every once in a while, Tom Brunansky will run across it in pursuit of a fly ball. For three seconds at a time, a dozen times a night, I get to know the right fielders of the American League: Dwight Evans, Larry Parrish, Harold Baines, Saint Paul’s own Dave Winfield, George Bell, and the exquisitely named Rusty Kuntz.
Across the polished concrete floor of the Metrodome concourse is a door that blends in with the wall. This is the entrance to the press box, and I spend most of every three-hour game wondering how I can bridge the endless forty feet from this workplace to that one.
For now I tong hot dogs from a Roller Grill into buns, roll the dogged buns into foil, stack the wrapped dogs like cordwood in a stainless-steel warming drawer, and sell them when the revolving doors to the Metrodome are unlocked. I pull beers, dispense pops, and pump molten nacho “cheez” with the viscosity of 40-weight motor oil into the little nacho-cheez hot tub in the corner of the tray. Every time I depress the cheez plunger, I imagine I’m buzzing in with an answer at the start of Family Feud. Dad and I still watch it after dinner at 6:30 and howl at the answers.
“Do you believe these bozos?” Dad says.
Richard Dawson: “During what month of pregnancy does a woman start to look pregnant?”
Bozo: “September.”
Dawson: “Name an animal that has three letters in its name.”
Bozo: “Frog.”
With the exception of ABC’s annual airing of Brian’s Song, it’s the only time I see Dad cry, nearly hyperventilating with laughter at Family Feud.
When the Twins are on the road, true to my word, I get another job, this one at “the Thumb,” our local branch of the Tom Thumb chain of superette convenience stores, whose mascot is an elf. Not an elf like Ernie Keebler, of the Keebler Company, whose headquarters in a hollow tree was in Elmhurst, Illinois, when I was born there nearly eighteen years ago; nor is it Hermey, the misfit elf and aspiring dentist in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Rather, the elfin mascot of the Thumb is there to sell cartons of Salems, copies of Penthouse, and six-packs of three-two Pabst Blue Ribbon to Bloomington’s thirsty, horny, Marlboro-jonesing citizenry.
I work from four to midnight scooping Polka Dot ice cream into cones for kids coming straight from baseball practice wearing the same uniforms of the Bloomington Athletic Association that I used to wear. I sell hot dogs from the little hot dog Ferris wheel on the checkout counter, as distinct from the Roller Grill at the Dome. I imagine a little hot dog amusement park, like Minnesota’s own Valleyfair but devoted to rides exclusively for wieners: Roller Grill, Ferris wheel, log flume. So much of my work night is devoted to daydreaming.
Occasionally, friends come into the Thumb and stroll past the register with a wave. “Hey, man!” They leave the store with frozen pizza-shaped goiters or six-pack-sized tumors under their shirts. The next day, the manager will tell me, before leaving for the night, that the till was $14.32 short on my previous shift. I’ll plead ignorance. And then I’ll get busy “fronting” the milk: putting the soon-to-expire milk in the front of the dairy case. At home, I’ll front my socks and underwear—moving the least recently worn to the front of the drawer—and fronting the plates and glasses in the cupboard whenever I unload the dishwasher.
In the back room at the Thumb is a pallet of shrink-wrapped nudie magazines that the manager shelves on his own. I’m never asked to front the Playboys. Two-Minute Tommy Kramer comes in on two separate nights, and the quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings takes three tins of Copenhagen from the rack on the counter and I ring him up, resisting the urge to tell him that he’s Tommy Freaking Kramer. But he already knows, and he knows that I know, and for anyone who doesn’t, he’s wearing a polo shirt with the Vikings logo where the alligator ought to go.
Another night, a drunk puts nine separate items on the counter and when I ask “Would you like a bag?” he says, “No, I’ll juggle them to my fucking car.”
At times like this I fantasize about being Brad, working at All American Burger in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, when the middle-aged customer keeps demanding a refund because he wasn’t “one hundred percent” satisfied with his breakfast. “Mister,” Brad tells him, “if you don’t shut up I’m gonna kick one hundred percent of your ass!”
