by Steve Rushin
Just last season, Cubs manager Lee Elia called those of us sitting out here “the fuckin’ nickel-and-dime people who turn up. The motherfuckers don’t even work. That’s why they’re out at the fuckin’ game. They oughta go out and get a fuckin’ job and find out what it’s like to go out and earn a fuckin’ living. Eighty-five percent of the fuckin’ world is working. The other fifteen percent come out here—a fuckin’ playground for the cocksuckers.” It should perhaps go without saying that Lee Elia is no longer the manager of the Cubs, but still, we embrace his depiction and—looking around—struggle to refute its central points.
Midway through the game, Phillies left fielder Jeff Stone loses a shoe while chasing down a drive to the gap. He simply runs right out of one half of his pair of spikes—the left one—and when the play is dead and he returns to retrieve it, a selfless shit-faced spectator seated near us removes his own left shoe and throws it toward Stone as a remedy. Quickly, the bleachers cough up another shoe, and then another, and within a minute, single shoes are raining down on the Wrigley sod, a hailstorm of unmatched sneakers, Sperrys, flip-flops, and wafflestompers. It’s like the freshman mixer all over again, except that the groundskeepers picking up the footwear have no intention of returning anything to their rightful owners.
After the game—a 6–3 Cubs loss, Lee Smith giving up 4 runs in the ninth, blowing the save to cost Dennis Eckersley the win—a half-shod crowd of happy inebriates limps away from Wrigley. They board the elevated train at Addison, stand in line at McDonald’s, and stumble into Murphy’s Bleachers bar the way Mom often found me adrift in a daydream when I was supposed to be getting dressed: with one shoe off and one shoe on.
Nobody cares about the late defeat, or their unshod feet, or anything beyond the comfort of the crowd, our shared shoe joke, the brick-and-ivy of the ballpark, and this gorgeous blue-skied hookie-playing Tuesday, whose date—September 11—holds no significance whatsoever, except as a perfect day in a blessed season for an otherwise star-crossed franchise.
8.
Home Again, Home Again,
Jiggety Jog
College is intimidating—though truth be told, I have not been “made timid” by my first weeks here, as my dictionary suggests. Rather, I arrived timid and have simply remained so: afraid to walk into the basement of Johnston Hall, where the College of Journalism is housed, and ask an editor at the Marquette Tribune for an assignment, any assignment. My academic advisor is the sixty-seven-year-old former journalism dean and Irish Guy from Chicago on whose massive head breaks a surfable wave of white hair. Between the hair and the owlish black-framed glasses, he’s a living cartoon, an Al Hirschfeld caricature, black ink on white paper. His voice is a deep rumble that rattles windowpanes while digressing far and wide from the matter at hand. He was the press secretary to President Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964 and 1965, and LBJ once said of him: “That man George Reedy knows more about more things that I could care less about than anyone else I’ve ever known. You ask him what time it is and you’ll get a history of clock-making.” Reedy is, in short, my kind of guy.
He’s the kind of guy who paid his way through the University of Chicago as a saxophone-playing circus clown, which somehow makes everything—from the Oval Office to the College of Journalism to journalism itself—seem marginally less august and intimidating. He tells me to march into the Trib’s offices and demand an assignment, and so I am assigned a six-paragraph story on intramural flag football—“Marquette’s own version of Monday Night Football,” as my lede puts it—and I have my first byline, my first clipping, which I mail to Mom and Dad. In the return address, I identify myself as Bud Ding Journalist.
This newfound courage does not extend to girls. One night the wall-mounted rotary-dial phone in my room at McCormick rings and I answer it and a female voice asks for me.
“Speaking,” I say.
“My friend Mary Kate O’Herlihy is in Western Civ with you and was wondering if you’d want to meet at the library tomorrow night to study.”
My armpits instantly inflame. “I have tickets to the Bucks game tomorrow night,” I say, and when a long silence ensues, I fill it with this clincher: “It’s the opening game and they’re playing the Bulls.” I feel like a secular priest, vowing fealty to basketball, and when I replace the phone receiver on its cradle I feel a simultaneous sense of relief and despondence.
