Nights in White Castle

by Steve Rushin

  Needless to say, Pat didn’t go to Mass, didn’t make his flight, and was wheeled through the airport on Monday morning with ligament damage in his ankle, and I already know that “Family Weekend” of 1983 at Providence College will be spoken of with amazement for decades to come among Patrick James Boyle’s nephews.

  Alcohol is a Rubicon I’ll have to cross. If I can swim that river of beer, swallowing most of its contents, girls will be waiting on the far shore, probably in bikinis, to believe the Bud Light commercials that air during every football game.

  As if to acknowledge all of this, Marquette houses some of its freshmen in a cylindrical high-rise dorm that resembles a 16-ounce tall boy of Old Milwaukee. McCormick Hall was completed in 1967 in a style that could best be described as Beer Can Brutalism. Its architect was Joseph Schlitz, or possibly Frederick Pabst. The building is twelve stories tall, and my room is on the third floor, and because the students on the upper floors have discovered a glitch—hold down the LOBBY button and the elevator will take you directly to the lobby, an express train bypassing all other floors—I climb the stairs holding a milk crate filled with my every possession. A flexible desk lamp peers over the edge of the box like a pet goose.

  The dining hall downstairs is catered by a food service called SAGA. Hans, my resident advisor, says, “SAGA stands for Soviets’ Attempt to Gag America.”

  Just last week, Ronald Reagan announced during the sound check for his weekly radio address, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you that today I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” This jocular threat of nuclear annihilation is hilarious and was the source of endless jokes in the past several days.

  On the third floor, Hans and I pass what used to be a large lounge, now evidently a storage area for decrepit furniture. Each floor used to have two of these TV lounges, but now there is only empty cabinetry where the TVs used to be. We’re told—can it possibly be true?—that students threw the TVs out the windows on the night, in 1977, when the Marquette Warriors beat North Carolina in the national basketball championship game in Atlanta. I try to imagine that joyous aftermath, the Zeniths—each one as heavy as a safe—falling from the windows, their seaweed-green screens shattering on the pavement below, all those MU freshmen defenestrating TVs like the rock stars of that era.

  Just beyond the lounge and the express-train elevator is my room, number 304, a tiny pie wedge of this circular building with just enough room for bunk beds, a mini fridge, a desk facing either wall, a window, and a wall-mounted, rotary-dial telephone the color of Silly Putty.

  My roommate gets up from his desk chair and extends his right hand. “Zeke,” he says. He’s dipping Skoal.

  Zeke is in ROTC and has preceded me by several weeks. The room is already festooned with U.S. Navy recruiting posters. The tiny fridge is already filled with cans of Old Style. In a city that smells like beer, we’re living in a giant beer can, which is in turn filled with many smaller beer cans.

  Zeke has already selected the bottom bunk. He’s spitting tobacco juice into a plastic cup, which is resting on the radiator, heating it like soup. I know from the profile card Marquette mailed to Bloomington a month ago that Zeke, my randomly assigned roomie, is from Cincinnati, and we discuss Hudepohl beer, Skyline chili, Graeter’s ice cream, the Big Red Machine, King Kwik convenience stores, and WLW radio for three full minutes, after which I’m relieved to meet Mom and Dad at the corner of 22nd and Wisconsin Avenue, in front of the M & I Bank, to open my first checking account.

  I don’t receive a free toaster or a handheld calculator, though I’ve been conditioned by newspaper ads and TV commercials to believe that such Price Is Right prizes come standard with the opening of any bank account. But I’m given something called a TYME card—which stands for “Take Your Money Everywhere”—and it allows me (get this!) to withdraw money from a machine just outside the bank, at any time of the day or night. I don’t have to wait in line for a teller. The machine is an automated teller.

  I’ve seen them on the news and in the newspapers: “Automated teller machines, for those still unaware, are the space-age machines near bank lobbies and shopping centers that permit customers to punch a keyboard to conduct their routine business, gaining access through plastic bank cards and personal identification numbers.” Norwest Bank has thirty-five of them in the Twin Cities, and customers using “ATMs” nationwide use them to withdraw, on average, thirty-seven dollars. Ninety percent of transactions in the Twin Cities are withdrawals, because customers don’t trust the banks to post cash deposits. “It is very difficult to encourage consumers to use that machine for anything more than getting cash,” a Norwest manager told the Star and Tribune in March.