I tell the drunk: “Then start juggling, because you’re wasted and I’m calling the cops.” He gathers his packet of bacon, his Winstons, his Slim Jim, his Mountain Dew, and sundry other ingestible vices and hauls ass for his car while I call the Bloomington PD to report a drunk driver. The phone number is taped to the counter just below the register. The Thumb doesn’t have one of those giant rulers adhered to the doorframe to help me estimate the height of a departing armed robber, but I eye every customer who walks in for his larceny potential. I’m prepared to fork over the contents of the till and all the cigarette cartons he can carry.
If Mom’s worried that her seventeen-year-old, posing as a nineteen-year-old, is closing a convenience store at midnight, she doesn’t say anything, perhaps because I called her bluff and got the job within a week of my breakup with Bennigan’s.
When I lock up the Thumb at midnight, and Tom gets off around the same time at T.G.I. Friday’s, he picks me up, and we take a Tombstone from the Thumb’s freezer case. At home, in the basement, we gorge ourselves on pizza, Mountain Dew, and rented videos. We only watch comedies: Bananas, Sleeper, The King of Comedy, The In-Laws. In the basement, punch-drunk with laughter at two o’clock in the morning, we wait for a ding to signal that our Steak-umm and Velveeta sandwiches have melted in the microwave. Like Pavlov’s dog, we salivate at the sound of a bell. It’s like old times, but not exactly. We laughed together as kids, but at each other, not with each other. We fought in this basement, with and without boxing gloves, and at some point—still in grade school—Tom rode away on his bike and I couldn’t pedal fast enough to keep up. Somewhere down the block he achieved escape velocity from his little brother.
We were on muscle bikes at the time, Schwinn Sting-Ray knockoffs, designed to look like little motorcycles and make each of us in South Brook a tiny Evel Knievel. When he got to Iowa State, Tom suggested to Mom and Dad that he might buy a motorcycle to commute to class, and Mom replied, “If you do, we won’t pay your college tuition.” But Dad casually told Tom that evening, “If you did get a motorcycle, your mother would never know.”
He bought a blue 1972 Suzuki Enduro 250, and on the first day of class he hit a car that had blown a stop sign. Tom was thrown over the car, sending him skidding on his pants across the pavement. The canvas uppers of his Top-Siders were torn from their soles, but Tom sustained only a broken pinkie toe. His white sweater was unmarked. “Obviously, I didn’t make it to class,” he told me. “But the next day I did. And the chick sitting next to me was the driver who caused the crash.”
The motorcycle was totaled. He buried it in the grave he blasted for his fictional frat brother (and very nearly for himself), then got another, a ’75 Honda 250, on which he jumped over the same grave, so strong was our childhood impulse to emulate Evel Knievel. On landing, Tom drove his front teeth through his lower lip.
His hospital visits tipped Mom and Dad off to his motorcycles, and I heard them talking in the kitchen about how one of their sons was a motorcycle daredevil and the other—me—wouldn’t even get his driver’s license. Daredevil and fraidy-cat, extrovert and introvert, party animal and wallflower. Tom and I have in common our nightly comedy video film fest. The next afternoon we’ll quote whole monologues verbatim from Sleeper: “Do I believe in God? I’m what you would call a teleological existential atheist. I believe that there’s an intelligence to the universe—with the exception of certain parts of New Jersey.”
Peter Falk in The In-Laws lamenting the horrors he witnessed in an African village: “Tsetse flies…the size of eagles…carried their children off to almost certain death.” At 3 a.m., it’s the funniest thing either of us has ever heard. The names of these p
rotagonists—Sheldon Kornpett in The In-Laws, Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy, Fielding Mellish in Bananas—will stay with us for the rest of our lives. We’ll never again run from any trouble without suddenly zigzagging while shouting another Peter Falk line: “Serpentine, Shel, serpentine!”
I would never tell Tom, but I’ve come to cherish these nightly film fests, what I now think of—in homage to Bob Dylan, our fellow Minnesotan—as the Basement Tapes.
Back in mid-June, six days after graduation, Mike and I watched Game 7 of the NBA Finals on Richie the C in his basement. I had started to write stories about the games on my typewriter and save news clippings about them in a manila envelope. When the Celtics beat the Lakers in Boston Garden, where it was 91 degrees on the floor at game time, we celebrated so loudly that Dory checked on us in the basement, and we hugged her. She only shook her head, as baffled by our joy as by our anger when they lost.