I could be a real priest. Father John Patrick Donnelly, SJ, bestrides the thirty-two-foot stage of the Varsity Theatre like a colossus—perhaps the Colossus of Rhodes, which he can tell you all about as he declaims off-the-cuff to 1,075 freshmen while lecturing on Western civilization, in Western Civ, with an authority handed down from God. My friend Vill (one of the Mikes) and I develop a devastating impersonation of Father Donnelly’s oratorical style—part John Houseman in The Paper Chase, part white-bearded God of the Old Testament—and especially his description of Christ’s duality, “His two natures, yuman and diviiine.”
Walking into Western Civ, up the theater aisle to find a seat, a girl waves at me, pointing at the mortified girl sitting next to her while mouthing: Mary Kate O’Herlihy. My armpits reignite as I take a seat several rows behind them, and across the aisle, and crack open our textbook and feign absorption in an upside-down page about the Protestant Reformation.
Mom wouldn’t mind if I became a real priest, a Jesuit priest, member of the Society of Jesus, and I like the name of the building where the Jesuits live at Marquette. Officially it’s the Jesuit Residence Hall, but everyone calls it the Jes Res. And because my full name is Steven Joseph Rushin, I’d be S. J. Rushin, SJ.
I like the symmetry, the near palindrome, and wonder if this kind of wordplay is worth staking a vocation on: S. J. Rushin, SJ, c/o Jes Res.
On September 22, 1984, my floor mates present me with a 40-ounce screw-top bottle of Schaefer in a brown paper bag to mark my eighteenth birthday. Schaefer’s most famous advertising slogan was “The one beer to have when you’re having more than one,” and I am evidently having more than nine. I’m carried out of McCormick on a litter and taken out to “the Bars,” to O’D’s, where a bored bouncer will inspect our fake IDs with a flashlight, gaze up at our faces, then back at the IDs, as if playing a Spot the Difference game in Highlights magazine. Even though I’m six foot five inches, with a permanent five-o’clock shadow, I sweat out the agonizing interval of those five seconds at the door, perhaps because my Iowa driver’s license identifies me as a five-foot-ten-inch twenty-two-year-old from Council Bluffs, and surely the bouncer can see me mouthing my “birthday”—May 19, 1962—over and over as a mantra, just in case I’m asked.
At one time there were fifty-three “bars or grocery stores” on or adjacent to campus, according to a history of Marquette, and collectively they’re a single destination: “the Bars.”
“What are you doing tonight?”
“Probably hit the Bars.”
The Bars are a low-rent version of the Strip. None of these places has a membership fee, as at Maximillian’s “disco restaurant” on the Richfield side of the Strip. On the contrary, the Avalanche—almost entirely devoid of furniture—barely charges for its beers: Pabst Red White & Blues cost fifty cents.
There are no White Castles in the benighted state of Wisconsin. The nearest one is on Harlem Avenue in Chicago. But there are plenty of substitutes, joints that are, like their patrons, luridly lit. We go to Cousins to sword-swallow submarine sandwiches at midnight, or to Real Chili, a Marquette landmark since 1931 whose bumper sticker slogan (“Not just for breakfast anymore”) concedes that the most robust patronage is in the wee small hours of the morning. The harsh lighting, the limited foodstuffs, the bouquet of odors—it’s like eating inside a bachelor’s fridge.
I’ve settled into the comforting routine of college life. I make a collect call to Mom and Dad once a week on Sunday evenings, and Dad—perhaps because he’s incurring the charges—hangs up the extension in the master bedroom after three minutes and returns to his Archie Bu
nker chair while Mom acts like the chair of a congressional committee who has five minutes to ask all of her questions: am I studying, am I eating, am I doing my laundry, and have I “met anyone,” to which I reply that I’m meeting all kinds of interesting people.
For instance, Hodes (another Mike) and I met a gentleman on the Trailways bus. We were going to Chicago, where Jim would pick us up in the Loop and drive us to South Bend, Indiana, for the Notre Dame football game versus Air Force. The bus left Milwaukee at 6 a.m. and was nearly empty, so Hodes took one row of seats and I took another, and we both gazed out our respective windows, anticipating ninety minutes of sleep. But just before the bus pulled out of the station, a small, middle-aged man in a short-sleeved dress shirt boarded and—surveying the empty rows—chose the upholstered seat directly next to Hodes. Hodes made panicked eye contact with me, and I began to laugh, silently but soon uncontrollably. By the time the man next to Hodes pulled a clipboard from his backpack, and secured in its clamp a child’s word-search magazine, and set about solving it with a pencil—circling diagonal “DOG” and horizontal “HEN” and upside-down “DUCK”—my shoulders were shaking.