  The card for the automated teller machine—the TYME machine—goes into my Velcro wallet alongside my Hennepin County library card, my phony YMCA membership card, and my brand-new Marquette University student ID card. This growing collection of cards is physical proof that I am developing my own identity, independent of my parents, even if my YMCA identity is technically somebody else’s.

  With less ceremony than the occasion warrants, a kind lady in a tweed business dress also presents me with a checkbook. The checks—they don’t yet have my name on them—start sequentially at 0001. I read somewhere that a person’s credit rating is commensurate with the numbers on his checks: the higher the better. So instantly I’ve gone from a nothing to a something. The next check Mom writes, if I have to guess, will have a number on it like 659327. She wields her checkbook like a gunslinger, drawing it from her purse, writing the check, memorializing the date and amount and check number in the check registry, then folding the check along the perforation and tearing it perfectly from the book with a flourish before handing it over to the clerk. All of this takes a second and a half. Mom cannot stress strongly enough the importance, in life, of balancing one’s checkbook.

  My checkbook, like hers, has a blue vinyl cover and non-scenic checks. While my eye gravitated to the checks enlivened by lighthouses and hot-air balloons, I understood instantly that scenic checks were not for the Rushins. I will never write “seventeen dollars and thirty-seven cents” across the Rocky Mountains at sunset, never sign my name on a dolphin breaching a cerulean sea. It just isn’t who we are. We never bought the Crayola 64-pack with built-in crayon sharpener, we don’t rest our bottoms on the pew when kneeling at Mass, and none of us will ever write a check with a dolphin on it. No male descendant of Don Rushin will ever wear a mustache or drive a pickup truck. Plenty of other people do all of these perfectly reasonable things, but not the Rushins. Mom and Dad have never stated any such precepts outright. But I understand them instinctively. I know them to be true.

  At the same time, I’m already becoming my own person. Mom and Dad don’t have TYME cards. Mom would no more use an automated teller than an automated doctor. She insists on walking into Community State Bank in Bloomington, is comforted by the pointy-ended ballpoint pens tethered to the teller counter by nine feet of beaded chain. In a pinch, she’ll use the drive-through lane, depositing checks in a clear capsule that resembles our blender. The capsule rockets through a pneumatic tube to the teller, seated at a microphone behind eight inches of bulletproof glass, talking to Mom through a tinny speaker. When I was a little kid, this mysterious ritual of adulthood never failed to fascinate, a 1950s vision of the future that already had a retro, Jetsonian, “space-age” feel. I loved to watch her consign deposit slips to that tube, a message in a bottle, but more often I hated running errands with Mom. Now I already miss them.

  Despite my fancy new TYME card, Mom suggests I use the checkbook whenever possible. Her check registry is filled with impeccable cursive. She can legibly squeeze anything—“Oxboro Dry Cleaners”—into those tiny rectangles in her beautiful Palmer Method script. Her non-scenic checks are light blue, so I order mine in the same light blue, the color of my oxford button-down shirts. I don’t know it yet, but I will fill my check registe
r with page after unbroken page of $7.04 withdrawals made out to Domino’s Pizza.

  But for now, Mom and Dad are preparing to leave me, armed against the world with my empty checkbook. It’s getting late in the afternoon, and they have a long drive ahead of them. “Call us,” Mom says.

  “Every Sunday,” I promise, though I wish I could call them five minutes from now, when they’re westbound on I-94, just to hear their voices. I’ve seen ads in the paper for “cellular car phones” that allow drivers to make and receive calls on the “analog cellular telephone network,” whose tentacles, apparently, have newly spread across the U.S. this year.

  But I’ll have to wait until Sunday evening, after dinner, because that’s when Mom and Dad get their calls from Tom and Jim. Dad listens on the extension for three minutes and says, “I’ll let you talk to your mother.”

  In the parking lot of the M & I Bank, Dad shakes my hand and Mom hugs me, resisting the urge to wet, with her own saliva, a wadded Kleenex fished from her purse. Never again will she wipe a smudge of something off my face.