Throughout the summer, we continue to play in Flip Saunders’s backyard every weekend. Flip is half a foot shorter than I am but has longer arms. We see him shooting his cuffs on the sideline at Williams Arena as a Gophers assistant. Mike and I have been going to Gophers games for years, getting the pocket schedule at Coach Liquors—on the counter next to the Dum Dum suckers every kid gets for accompanying Dad on his Saturday morning mission to top off his supply of Hamm’s Preferred Stock. Flip has enormous hands that easily palm basketballs and playing cards. He’s a self-taught magician. But his greatest sleight of hand is on the basketball court, I think, watching him dribble while composing a feature story in my head, for I’m now writing stories about the games we play in the backyard or driveway or playground.
In the coming weeks, we gather enough players in Flip’s backyard to contest fierce games of three-on-three. Tournament brackets are drawn up. Flip makes a trophy, wrapping a Cool Whip tub in aluminum foil so that it looks like the Stanley Cup. Flip tells me, as the resident word nerd, to come up with a name for the tournament. Madison Square Garden has the National Invitational Tournament. I decide this will be the Saunders Hoop Invitational Tournament. The acronym is written in Magic Marker on a piece of white hockey tape and adhered to the Cool Whip tub, and thus is born Bloomington’s answer to the NIT: the SHIT.
Flip’s friends have all played college basketball—one or two will play in the NBA—and while Mike and I are getting dunked on in Flip’s backyard, we’re equals in the bantering, to our blissful disbelief, getting away with saying things like “I’m gonna beat all a y’all motherfuckers in the SHIT.”
Flip’s life is a revelation to me, that you can still live like this—shooting hoops, cranking Rockwell on a boom box, making coins disappear with the tap of a wand—at the advanced age of twenty-eight.
The SHIT is contested on a perfect Saturday afternoon, June 23. It is a joy to have my shots blocked by men with thirty-two-inch vertical leaps and, when forced to sit out, to watch the baseball Game of the Week on NBC, Cardinals and Cubs from Wrigley Field. I’ve been to Wrigley on family trips to visit our old neighborhood in suburban Chicago, fallen in love with its ivy-covered brick walls, and even envied the cheapskates on the rooftops along Waveland and Sheffield looking onto the field for free: baseball’s Peeping Toms. Above all, I love the inebriated fans inside the park—both the bleacher bums and announcer Harry Caray, now a regular in my house thanks to cable TV. John and I watch the Cubs religiously. We’re captivated by the concept—games piped into our house like tap water, on WGN-TV. It doesn’t matter that the Cubs are in third place in the National League East and trail the Cards 9–3 today.
The Cubs score 5 in the sixth, each run bringing more SHIT participants off the court to the TV in Flip’s family room, until the court is empty and a semicircle of sweating basketball players stands around the set, watching Cubs second baseman Ryne Sandberg, his team down 9–8, face the Cardinals’ fearsome reliever Bruce Sutter with the bases empty in the bottom of the ninth.
Sandberg swings. “Into left center and deep,” screams Bob Costas. “This is a tie ballgame!” The ball is swallowed by the bleachers, a writhing mass of tube-topped women and shirtless men in nut-hugging jorts. It looks like the happiest place on earth. Flip, who played college basketball at the highest level, going 24–3 his senior year with the Gophers, appreciates the pressure Sandberg must feel with 38,079 watching him in Wrigley, and thousands more on the rooftops, and millions more around the nation gathered around their TVs.
It doesn’t matter that the Cards go up 11–9 in the top of the tenth, or that Sandberg comes up again with two out and one on in the bottom of that inning, unlikely to vanquish Sutter (again), tie the game (again), and restore the joy to Wrigley (again). Costas is already reading the closing credits. “Coordinating producer of baseball, Harry Coyle,” he says as Sutter delivers. “One-one pitch.” Another gorgeous Sandberg swing. Costas: “Do you believe it?”
The shirtless rabble in the left-field bleachers is fighting for another Sandberg home-run ball. The drunks on the rooftops are slapping each other five. Sandberg is calmly shaking hands with the third-base coach on his way to the plate like he’s just sold an order of ball bearings at a business meeting in Omaha. And the entire field of the first annual Saunders Hoop Invitational Tournament is rocking Flip’s family room to its foundation. Ryne Sandberg is who we want to be—cool, clutch, handsome, nonchalant, circling the bases in the late-afternoon sun-and-shadow of Wrigley Field. “If I ever have a son,” Flip says, “I’m naming him Ryne.