The gentle shaking of my shoulders and the vibration of the road and the hypnotic hum of the Trailways engine soon dispatched me to dreamland, where I remained for many minutes, until I was awakened by a burst of profanity, a small scuffle, and the middle-aged man with the word-search magazine rubbing his biceps and running to the back of the bus.
Hodes had nodded off shortly after the trip commenced, he told me later, and slipped into a pleasing road coma somewhere in the lawless border region between Milwaukee and Chicago, a landscape relieved only by Mars Cheese Castle, a twenty-four-hour “adult bookstore” in Kenosha, and an official state tourism sign for the Bong Recreation Area, named after a World War II fighter pilot from the Dairy State called Richard Bong, but now a backdrop for young stoners having their pictures taken as tractor trailers roar past at seventy-five miles an hour. It was somewhere near Bong, as Hodes enjoyed a deep and dreamy REM sleep, that he felt someone—the guy in the seat next to him, it turned out, his word-search magazine still clamped in the clipboard—caress his thigh.
Which is why I was awakened by two outbursts: Hodes’s short volley of profanity, followed by the word searcher’s yelp of physical and emotional pain after Mike punched him in the biceps, dispatching the man to the back of the bus, where he nursed his wounded arm and pride. Neither Hodes nor I, it scarcely needs saying, ever went back to sleep. Instead I spent the rest of the ride—on a Trailways bus out of Milwaukee, with a simple-minded sex offender circling his CATs and BATs in the back seat—dwelling on one fact: nothing like this ever happened in South Brook.
But I also thought: I can’t wait to tell this story to my friends and my brothers. It was why I wanted to be a writer, this need to bend and shape various experiences into a narrative balloon animal.
As his seat springs began to squeak, and he became preoccupied with what I could only assume was the clipboard on his lap, Word Searcher (it slowly dawned) was doing something in the back seat that—in Bloomington at least—is always euphemized as an act of animal cruelty: choking the chicken, flogging the dolphin, spanking the monkey. Word Searcher ducked into the bus’s only bathroom. And the Trailways sped on, whooshing under the Lake Forest Oasis, where on childhood trips to suburban Lisle, to visit old neighbors in the city of my birth, we’d stop at the HoJo’s and Amoco station suspended above the tollway, press our noses to a window (smudged with the noseprints of a hundred other kids), and watch the traffic pass beneath us.
Now the HoJo’s is a McDonald’s and I am that traffic, never again to be that kid, innocence yielding to experience on an almost daily basis.
Another fall day, another bus. I’m returning home for the first time, for Thanksgiving, on a chartered coach full of other students from the Twin Cities, many of them surrounded by the spent shells of Miller Lite cans. By the time we stop at the Burger King on I-94 in Tomah, Wisconsin, and everyone stands in the aisle waiting for the doors to open, a dude at the back of the line vomits on the passenger in front of him, and the chain reaction is like a string of fireworks popping, so that by the time we arrive at a parking lot in Midway, the seething air brakes signaling our arrival, I disembark smelling of barf and Burger King, but also with a powerful gratitude. Mom is picking me up here, and pulling into our driveway I’ll have to fight the urge to kiss the tarmac, like the pope does on airport runways, so happy will I be to get home.
But where is Mom? I scan the crowd of waiting parents and don’t see her.
“Steve!” It’s her voice issuing from a different head.
She gives me a kiss, walks me to the car, drives through Minneapolis while giving me a happy interrogation, but I don’t hear any of it. Who is this woman? We pull into our garage, where Dad said after every car trip of my childhood, just before turning off the ignition, “Home again, home again, jiggety jog.” I walk into the house as if for the first time, suddenly in love with the full-size fridge and its copious contents, Dad’s briefcase (in its familiar spot under the yellow telephone that is tethered to the wall mount by fifty feet of coiled cord), and every familiar dish, cup, and cupboard, down to the floral pattern of the shelf paper. Everything in this kitchen is cozily familiar, with one significant exception.
“Do you notice anything different about me?” Mom says.
