by Steve Rushin
In his ongoing mission to bind the planet in magnetic tape, Dad makes one of his regular flights to Los Angeles. On returning, he casually mentions that Northwest Airlines had upgraded him to first class on the flight from MSP to LAX, and he was seated in row 2. The two seats in front of him—seats 1A and 1B—were empty. “The doors were about to close,” Dad says, “when three people got on. Two of them were bodyguards, and the other one was your buddy.”
“My buddy?”
“Prince.”
The two bodyguards, Dad says, were enormous men in matching blue suits, “impeccably tailored,” and leather dress shoes “polished to a high shine, without a millimeter of wear on the heels.” Only Dad could see Prince and focus on shoeshines.
Prince, immaculate in a white jumpsuit, platform shoes, and the kind of mustache that would have Jim suggesting the cat lick it off, sat by the window in 1A. Dad sat in 2B, kitty-corner to greatness. One bodyguard sat next to Prince on the aisle in 1B, and the other took an aisle seat in the last row of first class. Prince didn’t say a word until the flight attendant took drink orders, at which time he whispered into the bodyguard’s ear, and the bodyguard in turn stood and whispered in the flight attendant’s ear.
“Funny thing is,” Dad says, “you could hear Prince stage-whispering, ‘Mineral water.’ And you could hear the bodyguard stage-whisper to the stewardess, ‘Mineral water.’ And then you could see the stewardess pour a mineral water and hand it to Prince.”
I’m hanging on every word.
“Somewhere over the Rockies,” Dad says, “Prince had to take a leak, and this elaborate protocol kicked in.”
Bodyguard Two in the back row walked to the can and knocked on the door. Finding it unoccupied, he signaled to Bodyguard One in seat 1B, who blocked the aisle while Prince got up. Once they secured Prince in the toilet, Bodyguard One stood sentry with his arms folded and his back against the john, while Bodyguard Two took Bodyguard One’s seat, presumably so no one could rifle through Prince’s carry-on valise. Naturally, given the complications of undoing a jumpsuit in an airplane bathroom, Prince took a while.
“When we landed at LAX,” Dad says, “before the plane stopped taxiing, the process repeated itself.” Bodyguard Two walked to the front of the cabin, Bodyguard One blocked the aisle to let Prince out, and the two behemoths made a Prince sandwich while deplaning. Dad was the next passenger off, directly behind them, and watched with an air of wonder as Prince and his bodyguards boarded a chauffeur-driven golf cart in the terminal and cleaved a path through the throng. If anyone was disinclined to notice this trio, a red light affixed to a pole on the back of the cart turned like a cop car’s beacon, and the world’s biggest rock star, wearing a jumpsuit and flanked by giants, made his way as conspicuously as possible through LAX at a stately rate of three miles per hour.
Purple Rain has its premiere at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on July 27. MTV broadcasts the spectacle live to my basement. The red carpet is a Who’s Who (and occasionally a Who’s He?) of 1984 celebrity: there’s Steven Spielberg, Paul Stanley from Kiss, Henry Thomas from E.T., Donna Mills from Knots Landing, John Cougar Mellencamp, Morgan Fairchild of multiple Love Boats, Lionel Richie, and Lindsey Buckingham from Fleetwood Mac. Little Richard tells the MTV veejay Mark Goodman that Prince is “the me” of 1984. Eddie Murphy is wearing a cheetah-print blazer, sleeves pushed up, collar popped, with no shirt underneath. Weird Al Yankovic, whose “Eat It” video is in heavy rotation on MTV, tells Goodman, “We all knew Prince was a great actor, but who knew he could sing?!”
Prince himself emerges from a purple stretch limousine, in a purple lamé coat, and ignores the waiting press. He hasn’t given an interview in three and a half years. The kid from Bryant Junior High is the biggest star in Hollywood.
We see Purple Rain at Southdale. The audience cheers when First Avenue comes on the screen because we’ve all been there or driven past it and now by some strange magic it’s on a movie screen. We try to identify any Kennedy girls in the concert scenes, filmed at First Avenue last summer. There’s an explosion of laughter when Prince tells his costar, Apollonia Kotero, “You have to purify yourself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka.” As Apollonia sheds her all-leather ensemble of boots, pants, gloves, and blouse, I can hear my own mom, from the shore, shouting that she should wait a half hour after eating before going into the water.