“Deb,” he says to his wife. “We’re naming our son Ryne. Ryno. Ryne Sandberg Saunders.”
The Cubs win it 12–11 in the eleventh. I don’t want to leave here, but I now also can’t wait to get to Marquette, to Milwaukee, a ninety-minute drive from Wrigley Field, and become one with the bleacher bums in the bucket hats.
The courtside boom box is pumping “When Doves Cry.” Prince’s movie Purple Rain, filmed in and around Minneapolis, will premiere in Hollywood in a few weeks. Prince’s success confirms my impression, formed in the previous decade by the Vikings and The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Cheerios and Lucky Charms and Tonka toys and a thousand other things that came from or were set in Minnesota, that I’ve grown up in the center of the universe, however many galaxies remain to be explored.
Even Dad knows Prince, and he’s remained steadfastly immune to the power of celebrity for his entire adult life. “Recording artist?” he says, hearing Prince described as such. The real recording artists, he’ll tell you, are the men engineering and selling Scotch brand recording tape to the coked-up candy-asses constituting rock and roll’s motley crew (including Mötley Crüe).
Very few popular music lyrics have been caught in the lint trap of his brain. The three lines he knows by heart are “On the road again,” “Hop on the bus, Gus,” and the title phrase from a Jerry Reed song: “When you’re hot, you’re hot, and when you’re not, you’re not.” Mom can actually identify and listen to current soft-rock titans Christopher Cross and Dan Fogelberg. And last year, when The Thorn Birds miniseries unfolded on ABC over what seemed like 487 hours, Mom was transfixed by Richard Chamberlain as the handsome Catholic priest with impure thoughts for Rachel Ward—the same impure thoughts for Rachel Ward that I’ve had since seeing her in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.
Dad wouldn’t know Rachel Ward from Monkey Wards, as we call the Southtown outlet of Montgomery Ward. It’s maddening because he spends endless hours in New York and L.A., in recording studios and television networks, in close proximity to rock and TV and even movie stars whose faces he doesn’t recognize and whose achievements he doesn’t esteem. Every year, Dad attends a dinner in L.A. at which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hands out its Scientific and Technical Oscars. These are real Oscars given to illustrious nerds at a black-tie ceremony held five days before the televised Oscars for all the other categories. Dad rents a tux in L.A. and returns to Bloomington with infuriatingly vague descriptions of the movie stars he encountered during the previous week: “Some
guy from Star Wars,” he might say, or “the gal who was in that thing your mother and I saw last year” or “that guy from that airplane movie you and Tom liked.”
“Leslie Nielsen? You met Leslie Nielsen?!”
“No, it was definitely a guy.”
He’s even worse with rock stars. When Dad walks into the family room to see a small man with a mustache and perm playing guitar on MTV, shirtless beneath a leather blazer, exposing a small woodland of chest hair, he squints and says, “Think I’ll walk into Mickey Mining tomorrow dressed like that guy, see how that goes over.”
“That’s John Oates,” I say, just to wind him up. “You don’t know Hall & Oates?”
“I know ‘Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey,’” Dad sings, and it’s a perfect rejoinder, reciting a novelty song from 1943, the last time he was attuned to popular culture. Until now, that is, because now—suddenly, impossibly—Dad knows Prince.
Prince is everywhere, a constant presence on MTV alongside Diamond Dave, who traded in his marble bag for a school-bus driver’s uniform in Van Halen’s just-released “Hot for Teacher” video. Someone has worked out that the numbers on the chalkboard in the video—20, 9, 8, 19, 25, 12, 15, and 8—correspond to letters of the alphabet. What they spell—TIHSYLOH—has to be read backward: HOLYSHIT.
To notice this, of course, you have to record the video, then play it back and pause it when the blackboard appears, but thousands of boys are doing that anyway, pausing the video as the bikinied teacher sashays across the classroom. Those boys have been enabled by blank Scotch brand videocassettes, and thanks to Dad we have an endless supply of them, stacked in the basement like gold bars at Fort Knox.