I nod in reply.
“What?” she says.
I can barely say it: “Your hair.”
“What about my hair?” She’s laughing at my deep discomfort. She seems to find it fascinating.
“It’s white.”
“Were you going to say anything?” Mom wonders. “I picked you up an hour ago. You didn’t mention it.”
After a long interval of silence, I manage to say, “Why did you dye your hair white?”
She laughs, cocks her head slightly, looks me in the eye, gives me another kiss on the cheek, and says, “I stopped dyeing it. On September 27. My fiftieth birthday.”
Three months ago, and for all my life before that, Mom’s hair was as black as a Kingsford charcoal briquette. Now it’s the opposite, as white as the guy’s on the Quaker Oats box, as white as her own fur coat, which matches the hair exactly. If this kitchen ever gets the white cabinets and countertops Mom wants, she will look—while standing in this very spot—like a benevolent version of the White Witch in the permanent winter of Narnia.
It has never occurred to me until this afternoon that while I am growing older so are Mom and Dad.
Our kitchen is full of things I never knew I loved and didn’t know I’d missed. The kitchen table, for starters. For three months now I haven’t sat down to eat, taking all my meals while lying in a bunk bed, walking down Wells Street, or standing at the counter in Amigo’s, ingesting nachos out of a Styrofoam clam box.
Iceberg lettuce, kept crisp in a seafoam-green Tupperware lettuce keeper, is the first vegetable I’ve eaten in three months that wasn’t on a pizza. I’ve come to think of vegetables as toppings or—in the case of carrots—an onion-dip delivery system. I gaze into our glorious, harvest-gold Frigidaire, feeling like a Soviet defector walking into Red Owl for the first time, marveling at the cold cuts, cheeses, nectarines, the roast wrapped in its fishnet swimsuit.
But I also see my family on these shelves and in these crisper drawers. There’s the grapefruit Mom will cut in half in the morning and eat for breakfast with a golf ball of cottage cheese, and the Grey Poupon Dad prefers to the French’s yellow mustard the rest of us like, and the packaged Jell-O puddings Mom has apparently purchased for Amy and John after caving in to their supermarket demands. Jim, Tom, and I always ate her homemade pudding with the trampoline of rubber skin on top, but Mom is fifty now, and white-haired, her defenses worn smooth like the paint on the banister.
“Would you mind closing the fridge,” Mom says, “or are you tanning yourself by the light bulb?”
I’ve probably stood here
for a solid minute, staring into the fridge as if it were a crystal ball. And it is, in reverse. Gazing into it, I can see the past. A can of frozen orange juice from concentrate is thawing on the top shelf. It’s about the only thing I know how to make—squeezing it out of the cardboard tube in a single citrus defecation, filling the empty can with water, then pouring it into the Tupperware juice dispenser and mashing up that semi-frozen bullet of concentrated citrus with a wooden spoon, stirring it, eating the occasional undiluted bit of frozen flotsam, a speedball of vitamin C. I know, even as I’m doing it, that I’ll never buy juice from concentrate as an adult, not when they sell it ready-made in cartons from Tropicana. These are the little inconsequential decisions I’ve already made about how I’ll live my grown-up life, my infinitesimal rebellions.
Two nights before Thanksgiving, I attend a Kennedy basketball game in khakis, maroon argyle sweater, button-down oxford, and belted raincoat, even though it isn’t raining and no rain is in the forecast. Collar turned up against the cold, I see myself reflected in the glass entrance doors as a double for Sam Spade, Humphrey Bogart’s hard-boiled detective. Alas, Oly’s greeting in the gym—“Help take a bite outta crime!”—lets me know the private eye I really resemble is McGruff the Crime Dog, the Ad Council’s cartoon canine who urges children, in public-service announcements, to narc on any suspicious characters in their neighborhood.
Still, as my penny loafers scuff against the highly polished hardwood in the JFK gym, I look back on that golden time now long vanished when—five long months ago—I was young and carefree, with no need of a belted raincoat.
As the current crop of Eagles runs our still-familiar offense—one of them is wearing my number 32, which I half imagined had been hoisted to the rafters by now—I remove a cotton handkerchief from my raincoat pocket (one of the twin tokens of my newfound sophistication) and ostentatiously blow my nose.