In its first week of release, Purple Rain replaces Ghostbusters as the most popular movie in America. This national recognition of Minnesota couldn’t be more gratifying. If Ronald Reagan uses his next State of the Union address to extol the virtues of Jimmy’s Lemon Tree restaurant or National Geographic devotes its August cover to Nine Mile Creek, I’ll not be as taken aback as I am to hear Lake Minnetonka—a place only we know—immortalized by Prince, whom everybody in the world now knows.
Morris Day, Prince’s Purple Rain costar and front man of the Time, is on Letterman. “It’s interesting to me that Minneapolis is producing stars in rock and roll music, and now film stars, and actually that major movies are being made there,” Dave says. “How does that happen?”
“It’s a mystery to me,” Morris says, to studio-audience laughter. It’s a mystery to all of us. Dave is from Indianapolis, a place often confused with Minneapolis, and Prince’s fashion sense, androgyny, and contradictory persona—reclusive but ubiquitous—clearly amuses Dave. “For those who haven’t seen the movie,” he begins a question to Morris, who interrupts: “Come on, everybody here has seen the movie.”
“I haven’t,” Dave says, to applause. A few nights later, he introduces Apollonia as “the first guest we’ve ever had named Apollonia, and a former Ridgid Tool calendar girl.” When he asks her what Prince is like, she says, “He’s very good at basketball. I beat him once, though.”
“Well,” Dave says, smirking, “he must be very good. He must be a regular Bob Cousy if he’s only lost once.”
I love Dave’s invocation of a Celtics legend, his skepticism over Prince’s hooping skills, and his inability to take Purple Rain half as seriously as its stars do. Dave is utterly insincere, in open mockery of his guests, sending up the conventions of show business—“Please welcome the lovely and talented” so-and-so—while conferring an ironic grandeur on his recurring bits. I look forward to his readings of his “voluminous viewer mail.” Or Stupid Pet Tricks: “This is just an exhibition, this is not a competition—please, no wagering.”
What I love even more than Dave is New York itself. Late Night opens every show with a camera panning Manhattan in the wee small hours—traffic lights blinking, steam pouring from strange street orifices, yellow cabs, blue police cruisers, chalked pavement, signs for the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, a marquee on 42nd Street—BAD GIRLS at the Victory Theatre. Announcer Bill Wendell always opens with a joke about the city: “From New York, where Minnesota Twins is playing in Times Square…”
Dad has filled the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet in the basement with maps—places he’s been and will return to—and I know from his map of Manhattan, which I’ve spread on the concrete floor and pored over like MacArthur with a map of the Philippines, that the camera is moving uptown in Late Night’s opening title sequence: from Times Square to Lincoln Center, then east to Radio City Music Hall. From there, the camera pans across 50th Street to 30 Rockefeller Center, and through a window into studio 6A, where Dave talks every night about New York’s weirdos, comical cost of living, and general hostility. “I was at a restaurant last night,” he says. “There was a ten-dollar service charge to get the Heimlich.”
But I can tell he loves it—who wouldn’t?—and that New York is superior in some way to Los Angeles, the city that fascinated me in the 1970s, with its CHiPs and its Brady Bunch and its Bad News Bears. Dave gets to make fun of everything and everyone for a living, the way my brothers and I used to at the kitchen table. Jim has started tearing Mike Royko columns out of the Chicago Tribune and mailing them to me: a thousand words in April on how the columnis
t has wasted a significant portion of his life watching the Cubs—270 full days in all, by his calculation—and he’s through with them forever: “Unless somebody can get me a couple for the home opener.”
Dad brings home Jim Murray columns from the Los Angeles Times. Murray refers to San Diego as “San Di-don’tGo…America’s retirement home.” San Diego seems more exciting than South Brook, but I’m laughing anyway, because the whole point is to make fun of something.
To be a professional smart-ass doesn’t seem achievable. But it’s fun as an amateur pursuit. For years, in addition to the Twins and Celtics game stories I compose on my typewriter, I’ve written phony letters, news columns, and epic poems. I pull one out of an accordion file folder, about the doctor who jogs through South Brook in his shorts in the winter.
’Twas the week before Christmas,
The temp minus thirty
Not a creature was stirring
Except for Doc Verbie
To whom someone should make
The following disclosure:
While keeping in shape
You’ll die of exposure.