  And then they’re gone. I watch the Cutlass Supreme head west down Wisconsin Avenue, its turn signal blinking back a tear, before hanging a left toward I-94, the Minnesota license plate—10,000 Lakes—disappearing from view.

  I resist the urge to wave a hanky as if the car is a departing ocean liner, never to return. And in fact, back in McCormick Hall, I do have a hanky among my meager personal effects, a snot-rag that is another rite of passage into manhood. The biblical edict to put away childish things said nothing about replacing them with the personal effects of manhood, but here are some of them in room 304: cloth hanky, terry-cloth bathrobe, and a fridge filled with Old Style.

  Back in our rooms, shorn of our parents, the freshmen of McCormick are summoned to the urban “lawn” outside the hall for a mandatory “mixer.” The men and women and at least one seventeen-year-old boy are told to remove one shoe and place it on a pile. Then we’re instructed to choose a shoe other than our own, find its rightful owner, and receive our own missing shoe in turn. I put my hand inside this Everest of Nikes, Top-Siders, and shower sandals and pull, like a rabbit from a hat, a single white Reebok Freestyle high-topped cheer shoe. As a taxonomist of footwear, I recognize this as a winning lottery ball. For a moment, I entertain the fantasy that a beautiful freshman cheerleader limping around in this shoe’s mate will have also found mine and recognize (in my Converse high-top) a kindred Larry Bird fan.

  And in fact, a beautiful girl does smile at me and say, “I think you have my shoe.” I blush, as if I’ve stolen it, or sniffed it or been caught in some other act of depravity, and—without a word, utterly contravening the entire point of the exercise—I bow my head and grimly return the Reebok. The girl pauses for a moment, as if to say something, for I am physically incapable of breaking the ice. It occurs to me, having recently read about the Soviets trying to free three thousand beluga whales trapped in the frozen Bering Sea, that what I need is a…Rushin icebreaker.

  As I lose myself in this inane wordplay, a bearded dude with several inches of boxer shorts exposed above his sweatpants approaches, my missing right Converse in his meaty hand. I grimly accept it while the girl walks away, leaving me where I was five minutes ago: alone, risk averse, and fully shod. “Goody Two Shoes,” as Adam Ant put it.

  Back in my room, Zeke has his wool-socked feet propped up on the radiator, sending cartoon stink squiggles into the air, one more smell in this city’s polyglot miasma. He never bothered to go out to the lawn for the shoe ceremony. I would have enjoyed seeing his own unspeakable Top-Sider returned to him in a zipped Mylar bag, pincered between salad tongs, held at arm’s length by a man in a hazmat suit.

  “Brewski?” he says, cracking a beer and handing it to me. I sit in my desk chair, three feet from Zeke’s, and sip. It tastes of carbonation and refrigeration. Slightly metallic. A full swig makes my tongue go numb for a second, the way it did when I’d lick a 9-volt battery to see how much juice it had left. Tom and I used to take the Rayovac 9-volts from our basement smoke detector and use them in our handheld Mattel electronic football game. Now I’m sharing a room with this stranger instead of my brother. Tom would have asked—while handing me my first beer—if I wanted to drink it out of the can or would I prefer a baby bottle. But Zeke doesn’t know this is my first beer, and I certainly don’t let on, and anyway, we’re both distracted by the middle-aged homeless alcoholic hanging out by the dumpster that our room overlooks.

  Hans the RA informed us that this “bag man”—the masculine equivalent of New York’s “bag lady” phenomenon I’ve seen on TV—is known to generations of McCormick residents as Richard the Bum. I admire the formality of it, like a European monarch—Ethelred the Unready or Sverker the Clubfoot. Richard the Bum is not a genial drunk like Otis on The Andy Griffith Show or the guys on Cheers. The drunks on TV—Foster Brooks on The Tonight Show and Dean Martin roasting celebrities—are happy-go-lucky men whose only side effect isn’t liver disease but chronic hiccups.

  Richard the Bum, on the other hand, is at this very moment shouting profanity at the upper floors of McCormick, whose open windows are coming alive with music and laughter and young people using their first night of semi-independence to deploy the word “party” as a verb.