At seventeen, I’m affecting the hard-earned world-weariness of the thirty-seven-year-old Letterman. Of course I don’t show my stories or poems to anyone. I think of the line from “Nights in White Satin,” a song that scared the striped pants off me when I was little: “Letters I’ve written, never meaning to send.” That’s what all my writing is.
In a week I’ll leave South Brook with my copper soft-sided suitcase and set out for the bright lights of the big city. If Milwaukee is not quite Manhattan, it’s 343 miles closer to it than Bloomington. Mom has taken me shopping for a bathrobe to wear in transit to and from the communal showers in my dorm, a hot pot for heating SpaghettiOs and Lipton Cup-a-Soup, and a portable black-and-white TV set, the size of my typewriter case, so that I can watch Dave on the desk in my dorm.
One late August morning I leave South Brook with my bathrobe, hot pot, and portable TV, looking like the movie poster for Steve Martin in The Jerk.
Part II
I Have Only Come Here
Seeking Knowledge
7.
The Beer That Made
Milwaukee Famous
Milwaukee’s low-slung skyline of smokestacks and church spires is broken only by the raised middle finger of the First Wisconsin bank building downtown, forty-two stories of flipped bird aimed at Chicago, whose suburbs send so many freshmen to Marquette. These FIBs, as they’re called in Wisconsin, for Fucking Illinois Bastards, come from Arlington Heights, Downers Grove, and Hoffman Estates. “Hoffman’s Mistake,” Dad said every time we passed a sign for it in our wood-paneled Country Squire en route to Chicago or Cincinnati in the ’70s.
Mom, Dad, and I now arrive in Milwaukee by Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, to a scratch-and-sniff city of odors: west of campus, the Miller brewery smells like hops. In Milwaukee, every morning is the morning after. I’m reminded of the wreckage left by Mom and Dad’s dinner parties, how I’d rifle the living-room couch for change the next morning and sniff the tops of lipstick-smeared beer cans, inhaling the scent of stale beer and stubbed-out cigarette.
To the east of campus, the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory is a real-life Roald Dahl phantasmagoria, pumping out Wonka-like bars for the Charlie Buckets of Milwaukee and issuing a kind of visible aroma for the rest of us, like those vapor trails of pleasing smells—fresh-baked apple pie on a windowsill—that travel up the nostrils of hoboes in old Warner Bros. cartoons. The leather tanneries south of campus carry the scent of animal hides on the wind. They have us surrounded, these smells, reminding me of the three stages of life—candy, beer, and death. I’m now entering that middle stage: beer.
Many of Marquette’s myriad bars are Irish pubs, neighborhood joints, places called O’Donoghue’s, O’Paget’s, Glocca Morra, Murphy’s Law, Hegarty’s, the Ardmore, the Gym, and—most belovedly—the Avalanche, home of the Naked Beer Slide. This last, I’m told, involves divesting oneself of one’s clothing, lubricating the floor with pitchers of Red White & Blue, then Pete Rose–diving across its foamy surface—from the men’s room to the jukebox—on an alcoholic Slip ’n Slide.
These buzzed high jinks ought to come naturally. I’m descended from a long line of happy inebriates. In stories overheard at Mom and Dad’s cocktail parties, or told among Tom and Jim and their friends from college, or howled at over Hudepohls during family reunions in Cincinnati, the men—they’re always men—are the heroes of drunken misadventures: fistfights in banquet-hall parking lots, downhill ski races in business suits at happy hour, shoeless walks from Wrigley Field after imbibing a vague but underreported quantity of alcoholic beverages—“a few beers,” “a couple of pops,” “a belt or two.”
The drinkers in my family tree—the drinkers falling out of my family tree, onto other family members, at picnics—are always happy. Even their hangovers have a kind of magnificence when being recounted days after the day after. After hearing about some of my blood relations’ apocalyptic hangovers, it made sense to me that ABC called its nuclear-holocaust movie The Day After. Drunkenness, at least in the retelling, is a kind of poetry. The adjectives alone are lyrical: “plowed,” “blitzed,” “blotto,” “wasted,” “hammered,” “schnockered,” “smashed,” “shit-faced.” I have never been any of these things. I still have never had a beer.
The drinking age in Minnesota is nineteen, but it has always been eighteen in Wisconsin, which is why high school friends make the sixty-five-mile round-trip to Hudson, across the border, to buy a six-pack of Leinie’s and transport it back across state lines, like Burt Reynolds and Sally Field bootlegging four hundred cases of Coors from Texarkana to Atlanta in Smokey and the Bandit. Underage drinking is illegal, so I want no part of it.
On July 1, seven weeks before I left for college in Wisconsin, the state legislature raised the drinking age in the Dairy State to nineteen. To remain in accordance with the law, I have no intention of drinking until my sophomore year, at which time it will become compulsory if the stories Tom and Jim tell me are true.
Last year, a few months before he graduated, Jim hosted Mom and Dad at Providence College for Parents’ Weekend, or what our Uncle Pat in Cincinnati insisted on calling “Family Weekend,” to explain why he’d also flown in for the festivities. While attending a Friday night welcome dinner, a Saturday matinee hockey game, and a Saturday night postgame reception, Uncle Pat managed to befriend every one of Jim’s teammates with his irrepressible bullshit. “Uncle Pat was being Uncle Pat,” Jim said last Christmas, when he told me this story for the first time, ten months after it happened. “He wasn’t exactly a wallflower, but he never got out of control, and by ten o’clock on Saturday night, when the last function had ended, he and Aunt Sandy and Mom and Dad went back to the Providence Marriott. They all had early flights out the next morning, so I’d arranged for my friend Father McPhail, the VP of student affairs, to say a private Mass for Pat, Sandy, Mom, and Dad early on Sunday morning.”
“How did that go?” I asked.
“It was going fine,” Jim said. “But just as the four of them are finishing their drinks at the Marriott bar and getting up to go to their rooms, a couple of guys from my team walk into the bar with their parents, see Pat, and say, ‘Hey, we know where your nephew is right now. Wanna go meet him at this party?’ It’s eleven o’clock on Saturday night, there’s a snowstorm starting outside, and of course—of course—Pat says yes.”
“How old is Uncle Pat?” I asked.
“Forty-three,” Jim said
“Go on,” I told him.
“So it’s late and the party is already kind of over by the time Pat gets to this off-campus house in Providence,” Jim said. “We’re all out of beer, but there are still enormous quantities of vodka on the kitchen counter. Pat opens one of the bottles and fills a sixteen-ounce plastic cup with straight vodka to the brim. No ice, no Coke. Straight, warm vodka. He proceeds to drink it like he’s drinking beer. And then he casu
ally pours himself another one.”
Jim was telling this story like a fifteenth-century mariner returning from an unmapped world with tales of dragons and cannibals. In his four years at Providence, he had never seen drinking this prodigious, and he was a college hockey player.
“As Pat is drinking these cups of vodka, there’s now a classic, full-blown nor’easter happening outside,” Jim continued. “You wouldn’t want to drive a block if you were sober, but as the party breaks up, somebody volunteers to drop Pat off at the Marriott. They somehow make it there. Pat gets out of the car, completely schnockered, and slips on the ice, badly twisting his ankle. He falls, and lands—I shit you not—in a shrub in front of the hotel.”
Needless to say, Mom and Dad have never mentioned a word of this to Tom or me. We sat there listening to Jim in slack-jawed wonder.
“He lies there for a while,” Jim said, “unable to get up. He told me later that two college kids eventually walked by, laughed at him, and said, ‘Look at the drunk guy in the bush.’ Pat yelled, ‘Goddammit, I’m not a drunk guy. I sprained my ankle and fell into this bush.’ So the kids went into the Marriott and got two bellmen, who came out and lifted Pat into a wheelchair and wheeled him up to his room. Which is how Aunt Sandy woke in the middle of the night to find two Marriott bellhops dumping her husband out of a wheelchair and into bed with his clothes on.”
Uncle Pat is Mom’s little brother. Where Mom is abstemious, Pat is Dionysian. The last thing Mom had said to Pat in the Marriott lobby on Saturday night was “Father McPhail is saying a special private Mass for us in the morning so don’t do anything stupid tonight.”
“So what happened in the morning?” I asked.
“Mom and Dad and Sandy got to my apartment early Sunday morning to head over to the little chapel on campus for Mass,” Jim said, “and I can see immediately that Mom is pissed. But I had to pretend that I didn’t know what was going on, that I hadn’t seen Pat drinking full cups of straight vodka last night. I asked them where Pat was, and they said he wasn’t feeling well, maybe he’d meet us at Mass. And I was thinking, Meet us at Mass? There’s a better chance he’s dead than he’ll meet us at Mass.”