  Near as I can tell, Richard the Bum has been panhandling in the parking lot. Some students have rewarded his efforts by showering him with coins from open windows. Hans the RA—another title from the Western Civ text I’ve peeked at, like Charles the Bald or Richard the Lionhearted—said some past students heated coins in their hot pots before tossing them out their windows. I picture the penny-sized stigmata in the center of Richard’s palms and think of Jesus. “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers,” we sang as nine-year-olds at Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, “that you do unto me.”

  This isn’t Bloomington. A few blocks down Wisconsin Avenue, just past campus, in downtown Milwaukee, the storefronts are full of mounted wigs. Mannequins wear double-breasted jackets and matching slacks in mustard or purple. A man in the market for a crimson fedora has more than one shop window to browse. But there are familiar sights and sounds too. Comforting ones. I hear a siren song down the hall: “Love, exciting and new…” A small crowd has gathered around a small TV to watch a rerun of the The Love Boat, and when I casually walk past, as if on my way to somewhere else, a drunk guy standing in the door sings, “Come aboard. We’re expecting youuu.”

  They’re playing a game called Chug Boat, which involves selecting a character on tonight’s episode—Isaac, Julie, Captain Merrill Stubing—and drinking every time he or she appears onscreen. This particular episode guest stars Tony Dow (Wally Cleaver from Leave It to Beaver), Grant Goodeve (David Bradford from Eight Is Enough), and Claude Akins (Sheriff Elroy P. Lobo from B.J. and the Bear and The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo). I attempt to point out these exciting cameos but am drowned out by freshmen chanting, “Chug! Chug! Chug!” Bidden to chug, I comply.

  And the evening passes, McCormick thumping like a human heart, my fillings vibrating to “We’re Not Gonna Take It” blasting from another floor, as my inaugural beer buzz deepens with every appearance on The Love Boat of Beaver Cleaver’s older brother. The hours wear on and the music de-escalates, until the distant purr of “Drive” by the Cars gives way to silence.

  On every floor of McCormick Hall, freshmen in brand-new bathrobes like mine are trudging down the hall in flip-flops, a toothbrush in one hand and a bar of soap in the other, on their way to or from the communal bathroom. This parade of the pajamaed brings an oddly comforting domesticity to the hallway on my first night away from home. From every room glows a desk lamp, or a goosenecked lamp clamped onto a bunk, or the graphic equalizer bars of a stereo turned low.

  I resist the urge to remove my set of brand-new hankies from their box to have at the ready: one in case the tears come in the middle of the night and the other to cling to as a tiny security blanket. For the first time in my life
I’m spending the night with strangers, entirely bereft of friends or family, a foot below the ceiling and two feet above my first-ever roommate unrelated by blood. How many more roomies await in my future I can only guess at. In this recumbent state, as the tiny room starts ever so slightly to spin, it occurs to me that I’m simultaneously two things for the first time in my life: drunk in a bunk. If only Dr. Seuss had written a bedtime story by that name, and Mom were here now to read it to me, for I’m already missing home.

  I make friends named Mike, Mike, Steve, and Steve. These were, respectively, the first and thirteenth most popular baby boy names of 1966. To distinguish the two Mikes on our floor, they’re renamed Hodes and Vill. The three Steves become Steve, Steph, and Stever, like the conjugation of some Old English verb (presumably meaning “to remain recumbent until the noon hour”). I’m Steph, and I cleave to the kids on my floor—from Milwaukee, Minnesota, and Chicago—who like sports. I am already contracting my horizons, narrowing my gaze.

  On a gorgeous blue-skied day in early autumn, we drive to Wrigley Field to watch the Cubs play the Phillies. The home team has a 7-game lead on the Mets in the National League East. We walk up to the bleacher box office and ask for four seats and pay three bucks apiece for the tickets. There are 28,964 of us in the Friendly Confines, leaving 10,000 empty seats. We sit in left field and chant, “Right field sucks!” The right field bleacher bums chant in reply, “Left field sucks!” This goes on for many minutes until we finally agree to disagree. We are drinking beer at noon on Tuesday: tube-topped women, tube-socked men in jorts, pot smokers, eschewers of shirts, sunscreen agnostics, the whole shower-sandaled rabble of North Side truants and deadbeats and day drinkers, the unemployed and the unemployable.